by Brian Hodge
Kamikaze Butterflies
"That story. It's a crock." Arenas was being contrary. "It sucks."
"That story is still the reason you and I are here, asshole," Satch spat back. Literally spat: Flakes of beef spread and cracker spattered Arenas' combat vest. He was bare-chested beneath, muscular, sweaty.
Two hours till noon, and already it had become hot enough to sizzle the brain within its crock pot of skull, with boiling cerebrospinal juice for basting. Masterson's temper kicked from simmer to pan-blacken; he was in no bloody mood. "Shut the fuck up, you, lameass, and you, limpdick, or I shoot me some boxcar craps with your teeth." The threat was pro forma; not much soul backed it up. It was too hot.
Arenas shifted back into his camp-complainer mode: "This ain't a military op, Sarge, so you don't really have any–"
"That's why it's not an order, buttplug."
The bitching never hung long in the suffocating humidity. They were all dedicated, irrevocably committed; just coarse, battle-tempered and badass nasty enough to believe they were right, the sort of surety that had, in other times, redivided the grid of the world map and changed the names of continents. The land itself endured. Only the nomenclature altered, according to the whims of the mighty or the subversion of the cunning. That was reassuring to Masterson, who in another war in another time had actually held the rank of sergeant. The only permanent thing was impermanence. Hold onto that.
Their plan was to change everything, but the land would always be the same.
The story suggested that if you hopped into a time machine, cruised backward, and meddled with the macramé of past events, you could disrupt in utero the world you had left. You could terminate a family line eons before its ancestors evolved to sentience. The seed of entire races and cultures could be ground dead like a cigarette butt; whole civilizations could be erased down to their skeletons and the bones mortared to timeless dust, all before the primordial amoebae of said civilizations struggled for their first food. History could easily be stabbed in the back, since it only marched forward, eyes front.
The squad that had designated itself Omega Team was counting on that story being right.
They quickly discovered that Heraclitus had been (or would have been, yuk, yuk) right, too: Time was a river. And if you paddled against the current, all the way back to the mouth of the waterway, and pulled your boat and supplies onto the shore, both you and the devices you carried would work just peachy, despite the paradox that neither would exist for millions of years. You could then murder every living thing in sight, napalm to soot cells that, in a mere burp of passing time for the planet, would eventually become you. Yet you would not, as the operatic cliché went, die before you were born.
You could get killed in back-time. Absolutely. But conventionally, and not thanks to a mean twist of plot.
McCullough had gotten killed, conventionally, just this morning, and his messy death was what had Arenas bummed. Boyo was damned near catatonic. Masterson noted that the men had reverted to calling him Sarge. It was something permanent, a reliable fallback in the jungle heat of what had been a one-sided war, until this morning.
Boyo squatted near the coffee fire, his blond rag-cut starch-stiff with dry blood. Half of McCullough had dropped and splattered him, and three hours later he was still rigid and staring, eyes too wide and blinking too frequently. The few words he had spoken concerned McCullough. He wondered aloud whether the fluids of his partner's tissue, which now soaked his cami fatigues, contained microorganisms that were still alive. Germs that might someday evolve into a new McCullough.
They were all going to die on this mission. They knew it and it was no strain. McCullough, however, had been the run's first casualty, and the way in which he had bitten the big one was spectacular.
Rather, Masterson thought morbidly, it was the way the big one had bitten McCullough …
There were all sorts of special surprises they had not anticipated, despite primo recon. Like a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming at them from out of the trees, for example.
They had been hacking their own trail, staggered at three-yard intervals, Satch walking point. Just past dawn they spooked a herd of swan-necked Maiasaurs and massacred the hindmost. Franco and Arenas and Bull potshot the lumbering reptiles–"blowing their tires" was the expression Bull had coined for shooting out a large dinosaur's leg with an RPG. Blow the tire and the whole beast crumpled, then Boyo laid down a mist of fifty-fifty from his incendiary tanks, then Mendoza touched off the fireworks with a grenade after they'd all retreated. The smell was awful.
Twenty klicks to the south the jungle was busy consuming itself by conflagration. That had been a happy accident, yesterday, courtesy of one of Mendoza's half-smoked Lucky's. The flames had engulfed an entire valley, feeding on the wind and defoliating hundreds of acres and barbecuing numberless animals. Including, Franco hoped, a lot of those football-sized roaches he'd seen the first day in back-time, one of which had scuttled over him while he dozed. It weighed at least fifteen pounds and he'd shot it to gruel with his monster .457 pistol. These sci-fi mutant bugs were virtually the only back-time life that could be killed with bullets. The bulk of Omega Team's ordnance was tagged for the big guys. Smokey Mendoza's riff with the cigarette had not cost them a round, and Sarge had been impressed.
Big reptiles could make the creepiest sounds when they died.
They sortied from brush to tropical thickets, where it was close and odious. The canopy of fronds meshed to block the sun and steam them slowly in their togs. Bull and Satch managed to pick off several gliding, errant pterodactyls as they wafted from perch to perch on the sopping updraft of plant decay. Small arms fire sent them veering into trees and cartwheeling earthward to snap their airy bonework amid death-tangles of vines and creepers. Watching a creature with a twenty-two foot wingspan fold up and crash off-course was pretty comical. They had all the tensile strength of spun sugar. One that Arenas gunned down hit the turf right in front of Boyo, who stomped its head flat and, laughing, made mud of its greasy brains.
All nine men paused to chuckle or ignite smokes when the whole enclosed atrium of jungle seemed to vibrate, which froze them all, cat-alert. McCullough looked up and found himself at ground zero of a widening shadow, just like Wile E. Coyote, eyes whitely visible in the abrupt darkness caused by the Rex landing dead bang on his head. A tri-taloned foot the size of a Datsun mashed him the same way Boyo had danced on the twirly-bird. Nobody had foreseen a ton-plus of death roosting above them. Bushwacked by a monster with barely a quart of brains. But hell, nobody had ever expected it to be such a virulent purple and yellow, either, and by the time the team could gawp at such wonderment and maybe wheel a LAWS rocket around to bear, McCullough had been gnashed in two. They all heard his ribs implode like cracking knuckles. Franco gut-shot it; dammed-up digestive gases sometimes made the beasts explode, and this one did, drenching everyone. Boyo did not intend to block any of the debris, but part of McCullough came whirling and hit with enough force to tear the flame-throwing rig from his back. It was the half with the head, and when Boyo sat up and opened his eyes, there was that head in his lap, staring right back, the fluids that had made his buddy function now soaking his fatigues.
Out of the trees, thought Masterson, out of the goddamned trees.
JOURNAL OF MATTHEW KOPERNICK
DATE (?)
No conqueror in history has ever had the luxury of the perspective we experience every time we snuff out another antediluvian life. The lesson of the story is that butterflies count. Worthless bugs can change history. Hindsight is what determines a battle to be victory of massacre. Change the future? Fuck. We've been doing THAT all our lives. But now the difference is that we are assured that the changes we are wrecking (SP?) will be broad, sweeping, altering literally everything that is to come. Not that we'll live to see any of it. But we know) and for warriors, the knowledge is enough to sustain us.
One thing more: We are men, nothing less, but not gods or super beings. Should
anyone ever dig up this journal and prove intelligent enough to fathom this language, that's the single fact we all want made diamond-clear: We sortied into our past and changed the building blocks all around, but we were men. Even with a purpose as heightened as we decided ours was, we could still die, and McCullough died like a soldier.
Sarge handed the journal back to Kopernick. "You think this is important for somebody to know?"
"Somebody should say something, that's all." Kopernick had taken to speaking in hoarse whispers, like a man whose life was on the wane in a movie.
"Fine. Sign it, seal it in one of the vacuum canisters, and maybe a billion years from now something with tentacles and eyes on stalks will dig it up and go bananas trying to decipher the meaning of the word fuck."
That elicited a phantom smile. "Yeah. Someday, maybe." Kopernick had been the one who timed the bomb to vaporize the time-travel lab thirty seconds after their departure. He'd always wanted to bash together an oil drum nuke, and since no one had chased them, Masterson assumed that puppy had detonated fearsomely, slamming the door behind them in a blast of hard radiation. The techs staffing the lab had not died as honorably as McCullough had. They had groveled and pleaded and, in microcosm, demonstrated all the traits Omega Team had come to despise in a world of wimpy politicos, do-nothing administrations, bread-buttering lawyers, mass child killers, greedy governments and the low common denominator of the undisciplined and unprincipled. Since the cancer was too entrenched, Omega Team opted to destroy the corpus and start anew with a fresh body.
Arenas, Franco and Mendoza began calling themselves the Terrible Trio, once Kopernick told them that the Greek root words dienos and sauros translated directly as "dire saurians," not "terrible lizards." The lizards were nothing in the terrible department, not compared to them. They were armed, sentient men, and Greek was now a language that would never exist.
What hey, victory.
The story went that the tiniest death, the soundless pulverization of a butterfly's fragile body in the past, could grow, in the future, to a thunderstroke, a palpable floodtide of sound that touched all, and changed all it touched. The payoff for death on a massive scale was therefore seductive to Masterson. Although the mission he proposed was a guaranteed one-way op, each member of Omega Team had volunteered. Each volunteer realized that each of their actions, even the tiniest, like Mendoza's smoldering cigarette butt, would yield results too large to be contained by any history book, ever. That power, savored briefly but equally guaranteed, was enough to recruit them. A story of people who never were, a fiction printed on dead trees in cheap black, could change the face of a world they scorned.
Stories could be rewritten. Authors die, tastes evolve, and all of a sudden some latter-day Mongol monarch decides recorded history should begin with him and razes entire cultures to ash and legend.
Technology has always existed to simplify ancient procedures. Just look at torture.
Franco, crazy fuck, decided he wanted to taste spitted dinosaur meat. Masterson said it would make him sick. Franco told him that it tasted like rattlesnake, only juicier. Then he died, vomiting blood and little foamy hunks of his own guts.
Dinosaurs: 2. Omega Team: 13,000+.
With two men gone, some cockiness waned. Fright and hostility took their turns. Kopernick shelled in and rarely spoke to anyone. Boyo's eyes stayed under the spell of McCullough's dead gaze. Satch got pissed and shot a tracer round into his face. Boyo died trying to slap out the fire in his head. Masterson returned the anger by blasting Satch out of his combat boots. The giant roaches dug up the military graves and ate the remains. Arenas and Mendoza, the surviving two thirds of the Terrible Trio, died together when they went searching for Bull, who had gone into the forest to take a dump and never come out. The Dire Duo took a lot of irritated prehistoric life-forms along when they checked out. When Kopernick went insane, Masterson disarmed him and confiscated his yet-unburied journal. When Kopernick managed to cut his own carotid, Sarge added a final entry and sealed the book up forever. He did not sign his name. What would be the point?
All I'd like to do now is stop, and hope our fight really meant something, and go home. But of course I am home already. It's impossible to go back because all of time lies ahead. Like time, I can only march forward.
Like history, I can only spend my remaining hours waiting for that knife in the back.
As he was putting down the cannister along with Kopernick's corpse, something flitted past Masterson's sweating face. It was a huge, glass-me insect, much like a butterfly, its cobweb wing-work splotched with ideograms of color. It circled his head and lit on the grimed handle of the folding spade.
Masterson laughed, gently now, and let it live.
Author's Note:
This story is presented with gratitude (and a slight grimace) for Ray Bradbury, for obvious reasons.
Graveyard
Layover.
You snooze;
You stay.
Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage
That upon which you are about to feast your eyes is one of two scripts written for a proposed legit stage revival of the Grand Guignol Theatre, circa 1990. (My companion piece, an adaptation of the Robert Bloch short story, "Final Performance," can be found in the collection Look Out He's Got A Knife.) Since this was one of two such productions being mustered concurrently, there was always a sense of fast competition to get our show on the boards first. "Our side" included, as contributors, magical bad boy Penn Jillette, Israel Horovitz, Phil Hartman, Charles Busch, and Wes Craven; as performers, Ann Magnuson, Bud Cort, Lea Thompson, John Fleck, Christian LeBlanc and Dan Butler among many others; as producers, Randy Bennett and Craig Strong, working on behalf of Douglas Cramer for the Aaron Spelling Company. Randy and Craig had just done Cynthia Hiemel's A Girl's Guide to Chaos before devoting nearly three years of development to this project.
It was pitched as "a Broadway revue produced in the lavish, blood-dripping style of the Grand Guignol…part Alfred Hitchcock, part Joe Orton and part Freddy Krueger," and participants not only encouraged, but assured that "the more horrible and grotesque the piece, the better"
The Grand Guignol project was pronounced dead in March, 1992. Rather than see this piece sink into the abyss of unrealized projects, I've included it here for whatever cheap thrills it's worth.
Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage
A one-act drama for Four Men, Three Players
Characters:
Hugo, a bum.
Clad like his brothers in a derelict's array of grimy castoffs, open-toed shoes, scarves and scrounged junk. He WALKS as though partially lame. MUMBLES to himself. Exactly the sort you'd avoid giving money to on any city street.
Alf, another bum.
Alf COOKS. He wears a battered FEDORA. Unshaven and filthy.
Howie, another bum.
One of Alf's gourmet pals. Just as weird, gross and dirty as the rest.
Joeboy, another bum.
Speaks with a slight cornpone accent. Wears fingerless gloves. Always picking his nose.
NB: Wardrobe should be creative and diverse with bum attire so we will differentiate among the bums by sight, not by name references.
Also:
Three Zombies
Decayed living dead corpses who rise from their graves to dismember and gobble up the bums. They are decomposed, skeletal, tottering, shuffling, clad in cerements, clodded in dirt and oozing slime. Brittle, flaking cannibal ghouls. Again, Makeup should go all-out to differentiate the Zombies. The Zombies do not SPEAK.
Setting
A CEMETERY, inclined from back to front of the stage. We do not immediately REALIZE this is a graveyard, due to lighting and misdirection. It might be possible to have the necessary TOMBSTONES and grave markers RISE from the set prior to their revelation, in order to misdirect the audience. The CEMETERY is backlit faintly so we may perceive a crooked PICKET FENCE and a LINE of denuded TREES. In the center of the set is a practical PIT which wil
l be revealed as an OPEN GRAVE. Players must be able to REACH into the pit to FETCH things, and Hugo must be able to FALL HEADFIRST into the pit and VANISH. Various HEADSTONES and CROSSES for the graveyard. Alight layer of FOG drifts DOWN throughout–this fog can help us DODGE certain effects as the bums are ripped apart at the climax.
Basically: We are having a picnic in a Universal Pictures Monster Movie cemetery.
ON CLOSED CURTAIN
As the audience waits for the next act. HUGO wanders down the aisle toward the stage, MUMBLING to himself like a dirty old man. He ASKS an audience member for spare change and is rebuffed. He is thoroughly gross. ASKS another audience member, and so on, until he MOUNTS the stage in front of the curtain.
HUGO
You've seen me. Oh yes, I got my eye out. Popped it out, heh-heh. I seen you people. You're'a bunchajerks. You don't understand humor. Folks don't realize. You ask for money to eat. We all need to eat. Don't ask for change, mind you, we ask for spare change. Well, we already know there ain't no change that's spare. Smart alecks. You go, "Got any spare change?" And you dumb shits go, "I dunno–ask me when I'm DEAD," ha-ha, very goddamn funny, says me.
CURTAIN RISES I SPOTLIGHT HUGO
As he SHUFFLES OSR. From STAGE LEFT a derelict, JOEBOY, ENTERS holding a LANTERN. Center stage, two more BUMS are seated around a cooking fire in what looks like a ROASTING PIT, with a SPIT across the hole. LIGHT gradually up on the fire as JOEBOY ASCENDS to join up with the other two, ALF and HOWIE.
