Danny tried to envision which way the tunnel went underground. Walking uphill from the entrance, he soon reached a wall of foliage that was simply impenetrable. He could make his way through very slowly, but he couldn’t see a thing. With no way to go through it, he tried going around it. This way brought him to a rocky incline that was too steep to climb. Retracing his steps, he went back and tried to find another way around. But this proved futile. The terrain was so uneven, and the foliage so dense, that he had to keep backtracking and reversing his course. After an hour, he became frustrated. An hour after that, he realized that he no longer knew the way back to the village. Cursing his own stupidity, he spent the rest of the night wandering until he finally found the village in the light of the rising sun. The old women were already up and preparing breakfast.
The gimpy-hand man and the nice man had an argument that day. Danny had gone to sleep as soon as he could crawl into the empty hut they let him use. He awoke in the sweltering heat of the afternoon and emerged from his doorway, blinking in the brightness outside even though the sky was heavily overcast. The humidity made him feel sticky all over.
At first, it wasn’t at all clear that the two old men were having a dispute. Neither of them spoke much under normal circumstances, so it didn’t seem unusual that they weren’t saying anything. But Danny noticed, during the rest of that day, that the two men were keeping their distance from each other. The women were avoiding them, too. The children were nowhere to be seen; they were probably playing their games in the jungle somewhere.
The gimpy man kept looking at Danny in a way that made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. He didn’t know what he’d done to make the old man angry, but he watched his step just the same. The kind man was more kind than ever, which did not please gimpy-man one bit. Their other friend, the one with the gigantic Adam’s apple, just shook his head and grumbled to himself all day—which was fairly typical for him.
That evening, after eating his meager supper, Danny went with the children to the jungle and joined in their games again. This time they were playing a hunting game. One would be chosen to be the prey. This one would run off into the woods while the others gave him a short head start. Then the rest of the children pursued the prey. They carried sticks, holding them like rifles, and when they tracked down their victim, they beat him fiercely with the sticks until he yielded. It seemed that the main point of the game was not to avoid the hunters, but to last as long as possible during the beating. The girls enjoyed the game at least as much as the boys did, and they seemed to be able to last longer under the blows of the sticks. Danny didn’t participate in the beatings, although they wanted him to. He carried a stick but didn’t use it.
Soon it was his turn to be hunted. They nudged him forward with their sticks and he took off running. They gave him only about fifteen seconds before they started coming after him, yelling and crashing through the underbrush. Danny cursed and ran faster, heading uphill toward where he thought the supply village must be.
He found the trail easily in daylight. It was overgrown and twisty, and didn’t appear to be frequently traveled. In the night he must have gone right past it without noticing. He followed the trail now, cutting through the jungle wherever the path turned sharply. The children were gaining on him, and the oldest one was shouting at the top of his lungs.
At last Danny decided he could run no more. He darted into a bamboo thicket just off the trail to wait for them. He dropped to the ground and lay there, panting and coughing, waiting for them to catch up. But they didn’t arrive. There was silence for some time, then the drone of the bugs started up again. Danny fought to control his breathing, wiping his sweaty face with his already-damp shirt.
Cautiously, he stood up and looked around. There was no sign of the children. Had they given up? Not a chance. They had limitless energy and could run at top speed far longer than he could. But where were they? He stepped out on the path, peeking around a thick tree trunk, and shouted in alarm when he felt something poke him hard in the back.
Spinning around, he peered into the jungle and saw nothing. He held his breath and watched the shadows until he saw a pair of glittering eyes.
“Psssst,” hissed the owner of the eyes. It was the oldest boy. Danny could see him more clearly now that he knew where he was. There were several others behind him. They were motioning urgently for Danny to follow them off the trail. They were still holding their sticks. Planning an ambush, no doubt. He turned back to the trail again.
The boy burst out of the underbrush and grabbed him by the arm, saying something in Vietnamese. He gestured at the trail.
Danny looked at the ground. There was something half-buried at the edge of the trail. Kneeling down, he got his face down close to look at it. It looked like an old Bouncing Betty, a leaping mine that would pop up into the air before detonating. Old, but it might be functional.
He looked past it down the trail and saw something else a few yards away: a claymore, situated right at a curve in the trail. The whole path was mined.
Danny muttered a string of the finest obscenities he’d learned from his fellow soldiers. He had just run a very long way down this trail and had somehow not been blown up. It looked like the mines were concealed next to the tight bends in the trail. In his haste to escape being beaten by the children, he must have missed the mines when he had barreled through the forest in a straight line, bypassing the curves. “Fuck,” he said. He thought he might have wet himself, although in this humidity it was hard to be sure.
“Fuck” the teenaged boy repeated.
“You said it,” Danny replied. Then he sat down on the ground and burst into tears.
* * *
The clouds concealed the moon for the next few nights, so Danny stayed in the village and enjoyed his last few days with the people there. Blueberry was teaching him to cook, which he had never learned to do properly. The man with the gimpy hand was still angry at the nice man, so Danny spent most of his time helping the nice one do work around the village and in the fields. He learned how to repair the frond roofs of the huts, how to take care of the ox, and how to trap small animals so they wouldn’t get away.
After another week, he waited for a relatively clear night and went out after everyone was asleep. He had been dreading this next part for several reasons, not the least of which was his crushing fear of entering that tunnel in the dark. You have to go in.
He made his way to the tunnel entrance and stood there, looking at it and wishing he were anywhere else in the world but here. Then he took a deep breath, clenched his teeth, and crawled inside. Claustrophobia gripped him immediately, and he very nearly backed out again. But he forced himself to keep going forward, eyes wide open in the total darkness, feeling his way through the narrow hole. The first time he’d gone through, in the daytime, it had seemed to take about ten minutes to get to the other end. Tonight it took at least twice that, and his terror made it seem much longer. Finally he ran up against the dead-end and stood up to push open the lid.
It didn’t budge.
He had never experienced true panic in his life, although he had come close to it a few times. Now he panicked. The panic attack lasted for a minute or so, after which he calmed himself and felt the roof overhead. The wooden cover was still there, as before. It had just been fastened in place somehow. He pushed harder, to no avail. Then, not knowing what else to do, he braced his back against the side of the vertical hole and shoved with everything he had. The cover shifted slightly and a few pebbles rained down on him, coating his face and mouth with dirt. He spat, then pushed again.
This time it moved a bit more, and he kept his mouth shut to keep the dirt out. Soon there was enough of an opening to fit his hand through, so he reached through and felt around.
Rocks. Someone had piled up a bunch of rocks on the lid. Danny laughed at himself and worked the cover free, shielding his head when the larger rocks fell on him. After a few more minutes he was out.
The air felt
fresh and beautiful outside. It was warm and full of humidity, but he breathed it gratefully as he lay on the ground under the open sky. That sky, he now saw, was starting to fill once more with clouds.
A single fat raindrop hit him in the eye as he lay there, making him yelp with surprise. Not rain, he thought as he scrambled to his feet. Please, not now. If it started coming down hard, he would have to abort his little mission. But that would mean going through the tunnel again, which he didn’t think he could do. So he ran to the hut where they kept the stash of weapons and got to work.
Moving as quickly as he could, Danny slid the cover off of the buried cache and started removing weapons. Most of these he set aside. He found the magnesium flare and put it in a safe spot, then went about collecting as much combustible material as he could find, which consisted mainly of sticks of dead bamboo. He piled this up in the open area at the center of the village. When he had assembled a reasonably large pile, he popped the flare and shielded his eyes from the painful brightness as he used it to start a bonfire. He stepped away from the heat of the fire as it grew, then took a burning piece of bamboo and began setting fire to the roofs of the huts. These caught easily, flaring up with such alarming speed that Danny had to move away quickly to avoid getting burned.
When he had set the last building alight, he turned to find the nice old man standing at the edge of the forest. He had a rifle in his hands and was grinning at Danny the same way he always did. But that grin didn’t seem so kind this time. He pointed at the ground with the barrel of his rifle, then aimed the weapon at Danny and waited. He wanted Danny to get down on the ground.
The cover of the jungle was only fifteen feet away. Danny thought he might be able to make it. His likelihood of success depended greatly on how good a shot the old man was.
As if to make just that point, the man lowered his aim slightly and fired a single round at Danny’s feet. The night bugs stopped their droning for a moment at the loud crack of the rifle shot. The bullet didn’t hit him, but the impact blasted his bare ankles with tiny stones and bits of dirt. “Okay,” Danny said irritably, raising his hands. “You stupid old smiling son of a―”
The old man never stopped smiling, but something changed in his eyes. Behind the pleasant exterior, Danny suddenly realized that the nice man was a monster. The old man pointed at the ground once more. Danny sat down, but this did not satisfy him. He gestured again at the ground, insistently. Lie down, the gesture said. Danny obeyed, and the man stepped forward. He stopped with his rifle in contact with the back of Danny’s head and said a few more words that Danny couldn’t understand.
Thinking back to Orlando, the assistant gunner, Danny said a quick, silent prayer to Buddha. Then he said one to Jesus, and in honor of Sammy Plotkin, said a third one to the Main Guy himself.
He wasn’t sure which of these prayers was the one that worked. As he waited for his death, two shots rang out from somewhere behind him. The smiling old man dropped like a ragdoll on top of Danny. He weighed practically nothing. Danny let the body flop to the ground and stood up to see who had saved him.
A small figure emerged from the darkness of the jungle. As the firelight fell on her, Danny saw a wrinkled old face with a big blue growth on her nose. She was frowning at him, but the rifle in her hands was pointed at the ground. A moment later, the man with the gimpy hand stepped into view behind her. The crackling of the fire was quite loud now, and shells were beginning to pop like popcorn in the hut that held the ammunition.
“Thank you,” Danny said, knowing they couldn’t understand. The woman didn’t acknowledge him. The man nodded once, approvingly. Then they both turned and walked away into the darkness.
“Was it a good thing you did?” Les asked him over the radio the following evening. Danny had left the burning supply village and made his way back up to his cave on the hill. The journey took all day. His booby-traps had not been disturbed in the time he was gone.
“It was what you wanted, right? I’m just going where you tell me to.”
“You know all those people in the village will die. Maybe they’re dead already. As soon as those yellow reds find out their supplies got burned up, they’ll round everybody up and shoot ’em. That’s why the old man wanted to kill you first. Self-preservation.”
Danny hadn’t told Les about the old man trying to kill him. Les knew anyway. He seemed to know everything. “I don’t know what’s right,” Danny replied. “It just seemed like it had to be done.”
“I think you’re right about that.”
It was raining hard again. The cave provided a little shelter, but the wind kept blowing rain inside. Danny sat against the back wall, wrapped in his plastic poncho, with a loaded weapon near each hand. He had to press the radio handset tightly against his ear to hear anything at all from the little speaker.
“Well,” said Les, “you’re going to have to move now. They were looking for you after you took out that truck, but now they’ll be out in real force.”
Danny sighed as he looked out at the opaque curtain of falling rain outside the cave entrance. “It’ll have to wait until morning. I’m not going anywhere in that.”
“Better wet than dead.”
“I said I’m not going tonight,” he snapped.
“All right.”
Les said nothing more for a while. Danny listened to the roar of the downpour.
“Les?”
“I’m still here.”
“Where you want me to go next?”
“West. Toward the green monkey.”
The green monkey again. Danny had already asked about the monkey several times, but Les wouldn’t speak much about it. All he could say—or all he would say—was that it was important to find this monkey, and that Danny had to do it.
After switching off the radio for the night, he curled up and listened to the rain. He was unable to sleep for a long time. Eventually he dozed off, but woke up again to the sound of distant gunfire. It was hard to tell the direction from inside his cave, but he thought the sound might be coming from Blueberry’s village.
It was another hour, at least, until he was able to fall asleep. For a while he dreamed of wandering in a forest of blue-green trees. Touching the trees brought visions of a man he almost recognized, although he didn’t know what the visions meant. After that he slept more deeply. If he had any more dreams, he forgot them by morning.
15
Croaker Norge
Tom Kajdas paused about halfway up the vertical wall of the pit. The hole was a deep fissure in the ground, perhaps ten feet across at its widest point. There was no bottom. It went on forever, down into a deeper darkness than he had ever seen. An outcropping of rock partway down had stopped his fall. He didn’t want to know what would have happened if he’d fallen all the way down.
Kajdas had not tried climbing anything in decades, not since he had moved out of his childhood home with the pine trees out back. Pine trees were wonderful for climbing. This pit was not. Its sides were made of dirt and rocks that came loose every time he tried to find a foothold. He had tried the climb more times than he could remember, and had fallen back down every time he’d made the attempt.
This time he was determined to get out. The opening above his head was noticeably closer; he could see a purple sky filled with colorful stars. The sight made him desperate to escape. He was not tired, although he had not slept since Nathaniel had thrown him into the pit. That was weeks ago, maybe months. He was not hungry, even though he had not eaten. Yet he kept climbing. Every time he fell, he got up and started climbing again.
The last ten feet were the hardest. Clumps of dirt came loose, and he struggled to find something to hold onto. The dirt went into his eyes and mouth. He spat it out, coughing violently, but he refused to let go. Finally, with a long groan, he put his hand on the ground at the edge of the hole and pulled himself up. He lay on the ground, panting and looking up at the sky. He was free of the pit.
But he wasn’t out of the forest. T
he red trees were all around, and he felt like the only person in the world. A wind was blowing, picking up dry leaves and dirt. He thought of calling out, to see if anyone would answer, but he was afraid the one-eyed man would hear him. The first priority, he decided, was to find someone who could help. He turned around slowly, looking for any sign of civilization, but there was none. There were only the trees, red and foreboding, under the strange purple sky. There was no telling how far he was from the nearest human being, or which way to go. One direction seemed as good as any other. He shrugged, picked a direction, and started walking.
* * *
Each morning Seymour was awoken by a loud noise in his head that seemed to come from nowhere. This was Nathaniel’s version of an alarm clock. He dressed in the blue shirt and jeans they had given him—he felt proud that he, unlike most of the Society men, had been given the blue clothes, and angry at himself for feeling proud—and went down to the dining hall. Escape was still the first thing on his mind when he left his cell, but now that he was free to leave his room whenever he pleased, it made sense to wait a bit and see if he could learn anything that would help him get the others out.
Alan Spence and Kevin Larson had been given the blue clothes at the same time as Seymour. Fleming usually saw them at breakfast. They didn’t sit with him, though; they kept to themselves and talked quietly. Larson was returning to his usual self, haughty and arrogant, but Spence had become pale and twitchy. He had always been a nervous sort of person, and his time in the caves had made him even more agitated. His eyes darted this way and that, never staying put. Fleming was worried about him.
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 22