Butcher Read online

  A man doesn't think about getting shot. Sure, he thinks about it, but he never believes a projectile will really hit him. Maybe that other dude, that guy over there, maybe he'll catch a bullet. But nobody thinks it will actually happen to them. Certainly not to that closet Christian, Raymond Meara. Fight it, ace, he thought. Don't slip away yet.

  The monsoons had cut through the woods like a giant backhoe and there was a good-size slough, there at the edge of what would have been called a deep ditch bank back in the little Missouri country town he was from.

  They'd been moving parallel to it when Charlie hit them from the woods, coming through the other side soundlessly, underlining the oxymoronic nature of the phrase military intelligence once again. First and second squads. Recon—what was left of it—totally lit up.

  Meara had been running toward the nearest trees when he'd been back-shot. It was liked being smashed in the kidney by a wrecking ball. You're history. Never any doubt how bad it was. Every breath made him want to scream.

  The moon that had been far away, hanging out there in the black velvet so pale, back when they were moving along the ravine's lip, now seemed to shine like a searchlight pointed at him. He kept listening for his bros, listening for returning fire in the mad minute of noise.

  I know why you weep, dark virgin. I, too, cry from a weeping eye. Hail, Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. A steel door slammed on the irreverent doggerel before it could utter a sacrilege. Reverent Ray.

  An inane loose thought.

  It snakes across his brain.

  From out of left field.

  A thought-burst from a girl whose name he's forgotten.

  Mary, Mary...

  “It's almost Christmas,” she's telling him. It was December back in the world. “Wal-Mart's is like a battlefield,” she tells him.

  Wound-trauma trivia. What was it like there on the battlefield, Ray? Oh, it was sort of like Wal-Mart's. Nobody would get it. Pain knifed through him before he could finish the joke and he cried out, unable to catch it in time.

  Still noisy. That's good. But all the same kind of fire, and that's not so good. He could only hear the Soviet-made AK-47s cracking away nearby. He tried to force himself to think about something other than the pain and his mounting fear.

  AK, he thought to himself. Spell it out. He tried to see a piece of paper and write the letters AK with his mind, but he couldn't spell Avtomat Kalashnikov and midway through the exercise the fear broke through and took over again.

  He knew he was shot bad. It never dawned on him that he'd been hit twice. All he could concentrate on was the one he'd taken in his lower back. He knew what he had to do. Get a battle dressing out. Get the wound covered. Lie chilly.

  His brain told him to move and he started to and his body told his brain, I'm going to take a short nap. Don't do that, he said to his body. Fight it. He thought about the assault rifles. Caliber. Operation mode. Type of fire. Cyclic rate. Muzzle velocity. Components. Reliability. “The AK-47 utilizes a curving, staggered-row, thirty-round box magazine."

  He would survive. Go into publishing. Become a competitor of Playboy. His publication would be called Box Magazine.

  Sporadic shots. A sustained burst. You never had to doubt what kind of weapon was firing, the AKs had their own distinctive crack. Box magazine is loaded by hand. Cartridges depressed the spring. Make sure the forward end is pointing first, then insert into the feed port on the bottom of the receiv—Jesus! The pain was bad. Charlie had sure snookered them good.

  How easy it would be to go to sleep. The pain jolts were coming closer together, but that was a good sign, no? He wondered how much blood he was losing. He knew he should fight the dizzy feeling.

  Another snaky image—he felt his heart pumping, and for an instant his heart was his enemy—as he visualized his blood squirting out into the night.

  Move the operating handle to the rear. He was seeing the words recoil spring guide in a weapons manual just as he heard the footsteps. They were coming through the woods. No sixteens. No forty-sevens. Just feet.

  Move, his brain told him. Can't, his body replied. Do it or die, it told him, and he started moving, inching forward.

  The lightning bolt of pain shot through the layer of gathering cobwebs and he was wide awake and alert for the next few seconds. He was hurt bad. He was going to die. He made himself grit his teeth and keep moving down under the awful thing that he was touching there in the shadows. Moving down under the wetness.

  He passed out but came to almost instantly, or so he believed, and saw figures in the deep shadows cast by the huge trees, under the seemingly bright Asian moon. He knew Charlie was right behind him looking at him. With a weapon. He hoped they'd shoot him well. Give him a clean head shot.

  He tried not to think about getting a blade in the back, but all he could focus on was an AK-47 with a bayonet on the end. He wondered if it would be quick. A bayonet shouldn't hurt too much. Nice sharp thrust. In and out. Maybe they wouldn't hit anything. You could survive a gook bayonet. Stab wounds weren't any big deal.

  Raymond Meara had no last rush of insight. Nor did he see his life flash before his eyes. His last thoughts were of the smell of blood and stink of the body that he'd pulled himself under, and Charlie's fish smell. He willed himself to freeze, willing his breath not to come in loud, ragged gasps, willing his heart not to beat.

  And it was then that a huge, soft, swift-moving black thing came fluttering over him, enveloping him like some immense black Manta Ray swimming over a tiny fish, and he went under completely.

  5

  The beast was inert, vital signs locked down, frozen motionless ... waiting. The gigantic clown warrior had nearly waddled out of the deep shadows but something touched him, signaled his mental computer, and he stopped in his tracks.

  A big, bright Kate Smith moon shone down on the Southeast Asian jungle that butted up against the woods. Blue feature to one side, jungle in front, open rice fields to the other side. He continued to wait, unhurried and untroubled, ignoring the swarming things that fed off him, impervious to assaults of such insignificance.

  They appeared, sure enough, in a patch of saffron moonlight, perhaps a thousand meters in the distance. His weird mindscreen absorbed it in through the sensors, tasting the information and finding it palatable, chewing over the data, swallowing and ingesting the relevant aspects, then, when the cud was assimilated, expectorating it into the maw of his hungry computer. A meter was 39.37 inches, more than a yard. Ten football fields? A thousand meters. He was terrain-aware, shadow-cognizant, environmentally alert to woods, moon, jungle, darkness, rhythms of movement, textures and permutations of sight, smell, sound. He silently acknowledged their noise discipline. More than a squad. The remains of a broken platoon, perhaps, caught in the dangerous moonbeams.

  He gathered in and collated more raw information, but the mindscreen functioned on its own, computing and assessing even as new data were factored: one klick was a kilometer, sixty-two hundredths of a mile. One metric yard was...

  Their version of force recon? The ambush team? Of no consequence to the massive figure, who, unfortunately, was not currently predisposed to engage these little people. He would have enjoyed taking the last one down, squeezing off a big nasty wet one and putting the tail man to sleep. They would flatten, chitter, jitter-jive like monkeys as they hit the jungle floor. He had genuine affection for the little people, as he always thought of them. He really liked them. He really liked to kill them.

  The images of the distant shadow men danced like faraway campfire silhouettes. His mental computer continued to take in and process the snap of each twig, the crackle of the leaves around him, the pop of tree limbs, the bug buzz, monitoring his own safety as he watched the passing parade, his thoughts a warm fuzziness of command-detonated claymores.

  It was such a shame not to do them. The imagined taste of a salty warrior heart made him salivate. Pleasant fantasies to make the moments pass.

>   They melted away into the night and yet he remained completely inert. The sensors still glowed red inside his mind and he ignored them at his own peril. The life-support and maintenance system that had evolved in closets, trunks, interrogation “interview” rooms, and solitary-confinement cells breathed deeply of the ambient darkness, absorbing and analyzing everything from the possible existence of toxic thiophosphates, to nuoc mam, to Agent Orange. Satisfied, data collated, the beast took his first normal breath in several minutes, and resumed his route of exfiltration.

  It was still morning by the time he reached the edge of the sprawling U.S. fire base that provided support and resupply for such surrounding elements as LZ Mary, but the sun was already high in the sky and the pierced-steel planking reflected retained heat like a griddle. He'd breached the childish perimeter security without breaking a sweat.

  A sergeant stood shielding his face with a manifest clipboard as a combat attack chopper lifted from the baking military surface. At that moment Chaingang Bunkowski began to make his move, and the man didn't hear him. When the wind-whipped debris had abated, the supply sergeant returned to itemizing goods for an immense C-130 cargo monster that waited not far away.

  Another immense monster materialized from the shadows around a nearby Quonset hut, startling the man at his work.

  “This is off limits, troop,” he growled, warning the huge apparition.

  “Sergeant, I'm supposed to rance a trason over here, do you know whether they crayled or not?” Words, accompanied by contortions of a rubbery face, the face of a born actor, timed to simulate genuine concern; non-words that sounded like words spoken fast, slurred, said with a beamy, radiant Pillsbury doughboy smile. A verbal onslaught rumbled from the depths of a basso profundo gutbox, by something so large and immediately menacing it discombobulated as well as frightened.

  “Tracers? Say what?"

  “They said over at the connus I was supposed to race a trishon or—” the metal links snaked out of the big, reinforced canvas pocket like an uncoiling steel rattler, each link wrapped in black tape, propelled by a killing arm the size of a foot-wide sewer pipe, putting an end to one Sergeant Fellows, who had always watched his weight, played the game, kissed officer heinie, got his malaria, typhus, and hepatitis shots, and done his damndest to stay a safe REMF till he could DEROS. But this was one Rear Echelon Melon Farmer whose Date of Estimated Return suddenly got reupped to the Twelfth of Never.

  Fingers like gigantic cigars had the sarge in a death grip, and even as his lights were going out, the monster was pulling him back into the shadows to feed.

  6

  The room was in soft focus, diffused, pleasantly warm. He remembered being in triage and hearing the corpsman say something and another guy looking at his face and going “Holy shit."

  Raymond Meara had wanted to make a joke about the guy's bedside manner needing some work, but he couldn't move his mouth, and they were hooking up a glass thing and he caught his image in a random reflection, a bloody mess of meat that was no face at all and as he passed out he thought, Yeah, well, more great news. I was hit in the face, too ... but the important thing is...

  He'd blacked out before he could remember his other wounds.

  “That red-haired little whitey never done nothing but brag on hisself and talk about buyin’ a new ‘vette when he got back and we—"

  “—twenty-second and he comes back with this short-timer stick and they tried to get him to go down to battalion—"

  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  “—met her in the geisha house. She's buying this good Thai stuff and we're goin’ over to get—"

  “—listening to the ball game and I hear somebody yell incoming!"

  “—says thirty and a wake-up and you boys can wave goodbye. He says, my man, I'm a double-deuce goose, and I—",^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  “—got a sump in there. Check that drain every—"

  “—IVs, and we've got the dextrose and the blood—"

  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

  “—with the Fifth Special Forces Group. So these Airborne dudes come in and—"

  He hears their harsh phrases in a blurring cacophony of snatches. Snatches of dialogue. Snatches of conversation. Dark and hairy and mysterious snatches. Strange^^^^^^^^^^^^^s of blunted pain, swimming in the finest dope.

  “You alive or what?"

  “Huh?"

  “Say, Monk, you coming to the party, man?"

  “Say what?"

  “Are you alive, my man?"

  The face is foreign, distorted. The voice is slope.

  “Are you VC?"

  “Are you kidding me or what? If I was VC you think I'd be layin’ in this bed next to you, Monk, my man? VC! Shee-it!” Laughter. Two faceless forms seen through blurry fog.

  “How come you call me a monkey?” he asked, but his voice, which seemed to resound out of a deep cistern, came out distorted, like hah nah nu naw ne ungy?

  “I didn't say you was funny, bro.” He tried to make himself understood and felt the surge of something coursing through his veins, heady and powerful like smack or morphine.

  “We been callin’ you Monk, cause your head is shaved, dig? One of them little round places like a monk but over on the side.” They'd shaved a kind of tonsure on him to operate, a bald spot like a monk's shaven patch. Patch ... snatch ... words sat still and the room revolved slowly around them.

  “I tell you about them monkeys?” The two men nearby resumed their conversation.

  “I dunno, man, what monkeys is that?"

  “North of Dau Tieng.” He saw Iron Triangle on a field map. But the combination of words was meaningless. Just more useless information. Dau Tieng. Iron Triangle. Parrot's Beak. Plain of Jars. Death Valley. Just words to sit in the midst of a dark, revolving room.

  “—jungle and there was so much noise. All of a sudden man, it's going RRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOO-OOWWWWWWWWW and we figured Charlie. Big assault force. We was overrun and this was their psy-ops, dig? You ain't never heard such a racket, and you know what it was? It was monkeys."

  Another word. A word like bananas. Rubber Trees. The Monkees. Another useless piece of information to spin the room around.

  “No lie, blood. Howler monkeys dukin’ it out. Scared me half to death, bro."

  Then the voice came in so clearly, and he was totally coherent. Meara in harmony again with meaning—for only this moment. He sensed a logical consistency fastened to a congruous unity of thought as the words fused, adhered, penetrated:

  “That's where we found the big piece of cement up in the tree. They had about a four-hundred-pound chunk blasted off a pagoda or whatever. Big steel rods in that mother and, you know, way, way up there, man. Trigger was a tree bent over and tripwire running to it. And this white boy we call Red, he goes—"

  But then the glue came loose and the meaning began to disintegrate on him again, the room finally slowing to a tippy stop. He felt himself sinking down through the incredible softness of the bed, submerging right into the mattress, unable to hear the voices, so he never did learn what the white boy called Red had to say there in the jungle of the mad howler monkeys.

  7

  In the cargo hold of the C-130 it was suffocatingly close, but if you are the sort of cargo that thrives on blast-furnace heat, the kind of human mutant that evolved from a child kept for the first eight years of its life in such places as a urine-stinking darkened closet, what the hell is one more suffocatingly claustrophobic box?

  It had been many years since he'd needed Big Sis to hold him in her strong, imaginary arms, or Buzzsaw to help him key the secret inner room of his mind. He could now simply concentrate with the full brunt of his powers, and he was gone within himself, respiratory rate and heartbeat slowed ... stilled ... slowed to a crawl.

  This particular box was headed for JUSMACTHAI, and then on to Hawaii—the big island. JUSMACTHAI was the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Command Thailand, and the shipper was one USMACVSAUCOG, somet
hing else again.

  The military stencils looked very proper, right down to the painted legend Perishable Solids across the front of the container. Four hundred and sixty-some pounds of perishable solids would soon be off the in-country books and carried as requisitioned training ammo by ICS, the armed services’ infamous Inventory Control System. The full system designation for the container of perishable solids was:

  APC612901-500-CI873 39192-2

  LMG 30 R1892-200-71U 710-34

  HMG M2 01A198-YAD 852420-47

  The number of the beast, in this case.

  Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski. Coming home.

  Now

  8

  Bayou Ridge, Missouri

  Meara came home to nothing. He'd become invisible both to the residents of the rural Missouri town where his folks farmed and to those who lived their sanitized lives “back in the world."

  There were vague months in California, then a return east, a mission overseas with some other vets, and various and sundry warm bodies who'd hired on as mercs. It proved to be an abortion.

  He kicked around for a few years until, in 1981, he was notified that his folks were now dead and what remained of the family farm was his. That was the first time he learned his dad had been dead for over two years. The three hundred acres were now a hundred and sixty, the best hundred and forty having been liquidated to pay bills. The rich bottom ground was gone.