The Men in the Jungle

by Norman Spinrad

  “It’s over!” Fraden screamed, straining his lungs but still barely audible even to himself over the gargantuan murmuring. “It’s over! We’ve won!”

  Mindlessly, the mob began to roar, and they took up the chant again, “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!” And Fraden’s voice was washed away like a zephyr in a hurricane. The great, all-enveloping carpet of Sadians began to jump and writhe madly, and Fraden could see whole bodies, limbs, severed heads being tossed above them like beach balls. The Sadians began to attack guerrillas still trapped in the arena, scattered Killers, even each other.

  Got to stop ’em! Fraden thought desperately. But there was no way of… Unless…

  He raised the rifle, pointed it dramatically toward the Pavilion, the Pavilion, which was a hideous heap of shattered bodies soaked in a great congealing puddle of red-umber blood.

  Below, eyes followed the point of the rifle, saw the charnel heap of bodies, the bodies of the Brotherhood of Pain which had ruled Sangre with a fist of iron for three hundred years, the bodies of the hated enemy, the broken ruined bodies of the Brothers lying inert and bleeding in the red Sangran sunlight.

  The fighting stopped again. The chanting stopped, and this time there was no great murmuring, but a silence, an ominous, pregnant silence as a hundred thousand eyes gazed in disbelief and wonder at the raw, bloody,meat that was the last remnant of the Brotherhood of Pain.

  With all the power of his lungs, feeling capillaries bursting in the back of his throat, Bart Fraden shouted into that terrible aural vacuum: “FREEDOM! FREEDOM! THE BROTHERHOOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE FREE REPUBLIC! GO BACK TO YOUR—”

  Then everything seemed to happen at once.

  Vanderling jumped up and backward, reaching for the rifle of the distracted Fraden, twisting around to face him as he leaped, his face a crimson mask of rage and hate.

  As Vanderling’s fingers brushed the rifle, about to snatch it from Fraden’s startled grasp, he suddenly screamed, doubled over, stumbling against Fraden.

  Fraden saw that Sophia had leaped up to the bench, had driven her knee into Vanderling’s groin.

  Even as the Stadium erupted in an explosion of screamed warnings, Fraden recovered, caught the doubled over Vanderling on the point of his jaw with the rifle butt.

  Vanderling tumbled backward, twisted half around, and Fraden caught him flush in the rear with a tremendous, savage kick. Vanderling rolled crazily, down the steeply sloped stands, smashed through the shattered railing separating the stands from the arena, disappeared in a maelstrom of churning bodies, arms, legs, spears, torches, clubs.

  It had all happened in an instant—the pointing to the Pavilion, the silence, Vanderling’s attack, Sophia’s blow, the screams of the Sadians, Vanderling’s tumble into the crowd. In an instant, like neutrons bombarding an unstable nucleus from all directions at once, and in the next instant, the unstable mass exploded with a terrible, primal fury.

  Freedom! The Brotherhood was gone! Freedom! The knowledge swept through the great packed crowd in the Stadium like a firestorm, setting every drop of blood in every wretched body ablaze with release, release from three centuries of a tyranny so gross it had all but implanted itself in their genes. Freedom!

  But this was Sangre, planet of opposites, of blacks and whites graven into the souls of men by an absolute despotism that adored Pleasure as a god but worshiped the devil of Pain, that knew no middle ground. To be a slave was to be an Animal. To be a Brother was to be free. Not freedom from, but freedom to—freedom to murder, to torture, to consume living flesh, to answer the call of every twisted whim that festered in the nether regions of the human soul, to pile a mountain of corpses to the sky in order to scratch the most ephemeral, sordid itch. Brothers were… Free!

  But the Brotherhood was dead, gone forever! Now the Animals of Sangre were Free! They were all Brothers in Pain now.

  The entire Stadium erupted into a bestial orgy of cruelty, murder, and senseless horror. Man turned on woman, woman on man, children on parents, sires on offspring. The Sadians fell on each other with knives and clubs, with spears and cleavers, with teeth and claws and bloody severed limbs wielded as clubs. The Stadium rocked and heaved as the entire packed arena and the far half of the Stadium tiered with writhing humanity above and beyond it became one solid mass of ripping, slashing, stomping murderous beasts. Men and women embraced, an embrace of death, as nails tore away faces, as hands ripped away hair by the bloody roots. Children went down under stomping feet, knives, spears sticking from their ruined backs, sank their teeth into bare feet and thighs, hung on by their mouths like snapping turtles in their death throes. Limbs were ripped off by scores of hands, sent skipping over the heads of the mob as the still-living bodies were pulled down, disappeared gushing blood in a forest of kicking feet, snapping and biting as they died.

  The far wall of the Stadium burst into flame, casting a lurid, flickering orange light on the madness below. Like reverse after-images burned into the return of a blinded eye, emotions, drives, hungers turned inside out, became their opposites. Love was hate, pleasure was pain, sex was cruelty, murder was mercy, life was death, death was life as three centuries of victimized frustrations burst forth in an endless explosion like a huge, inflamed pustule lanced at last.

  And every throat that was still connected to a pair of functioning lungs was screaming a hideous, mocking chant:

  “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  As Fraden watched mindless, rooted to the concrete on which he stood, the great mass of packed, crazed, tortured humanity surged against the stands to the left of the great sheet of flame, battered against the wood and steel and concrete with the weight of thousands upon thousands of bodies, hundreds of tons of infuriated, seething flesh. Like an irresistible ram, the entire mob began to press against the grandstand. The Stadium groaned and creaked and sighed like a living thing in agony, and finally, weakened by the adjacent conflagration, stressed beyond endurance by the solid mass of insane humanity, with a terrible crack like the sky splitting open, the entire section of grandstand gave way, crumbled, fell, bearing the thousands upon it to their deaths, burying the vanguard of the mob in an avalanche of bodies, splintered steel girders, great jagged chunks of concrete.

  But the great mass of the mob surged forward, the outer wall gave way, and, amidst the falling concrete chunks and girders, a great canyon opened up, splitting the far end of the Stadium, a clear line of sight and march to the shattered Compound wall and the city beyond…

  Between the Stadium and the city proper, all but obscuring the ruined Compound wall with their bodies, was a sea of people, a sea that seemed to reach clear to the buildings of the city, a sea upon which bobbed a thousand torches, and beyond the city was engulfed in a great pillar of fire below a huge cloud of heavy black smoke as thousands of wooden shacks were put to the torch.

  And then Fraden saw Willem Vanderling.

  Like a cork tossed up by a wind-whipped sea, Vanderling, his visage bloodied, his right leg twisted grotesquely like that of a ruined doll, seemed to pop up above the mass of humanity still packing the arena floor, bounced crazily above the Animals as they tore at him with a thousand hands.

  By his churning arms, his tortured convulsions, it was clear that Vanderling was still very much alive. Then one of the uprooted crosses was raised erect, high, above the heads of the mob by scores of hands. It dipped, disappeared from view into the human whirlpool. Then hands pulled Vanderling down and he too disappeared, a man sucked into living quicksand.

  But a minute later, both the cross and Vanderling reappeared, united now, held erect and aloft above the blood-crazed throng like some monstrous tribal totem.

  They had nailed Vanderling to the cross, cruel spikes through his wrists, his forearms awash in his own blood. Yet Vanderling, his head snapping back and forth in agony like that of a bat nailed to a barn door, his body writing in torment, was still alive.

  Like moths drawn to a candle, the Animals in the Stadium s
urged through the great rent toward the grisly funeral pyre of their city, their world, snapping at each other’s entrails like a pack of rabid dogs, still slaughtering each other as they ran forward to wreak their will upon the planet.

  And in their vanguard, as if some mystic ikon, as their battle-flag as they poured forth to sack and pillage and rape their planet, to plunge all Sangre into a long, long night of savagery and murder and cannibalism, which seemed as if it could not end until the last rabid mouth had torn the last shred of flesh from the hist splintered bone, they bore the cross, with Vanderling impaled upon it. And as they bore this living totem before them, men, women leaped up, snapped at Vanderling’s body with, their teeth, climbing halfway up the wood and tortured flesh, before falling back or being torn down by others, with shreds of skin and gobbets of warm living flesh still clinging to their fingernails and teeth.

  While the cross bobbed away and out of sight toward the city, while the Stadium emptied through the jagged rent, their voices cried out, a great, horrifying, mocking chant, a paean of sickening, soul-searing adoration:

  “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  “Willem! Willem!” Fraden wailed, a lost frail sound in the hurricane of obscene chanting. “I didn’t know! How could I know…?”

  Willem was a thug, a killer, everything that was crude and vicious and wrong in a man, Willem had tried to kill him twice in the past few minutes. But they had fought side by side in two wars, crossed light-years together, talked, eaten, cursed, argued, shared victory and defeat together. Whatever else he had been, traitor, killer, liar, Willem Vanderling was, after all, a real human being. To see him like this, the broken plaything of a mob of rabid beasts, this man who had been real, a real friend, a real enemy…

  Fraden tore at himself with his fingernails, trying to make himself feel something, anything—hate, guilt, loathing, even pain. But he felt nothing. He knew that what had happened, what was still happening, was real, but he could not feel it The horror was too much to comprehend, too abysmal to feel; his capacity for guilt, hate, loathing had been whited-out, overloaded. It’s not real!, his mind screamed. It can’t be real!

  But it was! It was! It was! Willem, broken and dying, was real! Sangre was real! The universe was real! It was real, and it was a bottomless, infinite black pit out of which things spewed before which the mind of man, his very soul, was a poor lost thing whining in everlasting darkness.

  The center of the universe, the mind in control! That was the lie he had lived by, the lie that had let him stand strong, and unafraid and proud. But existence had no center, and no man could control or comprehend it and it was a void of infinite possibility, infinite horror, in which a man was but a cruel, sick joke of fate; a chip tossed by monstrous, fell forces. And, it was real, all real, and only the Bart Fraden he had known all his life was unreal, a lie, a cipher, a pathetic, powerless nothing. Fraden was drained, sucked dry, overcome, powerless, unable even to care…

  Like the will-less creature he had become, he looked down, saw that Sophia, on her knees, was clinging to him, tears streaming down her face, her body wracked with sobs.

  “Bart, Bart, Bart…” she moaned. “Get me out of here! Please, please, please get me out of here!”

  His heart went out to her, one poor nothing crying in vain to another in a black void that felt nothing, cared not whether they lived or died. Some small dying ember still glowed hot, deep within him. She would not die here, not like this! It was all absurdity, action or inaction, but he would choose his own absurdity—at least nothing could deny him that.

  He jerked her to her feet, looked around narrow-eyed like an animal at bay. The Stadium was rapidly emptying through the great wound in its side, but the arena was still a maelstrom of horror. He looked at the stands above him, empty now, ruined. He saw a clot of perhaps two dozen Killers, clothes tattered shreds, eyes wild with fright standing uncertainly, abandoned by their dead masters, near an exit portal. Poor lost creatures like… Act! he told himself. Enough thinking! Act! Act!

  He scrabbled beneath the bench, pounced on the paper-wrapped bundle, catlike, ripped away the wrapping, threw the black Brother’s robe about his shoulders.

  Pulling Sophia behind him, he ran up the stands, confronted the Killers.

  “You!” he roared. “Form a circle around us! Now! In, the name of the Brotherhood of Pain, I order you to obey me! Jump to it! Move!”

  The Killers stared woodenly for a moment at this wild-eyed, roaring demon. A Brother! Orders! Merciful orders! The Killers formed a rough circle around them, rifles pointed outward.

  Down through the bowels of the ruined, burning Stadium they ran, through passageways choked with smoke. Empty, all dead and empty. They emerged into the sunlight between the Stadium and the Palace, by the circle of parked trucks. The Palace was burning, huge orange flames lighting up the sky, the heat searing Fraden’s flesh.

  Fraden shoved Sophia before him, half-lifted her into the cab of a truck, jumped up behind the wheel beside her.

  He turned the ignition, jabbed the accelerator, and the engine sputtered and caught. He tore off the Brother’s robe like an unclean thing, flung it down at the startled Killers, gunned the motor and the truck lurched away from the Stadium in a cloud of dust and rubber.

  The truck screeched around the corner of the burning Palace, and Fraden saw that the mob was fast receding toward the city. Every outbuilding bad been smashed to flinders. The Compound walls were breached, broken, piles of loose rubble, in dozens of places. The makeshift corrals that had filled the courtyard were gone, a million wooden splinters, and the entire courtyard was filled with the pulped, bleeding bodies of the Meatanimals—the pathetic corpses of thousands of naked children. To the west, Sade was a pillar of fire, a great consuming fire-storm, toward which, like a living carpet of insects, the Sadians swarmed, bearing ten thousand tiny, bobbing torches.

  Fraden floored the accelerator, steered the truck toward a rubble-strewn gap in the eastern wall. The truck jolted through the rent with a piercing scream of metal on concrete, sending a shower of sparks flying.

  Fraden’s foot on the accelerator was jammed against the floorboard. The truck careened madly down the grassy hill on which the Palace Compound stood, reached the broad empty plain.

  South, south, across the empty plain, Sophia staring woodenly ahead, not speaking, not looking at him. Perhaps fifteen miles south of the city, Fraden turned the truck to the northwest. The truck jounced cruelly across the plain, and each bump seemed to mock him, another blow inflicted by an uncaring fate, yet at the same time caused by his own hand.

  Finally, they reached the road that led west across the plain toward the guerrilla camp. Fraden steered the truck up onto the roadway, drove west toward the camp and the lifeboat.

  Escape! Escape! he told himself as they reached the canyon that funneled the road west off the plain, the canyon littered with the refuse of that last, terrible battle that now seemed a thousand years in the past.

  For hours they drove on in silence, Sophia a frozen mannequin, Fraden but a pair of hands on the wheel, a foot on the accelerator, connected by a mind that scrabbled for purchase, a place to stand, any place to stand. They drove through jungle, across clearings here and there past a village, till burning, burning, as the madness spread cancerlike and swift from the crazed thing that was Sade.

  Escape! Escape! Vagrant thoughts tormented him. He remembered another flight, less than a year ago, the flight from the Belt Free State. What had happened to the man who had fled the Solar System, cool, calm, calculating, with a smile on his lips? Where had he been lost? How had be become this thing that had plunged a whole world into darkness, step by step, blind, utterly blind, moved like a pawn by an invisible demon hand to the brink of the final pit?

  Finally, they reached the guerrilla camp. Fraden brought the truck to a halt beside one of the shiny, antiseptic-looking lifeboats. Wordlessly, he got down, help
ed Sophia from the cab. He went over to the ’boat, pressed the airlock door stud. The outer airlock door slid smoothly upward, and the interior of the ’boat beckoned. Beckoned to what?

  He looked behind him at the empty camp, the silent huts, the dregs of dozens of cookfires. Far in the distance, a wisp of smoke curled above the treetops, and another, and another. It seemed as if the planet were one vast decomposing corpse, and he was dissolving with it. Where would he go? What would he do?

  He thought of the first moment he had set foot on Sangre, the stranger who had landed on an unknown planet to make it his own, A wave of unbearable nostalgia and loss inundated him as he remembered that man who had stood so jauntily under an alien sun, who had seemed to hold existence in the palm of his hand, the Hero, the center of the universe, the Man Who… It all seemed so long ago and far away. Could he find that man again? Could he go back? Was there any other place he could go?

  He turned to Sophia. Her eyes were red, her cheeks stained with dried tears, her long red hair a tangled heap. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment.

  “You know what I’ve got to do?” he finally said.

  She stood there looking up at him, still as a corpse, her face an immobile, stricken mask.

  “Eve got to go back,” he said “Back to Sol, back to the Belt, back to Earth. Where… where else is there? I can’t go find another planet, start another… another Sangre. Lord only knows what they’ll do to me… I suppose I’m a war criminal or something.” He laughed, a bitter, whining sound, “Who cares?” he said. “What’s the difference? I’m finished anyway, empty, used up. I never was what I thought I was in the first place. It’s all… it’s all just too big for me, for anyone. I feel like a bug, like a bug who thought his wet rock was the universe, till someone came along and flipped it over…”