The team walked into a clearing less than two clicks out. They’d set fire to the ville and then beaten a guarded retreat back into the jungle, taking a different trail and detonating the munitions when they were safely clear. They couldn’t see the fireball through the trees, but they could hear the explosions and feel the ragged staccato tremors as Phnom Dac blew sky-high. Rocks and debris rained down behind them, snapping through the vegetation on its way back to earth. They continued on, keeping a watchful eye for trouble ahead and behind.
But trouble, when it came, came from above.
They were in a valley, little more than a niche between rocky slopes, and had entered a grove of sorts: a hole in the jungle big enough for extraction. They broke squelch and radioed in their position, and then sunk back into the jungle to wait. Walker guarded their rear, scanning the woods for movement. He was tired and uncharacteristically tense. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride, quietly smoking and waiting, and he thought that he should, too.
But nagging, haunting images of the way things went down in the hamlet continued to plague him. As he sat and stared into the undergrowth he kept seeing the bodies twitching on impact, the woman running down the hill, the woman lining up in his sights, the woman screaming . . .
In less than an hour they heard the whine of an approaching chopper. The team lit green smoke. An unmarked, camouflaged UH-1 circled overhead like a big metal dragonfly, then eased itself downward. There were mere minutes left to go when the prop wash bent back the tall grass and revealed the neat rows upon rows of sharpened bamboo stakes.
And only seconds when Walker looked up and noticed a peculiar movement in the trees. Way, way up, in the shadows of green and gold and brown.
Legs. Feet.
He yelled and dove behind an outcropping of rocks. Nobody heard him over the drone of the helicopter’s rotor. Nobody turned.
Until the shadows themselves opened fire . . .
. . . and Walker turned around just in time to see Major James “Bo” Strakker’s head vaporize in a cloud of bone and brain less than three yards away; he went down firing, rounds spraying out in a spiraling pivot. Stray nine-millimeter slugs took out two of the Nung team members before they could even blink. The door gunner on the chopper opened up on the treeline in the last seconds before the pilot’s windshield shattered and the ship spun down to explode in the field. Walker tried to cover the others, but there were too many of them; the bullets seemed to be coming from everywhere. Grenades dropped from the trees like apples at harvest time, dull metal thuds that threw shrapnel like molten confetti. Walker screamed as a heaping handful of it ploughed into the left side of his face and through the fabric of his Stabo-rig and into the soft skin and hard muscle of his back, cutting and burning like a sonofabitch from forehead to beltline. He fired wildly into the trees. The Huey exploded again as the ordnance caught fire, sending a huge black cloud of smoke and flame into the air . . .
He blacked out for maybe two minutes. When he came to, he was blind in one eye and the overall pain was impressive. He reached up and patted the left side of his face; his hand came away blood-slicked and full of tiny bits of twisted metal. The surface of his face was a welted, pulpy mass from cheekbone to forehead; his eye, as near as he could tell, was long gone. He gradually became aware that he was deaf in his left ear, too; not even a ringing. Just dead, dead space. Not good. He fought to control his breathing, to not lose it in the trauma of crippling disfigurement. Now was not the time. He had to survive, at all costs. He had to live.
Right then, living meant taking care of business. It took all his strength just to turn around. When he did, he saw that two North Vietnamese had lowered themselves from their tree-top sanctuaries about thirty yards off to his left. They had knives drawn and were busy inspecting the bodies of his team. The Australian and a couple of the Nung team were still alive. They fixed that, quickly and painfully. And they gave the all clear.
More ropes dropped out of the trees. They formed a ragged perimeter around the clearing, a perimeter he was on the barest outer edge of. They didn’t yet see him behind his little stone barrier. He used the fleeting invisibility to his advantage, pulling open his field dressing pouch, loading an ampule of morphine, and hitting himself up. Not much, just enough to take the edge off the pain so he could concentrate. Yeah, sure.
The morphine hit his already-shocked system like a velvet sledgehammer, flooding his body and brain with a leeching euphoria. He took aim and waited. The ropes wiggled as the others descended. He opened up on them when they were about twelve feet off the ground, taking out the two already there and another three on their way. They fell like sacks of wet rags. The rest of them scrambled back up and started capping back at him, pinging little dings out of the other side of his shelter. Walker peeked out. Another one was trying to sneak down. Walker popped him. The sniping redoubled. Stalemate.
Walker started laughing. It was a lovely little situation, all right; he couldn’t get out of there, and they couldn’t get out of the fucking trees. It was his own little Mexican standoff, deep in the heart of Cambodia.
They remained like that for the next hour and a half. In that time, Walker popped the rest of his morphine and four more snipers. He was dizzy, fucked up, and far from home. Self-cauterization had evidently caused his shrapnel wounds to stop bleeding, which was good. But he had nonetheless lost a lot of blood already, and that was not good at all. It was soon dark, his grip on reality was getting increasingly wonky, and it was only a matter of time before one or more of his tree monkeys successfully escaped from their hidey-holes. Or reinforcements came. Or he ran out of ammo.
Or luck.
The wind shifted, blowing the smoke from the chopper’s wreckage his way. The elephant grass had caught fire, too, adding a hempy tinge to the greasy mix of aviation fuel, cordite, melting plastic, and charring flesh. Walker choked, gagging in ragged fits. And as he squinted into the billowing smoke that roiled skyward, he saw it.
A face. No, not even that. Not that whole, not that complete.
Just a smile. Huge, huge; maybe ten feet long. A shadow across the foliage overhead, beaming down on him from above . . .
Hempstead and Jim sat in the woods on the mountain, feeding a small bonfire, the delicately flickering flames making their faces seem otherworldly and ancient, burnished with an amber glow. The melee in Philly was several hours and a hundred miles behind them. It had taken altogether less than sixty minutes to fly back, but the decompression was slow in coming. Technology had moved faster than their emotions. They were in shock. Something majorly fucked was taking place right under their noses, their past beginning to feel as though it were cycling back in on them like the world’s worst case of terminal feedback.
They had been sitting in a connected silence for some time, long after the madness had abated for the night. The protesters were gone. The grounds grew still. A three-quarters-empty pint of Jim Beam sat propped in a bootheel-niched swell of pine needle carpet. The pop of kindling and night sounds mingled with the faintly chill breeze rustling through the pine and elm and maple up and down the side of the mountain. It sounded like spirits, whispering in the shadows. Not evil, not good. Just there; an intrinsic part of the fabric of night. Watching. Waiting. Listening.
It was a perfect time for the telling of ghost stories.
Which, in a way, was exactly what they were thinking.
Hempstead snapped another twig or three and threw them in, biding time, chewing over the memory like an old dog on an old bone. When he closed his eyes he saw it hovering, glistening in the moonlight, before him.
A forgotten piece from a twenty-year-old puzzle, sliding suddenly into place . . .
Walker squinted up at the beaming shadow splayed across the canopy. Lying in the dirt and leaves, staring one-eyed up at it and with zero depth perception, it was comforting to consider it all the spectacular hallucinations of a dying man. The sun was starting to set, firing long waning rays through the smoke and the t
rees. The smile grew crooked, almost sardonic. It glitched back and forth in his mind’s eye. Now it was a smile. Now, just a branch, just a long shadow in dying light. Now, a smile. A shadow. A branch.
He would have been more than happy to pawn it off as either of the latter. It was possible, even probable.
Until the lips parted.
And spoke to him . . .
“Walker.” The voice in his head whispered his name flatly yet intimately, as though speaking itself were new, yet he was an old friend. It didn’t even register as sound so much as the tactile sensation of otherness in his mind. The voice was an alien presence that formed words that burned like white phosphorus in the deep folds within his skull. He was reasonably sure that if he could feel anything at all, he’d be terrified. At the moment, that was the best luck could offer him.
“Wahl-kerr . . .” creakingly langorous this time. He saw the smile distend, like the stretching of old rubber bands. He stared at it, watching the long shafts of light that spilled out when the shadow-lips parted. It moved like the crudely animated images in a flip book: there, not there, there, not there. Flick flick flick flick. It was mesmerizing.
“You’re dying.” It smiled reassuringly. He heard a snap to his right, turned and pumped two bullets into another sniper who was trying to flank him. A baker’s dozen answered back, chipping huge divots out of his sanctuary. They were gradually whittling it down, yessir. Arts and crafts with automatic weapons, yup yup yup . . .
He could hear them calling to each other, could feel the dull moist thud of metal in his back every time he moved. More were certainly on the way by now. Twilight was fast approaching; the forest was filled with the myriad sounds of the food chain in motion. Chirping, creeping, crawling. Beckoning him to join them. The morphine-induced mercy was hinting of its inevitable fade. To agony.
To death.
“I can help you.” It purred, a low-pitched rumbling that filled the space between his eye and brain.
Walker grinned, tasting blood. “Fuck you,” he said.
“We can help each other.”
“I don’t need your help.” He laughed weakly, coughing up a bubbly red froth.
“Check your ammo.”
He felt for his ammo pouch. Empty. Shit. The last clip was already in, already half gone. Time flies. He had a survival knife and a couple of frags and that was that. Maybe two to throw and one to hold. Funny, he hadn’t figured on such an ignominious end. Oh, well.
Walker looked up. It had changed shape, it wasn’t quite a smile anymore. It looked tense, fretful. The shadows were lengthening; it was getting harder to discern in the gloom. The sounds seemed louder. “I don’t need you,” he repeated, somehow lacked the defiant conviction of a moment earlier.
“Oh, yes, you do,” it whispered. “Just as I need you.”
A pause. A tremor of pain. Finally, “What do you want from me?”
The smile broadened. “Everything.”
. . . and it touched him, ethereal fingers sliding in to linger in his mind and eye and heart. Revulsion passed through him in spasms, his body shaking, his throat dry and raw. He saw the rupture from whence it came, heard a tremendous buzzing in his ears, saw the enormity of its intent in a vast, lurid gestalt of grotesque ambition . . .
Walker reeled from the seizure, looked up again. The smile was assured, more defined. “What the fuck’s going on here?” he mumbled.
. . . and the grip tightened, became a fist around his heart. He felt his spirit wrenched from its mooring, yanked upward into the trees. He could see his body back on the ground, wedged in its crumbling niche of stone. It didn’t look long for this world. He felt no pain, though, felt utterly detached from the goings-on below. His consciousness hovered, disembodied, before the giant grinning lips.
“Your dying is what’s going on,” the demon said, “and there’s not much time. Do you want to die?”
“Not particularly.” His defiance rallied.
“Then serve me.”
“Yeah, right.” And slipped.
“I’m serious.”
“You’re a hallucination.” And faltered.
“Not if you believe in me.”
Walker blacked out again. He came to, weak and in pain and on the ground. The food chain was feeding. The blood was congealing in the heat, sticking to his face and side and back. The snipers were still sniping. Even if they didn’t get him, the flies and the worms very shortly would. Thoughts of new life in his ruined socket flooded his mind; the images were increasingly hard to fight off. God seemed very far away, indeed, and he sure as shit didn’t believe in spooks. What he did believe in, though, was survival. At any cost.
“OK, fucker,” he said to the shadows in the trees. “You got yourself a deal.”
“Then prove it.”
“How?”
“Simple: surrender to me.”
Easy enough; it was an effort to even keep talking. Walker grunted and went limp, slumping into the earth.
And the demon did the rest.
It was like letting someone else slam down on the gas pedal and steer when you were strapped in the driver’s seat: his right arm jerked suddenly, fingers clutching toward the left shoulder strap of his Stabo-rig. Grasping the handle of the blade and putting it free. Six inches of razor-edged steel slid down and out into the hand, which moved of its own accord now, waving the blade in front of his face like a snake ready to strike. He stared helpless as the left hand came up and splayed, fingers stretching till the thin skin webbing between them seemed likely to split. The two limbs wavered there momentarily, a ritual puppet-dance before his solitary bugging eye.
And then they jerked even further, hauling him into an agonizingly upright position. More shots fired from the trees, pinging all around him. His left hand slapped down and clutched at the rock. The right hand hovered over it, quivering. Walker heard the scream welling up deep inside him, rumbling out from the pit of his soul like a runaway freight train. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a belch of smoke that marked the bullet with his name on it . . .
. . . and the knife came down . . .
. . . and time stopped dead in its tracks. There was a sharp thwop! as the blade severed the first joint of the third finger of the left hand.
The scream died.
The shooting stopped.
The bullet with his name on it fell out of the air an inch from his face as if slapped by an invisible fist. The jungle went utterly still.
And Walker trembled, watching the blood.
It flowed, in thick runnels, down the trunks of the trees. It dropped from unseen sources. Branches snapped as things fell thudding to the ground. First, the rifles, the grenades. Then the hands that held them. Then the arms. Then more, and more: jumbled pieces, unidentifiably mangled. Walker watched, incapacitated, as the grisly rain fell. And fell. And fell.
Warm gouts spurted out of the hole where his finger had been. Control of his body was returned to him; he fell over immediately, crawled right back up. The finger lay right where he’d left it. The demon chuckled as he stared aghast, chuckled again as he picked it up.
And then it said with great relish and solemn dignity, “Take this.”
It chuckled some more.
“And eat it . . .”
Walker crushed the butt of the Lucky into the ashtray. Momma was humming, over and over, the refrain from Carly Simon’s “Anticipation.”
“You’re so perverse,” he muttered.
Momma cackled. “I understand they even made that one a catsup commercial. How apropos.”
Walker shuddered. The memories were an endless repetition of freak show images: the severed finger, pressed to his lips. The bloody flesh, falling chunk-style. The food chain, resuming its twilight call.
And in the distance, the cry of a child.
He found her. The demon directed him, and he found her. A half click away, nestled in her dead mother’s arms. Screaming.
It was the babe from the ville. Walker’
s aim had apparently been close enough for rock ’n’ roll: he’d wounded the girl, she’d fled this far back into the jungle, she’d hidden, and she’d died.
Leaving behind her legacy, such as it was, on the jungle floor. Hurt, by his hand. Crying, in his arms.
He carried her back to the clearing, shambling like a zombie, sobbing shamelessly, stray bits of metal falling out of his back and neck. It was full twilight by the time he found the team’s radio. It was in perfect working order, which was more than he could say for the radioman. He broke squelch and sent a distress call. No one answered. He was about to do it again when the voice came like smoking neon letters in his head.
“Relax. It’s taken care of. Help is on the way.”
“Oh, really?” He was trying desperately to affect an air of blithe indifference. It was useless. He’d opened the door for a moment.
And now he had company.
In his arms the baby made a rasping, wheezy, sick-child noise. Walker looked at its face, distinctive even in the gloom. Almond eyes in a European face; a little half-breed, the bastard by-product of strangers in a strange land. Tiny little legs wriggled tiny little toes, tiny little arms clawed weakly. With all nine tiny little fingers.
In his head, that dust-dry laugh.
“WHO ARE YOU?!” he screamed, falling to his knees.
“My name is legion.
“But you can call me Momma.”
Walker howled, laughter mixing with the tears until he couldn’t be sure where the one left off and the other began. Not that it much mattered. Eventually he looked at the waif in his arms again. She was feverish, trembling. “And who the hell are you?” he croaked.
The sky smile opened wide. And the voice told him, immensely pleased . . .
The Scream Page 28
