He drew his M-7 and slipped the muzzle ring over the barrel. He held his breath then clicked it into place. There was a pause from below, then the damp snuffling continued. He took a firm grip on his rifle and pressed on the ejector clip with his thumb the same way he’d pushed in the spring lock on his door when he’d been a teenager. The tension built, and it clicked like a tiny twig breaking. The creature paused again, holding its breath. Luke did the same, and after fifteen seconds it started walking and sniffing again. He pressed in the fresh magazine but if the creature heard it around the tree it gave no sign.
Luke shifted his grip on the rifle and waited. The whatever-it-was came closer, circling around the other side of the trunk. It rose up, clawing and sniffing at the lower branches. Luke cocked his arm and let fly. The half-empty magazine sailed through the air and struck a hanging skull with a hollow crack. The skull rebounded, banging off a set of leg bones, which jived along half a dozen ribs. The thing dropped low, pointed itself at the other tree, and Luke jumped. His boots slid on the creature’s skin but he brought his rifle down bayonet-first into the back of its neck. The steel caught against something hard, and turned just as Luke’s boots skidded off the back plates and his ass hit hard enough to make his tailbone go numb.
The creature roared, and the sound reverberated over the water. It shook and bucked, whiplashing back and forth across the broken shore. Luke held on, jerking and twisting the six–and-three-quarter inches of steel embedded just south of the base of the skull. When he didn’t come free, the thing turned back toward the lagoon and started running. It managed three lumbering steps before Luke pulled himself onto his knees, and squeezed the trigger.
A bomb went off in the creature’s neck, and pain raked Luke from crotch to crown. The behemoth spasmed and threw him off. Luke hit the dirt hard enough to jar his brain, skidding through the mud in a graceless ballet. The creature swayed like a drunken prize fighter, blood and ichor pumping from its mangled neck. Its knees gave out slowly and it collapsed with its snout in the water. Blood pooled, pouring into the lagoon and turning it a darker shade of black. Luke watched the thing twitch and scrabble, but he stayed where he was until the creature’s bladder let go in a stream that reeked of battery acid. When he was sure it was dead he levered himself to his feet, collected his light, and went looking for his rifle.
He found what was left of his M-16 half-in and half-out of a mud puddle. The stock was cracked, the carry strap had pulled loose from the front mooring, and a thick clot of muck dribbled from the inner workings. The firing pin had blown through the rear workings, the hammer was bent back like a crippled gymnast, and the barrel ruptured like a rusty sewer pipe. The M-7’s handle was locked in place, but the blade had sheared right off. Luke ejected the clip, unsnapped the strap, and sat on a rock where he could watch the water along with its recently deceased resident.
Luke flexed his ankle and swore. It hurt, but nothing was torn or broken. He took off his boot, wrapped the ankle with the carry strap for support, then laced his boot back up. It still hurt, but he could probably run on it if he had to. He stripped off his jacket, grunting at all the little slivers that had blown back in his face. There were fewer of them than he thought there were, but still enough that it took him some time to pluck them all out. A few of the cuts bled, but not enough to worry about. He put his jacket back on, and ate his crackers while he looked for his helmet. He didn’t find it, but he did find the half-used clip he’d thrown at the bone chimes. A fair trade. He took out his compass. The cover was busted, and the needle was bent up at a useless angle. Luke swore then gathered a couple of big stones.
Keeping an eye on the corpse Luke panned the water and counted. There were seven little sandbars, each with a tuft of thick grass growing on them. He bounced a rock in his hand, and threw it. It landed on the first island with a dull thud. He threw the others, plopping a few lobs into the water for good measure. Nothing came roaring out of the depths. No mysterious ripples broke the surface. Luke nodded, and built himself a smoke. He took care not to spill any of his tobacco before putting it back in the little pouch that kept his makings dry. He flicked his lighter, and heat lightning lit up the treetops. Luke waited for thunder, but it never came.
He considered his situation. He was hurt, and a little shook up. He had no way to keep his direction straight. He was running out of light in a hurry. He could bed down where he was and hope he made it through the night, or he could keep going. He took a look at the dead thing and imagined what would have happened if it had found him in the dark. His lips writhed. Luke looked back the way he’d come, toward the clouds of flies and the bloody trail they were eating away to nothingness. No one was coming, but if he went back that way he’d be no better off than he was now. He checked what was left of his gear to make sure everything was buttoned up and strapped in.
“After a while, crocodile,” he said, flicking his smoldering roach at the thing that had lived and died in the Golgotha. Luke drew his pistol and started picking his way around the rim of the water.
He paused below the arch and looked up at the body. It was older than the first one, and it had rotted faster. It had both arms, and they were spread wide in welcome. Either that, or it was getting ready to drop on him when he wasn’t looking. Luke pursed his lips, and took a long drink from his canteen. There was another legend scratched into the left tree, faint enough that he had to lean in close to see it.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” he read. He looked back over his shoulder, then back at the dark doorway. He crossed the threshold.
* * *
Luke found the first stone with his bad foot. It was the size of a brick, and cocked at an angle like a sinking ship. It was the color of hospital sheets, and jagged cracks ran the visible length of it. Rounded and pounded by wind and rain the stone stood defiant; the tip of some buried pyramid lost and forgotten for centuries. Luke limped past, barely giving it a thought except to remember to pick up his feet.
He found more. At first there were only one or two, but they grew into clumps of a dozen or more. The clumps grew more frequent until he was on something that resembled a road. The trees parted, and Luke picked his way over the undisciplined-soldier course beneath a sky as black and empty as a Sunday chalkboard.
Nothing moved. No birds scuttled through the trees, and no snakes slithered after them searching for tasty eggs. Nothing stalked through the empty spaces, or pawed through the dead leaves carpeting the ground beneath emaciated bushes. Ragged cobwebs the size of burial shrouds hung from skeletal branches, and wrapped sacs the size of severed heads hung like sticky, tumorous pendulums. The road was dead, and its corpse was unquiet beneath Luke’s feet.
He smelled the river before he saw it. On top was the musty scent of stale rain, but beneath there was something else; a sharp tang like spoiled eggs in a burn bin. It crawled up Luke’s nose and squatted there, adding a touch of brimstone to every breath and making his eyes water if he sucked in too much air. The trees thinned and twisted, thinning like an old man’s hair. Ancient slabs of stone leaned against each other, fringes of thatched roofs still clinging to a few of the lean-tos. Scrimshaw sigils half-erased by time and the caustic air decorated some of the buildings as well, and shifting shadows lived behind their broken lintels. The darkness watched as he passed, and Luke picked up his pace.
The road ended atop a rise between two decaying stone columns. The eroded stumps were each two feet taller than Luke, and wide enough that his whole squad couldn’t have held arms around one of them. Tiger grass grew knee high, and hieroglyphics faded to near-invisibility spiraled over their surfaces. Beyond the leaning towers was a land of mist and darkness that glowed with witch fire. A red moon rose over the horizon, painting fingers of land in scarlet, and the slow-moving water a deeper, darker crimson.
The place was wrong. It looked wrong, it sounded wrong, and it smelled wrong. There were no sulfur swamps in their patrol area. There were no rivers big enough to make a clogged
drain like this one for at least a hundred kilometers in the opposite direction. No one in the area had reported stone landmarks to the map crews, and nowhere in the entire fucking country from bombed out tunnels to defoliated drop zones was ever this fucking quiet. It was like a library, in a church, in the middle of a graveyard, on Mars.
Luke flicked off his torch and belly-crawled over the rise. His ankle pulsed like a parade-ground hangover, and his canteen was nearly empty. His skull felt naked, and his eyes throbbed as he tried to see through the murk. The skin between his shoulders puckered, and his gut wouldn’t unclench. Everything in him said there were eyes out there, and whoever owned them was none too friendly. He glanced back the way he’d come, but saw nothing but darkness. When he turned back he saw something scrawled over the stone below the grass line. Luke held his kerchief over the torch to cut the glare, and leaned in for a closer look.
Now Entering Spook Central, the stones proclaimed in letters that had been written in an unsteady hand. Below that, the printing slanting the other way, was the missive Kilroy was here. Luke touched his tongue to the pad of his thumb, and ran it over the last e. It smeared, and when he sniffed his thumb there was no doubt about what the words had been written in. They were fresh, but not that fresh. A gunshot rang out somewhere in the darkness, and Luke’s shoulders twitched. He remembered Baxter telling him once that if you heard the shot you weren’t dead yet, and that if you weren’t dead it was time to get a move on before you were. Forward or backward, Luke couldn’t stay where he was.
The world came in flashes. Luke was halfway down the hill, scooting on his ass like a little kid and trying to look everywhere at once. Then he was at the bottom of the hill, bent over like a runner getting ready to put his feet in the blocks. He was scuttling through the grass, breathing through his open mouth, trying to hear something other than the slamming of his heart. He zigged and zagged over the open land, keeping his head down and his eyes wide open in the dark. He felt with his feet and his fingertips, slithering and scrabbling over ground he could barely see. He used the torch sparingly, kept its flashes brief, and managed not to run into anything. The fourth time he flicked the switch there was a crack in the near distance, and the torch exploded.
Luke dropped the flash, and rolled to his right. Three more sharp barks followed, and gray grit flew as rounds buried themselves in the dirt around him. Luke let out a moan, and coughed. He let it trail off into silence, going limp in a patch of scrubby grass. His left hand felt hot and wet. He spider-walked his right hand to his hip, making the muscles in his arm relax. He waited. No one approached. There was no more shooting, either. A minute went by, then a friend came to join it. The clock party had just gotten started when he heard whistling.
The notes were flat, tone-deaf things; the ghosts of murdered music. At first Luke thought it was the wind, but the sounds were too regular. Too human. The atonal dirge drifted, and something moved in the mist; a skinny shadow with its weapon held at port arms. Luke drew and fired, squeezing the trigger twice. A firebrand burned the back of his right shoulder, and the figure went down with a sound like laundry being dumped on a concrete floor. The whistling continued, but there was a wet, wheezing quality that said it no longer came from a mouth. Luke stood and approached, weapon leveled.
The shooter was lying on her back. Her frizzy blond hair stuck out like a halo in the dimness. Ugly, puckered worms of scar flesh squirmed at her temples and along the shaved sides of her head. She had a junky’s tan, and the skin around her nails was cracked and jaundiced. One or two of the nails still had chips of yellow paint on them. Her lips writhed over pale gums filled with loose teeth, and her breath hissed through the hole the copper jacketed slug had torn in her chest. She wore busted sandals, cut-off jeans, and beneath the mud and blood her tee shirt was stamped with the letters for Ohio State. She raised empty hands, and squeezed a trigger that wasn’t there. The whistling stopped, and her hands flopped in the dirt like dead starlings.
Luke didn’t recall sitting down. One minute he was standing over the girl, staring into her dead, hazy eyes, and the next he was on his ass. His face was wet, and clear snot dribbled from his right nostril. He flicked his Zippo, and noticed several, deep gashes along his left hand. Shards of plastic stuck out of a few of them. He pulled them out, grunting with each chunk.
He turned his attention to the girl. She had a spare clip in her back pocket, a wad of used chewing gum covered in lint, and a handful of pennies. Luke exchanged his pistol for his brush knife, and cut her shirt into strips. The tearing cloth was like a scream in the silence, and it brought him back to himself. He wrapped a long strip around the knife, and ran the Zippo back and forth over it. The cloth hissed and huffed, but eventually let the flame climb on. That was when Luke noticed the folded piece of notebook paper jutting out of the girl’s bra. He plucked it out and unfolded it.
It was a garbled mess. There were confessions to gods whose names Luke didn’t know, pleas for mercy, and cryptic nursery rhymes that reminded him of the stupid, endless tricks teachers had written on the board to help him remember facts and formulas. He read it twice, lips moving in silent repetition in the wan, wavering light.
Her name was Susan Griffith, and she was a sophomore. She’d been at a protest against the war, and someone had hit her on the head. After that was a series of white rooms, where people gave her pills and patted her arm reassuringly. She was flying, but she didn’t know how she got on the plane. She wasn’t alone, either.
She was taken to a cell to wait in silence and darkness. Then her food had come; a tray of sweet, salty mash with a bitter taste she couldn’t identify. The first three times she refused to eat, but the fourth time she gave in. It was the best meal she’d ever eaten, and she’d fallen into a stupor. She dreamed of men in white coats telling her everything would be all right. Saying her family loved her, and she was away at camp. She woke to whispers in the vents, and the cold, rhythmic echo of gunshots. The devil’s choir didn’t make sense at first, but in time she learned to love their words. To love their words and to hate the light.
They gave her Toto, a sleek, black thing that barked when she squeezed him, and stayed warm in her hands. She cleaned him, loved him, and when they’d grown inseparable the doors opened and she could go. She still thought about home sometimes, and about her boyfriend Paul. She thought about how she was going to fuck him after the protest, but never got a chance. She always found new friends though, and Toto would bark in the dark and put out their lights. The lights that hurt her eyes so much. Across the bottom of the page, written in tiny, smudged letters were the words All roads lead to Midian.
Luke was about to start over at the beginning again when he heard the moaning. It was flat and dull, like a busted church organ that only remembered one note. A high-pitched humming joined it. Teeth chattered in the mist like hungry castanets, with no rhyme or reason. A tongue clucked monotonously, like the owner was calling for a dog whose name he couldn’t remember. Shadows shambled out of the mist, drawn like blow flies to the dying fire in Luke’s left hand.
The first bullet spanged off the knife, twisting the metal out of true. The second tore through the meat of Luke’s little finger, snapping the bone and leaving the digit dangling by a thread. The third and fourth shots hit the knife just above the cross guard, sending it flying out of Luke’s hand. There were others, more than he could count, but they followed the burning brand as it tumbled into the dry grass. Luke leaped away, clutching his left hand to his chest and crouching near the dead girl who’d once been called Susan.
The spooks kept shooting, but the fire wasn’t made of flesh. It grabbed hold of the dry grass, and grew brighter. They kept shooting, but the hot lead passed straight through. The spooks reloaded, moving with a jerky, mechanical quality that was still faster than human hands should have moved. By the time they emptied their second magazines the fire had become a blaze, rearing like a dragon. It ate one of the shooters, who kept humming long after his clip w
ent dry. The others fell back, chattering and clicking like a swarm with a dead queen. Light poured into the darkness like an ink stain, puddling around the borders of the mist. Luke turned, and that was when he saw the bridge.
It was an old bobbing Betty. She was held together with rusty chains, and the slick, moldy boards didn’t look overly reliable. The half-deflated pontoons sagged like an old woman’s dugs in the slow-running current. The span shot straight into the mist though, and Luke knew if the old sow was busted she’d have been pointing down river. He sucked in a breath and forced his feet to move.
The bridge was old, and she ducked below the water in a few places, but she held long enough for Luke to make it across. He fell twice, and almost went over into the river, but he managed to limp onto dry land. The bridge calmed. After a few minutes it started to bob again. In the middle distance something cracked. Someone did a poor imitation of an owl, asking the same nonsense question again and again. Luke snatched the shovel off his belt, and brought the edge down on the bridge. Boards splintered, and the pontoons beneath sighed as they dipped down the rest of the way. Luke crashed the shovel into the chain hard enough to send shivers up his arm, but it held. The bridge bobbed more vigorously, and a chorus of barks and howls joined the questioner. Something stirred the mist, and a bullet clanged off the shovel head. Luke let it go, drew his pistol, and fired. The chain snapped, along with the supports holding it in place. The bridge shuddered, shimmied, and hung on for three more heart beats. Then the second chain gave way with a metallic sigh.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 28
