Headhunter

by Tim Curran

  He was waving at us as we passed overhead.

  I got a pretty good look at him and it left me cold.

  I thought: What the fuck’s he doing down there? Some friendly Viet giving us his regards or some crazy VC done lost his mind?

  But I knew it was neither.

  That man I’d seen…he was too big for an Asian…looked like a white guy. There could have been a very rational explanation for it, I told myselfmaybe some grunt from a Lurp patrol or Beret op, even though those guys generally didn’t draw attention to themselves—but I didn’t believe it. The way my mind was turning and careening, barely making the corners most days, heading for some mental crash of screeching rubber and mangled, burning metal, I was pretty sure I’d seen another ghost. The essence of some grunt haunting those ruins, waving up at us the way he’d probably still be waving two-hundred years from then.

  The pilot passed the word that we’d make the LZ in fifteen, twenty minutes.

  I lit a cigarette and kept watching the countryside below. God’s country, maybe. God’s country gone wild into some primeval, green hell where he hid away the misfits and freaks and horrors he himself could not bear to look upon or admit to. Those misty hills were giving away to the dark side of the moon, a forbidding lunar landscape of craters and deep pits from B-52 raids, scarred and stripped by napalm and defoliants. An ugly, shattered landscape like the flesh of a leper.

  And then the jungle reasserted itself and you could see the shadow of our Huey thrown against those green, crowded treetops and suddenly the gunner was no longer grinning, no longer darting looks back at me because something was banging into the belly of the chopper, something that made us jerk and climb and fall and shudder. We were being shot at from below and from the rounds chewing into us I knew it was from a .50-caliber machine gun hidden away.

  “Hang on!” the gunner shouted at me, attempting to return fire as we dipped and turned and lost altitude and black smoke filled the cockpit in a choking cloud and the chopper seemed to lurch horribly out of control.

  I clung tightly to the webbing of my seat like a spider in a high wind, my stomach filled with a sharp wetness. The rotors were thundering above, sharp and dull and pained-sounding, and my ears were filled with the sound of grinding machinery and metal fatigue. More rounds ripped into us and I knew we were going down. The gunner jerked in his chair as his throat blew out, a chunk of meat about the size of a pound of bloody hamburger sprayed past and over me like a spring drizzle and right out the other door.

  I think I was screaming and the pilot was shouting as we spun earthward like some injured, flaming wasp, trailing smoke and despair. We banked left, we banked right, we flew sideways, we careened down nose-first, then we spun and turned and my guts were in my throat and then right up through the top of my head.

  I could hear more rounds hit us and I could see that they had actually pounded holes through the metal flooring. Two more openings appeared near my feet and I drew my boots closer and tighter to me. The cockpit bubble blew apart in a storm of shattered plastic and metal and then the pilot slumped over, looking like some dummy stuffed with straw…only his straw was hanging out. In fact, it was thrown all over the cockpit.

  We were helpless. I think I curled into a tight, fetal ball as we bounced off the side of a mountain, crashed through the treetops, broke free, spinning around and around, a dead piece of metal. The door gunner, strapped in tight like a baby in car seat, flopped this way, then that, dancing in some weird, ghoulish pantomime, his arms flapping and flying, head lolling from side to side on that cord of flesh that still held it to his neck. And then there was an explosion, a great thudding roar that flipped us end over end and when I woke I was coughing on black plumes of smoke, my nose filled with gasoline fumes. I was hanging upside down, blood dripping softly from a gash in my scalp. Gagging and wheezing, my vision filled with black dots and gray haze, I frantically worked my harness, fumbling and fumbling, my fingers like rubber. There were flames licking up around me and I saw the gunner’s corpse was burning, plumes of greasy, nauseating smoke wafting from it.

  Then the harness popped and I fell, hitting the roof of the chopper and rolling through fire that singed my hair and then I tumbled free, right out the door. I dropped maybe ten feet, hit a moist, muddy hillside and rolled and rolled, coming to rest in a mutiny of spider-webbed ferns.

  When my vision cleared, I was vomiting from the fumes and shaking and whimpering. I saw the chopper wedged into a tangle of tree limbs on the hillside, engulfed in flames.

  I knew whoever had shot it down would be coming, so I forced myself up.

  I ran and stumbled and ran some more.

  I kept running, not knowing what else to do.

  *

  “He’s coming around,” a voice said.

  I opened my eyes and I was laying flat on the ground on a rain poncho. I could feel fingers of pain at my head. I raised my hand to touch it and brushed a damp field dressing. A knot of soldiers stood around me, all in fatigues and flak jackets, helmets. They wore the shoulder flash of the 1st Air Cavalry Division. I tried to sit up and fell back down again.

  “Just take it easy,” one of them said. “You’ll be okay. You had a good knock to the head. You’re gonna be medvaced out…later on.”

  It took a few minutes for it to all come back to me, but when it did, I panicked, trying to crawl off and they had to hold me down. Then my brain started working and I saw Danny Brown come over, lean his rifle against a tree trunk.

  “Mac, what the fuck you get yourself into this time?” he asked, but he was smiling and that pleasant black face was full of sympathy for me. “You gonna be fine, baby. But those other boys on the slick…toast, motherfucker, just toast. NVA opened up on your asses with a big fifty. We heard ‘em and took ‘em out, but not soon enough for you.”

  “How the hell did you find me?” I asked, sipping from an offered canteen.

  Danny told me I had come plowing through the jungle like some savage, knocking troopers out of my way that tried to help me. Full of blood and leaves, sticks tangled in my hair, chattering shit no one could understand. A couple Cav soldiers tackled me and the medic shot me with tranquilizers. That was last night…middle of the night…now it was late the next afternoon and I was laying in a little clearing on some hilltop. I could see the jungled hillsides climbing around us.

  I licked my lips. “You find…those gooks you were looking for?”

  Danny just stared off into the saffron mists lifting from those hills like a dirty veil off something dank and green and rotting. “No…we ain’t seen shit. Intelligence is off on this one, but—”

  “But, shit, Sarge,” a pissed-off white guy with a scar across the bridge of his nose said. “Truth now, just the truth. Last night, we lost seven men, a recon patrol. This morning we beat the bush, but we didn’t find nothing but some blood. But we…we heard things.”

  I eased myself up onto my elbows. My head throbbed madly then slowed to a gentle, persistent roll like a parade drum, bang, bang, bang. Then even that faded. “What things?” I said with more urgency in my voice than I had intended. “What did you hear, I mean.”

  “Get your ass back on that perimeter, corporal,” Danny snapped, giving the guy the hard look and getting it right back, but just for a moment. The white dude slipped off through the brush. So quiet, so quick, like a spider creeping away. “Listen, Mac. These be the Highlands. Spook-city, motherfucker. You been here, you done it, got done, you know the voodoo shit-shine that comes down out here. Charlie here, then Charlie gone. You follow a trail, then you turn around to follow it back and it’s gone. Go figure. Crazy country.”

  I took a belt from Danny’s whiskey flask. Jim Beam—sharp, warming, real. “Don’t fuck with me, Danny, lay it out. I’m a big boy.”

  “Fairy tales,” he said. “Knew a grunt with the 82nd. Motherfucker says he’s laying out on an ambush, up top some sweet hill, got hisself a boocoo killzone set up…and, shit, says he lost his mind rig
ht then and there. Said he saw some little girl in a red hood carrying a motherfucking basket go running into the jungle. Behind, yeah, behind her, he says, this big drooling-ass wolf, except it didn’t look harmless like in the story. Was big and mean and walked like a man, but had claws and teeth and eyes the color of blood. Wolf disappears into the jungle. Grunt says he just laid there, staring. Fog comes rolling in and he hears a scream like a little girl, right? Something comes pounding through the jungle. It’s the werewolf-man, but now he’s covered in blood, got that little girl hanging from his jaws, all broken and ripped and half-eaten. Grunt says he opens up on the motherfucker, bullets go right through the wolf like it’s made of smoke. The wolf pulls the girl out of its jaws, tears an arm off, chews it down, swallows it. Looks up at my grunt friend, laughs, and fades into the jungle.” Danny laughed, too, but it was a forced laughter. He was real nervous, sweat rolling off his face even though a bone-deep chill was whispering around us. “You believe that? I don’t. That motherfucker was always dropping acid. Full of shit. Fairy tales.”

  I was just staring at him. Somebody lit me a cigarette and stashed it between my lips. I took a long, slow drag. “Okay, Danny. Your friend was fucked up. What’s that got to do with now? What’s this fairy-tale shit?”

  Danny ran his fingers lovingly over the barrel of his M-16. “Just that shit happens in the Highlands. Even the Viets say so. We lost seven guys. Last night, we hear something creeping around our perimeter…another guy screams, disappears. We find blood in the bushes, not shit else. Except tracks like a giant walked through there. The M-60 gunner lets go with a blast, says he saw something carry the guy off. I asked him what it was. Know what he say?”

  I could just imagine. I waited. Waited some more.

  “Troll. He says it looks like some troll from a book when he was a kid. You know the kind? They guard treasure in some cave or shit.” Danny started laughing and that laughter was so close to an insane cackling, I looked away.

  “Where’s Reaper?”

  “He’s out with the other platoons, tracking the giant…we haven’t heard from him for awhile. But he say, they come back or not, we don’t extract until morning. And that means you, too. So sit tight. Gonna be a long motherfucking night, Mac.”

  And it was.

  A brilliant tropical sunset exploded over the horizon, painting the sky orange and red and yellow. The shadows grew thick as coiled snakes and tangled around us, slithering from all the dark crevices and hollows they’d hid in all day long. A crescent moon came up and rode in that hazy sky like a moist slice of rotting fruit. The night brought the chill with it and it laid over me in a frigid blanket while dampness crept up from the ground, got under my poncho and into my boots. I could hear night birds and insects calling out, an occasional sound of something moving through the fogged-in hollow below us. Nobody talked or moved. I heard a rustle of equipment now and then. That was the only way I knew I wasn’t the last man on earth. As my eyes grew accustomed to the murk, I made out dim figures, saw moonlight limning a helmet or rifle barrel.

  I sat there, my ass wet and cramped, but I didn’t dare move. I’d been on a lot of night ops, but this one was the worst. The very worst.

  Maybe I dozed, I can’t be sure, but suddenly my eyes snapped open and the darkness seemed not so bright and the moon was halfway across the sky. I heard muffled whispers, movement, sensed something had gone bad. I couldn’t put a finger on it, but the atmosphere had gone leaden and threatening. There was almost a smell in the air—raw, savage, venomous—but I knew I smelled it only in my mind.

  I heard Danny whispering to someone, but an angry, forced whisper. And some trooper’s voice carried over to me: “Eyes…I saw eyes looking at me…shining, they was shining…ain’t no tiger, ain’t no animal…” I heard a sharp crack and I knew Danny had slapped the guy and that made something drop down low into my belly, lay there hard and heavy like a stone. If these guys were coming apart…Jesus, what chance did I have?

  There are things that can make the jungle go dead quiet at night. Soldiers out stalking or some big animal moving around. When it went dead and mortuary-still out there, I knew somehow it was none of the above. Some signal had been transmitted and the bats hung without a sound, the snakes did not move, the birds froze on branches, insects seized up. I could hear water dripping from the triple-canopy above. My blood rushing in my ears. Someone breathing. Someone praying without a sound.

  And then it all exploded.

  M-16s on full auto rock-n-roll were expelling tongues of flame into the night and people were crying out and Danny was shouting and the grenades were popping with blinding flashes and roaring thuds, kicking up dirt and debris and sending leaves and loam spraying over us.

  I heard men scream at the tops of their lungs and heard those screams get silenced as if something wet was forced down their throats. I could hear men trying to secure the perimeter, but not knowing where the perimeter was. The jungle was strobing with light from all the shooting and blasting. There was another flash from a grenade that burned a red-hot image on my eyeball—the image of something enormous standing there with the limp body of an Air Cav soldier tucked under its arm. Troopers were shooting at it and I saw it wade right in, slap the rifles from the arms of men…along with their arms themselves. Then there were wet, snapping sounds and thrashing noises as men were broken against trees and crushed under foot.

  And then a silence that was thick and clotted.

  I sat there, frozen tight, waiting, just waiting. There was a fetid, high, hot odor wafting through our position that dug into my bowels with greasy fingers. I sat there, trying to keep my teeth from chattering and I knew, I felt there was something standing right in front of me and the stink of it was black and hideous like sucking air from a body bag.

  Something fell from above, squirmed on the back of my hand.

  I steeled myself, lit my Zippo.

  It was towering above me, a storybook atrocity, as wide as two men and tall enough where its misshapen head brushed a tree limb. I think I screamed. I think I pissed myself. All I know for sure is that as that handbigger around than a catcher’s mitt and sewn with frayed, dangling loops of skin, claws like bayonetsreached for me, I passed out cold.

  If my heart would have only stopped then, it would have spared me a lot.

  God yes.

  *

  I came awake being dragged through the jungle like a rabbit from a snare.

  And that’s pretty much what I was. I knew that all those Air Cav soldiers it had killed were only in order to get closer to me and now it had me. It had me by the ankle, dragging my rubbery body through the brush. I felt sticks cut at my face, dead branches tear across my arms. The thing’s grip was like a vice and I knew beyond a doubt that my only hope was to play dead. Maybe it thought I already was.

  So I allowed myself to be pulled through the jungle.

  It seemed to go on for some time and slowly the horror that rippled through me in ebon waves slowly lessened and a wild, lunatic sense of unreality fell over me. I kept telling myself that it didn’t matter what I’d seen or experienced these past few weeks, this was not happening. It could not be happening. I had banged-up my head real bad in the chopper crash and now I was having nightmares in the jungle or in some hospital ward.

  I only wished I could’ve believed that.

  The Headhunter’s smell was all over me, literally crawling over me in warm, sickening waves like being immersed in the rancid belly of some wormy roadkill. Suddenly, the jungle began to grow lighter and then it began to glow and flicker, huge amorphous shadows jumping and swaying and I could see the thing’s shadow thrown against the foliage—grotesque and hulking.

  I kept blinking my eyes, wondering if I was imagining that yellowish glow, but then I saw I wasn’t. Just ahead there was a yawning black cave mouth and from it, flickering, dancing firelight that lit up the world around it. I saw the forest and the thin, staff-like trees that jutted around me except they weren�
�t trees, but hundreds of tall, leaning bamboo stakes stabbed into that dark, moist earth and atop each one, a human skull. Some were jawless and fringed with mold, ancient and yellow, the darting shadows seeming to make them bob and sway like they were still alive. Some were covered with flaking flesh, sinews holding the jaws in place in grisly rictuses. Others were very fresh, very white, bits of skin clinging to them, a few ropes of hair, rusty bloodstains. Still others held intact heads.

  I was dragged through a litter pile of bones—femurs and ulnas and rib slats and spinal columns, the waste and cast-offs from a cannibal’s kitchen. Then I was in the cave and the stench made dry heaves roil in my belly, but I fought them down and away; I had to. The floor was scummed with slimy pools of filth and putrescence that were crawling with beetles that nipped at my arms and ass and legs. I was lifted into the air and tossed on top of a heap of bodies. I lay there motionlessly and then began to sink down amongst them until I was covered in the reek of voided bowels and that wet-copper tang of blood.

  It stank like a tannery, is what I was thinking. Hot, black, and noxious. Like a slaughterhouse, a place where animals were skinned and de-boned, slit and plucked and processed. I saw it all through the splayed fingers of a dead man—I think it was Danny Brown. The cavern was about fifteen feet in height and twice that in width. One wall, if it was a wall, was composed of carefully stacked human skulls, hundreds of them, arranged in perfect rows with the larger ones forming the base and the uppermost columns being the skulls of children. There was a pit dug in the floor and ringed with flat stones. A fire blazed away in there. Dangling from a chain pounded into the stone roof, was a huge blackened pot like a witches cauldron that you could’ve fit two grown men into easily. Something in there bubbled and popped, greasy trails of human fat dripping down the sides and sizzling in the fire.