Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  He soon finds the greenhorn in a hillside draw, lying prone against loose rocks.

  “You alright, Mike?”

  “Yeah, just,” he shifts his grip on his rifle, “preparing.”

  “Battle’s on the other side of this ridge, Mike.”

  “I know—I’m, uh,” he pauses, “tired.”

  “Ain’t no rest for the wicked.”

  He looks up at the sky. “Is that what I am now?”

  “Welcome to the Army.”

  He laments. “Must we be made sinful to punish those we perceive as sinful?”

  “‘There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “Romans, three twenty-three.”

  “The Bible?”

  “‘All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death.’ First John, five seventeen.” He stoops to his knees. “Sometimes we must act immorally in order to rectify a worse injustice.”

  “But,” Page cocks a brow, “the Bible?”

  Radiation Brother extends his hand. “My parents were Baptist.”

  Page takes his hand and is pulled to his feet.

  “‘For you equipped me with strength for the battle; you made those who rise against me sink under me.’”

  “Theologians-”

  “Psalm.”

  “Four-”

  “Eighteen thirty-nine.”

  “And we are equipped-”

  “And the Lord shall protect us lest we waver in His battle.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Does it help?”

  The private blinks. “Kinda, yeah.”

  “Then I mean it with all sincerity. You and I are both blessed with great fortitude. We have nothing to fear but our own cowardice—the one voice in a thousand that dares to argue ‘You Can’t.’”

  Pvt. Page grits his teeth; his gaze unwavering from Radiation Brother’s. “Alright.”

  “Alright?”

  “Alright,” Mike says. He retrieves his rifle and motions ahead with an open palm.

  Radiation Brother leads him back to the line and, upon reunion with their platoon, the enlightened greenhorn dashes past his brothers—out and beyond the treeline—with his rifle tucked in the crook of his arm.

  His comrades look on, bewildered, as the runt of their litter roars triumphant, racing past them and into the jungle clearing—a lush meadow overlaid with the traffic of angry munitions.

  Candyman's weathered scowl fades from its traditional etchings, conquered by placid awe. His eyes—or rather, eye—glazes over as if in a trance.

  He reawakens to the curious warcry of Sgt. Greene, who kneels beside him, motioning ahead with his outstretched arm. The sergeant's sense of fevered glory ripples down the line like tidewater, empowering each of Uncle Sam's sons with a courageous vigor.

  They sprint off the line—roaring like the lion's pride—and into the clearing, catching-up and keeping pace with the enigmatic Pvt. Page.

  A modern cavalry, these men race across the meadow—barrage be damned.

  Copper and lead swarm around them like a hive disturbed.

  Halfway through the meadow and the upwind hailstorm intensifies, forcing them to crawl through the tall grass, should they otherwise be hastily reduced to their base components.

  Then again, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, and the group's courage quickly erodes. As the whistles streak above, each man intimately questions the integrity of an impulse decision, uncalculated and forged in bravado.

  Death glides without wings through the air above.

  They are exposed, isolated, and alone.

  As the mortars fall around them, Death arrives in its second form: the chopping cacophony of steel wind and anger.

  Three cyclones of swords crest the canopy, loud and unflinching; swooping-in with a malicious thirst.

  Candyman looks to the sky, wherefrom the rain drizzles, and where God's own silhouette blocks the sun's hazy glow—the Holy Trinity, he shouts, “The Sea Wolves!”

  Without hesitation, Candyman stands with his top-fed rifle raised in hand. Saw-toothed Hueys sweep overhead as a loudspeaker proclaims, in a staticky boast, “We are the gods of fire and brimstone—and we bring you fire!”

  The three helicopters unleash a barrage of rockets, in beautiful synchronicity, that douse the jungle in explosions; shrapnel, fireballs, and smoke.

  The two fringe Hueys encircle the gooks’ outpost and flank it broadside; revving the air-powered motors of their miniguns; unloading eighty tax returns’ worth of ammunition the same way a circular saw cuts plywood—loud and proud.

  The platoon rises to their feet, staring out at the tropical treeline; entranced by the inferno, as the ferns crackle and the fronds snap; the bark shafts broiling brown and orange, like honey poured in tea.

  Pvt. Dyer raises his rifle to the blaze.

  “No,” Sgt. Greene says, laying his hand on the barrel of Dyer's gun. “Let the Sea Wolves get 'em.”

  Like a cigarette smoldering, the outboard pipes of the dueling miniguns glow a comforting amber-red.

  Mike melts in the shadow of his guardian angels. He turns, smiling, to his father—the Candyman, gazing at the conflagration with a childish wonder—and to Ajax Madison—our Radiation Brother, whose lip curls out and eyes glaze over, misty; paralyzed, for he sees not the jungle. In his mind, in this moment, Ajax is back in the Bronx.

  Upon this sight, Mike finds he can no longer smile. He looks up at the Sea Wolf helo, idling a mere hundred feet above his platoon.

  Its blades cut the clouds. Its loudspeaker crackles…

  “The Lord giveth; the minigun taketh away!”

  ( II | VII )

  Rats.

  Robust and lumpy—larger and heavier than your head—with a greased pelt of short grey-brown hair, forever slicked-back like a football coach's mane. Typically matted, and nurturing a toxic fungus.

  Crooked paddle paws. Calloused, flat, dirty pink nose. Black beady eyes offset; more accustomed to the dark underground than the wide world above. Thick, wide skull; vacant formless face.

  Teeth—buck teeth, like orange pencils, or tarnished finger bones whiddled into chopsticks. Tainted brown calcium, the vermin's curved icicle fangs. Ideal for gnawing at tuber roots, bamboo shoots, and government-issued combat boots.

  Rhizomyini: a tribe of four names and forty-million faces. Hefty, slow, and hiding—fearful; the oriental groundhog, foraging in burrows carved throughout East Asia. Eating, reproducing; scurrying, tunneling, and reproducing.

  Rats, everywhere.

  Invading American bases in greater numbers, greater frequency, and greater stealth than the Viet Cong. They chew through barrels and sacks, consuming food reserves without raising flags. Tunneling, down, beneath and through the trenches; destabilizing the integrity of defenses, and making residence in command centers.

  Imagine waking-up to a hungry, greasy, nine-pound marmot sitting on your legs and chewing through your pants. Imagine its foul odor, empty eyes, and wicked teeth, gnawing on your forearm. Imagine dozens of them scurrying over your body as you lie on the trench floor, in the dark of night, as a firefight erupts overhead. The hoary rats flee the ruckus in droves—sixty, seventy, eighty—abandoning their burrow and using you as a bridge.

  Pitter-patter, pitter-patter; the drumming of paddle paws and needle claws across your back and chest. Artillery sends them scurrying, and they seek refuge where you do: in the bunkers and the quarters, where it's warm, and dry, and comfortable.

  They share your bed. They steal your meals. They chew your clothes. They consume the flesh of the dead, bloated and moist. And they swarm.

  Rats.

  When within in the tunnels of the Central Highlands—those subterranean trails bored by slant-eyed slopes—the hoary rats seem somehow twice as big, and twice as territorial. Oftentimes posing a greater nuisance than the primitive gook and his secondhand Soviet munitions.

 
Seventy-five miles of tunnel play a complex host to hundreds of bulbous rooms: the bunk chambers, the hospital, the storeroom; the kitchen with the thin air shaft, for ventilating smoke discreetly; and the conference room, where maps, radios, and officers converge in constant conversation. The limestone walls bear the scars of shovels, picks, and scoops—the white concave swoops and conical nicks.

  Pharos leans against this shaved stone, nestling his shoulder into a groove as he cups the bell of his flashlight, concealing its glow. He peers around the corner, listening to the officers—three, he hears—discuss in their nonsensical tongue the logistics of what rages on the surface.

  He suppresses his instinct to blast motherfuckers, instead drawing his knife from its sheath. Its cold hilt wraps around his fingers, granting him a sturdy set of gold rings as he brandishes the blade upright.

  With toes first, he steps around the corner and into the conference chamber. The gooks have their backs to him, and their eyes glued to some parchment, lit only by a bare candle.

  He slinks closer, enough to eavesdrop on their inbred whispers, yet he trains his ears on his own steps—gentle steps—as dirt crunches underfoot. More focus poured into each footstep than can manifest as measurable.

  He approaches the rightmost officer, mere inches behind the trio, with his arms spread wide. He looms behind—his heart racing; his body a shadow in the night, or so he feels—and with held breath, and one tense squeeze, he claps his hands together, around the gook's face; the knife going lower than his bare hand, palm inward, driving steel into the gook's neck as his other hand plays ballast: catching the gook by the scruff of his sideburn and ensuring the knife drives deep, severing all the good parts.

  His arms uncross, pulling the knife from the gook and pulling the gook to the floor—an action sudden enough to draw the attention of the officers, who twirl on their heels, wide-eyed and stupefied. Pharos reels back and, with advantage, strikes the nearer officer in the jaw with his hilt's brass knuckles.

  A grisled snap brings Pharos's eyes to the gook's jaw, which hangs loose from the rest of the skull, and he lurches back for a second punch. The officer stumbles in shock. His partner pulls a pistol, behind the jawless officer, prompting Pharos to strafe before him, and the gook retracts to mend his aim.

  In this transition, jawless pulls a leather sap and raises it overhead. Pharos reaches for the gook's hand whilst he turns about, sliding in against the gook's chest; drawing the gook's arm down before him, and, with a pump of his knees, pulling the jawless officer over him—and jawless, tumbling feet-forward, inadvertently kicks the pistol from his partner's hand before falling on his back in the dirt.

  Pharos pivots on his heels, rising, with his arm extending; his knife snagging the wrist of the disarmed gook, sinking-in to hook between the thin bones of the forearm. The gook yelps and cries, trying to shake loose—only to worsen the pain.

  Pharos pulls the knife forward, slicing the gook's arm open, and down, to split the hand in half; exposing the bones within the flesh like a tulip sprouting from its leaves. The gook backpedals himself into the limestone wall, gripping at his mangled wrist and screaming.

  Jawless writhes in the dirt like an upturned turtle, shaking himself free from his daze and catching his breath. He steadies his hands to lift himself, finding them to now be slick with the warm blood of his throat-cut buddy, gurgling in the dirt and syrupy.

  The arm-slit gook calls his jawless partner to rise, and Pharos turns to meet him with a downward swing of his fist, catching the top of the gook's head with the butt of his knife's hilt. Jawless crumples and bites the ground.

  Arm-slit pushes off the wall and charges. Pharos side-steps the rush as he pulls his trench knife free from his fingers, rotates his grip, and takes it back tightly. With the blade down, he swings forth his steel to slice the arm-slit gook across the bridge of his nose. That, and a brass uppercut, knocks the gook to the ground.

  Jawless sits-up as Pharos saunters to his bedside, swinging his arm down with aplomb, past his waist; sinking his knife steadfast into the gook's eye socket.

  The last officer, squirming and squirting out his stump wrist, whimpers and shimmies back across the floor; crawling against the limestone wall. Through caking blood and rattled nerves, he struggles to see the American descending upon him with his knife, thirsting for his vittles.

  Pharos wipes his hands of the officers and exits the chamber, creeping back into the tunnels. He winds a corner to a six-way intersection: two crossed tunnels with a deep well bored through the center, reaching twenty feet high and forty feet down. In the middle of it all dangles a rope, rising; drawing water. He lingers.

  The bucket—dripping as it goes up—wobbles into view, hoisted towards the surface and out of sight. He peers up, beyond the bucket, for a glimpse of any spectators, of which there are none. Then, with a long and steadied step, he crosses over the well.

  Further through the tunnels, he weaves, crawls, climbs, and lowers himself. His flashlight sweeps the chalky limestone walls, and the dust of his efforts accumulates on his clothes.

  A corner turns into a false tunnel—a dead-end, with a punji stake trap sprung: tattered camo fatigues rotting loose around a putrid corpse, mostly bone; head cocked and eye sockets empty. Soft facial bones, shattered long ago by the gnawing teeth of hoary rats. And its skeletal legs, mangled; tangled around the fire-hardened pikes of the punji pit.

  Pharos backtracks to another cavernous corridor. It widens into a room, where three lean, fresh corpses hang from the walls: their crooked arms and the last layers of muscle taut across them. Remnants of men; the flotsam and jetsam of a downed gunship.

  Onward, the passage goes; redirected where the stairs descend. A twisting, turning path where all semblance of cardinal direction vanishes. There, a strung wire—a booby trap noticed only by the glint of his flashlight's beam—attached to a live grenade, concealed by dirt; detained in a limbo between action and consequence.

  The passage becomes a medical ward. Two lanterns, unlit, hang from the ceiling. Six cots, a trunk, and a shelf displaying stethoscopes, clamps, scissors; bandages, wrappings, and bands. His flashlight glints off of dozens of glass vials: single-servings of antibiotics, and jars of fluid, all with labels.

  He snakes the corridor and, at a fork in the tunnel, weaves right the path with metered steps. Turning a corner, his torch casts its glow on the obsidian tuft of a gook's hair, and he recoils to immediately extinguish the light. No commotion. He peeks.

  Over a dozen gooks lie asleep in canvas hammocks, hanging; two levels of stacked sacks, held upright to the walls by knots on stratified logs. The unwashed slopes appear almost peaceful in their slumber.

  Pharos slinks, inch by quiet inch, between the bunks. The air is stale and still, carrying only the sounds of rhythmic breathing—his own, staggered and shallow, in a sea of exhales, like whispered waves crashing.

  The heat radiating from their dormant bodies is as palpable as their odor. Sweat beads on his forehead. He hustles, ducking into the passageway and treading swift around the bend. A league ahead, there's a chatter: two-way communication, with one side mechanical.

  A glow from an adjacent room forewarns of its occupation: a radioman in a passionate dialogue with a faraway colleague. In the room next over, two gooks unpacking crates and stacking rifles. He passes the lot.

  Revolver drawn, he crawls in the dirt; splintered shards of wood planks in his hands. The ruckus grows louder: above, only eighteen inches of limestone between him and the fortified redoubt that has his comrades pinned.

  He presses a block of C4 pliable explosive against the tunnel ceiling, retreats into a nearby storeroom, and blows it, caving-in the firing post. He leaves, hasty; sprinting; weaving and ducking. All tunnels have an exit, he thinks, knowing the way back is thick with slant-eyed yellow monkeys.

  His revolver goes off when a gook crosses his path. The blast echo funnels down the chute; a ruptive roar, ear-splitting and violent. He does not stop. He fires
again on the expectation of another gook, only to hit the bare wall. His third finds a man before either of them saw the other. And all six are spent.

  Nothing remains to put between himself and the enemy—nothing but his knife. It's still too confined a space for his gift. It’s either knife or death. Onward, sprinting now. No time to waste with a light foot. Palming the limestone; climbing on hands and knees. Soon, then, he's lifting out—the light at the end of the tunnel, up; his comrades’ aiding hands take his.

  They're damp with sweat. He slips from their grasp. The sunlight blinds him, and he shuts his eyes.

  His ears tell him what he's missing: distant gunfire, but not too distant; rapid at that. Bombs; mortars and grenades. Large engines. Thumping and whistles. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  Pharos feels a hand wrap around his forearm, and he returns the gesture; sliding down, the slick of a body's dew on this hairy arm. His fingers brushing through like a clutched rug. All sliding ends at the wrist, with both men's palm heels snagged on the other's analog timepiece.

  Another soldier involves himself—brutish and heavyset; seated, with a cigarette casually held in his lips—getting a firm grip on Pharos and hoisting him back to the surface. He crawls away from the hole, where rats both big and small still linger.

  The M16 rifles of his comrades lay beside him in the grass. A radioman leans forward and yells into his headset; one earmuff of his receiver has been torn to pieces, and he bleeds below it.

  Nearby: a burnt-out tank, still crackling a small fire. American. Seven boys grip their rifles, with bayonets fixed and one foot forward; bracing like pikemen for a cavalry charge—these densely-packed stormtroopers and their wall of knives.

  Their sergeant points ahead and the boys rout the tank, elbows pumping; vanishing into the tall grass.

  Tattered helmets watch their backs: the operators of an LMG nestled in the crotched notch of a prone log. At its hilt is one of Uncle Sam’s thick-lipped sons, as dark as night and squinting down the iron sights. One hand steadied at the trigger and the other cupping the top of the gun body, reducing the recoil. With every bullet fired, his hand relapses, and his silver wedding ring clangs in beautiful syncopation against the gunmetal. Bang-tink, bang-tink, bang-tink, bang-tink…