The Men in the Jungle

by Norman Spinrad

  But the propaganda aspects of the battle were as important as the military ones. The Sangrans had been promised a circus, and a circus they would get. They would see a set-piece, a wordless gem of perfect propaganda: People’s Army destroying Killers on their own terms—hand-to-hand combat. That the Killers in question would be half-dead from starvation, would be virtually out of ammunition, would be decimated before they really had a chance to fight on their own terms, was beside the point. The myth of the Killers would be ended, and the myth of the People’s Army would begin.

  Perhaps twenty minutes passed, and then Fraden heard the sounds of scattered gunfire coming from the eastern end of the valley… Now he could see a squad of guerrillas, then another squad and another and another entering the eastern mouth of the valley, loping easily, firing occasionally over their shoulders, egging the Killers on. A hundred yards into the valley the guerrillas came, a hundred and fifty. Still no Killers. Two hundred yards, and now the guerrillas began to disperse, made for the slopes of the ridges in groups of twos and threes.

  Now a wedge of running black figures appeared at the eastern end of the valley, became a column of Killers, waving rifles, shooting but sporadically, as the forward salient of the Killer force entered the trap. Fraden held up his right hand, waved It high over his head at Vanderling, standing on crest opposite. Vanderling held his hand up, waited for Fraden’s signal.

  Fraden and Vanderling stood silently, arms rigidly aloft as the Killers poured into the valley, raising a great cloud of dust. Fraden held his arm immobile as the valley became floored with a black carpet of Killers. Finally, he saw that the trailing edge of the Killer column at the eastern edge of the valley had begun to thin out. It became a trickle, then petered out They were all there. They were all in the trap.

  Fraden dropped his arm, Vanderling caught the signal and dropped his.

  A thousand guerrillas surged over the crest of each ridge, over the top and down the slopes into the valley, converging skirmish lines one man thick, walking not running, slowly, methodically firing volley after concentrated volley as they descended the slopes, the steadily closing jaws of an immense, lethal vise.

  Caught between the two jaws of the vise, scores of Killers fell in that first moment, before they had even located the source of the concentrated rifle fire that was tearing them rapidly to pieces. More fell as the guerrillas continued to march down the slopes at a slow, measured pace, firing continually as they came. Only a few Killers returned the fire—they were lower on ammunition than Fraden had dared hope. Confusedly, the Killers trapped on the valley floor hit the dirt, trying to find cover where there was none. Bullets sent up thousands of little pillars of dust all around them. The air was filled with the screams of the stricken.

  Fraden stood on his ridge watching the vise jaws converge. It had been a smart move, keeping the herogyn-heads out of this one. Likely as not, the ’heads would’ve charged straight down into the Killers and been hacked to bits by morningstars before they could do any real damage. But the Sangran volunteers were none too eager for hand-to-hand combat with the Killers and as a consequence were obeying orders, marching slowly down the hill as they tore the Killers to pieces with the tremendous, converging crossfire. Had the Killers had adequate ammunition, of course, such a tactic would have been sheer suicide, but as it was, the Killers could do little but cling as close to the ground as possible and wait for the guerrillas to close with them. Charging either guerrilla line would mean that they would have to turn their backs to the other and splitting their forces would be equally futile…

  Now the guerrilla skirmish lines were about two thirds of the way down the slopes. An acrid haze of blue-gray gunpowder smoke hung over the valley. Fraden’s ears were tinny from the continual roar of massed gunfire. Through the haze, he could see that great numbers of Killers were already slain, lying in broken heaps in the grass—perhaps three hundred or more. Here and there an almost pathetic rifle flash could be seen as the Killers expended the very last of their ammunition, cutting down a guerrilla here and there ineffectually.

  Fraden lifted his gaze to find Vanderling across on the opposing ridge. He saw that Vanderling had moved halfway down the slope—was the idiot thinking of getting into that mess? He looked higher, saw that the opposing ridgecrest was filling up with Sangrans, men, women, children silently watching the battle.

  He turned, saw that the ridge behind him was also choked with watching Sangrans. They stood limply, jaws slack with disbelief, but their eyes were beginning to smolder as they saw Killer after Killer go down. Here and there a dull face came alive with a twisted smile as the Sangrans saw the People’s Army, the army that they were coming to think of as their army, marching virtually untouched down onto the valley floor. There was something in those eyes, those enigmatic smiles, that Fraden could not quite fathom, something that made him apprehensive, queasy—an unholy, hungry look that seemed strangely like lust, a wet glistening of the eyeballs, the thin edge of something dark and sinister creeping onto their countenances…

  Almost in relief, Fraden returned his attention to the valley floor. The guerrillas had reached the bottoms of the slopes. They hesitated, stood their ground and fired round after round into the Killers boxed between them, the Killers who were now using the corpses of their fallen comrades as human barricades. The moment seemed to hang in the air. The guerrillas stood their ground pouring a murderous crossfire at virtual point-blank range into the remnants of the Killer force who huddled and died behind their human bulwarks, unwilling to close, uncertain as to what to do next. Then…

  The remaining Killers decided for them.

  Near the center of the valley, a score or so Killers suddenly leaped up, heedless of the bullets filling the air around them, charged madly at the southernmost line of hesitating guerrillas, swinging their dreadful, blade-studded morningstars, howling their monomaniacal battle chant through foam-flecked lips: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”

  Panicked, the segment of the guerrilla line they charged scuttled back a few yards, then opened up. The charging Killers were smashed to the ground as if by some great metal fist.

  But if was too late; they had ignited their comrades. Half-dead from starvation, mad with frustration, half their numbers lying dead all around them, the Killers at last erupted. As one man, they arose, all along the valley floor, flinging aside the bodies of the fallen, howling, screaming, swinging morningstars, blood-reddened foam streaming from their self-lacerated lips, charged straight at the guns of the southern line of guerrillas in a totally fearless berserker frenzy. Those too badly wounded to run hobbled. Those who could not hobble crawled forward. Those who could not move forward thrashed madly on the ground, tore at their own flesh, joined in the battle chant that had become a terrible roar: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”

  Perhaps five hundred Killers charged a thousand guerrillas, charged straight into a wall of lead as the guerrillas fired volley after desperate volley, clearly terrified despite the overwhelming odds in their favor. The second fine of guerrillas trotted forward behind the backs of the charging Killers, poured concentrated fire into their unprotected rear. Twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty Killers fell in that mad moment, but the rest kept coming straight into the rain of bullets and finally through it, and the two or three hundred survivors fell upon a thousand guerrillas.

  It was no longer a battle; it was chaos. Outnumbered three to one or worse, the Killers tore into the guerrillas with a frenzy that seemed to approach exaltation. Swinging their heavy morningstars like tennis rackets, they split skulls like mashed watermelons. They leaped bodily upon guerrillas, sank their sharp teeth into throats, clawed at faces with their fingernails, kneed groins, stomped, crashed, tore gobbets of flesh from living bodies. Stunned with terror for a frozen moment, the guerrillas finally began to fight back using their guns as clubs, using feet and hands and teeth.

  Three, four, five guerrillas fell on every Killer, bashed at him with steel rifle-barrels, f
ists, feet. Mindless of the pain, oblivious of the mortal wounds he was receiving, each Killer would sink his teeth into the throat of one tormenter, bash a second with his bloody morningstar, kick at the groin of another, tear a face away like a bloody mask, and one by one the little knots of struggling men fell to the ground into tangles of thrashing bodies, whirling limbs and weapons, snarling, teeth-gnashing heads. Heedless of their own lives, the Killers did what they had been bred, conditioned, and trained to do—they killed.

  Fraden felt spasms knot his stomach as he watched the carnage. From where he stood, the battle was a nightmare image of one great organism with a thousand bodies, thousands of limbs, tearing itself to bloody fragments in a terrible paroxysm of self-loathing.

  And incredibly, unbelievably, the Killers seemed to be holding their own, fighting, tearing, killing, dying with a feral frenzy that was literally superhuman.

  Then, finally, the second line of guerrillas, a thousand men strong, entered the fray. Now it was eight or nine to one. Yet still the Killers fought on as they were ripped to still-convulsing pieces by a horde of ordinary, fear-crazed men.

  But the tide had at last turned decisively. Each Killer was the focus of a small, savage mob of guerrillas who tore at him, kicked, clubbed as he pulled one down, split another’s skull. Four, five, six more fell on him with hands, feet, captured morningstars, crushed him by the sheer weight of their bodies. The Killers were finished, but they refused to give up. The wounded, the hideously maimed, fought on, with shattered limbs, razor-sharp teeth, fingernails…

  Suddenly…

  Suddenly Fraden heard a terrible shout, like the cry of some immense carnivorous beast, a sound so hideous, so powerful, that it cut through the battle-sounds like a great guttural siren.

  On the slope opposite him, Willem Vanderling was charging down into the battle. Behind him, the entire hillside seemed to be covered with screaming, madly gesticulating Sangrans, men, women, even children, barreling down the slope toward the battle behind the running figure of Vanderling.

  “You imbecile!” Fraden shouted. “You bloodthirsty cretin!”

  Then a roar from behind him nearly knocked him off his feet; then he was engulfed by a tide of red-eyed, screaming Sangrans, men with faces like beasts’, women, their features contorted into harpies’ masks, children like savage wolf cubs, as the Animals on his own ridge surged past him down the hillside toward the battle. Fraden was knocked sprawling, was pummeled, kicked, was not able to regain his feet till the boiling caldron of humanity was past him.

  Dazed, bruised, scratched, but otherwise unhurt, he rose shakily to his feet and saw…

  Two solid walls of Sangrans converge on the battle below.

  And then the human tides enveloped all, Killers, guerrillas, the wounded and the dead and the dying in a great tortured mass of thrashing, kill-crazy Animals. He heard a sound like the sea breaking on a rocky coast, a sound compounded of shouts and screams, thousands of feet and fists pounding hundreds of bodies.

  Fraden watched as the Sangrans vented generations of fear and hate and frustration on a few hundred dead and dying Killers, watched limbs ripped off and held aloft like bloody totems or brandished as makeshift clubs. Fraden watched and watched and watched, wishing he could vomit, watched till he could watch no more, then sank to his knees, covered his eyes with his arms, heard the agonizing, gut-tearing sound shear through him like a knife, a slicing, jarring pain in his ears that seemed to go on and on and on forever.

  Finally, the sound seemed to change, become grotesquely, almost gay, a wild, merry carnival sound that seemed to be getting louder, coming closer.

  Fraden got to his feet, uncovered his eyes, saw that the mob was now surging up the hill toward him, thousands of grinning, laughing, shouting faces, bare skin glistening with blood.

  He saw a figure carried aloft on the shoulders of that unholy mob. It was Willem Vanderling, his clothes torn to shreds, his bald skull spattered with gore.

  Fraden had a moment to look out past the mob, time to catch a glimpse of the valley floor, a hideous red sprawl of bodies and torn meat and gore, and then the mob was upon him.

  A great cheer went up, and scores of eager, bloody hands raised him up, placed him high on the massed shoulders of the mob. Fraden rode the shoulders of his people like a cork bobbing on the sea, the President, the Leader, the Hero of the Revolution…

  Across the sea of humanity, riding a wave of shoulders about ten feet from him, he could see Vanderling, covered with the blood of his victims, the red Sangran sun casting crimson highiights off his naked skull, his eyes wide and glazed, his mouth an evil, self-satisfied sneer, oblivious of all save the glory of this moment of hideous victory, of sated blood lust…

  And then the inchoate cries and cheers of the Sangrans began to coalesce into a regular, guttural rhythm. They were chanting his name; “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  Over and over and over again, a chant of victory, of awakening, and a chant of adulation. “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  Despite himself, despite his loathing, despite the horror of that which had given rise to the chant, Fraden found himself unable to resist its call. He felt himself riding that sea of feral adulation, felt the sheer, unadulterated, obscene glory of the moment override all else, seep into the marrow of his bones, burn away the horror he had seen in a bright blaze of animal heat. A small voice lost in the convolutions of his mind screamed a faraway protest, but it could not shout down the chanting of the people, his people; as they bore him above them as a talisman. He was Bart Fraden, Hero of the Revolution, lost in the mindless animal glory of the moment, enfolded in the arms of that mighty lover no man can long resist.

  And he noted only in a moment that flickered from his mind in passing like a candle in a hurricane that the next time his eyes happened to fall on Vanderling, Willem’s face had become a tortured mask of naked, enraged envy.

  As Bart Fraden stood outside the doorway of his hut, the sounds of the camp behind him, the laughter, the slow-dying shouts of victory, the twilight murmurings of a victorious army settling itself down for the night, swirled about his shoulders like a wind-blown cloak, warmed him, caressed him, melded with the memories of other sounds, the sounds of his name being chanted by thousands of throats as he was borne on the shoulders of his people through jungle and grassland and a dozen wildly celebrating villages, finally pitched up by the great human sea like a piece of driftwood in the guerrilla camp, in the twilight.

  But the sounds of the camp behind him seemed to be the not-too-distant roar of that same sea of Sangrans that had borne him through the land as their hero, and Fraden found that the exaltation, the amoral glory, the feeling of being ten feet tall, had not been left behind with the Sangrans, but still seemed to enfold him, surround him with a hot golden aura of larger-than-life charisma.

  Fraden stepped through the doorway, stood inside the hut, felt his own power, charisma, manhood, light up his subjective universe, swell his sense of being to impossible proportions as Sophia, her back to him as he entered, turned, started to say something, then froze, her mouth limply open, her eyes wide with a wonder that seemed almost to be worship.

  For the red twilight silhouetting his figure in the doorway surrounded him with, a deep golden corona, threw his features into red and black chiaroscuro relief, and in that timeless moment, from the look in her eyes, he knew that the quirk of lighting, the animal heat he felt himself giving off, had combined in a weird alchemy that made her see him as he saw himself—triumphant, engorged, expanded, larger than life, a god, almost a god.

  Wordlessly, she came to him, put her arms on his shoulders, ran her hands slowly down across his chest, sank to her knees as her hands reached and loosened his belt, slid his garments slowly, sensuously to the ground, touched his bare skin as if it were some strange substance she had never felt before.

  She uttered a deep sigh of wondering, total, surrender, a surrendering sigh that was also a prideful moan of ownership, pos
session of this man who for an instant seemed to stand astride her universe. Then, on her knees, with her arms locked around his waist, her eyes deep green pools staring up at him, she took him into her, swallowed his bursting manhood, feasted upon the mad glory that sprang from him to her, drank deep from the bottomless well of his triumph-engorged ego.

  And when the moment passed and they parted, Fraden felt suddenly cold, suddenly stark sober, as if the mad magic of the whole day, the hero-ride on the shoulders of his people, the reasonless glory, had drained from him into her and at last spent itself. He looked back on the Bart Fraden who had entered the hut a moment before, and a long shudder racked his body.

  “Soph…” he muttered, a trembling, confused sound.

  Still on her knees, she looked up at him, and as he watched, the wonder drained from her eyes, and she smiled a wry, crooked smile.

  “I know, Bart, I know…” she said. “When I saw you there… like that, I felt it too. King of the mountain. My king, my mountain. It made me feel like… like queen of the mountain, the same mountain, just because I was yours. And because you belonged to me.”

  Fraden stared down at her and found himself unable to speak. She had always been something of a trophy to him, the most beautiful, toughest, most with-it woman he had ever known. The best woman for the best man. Like the food and the three Confedollar cigars and the imported booze, she was proof that Bart Fraden was the best, Numero Uno, the king of the mountain, the center of his universe. It was a jolt to realize that she felt the same way about him. That just as he needed to be what he was, she needed a man who was what he needed to be.

  “Soph…” he finally said, “God, how much we’re two of a kind! We’re so alike it scares me.”

  She rose to her feet, her eyes still fixed on his, eyes that laughed now, knowingly. “We’re stuck with each other,” she said. “King and queen of the mountain. And if the mountain crumbles, we go down together. Whither thou goest… The best man and his best woman.” She laughed, a cool, knowing little laugh. “And we are the best, Bart, aren’t we? After all, you as much as told me so yourself, Peerless Leader.”