“Name’s Mathis. Special Forces, formerly attached to the First Infantry.” A chuckle. “But you might say we seen the light and opted outta the service. How ’bout you, man? You gotta name?”
“Quinn. Edward Quinn.” He flipped up his visor; heat boiled into the combat suit, overwhelming the cooling system. The suit was scorched and shredded from the knees down; plastic armor glinted in the rips. He looked around for his gun. The cable that had connected it to the computer had been severed, probably by shrapnel from the mine, and the gun was not to be seen. “You run across the rest of my patrol?”
A static-filled silence. “’Fraid I got bad tidin’s, Quinn Edward. ’Pears like guerrillas took out your buddies.”
Despite the interference, Quinn heard the lie in the voice. He scoped out the terrain. Saw that he was sitting in a cathedral-like glade: vaults of leaves pillared by the tapering trunks of ceibas and giant figs. The ground was carpeted with ferns; a thick green shade seemed to be welling from the tips of the fronds. Here and there, shafts of golden light penetrated the canopy, and these were so complexly figured with dust motes that they appeared to contain flaws and fracture planes, like artifacts of crystal snapped off in mid-air. On three sides, the glade gave out into dense jungle; but to the east lay a body of murky green water, with a forested island standing about a hundred feet out. If he could find his gun, the island might be defensible. Then a few days’ rest and he’d be ready for a hike.
“Them boys wasn’t no friends of yours,” said Mathis. “You hit that mine, and they let you lie like meat on the street.”
That much Quinn believed. The others had been too wasted on the martial arts ampules to be trustworthy. Chances were they simply hadn’t wanted the hassle of carrying him.
“They deserved what they got,” Mathis went on. “But you, now…boy with your luck. Might just be a place for you in the light.”
“What’s that mean?” Quinn fumbled a dispenser from his hip pouch and ejected two ampules—a pair of silver bullets—into his palm. Two, he figured, should get him walking.
“The light’s holy here, man. You sit under them beams shinin’ through the canopy, let ’em soak into you, and they’ll stir the truth from your mind.” Mathis said all this in dead-earnest, and Quinn, unable to mask his amusement, said, “Oh, yeah?”
“You remind me of my ol’ lieutenant,” said Mathis. “Man used to tell me I’s crazy, and I’d say to him, ‘I ain’t ordinary crazy, sir. I’m crazy-gone-to-Jesus.’ And I’d ’splain to him what I knew from the light, that we’s s’posed to build the kingdom here. Place where a man could live pure. No machines, no pollution.” He grunted as if tickled by something. “That’s how you be livin’ if you can cut it. You gonna learn to hunt with knives, track tapir by the smell. Hear what weather’s comin’ by listenin’ to the cry of a bird.”
“How ’bout the lieutenant?” Quinn asked. “He learn all that?”
“Y’know how it is with lieutenants, man. Sometimes they just don’t work out.”
Quinn popped an ampule under his nose and inhaled. Waited for the drugs to kick in. The ampules were the Army’s way of insuring that the high incidence of poor battlefield performance during the Vietnam War would not be repeated: each contained a mist of pseudo-endorphins and RNA derivatives that elevated the user’s determination and physical potentials to heroic levels for thirty minutes or thereabouts. But Quinn preferred not to rely on them, because of their destructive side-effects. Printed on the dispenser was a warning against abuse, one that Mathis—judging by his rap—had ignored. Quinn had heard similar raps from guys whose personalities had been eroded, replaced in part by the generic mystic-warrior personality supplied by the drugs.
“’Course,” said Mathis, breaking the silence, “it ain’t only the light. It’s the Queen. She’s one with the light.”
“The Queen?” Quinn’s senses had sharpened. He could see the spidery shapes of monkeys high in the canopy and could hear a hundred new sounds. He spotted the green plastic stock of his gun protruding from beneath a fern not twenty feet away; he came to his feet, refusing to admit to his pain, and went over to it. Both upper and lower barrels were plugged with dirt.
“’Member them Cuban ’speriments where they was linkin’ up animals and psychics with computer implants? Usin’ ’em for spies?”
“That was just bullshit!” Quinn set off toward the water. He felt disdain for Mathis and recognized that to be a sign of too many ampules.
“It ain’t no bullshit. The Queen was one of them psychics. She’s linked up with this little ol’ tiger cat. What the Indians call a tigrillo. We ain’t never seen her, but we seen the cat. And once we got tuned to her, we could feel her mind workin’ on us. But at first she can slip them thoughts inside your head without you ever knowin’. Twist you ’round her finger, she can.”
“If she’s that powerful,” said Quinn, smug with the force of his superior logic, “then why’s she hidin’ from you?”
“She ain’t hidin’. We gotta prove ourselves to her. Keep the jungle pure, free of evildoers. Then she’ll come to us.”
Quinn popped the second ampule. “Evildoers? Like my patrol, huh? That why you wasted my patrol?”
“Whoo-ee!” said Mathis after a pause. “I can’t slide nothin’ by you, can I, Quinn Edward?”
Quinn’s laughter was rich and nutsy: a two-ampule laugh. “Naw,” he said, mocking Mathis’ cornpone accent. “Don’t reckon you can.” He flipped down his visor and waded into the water, barely conscious of the pain in his legs.
“Your buddies wasn’t shit for soldiers,” said Mathis. “Good thing they come along, though. We was runnin’ low on ampules.” He made a frustrated noise. “Hey, man. This armor ain’t nothin’ like the old gear…all this computer bullshit. I can’t get nothin’ crankin’ ’cept the radio. Tell me how you work these here guns.”
“Just aim and pull.” Quinn was waist-deep in water, perhaps a quarter of the way to the island, which from that perspective—with its three towering vine-enlaced trees—looked like the overgrown hulk of an old sailing ship anchored in a placid stretch of jade.
“Don’t kid a kidder,” said Mathis. “I tried that.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Quinn said. “Smart peckerwood like you.”
“Man, you gotta attitude problem, don’tcha? But I ’spect the Queen’ll straighten you out.”
“Right! The Invisible Woman!”
“You’ll see her soon enough, man. Ain’t gonna be too long ’fore she comes to me.”
“To you?” Quinn snickered. “That mean you’re the king?”
“Maybe.” Mathis pitched his voice low and menacing. “Don’t go thinkin’ I’m just country pie, Quinn Edward. I been up here most of two years, and I got this place down. I can tell when a fly takes a shit! Far as you concerned, I’m lord of the fuckin’ jungle.”
Quinn bit back a sarcastic response. He should be suckering this guy, determining his strength. Given that Mathis had been on recon prior to deserting, he’d probably started with around fifteen men. “You guys taken many casualties?” he asked after slogging another few steps.
“Why you wanna know that? You a man with a plan? Listen up, Quinn Edward. If you figgerin’ on takin’ us out, ’member them fancy guns didn’t help your buddies, and they ain’t gonna help you. Even if you could take us out, you’d still have to deal with the Queen. Just ’cause she lives out on the island don’t mean she ain’t keepin’ her eye on the shore. You might not believe it, man, but right now, right this second, she’s all ’round you.”
“What island?” The trees ahead suddenly seemed haunted-looking.
“Little island out there on the lake. You can see it if you lift your head.”
“Can’t move my head,” said Quinn. “My neck’s fucked up.”
“Well, you gonna see it soon enough. And once you healed, you take my advice and stay the hell off it. The Queen don’t look kindly on trespassers.”
On reac
hing the island, Quinn located a firing position from which he could survey the shore: a weedy patch behind a fallen tree trunk hemmed in by bushes. If Mathis was as expert in jungle survival as he claimed, he’d have no trouble in discovering where Quinn had gone; and there was no way to tell how strong an influence his imaginary Queen exerted, no way to be sure whether the restriction against trespassing had the severity of a taboo or was merely something frowned on. Not wanting to take chances, Quinn spent a frantic few minutes cleaning the lower barrel of his gun, which fired miniature fragmentation grenades.
“Now where’d you get to, Quinn Edward?” said Mathis with mock concern. “Where did you get to?”
Quinn scanned the shore. Dark avenues led away between the trees, and staring along them, his nerves were keyed by every twitching leaf, every shift of light and shadow. Clouds slid across the sun, muting its glare to a shimmering platinum gray; a palpable vibration underscored the stillness. He tried to think of something pleasant to make the waiting easier, but nothing pleasant occurred to him. He wetted his lips and swallowed. His cooling system set up a whine.
Movement at the margin of the jungle, a shadow resolving into a man wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying a rifle with a skeleton stock…likely an old AR-18. He waded into the lake, and as he closed on the island, Quinn trained his scope on him and saw that he had black shoulder-length hair framing a haggard face; a ragged beard bibbed his chest and dangling from a thong below the beard was a triangular piece of mirror. Quinn held his fire, waiting for the rest to emerge. But no one else broke cover, and he realized that Mathis was testing him, was willing to sacrifice a pawn to check out his weaponry.
“Keep back!” he shouted. But the man kept plodding forward, heaving against the drag of the water. Quinn marveled at the hold Mathis must have over him: he had to know he was going to die. Maybe he was too whacked out on ampules to give a shit, or maybe Mathis’ Queen somehow embodied the promise of a swell afterlife for those who died in battle. Quinn didn’t want to kill him, but there was no choice, no point in delaying the inevitable.
He aimed, froze a moment at the sight of the man’s fear-widened eyes; then he squeezed the trigger.
The hiss of the round blended into the explosion, and the man vanished inside a fireball and geysering water. Monkeys screamed; birds wheeled up from the shoreline trees. A veil of oily smoke drifted across the lake, and within seconds a pair of legs floated to the surface, leaking red. Quinn felt queasy and sick at heart.
“Man, they doin’ wonders with ordinance nowadays,” said Mathis.
Infuriated, Quinn fired a spread of three rounds into the jungle.
“Not even close, Quinn Edward.”
“You’re a real regular army asshole, aren’t you?” said Quinn. “Lettin’ some poor fucker draw fire.”
“You got me wrong, man! I sent that ol’ boy out ’cause I loved him. He been with me almost four years, but his mind was goin’, reflexes goin’. You done him a favor, Quinn Edward. Reduced his confusion to zero”—Mathis’ tone waxed evangelic—“and let him shine forevermore!”
Quinn had a mental image of Mathis, bearded and haggard like the guy he’d shot, but taller, rawboned: a gaunt rack of a man with rotting teeth and blown-away pupils. Being able to fit even an imaginary face to his target tuned his rage higher, and he fired again.
“Awright, man!” Mathis’ voice was burred with anger; the cadences of his speech built into a rant. “You want bang-bang, you got it. But you stay out there, the Queen’ll do the job for me. She don’t like nobody creepin’ ’round her in the dark. Makes her crazy. You go on, man! Stay there! She peel you down to meat and sauce!”
His laughter went high into a register that Quinn’s speakers distorted, translating it as a hiccuping squeal, and he continued to rave. However, Quinn was no longer listening. His attention was fixed on the dead man’s legs spinning past on the current. A lace of blood eeled from the severed waist. The separate strands looked to be spelling out characters in some oriental script; but before Quinn could try to decipher them, they lost coherence and were whirled away by the jade green medium into which—staring with fierce concentration, giddy with drugs and fatigue—he, too, felt he was dissolving.
At twilight, when streamers of mist unfurled across the water, Quinn stood down from his watch and went to find a secure place in which to pass the night: considering Mathis’ leeriness about his Queen’s nocturnal temper, he doubted there would be any trouble before morning. He beat his way through the brush and came to an enormous ceiba tree whose trunk split into two main branchings; the split formed a wide crotch that would support him comfortably. He popped an ampule to stave off pain, climbed up and settled himself.
Darkness fell; the mist closed in, blanketing moon and stars. Quinn stared out into pitch-black nothing, too exhausted to think, too buzzed to sleep. Finally, hoping to stimulate thought, he did another ampule. After it had taken effect, he could make out some of the surrounding foliage—vague scrolled shapes that each had their own special shine—and he could hear a thousand plops and rustles that blended into a scratchy percussion, its rhythms providing accents for a pulse that seemed to be coming up from the roots of the island. But there were no crunchings in the brush, no footsteps.
No sign of the Queen.
What a strange fantasy, he thought, for Mathis to have created. He wondered how Mathis saw her. Blond, with a ragged Tarzan-movie skirt? A black woman with a necklace of bones? He remembered driving down to see his old girlfriend at college and being struck by a print hung on her dorm room wall. It had shown a night jungle, a tiger prowling through fleshy vegetation, and—off to the side—a mysterious-looking woman standing naked in moonshadow. That would be his image of the Queen. It seemed to him that the woman’s eyes had been glowing…But maybe he was remembering it wrong, maybe it had been the tiger’s eyes. He had liked the print, had peered at the artist’s signature and tried to pronounce the name. “Roo-see-aw,” he’d said, and his girl had given a haughty sniff and said, “Roo-sō. It’s Roo-sō.” Her attitude had made clear what he had suspected: that he had lost her. She had experienced a new world, one that had set its hooks in her; she had outgrown their little North Dakota farming town, and she had outgrown him as well. What the war had done to him was similar, only the world he had outgrown was a much wider place: he’d learned that he just wasn’t cut out for peace and quiet anymore.
Frogs chirred, crickets sizzled, and he was reminded of the hollow near his father’s house where he had used to go after chores to be alone, to plan a life of spectacular adventures. Like the island, it had been a diminutive jungle—secure, yet not insulated from the wild—and recognizing the kinship between the two places caused him to relax. Soon he nodded out into a dream, one in which he was twelve years old again, fiddling with the busted tractor his father had given him to repair. He’d never been able to repair it, but in the dream he worked a gruesome miracle. Wherever he touched the metal, blood beaded on the flaking rust; blood surged rich and dark through the fuel line; and when he laid his hands on the corroded pistons, steam seared forth and he saw that the rust had been transformed into red meat, that his hands had left scorched prints. Then that meat-engine shuddered to life and lumbered off across the fields on wheels of black bone, ploughing raw gashes in the earth, sowing seeds that overnight grew into fiery stalks yielding fruit that exploded on contact with the air.
It was such an odd dream, forged from the materials of his childhood yet embodying an alien sensibility, that he came awake, possessed by the notion that it had been no dream but a sending. For an instant he thought he saw a lithe shadow at the foot of the tree. The harder he stared at it, though, the less substantial it became, and he decided it must have been a hallucination. But after the shadow had melted away, a wave of languor washed over him, sweeping him down into unconsciousness, manifesting so suddenly, so irresistibly, that it seemed no less a sending than the dream.
At first light, Quinn popped an ampul
e and went to inspect the island, stepping cautiously through the gray mist that still merged jungle and water and sky, pushing through dripping thickets and spiderwebs diamonded with dew. He was certain that Mathis would launch an attack today. Since he had survived a night with the Queen, it might be concluded that she favored him, that he now posed a threat to Mathis’ union with her…and Mathis wouldn’t be able to tolerate that. The best course, Quinn figured, would be to rile Mathis up, to make him react out of anger and to take advantage of that reaction.
The island proved to be about a hundred and twenty feet long, perhaps a third of that across at the widest, and—except for a rocky point at the north end and a clearing some thirty feet south of the ceiba tree—was choked with vegetation. Vines hung in graceful loops like flourishes depended from illuminated letters; ferns clotted the narrow aisles between the bushes; epiphytes bloomed in the crooks of branches, punctuating the grayness with points of crimson and purple. The far side of the island was banked higher than a man could easily reach; but to be safe, Quinn mined the lowest sections with frags. In places where the brush was relatively sparse, he set flares head-high, connecting them to trip-wires that he rigged with vines. Then he walked back and forth among the traps, memorizing their locations.
By the time he had done, the sun had started to burn off the mist, creating pockets of clarity in the gray, and, as he headed back to his firing position, it was then he saw the tiger cat. Crouched in the weeds, lapping at the water. It wasn’t much bigger than a housecat, with the delicate build and wedge-shaped head of an Abyssinian, and fine black stripes patterning its tawny fur. Quinn had seen such animals before while on patrol, but the way this one looked, so bright and articulated in contrast to the dull vegetable greens, framed by the eddying mist, it seemed a gateway had been opened onto a more vital world, and he was for the moment too entranced by the sight to consider what it meant. The cat finished its drink, turned to Quinn and studied him; then it snarled, wheeled about and sprang off into the brush.
Future on Fire Page 12