by James Hunter
We smoked the rest of the cigarette in silence, wrestling with thoughts of Phillips and Wrangle. Wrestling with thoughts about all of it.
Greg stomped back into the clearing fifteen minutes or so after we’d killed the smoke. When he saw me sitting there with Rat, looks of relief and fear flashed across his face in turns. I could tell that he wasn’t sure about me, but was also happy that Rat hadn’t put a round into my skull.
“You good?” he asked me.
“Yeah, super,” I said. “Sunshine and daisies all around. And I’m me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He nodded, though he didn’t speak for a beat. “Well, alright. It’s good to have you back. Now how’s about the two of you stop lollygagging around and get ready to move. Last time I checked, the Corporal was the only one with a serious wound.”
“And go where?” I asked. “Look around, Greg, we’re lost in the sauce. I can’t tell my head from my asshole out here. We need a plan, or we might as well just wait here for the VC to gun us down.”
“I’ve got a plan,” he said tersely. “The plan is to go put an end to this daggon mess.” His lips compressed into a tight line. “I think I found where the music’s coming from.”
SIX:
Wrangle
Greg led from the front, taking his time, picking his foot placements carefully, keeping as quiet as he could considering the circumstances. I lingered back five feet or so, Corporal Stanton slung over my shoulders in a classic fireman carry, while Rat brought up the rear. The trek wasn’t a long one, maybe half an hour of steady humping, but it was as brutal as a mule kick to the groin. Carrying my pack and Stanton—who wasn’t exactly a welterweight—was taxing, especially since the path Greg forged through the trees seemed to be on a damn near ninety-degree incline.
The climb seemed to last for ages, but Greg was right—we were going in the right direction. Every few steps I glanced up from my plodding journey, and sure enough, the strands of music rolled down the hill like a waterfall of brilliant color in the night. We hiked on, until at last a strange structure materialized out of the trees before us, suddenly appearing like a ghost taking form amidst the greenery. I’d been expecting a bunker, a tunnel, or even some kind of concrete testing facility, but I wasn’t expecting an ancient and dilapidated temple of rough, moss-covered stone.
It was a monstrous complex, which seemed to twist and wind through the forest, as though built to accommodate the behemoth tree trunks spread throughout. Several of the smaller outbuildings had fallen to the ground, now rubble, in the form of giant stone blocks. They obstructed our ascent to the central temple, nestled a little further back into the lush vegetation. The main building was a blocky structure covered in carvings and reliefs, capped with an intricately wrought conical spiral jutting from the top. Even more incredible was the massive banyan tree, which grew over and out of the building, its roots and gnarled limbs draped over the walls, encompassing the structure.
The tree was dead though, only a massive stump sticking up into the air like a broken bone, black char marks marring its surface. I couldn’t be sure, but I would’ve wagered that the base of the thing was thirty or forty feet in diameter, which meant it had been one big-ass tree. Had it been alive, it would’ve dominated the tree line like a skyscraper, looking down on lesser buildings. The center complex only had a single dark opening, a giant black eye staring at us as we threaded our way through the debris. Flowing from it was the music. We’d found the source.
Once we got a little closer, I was able to make out some of the “art” on the stone walls, and I use “art” in the most liberal sense of the term. The reliefs and statues were grotesque things, pictures of some old god, made entirely of tree roots, drinking blood, crushing the skulls of his enemies, and towering over a pile of corpses a thousand deep.
This wasn’t a Buddhist temple. We’d come across a couple of shrines, but trust me, this wasn’t that. There wasn’t a Buddha anywhere to be seen, the typical hulking temple guardians were also absent, and there weren’t any carvings of the dharma wheel—the primary symbol of Buddhism, representing the Eightfold path. Nope, none of that jazz. This was a primal place, not a temple built to seek enlightenment or refreshment, but a shrine to proclaim death and darkness. I could feel all that hateful energy radiating outward in waves of force that battered against me while, conversely, calling me onward.
We were almost to the temple doorway when something collided into my shoulder with a whack and sent me sprawling onto the rubble covering the jungle floor. Corporal Stanton’s weight landed on me with crushing force. What the hell had just hit me? I heard shouting and a few gun reports, but I couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. I reached up to shove Stanton’s body off me but stopped when I felt warm liquid against my fingertips. I pulled my hand back; my fingers were coated with slick red. I screamed and pushed Stanton away with a grunt, flipping onto my back and running my hands over my body, looking for the bullet wound, sure I’d been hit.
There was blood all over me, soaking into my cammies, but I couldn’t find an entry or exit wound. I glanced down at Stanton—most of one side of his face was gone. Just a mess of red gore. I screamed louder, the sight so sudden and unbearable. All the killing, all the death…
What the fuck?! I swiveled and cried out, “I need help here!” I pulled my flak jacket free and ripped my blouse off, revealing a filthy green skivvy shirt marred with blood, both old and new. I crawled over to Stanton and pressed the blouse onto the wound. A pointless effort—the man was dead and nothing would bring him back, but my mind seemed unable to grasp that truth just then.
“Let him go, Wrangle,” I heard Greg call from off to the side. I swiveled away, still keeping a hand on Stanton’s mortal wound. Greg had his rifle up, trained on a spot behind me. I turned again, trying to get some idea of what was happening. That’s when I saw Wrangle cautiously circling toward the temple, with Rat held in front of him, his M-16 pressed up under Rat’s jaw, jammed deep into the smaller man’s throat.
Wrangle looked nine-kinds of crazy. His eyes were wild and unfocused. He had his head cocked too far to one side, listening to the music, nodding his head as if he were hearing some unheard set of instructions.
“I’m. Ta-king. H-h-him,” Wrangle said to Greg, the words disjointed and hard to follow, like maybe Wrangle couldn’t rightly remember how English was supposed to work. “An Off. Ering. For Th-th-the Mus. Ic.” He backed into the tunnel, Rat held before him, eyes wide with panic. “Don’t follow. I. Will. Kill. Hi-Hi-Him.” Wrangle spat, one eye twitching in time to the beat of the tune—a spicy, big band number I didn’t recognize—blood dribbling from his ears and the corner of one eye. Poor son of a bitch was gone, and I knew he was just as much a victim as Stanton.
“Don’t let him take me,” Rat cried. “Please-please-please.”
“Don’t worry, Rat,” Greg said, his voice even and reassuring. “We’ll come for you, we’ll get you out of this mess.”
Wrangle pulled Rat into the shadow of the doorway and disappeared into darkness. Greg gave it a solid ten count, keeping his gaze fastened firmly on the entrance, just in case Wrangle decided to take another pop shot. Then he turned and hustled over to my side, giving me a once over before sizing up Stanton lying on the ground, his head a misshapen lump under my blouse.
“Yancy?” he asked.
I turned my face toward him and wiped the back of my hand across my cheek, rubbing away the fat tear making tracks in the dirt on my face. “I’m fine. It’s not my blood, all Stanton.”
He looked down to the blouse covering Stanton’s face. “He’s dead, Yancy.” He spoke slowly, like maybe I wouldn’t be able to understand. “Nothing we can do for him now.”
“You think I don’t know that, shithead?” I looked back at Stanton, not wanting to leave his body out here to rot in the sun or to be eaten by jungle critters. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, not now. Greg held out a hand, which I gladly took, and pulled
me upright. I glanced back at Stanton, unable to take my blouse away, not willing to look at his face, then turned toward the temple’s entry. “Let’s go slay some bodies.”
The temple’s interior was dark and gloomy, though broken up by occasional wall-mounted oil lamps, which looked like a fairly recent addition. Greg pulled a flashlight from his bag and guided us in, the beam of his light cutting swaths of illumination through the gloom as we moved deeper and deeper into the complex. The place was huge, with small hallways breaking off at random intervals, hooking off in other directions before quickly disappearing. Several times we ended up taking lefts or rights, following the music. If it hadn’t been for that music, finding our way might’ve been damn near impossible. But I could see it going strong as ever, a thick wicked vine of gold, beckoning us onward.
At every turn, Greg paused, pulled his K-Bar from its sheath, and chipped away a rough arrow to guide us out, should we actually be lucky enough to make it out. After ten or fifteen minutes—time seemed to twist and bend in funny ways down in the dark—we came upon a circular room, maybe thirty feet in diameter, with six tunnels (seven counting the one we’d entered from) breaking off at even intervals like the spokes on a wheel. The music drifted from the tunnel directly across the room from us.
But another sound drifted down from one of the other passages. A lonely, miserable, weak cry for help.
“Please, help me,” the voice called out, echoing down a passageway to our right. “Mercy, have mercy.”
Greg slowed his step, glancing back over his shoulder, as though to ask, Which way here, boss? What do we do? I paused, not sure what the best play was. It was clear that the music wasn’t coming from the same direction as the plea for help. So if we wanted to get to the bottom of this, we needed to put the blinders on, stick straight, and forget all about the person literally begging for mercy. But could I live with myself if I let some innocent guy rot down in this shithole? Hell, for all I knew, it was a trap. Yeah, probably the smart thing to do would be to move forward and worry about rescuing captives after we’d dealt with the primary threat and got Rat back safe and sound.
“Please,” the voice came again, cracking and dusty with age. “Anyone, I’m trapped here. Mercy, I beg of you. Mercy.”
Dammit. I stopped, unable to push myself further into the labyrinth of passageways. I’d done a lot of bad things, hurt people who maybe should’ve had a chance to live, seen friends die and enemies die—all that death, ignoble and ugly. If I could help that poor schmuck down there, save even one life, maybe this stupid mission would be worth something after all. Maybe Stanton, Phillips, Jackson, Cortez, Moody, Wilson, Lewiston, and Ox wouldn’t have died in vain.
“This way,” I told Greg, pointing toward the passage to the right, before trudging off down the corridor.
SEVEN:
Myths and Legends
The tunnel wasn’t especially long and ended in a square room filled with a dozen blocky cells, each with iron bars standing in place, all well-maintained and functional despite their obvious age and the general disrepair of the rest of the temple.
“Here,” the man rasped. “Please, free me,” he wheezed from beneath a shaggy pile of tattered clothing. The guy was in one of the cells lining the back of the room, although why anyone would’ve locked the poor schlub up was beyond me. He was a bent and withered Asian man, crushed beneath the weight of time, his skin a pale tapestry of wrinkles, his mouth devoid of teeth, milky cataracts covering both his eyes, while a long wispy beard covered his jaw. He was filthy, what little hair he had was matted, and even from ten feet away I could smell the sour stink of his fragile body.
“You really think this is a good idea, Yancy?” Greg whispered into my ear before continuing his scan of the room. “Could be this old timer’s in here for a good reason.”
“Of course it’s a good idea. Stop being so friggin’ paranoid all the time. We’re here to get a radio, get Rat, and get our asses outta here, but we’re also here to throw a wrench into this freak-deaky music machine. Whoever is running this show sure as shit ain’t on our side. So enemy of my enemy and all that jazz.”
Greg grunted his reply, obviously unconvinced, but offered no more overt objections.
I padded forward slowly, not wanting to startle the old geezer since it was obvious he couldn’t see a lick. “Alright there, old-timer, if I let you outta this cage, you’re not gonna cause any trouble, right? My friend back there thinks you might be dangerous—he’s got a quick trigger finger, so don’t give us any reason.”
“No,” he said softly, “I’ll offer you no trouble at all, young one. That is quite the problem, I’m afraid. I can’t cause anyone any trouble these days. Once, I was set to guard this tomb, this prison, but …” He trailed off, raising rail-thin arms. “It is as plain as the nose on my face that I am not much of a guard. Not anymore.”
I reached out a hand and pushed at the door, expecting to find it locked, but it swung in without a hitch. I scrambled back a step, raising my rifle to the ready, training the muzzle on grandpa. “Gate’s not even locked,” I said. “You’re making me real nervous here.”
“Fear not,” he said, his voice resigned and oddly peaceful. “I cannot walk, cannot move. The lord of this place has already exacted a portion of his revenge. Broke my legs, crushed my pelvis, smashed my feet to pulp, and threw me in this place to suffer endlessly.”
I glanced down at the rags wrapped around his torso and waist. What I’d at first taken to be filth was actually globs of dark, clotted blood. The smell wafting off him was a sickening mix of metal and rancid decay. Meat gone bad, then left out in the heat of the day.
“Aw, shit,” I said, feeling appalled, wanting to look away and forcing myself not to. “I can’t help you,” I breathed out. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you, nothing anyone can do for you.”
“With this?” he asked, waving an arm over his lower half. “No, I should expect you cannot do anything for this. But that is not the help I seek. Please, you and your friend, come here. Sit with me for a few moments. Let an old man say his piece, so I may die with satisfaction and, mayhap, hope.”
“Can’t do it, Yancy,” Greg said from behind. “We gotta move it.”
“Wait, young man,” he said with a feeble smile. “Do not be so rash. Youth are always too rash. Come, sit with me. I will tell you about the lord of this place. Is not a little foreknowledge of your enemy worth a few minutes’ time?”
Greg didn’t say anything for a moment, and I could almost hear the wheels clanking away inside his head. “Fair ’nough,” he replied, “but don’t even think about pullin’ a fast one over on me. Puttin’ you down would give me no pleasure, but you better daggon well believe I’ll be ready to fire.”
“Yes, fine. Fine,” he said. “Now come, boy. Come.” I walked into the cell, Greg following closely on my heels. I copped a squat near a wall a few feet away from the crusty geezer, while Greg stayed standing in the cell entryway.
“Alright,” Greg said. “You’ve got two minutes to make this worthwhile, so …” He twirled his finger in a let’s get this show rolling gesture.
“Do you believe in magic?” the old man asked, speaking to both of us, though clearly looking at me, even though I knew he couldn’t possibly see with those milky eyes of his.
“I’m not twelve,” Greg said, “so no, I don’t believe in magic.”
I, on the other hand, didn’t say anything—couldn’t say anything. Before all this shit started I would’ve said magic was a load of bullshit as deep as the ocean. But after seeing this place? Seeing the music? What the hell did I really know? Hell, according to Rat, I’d turned my E-Tool into a flamethrower. Magic? Hell, maybe.
“But you do believe in God, yes?” the man asked, turning his head toward Greg. “I can see it in you. The White King has marked you.”
“God,” Greg said, “isn’t magic. He’s God. You got a minute and a half left, better move it along.”
&nb
sp; “The point is simply this,” the man said, apparently unconcerned over Greg’s threat. “You believe in that which you cannot see. God, angels, demons … Magic. It is true that you cannot see the magic underpinning creation, but it is real nonetheless. Your unbelief does not make it less true. This magic, though, may not be what you imagine in your mind. There is energy, you see, energy in life, in creation. This is the magic. The Vis.” He uttered the last word almost reverently.
He held up a hand, a small smile playing at his lips. A globe of light, nearly the size of a basketball and shifting from blue to violet and back again, sprung up before the old man’s outstretched palm. I thought for a moment that Greg would put a round right into the guy, but for once, it seemed like he was at a loss.
He wasn’t the only one; it sure as hell felt like someone had snatched all the pep right out of my step. In fact, the display of power made me positively squirm in my seat. If that was real, maybe Rat’s accusations were dead-on.
“Now that I have your attention,” he said, his voice a soft whisper, “let me tell you about the lord of this place.” The globe spread and grew, changing and transforming in shape: a miniature three-dimensional banyan tree, towering over a pristine jungle, floated in the air before us. “Once upon a time,” he intoned, his voice taking on the familiar cadence of a storyteller, “before men covered the world, a great tree stood. In truth, it was the tree which now covers this temple. This tree was home to a great spirit, a Leshy of the Fae Court. But he was no ordinary Leshy. No, he was one of the few great Tree Kings of Old.”
Before my eyes, the banyan tree distorted, and a massive face emerged from the trunk’s surface—emerald green eyes the size of car tires sat over a gnarled, bulbous nose, which, in turn, sat above a wide smiling mouth. “Xuong Cuong was his name,” the man said, “and he was a benevolent ruler, a peaceful spirit who cared for the jungle and its inhabitants as any good monarch should. But, as with so many stories, tragedy awaited the great Tree King.”
