by Paul Monette
Schaefer stood up decisively and whistled to the others: “Okay, we move out!”
Just as he called the order Ramirez limped into the clearing, blood caked on his forehead, the dried red streaks fanning out across his cheek like warpaint. He stood like a specter, swaying as if he would faint at any moment.
Blain saw him first. With typical drop-dead bluntness he exclaimed, “Jesus, man, you look like fuckin’ Dracula.”
The rest turned as Blain spoke, crouching and ready to return fire as Ramirez gasped out his story. “The girl—she got away,” he explained breathlessly. “Hawkins followed her up the canyon, but then right after that I heard a shot. So I came back here to get you guys. We gotta go find them.”
As Ramirez spoke, Billy was already hacking through a mass of ferns on the ridge slope, the most direct route to Hawkins and the girl. The Indian knew from the sound of the gunshot exactly which way to steer. The plan to head out had now been abandoned as quick as the order had been given, simply because one of their own was in trouble. Mac helped Ramirez along as the others climbed the ridge, moving out in an offense/defense pattern, combing every inch of jungle with weapons cocked as they pushed forward.
It was scarcely a couple of minutes before they broke through the last of the ferns to the canyon rim where Anna had passed and on into the long moss-covered alley, the murder site still ripe and raw with the latest desecration. Billy was the first to reach the emotionally spent girl, but the others quickly caught up with him. The six commandos stood in a semicircle round the cowering Anna, each wrestling with a dread that only seemed to grow more nightmarish, and these were men who spent their lives strangling the guts out of nightmares. Anna’s blood-splattered face was glazed with terror, her eyes vacant, her pupils dilated black as onyx, as if she had just seen Satan himself. She wasn’t even aware of the commandos’ presence.
Dillon knelt down and shook her shoulder gently. “Hey . . . hey, what the hell happened?” he demanded, louder and louder, trying to revive her. But it was useless. She curled there quivering, lost in her nightmare, stubborn almost, as if it would be more terrible to wake and have to tell it. Then Dillon wiped some of the blood from her face with the back of his hand and carefully turned her head looking for a wound. There was none.
“I don’t think it’s her blood,” he announced in a slightly dazed voice.
Schaefer looked grim. “Dillon, you stay with her,” he said flatly, taking control, totally ignoring rank. “All right, let’s look around,” he ordered, turning to the remaining soldiers. Schaefer’s natural leadership role was surfacing strong and clear in the grip of danger. Hierarchy meant little in the kind of crisis that whittled men down to the soul. In any case Dillon was too scared to argue.
Already Billy had been scouting the immediate area and stumbled on Hawkins’s weapon and radio. He trotted back to the others hauling the blood-splattered equipment and dumped it unceremoniously on the ground.
“Major, you better check this stuff out,” said the Indian urgently.
“Hawkins?” Schaefer questioned, nodding toward the broken gear and not really needing an answer.
“I think so,” Billy replied, shying ever so slightly from the truth.
“Let’s get on it!” And they all fanned out, Ramirez quickly picking up the torn track of mossy turf across the alley and the crushed section of underbrush through which Hawkins’s body smashed till it slammed against a bamboo trunk. Climbing through the broken brambles, his head and balls still throbbing, Ramirez walked straight into a pile of bloody human entrails oozing against the base of the tree. Ravenous flies had already zeroed in on the meal and swarmed in a frenzy around the slick red pool.
Schaefer was right behind the Chicano and stared down at the bloody heap, stunned all over again. “What in God’s name . . .” he muttered bitterly, thinking with a sudden chill how terribly cruel a godless world could be. And even though he’d always supposed he believed in nothing, he prayed just then for something to help them. Anything.
“I think it’s Hawkins, Major,” Billy offered.
“Then where the hell is his body?” Schaefer demanded.
Billy pointed to the ground a few feet away. “Tracks. Major,” he said. Heading off into the jungle were three-toed footprints almost eighteen inches long. A deep hole punctured the ground at the back of each print from the powerful hooked spurs that protruded from the alien’s heels. Schaefer swallowed hard, a sick feeling rising in his stomach. At that moment he realized he could no longer deny the evidence. And Billy was definitely not on his way to selling rugs in Louisiana.
“What the fuck?” said Blain, incredulous as he stared down at the prints. “Even these fuckin’ contras don’t got Russian shoes with prints like that. That ain’t no guerrilla. That ain’t even . . .” And the man went speechless, who had always before kept the words flowing, even when the bullets were zinging overhead.
Schaefer took up where Blain left off. “Not even human,” he said soberly. “Not even an animal.”
“Then what?” whispered Blain.
“Pal, we don’t even got a name for it. That’s how bad it is.”
Without a word they began to follow the tracks until they reached a point hardly fifty yards from the hideous pool of guts—where the footprints simply stopped, as if whatever made them had vanished into thin air again or taken to the sky.
Schaefer considered the situation for a second. “Okay, back to the girl. She’s our only hope for an answer.”
As the commandos marched back to where the rebel woman was being watched by Dillon, she was beginning to come around. A slight moaning issued from her lips, as if she were begging her way back to reality. As Dillon bathed her lips with water from his canteen, the major approached and stood just a few feet from her, hands on his hips. She looked up at Schaefer and struggled to focus as he towered above her, his massive muscular frame casting a shadow that blocked her whole body from the late orange sun. She seemed grateful for the shade, but otherwise she looked pitiful. The spark and fury, the whole rebel spirit, had been knocked out of her forever.
Schaefer realized how threatening he must look and so squatted next to her and spoke soothingly. In gentle Spanish he tried to evoke a response. He took up her hand in a gesture of truce. “My man caught up with you, didn’t he?” he said. “Then something happened. Who attacked you? How’d this blood get on you?”
Anna looked at the major, baffled and teary-eyed. For the first time since the attack she began to form words, barely recognizable, but nonetheless she was talking at last. “The . . . the whole jungle . . . it came alive,” she stumbled. “More than a jaguar—more than all the snakes. It ripped him open and dragged him . . . over there.” And she pointed to the crushed bushes, the spot where Hawkins’s body had flown like a broken puppet.
The rest of the men had been standing quietly a few feet away. “Christ, she don’t make any sense,” Dillon broke in. “It’s the damn guerrillas, and she knows it. All we gotta do is go in there and grab ’em. Let’s go.”
Ramirez, searching desperately for a logical explanation, frightened of the truth, quickly patched together a story. “Coupla monkeys been trailing us all the way from the camp, Major,” he said with bold assurance. “Billy heard ’em. She musta set us up and then ran for it,” he reasoned, pointing at the shocked girl. “They were waitin’ all this time. I shoulda wasted the bitch when I had the chance,” he snarled.
Schaefer looked at Hawkins’s blood-stained gun and radio, then back to Anna, sorting through the sketchy evidence, trying to make it fit anything but Billy’s version.
“Then why didn’t they take the radio and his gun?” he asked brutally, puncturing the first hole in Ramirez’s story. “And why didn’t she escape?” he added, nodding to Anna. “If they fuckin’ came to rescue her, how come they forgot her?”
No response. Everyone was dumbstruck and squirming with discomfort. Then Billy broke the silence. “It’s the same thing happened to Davis,�
�� he announced grimly. The air of certainty in his voice was unmistakable.
Schaefer was suddenly red with rage, impatient and adamant. He made his intentions savagely clear. “I want Hawkins found,” he ordered, looking around at the others. “Sweep pattern and double back. Fifty meters,” he barked, indicating the range of jungle he wanted scoured by the inch. He slammed his fist in his hand ready to burst with frustration.
The soldiers spread into the darkening jungle, turning it inside out, bush by bush, deadfall by deadfall. High in the bowl of the canyon Schaefer came to a tall sycamore with a heavy carpet of vibrant green moss growing lush around its base. His keen eye was drawn to a brilliant scarlet spot, about four inches across, which stood out in vivid contrast to the green. The major crouched and studied the dark red mark, then touched it with the tip of his forefinger and felt the wet slick of it.
“Blood,” he said blankly to himseif, his shoulders sinking slightly as if with the weight of grief to come. Even as he spoke a drop of the red liquid landed in the center of the stain with a dull plop. He looked up reluctantly, clenching his jaw in anticipation of the new horror. Above him in the dense foliage he saw a spattering of more red drops dripping slowly from leaf to leaf from high in the upper branches. The dry tawny sycamore leaves clattered against each other with a mournful sound.
Then he saw it, hanging so high it was nearly at the top of the tree. Suspended from the ankles much in the way Davis’s crew had been, Hawkins’s body swayed like a grisly pennant, hideously displayed, his chest ripped open and emptied of its organs. Above the normal hum of the jungle the only intruding sound was the screeching of a couple of vultures as they fought over rights to the flesh. The body was trussed like an animal strung up to dry in the sun, and the slight upper breezes gentled it slowly back and forth, the eerie movement giving the hideous illusion of life in death. And nothing wept and nothing cried out. For all its awfulness it was death the same as ever. The choked and meaningless jungle didn’t even notice.
Unblinking, Schaefer stared up at the gruesome sight. Without taking his eyes off the mangled body of the Irishman he gave out with his low whistle, summoning the rest of the team to his side. There was something hopeless in the whistle, somber as plain chant. There was no question that he was summoning them to death.
The major was too absorbed to notice Blain arrive first, so the burly commando said nothing and merely followed the fix of Schaefer’s eyes. Even such a jaded veteran as Blain, witness and sometime participant in acts of barbaric cruelty, was stunned into silence. Blain’s jaws hadn’t been emptied of tobacco juice since he shoved the first plug in his mouth at twelve years old—until now, that is. His mouth fell open as he gasped and the spongy rancid pulp spilled out, glanced off his belt buckle and landed in the dirt, followed by a thick stream of brackish spit veined with yellow-brown that drooled helplessly down his chin. He wiped his mouth with the back of his grimy sleeve, then instinctively and without a word pulled his rifle to his shoulder, released the safety catch and faced the savage jungle as if it was another planet.
For the Irishman was the first member of the team killed in action in the whole seven years they’d been operating as a unit. Davis and his crew had been mates to several of the commandos in one mission or another, but they weren’t part of the brotherhood of six. Hawkins was one of their own. Until this moment they were in some real way invincible. And now there was a break in the line, and anything could happen.
E L E V E N
As the other commandos gathered, Blain bit off another inch of sticky plug and moved out impulsively, scanning the tangled jungle with his rifle, desperate to take revenge. The whole time he was sputtering to himself about the bastard rebels he planned to skewer on his machete and send to hell for the barbecue. Anyone and anything in his path would be dead meat, he promised Hawkins silently. Yet even in his rage he paid acute attention to any tip-offs the jungle might offer of enemy presence—a snapping twig, the glint of a gun chamber between the branches of a rubber tree.
A minute later he was obliged by a rustling deep in the bushes ten yards ahead. Carefully, silently, he pulled the rifle sight to his eyes and focused the crosshairs in the direction of the noise. “C’mon ya shit-eatin’ mothas,” he hissed with a mad grin, anticipating revenge. “Lemme see your fuckfaces so I can fill ’em full o’ holes!” And he began to squeeze slowly on the trigger, waiting in a kind of rapture for the right moment.
He expected a terrorist—maybe two, maybe more. It didn’t matter. A dozen would suit him just fine. He’d let go the whole round in a second and make garbage of all of them. The sound grew more distinct, and Blain held his breath to steady his aim.
“C’mon fuckers . . . c’mon right in,” he whispered. “Ol’ painless ain’t got no patience.”
Suddenly sounds of a charge—and a small tapir burst through the leaves, whinnying with its ears back as it scampered across the clearing and dived through the high canyon grass. Blain winced, then exhaled in deflated surprise as the animal disappeared from sight. “Shit!” he cursed, exasperated. His body, tensed from head to toe in hyperalertness, relaxed at the sight of the animal, going almost limp from the anticlimax.
But just as he permitted his senses to rest and go off alert he felt a curious piercing burn across his shoulders. And echoing like a mockery in his ears he could hear Hawkins’s voice, sounding almost as if it were underwater: “Hey, Blain, you ever heard of a toothbrush?” Blain looked down bewildered in the direction of the sting, and he saw a gout of blood erupting from a tear in his shirt.
He spun around, raising his rifle a second too late, only to be greeted by the alien’s spear streaking toward him like a guided missile. The creature attacked in its own concept of time, a blurred streak inhumanly fast, measured by the millisecond. The razor sharp weapon entered Blain’s back at the base of the spine, ripping through the spinal column with a force so awesome it cut through bone and burst out through his chest. He just had time to let out a half-scream that drowned out all the rest of the jungle, the screeching parrots and blue-hair monkeys, the million cicadas whizzing their legs.
Grotesquely, the tip of the alien spearhead pierced Blain’s heart and rocketed it out of the body, the organ attached to the tip like a macabre trophy. A hundred Mayan priests sighed in their temple graves. Then the deadly weapon slammed into the side of a bamboo tree, and the heart exploded in a bloody pulp that clung to the bark, the veiny red flesh as weird as an alien presence itself. Blain’s body, which stood dead on its feet for seconds that would have seemed like hours to an observer, at last keeled over on the ground. The cavernous hole through Blain’s chest was big enough for the tapir to crawl through.
Close by, Mac heard the short burst of Blain’s wail and scrambled up the canyon toward the sound. As he charged into the clearing where Blain had stood moments before he saw nothing but a newly roughed-up track of dirt; then beyond, the alien’s spear still vibrating from the impact with the tree. With his M-22 readied, Mac stalked closer in time to hear a strange wet sucking sound like a famished peasant pulling a bowl of soup to his lips.
He stopped for a second and listened, bewildered, then pushed aside a red fern leaf and saw the retreat of the mighty, two-legged creature—not ape, not man, but warrior without a doubt—as it raced off into the trees. Laying on the ground just inches away was the shell of Blain’s body. Mac looked down and saw his partner’s deflated corpse emptied of its organs, a kidney and a few feet of intestines strewn nearby, dropped accidentally by the monster as it flashed away.
The commando choked and could feel the banana he’d eaten before the rebel attack erupt into his mouth. He turned his head aside and blew out the sticky, half-digested yellow mass, then shook his head and sobbed out loud, wiping his stinging eyes in disbelief.
Yet he quelled his grief quickly in favor of a passion for revenge. He pulled his wits together, drew his rifle to his chest and aimed nakedly in the direction in which the alien had fled. As he blaste
d into the trees he shouted a wild and primitive war call—not a cry he’d learned in basic training, but one that came directly from the soul, the unconsolable wail of agony when a man loses a brother.
He emptied the entire magazine at his waist before thinking to call out to the others. But it didn’t matter. Every living thing within a radius of two miles heard Mac’s raw scream and the explosion of gunfire. Immediately the commandos were on their way, tearing through the brush in a kind of frenzy, as if they barely had a second now to tie a tourniquet on this nightmare.
When Mac’s ammunition was exhausted he reached down and grabbed up his buddy’s rifle, which had snagged on a bramble during the havoc. Once more he poured the ammunition into the black-green vegetation, riddling the trunks of trees and scattering nests and bursting seed pods, as if the jungle itself must die for this one. His glazed saucer eyes were possessed as he swept the gun back and forth across the path. Whatever reserves a man can muster, Mac burned now with a white fire, then summoned more to burn again. In his crazed state now he would happily level the entire country and all the rotten dictatorships bordering it if necessary, anything to wipe out the wrongness responsible for his best buddy’s murder.
The other commandos were zeroing in on the site one by one, erupting out of the choking brush.
“What the hell’s goin’ on,” Ramirez bawled to Mac, shouting to compete with the deafening crack of bullets ripping from Blain’s rifle.
Mac screamed back without a second’s holding fire. “It got Blain!” he cried. “Ran that way!” And he let off another stream of bullets into the splintered grove of bamboo to point the way.
“Lemme give you a little light,” Ramirez hissed with an edge of black humor as he released his grenade launcher and whumped two volleys into the jungle. Seconds later a pair of deafening explosions sent fragments of dirt and leaves and sticks everywhere, knocking birds from the air as the canyon roared with a phosphorous light. Then the blinding chaos was followed by the stunned silence of aftershock, as if the whole world had paused for a breath of grief.
