Jenkins was getting drunk in a bar one night when he heard a couple of non-coms tossing back rice whiskey and talking tall. One of them got real quiet before he told his buddies he’d heard from a green beret that the Slog was where all of the special forces had bivouacked deep in the jungle. He said the greenies had taken over some half-rotted stone temple all covered in red stains and letters nobody could read. According to him the greenies took VC prisoners, staked them out on top of the tallest stones, and cut them up one piece at a time. They let the blood flow, and howled out the old names that wind, rain, and the jungle damp had spent centuries trying to erase from the walls and floors of that unholy place. What they did after was worse though, and when his drinking buddies prodded for more the storyteller tossed back another shot and refused to talk about it anymore.
Luke had been sitting up keeping watch with Cooper one night when the medic had started shaking. Before his teeth had finished chattering Cooper told Luke about his first week on patrol. It had been a routine nature hike until a kid named Frankie Prince had found a booby trap the hard way while walking point. The kid had lost a leg, half his face, and most of an arm, but Cooper had kept him alive. They called in an evac but it didn’t come. Frankie had been lying there moaning and twitching, slipping in and out of consciousness. Cooper was half-nodding when the kid’s good eye shot open, and he grabbed the medic’s arm hard enough to leave week-long bruises. Frankie said they were all dead, dead and rotting in the Slog. He said he’d be dead too if he didn’t get out. He took two more deep breaths, and then whatever was still holding on inside Frankie let go. Cooper said it was like watching someone’s soul drown. Ten minutes later the medic threw up in the latrine.
Gardner had been chasing the dragon in a chop-down tent while some guy two puffs away from floating out of his skin babbled about screaming trees, and something pale and blind swimming down out of sight in the swamp water. Simms had been down in the brig trying to ignore a shiner he’d gotten for taking a swing at his sergeant while the guy in the next cell muttered about ghosts coming to drag him down into the mud. According to the guard the guy had been the only survivor of his unit, and he’d tried to desert twice right out of the hospital. Whatever it was he saw out there had scared him bad enough he was less afraid of a court martial than staying in-country for one more day. In the end he chewed off his own tongue, and choked on it. Even Johnny, with his freckles and carrot-colored high-and-tight wore a hard grin when he said the name of the place out loud. Like those two words might be enough to call up the devil.
“Well,” Luke said, blowing his two-stroke smoke back out through his nose. “What did he say?”
Johnny gave Luke a you-aren’t-going-to-believe-this-shit head shake. The redhead opened his mouth, and the right side of his head exploded like his skull had sneezed. Half a second later lead rain poured through their little camp, accompanied by the distinctive, clacking chatter of Kalashnikovs. Men dove for foxholes, snatching helmets with one hand and rifles with the other. Luke rolled, sucking in breath and choking on his smoke as a nine-pound sledge slammed into his back and sent him tumbling. He crashed into the bottom of his foxhole head-first, and his teeth snapped shut like a spring-loaded trap. Lights blossomed behind his eyes, and he felt wetness around his thighs. Dirt showered down on him, and he had enough time to wonder if he’d pissed himself before he went under.
* * *
Luke came to with cold mud cupping his balls, and harsh light slanting the wrong way into his hole. He tensed, then slowly relaxed. He took shallow breaths that barely filled his belly, and listened. He didn’t hear anything. There were no voices, no squelching footsteps, and no groans of pain. There was no wind, and if the jungle was still up there nothing moved in or through it. The constant drone of mosquitoes, like the high tension wires in the backyard you forgot about until there was a blackout, was gone.
Moving like a man underwater Luke felt for his rifle. He dragged it close, and probed blindly for his helmet. He hung the dark green half-turtle on the end of the barrel, and slowly raised it. No shots rang out. Nothing moved. He lowered the decoy, and raised it a moment later. Still nothing. Skin pebbling and muscles tensing he put his muck-smeared helmet back on. Luke checked his weapon then coiled his legs under him. He took a deep breath, kissed the silver crucifix his mama had given him, and stuck half his head out of the hole.
Nothing had changed, but everything was different. The jungle was still there, but in the flat light its deep, rich green was two licks from black. Simms’ bedroll was half-undone, sodden with mud like a bad memory of some forgotten summer camp. Jenkins’ mirror hung from a low branch, swaying and flashing as it swung in and out of shadow. The King of Hearts stared at the sky, his placid face covered with fat, red spatter and tiny chunks of gray meat. Three sheets of notebook paper with ragged edges fluttered from underneath a root like crippled birds. There were no other holes.
Luke’s brain tried to process what he was seeing. A hundred synapses fired in a thousand directions, trying to shine a light on the answer. Luke’s legs decided it would be a question better considered from a distance, and his heart agreed. His lungs fell in line, and in less than three seconds all of him was into the trees and away.
He didn’t run like a soldier, with his eyes up and his ears sharp. He didn’t run like a civilian either, bulling through anything that got in his way. Luke moved like a swamp rabbit, panting as his arms and legs pumped in a perfect rhythm. He leaped over outstretched roots, swung around skinny trunks, tucked down under clutching branches, and vaulted over dead falls without thought or hesitation. It was graceful, even pretty in a desperate sort of way as he defied gravity to put the unnamed terror behind him.
He stopped running when he came to a blasted tree. The thing had been a cypress once upon a time, until God had laid it low. Black and twisted, with gnarled fingers severed at the second knuckle, the tree sat alone like a woodland pariah. Words had been carved into it by a hundred hands, and they were written in nearly as many languages. Luke saw English and French, Vietnamese and Dutch nestled side by side in ways their mother countries never had been. He saw short, choppy characters he didn’t recognize, and letters that made his eyes hurt to try and follow them. Poetry, profanity, and the worst parts of the bible ran helter-skelter over the tree’s lightning-struck skin, blending into a cacophony of carpentry. In the bloody light of late day it looked like the Maypole at a devil’s social.
Luke took one step into the no-man’s-land that surrounded the blasted tree. His nostrils flared, and he silently mouthed the words he could make out. Closer to the tree the smells of char, damp, and rot lingered in the air. There was something else, too; something sharp and tangy, like a sock full of pennies accidentally thrown in the wash. Luke socked his rifle to his shoulder and took a careful, quiet step around the tree. On his third step he found the source of the smell.
The body still wore the black pajamas of a Viet Cong soldier. The cloth was shredded, and it hung like a tattered flag at a hobo’s funeral. Beneath the cloth the flesh had gone bloated and sallow, sagging off the bones like the corpse had been a hundred years old when someone put him out of his misery. The legs were gone at the knees, and only a grisly shard of red bone poked out of the remains of the left sleeve. A colony of beetles nested in the stump of the neck, and the noises as they ate sounded like wet radio static. The ghastly sack of flesh was nailed to the tree, and its one remaining arm pointed off into a thick wall of unbroken tangle. In big, bold letters where the head should be were the words Checkpoint Charlie. Above the hand, little more than a bony puppet held together by strings of gristle was carved one word: Slog.
Luke stood there with his mouth open, and the sour taint of the decaying road sign sitting heavy on his tongue. His guts clenched, and his rifle lowered, but those things seemed far away and unimportant. He stared transfixed at the mangled effigy while mud soaked through the vents in his boots. A centipede as thick as his middle finger and nearly as long as
his forearm burrowed out through the hollow of the throat. Charlie sighed, and a rush of thick, black blood burbled down his skinny chest.
Luke turned his head, and vomited. It was thin and yellow, like polluted river water. He heaved three times, hands on his knees and his asshole puckering every time his belly knotted up. Cold, greasy sweat ran down his cheeks, and dripped from the tip of his nose. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and spit. When he looked up, he saw what Charlie was pointing at.
The jungle had parted her legs, and in the thick tangle Luke saw a hole. The edges dripped dampness, and thick musk wafted from it. The smell was a miasma; new life growing fecund in a womb filled with teeth. It stank of black water in stagnant pools, overgrown toadstools blooming from the mouths of dead things, and the slow, serpentine life that fed and bred in the shadowy places of the earth. To Luke it smelled like home. He looked back the way he’d come, and the twisted trees stared back at him with sunset eyes. The shadows reached for him, and a flock of birds burst into the sky no more than three klicks back. Something was headed his way.
Luke took stock. He had his rifle, two full magazines, a sidearm, an M-7 bayonet, a brush knife, a canteen, and a dirty handkerchief. He had a compass, an old lighter, makings for two or three more smokes, a dirty helmet, a pair of wet boots, an entrenchment tool, a torch with a cracked red lens, and a couple packs of stale crackers he’d been keeping in his breast pocket. What he didn’t have was a radio, a map, or a clue. He was four days’ out, off of any and all trails he knew, and he had to get back to friendly territory. That meant dodging patrols, avoiding the locals, and conserving as much ammunition as he could. He glanced up at Charlie again, and watched as one beetle chased another down the dead man’s shoulder to fight for a particularly succulent chunk of throat meat. He looked where Charlie was pointing, then down at his compass. The needle wavered, but it seemed pretty sure that Charlie was pointing in the direction Luke needed to go. Whatever was down that way was no friend to the Viet Cong. Even if the enemy of his enemy was his friend though, a man would have to be crazy to go down that path in the dark. Another man would have to be even crazier to follow.
“Anybody else comes this way, you never saw me,” Luke said, his usually deep voice an octave or so higher than normal. The rotting neck bobbed slightly, as if Charlie was trying nod. A laugh burbled in Luke’s throat. He choked it back, turned, and ran for the hole before he lost his nerve.
* * *
Luke swept his torch over what little path there was, looking for trip wires, snares, or signs of recently disturbed earth. He glanced up every half-dozen steps or so, clearing his three, six, and nine o’clock positions. There was the usual animal chatter, splashings and crashings in the dusk-clotted brush and high up in the dim tree tops, but there was nothing big enough or close enough to warrant his attention. He was fifty yards in when he raised his head; what he’d thought was just another vine was staring at him with flat, dead eyes the size of croaker marbles. He gasped, and fangs as long as bass fish hooks clicked off his helmet. He squeezed the trigger, and his rifle hacked a round into the underbrush.
Luke dropped onto his heels, and brought the M-16 up to catch a blow that never came. The snake swung like a busted door spring, spinning slightly as it arced through the air. Luke swallowed until his heart was back where it belonged. He stopped the fleshy pendulum with the barrel of his weapon, and raised his light.
It was a python, and the goddamn thing was big enough to swallow a six-year-old and still have room for her little dog too. It had a shovel head big enough to dig a grave with, and in the red glare its hide was a dull, rubbery black. It had been stapled to the tree by its tail with wooden stakes, and thick, viscous fluid dripped from the jutting jaw. Something snapped with the wet pop of a sodden rubber band. The mouth bulged, distended, and a pale sack of meat fell out. It plopped into a puddle of the serpent’s dribbling decay, and spattered Luke’s boots. It looked like a leather purse with the lining pulled out. He let the snake go, and kept walking.
There were others. A toad the size of a dinner platter hammered down a broken branch where it had popped like a balloon full of moldering guts. A marbled cat strapped to a skinny trunk with a web belt, all four feet and its tail cut off for good luck. A family of crucified rats watched him pass without so much as a squeak, and a gibbon’s head grinned at him good-naturedly like they shared some private joke.
That wasn’t all. Whoever had left the bloody blazes marked the trail in other ways too. Some of it was smudged and smeared, written in pencil, pen, blood, or shit by the smell of it. Other messages were clearer, dug deep into the bark with knives or burned in with careful patience. I volunteered because I wanted to defend my country, one trunk proclaimed. I married a girl I hate because I knocked her up, another said. I bought drugs for my brother so he’d spend more time with me. After a while Luke stopped reading; the confessions made him sick in ways the gutted signposts never could.
The path decayed along with its markers, meandering back and forth like a drunk with a sextant had plotted the way. What had been a trail grew wild and bent-legged, jogging over hillocks and dipping into ditches. The earth grew wet and spongy until it was like walking over a dead man whose skin was starting to give way to corruption. In places it opened up, and dark water gaped beneath the ground. Flies buzzed in the blackness, eating away the mangled bread crumbs until there was almost nothing left. The clouds parted for Luke’s lamp, and closed in a curtain when he’d taken his light and moved on.
He’d gone nearly twenty yards with no sign of something dead when the air opened up. It was like stepping from a narrow narthex into a vaulted cathedral. The hum ceased, and somewhere nearby water lapped at muddy shores. Far above was a faint click-clacking sound, like bats roosting. Luke held his light up high, but still couldn’t see more than a few yards in any direction. Thick grass shushed against his knees. He turned left, then right, skin prickling on the nape of his neck. The torch flickered, and Luke smacked it against the heel of his hand. It juttered, then steadied. He unscrewed the red lens with careful fingers. White light bloomed, and Luke nearly dropped the flash.
Towering trees stood in a wide circle, their hoary branches and scarred trunks thick and strong. Bones hung from those branches, swaying on twine tendons with every breeze. Femurs clacked against scapulas like wind chime xylophones, and finger bones conducted a symphony of swaying spines. Beneath the bones a lagoon swallowed the land, but eight little islands reared out of the murky pool. Across the expanse, no more than forty or fifty yards away, two trees embraced each other like conjoined lovers. Martyred above the arch like a meat gargoyle was another torso. Black rags and flayed skin dangled from scored ribs, and something was carved in sloping, idiot letters above the carcass.
“Golgotha,” Luke muttered, sounding out the legend written in yard-high letters. The word fell into the quiet, hollow as a lie told in a confession booth. “Jesus Christ.”
Luke stepped closer to the water’s edge, shining his light up at the macabre mobiles. They reminded him of the gator bells his uncle put up every spring. They’d ring in the wind, but people in the parish looked for the brass baubles even if they couldn’t hear them. They knew if there was a bell hung in a tree it was there to let everyone know to keep their hands on the throttle and their fingers on their triggers.
Something splashed in the water, and Luke swung his beam over the pool. Ripples skipped and bounced, turning the surface into a melting spiderweb. Luke thumbed his rifle’s selector switch with his right hand and cozied his finger around the trigger. His knees bent without conscious input, and he tracked his light from one end of the water to the other. All he saw were the waves, and seven little sandbars.
Luke was already moving when the water surged. He made it two steps before the little lake burst like an infected sore, showering his back with warm, brackish wet. His ankle turned, and he went down hard. His flash bounced away in a crazy kaleidoscope of light and dark, and something
went after it. Something the size of a diesel tractor that hissed like July rain on a hot top. Luke swung his rifle up with clumsy, half-numb hands, and fired. Three rounds made flat, slapping sounds, and the shape grunted. The torch stopped rolling, and the creature turned toward Luke.
It looked like something that had crawled out of the bottom of the barrel after the six days of creation were over and done with. Its hide was a pale, quarried gravel stretched over a too-big frame. Its massive chest dragged the ground, but its belly sloped up and back to pair powerful hindquarters. Meat hook claws tipped the end of massive feet, tree trunk legs churned the mud, and a lashing, scaly tail dug great gouges in the earth. It had too many legs, too many teeth, and a face that was nothing but a pale, eyeless shelf of bone above a double line of gaping, snuffling holes. The blind behemoth hissed, and charged.
It was fast. Fast enough that Luke barely had time for one more burst before it was on him. He rolled, and the thing thundered past. The tail smashed against Luke’s helmet, turning his roll into a spin as the chin strap gave way and the steel cap sailed into the darkness. He slammed into a tree hard enough to shake dew from the leaves. The bones overhead beat out a dinner-bell boogie.
The ground shook as the thing wheeled ‘round and came again. Luke didn’t have time to roll out of the way. He jumped, grabbed a branch, and swung his legs up just as the sightless freight train rammed the base of the huge tree. The tree swayed, and Luke’s grip went queasy. He hooked his legs around the branch, gritted his teeth against the pain in his ankle, and hauled himself up. The thing hit the tree again. Then a third time. It paused, head cocked like it was listening for falling fruit. When nothing fell it walked around the side of the tree with its head held high in the air. It took a step and snuffled. Then two more. Then a third. Luke stood slowly, arms out for balance until he had his back against the trunk. The thing wasn’t sure where he was, but Luke was sure it would find him if he didn’t figure something out fast.
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 27