Flashback

by Amanda Carpenter

  And with that, in spite of her mother’s protests, Dana got some money out of her purse and left the house, heading for the store. Maybe she would stop at the post office and get some stamps. They only had a few left and they would be paying bills soon. Her eyes travelled to the sky and she felt a drop of sweat trickle down the side of her face. Maybe she would stop at the drug store and pick up some salt tablets. She wouldn’t be surprised if it broke a hundred degrees today.

  Back in the house, Denise stood and bit at her lip in indecision. Then she made up her mind and picked up the phone book by the telephone, her finger travelling down a list of names until she reached Mrs. Cessler’s phone number. She then picked up the receiver and dialed quickly, hoping that David hadn’t seen fit to change the number when he moved in. She stood there for a very long time, listening to the phone ring on and on, with no one there to answer.

  Dana wandered on down the pavement, not really paying attention to anything around her. She was lost in her own thoughts, struck by a mental image. She felt that tight wire inside of her, but now she rather fancied herself walking over the taut, vibrating wire, and the wire was stretched over the pit. She shrugged off such fanciful thinking as she realised that she was in front of the store. The post office was across the street. She headed there first since she could put the stamps in her pocket and she didn’t fancy juggling her packages while trying to buy stamps. As she paid for them rather absentmindedly, her head snapped up like a leash being pulled tight on her neck.

  Something was happening outside. Someone was distressed—she didn’t know who. It was someone young. She hurried outside, looking up and down the street, shading her eyes from the summer sun. There was no one there. Dana checked the street and then jogged across, not really sure where she was going, hunting the air for a location.

  Something was close, something dangerous, something wild. Her steps slowed and then she went on, walking now. Not something, but someone.

  She quietly turned the corner, making for the blind alley behind the grocery store, sure now where she was going, and sure of who she would find. Someone whimpered, a girl’s frightened cry, and Dana came upon the two people, Mick and a girl she didn’t know but who looked very young. Perhaps fifteen, no more. The girl was backed against the wall and Mick stood over her, menacing and overpowering, but in the instant they both became aware that Dana was there, he immediately became nothing more than a young man, out to tease a young girl.

  But Dana knew better, because she didn’t rely on appearance but rather undercurrents, and what she most definitely sniffed from that young girl was the stench of fear. She smiled a slow cold smile and walked casually forward. “Hello, Mick. Nice day, isn’t it? What are you up to today, hmm?” And as she spoke, she deliberately walked right up to him, stared him in the eye, forcing him to fall back an automatic step. She was then right by the girl, and she put out a hand without looking, feeling a cold and trembling hand creep into hers. She squeezed.

  Mick then smiled unpleasantly. He was taller than Dana by half a head and looked strong. “Why, if it isn’t the little Miss Snob! What’re you doing back here, anyway—come to check out the garbage?”

  Dana looked him up and down, feeling a cold wave of anger so intense, it shook through her like a storm. “It appears to me,” she said slowly, “that the garbage is just fine. Stinks, as usual.” She turned her head to the young girl and smiled down at her. “But what I’d like to know is why such a young thing like you is back here with all the garbage?”

  The other girl stammered out something, but Dana didn’t catch what it was for Mick interrupted nastily, “Don’t believe a word of what she says. She wanted to come back here! No matter what you may think, I didn’t force her back here!”

  Dana looked at him, her eyes very brilliant and still very cold, like clear washed emeralds. She sensed too many things, and she had to stand still to decipher them, trusting her own senses over anything Mick told her. She sensed his fury at her appearance, mingled with that flicker of danger and sheer, utter boredom, coming from a reckless young man with little or nothing to do. She sensed the fear coming from the young girl and it was that of a trapped animal, mingled with a sense of shame. Mick was telling the truth, as far as it went. She looked at the other girl thoughtfully. “Well, I certainly hope that you’ve learned your lesson,” she said mildly, letting go of the small hand she’d had clasped. “And it looks like you’ve been frightened enough, so why don’t you just get out of here and go home, hm? Or at the very least, stay out of trouble and stick with someone your own age.”

  The girl scuttled away like a frightened rabbit, and Dana turned back to lash Mick one more time with her contemptuous eyes before preparing to leave, herself. But even as she turned away, she knew she wasn’t going to make it, so she wasn’t surprised when Mick’s heavy hand came down and clamped on her arm, throwing her around to face him. That dangerous quality she had sensed in him had come to the fore. As she hit the wall facing him, though she hadn’t been surprised, her heart started to pound and her mouth dried out with a kind of fear she’d never felt before. He was bigger than she, and his shove had contained a lot of physical power in it. But she faced him with every appearance of nonchalance, though the danger was like a bad taste in her mouth.

  “You’ve butted in where you’re not wanted, sister,” he said softly, eyes glittering strangely as he looked her up and down, appraisingly. The look was coldly sexual, and degrading. “Are you willing to take the consequences, I wonder?”

  “Back off!” she snarled, the fury in herself growing and spilling out at his encroachment. How dared he? And in that split second, realisation flashed into her mind with the force of a lightning bolt. It wasn’t just Mick who was emanating that danger. It was herself. She was dangerous. She barely blinked an eye outwardly, though she was seething inside, and she continued in a soft voice that made Mick’s eyes widen. “You aren’t intimidating a young girl anymore, and I suggest you re-evaluate what you’re getting yourself into. You’re deeper than you think. Now, let me pass.”

  The widened look in the young man’s eyes dissipated, along with his look of perpetual boredom, into something like excitement. Dana felt his interest quicken, and she began to feel quite alarmed, backing up as far as she could to get away from him. This was not merely the obnoxious young man who would plague her occasionally for the sheer devilment of it. This was an animal; something, she sensed fearfully, ready to throw off the bounds that society pressed on it. “Why, I might let you by,” he drawled slowly, coming forward until she was backed against the wall much in the same way that the other girl had been. “If you can give me the right kind of password, or—well,” and he smiled, “the equivalent thereof. Come on, sweetheart. So you’re not the young thing that I was teasing a moment ago. That’s all the better. You’re old enough to play in the big league now, aren’t you?” And he reached out an idle-seeming hand to wrap a strand of her thick hair around his finger.

  He was much too close. She swept out a stiffened arm and knocked his hand away from her so violently that he bit off a muttered exclamation, and her head jerked as he took some of her hair with him. She bit out between her teeth, “You keep your hands to yourself, little boy. I don’t like it—they’re all muddy. Now, get out of my way before I take half of your face off with my fingernails.”

  She pushed past him, knowledge sick within her: she knew he wouldn’t stand for this; she knew he was going to react aggressively, even as she made the move to get away. It was a hopeless attempt to get out of the situation, and everything inside of her was taut, vibrating, don’t touch the wire, Mick, don’t touch it or it’ll snap, don’t touch me…

  …And his hand came down on to her shoulder again, heavily, fingers biting cruelly into her slender collarbone, the pressure swinging her violently around, his face contorted into a mask of rage which, compared to what was about to blow up inside of her, was just a mere childish tantrum. As she came around, her arm shot up and
her hand cracked across his cheek as hard as she could hit. The fingers in her hand numbed as his head snapped back, and then he slammed her against the wall.

  She hit the concrete with her shoulder, bruising herself to the bone and crying out. There was no time to think right then, all she could do was turn her head and look at Mick as he came for her, both hands shooting out and aiming for her neck as he intended to grab her and yank her to him.

  Something snapped in her head; the wire broke; everything in the world seemed to click over into something else, something different. The entire reality of the world as she knew it shifted. Her eyes widened in horror as she watched Mick’s hands coming at her in slow motion. Then, strangely, she was seeing two people where Mick was standing, one of them odd looking, foreign. He had come at her in that very same way, seemingly to waver in the incredible, muggy heat, and she dropped down instinctively, her body jerking in an unfamiliar movement that was somehow hauntingly familiar too, and her stiff hand shot out to chop at his vulnerable neck. His head jerked, and she took the opportunity to go to her hands and knees, her leg sweeping out to knock him flat on his back. He lay there for a second, stunned, and she came to her feet as he rolled over. She whirled and started to run, and smacked right into a hard body that was coming their way. It was David, and he grabbed her shoulders to steady her, but she knocked them away and ran on, swiftly.

  Mick in the meantime had rolled to his feet and had started to chase her, jerking up short as he saw that someone else was there in the alley. He stopped warily, chest heaving and eyes looking half wild as he stared at David askance.

  David, with more than half of his mind on Dana and where she might be running to, moved quicker than a striking panther, his body a blur, and Mick was then pinned against the wall, choking, as David’s forearm pressed mercilessly against the younger man’s larynx. His teeth were showing in an unconscious snarl, and he looked incredibly dangerous. Mick started to stammer out something, all of his bravado washing down an invisible drain as he was no longer confronting a young girl or a smaller, weaker woman but a fully mature and powerfully built, angry man. David cut him short as he bunched his fists into the collar of Mick’s shirt and shook him until his teeth rattled, then throwing him aside like a tossed mongrel pup, biting out harshly, “I don’t have time for this now. If I see you again, I’ll ram my fist down your throat. Do you hear me, boy?”

  Mick’s eager nod and quick reply was lost to David as he ran back through the alley, looking up and down the street alertly, dark eyes oddly vivid and his face, under its overlying habit of inscrutability, showing a hint of worry. Then his head went up, the action oddly like Dana’s habitual sensing the air, the action wholly unconscious. He turned and loped up the street.

  Dana was running as fast as she could, caught in the middle of a singularly odd crisis, propelled into it by that hauntingly familiar aggressive movement from Mick. Her chest heaved in huge, air sucking gasps, her face and bare neck and arms glistening with sweat. Her head jerked first to the left and then the right, searching for signs of danger.

  Her whole perception had clicked over into something so very real to her, so utterly immediate and frighteningly present that she was in a state of panic. The landscape was different, her home, her whole world far, far away as she fought to survive in a place totally alien, bizarre, and threatening.

  She had to get to those soldiers, had to find them as soon as possible. Five men, no, five mere boys, injured and alone in the rain forest would never survive all of the snipers, the guerrilla fighting, the damnable booby traps. If night fell and they were still out there, they might as well be dead. For that matter, so might she/he. That ’copter crash had really shaken her/his world up. God knows, she/he didn’t ever want to see another helicopter again in his life. After this, by God, he’d never fly again, not if he’d anything to say about it.

  No weapons, no ammunition, no food, no medical supplies, no shelter—chances were, all of them would die tonight. If the Viet Cong didn’t get him, then a Bouncing Betty would and just blow him to hell. God, this was senseless, a huge jungle full of creeping, sweating, panicked kids fighting dully on. There was absolutely no relief from it, the constant presence and danger of this stinking hole. There was nothing in this world but survival. And it wasn’t any easier just because he was a few years older than most of the eighteen-year-old boys who were given guns and shown how to kill, and then shoved into a nightmare.

  It didn’t matter how old you were; you were never ready for anything over here. Violently killed people are dead, no matter how one looks at it. The blood was red, no matter who it came from.

  Dana ran on, her mind working on two levels. On the very superficial level, she was seeing the strip of asphalt she was racing down and acknowledging its existence. But that level was fast disappearing as the other level of consciousness pushed to supremacy. It wasn’t really there in the context of reality that she was now seeing. It was beneath her feet and yet different as she wandered in that disconnected reality that dreams and nightmares occupy. She passed a tree that she’d known for fifteen years, a good, solid oak, but it wasn’t familiar anymore. Everything was enemy territory, alien landscape, different, sinister.

  She’d overbalanced, and fallen in. This was the pit. This was where the nightmares had been heading, gradually sucking her in until she was no longer the observer but the participant, not merely sharing the dream but living it, with her fear and sweat and rage. She couldn’t separate her own ego from the picture.

  God, what a time for this to be happening to him! He was an old timer now, almost ready to be shipped back to the States. He had only a month and a half more to put in until he had served his time, and then he was going home. It was typical. All of the old timers got it just before they were to leave this hellhole. Either that or they got it just after they came back from R&R.

  If he ever got out of this place alive, he would never think, hear or talk of it again. He’d bury this so deep that no one would ever find it again, least of all him. He never wanted to remember this time. He’d never even breathe the name Vietnam.

  It was all so senseless. It was all so futile and senseless.

  Chapter Five

  Dana burst into the house like a bullet, hurtling through the living room and racing madly for the stairs. She threw open the hall closet door and started to haul things out swiftly, cursing at her shaking hands as she fumbled. First she drew out a blanket and threw it on the floor, spread out. Then she started to throw things on it: the first aid kit, rolls of bandages, scissors, a few clean, white towels. Her mother, attracted by the noise, came out into the hall and stared at Dana, amazed.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Denise demanded.

  Sweat glistened on Dana’s forehead. She barely heard her mother’s question. It was a good thing this encampment was so close. She had to hurry before someone came upon her. Damn it, she had no weapon! What should she do—something sparked in her mind and she grabbed the edges of the blanket together and hauled it downstairs. Denise followed, beginning to feel alarmed.

  “Dana, will you tell me what you think you are doing?” she repeated, grabbing a hold of her daughter’s arm.

  Dana threw it off violently. “I crashed!” she shouted impatiently. “I crashed before I could get to them! They’re going to die if we don’t get them to a MASH unit soon! Get the hell out of my way!” She had to try to make it to the unit with these supplies. It wasn’t much, but it could make the difference between life and death for some of them. She ran into the kitchen and swept like a fury through the cupboard, grabbing cans of food at random and throwing them down with the medical supplies. Then she pelted for the study, yanking open drawers as she searched, leaving a wreck behind her as they fell out to the floor when she pulled too hard.

  “Oh, my God!” Denise, ashen-faced, breathed. She jumped forward, throwing out both hands. “No, Dana! Don’t—don’t do that…Oh, dear God…” Intent as she was, horror-stricken a
t what Dana had found, Denise didn’t hear David crash into the house until he was right behind her, pushing roughly past and heading like an arrow for Dana only to be brought up short as she slowly turned around and stared at him with dilated eyes, her skin stretched tight.

  She was holding a black and deadly revolver in one small hand, and she pushed the wheel back home.

  She stared at David, a look of wild desperation in her eyes, and her hands trembled on the small, heavy gun. He was standing absolutely still, absolutely white, his eyes leaping with emotion. He just looked at her and there was something sick in his eyes. “Dana,” he said gently and quietly, making no move. “Dana, sweetheart, please listen to me. It’s all right. You can relax and put the gun down now. Please, can you manage to give me the gun?” He advanced one step.

  She just stared at him, eyes wide. It was hot, so hot. ’Nam was just pure murder in the summertime, getting unbearably humid and scorching. It was pure murder in the winter, too, with the rainy season and the monsoons, and water and mosquitoes everywhere. In fact, ’Nam was just plain murder, no matter how you looked at it. Kids murdering kids, and nobody was stopping it. Crazy, the whole world’s gone crazy. She took a deep, shaking breath and mopped her forehead. Her hand came away wet. “I forgot the salt tablets,” she whimpered, looking at the wetness on her hand.

  David, eyes intent, heart leaping, took another step. She was across the desk, so far away. God, she looked so small and fragile and innocent, and she had that gun held so precariously in her hands. “I’ve got some salt tablets, sweetheart,” he muttered, and he held out his hand. “I have some at home. I’ll give them to you, only you have to put the gun down to go with me. Please, Dana, put it down.” Oh, please.

  Denise, terrified and frozen, could only watch David as he took another step. Dana’s eyes suddenly sharpened on him fiercely, and she backed so sharply up against the bookcase that she cracked her sore shoulder against a protruding shelf and cried out in pain. Denise made a sound and covered her mouth with both shaking hands. David had frozen again.