by J. F. Holmes
“Light them up!”
It was a short, sharp firefight. Master Guns knifed the guy on top of him, while the rest of my fire team, augmented by Trahn’s Ghost Hunters and Fox’s platoon, killed the remainder.
“Any wounded?”
“No, sir,” Master Guns replied as I looked at the blood spattering him. “This is from the guy I killed. He didn’t even resist.”
“Major, I’d suggest removing the heads of the bodies,” Captain Trahn said.
“Why?” Master Guns asked.
“No head, the body can’t be reused as a carrier for a daemon. If we don’t find Dr. Baird, we don’t want to leave him fresh corpses.”
“That makes sense, sir.”
“Yeah, it does. Spread the word,” I said, taking a musette bag from Fox.
“I’ll let my platoon know, sir,” Fox said.
In the bag was the usual ash and trash intel sources—wallets, a couple of books of Uncle Ho’s poetry, letters from home, and several unusually folded bits of paper.
“Major, may I?” Trahn asked, reaching for one of the bits of, for lack of a better term, origami.
“Sure,” I replied, extending my hand.
He took the paper and said a quick prayer under his breath before carefully unfolding it.
“Yes, we’ve seen these before,” he said, handing me the slip of paper.
“I can see it’s in Vietnamese, and that’s about it.”
“It’s an Eastern Orthodox prayer of protection,” Trahn replied. “We have been finding it on NVA soldiers in areas where there is reported supernatural activity.”
“So the Communists are issuing prayers?” I asked, folding and slipping the scrap of paper into a plastic bag to go in my intel report from this mission.
“Yes, sir. Ho and some of his generals are a bit more pragmatic than people want to believe. It also seems that if it keeps the soldiers calm, they’re willing to use it.”
“That makes sense,” I replied, adding the letters and wallets to the bag. “Let’s go see if they’ve found anything at the house.”
The rubber trees had lost that ‘kept’ look. Several looked like they’d tangled with something big, which had broken them off about three feet above ground level.
“Elephant,” he replied, stroking the stubble on his chin. “Or artillery.”
“We pulled the records for the last year. Nothing’s fired on these coordinates, including Air America.”
“You asked, I answered.” Huggins shrugged. “Probably an elephant.”
“I hate not knowing shit like this,” I said, walking down the line of damaged trees.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen, sir?” Master Guns was striding along beside me. “We all get eaten by the boogey man and shat out?”
“You are not helping, Master Guns.”
We finally exited the plantation forest and crossed the overgrown road to the main house and buildings where raw latex had been process for shipping to the World. There was a beaten path through the elephant grass from the trees to one of the outbuildings, complete with one footprint in the dust of the road.
“No way, sir,” Master Guns said, laying his M16 down next to the footprint and taking a photo. The footprint was longer than the rifle.
“Boogey man hypothesis looking more realistic, Master Guns?”
“No offense to Captain Trahn, Major, but have you ever seen a Viet or Laotian with a size forty-eight boot?”
“I think we know what broke the trees,” Captain Trahn said.
“Yeah, a Laotian giant,” Master Guns said, recovering his rifle.
“No such thing,” I replied, walking across the weed-strewn gravel to the front door of the house.
One panel of the door hung drunkenly from the frame; the other was ajar. Leaves, water-swollen books, and bits of broken plaster covered the entryway floor. Small things skittered in the ruins. Private White was waiting in the main room.
“Staff Sarn’t’s this way,” White said, leading us through the house.
Davis was waiting in what had probably been the cook’s room off the kitchen. Someone had cleaned the room, unlike the rest of the house. There was a rusting, iron framed bed with a new mattress and sheets, a table with a broken leg, and a desk.
“Someone with contacts on the black market has been here, sir,” Davis said, pointing to a stack of C-rations in the corner.
“Any papers?”
“A diary, sir, but it’s encrypted,” Davis said, handing over a pair of leather-bound books. I flipped through the pages—except for the dates in the French style, nothing was readable.
“Well, whoever wrote this has neat handwriting, at least,” I said, handing one of the books over to Captain Trahn.
“This is Doctor Baird’s handwriting,” Trahn replied. “Other than that, yes, we’ll have to hand it over to crypto to figure it out. If they can find a key.”
“We also found some notes in…French, I think,” Davis said, handing over a three-ring binder.
I passed it straight to Trahn. French wasn’t on my list of languages.
“Creole, I think,” Trahn said, flipping through the pages. “Probably Haitian. Looks like a series of potions for preserving a human body for daemonic possession.”
“You can read that?” I asked, looking over his shoulder.
“There are differences in Haitian French and Vietnamese French, but there are structural similarities,” Trahn shrugged, handing me the notebook. “I also spent a few years in Haiti after the seminary.”
“I wasn’t aware the Church offered travel opportunities, Father.”
“Much like the Marine Corps, Major, the Church offers travel to exotic locations, where you can meet interesting people. The only difference being the Church officially frowns on killing them after you meet them.”
“You photograph this?” I asked Davis, adding the notebook to my ruck.
“Yes, sir,” he replied as Corporal Cragen stuck his head in the door.
“Sir, we found something in the processing shed,” Cragen said when I saw him.
“Lay on,” I replied.
The processing sheds lay between the ‘big’ house and the laborer’s quarters—most of those were in ruins. I could smell formaldehyde and rot before entering the shed. Inside there were tables covered in dried blood and vats. The formaldehyde stench rose from the vats.
“Sir, I’ve seen some weird shit since I joined you, but what we found in those vats…it’s disgusting.”
I walked to the first vat and looked in. There was a body floating just under the surface of the formaldehyde.
“Makes sense,” I said. “Preserve the bodies until you can add a motivator. I take it you found the spell circle in the other shed?”
“Yes sir, more or less. The third one, though, that’s the weird one.”
“Weird how?”
“Sir, you ever seen the movie Frankenstein?”
“Yes. I even read the book.”
“Well, imagine that, only worse,” Cragen said before leading us out of the shed.
Cragen was correct. The third shed looked like someone had taken the Tesla coils and other pseudo-scientific equipment after viewing the movie Frankenstein and then tossed in kabalistic markings and all the chemicals they could find. There were also molds for the various body parts—bones and organs in industrial sizes.
There was a partial skeleton laid out on a giant-sized prep table—all the bones of the lower body were on the table, along with the spinal column. Someone had manufactured the bones—you could see the smaller bones that made the larger ones.
“Corporal Cragen, you’re correct. This is officially some weird shit,” I said, looking at the silver wires that joined the bones together.
“This is nothin’, Major,” Cragen said, pointing to the vats at the end of the shed. “Those are full of bits—muscles segregated by type, organs, and a big old bucket of brains.”
I turned to Trahn.
�
�You suspected this?” I said.
“Yes, Major, based on the notes in Haitian Creole. This is what you do when you want to bring a larger, more powerful daemon to life,” Trahn said. “The necromancer constructs a body that’s capable of holding what he brings to this plane.”
“That would explain the footprints outside,” Master Guns said. “What do you do with undead giants?”
“Anything you want,” Trahn said, deadpan.
“Cragen, photograph everything and get the explosives rigged. We need to get out of here before Baird gets back with his pet giants.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a gabble on the radio. Wilson tilted his head, putting an ear to the handset. He slipped it from his shoulder strap.
“Hold one. Major,” Wilson started, “there’s movement over by the LZ.”
“Cragen, you got this?” A nod. “Right, let’s go see what’s going on over there.”
“On the way,” Wilson said into the handset before clipping it back to his shoulder strap.
I’d picked the LZ based on the aerial photographs of the site. Back in the 1800s, they’d probably used the clearing to do preventive checks and maintenance on the elephants they used for heavy lifting power. It’d looked clear in the photos, so we were going to do some landscaping by high explosives to clear enough area for the Sea Knights to extract everyone. The firefight started before we got there—automatic weapons fire, answered by semi-auto and bolt action rifles, along with limited automatic weapons fire.
The weird part was watching incoming tracers float past. A green ball would drift lazily toward me, and then snap past as if it was late for a flight home.
“Jesus sir, that’s a Jap Type 99 machine gun,” Huggins said, crouching behind a tree. “Got shot with one in Korea. I still have nightmares about the sound.”
The Type 99 fell silent following the CRUMP of a 40mm grenade exploding in the jungle around the clearing. Ahead, I could see Lt. Anderson; he turned and waved me forward. I dashed and dove for cover as a desultory firing started from the other side of the clearing.
“Sorry, sir, thought we’d cleared them all out,” Anderson said. “We’re taking a lot of fire, but no one has been hit yet.”
Three grenades going off in rapid succession punctuated his statement. A Marine ran past, humping ammo to comrades on the other side of the clearing—I could hear the grenades in his cargo pockets clicking as they bumped together, and said a quick prayer that the Marine hadn’t broken both legs off the cotter pin holding the spoon down, otherwise, things could get messy.
“Looks like Doctor Baird got back,” Captain Trahn said as a line of walking corpses rose from the far side of the clearing.
There was a ragged “Banzai!” and the corpses broke into a shuffling charge.
“Damn, Major,” Master Guns said, dropping down next to me and putting a three-round burst into the head of the corpse waving a broken wooden stick—probably the remains of a flagstaff. “At least they’re not playing bugles.”
“Thank god for small miracles,” I replied. Master Guns and I had been together a long time—since the Frozen Chosen. I’d mustanged up after we got back to the states. Master Guns had said to hell with that and stayed enlisted. He liked to joke that I was an idiot and needed someone to watch over me, so once I’d finished Officer Training school, he’d followed me to various scenic vacation locations around the world.
“Either way,” I said, looking at Lt. Anderson and borrowing his M-79.
Anderson mouthed ‘high explosive’ before continuing to direct his battle.
“Either way, sir?”
“Either way, we’ve still got to kill all these bastards before we can get out of here,” I replied, firing the bloop gun.
It kicked my shoulder, and I knew the shot was going to land just where I’d wanted it to—just in front of the corpse with a sword. The grenade went off, scything the corpse and the two closest to him down. They continued to crawl forward.
“Headshots, Major,” Master Guns said, shooting the sword wielder in the head. The corpse stopped moving. Master Guns shifted targets.
The firing slowed, and then stopped. “Lieutenant, hold your position. I’ll move forward with the Ghost Hunters and see what’s left.”
“Yes, sir.”
We advanced to the edge of the clearing, and then moved across, pausing to dispatch any still writhing corpses. They were a mix, mostly Japanese, but there were a few rotten French uniforms as well. I stepped around a tree at the far side of the clearing and knocked over a small figure that was trying to fire an AK-47. I dispatched the body with a single shot to the head before recovering the rifle from the twitching corpse.
“Looks like daemons know squat when it comes to modern firearms,” I said, clearing the jammed cartridge from the action.
“The possessed you shot probably had limited time with the weapon. At most a few hours of familiarization,” Captain Trahn said before blessing the body. “He was probably just a villager that got handed a rifle.”
“We’re still short a bunch of villagers,” I said, watching Wilson gather intel. “And where’s Baird, if these are his troops?”
“Good question, Major.”
* * * * *
“Hey, Major, you remember that patrol from 25th ID that disappeared about a year ago?” Anderson asked, walking across the clearing.
We’d thrown out listening posts around the clearing, just in case. I mean, the plantation was officially Middle of Nowhere, Laos, but you’re never sure when a wandering giant or NVA patrol is going to show up, so better safe than sorry.
Even though we had a budget that was unlimited, Marines are by and large frugal, so we were stacking the bodies and weapons around the trees we were going to blow down for the LZ. The same det cord that will blow down trees will take the head clean off a corpse, and chop the body into convenient, bite-sized pieces if you throw a couple of wraps around it.
We’d brought a lot of det cord with us.
Most of the company had pulled in around the clearing. The charges had been set in the mad science lab in the processing building, and we were going to blow both sets of charges simultaneously, because sure as god made little green men—don’t ask—the blasts would attract attention from nefarious forces.
“Yeah, something about them just disappearing near the border,” I said, stuffing another handful of Japanese and French dog tags in a bag for later sorting.
“Well, we found one of them,” Anderson said, handing over a set of dog tags.
They read Niedermeyer, Douglas C.
“Command’ll be happy to ship the family one hundred and eighty pounds of sand in a sealed coffin,” I replied, adding the tags to the bag. “Unless?”
“We can put what’s left in a body bag, sir. But it looks like he was fragged before rotting in the jungle for the last six months.”
“Yeah, something tells me we’re better off listing him as deceased, body non-recoverable,” I said.
“Yes, sir. We should have it all ready to blow everything up in about half an hour.”
“Good,” I said, dusting off my hands.
There was a brief spatter of rifle fire from the south.
“Sir, Lt. Fox reports contact,” Wilson said.
“Just contact?”
“Yes, sir. That, and something large and grey moving through the forest.”
I took the handset.
“Hammer Six to Hammer Three, what’s your target, over?”
“Hammer Three to Hammer Six, target unknown. It’s bulling over trees, however. Rifle fire is doing nothing, sir. Request you send the M67 team to my position, over.”
The M67 was along in case we needed to break something in a hurry. Right now they’d stacked arms and were helping to drag bodies to trees.
“Master Guns, get Sargent White and his team,” I said before responding to Fox.
“Sir,” Master guns replied, sending a runner for the anti-tank team.
&n
bsp; “Three, Six. I’ll be bringing the anti-tank team to you, over.”
“Roger that, Six. Three out.”
“Large and grey, Major? Could be an elephant,” Captain Trahn suggested, bringing his squad over.
“That’s what I figure, but if Fox has been shooting it, it’s probably pissed off,” I said as a horrid, dry screeching started to the south.
“If it’s an elephant, sounds like his nuts are caught in a tractor, Major,” Huggins supplied as we started toward Fox’s position.
“I always wondered what that sounded like, Master Guns. Thanks for completing my education,” I replied.
“Happy to oblige, sir,” Huggins replied with a grin.
What had been a few spatters of rifle fire escalated into a full-blown firefight. All the fire was from American weapons, which was unusual, although the weird, dry screeching built in volume and frequency as we got closer to Fox’s position.
“What’s going on, Lieutenant?” I asked, dropping down next to Fox behind a tree.
“There’s a pair of elephants…well, they look like elephants anyway, sir. We’ve been able to keep them from advancing, but rifle fire is just pissing them off, and they’re shrugging off machine gun fire and forty mike-mike, sir.”
“Sergeant White, sounds like you’re up,” I said. “Command team will hold here.”
White and his A-gunner Holmes moved toward the sound of the heaviest firing.
“Back blast area clear!” The A-Gunner’s shout was almost drowned out by the solid THUMP of the M67 firing.
“Load HEAT!” White shouted.
“UP! Back blast area clear!”
A wet SLAP followed the THUMP.
CRUMP.
“Load HEAT. Shifting target. Christ, Miller, drive the fucker out from behind that tree, huh?”
There were three quick bursts of fire.
“That’s it, you big bastard…Firing.”
Nothing.
“Misfire.”
“Misfire.”
“Keep it off the M67!”