Mad Dogs

by James Grady

  rrr-rip

  —done. Thumb’s on the TRANSMIT button…

  The chute tore with a loud rip as Zane pushed the TRANSMIT button. He dropped straight down until the chute cords caught and swung him like a pendulum smack into the tree. Inertia flung the FCT transponder from Zane’s sweat slick hand.

  Every inch of Zane hurt from being slammed into the tree. He burned in fire.

  Ignore that. Time. Need time. Did the messages go through?

  Miss Black Pajamas machinegunned the tangle of parachute cords above Zane’s head until they parted and he crashed/slid the last 20 feet to the jungle floor.

  But he had some mojo left: they cut off all his clothes, freed him from the most suffocating heat. They poured water over his head. Gave him one drink. Yelled questions. Slapped him. Gave him another drink. The clearing floated into focus. Three Hmongs, hands bound behind them. The oldest sent him a smile.

  The Captain leaned close, and in English said: “Why are you in our jungle?”

  Zane said: “Tourist.”

  Soldiers jerked him to his feet. Chopped a shovel into the dirt beside his bare toes.

  “Dig a deep hole for your friends,” ordered the Captain.

  Already have, thought Zane.

  “One question you will answer,” said the Captain as naked Zane shoveled jungle muck out of the pit that was now as deep as his knees and longer than he was tall. “Will you stay in this pit for the rest of forever?”

  Yes, he knew. But said nothing.

  Guerrilla-dressed Miss Black Pajamas had an oval face with butterfly lips. A woman had cut him down from Hell’s tree to put him in his grave. Zane froze as she used her machinegun muzzle to push his naked penis first to the left, then to the right. She withdrew her gun. Yawned.

  “Dig,” said the Captain.

  When the pit was hip deep, they dragged over Jodrey’s body.

  “Do you want to join him?” asked the Captain.

  Then he put his pistol to the head of the nearest Hmong and blasted crimson gore on the emerald jungle.

  Urine rolled uncontrollably out of Zane’s virgin penis.

  “So much for those who are useless,” said the Captain.

  “Can I bargain for their lives?” said Zane. Make time!

  Knew the Captain lied when he said yes. The Captain asked about the radio frequencies for Special Forces A-camps. Truth was, Zane didn’t know. He would have lied if he had. The truth was what he told the Captain. Who shot another Hmong.

  “Now you must dig deeper.”

  So he did.

  “Only one left. Who do your counter-intelligence people suspect in Hue?”

  Know that don’t can’t tell them don’t say anything time buy—

  BANG!

  “Now there’s just you,” said the Captain standing by the heap of dead bodies.

  Now it’s all just drama, Zane believed as he dug. Honest, I’m too valuable to kill.

  Birds rocketed out of the trees.

  Because he knew, Zane had a heartbeat to dive in the grave.

  God’s fist hit the jungle floor. That impact bounced Zane in his hole. Bomb blasts tore apart trees and birds and monkeys and snakes and people and hurricaned a greenish-red mush. Threw logs over the ditch, a roof that absorbed a hail of skin-ripping debris. Only six bombs fell, one stick horded from an already planned run diverted to answer Zane’s second, two-word FCT message, but they were 1,000 pound bombs and one stick was enough to grant his plea:

  ARCLIGHT ME

  Arclight: ’Nam speak for a B-52 strike. Called in by a soldier on top of himself and his FCT homing signal. A last stand tactic to wipe out the enemy’s gain—in this case, one that included captured Top Secret spy gear. The times in Vietnam that a soldier dove on a grenade to save his buddies or called in lethal ordinance on top of himself in a defiant last stand merited the awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  This time that medal had to stay secret because of Zane’s first message:

  BETRAYED

  How else would the Captain have known that the insertion team was late?

  Four days after Zane’s Arclight, 30 Shan State mercenaries picked their way through a shredded soccer stadium of Laotian jungle. Mist floated in the snapped-off trees. They found a white orchid blooming in a patch of squishy cloth. Back in the mountains of Burma, they grew poppies. But their American friends had a briefcase full of greenbacks to trade for a hand-sized box they said was still beeping to their satellite. So the mercenaries took the tracking device the Hawaiian shirted man gave them, slid through this jungle. They found the stubborn transistor radio-thing between two rocks. Ants swarmed over it. They congratulated each other, turned to walk home.

  Almost shot him when he popped up in a trench like a naked Jack-in-the-box toy.

  And screamed in American: “Mojo!”

  He was covered with leeches, sunburned and blistered. His lips were cracked and had barely been able to slurp pools of ground water filled with parasites. But what was the most startling about the zombie who leapt from the grave was how his growing out hair and beard had turned absolutely stark white.

  They dragged the zombie out of the pit. Poured water on his face and in his mouth. Bomb blasts had scrambled his electronic insides. He babbled. When he took a step with his left foot, his right hand flipped up like a broken wing.

  So they hung him from a pole. The mercenaries carried samples of their cash crop product. They sprinkled their white powder in his wounds to stop his gibberish by stopping the pain. The zombie swung from that coolie pole for five jungle tramping days. The Hawaiian shirted man gave the mercenaries a $50,000 bonus for him.

  Eight years later, in the psych ward at Bethesda (Maryland) Naval Hospital, Zane’s bomb and trauma and heroin shocked neural pathways had re-wired enough so that when he looked out from his wheelchair at the night sky’s purple and red starbursts of fireworks exploding over Washington, D.C.’s Mall for America’s BiCenntenial bash, a nurse heard him mumble a coherent thought: “Pretty.”

  Two years later, he could walk and talk, feed and bathe himself. But he rocketed awake every night. By his 32nd birthday, he’d regained enough willpower to refuse to cut his snow white hair, saying: “I earned it.”

  When Zane was 33 and President Jimmy Carter halted U.S. grain sales to the Soviet Union because they’d invaded Afghanistan and ex-Beatle John Lennon was assassinated by a creep obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, military doctors ruled Zane functional but fucked-up, physically fine but oh-so crazy. Plus his white hair and beard spooked the staff and other patients. The staff strapped him on a stretcher, lashed on an Army paratrooper briefcase full of his medical records and his Congressional Medal of Honor, rolled the stretcher into an Army hearse, and transported Zane to a new Top Secret facility in Maine.

  Zane pioneered Ward C. Lost to nightmares most nights. Went violently batshit when he got over-heated and the temperature reminded him of hanging in a tree in Hell. But he carried the weight of all that had happened to him and he never, no never, cried.

  Oh, and he couldn’t have sex.

  Couldn’t sneak advantages when he was 40 from a harshly divorced nurse who wore musk perfume, kept innocently touching him.

  Couldn’t follow up on what he inevitably initially felt for Hailey after she showed up. Not that she’d have let him… follow up, but if she could have in good conscience bestowed that mercy, she would have.

  Couldn’t even masturbate.

  Everything Zane or the shrinks tried… failed to function.

  Russell claimed it was madman’s mojo.

  And Zane said: “’Xactly.”

  16

  The wreck on the highway caught us 39 minutes after we James Dean-ed the roadblock at the Reiss river bridge.

  Russell piloted our stolen Jeep. Hailey sat beside him, Zane a
nd Eric shared the back seat. I huddled in the rear cargo compartment, clutched the painter’s tarp around me. I wore my GODS’ ski underwear top, boxer shorts and socks. Chills shook me even though I was perched in the path of the warm breeze streaming from the heater.

  “You look like an old gypsy lady in a shawl,” Russell said as his eyes met mine in the rear view mirror.

  He shifted his gaze to the back seat Buddha reflection of Zane, who wore only a faded Army shirt and dry underpants. Cold worked for him. The river had tangled his long white hair and beard. Russell told him: “You look like some kind of pervert.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” said Zane.

  “Chill,” said Russell. “We’re doing great.”

  We’d avoided Interstate toll thoroughfares, fled south on back roads like this two-lane late night deserted state highway through rolling hills and scruffy woods.

  Russell checked his watch: “The troopers on the bridge are 37 minutes behind us. They’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

  Yellow light lanced our Jeep’s back window.

  “Duck down!” yelled Russell and I did, knew Zane and (of course) Eric did, too.

  The yellow light dialed up ever brighter until the Jeep’s passenger compartment glowed with a surreal intensity.

  “Shit!” I heard Russell yell to a rumble racing towards our rear bumper. “Back off, man! Slow the fuck —”

  A blast of wind hit our Jeep. Our vehicle buffeted to the right from that impact, then got sucked to the left by the slipstream of the 18-wheeler semi-truck rocketing past us. My stomach churned. Russell fought to keep our fishtailing Jeep between the white lines. Through our windshield, I saw the truck’s trailer box whipping from side to side like a furious dragon as its teamster steered from passing back into the right lane he claimed as his sole property. Taillights on the truck disappeared over a hill.

  “Somebody else needs meds,” said Zane.

  Russell sped up. “Fuck him! Nobody gets away with almost killing us!”

  “Let it go!” I said. “We can’t afford more trouble!”

  We surged over the hill—

  “Look out!” Hailey braced herself against the dashboard.

  Russell stomped on the brakes.

  Our Jeep wheels locked. We skidded, fishtailing again but again Russell kept us between the white lines and our Jeep—

  Slid to a stop in the middle of the highway.

  Our high beams filtered an eerie blue glow over that night scene. The wreckage of a family minivan blocked the road ahead of us. The minivan lay on its driver’s side. Steam hissed from the van’s mangled hood and as we watched, one tire spun to a stop.

  “Oh my God,” whispered Hailey.

  Zane and I pulled on shoes. Neither of us slipped into our soaked pants. We all jumped out to the road. Beads of glass crunched under our feet.

  “He blew them off the road,” whispered Russell.

  Can’t stop! Killers are chasing us! I thought. Said: “Gotta do it!”

  We ran to the wreck.

  “Gas!” yelled Hailey. “I smell gas!”

  Safety glass in the van’s windshield had splintered into an opaque mosaic.

  Eric yelled: “Fuel tank rupture!”

  Russell and I climbed onto the upturned side of the van. The glass in that front door’s window was gone. A deflated air bag filled the empty front passenger seat.

  A woman slumped against the driver’s door that was now the bottom of her van. The air bag from the steering wheel draped her lap. Blood flowed from her nose. She moaned. Her right hand twitched with an animation that seemed to rule out spinal cord injury but her left arm sprawled in an unnatural zig-zag.

  I jerked on the passenger door: frozen shut. Russell and I stood on the passenger door, muscled the sliding side door: it refused to budge.

  “Frame’s bent!” said Russell. “Lost control and flipped it. Tumbled and rolled.”

  “I’m going in!”

  Russell helped ease me through the punched out passenger door window.

  Zane yelled: “Yes, Eric! Use that chunk of bumper to dig your canal for the gas! Hailey, grab those pieces of metal, dam it that way!”

  Russell lowered me into the cramped and topsy-turvy passenger compartment. My feet brushed the driver’s head. My shoes found a hard surface. I bent my whole body into the car, my head dropping below the window I’d come through, my bare legs tingling from a myriad of cuts. As I wedged myself lower to reach the moaning driver, the bluish glow cast by our Jeep’s headlights revealed them:

  The baby boy snug in his car seat behind his mother, a pacifier still somehow sucked tight in his mouth, his wide-open eyes the size of his tiny fists.

  The toddler girl, call her six years old, proud to ride in the back seat where she wore the seat belt and the shoulder strap that in the wondrous ways of childhood and car wrecks was now cinched tight around her neck.

  “Knife!” I yelled.

  The girl’s face turning blue in that cramped topsy-turvy car told me that even if one of us would have had a knife, I had no time to get it and cut the strap.

  I pulled on the shoulder strap to loosen it: locked at that extension, tight so the girl wouldn’t fly out of her seat, so tight I couldn’t get the clasp to release, so tight that she was dying from gradual strangulation.

  Unless.

  If I was wrong, at least she’d die quick.

  Like a killer, I pulled the strap tighter around her neck.

  She thrashed, gurgled, her arms—

  The safety rollers released their lock on the strap and it slid loose with my reversed pull, just like it was designed to do.

  The girl gasped, wheezed. She fell into my arms like a heavy rag doll. I passed her up through the window to Russell.

  An intercom voice filled the van: “This is Janet with On-Board Wireless Services System. Our indicators show that your air bags have deployed. Is everything all right?”

  Twisting my head down and to the right let me see a red bulb glowing on the box built into the van roof by the rear view mirror.

  “Is anyone in the vehicle?”

  “Come on!” I frantically battled the release on the baby’s car seat.

  The baby boy waved his arms with my efforts and never dropped his pacifier.

  “Hello? Is everything OK?”

  The car seat release popped open.

  “Our protocols assume your vehicle has been in an accident. If you can, please try to push the TRANSMIT button. Please!”

  Hailey yelled: “I can’t stop gas trickling under the car towards the hot engine!”

  Pacifier and all, I passed the baby up to Russell.

  “Please remain calm. Your Global Positioning System has given us your location. The state police are on their way.”

  Russell yelled: “We gotta get out of here!”

  Hailey yelled: “The gas is gonna hit the hot engine!”

  “One more to go!” I yelled.

  But no matter how I twisted like a contortionist in that cramped jumble of van seats and dashboard, I couldn’t reach the mother’s seat belt clasp and lift her free.

  “State police say they are approximately 3 minutes away. You’re almost safe.”

  Hailey yelled: “Hurry!”

  Exhaling let me brace my hands against the van seats and ram my underwear-clad butt against the safety glass mosaic windshield. Once, twice, third time cracking it free from the frame, fourth time knocking it out, gaining space to bend over, free the mother and pull her out of the van, drag her far away and lay her beside her kids.

  The little girl stared up at me and with a hoarse voice said: “Are you angels?”

  “No.”

  And I ran away. Left the family laying on the side of the road. Russell used our Jeep’s 4-wheel-drive to na
vigate around the wreck, race us down the dark highway.

  A candle burst of orange flame flashed in our rear view mirrors.

  Red emergency lights flickered over the horizon beyond our windshield.

  Russell killed our headlights as he whipped the Jeep off the highway. Rough terrain bounced us like dice shaking in a cup, but we managed a stop in the trees that was neither a collision nor a quagmire.

  Red lights whirled on two police cars that rushed passed our improvised exit.

  Russell waited until they were red dots by the distant flickering candle, kept our lights out as he gingerly navigated our way back to the highway. We drove away using the not-yet-full moon to light the road until our mirrors held no spinning red lights or burning candles, then on came our headlights and our Jeep roared forward.

  “Least we know there can’t be many cops left in front of us,” said Eric.

  “What about that damn trucker?” said Russell.

  I shook my head. “Some people get away with murder.”

  “Don’t tell us that,” said Hailey. “Not that. Not now.”

  We rode through a cluster of roadside houses too small to be a town. Saw no one in the homes’ dark windows, were certain that no one saw us.

  “That kid back there,” Zane told me. “She thought you were an angel. Thought you were already dead.”

  All I could say was: “Out of the mouths of babes.”

  17

  Call my first suicide an homage to James Vincent Forrestal.

  The unforgettable Forrestal.

  Dartmouth. Princeton. Wall Street bonds whiz. One of FDR’s White House West Wing bright boys. Undersecretary of the Navy. Made history after WW II as America’s first Secretary of Defense. President Truman pinned America’s highest official civilian honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, on Forrestal’s business suit.

  Forrestal went crazy on the job. Got paranoid about what “they” were scheming. The Soviets who’d stolen our atom bomb secrets and were terrorizing our American way of life. Pentagon power players who kept knifing his plans for battling The Red Menace. The “high placed Congressional sources” who kept whispering: “Forrestal cares more about oil and Arabs than he does about the fate of the Jews and Israel.”