The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  Once finished with the cleanup, they each grabbed a handle on the back of the truck and stood on their platforms as the truck carried them to the first house on the next block. “When do we learn some good stuff?” Flem whined. “Maybe the work wouldn’t seem so bad if Lord Orc would teach us a little faster.”

  The truck stopped, and they hopped off to grab the next set of trash cans. “You’re a promising kid,” John told him. “Don’t let this go to your head, but you’re one of the best new ones we’ve got.” Flem smiled. “If you’d just quit your whining, that is.” The smile faded. “So you’re not satisfied with Arthur’s way of doing things, is that it?”

  Flem looked at him out of the corner of his eye. No one was supposed to call Arthur by name, especially in front of the recruits. “What if I’m not? He’s in charge.”

  “Yeah,” said John. “He’s in charge. But… he may not always be.”

  They worked a while without talking. It was hard to talk while doing this kind of physical labor. The sun was just coming up over the country club at the end of the block. The owners of the mansions were just waking up and walking out in their pajamas to get their newspapers. None of them even glanced at the garbage men as they made their rounds. None of them knew that their garbage was collected every week by the Society of the True Judgment—the men who would one day rule over them.

  “What did you mean by that?” Flem asked, a couple houses later.

  “By what?” John replied, although he knew exactly what Fleming meant.

  “Some of the others don’t like you. They say you’re not really a believer in the True Judgment.”

  “No?” John was starting to feel the fatigue. Even the lighter cans were becoming harder to lift. Fleming was fighting through it, but John could tell he was near his limit. “Let me tell you something. They’re right about me. If the test of a true believer is following Arthur blindly, then I fail the test.”

  Flem paused for a breather before picking up the next can. They were half a mile from the end of their route, and John wasn’t sure the kid was going to make it. “But he’s Lord Orc, isn’t he?” said Flem as he tried to catch his breath.

  “I know for a fact that he is.”

  “Then why don’t you want to follow him? Urizen can’t be allowed to rule.”

  John leaned against the truck, ignoring the impatient look Shigley was giving him in the rearview mirror. “Urizen can’t be allowed to rule, you’re right. But with Arthur, you always need to ask yourself a couple of questions. First, are his plans sensible? Second, even if his plans work, would the world be better off with Arthur in control of things?”

  Flem snorted. “Lord Orc would put you on garden duty if he found out you were talking like that.”

  “So he won’t find out about it, right?” John held Fleming’s gaze for a long time, until Fleming dropped his eyes.

  “I won’t tell him.”

  “Good. You have a lot of promise, I’ve told you that. When you come to your full potential, there won’t be many who can stand up to you. The time will come when the Society will have to change. I want you on my side when it does, you and a few others.”

  Flem had caught his breath by this time, although he was still looking a bit shaky. He grabbed the next trash can. “What are you planning to do?” he asked.

  “You’ll see. Just be ready to follow my lead.”

  4

  Black Pajamas

  Things got rather unpleasant for a while after Achtenberg got blown up. Danny’s first impulse was to run away from where the booby-trap had gone off. That was what the others all had in mind too, so there was the beginning of a stampede back downhill the way they had come. But there were more noises from that direction that sounded a lot like AK-47 fire, so Danny plunged into the bamboo instead.

  “Hey!” a voice called from behind him. “Charlie Brown! Wait up!”

  Danny didn’t wait up. He continued to crash through the bamboo for another thirty feet or so, until it occurred to him that he was making a tremendous noise. Looking around frantically, he found a large mound of dirt on the ground and threw himself down beside it.

  Angus came flailing through the bamboo next, clearing a path by waving his arms around like a maniac. His red hair looked even redder than usual in the jungle. Behind him were Lieutenant Lonnie and Volpe, the RTO, who was clutching his helmet tightly to his head with both hands. The three of them ran right past Danny’s mound of dirt, and would have kept right on going had Volpe not tripped over Danny’s feet and fallen in a heap.

  “Holy God,” Lonnie Metcalf was moaning. “Hooooly God.”

  Danny sat up and wiped some of the dust off of his face. “Did they see you come this way?” he asked the Lieutenant. “How many of ours got hit?”

  “Holy God!” Metcalf said again, much more loudly. Blair shushed him and began to load an ammunition belt into his M60. They could hear shouts and gunfire from the direction of the trail, but the bamboo was thick enough to conceal them.

  “Anybody seen the AG?” Angus asked the others. They all looked at him blankly. “Orlando,” said Angus. “Has anybody seen the assistant gunner?”

  No one had.

  “All right. So this is all the ammo I’ve got. Charlie Brown, get your rifle out of the dirt and protect me. We’re going back to see who needs help.”

  Danny noticed that the barrel of his M16 had stuck firmly in the mound of dirt when he’d dropped to the ground. Hastily, he pulled it out and cleaned the dirt out of it.

  “And you better get rid of those ants.”

  Ants? It wasn’t until that moment that Danny realized his mound of dirt was a very large anthill, which was home to a colony of very large ants. These had been coming out in droves to attack him while he’d been lying on the ground, and were now beginning to bite. He leapt to his feet with a yell and tried to brush them away. They were holding on tight and were hard to brush off. Blair was already making his way uphill through the bamboo, parallel to the trail.

  A man was calling out from that direction. At first Danny couldn’t tell if the cries were in English or Vietnamese, but as they came closer he recognized the voice of Sammy Plotkin. Then they heard a sharp slap, and Plotkin’s screams for help were cut short.

  Blair slowed to a walk, scanning the bamboo ahead. Danny crept along with him, rifle at the ready. They had circled back almost to the trail again, and they could hear voices talking in Vietnamese up ahead. The gunfire had stopped.

  Angus held up a hand, signaling Danny to stop. Danny could see the trail now, just a few feet ahead. Some Vietnamese men in black pajamas were dragging bodies off the trail and piling them up like sandbags. Danny counted three bodies. Only one of their faces was visible from where he stood—Orlando Whitfield, the assistant gunner. Orlando had met Jesus by now, if things had turned out as he’d expected, and was no longer concerned with what happened in Vietnam. Danny looked at his open eyes and cursed under his breath.

  Plotkin was lying face-down in the dust a few yards up the trail, coughing weakly. Blood was dripping down the side of his face from an ugly wound on the side of his head. One of the enemy soldiers was tying his hands behind his back.

  Danny switched his weapon to full-auto. So far he had not had to kill a single person since coming to Vietnam. It appeared that was about to change. Blair pointed to Danny, then toward the downhill section of trail. He wanted Danny to cover that area while Angus took care of the rest. Danny nodded and spent a few seconds trying not to hyperventilate. Then Angus shouldered his machine gun, aimed it at the nearest target, leaned forward, and pulled the trigger.

  The recoil pushed the big man backwards at first, making his initial burst go too high. He corrected himself the next time, while the Viet Cong were still gaping at the spurting remains of the first one Angus had hit. Danny watched, fascinated by the unrelenting power of the M60 as it shredded the thick bamboo stalks and cut into the enemy soldiers. Then he saw motion from the trail to his right and remembered
that he was supposed to be helping.

  Two men were dragging a body uphill by the arms to add to their pile of corpses. The body didn’t have a face anymore, but it was still wearing a pack with a red cross emblem on it. “Assholes!” Danny yelled at the men. “That was our medic!” The two Viet Cong, who appeared to be in their teens, stared dumbly at him and dropped the body.

  Danny had once had the experience of being shot. It had been a terrifying experience, and painful. He’d been lucky to survive, and he had never even seen his attacker’s face. Until this moment, he had been wondering if he’d really be able to kill a man. The two boys facing him were armed, but had not drawn their weapons. Danny was surprised at the rage that rose up in his chest—anger at the Vietnamese who kept killing his friends, anger at himself for being afraid of them, anger at having to be here in the first place. Anger at Ed Terwilliger for asking him to leave his family for this. And then they went and killed the medic. The one person here who was supposed to make people not bleed. Roaring with fury, he pulled his trigger before he even raised his barrel to take aim. The bullets took one of them at the knees. He continued firing in full-automatic mode, bringing up his weapon to put several more rounds in the first man before swinging around to kill the other one. He only stopped when his twenty-round magazine was empty. Then he reloaded, looking around to see if there were others waiting to get him while he changed clips. But no attack came.

  When he returned to Blair and Plotkin, the air was full of smoke and the floating dust of shredded bamboo stalks. Angus threw his machine gun down on the ground—“Barrel’s done for,” he said, and Danny could see that the metal had warped from the heat—and helped Sammy Plotkin to his feet. Plotkin gave Blair a big, bloody hug.

  Danny surveyed the damage Angus had wreaked with his machine gun. The Viet Cong had been cut to pieces, with the exception of one who had only lost a leg. That one was lying in a muddy puddle of his own blood and aiming a pistol at Angus. Danny aimed his M16 and pulled the trigger, realizing too late that he’d forgotten to take his weapon off of full-auto. He emptied half of his clip into the enemy, making quite a mess in the process. The recoil made him lose his balance, and he sat down hard on the ground.

  “Thank you, Charlie Brown,” said Blair.

  “You’re welcome,” said Danny. Then he leaned over and threw up.

  Their other two companions were still waiting next to Danny’s anthill when they returned. Lieutenant Lonnie was looking at the map and talking into the radio, but seemed confused about where they were. Volpe stood up when he saw them coming. “You guys need any help?” he asked Angus.

  “We got it,” Blair replied. “Thanks anyway.” The look in his eyes made Volpe shrink back.

  “I don’t know how many,” Lonnie was saying. He looked up and counted the men around him, then counted again. “There’s four of us still alive.”

  “Five,” Danny corrected. “Count yourself.”

  Lonnie did another head-count, his lips moving slightly as he counted. “There are five of us. Yes, five, that’s what I said the first time.” He looked about ready to jump up and run away into the jungle.

  A thought occurred to Danny, and he ran back over to retrieve the medical kit from Lindy’s body. He tried not to look at the shredded VC bodies that were scattered across the trail. Clutching the bag under his arm, he went back to see what he could do for Plotkin’s head wound.

  “Don’t do that, man,” Angus told him as he sat down and started to rummage through the pack. Blair had drawn his pistol and was peering into the forest of bamboo around them. “The racket we just made, there’s probably a hundred more coming.”

  Danny gave him an irritated look. “He’s bleeding. Somebody needs to treat the wound, and our medic’s dead.”

  “Go with somebody next time.”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the Lieutenant was saying into the radio. The handset was shaped like a regular telephone receiver, except the cord plugged into the large metal box that held the radio parts. Lonnie still sounded very close to utter panic. He took off his helmet and scratched his head as he consulted his map again. “About three klicks, maybe.”

  Danny found a field dressing in Lindy’s bag and applied it to the bloody patch on Sammy’s head. It looked like he’d been pistol-whipped. He wrapped some gauze around Plotkin’s head to hold the dressing in place, but it kept unwinding.

  “You’ve still got ants on you,” Blair told him.

  He’d forgotten all about the ants. They were biting him under his clothes now; in the excitement of the moment he’d stopped noticing. Now the bites were itching furiously. Scratching himself like a dog, he finally managed to get the bandage to stay on Sammy’s head. Plotkin, dazed but conscious, punched his arm weakly. “You’re all right, Charlie Brown,” he said.

  “Get your stuff together,” Lonnie told them as he handed Volpe the radio handset. He was trying to hide the panic from his voice, although Danny could still sense waves of fear rolling off of the man. “Mission’s aborted. There’s a valley about three kilometers to the east of here, just this side of a small village. Our orders are to secure an LZ there. We’re too close to the installation on the hilltop for a chopper to come anywhere near us if we stay here.”

  Blair was shaking his head. “Never make it that far. Every gook in the area knows we’re here by now.” The images Danny received from Blair’s head were full of gunfire and exploding people.

  Lonnie Metcalf gave Angus a look of loathing. We’ve seen him lose his cool now, Danny understood. He won’t forgive us for that. “Can it,” said Lonnie. “Let’s go.”

  “What about our dead?” Danny asked.

  “Have to leave them.”

  Angus borrowed a rifle from one of the fallen soldiers as they moved out, and Danny refilled his magazine. He thought of searching their pockets to see if any of them had been carrying any green monkeys, but it was hard to tell from the remains where exactly their pockets would be.

  They began making their way back down the dirt road to the south, where the map said there was another, smaller trail that would take them east. They all stopped when they heard a deep rumbling from somewhere in the distance.

  “Bombs?” said Volpe.

  “Thunder,” replied Blair. “Storm’s coming.”

  The rainy season was starting at last. Danny was looking forward to getting a break from the choking dust. They made their way in silence as clouds rolled in from the west. Fatigue set in quickly. Danny was practically asleep on his feet, seeing visions of Angus tearing men to pieces with his machine gun. He forced himself to stop recalling that image, and soon his thoughts drifted back to the days before he had come here.

  “It was a dream I had,” Ed was telling him in the hospital. “I dreamed of a three-headed man. He was sitting at the middle of a spider web, and he was weaving traps to catch someone. In his hand he was holding a metal book. I think that man was Urizen.”

  “What does he have to do with a monkey?” Danny asked.

  “Well, there were three animals sneaking up on the man. One was a green monkey. One was a blue horse. The third one was a black snake. A voice told me that I had to kill the man with three heads, but to do that, I would first have to find the three creatures that were hunting him. I think the snake is Orc. Some of Blake’s writings refer to him as a snake. That would be Arthur, and we know where Arthur is. But the other two have to be found.”

  “And the monkey’s in Vietnam.”

  Ed nodded.

  “Did the invisible voice tell you that?”

  “No, I just knew it. You have to be the one to find the monkey. Someone else has to find the horse.” Ed’s eyes darted toward Sarah as he said this. His expression was grim.

  “What about you? What will you be doing while I’m off looking for this monkey?”

  “I have to find the man at the center of the web.”

  “So you can cut off his heads?”

  Ed shrugged. “If I can. Will you hel
p me?”

  Danny looked out the window. He really didn’t want to go to war. Getting shot once was enough for him.

  “I’m sorry to ask you for this. I just know it was the kind of dream that we need to pay attention to, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Danny replied. “I know.”

  And so he’d enlisted, and he’d gone to Basic at Fort Dix and gotten up at four in the morning and crawled through mud and been yelled at by a drill sergeant with bad breath. Then he’d been flown to Vietnam and promoted to Private First Class before finding himself out in the jungle carrying an M16 and wondering how he’d let himself get talked into doing something this stupid.

  The rain started in the early afternoon. During the long marches in the dry dust, Danny had wished hundreds of times that it would rain a little, to cool everything off and keep the dust down. The rain that fell was a kind of mockery of all those wishes. There weren’t individual drops that he could make out, just sheets of water pouring out of the sky. Darkness fell at two in the afternoon. The men put on plastic ponchos and resigned themselves to getting soaked to the skin.

  Plotkin had rallied when they’d told him a dustoff was coming to take him back to friendly territory. But when the rain started, his stride began to falter and it became clear to Danny that his head wound was more serious than he was letting on. Once, as they were battling their way through some thick undergrowth, he staggered off the trail into the jungle and vomited on the ground. When he rejoined them, he was pale and seemed to be having trouble standing up.

  They found the eastward path and followed it into thick jungle foliage, which did nothing to diminish the volume of rainfall dumping down on their heads. Two hours later they emerged from the forest and found themselves at the edge of a grassy field. They were far out in the open before they even realized they’d left the jungle and exposed themselves.

  “Sir!” Blair said, shouting to be heard over the roar of the rain. “Lieutenant!”

  Lonnie kept walking with his head down until Angus caught up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. The Lieutenant nodded, and they all trudged back to the edge of the field. They had to lean forward to keep from getting knocked down by the rising wind. Sammy sat down on the ground, looking haggard. Danny changed the dressing on his head, keeping the bandage as dry as he could, but everyone knew the surface wound was not the real problem.