Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  It was easy for Candle to despise the loudly humming monster he saw floating above him, as if it were the insect itself and not the human gunner that was unloading those pounds upon pounds of metal projectiles through the roof of the fragile home. But he didn’t hate all the organic technology the Guests had bestowed upon humankind over the decades, this technology more and more complex every year. Gifts in return for the...entertainment...these humans provided, with their rapes, murders, their wars. He was actually rather fond of the organic automobile he himself owned, a dome-shaped beetle-like creature popularly nicknamed the VW “Bug” (their sort grown on farms in Germany). But it was hard to remember, sometimes, that these living machines were not the Guests themselves. That the true nature of the Guests was unknown...anonymous...

  And over the past couple of years, though in form the various mutated creatures had become more advanced, it had been noted that their life spans were not as long as they once had been. After only a year or two, an organic TV might begin to stop receiving images, rot while alive and quickly die. The living buildings that had sprouted up in greater and greater profusion in the cities, barely recognizable as having their origin in the world of terrestrial invertebrates, were dying off and decomposing as if they had contracted some mysterious disease. And then there were the Mediums – those human hosts, to some degree always in a position of authority, who carried a parasite insect which enabled them to be more directly linked to the minds of the Guests. Yes, look what was happening to some of the Mediums, lately...

  Was it too much for Candle to hope that the influence of the Guests was waning, or becoming infected, corrupted? Did some interference between the dimensions now make it difficult for them to master the cells of their tools? If so, did that mean it was also harder and harder for them to peer into the realm the humans dwelt in? Candle could only pray it was so.

  But what then, anyway? Humans would still want to see the staring dead eyes and the sundered flesh he caught on film. Humans would return to their own wars over politics or religion or natural resources, instead of being directed like chess pieces for the amusement and titillation of an unseen force. Either way, it would be the same...just the same...wouldn’t it?

  And if the Guests faded away altogether, and every last one of their instruments decayed, could he still earn his living with a purely mechanical camera? Or would he, in essence, decay too? Candle wondered if he himself were a kind of parasite...

  Three soldiers were heading toward Candle; they tended to separate into such small groups in their sweeps. He figured it was one of these men who had fired upon the family that had been hiding behind the bamboo trees. As they came, one of them made an exclamation and raised his M-16 a little higher. Candle glanced around behind him. He saw that the small boy who had been struck down with his parents was staggering dazedly after him, somehow still alive despite having had his nose torn away and one arm broken off at the elbow, hanging by only a few rubber bands of tissue.

  “Jesus Christ,” Candle breathed, as if that were the person he had seen so miraculously resurrected.

  Of course, the soldiers spattered him with bullets and he crumpled without a whimper. Candle spun to glare at them, but saw one of the GIs had tears streaming down his face.

  “This is too much, too much,” he blubbered, sagging, and one of the other GIs took him by the arm to support him. The man yanked himself free. “Too much,” he said, as he and his buddies veered off in another direction.

  Candle forced himself to temper the overall hatred of his countrymen that had suffused him today. He reminded himself that the Vietnamese could treat their own people with shocking brutality. And, he had seen three American soldiers early on in today’s attack herding a small group of civilians out of the village, urging them to flee for their lives. He knew he did not walk amongst devils or angels. Just humans. That was bad – and good – enough.

  As if he himself were one of the patrolling soldiers, moving from one scene of murder to the next like pollinating bees, Candle resumed his wandering of the village the Americans had dubbed Pinkville, in reference to the target-like red dot that denoted its place on their maps. Tramping briskly along, lest he miss some tasty tidbit to feed his pet, he squinted up at the dragonfly monster as it swivelled again, rose higher, fluttered away like a pollinating bee itself.

  He came upon a man he knew as Rivet, who was shouting at a cowering knot of women and thrusting a .45 at them. “Come here! Come here, you. VC Boom, right? You a VC Boom?” He was asking her if she were a prostitute, despite the fact that she held an infant. He was unzipping his fly with his free hand, trying to get the woman to understand with gestures of flicking hand and waggling penis and pointing gun that if she didn’t go down on him he would shoot her baby. Sobbing uncontrollably, the woman nevertheless handed her child to one of the other weeping women. Candle stopped clicking frames once the woman actually knelt down in front of the American (a shoving hand on the top of her head). The photographer denied his camera more than that; not just the oral rape, but the “double veteran” ritual that was sure to follow.

  Still, he soon chanced upon a “double veteran” in progress. A girl of about 14 lay nude on the ground with a soldier atop her and another standing by, buckling his equipment-laden belt. As Candle approached, the GI rose from the girl, planted a foot on her belly when she tried to sit up, and let loose a brief volley into her head.

  Their different appearance and language made them seem less like humans, more like things to these men, Candle mused. But they were not so alien that they weren’t sexually arousing...just alien enough to slaughter.

  On, he walked. He could almost feel his camera tugging at his arm like a bloodhound. A Ouija board’s planchette, pointing itself at the urging of the ghosts they called the Guests. But he knew he alone was the camera’s legs, however much its cilia-like limbs rippled. He was the driver of a getaway car; just as culpable. Right? He was an accomplice...

  He passed a buffalo fallen on its side, still snorting defiantly as it lay dying. His trigger was depressed, but instead of releasing a merciful killing bullet he merely recorded the beast’s suffering. Click. In front of the smoldering ruins of one of the first houses burned he aimed his camera at a blackened corpse, a cinder in the shape of a woman, her arms raised in the air as if she waited for someone to take her hands and lift her to her feet. Click. A heap of maybe thirty bodies, intestines disgorged from burst bellies; at the top of the pile like the crowning cherry on a sundae, the body of a naked baby with one soft buttock blasted away. Click.

  It’s history, Candle told himself, pointing the camera at the mound of bodies stacked up like rubbery mannequins. He knew, from experience, how far away to stand, how best to align the camera (it had two horny fin-like ridges on its back that he liked to sight between), despite the lack of a viewfinder. Yeah – I’m a real artist, he thought. Real talented. But it was history; he must preserve it. It would make a difference. All titillation of Guests, of newspaper buyers, of TV watchers aside...someone would learn a lesson from this, wouldn’t they? These images would serve a different and greater value – right? It was an awesome responsibility; he was obligated to transcribe the very worst of these atrocities onto film. Because otherwise, one day it wouldn’t seem real anymore. It would be forgotten. New atrocities would replace it, like a dune in the desert swept away as the next dune formed. It would have never happened at all.

  It was history. It was history. And this was the only way he could will the strength into his finger to squeeze that trigger again. Click. Again. Click...

  He was surprised that he hadn’t vomited. Dismayed at himself that he hadn’t even shed a tear. God; even some of the murderers had shed tears. But tears would blur the lenses of his eyes, and his brain was as much a roll of film as the one jammed up his camera’s ass. And he was like that little boy who had come tottering along with his nose gone and his arm swaying by a tether. Shell-shocked. Traumatized. Numbed beyond real comprehension.<
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  But he wished he could cry...if only to reaffirm that he was still sane, still alive, still human.

  The camera seemed almost to know that they had reached a kind of destination. Ahead of him, Candle recognized one of the officers with two of his men. At some point or another, they had rounded up a group of what Candle judged to be fifty or sixty Vietnamese – primarily the very elderly, women, children and infants – and had them all squatting close to the ground. The villagers gazed up in dread at the tall, uniformed men speaking in an alien language, carrying bulky weapons...stared at one individual in particular. The man Candle fixed his attention on.

  His name was Lieutenant William L. Broom, and he was a Medium.

  In the early days, beginning at the turn of the 20th Century, the Guests had only been able to create a more direct link with these selected individuals – always, with the host’s consent – by means of a large, tick-like insect affixed to the back of their skulls like an immense tumor. As the decades had progressed and the biotechnology had evolved, however, the parasites had become less bulky and grotesque, until now the creatures were so small (secreted away inside a host’s head) that one could not tell a Medium by appearance alone.

  And yet, lately there had been the decline and decay of so much of the Guests’ organic technology. The Mediums had not gone unaffected. Candle had noticed earlier today that Lt. Broom had been wearing a patch of gauze taped over his ear, and had assumed at the time he was suffering a draining infection or perhaps a wound. But now he realized the truth. The patch of gauze was in need of changing; it was soaked a dark brown color. Also, a band of fluid too dark and seemingly too thick to be blood was running out of one of the man’s nostrils. He licked the little hollow above his lip, unconsciously. As the photographer approached them, the officer was raging at his two men.

  “I thought...I thought...damn it,” he was bellowing, his face flushed red, pacing back and forth in front of the hunkering villagers, “you idiots...I thought I told you to take care of them!” He was visibly trembling. Quaking, as if he might flop to the ground in a full-fledged seizure.

  “We are – we’re watching over them,” one of the two soldiers answered a bit meekly, cowed by his commander’s display.

  “No! No! No!” Broom shouted, suddenly only inches from the man’s nose, spraying him with spittle and flecks of the syrupy brown blood. “I didn’t ask you to babysit them...you...you...you fucks...fuck...fucking kill them. I meant for you to k-k-kill them!”

  “Sir...”

  “Form a line. You too,” he barked at the other soldier. And he looked at Candle and started to command him to join the firing squad, also, until he saw that he was carrying an avid camera, not a dispassionate gun. There had been attempts by the Guests to create organic guns, perhaps transmitting images from the very instruments that spewed killing projectiles – maybe even transmitting brief snapshots from each tiny beetle-like bullet itself – but none of these mutations had been viable.

  “C’mere, c’mere, c’mere...c’mon, c’mon...we’ll line up here...here...here, you stupid fucks...line up...we’ll fire into them...we’ll...fire when I tell you. When I tell you, you fire, understand? Huh? Answer me!”

  The first soldier lifted the grenade launcher he carried. “Ah, sir, if I...if I shoot this, we could get hurt, too. And, it would be a waste of ammo, sir. I’ll just hang back – watch out for anyone trying to escape...”

  Broom didn’t contest what to Candle was clearly a ruse by the soldier to avoid taking part in the firing squad. The officer instead wheeled at the second man and roared. “You! You fire with me! Now, damn it, now! Now! Shoot them, kill them, fucking kill them!”

  Then Lt. Broom and his man turned and opened up on the people squatting before them, not even a dozen feet away, their M-16s flicked to fully automatic. Candle pointed the camera at the villagers like a third gun, after all. Some of the victims tried to stand up and run, but they were sprayed with lead and went down fast...clumps of flesh, chips of bone, tatters of clothing and a mist of blood rising up like fragmented ghostly effigies in their place.

  He saw arms shot off bodies. Heads torn from their necks by the bullets. The soldier Broom had commanded to join him broke off after a while, his face awash with tears, and tried to push his steaming gun at the soldier with the grenade launcher, but that man would not accept it. The man with the grenade launcher even began yelling curses at the officer, but heedless of his traitorous men, Lt. Broom went on firing alone...reloading his weapon with magazine after magazine...swearing or yelling but his words incomprehensible beneath the chattering of his rifle.

  “God help us,” Candle himself uttered. But he couldn’t hear his own words, either. “God help us...”

  When the officer’s gun ran empty for the last time, not a single one of the heaped bodies so much as twitched. Candle could see that mothers had made themselves into shields over the bodies of children. He could think of no braver act for a parent, for a human being, to perform than that. But it had been to no avail.

  Facing his men, trembling less violently, as if some domineering lust had been assuaged, in a surprisingly composed tone Lt. Broom said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Fucker,” Candle muttered, trudging along after him and the two infantrymen, staring at the back of Broom’s head as if he expected to see the parasite part the hair there to gaze back at him mockingly. He felt he had no choice but to follow him; his camera’s legs were practically swimming in the air to keep up.

  As they marched, they passed yet another dead buffalo lying by the path, and a butterfly fluttered up into the air from behind it, so that it looked to Candle as if the insect had emerged from the body of the torn animal itself. The butterfly put him in mind of an article he had read in a magazine recently. There was an insect native to Asia referred to as a tear-sucking moth, more formally known as Lobocraspis griseifusa. This moth would poke a buffalo in the eye with its proboscis, causing tears to form, which it would then drink for the salt and white blood cells they contained. The drinking of tears was called “lachryphagy”. Reading about this moth had reminded Candle of the Guests – nourishing themselves on human tears instead...

  Eventually, they arrived at an irrigation ditch on the eastern edge of the village. Here, Candle estimated another fifty or so prisoners had been herded together and made to stand down in the ditch itself, this gouge in the earth looking like a trench dug for soldiers. Candle saw Broom sit and rest for a little bit as more soldiers arrived. In the mean time, the officer rubbed at his temple and looked at his fingers, repeatedly, as if he expected to see more blood leaking from the very sutures of his skull. Finally, as if drugged into slow motion, he looked up at his men and slurred, “We’ve got another job to do.” He rose.

  Broom became increasingly animated again after his brief stupor. Candle was unable, or afraid, to take his eyes off him. The officer began attempting to interrogate an aged Buddhist monk. Candle himself could barely make out the officer’s shouted questions, and knew the monk was understanding none of it. Finally, in disgust, Broom drew back his M-16 and used its butt to hammer the monk directly in the teeth. The man managed to remain on his feet, pathetically dignified.

  Candle peripherally saw a toddler, maybe two years old, climbing up the side of the trench as if he might escape unnoticed. Broom did notice, however, and broke off from his interrogation to snatch the child up into his hands, throw it back into the ditch, and fire a burst from his M-16 into its body. He then stormed back to the monk, ignoring the screams and wails rising as if from the very pit of hell.

  But Broom was getting nowhere with the holy man – and suddenly, impatiently, shoved him into the ditch and riddled him with bullets, too.

  More villagers were shepherded to the trench, struck with rifle butts if they hesitated too long in scrambling down to join the others. Not long before, a couple of the soldiers had been playing in a subdued way with some of the village children, as if to soothe them, but now these chil
dren had been added to the ditch, too. Candle could read dread in the faces of these GIs. It was strangely reassuring to him, to see that emotion there.

  In fact, Candle saw one of the soldiers, a black man named Hinge, bluntly refuse when ordered by the lieutenant to prepare to fire upon the prisoners in the ditch. Broom’s face went a shade of purple, as if he were asphyxiating on his own rage, and he leveled his rifle at the man’s eyes...but several other soldiers leaped in front of Hinge.

  “You fucks...you cowardly fucks...you fucking traitors...I’ll court-martial you, I’ll kill you...k-k-kill you...” He began to stamp over to the lip of the trench.

  Candle had flicked his eyes from the officer to the people massed down on the floor of the ditch. He saw a tiny elderly woman in a red shirt, her face twisted in anguish, a younger woman hugging her from behind with her face pressed against the back of the old woman – her mother? Beside them, a woman in black pajamas held her son, a toddler with his eyebrows raised in confused trepidation, on her hip. On the other side of the old woman, a little girl in a white shirt and black pants – her hair cut into a black helmet with a fringe of bangs – clung to another adult woman with a look of absolute terror on her face, like the theatrical mask of tragedy, and Candle found himself jerking the camera in their direction to capture forever that ephemeral mask of flesh.

  “Wait!” he heard himself yell. But although he was instinctively, professionally doing his job in pointing the camera at this knot of victims, he had not called “wait” so that he might get his shot before they opened fire. He had called “wait” as an involuntary exclamation – as if at the last moment he might stop them from what they were about to do.

  But Lt. Broom began discharging his weapon down into the ditch. Several other men took this as their signal to open fire, as well, and the chorus of gunfire became deafening. The little group of people Candle had specifically focused his attention on were cut down out of his sight, lost in the smoke and flying blood and dropping bodies. An image on the retina, a blink, and then gone.