The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Ken had been inside for more than an hour. He hadn’t seen a living soul, though, after passing through two interior hatchways, he’d found what seemed to be living quarters for several people, with folded clothes, tiny cook stoves—smoke was carefully piped away from the tunnels themselves, and other pipes, barely wider than a stick of bamboo, provided circulation, and a few boxes of ammo indicated that there had been people here recently. Which could mean that they knew he was in here, and were moving toward another exit—or setting a trap.

  Still, he kept going.

  Another hatchway.

  Heart pounding in his throat, he cracked it, listened. No sounds. He pushed through, reached ahead with one hand and touched the floor, then the ceiling. The floor was kind of far down, as if the tunnel on the other side of the hatch was a couple of feet lower than this one. Maybe it’s an older section, from the French days, he thought.

  He went through the hatch, reaching down for the floor with both hands. Because of the angle, because he was going down farther, he hit the floor with more of his weight, and he was off balance as his legs came through the hatch, and the floor gave way beneath his fingers.

  He tumbled down, thinking, shit, I’m dead.

  Bamboo strips tore at his skin as he plunged through the false floor. But when he hit bottom, he felt solid ground. No stakes. No mines. He didn’t understand.

  And then he felt the skin of the cobra as it writhed against his bare skin.

  He lurched away from it, flicking on his light at the same time. There were three snakes, two banded kraits and a cobra. The kraits were small snakes, only about two feet long, but their venom was deadly. So was the cobra’s, for that matter, and this one looked to be about six feet long, though it was coiled up so Ken couldn’t tell for sure.

  He needed to get out of the pit, which was only about four feet deep. But he was afraid that any sudden motion would attract more attention from the snakes. Slowly, he tried to bring his .38 into firing position.

  The first krait didn’t wait for him. It darted toward him, mouth opening, fangs gleaming in the glow from his flashlight. Before the thing could reach him, though, the cobra struck—not at Ken, but at the krait. It caught the smaller snake in its mouth, fangs sinking in right behind the thing’s head, and whipped its own head back once, flinging the dead krait to the side.

  The second krait almost seemed to understand what the cobra had done. It began to slither away, heading for the shelter provided by broken bamboo that had fallen in with Ken. The cobra didn’t give it a chance to get there, though. It lunged, killing the second krait as easily as it had the first.

  Ken watched all this in rapt fascination, but when the cobra turned its gaze on him, he realized he should have used the opportunity to get away. The snake eyed him almost as if it had intelligence. Ribs on the sides of its head flared out, forming the hood for which cobras are famous. He knew these snakes could spit venom, though he couldn’t remember in his panic if that was as poisonous as being bitten.

  Still keeping its gaze locked on Ken’s, the cobra stretched its length up, and up, like a snake charmer’s accomplice impersonating a rope. When it was high enough, it set its head down on the shelf that was the tunnel’s real floor, and the rest of it followed. Ken held his fire—shooting the gun would announce his presence up and down the tunnel, and if he could, in fact, survive this trap he’d have a good chance of getting the drop on anyone in its depths.

  He stood, watching the snake, and putting his hands on the sides of the pit in order to hoist himself out if the snake actually went away. But the cobra only slithered a couple of feet down the tunnel before it stopped and looked back at Ken.

  “Follow me,” it said.

  In retrospect, Ken realized that an important aspect of the whole magic thing was the ability to believe in it. He would have sworn, before that second, that there was no such thing as a talking snake, that anyone who said there were talking snakes was a liar, and that if you said Ken Butler believed in talking snakes you were a damn liar.

  But in that moment, without even thinking about it, Ken believed. That was how powerful the magic was. It erased doubt.

  He followed the snake.

  The cobra took him on a grand tour. They never did find any Viet Cong—the tunnel had, it seemed, been cleared out shortly before he’d arrived. But it showed him where other booby traps were, it led him through the ammo dumps and barracks, it pointed out the best places to put bombs when he came back down.

  Finally, several hours later, the cobra showed him to the exit, a different one than the entrance he’d used that morning. Ken had opened the hatch and stood blinking in the sudden sunlight, letting his eyes acclimate. When he could see again, he looked around for the cobra, but it was gone.

  Ken shrugged, the magic still working its mojo on him, keeping skepticism at bay. A talking cobra tour guide. It wasn’t like the thing had carried on a running conversation or anything—since that one phrase, “follow me,” it hadn’t said a word until the very end. As Ken had checked out the exit, looking for any final booby traps, the snake had whispered to him. “Didi mao,” it said, “didi mao.” Vietnamese this time, instead of English, but every grunt learned those words almost as soon as he arrived in country. Get the fuck away from here.

  Ken got. Once clear of the tunnel, he went looking for his patrol.

  And he found them, near the hatchway he’d used to go inside.

  Every one of them was dead. Small arms fire, a couple of grenades, maybe. They’d certainly returned some fire but they must have been seriously outnumbered. Parched, Ken picked up the canteen of a PFC named Friedman, but when he shook it he heard shrapnel rattling around in it. He tilted it, and blood poured out with the last few drops of water.

  Gradually, Ken understood that if he’d been out here with them, he’d be dead too. As it was, the VC who had done this must have known there was someone in the tunnel, must have gone in looking for him. Only the cobra, leading him through the underground maze, had saved him.

  He ran all the way back to camp, working out a story the whole time to explain how he had come to be spared. The next day he’d accompanied a mission back to the tunnel to retrieve the bodies and kill the VC who had slaughtered his friends.

  After that mission, he’d never volunteered for tunnel duty again.

  But he never forgot that taste in his mouth. He never forgot his first magic day.

  Part Two

  Harold Shipp

  Chapter Nine

  “You know, even when they bombed us at Pearl,” Hal Shipp said, “there were still those who didn’t want to go to war. You remember?”

  “Barely,” Virginia replied.

  Hal laughed. They sat on a settee in their motor home, watching a tiny black and white TV, powered by solar panels Hal had installed up on the roof. The rabbit ears had a hard time bringing in a signal here, but they could get a couple of the networks okay if you didn’t mind some snow. The news had included coverage of peace marches on college campuses, which had prompted Hal’s comment. “Well, you were young,” he said. “I remember. Not many agreed with them, but they were there. Conscientious objectors. Nothing wrong with speaking your mind, even if you’re wrong. I thought they had every right to believe what they wanted, I remember.”

  She pressed more firmly against him, her shoulder pushing into the yielding flesh just above his ribs. “I’m glad you remember.”

  “I remember a lot,” he told her. “I enlisted on a Friday. It was raining in the morning, but it had cleared up by afternoon. It was about three weeks after Pearl Harbor, and we all knew we were going to war. I wanted the Pacific Theater but I ended up in France anyway.”

  He knew he had problems with his memory—at least, he remembered Virginia telling him that he did, though he couldn’t remember those specific times when his memory had failed him. He was willing to take her word for it, though—she wouldn’t lie about something like that, and anyway there were those times h
e just couldn’t account for any other way. More of them than ever, lately.

  Not today, though. He’d been a little foggy when he’d first awakened, but not since he touched Ken Butler’s hand and got a jolt like the time when he was a boy and had jammed the rifles of two metal toy soldiers into the holes of an electrical outlet to see what would happen, and what happened was he’d been knocked off his feet onto his ten-year-old butt and the metal gun barrels had melted into small black blobs. The shock had been a lot like that; it was nothing like the static electricity he’d blamed and he’d be damned if Ken hadn’t known that too, but he and Ken had both been willing to laugh it off because there were other people around, people who didn’t know what it might really be about, and if there was ever a time to tell them that wasn’t it.

  Because today was a magic day, Hal was sure, as yesterday had been. And the other thing he was equally sure of, as sure as he’d ever been about anything, was that Ken Butler knew it.

  And that could only mean that Ken had them too.

  Hal shook off the thought of that. There was nowhere to go with it, not right now.

  “You know I was with the 30th Division, right?” he continued. He didn’t give Virginia a chance to respond. “Old Hickory, we were called, because they were mostly Southern boys in the Division, originally. 119th Infantry, 2nd Battalion. We moved to Florida, then Tennessee, then Indiana, before we of us shipped out to England. After that…well, you’ve heard my Omaha Beach stories.”

  Virginia shuddered. “Yes, and I don’t care to hear them again.”

  “That’s good,” Hal said. “Because I’m not inclined to talk about them. We landed there on D-Day plus four, to replace those poor boys from the 29th who’d been chewed up by the Germans there. But what I want to talk about came weeks after D-Day, the first week of July, in fact, and I’m pretty sure it’s a story I’ve never told you. Never told anyone, for that matter, not even the day it happened.”

  Virginia straightened up on the couch, planted both of her feet firmly on the floor. “Are you sure you want to talk about this, Harold?”

  He considered her for a moment. She had shrunk, over the years. She’d never been tall but now she seemed almost doll-like, skin like fine porcelain, smooth to the touch, a faint network of veins visible just beneath the surface. Her hands and feet seemed too tiny to be real. Looking at her rubber flip-flops, he wished he’d made the kind of money that could have kept her in fine leather shoes and a decent house. But that kind of thinking did nobody any good, he knew. What’s done is done and there’s no undoing it. And anyway, not all the decisions that had brought them here had been in his hands, not by a long shot.

  “It’s not that, Gin,” he replied. “Not that I want to talk about it. But I have to, and I think it has to be today. I suppose you don’t have to listen if you don’t want, but I wish you would.”

  “Of course, darling,” she said. “Let me just get us some lemonade or iced tea.”

  Harold shook his head. “Just water for me,” he told her. “It’ll taste awful, and I’d hate to waste anything.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him quizzically. “I’ll explain in due time,” he said. “Just hurry back.”

  She went into the galley area and rummaged in the icebox for a few minutes, returning with a glass of lemonade and one of water over ice on a plastic tray, and a couple of cookies on a saucer. She set the tray down on a white plastic parson’s table within easy reach, and returned to her position beside Harold on the sofa.

  “We were trying to liberate the French city of St. Lo,” Harold continued. He took a sip from his water and made a sour face. “Yep, still tastes horrible. Anyway, I’m not going to give you the full play by play of the military operation. The 29th gets most of the credit for taking St. Lo, and as far as I’m concerned they can have it. But they wouldn’t have done it, or at least not as easily, if it wasn’t for the 30th. We took Hill 30, which the Germans had used as a vantage point to see the whole city. After that, we opened up France for Patton. Wasn’t for us, the war still would have been won but it would have taken several months longer to win it. But that’s taking the story in a different way—I start going there and it’ll take months to finish it.

  “So we’re outside St. Lo, and we’re supposed to cross the Vire river and get up the hill and take it. The Germans have fortified the top of the hill, they’ve got 88s and 105s up there, and Panzers. We have artillery too, and air support, but still and all, it’s a bloody fight. Bloody and wet.”

  He remembered the stink, the smells of sweat and bodies and gunpowder and fire and the river and the flooded farm fields, all mixed in the July air like a noxious cocktail mixed by Hell’s own bartender. The sharp stench when a man is blown open, so different from the butcher shop smell of a body that’s been hanging upright, wedged into a hedgerow and shot a couple of dozen times because from a distance, through the fog, you couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead. Until you were over there you wouldn’t think death had so many different scents. But he didn’t want to share that with Virginia. Some things a man had to protect his wife from.

  “We were coming in from the south, through a tiny town called St. Fromond-Eglise. This was farm country, and the village wasn’t much more than a handful of stone buildings and of course a beautiful church on the town square. The Nazis had owned this area and most of the men were dead, the women and kids mostly stayed indoors and tried to keep away from the Germans. Most of the people lived outside the village itself, in big farmhouses that had been in their families for generations. They were happy to see us coming, I can tell you that. You never saw such joy on people’s faces when as when American G.I.s came into town.

  “But on this day—” Harold stopped short, suddenly unable to put his finger on just what it was he’d been going on about. He took a sip of water, blinked a couple of times and cleared his throat, mechanisms he’d developed to stall for time while his brain tried to turn over, like an old engine on a cold morning. There ought to be a Diehard for the human brain, he had thought many times. Something to spark it when things get hazy.

  He looked around him. He was in some small space, a room in a little apartment or a trailer, maybe. A woman looked at him expectantly, small and frail and familiar. He had seen pictures of her, maybe, or met her once a long time ago. He hadn’t expected to see a woman here, though he wasn’t entirely sure why not. He stood and went to a window, looked out at a strip of cement and brown, barren hills beyond. He realized then that he’d been expecting to see green hedgerows under a gray sky, and it came back to him, and he picked up the sentence where he’d left off, returning to his place on the sofa.

  “—July seventh, it was, a foggy, rainy day—we were taking heavy fire. The Nazis set their 88s on us and the shelling was terrible. I remember I was running with five guys, keeping our heads down, looking for cover, and we ran in between some of the buildings in town. But then we heard a shell whistling in and we all hit the dirt, and it landed close by. When I opened my eyes again my ears were ringing so loud I could barely hear, and there was all this smoke in the air, and I couldn’t see any of my buddies. I found out later that I’d been blown about twenty feet by the blast and they thought I was dead. There were more coming all the time, so they couldn’t stop to pick me up. They’d have come back for me, though. That was how we did it there.

  “So now I’m all alone, half-deaf and I might as well be blind from the smoke. And still the shells are coming in, so I figure that there must be some of my guys in the town, only I can’t find them.”

  Harold realized his breathing had quickened and a film of sweat covered his forehead. He picked up the glass of ice water, took a sip, and held it against his brow. The memory was vivid, more so than his memory of the Grape Nuts he’d had for breakfast this morning. Confusion and panic had warred in him, and to this day he wasn’t sure which had won out or if they’d in fact just been opposite sides of the same coin.

  “I guess I kind o
f stumbled farther into town,” he went on. “I still had my rifle in my hands and my helmet on my head, but I was worried, I don’t mind telling you, because I couldn’t find the guys and I didn’t know where the Germans were or if the next shell was going to be the one that would finish me off.

  “A couple of minutes later I found myself in the town square. It was completely deserted. The church was on one side, with its tower facing the square, and the town hall on another, and a couple of other buildings. In the center the square was cobblestoned. It must have been hundreds of years old, I remember thinking that. The streets and houses must have been in the same position they’d been in since before Europeans settled North America. But the Nazis didn’t care about that, and I guess at that moment we didn’t either. The two sides in a war are never as far apart as they think they are, I guess. Their goals are different but not how they go about them.

  “Anyway, I was there in the town square and I could hear artillery pounding in the distance, our guys, hammering the German positions. But then I heard another 88 shell, the whistle like one of those fireworks that make so much noise, only louder, and I dove for the ground again, but there was no place to go except onto the hard cobblestones. I flattened there, and the whistle kept coming, and then I did something I never should have done.

  “I looked up.”

  “I crooked my neck and looked up and I actually saw the thing coming, the shell spinning as it flew into the square like something in slow motion. I guess it was, or I never would have been able to make out any detail. I turned back and looked at where it was headed, and I knew it was going to hit the church.

  “Which is just what it did. It hit the church and exploded, and the air right over my head was filled with what must have been tons of stone and glass and flaming wood. You know those pictures on the TV of the World Trade Center?”