The Scream (35 page)

And at each one, just on the other side, the demons waited.

They knew that it wouldn't stay open long. It never did. The Mother struggled to protect herself, healing the perforations even as they occurred. Closing the holes, shutting them out. Their opportunity, such as it was, lasted only seconds.

But, sometimes, seconds were long enough.
. . .

On the afternoon of the second day they reached the hamlet of Phnom Dac. Once there, they rounded everyone up: maybe sixty-seventy people. Men, women, children. Strakker's team was slick, all right. Total pros. He had the Nung team circle around and come in on the north side first; the spotters thought they were NVA. By the time they realized what was up it was too late. Slick.

They found rice, and medicine, and ammo, and weapons. Standing orders were prepare to blow in place. This they did, conscripting the aid of several villagers in piling the ordnance in heaped and bristling pyramids, then wiring it all for command detonation when they'd gotten safely out of range.

Then they came to the problem of the prisoners. Standard mission procedure was to evac civilians to a POW camp, interrogate them till they found out who was doing what, and relocate the rest to a fortified hamlet somewhere in the south. That was what they usually did.

Not here. Not this far over the border, no fucking way. The fate of Phnom Dac seemed cloudy, until Major Strakker stepped in. He made it all crystal-clear. He took one of the ville elders from the huddled mass, held him by the chin and scalp, and very calmly asked him when the next NVA convoy was due in. He got no satisfactory answer, only a stream of appeasing denials. More questions, more denials. Strakker nodded and listened and nodded some more.

Then he snapped the old man's neck, like a dry twig. And he hauled up another.

And another.

And another . . .

The veil stretched. The veil stretched. With each snap of bone and cartilage the opening forced a little wider. Until it was possible to get a little help from the other side.

Until it tore completely
. . .

Six dead dinks later, the team got the picture. They questioned a few more. And they lined up the rest. Sixty, seventy people. Men, women.

Children . . .

. . .
as the Passage opened, the pipeline between worlds. It was tiny. It took far worse to effect any sort of major opening for more than a microsecond, and this was nothing compared to the gouges left by Dak To or Hill 875, Dien Bien Phu or the Plain of Jars. The horrors here, such as they were, were barely enough to squeeze through. Still, opportunity knocked.

And the demons answered.

Only a few got out, scrambling and clawing through the void, beating each other back in a mad dash for substance. The first through the gap became flame, became smoke, became madness and hate and rage. They tainted the adrenaline-charged moment like a mega-dose of impure speed: amping the panic, poisoning the fury
. . .

They shot them. It took five minutes, tops. It was nothing personal.

Walker did his bit like everybody else. The professional in him understood the necessity of it, understood that they were operating in an area where they were officially "deniable," against an enemy that commonly employed women and children as fighters, smoke screens, and sacrifices. They all knew the rap. Every one of them left breathing threatened their odds of getting out of there alive.

But his human side felt it: the schizoid fracture deep within his soul. On the one hand, the urge to waste these fuckers here and now. Every last little slit-eyed zipperheaded one of them.

And totally at odds with that, the glaring sense of
wrongness
. You don't kill civilians. You don't kill
children
. Sixteen years of Catholic schooling had pounded that much into him, and he'd come halfway around the planet to fight the good fight for God and country. He was beginning to realize that he'd become enmeshed in a machine not of his design, one whose purpose evaded him and whose outcome was to transform him into exactly what he'd come here to halt. He stood there with an AR15 smoking in his hands and watched the rounds shimmy and pock into backs, legs, heads. Most of them just laid there and took it.

But one woman-more a girl, actually, but with a babe of her own in her arms-made a run for it. She was near the edge of the woods on Walker's side. She broke through the underbrush and hauled ass down the hill.

Walker shot her, too.

She screamed, a high-pitched shriek, and the baby wailed. But she kept on running. He fired a few more rounds in her direction, slicing through the leaves along her projected trajectory when he couldn't see her anymore. She stumbled, but kept running. The baby kept crying.

And Walker kept firing . . .

Already the gap was closing, healing shut. Of the demons that pried free that moment, only one resisted the impulse to flee, to settle for what could be bought in the immediacy of the moment. It alone remained, one ethereal appendage hooked through the slit between worlds, like some hellish Dutchman with its finger in the dyke. Working the wound. Keeping it open. Gathering strength
. . .

The team walked into a clearing less than two clicks out. They'd set fire to the ville and then beaten a guarded retreat back into the jungle, taking a different trail and detonating the munitions when they were safely clear. They couldn't see the fireball through the trees, but they could hear the explosions and feel the ragged staccato tremors as Phnom Dac blew sky-high. Rocks and debris rained down behind them, snapping through the vegetation on its way back to earth. They continued on, keeping a watchful eye for trouble ahead and behind.

But trouble, when it came, came from above.

They were in a valley, little more than a niche between rocky slopes, and had entered a grove of sorts: a hole in the jungle big enough for extraction. They broke squelch and radioed in their position, and then sunk back into the jungle to wait. Walker guarded their rear, scanning the woods for movement. He was tired and uncharacteristically tense. Everyone else seemed to take it in stride, quietly smoking and waiting, and he thought that he should, too.

But nagging, haunting images of the way things went down in the hamlet continued to plague him. As he sat and stared into the undergrowth he kept seeing the bodies twitching on impact, the woman running down the hill, the woman lining up in his sights, the woman screaming . . .

In less than an hour they heard the whine of an approaching chopper. The team lit green smoke. An unmarked, camouflaged UH-1 circled overhead like a big metal dragonfly, then eased itself downward. There were mere minutes left to go when the prop wash bent back the tall grass and revealed the neat rows upon rows of sharpened bamboo stakes.

And only seconds when Walker looked up and noticed a peculiar movement in the trees. Way, way up, in the shadows of green and gold and brown.

Legs. Feet.

He yelled and dove behind an outcropping of rocks. Nobody heard him over the drone of the helicopter's rotor. Nobody turned.

Until the shadows themselves opened fire . . .

. . .
and Walker turned around just in time to see Major James "Bo" Strakker's head vaporize in a cloud of bone and brain less than three yards away; he went down firing, rounds spraying out in a spiraling pivot. Stray nine-millimeter slugs took out two of the Nung team members before they could even blink. The door gunner on the chopper opened up on the treeline in the last seconds before the pilot's windshield shattered and the ship spun down to explode in the field. Walker tried to cover the others, but there were too many of them; the bullets seemed to be coming from everywhere. Grenades dropped from the trees like apples at harvest time, dull metal thuds that threw shrapnel like molten confetti. Walker screamed as a heaping handful of it ploughed into the left side of his face and through the fabric of his Stabo-rig and into the soft skin and hard muscle of his back, cutting and burning like a sonofabitch from forehead to beltline. He fired wildly into the trees. The Huey exploded again as the ordnance caught fire, sending a huge black cloud of smoke and flame into the air
. . .

He blacked out for maybe two minutes. When he came to, he was blind in one eye and the overall pain was impressive. He reached up and patted the left side of his face; his hand came away blood-slicked and full of tiny bits of twisted metal. The surface of his face was a welted, pulpy mass from cheekbone to forehead; his eye, as near as he could tell, was long gone. He gradually became aware that he was deaf in his left ear, too; not even a ringing. Just dead, dead space. Not good. He fought to control his breathing, to not lose it in the trauma of crippling disfigurement. Now was not the time. He had to survive, at all costs. He had to live.

Right then, living meant taking care of business. It took all his strength just to turn around. When he did, he saw that two North Vietnamese had lowered themselves from their tree-top sanctuaries about thirty yards off to his left. They had knives drawn and were busy inspecting the bodies of his team. The Australian and a couple of the Nung team were still alive. They fixed that, quickly and painfully. And they gave the all clear.

More ropes dropped out of the trees. They formed a ragged perimeter around the clearing, a perimeter he was on the barest outer edge of. They didn't yet see him behind his little stone barrier. He used the fleeting invisibility to his advantage, pulling open his field dressing pouch, loading an ampule of morphine, and hitting himself up. Not much, just enough to take the edge off the pain so he could concentrate. Yeah, sure.

The morphine hit his already-shocked system like a velvet sledgehammer, flooding his body and brain with a leeching euphoria. He took aim and waited. The ropes wiggled as the others descended. He opened up on them when they were about twelve feet off the ground, taking out the two already there and another three on their way. They fell like sacks of wet rags. The rest of them scrambled back up and started capping back at him, pinging little dings out of the other side of his shelter. Walker peeked out. Another one was trying to sneak down. Walker popped him. The sniping redoubled. Stalemate.

Walker started laughing. It was a lovely little situation, all right; he couldn't get out of there, and they couldn't get out of the fucking trees. It was his own little Mexican standoff, deep in the heart of Cambodia.

They remained like that for the next hour and a half. In that time, Walker popped the rest of his morphine and four more snipers. He was dizzy, fucked up, and far from home. Self-cauterization had evidently caused his shrapnel wounds to stop bleeding, which was good. But he had nonetheless lost a lot of blood already, and that was not good at all. It was soon dark, his grip on reality was getting increasingly wonky, and it was only a matter of time before one or more of his tree monkeys successfully escaped from their hidey-holes. Or reinforcements came. Or he ran out of ammo.

Or luck.

The wind shifted, blowing the smoke from the chopper's wreckage his way. The elephant grass had caught fire, too, adding a hempy tinge to the greasy mix of aviation fuel, cordite, melting plastic, and charring flesh. Walker choked, gagging in ragged fits. And as he squinted into the billowing smoke that roiled skyward, he saw it.

A face. No, not even that. Not that whole, not that complete.

Just a smile. Huge, huge; maybe ten feet long. A shadow across the foliage overhead, beaming down on him from above
. . .

Hempstead and Jim sat in the woods on the mountain, feeding a small bonfire, the delicately flickering flames making their faces seem otherworldly and ancient, burnished with an amber glow. The melee in Philly was several hours and a hundred miles behind them. It had taken altogether less than sixty minutes to fly back, but the decompression was slow in coming. Technology had moved faster than their emotions. They were in shock. Something majorly fucked was taking place right under their noses, their past beginning to feel as though it were cycling back in on them like the world's worst case of terminal feedback.

They had been sitting in a connected silence for some time, long after the madness had abated for the night. The protesters were gone. The grounds grew still. A three-quarters-empty pint of Jim Beam sat propped in a bootheel-niched swell of pine needle carpet. The pop of kindling and night sounds mingled with the faintly chill breeze rustling through the pine and elm and maple up and down the side of the mountain. It sounded like spirits, whispering in the shadows. Not evil, not good. Just
there
; an intrinsic part of the fabric of night. Watching. Waiting. Listening.

It was a perfect time for the telling of ghost stories.

Which, in a way, was exactly what they were thinking.

Hempstead snapped another twig or three and threw them in, biding time, chewing over the memory like an old dog on an old bone. When he closed his eyes he saw it hovering, glistening in the moonlight, before him.

A forgotten piece from a twenty-year-old puzzle, sliding suddenly into place . . .

Walker squinted up at the beaming shadow splayed across the canopy. Lying in the dirt and leaves, staring one-eyed up at it and with zero depth perception, it was comforting to consider it all the spectacular hallucinations of a dying man. The sun was starting to set, firing long waning rays through the smoke and the trees. The smile grew crooked, almost sardonic. It glitched back and forth in his mind's eye. Now it was a smile. Now, just a branch, just a long shadow in dying light. Now, a smile. A shadow. A branch.

He would have been more than happy to pawn it off as either of the latter. It was possible, even probable.

Until the lips parted.

And spoke to him . . .

"
Walker
." The voice in his head whispered his name flatly yet intimately, as though speaking itself were new, yet he was an old friend. It didn't even register as sound so much as the tactile sensation of otherness in his mind. The voice was an alien presence that formed words that burned like white phosphorus in the deep folds within his skull. He was reasonably sure that if he could feel anything at all, he'd be terrified. At the moment, that was the best luck could offer him.