The group was silent. Perhaps skeptical. Conroy’s deep look of worry and Brock’s little shake of the head deadened the conversation. The sun was edging out of the horizon, scorching the sky. Finally, Mir spoke. “The forefathers had a vision of a government that would stay off the backs of the people, and in their time that vision was mostly realized. But let’s look at how that vision is different than the reality of today.”
“Within our democracy, we have the power to vote out the politicos though,” Split said.
“Do we?” I asked. “Does it really matter who we vote for? Has it made any difference in the last fifteen years?”
Seee added, “We are gravitating closer and closer to a dangerous situation when the blood on the streets will thicken. How will the people have the means to defend themselves? Mir brought up a good point. Let us ask: Should the State be altered to bring it back in line with the vision of our forefathers? If so, do you think it would be allowed? Who would try it?”
“You are saying the citizenry is becoming hostage to the State,” Brock said.
“How has the United States evolved for the better,” Seee asked, “and how has it veered off course? How do we effect change if it can’t be done through voting? Is anything moveable through the vote anymore?”
We all thought deeply about these questions. The men argued longer while Seee kept silent and listened. Then Conroy asked, “But how do you go about changing anything?”
Seee replied surreptitiously. “I’m not sure. What I do know is how I choose to live my life and that entails sacrificing for my beliefs. Not because I think I’ll be judged, but because I am judge in the here and now, and I want to be a clear lens for those to see the country’s true shape. Tradition does not equal truth, nor does it guarantee liberty. When liberty fades then what you have is tyranny, and then what use is a country?”
As Brock was in the middle of a reply, a large blast rang out in the distance. Another explosion quickly followed. Seee shot to his feet, reached into his pocket, and put in an earpiece. “Talk to me,” he said, then cupped his ear and ran briskly into the forest. Through the earpiece we heard, Enemy in the wire.
We bolted back to camp, Seee in the lead, slithering through trees and underbrush. Under shadows, we swarmed through the jungle, all of us in the wake of Seee’s path, blisters on his feet slowing him down. The explosions continued with the rattling shots of a machinegun. As we got closer, we heard screaming deep within the jungle. More machinegun rounds blasted sporadically from several more guns. Then, the sound of grenades came.
Two hundred yards from camp, Seee broke off and leapt into a teak tree, scampering up it like a monkey. He threw down two shovels, pointed to a spot away from the tree and commanded us to dig. Split and I frantically shoveled earth, tossing it over our shoulders. Seee whispered to us that this was not a drill. He said they were probably guerillas after weapons, some of them probably tripping off mines around the perimeter.
A few inches into the soil, Split and I hit metal with our shovels, then dug around a trunk as the others helped push the soil away—an arms cache, a treasure chest of everything from machineguns to RPGs. We suited up in flak jackets, unzipped ammo bags and stuffed them with grenades and shells. Each of us fit an infrared NVG over a helmet. I grabbed a shotgun and slung it over my shoulder. Seee threw Mir an M40A3 and took one for himself. All of us picked up M16s mounted with sights, and slipped in close to the camp where the view was less obstructed by trees.
We crawled through the bush on elbows and knees with our M16s in front of us until we were fifty yards away. Seee counted twenty-one men in the camp clearing. Most had flak jackets on. Others were poking about the perimeter. Several teams of four or five gathered rucksacks, preparing to leave on patrol. Out on the perimeter, two of the enemy were pulled out of the jungle by their comrades unconscious and bleeding. Even with the light smothered by a waning sunset, we could plainly see they were Asian, the first people we had seen outside The Abattoir. Our eyes lit up with the revelation of a secret.
We inched a few yards closer and saw Eaton Atlas and Drew Gareth on their bellies, pinned to the ground, hands zip-tied behind them. Three other friendlies were face-down in the mud, bodies limp. From that distance identification was impossible. It looked like the others had scattered. Machinegun bursts came blasting from the hills, but the interval between the rounds lost pace.
Out in the clearing, we watched a soldier pop out of Seee’s camouflaged wigwam with a map fluttering in his hands. Four men dragged Atlas and Gareth to their knees. Two stood on each side, pinning them in place. The man with the map shouted in broken English as he circled around them, shoving the map in front of their faces. The two remained stiffly quiet. The enemy wore olive green short-sleeved uniforms, red patches on the side, like something out of old Korea. The map man had a flashy bald head, shiny even in the dimming light, a skull more spherical than egg-like, a chin dimpled and hairless. Here stood a man who had never been taken seriously. Now, he had to prove everyone wrong and double-down on severity.
The map man barked at the two again, poking the paper with a finger. He waited a long ten seconds for one of them to speak. Then he ripped away the map and moved behind them, removing his pistol from a side holster.
No one doubted what was going to happen next. The surrealism struck us as if it were theatre, the audience with a certain foresight of the upcoming scene. We held our breaths, looked at one another. Seee sensed our anxiety and motioned with a stern hand for us to hold. A memory blipped in my head from the day I saved Timothy Skies—police sergeant Smith ordering me to keep my position. Here, I didn’t have the courage of the hero from long ago.
Brock and Conroy lowered their eyes. Split had a shaking finger on his M16 trigger, the map man in the crosshairs. Seee, shook him by the helmet, and when he had his attention, clenched his jaw and shook his head no.
The map man pulled the trigger on Drew Gareth. A loud bang leapt into the forest as blood burst from Gareth’s forehead. His body went limp, boneless as a squid as the two men holding him stepped back, letting him crumble to the ground. We gritted our teeth watching as blood pooled around Gareth’s skull. The two men covered in blood spray wiped their faces on their sleeves.
Atlas had his head turned. The two men holding him up twisted his neck, bent him over, and pushed his eyes closer to the wide-eyed Gareth with part of his brain oozing out of his head. The map man pivoted back around to Atlas, kneeled down to gaze at him in the eyes, then doubled up his shouting while grabbing a clump of his hair. But Atlas simply shook his head. If any fear gripped Atlas, the map man certainly wasn’t seeing it.
I gazed over at Seee and could tell Atlas was making an impression on him. The map man went back into the wigwam and came out with Seee’s machete. He shoved the shiny blade under Atlas’s throat, sawing the dull side against his skin. We looked at Seee once more, but he motioned again for us to wait. Too many—too many, came the whispers down the line, too many in the camp for us to take.
Atlas clenched his jaws, snapped his eyes shut. The map man took his time slicing off his ear, cutting it slow and delicately, as if it were a hunk of steak he were cutting into. Then he took the ear in his fingers, and held it high in the air. Atlas couldn’t help but scream, though it wasn’t one of fear or pain, rather a growl of pure rage, a bear cry, shrill and dark from a vagrant beast, one that said, You’ve just pissed me off and I’m coming to fuck you. Atlas twisted his shoulders to break free, but he was wedged in good between the men on each side of him. Finally, one of them gave him a hard knee to the ribs.
I glimpsed over at Seee. A calm, sanguine look took over his face, more apathetic than a machine. He disassociated himself from the scene, biding time until the odds were right. Calculating probabilities with a raw unemotional discipline, reworking the battle plan, thinking if they killed Atlas, grenades and mortars could be used. But he also knew the enemy would only kill him out of pure rage, that it would be unwise to kill him be
fore he talked. I remembered turning away in disgust, but later the sentiment would turn to admiration.
Atlas wheezed on the ground, the wind knocked out of him. The onlookers at the perimeter finished packing, and finally two of the patrols dipped into different parts of the jungle. We counted twelve men remaining. Seee called us into a huddle. Each man would snipe a target. Split and Brock would then split off into the woods and flank one of the patrols entering the jungle. Mir, Conroy, and I would flank the clearing and retake the camp. Seee told us he would provide the cover fire.
The guards lifted Atlas from the ground onto his knees. The map man straddled him again. He repeated the yelling routine, but Atlas remained more tight-lipped than ever, pressing his lips together, the fleshy parts hidden in a prankish, childlike expression. The map man stood up, ordered the two men to tilt Atlas’s head back, then threatened to cut off his nose with the machete.
Atlas missed seeing the man’s body jerk since his eyes were soaked in his own blood. Perhaps he heard the six shots crush five enemy skulls. The other, Mir’s man, covered a hole shot in his neck with his thumb. Blood gushed out making a fountain over the body of the map man. Seee put down two more before I had enough time to aim again. One of the guerillas reached for a shouldered walkie-talkie, but before he could get a word out, Mir’s second shot cracked a bullet through his teeth. Seee motioned for us to move out, dropping his M40A3 for an M16.
The battle pitched forward. I caught a glimpse of Brock and Split taking off the other way. My hands damp with sweat, a cold layer of fear crawled over me. A jolt of adrenalin flew through my body as I rushed to my feet. Through the bush I ran in a neurotic stumble. Were Conroy and Mir behind me? I didn’t know. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the muzzle flash of Seee’s M16 as he drew the fire away from us. Perhaps three or four guerillas remained, now on their stomachs, most of them shooting wildly into the jungle in Seee’s direction. Bullets and tracers sprayed the jungle in chaos.
All reaction. No control. Revved-up and running at transonic speed, the red glow of tracer rounds zinging in streams overhead. Hundreds of bamboo trees in front of me, long and lank, networked together, root systems interleaved, all part of the same underground organism in a semi-live state. Doors opening as I fly through them. Step through the wrong one and a bullet catches you in the head. The world pushes forward without you.
I sprint over dead leaves and detritus as if the earth beneath flames with fire. The hot streak of sweat on my brow stings my eyes as I gallop through the woods. Trees splinter in front of me, the ground kicking up earth from a sweep of bullets. Closer and closer I bolt toward the spitting muzzle fire. Then I hear a cry from behind. Someone trailing me, hit. No time to look. Shotgun in my arms, I burst into the clearing, a side shot open with one of the machinegunners. He must have seen me in the corner of his eye. Rolling over frantically, he tries to adjust. I pull the trigger in a full charge, the spray of the shot blowing him backwards. Another guy snaking on the ground swivels toward me, the man just realizing the nature of the ambush. I pump another slug back into the chamber. Peace, brother, but this is war.
Buried under a body, Atlas now rises with the machete in his hand, his face bloodstained and mean. A wild, hungry expression in his eyes like a vampire after the first sniff of blood. One of the enemy flees into the woods. A single shot coming from the jungle cuts him down. Conroy now through the wall of trees. The last of the enemy surrenders, raising his weapon in the air, but Atlas slides behind him in no mood for mercy.
The area was ours. Seee stepped into the clearing, popping off rounds in enemy corpses. Conroy helped hobbling Mir. Mir was hit twice, once in the flak jacket and another in the leg. Blood streamed down his fatigues from the wound. Seee ordered Conroy to patch him up. He opened his backpack and threw Conroy a med kit. Then he looked over our dead, turning each on his back. It looked like they had been ambushed from the rear—all of them shot from behind. Seee’s face went pale when he glared at the face of one of them. It was the rugged Ahanu, his whole face pale and frozen in time looking up at us. Seee put his hand over Ahanu’s chest and said a farewell in Yoncalla. We were wide open out here, I thought. Even still, Seee fingered one of the exit wounds, and striped his cheeks with Ahanu’s blood. He ordered the bleeding Atlas to come with him, me back into the jungle to tail the patrol Brock and Split were flanking. They would certainly be coming back, he said.
We split up, him and Atlas running into one side of the jungle, me the other—both of us outnumbered but with the element of surprise. I hesitated for a moment, thinking of the prime opportunity in front of me. Track the tracker. An ambush he would never expect. I stood frozen, hearing my own breathing. A few seconds later, I walked deeper into the forest, double-backed, and then changed my mind again. It wasn’t just Atlas stopping me from fulfilling Pelletier’s wish, something else gripped me to turn away from my promise.
I flipped down the NVG over an eye, and a green tint filled my vision. The world came in focus differently, the roots of trees like veins in the earth. I ran through the jungle, losing myself in the maze of the bush. A retro reality passed before my eyes. Senses sharpened once again, but my mind levitated out of body, stuck in a wet blanket of dissociation, lost in a deprivation chamber in the jungle of some alien planet lush and verdant. I seemed to be a stranger to myself, wondering who the man was running away from his word. The heavy breathing I heard I associated with myself only because it synched in with my own. I ran uphill as I hard as I could until my breath caught up with my boot speed. Then all of a sudden, I stopped.
Up ahead, there was a shake in a cluster of bush. Three enemy emerged contoured against a full moon, coming down the ravine in a swift trot, their faces distorted and green. I ducked behind a large felled tree with upended roots.
There they were. In threes—birth, life, and death traipsing obliviously through the jungle toward a point of ambush. They carried AKs in their hands, their faces blurs without feature or depth. Sewn-up eyelids blind to past, present, and future; their time now multifaceted stepping through a set of trees. A failure to see they had walked through the wrong door. They looked between twenty-six to thirty years old. Their pasts still belonged to them, but their presents were stuck in a mind frame hoping the rough day was through, their faces weary with it. I tightened the stock of the shotgun firmly against my tensed shoulder, my left arm ready to pump. I was the predator, sniffing their scent riding the wind. Their futures hid behind a hooked index finger squeezing a metal tooth, my right eye in the sight ready to ground the trinity—father, son, and Holy Ghost.
The blind men marched closer, their boots loud climbing the stairway between earth and sky. My eyes stung, moistened by sweat seeping into them. I wiped my brow on my arm and waited for one of them to look up and see me. To give me an excuse. Seee’s voice came to me, There is no fair in a fight. But where do you draw the line? Had it been cut to ribbons?
I clamped my thumb and two fingers together and touched my forehead. I swept them over my stomach and shoulders, completing the sign of the cross.
Prisoners. I could take them as prisoners.
But here I was, Cerberus, the three-headed hound from Hell, coming to take them.
Prisoners, I repeated. Take them as prisoners.
But I couldn’t.
And in the end, I wouldn’t.
Chapter 10
“The pessimist complains about the wind, the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
-William A Ward
The day after the Battle for Atlas (as it became to be known) wherein a gang of Burmese invaded the camp, the men of The Abattoir buried the dead. Even with the loss of Glen Aims, Adam Avery, Drew Gareth, and Ahanu, the number killed on the enemy side far outnumbered Abattoir losses, and in the end the remainder of enemy guerillas retreated back into the forest. Pride glowed throughout the camp, and even though temperament remained solemn during the burial ceremony, each of us basked in the victory, so much s
o we seemed to miss questioning what it was really all about. Some thought Seee himself had instigated the attack as a test. Then a rumor spread around that he had stolen from the Burmese mob, inviting an attack. But all of this seemed far-fetched. Seee’s anger steamed outwardly. He cursed what he called a lack of forewarning in the system. When I asked him what he meant, he remained tight-lipped. Further prodding earned only reproach. Merrill, Des, and Kumo sidestepped around him.
Before the battle began, the camp had fallen under the watch of Kumo and Ahanu. After the first set of mines exploded, Kumo led a group of fighters into the jungle. Everyone played his part in the fight, and everyone had their own story to tell about it.
Kumo, Merrill, and Des built a wooden ziggurat eight feet tall in which they placed the wrapped Ahanu’s body on top. The bodies of the other three rested on the levels below. At twilight, Seee lit the torch that would send them away in flames. Black smoke billowed high up into the horizon. In his speech, he said not all of us would have such a sendoff, but we would do the best while we still had the luxury to do so. He warned the enemy could be back, so all of us had to be alert during night watches. A few hours later, he called us together and told us the problem would be fixed another way, by relocation, and it would start tomorrow.
So on the day after the ceremony, a day in November of 2022, the students of The Abattoir faced a new challenge, unaware they were about to sail off the end of the flat world into an unknown universe, one always duplicitously present, but whose true form we had only imagined.
We spent the morning setting booby traps in the forest. Afterward, I walked by Seee’s bivouac, and through the crack in the canvass door saw him spreading out the map, the paper now blood-tattered and worn, onto a metallic table. Des was packing up supplies outside—tents, ammo, M16s, ready-to-eat-meals—throwing it on the backs of idling horses nibbling on grass. The smell of urine from one of them was thick in the air. I crept to the back of the shelter and listened to the low whispers coming from inside.
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