I ran.
Out of the house, down the street, away from the huts, finally collapsing on a patch of elephant grass. At first I was afraid to look down at myself, but when I did, I saw nothing—saw exactly what I’d seen up till now, the drab green camouflage fatigues stained with blood. All this time, I realized, I had seen everyone else’s wounds but mine. Not till now.
I sat there, gathering my wits and my courage, trying to work up the nerve to enter another hut. I didn’t think about the mirror, didn’t dwell on what I’d seen. Better just to think of myself this way, the way some part of me wanted to see myself. When I finally got up and started round to the huts again, I steered well clear of the doors.
There was the usual assortment of sickly kids—malaria, mostly, but from the look of them, a few typhoid, influenza, and parasitic dysentery cases as well. I felt gruesome as hell, trying to choose which one to take, even knowing this was only a ruse, something to shock DePaul back to normalcy. Just get it over with. I looked in one window and saw what appeared to be a two-year-old girl—in a dress made of old parachute nylon, an earring dangling too large from one tiny lobe—being washed by her mother. It was only when the mother turned the child over and I saw the small brown penis that I remembered: the mother was trying to deceive the evil spirits into thinking their sickly boy-child was really a girl, and thus not worth the taking.
Jesus, I thought. Said a lot about the place of women over here. But it did mean the kid was probably seriously ill, and after I’d used her—him—to get DePaul back to normal, I could take the poor kid to the nearest Evac . . . leave it on the doorstep of the civilian ward with a note giving the name of his village.
Assuming I could write a note.
Assuming I could even take the kid in the first place.
I took a deep breath and, once the mother had left the room, walked through the wall of the hut. I didn’t feel the bamboo any more than I’d felt the tripwires I’d run through. I stood over the infant, now worried that my hands would pass through him, too . . . then slowly reached down to try and pick him up.
I touched him. I didn’t know how, or why, but I could touch him.
I scooped the boy up in my arms and held him to my chest. He looked up at me with old, sad eyes. All the kids here had the same kind of eyes: tired, cheerless, and somehow knowing. As though all the misery around them, all the civil wars and foreign invaders—from the French to the Japanese to the Americans—as though all that were known to them, before they’d even been born. Rocked in a cradle of war, they woke, with no surprise, to a lullaby of thunder.
I walked through the wall of the hut, the child held aloft and carried through the window. When we were clear of the building, I hefted the boy up, held him in my arms, and headed into the bush before anyone could see.
I wanted to stay off the main road, for fear that someone might see me: not me, I guess, since I couldn’t be seen, but the kid, the boy. (What, I wondered, would someone see, if they did see? A child carried aloft on the wind? Or an infant wrapped in the arms of a shadow, a smudge on the air? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to find out.) Every once in a while I’d see a dead VC look up from where he was squatting, on the banks of the river or in the shade of a rubber tree, and look at me, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes resentment, sometimes fear. They never said anything. Just stared, and at length went back to their mourning, their weeping. I hurried past.
About half a mile from DePaul I caught a glimpse of a squad of still-living VC, about a dozen yards into the jungle, carrying what looked like an unconscious American GI, probably an LRRP. I immediately squatted down in the bush, hiding the kid from view as best I could, dropping a fold of blanket over his face to protect him from the prickly blades of grass. I watched as one of the VC bent down, reaching for what looked like a patch of dry dirt, his fingers finding a catch, a handle of some sort, and then the earth lifted and I saw it was actually a trapdoor in the ground itself—a piece of wood covered with a thin, but deceptive, layer of dirt. One by one the VC crawled headfirst into the tunnel, until only two were left—the two carrying the unconscious GI. I debated what to do—was there anything I could do?—but before I could make a decision, I saw the GI’s head tilt at an unnatural angle as he was lowered into the ground . . . and I knew, then, that I’d been mistaken. He wasn’t unconscious; he was dead. And, very quickly, lost from sight.
Psychological warfare. Drove Americans crazy when we couldn’t recover our dead, and Charlie knew it. Just like we played on their fears with the Wandering Soul, they played on ours, in their own way. I got up and moved on.
Less than half an hour later I was back at the river. DePaul still floated helplessly above the rapids. He looked up at my approach, the torment in his face quickly replaced by astonishment and—fear?
I brought the kid to the edge of the river, looked up at DePaul, made my voice hard, resolute—all that Sergeant York shit.
“He’s got malaria,” I said, tonelessly. “You can tell when you pull down his lower eyelid, it’s all pink; he’s anemic, can’t weigh more than twenty pounds. They could save him, at the 510 Evac. Or you can take him, to save yourself.” I stared him straight in the eye. “Which is it, DePaul?”
I’d known DePaul since boot camp. Faced with the reality of it, I knew what he’d answer.
And as I waited, smugly, for him to say it, his gaseous, wraith-like form spun round in mid-air, rocketed downward like a guided missile, and slammed into me with vicious velocity, sending me sprawling, knocking the kid out of my arms.
Stunned, I screamed at him, but by the time I’d scrambled to my feet he had the kid in a vise grip and was holding the poor sonofabitch under the water. I ran, slammed into De with all my strength, but he shrugged me off with an elbow in my face. I toppled backward.
“I’m sorry, man,” he kept saying, over and over; “I’m sorry . . .”
I lunged at him again, this time knocking him offbalance; he lost his grip on the kid, and I dove into the water after the boy. It felt weird; the water passed through me, I didn’t feel wet, or cold, nothing at all; and the waters were so muddy I could barely see a foot in front of me. Finally, after what seemed like forever, I saw a small object in front of me and instinctively I reached out and grabbed. My fingers closed around the infant’s arms. I made for the surface, the kid in my arms; I staggered out of the water, up the embankment—
I put the boy down on the ground. His face was blue, his body very still. I tried to administer mouth-to-mouth, but nothing happened; and then I laughed suddenly, a manic, rueful laugh, at the thought of me, of all people, trying to give the breath of life.
I looked up, thinking to see DePaul towering above me . . . but he was nowhere to be seen. And when I looked up at the spot above the river where he had been tethered, helplessly, for so long—
I saw the spirit-form of the little boy, floating, hovering, crying out in pain and confusion.
I screamed. I screamed for a long time.
And knew, now, why I’d been able to touch the child, when I hadn’t been able to touch anything else: I was the ma qui, I was the evil spirit come to bear the sickly child away, and I had done my job, followed my role, without even realizing I’d been doing it. I thought of Phan, of his daughter Chau, of DePaul and of myself.
Death makes of us what it wishes.
I wept, then, for the first time, as freely and as helplessly as the VC I’d seen and heard; wept like the Wandering Soul I knew, at last, I had to be.
I must’ve stayed there, on the banks of the river, for at least a day, trying to find some way to atone, some way to save the soul of the child I’d led to perdition. But I couldn’t. I would’ve traded places with him willingly, but didn’t know how. And when I went back to the spirit house where Phan and his daughter dwelled, when I told him of what I’d done, he showed no horror, expressed no rage; just puzzlement that it had taken me so long to realize my place in the world.
His daughter, on the other ha
nd, gleefully congratulated me on my deed. “Ma qui,” she said, and this time, hearing the word, I understood it not just as ghost, but as devil, for it meant both. “Did it not feel good?”
A terrible gladness burst open, someplace inside me—a black, cold poison that felt at once horrifying and invigorating. It was relief, expiation of guilt by embracing, not renouncing, the evil I’d done. Chau, as though sensing this, laughed throatily. She leaned forward, her spiteful smile now seductive as well. “Yêu dâu,” she said, “yêu quái.”
Beloved demon.
“Together we could do many things,” she said, twisting a lock of long black hair in her fingers. Her eyes glittered malevolently. “Many things.” She laughed again. Cruel eyes, a cold-blooded smile. I felt betrayed by my own erection. I wanted her, I didn’t want her. I loathed her, and in my loathing wanted her all the more, because perverse desire was, at least, desire; I wanted my cock, dead limb that it was, inside her, to make me feel alive.
When I realized how badly I wanted it, I ran.
She only laughed all the louder.
“Beloved demon!” she called after me. “You shall be back!”
But I haven’t been back. Not yet. Nor back to the crater, the place of my death, not for many months. I still search for my body, but I know that the odds of finding it, in the hundreds of miles of tunnels that honeycomb this land, are virtually nil. I search during the days, and at night I come back to my new home to sleep.
I have a birdhouse of my own, you see, just outside the village; a treehouse perched on a bamboo stump, filled with Joss sticks and candles and little toy furniture. I come back here, and I fight to remind myself who I am, what I am; I struggle against becoming the yêu quái, the demon Chau wishes me to be. Except, that is, when the bloodsong sings to me in my voice, and I know that I already am the demon—and that the only thing that stops me from acting like one is my will, my conscience, the last vestiges of the living man I once was. I don’t know how long I can keep the demon at bay. I don’t know how long I want to. But all I can do is keep trying, and not think of Chau, or of how wonderfully bitter her lips must taste, bitter as salt, bitter as blood.
Damn it.
Above me, the Wandering Soul cries out from its box, wailing and moaning in a ridiculous burlesque of damnation, and I think about all the things we were told about this place, and the things we weren’t. Back in Da Nang, when anyone would talk about the Army’s “pacification” program—about winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese—the joke used to be: Grab ’em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow. Except no one told us that while we were working on their hearts and minds, they were winning over our souls. The Army trained us in jungle warfare, drilled us in the local customs, told us we’d have to fight Charlie on his own terms—but never let on that we’d have to die on his terms, too. Because for all the technology, all the ordnance, all the planning that went into this war, they forgot the most important thing.
They never told us the rules of engagement.
ROBERT R. McCAMMON
The Miracle Mile
“THE MIRACLE MILE” atmospherically sets the scene for Robert McCammon’s anthology Under the Fang, in which vampires have usurped humans as the dominant race on earth.
McCammon was only 26 years old when his first novel, Baal, was published in 1978. Since then he has followed it with a string of commercially successful books including Bethany’s Sin, The Night Boat, They Thirst (more vampires), Mystery Walk, Usher’s Passing, Swan Song, Stinger, The Wolf’s Hour, and the collection Blue World and Other Stories.
More recently he has moved away from the horror genre with the novels Mine and Boy’s Life. However, the following story proves that he has not lost the ability to take what has almost become a genre cliché and turn it into a very effective dystopian nightmare.
THE CAR DIED OUTSIDE PERDIDO BEACH. It was a messy death, a wheeze of oil and a clatter of cylinders, a dark tide spreading across the sun-cracked pavement. When it was over, they sat there for a few minutes saying nothing, just listening to the engine tick and steam, but then the baby began to cry and it came to them that they had to get moving. Kyle got the suitcase, Allie took the bag of groceries in one arm and the baby in the other, Tommy laced up his sneakers and took the thermos of water, and they left the old dead car on the roadside and started walking south to the Gulf.
Kyle checked his watch again. It was almost three o’clock. The sun set late, in midsummer. July heat crushed them, made the sweat ooze from their pores and stick the clothes to their flesh. The road, bordered by pine woods, was deserted. This season there would be no tourists. This season there would be no lights or laughter on the Miracle Mile.
They kept walking, step after step, into the steamy haze of heat. Kyle took the baby for a while, and they stopped for a sip of water and a rest in the shade. Flies buzzed around their faces, drawn to the moisture. Then Kyle said, “I guess we’d better go on,” and his wife and son got up again, the baby cradled in Kyle’s arm. Around the next curve of the long road they saw a car off in a drainage ditch on the left-hand side. The car’s red paint had faded, the tires were flat, and the driver’s door was open. Of the car’s occupants there was no sign. Allie walked a little closer to Kyle as they passed the car; their arms touched, wet flesh against wet flesh, and Kyle noted she looked straight ahead with that thousand-yard stare he’d seen on his own face as he’d shaved in the mirror this morning at dawn.
“When are we gonna get there?” Tommy asked. He was twelve years old, his patience wearing thin. It occurred to Kyle that Tommy asked that question every year, from his seat in the back of the car: Hey, Dad, when are we gonna get there?
“Soon,” Kyle answered. “It’s not far.” His stock reply. They’d never walked the last few miles into Perdido Beach, not once in all the many years they’d been coming here for summer vacation. “We ought to see the water pretty soon.”
“Hot,” Allie said, and she wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “Hot out here.”
Over a hundred, Kyle figured. The sun reflecting off the pavement was brutal. The road shimmered ahead, between the thin pines. A black snake slid across in front of them, and up against the blue, cloudless sky hawks searched for currents. “Soon,” Kyle said, and he licked his dry lips. “It’s not far at all now.”
It was four o’clock when the pine woods fell away and they saw the first wreckage from Hurricane Jolene. A motel with pink walls had most of its roof ripped away. A twisted sign lay in the parking lot amid abandoned cars. Curtains, cigarette butts, deck chairs, and other debris floated in the swimming pool. “Can we get out of the sun for a few minutes?” Allie asked him, and he nodded and led his family toward the pink ruins.
Some of the doors remained, but most of them had been torn from their hinges by the storm. The first unit, without a door, had a bed with a bloodstained sheet and the flies spun above it in a dark, roiling cloud. He opened the door of the next unit, number eight, and they went into a room where the heat had been trapped but the sun and the flies turned away. The room’s bed had been stripped to the mattress and a lamp with flamingoes on the shade had been overturned, but it looked safe. He opened the blinds and the windows, and in his inhalation of air he thought he could smell the Gulf’s salt. Allie sat down on the bed with the baby and took a squeeze tube of sun block from the grocery bag. She began to paint the infant’s face with it, as the baby’s pink fingers grasped at the air. Then she covered her own face and arms with the sun block. “I’m already burning,” she said, as she worked the stuff into her skin. “I didn’t used to burn so fast. Want some?”
“Yeah.” The back of Kyle’s neck was stinging. He stood over his wife and looked at the baby, as Tommy sprawled on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “She needs a name,” Kyle said.
“Hope,” Allie answered, and she looked up at her husband with heat-puffed eyes. “Hope would be a good name, don’t you think?”
It would be a
cruel name, he decided. A name not suited for these times or this world. But saying no would be just as cruel, wouldn’t it? He saw how badly Allie wanted it, so he said, “I think that’s fine,” and as soon as he said it he felt the rage surge in him like a bitter flood tide and he had to turn away before she saw it in his face. The infant couldn’t be more than six months old. Why had it fallen to him, to do this thing?
He took the thermos and went into the bathroom, where there was a sink and a shower stall and a tub with a sliding door of smoked plastic. He pulled the blind up and opened the small window in there too, and then he turned on the sink’s tap and waited for the rusty water to clear before he refilled the thermos.
Something moved, there in the bathroom. Something moved with a long, slow, and agonized stretching sound.
Kyle looked at the smoked plastic door for a moment, a pulse beating in his skull, and then he reached out and slid it open.
It was lying in the tub. Like a fat cocoon, it was swaddled in bed sheets and tacky beach towels covered with busty cartoon bathing beauties and studs swigging beer. It was impossible to determine where the head and feet were, the arms bound to its sides and the hands hidden. The thing in its shroud of sheets and towels trembled, a hideous involuntary reaction of nerves and muscles, and Kyle thought, It smells me.
“Kill it.”
He looked back at Allie, who stood in the doorway behind him with the baby in her arms. Her face was emotionless, her eyes vacant as a dreamer’s. “Kill it, Kyle,” she said. “Please kill it.”
“Tom?” he called. He heard his voice crack. “Take your mother outside, will you?” The boy didn’t respond, and when Kyle peered out from the bathroom he saw his son sitting up on the bed. Tommy was staring at him, with the same dead eyes as his mother. Tommy’s mouth was halfopen, a silver thread of saliva hanging down. “Tom? Listen up!” He said it sharply, and Tommy’s gaze cleared. “Go outside with your mother. Do you hear me?”
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