by John Shirley
The two men on either side, he knew only by their nicknames, Lyle and Tector. They’d once screened the movie The Wild Bunch at the base and these two had eaten it up, hollering and hooting in the back row to beat the band, declaring they wanted to meet their deaths the same way as Warren Oates and Ben Johnson. Lyle smoked a long-stemmed pipe, probably packed with koon sa from the skunky smell and the red haze in his eyes. Tector had a spread of suppurating sores creeping up the side of his face, maybe leprosy. All three were armed. Tector had an AK-47, Lyle a homemade crossbow, and Rin a sharp, curved Cambodian dha.
Beo sank to his knees and clawed the black dust. He sobbed.
“How’d you escape?” Jatczak asked the others, slinging his rifle.
They came closer.
“They catch me, march me through bush, but I get loose, tre bien,” said Rin. “These two, out fishing when gooks come.”
“We’ve got a chopper,” Jatczak said. “It’s damaged, but maybe we can get you back to William.”
Rin chuckled, showing his black and yellow Indian-corn teeth.
“No … we stay, lieutenant.”
Yeah, William was probably the last place anybody would want to be in another half hour.
“What’ll you do?”
“Mut bong pao,” said Rin.
A sacrifice. They’d adopt a water buffalo into the tribe and then kill it. Everybody present would eat some of it. The Gia Rai were big on sacrifice to the caan, the evil spirit of the mountain on which they lived. The caans slept in the rivers and the rocks and had to be appeased regularly, particularly in times of misfortune. Beo had told him once that every family killed its first-born child for the caan, to ransom the spirit of the next. He’d taken it as koon sa talk, as they’d been sharing a pipe of the local homegrown at the time.
“I don’t see any animals,” said Jatczak.
“How many men you bring?” Rin asked. He was standing too close.
“Just Hale and …”
There was something off about the look in Rin’s flat eyes. He looked through Jatczak.
“I’ll go tell ’em you’re here,” said Jatczak.
“Glun will go,” said Rin.
Lyle, the pipe smoker, nodded and walked off with his crossbow on his shoulder.
Rin went to Beo and put his hands on the man’s heaving shoulders.
“I hear the ghosts of our people screaming,” he said in Gia Rai.
“We can do nothing,” sobbed Beo.
“We can do nothing,” Rin agreed. “But the servant of Shugoran may.”
Beo straightened slowly and looked up at Rin, blinking away his tears. “Shugoran?”
“The caan. The yang pri are burned,” Rin said, pointing to the smoldering stand of sua trees with his sword. “Even now it stirs, smelling death.”
Suddenly, from the east end of the village, down by the chopper, there came the clatter of Hale’s XM177 on rock-and-roll, and the popping of the ARVNs’ .45s.
“Contact!” Jatczak heard Hale yell.
He unslung his rifle and started to run, but Rin’s narrow ankle jutted out and tripped him. He fell sprawling on his belly. The next minute his weapon had been kicked away. Tector loomed over him, covering him with his AK.
“What the fuck?” he yelled. “Beo!”
Beo still knelt in the dust.
“Come with me,” Rin said to Beo, turning away from Jatczak.
The firefight continued on the side of the mountain. He had thought it was the NVA doubling back on the chopper, or maybe the reinforcements they’d feared, but he heard no returning fire at all. Then it was just Hale’s XM177, and him yelling ‘Get some!’
Then nothing.
Beo stood up and followed Rin to the sacred grove. Rin hacked at the bases of the damaged trees with his sword. Beo stuck Jatczak’s pistol in his waistband and uprooted the spindly, blackened sua one at a time.
Out of the smoke to the east came Phom, limping, an arrow through his left leg. Lyle walked behind, Phom’s submachine gun aimed at his back, the crossbow over his shoulder again. He was still smoking.
“Beo! What the fuck’s going on?” Jatczak yelled, as Phom was flung down beside him.
Beo said nothing. When they had worked the last tree out, Rin called the others. Phom and Jatczak were hoisted to their feet and dragged over.
The five sacred trees lay scattered. The ground they had occupied was a black hole now. Jatczak knew it couldn’t be that big, but the darkening shadows gave it the illusion of depth. A rotten smell rose from the hole, like decomposing vegetation and fish.
They were forced to their knees.
Phom yammered shrilly in Vietnamese, asking what was going to happen over and over. Jatczak only shook his head and repeated that he didn’t know.
Rin raised the sword and chopped through the back of Phom’s neck with a single whack that sent his gobbling head bouncing into the hole.
Lyle lost his grip on the ARVN’s jerking body and it lurched to its feet, the stump spewing a diarrhetic surge of blood that plopped warmly down on Jatczak.
It stumbled a few steps, tripped in the hole, and crashed to the ground, jerking and emptying itself into the black dirt and its khakis.
Rin chased it down and hacked it with the sword, the sound like wet kindling being chopped. He cut furiously, the sword swishing in the air, blood and meat flying up over his shoulder.
“Oh Jesus!” Jatczak whispered.
Rin stood up and turned. There was a hunk of something dripping in his hand, and he pushed it up to his face and bit into it.
Mut bong pao.
Jatczak felt for his knife in the dark.
He watched Rin hand the chunk of meat to Tector, who partook before passing it to Lyle.
Lyle put the scrap of the dead ARVN to his lips. Jatczak looked across at Beo. The man’s face was a mask of disgust and wide-eyed terror. In that moment their eyes met. Jatczak remembered giving Beo’s pretty little daughter a Hershey’s bar, soft from being in his pocket, and asking her name. Fumier. Suspecting an embarrassing mistranslation, he had asked Beo if he knew what the word meant in French.
“Manure,” Beo had confirmed. “Because she’s such a beauty, she must be kept humble.”
Jatczak had laughed at that, and he grinned now, insanely, as a blood-smeared Rin advanced on him with the sword raised. This fucking country. In one month he would’ve been on the freedom bird. He was gonna buy it in the bush after all, and it wasn’t even a gook that was doing him.
He pulled his knife and rammed it to the knuckle in Tector’s gut, for what it was worth. There was a gunshot. Rin toppled over, grimacing. Jatczak’s .45 was in Beo’s hand. The second bullet went through the hunk of flesh in Lyle’s teeth and blew out the back of his skull.
Rin rolled over, groaning beside the hole.
Jatczak got to his feet.
“Christ, man.”
“Sorry, lieutenant,” Beo said. He handed the pistol over.
Jatczak took it and covered Beo, not sure what he was going to do next.
“We should leave, sir,” Beo said.
“We?” Jatczak exclaimed, backing away.
“Now, sir,” Beo said, staring down at Rin.
Jatczak spared a glance.
Beo hadn’t been looking at Rin. He was looking at the hole, at Phom’s head emerging from the shadows.
Jatczak couldn’t understand what was happening. Phom’s body was lying cut up a meter from the hole. How was his head moving?
It rose out of the dark, a slack jawed, drawn expression, drooping, dead eyes. The lids fluttered, and the eyeballs rolled weirdly in their sockets, as if they were being operated by a brain unused to the interface. The head turned back and forth slowly, the eyes screwing in unnatural directions.
“The fuck is that?” Jatczak shrieked, every hair on his body from his scalp to the tops of his feet uncurling.
“The caan,” said Beo, backing away.
Jatczak trained his pistol on the head an
d emptied the clip at the thing, cutting it dead center in the sagging face.
It shook with each impact, and the skull trembled and cracked beneath, dribbling a surprisingly little amount of blood and a considerable volume of some sticky, greenish black ichor that spurted over Phom’s cheeks and out his nose and the corners of his downturned, disapproving mouth.
The ground jolted so hard beneath Jatczak’s feet it nearly knocked him on his ass. Beo grabbed his elbow.
“Let’s didi, lieutenant!”
But Jatczak lingered, fascinated as the head rose clear of the hole on the end of some undulating substance he couldn’t quite make out in the twilight. It was a viscous, glistening sludge. It flowed over Rin, who managed a weak moan as it pulled him close, like a child gathering a favored toy in its slumber. The ground cracked and crumbled and more of the stuff bubbled up. Even as Rin rolled into the thing, it reached out to the mutilated body of Phom and the corpses of Tector and Lyle.
Beo would wait no longer and jerked him nearly off his feet.
Jatczak ran alongside him, down the length of the village, the crisp bones of the dead snapping beneath his boots, through the gate and down the hillside to the chopper.
Hale and Thu lay dead near the skids, crossbow bolts in their chests. Wurlitz was on his knees, still in front of the tail rotor with his toolkit spread out alongside him.
Had he hid during the shooting and crept out to finish his repairs? No. As Jatczak got closer he saw Wurlitz was pinned to the tail by a bolt through the back of his neck.
Beo broke the arrow and pushed Wurlitz’s body away.
“Will it fly?” he asked, squinting mystified at the rotor in the dark.
“Hell if I know!” Jatczak said, running for the cockpit.
The earth shook again. Lightning lashed the sky in a jagged arc over the village. Black clouds funneled upward from the middle of the village, and a hard, cold wind kicked up that made the trees bend almost double. Thunder rolled.
Jatczak slid into the pilot’s seat. He toggled the engine control and engaged the main rotor. It whined to life as he flicked the overhead switches and lit the cockpit.
Beo jumped in the back and shouldered into the monkey harness, manning the right-side M60.
The rotor whipped the air now. Jatczak grabbed the stick and eased the ship into the air, praying Wurlitz had fixed the tail rotor before he’d bought the farm.
He glanced to his right and wished he hadn’t.
The thing lumbered out of the burned village, a great dark mound wavering on two thick, indistinct legs. Just as it had gathered the corpses of the ’yards and Phom to it, it had also pulled all the burned villagers together, and now wore them, the twisted limbs of charred men, women, and children interlaced like some horrific suit of corpse mail. It had no arms, no features, but in its center there was a deep, swirling fissure, a terrifying throat-like tunnel of glistening dark slime. The hurricane winds that seemed to emit from the throat tore the planks of the wrecked hootches loose. Bamboo and wood were sucked into the black swirl and then swiftly absorbed and distributed to its swelling outer layer. The trees splintered and joined it too.
He felt the winds pulling at the Huey.
The bodies of Hale, Wurlitz, and Thu rolled and slid uphill toward it.
Beo cut loose with the M60, raking the thing with bullets, but though the bodies erupted and bled, and the thing shed bits of plank wood and bamboo, it didn’t slow.
Jatczak tested the rotor pedals. The Huey turned sluggishly. He banked away and hauled ass east for William, climbing and weaving out of the thing’s path.
“Jesus Christ, Beo! How do we stop it?”
“Don’t know!” Beo yelled against the rush of the wind and the chopping of the rotor. “The sacred trees kept it sleeping! The sacrifices! Now there’s nowhere to go!”
Jatczak looked down on it as they climbed.
It was descending from the hill now, tearing up rocks, dirt, the whole jungle, getting bigger every step it took and leaving a bare swath of stumps and flattened foliage behind it. He heard the trees ripping free, even above the engine.
It looked like the hill had come alive. It inhaled bats, birds, a tiger, even the lightning, which rippled down into its empty face as if it were nursing from the ponderous thunderheads overhead. It was a monarch conscripting all its vassals. A wild, hungry vortex building a patchwork suit of armor from vegetation and animals. It howled like a lonely monsoon as it came.
Jatczak struggled to keep ahead of it. Beo held the trigger of the shuddering M60 so long it began to heat up and cook off, the bullets popping in the belt so that he had to rip it free, nearly losing his hand in the process.
“Beo!” Jatczak yelled, fighting to keep a scream from erupting through his lips. “Get on the radio!”
Beo knew how to work the portable RT. In a few minutes they heard the panicked chatter of Captain Quách going back and forth with his superiors. They could clearly hear explosions and gunfire amid the squelching.
Beo brought the RT up to the cockpit and Jatczak yelled into the receiver.
“Pot Shot to Chilly Willy, Pot Shot to Chilly Willy …”
After a few minutes, they heard Dyer’s voice.
“Pot Shot, this is Chilly Willy actual. We got our hands full here. What’s your situation? Over.”
“Sir … I got … there’s something … big. Sir, I don’t know how to explain this.… I don’t …”
Jesus, he couldn’t even keep it together on the radio. How to describe the thing? It was as if somehow all the blood of all the children they’d doused in napalm, all the malformed defoliant babies, all the lost limbs the VC had hacked from their own people, all the blown-off fragments of all the men and women and the hate and bile of this whole freak show had seeped down into the ground; and the earth, she had puked up something, something concocted from all that heinous shit. Something that was coming to consume everything and everyone.
Dyer’s voice came back, surprisingly calm.
“Easy, Pot Shot, easy. Have you still got that good-luck charm I gave you? Over.”
The what? Jatczak had forgotten the star-shaped stone charm. He didn’t have it. It must have fallen out of his pocket at some point. What the hell did he want to know that for?
“Uh … negative, Chilly Willy. Over.”
There was a long break.
“Pot Shot, has the boogieman left the hill? Over.”
It sounded like he said ‘boonieman.’ That’s what this was. The Boonieman. The boonies come alive. The ’Nam on foot. The whole goddamn war given a clumsy, monster’s body with punji stick teeth, toe-tag eyes, and napalm breath to shamble around in.
“Pot Shot, I say again, has the boogieman left the hill? Over.”
Dyer knew about the thing in the hill. Jesus, why hadn’t he told them? He fought down his panic.
“Chilly Willy, affirmative. It’s comin’ your way, sir. Over.”
Another maddeningly long break.
“Pot Shot, understood. Be advised. Do not attempt a landing. Over.”
Landing? Jesus, it was the last thing he wanted to do. Still, there was Beems and Albarada and the others. They were his brothers.
“Chilly Willy, that thing’s not stopping. If you pop us some smoke I can come in for evac. My ship’s practically empty. Over.”
Then all of a sudden there was a hell of a lot of feedback and Quach’s voice came through, spluttering.
“Yes! Yes! Come and get us!”
Then Dyer was back.
“Pot Shot this is Chilly Willy actual. Do not. Say again. Do not attempt a landing. Our lines are failing. You can’t tell the cowboys from the Indians down here. Just get yourself a nosebleed seat and watch the fireworks. Over and out.”
He understood. Dyer would call in an air strike. That would take care of the thing. Had to.
Five minutes later, with the Boonieman dogged on their six, they spied William.
It was a Chinese fire drill down there,
lit up by intermittent explosions, and the flickering pulse of a drifting parachute illumination round from the center artillery. The ARVNs scurried all through the compound like ants in a rainstorm, transporting ammo, relaying orders, bearing wounded away. The bunkers poured green tracer fire outward as wave after wave of NVA regulars rolled inward from the tree line and collapsed in the trenches or got hung up on the barbed wire or were cut off at the ankles by claymores or flung into the air by mortars.
The Howitzers fired in succession, the ARVN crews scrambling frantically over them. Jatczak saw the 105 shells crash into the jungle, trying to crush the attack at the source. It was no use. The NVA were coming in from every direction, and as they watched, a squad of belly-crawling coal-black sappers blew a new hole in the wire and sandbag perimeter on the south side with improvised Bangalore torpedoes on bamboo poles. The enemy poured into the gap.
In that instant, the Boonieman broke through the tree line. It was immense, as tall as the hill on which FSB William sat. Behind it, leading all the way back to Beo’s village, was a wide path of bare earth like that left behind when the C-123’s dumped Agent Orange. He could barely stand to look at the slimy hole in the middle of it, as if he would be compelled to aim the nose of the chopper for that opening and fly right in.
When it reached the lines of NVA, they were swept screaming into the dark sky, tumbling end over end like swarms of bugs caught up in a vacuum. Their equipment was sucked up too, guns and mortars crashing along with the rush of men, mashing together in a grotesque amalgam of steel and flesh, vegetable and bone, wood and rock.
Beo gibbered in the back, something about his family.