All-Monster Action!

by Cody Goodfellow

  “That’s what I get for chasing it with Listerine. Look, Sarge, if those jokers want to call down hell on themselves, that’s their lookout.”

  “Maybe,” Canute rumbled, “but we’re going up there just the same.”

  Wheeler wasn’t the worst soldier he’d ever seen, or the least bearable human being, but he thought too much of his mouth, and all the crap that came from it. Used to write features for Stars & Stripes, and the Seattle Post before the war. Used to be a lieutenant with photographers on call and invites to every fancy dress ball in the Philippines. Canute didn’t know or care how much of his sob story was true, but he could tell that Wheeler thought he was being punished, when they sent him out here.

  When they fell silent, they heard the rumbling cadence, like distant heavy bombardment, just beneath the rustle of the kunai grass and the chattering of the parrots.

  “God damn it,” Wheeler muttered, “are they coming already?”

  Laslovic started to back up into the trees, but Canute stopped him. “No, dummy. Drums.”

  “What gives?” Wheeler demanded in a loud, climbing pitch. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Ask him.” Canute pointed at a tiny figure crouched at the far end of the landing strip. The moment they spotted the black-skinned phantom, he vanished into the jungle at the base of the mountain.

  Take a step inside the green curtain of jungle, and the sound of the surf was muffled, drowned out by the cacophony of birds, frogs, insects and unseen creepers in the undergrowth and in the dense canopy of the trees. In the daytime, the shade was a sham, a syrupy distillation of heat thick as tar, the deep, nauseous heat of compressed, festering life. By night, when the warmth of the sun had been sucked into the sea and the sky and a chill wind howled in off the thousands of miles of rolling ocean, the jungle hoarded the heat for itself. The webs of bloated vines and broad-leaf brush were so thick a man could chop all day and clear only a hundred feet of trail, but things moved about within, quick and confident.

  Strange thoughts, like alien seeds blown into his brain, took root and grew. Everything on this island found its way here from somewhere else—borne on the wind, or brought in on the tide. How lucky frogs and lizards made the trek and then settled in to raise little ones was a bedeviling riddle, but he supposed they did it, because they were here. What did the frogs do, he wondered, when they turned up on this rock, and all of them were bulls?

  He checked himself with a rueful grin. He’d only been here a year, and look at the state of his noodle. No wonder the natives got up to the doings they did.

  A flock of red parrots came screeching down and roosted on the branches just above their heads. Their chatter rattled around in his head until it sounded like words, the same words chanted over and over. He tried to tune it out, but Wheeler picked up a rock and shied it at them. They flitted up into the air and settled, resuming their maddening chorus.

  Ro bilong kago…

  A game trail split the impenetrable green at the end of the airstrip. Private Laslovic walked thirty feet ahead of the others, eyes peeled for an ambush.

  He saw trees like petrified giant octopi, their enormous roots splayed out in the black, putrid soil, their trunks all but buried under tufted bromeliads, spaghetti-tangles of vines and other parasitic flora. He saw lush, unspeakably colorful orchids and other flowers so vividly evocative he felt the need to go to confession. He saw spiny blossoms that dripped venomous nectar, and yawning pitcher plants clinging to the towering trunks. The emerald moonlight sifting through them showed the silhouettes of bird and monkey skeletons floating in their honeyed gullets.

  The trail ended at the foot of the mountain, at the base of a staircase of rough-hewn logs cut into the almost vertical slope. Where it led, the mist and the jungle canopy did their level best to hide from sight.

  Laslovic looked back at Canute, who waved him on. “This is a hell of a place to try to fight a war,” Wheeler grunted.

  Canute drank from his canteen and relit his cigar stub. “Beats the hell out of the last one.”

  “All these islands look the same to me, after the Army’s through with them.”

  “Not the last island,” Canute said. “The last war.”

  “Jiminy!” Laslovic blurted. “You sure must like to fight.”

  “I used to. Keep moving.”

  Stanislaus Laslovic prided himself on his lack of imagination. A big dumb Polack from a Pennsylvania scratch-farm, he could see where brains paid off a lot less than they were cracked up to. Daydreamers chased themselves around their heads all the time, and got themselves killed.

  Laslovic served with two infantry platoons for the Rabaul campaign to eject the Japs from mainland New Guinea. In the first, an unlucky mortar dropped into their Higgins boat at the Saidor beachhead. He was the sole survivor.

  Reassigned to another platoon, he was the only one to make it to the rallying point on the beach. Spooked by his uncanny luck, his CO asked him where he wanted to go, and when he said he wanted to fly airplanes, they transferred him back to the Army Air Corps support division. Laslovic didn’t count himself lucky, or curse himself for a jinx. God simply had other plans for him, which were, as of yet, none of his business.

  Wheeler was a rubber room candidate, with his rolling eyes and second-guessing, and even old Canute seemed spooked. His scarred, weatherbeaten brow squinted around his glass eye like there was sand in his socket.

  Laslovic looked up at the mountain. “Maybe they won’t see it. Why would they want to help the Japs, anyway?”

  “They ain’t calling the Japs, dingus,” Wheeler said. “They’re calling for the South Pacific’s answer to Santa Claus. They want more Coca Cola and condoms and Gideon Bibles, and plenty of plump, juicy white men to roast on spits with pineapples in our mouths, until the meat just falls off the bone—”

  “Put a sock in it,” Canute said. “They ain’t cannibals.”

  “Then ask them what they did with Amelia Earhart.” Wheeler’s tone got comically grave as he invoked his pet obsession. “It’s the Madness, I tell you.”

  “Nuts,” Canute grunted.

  “I heard stories from some guys in the Navy,” Wheeler said, church-whispering, “about things the natives get up to, out in the dark corners of the Pacific. Down in New Guinea, they call it the Vailala Madness.”

  “You don’t know nothing.”

  “Most of ‘em never laid eyes on a white man before, let alone steel tools, or planes or ships. They see the stuff we bring out here, and it’s like magic. They figured pretty quick we were just men like them, but we’ve got the gods’ special juju.” The idea clearly tickled him. “If you know so much, Canute, what’s up there?”

  “Never been,” he lied.

  Wheeler’s head whipped around so fast you could hear something pop in it. “What do you mean, never been?”

  “Sacred ground. They come down when they want to trade, and bang the slit-gongs when they see a plane. They’re good neighbors.”

  They were not a proper tribe, and Canute suspected they had only moved here a few decades ago, probably running from colonial administrators. He had never seen women or children, but knew there were some in a compound on the other side of the island. The men kept a vigil on the mountaintop; the sounds of their drums and chanting sometimes preceded the first radio contact from incoming planes and ships.

  There were fewer than twenty men. Closer to the war, or with a more diligent CO, they might have been relocated or worse. Colonel Shubert had made noises about their mountaintop activities, but he was too concerned with the complications of fraternizing with the natives. Somebody had to play good neighbor, and Canute had quietly assumed the role. Yage Moses, the old headman, liked Coca Cola and Camels.

  They soon lost count of the steps. They crawled on all fours, hauling themselves up and clinging to the slimy, rain-swollen logs to keep from sagging backwards and tumbling down the stairs, which by now had become more like a ladder.

  In the bars of
moonlight, Wheeler thought they looked like convicts, fugitives from a chain gang. “What if they’re up there, waiting to ambush us, sarge?”

  Wheeler strained to see spies in the misty darkness. The trees cast colonnades of tangled shadows in the moonlight, and something hid in every single one of them. Chirping, trilling, buzzing, squawking life could give cover to legions of stalking feet.

  The deep, tarry stink of the soil made his stomach convulse. The air was so humid, you could almost squeeze a fistful of it and fill a canteen. A pitcher plant hung just above his head. Something inside it splashed out its final, feeble death-struggles. Vast tapestries of spider webs hung between the branches with neat little bundles woven into them, the shriveled mummies of parrots. Wheeler stumbled back and caught himself on a tree.

  Laslovic reached the top first, but they had to shove him clear of the landing to climb up. He just stood there with his mouth open and eyes unblinking, marveling at the sight of the mountaintop. Whatever he expected, this was the last thing he might’ve guessed.

  “Holy cats,” Laslovic hissed, “it’s the landing strip all over again.”

  From the steps, what could only be a hand-graded runway ran arrow-straight across the rocky, but oddly barren peak. A tower of bamboo and palm fronds tilted alarmingly over a huge bonfire on the edge of the strip. A mock plane slapped together out of same was parked beside it, waiting for clearance. Bits and pieces of metal glinted dully in the firelight; scraps pinched, Canute noted with a rueful smile, off the old P-40 abandoned at the end of the strip.

  The tribesmen pounded slit-gongs and hand drums and blew gourd trumpets, and danced in a circle around the tower, where a little man in a motley cape of feathers and a headdress made of seagull wings presided with outflung arms and a bellowing ululation coming out of his mouth like an air raid siren.

  When the three of them came into the light, the ritual fell silent as if somebody stumbled over the plug.

  “Ain’t that a kick in the teeth,” Wheeler gasped, still winded from the climb. “The Skull Island Aerodrome.”

  Canute raised his hands high. “Yage Moses,” he called out, “I bring cargo to trade.”

  The little headman sprang down from the tower and scuttled up close to Canute. While the others wore only bark girdles or laplaps, Yage Moses proudly sported one of Colonel Shubert’s parade uniform jackets and a spotless khaki blouse. In the dancing firelight, they looked as different as two kinds of trees. Even with his fancy winged headdress, the little Polynesian hardly reached Canute’s shoulder, and was stooped and bent with age and abuse. Canute never asked, but figured by his grasp of Pidgin English and the stripes of scar tissue down his back that he’d once worked a colonial plantation, probably in the Madang District of New Guinea, when it was held by the krauts.

  “Mipela laik no mo bisnis long wetman,” Yage Moses said, “Usim kago kam tunait.” His lips and chin were stained red and slick with spittle from a binge of betel nut, and his yellow-tinged eyes gleamed like dying automobile headlights.

  “Japs fly tonight.” Canute pointed at the sky. “We beat them good, burned their home island down, but they look to die fighting. You don’t want the Japs to come, so put out the fire and turn off the radio.”

  “Ask them what they think they’re doing,” Wheeler demanded, “and where the hell they got a radio.”

  “Yu mikim wonem?” Canute asked.

  “Yu Canute strongpela, gutpela,” the headman said, smiling warmly and patting Canute’s arm. “Yu skelim kago, tasol wetman tok oltaim bulsit, no skelim wanpela tok bokis bilong kago. Taso yu Ami lusim ailan kwiktaim.”

  Wheeler cut in. “What’s that?”

  “He’s mad at us for not sharing the cargo secret. He says we’re leaving soon.”

  “How’s he know the war’s over?”

  “He doesn’t. He thinks someone else is coming, with his cargo.”

  Laslovic said, “Maybe he’s telling us we ought to leave…”

  Wheeler kicked the ground. “Damn it, tell him we can’t!”

  “We can’t fight, either.” Canute took the little crate from Wheeler and set it down before Yage Moses. “Wusat I kam?” he asked in Pidgin: Who is coming? The headman only smiled at the crate.

  When he opened it, Yage Moses grinned even wider, making a show of both of his yellow, tortured teeth to pry the cap off a bottle of Pabst.

  Canute looked him in the eye, trying to see him man to man, as he said a word the headman probably never heard before from the lips of a white man. “Please, Moses. Put out the lights and kill the radio.”

  Yage Moses swigged the beer and returned Canute’s stare. He didn’t break it as his little black hand snaked into the crate and took up the hand-axe.

  Laslovic swore and pointed his M1. Wheeler jumped back and cursed his own rifle, still slung on his shoulder.

  Yage Moses raised the axe high, lifted his head and called out in his native tongue to the sky.

  When the natives heard it, they raised a cheer and resumed drumming and chanting. Canute backed away until Laslovic and Wheeler flanked him with their rifles at their shoulders and their jaws on their chests.

  One by one, the natives danced by the crate and knelt before Yage Moses, who poured a splash of beer into each upraised mouth, like a priest dispensing sacramental wine. Each supplicant took a bottle of soda pop or beer and danced out onto the landing strip with renewed vigor. The swaying, hopping dance described a circle—no, a diamond—with a stone marker at each corner, and when each dancer reached a marker, he jumped onto it and took a drink. At the nearest marker, Yage Moses took up a bullroarer on a rope and swung it wildly around him, the uncanny sound rising until it perfectly mimicked the props of an airplane.

  “What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Wheeler demanded.

  Laslovic clucked his tongue. “Looks like they’re playing baseball.”

  They must have watched for months as the soldiers played pick-up games on the airstrip, and supposed it to be some arcane ritual for summoning planes—and cargo.

  The radio squealed, and static of a peculiar, liquid tone drowned out their ritual. Canute sidled over to the radio in its shrine atop the tower. It was a footlocker-sized shortwave box, warped, peeling and encrusted with moss and mold, a relic left by the Aussie coastwatchers.

  It should not have worked.

  For one, it was not plugged into anything. For another, the guts of the radio were long gone, replaced by bones, feathers and bits of junk scavenged from camp: bottle caps, shell casings, mess tins and silverware, arranged in an artful array that received and transmitted sound.

  It was not the familiar sound of the empty airwaves, with its audio storms caused by weather and sunspots and such. No, whatever frequencies this radio broadcasted on, they were not the ones that brought Glenn Miller and Abbott & Costello. It was more like the echoing ambience of some colossal enclosed space beneath a shadowy sea, a grotto vast enough to contain islands, feeding on deeper, greater caverns beyond, teeming with secret life.

  And through it, the chant of Yage Moses and his followers echoed, loudly proclaiming their faith, and demanding an answer.

  Laslovic tried not to pray aloud for the natives, or for themselves.

  The business with the airplane fascinated him, and disturbed him deeply. He went to church, read his Bible. He knew that only God’s providence could lead them to victory in the war. He also recognized pagan idolatry when he saw it.

  For a moment, when he’d first seen a plane take off, he felt a reverence, an awe, not just for the hope they represented, but for the power they gave. There could be no greater power that God might grant a man, Laslovic thought, than to fly.

  That he never would fly one did little to diminish that weird charge that came from seeing them, like the first time he saw a horse, back home, and his Daddy set him on its back, and it flew.

  Then he saw the natives’ airstrip, and his mind was thrown into disorder. Someone had been praying to the Army’
s airplanes, and had gotten so exercised that they made idols of them. He could feel it when he touched the rusted P-40 prop like a holy relic tied to the front of the bamboo mock plane on the runway, that vibration you feel when a church really gives it up for God, but fraught with tension, like it might fly off in any direction at any moment, borne aloft on the wind from unholy prayers.

  And now, as if in answer to their misguided invocation, the Japs were coming.

  “D’you hear that?” he asked.

  Down below, the lights were all doused, so the bonfire at his back was the only light on the face of the earth. Smitty and the other drunks would be hot to try to wing a Zero with the fifty caliber machine guns, but they’d only advertise their position. Best to let the natives serve as a decoy; best for his people. But something had gone haywire here—not just with the natives, but with the basic rules of what was and what could not be.

  The wind blew out of the northwest in choppy gusts, and on it, a buzzing rumble, the sound of planes. Only Laslovic could hear it at first, but it grew steadily louder.

  “Sarge, they’re crazy as bedbugs,” Wheeler spat, raising his rifle. “We’ve got to put out that fire, and to hell with them if they try to stop us.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Canute said. “If they’re coming, they’ve seen it.”

  “We’re gonna get bombed, if we stay here.”

  “You run and hide. I think I’ll stay a while.”

  Canute stood with Yage Moses at the end of the mountain airstrip, scanning the silver and black murk on the horizon. Wheeler ranted at his back, but didn’t move, and Laslovic stood beside that mock plane with a look on his face like a kid who just found out Santa Claus might not be a fake, after all.

  Canute felt something kindle inside him as he scanned the empty sky, a tiny fire he gave up feeding years ago, all but buried under a lifetime of green fuel that made only smoke. He joined the Army and went to France in the Great War, not to fight, only to see the world; but the Army showed him only boot prints, bomb craters and the silent reproach of dead doughboys just like him who’d caught a faceful of the world.