Supers Box Set

by Kristofer Bartol

  “Pharos—enough.”

  “A horrible, ugly monster,” he muses, staring into the gook’s limpid eye, “masked only by a thin layer of lambskin.”

  He holds the head up, proud, and lets it go—falling to the cobblestone, with a crack, squish, and splatter.

  He turns to Boy Cumulus. “No reason to get excited, I suppose.”

  “Pharos… man,” the weatherboy cools, “How about we get you back to base; to a doctor, who-”

  “No, no—I took her to a doctor already, and they said they couldn’t do anything.” Pharos stares into a hyaloid abyss. “They said they couldn’t do anything, because they’re just men, and men are weak.” He looks to Boy Cumulus, “Aren’t we all, Cume? Fallible and weak? Tied to the here-and-now by only a thin thread of life—a cruel, fickle, fragile gift, this life; tenured by a spider’s leg designated as rope, and bound to break eventually.”

  He grips his rifle in his hands, wringing the metal with all he can muster; exerting his anger through his arms.

  “One man’s fate is not another’s, and yet we all end the same.”

  “Look, buddy—I know this is difficult, man. We’ve all been through pain and loss. I ache right now, too—I really do. I miss her.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I loved her.”

  “You loved her.”

  “Like a brother loves a sister, I loved her.”

  “I loved her, too,” Pharos mews. “I loved her so much I’d have sacrificed myself for her—but I was not there, no… Where were you?”

  “I was there, man.”

  “And what?”

  “And it happened before we could react. Nobody saw it coming.”

  “Saw what, Cume?”

  “Molly, man! Miss Bliss! What more do I have to say to convince you you’re not the only one who lost somebody today?”

  “But to me she was everything," he seethes. "I don't have anything else."

  "You have us!"

  "But I needed her. And she was taken from me," he fumes, "by these fuckin'," pointing his rifle at a woman's corpse; foaming at the mouth, "stupid slant-eyed fuck-" bang!—he discharges his rifle into the corpse—bang, bang, bang!—sprouting lukewarm geysers that splash crimson; and he finishes screaming, "DUMB FUCKIN' ANIMALS!”

  Boy Cumulus holds his hands before him, raising his eyebrows, almost condescending. "Whoa, guy."

  Pharos's shoulders rise and fall with every heavy breath, wheezing through his sobbing throat. "You don't get it! You don't care!"

  “Oh, really, Pharos? You wanna play the victim card right now? You want to be the one who feels the most pain? Who can say ‘I lost the most, so y’all should feel bad for me instead,’ huh?”

  “We were soulmates! I knew her better than anyone!”

  "Anyone, huh!" the weatherboy shouts. “What, so- so she’s told you all about her darkest pains? Her childhood insecurities? How she was picked-on, relentlessly, for blossoming early? How she taped her tits down so people wouldn’t stare at her, and then not two years later the schoolkids all unanimously decided she’s a hot commodity? How she went from the freak to the honeypot in an errant minute, and she never knew what it was like to be herself; what it was like to feel comfortable in her own skin?”

  Pharos stares, and dry-swallows. “I knew she had a, um- She was never happy about her appearance.”

  “Where’d her powers come from?”

  “She’s a super.”

  “She’s a mutate, Pharos. She slit her wrist in the eleventh grade—almost died, but her resuscitation triggered something within; something she always thought derived from her split image; her desire to get away.”

  “No—no, she said she was born with it.”

  “You don’t think she’d have run away if she had her portals as a kid?”

  Pharos blinks.

  “And the scar down her arm—you ever notice that?”

  “She said it came from a childhood accident, in climbing a fence.”

  “Like a battered wife claims her black eye is from clumsiness.”

  “Okay!” Pharos erupts, “So I- so she never told me about her sad youth! As if that makes my loss any less!”

  “I’m not fucking trying to convince you that I miss her more than you—I’m saying I lost her, too! We all lost her! And you can feel angry about it—you have that right; it’s your goddamn right to be sad. She was a wonderful-”

  “She was faultless.”

  “Don’t martyr her, goddammit! Honor her, celebrate her, raise a toast to her, sure, but don’t condense her memory into prose and iconography. She was a person, like you and me—warts and all.”

  Pharos asserts with a downturned finger. “She was faultless, and you’re a fool if you say otherwise.”

  “Listen,” Boy Cumulus cools, “Let’s stop this run-around; this false talk and venom. It’s getting late. How about we head back to base and sort out all this…” he gestures around him, “all this shit you wreaked here. There’s gonna be a lot of questions-”

  “No questions—it’s cut-and-dry, ain’t it?”

  “Look, I can’t explain it as well as you can, but your way of coping is dangerous, self-destructive, and sadistic. You’ve killed fifteen, maybe even thirty people here—innocent people.”

  “Innocent.”

  “Yeah—and the Army’s probably getting word of it, right now, and they’re probably already on their way here to subdue you. Maybe, if you go willingly, and you explain to the generals—as much as you can explain a massacre—maybe you can get away with a court martial and a ticket home… but first you need to drop the weapon and close your eyes.”

  “I’m not closing my eyes.”

  “If they think you might do something erratic, which they have reason to believe,” he gestures around him, “that that’s possible, then they might not give you the chance to explain yourself-”

  “I’m the only one here with their eyes open.”

  Boy Cumulus sighs. “Huh?”

  “Molly’s death taught me something that nobody else seems to have realized: This isn’t a war we’ve gotten ourselves wrapped up in.”

  “It’s not?”

  “The government wants you to think we’re the noble democracy against the evil communists, but that’s not it; that’s the cover story. What we’re here for is extermination; the killing of vermin and lesser beings.”

  “That’s- that’s archaic thinking.”

  “Then why is it wars like these are only fought in third-world nations? The Nazis tried it but the Brits took umbrage and turned into a globe ordeal—and the Brits only got involved because Hitler was stepping on their toes. They had Arabia, India, Africa, Egypt all under their control, and Hitler’s Aryan empire would’ve contended their own. Nobody gives a fuck about the ‘freedom’ of these primitive slants; they want only the natural resources, the cheap labor, and the control, so we pit North against South and train them to kill each other—and if we can’t force a victory, well, that’s when you implement the nuclear option.”

  “We’ve disbarred atomic weapon usage since the Hibakusha. It’s in the UN Charter.”

  “Cume, the UN employs at least a dozen men and women more powerful than any atomic weapon—yourself included. You really think we’re here to implement democracy in South Vietnam? If we were, we wouldn’t be backing coups and digging trenches. We’d be stimulating the local economy, championing community virtues, developing federal work programs, and giving people the freedom to elect their own despots.”

  “That’s a killer thesis, professor. You sound like a crackpot.”

  “Name one instance where a years-long occupation and asymmetrical slaughter led to a happy, thriving, democratic nation.”

  Boy Cumulus blinks.

  “I thought not,” Pharos smirks. “You and I are here for one thing, and one thing only: killing gooks. We wipe-out enough of ‘em—faster than they can mount a resistance—and they’ll resign to the fight and submit to corporate ow
nership. It’s the American way. It’s the only way.”

  The sidestreets rumble with the approach of a dozen roving tanks; growling mechanical beasts that crush the cobblestones underfoot. Pharos slings his rifle over his shoulder and widens his stance.

  “So whaddya say?” he jerks his head, “You can be the noble bishop, sacrificed in war under the king, or you can be the eternal rook, concerned not with the battlefield but with the king himself.”

  He extends his hand but Boy Cumulus hesitates, looking between Pharos's hazel eyes and the blood drying on his outstretched fingers.

  “Don’t tell me you’re gonna stand by the empires,” Pharos barks. “What do you owe them?”

  The tanks rumble nearer. Boy Cumulus bites his lip.

  Pharos shifts his gaze past the weather wunderkind.

  Boy Cumulus looks over his shoulder at the tank that rounds the corner. Its turret swivels toward them.

  Pharos inhales as his eyes glow orange, and he sneers to release a thick beam of plasmic light—but Boy Cumulus swirls the humid air and casts an arc of blowing sleet, curling the ocular beam skyward; refracting its potent heat.

  The attack dissolves into steam as both men stand apart, staring each other down: Pharos, consumed by contempt and betrayal; Boy Cumulus, of steadfast austerity and righteous pride.

  Boy Cumulus stirs the air with a limp finger, prompting a sudden swirl of grey fog that expands, filling the market square. Pharos roars—his teeth slick with salivary spray; his brow scrunched tight and low over orange-burning eyes.

  He unleashes a fury of ocular bolts that cut through the smog in all directions, obliterating shops unseen with the crashing and splintering of wood; cracking and dislodging bricks from mighty stone walls; evaporating clouds that quickly recover—and then silence.

  The fog settles—slowly disapparating—to reveal an empty market, littered with busted wood beams and limp brown bodies. Only Boy Cumulus stands among the wreckage.

  American and ARVN soldiers rush from behind the tank to overtake the market, establishing their presence. Boy Cumulus stares ahead, where his comrade was standing in their final moment—and then something grabs his ankle.

  His gaze snaps to the ground, beside him: from under a wood heap, a woman's arm emerges, dirty and shaking.

  He stares, unblinking.

  An ARVN soldier drops beside him and unburies the woman, finding her bloodied in her blue-striped robes. She clenches her teeth and moans as the soldier turns her over. She grips a wood plank hard enough to break her fingernails. The soldier leans over her, hands poised, unsure of what to do.

  Two fieldworkers mosey into the market square, at once startled and alarmed. One wears a conical woven hat, only to remove it and run to the aid of a corpse. The other shoulders a yoke lengthwise, bowing downward; weighted by two netted boxes each concealing a fisherman's haul.

  She drops it, with a duplicate thud—a splash of newsprint-wrapped fish—and she staggers, overstrung; neurotically darting from one body to another, desperately optimistic to find a pulse.

  Storm clouds gather in the distance, embellished by black smoke that billows toward the setting sun.

  The rebel travels westward still,

  According to the rumor mill,

  In fleeing those he would disown,

  Consumed by rage he must fulfill.

  He turned his coat to lesser known

  Lands where trees takeover stone

  Of ancient temples on the bog,

  Entombed in earth and overgrown.

  I cannot track him through the fog

  Without the eyes of demagogues

  Pursuing me in violent haste

  To write their battle's epilogue.

  And so the totem is defaced;

  His noble past has been erased.

  My name forever in disgrace.

  My name forever in disgrace.

  ( II | VIII )

  Four heavy-barrel .50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns, mounted in pairs on either side of a swiveling turret, thirst for the iron bellies of enemy birds, and yet they have only ever known the ease of scolding soft-bodied ground targets. The soldier behind the trigger—his bucket hat obscuring his eyes in shadow—leans forward against the turret’s thick steel shield, upon which is painted the name “Devil’s Disciple.” Other turret emplacements around the hilltop share in whimsy, with names like “Bad Dream” and “Bounty Hunter.”

  “The Great Eve of Destruction” designates the long barrel of an artillery cannon mounted to a tank body: the M107 175mm, a howitzer on steel treads. Its vested stewards close the loading hatch, turn, and plug their ears. The cannon booms, recoils, and spits out its barrel a mushroom of disturbed and blackened air, only to be just as quickly punctured by a racing bombshell, gone toward the horizon. The stewards rush the beast again and plunge its lever, opening the hatch to spill the casing of the last and load the casing of the new…

  Artillery sounds around the hill, from massive mortar machines aimed largely windward, entrenched in permanent pads behind sandbag walls. Dozens of similar redoubts surround the basecamp hill, for aerial defense systems and artillery emplacements, and at the summit stands the sole watchtower, three stories tall and roofed with leaf-green tarp. The outermost ring of entrenched artillery are the mortar pits—the transportable stovepipes, central to their circular coves; and buried in the mud walls of each pit, like makeshift shelves, are crates upon crates of ready shells. A small wooden sign on a pit's portcullis: “Home is where you dig it.”

  The true base lies within the hill, like mole tunnels dug and reinforced by corrugated panels with iron beams. The roadway to the tunnel gates widens with descent, flattening upon a prairie long-since overhauled into an airfield; an evac hospital, where helos land with haste to deliver wounded to waiting trucks—long-bodied delivery vans from General Motors, painted dark green with white square and red cross. A comms radio tower, alternating red and white, sixty-feet high, bedecked in satellite dishes. And the signpost up ahead, bright red; advising as to what lies beyond each of three roads.

  Beyond the airfield, in the dusty sawgrass plain, travel a party of square-cornered APCs, cloaked in matted grasses and carrying housewares—wooden chairs, bedrolls, baskets, bins, bags, a card table, and a pile of jackets. One prowler, “CAMBODIAN JUNGLE BUSTER,” loads men through its rear hatch; its engine grumbling. The broadest of these men balances an M60 LMG on his shoulder; strikes a matchstick against it; lights the cigarette between his lips. Tattooed down his arm in gothic script, appearing as it had on the helmet he no longer wears, “GOD IS MY SHOTGUN.”

  Similar statements appear on the helmets of those around him, including “Blood Type O,” “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him,” and “If they’re going to draft anything, why couldn’t they draft beer?” A wiggly line draws correlation between an ovaloid puncture, shaved off a helmet dome, and a hand-printed date, “MAY 6, 1967.” Another helmet's elastic band wreaths an array of photos—portraits of the same thick-skinned brunette, all taken in the same studio—around the dome like jewels in a crown. “PIER 8;” “ALL MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD;” a rubber chicken tucked into an elastic band, ready at a moment's notice; and the spindlehorns of a mountain goat, strapped to the front of a helmet, for the impression of a satanic fiend—a warrior of darkness.

  Marching; marching down the dusty road, the tanks and jeeps kicking silt into the air. Helmets on, vests open, hands clutching dangling rifles and gripping the fronts of belts. Barbed wire unspooled along the roadsides. Three men march with the M72 LAW—an unguided single-shot anti-tank missile—strapped atop their rucksacks. Few have spared the space for bedrolls. Toothbrushes and pencils are threaded through holes in helmet fabric. Ammo magazines half-full. Canteens half-empty.

  The dirt road slithers into the jungle, soon supplanted by trodden grass, and deeper still, until all that isn't green is a mere twosome of tire-worn ruts, endlessly parallel; ground to dust by a succession of convoys. Bird
s flutter between trees, crossing over the road, only to scatter when gunfire erupts from the lush.

  The platoon dives for cover, in the grasses and the fronds. One soldier hurdles himself into the roadside gully, falling behind his bleeding friend; his helmet rolling away from his grasp; his smoky sullen eyes peering through the grasses, searching for the source of the enfilade without becoming a target. Two other soldiers, each wearing gold wristwatches, take cover below the roadside's dirt embankment. They assemble their machine gun on its bipod, mount the ridgeline, and fire together over the top. Their weapon, hungry for belts of ammunition, chews ferocious and expends brass casings like cherry pits.

  Still, nobody can tell where the hailfire hails from, only that it comes incessant. One man lies in reeds, his abdomen shot; men aid under-arm those that limp, guiding them away from the hot zone and through thickets—to relative, presumed safety. One man en route is shot through the lower back; the bullet exiting out his canteen, spilling water and blood alike. He staggers until he can no longer walk, then to his knees, then to the reeds, and he crawls.

  A lieutenant collapses beside a radioman in the underbrush and he orders a call for medevac. The radioman fumbles his rifle from his hands and retrieves his receiver, barking into cupped hands the requested support. The lieutenant gathers a squadron and leads them through the thicket, to a clearing—the new LZ. Three Hueys race inbound. He raises his rifle aloft by two hands, level, to signal friendly. The wounded emerge from the thicket to flood the flowing ocean of windswept grasses; carrying those with bleeding bandaged legs, or gutted abdomens, or head wounds seeping and unconscious.

  There's gunfire upon the Hueys as they prepare to settle in the grasses. The medic waiting in one helo’s cabin bay, standing beside the door gunner, takes three shots in the chest and he tips, tumbles out the door; falling in an unfought nosedive—the helo silhouetted above and the medic’s graceful kingfisher plunge to the earth below, into the tall grasses of the waiting wounded. His body crackles, crumples, bounces upon impact.