New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  A form took shape, melting out of the darkened hut, revealing itself with aching slowness, inch by inch, limb by nightmare limb.

  “Dear God,” Crosshairs whispered as every monstrous appendage, every unfathomable proportion, every heart-stopping dimension flayed themselves into his cortex with hellish clarity.

  In its totality it was unlike anything they had ever seen, although portions of its anatomy were dimly recognizable. It was short and squat, capable of walking on two limbs, or four, or six. Some of these limbs terminated in cloven hooves, others webbed digits, or suction-cup discs, or nail-tipped claws.

  The body was skinless, thick cables of muscle knitting together an alien skeletal structure. Bristly hairs grew through raw tendons crawling with black flies. The head was scooped inwards like a shovel’s blade; two flaps of skin rose from its shoulder blades to encompass the skull in the manner of a cobra’s hood. The eyes were huge and multifaceted, like a dragonfly’s, mouth spanning half its face, studded with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. A pair of tarantula-like fangs, long and black, curved below the creature’s jawbone, dripping venom that sizzled the moist earth. It regarded the VC soldiers with horrible understanding: like a malicious child peering at bottled insects.

  I don’t believe this, Oddy thought. I’m not seeing this. Maybe I’m asleep and this is just a very intense dream. Maybe I’m dead and unaware of it. Could this be hell?

  And yet he knew he was not dead, not dreaming, and this was as real as any event in his life had been. As a soldier, you had to trust your senses: sight, smell, touch, memory. If you could not trust them, you could not trust anyone or anything. And if you couldn’t trust, you would not survive. So Oddy was forced to believe what he saw, even if it meant questioning every truth of the world he existed in.

  The VC soldiers fumbled to insert fresh clips into their AK’s.

  Too slow. Eons too slow.

  With a quickness defying the laws of physics and locomotion, the skinless creature advanced. Limbs whirling, it moved down the line of soldiers. None of them moved. None of them screamed. The tell-tale sound of cleaved flesh carried across the clearing.

  The creature paused, a magician preparing to reveal a most bewildering sleight of hand. One by one, like deadheaded dandelions, the soldier’s heads fell to the ground. The killing slices were surgically straight: it would’ve been possible to center the bubble on a carpenter’s level by laying it across the severed necks. Solid columns of blood gushed from the stumps, high into the air, a horrific water ballet.

  Eight men dead. That fast. A heartbeat. A blink.

  The creature pounced on the terrified officer.

  Tripwire, Gunner, and Crosshairs stared at their Sergeant. Zippo, Answer, and Slash waited for a signal.

  Oddy was on the bubble. He thought back to officer’s training, the five cardinal questions an officer must address before engaging. Yet he knew this decision could not be made by following institutionalized guidelines. It had to be a gut reaction. And his gut said:

  DO IT. FAST AND HARD.

  DO IT NOW.

  The creature slashed at the VC officer’s face and chest in the manner of a hen scratching the dirt of its coop. The smell of blood overhung the village like a cowl.

  We have to kill it, Oddy thought. Kill it now or die trying.

  “Follow me if you want,” Oddy said. “No shame if you don’t.”

  Then he stepped into the clearing.

  Every heartbeat thundered in Oddy’s chest like a cathedral bell. He was hyperaware, moving quickly but silently. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zippo and Slash cutting across to rendezvous. Their eyes were wide and terror-filled. But they came.

  Anytime. Anywhere. Anyhow.

  I will die for you.

  Oddy racked the Mossberg scattergun. He’d picked up the nasty habit of soaking the buckshot in rat poison and repacking the shells. It was a dirty trick, but he’d seen Charlie pull some doozies over the course of his three Tours. Factoring in the creature’s speed, the best he could hope was to get off two, maybe three good shots.

  He felt something whiz past his right ear and, a fraction of a second later, a hunk of the creature’s cobra-like hood vaporized in a cloud of red. Oddy craned his neck to see Crosshairs reloading his sniper rifle. The bullet missed Oddy’s head by two inches, maybe less.

  The creature let loose an ear-piercing shriek. Beneath it, the VC officer was a scattering of skin-rags that only a seasoned forensic pathologist could’ve identified as of human origin. Its jaws snapped. Oddy saw tiny white worms crawling between its teeth.

  He raised the shotgun and unloaded buckshot into those teeth.

  Zippo charged hard. The creature was flat on its back, its face buckshot-torn. Zippo pulled up at twenty feet and trained the nozzle. Whoooosh. A spiraling funnel of fire ripped across the night to engulf the creature’s thrashing form. Zippo swept the nozzle side-to-side, screaming, “Eat it! A–hooo–yeah! Eat it and die!”

  The creature stood in the bath of flame. One of its eyes drooped like a half-inflated balloon, the membrane withered like an apple gone to rot. Its mouth and surrounding flesh were pocked with blackened perforations where double-aught buckshot burrowed home, streams of greenish fluid trickling from the holes. Fire lived on its shoulders and limbs, swirling eddies and flaming dust-devils pouring out of its mouth and rising from its back in fiery wings.

  And yet, if its remaining eye could’ve been said to reflect any emotion, that emotion would be wry amusement.

  It’s been so long, young one, a faraway voice chimed in Oddy’s head. So long since I’ve been tested.

  Perhaps it was a need for cover that made Slash duck into the central hut. Perhaps it was simple curiosity. Inside it smelled primal and hostile: if it were possible to breathe blood, Slash felt he was now doing so. Sarge’s shotgun barked outside, then Zippo screamed something over the gale of his flame-thrower. The ground beneath Slash’s feet was uneven and slippery. Felt like standing on a pile of wet latex. He lit a flare, illuminating the hut in stark orange light.

  Skinned bodies—ten, fifteen, more—hung suspended from bamboo poles. Robbed of their flesh, the bodies were sickeningly skinny. On the floor beneath them, their skins lay in yellow pools. It filled every one of his senses: the stench of opened entrails, the sight of the bodies, the feel of their flesh under his boots, the creaking sound as they spun on copper-wire garrotes, the air salty with blood. The majority were children. Their underdeveloped penises were flaccid red knobs, skinned vaginas the petals of scarlet flowers slicked with dew. Slash reeled. His face brushed a flank of tacky meat. He could remember nothing of his life before this moment: he’d been born into this horror, reared in it, knew nothing but.

  He unhooked a body, a young girl, from the garrote…

  Tssst, Crosshairs’ rifle whispered. Thuup: a flaming wedge disappeared from the creature’s scalp. But it would not go down. Was this something that could be killed using the customary tools of warfare, bullets and fire and black rage? Or was something greater required: faith, holy water, a sacrificial virgin? Crosshairs ejected the spent shell from the rifle breech, jacked a new round, exhaled. Tssst.

  Zippo jettisoned the LPO-50 in favor of a pair of Magnums. He held one in each hand, firing them one at a time, right hand, left hand, right, left. His eyes were huge and he was thinking, What the fuck’s it gonna take?

  “Duck, Sarge!”

  Oddy hit the dirt as Gunner opened up with the Stoner. Set on full autofire, the gun sounded like a jackhammer. Bullets slammed into the creature, stitching its torso and ripping gobbets of melting flesh from its sides. Oddy saw, for the first time, an expression cross those nightmare features to give him hope.

  Ouch, the expression said. That fucking hurts.

  So it did something about it.

  One second the creature wasn’t there and the next it was on top of Oddy. He thrashed against its seething strength, but his arms were quickly pinned to his sides with the ease
of a mother restraining a fretting infant. The creature’s smell—wet rawhide burning in a campfire—filled his nostrils. Up close, its features were a lunatic mishmash of animal, human, monster. One insectoid eye was now completely deflated, corneal jam sizzling down a flaming cheek. Its teeth were those of an extinct species, some giant carnivorous lizard. Its skinned nose was pert and upturned, a schoolgirl’s nose. Oddy was suddenly aware of how full his bowels were.

  A claw-tipped limb ripped through his fatigues, shredding his flak jacket like it were tissue paper. Oddy sucked his stomach in, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain across his chest. Blood gushed out of him to spatter his pants, his boots, the dirt. It hoisted Oddy as if he were no more substantial than a seamstress’s dummy and hurled him toward the fire pit. Oddy hit the ground hard, saw stars, struggled to a sitting position, and saw his thighs were coated in blood.

  For the past forty-seven seconds—the time that had passed since Oddy stepped into the clearing—Crosshairs had been in “the zone.” A preternatural calm had settled over him. The world receded until all that remained was the pinprick of existence seen through his Gewher scope. His hands did not shake, and he fired as smoothly and easily as he had at the firing range in Duc Phong. His fingers worked the bolt crisply and his shots, give or take an inch, hit their mark. He chambered another round and squeezed the trigger as Oddy sailed through the air. The slug struck the creature’s flank, tearing loose a knotted network of muscle. The creature turned sharply, clawing at the spot where the slug had tore through, slitting its remaining eye at the sniper hunkered behind a copse of mangroves.

  Then it came for him.

  When Crosshairs was a small boy, he’d once rolled a flaming, kerosene-soaked tire down a hill. It was night, the hill steep. The tire wobbled as it rolled downhill, picking up speed, flames spun by centrifugal force to resemble a glowing buzz saw, wild and uncontrolled and unstoppable, strangely beautiful, strangely terrifying.

  This is what the creature reminded him of as it closed in on him: a flaming dervish rushing headlong at top speed. He squeezed off a final shot. Then it was on him.

  This is how a gym rope must feel, he though crazily as the creature shimmied up his body. Fire-tipped claws ripped into his flesh; octopus-like suction discs, blazing hot, leeched to his skin leaving blistering circles. A wall of gnashing, blood-stained teeth reared. A brittle crunch. Crosshairs crumpled to the ground, the top-left portion of his head gone.

  The creature turned to Gunner, who was slamming another clip into the Stoner. Zippo continued to fire the Magnums: flaming plugs of tissue leapt off the creature’s body, dotting the ground like glowing coals. The creature moved slower, badly wounded, less assured but more enraged.

  Oddy’s pants and underwear were soaked against his skin with blood. He had no idea how badly he was hurt. He heaved himself up and stumbled towards Crosshairs.

  “Come on!” Gunner screamed at the thing. “Come get some!”

  The hydrostatic shock of the Stoner’s .223-inch rounds were capable of killing a bull moose. In the three seconds it took to cover the distance between Crosshairs’ body, Gunner plugged no less than eighteen rounds into the creature, many at point-blank range.

  He might as well have been armed with a pea shooter.

  The creature lashed out. Gunner’s weapon fell to the ground. Unfortunately for Gunner, his arms were still attached to it. “Oh god,” Gunner mumbled.

  Darkness prevented the others from seeing Gunner backing into the jungle. They could only hear screaming, and the spraylike sound of blood. Then, for a heart-wrenching moment, Tripwire saw Gunner illuminated by the flickering flames that rose off the creature’s body. The armless machine-gunner’s face was ghost-white, his eyes wide and terror-filled, like a child face-to-face with the monster lurking beneath his bed.

  “TobyNancyHollyBradTobyNancyHollyBrad,” Gunner said, retreating further into the jungle. The names were those of his children. He’d been a poor husband and a poorer father, disrespectful of his marriage vows and neglectful of his children. Yet he had hoped, with the sincerity of feeling not unusual in those who’d faced death, to turn over a new leaf upon his return. There would be little league games and soapbox racers, school plays and piano recitals. Now, the blood from his madly-jetting stumps plastering his face, he knew this would never be. This certainty, the bitter clarity of it, filled him with a depth of regret so profound it was as if his heart had been seized in a cold fist and compressed into a tiny red agate. He thought, senselessly, that if he continued backing away he might somehow retreat in time—return to yesterday, last week, last year. Perhaps, were he to retreat far enough, he could return to the exact moment of decision and choose differently, make a choice that ensured he wouldn’t die here, like this, half a world removed from everything he knew and loved.

  The creature lashed again. Gunner’s perspective suddenly dropped two feet as his legs were cut from under him. He turned, this armless, legless thing, running clumsily, running on shredded stumps, running until equilibrium deserted and he fell face-first into the dirt, leg-stubs kicking feebly.

  “TobNantyHoddyBlad,” he whimpered, mouth filling with dark jungle soil.

  Something slashed the back of his neck. Then nothing.

  By the time Oddy reached him, Crosshairs had two morphine syrettes jutting from his chest. He was uncapping another. Oddy eased it from his fingers. “Pacify, son,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine. Fine as cherry wine.”

  He removed his shredded flak jacket and propped it under Crosshairs’s head. Then he covered his face with his fatigue vest. The damage was too gruesome to contemplate. Huts blazed all around them, bright orange shafts holding the night at bay.

  “We need a med evac now!” Oddy shouted into the PRC’s mouthpiece.

  “What’s your twenty?” dispatch asked.

  Oddy fed the rough coordinates. Dispatch spat out a landing area one klick east.

  “How soon?” Oddy asked.

  “Give it twenty.”

  “Better make it faster. We got some KIA’s, another one on death’s door.”

  “Give it twenty,” came dispatch’s impersonal reply.

  Answer had not moved when Oddy stepped into the clearing. It had nothing to do with fear, or apprehension, or panic. If Answer felt these emotions at all, it was on a remote and rudimentary level, the level upon which lesser gods and demons experience emotion. He didn’t engage because he was certain the creature they sought to kill was intrinsically unkillable. But, more importantly, he suspected that on some level, possibly cellular, he and it were identical. It would be as counterproductive as attempting to destroy one’s mirrored image.

  Slash stepped from the hut. Blood ringed his neck like a sunburn. Something was draped around his shoulders, something slack and greasy resembling a small animal turned inside-out. Answer realized it was a child’s body. Slash began walking into the jungle.

  Answer stepped into his path. He recognized, with perfect clarity, that Slash had gone insane. Something about the set of his mouth and the way he’d wrapped the child’s arm around his neck like a scarf.

  “What do you think?” Slash shrugged. The tiny body flapped.

  Answer said, “Keen…fashion sense.”

  Slash unsheathed his knife. He shaved a ribbon of flesh off the dead girl’s thigh with slow deliberation. It landed in the dirt, stuck with pebbly soil the color and texture of coffee grounds. “There’s more inside,” he said. “Hanging. Some kind of altar.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Answer said.

  “Why didn’t you help?” Slash pushed the knife-tip into one of the girl’s eyes. “Why are you still here?”

  Answer said, “Why aren’t you helping?”

  “I got…sidetracked,” Slash said. “We needed you. I think Gunner’s dead, and Crosshairs…where the fuck were you?” Slash jabbed the knife in Answer’s direction. “We got to stick together, man. We don’t, what are we? Animals,
man. Fuckin’ animals.”

  “Put the knife away.”

  “You ain’t my C.O., man.” The knife weaved in front of Slash’s face like a hypnotized cobra. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I’m not telling you anything.” Answer flicked his wrist and the carving chisel he’d loaded up his shirtsleeve dropped into his waiting palm. “I’m asking you. Nicely.”

  Slash sneered. “You little prick. So young, so righteously fucked up.” Jab-jab went the knife. “I’d be doing the world a favor.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

  Slash chopped sideways with the knife, but clumsily, the flayed corpse screwing with his balance. Answer deflected the blade, taking a deep gash across his fingers, and brought the chisel up in a tight arc, stabbing it into the flesh between Slash’s second and third ribs. Slash made a barfing noise—braaak!—dropping the knife. Answer pulled the chisel out. Very little blood.