“Sarge?” Billy spoke up again. “If what they’re saying is real, there can’t be enough of those things to really matter can there?”
“How the Hell should I know kid? I’m a soldier, not a crypto-zoologist.”
“How could there be?” Pullman laid his rifle against the jeep, propping it there as he fished a smoke of his own from his pocket. “There’s no way the things could have stayed hidden this long if there were.”
“We don’t know anything about the creatures, Pullman,” Sarge pointed out, surprising Billy. “We don’t know where they live. We don’t know what they do out there in the woods. Nothing. Who can guess at how many there are or what they’re planning?”
Silence hung in the air like a tangible force around Billy until Pullman finally nodded and answered, “Nobody I guess.”
He placed his cigarette between his lips, picking his weapon back up, and headed back to his spot on the road without another word.
Sarge looked Billy over. “You gonna be okay up there kid?”
Billy nodded from where he stood in the rear of the jeep.
“Good because—” Sarge started, but whatever else he was about to say was lost, drowned out by the half human, half animal shrieks that came from somewhere in the direction of Babble creek.
Sarge and Billy looked up from their conversation to see waves of monsters moving towards them. The things were all between nine and ten feet tall, covered in matted, brown hair. Where moments before, they’d been so quiet as to approach unnoticed, their footfalls on the road now sounded like thunder as they rushed forward. Their mouths were twisted in hungry snarls, and their red eyes burned with hatred and anger.
The chattering bark of Pullman’s rifle as he raced to the jeep, firing over its hood at the advancing horde, snapped Billy and Sarge out their shock. Sarge spun around, jerking his own M-16 up. It spat burst after burst at the things. Billy swung the mounted fifty cal to face the beasts and opened up on them. Sarge and Pullman’s rounds only seemed to be making the creatures madder as they came, without even slowing them, yet Billy’s cut them down in rows. The heavier rounds of the mounted weapon sank deep through thick muscle, cutting down several of the monsters where they ran. Those creatures fell, feet entangled in their own intestines, to sprawl upon the road. Billy blew chunks of flesh away from the bodies of numerous others. One monster even lost an arm and stopped dead in its tracks to stare at the blood jetting from where the limb had once been attached. Resistance was useless though; there were just too many of the damn things.
As the creatures began to reach their position, Sarge screamed for them to fall back, but Billy had no idea how or to where. More of the beasts had emerged from the trees all around them. One of them picked Sarge up, as if he weighed nothing, and shook the big man in the air before it completely ripped him in two. With a roar, it flung the pieces in separate directions. Billy swung the machine gun to catch the thing dead in the chest with his stream of fire. The creature imploded under the sheer force and number of bullets tearing into it as a shower of blood covered the asphalt around it. Its twitching corpse collapsed unmoving on the road as the other creatures trampled it in their haste to get at him. Billy held his ground. He could hear Pullman screaming behind him but didn’t dare turn to see what was happening to the man.
Billy kept his finger tight on the machine gun’s trigger, swinging wildly back and forth in a wide arc, trying to take down as many of the beasts as he could. He felt a pair of massive hands close on his shoulders, then he was jerked from the back of the jeep and flung sideways onto the road. He struck the pavement hard. The pain jolting through him told him his right arm had snapped underneath his own weight. He struggled to yank his pistol from the holster on his hip as the beasts closed on him. Dozens of hairy hands reached out, digging into his flesh. He cried out, his eyes full of tears born of fear, and then pain as he was yanked apart. He saw one of the beasts raising his left leg to its yellow teeth and another scooping out long, red slicked strands from his stomach. He’d heard that a severed head lived on for a short time after being removed, and he soon found that it was true. The last thing he saw was a glimpse of the trees along the side of road as his head was tossed through the air and his world went black.
Thela Hun Gingeet
David Benton and W.D. Gagliani
The staccato throb of the Huey’s rotors was practically deafening as the helicopter cut a path through the night sky between Command and Control Central in Kon Tum to the insertion point just south of Luang Prabang east of the Mekong in central Laos.
They were going over the fence. Flanking them on either side were their escort choppers, gunships loaded for bear.
Special Forces Sergeant Jake Carter, One-Zero of Recon Team Python, sat with the hundred-round drum magazine of the Russian RPD Light Machine Gun resting on his knee. He was staring out the Huey’s open door, past the ride-along gunner. Below them an open field of elephant grass that the boys called the Golf Course stretched in all directions, illuminated by the glow of the nearly-full moon. In the distance he could see the flash of cluster bombs pounding the Ho Chi Minh trail. He sighed and turned away from the door, refocusing his attention on the team.
Sgt. Larry Kane leaned into Carter, yelling over the heavy thrum of the bird’s engine and the rushing wind. “So what’s the pucker factor gonna be on this drop?”
“Unknown, Kane,” Carter yelled and shrugged broadly enough to be seen. “We should be in and out, two days. Not expecting anything out of the ordinary,” he lied.
“So what you’re saying is that we’re screwed?”
Carter allowed a fragile smile to cross his face and leaned back into the seat. They knew the ropes. The truth was, he really didn’t know what to expect. The mission briefing had been short and sweet. They were to observe whether there was ‘enemy activity’ at a godforsaken Taoist temple west of the Plain of Jars, far north of the panhandle. Though Carter had been team leader on a dozen MACV-SOG missions with Recon Team Python, none of them had crossed this deep into the interior. The main war zone was to the south and east, but they were flying a black op into the heart of Communist-controlled Laos and he had little idea as to why. Even if it were an NVA stronghold or training facility, it was too far from the front lines to be of major concern, especially considering that they were teetering on the cusp of the rainy season.
And, overall, it just didn’t feel right.
There was something about this one – they’d been told ahead of time they were going in black. If caught, their existence would be denied. For all intents and purposes, they were dead unless they made the extraction point.
Carter, like all his men, had volunteered for dangerous assignments. No point grousing about it now.
The Huey jinked to avoid a barrage of anti-aircraft fire, glowing green tracers suddenly surrounding them and lighting up the night. Carter grabbed his seat to brace himself as the chopper swerved evasively. A handful of pounding heartbeats later, the assault was left behind as unexpectedly as it had found them.
The pilot turned, looking over his shoulder with a grin.
“Laugh a minute,” he shouted.
The teams never found the pilot's sense of humor contagious, but you did what you had to do to get clear of the fear.
RT Python was comprised of seven men; three grunts and four Yards. Outside of Carter, Sgt. Kane was One-One, and the newer guy, Sgt. McBride, was One-Two. The three of them were Special Forces – Green Berets – and what they’d all volunteered for was duty in the Studies and Observations Group, so they had to be either crazy or gung-ho. Their Montagnard companions were all from the Bahnar tribe: Mock, Jek, Phut One, and Phut Two. The whole team were designated Bushmasters, specially trained for jungle combat. And this wasn’t their first rodeo.
Something nagged at him about that, but it was gossamer in a delicate night’s breeze.
Carter pulled a square out of his pocket, lit it with his Chinese Zippo copy, and took a deep drag. The
mission was nagging, of that he was sure. Yeah, a few nerves were normal. The adrenaline rush of getting dropped into the boonies – into the unknown – was something he lived for. But this was different. It was as if that voice inside his head was warning him. Whatever they ran into, they were on their own. There wouldn’t be any Hatchet Forces or Air Cav sweeping in the clean up if they ended up in deep shit... they were already too far out, and blacked out on top of it. Why, he didn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to know. Even if they did call for an extraction, it would take hours for a slick to arrive. This was gonna be a clean fight, RT Python against whatever they found out there. But that wasn’t what was bothering Carter.
No, maybe it was that slimebag spook, Pearson of the DOD. He’d been at the briefing, quietly lurking like the snake that he was. Sure, Pearson wore Hawaiian shirts like banners and was friendly enough to your face, but it was that fake friendly of someone who was gaining your trust so you wouldn’t expect the knife when it slipped into your back. Carter didn’t like him, or any of his cronies. They were chickenshit in Carter’s opinion, but when you were deployed in Uncle Sam’s clandestine army you had to deal with the devil. It came with the package. You didn’t have to like it.
The choppers headed north along the hazy border between Laos and Thailand trying to steer clear of Charlie’s known nests. The flight seemed to take forever. Carter thought that it was probably similar to what a man would feel like on his last day on death row... waiting. The roar of the Huey’s rotors made conversation difficult – impossible if you didn’t want to blow your voice out. They didn’t want to talk anyway. They knew what needed to be done. They just wanted to get in and out alive and get back to base with the intel. And then maybe do it all over again.
He saw them all gripping their weapons, an assortment of French MAT submachine guns, Russian RPDs, and Chinese AK47s for the Yards. If they were caught or killed, none of their gear was US-made.
And that had made him nervous, sure enough.
Turning east, they flew into the mountainous region south of Luang Prabang. These weren’t the mountains Carter was familiar with from his youth, growing up in Colorado. The mountains he’d explored as a kid were mostly outcroppings of solid rock, with evergreens sprouting in the foothills. Those trees’ acidic needles kept the undergrowth to a minimum in the thin soil. No, these mountains were covered with lush growth from base to summit. They always reminded Carter of some kind of prehistoric jungle lost in the folds of time. If he’d seen a pterodactyl wheeling across the sky he wouldn’t have been surprised. There were all sorts of creatures down there – though not dinosaurs – and they were plentiful. Just about every manner of creeping crawling thing was well represented down below the upper canopy, some of them extremely dangerous.
For some reason, Carter wasn’t worried about the fauna. He tried to shake away the nagging internal voice, the sound of...
“About five minutes to insertion,” the pilot yelled back over the seats, displaying the five fingers on his hand to make sure he was understood above the noise.
Carter nodded and took a quick inventory of his equipment, for the hundredth time. He sighed and crosschecked Kane, making sure his gear was secured as well.
The Huey and its escorts came in low. They weaved between the looming mountains, cutting their path above the valleys like a river carves its own channel through living rock. The full moon was above, but there was no light from below. No sign of a nearby village, or hootch, or any people at all. And nothing to give any indication that they were near anything like an NVA military base, if that’s what they were looking for. All of which was relatively good.
“Here you are,” the pilot called out like a New York cab driver, giving Carter and the others a thumbs up. He held the Huey hovering above the wavering treetops.
Carter grasped the steel bar and leaned out the open door, staring down into the sea of blackened greenery. It was dark as midnight down beneath the triple canopy, but below that their newfangled night-vision gear would help them avoid breaking their legs when they reached the ground.
He deployed the clumsy and heavy Soviet PNV-57 night vision goggles that had been slung around his neck. He wished they could be using US-made SU49 NVGs, but they were incognito and all tell-tale gear had been nixed. He hated wearing these damned Soviet albatrosses. They felt like strapping a brick to his face and another to the back of his head, but they mostly did the trick in extremely low light – working on the same principle as a green eye. Down there where there were only the faintest traces of moonlight, there was enough light filtering down to make the goggles useful. Under a full moon like tonight’s, however, the goggles were next to useless. Above the canopy they’d be blind. Once below it, the goggles would give them what they needed. The Yards would be going in without the night gear – their eyes were accustomed to the jungle’s blackness.
Carter signaled to Jek, and the Yard fast-roped from the slick into the jungle below. Next was Phut Two, followed by Mock, then McBride, Kane, Phut One, and finally Carter himself took to the wire and dribbled downward like a spider weaving a web.
When he reached the jungle floor, the rest of the team had already set up a small perimeter around the insertion point. The three choppers wheeled away, heading back to CCC, as soon as he touched ground. The thunderous din of their spinning blades faded slowly and soon the raucous nocturnal jungle fauna had once again taken over.
The mosquitos were on him immediately, and Carter slapped one that was tickling the hairs on his neck. He could feel its not-so-tiny crushed body curled beneath his fingers.
Goddamn insects. They made life in the bush miserable. And then there was the rainy season.
“Glad to get out of the egg-beater,” Kane muttered. “I can barely feel my legs.”
Carter shushed him. He wanted to move the team away from the insertion point in case any dings had seen or heard the choppers.
They headed east by northeast, sticking to the lowlands. Jek took point, followed by the slack man, Phut Two, then Mock, McBride, Kane, and Carter, with Phut One walking sweep.
With difficulty they cut their way through the thick undergrowth with machetes that would dull much too soon. And the ‘magic’ goggles just weren’t good enough to help them keep moving rapidly through the forest depths out here in the boondocks. After a while they were all wearing the gear slung around their necks again. When they were about a couple hundred yards from insertion, Carter stopped them. They were already dragging due to the night’s heat.
“We’ll stay here ‘til morning,” he announced. “Jek, Mock, keep an eye out for watchers.” The Montagnards melted away like ghosts. The others hit the ground, grateful for the respite.
Carter threw his rucksack down and settled himself on the ground next to it. He opened the ruck, pulled out his canteen, and took a deep tug of metallic water. Finally he took off the damned goggles, tucked them and their power pack into the bag, leaned back, and closed his eyes. The machine gun lay across his legs, his finger resting on the trigger guard. He wouldn’t sleep. It wasn’t fear of the enemy that would keep him awake – it was responsibility for the team. So he listened to every sound while resting his eyes. His mind raced, not for the first time.
The sounds of night insects and tree frogs lulled Carter, calming his hardened nerves until he heard something else whispering between the endless night chirping. He bent his ear to try and capture the sound. At first he thought was that it was an enemy patrol, their gear clinking.
He listened carefully.
No, it was laughter... a child’s laughter.
He opened his eyes and turned to survey the perimeter. There, barely visible through the fronds and vines stood a slender Asian girl in a chang-ao, a traditional Chinese garment. The girl stared at Carter and held her finger up to her smiling lips. Then she beckoned him with a wave of her tiny hand.
He rose slowly from his position on the ground, checking the shapes of his sleeping teammates. No one had stirred. No
one had heard the laughter. No one was awake.
He hesitated, not sure what he was doing. Or why.
He thought he might be asleep, dreaming. He pinched himself and felt it.
She was still there, half-hidden in the dense undergrowth, waving at him, beckoning him toward her.
He shrugged. Then he began to follow her.
Jesus, what am I doing?
His eyes had become remarkably well-adjusted to the dark and he followed her at an unintentional distance, unable to keep pace with the girl who was now running with one hand gathering the material of her robes. He hadn’t initially realized that he had left his machine gun behind, and when he did, he was far from the others. Too far to go back.
He was abandoning his post, but he felt compelled.
You never leave your weapon! his internal voice screamed at him.
But he had, and he couldn’t go back. He would lose the girl.
His back itched, as if someone watched from afar.
Barely in control, he pressed on through the darkness.
SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror Page 24