by Jay Brandon
Carol was too breathless and frightened to feel triumph, but after she turned a corner of the tunnel and was out of sight of Loftus she felt a giddy sense of hope. She was almost free, not only of him but of the whole horrible house. Once outside it she didn’t care if she’d be barefoot and alone on the nighttime streets. They’d be Houston streets. Home would be within her reach.
The tunnel lights weren’t on at this end, but there was a faint glow from up ahead, leading her to hope she was getting close to the exit. She stumbled, brushing against the tunnel wall, pushed off from it, and ran harder. In her imagination she could feel something right behind her, stretching out a bony hand. It was the house itself, unwilling to let her go.
She rounded a last bend and saw the gate ahead. It was a heavy gate of iron bars, six feet across and eight feet tall, its framework anchored in concrete on the bottom and sides. For an instant Carol saw only the gate, saw freedom, and ran desperately toward it.
But in the next instant, seeing what lay just beyond that gate, she skidded to a stop and screamed. The scream was startled out of her, taking the last of her breath.
Outside the tunnel was a crowd of Vietnamese, straining against the gate, their faces pressed between the bars, their arms reaching through them. Their faces were contorted with the effort to get in, and their bodies were pressed together into one flesh. At sight of Carol they strained all the harder, groping toward her, their fingers turning to claws. A horrid murmur arose from them.
After the days Carol had spent in the house, surrounded by malevolent Vietnamese, this sea of brown faces was the worst sight she could have imagined. Her safe world had vanished. There was no home to escape to any more. Inside the house and out, the whole world had turned Vietnamese.
She sank to the ground, trapped.
* *
Khai followed Daniel out of his study but then swerved toward the front door. On the porch he found a small crowd of his men. A few more were out in the yard, trotting toward the fence. A storm was approaching. From the smell of the wind it was almost here. It swirled Khai’s hair.
“What is the problem?” he asked in Vietnamese.
A man who was startled by his boss’s sudden appearance answered, “No problem. People at the gate. They started throwing rocks. We shot and they ran away.”
“You fired rifles here?” Khai asked angrily. He strained to hear anything unusual in the night but couldn’t.
“Two shots only. Just to frighten.”
“If police come—” Khai began, but interrupted himself. “Why would a crowd of Americans be at my gate?”
“Not Americans,” said his man. “Vietnamese.”
“Viet—” Khai was even more startled. He glanced back at his own house, as if to assure himself that its bulk still stood behind him. “Tang’s men?” he asked.
“No. These were women. Old men.”
Khai looked at his imposing front gate. There was no one there. “Where did they go?” he asked. Something was stirring in his mind but he couldn’t place the anxiety yet. “They may be trying to get in somewhere else along the fence.”
“That’s what they’re going to check,” said his informant. Khai saw another of his men drifting back in toward the house, shaking his head. Others were spreading out across the yard. The fence was long, it would take time to check. He should have replaced the dogs already.
Khai’s thoughts were back inside his house, on Daniel Greer. Khai was enough of a tactician to know a diversion when one was described to him. Women and old men at his gate were not the threat.
“Come with me,” he said. The man picked up his rifle and obeyed, of course. In the hall they found more men running toward the front porch. Khai intercepted them and turned them around, heading back upstairs. “The American” was all he said to them, but they understood.
Daniel had tried all the rooms on the second floor without finding Carol. Each empty room increased his fear. He had been insane to trust Khai. She was dead already.
In the last bedroom he found the Vietnamese woman bound and gagged. Her eyes were open. Daniel swept his eyes around the room, saw there was no one else in it, and started to run out again, but something stopped him. Her simple aliveness. His wife was dead and here was Lmh’s still living. Something about that didn’t make sense. He closed the door and approached her. Her eyes didn’t plead with him, nor did they flinch away. She just stared, enduring.
He pulled the gag from her mouth, but when he asked her a question she answered in muttered Vietnamese. He untied her. She sat up slowly, as if very tired. She was looking at his gun. Daniel glanced at it himself. The woman didn’t look afraid of the gun; she looked as if she wanted it.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked again. “The other woman?”
He thought maybe the Vietnamese woman understood, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. He almost said something to her about her husband, but refrained.
No more time to spend on her. Daniel ran back to the door and out. There was a third floor, or an attic. He knew that from having seen the outside of the house. He started back for the stairs and saw Khai appear at the head of them, with a few of his men. Daniel stopped.
“Where is she?” he shouted.
Khai’s response was too soft for him to hear. The man next to Khai raised his rifle and fired.
Carol’s fingers were scrabbling in the dirt, as if she could dig a new tunnel, or a hole for herself to hide in. It was a mindless action. She couldn’t go forward and she couldn’t go back. She wanted to run back the way she’d come, away from those clutching yellow fingers, but she knew what lay behind her. She imagined she could hear footsteps now, Loftus coming after her, and behind him the whole Vietnamese army she couldn’t escape.
There was no safe place to look. She was staring down into the dirt, afraid she’d lose her mind if she looked up again at that yellow Hydra of arms reaching through the gate. She didn’t look up until she heard her name.
“Please, Mrs. Greer.”
She thought it must be an illusion. But when she looked up the crowd of Vietnamese had pulled back slightly. A teenage boy stood in front of them, just outside the gate. He stood straight, hands at his sides, just looking at Carol.
“Please, Mrs. Greer. We have to get in. I unlocked the gate, but there’s a latch on the inside we can’t reach.”
Carol crawled slightly forward, eyes straining through the dimness. The Vietnamese were standing outside, and it had just started to rain. Two or three of them were almost twitching with eagerness, but the boy held them in thrall. They stood behind him, their hands withdrawn from the bars.
“You remember me, Mrs. Greer.”
Strangely enough, Carol thought she did remember him, but she couldn’t recall from where. It seemed that the boy was someone she had known in childhood, now turned Vietnamese along with the rest of the world. The boy appeared out of context, even in the middle of that crowd of similar appearance.
Carol still hesitated. But back down the tunnel now she could hear movement. She looked back but there was nothing she could see.
When she looked back at the gate a man had appeared there beside the boy. A Vietnamese man of some years but also of imposing height and bulk. His hands gripped the bars. His dark eyes held Carol’s.
“My wife—” He looked toward the house. Carol saw that his hands were straining on the thick bars, as if he could pull them apart.
She knew him. It seemed years ago, but he was the pawnbroker whose shop stood across the street from Daniel’s. The man whose wife still lay bound and helpless upstairs in this house.
Carol began nodding unconsciously. She crawled forward and stood. If the hands had come groping through the bars again she would have shrunk back, but the boy’s discipline was tight. The Vietnamese stood there like soldiers, though their eyes implored her to hurry. There were mostly men in the crowd, but a few women as well. The teenage boy was the youngest of the lot.
“Thien
,” Carol said suddenly, and the boy nodded.
When she got close to the gate she saw that there was a thick metal plate at the top of the bars. A horizontal bar that fit into a slot in that plate was holding the gate closed. It was too high above her head to reach.
She looked to Thien for instructions but the boy’s eyes had cut away from her. Carol looked back over her shoulder and saw John Loftus. He had stopped against the wall of the tunnel some thirty or forty feet back. Still naked from the waist down, he seemed to glow white in the darkness. His round eyes were wide, she could see that even from this distance. He was staring at the Vietnamese, but then his eyes moved to Carol instead. He saw her hand stretched upward, and he saw the bar still in place, holding the gate closed. He saw the Vietnamese were still locked out.
He started forward.
Carol screamed. She shrank back against the hard iron bars. Wind blew the rain in, soaking her back.
“Quickly,” said a voice at her shoulder, and Carol did the bravest thing she had ever done. She turned her back on Loftus.
Two Vietnamese men had taken Thien’s place at the front. They were kneeling, reaching their hands through the bars, and had linked those hands inside to form a step for her. Carol put her bare foot into those linked brown hands. When they began to lift she almost fell back, but she grabbed the bars and steadied herself.
She heard Loftus’s running steps behind her and knew she would feel his hands any instant. The faces of the two Vietnamese men were at her waist, straining with the effort to lift her. She lurched upward a foot or so, and the restraining bar was still a few inches from her outstretched hand.
And Loftus had her then. His arms came around her waist and he yanked her backward. She had been holding the bars only with her left hand as she groped upward with the right, and she lost that feeble grip and fell back with him. She could feel rather than hear the inarticulate growl in his throat. His chin pressed the top of her head.
She clawed at his arms and he threw her aside, into the dirt again. She saw his face, and was surprised to see fear. Loftus looked back quickly over his shoulder. But the gate still held. He had stopped her in time. He laughed. There was no restraint in him. He stood over her and laughed in triumph.
Carol had no thoughts at all. She wouldn’t have planned what she did next. For a moment she was just consumed with hate. She launched herself off the ground straight at him. Loftus was completely unguarded. She threw herself against his chest and he fell back. Neither of them had any balance. Carol dropped to the ground again. She stood shakily, trying to prepare herself for his counterattack.
She looked up to see the strangest look on his face. Rage and puzzlement mingled there. Loftus was trying to lunge toward her, but he had fallen back against the bars and the bars held him like a spiderweb. Carol shared his puzzlement until she saw the arms. They had come through the bars again to encircle John Loftus—his waist, his legs, his chest.
The hands were there again, forming the step for her to reach the latch. Carol stepped into them unhesitatingly this time and they lifted her smoothly. Her hand reached the handle of the restraining bar.
Beside her Loftus exploded, kicking and straining and biting. He jerked an arm free and then a leg. The hands groped for him but failed to find a new grip.
Carol pulled on the handle with all her strength. She tried to step aside for more leverage and stepped right out of the hands holding her. One foot swung in empty space. She hung on the handle of the bar as if it were a trapeze. When she swung on it the bar moved.
John Loftus pulled free. He was growling like an animal again. Carol heard him behind her.
But by this time Linh had pulled his handgun from his pocket. Loftus saw it. Unlike Carol, Loftus never hesitated. He turned and ran. He was a pale glimmer down the tunnel. Linh fired but Loftus ran on unscathed, already shouting for reinforcements.
Carol gave one last tug and the bar slid aside. She dropped to the ground and the gate came open with all the force of that eager mob outside. They surged past her, screaming. There were more even than she had imagined, filling the tunnel momentarily from side to side. Very few of them seemed to be armed with anything other than sticks, though. Carol watched them go rampaging up the tunnel, but that wasn’t important to her anymore. What was important was that the gate was open. She could feel the wind and the rain pouring over her and they felt wonderful.
“Are you all right?”
Thien was the only one who had stopped to inquire of her, but it was obvious the boy was eager to join the crowd racing into the house. This was Thien’s plan come to fruition. He was the one who had obtained the key to the secret gate, as well as knowledge of this hidden entrance itself, from the Saigon cowboy in Daniel’s garage. He had given it in exchange for his life after Daniel had left Thien alone with the men in his futile attempt to rescue Carol. And it was Thien, along with Linh, who had organized the other merchants and their families into a resistance force determined to free themselves from Khai’s domination or die.
“Don’t worry about me,” Carol said wearily. “As soon as I find Daniel—”
“He’s inside.”
“Inside?” Carol looked back down that dark tunnel. She shuddered.
“Looking for you,” said Thien, dancing with anxiety. “I have to join them.”
He ran, leaving Carol standing there alone in the soothing rain, looking back into the tunnel and shaking her head as if someone had made a horrible suggestion. Tears started in her eyes.
He couldn’t stop the blood. It poured down the side of his face, blinding one eye. Daniel was surprised there could be so much blood. He could feel it pulsing in his temples, the blood racing as if eager to escape his body. He pressed one hand hard against his forehead and the flow of blood slowed, but when he took the sticky hand away it started up again.
Khai’s man had missed his shot but the rifle bullet had struck the door jamb beside Daniel, knocking off a splintered chunk of wood that ricocheted into his head, giving him a deep gash over his left eye. Daniel had fled before anyone else could fire. Around the comer and up the narrow stairs he found there. It was a monkey’s instinct, to seek higher ground. In this instance it had probably betrayed him. Going higher in the house further isolated him from rescue. At the top of the stairs he had found an attic door, opened it to find the attic apparently empty, but then he had stopped there in the doorway. Those narrow stairs offered his best defensible position. A rifleman had appeared in the opening at the bottom of the stairs and Daniel had fired the .45 at him. From the scream he didn’t know if he’d hit the man or just scared him, but others had stayed back. Two or three bold ones had stuck their heads around the stairwell opening and Daniel had fired at them. They didn’t test him any more after that and he was glad of it. He didn’t have an extra clip for the .45. He lay back against the attic door and rested. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be another way into that attic behind him.
Where was Thien? He should have been there with his merchant army by now. Clerk commandos. Maybe they had all turned out to be as cowardly as he. Daniel should have just done as Khai had ordered and murdered Linh. Instead he had let Thien talk him into this alternative, to fake the murder. The reason he had finally gone for it was that he didn’t know if he really could have killed the innocent Linh, even to save Carol.
He didn’t know what Thien had said to the Vietnamese pawnbroker to make him cooperate. Thien had been the go-between, selling the scheme to Linh while Daniel sat in his own shop and waited. When he’d entered Linh’s shop he hadn’t even been sure they had an agreement. He still remembered Linh’s bullet singing past his ear.
Daniel was growing light-headed. His hands seemed to be yards away. He watched them fumble with the tail of his shirt and tear off a wide strip. He closed his eyes as the robot hands wrapped the cloth around his forehead and tied it. The blood kept flowing, but more slowly. His eyes stayed closed.
Then they jerked ope
n and he started to his feet hard enough to make his head pound. He had remembered Carol. She must be there somewhere. If she was still alive, then Khai had sent men to bring her. That’s why they weren’t rushing Daniel’s position at the top of the stairs. They’d bring her if they had her. Daniel’s hope of saving her had trickled away. His best hope now was that they could die quickly and together. And that he could kill Khai in the process.
He could do that. Renewed strength flowed to his hand as he gripped the .45 and started slowly down the stairs.
It was like a party until the first of them was killed.
Thien’s mob of Vietnamese were survivors of the fall of South Vietnam, many of them survivors of the last days of Saigon. They had lost everything in just such a scene of carnage as this. They had seen mobs storm through their homes smashing and looting. But this time they were the ones wreaking the carnage. The feeling was exhilarating. They burst out of the tunnel and went rampaging through the first floor of the old mansion, knocking pictures off the walls and sending shelves crashing to the floor. They met no opposition at first. Most of Khai’s men were either outside or upstairs. The mob owned the house, or so they thought.
In the living room they had their first fatal encounter. One of the youngest of l6iai’s men was walking through, on his way to report the negative results of the search of the perimeter. He was almost to the stairs when the most eager of the mob came through the archway beside him. The young man was holding his rifle by its barrel, dragging it behind him. The forerunner of the mob was a middle-aged man armed with an aluminum baseball bat. Both of them hesitated. The young man’s mind produced no thoughts at all. He had no reason to fear middle-aged Vietnamese. He saw them only in the course of collecting tribute, of laughing at their consternation when he demanded extra for himself or laid a casual hand on their daughters. He had never seen one like this before, face contorted in rage. The shopkeeper raised the bat and his voice and came at Khai’s young man like fury made human.