There Will Be Killing (4 page)

“When?” Kellogg demanded. “Why didn't I hear about it?”

“Because it never happened—just as this will never have happened. But I will tell you in strictest confidence that a man was removed from the field five years ago, placed in the Madigan General psychiatric lockdown unit, and apparently being both brilliant and dangerous, he somehow managed to disappear with his charts, leaving behind several dead bodies and not much else. The army has given Intelligence precious little to work with beyond the recent emergence of a so-called Ghost Soldier, and some similar activity five years ago that got buried so deep the paper trail was extinguished. Whatever the case, my people figure your mental people here are central clearing for this sort of thing. It's my job to pick a couple of your men to help me while I work undercover as one of them. They are to provide the professional guidance I require to find whoever is doing this if it's coming from behind, or determine if we're dealing with another form of psychological warfare that will be dealt with as swiftly and severely as possible. Case solved, I disappear. That's it.”

Kellogg nodded slowly. A little smile now befitting an Emperor restored to his cloak and crown. “I would like to volunteer. I'm a trained physician, and I am perfectly ready to go out after any sick bastard killing our troops.”

“And that's exactly what I was told to expect an officer of your caliber to say.” Mikel said this so sincerely Gregg half believed it himself, until he smoothly tacked on, “But Colonel, you have too high a profile. I mean, everybody knows who you are and we have to be incredibly discreet. Besides, it's dangerous. The army does not want to risk losing you. I was told.”

“Oh! Well right, of course, I understand the General's thinking on this.”

“He knew you would, Colonel. He only requests your complete support, which he felt confident you would gladly provide to me as well.”

“Of course I am here to help in any way I can. Do you have anyone in mind yet to help you?”

Mikel gestured to either side, to Izzy and Gregg. “These two.”

“What?” Gregg was sure if he looked on the ground he would see his stomach flopping around his feet. “What, are you kidding? No way!”

“You don't even know us!” Izzy had definitely found his voice. It was the loudest in the room. “I just got here!”

“Sorry.” Mikel shrugged. “Too late. I checked everyone out. You guys drew the lucky straws. And Izzy, I am sorry about what happened to Morrie.”

Frantic, Gregg appealed to Kellogg. “Sir, we can't do this. We are just drafted shrinks, we—”

“And Captain, you have been drafted again,” Kellogg decreed. “Is that clear? Do you hear me loud and clear? This is a direct order from command. We—that is I and YOU—will cooperate fully. Am I clear soldiers!”

Gregg looked at Izzy who looked back at Gregg and they both just started shaking their heads when a loud commotion could be heard from the outer office.

Sergeant Jackson yelling: “PUT DOWN THAT WEAPON AND GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE, RIGHT NOW!”

Then Derek's voice: “NOW IT IS YOUR TURN, MOTHERFUCK.”

Gregg raced for the door. Mikel and Izzy were right behind him, racing into the main area. There was Derek. Holding an M16.

He brandished the rifle at Top. “How do you like being yelled at, huh? Like being scared? You like it, motherfuck?”

Gregg knew he had a gift and that gift was his voice. He had never needed it more than now.

“Hey, Derek,” he said softly, reasonably. “Hey man, just easy huh?”

“Stay back! I got no quarrel with you, Doc.”

Gregg took a step closer to Derek, still talking really calm and quiet. “Come on, Derek, come on man, you'll be home by—”

Sergeant Jackson stood up. “You will put that weapon down and come to attention soldierrrrrr. . . .”

The concuss of the M16 fire shredded the room as Derek opened up and exploded Top's skull, then tore holes through Top's chest, blowing him across the room and slamming him into the wall where he slowly and wetly slid down to the floor, joined by shards of glass and the remains of family photographs.

There was only silence and Derek's ragged breathing.

“Fuck you all!” he screamed. He fired another burst into Top's body.

It seemed like slow motion as Gregg saw Derek bring the barrel of the rifle up toward them, everyone frozen in shock and horror.

Except Mikel, leaping horizontally into the air, knocking Izzy, and then Gregg to the floor. Then somehow Mikel was fluidly ripping Terry's pistol from its holster and was rolling and firing in return as Derek's M16 rounds ripped over their heads.

On the ground Gregg felt very far away as he watched the slow rolling of volumes of blood, flowing over the floor. Top was down and dead on one side. Derek down and very dead on the other. Gregg turned his head to another angle and stared into Izzy's unblinking gaze, glasses knocked off, brown irises swallowed by his pupils, huge inky pools of black. Gregg's ears were ringing and then he heard choking moans and turned his head yet another way. Terry was on the floor with a chunk of an upper arm blown out, pumping even more blood from one of Derek's M16 rounds.

Mikel was already using his own belt as a tourniquet to bind Terry up when Izzy began to retch.

“Shouldn't he be accustomed to blood?” Mikel asked Gregg. “I thought psychiatrists were supposed to be medically trained.”

Gregg couldn't get his vocal chords to move. He stared dumbly at Mikel, whose serene expression was jarring in the sea of carnage.

“Never mind, almost done here,” Mikel said. Then to Izzy, “Welcome to Vietnam.”

The night of the same day in downtown Nha Trang, Izzy kept wondering when he would wake up. Soaked in sweat, his nerves like bees inside his body, he hadn't wanted to come here, but Gregg and Robert David and Mikel had insisted. They didn't want him staying at the villa alone and Izzy didn't make them ask twice.

He was too afraid to be alone. Even now he wanted to hold onto their hands like a child. If they left him, he would collapse right here, enveloped in the soft warmth of a tropical night that saturated his nostrils with the scents of flowers, spices, food, shit, beer, and marijuana. His vision felt assaulted by neon and a moving carnival of cars, jeeps, and bicycles. Vespas and three-wheeled cycles swirled amidst constant honking while Magical Mystery Tour blared in the background. The streets were full of GIs in jungle fatigues and men in gaudy aloha shirts openly soliciting baby girl prostitutes dressed in barely anything.

“Nha Trang is where the troops and contractors come to avail themselves of some in-country R&R, Izzy.” Robert David was talking to him now, acting as tour guide and his cultured Southern accent, with the way his R&R came out soft like “Aah” and “Aah,” seemed even more preposterous than it had during rounds before the world fell apart and Top got murdered and Mikel killed Derek before Derek could kill him and Gregg.

He should be dead right now, his first day in Vietnam. He should be in a body bag while his fiancé sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and lit candles. If it wasn't for Mikel, his blood would be all over the floor instead of the vomit that got cleaned up with Top's brains and—

Izzy lurched to the side and started dry heaving into the street. There was nothing left to throw up. He hadn't been able to eat all day. He didn't think he could ever eat again.

“C'mon.” It was Mikel, his hand on Izzy's shoulder. “Let's get you drunk.”

“I don't think. . .Agent Mikel, I don't think—”

“That's a very good idea.
Don't. Think.”
Then next to Izzy's ear he whispered sharply, “And for Chrissakes, don't call me `Agent' again and make me regret getting in the way of that gun. It's J.D., okay? Just J.D.” A slap on the back and Just J.D. announced to Gregg and Robert David, “I say we could all use a drink.”

“I concur,” announced Robert David as he grabbed Izzy by one arm and Gregg took the other, moving him out of the flow of traffic and with a quick turn, down a back alley street. That's when Izzy noticed that Gregg's hand was trembling, and so was his go-easy voice, as he picked up with the travelogue.

“Troops come in from all over and try to forget where they are and what they are going back to out there. You can buy anything and anyone you want on this street, and it's what, five minutes from our quarters?”

The street was packed on both sides with small shacks made of tin cans and cardboard and plywood. Izzy numbly watched a couple of men who could have been at a stateside barbeque with their tropical Hawaiian shirts stretched across big bellies and big gold watches that yelled Jersey, held up on each side by two little Vietnamese girls. Even made up like whores with little pushed up breasts and tiny skirts they couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve years old.

“This is a nightmare.” Izzy closed his eyes tight, willing the grotesque vision to go away. It did, only to be replaced by the sight of a little boy, also made up to look pretty, leading another fat middle-aged pleasure seeker past a shack's door. They disappeared, to do only God knew what.

God could know. Izzy didn't want to know. And then J.D. apparently thought a little history lesson was in order, as if that put it all into some kind of perspective.

“This old alley has existed since the Indochina War when the French were here. The visitors that look like they should be roasting on a spit are mostly civilian contractors behaving badly away from their own homes. Money is precious. They have it. The families do what they must to survive.”

“I want that drink,” Izzy told J.D., told them all. He honestly didn't give a rat's ass if he threw it up immediately as long as it bought him even a moment's respite from this. . . this. . .

He couldn't even give this a name.

The bar they entered was full of drunken soldiers and more prostitutes. Izzy never thought he'd be grateful to see girls who were closer to twenty than ten selling themselves on a very open market. “B girls,” J.D. explained, as if that explained anything about the inflated cheap boob jobs that made Izzy wish he could do a lobotomy on the plastic surgeons responsible—though he'd lay dollars to every Red Cross Dolly Donut not one board certified plastic surgeon had performed a single one of the surgeries.

A terrible really loud band played “Proud Mary,” and that's when Izzy was jostled by some drunks, got turned around, and was suddenly lost in the smoke and neon.

Frantically he scanned the room for J.D., Gregg, Robert David. No luck. Everyone around him was in the same green uniform or garish aloha shirt and he didn't recognize even one face from the hospital. His nausea, momentarily forgotten, courtesy of the “Scotch rocks, make it a triple, and make it your best” J.D. had ordered for him, returned with a vengeance. And it wasn't from the few sips consumed. Homesick, that's what he was; literally physically sick with his longing for home. He would easily give up all the years of his later life just to be home right now. No wonder everyone was obsessed with counting the days.

“Three hundred and sixty-four days and a wake up,” Izzy said aloud, wondering if crazy people talked to themselves because it made their alternate realities more real. Perhaps this would make a nice clinical trial test at the end of the impossible tunnel of days where reality glittered so wonderful and precious Izzy could not believe he ever took it for granted as he muttered the first of ten thousand small prayers to whatever, or whoever to just let him live, make it home, and he would do anything in gratitude.

The bodies pressing all around him took on the substance of quicksand, and then the quicksand became like fluctuating concrete that jostled Izzy one way then another. The bass of the band thundered into his brain until he found himself standing in front of a ridiculously big and very drunken warrant officer, shouting at him.

“What, what? I beg your pardon,” Izzy shouted back above the din. “I'm lost. Did you say you could help me find my friends?”

“I
said
Welcome to the Nam, you fuckin idiot new guy!”

And then J.D. was dragging the fuckin idiot new guy away, shouting, “Try not to antagonize the animals,” as he plowed a path to the relative safety of a back exit door.

Outside it was hot but thankfully quieter and Izzy wanted to apologize, though for what he didn't know. “I wasn't, wasn't, I did not say. . .”

J.D. silenced him with a glare that had the effect of a double slap.

“Listen up and listen up good because I need you and you are no good to me dead,” he said bluntly. “Wake up, quit whining and feeling sorry for yourself. Nobody here gives a shit where you come from, or where you are going. Nobody. What will get you killed faster than anything is pretending you are still what and who you were in the world. You are
not
in the world anymore. You are
not
anywhere near where there are rules you can still live by. So I am telling you: Wake the fuck up. Are you with me so far?”

Izzy managed a creaky up and down movement of his head.

“Now, the second most dangerous thing besides the danger you pose to yourself are the other fucking idiots who were sent over here. If you were not a shrink and an officer, if you were just some grunt in the field, your own guys might have shot you already because your head is so far up your ass it's still in New York and that makes you too dangerous to be around. If you don't wake up soon, one of ours is far more likely to kill you than Charlie. Just about every third guy here is ready to snap, lose it, go psycho. You got a real life introduction to it this afternoon. This is one giant insane asylum, the whole place. Take note, Dr. Moskowitz, because this is your first, last, and only reality orientation that just might keep you alive long enough to help me out and get you home.” J.D. gave him a little thumb to forefinger
ping
on the bridge of his black horn rims. The ones J.D. had fished out of the blood and brains and puke, then cleaned off with his shirt before perching back on Izzy's nose. “Now tell me, Doc: What's The Big Message?”

“Wake the fuck up.”

“That's right. Now follow me.”

J.D. took off down the alley, no backward glance. Izzy followed as instructed, muttering robotically, “Wake the fuck up, wake the fuck up. . .” while he tried to wake the fuck back up in New York City where everything and everyone he'd ever cared about existed on some alternate plane.

But they still hadn't materialized as the officer's quarters came into view. Or even by the time he laid in bed listening to the fan turning overhead, the sounds of a Vietnamese family sitting on the porch of their house in back of the villa. He imagined their voices belonging to his mother and father, aunt and uncle, and grandparents; imagined them all sitting together on the porch at their summer cottage while he and Rachel snuck away to make out under the stars, and he imagined all that gloriousness until he fell asleep.

Suddenly the sensation of some invisible hand yanking the sheet out from under him and throwing him to the floor jarred him awake. There were shadows of racing feet in the hallway, accompanied by shouts of “INCOMING! INCOMING!”

Before Izzy could pick himself up another concussive blast sounded, followed by screams outside the villa, then another explosion even closer that coincided with a loud
bang
as his door flew open and Gregg raced inside.

“Come on, get out!” Gregg was hauling him to his feet before the command could register, then together they scrambled down the stairs and out the front door, just in time to see another mortar blast hit. They both dropped to the ground, next to another young man Izzy didn't recognize.

“C'mon, c'mon!” he urged them, “Get up! We need to get to the bunker!”

Gregg grabbed Izzy's arm to go, but Izzy couldn't move. He was paralyzed. Something warm and wet drizzled down his leg. His muscles were like water, his eyes felt like they were spinning in their sockets. He was dizzy, hyperventilating, and he couldn't stop it, couldn't even control his own bladder while Gregg shouted:

“Let's go, let's go!” Gregg and the other man were up and running. Even if his own life depended on it, Izzy could not follow. All he could do was look at Gregg's back—which suddenly stopped its retreat as Gregg glanced over his shoulder, saw Izzy still down on the ground where they had left him.

“Izzy!” Gregg raced back to help him up and had him halfway to his feet when the high pitch of another mortar shrilly screamed and they both dove back to the ground, and watched the burning, white phosphorous mortar hit almost directly in front of where they were going to run for the safety of the bunker.

Their companion, the one who had urged them to run with him, turned into a gory cartoon character. For a moment, his legs seemed to be moving from his severed upper body and Izzy could smell seared flesh. He wasn't cognizant of crying, but it felt like hot tears were racing down his cheeks while he tried not to choke on his own vomit as some important part of him, a part of his self since boyhood that had been raised on Disney movies and Cub Scout meetings departed, never to return again.

Covered in every conceivable bodily fluid except blood, Izzy knew a terrible truth that would forever haunt him: what saved his life that day was that he was not brave; he was too scared to move. The brave man, the man doing the smart thing of getting to the safety of the bunker, was cut down by a random and malicious darkness of fate that cared not a whit for right or wrong. And if right or wrong didn't matter, what did?

Survival.

Gregg's chest was shaking from holding in his silent sobs. Izzy would have offered him a tissue if he'd had one handy like shrinks always did back in the world. But they were no longer in the world and he was no longer the Israel Moskowitz who had arrived in Vietnam
just that morning. Izzy really didn't know who he was anymore and he had no idea who or what he might become. He only knew that if he was going to survive and get the hell out of this hell-hole, he had to be smarter than the smartest guy he'd once been in the Columbia University med school.

“Wake the fuck up,” Izzy whispered as he wiped the snot from his nose with the end of a military-issue tee that smelled like piss and stomach juices minus any solid bits from breakfast, lunch or dinner. In order to survive you had to eat and so he would eat in the morning whether he was hungry or not. He had to eat and he had to remember his first, last, and only orientation, which defined this new reality that came down to four simple words.

Izzy said them once more, only this time like he meant it:

“Wake the fuck up.”