That halted Blythe as if the phone had reached the end of an invisible cord. The vista of walkers wavered into a single flat mass, then steadied and regained some of its perspective. “Never mind. Plenty of time,” he said rapidly. “All I wanted – ”
A shoulder much more solid than a human body had any right to be rammed his protruding elbow. The impact jerked his arm up, and the shooting pain opened his fist. He saw the phone describe a graceful arc before it clanged against the railing of the right-hand walkway and flew into the crowd some thirty yards ahead. Arms flailed at it as though it was an insect, then it disappeared. “What was that for?” he screamed into the old man’s face as it bobbed alongside his. “What are you trying to do to me?”
The son’s face crowded Blythe’s from the other side, so forcefully it sprayed Blythe’s cheek with sweat. “Don’t you yell at him, he’s got a bad ear. Lucky you weren’t knocked down, stopping like that. Better believe you will be if you mix it with my dad.”
“Can someone pick up my phone, please?” Blythe called at the top of his voice.
The women directly in front of him added winces to their quivering and covered their ears, but nobody else acknowledged him. “My phone,” he pleaded. “Don’t step on it. Who can see it? Look for it, can you all? Please pass it back.”
“I said about my dad’s ear,” the man to his left rumbled, lifting a hammer of a fist which for the present he used only to mop his forehead. Blythe fell silent, having seen a hand raised some yards ahead of him to point a finger downwards where the phone must be. At least it was in the middle of the road, in Blythe’s immediate path. A few raw steps brought him a glimpse of the aerial, miraculously intact, between the thighs of the singleted woman. He stooped without breaking his stride, and his scalp brushed her left buttock. His finger and thumb closed on the aerial and drew it towards him – only the aerial. He was staggering forward in his crouch when he saw most of the keypad being kicked away to his left, and several other plastic fragments skittering ahead.
As he straightened up, a grasp as hot and soft as flesh yet rough as concrete seemed to close around his skull. The singleted woman had turned on him. “Whose bum do you think you’re biting?”
Any number of hysterical replies occurred to him, but he managed to restrain himself. “I’m not after any of that, I’m after this.” The words sounded less than ideally chosen once they were out, especially since the aerial in his hand was rising between her legs as though magnetized by her crotch. He whipped it back, the grip on his skull threatening to blind him, and heard himself shouting. “Look at it. Who did this? Who smashed my phone? Where are your brains?”
“Don’t look at us,” said the woman with the increasingly bare and moist midriff, while the son leaned his dripping face into Blythe’s: “Keep the row up if you’re after an ear like my dad’s.” All at once they were irrelevant, and he let the aerial slip from his hand. There was at least one working phone in the tunnel.
As soon as he attempted to edge forward the crowd swung its nearest heads towards him, its eyes blinking away sweat, its mouths panting hotly at him, and started to mutter and grumble. “What’s the panic? Wait your turn. We all want to get there. Keep your distance. There’s people here, you know,” it warned him in several voices, and raised one behind him. “Now where’s he scuttling off to? Must be afraid I’ll report him for going for my bum.”
The obstruction to his calls was about to turn physical if he couldn’t find a way to fend it off. “Emergency,” he murmured urgently in the nearest unmatched pair of ears, which after hesitating for a second parted their bodies to let him through. “Excuse me. Emergency. Excuse,” he repeated, stepping up the intensity, and was able overtake enough to people that he must be close to the phone. Which of the clump of blonde heads belonged to it? Only one looked real. “Excuse me,” he said, and realizing that sounded as if he wanted to get by, took hold of its unexpectedly thin and angular shoulder. “You had the phone just now, didn’t you? I mean, you have – ”
“Let go.”
“Yes. What I’m saying is, you’ve got – ”
“Let go.”
“There. I have. Excuse me. My hand’s in my pocket, look. What I’m trying to say – ”
The woman turned away as much of her sharp face as she’d bothered to incline towards him. “Not me.”
“I’m sure it was. Not my phone, not the one that was trodden on, but weren’t you talking on the phone before? If it wasn’t yours – ”
She was surrounded by female heads, he saw, all of them preserving a defiant blankness. Without warning she snapped her head round, her hair lashing his right eye. “Who let you out? Which madhouse have they closed down now?”
“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to . . .” That covered more than he had time to put into words, not least the inadvertent winks which his right eye must appear to be sharing with her. “It’s an emergency, you see. If it wasn’t you you must have seen who it was with the phone. She was somewhere round here.”
All the heads in her clump jeered practically in unison, then used her head to speak. “It’s an emergency all right, an emergency that you need locking up. Just you wait till we get out of here and talk to someone.”
That made Blythe peer at his watch. Sweat or a tear from his stinging eye bloated the digits, and he had to shake his wrist twice before he was able to distinguish that he would never reach the tunnel exit in time to find a phone outside. The crowd had beaten him – or perhaps not yet, unless he’d failed to notice it sending a message ahead that he was to be stopped. “Emergency. Emergency,” he said in a voice whose edge the heat seemed determined to blunt, and when he thought he’d sidled far enough away from the woman who wanted to persuade him he was going mad, let his desperation grow louder. “Emergency. Need to phone. Has anyone a phone? Emergency.” A shake or a wave of the heat passed through bunch after bunch of heads, and each time it did so his right eye blinked and smarted. He was trying to sound more official and peremptory when his voice trailed off. At the limit of his vision the packed flesh beneath the unsteady lights had come to a complete stop.
He could only watch the stasis creeping towards him, wavering into place in layer after layer of flesh. It was his worst possible future racing to meet him, and the crowd had been on its side all along. As he heard a murmur advancing down the tunnel from the direction of the unseen exit, he strained his ears to hear what it was saying about him. He was feeling almost calm – for how long, he couldn’t predict – when words in an assortment of voices grew distinct. The message was past him before he succeeded in piecing it together. “Someone’s collapsed in the middle of the tunnel. They’re clearing the way for an ambulance.”
“Bastard,” Blythe snarled, not knowing if he meant the casualty or the crowd or the ambulance – and instantly knew he should mean none of them, because he was saved from the future he’d almost wished on himself. He began to shoulder his way forward. “Emergency. Make way, please. Make way,” he was able to say more officiously, and when that failed to clear his route fast enough “Let me through. I’m a doctor.”
He mustn’t let himself feel guilty. The ambulance was coming – he could see the far end of the tunnel beginning to turn blue and shiver – and so he was hardly putting the patient at risk. The ambulance was his only hope. Once he was close enough he would be injured, he would be however disabled he needed to seem in order to persuade the crew to take him out of the crowd. “I’m a doctor,” he said louder, wishing he was and unmarried too, except that his life was controllable again, everything was under control. “I’m the doctor,” he said, better yet, strong enough to part the flesh before him and to blot out the voices that were discussing him. Were they trying to confuse him by dodging ahead of him? They had to be echoes, because he identified the voice of the woman who’d pretended she had no phone. “What’s he babbling about now?”
“He’s telling everyone he’s a doctor.”
“I knew it. That’s what they
do when they’re mad.”
He needn’t let her bother him; nobody around him seemed to hear her – maybe she was fishing for him with her voice. “I’m the doctor,” he shouted, seeing the ambulance crawling towards him at the end of the visible stretch of tunnel. For a moment he thought it was crushing bruised people, exhaust fumes turning their pulse blue, against the walls, but of course they were edging out alongside it, making way. His shout had dislodged several voices from beneath the bleary sweat-stained lights. “What did she say he’s saying, he’s a doctor?”
“Maybe he wanted to examine your bum.”
“I know the kind of consultation I’d like to have with him. It was a quack made my dad’s ear worse.”
Could the crowd around Blythe really not hear them, or was it pretending ignorance until it had him where it wanted him? Wasn’t it parting for him more slowly than it should, and weren’t its heads only just concealing its contempt for his imposture? The mocking voices settled towards him, thickening the heat which was putting on flesh all around him. He had to use one of the walkways. Now that he had to reach the ambulance as speedily as possible, he was entitled to use them. “I’m the doctor,” he repeated fiercely, daring anyone to challenge him, and felt his left shoulder cleaving the saturated air. He’d almost reached the left-hand walkway when a leotarded woman whose muscles struck him as no more likely than her deep voice moved into his path. “Where are you trying to get to, dear?”
“Up behind you. Give me a hand, would you?” Even if she was a psychiatric nurse or warder, he had seniority. “I’m needed. I’m the doctor.”
Only her mouth moved, and not much of that. “Nobody’s allowed up there unless they work for the tunnel.”
He had to climb up before the heat turned into sweaty voices again and trapped him. “I do. I am. There’s been a collapse, the tunnel’s made them collapse, and they need me.”
He’d seen ventriloquists open their mouths wider. Her eyes weren’t moving at all, though a drop of sweat was growing on her right eyelashes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s all right, nurse. You aren’t required to. Just give me a hand. Give me a leg up,” Blythe said, and saw the drop swelling on her untroubled eyelid, swelling until he could see nothing else. If she was real she would blink, she wouldn’t stare at him like that. The mass of flesh had made her out of itself to block his plan, but it had miscalculated. He flung himself at her, dug his fingers into her bristly scalp and heaved himself up with all the force his arms could muster.
His heels almost caught her shoulders. They scraped down to her breasts, which gave them enough leverage for him to vault over her. His hands grabbed at the railing, caught it, held on. His feet found the edge of the walkway, and he hauled one leg over the railing, then the other. Below him the nurse was clutching her breasts and emitting a sound which, if it was intended as a cry of pain, failed to impress him. Perhaps it was a signal, because he’d taken only a few steps along the way to freedom when hands commenced trying to seize him.
At first he thought they meant to injure him so that the ambulance would take him, and then he saw how wrong he was. He had an unobstructed view of the ambulance as it rammed its way through the crowd, its blue light pounding like his head, the white arch flaring blue above it as he felt the inside of his skull flaring. There was no sign of anyone collapsed ahead. The ambulance had been sent for Blythe, of course; the message had been passed along that they’d succeeded in driving him crazy. But they couldn’t conceal their opinion of him, hot oppressive breathless waves of which rose towards him and would have felt like shame if he hadn’t realized how they’d given themselves away: they couldn’t hold him in such contempt unless they knew more about him than they feigned to know. He kicked at the grasping fingers and glared about in search of a last hope. It was behind him. The woman with Lydia’s hair had abandoned her pretence of having no phone, and he had only to grab the aerial.
He dashed back along the walkway, hanging onto the rail and kicking out at anyone within reach, though his feet so seldom made contact that he couldn’t tell how many of the hands and heads were real. The woman who was still trying to convince him he’d injured her breasts flinched, which gratified him. She and the rest of the mob could move when they wanted to, they just hadn’t done so for him. The beckoning aerial led his gaze to the face dangling from it. She was staring at him and talking so hard her mouth shaped every syllable. “Here he comes now,” she mouthed.
She must be talking to the ambulance. Of course, she’d used the phone before to summon it, because she was another of the nurses. She’d better hand over the phone if she didn’t want worse than he was supposed to have done to her colleague. “Here I come all right,” he yelled, and heard what sounded like the entire crowd, though perhaps only the tunnel that was his head, echoing him. As he ran the tunnel widened, carrying her further from the walkway, too far for him to grab the aerial over the crowd. They thought they’d beaten him, but they were going to help him again. He vaulted the railing and ran across the mass of flesh.
It wasn’t quite as solid as he had assumed, but it would do. The heat of its contempt streamed up at him, rebounding from the dank concrete of his skull. Was it contemptuous of what he was doing or of his failure to act when he could have? He had a sudden notion, so terrible it almost caused him to lose his footing, that when he raised the phone to his ear he would discover the woman had been talking to Valerie. It wasn’t true, and only the heat was making him think it. Stepping-stones turned up to him and gave way underfoot – there went some teeth and there, to judge by its yielding, an eye – but he could still trample his way to the phone, however many hands snatched at him.
Then the aerial whipped up out of his reach like a rod that had caught a fish. The hands were pulling him down into their contempt, but they weren’t entitled to condemn him: he hadn’t done anything they weren’t about to do. “I’m you,” he screamed, and felt the shoulders on which he’d perched move apart further than his legs could stretch. He whirled his arms, but this wasn’t a dream in which he could fly away from everything he was. Too late he saw why the woman had called the ambulance for him. He might have screamed his thanks to her, but he could make no words out of the sounds which countless hands were dragging from his mouth.
DAVE SMEDS
Survivor
DAVE SMEDS’S WORK has been called “stylistically innovative, symbolically daring examples of craftsmanship at the highest level”, by the New York Times Book Review. He is the author of the fantasy novel The Sorcery Within and its sequel, The Schemes of Dragons, and his short fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Full Spectrum 4, Return to Avalon, Dragons of Light and David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible, and such magazines as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Pulphouse, Mayfair and Club International. He also wrote the English-language version of Justy, a Japanese “manga” mini-series released in America by VIZ Comics. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a graphic artist and typesetter. He also holds a third-degree black belt in Goju-ryu karate and teaches classes in that art.
“I have written two other works that draw upon the Vietnam War as source material,” reveals the author, “– the first is ‘Goats’ in the anthology In the Field of Fire, the second my Nebula Award nominee ‘Short Timer’ from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In an attempt to avoid repetition, I almost refrained from beginning ‘Survivor’. Blame Janet Berliner, the main editor behind Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn, who wanted something ‘powerful and visceral’ from me for the book; part of her campaign to ensure that she and Peter ended up with a volume that firmly departed from the ‘fluffy unicorn’ anthologies that have come along from time to time.
“Well, there isn’t much out there that gets more powerful and visceral than Vietnam, and I’d already done enough research about that subject for several novels, a fact of which Janet was aware. She enthusiastically approved my decision and we were o
ff – through two utterly different drafts, then other significant changes, and finally a slight but important modification of the finale based on a deft suggestion by Peter. I doubt I’ve worked harder on a piece of short fiction than this one.
“There were other, non-career, non-literary reasons for my choice of theme, of course. Those can be summed up in my statements in the anthology introduction:
“ ‘War is something that stays with soldiers even after they come home. That’s especially true of the Americans who fought in Vietnam. Soldiers of the nation’s other wars typically served for the duration. In Vietnam individuals were yanked from the field of fire whenever their DEROS date (Date of Expected Return from OverSeas) rolled around, often being thrust within twenty-four hours into a peacetime milieu they no longer felt a part of. That we ultimately lost the war is only part of the point. Those men never had the satisfaction of knowing they had stayed until the job was done.
“ ‘May each of the half-million guys who went find their closure.’ ”
1967
G I BOB’S QUALITY TATTOOS the neon sign declared, luring customers through the Bay Area summer fog with a tropistic intensity. Tucked between a laundromat and an appliance repair shop in lower Oakland, the studio was the only place of business on the block open at that hour. Troy Chesley scanned right and left as if he were on patrol, dropping into a firefight stance behind a parked car as a thin, dark-skinned man strode up to the nearest intersection.
“Easy, man.” Roger, Troy’s companion, grabbed him by the collar and yanked him toward the door. “We ain’t back in ’Nam yet.”
Troy’s cheeks flushed. He had been doing things like that all night. No more booze. It wasn’t every grunt that got a furlough back to the mainland in mid-tour, even if it happened for the worst of reasons. The least he could do was stay sober enough to acknowledge he was out of the war zone.
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