The Sangrans roared, a terrible, half-laugh, half-growl. A mad, feral look came over the feasting villagers.
Then a dozen of them, eyes blazing with wild hate, mouths greased with human fat and grinning cruelly, tossed aside jugs and chunks of meat, rushed up to the Killer, pulled him off the ground, dragged him writhing in his bonds and growling through his gag to a fire where a nearly done Meatanimal was being turned on its spit by a gaunt Sangran woman.
Looks like they do think so! Vanderling thought woozily, half-falling to the ground by the hut. Either that or they don’t much care… Wonder what fun and games they have in store for the poor crud…?
To his horror and unbelieving fascination, Vanderling soon found out. He took a long swig of wine from a jug that lay by the hut as two Sangrans took the roasting carcass off the spit while others literally ripped every shred of clothing from the Killer’s body as the entire village gathered around the fire and cheered them on.
Vanderling took another drink, found himself drifting Into torpid indifference as the villagers tied the Killer, his every muscle twitching in terror, his eyes bugging wildly, to the long wooden spit.
Vanderling took yet another drink, was nearly out when they lifted the spitted Killer out onto the two forked sticks that supported the spit over the roaring fire.
The Killer began to writhe terribly as the flames licked and scorched his naked body, Vanderling could hear muffled, anguished shrieks through the gag, as his eyelids began to droop irresistibly. The gaunt woman began to turn the spit, and now the flames licked the Killer’s back, now his chest, and his lank hair suddenly went up in a crown of flames…
Then someone ripped the gag from the Killer’s mouth, and a long, shrill, terrible scream pierced the air, drowning out the howls and mad laughs of the Sangrans who clustered around the spit, slobbering chunks of meat on their bare chests distractedly as they enjoyed the enemy’s agony.
After a time, the scream subsided into a kind of low, continuous moan… Then, after several minutes, as the fire began to pop and sizzle, the moaning became a barely audible sigh, finally stopped.
But the Sangrans continued to roast the now dead Killer.
Vanderling managed to shake his leaden head once. Gonna eat him, he thought in almost schoolteacherish disapproval.
“Can’t be any good,” he managed to mutter drunkenly. “Crazy bastards… Mother gotta be tough as n’old boot…”
Then he fell into a deep, totally stupefied sleep.
Bart Fraden glumly shoveled another glob of the mealy stuff into his mouth—a bland concoction of rice, vegetables and the dried weeds that passed for the local spices. Across the table, Vanderling’s plate was untouched, but Sophia was still packing the slop away. Nothing seemed capable of slacking her appetite for very long. Once we’ve got this mudball under control, he thought, we’ve got to find some way of importing Terran animals, though what we’ll use for foreign exchange…
“What’s the big joke, Chrome-dome?” Sophia said, and Fraden saw that Vanderling was grinning an infuriatingly smug, self-satisfied grin. Willem had certainty been acting strangely on this visit back to camp—grinning at odd moments at incomprehensible things, at his herogyn-heads, at other guerrillas returning from turns at playing bandit, looking sleek, well-fed, even fat… And now, he’s grinning at nothing at all, just a meal in my hut. What the hell’s so funny about that? Screw it, we’ve got business to attend to!
“Time to start stage three, Willem,” he said.
“Huh…?” Vanderling muttered abstractedly.
“Third stage of the classic four-stage revolution,” Fraden said. “First stage is to secure and hold a district, and we completed that months ago. Second stage is to tie down the opposition by fomenting general planetwide pillaging, looting, and banditry. That’s what you’ve been doing for the past two months, isn’t it? Okay, so now we’re ready for stage three. We’ve got the Killers tied down in thousands of small occupation groups, and now we can hit ’em all over the planet with locally superior forces, wear ’em down inch-wise, bleed ’em dry, and finally force Moro to pull back what’s left of the whole kit and caboodle to an enclave in Sade. Then stage four, we wipe out the enclave and we’re the only force left on the planet; we clean up the terrorism and sit back and congratulate ourselves.”
“Yeah, sure…” Vanderling said, “Only your stage two needs more work. Much more work.” Vanderling’s eyes seemed almost to be glowing. What was going on in that shiny little head of his?
“I don’t get it,” Fraden said irritably, “The reports 1 get from Olnay’s boys say half the villages on the planet are striking. The woods are full of bandits. The Killers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Every Brother on the planet’s screaming for more Killers by now, and we know they’re not getting ’em because there’ve been no significant troop movements since Moro spread out his reserves. The Killers are spread as thin as they can be. It’s time to start hitting ’em, and hitting ’em hard!”
“Jeez, we only got a couple thousand of our boys in the raiding parties,” Vanderling whined, “We got another six thousand or better you can use against the Killers.”
“Me?” Fraden snapped. “What the hell do you mean, me? You’re the tactician, remember? Running the army in the field’s your line of evil, not mine. Why do you think I took you with me when we left the Belt, for laughs? What’s with you, Willem? What is all this?”
“I’m telling you, man, I’m telling you! Sure we got the Killers tied down. Sure there are raids all over the place. But damn it, our boys are making half those raids. We hit and move on and hit again, maybe two or three times in a good day, but those dumb-ass villagers, they raid and have a big feast and stuff themselves silly and they don’t move again till their guts start to rumble. It looks like the thing has its own momentum from where you sit, but I’m telling you that our boys are still the ones that’re keeping it going.”
“What kind of crap are you trying to hand me?” Fraden said. “Can’t you even count? The reports say there’s something like ten thousand incidents a day planetwide. You expect me to believe that about a hundred groups of our boys are responsible for half of ’em? Come off it, man, come off it!”
Vanderling frowned hard, seemed deep in thought—Fraden sourly imagined that he could smell the wood burning. “Er… so I exaggerated a bit…” Vanderling finally said. “But it’s… er, the competition… yeah, that’s what you’d call it; competition. Look, I’m going from group to group in the outback, and I hear of a district where things are too quiet. The local yokums have made a big haul and they’re just sitting around playing with themselves, right? So then I have our boys hit four, five, six times in the same area, real quick—boom! boom! boom! Dig? Then the local talent gets to figuring that if they don’t start moving, someone else will knock over all the easy marks. We keep ’em on their toes. Sure, the yokums do most of the raiding, but we keep ’em at it. Leave ’em to themselves, and they get lazy.”
Fraden studied Vanderling dubiously. The whole thing smelled like an ex post facto cock-and-bull story. All reports indicated that Sangrans were really going ape, raiding everything in sight, wasting food like there was no tomorrow. The planet was full of Meatanimals running wild, half-eaten corpses, even dead Meatanimals that the bandits just let lay where they fell. So what was Willem’s real reason?
“Okay…” Fraden said slowly. “So we’ll assume that you’re right. But that doesn’t mean it has to tie you down. Our raiders can handle that end of it by themselves. In the meantime, we start stage three. You concentrate on planning ambushes, get things moving. As you said yourself, even if we keep a couple thousand men on the raiding campaign, you’ve still got six thousand to work with.”
Vanderling frowned, scratched his bald skull. “Look,” he said, “I’m telling you that the raids are what count now. I’ve gotta keep my hand in, gotta keep the feel of it That’s the way I run an operation like this. Maybe you think those ’heads will ke
ep their cool without me dropping in on each group every once in a while? Those babies don’t give a shit about your Revolution or tactics or anything else except killing and herogyn. I give ’em a big supply of herogyn when they go out and they stay stoned the whole time. Give ’em no herogyn, and they’ll go utterly ape. This way, I hit every group a couple times a month, and give ’em just enough to stretch out till the next time I see ’em, and man, they know it It’s the only way to keep ’em in line.”
“Okay, so we phase the ’heads out of the raiding operation. We—”
“Goddamn it, Bart, this is my line of evil, remember?” Vanderling snapped churlishly. “I’m the tactician; you just said so yourself, I don’t tell you about over-all strategy, don’t tell me how to run things in the field! I say that I’ve got to stick with the raiding program, and you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or do you want to try running everything yourself? Try it! Be my guest. See how far you get!”
Fraden was taken aback by Vanderling’s vehemence. Besides, Willem had made some good points. And he had always seemed to know what he was doing when it came to running an army in the field. No point in stirring up trouble when you could avoid it…
“Okay,” Fraden said. “So we compromise. You stay with the raiders another three weeks and phase out the ’heads. After that, I don’t care what you think the tactical situation is, you handle the main force full time. Just remember that strategy dictates tactics and not the other way around. Dig?”
“I dig…” Vanderling said sullenly. He got up, headed for the doorway.
“Hey, you haven’t eaten a thing!” Fraden called after him.
Vanderling turned, his face suddenly smiled. He seemed to be suppressing a snigger. “Guess I just don’t feel like bunny-food,” he said. Then he was gone.
As Fraden stared at the empty doorway, he felt Sophia’s eyes on the back of his neck. He turned, saw that she was staring straight at him, sardonic amusement in her green eyes, a twisted, almost indulgent, smile on her lips. He stared back questioningly.
She continued to look silently at him, like a petulant Cheshire Cat.
“All right, all right!” he snapped. “So what is it?”
“Far be it from me to interfere in the weighty and complex affairs of state…”
“Jesus Christ, Soph, spit it out, will you! Enough little mysteries for one day!”
“You mean you don’t see it?” she said incredulously. “You really don’t see It? You’re not putting me on?”
“See what, dammit?”
“Old Bullethead, what else? Why he’s so dead set on going back to the woods with his trick-or-treat pals instead of staying here and playing general.”
Fraden sighed. Another tirade about Willem was about due anyway. Might as well get it over with.
“Okay, Sherlock,” he said, “give with the brilliant deduction.”
“Good Lord, Bart, what’s the matter with you? Are you so wrapped up in playing hero that you don’t see what’s happening with Chrome-dome? He’s digging it! He’s enjoying it; he’s got his own planet-wide pigpen to wallow round in and he doesn’t want to give it up.”
“He’s enjoying what?”
“What?” Sophia shouted. “What! Running amok, that’s what! Ye gods, Bart, here we have old Bullethead on a special assignment—and what’s his little chore but tearing up the countryside, killing and looting and behaving in general like the utter swine he is. He’s wallowing in it. Killing and looting and god-knows-what… Do you know what? Do you really know what Chrome-dome and his goon squads are doing?”
“They’ve been ordered to raid small Killer outposts and storehouses and Meatanimal herds and distribute all but what they need for themselves to the villagers as an example. That’s hardly—”
“Ordered, schmordered! Do you know that they’ve been following your orders? Do you have anything but Vanderling’s word for it? You’ve been too busy with other things to check up on what they’re really up to. I can imagine what’s going on. I can just imagine! Fun and games! I notice that Bullethead looks mighty fat and healthy. You really think he’s been eating the same rabbit food we’re making do with? You think Bullethead and his cronies are about to live off grain and vegetables when you’re not around, and when they’ve got all those nice fat little—”
“Not Willem!” Fraden exclaimed. “The Sangrans… well, they’re Sangrans, and you’ve got to make compromises here and there in a war like this, but Willem…”
“Oh sure, sure, dear sweet Bullethead. And wasn’t he smirking like some dirty old man watching us eat this mung? Didn’t you wonder what was going on in his shiny little head?”
“Now that you mention it…”
“Now that I mention it, he says!” Sophia shouted. “Jesus H. Christ oh a bicycle! I’ll tell you what tickled his perverted funnybone—Bart Fraden choking down rice and vegetables while he’s been dining on nice juicy meat for two months, and never mind that it’s human meat. I’m sure that Chrome-dome is beyond such fine culinary distinctions at this point.”
“Aw, you’re jumping to conclusions, Soph…” Fraden muttered without much conviction. Willem did look like he’d gained weight, and all that crap about momentum and competition did sound pretty damned phony…
“So I’m jumping to conclusions,” Sophia said with sudden sly calmness. “Alrighty… So suppose you take the ’boat and have a look for yourself. Take some time. Ask some questions. The Animals will tell you the truth, won’t they? You’re the Big Hero, aren’t you?”
“You may have a point,” Fraden admitted grudgingly. “We’re doing the liberator bit, we’re not supposed to be carbon copies of the Brotherhood. If Willem’s getting out of hand…”
Fraden gritted his teeth. If Willem was playing games behind his back, the time to stop it was now, before things went any further. It was all very well to throw away your sensibilities when you were fighting a revolution—war was no time for excessive scruples. But, hell, he thought, when we win, we’ll have to rule this mudball We can’t have everyone, including our own troops, going ape. If Willem…
“Okay, Soph,” he said. “I’ll leave in the morning. We’ll soon see if there’s anything to this.”
Sophia shrugged and went back to eating her rice and vegetables. “Just don’t holler when I say I told you so,” she said between mouthfuls.
As he kept one eye on the lifeboat’s viewscreen looking for a third Sangran village to case and conned the ’boat with the other, Bart Fraden felt a growing uneasiness. He had hit two villages at random so far, and superficially everything seemed to be swinging along according to plan. The fields of both villages had been lying fallow, with the local Brains having been killed by the usual guerillas-dressed-as-Killers, they had both been half empty—the men were off in the jungle on raiding parties. Generally, all according to plan.
It was the specifics that bothered him. The women and children of both villages looked fatter and healthier than any Sangrans he had ever seen before, and the bones of Meatanimals littered both villages around burnt-out cookfires. But then, what else could you expect when you encouraged a protein-starved populace to run wild? When the Revolution was over, and more conventional food animals could be introduced from off-planet, then it would be possible to deal with the rampant cannibalism with a heavier hand. No, that really wasn’t what smelled so wrong… It was that story they told in the first village, about how the Killers who had killed their Brain had also killed seven villagers… And those other human bones in the second village, adult human bones, skulls with teeth filed to points—Killers’ bones. They had taken prisoners and they had… they had eaten the Killers they captured. That was bad enough, but the story they told about it, about just happening to find two wounded Killers and being very hungry at the time… It just hadn’t seemed like the whole truth…
Now Fraden saw another village in the viewscreen. Hey… what was that?
There seemed to be a big commotion in the center of the vi
llage… people milling around, smoke rising from nearly a dozen fires…
Fraden gritted his teeth as he spiraled the ’boat down toward the village. It looked as if he was about to see exactly what they did do after a raid while they were doing it, and his curiosity was nearly outweighed by his apprehension.
He landed the ’boat in the center of the village, and, Hero of the Revolution or not, unshipped a snipgun before he stepped out of the airlock and into a grotesque carnival.
It was quite a sight. Ten big fires roared in the center of the village, and a spitted Meatanimal was being turned above each fire by a Sangran woman. Other butchered carcasses, already spitted, were piled by the fires, waiting their turn. The air was filled with the pungent odor of roasting meat, tormenting him, causing his mouth to water despite the essential horror of the situation. It had been so long since he had tasted well-cooked meat… About two hundred men, women, and children stood or sat around the fires, holding chunks of meat, whole joints of Meatanimal, drinking wine from day jugs, and staring curiously in the direction of the ’boat as he emerged.
And as they saw him, they began to cheer, waving half-denuded bones, greasy bits of meat. Those who had been sitting sprang up, and the whole mob began to chant his name: “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”
Fraden found himself being torn in all directions. The smell of the meat caused his digestive juices to flow, but the thought of what that meat was, the sight of the all-too-human-looking carcasses, turned his stomach. The sound of people chanting his name awakened old echoes, buoyed him, but the… the things they were waving as they cheered him edged the buoyant feeling with disgust Still, this, after all, was what he had known was going on; it was all according to his own plan. But he had never seen and smelt it before, and the actual experience was viscerally nauseating.
The Sangrans formed a cheering, gesticulating welcoming mob as he reluctantly walked toward them: “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”
“Long live the Free Republic!” Fraden shouted, trying to stop the chant, which, moment by moment, seemed to him to become, more and more mocking. Sangrans clustered around him, shook his hands, slapped his back with fingers smeared with human fat, babbled, laughed, grunted, burbled with unholy glee.
The Men in the Jungle Page 18
