New Title 1

by Lestewka, Patrick

  “That I cannot say. Nothing is for certain.” Chaos’s flaming shoulders shrugged. “Que sera, sera.”

  Chaos turned and walked away. Wounded though it was, its myriad limbs still moved in perfect sync, like gears in a precision timepiece.

  “Don’t go,” Answer said. Tears shined in his eyes. “Please…stay.”

  Chaos disappeared into the fiery jungle. Flames leapt to greet it and Chaos spread its arms wide to receive them. Then it was gone.

  Answer got up. He considered pursuit, dashing headlong into the flames, catching up to Chaos, or dying in the attempt. His life, whatever slim value system he had previously operated under, was obsolete. Duty, valor, sacrifice: such ideals seemed trivial now.

  Whatever will be will be…

  He turned and walked in the opposite direction, following the voices of his unit members…

  “Shitcan that talk, dogface,” Oddy said. “Where’s Answer?”

  “Here, Sarge,” Answer said, melting out of the foliage. Crosshairs lay on the ground with a blood-soaked blanket wrapped around his head. Zippo gave him a look that said: Where the fuck you been while this shit’s been going down?

  “We got a med evac rendezvouz one klick down this speed trail,” Oddy said. “Answer, scout ahead. Trip and me’ll hump Crosshairs. Zippo, you tail.”

  They raced down the speed trail as if the devil himself were in pursuit. Five pairs of eyes scanned the darkened jungle; four fearfully, one in hopeful anticipation.

  “Go go go!”

  The landing site came into view. A Huey waited. Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” pumped out of the cockpit speakers at a pitch capable of vibrating teeth from gums. They lifted Crosshairs onto the chopper’s honeycombed aluminum floor before hopping in themselves.

  “Motherfuck.” Tripwire’s body shivered against Oddy’s. “What was that thing?”

  “Don’t know, son,” Oddy replied through gritted teeth. “Hope to Christ it’s dead.”

  The door gunner was the same kid who’d ridden shotgun on the drop-off. He said, “Where are the other two?”

  Oddy shook his head.

  “Oh,” the kid said.

  The Huey flew directly over the village, which was now nothing but a flaming scalp in the darkness. Oddy leaned into the cockpit. “Get on the horn,” he told the pilot. “I want a napalm drop on that village and outlying area. Give me as wide coverage as I can command.”

  The pilot said, “That village is burning merrily all on its own.”

  “Don’t lip me, son. Got no patience for it.”

  The pilot flicked the com-link toggle on his headset. “A-303 team leader requests scar line on coordinates fifteen-twenty-two-niner.”

  “Roger,” came the reply.

  “What’s the problem, Sarge?” the pilot said. “Some of ’em get away?”

  “Precautionary measures.”

  “One hell of a precaution.”

  Minutes later a phalanx of F-4 Phantoms buzzed the Huey. The incendiary whoosh of the napalm drop was audible for miles around.

  Please God, Oddy thought. Let that be the end of it.

  ««—»»

  A-303 Blackjack was disbanded after the mission. Oddy and Zippo returned to the States, followed shortly thereafter by Crosshairs. Tripwire set off for Thailand.

  Answer stayed.

  There was no reason for him to return: no family, no girlfriend like the one Crosshairs was always yakking about, no factory job waiting. But there was a reason to stay—he knew, on a bone-deep level, Chaos was still out there.

  Waiting. Watching.

  He fell in with a group of Green Berets working Night Recon. The Greenies were baaad motherfuckers, most of them jungle-mad. Answer fit right in.

  They worked night patrol. Answer applied camouflage—green stripe, black stripe, green stripe, black stripe—until his body was colored with the jungle. He slipped through the darkness like water, like oil, soundless, centerless. Answer became the jungle. He lost himself in the land, and in doing so located himself. His Truth. He stopped carrying a weapon, except for his K-Bar. He didn’t need a gun anymore. He had become part of the terrain, indistinguishable from the trees and the dirt and the water.

  At night in the jungle he felt as close to his own body as was humanly possible: his blood moving, his hair, his skin, his heart pounding with the rhythm of the land. He felt the roots beneath his bare feet and wished they might grow up into him, anchoring him in place, connecting him to the land. Sometimes, out in the darkness, he slipped into a kind of daydreaming state. He dreamed of dead bodies, acres upon acres of them, piled atop one another like split logs. He dreamed of armless, legless, headless corpses, fields of little rag dolls pulled apart, liquid, stuffed with streaming redness, flowing out and away. He dreamed of bloated rats skittering over and into the piled carcasses like ants trundling in and out of their hills. Vietnam—the bloodshed and madness and chaos of it—became him. He crossed to the other side. He was part of the land. He became shadows and nightmare. He wore a necklace of human tongues.

  He was watching and searching.

  He was waiting to be found.

  — | — | —

  Northwest Territories

  December 8th, 1987. 1:20 a.m.

  Once, during an R&R stint in St. Petersburg following a string of Midwest bank jobs, Oddy went scuba diving. It struck him that the pastime had much in common with his Tours in Vietnam.

  Men were not meant to breathe underwater.

  Men were not meant to go to war.

  Submerging for the first time, his heart hammering inside his wetsuit, taking that first lungful of compressed air…so unnatural. Dropping to the ocean floor, staring into the silty water, wondering what creatures might emerge from it…unnatural. Nitrogen entering the bloodstream, blossoming in every ventricle…unnatural. But after a while you got used to the unnaturalness of the situation. Came to enjoy it, even.

  Same rules applied in Vietnam. The first time he’d waded through a rice paddy with an M-16 raised overhead…unnatural. First time he’d set an M-14 toe-popper under a pile of wet leaves and dropped a Twinkie beside it…unnatural. The first time he’d killed a man, blowing a moon-roof in the back of his shocked yellow head…so unnatural. But by that time he’d dipped far enough beneath the waves he’d entered that fathomless realm where there was no right or wrong, only grim survival.

  Dangers abound in both cases. Free divers who spend too much time at great depths suffer aseptic bone necrosis from years of residual nitrogen bubbles trapped in their marrow, bones left fragile as honeycombs. Soldiers who spend too much time in a warzone suffer shellshock and night sweats; their minds become fragile as honeycombs—or worse, hard as obsidian. But these are the prices to be paid by those who live and breathe at those alien depths where the wild things are.

  Now, as he ran through the night, Oddy was struck by how natural the situation felt: the weight of a gun in his hands, the blood and pain hammering his calves and thighs, adrenaline spiking through his heart. He was in the eye of madness. Where the wild things are. And he belonged.

  How long have I been running? he wondered. Felt like forever. His legs burned as if the veins were shot full of carbolic acid. Answer flashed up the path ahead of him, Sig Sauer sweeping the fringing bushes. Zippo and Tripwire brought up the rear. The land stretched before them, endless and dark and menacing.

  “Hold up.”

  Answer stopped and turned. His gun tapped his leg with the irritability of a man late for an important meeting. Zippo and Tripwire caught up.

  “What’s the problem?” Zippo said.

  Oddy pulled the map out. Answer snapped a flare alight.

  “We’ve been running like headless chickens,” Oddy said. “My bearings are shot.” He pointed in a westerly direction. “Lake’s over there. If we cut across this inlet, we’ll shave off half a day.”

  A distant explosion swelled across the treetops. Tripwire bowed his head in recognition of what the sou
nd meant. And then there were four, Answer thought.

  “We hoof it down to the lake,” Oddy said after a moment, “slap on the snowshoes, and hightail it across the ice. How much ammo we got?”

  “The flamer’s toast.” Zippo spoke like a boy whose puppy had been run over. “Got five magazines for the pistols.”

  Tripwire checked his pack. “One more clip, plus whatever’s left in the one I’m using. He fingered the bandoliers crossed over his chest. “Still got enough explosive to blow a hole in the world.”

  Oddy said, “Answer?”

  “Couple hundred rounds.”

  “And I got two belts for the H&K.” Oddy smiled wearily. “After that I guess we’re using our bare hands.”

  Zippo leaned against a tree covered with brittle moss and frozen white flowers. Slowly, like a drunk sliding down an alley wall, he slid down the trunk, hitting the ground with a groan.

  “Zip?” Tripwire came over. “You okay?”

  “My fucking ribs,” he said. “Busted a couple, I think.”

  Tripwire unzipped the hitman’s parka. Beneath his thermal vest, the left-hand side of Zippo’s chest was lumpy, as if shards of broken glass had been inserted beneath the skin. The hitman shifted. Things ground inside his chest, bone against bone, bone against organ. His torso felt like it was packed full of thumbtacks.

  “Yeah,” Tripwire said. “Three greensticks, maybe more. Also a dislocated shoulder.”

  “Do what you do,” Oddy told him.

  Tripwire cracked the M-5 kit. He loaded Zippo up on streptomycin for the pain and penicillin to stay infection. “I could give you morphine, Zippo, but you’d be fuzzed out of your mind.” The hitman shook his head, grimaced, and said, “No morphine.” Tripwire removed Zippo’s thermal vest and braced his left shoulder against the tree. Zippo’s dislocated clavicle bone pressed against the skin, the knob looking like a gold ball.

  “I’m gonna pop it back in,” Tripwire said. “It’ll hurt like fuck.”

  “Get to it.”

  Instructing Oddy to keep a firm grip on Zippo’s right shoulder, Tripwire went behind the tree and gripped Zippo’s left shoulder from the opposite side.

  “One…two…three.”

  Jerking hard on his shoulder, Tripwire popped Zippo’s shoulder-bone back into its socket. It re-located with a crisp pop. Zippo screamed. Tripwire wrapped the hitman’s chest and shoulder in Ace bandages before helping him into his vest and parka.

  “You going to be okay?” Oddy said.

  “You lead, Sarge,” Zippo said, “and I’ll follow.”

  “Let’s get at it, then.”

  They cut across a steep downhill grade leading to the lake’s shore. Great Bear stretched for miles, covered in a white pane of snow. The trees of the far shore were pinprick spires. The men pulled on the snowshoes and set off. The snowshoes took some getting used to: to compensate for their width, the men were forced to adopt an awkward bowlegged gait. Their breath puffed out in great white plumes. It had been over twelve hours since they last rested.

  Tripwire pulled up beside Oddy. He shook two Luckies from the pack, lit them, passed one to Oddy. “Absurd, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “Us. Here. Life. The universe.” Tripwire exhaled smoke through his nostrils, smiling.

  “Hmmm,” Oddy said. “Yeah. Absurd.”

  “But don’t you also feel a bit like…I don’t know, like this feels so…”

  “Right?”

  “Exactly,” Tripwire said, clapping his hands together. “I feel right out here. I mean, no question I’m scared as shit—but it’s not bad. It’s like I belong here, and this was something I was meant to do. And it’s wrong, I know—Christ, Crosshairs is gone—but I can’t help it.” He looked away, ashamed of the admission. “You know?”

  “Sure I know, son. Think about what brought us together in the first place—the fact we’re good at destroying things. The army saw it before we saw it in ourselves. We were born into this, born to fight and to kill…and, on some level, to enjoy it.” He took a long hard drag on the Lucky, inhaling so deeply its coal flared like a neon sign. “If the war hadn’t found us, we would have found the war. And if not ’Nam, then some other conflict.”

  Tripwire puffed contemplatively, cigarette smoke curling around his manicured fingernails. He’d had them done a week ago at an East-LA esthetique, clipped and filed, the cuticles buffed. Now there were bits of a vampire’s face underneath them. “Some shitty birthright, isn’t it? Like we’ve been bred, bred from the cradle, to be what we are.” He looked at his hands, detached, as if they were not a part of him. “And isn’t it strange how we all came? None of us married, no families, all of us needing, for one reason or another, to accept Grosevoir’s proposition.”

  Oddy licked his thumb and pointer finger and extinguished the cigarette’s heater between them. “You think it’s fate, son—destiny?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, I think, could be—”

  “I think it’s fate. No other way to explain it.”

  After a moment, Tripwire said, “Yeah. So do I.” There was a grimness to his voice, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of the inevitable. “More of us are going to die before this thing’s over, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know, son.”

  Somewhere on the lake’s far side a great noise arose. The men turned their heads. In the distance, carrying over the lake’s frozen plate, the sound of snapping wood. Not twigs. Not branches, even. Trees. They were being broken low, near their bases, two-foot-thick trunks shattering like dandelion stalks.

  “Jesus Christ…” Tripwire whispered.

  A massive shape moved through the forest skirting the lake. Silhouetted against the permanent dusk, its immense frame towered above the trees. Its arms, which may or may not have been covered in matted fur, swung loosely at its sides. Its legs, each twice the size of a stabilizing support on an offshore oil rig, covered two-hundred yards in a single stride. Birds massed in a loose halo above its head; its hand occasionally rose to brush at them in an agitated manner. Although it was difficult to tell, Oddy thought he saw human-sized creatures clinging to the massive beast’s back, sides, and chest. They scuttled across its shoulders or rode the hillock-sized knobs of its spine or simply clung for dear life wherever purchase could be found. Zippo craned his neck upward in an attempt to take in the thing’s head. He saw two red pits, each the size of a swimming pool, where its eyes should be. Its smell carried across the lake: wood sap, smoke, carrion. The men stood stock-still, willing themselves invisible, until the shape ambled from view.

  “Of all the times to be without a camera,” Zippo said finally. “Ripley’s would’ve paid big money for a snapshot of that thing.”

  They hiked for another hour before breaking for grub. The portable stove had been lost during their flight from the vampires, so they tore the dried food packets open and ate the contents with their bare hands. Dehydrated shards of beef cut the insides of their mouths, rock-hard kernels of corn shattered between their teeth like jawbreakers, bullion powder gritted on their tongues. Zippo cracked open four tins of fruit salad and passed them around. The men ate greedily, silently, hands and mouth smeared with sweet syrup.

  “Sarge,” Tripwire said once they’d finished. “You tell me to, I’ll get my ass up and hoof it until I keel over dead. But I really wouldn’t mind a bit of a rest.”

  Oddy glanced at Zippo out of the corner of his eye. He was looking pale and had been coughing up gobs of blood throughout the meal. “Okay. We got good sightlines here—nothing’s going to sneak up on us. Take a break.”

  Answer retrieved four flares from his pack. He snapped them alight and set them around the encampment. Tripwire collected the empty fruit salad tins.

  “Give me your fishing rigs,” he said.

  Tripwire took the tins and the fishing line and walked out to where the flares had been set. He scooped a hole in the snow, into which he deposited a tin.
He unhooked four grenades and tied fishing line to the pins. Then he placed the grenades into the tins and played line out until he was back with the others.

  “A little boobytrap,” he said. “We see anything coming, I yank the line, pull the pin, and…” he placed his fist in front of his mouth, made a pop sound, and opened his hand. “…boom.”

  “Nice idea,” Answer said. “But won’t the explosions crack the ice?”

  Tripwire frowned. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  Oddy said, “Well, we can all swim.”