Night Creepers

by David Irons

  The SKS was a Soviet semi-auto rifle that Spiers had been salivating over for months. He wasn’t sure why he had to have one, other than the fact that he couldn’t seem to get one.

  Carmody turned his gaze from the treeline. “Yeah, yeah, you and your goddamn SKS. And who told you the smoking lamp was lit? Put that sumbitch out. Slopes can smell American tobacco for miles.”

  “I was done anyway.” Spiers butted it on the damp sole of his jungle boot. He buried it in the soft earth so no one would find an American cigarette butt lying around.

  Carmody slipped his cap off and swatted flies with it, scratching his bristly gray scalp with his other hand. Using the spotting scope, he scanned the jungle in all directions. He frowned, cussed, shook his head. “If that gook officer was gut-shot, he sure made a good run of it.”

  “He’s dying. Gotta be. He probably dropped dead out there somewhere. We’ll never find him. You know how they go to ground.”

  “Less talking, Suzie Q. Fix those weapons.”

  Spiers went about sabotaging the AKs. It was SOP. If you couldn’t take it with you, you denied the enemy the use of it. In the case of rifles, you rigged them so they’d explode next time they were fired. Denying the enemy got carried to great extremes like everything in that war. The infantry would generally destroy anything it couldn’t carry off—burn hootches, blow ammo dumps, booby trap enemy dead, shoot pigs and chickens and dogs, torch crops. There was an art form to total destruction and there was no more dangerous, brutal animal in the world than a nineteen-year-old American boy. Spiers had heard that some of the soldier of fortune snake-eaters—SEALs and LRRPs and Berets—would actually drop poison vials into wells and inject livestock with infectious diseases. Maybe it was just bullshit, but maybe not. The stories made the rounds and you tried not to think too much about them.

  Spiers and Carmody were a sniper team, spotter and shooter, though they both did their fair share of both. There wasn’t much they could do to deny the enemy besides putting bullets in their skulls. Today had been a good kill: six Viet Cong sappers. Easy as pie. They caught them in a dry wash and picked them off one by one. They both did the hunting. They set up in a high bamboo thicket and started popping rounds before the VC knew what was what. It had almost been too easy: nice clean headshots for the most part.

  It got to Spiers every time.

  The way the body flopped around, the brain going haywire and shooting electricity down every neural pathway, energizing every single nerve ending. It was obscene for a man to die like that, flipping and jumping and writhing…yet, intriguing. Like a sideshow attraction that disgusted you, but made you look. No dignity in a death like that.

  Carmody had taken out two of them in that manner.

  The gooks had been asking for it, really, getting themselves tangled up in a clusterfuck like that. Out in the open, sitting around sucking up their fish sauce and rice. Uncle Ho should’ve thanked Carmody and Spiers for greasing the bastards. After the shooting was over, Carmody lobbed a grenade into the wash to finish the job. It hadn’t been necessary, but Carmody was nothing if not thorough.

  But somehow, some way, that officer had slipped away. Go figure. Those Viets could be god-awful tenacious when the mood struck them.

  Spiers could see him now—the canvas belt he wore, the red star emblazoned on the square aluminum belt buckle. An officer, all right. He’d seen him go down, seen that round—one of Carmody’s—clip him in the belly.

  Yet, he’d made a run of it.

  Amazing.

  Not for the first time, Spiers was absolutely in awe of the human will to survive.

  “We better E and E our asses out of here, Gunny,” he said, feeling uneasy for some reason. The sun. The heat. The dank, rotting undergrowth…he wasn’t sure what. “Let’s escape and evade and find that LZ before dark. We don’t wanna be left out here.”

  Carmody got that look on his face. “I think we’re gonna track that gook officer, Cherry.”

  Shit, Spiers thought, there goes my drunk. Carmody…fucking boonie-rat Jungle Jim manhunter.

  He licked salt off his lips. “Maybe we shouldn’t, Gunny. That dink probably made for a base camp. We ain’t up to tangling with a VC/NVA company tonight.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy, Cherry. There’s no camp out there. Ain’t no nothing out there. No Charlies. Not even Tarzan. Just one belly-shot slope that I plan to finish off. Fucker’ll probably be dead by the time we find him.”

  But Spiers just shook his head. “He went east for chrissake. Probably making for the Cambode border to meet his buddies. And, shit, we can’t be far from there now. You know we can’t go over the fence. You know that well as I do.”

  “Says who?”

  “Regulations. Rules of engagement—”

  “Fuck regulations, Cherry,” Carmody spat. “I want that little zipperhead. I plan to mount his sorry head on my wall. Besides, we’re an easy twelve klicks from the border. We’ll tag that bitch in two. Probably fell into the bush and died.”

  Spiers said, “We ain’t no twelve klicks, Gunny. We’re way the hell out here. I never been out this far before. Border is probably just over that rise. We get caught there—”

  “Be better if we were caught here?”

  Spiers just shook his head. “The chopper…”

  “Don’t sweat that, Cherry. They know how I work. Nobody pops smoke, they won’t even come in. They’ll come back in the morning and we’ll be waiting for ‘em.”

  “Ah, Gunny, c’mon…I need a cold beer.”

  “Fuck you and your cold beer, sweet Mary Jane.”

  Spiers rubbed his eyes. He needed this like tits and a wiggle. It had WIA or KIA written all over it. And, maybe worse, POW. He knew it would happen, though. Carmody was one crazy gung ho grunt. A diddy-bopping bloodhound. Usually, they went out as a five-man Killer Team—Carmody, Spiers, two grunts, a radioman. But when it was just the two of them like this, Carmody acted like they were out on a father and son camping trip. Fucking boy scouts hiking out to Camp Pokatwatta.

  But it was pointless to argue; Carmody outranked him. “All right, Gunny. If that’s what you want. Who am I to argue? I just do what I’m told like a good little grunt.”

  “That’s what I like to hear, Cherry.”

  “I believe that. You’re not much for live and let live.”

  Carmody glared at him. “Don’t think I’m not onto you, Cherry. I see you reading your communist propaganda. Don’t think I don’t.”

  “What propaganda?”

  Carmody spit at a rock lizard. “That Chinese shit. Goddamn Chi-com mind fuck, that’s all it is. Pretty soon you’ll be wearing a fucking party badge and sucking Uncle Ho’s dick.”

  Spiers almost started laughing. The book Carmody was referring to was Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a classic text on warfare from the Han Dynasty, written well over two thousand years ago. He found it interesting, but not so interesting he would have actually paid money for it. He never bought it, he caught it. The book was thrown to him from a chopper by a Green Beret on his way up to the A Shau Valley. That was six months ago and Spiers was still holding onto it. It was worn and creased and generally dog-eared, but he was always looking at it, even though he’d read it cover to cover twice. It came out of the sky, manna from heaven, so he hung onto it like a good luck charm.

  “There’s nothing communist about that book, Gunny.”

  “Shit.”

  He’d never believe it and Spiers knew it. Books weren’t something Carmody spent much time with. He read the sports page when a newspaper made the rounds, but refused to look at the headlines because they were all written by the “pinko press.” Something which Spiers found hilarious.

  “That’s what I like about you, Gunny. You’re so fucking narrow-minded. The Pentagon pushes your buttons and you walk and talk just like a real human being.”

  Carmody got in close and personal. “Listen to me, Cherry. I’m not some brain dead flag-waver. I came to Vietnam to kill people
. You can think it’s for country and flag, but that just shows you how fucking brainwashed you are. I kill communists because I fucking hate ‘em and I like killing the little fuckers. I like stepping on them the way other people like swatting flies. It gives me great fucking joy to crush the little vermin for I am one mean, heartless, motherfucking killing machine. I am the shit in Charlie’s rice and every time he chews, goddamn, but he’s gonna wince at my taste.”

  “Gunny, with all due respect, I’m beginning to think you’re a first class psychopath.”

  “Right you are, son. I take lives, I drink blood, and fuck corpses. I make assholes pucker and balls shrink. I’m every mother’s nightmare and every commander’s wet dream.” He grinned sardonically, dropping Spiers a wink. “Now that we’ve established that, let’s go bag that officer.”

  Spiers just shrugged. He had no say in the matter and he knew it. So much for getting back to the firebase for some cold beer and a good night’s sleep. They’d never be seeing FSB Deep Cut tonight. He was hopeful about tomorrow…but not very.

  Carmody checked over his gear with eagerness like a teenage boy coming of age and going on his first November deer hunt, dreams of trophy bucks dancing in his head. The gleam in his eye was much the same.

  “I’m taking a piss call before we go on our hike,” Spiers announced.

  Carmody scowled. “Figures. You got the bladder of a twelve-year-old girl. Go air your pink slit in the bushes and try not to get your skirt wet. Jesus H. Christ.”

  Spiers stepped behind a tree, God knows why. He’d been living in close confines with battle-scarred Marines—the crude, the rude, and the lewd—for months now and there was really nothing approaching privacy, but sometimes when you could get it, you took it…despite all the stories of the poor bastards who’d been wasted by Charlie when they slipped off to do their business.

  When he got back, Carmody was staring at the fly-specked corpses broiling in the heat. “We’ll be back soon,” he told them. “You wait on us. Put a candle in the window.”

  “Let’s go already,” Spiers said.

  Carmody grinned. It was not a pleasant sight. His teeth were like yellowed tombstones set into that seamed, painted face. “Grab your ruck, Cherry. Let’s hump. We gonna bag us a Chuck and step in some shit.”

  But Spiers had a weird feeling they were about to step into something much worse.

  Something he just couldn’t put a name to.

  2

  They moved like stalking cats: quiet, controlled, predatory.

  Carmody led them through the trees and it was thick brush forest, a maze of damp ferns, gnarled teak trees, snaking vines and heavy-clotted undergrowth. The ground was muddy and uneven, an obstacle course of rotting logs, fallen branches, and leafy loam four inches thick that sucked their canvas boots straight down. The triple-canopy jungle blocked out most of the light from above, creating shifting pockets of shadow and steaming rank mist. Whenever they broke free into the hot sun, it was into fields of sharp-edged razor grass that grew seven feet high and would slice exposed skin. Then it was back into the jungle again, to fight through thickets of interlocking scrub and tangled vines and muddy sinkholes while clouds of mosquitoes and gnats hovered around them in a buzzing, persistent aura.

  The only good thing about any of it was that it was such primitive country—prehistoric is the word that passed through Spiers’ mind—and so congested, that there was no way any sizeable enemy unit could move through it. So beyond small bands of VC, he didn’t figure they had too much to worry about other than the local wildlife: poisonous snakes and venomous spiders and whatever other awful things that had come to term in its dripping vastness.

  Carmody, who was twice his age, moved through it like an indigenous tribesmen, a fucking Nung Kit Carson scout. He did it quickly yet carefully, quietly and smoothly. He wasn’t even human. He was part monkey and part snake and part mole. Nobody could move like this guy; he wasn’t even human. Spiers had a hell of a time keeping up with him.

  “C’mon, Marine,” Carmody whispered to him, holding some fan leaves aside. “You move like my maiden aunt fucks.”

  And Spiers thought: That crazy motherfucker, he’s gonna lead us into a VC ambush and six months from now some ARVN grunt patrol’s gonna find our bones and wonder who the hell we were.

  The countryside was a mutiny of dense vegetation and there were just too many places for the enemy to hide. And that officer…well, he could’ve crawled off and died just about anywhere. They could have walked within four feet of his body and never even seen him. This was bullshit. The way things were going it would be dark before they evaded to the LZ.

  They crossed a spreading boggy pool of emerald green water, the surface slicked with algae and covered with gliding bugs. The bottom was slippery with flat, mossy stones and it was quite a job to keep from going on their asses with all the equipment they were carrying.

  At least it was for Spiers.

  Carmody moved through it like a kid, sure-footed with impeccable balance. On the other side, some fifteen feet in front of Spiers, Carmody held up a hand and Spiers stopped. His heart was thudding and he was up to his knees in the muck. If they made contact with the enemy now, he was a dead man. After a moment, Carmody motioned him forward.

  “See it?” he said.

  Spiers did. On a flat-bladed leaf, there were a few drops of blood.

  Beyond, there was a neat little trail of it through the fronds. Many of the stems were broken, petals flipped up with the lighter undersides showing. A rotted log had been disturbed by a boot, the darker wood gouged free. Someone had been through here, someone in a hurry. Someone stumbling blindly through the brush with no attempt made to cover their progress.

  It was the sort of trail an injured, desperate man might leave behind.

  Carmody grinned like a viper, moving forward in a slow, careful duckwalk, eyes wide, ears open, and nose sniffing like a Bluetick hound hot on the trail of a possum. He not only saw the blood, Spiers knew, but he smelled it and nothing would stop him now. He was relentless when he was on the trail of the enemy, absolutely relentless. He was a brutal and vicious killer when he was hot on the spoor of a communist. There was no way he would stop until he greased that officer, just no way. The idea of it was unthinkable to him. It was like having sex without an orgasm and Spiers figured for guys like Carmody that comparison was pretty damn apt.

  Grimweave is available from Amazon here!

  Or find more great horror books at www.severedpress.com