by Jeff Long
“What if he’s one of them?” Duncan asked from the back. He had been quiet ever since leaving their shelter.
“One of who?” Kleat’s voice was cautionary. He’d had a bellyful of ghost talk.
“One of the Blackhorse men.”
“Christ.” Kleat quickened the pace, leaving the thought behind.
Molly pondered it. “One of the original soldiers?”
“We know they were here. What if not all of them died?”
“A living MIA?”
She felt boosted. Amped up. Here was the ultimate survivor tale. A Robinson Crusoe in fatigues, subsisting in a lost city for thirty years, dodging enemies, and eluding the $2.6 million reward for his capture. In Luke, not the city, lay her story. If it was true.
But it couldn’t be. That quickly, she dismissed it. “He’s just a boy. Twenty years old.” Except for his eyes, the thousand-year-old eyes.
“I thought of that, too,” said Duncan, undeterred. “But what if he’s a different kind of MIA? What if he’s Luke’s son? Or the son of one of them?”
She stopped. Kleat came back to them.
“You’re saying Luke came looking for his father?” she asked. Then she remembered his young face. The war was thirty years ago, and the boy was twenty, not thirty. Once you’ve crossed the thirty mark, you know the difference. “He’s still too young.”
“Not if his father did survive.”
“I don’t get it.”
“They were trapped. Some of them died. Maybe only one was left. He didn’t dare descend. One war after another raged out there. Maybe he went mad. Maybe he was injured and suffering from amnesia. What if he went off into the mountains and some tribe took him in? And twenty years ago, he had a son. A son who could watch over the remains.”
A son dressed in peasant pants and Vietcong sandals. All borrowed together.
“A half-breed guardian angel?” said Kleat.
“I’m only saying what if,” said Duncan.
“Okay, what if he is the sentinel and this is like his own tomb of the unknowns. That doesn’t explain why he went down and chose us and gave away his secret.”
“Maybe that was his job. To find someone to take them home.”
“That’s crazy,” said Kleat. “The kid’s a Westerner. Blue eyes, blond hair, white skin. And where did he learn his English?”
“That’s a problem,” Duncan admitted.
“Not just his English, his American,” said Molly. “You can’t fake an accent like that. I heard it. He’s from West Texas, not the Cambodian highlands.”
“You’re right,” said Duncan. “I was just trying to come up with something other than ghosts.”
33.
A surprise awaited them partway down the staircase. From there they could see into the clearing, and the brothers had not left. The Land Cruiser stood ready to go, its engine running. Molly could smell its exhaust through the rain.
“By God,” Kleat said.
Her relief took over. She wanted to collapse. She didn’t have to hold it all together anymore. Everything was going to be fine. They were going to drive out of here.
“Hello,” Kleat shouted down. He waved the machete in the air. A tiny figure appeared on the far side of the truck and waved up at them.
“There’s luck for you,” Duncan said.
They passed the ledges, and Molly saw the splintered poles and shredded fabric of their tents among the relentless vegetation. Across the way, Kleat’s immense bonfire was nothing but mud and charred logs. The thatch hut looked as desolate as the ACAV stranded in the tree above.
The next time she came, the forest would have consumed it all, the hut, the fire pit, and the leftovers of their tents. It would be as if they’d never been here. She felt a twinge of regret. Above and behind her, the waterways were coursing and gurgling. She wanted to see the city the way the people had seen it twenty centuries ago, with the water animating its canals and gargoyles. The city would never belong to her again the way it did at this moment. Surrender. Now was her opportunity.
At the base of the staircase, Kleat paused. “All right, listen up. We’re going to have to work as a team on this.”
“We are a team,” Molly assured him. She heard the havoc in his voice. And now he had the machete.
Raindrops spattered off his scalp. The veins were rising. He took out a bundle of dollars. “We’re coming down empty-handed. But we still have cash. Don’t offer anything at first,” he said to Duncan. “Let’s see where we stand with them.”
“Good idea, John,” Duncan said.
“You stay to the right. I’ll go in from the left.” He fastened the flak jacket shut.
“That won’t be necessary, John.”
“Stay separated.”
“It’s going to work out,” Molly said.
“We’ve got what we came for,” Kleat said. He patted the pocket along his thigh. It bulged with the scalp and teeth and dog tag.
“Don’t do anything,” she said.
Kleat looked at her with his one fogged lens and that aged eye. He started across the clearing.
“He’s going to kill them,” she whispered to Duncan. “Or get us killed. Warn them.”
“They’d shoot us for sure.”
“But we’re not with him.”
“We’re Americans, Molly. Do you think they see a difference?”
“We should go back up the stairs.”
“How far do you think we’d make it?”
“Stop him then.”
They hurried to catch up with Kleat. In their absence, Doc and So had shimmed wood and stones under the wheels of the Land Cruiser and rolled it down to safety. The engine was idling.
The truck was another matter. Its front end pitched up like the stem of a sinking ship, deeper than ever. It was a goner, but the brothers weren’t giving up. With axes and shovels, they had spent the morning chewing down to the wheels and axle. Their hole looked more like a grave than true hope. A rusty cable fed from the front hitch, ready to attach to the Land Cruiser for a heroic tow.
As the three Americans approached, Doc climbed from the muddy pit, ax in hand. Molly’s stomach knotted. Their rifles were probably on the front seat of the truck, out of the rain. She looked for Vin, a friendly face.
So poked his head up from the pit. Plastered with black mud, the two Khmers looked the way God’s Adam must have looked like in his first moments, mud with two eyes. Molly did not reach for her camera.
Duncan greeted them. Doc spoke. “He wants to know, where’s their cargo.”
“Start bargaining,” Kleat said, moving to flank the pit.
It was beginning. Molly wanted to freeze them all, make them as still as carvings.
Doc wasn’t fooled.
“He wants to know how you got Vin’s machete,” Duncan said. “He wants to know where their brother is.”
So pulled himself from the pit. The mud made sucking noises. He was armed with a shovel.
“Tell them.” Kleat was smiling, all innocence. “We sent him to get help.”
So barked at them.
“They say he never came down.”
“Then he must have gotten lost. He’s on his way.” Kleat held up his money. Water sluiced off the bright steel blade.
Duncan frowned. He spoke with the brothers.
“I told them we should start searching for him. The ruins are moving around. A stone might have fallen on him. There are animals, too. And the typhoon will get much worse, I think. We don’t want to be inside here tonight.”
“Good,” Kleat said, smiling. “We’re on their side. Keep talking.”
Duncan knelt to draw in the mud with a twig. Maps, always maps with him. Doc sat on his heels to add his own lines to the diagram. So looked over their shoulders. Molly stepped closer.
No one noticed Kleat until the door slammed shut up ahead. He gunned the engine, and with a wild glance back through his broken glasses, he took off. The Land Cruiser shot a rooster tail of leaves i
nto the air and bucked forward over roots and tipped paving stones.
He was leaving them.
Molly was surprised by her surprise. Of course he was leaving them. He was Kleat.
The brothers gave a shout. Duncan, too. A waste of breath.
Molly watched it unfold. Duncan waved his arms in the air. The two Khmers raced around to the truck and grabbed their rifles. Duncan yelled at them not to fire. They cut loose anyway and gave chase.
34.
From behind, Molly couldn’t tell one mud figure from the other. One let off a long burst that emptied his banana clip, and he changed to a fresh one without missing a step. She ran after them.
Picking up speed, Kleat reached the green mineral causeway that ran between the ancient reservoirs. He veered to miss the remains of a naga, putting more distance between them. There was going to be no stopping him.
The brothers ran on. The faster one sprinted ahead, not bothering to shoot, maybe gambling that Kleat would clip a statue or that one of his brother’s bullets might puncture a tire. Molly continued after them. She didn’t want to see Kleat punished, but she didn’t want him to escape either. She just wanted to see.
She had reached halfway across the long causeway. The mouth of the gateway appeared in front of them, like the eye of a needle. Through there it would be blue sky, or almost.
One brother fired. The other chased.
The Land Cruiser suddenly lifted up on an orange blossom.
That was the first antitank mine detonating the fuel tank.
A heavy boom echoed across the water. From Molly’s distance, the Land Cruiser seemed to be launching into space. It spiraled forward through the plume of fuel and smoke.
The truck started to land on one side, then jumped again, thrown by the second mine. It flipped onto its roof, still moving, and the screech of metal rippled back to her in stereo along the tops of both ponds.
Flames shot up. Smoke spilled like ink.
The reserve fuel tank went off. The fireball created a temporary sun in the rainfall. It even cast an artificial rainbow.
An arm appeared from one window. Somehow Kleat had survived the explosions. He was trying to drag himself from the burning car.
The sight of him struggling to escape renewed the brothers’ fury. Molly thought of the turtle in their fire last night. They would have no mercy.
She was sure the wreck had quit sliding. But then it moved again. From her distance, it looked like translucent animals rushing up from the water and bunching around the fiery vehicle. It was the rain in her eyes, she thought.
The Land Cruiser shifted. It hit a third mine. What was left of it flipped off the road.
The water was deeper than she’d guessed. The flaming ball of metal didn’t float and go under in a lather of bubbles. It vanished. The man-made lake swallowed the man-made sun in a single bite.
Molly came to a standstill.
Kleat was gone.
Plastered in mud, the two brothers howled and fired their rifles into the water, cheated of their enemy.
She wasn’t sure what obligation she had to Kleat. He had left them to die. Let the prehistoric fishes have him. But someone needed to witness what was left. Someone had to say a few words over the water.
Grimly, she started forward.
In the space of an instant, she felt a hand wrap around her left ankle, rooting her foot in place. She felt its fingers squeeze.
Even as she glanced down, the image of a fist disappeared. There was the echo of a sensation, a physical resonance. Then it was as if it had never been.
She lifted her foot. A piece of green waterweed led over the road’s rim, limp and flat. Her imagination was in overdrive. She had invented the hand to halt herself.
She peered over the edge to see if a wave had flung up the weed. The wreck might have caused a ripple or runoff from the city. But the water was flat and dimpled by rain. And occupied.
Something was in there. Molly moved her head to one side.
It was the other ACAV. It had sunk to the bottom and was lodged in mud. Weeds floated up from the machine-gun barrels. A goldfish the size of a carp swam from one hatch. Another peered up at her from the depths of the second hatch. She leaned out over the water, angling for a better view. Their eyes weren’t spaced like the eyes of a fish. They were almost human.
“Molly!”
She pulled back from the water. Duncan was standing at the forest’s edge. The machete hung from one hand. The pacifist had armed himself.
“Come back,” he said.
“Kleat’s gone,” she announced. She heard her unnatural calm. “And I found something in the water.”
“Molly, before they start back. Their blood will be up. We have to hide.”
She glanced down the road at the brothers. They were prowling from side to side, searching for any trace of their vehicle or Kleat. “But we didn’t do anything. Kleat betrayed us all, you and me, too.”
“They’ll figure that out eventually. But it will be better if we’re not around when they return. Come back. We’ll take some food and spend the night in the ruins. We’ll go find Vin. That will satisfy them. It will all work out.”
That sounded sensible. Good old Duncan. She turned.
There was a fourth detonation out on the road.
Molly looked in time to see a man flying from the road, like a puppet getting jerked from the stage. There was no ceremony to it, barely a bang.
Abruptly he stopped, in midair.
She thought that it was an illusion, that time had stopped. The arc of his flight would continue in the next moment, it had to.
Then she saw the tree branch quivering. He’d been impaled on its tip. There he hung, like an ornament. Less than that, like a bit of trash caught in the trees.
Fifty yards ahead of Molly, the remaining man froze in place. The brothers were children of the mine fields. They knew them with the same dread and familiarity the Dark Ages had known hell. One step more, forward, backward, or to the side, and the man knew he might be maimed or killed. He stood there as if his very soul was at risk. And for him, it was. Samnang had told her that to die away from home, away from burial rites and family, meant wandering for eternity.
For a full minute, the young man didn’t move. Covered in mud, anonymous to her, he was like a tar baby with a rifle stuck in his hand. Next to him, rising higher than his head, a naga bared its stone fangs.
The man groaned. It wasn’t a word, just a noise escaping his lungs, the start of grief.
“Stay where you are, Molly.”
Duncan started out to her slowly with a stick in his hand, touching gravel and leaves as if reading braille, scanning all around his feet for trip wires or metal buds or any evidence of mines.
He took hours, it seemed. Molly didn’t move. The lone brother didn’t move. She kept her eyes away from the man hanging in the tree.
Molly felt heavy, and yet light, magnificently light. Released. Anointed, in a way. She had been spared, but more important, she had seen. That was the crux of it.
As a photographer and a journalist, she had made a living from catching the meta-moments. In an article on a day in the life of an emergency room, she’d captured birth, suffering, and the still toes of a traffic fatality, and thought she’d seen it all, and in a sense she had, through her glass lens. No glass this time. No mirrors.
She stood obediently. Duncan was coming for her. He was almost here.
Once again, as in the bamboo thicket and when she had descended from the tree, Duncan laid claim to her. He was taking her back from the jaws of this place.
Beyond his shoulder, one of those giant god heads was smiling across the water, eyes closed but aware, deep in his dream of them. That was probably all she needed to know. They were figments of a stone imagination. And yet she wondered at it all. There was Samnang’s cosmic stream, but then there were the day-to-day riddles, like land mines where there had been none before.
“How could this happen?” sh
e asked.
“The soldiers,” said Duncan. “Thirty years ago. They must have laid them.”
“But we drove in this way. And now look.”
“Chance,” he said. “The robots of destiny. Like they say, mines are infinite war.”
“No. Someone placed them here for us.” She was utterly certain about that.
Duncan corrected her. “For someone like us. The soldiers were guarding themselves.”
“It’s like we’re not being allowed to leave,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” said Duncan.
“They were laid to keep us here.”
“Not so loud,” he said.
That frightened her. He wasn’t disagreeing. It came to her. “Luke?” she said.
“Not now, Molly. One thing at a time.”
“What about him?” The tar baby.
“I’ll go for him next.”
35.
It all might have worked as Duncan said. He would have led Molly to the forest and returned for the final brother. But an animal began to cry. It started as a tiny, thin keening, and Molly was sure it was some macabre birdsong.
Then she realized it was coming from the corpse skewered on the tree. The mine had lopped away his lower legs. His arms were broken at the elbows. But even with the spike of the branch punched through his chest, what remained of him was not yet dead. There he hung, above the water.
The cry rose an octave. It was awful. He didn’t seem to take a breath. Like some inelegant jungle bird up there, he rustled his wings weakly, whistling a one-note song. The rain spoiled her make-believe. The mud was being washed away. She could see the red meat underneath.
The man on the road appealed to his brother. He reached up. They were only twenty feet apart, separated by the span of air and water. The dying brother gave no sign of recognition. His cry went on.
Thunder shook the pond. It came up through the mineral vein carved into the shape of the road.
