by Joseph Storm
The guard whacked the dog on the head, finally succeeding in returning it towards the trail. However, the act produced little results. A few empty sniffs in a circle-pattern led the German Shepherd back towards the shoes.
“They must have recrossed the river,” the guard yelled. “I will have the men on it immediately.”
“Hook, line, and sinker,” Commander Sin said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Clearly...you idiot. It’s the oldest trick in the book...but, one of the most effective,” he said. “They covered their scent...therefore hiding the trail. They could be anywhere now...west, east, south...even behind us.”
“We await your orders, sir.”
“Double the search,” he ordered. “No...triple it! I want men combing every inch of forest!” The guard gathered the dogs, heading away from the river. Commander Sin looked back towards the discarded footwear, as pain gripped his chest. Age old memories overtook his mind.
The year was 1970, as a two-eyed, 18 year-old Xavier Sin sat inside a jail cell for the murder of a man in a bar fight. He already had a record for armed theft, and was looking at a sentence of twenty to thirty years. It all depended on the ruling of his manslaughter plea.
All the evidence and witnesses were in place. It was only a matter of time before he would lose his case, and the productive years of his life would end in a prison cell. That was, until a top-secret program was put into production by the US military. If Xavier Sin would agree to serve in the Vietnam War, willing to do the kind of missions that no one else wanted to do, he would receive clemency.
“Where the hell do I sign?” he asked, as the prison doors were slid open, and he was fitted for a military uniform.
After a crash course in military training, Xavier was in the air, flying over the battered grounds of Hanoi. He, along with a team of “expendables,” were dropped into the woods. Upon landing, they snuck their way towards a convoy of mortar rounds and cheaply made Chinese Type 56 AK guns. The weapons were being unloaded to defend Hỏa Lò Prison, which was originally built by the French to house their own prisoners. It became known as the Hanoi Hilton when they fled, and the Vietnamese took over. The open convoy, which was momentarily left exposed and alone, was the ultimate target of the top-secret team.
Each soldier was given a crate of weaponry, equal to the ones which were being unloaded from the Vietnamese convoys. However, the decoy additions would not perform quite the same. Each of these weapons were tampered with, made to backfire, explode in chamber, or misfire in an unpredictable pattern.
Xavier didn’t really care about the mission. The bitter man was taken from his drunk father at the age of seven, placed in an even more abusive foster care system, courtesy of the United States Government. I’m not even sure whose side I’m on, he thought to himself. But if it gets me out of the slammer, I’ll do it.
The convoy was cleared of Vietnamese soldiers, as the American squad’s mission leader gave the hand signal, indicating to move. The men were informed that they would have a time ranging from one minute to mere seconds. If they were captured, none of them would have ever existed, along with the mission.
They knew what they were getting into, but for each one, the risk was worth the reward. The men darted from the thick forest of green, each one holding a rectangle crate. They scattered the faulty weapons down amongst the pile, heading back to the woods.
All of a sudden, a voice screamed out in Vietnamese. A returning enemy soldier pointed out the infiltrators. The sobbing wails of a hand cranked alarm filled the air, as guards in the towers turned their guns on the American targets in the open field.
Bullets popped the ground, tracing a trail of destruction through the dirt. They hit one man after another. The expendables were sitting ducks, and each man knew it, though refused to surrender themselves to the fate of a vicious enemy.
One of the men behind Xavier fell to the ground, shot in the chest, screaming out in pain. “Help me! Don’t leave me behind!”
Xavier kept running, noticing that the guns were now on him. He stopped, and turned back for the injured man.
“Thank you, brother,” the man called out.
However, the words of appreciation were for naught, as the opportunistic Xavier Sin dragged the soldier in front of him. He cruelly used the man as a human shield. “Hold still,” Xavier said coldly.
“Don’t do this! I have a pregnant wife at home!” the man yelled.
“There’s no more a reason to die than that,” he said, letting out a raspy, nervous laugh.
“Ahhh!” the man screamed, as bullets riddled his back. Blood spilled from his mouth, as he slowly faded away.
The other soldiers nearly made it to the cover of woodland. They were mowed down, all dying but one, who was shot in the ankle.
The blazing guns came to a sudden halt. Armed Vietnamese soldiers entered the open field, beating the men, dead or not, in the head. “Mercy!” Xavier yelled, though he wouldn’t receive any. The beating continued, as one of the enemy soldiers told his comrade to stop. They dragged a bloodied Xavier into the Hỏa Lò Prison, along with the single surviving, wounded soldier, named Tom Johnson.
Inside the prison, the two captives were strung up against the walls. Their wrists were cuffed with barbed-wire, faces covered in blood.
Tom Johnson was trying to hold himself up, shifting the weight off his bullet ridden ankle. He was the first to get questioned.
“What you know...mission?” the officer asked in broken English.
“Private Thomas Johnson, 265605234,” he said, repeating his rank, name, and social security number.
The officer kicked Johnson in his wounded ankle, causing him to fall from his stance. The man hung from the barbed-wire by his wrists. Blood spilled down, unleashing a pained scream from the soldier’s mouth.
“I ask one more...what you know?”
Tom pulled himself to his feet, regaining his composure. “Private Thomas Johnson, 265605234,” he muttered from his lips.
The Vietnamese officer went to bash Tom’s head in, as Xavier called out. “It was a top secret mission...meant to add fouled up guns and ammunition to your stock pile.”
“Don’t tell these bastards anything!” Private Johnson called out. The officer finished him off by cracking his head open with the butt of a rifle.
“More,” the officer said.
“If I tell you everything...will you let me live?”
“You live....now tell.”
“The weapons were placed on the left side of the pile...you can identify them by the type of wood used in the crates. It’s manufactured plywood...painted on wood grain...flat...not cratered like your boxes.”
The officer shouted a command in Vietnamese to his men. They left in a hurry to remove the weapons. All but one Vietnamese soldier exited, joining the officer’s side. The man pulled a burning stake of metal from a simmering fireplace of ashes. The sharp rod shined red at the tip.
“I...I thought you said I would live? I told you everything.”
“You live...we torture,” he said.
“No!” Xavier called out, pulling away from the approaching metal poker.
“What else you know?” the officer threatened him.
“Nothing...I swear.”
“Wrong answer,” he said, giving the nod to the assisting soldier. He gripped Sin’s face, pulling it straight forward. The red-hot metal stake was slowly pressed against Xavier’s temple, dragged all the way to his eye. The remaining scar sizzled like a seared steak, but would not compare to the next wound. The burning metal was placed against his eyeball, singeing the sight from it.
Sin gritted his teeth, trying with everything in him to not show weakness or pass out. “We had a deal!”
“No deal with rat,” he said, motioning to the assistant. The eager man went into a cage, yanking out a shit-eating, large rodent. It was placed inside a bag, and brought over to Xavier.
“You wouldn’t!” Sin yelled.
“One rat...deserve other,” the officer said. He forced the bag over Xavier’s head, tying it around his neck. Sin shook with madness, trying to break free from the cuffs of barbed-wire cutting into his wrists.
Speckles of blood decorated the bag, as the starving rat gnawed on his wounded eye. It eventually ate it clean from the socket. Sin did everything he could to fight it, though he lost consciousness.
“Take to new home,” the officer ordered the accompanying soldier.
For over a decade, Xavier Sin would rot in a small, bamboo tiger cage, much the size of a coffin.
Each day, he was fed one bowl of a putrid porridge, consisting of things that Xavier couldn’t identify to this day. In fact, the only recognizable ingredients were the meal worms, which wiggled down his throat, providing some much needed protein.
His bathroom consisted of the gaps in his cage. The bed was the sharp, hard bamboo shoots under his back. In the present, he would still wake in the night, smacking phantom poisonous spiders from his neck, arms, and legs, as if he was still stuck there.
He watched, as in 1973, prisoners were released under an agreement with the United States. As promised, his name wasn’t on the list. He tried to kill himself many times, though the guards watching over him twenty-four hours a day, made sure they stopped him.
He eventually accepted the fact that he would live the remainder of his life in the horrid conditions, stewing in bitterness everyday. The very little compassion and love that he had before the captivity had turned to pure hatred of his country. It was a place which he resented long before.
It wasn’t until 1982, when a man named Mika Sorka walked through the ragged gates of the broken down Vietnam prison. He asked, “Show me the worst one of the remaining lot.” It wasn’t a hard decision to make, as the officer led him right to Xavier Sin.
Mika leaned in, asking, “Your country abandoned you...what do you think of them now, soldier?” A fit of rage painted Xavier’s face, as he spit into Sorka’s.
The officer started poking a bamboo cane through the tiger cage, as Mika stopped him. One of Sorka’s personal guards wiped the spit from Sin’s face, allowing him to laugh out loud. “That is the exact response I was hoping to hear. Free him,” he said.
The officer opened up the cage door, pulling the horribly atrophied man from his prison. Xavier tried to move his stiffened, unused legs, though couldn’t budge them an inch.
“Your appendages will be back to normal in time,” Mika said. He looked over at the remaining prisoners in line, as their arms, legs, and heads awaited a date with the machete. “I can not say the same about them.”
Sorka’s personal guard helped the injured Xavier Sin to his feet. Mika also helped prop him up.
“Am I going to die?” Xavier asked. “Please say I am!”
“Just the opposite, my new friend. You will live...to make others die,” Sorka said with a smile. “To get your revenge on America.”
Xavier was carried towards the exit gates. It was a sight he never thought he’d see alive. On the way out, Sin witnessed the hacking of feet from any remaining soldier that was left unclaimed by their country.
Xavier snapped back to the riverside chase, as a guard’s voice interrupted his memories. “Commander? Are you coming?”
Sin focused one last time on the fugitives’ empty shoes. The difference was, their severed appendages were not included.
“Get more men now!” he demanded.
******
Joe Striker wondered through the cold fog alone. “Hello?” he screamed out. “Where are you?”
“Where are you?” his voice returned to him as loudly.
The fog filled the air, turning his visibility to zero. Suddenly, he entered a clearing, seeing the large poplar tree, which his wife was buried under. “It’s impossible...that’s nowhere near here,” he told himself. Joe ran his finger along the name carved into the bark. It was unmistakeable. The location could no longer be denied.
His foot was grabbed by a soiled hand, reaching up from the muddy dirt. “No!” he yelled out, being dragged down into soft ground.
He reached for solid dirt. More hands reached from the depth of the earth, gripping his neck, face, head, and arms. Pained voices sounded from below, “Come back to us,” they cried out in high and low-pitched tones.
Joe managed to fight the hands away. He wiggled from their grip, crawling from the slime, though sinking back down as if he was in an endless sea. Swimming forward, his arms hit another body, one with long hair.
Its face slowly peered up from the mud, revealing the rotted corpse of Jenny Striker. “Hello, my dear,” she said, as a mixture of blood and dirt seeped from her mouth. The skin on her face slowly started to droop off.
“Jenny!” he yelled out, running his trembling fingers through her soiled hair.
“Come back to me,” she attempted to say, as her teeth fell out and jaw broke off, dangling in her skin. His wife dragged him down into the raw filth.
“I’m not ready...I have to save our son,” he yelled, pulling away, yanking her arm off with the motion. Her detached fist stayed gripped around his wrist.
Joe swam backwards, away from the horrifying sight of his deceased wife. It only led him back into the arms of his murdered colleagues, trying to drown him. Jenny’s face had completely fallen off, revealing a jawless skeleton. She landed on his body, taking him down to the mass grave hellhole that he once crawled from.
“Joe,” Becky’s voice gently said, as she placed a hand on the sleeping Striker’s head. He bolted up from his tense slumber, wiping wet dirt from his face. “You must have been dreaming,” she said.
“It was no dream. In fact, it was a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But...you’re not awakening into anything better.”
Joe peered over at Father Tyme, who was sound asleep. A loud snore sounded from Gunner, who was also asleep, each one covered with dirt.
“He’s been snoring so loud, I keep thinking...he’ll lead them right to us,” Becky said. She wiped her own tired eyes with her dirty hands.
After two days straight on the run, they had emptied of energy. The three had no time to eat, taking quick drinks from the muddy river with their cupped hands. There came the point where they had no more ability or will to go on. It was a do or die moment.
“Leave me,” Father Tyme had said, as the older man dropped to his knees. “I can not go on anymore...I don’t have the ability.”
“Let’s go, old man,” Gunner said, lifting Father Tyme up in an over the shoulder carry. After a few seconds, even the usually strong Shoman hit his knees. “Just gimme a minute...I can do this.”
“This is inhuman!” Becky yelled, as dogs could be heard barking in the far distance. “They have thousands...we’re just a few people. Their dogs will just sniff our scent...no matter where we go!”
Striker thought hard. He remembered a skill he was taught in his Marine Core training. “What if our scent...is no different than the ground they walk on?”
He bolted over to the nearby river, taking off his shoes. Joe dug into the bank-side, scooping a large-pile of wet mud from it. He covered his feet completely. The others came over, watching him.
“Now’s not the time to play in the dirt, kid,” Gunner said.
“The mud will harden, trapping our scent with it...leaving its own scent behind us.”
“Are you sure this will work?” Becky asked. “We’ll be without shoes on this terrain...not to mention cold weather clothes!”
“Sleep or shoes...decide now...because we don’t have another moment to waste,” Joe said sternly.
Becky joined Striker, taking her shoes off, and throwing them in the pile. She covered herself in the mud, assuring herself, “People pay hundreds of dollars for this...I’m getting it for free.”
“Minus the bugs and duck shit,” Gunner told her. He joined the in the act, along with Father Tyme.
“Thanks for reminding me,” she said.
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“Always willing to help.”
The act worked, allowing them to stop the journey forward. They made a side lateral move to the south, letting Commander Xavier take the decoy, and pass them up.
They collected handfuls of tadpoles, small fish, and frogs from the river, cooking the small meat with Gunner’s hand lighter. Each one ate the primitive meal like it was the best of cuisine.
The exhausted group fell asleep quicker than newborn babies, except for Becky Fox. She closed her eyes, and leaned against a tree, assuring herself that the crawling things of the forest were asleep as well. She had just managed to doze off, when she was startled by the noise of Joe, being rustled by the nightmare.
“Was it your wife?” she asked him.
“What?”
“The nightmare...was it about your wife?”
He looked away, trying to not show his emotion. “It’s one of many nightmares I’ve had over the four years. Each one...more horrible than the next.”
“I’m sorry, Joe...I really am.”
“Every night, in that small, one room apartment with no TV or radio to distract me...I lay there...haunted by memories. I kept asking myself what I could have done to save her. There was even a point...things got so bad, I placed the gun to my head. Cocked the hammer, put pressure on the trigger...and pressed it.”
“You pressed it?”
“As you probably can guess...it didn’t fire. I left one chamber empty, closed and spun it like a wheel of misfortune. I wanted to test him...see if he was even real. My guess was negative.”
“Test God?”
“I wanted to see what I was meant to do with the rest of my useless life...if anything. I certainly didn’t want to live...but sure enough, I got my answer. The hammer snapped with all its might...nothing came out. There I was...spared...awakened to the fact...that I had to move on. I had to be something greater than I currently am...though to be honest, it still didn’t take away the blame. The pain didn’t leave. The only thing that did pass...was the burden of my purpose.”
“You must stop blaming yourself. How could anyone have known what would happen? I have a family...mother, father, sister, and brother...whom I love very much. They live in Florida...and honestly...I had enough guilt only seeing them once a year at Thanksgiving. I don’t know where they are...or what happened. I’ve cried every night...wishing I could have done my job as a reporter...protected them...but...I didn’t. How do I sleep at night? I find comfort in the fact that my heart was in the right place...even if I wasn’t.”