Savage Nights

by W. D. Gagliani

  "Fuck!" The Lieutenant tried to stand, but the ground turned liquid under him and the already low ceiling lowered even more. The old wounded Vietnamese man — a villager? he didn't look like a VC guerilla fighter – lay on his side pinned beneath the dead doctor. The Lieutenant crawled closer. Grinding gears and engines seemed only inches above him as he approached the old man, who was trying to turn toward him.

  "Hold it," the Lieutenant muttered repeatedly, "Just hold it! I'm trying to take you out of here..."

  He grabbed the old man's withered arm and started dragging him back toward the tunnel mouth, but the old man resisted and hissed a stream of Vietnamese. The Lieutenant knew he was hurting the villager, but he had no choice — he pulled and moved backward, when the rumble from above grew unbearably loud and he heard the bamboo logs snap like pretzels under the weight of whatever rolled on top, and then the floor shifted under them as well and tilted at an extreme angle as if hell itself were opening up to swallow them.

  The Lieutenant heard himself shouting incoherently from far away as the floor gave way and both he and the old man, followed by the doctor's corpse, were sucked down into a lower level of the tunnel complex, falling at least three meters and crashing together onto a rounded surface, while above them the roof pitched downward in jagged sections and tons of red clay turned to powder and dust and buried them both.

  All light extinguished, the blackness was as shocking as the fall downward.

  ***

  Later.

  Blackness surrounded him. He swam in blackness, breathed blackness, seemed to swallow blackness.

  The Lieutenant awoke coughing his lungs out, as if his body were trying to cough the blackness out of his system. He felt a thin line of drool emit from his lips and he imagined it was black. Or maybe red, like the clay that had powdered under them and swallowed them. He coughed again, feeling the jab of a broken rib, amazed despite himself and his situation to find that he was not in greater pain. Something soft and leathery brushed his face as he realized that he couldn't move more than a few inches in any direction. Leathery and strangely skin-like. At first he thought it was a rough cloth. The cough racked his chest again and in the midst of the spasm he turned his sore face just slightly and then he recoiled in fear and disgust.

  It was a face, lying against his own face.

  He felt the nose, soft, protruding from its center. A leathery cheek, stretched over teeth; a jawbone knocked out of alignment.

  Jesus.

  It was either the doc or the old man.

  Their faces were almost cheek to cheek, in parody of a lovers' embrace. The Lieutenant tried to move, but beside the pain in his chest, his arms were pinned to his sides by ceiling rubble and clay. He clenched his fists and rejoiced when he realized they still worked, but one of them brushed more dead skin and he knew even though he couldn't see it he'd touched one of the dead man's arms.

  He sensed that a section of the bamboo roof had jammed itself diagonally above them, sheltering them from most of the cave-in. But how many tons of rubble lay above it? And how long would the air pocket last?

  Sure as hell he was freaked out about hugging the dead guy, but at least he was alive. He tried to squirm his way off the corpse, in any direction. He twisted, shoved, leveraged, his breath coming in gasps. He gave up, exhausted, and lay his face down onto the dead man's face.

  The corpse's eyeball moved under its lid, sliding like a wet grape over his cheek.

  The Lieutenant screamed, his mouth agape.

  His body was trapped.

  He felt the old man's ruined jaw crack as the head turned and faced him as if ready for a kiss.

  He screamed again. Then the Lieutenant realized he could see. An aura seemed to glow around the other man's skin, just enough to make out a few details of their prison. First, he realized that he seemed to be sandwiched between both Vietnamese. The doctor's head lay sideways like a deflated balloon, bits of wet gore pooling somewhere below and presumably under the Lieutenant. The old man, he was alive, though too seriously gone to last much longer. But they were locked together.

  And if I don't dig my way out of here, they'll keep me company forever.

  The Lieutenant squirmed again, but this time he felt the old man's head swivel slightly. No, he could see the old man's head turn. He blinked as the old man's eyes opened and stared into his. A strange greenish light, a shade similar to the aura, but still somehow different, seemed to envelop them both, and the Lieutenant froze as he felt hands on his head, on his eyes, on his mind... and then heard — or thought he heard — the old man speak.

  The old Viet's speech came as garbled syllables punctuated by a bloody gargling sound from where part of the jaw bone had speared through his throat. Nevertheless he managed to speak in an even tone that his position delivered directly into the Lieutenant's ear. The man's voice, the aura visible around his body, and the fact that the Lieutenant was sandwiched between a corpse and someone who would surely die angered him in ways he could barely understand.

  "What the fuck are you saying?" he snarled. "If you and your friend here hadn't held me up, we'd be the fuck out of here by now."

  The old man responded but his voice died in another gargle. For a second, the Lieutenant thought he had almost understood the sounds as words.

  "What? What the fuck is that?"

  The Viet's breath came in a fading rasp.

  The Lieutenant turned his body slightly, trying again to squirm out of the grotesque embrace. The eerie glow surrounding the old man seemed also to light their prison, and the Lieutenant confirmed that a jagged segment of the previous roof now held back who knew how much clay and earth. He could see threadbare burlap sacks around them, some burst open to reveal brown and white rice. The space below them had been used as a supply chamber, and the two tunnels had presumably pancaked under the weight of the earth-moving equipment on the surface.

  In the strange light, the old man's eyes became brilliant beacons, fixing the Lieutenant's with their light and trapping him as surely as if hands had grasped his body.

  Sharp fingers pried into his flesh, through his tendons and along his bones, scraping the marrow.

  The Lieutenant heard a scream.

  It was filled with fear and hatred and disgust, and it pierced his ears.

  Then he realized that it was coming from his own throat.

  The old man's eyes boring into his, now the Lieutenant mewled weakly. The fingers twisted under his skin, touched and tapped his organs, poked and then withdrew. His body seemed to be unhurt, but his head began to throb with a sharp, jagged pain.

  Makes sense, a voice in his head pointed out. Look at what's happened to you in the last few hours.

  How many hours?

  And what had happened?

  A strange sort of heat boiled into the Lieutenant's eyes from those of the old Vietnamese man inches away, and he tried to force his closed, but the pain lanced in anyway.

  He was still screaming. He had never stopped.

  Then he saw a clay-encrusted American squirt into the hospital chamber from the tiny tunnel entrance, brandishing his knife and pistol, and his hatred and anger led him to berate the uncouth invader even as his elderly patient asked him to stop...

  The American, a truly large man even though he had crawled through the tiny fighter's tunnel, tried to stand up but couldn't because of the low ceiling — and perhaps his muscles were stiff, as well — threatening him and the Ben Suc village elder with words neither could understand. But his tone was unmistakable. He planned to kill them, and the doctor would not let this happen.

  Then the earth shook and rumbled and the pistol fired and the doctor felt one blinding pain in the middle of his forehead and died, his awareness dying with him.

  The Lieutenant screamed again, for when the doctor died, he died as well. It was his pain the bullet caused, as the hot metal tore through tissue and muscle and bone.

  When he opened his eyelids, the light still shone in the old man'
s eyes, and then the Lieutenant experienced the scene of his arrival, but this time as if watching through the old man while he lay on his pallet. The Lieutenant felt the old man's wound, on which the doctor had just begun to work, his life and blood draining away into the red clay of his ancestral home. When the American burst into the chamber from the tunnel, he thought to keep the doctor from attacking the invader thereby perhaps saving his life, but the American had shot and killed him anyway. It might have been an accident, but since the American was in the old man's country and region uninvited, and since the large white soldiers had already razed his village and chased away all his people, rounding up those they claimed were VC, the old man could not see the difference. Killing was killing, and dead was dead. And now that he had the American in his grasp, a prisoner of his ancestral earth in the literal sense, he wished to teach the invader an unforgettable lesson.

  The Lieutenant tried to shrug off the voice in his head and the images he did not want, but they came unbidden.

  Then he became Sarge, turning away from the hole the Loot had entered to have a smoke while planning the next score for his mysterious connection, a captain from the Big Red One, as far as he knew, stationed in Cu Chi Base — where they had tennis courts and a swimming pool and air conditioned huts, the bastards. Though at night the tunnels came alive with infiltrators who slit the throats of perimeter sentries who expected attackers from outside the fencing and Claymore fields, not inside. He smoked his cig, was it the last one already? and hoped the captain would continue their little partnership at least one more time. Then Sarge had a scam going near the river, too, but that was for later, when this fucking operation was over and they got themselves a turn in the cool air of the base. There were women there, too, nurses who were sometimes almost like whores in bed. At least, that's what he heard. He caressed the bolt of the sun-heated M-16. Goddammit, Fuckin' get back here, Loot, I wanna get outta the sun.

  Then the Lieutenant blinked and he was watching Sarge walk aimlessly around the hole. He wasn't looking through Sarge's eyes anymore — he was looking at Sarge. He wanted to go into the hole and kill another gook. Ever since that hole last week, when he'd crawled in and found himself behind a slimy little tunnel fighter — coward who squirmed away from him — and he'd given chase along the dark shithole until he'd caught the gook's ankle and pulled him back into his knife, stabbing him repeatedly in the back and side until the fucker had bled to death right there in the tunnel. Then he'd dragged the corpse back with him to the tunnel mouth and had the squad pull him up with a rope, at which point he'd posed for some pictures with his prize. That's how he thought of the gook, a prize, like a trophy fish or some wild animal on an African plain. He'd liked that close-in killing, though it would have been more interesting if the yellow bastard had tried to fight. They'd found a live grenade on him, so he'd been lucky the fucker hadn't blown them both up, but what the hell, their side had to have some morons too. Where the hell's Loot, anyway, he's been gone too fuckin' long. Sarge was antsy, and the rest of the squad wanted to get outta the sun, but their leader was in the ground and they had to wait. Jesus, that was some hot sun. He remembered the blood squirting all over the inside walls of the tunnel and smiled — it'd make a helluva story when he got home. If only he could have gotten himself another gook today. He'd heard they cut ears off them sometimes and made rattles. Maybe he'd look into that, next time...

  The Lieutenant's awareness of Digger's mind faded and then he was into Smitty's head, and that was no place to be staying for long, because Smitty'd taken the draft instead of a jail sentence, and just knowing what Smitty'd done to get that choice was enough to make the Lieutenant never want to speak to Smitty again. But there he was, reliving Smitty's life of crime as if it were exciting. Smitty liked girls, particularly when they didn't much like him. He liked to lay his hands on girls, then his fists, then he liked spreading their legs open and splitting them apart with his erection, all the while holding his grandfather's straight-razor to their necks until a thin trickle of blood would run down their collars and onto their breasts.

  Christ.

  Then he was out – thank fucking God! — and in the next few minutes the Lieutenant had visited every squad member's mind, sitting in there like a silent visitor, sorting through the thoughts and seeing through their eyes as if they were his own.

  He tried again to pull himself away from the village elder, the man in charge of a village eradicated – pacified – his people scattered over the countryside, but he could not. He saw Americans he did not know shooting one villager they suspected of VC ties, and torturing a teenager before letting him go with wounds which would later kill him. He saw a young woman raped in a rice paddy, two infantrymen taking turns, turning her over and over like some kind of obscene toy until she was a lifeless sack of skin and bones, and one of them later sitting on a Coke can booby trap that would blow his legs clean off. Was that justice being served?

  Maybe it was.

  Jesus, he wanted to stop the visions. Was he seeing through the old man's eyes, or through the eyes of his fellow villagers? His family? His ancestors? The Lieutenant moved his arm infinitesimally, trying to make some room to dig himself out as much as possible, to pull himself away from the doctor's corpse and the old man who held him captive with some kind of curse he could not understand.

  For that was what it was, the Lieutenant knew that now, a curse. A curse on him and his fellow soldiers that the old man wished to visit on them all for what had been done, was being done even now, to his country and his people and his soil. And his soul, for that matter.

  All this the Lieutenant saw and felt, and he cried dry tears from eyes that had now seen way too much, but he could not extricate himself from his prison of dead flesh and clay.

  Sometime later, when he sensed that the old man's wrath was winding down along with his life force, the Lieutenant managed to move his right hand more than he had been able to, and miraculously he felt the familiar gunmetal shape of his Smith and Wesson nearby, which he laboriously inched into his grasp until his finger lay on the trigger, the gun's weight almost too much for his waning strength. Hours passed and the old man's fetid breath on his cheeks diminished steadily, and at least he had no more visions to share, but the Lieutenant had thought hard about what he had seen — what the old man had somehow made him see — and what he had experienced vicariously even as the air in their little shelter grew heavy and stale. The Lieutenant's mind had wandered back to those other minds, and then the old man had sent him more visions as he'd awakened with new hatred and anger. The Lieutenant had slowly, fastidiously maneuvered the pistol so the barrel lay at such an angle that slight pressure on the trigger would end these visions once and for all. He embraced the thought of death, now having seen so much of it, and so much caused by his friends and countrymen. They would both die in this hole together, but the Lieutenant did not want to wait for his body to break down, for thirst and hunger to do their worst. What an irony, really, that sacks of rice and other supplies lay all around, but all he could do was bring a pistol to bear on his own head.

  He continued to maneuver, occasionally stopping to rest, or feeling the weakening old man invade his head with less and less frequency, until he thought the elder had expired. But then he felt a gentle breath on his clammy skin and knew the old man would outlive him. At least he would deny the old bastard the opportunity to torture him any longer with the evil his comrades harbored in their hearts and souls.

  When the time came, the Lieutenant steeled himself and squeezed the trigger.

  In the enclosed space, the gunshot deafened him.

  But that was all.

  The Lieutenant felt the bullet nearly graze his cheek. But its impact was with the old man's ruined jawbone, a sickeningly wet smack that snapped back the wrinkled head like a rotted melon.

  Visions and hatred flowed between them as if through a live wire, seemingly for hours, until death extinguished the old man's aura and the hateful beacons o
f his eyes forever. Blood and gore coated the Lieutenant's head and face, almost as if the old man's ultimate revenge involved destroying the Lieutenant's sanity with the detritus of his own murder.

  In the deepened darkness, the Lieutenant sobbed and embraced the deaths he had caused. He didn't know how many hours he lay in that position, the pistol now knocked askew by the recoil and with no hope to finish the one mission he had set out to complete.

  Eventually, his sanity skating on the edge and his body screaming its willingness to die, the Lieutenant heard the rumble of bulldozers not far above him as they stripped the top off the tunnel complex layer by layer.

  With no voice left, he waited for his shelter to collapse around him, or for a bulldozer to crush him or slice him to ribbons with its blade. He welcomed the end.

  But then the roof section was peeled off and the corpses rolled away from him of their own volition, as if willingly, and laboriously the Lieutenant stood up amidst the crater-like remains of the complex.

  A grunt from Charlie Company shouted and pointed at the living corpse. Rifles trained on him, the squad recognized his homemade Rat insignia and cheered him.

  He was almost two miles from his Rat Tunnel squad.

  From the dead, of the dead, with the dead.

  Like Lazarus, Lieutenant Brant would never be the same.

  KIT

  Kit felt hands or straps holding her in place, perched in the armchair, as Marissa joined the masked men on the bed. Her attention span wavered and her eyelids were heavy, but in a portion of her brain she was able to process and store what she saw: Marissa and one man (Daffy Duck) embracing, then licking each other's bodies slowly, while the other masked thug (Elmer Fudd) filmed the action with a small Handycam.

  Whatever drug Kit had been fed had relaxed her, turned her to rubber, but the distortion seemed to be fading. She wanted to shake her head, but it was held in place. Someone behind her held her so she could watch.