by Kirk Adams
Moving first to the totem pole, John collected the remains of Heather’s scalp. After looking for every strand of hair he could find, he removed his shirt and covered her remains for later burial. Meanwhile, Viet piled wood around the totem pole and placed the bones of the devoured baby atop the wood and set them ablaze after John commended the child’s soul to God. Then the search party moved toward the far side of the island.
As they neared the beach, the sickening and sweet stench of burned flesh filled the nostrils of the rescue party, so they hurried toward the odor and found what remained of the missing citizens of Paradise. Charles and Joan were unclothed (with long strips of flesh sliced from their arms and legs and rolled in salt for jerky) while Deidra remained clothed and mostly intact (excepting only several fingers chewed to the knuckle). Ashley was no more. She had been eaten raw and little more than a gnawed skeleton remained, though a few pieces of unpicked ligament also stuck to her joints. It was even worse for Stuart—who was smoked over a fire that still smoldered, his once-white skin cooked golden brown and a spit run from his anus to his mouth. It was clear he’d suffered terrible agony—the anguish of death evident from his contorted face and wild-staring eyes.
It took the search party an hour to bury their dead. After graves were dug and bodies buried, Viet watched as John performed a Christian burial service as best as he could remember. Both men wept.
John and Viet returned to the beach by early afternoon, forced to detour from the main path after the burning totem toppled and set the woods aflame. The grass was still burning when the two men came to a smoldering field, where thick smoke forced them to thread their way through the brush. There, they captured two more natives—a young mother with stretched teats (no wider than her wrist and hanging past her ribs) and a young child. Caught hiding in tall grass, the woman jumped away but was grabbed by the quick-footed Viet. While John tied the native’s feet with nylon cord, Viet investigated a noise in nearby brush—which proved to be a whimpering baby boy. Viet attempted to return the child to its mother, but the woman refused the child until Viet compelled her with sharp words and pointed gestures.
After marching the captured mother and child to the beach, John and Viet were greeted by utter horror: the throat-cutting boy was hanging from a palm tree, his broken neck stretched and his eyes bulged out. An eastern guard explained that the boy had been caught nibbling the fingers of a dead southerner. The easterner also pointed to a young woman and old man dangling in a nearby grove and noted that the woman had killed a northern guard with a knife thrust to the back and the old man was the tribal chief. Moreover, every one of the captured warriors lay on the beach dead—the spears driven deep into their chests still standing upright and the eyes of the executed heathens opened in unblinking terror. The easterner didn’t know why those prisoners had been put to death and didn’t really care.
John turned pale when he saw the line of bodies. When he saw Viet sprint toward a band of northsmen gathered near the treeline, he followed his friend—shouldering a spade as his weapon. As the two westerners approached jeering northsmen, they saw Father Donovan using a sharpened spear to tear open the pregnant belly of a dead native.
“What the hell are you doing?” John screamed as he pointed first to the hanged prisoners and then to the disfigured corpse.
“They,” Father Donovan answered, “need to be taught a lesson.”
John’s face turned almost purple. “Murdering prisoners is a lesson? What kind of lessons do the dead learn?”
“Were we supposed to set them free?”
“We were supposed to decide justice at the Assembly.”
“Why burden others,” Donovan said without hesitation, “with this bloody business? Let’s get it over with here and now. Justice is in our hands.”
“Murder is justice?”
“Capital punishment is the proper term.”
“On what grounds were they executed?” John whispered, his anger evident in the clenching of his teeth and trembling of his voice.
“The girl,” Donovan said with a glib tone, “murdered Roberto and the boy ate Serina. This one tried to escape. And the chief ... well, let’s just say the others needed to be taught to fear us. Sometimes it’s better to be feared than loved.”
“What others? They’re all dead.”
“Only the men.”
“Why couldn’t you wait for the General Will of the People to assemble? What was the hurry?”
“I guess,” Donovan said with a smirk, “they tried to escape or something. They’re damned cannibals. We can’t talk to them and they’re not going to make peace. What else could we do?”
Chuck and Jason moved beside the radical priest.
“Kill them all,” Jason said, “and let the worms sort them out.”
“You’ll give an accounting,” John now waved his arms and clenched his fists as he screamed, “to the assembly for this butchery. I swear it. This is no different than the cannibalism I saw on the other side of the island.”
“No?” Father Donovan yelled back. “Maybe we ought to plan a barbecue. I’d kill them all again if I could. No regrets for me.”
Now Steve returned from patrol and joined the conversation. His voice carried rage, though his fury was controlled and subdued.
“This isn’t combat,” Steve said through gritted teeth. “It’s murder.”
“Your first war?” Donovan taunted as he laughed out loud. “Or did you earn a Boy Scouts merit badge in strategy and tactics?”
“We took plenty of prisoners during the Gulf War.”
“That wasn’t war,” Father Donovan said. “It was a live-fire exercise. Nicaragua was war.”
At that moment, a muffled scream sounded from the trees and the three westerners hurried into the woods—where they discovered a teenaged native lying on her back, her wrists bound and mouth now gagged. The girl’s nose was bloody and eyes bruised, and she watched in terror as two northsmen (and one of their women) determined her fate.
“Mind your manners,” the northern woman told the arriving westerners. “They cast lots to see who’d do her first. You’ll have to wait your turn.”
One of the men started to unbuckle his belt, but immediately howled in pain when John swung the flat edge of his spade into the side of the man’s leg. A knee buckled and the man collapsed. His partner jumped back and the woman raised her own ax as John thrust his shovel forward—ready to brawl.
But there was no fight, for two more fighters quickly reinforced Steve and his compatriots when Ryan and a southern man hurried to the scene—the former actor now wielding two spears and his associate brandishing a large knife. Even after Donovan and two confederates arrived a few moments later, the balance of power continued to favor Steve and his allies.
“Put the weapons down,” Steve ordered the northerners.
“She’s war booty,” a northsman said.
“That’s a bit literal,” Father Donovan said with a grin as he joined his companions, “but I do like the pun.”
“No one touches the girl,” John said as he stepped closer to the girl and aimed the sharp of his spade at the chest of the northern man with an unbuckled belt.
“I’m with John,” Steve said. “There’s been too much butchery already.”
“They’re not real women,” a northsman said, “only cannibals. They won’t even care.”
“They’re human beings,” John said, “and they have rights.”
“They ate our neighbors.”
“Is she worth your life?” John said with a scowl. “I tell you this girl won’t be touched while I live.”
“You westerners,” Father Donovan scowled, “are nothing but damned bourgeois moralists. Like Russian liberals, you have no idea what it takes to make a proletariat revolution; and like American academics, you gave up on the socialist triumph too soon. Do you think politics is a debating society? Do you think we fought the Contras with ideas? Do you think we terrorized Reagan’s gunmen with quotes from
The Communist Manifesto?”
“You won’t terrorize this girl with anything.”
“Suit yourself,” Donovan said, “and take her with my blessing. I’ve known monks who were less fastidious than you people.”
Viet lifted the girl to her feet and escorted her toward the LCVP—which had been moved closer to shore—with the help of Ryan while Steve and John argued with Donovan over the fate of the prisoners. After some banter, Donovan said that the math alone dictated a policy of extermination.
Steve asked him to explain what he meant.
“We brought thirty-something soldiers with us,” Donovan said, “and we have room only for our own missing neighbors.”
“One man,” John now dropped his chin and whispered, “was cooked and another eaten raw. Some were being smoked for preservation. No one else needed to see that gruesome mess, so we buried them.”
“There’s nothing to eat on this god-forsaken island,” Father Donovan said, “except human flesh. They’ll eat their own children if we give them the chance. You two are the humanitarians. Tell us what to do.”
“How many are there?” Steve said as he made his own quick count.
The other waited for his numbers.
“Eleven women and thirteen children,” Steve announced. “If we bury our dead on this island, the weight should balance out. These natives are skin and bones. And the sea is calm.”
“I’d bring,” Donovan said with a scowl, “our dead home and leave the heathen to eat themselves. There’s not a boy over ten still alive and they’d all be gone before they can reproduce. Problem solved.”
Now Dr. Morales pushed his way into the conversation. “That’s genocide,” he declared.
“Genocide of three dozen cannibals? I don’t think so.”
“A whole people group would be exterminated.”
“And good riddance.”
Steve put a hand on Dr. Morales’s shoulder.
“We’ll take them with us,” Steve declared. “It’s the only decent thing to do. It’s all women and children.”
“See,” Father Donovan said, “how things manage to work themselves out? If the men still lived, we’d have had to leave them all behind to eat or be eaten. As it’s said, God works in mysterious ways.”
The northerners walked away while Steve and the westerners returned to the battle site and spent the next hour burying those killed in battle (with Brent and Hilary numbered among them). John recited the Lord’s Prayer over their graves and Steve ordered a military salute at their funerals—during which Father Donovan conducted final sweeps of nearby islets. Though screams were heard from one islet, Donovan and his raiders returned with no prisoners and answered no questions. Afterwards, captives were loaded into the landing craft and guarded by the bloodstained veterans of Paradise. By midafternoon, John steered the motorized launch through the coral reef as the LCVP followed close.
It was a choppy return to New Plymouth, broken several times by the sobs and sickness of terrified natives—whose taboo against crossing the sea was being violated and whose untested stomachs churned. The soldiers of Paradise, however, showed little regard for the suffering of cannibals vomiting out the remains of family and friend and turned cold shoulders to the natives and their crying children, though one ill-tempered northerner knocked a wild-eyed and screaming girl to the deck and kicked her in the ribs. The hysterical native wept and wallowed in a pool of half-digested flesh for an hour. Only when the landing craft came within sight of Paradise did an eastern woman splash her with a bucket of seawater.
37
Hysteria and Humanitarians
John motored the launch into the murky waters of Paradise late in the afternoon. As soon as the dark-shadowed island was in distant sight, he abandoned escort duty and gunned for port—where loved ones awaited news of the expedition. There, he told a fleet-footed girl to sound the alarm atop Mount Zion as he briefed everyone close about the destruction of southern manhood and slaughter of his own friends—as well as the fate of those initially captured by the cannibals. He also explained that the General Will of the People was needed to deal with captured civilians. No one who listened uttered a word and only after his account was finished did villagers individually approach him with fear and trembling, asking if he knew the fate of loved ones. Some islanders soon wept from grief while others sobbed from relief. Young children wandered aimless, unable to absorb the shock of death and grief. A southern boy who had lost both parents wept inconsolably, but there was no one to comfort him and eventually he wandered into the forest.
The siren already wailed atop Mount Zion when the LCVP lumbered aground. Medical assistants brought stretchers to transport the wounded to the infirmary while the living embraced with unashamed hugs and kisses. John ran to base camp—where he learned that contact had been made with a yacht whose captain promised to relay any requests for medical assistance. On his own authority, John instructed radio operators to request immediate medical assistance, then returned to the beach to deal with the captives. Meanwhile, native women who deboarded the landing craft were contained to the beach by armed guards—where they and their children wailed, tore flesh, and pulled hair at the sight of an enemy so numerous and strong. Some trembled as they eyed roasting spits built on the beach while others watched a polyglot of races—every black or white or red or yellow or brown face fixed on them—stare in unforgiving hatred or inconsolable grief.
Some natives tried to make amends. A sharp-toothed woman in her twenties, visibly quaking in fear, stepped forward with her head bowed as she dragged a toddler through the sand and carried a baby at her hip—placing both before the citizens of Paradise before scampering back to her own people. The toddler ran as fast as he could toward his own people and even managed to slip past his mother by diving between her legs, but the baby just thrashed in the sand and cried. The mother pointed at him, cried out shrill sounds and unintelligible words, and motioned for her enemy to take the child.
“Oh lord,” Dr. Morales said, “she’s offering her child for dinner so we’ll spare her.”
Though the anthropologist returned the child to its mother with a few curt words, the woman backed away, pointing at the child and shouting to the people of Paradise. When none responded, she rolled the baby into the sand a second time and stepped away.
As the baby cried, a battle-tested northsman pushed the anthropologist from his path and approached the child—pointing with one hand and holding a hoe with the other.
“Pick it up, you damned heathen!” the northsman screamed.
The woman didn’t move.
“Pick up your baby!” The northerner aimed the weapon at the mother. “Pick it up now!”
Now the woman became hysterical, babbling with such speed that Dr. Morales didn’t even try to translate. As the baby cried still louder yet, the northsman grew even more agitated.
“Someone,” the man screamed, “better shut the little heathen up.”
When no one responded, the northsman became utterly enraged—now screaming and threatening the woman as he motioned toward the child in a dozen different ways. Still, the woman wouldn’t go to her child and the baby screamed ever louder until the northsman finally raised his hoe above the baby’s chest.
“This is its last chance,” the northsman threatened.
“I’ll take him!”
It was Kit who called out for the child’s life as she pushed through a crowd of onlookers and threw herself between the raging northsman and the crying baby. Only as she moved the child into the forest (where the baby’s cries were muffled) did the warrior lower his weapon. Only then did the native woman stop her pleading and protesting.
A few minutes later, the captive cannibals were driven inland and placed under guard in a meadow. When several islanders set food and water before them, the women scrambled to eat. Boys and girls who threaded between the feet of old women and young mothers alike (to grab a share of the food) received kicks and blows for their pains, though one
of them occasionally would run off with a handful of food—fighting off his peers to keep everything for himself. Few, however, succeeded and only after all adults had satisfied their own hunger did the young secure a few scraps to eat. Even babies weren’t fed until their mothers first quenched their own thirst by lapping milk pumped into their cupped hands or suckling the teats of other nursing mothers (who soon received the same favor in turn).
Guards looked on the spectacle with evident disgust, cursing some natives and poking others with sharpened sticks to stop the worst abuses. Some of the women scurried from their sticks and others hissed in anger, but no matter how hard they poked and prodded, the guards couldn’t inspire the cannibals to a single act of Christian charity, human kindness, or maternal love.
Three hours after the militia’s return, a moment of silence was observed for the dead and wounded as the General Will of the People was called to order inside the large tent—the assembly dimly lit with lanterns. Steve briefed the assembly on the day’s fighting and asked for citations of bravery for several men. He singled out John, in particular, for several acts of heroism and humanity throughout the long day and commended the southern soldiers who’d suffered the brunt of the initial attack without breaking ranks. Upon his recommendation, the assembly awarded the fallen southerners a unit citation for valor and authorized combat ribbons for all veterans of the short war.
Only then did talk turn to even more difficult matters.
“There’s also bad conduct to deal with,” Steve said, “and I wish I wasn’t the man standing here.”
The assembly hushed.
“Several men,” Steve said as the kerosene ran dry in a flickering lantern and a shadow subsequently covered his face, “and one woman went AWOL this morning and one man deserted in the face of the enemy. They let others die in their place and exposed our people to greater risk.”