Second Round: A Return to the Ur-Bar

by Garth Nix

  Westerley wasn’t sure what he’d seen either, though he was sure he’d emptied an M-16 magazine into it to no effect. His traumatized memory included a glimpse of something like an enormous rainbow-scaled snake that reared upright on its lower coils, but it moved so swiftly in the moonlight he really wasn’t sure what he’d seen, and everything had been made even more confusing by the smoke grenades that had been wrenched—or bitten—off the webbing of one of the victims, red and yellow smoke billowing everywhere.

  His rifle proving ineffective, and his radio operator falling headless next to him, Westerley had fired a hand-held parachute flare straight at where he thought the creature was moving to next, punching it straight in front. The burning magnesium had hit something and, unlike the previous richocheting bullets, had given the creature pause. Westerley didn’t think it had actually hurt it at all, but he wasn’t going to wait and see. He ran up the hillside, plunging into the dense jungle, worming his way through a network of tree roots and undergrowth he hoped the beast couldn’t navigate.

  Whether it could or not, it didn’t.

  Westerley and Cao were the only survivors, Cao found six hundred meters downstream at dawn the next day, Westerley staggering back into camp a few hours later. By mutual agreement, they had not discussed nor reported what happened in any detail. Both were in hospital for several weeks afterwards, feigning concussion and confusion to go along with their numerous minor injuries. Westerley did in fact have a potentially serious gunshot wound, someone’s panicked fire having creased his back, leaving him with three long, parallel scars that looked like he’d had a red-hot pitchfork applied to his skin. Two inches deeper and he would have been dead.

  “I’m not going anywhere near anything like … whatever that was,” said Westerley. “In fact, I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here and drinking beer until I pass out.”

  “I don’t mean there will be a … naga … involved,” said Cao.

  “Naga?” asked Westerley. He knew a little about nagas, or at least had heard about them from his Montagnard soldiers. After his personal experience, he had changed from a skeptic about such things to share their belief, though he kept quiet about it.

  Cao shrugged.

  “It’s a good enough name for something we don’t … can’t … know. But I don’t mean there will be something like that creature involved. I have come to you because we asked General Vinh Loc’s astrologer what we should do about this bar, this strange bar where there should not be a bar. And she said, ‘It is for the beer-drinker, the star-shooter, the man of gold, the naga’s lost prey.’”

  “Could be anyone,” said Westerley, his face set in the expression he used to scare the shit out of new recruits.

  Cao laughed and tapped the warrant officer’s glass.

  “Beer-drinker.”

  “Yeah, well, it used to be fun. Can’t say I even like the taste that much now. Even the VB they fly in tastes … disappointing.”

  “Star-shooter. The flare you fired, that saved us both. It would have come for me in the water, you know. You drove it back … somewhere.”

  “That was pure arse luck. If I’d had a kitchen sink on me, I’d have thrown that. It just turned out to be a flare.”

  “So you’re lucky,” said Cao. “That is also good.”

  Westerley rolled his eyes and took a deep swallow. The beer, every beer, was disappointing. It was cold, but that was all. It didn’t even seem to make him drunk anymore. He couldn’t get lost in it, like he’d always been able to do before. He just drank and drank and drank and it didn’t make him cheerful, or boisterous, or do anything damn else, until the moment he went from lifting a glass to unconsciousness.

  “The man of gold.”

  “Well, that’s the prime bullshit that explodes the whole thing,” said Westerley.

  “Is it?” asked Cao. He turned around and called out to the group of sergeants and warrant officers gathered around the now nearly empty bottle of rum. “Hey, McLintock. What’s Westerley’s nickname again?”

  “Nugget,” called out McLintock. “Cos he’s a turd.”

  One of the younger sergeants started to laugh, stopping immediately as Westerley and McLintock both stared at him savagely and he realized no one else was laughing.

  “Turds of a feather,” said Westerley. He raised his glass to McLintock, who gravely raised his back. They drained their glasses together, then smashed them onto bar and table respectively, broken glass going everywhere.

  “Nugget,” said Cao. “Gold.”

  “Oh, come on,” spat Westerley, wiping some blood on the bar cloth. “I got called Nugget because I’m short and wiry, it’s got nothing to do with gold.”

  “The naga’s lost prey.”

  “That could be you,” protested Westerley. He gripped the Major’s wrist, tight around his watch, hard enough to hurt, though Cao didn’t react. “You’ve got a gold Rolex. You’re the man of gold.”

  “I don’t drink beer,” said Cao. “Not normally. Only with you.”

  “Fuck,” said Westerley, his voice as tired as it ever got. “I just worked out why the General’s really here.”

  “Yes,” said Cao. He smiled his sardonic smile. “My general, your Australian general, they like to help each other out. But I explained that would mean nothing if you didn’t agree.”

  “Nah, it means I don’t have a choice,” said Westerley sourly. He wished the beer was having an effect. In the old days, after a dozen beers, he’d happily deck an officer, no matter whose army they belonged to, particularly in the sergeant’s mess, since everyone would swear blind the officer fell or whatever, with three or four equally ludicrous alibis for Westerley on offer from his fellow NCOs.

  He just didn’t feel like it now. Fatalism, he supposed, something he was aware had been creeping over him this last tour. Que sera, sera, like Doris Day sang. Whatever will be, will be. You put an eighteen-year-old boy into green in the closing year of WW2 and after twenty-five years fighting the Japs, the Koreans, various Malayan insurgents, the Indonesians in Borneo, then the Viet Cong and the NVA, even enemies he couldn’t describe or comprehend, it was quite clear the boy would not be famous or rich.

  He would just end up not knowing what else to do, having somewhere along the line lost the ability to have a civilian life, a creeping malaise that was now reaching into his military life as well, beginning with the lack of savor in the beer that had always been his reward and escape and philosophical booster fluid.

  “So tell me about the mission—this bar you want me ‘to check out,’” said Westerley, falling back on the one thing he did know, that he could always be.

  A professional soldier.

  Cao started to talk. Very quietly.

  * * *

  Sixteen hours later, Westerley was looking at the suspect structure from the ruined bank of a bombed-out rice paddy. Cao was with him, talking to his headquarters on the radio. He’d brought two of his smiling killers with him, as well as the radio operator; they were out on the flanks. The long, tropical dusk was setting in, bringing with it all the usual bugs and making sweat and the humid air seem to be pretty much interchangeable. They’d been dropped five kilometers back and had walked and waded in the hard way, staying off paths.

  The whole area had been designated a free-fire zone by the Americans some months before, but even that didn’t explain the quiet. Nugget had never experienced such an absence of people, not anywhere he’d been in his time in-country. Cao and his men were nervous, too, something Westerley hadn’t seen before either.

  “It looks like it’s made of adobe,” said Westerley. “Kind of out of Texas or somewhere. You sure this isn’t some weird Yank thing? Psy-ops or something?”

  “It is made of mud bricks, we know that much,” said Cao. “But not local mud. Wrong color. And the Americans… the ones that know about it are worried. They sent in a team as well.”

  “What?” spat Westerley. “You didn’t tell me that! Surefire way to fuck everythi
ng up is not tell me shit like that!”

  “I didn’t know,” said Cao. He looked across at his radio operator, who was lying on his side against the earthen wall, making sure the folded-over bush-whip antenna of his ANPRC-77 stayed below the rim of the bank. “I just got word.”

  “I hate this fucking left-hand right-hand bullshit,” said Westerley. “Who’d they send in?”

  “Ranger lurp,” said Cao. “Six men. Went in just before noon, none came out.”

  “And eight of your guys the day before? Went in, didn’t come out?”

  “Yes, eight.”

  “Got to be a tunnel complex below, but … no communication at all? Nothing?”

  “Both units confirmed they were about to enter, then nothing,” said Cao. “I had two men to cover mine, a little closer than we are now. They heard nothing, saw nothing. They waited two hours, then retreated to the LZ and reported. That’s when the General asked his astrologer and I came to find you.”

  “The Americans have anyone else here now?” snapped Westerley.

  “No one has told me they do,” said Cao.

  “Find out,” said Westerley. “I’m going to take a look. By myself.”

  Cao nodded and took the handset from his radio operator again. Westerley was a little surprised. He’d expected an argument, expected Cao would want to come along. But then this whole thing wasn’t anything like normal.

  A fucking two story adobe building in a destroyed village in a free fire zone with a flashing neon sign above the main door that said “Bar.” It was either the most complex practical joke ever perpetrated in wartime—or it was even weirder than that night by the stream eight kilometers out of Polei Kleng.

  Westerley took his time getting to the bar, moving from cover to cover, pausing to listen and watch. It was still strangely quiet and that was another oddity, since that flashing neon sign had to be powered by something and he couldn’t hear the familiar chug of a diesel generator. Maybe they had big batteries and only ran the generator part of the time …

  He was about forty meters away, prone in the dirt by the fallen corner of what might once have been the village temple, when he did hear a faint drone and for a moment was reassured that there was a generator here after all and the neon sign could be explained. But then he realized the sound was more distant and up high. Rolling on his side, he scanned the darkening sky until he saw it. A very faint speck of a silhouette, orbiting the village maybe nine hundred meters out and about two thousand meters up. An OH-1 Bird Dog, almost certainly American, with a forward air controller aboard, ready and more than willing to order in artillery or air strikes to support the Ranger LRRP who’d gone into the bar earlier today.

  Or to avenge them, Westerley thought, and was grateful Cao spoke such excellent English and was very experienced working with American FACs and pilots. Cao would make sure there would be no unexpected rain of artillery, bombs, or napalm while Westerley was reconnoitering the bar.

  He watched the building for twenty minutes, until the dusk gave way to real dark. Or what would have been the dark he knew so well if it wasn’t for the neon sign.

  There didn’t appear to be any way in apart from the front door. The windows were heavily shuttered and flush with the walls. There might be an entry point in the roof, but he didn’t think he could climb up to it. The sign had looked promising from a distance, to be used as a handhold, but it was higher up than it looked, at least ten feet. The whole building was bigger than it had looked from the rice paddy, which was something else to give him pause.

  All he could hear was the faint, distant buzz of the Bird Dog. No birds, no frogs, no livestock, no human noises.

  The door opened a crack, light spilling out. Westerley shut one eye to preserve his night vision and settled his elbows and the CAR-15 into his shoulder, ready to take the shot.

  “You coming in for a beer or what?” asked an unseen voice. A deep, male voice. In English, with an accent Westerley couldn’t place. Maybe a mixture of accents.

  With the man’s words came the scent of beer. Real beer, like he used to smell when he was a kid growing up in the near-slum of Redfern. When the wind blew right, the yeasty, malty smell of the Tooth’s brewery would wash across, often just before a summer thunderstorm. Fresh beer and humidity—the two were linked in Westerley’s mind with childhood, the innocent time before his first war, though even that seemed like a more innocent time than now. Fighting the Japanese had been … straightforward.

  Westerley’s finger curled back—outside the trigger guard. He took another deep sniff of that amazing beer smell, hesitated, then stood up, stepping forward out of his partial concealment. He kept his carbine ready, squinting to see the shadows around and inside that door, where the neon light didn’t reach.

  “Reckon I’ll try the beer,” he said.

  Whoever had spoken didn’t come out, but the door yawed wider and the smell of beer grew stronger. There was noise now: bar sound, pub sound, people talking and drinking, stools or chairs shifting, glasses clinking, a knife scraping on a plate. Soft light spilled out, candlelight, not harsh neon or anything electric.

  The man in the doorway was huge, six foot six or more, and hugely muscled. Dark-skinned, but not an African. He had a shaped beard, braided with little leather cords. He wore an odd white tunic and a sort of leather kilt. His large, thick-fingered hands were empty and Westerley saw no obvious weapons.

  “I’m Gil,” he said. “This is my place. Welcome.”

  Westerley lowered his carbine, thumbed the safety. Whatever was happening here, he knew instinctively he wasn’t going to fight his way out of it. This man had the same sort of … feel … aura … he didn’t know how to describe it … as the creature Westerley had fired the flare at it in the jungle ambush the year before.

  “Come on in,” said Gil, turning to provide the broad target of his back. “There’s some baskets just here, you can leave your weapons. Keep your knives. We don’t mind knives.”

  Westerley followed him into a long corridor lit by candles in sconces carved out of the mud-brick walls. The floor was paved stone and looked very old. Halfway along, there were half a dozen tall wicker baskets with a wide variety of weapons protruding: M-16s, AK-47s, a Garand, a couple of RPG-7s, even a couple of old French MAS-49s.

  “Grenades on the shelf at the end,” said Gil, lifting a curtain to go into the bar proper. Scent, noise, and light increased for a moment, then the curtain fell back.

  Westerley carefully put his carbine and .45 pistol in one basket and his two fragmentation and two smoke grenades on the low shelf he hadn’t seen at first, beyond the last basket. There were already a lot of other grenades there, again, of all types: US, Russian, French, Chinese.

  He unclipped the knife on his shoulder webbing before he drew back the curtain, went into the bar, and stopped, the curtain sliding down across the back of his neck.

  It was the kind of place he liked. About twice the size of the sergeant’s mess at Nui Dat—which was bigger than seemed possible from outside. Half a dozen long tables of old, dark wood, with benches of the same timber, ran through its center. Candles bunched in half-melted groups of five or six sat on platters of fired but unglazed clay. The actual bar ran the width of the room and it was made of the same stone as the floor. There were a lot of tankards on the bar, a varied lot, some glass, pewter, pottery, some even wood. And the shelves behind the bar were not lined with familiarly-labeled glass bottles, but clay jugs, stoppered with wooden bungs. Right in the middle, on a shelf of its own, there was a clay or maybe stone tablet carved with bird-scratch symbols. A tall white candle burned on either side of the tablet, as if it were a shrine or something.

  There were maybe twenty people in the bar. Mostly men, though there were some women. Everyone was in uniform, of one kind or another. He saw Cao’s men, and the Rangers, and two women who were US Navy nurses, but there were also men and women in the black pajamas of the Viet Cong and the tan outfits of the NVA. Everyone, from all s
ides, they were all sitting together, mixed up, drinking beer, talking. Vietnamese and English, Korean too. A couple of men on the end were ROK “volunteers.”

  “Come and get that beer.”

  Gil was behind the bar, pouring a foamy brew from one of the clay jugs into a pewter tankard. In a daze, Westerley crossed the room and took up his usual stance, leaning on one leg, hip against the bar.

  The beer Gil put down in front of him smelled truly wonderful. Westerley couldn’t help but lick his lips. But still he hesitated.

  “What is this place?”

  “A bar. A once and future and always will be bar.”

  Westerley looked at the foamy head on the beer and swallowed, his throat dry. Still, he couldn’t drink. Not yet.

  “What’s your bar … doing here?”

  “Serving beer,” said Gil. He smiled. “You look like you need one. Or maybe two.”

  “Two won’t even hit the sides,” said Westerley, and gave in. He lifted the tankard and poured the beautiful fluid down his throat, washing away dust and grit and a few half-swallowed bugs, but even as he finished it, he knew it wasn’t enough. Even the perfect beer couldn’t wash him clean, couldn’t carry him like a wave back into life, a proper life.

  “Not bad,” he said to Gil, with a smile that told a different valuation. “Can I have another?”

  “One more,” said Gil. “In a moment. Closing time, you see. Got to finish up before the B-52s unload.”

  “What? But Cao, he’ll have told them I’m—”

  “It wasn’t up to Cao,” said Gil. “His boss, the general. Lost his nerve, and doesn’t want to know now, just wants us to go away, and he’s convinced the Americans. But no harm will come to the bar. It’s just that those Rangers, and your friend Cao’s men, they have to go out the way they came in, in the village. So they need time to get clear.”

  “What about the others? The nurses, those two Koreans—”

  “They came in a different door,” said Gil. “They’ll go out the same way. The main question is, what about you?”