Turn of the Cards w-12

by George R. R. Martin

  Monster swung his massive horned head to bear on the tank. The puny soft things had gotten under cover mighty quickly; it would be inconvenient to root them out. Here was prey that would find it harder to get away.

  Casaday’s big shoulders heaved in a sigh of relief. “T-72. They’ll handle the son of a bitch.”

  “Five bucks,” Carnifex growled from the side of his mouth, “says you’re wrong.”

  With a whining of servomotors the long gun rose to aim at the center of that broad chest. The commander, sitting half out of the top turret hatch, decided the target could likely be considered armored. He muttered into his helmet mike, calling for an armor-piercing sabot round to be loaded.

  A moment, and the loader called the round loaded. Immediately the gunner called ready; he didn’t need a return from his laser rangefinder to lock a target that size less than a hundred meters away.

  “Fire,” the commander said.

  The horrific sound of the 125 practically knocked the little knot of onlookers into the cracked temple façade. Hot wind slapped them and stole their breath away.

  The monstrous being rocked slightly as the round took him in the center of the chest. Hellfire blazed yellow through the hole. The Monster roared his pain. His voice dwarfed the cannon’s.

  Unfortunately his hide wasn’t as tough as a NATO main battle tank’s. The round just passed through him, imparting little energy. He threw out his arms and flexed his muscles.

  The hole closed up.

  Carnifex stuck his hand out. “Pay.” Absently, transfixed by the awful scene, Casaday dug in his pocket for his billfold.

  The Monster started walking toward the T-72. Its commander was shouting into his mike, drumming his fist on the low domed turret top to speed his crew. He wanted high explosive this time.

  They had about three strides of clawed feet to reload in the cramped confines of the turret. They had considerable motivation. The gunner cranked his cannon to full elevation. It still only bore on the creature’s navel, if he had one. He fired without waiting for command, the millisecond the heavy breech closed. The tank rocked back to the recoil as a flame the size of the vehicle itself bloomed from the cannon.

  A globe of yellow flame obscured Monster’s stomach. The under-lighting flare would have made his features demonic if they hadn’t already been. He stopped.

  Then he smiled. And grew a foot.

  “Shit,” Carnifex said.

  “Fuck,” said Crypt Kicker, who wasn’t impressed by much.

  “Shitfuck,” Carnifex added.

  The impact had at least rocked Monster back on his heels. He took a step back, braced. “Bastard sure is hung, isn’t he?” Casaday remarked to no one in particular.

  The tank commander stood his ground. He was no candy-ass Annamese or Cochin Chinese. He was a Northerner, proud, tough and hard as socialist steel. He grabbed the handles of the heavy 12.7mm roof gun and sent a stream of green tracers arcing at the giant beast, aiming for the eyes.

  The thumb-sized bullets bothered Monster no more than a swarm of gnats. He held out his clawed hands, made fists. Lightning squeezed out between his fingers and struck the tank.

  Wreathed in sparks, the tank commander threw his arms in the air as the enormous current fired his neurons for him. Then the remaining thirty-eight rounds of main-gun ammo cooked off at once. The turret flew into the air on a column of blue-white flame. The men on the temple steps cringed as it crashed smoking to the ground beside the building.

  The Monster threw back his head and laughed.

  J. Robert Belew sat with his arms crossed on the wheel of his blacked-out GAZ jeep and stared. “Well, I’ll be dipped,” he said softly.

  The PAVN infantryman the FULRO patrol had picked up while trying to work its way to the temple had told the truth. A rotary-wing squadron had set up an impromptu base in a bean-field seven klicks from the ambush site. Four shark-like Mi-28 Havoc attack choppers sat in the hard shine of generator-powered spots, their motors turning over, their rotors sweeping lazy circles. Soviet-bloc doctrine notwithstanding, this band was tuning up for a little night music.

  There had been no way to reach the temple, especially when the tanks put in their appearance. Mark would have to fend for himself, if he still happened to be alive. The priority now was to try to keep the core of the rebel army intact under attack by at least a division of PAVN armor.

  Belew had ordered the men to scatter in the woods. The rebels were probably outnumbered, certainly outgunned. Evasion was their best defense, as it always was. Because the People’s Army was well equipped with antitank rockets in various shapes and sizes, the rebels were too — they stole them, bought them, or received them from deserters, the way God intended guerrillas should be armed. If they could just melt into the woods and fields, the rebels could not only survive, they might even lay some hurt on their enemies. The key was having enough time to break into cover.

  Belew was looking to help buy them that time.

  The eagle-headed joker Osprey and the other NJB deserters had given Belew grief. Mark was one of their own. They were determined to wade through however many of their former comrades and PAVN troopies lay between them and him.

  The unmistakable sounds of tanks on the prod had changed their minds for them. To the untrained, tanks are totally terrifying, vast prehistoric beasts, deadly and invulnerable.

  As a matter of fact a man afoot, in the dark, in vegetation, had it all over a tank; the beast couldn’t see him. If he were cunning — or had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or even your clichéd pop-bottle-o’-gas, he could take the offensive. Belew just didn’t tell them that. Shuffling their feet with the guilt of their self-assumed cowardice, the erstwhile New Joker Brigaders joined the exodus from the derelict plantation.

  The engine whine’s timbre changed, rising, becoming more insistent. The squad had gotten the word to move.

  There are two ways to get someplace where you don’t belong. You can sneak. Or you can just cruise on in as if you had all the business in the world there.

  Belew let out the clutch and drove, fast enough to come on like a Man in a Hurry, not fast enough to look like a charging foe.

  As the armorers checked the weaponry slung beneath the Havocs’ stub wings, Belew drove up right alongside the nearest ship. The hustling ground crew barely spared him a glance; they recognized the Gestalt of one of their own jeeps, and they had more important things on their mind than brass coming out to kiss the brave People’s Flyboys ’bye.

  The pilot looked out his still-open side hatch and saw a pale, square face. His thick-gauntleted hand fumbled for his sidearm.

  Belew quick-drew his Para Ordnance and shot the pilot twice in the chest. The ground crew fled as he vaulted out of the jeep, ran to the chopper to drag the dying pilot out.

  The gunner turned a blank visor toward Belew from his station in the nose. Belew gestured with the handgun. The gunner was brave but not stupid. He climbed on out and ran. Sensing what was about to happen, he ran hard.

  Holstering his 10mm, Belew slid into the pilot’s seat. He tore the bandages off his left hand, pressed it palm down onto the helicopter’s console, and slashed off his budding new fingers. Then he pressed the spurting stumps against the cool metal.

  “Ahh,” he said, as his soul entered the metal. There was nothing better than the feel of fusion with a fine machine. It was better than sex.

  Well, almost.

  J. Robert Belew was a pronounced polymath. But piloting was not among his many skills. With his hands on the controls he could no more fly the Havoc than he could fly by flapping his arms.

  But he wasn’t the pilot now. He was the helicopter.

  He sped the spinning of his rotor and leapt lightly into the air. Changing the pitch of his blades, he tipped his nose forward, began to slide slowly forward.

  Suspecting nothing, the ship to his right touched off. He swung his chin gun right and blew him from the sky with a burst of 12.7, Magnanimous in his exaltat
ion, he hovered then, permitting the crews of the two craft still on the ground to bail out and escape. Then he destroyed the choppers.

  He rose up in the sky, then, a circle-winged hawk of plastic and steel and incipient fire, hungering for prey.

  Chapter Fifty

  Monster stood above his opponent’s pyre, raising triumphant arms to the sky.

  Crypt Kicker stood for a moment, seeming to contemplate the creature. Then he put his head down and charged.

  He struck the being’s shin and bounced. He didn’t have the mass to cut its leg from beneath it. Monster stopped his joyous bellowing and gazed curiously down.

  Crypt Kicker braced his legs and heaved. With a squall of surprised fury the Monster toppled backward into the trees.

  The earth shook. Crypt Kicker turned back to face the temple, dusting his hands together as if to say, “Now, that wasn’t so hard.”

  “Don’t get carried away, you dumb son of a bitch!” Carnifex shouted. He pointed.

  Monster was rising, vengeful, from the woods. His eyes blazed like yellow spotlights.

  Crypt Kicker turned. A giant clawed foot was poised above him.

  The foot came down. It slammed on the ground with jarring finality.

  “Sweet Mother Mary,” Whitelaw breathed. “The poor sod.”

  “What’s it matter?” Carnifex said. “He was dead anyway.” Whitelaw gaped at him in dismay.

  Monster turned his blazing eyes toward the temple. The little group turned and bolted into the building, ricocheting off one another. Except Carnifex, who ran around the side.

  Monster shrieked. It was a sound like the sky being split in two. He jumped aside, clutching the foot he’d dropped on Crypt Kicker. The sole was smoking.

  Crypt Kicker rose from the redneck-shaped impression he had made in the earth. By the woods the soil was spongy with mulch.

  Streaming smoke, he began to walk purposefully toward the giant creature. “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” he intoned in his deep, dry voice. “‘I shall not want.’”

  Slowly Monster lowered the foot Crypt Kicker’s acid had injured.

  “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’” Crypt Kicker said, inexorably advancing, “‘I shall fear no evil: for thou art with me.’”

  Monster raised a fist.

  Crypt Kicker raised his in reply. “‘Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me!’” he screamed, and charged.

  Lightning blasted him back twenty meters.

  Monster came forward to gaze down at the sprawled body of his antagonist. Crypt Kicker didn’t move. He did smolder some.

  Monster roared his victory cry and walked on. The night was alive with small, soft things. He longed to hurt them all.

  Billy Ray had never run from a fight in his life. He wasn’t about to start for this oversized green puke-bag, no matter how horny he was.

  Carnifex was reckless, but he wasn’t stupid. He just knew when to make a tactical withdrawal.

  Monster strode by the temple. Carnifex launched himself from the pagoda roof in an ace-powered leap.

  Monster felt a tiny impact on the back of his calf. He paid it no mind. Whatever it was was too small to hurt him. His mighty cock vibrated with the lust for pain.

  Everywhere were tanks and soldiers. Monster looked, and it was good.

  It was time to smash.

  For all its troops the People’s Army had not been able to concentrate overwhelming numbers against the rebels. The country was too wracked by rebellion. The government could not pull many troops from any one area without simply writing it off. Hanoi was unwilling to surrender a square centimeter of Vietnamese soil to its foes.

  That was a mistake.

  PAVN had committed its finest armored troops to this fight. If they could claim a one-sided victory over the rebel main force, it would go a long way toward reestablishing its credibility as being in control, in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the eyes of Vietnam. It would not matter if rebel losses were insignificant compared with the rebellion as a whole. This is the world of Maya; appearance is all.

  The PAVN soldiers were brave. Some of them ran; most of them didn’t. They hung in firing at the monster for all they were worth.

  Unfortunately the energy of their shells only strengthened him. Their defiance just amused him. And whetted his appetite for destruction.

  He smashed, and slew, and tore asunder. Loops of gut hung from his fangs, and blood ran down his claws.

  Grunting, sweating, swearing beneath his breath, Carnifex scaled Monster’s back. The creature’s shark-like hide offered little by way of footholds. He was making his own, plunging his fingers and kicking his feet bodily into Monster. Monster obviously was not regarding him as a sufficient irritant to do anything about.

  He wasn’t letting himself think about what that implied.

  He had just reached the right shoulder blade when another fusillade of tank shells slammed against Monster’s chest. Carnifex hugged the reeking flesh. “Jesus!”

  It was sheer luck he hadn’t been dislodged by the explosive impacts. Hell, I’m lucky nobody’s back-shot this big son of a bitch. But Monster wasn’t leaving anybody in his wake in any shape to fire him up from behind.

  The vibrations stopped. Carnifex could feel the creature swell with power.

  “I’m not getting paid enough for this,” he grunted. He resumed climbing.

  The AT-6 Spiral missile streaked toward the T-72. Belew kept his eye on the target and willed the missile to it, his desire transmitted through the medium of UHF radio signals that guided the rocket. He could feel the missile slide through the heavy moist air with silky, sliding sexual friction. Could feel the impact, and then release as the tank exploded.

  He did not pump his free fist and yell, “Yeah!” This was deeper than that.

  Eight missiles in the Havoc’s load. Eight tanks shattered. He was batting 1,000.

  He could see flashes lighting the sky to the southwest. It looked as if there was a major tank battle going on, with some Brobdignagian arc-welding thrown in. Belew had no idea what was happening; his team didn’t have the firepower to hold up one end of such a display.

  Somebody was giving the PAVN spearhead a hard time. He had the radio turned off; the chatter distracted him, spoiled the purity of his fusion with the machine. For the moment he didn’t much care what was going down over there. He was loose in the enemy rear as an airborne killing machine. He was out of weapons that would bust their tanks, but his ship was still gravid with bombs and 57mm rocket pods, and he had plenty of ammunition for his four-barrel 12.7mm Gatling. A modern armored formation sucked fuel and resupply. And that meant … soft targets.

  There, on a black ribbon of paved road: the shiny steel-dachshund shape of a fuel tank-truck. He banked and stooped like a heavy-metal falcon.

  With a grunt of Gargantuan effort Monster raised the forty-two-tonne T-64 off the ground, then military-pressed it over his head.

  And Carnifex leaned over the massif of his right brow. Stiffened to a blade, his fingers speared for the yellow slit-pupiled eye.

  Reflexively Monster shut the eye. Despite the dizzying distance to the ground, Carnifex let himself fall. He grabbed a handful of lower eyelash, caught himself. Then he hauled himself up to try to pry the lid open.

  Monster tossed the battle tank away. He took Carnifex’s hood between the clawed tips of thumb and forefinger and plucked him off.

  Dangling mere meters before that vast, hideous face, in the full smokestack blast of his polluted breath, Carnifex shook his fists in defiance.

  “Go ahead and swallow me, scumbag!” he yelled. “I’ll chimney up your throat, punch through the roof of your mouth, and eat your fucking brain!”

  Monster studied him a moment more. Then he flipped him away.

  His impertinent foe already forgotten, Monster surveyed the scene. There were broken and burning tanks everywhere. Nobody was shooting at him anymore. He was out of victims.

>   He raised his claws to the cloudy heavens and roared in disappointed rage. The lust in his loins had not been slaked. He had a world of hurt yet to inflict before he could find release.

  Then something caught his yellow eye, a kilometer or so beyond the trees, in the midst of an expanse of cultivated fields. A tiny hamlet, dark, surrounded by its little bamboo fence.

  Innocence. Helplessness. They drew him like a magnet. His cock pulsating with excitement and need, he lumbered toward the village.

  He had almost reached it when a voice spoke in his head: “Wait.”

  He stopped, growling resentment at the intrusion. The massive horned head swiveled left and right, looking for the source of the irritation. Fury beyond fury piled upon the anger that blazed within him. No one told him to wait.

  “This isn’t you. I know it’s not.”

  He raised clawed hands, roared a shattering wordless affirmation: IamIII!

  “No. You aren’t. You’re an illusion, an aberration. I’m speaking to the real you. That which is buried deep inside. That which is … good.”

  Monster shook his head, as if to cast forth the insistent voice. He hated the voice. He wanted to find where it came from, and smash, and kill. It said things that must never be said to him.

  “Isis … Moonchild. It’s me, Eric. Your love.”

  NO! Negation erupted from the molten core of him.

  “Yes.” Images flooded his mind: Isis and Eric, holding hands by candlelight, walking out along the paddy dikes beneath the moon’s benevolent face. Gentle; loving.

  Monster pummeled his face with the heels of his hands. He would not see these things. He must not.

  “Isis. You’re still in there. Come out. Fight the evil. You can defeat it, send it back where it came from.”

  Monster was out of control, reeling blindly in agony. In fear.

  Fear fed the anger. As it always does. It was not right that he should fear. He was the mightiest of beings; His will be done, on Earth as it was in Hell.