The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Troy was no longer sure why he had let Roger talk him into this. Nabbing some skin art was one thing; doing it in such a seedy locale was another. He jumped as the little bell above the lintel rang, announcing their entrance.

  A man appeared through the curtains at the back. “May I help you?” he asked.

  The hair on the nape of Troy’s neck stood on end. Or would have, except that his father had insisted on a haircut so that he would look like a proper military man for his mother’s funeral (“Your lieutenant lets you look like that on the battlefield?”). “Shit,” he blurted. “It’s a gook.”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than he knew it was the wrong thing to say. Yet the tattooist merely blinked his almond eyes, shrugged, and said calmly, “No, sir. Nobody but us chinks here.” He spoke with no more than a slight accent, and with an air that said he was used to the ill grace of soldiers.

  “Sorry. Been drinking,” Troy mumbled. But drunk or not, it wasn’t like him to be that much of an asshole. For some reason he felt menaced. The man was such a weird-looking fucker. He appeared to be middle-aged, but in an odd, preserved sort of way. His shirt was highly starched and black, his skin dry as parchment, his fingertips so loaded with nicotine they had stained the exterior of his cigarette. He sure as hell wasn’t GI Bob.

  He had no tattoos on his own arms. What kind of stitcher never applied the ink to himself?

  “Come on,” Troy said, tugging Roger’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Roger slid free. “We came all this way, Chesley my boy. What’s the matter? Are the guys in your unit pussies?”

  Those were the magic words. Troy barely knew Roger – their connection was that they had shared a flight from Da Nang to Travis and, in seven hours, would share the return leg – but he was his buddy of the moment, and he couldn’t let the man say he lacked balls. He was a God-damned US of A soldier heading back to finish up eight months more In Country.

  “All right, all right,” Troy muttered.

  “Do you know what design you want?” the stitcher asked. When both young men shook their heads, he opened up his books of patterns. “How about a nice eagle? Stars and Stripes? A lightning bolt?” He opened the pages to other suggestions he thought appropriate. To Troy, he seemed to give off a predatory glee at the prospect of jabbing them with a sharp instrument.

  In less than two minutes Roger pointed to his choice: a traditional “Don’t Tread on Me” snake. The artist nodded, propped the book open on the counter for reference, and swabbed the infantryman’s upper arm with alcohol. To Troy’s amazement, he did not use a transfer or tracing of any sort. He simply drew the design, freehand, crafting a startlingly faithful copy. The needle gun began to whir.

  The noise, along with Roger’s occasional cussword, faded into the background. Troy turned page after page, but the designs did not call to him. It had finally struck him that he would be living with whatever choice he made. A sign above the photos of satisfied customers warned, A TATTOO IS FOR EVER.

  Whatever image he chose had to be right. It had to be him. He finished all the books: No good. They contained nothing but other people’s ideas. He needed something he hadn’t seen on anyone else’s body.

  It came to him clearly and insistently. “Can you do a unicorn?” Troy asked.

  The artist paused, dabbing at Roger’s wounded skin with a cloth. “A unicorn?” he asked, with the seriousness of a man who used powdered rhinoceros horn to enhance sexual potency.

  “A mean son-of-a-bitch unicorn, with fire in its eyes and blood dripping from its spike.” Troy chuckled. “That’d be hot, wouldn’t it, Rodge?”

  “That’s affirmed,” Roger said.

  The stitcher lit a new cigarette, sucking on two at once, and blew a long, blue cloud. He closed his eyes and appeared to tune out the parlor and his customers. When he roused, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a fresh needle gun, its metal gleaming as if never before used. “Yes. I can do that. But only over your heart.”

  Troy blinked, rubbing his chest. He hadn’t considered anywhere but his arm, but the suggestion had a strange appropriateness to it. “Yeah,” he said. “OK.”

  The artist pulled out a sketch pad and blocked in a muscular, rearing horse shape, added the horn, and then gave it the intimidating, man-of-war embellishments Troy had asked for.

  “That’s fabulous,” Troy said. He bared his upper body and dropped into the chair that Roger had vacated.

  The man pencilled the design onto Troy’s left breast, with the unicorn’s lashing tail at the sternum and the point of his horn jabbing above and past the nipple. He performed his work with a frenzied fluidity, stopping only when he reached for the needle gun.

  “Point of no return,” he said, which Troy thought odd, since he hadn’t given Roger that sort of warning. It was at that moment he realized why the symbol of a unicorn had sprung to his mind. During the funeral, while the minister droned on, Troy had been thinking of an old book in which the hero was saved from death by a puff of a unicorn’s breath.

  His mind was made up. He nodded.

  The needle bit. Troy clenched his teeth until his mouth tasted of metal. As the initial shock passed, he forced himself to relax, reasoning that tension would only worsen the discomfort. The technique worked. The procedure took on a flavor of timelessness not unlike watching illumination rounds flower in the night sky over rice paddies fifty klicks away. Detached, Troy watched himself bleed. He could handle anything, as long as he knew he was going to survive the experience. Wasn’t that why he was there – proving like so many GIs before him how durable he was? To feel anything, even pain, was a comfort, with his poor mother now cold in her grave, with himself going back into the jungle hardly more than a target dummy for the Viet Cong.

  To be able to spit at Death was worth any price.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Siddens, pointing at Troy’s chest.

  The squad was hanging out in a jungle clearing a dozen klicks west of their firebase, enduring the wait until the choppers arrived to take them beyond Hill 625 – to a landing zone that promised to be just as dull as this one. They had spotted no sign of the enemy for a week, a blessing that created its own sort of edginess.

  Troy, bare from the waist up, held up the shirt he had just used to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The tattoo blazed in plain sight of Siddens – the medic – and PFC Holcomb, as they crouched in the shade of a clump of elephant grass.

  “It’s a unicorn,” Troy said, wishing he had not removed the shirt. “You know, like, ‘Only virgins touch me’?” He winced, too aware of being only nineteen. The joke had seemed so good when he thought of it, but in the past three weeks, the only laughing had been at him, not with him.

  But Siddens did not laugh. “You got that back in the World?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  The medic turned back to Holcomb, obviously continuing a conversation begun before Troy had wandered over to them. “See? Told you it had to be something.”

  Siddens and Holcomb were a study in contrast. Siddens was wiry, white, freckled, and gifted with a logic all his own. Holcomb was beefy, black, handsome, and spoke with down-home, common sense directness. But Troy thought of them in the same way. Siddens was the kind of bandage-jockey a grunt relied on. Dedicated. He was determined to get to medical school, even if his family’s poverty meant taking a side trip through a war. Holcomb was steady as a rock. He wrote home to his widowed mother and eight younger siblings back in Mississippi five times a week – he had a letter-in-progress in a clipboard in his lap at that moment.

  Troy, who had dropped out of his first semester of college, and who had managed to write to his mother only three times between boot camp and her death, wanted to be like both these men.

  “You guys want to let me in on this?” Troy asked.

  Holcomb smiled and pointed at the tattoo. “Doug here thinks that’s your rabbit’s foot. Your four-leaf clover. Ain’t nothing gonna touch you now.”
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br />   Troy laughed. “What makes you think that?”

  “We been watching you since you got back. Remember that punji pit you stepped into? How do suppose you landed on your feet without getting jabbed by even one of them slivers of bamboo?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “And where you figure all that luck comes from?” Holcomb asked. “You were never that lucky before. Remember your first patrol? You be such a Fucking New Guy you poked yourself with your own bayonet. You slashed your ankle on that concertina wire.”

  Troy nodded slowly. The story of his life. Broken leg in junior high. Burst appendix at fifteen. Nobody had ever called him lucky. Little mishaps plagued him all the time.

  But not for the past three weeks. Not since he had acquired the tattoo.

  “Causality,” Siddens intoned. “Everything happens for a reason. Remember Winston?”

  Troy remembered Winston very well. When Troy was first assigned to the platoon, the corporal had been a short-timer just counting the days until his DEROS. He used to meditate on which boot to put on first. Some mornings he started with the left, some days with the right. When he doubted his choice, he was jittery as a rabbit. On one patrol, his shoelace broke. His cheeks turned the color of ashes. A sniper wasted him that afternoon.

  “He knew he was fucked,” Siddens said. “Nothing could have saved him. You’re just the opposite. You’ve got the magic right there on your chest. It’s locked in. You’re invulnerable, Bozo. You’re immortal.” His voice dropped. “And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

  Troy rubbed his chest, frowning, wondering if the two men were just trying to mindfuck him. But Holcomb just nodded sagely, adding, “Some folks get to know whether their time a comin’. The rest of us, we just keep guessing.”

  Siddens was right. It was as if there were a force field around Troy. Even the mosquitoes and leeches stayed off him. When he and some other grunts from the platoon spent an R&R polishing their peckers in a Saigon whorehouse, Troy was the only one who didn’t need a shot of penicillin afterward.

  Troy began leaving his shirt off, or at least unbuttoned, as often as possible, until he realized his tan was obscuring the tattoo, then he covered up again. He began to smile and make jokes. He even volunteered to be point man on patrols. At first the lieutenant let him, but later shitcanned the idea: Troy wasn’t cautious enough.

  Then, as the summer of ’67 dribbled into late autumn, the North Vietnamese began to get serious about the war. Suddenly the enemy’s presence meant more than an occasional sniper, a punji pit, or a land mine in the road. It meant assaulting fortified bunkers in the face of bullets and heavy artillery.

  As the whole Second Battalion was swept into the midst of the firefight in the hills surrounding Dak To, Troy huddled in a foxhole, trying to banish the noise of the bombs from his consciousness. A 500-pounder from a US plane had accidentally wasted thirty paratroopers over on Hill 875 – “friendly fire” – trying to dislodge the NVA from their hilltop fortifications. A brown, sticky mass stained the crotch of his fatigue pants – it had been there for hours. Hunger gnawed at his stomach – no resupply had been able to reach them for two days. Over and over he repeated the words Siddens had told him: “Don’t worry. You got the magic.”

  He so needed to believe.

  Dusk was falling. Staff Sgt Morris passed a hand signal back. The platoon was going to advance.

  A cacophony of machine guns and grenades filtered through the vegetation ahead. Somewhere, other elements of the battalion needed help. Troy gripped his rifle tightly as he rose from his foxhole. Crouching, he joined Holcomb and Siddens. They sprinted forward a bit at a time, heading for the base of the next large tree.

  Troy was consumed by the urge to shut his eyes and clap his hands to his ears. No sooner had he done so than the ground erupted in front of him. Blinking, ears ringing, he realized only after the fact what he had sensed.

  “Incoming!” he shouted.

  His yell came too late. The smoking crater was already there. He was covered with specks of heavy, red laterite clay. He whirled to his right. There, still upright, stood the pelvis and legs of Doug Siddens. The medic’s upper body lay somewhere in the brush.

  Troy spun to his left. Leroy Holcomb was trying to scoop his intestines back into his abdomen with his remaining arm. Troy caught him just as he fell. His buddy let out a sigh and went limp, his blood and life soaking into the ruptured soil. He didn’t even have time to utter a last sentence.

  Troy cradled Holcomb’s head in his lap. Sgt Morris was yelling – probably something about retreating to the holes – but the words sailed right past. Troy examined his arms, his legs, his torso. Not a single cut. He had been the closest man to the explosion, and all it had done to him was get him dirty.

  “Who’d have thought those gooks could whip our asses like this?” muttered Warren Nance, the radio telephone operator.

  Troy raised his finger to his lips. The RTO should not have been talking. The jungle was fearsomely still, but that did not guarantee that the enemy had all fled.

  The Battle of Dak To had ended suddenly. One moment the NVA were there, blasting with everything they had; the next moment they had melted into the earth, leaving the clean-up to the Americans. At present, Troy and the other survivors were scouring the jungle for the wounded and dead, a gory process that a Special Forces sharpshooter at the base camp had called, “Shaking the trees for dog tags” due to the unidentifiability of some of the remains.

  After the adrenaline overdose of the past week, the quiet did not seem real to Troy. Coherent thought was impossible. He still touched himself here and there, confirming that no pieces were missing. He felt no victory, no elation, no horror, no fear. All he knew is that he was here. The only emotion he was sure of was relief: What was left of Siddens and Holcomb had been zipped into body bags and shipped off. The KIA Travel Bureau was the wrong way to leave Vietnam, but at least he knew they were no longer rotting on the ground a million miles from home.

  Why them? were the words rolling over and over through his mind. Why them and not me?

  Whenever he considered the question, his hand rose up and scratched the left side of his chest. Sometimes it almost felt as if the unicorn were rearing and stamping its feet. Today the impression was stronger than ever.

  They came to a gully containing the body of a dead US soldier, lying on his side. Flies crawled from his mouth and danced above the gaping wound in his back. As Nance bent to roll the corpse flat to check the tags, Sgt Morris grabbed him by the radio and hauled him back two steps. “Hold it!” he hissed.

  Morris knelt down, shifted a few leaves next to the front of the dead man, and uncovered a trip wire. “It’s booby-trapped.”

  “Damn,” Nance said. “Sure saved my ass, Sarge.”

  A burst from an AK-47 blistered the foliage around them. Nance jerked and fell.

  “Down!” Morris yelled.

  The squad hit the ground. Instantly half a dozen men trained their weapons in the direction from which the attack had come and began emptying their clips as fast as they could without melting their gun barrels.

  Troy knew the bullets would continue to fly for minutes yet, even longer if the sniper were stupid enough to shoot back rather than play phantom. Meanwhile Nance was lying next to him, choking. A slug had torn through the back of the RTO’s mouth.

  What do I do? Troy thought. Nance was dying, and they had no medic; Siddens had not yet been replaced.

  Troy’s tattoo quivered violently. Abruptly the knowledge he needed came to him. He checked in Nance’s mouth and confirmed that his upper breathing passage was too damaged to be cleared. Surgeons would have to do that after the medevacs airlifted the wounded man to a field hospital.

  Nance’s skin was turning blue. Troy pulled out his knife, located the correct notch near his buddy’s Adam’s apple, and sliced. Holding the gash open with his finger, Troy nodded in satisfaction as air poured directly into Nance’s trachea.
The RTO’s lungs filled.

  The panic in Nance’s pupils faded to mere terror. Sgt Morris managed to get to the radio on Nance’s back and used it to request a chopper. Troy sighed. His buddy would live.

  And then, with brutal suddenness, he understood why he had felt so certain of a medical procedure he had never before attempted. A presence was hovering inside him. He had been aware of the sensation for days, whenever the tattoo stirred, but he had not realized what it was. All he had known was that, from time to time, he felt as though he were looking at the world with different eyes.

  The presence was not always the same. There were two entities. The visits had begun the night Siddens and Holcomb had died.

  His buddies had not left him, after all.

  1972

  Specks of red Georgia clay marred the knees of Troy’s baseball uniform. He bent down and brushed with his hands, but the dirt clung. With an abruptness just short of frantic, he tried again.

  “Chesley!” The booming voice came from the rotund, middle-aged man near the dugout. “Where do you think you are? Vietnam? Pitch the damn ball already!”

  “Sorry, Angus,” Troy called, straightening up.

  Troy had made the mistake a few days back of telling Angus that a lapse of attention had been caused by thinking of the war. Now the old fart accused him of more of the same any chance he could.

  Troy shrugged off both the insult and the distraction that had provoked it. The ball was cool and dry in his hand, a tool he knew how to use. He wound up and let fly. The batter, suckered by Troy’s body language, swung high and missed. Strike two.

  Angus nodded. That was the kind of quality he expected of a prospective pitcher. Troy tipped his cap at the talent scout. Everything under control.

  Troy had been thinking of Vietnam, though. Specifically of a buddy named Arturo Rivas with whom he had served during his second tour.

  “When I get out of this puto country, I’m going to do nothing but play baseball,” Rivas said, huddling under a tarp. Thanks to the monsoons, the platoon hadn’t breathed dry air in four days.