by Paul Monette
The alien, racing among the trees, stopped in its tracks as the white flash from the grenade explosion short-circuited its heat-seeking vision, momentarily paralyzing it. As it froze in a crouch, a shard of shrapnel zinged through the air and managed to lodge in its thick-hided shoulder. It barely felt the merest twinge of pain, but the gash was deep enough to cause a glob of blood—a thick, translucent, amber jelly—to splash on the leaves of a kingfire bush.
The group of men, now including Schaefer and finally Dillon dragging Anna along behind, stood wide-eyed in the clearing, ears ringing painfully as they waited for the jungle to settle. For a moment the only movement was the pale blue smoke wafting from the end of Mac’s rifle. And every one of them looked as if he hadn’t a clue where to go from here. Their dozen wars suddenly amounted to nothing, and their massive kills and their awesome bravery and luck were as meaningless as the random swarms of bees that floated like liquid gunfire in the deep of the woods.
Anna suddenly broke free from Dillon’s clench on her arm and wobbled over to Blain’s body as if she were drawn by a kind of spell. As she looked down at the mangled flesh her eyes glazed over in renewed terror. But this time she didn’t go rigid with shock as she did at Hawkins’s run-in with fate. Schaefer watched her carefully, knowing the girl’s recollections and Mac’s report might shed some light on the workings of the enemy’s mind. As Anna stared transfixed in horror the major glanced between the two witnesses, impatient for some answers.
Mac spoke first. “I . . . I saw it,” he stammered.
“What? Saw what?”
“I saw it,” he repeated dully. “Fuckin’ thing . . .” And his voice trailed away as if there were no more words to describe it.
Then Mac and Anna, both looking down at the body, simultaneously raised their heads. They locked eyes in recognition, as if they shared a common secret. The same thing had cut out both their tongues.
Schaefer’s patience was spent. He turned to Mac and shouted. “Mac! Mac! Look at me, goddam it!”
The brute soldier stared ahead dumbly, his face numb with shock. He’d shot all his bullets. His power was over, and his rage was useless.
“Who did this?” Schaefer demanded, shaking him by the shoulders angrily.
Suddenly Mac was furious too, as he groped his way out of his trance, furious because he had no explanation. “I don’t know what the fuck did it,” he said with disgust. “Somethin’ terrible . . . big like a gorilla, only it didn’t have no hair. I saw it, Major, I saw it,” he insisted almost pathetically, as if fearful no one would believe him.
As Mac was struggling to describe the alien, Ramirez, who’d been nosing around the immediate area, came running back to the dwindling group.
“Nothing, Major. Not a fuckin’ trace,” he reported in a rage of frustration. “Like they all disappeared in a hole in the ground.”
The stunned and bewildered commandos instinctively moved closer to Schaefer, gathering round him as if to draw comfort and direction from their leader. Schaefer looked up at the yellowing sky now beginning to roll with heavy dark clouds, the day fading into a dusk that would grow no cooler, only wilder.
“We’re losing the light,” he said quietly. “I want a defensive position set up at the top of the ridge. Empty all your pockets. We’re gonna need everything we got.”
Mac, agitated to such a pitch that he growled like a cornered puma, forced himself to get calm again, at least enough to get back to business. “Yes, sir,” he replied vigorously to Schaefer, relieved to dive into a project and distract himself from his grief and rage over Blain.
Even Schaefer was nervous, though. He realized this elusive enemy was a tactical magician with tricks up its sleeve they hadn’t even dreamed of. Shreds of evidence were slowly, if vaguely, piecing together, confirming Billy’s far-out notion that some kind of unearthly killer was on the loose. As the jungle grew swathed in shades of purple the major knew his team would be ever more vulnerable to the mysterious predator who was picking his men off one by one.
And the most unsettling thing was this: Schaefer had always been able to understand before exactly why an enemy hated him. They shared their opposite sides of a war and fought as best they could as heroes. Here he was sure of nothing whatsoever. The enemy came from nowhere, and it had no army and it had no country and it had no creed and it had no mercy.
Urgent as the time was, Schaefer felt compelled to allow Blain a last dignity, however makeshift, before setting up camp for the night. “Put him in his poncho liner for now,” said the major, pointing toward the ravaged body. “We’ll bury him in the morning.”
“I’ll take him,” Mac said urgently, determined to cover his buddy even in death.
And while Mac attended to the cerements, the rest of the commandos climbed the steep canyon to the campsite Schaefer had chosen. Anna, her eyes drawn to a nearby bush, wandered slightly away from the group unnoticed by the others. They all understood she was too freaked out to flee. But this was no attempt to escape. She had noticed the queer glimmering spot of orange among the leaves. As she approached the bushes she reached out, her fingers hovering over the leaves where the alien’s blood gleamed, its color and irridescence like a distillation of all the jungle’s mottled orchid hues.
Tentatively she touched a fingertip to the saplike glob, then drew her hand close to her eyes and examined a drop of it as curiously and innocently as a child pinching the wings of its first butterfly. Anna had not quite returned to the real world. Though functional again, she had preserved some part of herself in a distant and safe buffer zone in her mind, soothing as a fairy tale. She was insulated now from the full screaming terror she’d witnessed earlier, and her fascination with the amber depths of the alien’s crystalline blood was a way of pretending the nightmare never happened.
As she vacantly studied the odd substance, sniffing it delicately, Dillon came up behind her. She looked up with a smile as he motioned her to return with him. Shrugging like a child Anna passively obeyed, absent-mindedly wiping her sticky fingers on her fatigue pants.
Then Dillon and the newly docile Anna—the antithesis now of the fiery Amazon who’d been taken at the guerrilla camp—walked silently back up the slope to the others. The commandos had begun to establish their defensive camp in a dense grove of firs that abutted a solid wall of canyon rock. They had already dug makeshift foxholes, and Ramirez and Billy and Mac were kneeling in theirs, weapons cocked and ready.
Their sweaty fatigues were well suited to the high-country surroundings, the greens and browns fading with the daylight, the dark tones all merged in a way that seemed almost magically unified—except that by comparison the alien’s capacity for camouflage was lightyears ahead.
Dillon helped Anna step into a shallow foxhole where she huddled in her dreamlike state, rocking in a slow and methodical way like a mental patient on high-dose salts. Now and then she looked down at the alien bloodstain, which glowed sweetly in the gathering dark with a faint orange luminosity. Slowly she moved a hand toward the spot and stroked it lightly, then caught her breath with a shiver, as if a memory of the brutal attack on Hawkins had rushed to the front of her mind. Then the next stroke seemed to calm her down, and she fell into a peaceful doze.
Nearby Mac was stringing a trip wire low to the ground, covering it with leaves and grass. After completing a wide circle maybe fifty feet across, till there wasn’t a single break surrounding the site, he moved into camp and reported to Schaefer.
“We got most of the flares set up,” he said. “And two claymores just outside. Nothin’s comin’ close without trippin’ on somethin’.”
“Good work, Sergeant,” Schaefer acknowledged curtly, his mind trying to process a hundred details. Then, suddenly sensitive to the bond that lay broken between Blain and Mac, he added softly, “I’m sorry, Bull. It’s never easy. He was a good man.”
“I never had no brother. He was it,” Mac replied simply, almost matter-of-factly, his lips tightened as if to contain his emot
ions.
Then he walked back over to the poncho containing Blain’s body where he had left it lying at the edge of the camp. He pulled back the zipper to reveal Blain’s face, which looked peaceful in death, as if lying in state. The weapon had done no damage here, and the nightfall pale of the last light made the gray of death softer. Gently Mac reached a hand into Blain’s shirt pocket and pulled out the flask they had shared earlier in the day.
The worn chrome was rubbed away, revealing the brass beneath. Mac rolled up a shirtsleeve to expose the cleaner face of the rough cotton and carefully rubbed the flask in a circular motion, as if he were polishing a valuable piece of jewelry. The outline of the insignia—101st airborne division—was still visible on the side. It was the company Mac and Blain had served in together in Nam, fourteen years before.
He removed the cap with a priestly dignity and raised the container to his lips, taking a swig of the sour mash whiskey, careful to leave enough for another hefty shot. Then he replaced the cap, lifted the flap on Blain’s shirt pocket and gently pushed the flask back into place.
“I don’t know where you’re goin’, bro,” he said, “but two bits says you can use this.” Then he lingered a moment and saluted his friend one final time. Then zipped the poncho shut. The dark had fallen completely now.
“Adios, buddy,” he whispered.
T W E L V E
Once the dust from the blast had settled and the explosive flashes faded into the murky dusk, the alien shook its head as its vision began to return. It peered down at Hawkins’s naked corpse, its prehensile spur piercing deep into the Irishman’s thigh as if the body were a side of meat hanging from a butcher’s hook. With some difficulty the creature dragged its newest victim through the vine-webbed tangles of jungle like a sack of stones.
It had no concept of the heart loss that attended an earthling death or the rage it had stirred in the surviving commandos. Killing was simply a means to an end and had no more significance than the plowing down of the trees to make room for the spaceship. Only the lower species ever died on the alien’s home planet. The higher forms so endlessly transformed themselves that they never inhabited a body long enough to die. They sloughed themselves like snakeskins. Therefore the creature dissected these killer soldiers as dispassionately and as carefully as a clockmaker might dismantle an unusually subtle timepiece.
Obsessively it probed to locate the center of man’s identity by analyzing every millimeter of flesh and bone. Though it hadn’t succeeded yet, it had already figured that the skull and perhaps the spinal cord were crucial pieces of the puzzle. The rest of the body was patently clumsy and unimportant—discardable, like packaging.
The alien hauled the body through the night for about a half mile till it reached what looked like a dry lake bed in a thick expanse of cottonwood trees. The lake bed was like a bowl at the base of a jagged hill five miles from the Conta Mana border. An odd, surreal bluish glow filtered through the cottonwood branches, like a full moon’s bathing glow on a clear night, yet here it shone at ground level like a fallen star, and tinted with an aqua sheen like the shallows of the Caribbean.
The eerie light emanated from the alien’s spacecraft, which had set down in the middle of the lake bed. Here was the egg-shaped ship in which the creature had traveled sixteen million miles on its single-minded search for a sense of self. And for the second time. The lake bed had been hollowed out by its fiery landing a thousand years before. For this trip it had honed in on automatic pilot.
The oval-shaped craft sat ominously still, its smooth metallic shell glowing with a copper patina. The alien stood before it and with a gesture like a blessing raised a three-fingered hand. A ramp extended from the side of the ship and lowered to the ground, seemingly suspended on a dozen lasers. The intruder from another world hefted the bloody body over its shoulder, walked up into the ship, and slung down its newest prize. The silence was broken by the dull thump of the body hitting the cold tungsten floor.
With vastly concentrated strength, its spur still snagged deep in the human flesh, the alien punctured the skin at the base of Hawkins’s spine with its other clawlike hand, severing the cord like a knife through butter. Then it bore upward, ripping at the vertebrae. Stubbornly it yanked harder, pulling the entire spine free of the body, a sickly snapping and popping of cartilege echoing off the chamber walls as bone separated from tissue.
Without a trace of emotion the alien bore the head and spine into a further chamber of the ship, leaving a ghostly trail of blood and flesh on the pristine floor. It entered an oval room illumined by an intense blue light. The marauder laid the sacred remains on its autopsy table and stood back, watching as the light from above shifted to a yellowish orange. Then, with the help of laser technology centuries beyond the earth’s, the connective tissue clinging to the bones shriveled and disintegrated into tiny mounds of dust.
Then the light changed to a soft green, and the alien lifted the skull column and admired the trophy under the light. It was as smooth and white as a steer’s skeleton in the desert picked clean by scavengers and bleached for years by the sun.
The alien reached out and placed it precisely on a glowing shelf along one side of the ship, caressing it gently, proudly, as one might a prized artifact from an ancient civilization. It felt of the texture and stroked the hollows with a haunting detachment. As the green light glowed ever more triumphant it became evident that this was only one of many such trophies displayed around the room. It was some otherworldly equivalent of a big game hunter’s headroom, walls covered with elephant tusks and moose antlers. Yet it bore a kind of purity too, like a scientist’s lab or the inner sanctum of a temple.
At the makeshift encampment Anna and Billy were staring warily into the trees as the black shade of darkness caused objects to merge in a mass of tricks and shadows. Fueled by their fear, their imaginations played havoc as they gaped at the pitiless jungle, each with his own inadequate god.
Ramirez had just finished setting up Hawkins’s radio and began twisting knobs frantically in search of a frequency that would connect the commandos with their lifeline, the standby choppers waiting just over the Conta Mana border. Dillon stood by holding the handset and started to speak as broken crackles of static began to sputter from the speaker.
“Blazer One, Blazer One, come in! Red Fox here. Over.”
In return he could hear a barely audible voice garbled with interference. “Blazer One here. Position and status, Red Fox. Over.”
Dillon winced nervously. He hadn’t ascertained their coordinates but knew they had to be within a few miles of safety—that tantalizing couple of miles that mocked them like a thousand in their sudden danger. “Blazer One, Mayday! We’re just over the border near the river. Enemy camp destroyed. Two dead. Guerrillas in pursuit. Need immediate pickup. Circumstances critical. Over.”
Interminable seconds passed as the men huddled about the battered radio. Then, through waves of interference, they got their reply. “Request for extraction denied. Your area still compromised. Proceed to Sector three thousand for prisoner extraction, Prionty Alpha. Next contact at ten thirty hours.”
Dillon’s face went pale with rage as he listened to his orders. “Roger, Blazer One. Over and out.” He switched off the receiver. “Dumb fuckin’ bastards,” he growled, turning to the others gathered around. “What the hell do they think this is—tag?”
Schaefer watched Dillon with the hint of a smirk playing about his lips. At last he could hear an echo of the old ghetto fury welling up in his former compatriot.
“What’s the matter, Dillon?” teased the major. “Limo outa gas? Expendable assets, pal, remember?” He spoke with savage irony. “Seems Langley’s never around when you need ’em, huh? We should’ve requested a little tour in Syria. Transportation’s regular, and they got TV cameras up the ass.”
“We’re still too far in,” Dillon replied tightly, ignoring Schaefer’s taunts.
But Schaefer wasn’t buying Dillon’s version anym
ore. “Bullshit, nigger, you’re just like the rest of us now.”
The major was thinking to himself that if it weren’t for the darker situation of the alien he’d be just as happy to flatten Dillon, whom he thought of now as a coward at worst, at best a hopeless incompetent.
Dillon glared back at Schaefer, silently reading his thoughts, the dead receiver lying useless in his upturned hand. The men waited to see if the confrontation would explode—eager for it, really. But then the major stood up and turned abruptly to Ramirez, who was craning his eyes at the impenetrable canopy of vines and branches.
“Shitload o’ good a chopper’d do us in here anyway,” the Chicano sneered.
Dillon turned to Mac, determined to establish command again. “Who hit us today?” he asked sharply.
“Don’t know, only saw one of ’em,” Mac answered vacantly “Camouflaged, kinda like Spiderman. He was over there . . .” he said, pointing into the rugged chaparral, recalling the chase. His words trailed off with his terrible memories. “Those fucking eyes,” he muttered, numb and awestruck. Then he shivered in the steamy night, though the temperature still hovered just under a hundred.
Dillon interrupted impatiently. “What, Sergeant?”
“Those eyes!” Mac turned, shaken, glaring at Dillon and shouting angrily. “It was like lookin’ straight into hell! But I know one thing,” he swore with huge conviction. “I drew down and fired right into its heart. Capped off two hundred rounds and then my pistol—the full pack.” His hands were shaking with murderous rage. “Nothin’ . . . nothin on this earth coulda’ lived, not at that range!” At the end his voice was a roar of defiance, as if he would throttle Dillon if the black man dared to contradict him.