by Chuck Dixon
“They got plans for us, bro,” Rick said. “Yeah,” was all Jimbo could manage.
The mob of blue warriors was joined by the rest of the village. It looked like the entire population was out for a night on the town. They muttered with excitement. Some kids pitched rocks at the prisoners until they were run off by Bucky spitting and barking.
The whole party moved back in the direction of the cage, shoving Jimbo and the others before them. From pitched battle to celebration, it was all taking on a Mardi Gras feel with laughter and shouting from the mob. Horns were blown, and fingers tapped small drums of animal hide stretched over rings of warped birch branches. They reached the cage where the score or so of locals were hauled out and pushed into place to join the company of Jimbo, Rick, Bat, and Byrus. Bucky led the way, with old noodle tits crab-walking beside him and giggling like a mental patient. The noisy parade moved out through an opening in the rear of the skin palace and along a trail of beaten earth in the direction of the cliffs standing black against a sky of fast-moving clouds.
Whatever they were being saved for lay ahead of them at those cliffs. From the excitement building in the crowd, Jimbo surmised that this was a welcome event. Party time for the blue crew with the Rangers and their friends the guests of honor.
Jimbo recalled those headless skeletons that decorated the fence surrounding the village. Well, that particular mystery would be answered soon, he thought.
41
Coolidge Left
Lee Hammond had made it through sniper school at Fort Benning more through persistence than anything else. He called it “the tyranny of will.” Two times he’d gone from Harmony Church to FTX, washing out before the final shot. The wind had not been with him. The third time he’d made it through the grueling course to the end. He struck the final shot at one thousand yards by sheer luck. The metallic clang of his round hitting home was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. The stress, abuse, and four-hundred-yard crawls through freezing mud. Three times to make the cut. Three times to get that sniper patch.
He’d never be the natural marksman that Jimmy Smalls was even if he used that man’s rifle. The Pima had some sixth or seventh sense that let him up close to his target on some spiritual level Lee could never achieve. Once in the crosshairs of the one-eyed Indian, the targets could probably hear an astrally-projected whisper in their ear before the killing round ended all their worries forever. Or some mystic shit like that, Lee imagined.
Or maybe the son of a bitch just had eyesight like Catfish Hunter.
But within five hundred yards Hammond could drive nails with a Model 70 eight times out of ten. Good enough for him.
And that’s where he was positioned. Downrange in the deepening dark of the causeway with the night-vision scope sweeping the front façade of the wicker fence before the village where his friends were being held. He was standing for the best view. The dark of night was his hide. Behind him, fifty yards or more, Chaz was holding back the skinnies, waiting for Lee’s sign to come forward. That was a job in itself. Homer and the others smelled blood and were twitchy to get some action of their own.
The moon was low in an overcast sky. Clouds were building, and a warm wind made the cattails dance and the rushes murmur.
The air was alive with every bug in the hemisphere. Mosquitos the size of sparrows. Cicadas as big as pigeons buzzing and fluttering. The water on either side of the causeway was a source of high white noise. Toads chirruped. Lizards croaked. Frogs wah-wahed. Who the fuck knew what cackled in sudden bursts now and then. It was a mad rave of animal noise rising and falling in a discordant rhythm that could drive anyone insane if they listened long enough, the brain trying to make sense of a senseless cacophony.
Brain-numbing, but it covered all noise of their approach like a warm and fuzzy audio blanket of sound.
In the greenish field visible through the lens, ghost-like figures meandered in the flickering light of pitch torches mounted on the fence wall. The meandering ghosts threw crazed emerald shadows on the sand.
Five targets. Male. Near naked. Little guys but clearly human. One of them turned to look right at Lee in the 30x view, eyes aglow like a raccoon caught in a headlight.
A squeeze on the trigger.
The thick, wet air absorbed the suppressed cough of the big rifle. The creatures of the night had a sudden hiccup in their riff, but filled the gap of silence back in within a half second.
Lee brought the scope back down level. His target lay still on the ground. Two of his buddies ambled over to see why their pal suddenly dropped to the mat as if thunderstruck.
The crosshairs shifted to center mass of the largest of the curious duo. Squeeze. The man slumped to the sand. Shift. Squeeze. A skull turned to vapor. The remaining pair of dummies realized something was up but stayed on the shore, searching blindly into the surrounding dark.
Squeeze. One of the peepers dropped as though pole-axed.
The last clueless bastard realized that he was next for the chop. He turned to sprint for the open gateway. Lee’s finger pressed on the ridged surface of the trigger ever so slowly. A few foot-pounds of pressure and…
The final sentry stumbled to a stop and dropped face-down, arms spread, three paces from the gateway.
His trainer at Benning would say they were weak cheese shots. But this country was the baddest of the bad bush, and here there were no weak cheese shots. No milk runs. No easy days. He was five for five, and the way was clear for insertion into the hot zone.
Lee turned and cut the surrounding din with a two-finger whistle.
Chaz led the skinnies across the causeway toward him at the trot. Bart and Millhouse were closest to him, carrying bandoliers of extra mags for the M4s. Homer followed close and took the Winchester back from Lee. He winced at the scorching touch of the hot barrel. N’itha was silent and staring from among the pack of softly hooting and cooing skinnies. This was as quiet as they could be. This was monkey noise discipline and the best the Rangers could hope for.
Restoring his M4 to his combat sling, Lee turned to his merry band of brothers.
“Gate’s clear. Wide open for infil. Any thoughts on tactics?”
“Once we’re inside the skinnies will do what they do. It’s up to you and me to locate our people and pull them out of there. I’ll keep Neeta close since I can’t keep her back.”
“Love,” Lee huffed.
Chaz nodded. “Fucking A.”
“As a plan, it sucks dick,” Lee said, drawing back the cocking handle on his rifle back to chamber a round.
“Bad plan’s better than no plan.”
“And love is free, but sex is twenty bucks.”
“Hoo-ah, asshole.”
“Rikki?” N’itha said, eyes shining like pewter in the muted moonlight.
“Yes. Ricky,” Chaz said and smiled, hoping the confidence he was faking was some comfort to her.
“Let’s go twenty-first century on their prehistoric asses,” Lee said and trotted toward the glow of the fires. Rain began to fall in fat gobbets.
The platoon of naked man-apes followed their calls growing louder with their excitement. They knew jack shit about war. All they understood was that here was live meat on the other side of the water, and it was theirs for the taking.
42
The Pit and the Hammer
The carnival throng of blue men and their wild entourage hiked under torchlight along a ledge that followed around the base of the red cliffs on a curving path. Their prisoners were shoved and pulled before them, leaders of the parade. The rock ledge was less than ten feet across at the most narrow spot causing the revelers and their unwilling guests to contract into a long column marching away from the village into the shadows of the sheer rock wall towering above. The surface of the pathway was slick with fresh rain beginning to lash down in big drops. An equatorial rain, heavy and hot.
Bucky yapped away and jabbed upwards with his stone bludgeon. A group of warriors broke from the line to clamber up a sle
nder path that sloped up the wall at a thirty-degree angle. There was only room for them to move in single file, but they did so with practiced ease, moving at a run while staying on the hand-width trail high up into the greater dark.
Jimbo craned his neck to the extent the choker about his throat would allow. He watched the twenty or so blue fuckers climb out of sight above them. It was all a part of a ritual that he was in no hurry to see any more of. His mind worked furiously. They were bound and weaponless. In addition to that, they were outnumbered with no place to run. To one side of the path was a near vertical rock wall. To the other, a drop into a shadowy pit roughly oval in shape.
Out of that pit rose the heavy funk of rotting flesh. The sweet, cloying smell of decomposition. Jimbo risked a look over the lip of the ledge as he tramped along. In the pit below grew thick stands of flowering sumac. A flash of lightning ripped the sky in half and momentarily illuminated the floor of the depths.
The flickering blue radiance flashed off the white of bones. The remains of thousands of souls. Human rib cages, femurs, spines, and scapulae. A vast collection of bones from years and years of victims. Generations of dead captives that went before them up this ledge. The source of the decorations that lined the fence without. Every manner of skeletal remnants lay below but one.
Not a single skull.
These victims were tossed to this mass grave without heads.
A second flash of lightning came on the heels of a crack of thunder that resounded off the surrounding rocks with a fearful resonance. This second glimpse into the pit revealed dead who’d been disposed of more recently. The black shapes of carrion eaters of some unknown species crawled over the gray-white flesh of corpses littering the slopes of the crater. Men and women. Children and infants. All discarded like so much rubbish. A landfill of the forgotten, now food for vermin.
And each without a head. It was an unwanted preview of what lay ahead.
“We’re not going down easy,” Jimbo said loud enough for the others to hear over the sing-song chants and jeers of the following mob.
“Fucking A,” Rick growled low then repeated it in a shout at the top of his lungs. Blue men around him laughed at the sound.
“It is all booshit,” Byrus said, understanding the sentiment if not the nuance.
“Say the word, Jimmy. I’m ready to take some of these assholes over the side with me,” Bat said, jaw clamped tight to keep her teeth from chattering.
The final rush. Jimbo could feel a flush through his limbs, rising warm from his belly. Adrenalin, born of fear, infused him. Next would come the calm, the easy feeling of knowing that death was likely and close. He’d felt it before. Back on Highway One in Afghanistan in an MRAP that was flipped by a roadside bomb. He lay listening to the strike of rounds on the armor and the screams of his platoon mates. The most recent time he had this sensation of battle Nirvana was above a dry wash in Judea when men were coming for him and Byrus with spear and sword.
He wished the Pimas had a death chant. At least there was none he knew of. His tribe wasn’t those kinds of Indians. Not like the Cherokee or the Crow. The Pima were a happier people than their more dour brothers to the north and east. The only thing close to a death song that came to him was the Johnny Cash tune, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” that everyone in his tribe knew by heart. The story of Hayes, a Pima who joined the Marines in World War Two and was one of the jarheads who raised the flag atop Suribachi.
There they battled up Iwo Jima’s hill, Two Hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again. And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised Among the men who held it high Was the Indian, Ira Hayes.
Jimbo laughed when he thought of it. Going to the happy hunting grounds and my death song was written by a white guy, he thought. Well, it was the Man in Black anyway. Can’t do much better than that.
The ledge widened gradually until it grew to a shelf of rock broad enough for much of the accompanying crowd to gather in a half-circle. Others watched from farther back up the trail. The younger among them climbed to the vantage posts of natural mantels in the rock where they sat with legs swinging or stood clinging to the cliff face, eyes eager for what came next. This was the big show. No one wanted to miss what was coming except the victims.
The center of all the attention was a niche in the face of the red cliffs that ran all the way up into the dark above. It may have started as a natural formation but showed signs of being deepened and widened in places with tools of some kind. The interior was a yard across. The surface shone with rainwater that ran down its smooth surface like a natural downspout. The most unusual feature was a rounded stone resting at the bottom of the niche. It was six foot in height and an arm’s breadth around at its widest point. It looked to weigh a half-ton. There were ropes of wound hemp fortified with leather and bound around it in a sturdy netting. A wrist-thick rope rose as a cinch above it to run up the vertical channel to where it vanished into the gloom above. The rope was hemp or sinew and wrapped around with bands of leather to prevent breaking. The rope was made to hold the full weight of the thousand-pound stone.
The bottom of the hemp-wrapped stone and the floor of the channel were stained black to a height of three feet with a black rivulet running down the slight slope to the shelf of rock upon which they all stood. It was blood. A permanent stain. The stink gave it away.
Jimbo was getting a sense of the significance of all this when the naked old bitch came creeping up to them with a gaggle of topless women behind her. Each of the women carried wooden bowls filled with a powdery substance the consistency of flour. There was red, yellow and blue silt and the women pitched handfuls of the stuff on the prisoners standing in a loose rank. Dried and crushed flower petals pounded into a fine dust. Jimbo recognized the sweet smell of cornflowers and marigolds. This was all part of a familiar ritual, and the women wore faces frozen in solemnity. The crowd waited silently until all the prisoners were coated head to foot with the flung Technicolor residue that was quickly mixing into a mud-colored mess under the increasing rainfall.
At this the mob let out a whoop, raising and lowering their arms in unison like a drunken baseball crowd failing at performing The Wave. They whooped and waved until the bleats of a horn called them to quiet. The capacity crowd parted to allow the bier-carriers passage. The blue men bore the twisted form of the god-king onto the shelf and up to the line of prisoners. They wore ceremonial skirts of long feathers now drenched and slick with rain.
The freak waved the fingers of his one whole hand in some kind of gesture of damnation or benediction, or maybe it was a palsy. The crowd lowered their eyes. Many dropped to the ground as if they’d been flung down. They bopped their foreheads on the stone in regular rhythm.
N’itha’s people lowered their eyes as well. They feared this malformed curiosity as much as his loyal followers loved him. They had reason to be scared. This fucked up mutant was the undisputed Caesar and Jesus here. He was about to give the people what they wanted.
Bucky threw his head back and bawled a command that reverbed off the rocks. From high above, there was an answering call followed by numerous grunts. These were the blue guys Jimbo had seen part company with the rest and climb up the cliff wall on that skinny sill in the rock.
The hemp rope was pulled taut from above. Water sprayed from it as the fibers tightened and thrummed. With each succeeding grunt, the pillar of rock was hauled a few more feet up the channel. It rose, grinding on the interior of the channel until it was lost to sight in the gloom. The cadence of grunts continued until the thousand-pound weight was drawn, by Jimbo’s guess, at least a hundred feet above the base of the red cliff.
A shout echoed down from above. Bucky called back and turned to the line of captives before him. He walked down the rank, tapping each prisoner on the chest lightly with the rounded stone at the end of his club. A grin split his face when he stopped before a young girl who looked to be no older than twe
lve. Bucky touched her face with his fingers then yanked her chin up, forcing her to look him in the face. The irises of her eyes quivered with the fear rising within her. He took a handful of her hair and pulled her from the line.
Indigo warriors stepped up and took hold of her as she bucked and scratched and kicked to be released from Bucky’s grip. They carried her bodily to the foot of the vertical pipe. They laid her down on her back with her head positioned within the niche atop the blood-stained rock. Blue men sat on her chest and legs to hold her in place. The crowd took in an audible breath of anticipation as Bucky raised his hammer and howled a command.
The thousand-pound stone chundered down from above. A rising scream could be heard above the growing grind of the falling weight dropping down the stone throat of the shaft. The girl shrieked at the sight of the crushing weight racing down toward her. The stone struck with an impact that could be felt as well as heard, cutting off the girl’s scream in an instant. The blue men seated atop the girl were showered with blood, bones chips, and globs of brain matter.
A second of silence followed only to be shattered by the throng’s sudden roar of joyous approval. The noise shook Jimbo out of the stunned torpor that riveted him in the wake of this new horror.
The rope grew taut again, and the stone was hauled back up the channel for another round.
The girl’s body was dragged from place. Her head was now gone. Only a mess of blood, brain matter, and bone fragments splashed on the face of the rock and bodies of her handlers’ remained. Grinning, teeth yellow against the greasy crimson mess dripping from their faces, they dragged her across the rock shelf and tossed her off the edge into the pit below.
The mob was mindless with glee, cheering and calling and stamping their feet in mad jigs. Some women dropped to their hands and knees in orgasmic seizures, and some of the blue men accommodated them, mounting them from behind to copulate with violence and without shame. As each man swiftly exhausted himself another took his place. The look on the women’s faces was a horror of pain and pleasure painted with running lime, the ash black around their eyes, creating ebon tears. This was the human race as a feral pack. Sex and death all wrapped in a ceremony that satisfied their lusts for both.
