Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  Feeding the LMG in perpetuity, a belt of heavy rounds glide over the calloused hands of a scruffy, dead-eyed white boy whose background, though rural, is of poverty comparable to his trigger-happy partner. Pinned to his helmet is a yellow and green campaign button reading “WE TRY HARDER.”

  The sky is forever overcast. Parachutes fall like mushroom caps, attached by tapered strings to little green Army men. An enormous four-engine plane soars away, spilling boys and buckaroos out its ass, and they drift to Earth, swishing and swaying and shot-down by heavy guns; Soviet guns. Unmistakable streaks of green light, the barium salts in Soviet tracer rounds—the carrot on the stick of a meandering reaper’s blade.

  Local ARVN troops wade knee-high through still waters to meet them. Cigarettes and C4 blocks strapped to their helmets; rifles cradled in arms. Palm fronds, long and limp, bow in front of their faces, parting like curtains.

  “Bầu trời trở nên tối và đột nhiên tôi có thể nghe thấy mọi thứ,” one whispers. “It's getting dark, and suddenly I can hear everything.”

  Out from the waterborne grasses, and the riverbank brambles, stride two phalanxes of gunning Vietcong—ferns tied around their waists, like the petals of an orchid; their helmets threaded with grass stems, disguised as mobile molehills.

  ARVN attention swings toward the marching serpents—the creatures of the marsh, surrounding them; flanking triangular on two of three sides, like the end of a tunnel barred suddenly with an iron gate. Calling for retreat is not enough, and in the span of their about-face they are mowed-down: twenty-five local boys, now newly-minted members of the marsh's detritus.

  The descending Americans rush upon the scene, cutting-loose their parachutes and blazing for vengeance. Those Vietcong who evade their wrath steal away into the hills, disappearing into thickets. The marsh falls silent for a moment—a silence absent of satisfaction and peace. The Americans regroup.

  Firing erupts once more, seemingly from all sides. The Americans curse and crouch, splashing to their chins in the murk; running, sloshing; fighting for the embankment. They take cover behind the muddy levee, kneeling in the water with their chests submerged; arms poised on the riverbank, and rifles fortuitously flush with the ground—peering out to shoot anything that moves.

  A grizzled colonel reloads his rifle. His rucksack bulges with the trinkets of war. He adjusts his beleaguered shoulder and looks around, seeing no break in the offenders’ line.

  “Fucking entrapment!” he hollers above the din. “Where's our relief?”

  “Like I fuckin’ know,” his comrade replies, almost laughing. “Prolly pinned just like us.”

  “I can't get a goddamn bearing with all this hubbub!”

  “Maybe Boy Cumulus will part the clouds—then we can get a heading off the sun!”

  “If any of those guys were nearby, they'd be on us already!”

  “Well, I don't know! But there must be some kinda way outta here!”

  The colonel bites his lip. “Tell, uh, tell first squad to lay suppressive and we'll punch a hole through.” He points to a forested ridge. “We gotta link-up with the Marvelous Six if we wanna live through this!”

  Grenades rain onto the grassy hillock ahead, erupting in a veil of dirt and debris. Then, through the veil, an enraged platoon of Vietcong rush downhill—bayonets fixed and rifles unloading. The Americans lurch—hearts pounding; spitting vulgarities—and raise their rifles, replying with a repressive and hasty barrage. The slopes still near, sprinting, once again clad in earthly vegetation.

  The sergeant and his seven pikemen, with bayonets affixed, emerge from the jungle and intercept the Vietcong charge. The hillside devolves into the purest of bloodsport: the sticking of sharps, thrust deep into the assorted meats of men, who scream all the same; the parrying of barrels, with feverish evasion and high anxiety; prods missed, slashed, and stuck, twisted and pulled. Momentary bursts of discharged chambers, passing bullets into organs without ever kissing the air.

  Sunlight streams through canopy as the clouds part in concert with a cold downdraft. The silhouette of a centipede floats before the sun, gliding down to the earth: a long cloud supporting four riders, their arms out like sails.

  Americans and Vietcong alike look to the sky. Then, in an instant, the silhouette vanishes—and, as suddenly, it appears directly overhead, carving the cold air the way an eagle skims a glassy lake to snatch a careless trout.

  From the cloud shuttle leaps the ravaging Raze, raking the air with a downward swipe of spread fingers. Yards away, four riverine curtains of fire form and flay the air, suspended; lashing like infernal whips to strike and sear a collective of Vietcong guerillas—cleaving caustic claws that cauterize all the same.

  Watchdog calls-out targets for Miss Bliss and Boy Cumulus who, together, unleash an inescapable crossfire of freezing sleet and bone-shattering electricity. The valley is silenced in two minutes’ time.

  All is calm again, for now. As Watchdog tells, the jungles beyond the ridgeline still belong to the Vietcong. Seems the American Airborne had dropped into an encirclement, he says. “If we stay here, it'll be Dien Bien Phu, Part Two!” and then, "Yeesh—tough crowd."

  The radioman calls-in for an exfiltration. Boy Cumulus leads the American company into the jungle as Miss Bliss relocates the wounded by way of portals, settling them into a thicket of trees.

  The Americans wait among the tall grasses—sitting, kneeling, and lying down; hypervigilant. The wounded are patched by whispering medics. Tourniquets, bandages, blood. Weary brows and darting eyes. Sinewy forearms caked in sweat and dirt, draped across exhausted knees.

  Then it's heard: the chopping cacophony of steel wind, thundering over the horizon. The able men rise to their knees, listening close; stifling smiles. The more anxious of them rise to a squat, steadied on their heels. A sergeant slowly palms down: wait. Still, rifles are raised, held eagerly by one hand with the muzzle skyward; ready to sprint into the open, to secure a path to the first helo.

  A medevac swoops overhead, buzzing. Someone throws a grey canister into the clearing, and it pops, spilling its pinkish gasses into the air. Billowing a great volume, unmissable. A handful of rash Americans run out to the red smoke, to wave their arms—a dynamic but unnecessary signal boost.

  A dozen more run out to aid them, eyeing the perimeter; holding their rifles at the ready. The smoke spirals high, red and fluffy—a lodestar for the Americans and Vietcong alike.

  The wounded are carried down a dirt road, parallel to the clearing. Infantrymen line either side of the road, funneling the wounded through. From above, the men look like a Roman colonnade, with a caravan marching on to conquer.

  Inside one of many cockpits, helo pilot Cpl. Shiffrin looks below, confirming into his headset the breadth of the LZ: the narrow clearing between the dirt road and the riverbend. Sunlight from the pale sky filters through his panoramic shell windows, bathing his cockpit in a sickly absinthe-green. His Nomex jumpsuit, thickly-armored with aramid fibers, and his bulky orb helmet each glow almost iridescent.

  Shiffrin guides his rumbling flight in a descending chain of Hueys, two-dozen long, and from his posterior position he observes the third hovercraft erupt in flame and crunching steel. It careens larboard as it splinters into fragments of men and metal, falling from the sky; raining upon the mountainous jungle.

  The remaining helos scatter like spooked rats, diving every which and way in beelines for the ground. A series of concussive bolts, as furious as arrows, then rupture from the ridgeline weald, peppering the peeling Hueys. One helo, settling near the riverbank, catches a bolt to the underbelly, sending it to list sinister—and the men running to its berth quickly turn tail, as the blades cleave clean through two infantrymen, severing their torsos from their waists. The Huey hits the dirt and its blades crank to a stop, snapping apart on impact. Dust and grasses loosed by the whirling blades conjure-up a dustbowl haze.

  The heroine Raze sprints to the felled beast, surmounting its ugly belly
to inspect within: the pilot—alive albeit bruised—and his battered, rattled gunner. The only true casualties of this crash are three cans of Coca-Cola, tin-burst and fizzing foam.

  A third Huey absorbs two concussive bolts through its underside, though it manages to land shortly thereafter. Miss Bliss arrives on scene to find the helicopter’s bottom blown-out, and the metals absent from its belly appear to have blasted inside, like shrapnel, to eviscerate the occupants…

  The pilot clutches his right arm. His abdomen and thigh bleed well. The door gunner—having the fortune of being strapped in—clings to his harness, and everything below his left knee clings to him by a half-dozen strands of thin viscera. The padded wall beside him is splattered with a misty red spray, and the floor beneath is slick with his vital spillage.

  In the surrounding commotion, the last of the Hueys make haste for the ground. Further bolts from the ridgeline crack, spall, and ricochet off the roaring metal birds. Cpl. Shiffrin of the posterior craft shivers with every twang and snap; then, a loud bang behind him. His gaze fixates to the gauges as the rotor rpm indicator slides toward red—and, the longer he stares, the faster it seems to divert.

  Electric chirps punctuate the air, like the worst of crickets, as the angle of the vehicle’s descent sways. The morale of door gunner Pvt. Goggia descends with it. All that wasn’t yet broken was doomed to someday be just that, and this—he feels—is fate’s chosen moment. Airspeed slows, altitude drops, and acuity seeps out of their ears, boiling hot with anxious fear—sweating palms, pounding heart, and tunnel vision.

  Gravity—an impartial and omnipotent force; one of nature’s most divisive laws, resisted tooth-and-nail by the human species for centuries, and yet the mammals never surrendered. Shiffrin and Goggia now stand on the threshold of another entry in humanity’s endless tome of faltered aerial feats, spiraling gracefully back to the Earth—the rocks and soil their ancestors pounded with heavy feet, having dreams of flight but never the means.

  Pvt. Goggia holds no measure in his safety, save for a vice grip on the sidewall’s iron handle. His destiny rests in the occupied hands of Cpl. Shiffrin—the man whose job is now (and in some ways always had been) to arrive at the crash site first, for without a crash there can be no salvage.

  The helicopter tail rotor, as it is wont to do, veers instinctively toward a lone and barren tree. The tail then folds with a horrible iron crumble, like a billboard of aluminum foil, and its chopping blades tangle in the tree limbs. Upon dead-stop, the tail snaps, and the chassis drops nose-first to the ground—a two-ton weight released from the ent’s slippery hands.

  Like a beer can crushed upon the forehead of Vietnam, the cockpit crumples against the riverbank, shattering the panoramic shell windows and collapsing the cabin inward on itself. The pilot, Cpl. Shiffrin, pops like a ripe tomato, caking the cracks between vinyl and console with his organic pink paste.

  Battered and bloodied, Pvt. Goggia awakens in a daze, lying atop the forward cabin wall. The upright helo disorients him, for a moment, as would a carnival funhouse: aft is up, front is down, roll is yaw. Two twitchy infantrymen peer into the downed craft and eye the private, face-down and writhing. Blood streams down his face from a fissure above his eye. His vest is soaked red and his helmet is either missing or—as they surmise—in the Twilight Zone.

  The infantrymen pull Goggia from the wreck, leaving behind the carnage of the cockpit and two beige plastic benches, smeared by the blood of soft bodies and desperate hands.

  The wounded are carted hurriedly to those awaiting helos that survived their arrival. Concussive bolts come again from the jungle, only closer now. Hueys take-off up and down the valley, evading—if only by luck—the incoming enfilade of energy.

  A column of men, holding low their weapons, idle in the LZ; hunkering, with helmets held firm; their torsos wrapped in bandoliers and bandages. The downdraft from a settling chopper's whirring blades blows the long valley grasses to the mat, curtseying in unmitigated kowtow.

  The men board with haste, and overstuffed helos ascend—one after another—in an unchoreographed aerial ballet. All men yet unextracted wait anxiously on the soggy riverbanks, in patches of tall grass, for the next import of medevacs. Many express their preference for walking, or crawling, but medevacs appear to be the only way out of the valley today.

  A hundred isolated infantrymen scour the horizon, feeling less predator than prey; knowing the Vietcong know better their location than they know of the Vietcong. They look in all directions, uneasy, as the bolts have not come since the last mass-departure.

  They squint, looking skyward for salvation; gritting their teeth. Another batch of choppers crest the ridgeline and the bolts come again, like pure-force missiles from a telekinetic trebuchet. Another batch of fifty men—the luckiest of the bunch—are taken away, to the safety of the unreachable skies, and the last of the company remains on the riverside.

  Boy Cumulus takes Watchdog aboard his cloud and up, where his vantage is unimpeded. From below, again, come the thunderbolts.

  “There!” shouts the sentinel, “in the treefall gap!”

  Concussive beams blast through a break in the canopy, and Boy Cumulus swerves away, down into the jungle, cruising the understory; weaving between dark-mighty yellow merantis, ivory-tower tualangs, and wiry-white Hopeans, siamensis and nutans. Watchdog foretells their arrival and, routing the trunk of one dark-mighty, they’re struck with a thunderbolt—knocked from their lofted fog and falling forty feet to the forest floor.

  Boy Cumulus slows his fall with a jet of sleet. Watchdog, on the contrary, lands hands-first in a bushel of ferns. He emerges from the brambles, gritting his teeth and seething, as neither of his arms can soothe the other: the left, grossly folded midway through the forearm, with wrist nearly touching elbow; the right, snapped out of its socket and drooping loose like a beaded necklace.

  He lifts his chin and yawps like a wild animal—nostrils flaring, eyes bulging; groaning and grinning, involuntarily, at the absurdity of his injury.

  Rustling in the jungle underbrush precedes the sight of a scrawny gook clad in black pajamas.

  “Tôi thấy bạn!” shouts the man in black, squinting and pointing. “Tôi là Khán Giả!”

  His eyes widen into almonds, and a slit parts between his bushy brows, unveiling a half-glazed third eyeball—centered above his stout nose—from which another psionic thunderbolt erupts. He dashes, then, back into the underbrush.

  Boy Cumulus pivots to and fro, shifting his gaze between his staggering comrade and the fleeing man in black.

  Watchdog urges, “Go on—get after him!” but the weather wunderkind hesitates. He curses under his breath, and he jogs to the aid of his wounded brother.

  Thunderbolts again wash over the valley, riddling the iron birds; prompting plenty to restabilize. One bolt cuts well through the cabin of an evacuating Huey in its takeoff, severing its main rotor; sending it on a parabolic arc, hastening downward into the marshy river—a calamitous splash.

  The obstinate Pharos charges across the valley, pursued by the gunfire of a gook regiment crouched along the treeline. He runs for the capsized Huey and dives into the river. Seven men surface in succession, coughing and gasping and thrashing to swim, weighted by full gear and tired limbs.

  The soldiers pull one another from the waters. Pharos submerges himself beneath their kicking feet, where the last of the cabin's air rises in bubbles. He follows these like breadcrumbs to the sunken Huey, obscured by hazy silt and flotsam vegetation. The cockpit is still helmed by its pilot, peering eternally through absent windshield with what remains of his face.

  Pharos grabs a hold of the cabin's cold metal frame and pulls himself inside, colliding with something plump and heavy—a limp, bound, and headless corpse floating just below the Huey's iron ceiling. He pushes the fellow aside, out to surface, when he notices another body—thrashing; deplete of breath—pulling hypnotically slow on a bench forcibly bent over his leg.

  Pharos pad
dles south and pries at the seat—its warped metal legs unforgiving; a chest-burst radio operator still buckled-in atop it—and the trapped soldier, choking-down dirty water, rattles the bench in a futile attempt to yank himself free.

  His efforts soon exact their toll and, within seconds, the soldier loses rigidity—his arms drift apart; his spine crimps; his eyes glaze, half-open; his hair undulating like seagrass. Pharos grimaces, spilling the last of his air reserves to the surface.

  He reorients himself closer to the bench's frame, palms one of his eyes closed, and squints the other, acutely fixing his sight on the leg of the seat. His slit eye then, like a welder's torch, ignites a fine beam—a blaze blue; as narrow as a pencil—and carves through the frame, reducing the warped steel to a molten syrup that curdles in the murk.

  The soldier's leg floats free from its snare, and his limp body drifts heavy toward the surface, aided by the grasp and paddling of his liberator—Pharos, gasping; kicking; climbing the sunbeams that strain through the river surface, just out of reach.

  His efforts, too, exact their toll and, within seconds, they breach the waters. Pharos gulps air as if for the first time. The soldier floats to the embankment, pulled free and inflated by his comrades. Pharos coughs-up brown water and crawls along the riverbank, dragging his drenched leather through the grass; and coarse wet denim chafes his legs.

  He flips onto his back, splaying his limbs, and he breathes. The sounds of war ongoing come back to him—thumps, bangs; broken air and thunder; copper clinks and desperate cries—reigning tyrannical in his ears. He sits upright; his gaze drawn immediately to a firefight across the river…

  A relentless machine gun in the jungle; a wall of such resistance unseen beyond the trees; the Vietcong defensive line, on the edge of the valley. An RPG shoots out of a thicket, toward the Marvelous Six, and Miss Bliss conjures a void to swallow it, sending it back whence it came—and exploding in the jungle.