UNBREAKABLE (Murder on the Mekong, Book 1): Vietnam War Psychological Thriller

by Hart Rivers

  This being a vast, blasted, stinking mud hole filled with temporary fragile shells of metal and shallow holes in the ground, which were in turn filled and covered with sandbags. US GIs were actually living in this mud hole where Gregg could smell the smoke from burning cans of shit from the latrines wafting across the wasteland. The new guys in dark green jungle fatigues appeared nearly as shocked as he was to be here. The old soldiers in faded out fatigues were themselves somehow faded out, nearly spectral. Many were gaunt and wasted from stress with lesions on their skin that looked infected and inflamed. The soldiers he looked at directly just stared blankly back at him. He was a visitor. A being from another place that could come and go from the living hell they had been consigned to.

  “Where are we?” Izzy posed his question in the kind of wheeze that suggested he was trying not to breathe the putrid air beyond the amount it took to keep breathing.

  “We’re at the firebase, Doc,” Rick explained, as if that explained anything. “These poor grunts here just finished getting the shit shelled and rocketed at them for about two weeks, which we happily missed, and as you can see this place is such a goddamn puking mess all the more reason me and my guys are moving out of here two days max. We’ll be setting up about twenty-five clicks north, for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  Rick paused and his expression shifted as darkly as his demeanor. “Listen, I got the message from on high that we are after the same fucker—or fuckers—that took down some more of our guys. I was instructed to let you shrinks see the bodies first, before they got taken to the regular morgue, so we set up a temporary right here.”

  Rick stopped outside a battered steel Quonset surrounded by green sandbags. Gregg had a terrible premonition JD had not exaggerated about the “worse.” His nod confirmed as much just before Rick opened the door.

  The odor that whooshed out had Gregg bending over, as Izzy managed to gag out, “Oh, god, the smell.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a morgue,” Rick said. “Come on in, and thanks for puking outside by the way, Gregg. Most people would have done it in here.”

  The dread crawling up Gregg’s spine was one long creeping vicious tropical centipede waiting to snap its burning jaws into his brain as he forced his feet into this awful place with bright lights illuminating what looked like a storage room.

  It was filled with body bags.

  There was something odd here, though. The body bags were separated, with a special group of the bags laid out on several long folding tables.

  These were the bags they approached.

  Gregg knew he was moving in the direction Rick was going and JD was quickly following, but he couldn’t feel his feet and there was a buzzing sound in his ears that blended with the white lights and shadows and his twisting thoughts, the black bags and stench. Like rolling drums in the background, his grinding dread escalated with each step closer, closer, to whatever was about to come.

  They all gathered around one of the long tables. Gregg looked across at Izzy, silently asking if he was going to make it. Izzy nodded and Gregg could see he was holding himself together with that sort of disassociated professionalism they all had to learn to survive, while inside his guts were clenched tight.

  “Now regarding that fucker—or, fuckers,” Rick said. “The Ghost Soldier stories that really brought you docs here to help… I don’t know, analyze, I guess?”

  “Yeah, the Boogeyman, or whatever. Gregg thinks it’s bullshit, and until Izzy and I see something to convince us otherwise, we’re inclined to agree.” JD shrugged like they just couldn’t buy something baked up around a campfire, even if it had come from one that smelled more like the burning shit outside than roasted marshmallows. “One look out there and it’s easy to understand how crazy stories like that get started.”

  “Maybe.” Rick reached for the first bag and opened it. He pulled out a head, as cleanly severed as the monocled cobra’s, except this one was human. It had also been scalped and the eyes were gone. “Then again, maybe not.”

  When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty,

  There arises the recognition of ugliness

  When they all know the good as good,

  There arises the recognition of evil.

  Lao Tzu

  Blue Fish in Love with Red Lotus

  KITTENS

  Maybe my stepfather should not have been too surprised when the gun went off.

  When I was younger, about 7, he rented an old broken-down house. It was in town but was kind of isolated next to an old abandoned estate. The estate house had burned down a long time ago leaving a burnt brick chimney, but there was a sagging garage still there with lots of old crap. Other kids would have thought it too spooky and dark and full of spiders and ghosts but not me. For a kid with no friends it was a pirate cave filled with trunks of treasure. There really were old chests of drawers and little boxes of costume jewelry. But then something better. A friend came. She was pretty scruffy and skittish but she was my friend. I took a hairbrush from my mom’s room and I stole and scrounged food from the kitchen for my new friend and in about a week she was Beautiful.

  I did not know she was pregnant, I just thought she seemed kind of chubby. She was so afraid of people but that was good because she never followed me home. Pretty soon I had a little nest for her with one of my old blankets and a broken cup for her food and water and with my care and feeding she looked beautiful to me even with her scars and chewed ears from all of her scraps before I took her in. Then one day there was a huge surprise. Usually, whenever I got close to the garage she made her little sound, kind of a mewing squeak but today was silent and I was anxious and rushed in and there she was in her nest with 5 little kittens. Of course their eyes were shut and they just looked like little mice. They all grew so fast. They looked so different that I thought that they must have all been different kinds of cats. There was a fuzzy yellow one “Butter,” and a sleek black one “Panther,” and a big furry black with bright green eyes “Jade,” and a striped “Tiger” and my favorite, a black and white “Panda.” All of these little guys were soon great fun. They would swoosh around chasing each other and tumble each other over and over and for me it was about the best time and the most friends I had ever had. In the late afternoons in the fall I would bundle up and take my own nap in the nest with them all snuggled in with me.

  One day I rushed home from school. It was just after Thanksgiving and I remember because I had been taking leftovers out of the fridge for all my “friends.” I decided that I would take the drumstick. Stupid, because that is easy to notice missing, but I thought nobody likes drumsticks in this family and anyway I got to the old garage with the drumstick and came running in calling out “Panda,” “Butter,” “Jade,” “Panther,” “Tiger” and they were all so happy eating the drumstick and playing with it that I did not hear a thing until a low laugh came from the shadows.

  And there was my stepfather. He was holding Friend, the mother cat, and stroking her. I was really happy for a minute because I thought he must like her, I mean how could anybody not and she was purring and I thought maybe he will want them to move to our house and they could sleep in my room and… he twisted her head and broke her neck and threw her so hard her head blew up in a red blob on the wall.

  “So the little man has his own little kitties.”

  “I… I…I only feed them my food, I’m sorry.”

  “You are sorry,” he said, “and it is not your food, it is my food, you have been stealing my food and now you are going to pay for it….”

  I was already crying about Friend… I was so used to his beatings that I just got ready for it right there….

  “NO, it is not going to be that easy,” he said. “Go get the shovel.”

  I came back with the shovel resigned to thinking I would have to dig the grave for Friend.

  “I’m sorry,” I begged, “please, don’t hurt the kittens, it’s my fault, don’t hurt them…”

  “I am n
ot going to hurt the kittens, you little idiot… you are. You did this, you stole from me and you are going to fix it. You are going to kill every one of them with the shovel, the fast way with the sharp end or the slow way with smashing them, it’s your choice…” he took out his Zippo lighter, lit a cigarette, and then left the lighter going, “or I am going to burn them alive, you got it little man? Kill them fast or watch them burn. Here I’ll help you… kill the one you love the most first, the others will be easier….”

  Maybe he was right, but I did not know that then. My hands were shaking, I was crying too hard begging for their lives that I made a mess of every one of them, one after another, after another… I killed Panda last.

  Chapter 17

  When at last they lifted off, the sky was turning a darker shade of purple. Rick waved from below. JD waved back.

  Izzy didn’t feel capable of even that much. He wondered if he looked as bad as Gregg—who looked as fucked and fried as the wiped out grunts at the firebase.

  Lungs still burning from doing everything possible not to inhale the rotting stench of decomposition, Izzy sucked in a big breath of fresh, cool mountain air filling the chopper. For a while he didn’t move or say anything while he tried to cleanse his mind. When that became as likely as pulling a genie out of a bottle, he decided a more direct approach may better serve his own mental health, just put it on the table and purge his system with the old go-to remedy of intellectual discourse.

  “Gregg? Gregg, did you ever see anything, anything, like we just saw in your post-doc work?”

  “No, man, nothing even close. I put in my hours in a mental institution, did my rotation inside a locked ward with the criminally insane…”

  Gregg trailed off. His lips visibly shook. Izzy’s hands were shaking really bad but he figured after this they were entitled to chatter away so he didn’t even try to hide them.

  “I never liked working with the criminally insane,” Izzy picked up. “I did my intern time in the hospital, right? Saw my share of bad accidents, shootings, knifings, domestic violence in the ER, you name it. But none of it comes remotely close to… to… what we saw back there was the work of a monster. A whole pack of them. Body after body after body… it was fiendish.”

  “Evil,” Gregg agreed. “Like, what kind of animal could do something like that?”

  “I don’t know. But it has to be more than one to carve up that many. Not even Jack the Ripper could pull that off without an assist from Albert Fish.”

  “The Werewolf of Wisteria?” Gregg grimaced.

  “One of many names. As you’ll recall he was known as ‘The Boogeyman,’ too.”

  “What I mostly remember is that he liked to eat children.”

  They let that sit between them, the sick pathology of the mind that could be so deeply disturbing yet fascinatingly macabre. Izzy was reminded of how naïve he had been when he went into child psychiatry, as if treating kids meant a gentler, kinder type of mental hell. He had been so wrong. It was just the opposite.

  “Children are the most victimized, you know,” he said, and didn’t know why he was even talking about it. Children had nothing to do with the mutilated remains in the body bags, but he felt so unclean it was like he had to verbally wash some of the filth out of his own mental system. “They’re helpless and they’re weaker. That’s why the predators and most twisted seem to single them out for the worst crimes.”

  “I don’t know how anything could be worse than the body of work we saw.”

  “From what we saw I wouldn’t put anything past that kind of beast, demon, whatever you want to call it. Maybe he—or they eat children, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  Maybe they eat children, too. “I’m not a forensic pathologist but… judging from the bruising, blood, and swelling around the eye sockets of the first head, I suspect the eyes were taken out while the victim was still alive. Dead bodies don’t respond to injuries like that.”

  “Why remove the eyes first?”

  Gregg and Izzy looked at JD as if he had just walked into a room.

  “For the joy of it?” Izzy guessed. “Fulfillment? A sense of power?”

  “Or maybe for entertainment purposes,” Gregg added. “The same way some people get off on snuff films or cock fighting.”

  “But why?” JD’s brow furrowed. “What can you tell me that I don’t know? Come on, guys, I need your help here.”

  Izzy considered the source of the request. JD had pumped Derek full of bullets with the fluid precision of a professional killer. But he had done it without emotion, without glee, more like an accountant balancing the books. Killing was just part of the job for him, not a passion.

  “We all have a dark side,” Gregg explained. “There’s a part of the mind that is immensely stimulated by the dark and the violent—it’s not a conscious choice, it’s how we’re hardwired as humans. That’s why sadism makes great entertainment. The gladiators in Rome, they weren’t warriors. They were mostly prisoners forced to fight to their death with animals or other prisoners, and the gorier the better for the crowds. Popcorn, peanuts, Crackerjacks anyone?”

  “I’m afraid Gregg is right. It’s part of the human psyche, even if we don’t like to admit it or think about what sort of cruelties we’re capable of. Though after today, there’s not a lot of guess work left about that, is there?”

  “If you mean the elephants, agreed. But if you’re referring to what we saw at the morgue?” JD shrugged. “At first I wondered if it could be some good old payback, which is all about revenge, not just shits and giggles.”

  “Payback?” asked Gregg.

  “Yes, it’s a thing that happens in wars, each side escalating on their kills to terrorize the other side, but in this case, as you say, pretty creepy and over the top. Actually, after seeing the extent of the evidence, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that there is more at work here than anything as simple as payback. Or pleasure seeking.”

  It struck Izzy that JD was immune to the impact of the mutilations. Maybe that made him well suited to his job. Maybe one reason JD needed them was because a lack of immunity is what made him and Gregg good at theirs. Yet the difference between them was thinning and Izzy had to wonder if he would ever reclaim the sweetness of life that was as untainted as picking berries with his grandmother on a summer morning and watching them swirl into the taste of ice cream just made with his dad. Now, the images of those body bags opening squirmed around in his mind, and he remembered something his mentor, Dr. Haride, had not that long ago said:

  We have a wonderful capacity to make little rooms that we can carefully set aside inside our heads and we know well before we approach those rooms that it best not to even start to go down the hallway lest we start nightmares. I warn you all that if you can avoid those rooms do so. I was once involved in a case of a man who abducted and tortured children; I will not say to you anything of what he did, only that with all of my heart I wish for the time before I saw the images of what he had done. For now I cannot rid my mind of them and I tell you it is a kind of hell to know.

  Dr. Haride had warned Izzy and his small, hand-picked group of young specialists about to graduate, what the minds of both clinicians and MDs in the practice of psychiatry could hold. Even the best and strongest minds could only tolerate so much of the soul poisoning quality of the horrific work that often came within the field of child abuse, which, as it turned out, often crossed paths with the criminally insane, which was the very field he had tried to avoid.

  Izzy now knew what Dr. Haride meant. He thought he did when he thanked him for such a compelling lecture. He thought he did when he worked with children who had survived unthinkable atrocities. But now that he had gazed upon the chilling hell unleashed upon those poor men in the morgue—they were someone’s children—Izzy knew too well and he knew too much, because he knew the depth of his own capacity for cruelty.

  As with the elephants, he wanted revenge on the perpetrators of those mutilated bodies. He wanted
Rick to find them and send them home in body bags, too. Just clean kills, nothing too cruel or sordid, nothing like what they had seen, but whoever was capable of that was unsalvageable and the world was a better, safer place without their poisoned presence. Listen to myself, he thought, “clean kills.” My head is starting to twist stuff just like Gregg said it would. Instead of wishing we could cure the predator, now I want “clean kills.”

  At first Izzy wasn’t aware he had spoken aloud, but then JD asked, “What did you say?”

  And Izzy knew. He might have lost his innocence but he had been instilled with guiding principles and at least he hadn’t lost those yet. There was a difference between being forced into something against your will and funneling that will into a worthy cause. He had crossed that line.

  “I said I want to help you.” Izzy looked over at Gregg. Apparently they had been raised on some of the same “do the right thing” stuff. Gregg, maybe even more, all things considered.

  “Yeah.” Gregg nodded. “Me, too.”

  Upon landing at the LZ, where they had been picked up earlier that day, Gregg nearly dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. He had never been so grateful to live in Nha Trang, to sleep in an old villa and work at the 99KO, Camp McDermott included.

  JD had arranged a waiting jeep. He threw his gear into the back and got behind the wheel.

  “I could use a walk,” Gregg told him. His insides were still vibrating.

  “Same here.” Izzy shouldered his gear.

  “Then I’ll see you guys. Listen, thanks a lot. I’ll try to make this up to you someday.” JD actually saluted them. “Okay, time for me to get to work.”

  As the jeep sped off, Gregg wondered if JD was really on his way to the mission to see Kate. But after the elephants and the firebase and the morgue, he was simply too numb to think beyond some immediate means of self-comfort.