West and Cakes pushed into the unlocked room. Inside were two long, cramped aisles maintained for shit – empty racks next to over-packed ones, boxes stacked on boxes in no order. Outside there was screaming and shouting and more of that terrible vibration.
“Find us something,” West said, and Cakes started hefting and tossing.
West saw a rack of shotguns and went to investigate. A half-dozen 20-gauge Ithaca 37s, and seven cases of 28-gauge shells. Useless. Someone had stuck a captured Soviet burp gun behind a stack of dented helmets. He was hopeful for a split second – the PPSh-41 was shit at any distance but up close it could spray a lot of lead, fast – but the sole long box magazine was empty.
Does it matter, anyway? He hadn’t wanted to think about it, was planning to assess after he’d seen their firepower options, but that one that had killed the man in pink – it didn’t have a head. No head, and just as lively as a square-dance. Unless the kid could come up with some folk magic remedy, West wasn’t hopeful at their chances.
“I got us three working M1s and a shitload of Willie Petes,” Cakes said. “M15s, though, they don’t explode.”
White phosphorous signaling grenades. Maybe. Fire killed everything. He reached for the heavy, clinking bag of .45 rounds that Cakes had filled, shouldered it, and took two of the M1s. “Bring ‘em, whatever you can carry. Maybe these things will burn.”
Outside, someone had finally had the presence of mind to hit the air raid siren, and the rising, falling wail of it drowned out the world.
* * *
The gangshi burst in through the corner of post-op near the scrub room, directly in front of the two men who’d run inside, and then everyone was screaming. Broken wood and bent metal framed the glowing dead man, clothed in the peasant garb of a farmer. Its body had bloated in recent death; the creature looked swollen, puffy, the man’s face as round and shining as the moon. Dust rained down from the ceiling. One of the two men who’d run in – Lee knew he was with the motor pool but didn’t know his name – tried to get away and could not. The gangshi had already fixed its lifeless attention on him. The man shrieked in fear and then agony as the gangshi absorbed his chi. His body withered and dried and shrunk as his energy was stolen away and Lee could feel the shudder of shifting balance, imagined that the terrible vibration was the sound of distortion in the universe.
The ROKs cried out and somehow found legs, falling, running, crawling beneath cots. The farm boy on the floor kicked his feet, shrieking, and the gangshi turned its whole body towards the movement. Farm boy screamed. He’d pulled out the stitches in his side in his struggles. Fresh blood seeped through his bandages.
“No! No!” he yelled, as the gangshi hopped closer, and then the sounds he was making changed, from fear to terror to pain. The gangshi had connected with him. As the farm boy’s skinny body depleted, the bloated man shone more brightly, rich with chi.
If it is full… No one had suggested that the gangshi could get full, but surely they could not absorb more chi than a body could hold.
“Be still,” Lee said to the Americans. “Don’t make it see you.”
The dark haired man – the tall sergeant had called him Burtoni – immediately froze, his eyes cast down. The other one with jugeunkkae on his face, McKay, tried to hold still but he was so afraid. He shook and he could not look away from the gangshi, could not make himself calm. Lee didn’t want to die but thought that McKay was going to crack and bring the gangshi to them. Lee closed his eyes and thought of his family.
Pak Mun-Hee chose the moment to cry out to God, tongsung kido, to plead forgiveness for his sins. The ganshi’s feet shifted, and it hopped towards Pak. The ROK cried out and fell back, unable to get up from his cot. He knocked over a tray of syringes that Nurse Miss Jenny had been preparing and the polished metal tray clattered to the ground. Glass broke. Overhead light splashed across the tray and Lee was up and moving. One word was in his head. Mirror.
Lee scooped up the metal tray as the bloated gangshi connected to Pak Mun-Hee from an arm’s distance away, stilling his frantic movements, trapping him in the unnatural exchange. Lee thrust the tray up in front of the gangshi, breaking the connection, forcing the gangshi to confront his own reflection. The tray seemed to vibrate in his hands. Lee did not look at the creature or at Pak Mun-Hee. He squeezed his eyes shut.
For a moment nothing at all happened, and Lee felt sweat break out all over his body. And then a horrible, high-pitched keening erupted from the gangshi. Lee risked a glance. There was no change in the dead, bloated face but the keening cry went on and on, the sound of fury and hate and fear spilling from its lifeless throat. It was a terrible sound.
The gangshi shifted on its bare feet and hopped back outside, moving almost too quickly to see. It was there and then it was gone.
Lee felt his knees give out and collapsed. Pak Mun-Hee sobbing, thanked him, thanked God. Burtoni was with him in a second, pulling him to his feet, dragging him back to their friend’s cot. Outside, men screamed and fired weapons.
“The story of the mirror, it is true,” Lee said. What a terrible cry! Thinking of it made his knees feel weak again.
“Okay, okay, this’ll work,” Burtoni said. “There’s trays all over the place. We can put ‘em on the patients, maybe hang them from the walls—”
McKay laughed, a high-pitched, rising sound. His gaze darted back and forth, back and forth. “Right, they’re scared,” he said, and laughed again. “They’re scared! They’re not real, but they see themselves and they run away!”
He couldn’t control his laughter now, holding himself, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. Burtoni looked at Lee, met his gaze. Lee could see his thoughts, and agreed. McKay was michin geos. Shook.
Burtoni turned a scornful eye on McKay. “Get ahold of yourself, or I’ll slap you in the puss. What are you, a girl?”
“They’ll be scared,” McKay whispered, wiping his eyes, still grinning. “But they’re not even real.”
“Yeah, that’s a laugh riot,” Burtoni said. “Come on, help me push the cots together. Lee, get as many of those trays as you can carry.”
Lee nodded and McKay at least got up to help Burtoni, still chuckling helplessly. Lee ran for the bins of sterilized trays, unable to believe that he’d been able to act. Perhaps because he was still unable to believe that the villagers had been right, that the dead had been called home.
The building shook and another gangshi crashed into the room through the south wall. The cabinets there fell to the ground and broke, scattering bandages and suture kits. Lee snatched up the trays and headed back for where the Americans had shoved several cots, Pak Mun-Hee, the wounded American, and two of the unconscious men. He looked back over his shoulder, afraid that it was fixing on him but it only stood there, stupid and dead. They would hold up the trays and be safe, they would—
Lee realized what he was seeing. The gangshi’s eyes were gone, dark holes where they should have been. Its whole face had been gnawed and picked at, as though it had been outside on the ground for a long time. A splinter of cartilage was all that remained of its nose. Its cheeks and lips were gone, chewed down to a wide yellow grin. Its tattered shirt was full of new holes. Lee skidded to his knees next to the cots and passed out the trays, sick with new fear. How would it see its reflection without eyes?
Through the holes in the building they could see men running, they could hear trucks driving away.
The eyeless gangshi pivoted towards Lee, and the injured and the cots, huddled together in a great obvious lump, trays sliding to the floor and clattering. Burtoni was whispering a Hail Mary, holding a silver tray over his face. McKay shook, his expression a frozen grin, his eyes full of tears.
The doors to post op slammed open and the doctor, Captain Elliott, came running in with two orderlies and Nurse Miss Claire. They saw the gangshi and stopped, backing towards the door. One of the orderlies made the sign of the cross in the air.
Lee saw what McKay was going to do a
second before he did it, but was too late to try and stop him.
McKay stood up, his metal tray falling to the ground, pointing his weapon at the faceless creature. “You’re not real!” he yelled, and then fired and the gangshi hopped once more and was with him, ignorant to the fresh holes in its head and body. McKay screamed and was caught, staring into the chopped mask of flesh. His body began to change, to shrivel up.
“Fire in the hole!” someone called out, and Burtoni pulled his unconscious buddy’s cot over on top of them, slapped an arm around Lee, and slammed them both to the ground.
There was a clatter and then a soft pop and then the air was alive with snakes, with the smoking hot glow of burning phosphorous. The heat was sudden and searing, the light blinding. The gangshi was enveloped in a hissing, electric white shower and Lee had to look away. It was so bright he could see it through his eyelids, and then there were curses and screams and he felt burning particles settle across the backs of his bare legs. He pulled them in, made himself small beneath Burtoni’s heavy arm.
The hissing went on seemingly forever and as it died away Lee dared to look up. Coughing, he waved at the thick, burnt-meat smoke and saw a pile of burning flesh and bone and fabric where the gangshi had been. The doctor and the orderlies were running around and putting out small fires. The holes in the building let out the worst of the smoke but the chemical stink was terrible, like bad garlic, and Lee’s eyes burned and his nose ran.
The two big American soldiers were back, the sergeant and the private with the bad words. The private was spinning a ring around his finger.
“Looks like fireworks,” he said loudly, and coughed.
* * *
The GIs helped the doc get the patients loaded into a personnel carrier, Young and five others, plus a handful of camp workers who’d been injured in the attack. All around them chaos reigned. Groups of soldiers ran and fired, yelled and died. A goodly number were getting out, trucks and jeeps heading in all directions. Cakes kept up a steady screen of Willie Petes, the white-hot burning chemicals keeping the gangshi away from them. They wouldn’t jump through one, anyway. Burtoni helped the orderlies carry the patients out, while Lee and the medical officers ran supplies. West watched their backs toward the north, the black hill where the lanterns had been. Outside the brilliantly lit corridor of hissing phosphorous, dimly glowing gangshi hopped and darted silently across the dark land.
There were hundreds of them now, tearing through the MASH buildings, demolishing the tent town on their way to wherever. Main power went out – the generators were dying – and the wailing siren finally wound to a stop. West saw a Jeep whip by with Sanderson peering out the back, dull confusion on his useless face. West didn’t salute.
The doctor made his last trip out of the sagging post-op building holding a clinking duffel bag. Burtoni ran alongside him, holding up a metal instrument tray like a shield.
“We’re bugging out, Sergeant West,” the doctor said. “Get your men in the truck.”
“Yeah, Sarge, we gotta go,” Burtoni said, nodding emphatically.
“What about the priests?” West asked, gesturing vaguely towards the dark hill north of the camp, where he’d seen the lanterns. “If we don’t stop them, they’ll keep calling up more of these things, won’t they?”
“I don’t know anything about any priests,” the doctor said. “I’m getting these men out of here, now. We’re going south to the 124th.”
The Korean kid was looking at West. “The man from the village, he said the temple is rotten. He said the priests follow a bad man.”
“Bad how?” Burtoni asked.
“He is michin,” Lee said. “Ah, wrong in the head. Stark staring bonkers.”
“You know where this temple is?”
Burtoni was shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter about no temple, we gotta go, Sarge. We should stay with Young, right?”
Lee pointed. “North, they said. High on the hill, in the woods.”
West imagined bugging out with the doctor, with the other MASH refugees. Maybe it was safe at the 124th, maybe not. The way these things moved, where was safe? And how long would it take, to convince someone with the authority to call in a strike this far south?
And then hope we hit the bad temple with the bad priest, and hope that actually stops the dead from hopping around. For Pete’s sake, he was looking at the goddamn things and he didn’t believe in them. Who would listen? How many more people would die before they could talk the brass into believing ghost stories? They had a chance to stop this here, now.
“Burtoni, Cakes, bug out with Young,” he said, making the decision as he spoke. Fuck Sanderson, anyway. The buck had to stop somewhere.
“I’m going with you,” Cakes said. West had known he would.
“I’ll go with Young,” Burtoni said.
“Aw, don’t break a heel running,” Cakes sneered at him. “We’re going after ‘em, aren’t we, Sarge? Gonna prang those hoodoo gooks!”
Cakes’ enthusiasm was both disturbing and welcome. “We’re closest and we’ve got the news,” West said. “May as well be us.”
“I go with you,” Lee said.
“Forget it, kid,” West said. “You bug out with the captain.”
Lee shook his head. “You need me, to talk to the priest. To stop the gangshi.”
The kid gestured at the darkness beyond the stuttering Willie Pete. “It is wrong to make them walk again.”
The simple words seemed to resonate with all of them. Two years of men dying for scraps of territory, to be on the side with the most when the agreements were finally signed. It was all so pointless, so crazy.
Burtoni gripped his metal tray and his M1 and looked between West and the truck, the kid and Cakes. His struggle was clear on his hang-dog face, stark black and white by the light of the hissing grenade.
“Don’t go bleeding all over everything, making up your mind,” Cakes said.
“Fuck you, Cakes,” Burtoni said, then sagged. “Okay. Okay, I’m in.”
“Let’s get a ride,” West said.
* * *
A tiny little fleck of white phosphorous had landed on Cakes’ right leg when he’d blown the shit out of that monster in the hospital ward, and that little piece had burned deep. It wasn’t bleeding but it hurt like hell. Cakes was limping by the time they snagged a Jeep, lighting their way to the motor pool with Willie Petes, dodging the blindly hopping gooks through the ruined MASH. Sarge made him sit in the back with his leg up and had Burtoni drive. The gook kid was the only one small enough to fit in the back seat with him.
The kid pointed them along a steep road north that cut back and forth through the woods. As the MASH fell behind them, Cakes dug through their bags, seeing what they had left to work with. It could be worse. He found the loose box mags for the M1s and a carton of rounds. Wincing at the pain in his leg – it was swelling, too – he started loading.
“You been to this temple before, Lee?” the sarge called back.
“No,” said the gook kid. “Only the villagers told us about it. It is by the road north.”
Cakes looked at him. “Ain’t you a villager?”
“No.” The kid gazed at him with flat eyes. “I am KATUSA, with the MASH.”
Korean Augmentation To the United States Army. Cakes snorted. Bunch of starving refugees digging shitholes and hauling sandbags.
“You have family with you?” the sarge asked, raising his voice to be heard over the grind of the Jeep’s lower gears. The grade was steep and bumpy as hell. Burtoni was a shit driver.
“No,” the kid said. “No family.”
He didn’t sound whiny or look all heart-broke about it, just said it, matter of fact.
“What happened to ‘em?” Cakes asked.
“We were on the Hangang Bridge two days after 625,” the kid said. “In the early morning. Our army blew it up to stop the North from advancing into Seoul. I would have died, too, except my father sent me ahead to find out why no one was mo
ving.”
Cakes wasn’t sure what to say to that. He tried to imagine all his relations, his parents and sisters and cousins and grandparents, all blown up at once. He couldn’t do it.
“After that, many of us walked all the way to Pusan,” he went on. “I was there in September 1950 when the first UN soldiers landed.”
“Fuckin’ marines,” Cakes said, and shook his head. “Think their shit don’t stink.”
The kid smiled a little. “Hey, I got a Marine joke.”
“You’ve got a Marine joke?” Cakes snorted. “Let’s hear it.”
The kid nodded, smiling a little more. “A dogface and a marine are walking down the street, and they see a kid playing with a ball of shit. The dogface says, what are you making? The kid says, a dogface. The dogface says, why aren’t you making a marine? The kid goes, I don’t have enough shit.”
Not enough shit to make a marine, that was a good one! Cakes laughed. The kid had more hard bark on him than Burtoni, anyway.
“You getting an inventory?” the sarge called back.
Cakes kept loading. “We got eight signal grenades left, four extra mags of .45 ACP for the M1911s plus about forty rounds, six full clips of thirty-aught-six for the M1s plus a carton loose.”
“There are the silver trays,” Lee said. He held a stack of them in his lap. “We saw one run from its reflection.”
West looked back at them. “We’re going in ready but we’re gonna talk to them first, okay? See if we can’t persuade these guys to stop what they’re doing…” He trailed off, staring out the back.
Cakes craned his head around and looked.
A pale green glimmer far back on the road was suddenly closer, close enough for Cakes to see the outstretched arms, the hanging face. It hopped forward and then was falling away, standing still as they drove on.
“Hey, I think this is it,” Burtoni said. “There’s some hooches up here on the left—”
Cakes was watching the devil recede, and it was some strange trick of the eye, that its narrow hands were suddenly pressed to the back flap of the moving Jeep. They’d left it behind but now it was right on them, its mouth hanging open drooling and stupid, one of its eyes stuck closed, its skin glowing like radium.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 5