The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  I will cross the brass-and-marble lobby, not hurrying, and enter the elevator. I will pull on a pair of powdered surgical gloves and press the button for the twentieth floor, one below the penthouse. As it rises, I will dislodge a ceiling panel, unlatch the maintenance trapdoor, and hoist myself onto the car’s roof. I will replace the panel and wait for the elevator to stop before climbing a maintenance ladder to the penthouse ventilation shaft. Unhinging the grate, I will crawl into the shaft. I will hear voices speaking in Japanese. I will crawl down the shaft until I am directly above those voices, until I can peer through a vent and see their owners’ shiny silk suits and yellow skin.

  This is what I will do. This is what I did.

  And here I am.

  Kawanami reclines on a leather sofa with a tumbler of scotch. He’s talking to someone via speakerphone. To his left sit a pair of bodyguards decked to the nines in French-cut suits and black wingtips, TEC-9’s resting on their laps. Intricate tattoos project above their collars and shirt sleeves. I idly wonder how their skin might look drying on the limbs of a breadfruit tree, yard upon yard of skin inked with intricate designs, dragons and koi and samurai warriors and suddenly the ventilation shaft is very cramped, I feel claustrophobic, flashback to…

  …deep in the guts of Phuoc-Long province, walking in darkness through a grove of banana trees. Our boots crush the rotting fruit underfoot, filling the air with their sickly sweetness. Eakins, a Cherry we were escorting to Song-Be, trudged along on a path of flattened elephant grass while the rest of us, keen to VC booby traps, kept to the fringe. Eakins, a beach-bum with a bleached-out brushcut, was singing something by the Beach Boys: “We got this board and we call it a Woody; it ain’t too cherry, it’s an oldie but a goody…”

  Then the ground opened up and swallowed Eakins to the armpits. He was screaming, arms flailing, digging up chunks of loose earth and mashed banana. His body thrashed like he was being fed feet-first through a wood-chipper.

  I humped twenty feet up the trail, found the tunnel, dove in head-first. I didn’t know Eakins and was fairly certain I wouldn’t like him if I did. Didn’t matter. He was a Marine and I was going to save him if I could, die if I had to. We were all like that back then, operating at a level above duty or patriotism or friendship: I will die for you and you will die for me. There is a terrible, reckless kind of strength in such a simple code of conduct.

  Anytime. Anywhere. Anyhow. I will die for you.

  In the tunnel, wet earth pressed against me. Ahead were noises like slabs of raw meat colliding. I triggered the LPO-50’s pilot light, producing a narrow finger of flame.

  “Jesus Christ…”

  A pair of Gooks crouched in the blackness clutching long, sharp knives. Eakins’ legs, what was left of them, kicked wildly. All the flesh and most of the muscle, with the exception of his booted feet, was hacked away. The bones of his shins and knees collided wetly, clicking and clacking. His belly was slashed open and his guts had tumbled out. Long bluish ropes of intestine glistened like wet cables and the Gooks hacked at them with gore-streaked blades and the smell of blood was so strong that suddenly the tunnel was the size of a gopher burrow.

  The Gooks turned to me and their faces reflected perfect, undiluted hatred and that’s when one of them shoved a blade up into Eakins, digging and twisting until something thick and clumped and rank-smelling spewed out of the ragged hole, splattering their snarling upturned faces.

  Pulling the flame-thrower’s trigger felt like an absolution. The LPO-50 spread a carpet of fire that filled the tunnel with the smell of burning butane and burning flesh. The heat blistered my face and singed my eyebrows to ash but I kept the trigger down. And all the while I’m thinking, “Please someone shoot Eakins, shoot him in the fucking head, end his misery because…”

  …Kawanami’s off the telephone. He rises and walks to the window. His bodyguards follow. They’re all facing away from me.

  Rock and roll.

  The Llamas kick in my hands as slugs tear through the ventilation shaft, leaving a network of dime-sized holes. Through the vent I see a bullet punch through a bodyguard’s neck, just below his hairline. The slug bores through his throat, leaving a fist-sized exit hole where his collarbones meet. He drops to his knees, hands raised to the wound. He appears to be praying.

  The other bodyguard takes one slug through the knee and another turns his elbow into red mashed potato. He folds like a pup tent onto the cream carpet, spraying the TEC-9, punching holes through the far wall. I drill a bullet through the left lens of his sunglasses. His head snaps back like it’s been nailed to the floor, pulped eyeball oozing around the mirrored plastic.

  I smash at the vent with the pistol butts until it swings open and pour myself through to land feet-first on the carpet. Ten seconds have gone by.

  Kawanami stands beside the window, drink in hand. He is trembling, but whether this is fear or the palsy of his age I cannot tell. He knows my presence means his life can now be measured with a stopwatch.

  “I’m going to kill you, now.”

  The old man nods. He does not beg, or offer to double whatever I’m being paid. He just nods and sips his drink, eyes never leaving mine. I can only hope, when my time comes, I check out with similar dignity.

  The silenced Llamas make a dull mechanic hiss—snick-snick, snick-snick—as I double-tap the triggers. Hollowpoints tear through Kawanami, blowing the back of his blazer out. There are only pinpricks of blood on his chest but I’m certain his back now resembles a surrealist painting, bullets leaving massive exit holes. The window spiderwebs and then shatters. His body is thrown backwards, feet propelled from his shoes—I notice a hole in his argyle sock through which one big toe pokes—and his neck is severed clean through on the jags of window-glass. His head plummets twenty-one stories to the sidewalk.

  I’m heading to the elevator when I notice a TEC-9 laid across the sofa’s armrest. It can’t be Kawanami’s so that means…

  Ssshhht is the sound of my suitcoat splitting as a blade slashes diagonally across my back, shoulderblade-to-hipbone. I barrel-roll to my left instinctively, adrenaline redlined, and catch a glimpse of my attacker. Another cookie-cutter bodyguard wearing shades and a suit, but this one’s got a ten-inch Barlow knife and as I face him he lunges at me.

  I feint right and the knife slices into the meat of my right bicep, sawing through skin and sinew. I spin on the ball of my foot, rolling off my attacker’s momentum, coming through with an elbow that forces his jaw bone into his neck, jamming it into the big cluster of nerves there. He goes down and I cross behind the sofa, pulling the screwdriver and box-cutter from inside my suitcoat.

  “Listen,” I say to the guy. “Your boss is dead. You lose, I win. What’s the use you dying now?”

  The dude just snarls at me.

  You try to toss these fucking mongrels a bone…

  He comes around the sofa, chopping at me with the thick blade. I draw back far enough to avoid a fatal wound but the tip passes through my shirt below my nipples and blood pisses through the slit. I bring the box-cutter around in a hard arc, slashing at his unprotected face, creating a half-moon gash starting at his hairline and terminating somewhere below the jawbone.

  He screams and his hand goes up to grab at his face, his hand’s trying to press the fatty flap of skin that was so recently his cheek back in place. The box-cutter slips from my right hand as I jerk my left up into the gap between his outstretched arm and chest, screwdriver aimed at a spot beneath his chin. I know this is going to end ugly, ugly and senseless, but these things usually do.

  The screwdriver punches through his throat—thack!—and blood sprays down in twin brownish geysers, staining his suit. This is accompanied by a horrible hissing noise as his jugular pumps blood around the screwdriver’s molded plastic handle. He opens his mouth and through red-streaked teeth I glimpse the screwdriver’s tip. He’s making this noise, this horrid gurgling, and it fills me with a desperate sort of pity so I yank the screwdriver out of h
is throat and bury it in his left ear. He squawks, eyes blinking, and face-plants on the carpet.

  Less than two minutes and I’ve earned $110,000.

  But I’m a mess. In the bathroom, I strip my shirt off to examine my arm. The gash is straight and very, very deep and when I clean away the blood I see things that look like snapped piano wires and I force myself to stop looking and wrap the wound in a towel.

  Three suitcases stand next to the front door. I rifle them to find a black Cerutti 1881 shirt and suitcoat. Through the shattered window I hear distant sirens.

  It takes forever for the elevator to reach the penthouse. I take it to the third floor before stumbling into the stairwell and descending to the underground parking lot.

  Fred Jackson’s two-tone Chev is parked behind a pillar in section E-8. I slump into the front seat and Fred—skinny and shrewish with aviator sunglasses and a pencil-thin moustache of a style favored by ’70s-era adult film performers—whistles softly.

  “Oh, Danny-boy,” he says. “You been wrestling grizzlies or what?”

  “Just drive.”

  Fred navigates up a series of ramps, pays the attendant, and angles onto the street.

  “Going to need medical attention?”

  “Arm’s hacked up bad.”

  “We’ll head to your place and call Lois.”

  Lois is Fred’s wife, a registered nurse who administers to the bumps and bruises I absorb in the line of duty. Fred reaches into the back seat and grabs a cell phone, a white behemoth twice the size of the PRC units we hoofed in ’Nam. I close my eyes and when I open them we’re at my condo complex.

  Fred parks near the service entrance and hustles me up the maintenance elevator. He drags me to my apartment, kicks the bathroom door open, and sets me in the bathtub. He lifts my arm and cinches a belt above the gash. I close my eyes again and when I open them Lois is beside me. Fred’s wife is sexy as all hell and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to screw her, that tight body, that pert can. She injects me with something.

  I awake in bed with my arm heavily-bandaged. Fred comes in with an envelope.

  “Someone bathe me?”

  “Lois,” Fred says. “And not just to prevent infection. You reeked.”

  “What kind of soap she use?”

  “Irish Spring.”

  “I smell like a leprechaun fart.”

  Fred laughs. “Ninety-three stitches—took a couple yards of catgut to put Humpty-Danny back together again.” He tosses me the envelope. “Don’t see Ed McMahon’s mug on it, so I guess you can’t quit your day job.”

  I tear the letter open with my good hand.

  An unsigned check for fifty thousand dollars slips onto the coverlet.

  — | — | —

  Neil “Crosshairs” Paris-Card Shark

  Las Vegas, Nevada.

  November 30, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

  All that remains clear anymore is the split-second before it all happened: the scissoring limbs and wall of gnashing blood-stained teeth and the smell of flayed and burning children. Then the creature scrambled up my chest, talons hooking into my skin, a brittle crunch, followed by earth-shattering pain.

  I came to on the jungle floor, my nose—what was left of it—inhaling the stench of rotting vegetation. The left side of my face felt as though it’d been dipped in liquid nitrogen and smashed with a Louisville Slugger. A hand hammered shots of morphine into my chest. Focusing with my remaining eye, I realized the hand was my own.

  Then Oddy, his big black skull like a solar eclipse, eased the syrette out of my hand. “Pacify, son,” he whispered. “Med evac’s on the way.”

  The dirt surrounding my head was wet and sticky. Noise came from my skull. A horrible pissing sound.

  Tripwire joined Oddy. He got an eyeful of me and paled.

  “Jesus Christ, Sarge. He ain’t going to make it.”

  “He’s one tough fuck.”

  “Shit, Sarge, half his fuckin’ head’s missing—”

  “Zip that lip, soldier.” Oddy propped a balled-up flak jacket under my head and wrapped a shredded blanket around my face. “Gonna be fine as cherry wine.”

  Footsteps came near. “Gunner and Slash are dead.” Zippo’s voice.

  Oddy said, “What happened?”

  “It was…that thing. Slash’s spine is torn out, bits of him scattered across half the fucking warzone. Found Gunner’s head, but that’s it.”

  “This is royally fucked up,” said Tripwire.

  “Christ Sarge, Gunner’s a fucking head,” Zippo said.

  “I’m dying,” I said weakly.

  Oddy said, “Shitcan that talk, dogface. Where’s Answer?”

  “Here, Sarge.” Although I could not see him, I knew Answer had made his usual entrance: materializing silently from the undergrowth, the epitome of Blackjack’s “Swift, Silent, Deadly” credo.

  “We got med evac rendezvous one klick down this speed trail,” Oddy said. “Answer, scout ahead. Trip and me hump Crosshairs. Zippo, you tail.”

  We raced breakneck through the midnight jungle. Oddy’s hands were hooked under my armpits, Tripwire had my ankles, my body slung like a hammock between. The Thing that had slaughtered Gunner and Slash and had nearly punched my ticket, the Thing we found hunched and gibbering in a hut full of skinless Viet villagers, was still out there. We’d hurt it, and badly: I’d personally drilled it with five .303 copperjackets before it stole my face. But it was still alive, still lurking in the bush.

  “Go go go!” Oddy hollered.

  Soon I heard the drone of the Huey’s Pratt & Whitney engine. I passed out…

  …and awoke in a field infirmary near Duc Phong with an IV drip suspended above my head and a heart-rate monitor beeping at my side.

  I could not feel my body.

  I wasn’t paralyzed: I could wiggle my fingers and toes, blink my eye, raise my arms and legs. But I could not feel my skin. It was as if the surface of my flesh, billions and billions of nerve endings, were shot full of Novocaine.

  A young medic noticed I was conscious and approached with a timidity bordering on reverence. “Are you feeling alright?”

  “So…thirsty.”

  “I’ll get something,” he said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  I’ve heard the refrain so many times it has attained the singsong quality of a show tune: You are lucky to be aaa-live—YES SIR!—lucky to be drawing breath—OH MY!—a medical miracle for all to see! The fortuitousness of my survival is, I’ve come to realize, a wholly subjective matter.

  The medic returned with a glass of water. He was accompanied by an older man who I learned was the surgeon responsible for saving my life.

  “You were dead,” he told me in the matter-of-fact tone of those inured to death. “When your unit offloaded you from the Huey, your brainwaves were flatlined.”

  I asked about the others.

  “Your unit was disbanded after the mission. Unconditional releases.”

  He asked how I felt. I told him I could not feel my body.

  “That can’t be,” he said. “We’ve done reflex-tests and—”

  “Not paralyzed. It’s just…everything’s…numb.”

  He pinched my arm hard enough to redden the skin. “Nothing?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well,” he shrugged, “side-effects are to be expected. You are lucky to be alive.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  The left side of my face felt terribly wrong. I raised my hand to touch it.

  “Don’t,” the surgeon said. “The wound is still tender. Alex, give him a mirror.”

  The medic offered me a barber’s mirror.

  “Oh good Christ…”

  “I did the best I could.” The surgeon’s voice was a million miles away. “There’s only so much I could do…”

  A chunk of bone and brain and skin roughly the size of a horse’s hoof had been carved from my skull. Half my forehead, my left eye, my left nostril and cheek and ear—all gone. A s
kin-graft—culled, I later realized, from my ass—had been sewn over the gaping wound to prevent the rest of my brain from sloshing out. The transplanted skin was dappled with wiry black hair: my ass hair. For some reason they continued to grow and I now shave them twice-weekly, pausing occasionally to savor the absurdity.

  I was never exactly a handsome man, but sweet fuck…

  The doc said I’d lost one-fifth of my frontal lobe, one-third of my thalamus, nearly all my limbic cortex. If someone were to stab me in the back, I would feel the blade’s pressure but there would be no pain whatsoever. It’s entirely possible I might bleed to death out of sheer ignorance.

  Other complications were expected. I did not disappoint. Apart from the numbness, everything I eat tastes like burnt toast—I ate burnt toast in hopes of it tasting like Lobster Newburg but no such luck. My hearing wavers in and out like a radio on the fritz and I’ve got no control of my johnson anymore: I pop wood for no earthly reason, sometimes blow my load in public places without a pretty skirt in sight.

  “We only use ten percent of our brains,” the baby-faced medic told me. “Einstein used eleven and he was a genius.”

  I said, “Shut up, man.”

  They sent me to a veteran’s sanitarium in Coldwater, Michigan. I wasn’t bugshit like the Section-8’s they had cooped up there, but the doc felt I’d have difficulty adapting to my “altered physical paradigm.”

  I met a vet named Eugene there. Eugene was a Major with 7th Recon, spent thirty-three months in Da Nang. It takes a certain type of person to keep their shit wired tight in Recon. Eugene was not that type. At thirty-one years old his hair was snow-drop white, arctic tundra white. He patrolled his room with a squeeze-bottle of Mrs. Butterworth, filling in every crack with syrup to stop the poison gas he thought the Gooks were pumping in. He confided that when he took a dump, the voices of dead Gooks talked to him through his asshole—the shit-voices, telling him to do awful things. Sounds funny, but it wasn’t, not really. The poor bastard wore earmuffs to the bathroom.

  Eugene killed himself. A lot of vets were doing it back then; bodies left the sanitarium with the regularity of laundry sacks. Nearly cut his head off with a can opener. Tore his jugular open, bled out on the cold tiles of his room. A dull fucking can opener. Vietnam gave us that, at least: the ability to perform the unthinkable…