From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  “I’m not—not any longer,” the rifleman replied. He shook his head as if to clear something from his hair. He went on, “What we’ve done doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me, and it doesn’t matter. But if you have some place for a demonstration, we’ll—demonstrate.”

  Kerr nodded. “That would be best,” he said neutrally.

  Coster suddenly turned and lowered the rifle again toward the door. “Speaking of fools,” he said, “your Mr Penske—”

  There was no knock. The door slammed back. “All right you—” Penske shouted before he realized that the fat muzzle of the automatic rifle was centered on his breastbone. The swarthy man held a carbine waist high, his left hand locked on the curving 30-round magazine.

  Obviously furious but with no more sound than his chair made clattering on the floor, Kerr strode toward the disconcerted Penske. With his left hand the black gripped the carbine and tugged the smaller man back within the room. Then his right hand slapped Penske’s head against the wall. He stepped away, holding the carbine muzzle-down. “And if you’d used it, you damned fool?” the big man demanded. “If you’d brought the police down on us here, what chance would our plans have had then? What chance?”

  “You didn’t have to hit me,” Penske said, not quite meeting Kerr’s eyes.

  Contemptuously, the black unloaded the carbine, tossing the magazine onto a stuffed chair and ejecting the round in the chamber. It winked against the carpet. “Get the things out of the van,” he said.

  * * *

  Kerr had rented the furnished apartment a month before, but that was as far as preparations had gone. The can-opener beside the sink was broken and Penske, grumbling, had to hack their dinners open with his heavy-bladed dagger.

  “If you were a real Green Beret, you could bite the lids off,” Davidson gibed.

  “Shut the hell up!” the short man snarled. He caught Coster eying him as the rifleman spread baked beans one-handed on a slice of bread. “I’d a’ made it, no goddam doubt,” Penske said defensively. “Only they had us doing sprints up and down the company street with sand in our packs. Some wise-ass clerk thinks it’s funny to laugh at me. I knocked his teeth out, and the bastard’s goddam lucky they hadn’t issued us ammo. But the goddam government don’t want anybody that’ll really fight, so they busted me out.”

  “Makes a good story,” Davidson said. “I think they caught him with his—”

  “Dee!” Kerr said.

  Penske’s eyes unglazed and he slowly lowered his knife back onto the can of spaghetti. He hammered the hilt down with his palm, splashing the red sauce onto the table.

  Despite their hostility, Davidson and Penske settled down to a desultory game of cribbage after dinner. Kerr sat in the living room across from the rifleman. “I don’t play games that you have to score,” the big black said. “When I win, the whole world will know it. When I win, there won’t be any polite Orientals pumping mercury into the sea because poisoning children is cheaper than not. There won’t be any blue-shirted gestapo beating in their brothers’ heads because the bankers say to. There won’t be any more nuclear powerplants pouring out their deadliness for a quarter million years.”

  The rifleman smiled. He held a jelly glass he had filled with whiskey and had not diluted. “There won’t be any three-year-olds orphaned in La Prensa because their daddy was too slow emptying his money drawer.”

  “What are you here for?” Kerr demanded.

  Coster’s free hand played with his rifle. “Now? To kill a Japanese politician in America discussing import quotas.” He swigged his drink.

  Kerr leaned forward. “To show the rich that there is justice for the people?” he pressed.

  “Human society’s a funny thing,” said the rifleman, staring at the reflection of the overhead light in his whiskey. “Very complex. But if it gets enough little thrusts, all in the same direction … lots of people hate lots of other people anyway. Someday enough people are going to hate enough other people that one of them is going to push the button. Then it all stops.”

  Kerr’s lips tightened. “Bad as things are, I don’t believe they’ve come to that pass yet. Nobody would gain by that.”

  “Right. Nobody would gain.”

  Penske and Davidson were arguing about the count. The dinette was blurry with cigarette smoke. Kerr stared for a moment at the ex-soldier, then said to Coster, “There’ll be bodyguards, you know. Secret Service men.”

  “Bodyguards,” Coster snorted. “Like Huey Long had? It was one of his guards who killed him, you know, a bullet ricochetting in the marble hallway. And when King Alexander was killed in Marseilles, the gunman ran right through a line of mounted gendarmes.”

  “I suppose you shot him, too?” Kerr said acidly. “Like Kennedy?”

  Coster looked at the heavier man with an odd expression. “I wasn’t there,” he said. “That was in 1934. The man who did it used a pistol, yes, but there was an automatic rifle backing him up. If it had been needed.” He finished his drink with a long swallow and said, “A push here, a push there.…”

  Kerr stood abruptly. “It’s been a long day for us,” he said. “Now that I’ve stopped seeing pavement, I’ll go to bed. You can carry your things into the smaller bedroom, Coster. Penske fits the couch better, I think.”

  Coster nodded. “I don’t have much,” he said, toeing a canvas AWOL bag.

  In the dinette, Davidson threw in her hand without a word. She followed Kerr into the larger bedroom, slamming the door behind them.

  The rifleman walked over to the table, his weapon muzzle-down in his left hand. He poured a drink and raised it in an ironic salute. “Cheers,” he said to the brooding Penske. He drank and walked into the remaining bedroom without bothering to take his bag.

  * * *

  Penske drove with Davidson on the front seat beside him. Her short hair was dark except at the roots where it was growing in blond. Kerr and Coster looked at each other from side benches in the windowless back of the van.

  Over his shoulder Penske said, “Ah, George … the guy who owns the farm, Jesse, I met him when I was at Bragg, see? Could be he won’t be around and he’s not gonna care what we’re shooting, choppers, grenades, whatever. Only maybe you better stay in the back, you know? It’d be better if Jesse didn’t, you know.…”

  “Jesse doesn’t like his black brothers, is that it?” Kerr said easily. His face worked and he added, “Don’t have much use fer a nigger ’cept to kick his black butt, that is.”

  “Well, George…,” the short man mumbled. “We just needed a place to range in the guns.…”

  “That’s all right, it’s no fault of yours,” Kerr said. “Or your friend’s.” He looked over at the rifleman. “You see what they do, splitting natural allies so that they’d rather tear each others’ throats out than both tear at their oppressors. Turning humans into beasts.”

  “Humans are beasts, of course,” Coster said without emphasis. “Whether or not Darwin was right, he was convincing on that score. I think that’s why the concept of werebeasts is so much less terrifying today than it was in the Fifteenth Century. We’re all basically convinced that man-beasts are normal reality. Hieronymous Bosch and his constructs of part flesh, part metal … that I don’t think we’ve outgrown. Yet.”

  “Is that all injustice means to you?” Davidson asked sharply. “That we’re all beasts, so what? Did you just get out of your flying saucer or something?”

  Coster looked at her, his fingers toying with the selector switch below his rifle’s gunsight. “Viewpoint, I suppose,” he said. “But no, I’m human. Funny, I used to wonder what aliens … creatures from space, that is … would look like. I thought they might look just like you and me.” He began to laugh brittlely.

  No one in the van spoke again during the remainder of the drive.

  After nearly an hour on the road, Penske pulled off on a farm track. A gate stopped the van immediately. The swarthy man jumped down, unhooked the chain, and tugged the sagging fr
ame out of the way. As he got back in and slipped the van into gear, he explained, “Jesse said he’d loop it for me, not run it through the bars.”

  Penske pulled up just beyond the arc of the gate. He said to Davidson, “Go hook it shut. We don’t want any a’ the cows to get loose.”

  Davidson’s eyes narrowed. “You opened it, you can shut it. Who the hell—”

  “Look, bitch!” Penske said, his right hand curled by reflex into a fist, “You’ll shake a leg or you’ll—”

  “Penske!” Kerr shouted, thrusting his torso over the seat and forcing the driver back without contact. “What do you think we are, exploiters ourselves who treat women like furniture? Want to try that with me too, is that what you think?”

  “George, I…,” Penske began. He shook his head fiercely to hide the tears of frustration. Then he unlatched the door, almost falling out backwards in the process. He closed the gate. It was almost a minute before the short man got back into the van and drove on. There were three more gates in the long track between the highway and the pasture swale in which they finally halted. Penske opened and closed each gate himself without saying anything more.

  In wet weather the swale drained into a creek more than three hundred yards from the van. The bank beyond the watercourse was steep but generally grassy. There was a bare patch in line with the axis of the swale. Bits of cardboard and metal there brightened the bullet-gouged bank. Other target material lay in riddled clumps at various distances along the way. There was some scattered cartridge brass, mostly .22 caliber—centerfire empties had been picked up for reloading.

  “The boys around here use it a lot,” Penske said in satisfaction as he took cases out of the back of the van.

  “The boys,” Davidson snorted. “The Klan’s more like it.”

  Penske looked at her without speaking or moving. He had just begun to load a magazine into a carbine. He looked back downrange after a moment.

  Davidson swallowed, then bit at a knuckle. “I’ll set some targets up,” she said.

  “That’ll take rigging,” Penske said without turning around. “You get the rest a’ the guns loaded. Coster’n me’ll rig the targets.”

  “Sure,” she said, and she slid a box of miscellaneous empty containers over to the automatic rifleman.

  Coster gripped the box with his left hand and his jutting hip bone. His other hand held the rifle at its balance. “All right,” he said, “where do you want them?”

  “I doubt you’ll have to fight off the field mice,” Kerr observed from the van. “You can leave the gun here and save the trouble of carrying it.”

  “No trouble,” Coster said. He began walking down the swale.

  Penske, carrying an armload of clothesline and plastic milk jugs, trotted along beside the rifleman. “You put a few a’ those at one hundred and two hundred,” he said “Save a lot for the bank across the creek, though, ’cause that’s where it’s really gonna be at. We’ll see if you can handle that thing’r not.”

  The smaller man stopped some fifty yards from the van. He dropped his load and pointed. A fence post and a metal engineer stake stood on opposite rims of the swale. “I’m gonna rig a moving target,” he said. “You set up the bottles.”

  Both men worked quickly. By the time Coster had returned to the line of the posts, the shorter man joined him unreeling clothesline behind him. “Aw right,” Penske said, wringing his hands with enthusiasm as they strode back to the firing line. “Aw right, now we just see how goddam good you are.”

  Coster said nothing.

  On a blanket beside the van, Davidson had laid out half a dozen varied long arms. Kerr was still in the vehicle, either in deference to Penske’s request or from a disinclination to be anywhere else. Penske had forgotten his shirt downrange. Sweat streaks trembled along valleys separating ridges of chest muscle. He picked up what looked like an ordinary autoloading rifle and checked its magazine before cradling the weapon in his left arm.

  “We let the lady shoot, hey?” Penske said to Coster with a high-lipped grin. “Then you’n me try it.”

  The automatic rifleman shrugged.

  Davidson passed Penske’s reference with only a scowl. She picked up an M1 carbine and pointed it in the general direction of the nearest bottles. Her grip on the trim little weapon was fierce enough to whiten the skin across the tendons of her hands. She held the gunstock a good quarter inch from her shoulder. The first shot was loud and metallic, startling even to those who were prepared for it.

  “You don’t wanna let it scare you,” Penske said, reaching for the carbine.

  “Go shove your head up your ass!” Davidson flared, snatching the weapon away with a clear willingness to empty it into the swarthy man. She whirled back to the targets and fired a long, savage volley as fast as she could jerk her trigger finger. When she paused, the muzzle had recoiled up to a 30° angle. None of the men spoke when she glared around fiercely. Squinting along the barrel, Davidson resumed fire more deliberately until the banana magazine was empty. Her brass spun off in flat arcs to the right. Once a puff of dirt halfway to the targets marked a shot. Davidson flung the carbine back onto the blanket and stalked into the van.

  Penske started to say something but thought better of it. He grinned at Coster and raised his own rifle. Instead of a shot, there was a ripping five-round burst, the rifle emptying its own magazine as Penske held the trigger back. Dirt spouted around the bottles, though the last three shots had been slung skyward by the recoiling muzzle.

  “Thought you had the only automatic rifle here, huh?” the short man crowed. “Converted this myself, same as the one a’ the M1s and the .22 there. Not so special now, are you?”

  “You only hit one bottle,” Coster said. His left hand curled around the grip on the rifle’s forearm.

  “Only one?” Penske cried in a fury. “A man’s a lot bigger target’n a goddam bottle!”

  Metal clicked as Coster’s forefinger slid forward the safety catch in his rifle’s trigger guard. Speech crumbled into the shattering muzzle blasts of the automatic rifle.

  Coster ignored the nearest targets. The bottles at 200, then 300, yards disintegrated in pluming earth. The weapon fired in short bursts of two and three rounds, the muzzle recovering momentarily between blasts to snuffle another target. When the bolt locked back on an empty magazine, there was nothing but dust and glass shards at either aiming point.

  Coster’s fingers relaxed on the handgrips. He extracted the magazine and began thumbing cartridges into it from a box on the ground. He looked sidelong at Penske.

  “We’ll try the moving one, wise guy,” the shorter man said.

  Behind them, Kerr had gotten out of the van. “What kind of gun is that?” he asked.

  “M14E2,” Penske replied. “The squad automatic version of the standard M14. Has pistolgrips and a straight-line stock. Made goddam few of’em, too, before they switched from the fourteen to the sixteen.” He looked at Coster. “Hey, ain’t that so?”

  Coster shrugged and locked home his magazine. Heat waves danced from the tip of the barrel where metal was exposed to the air.

  “Well, don’t you even goddam know?” Penske demanded. “How’d you get that rifle, anyway?”

  The rifleman looked at him. “You’d better hope you never learn,” he said. “Now, are we going to shoot guns or talk about them?”

  “We’ll shoot,” the smaller man said fiercely. “We’ll goddam shoot.” He pointed to the gallon milk jug suspended beside the engineer stake. “One line’s through the handle, the other’s tied to it,” he said. “When I pull this one—” he gestured with the loop of wire-core clothesline in his left hand—“the jug runs to the other post. Don’t sweat, I poured it full a’ dirt so it’ll show if you hit it. If you hit it.”

  “Then pull,” Coster said and braced himself. His knuckles were as white as Davidson’s had been. His head, hunched low, looked more like that of a man trying to hide than one aiming.

  Penske chuckled. “Won’t
hit nothing but air if you’re that scared a’ your weapon,” he said. He tugged two-handed at the line bent around the fencepost. The jug spurted sideways and the first three bullets ripped it. Sandy loam sprayed from the torn plastic in all directions. The impacts spun the jug around its support line and the second burst caught it at the tip of its arc. Dirt flew again and both lines parted. The gun muzzle tracked the flying container, spiked it in the air, and then followed it down the swale, the bullets themselves kicking their target into a semblance of life.

  Flying brass had driven Kerr back from where he stood to Coster’s right. Now he massaged his left fist with his right palm, watching the rifleman reload methodically.

  “That enough?” Coster asked. Kerr nodded.

  Penske had silently begun to gather up the paraphernalia they had brought. Suddenly he stopped, staring at the empty cartridge box he held in his hand. “You reloaded from this,” he said, waving the box in Coster’s face. “Last time.”

  “So?” said the rifleman. “You want me to pay you for them?”

  “You stupid bastard!” the shorted man blazed. “This was .30-’06 for my Remington there. It won’t fit a goddam M14. You need .308!”

  “Then I didn’t use your ammunition after all,” Coster said, backing a step. “I brought my own in my kit, you know.” His foot tapped the AWOL bag gently.

  “Let’s see that goddam rifle,” said Penske, lunging forward, and the safety clicked off with the muzzle only six inches from the bridge of his nose.

  “Don’t,” said Coster very quietly.

  Sullenly, the ex-soldier backed away. “Somebody gimme a hand with this crap,” he said, thrusting weapons back into their cases.

  “We aren’t rivals, you know,” Coster said without lowering the M14. “I wasn’t Oswald’s rival either. If you want a man dead and he dies, what else matters?”

  “Just shut the hell up, will you?” Davidson burst out unexpectedly.

  The three men looked around in surprise. Davidson’s fists were clenched at waist height, her elbows splayed. After a moment Coster said, “All right.” He dropped the muzzle of his rifle and began handing guns back into the van.