The Healer's War (30 page)

Ahn had to sneeze just then, and since he couldn't see what I saw, he made no effort to muffle the noise. The brown oval bobbed back and forth, searching for us, a metallic gray tingeing its edges, but the forest redirected sound. Although Ahn was standing right beside me, his sneeze could have come from anywhere. I bent low, clapping my hand over Ahn's mouth. He grew very still and we hunkered in silence, waiting.

The brownish aura floated a few paces away from us, and I heard bare feet on damp ground.

Then abruptly it doubled over and began coughing. I focused on the figure within the light and saw a small woman. She was pale, her skin wrinkled like a prune's, her hair caked with dirt, her pajamas black.

She wore bandoliers draped across her chest and a rifle slung over one shoulder. Her left arm was raised, the wrist daintily covering her mouth, a foot-long dagger held negligently in that hand. She coughed, and melted silently into the green at the side of the trail. Moments later, where she had been, William's wine-colored aura bobbed slowly in on the fog, looming over a far vaster patch than hers had. It stopped a short distance away on the other side of where she had been, and as it hovered there, it gradually changed, the wine separating into rays of red and black, spurting from him like blood from an arterial wound.

Suddenly a second glow rose up from the ground between us, within it a man not so well equipped as the woman. I froze with my hand over Ahn's mouth. I had no idea how much I was able to see because of the aura, how visible I was to them, how much of them William could see. But a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth person issued from the hole without seeming to see us, their auras blending with the mist. As a seventh rose up to follow them and carefully turned to plug the hole behind him, William struck, and the small figure crumpled over the hole. Silently William stripped the body. Relieving the dead Vietcong of a long knife, he slit the throat with the efficiency of the neighborhood meatcutter.

He took two more steps before he saw us.

The mist boiled up around him, curling in and out of a black and red radiance pumping from him. His face was hard and his eyes cold and resentful, but he raised one arm and motioned us forward. I hoisted Ahn onto my hip and stepped over the corpse. When we came even with William, he pointed into the mist beyond him, where he had already squashed some of the undergrowth.

I started, expecting that he was going to follow and keep the VC off our tail in case they were inclined to be there, but when I glanced back, the red and black stripes were overlaid with green as he cut into the forest in the direction the other Vietcong had taken.

Ahn clung tightly, silently, but I was making an incredible amount of noise trying to carry him and follow William's course through the foliage. I hoped if the VC heard us, they'd mistake my noise for their own. Or for William's, if they discovered him. God, I hoped they wouldn't. What if they caught him? I prayed to God that wouldn't happen. I wouldn't know what to do. I didn't have a weapon. I couldn't save him. How could I live with myself if I just let him get caught, tortured maybe? Maybe I wouldn't have to worry about it. If they caught him, they'd probably get us too.

If we got away this time, maybe we could try to find a village someplace, somewhere where it looked as if there was enough food. Maybe I could pay them to take Ahn in at least until I could find help. If he'd had two legs, he probably would have left me by then, I thought. A lot of Vietnamese kids adopted Americans, but when it looked as if the bases were going to get hit, the kids suddenly became history, along with a lot of other friendlies.

We stopped dead in front of a huge snarl of roots, impassable as the Great Wall of China. Unable to go forward, I sat on the ground and waited. Ahn continued to cling to me, and I thought he might be crying.

The wind shivered the grasses and smaller leafy plants, and the fern fronds swayed and danced, the bare trunks creaked, the leaves rattled like Halloween skeletons, while the rain beat its erratic patter and splash all around us, and on top of us. It had the advantage of keeping my own trembling limbs from shaking the shrubbery like a pair of Mexican maracas.

do we huddled there getting stiffer and stiffer, and I tried to distract myself by remembering what it was like to be dry. We were still erilously close to the VC tunnel entrance, which was what that hole had to be. I wondered if a second group would file out of the hole. Maybe I should have moved the dead VC. His body still emitted a faint mustard-colored glow, growing gradually darker, drifting on the wind, separating itself. The version of the Twenty-third Psalm that went

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the whole damn valley," went through my head and I felt a rather savage rush of pride in William; then, watching the VC's feeble aura fade like an ember, I felt ashamed and said a generic, universalist prayer, including in the scope of my entreaties the elderly gent with the flowing beard and kindly eyes and the cosmic forces of the universe and my own idea of Buddha, of whom I could conjure up only the image of a statue.

We had had to kill the guy-I felt I'd killed him as much as William. Or would have, if I'd had a means. Anyway, his death no doubt saved my ass, let's put it that way. But it had been nothing personal, and I wasn't especially glad he was dead.

As I watched, the dead terrorist's aura grew clearer, ruddier, within the milkiness of the mist, like fire deep in an opal. The discoloration from hatred, grief, and fear was dissipating with death . . . sort of like in the werewolf movies where the ravening wolf, after being shot by the hero's silver bullet, slowly turns back into the innocent human being infected with lycanthropy.

I was glad William had been so thorough, because if he had left the VC

alive, I knew I'd feel honor-bound to try to patch the poor SOB up. As it was, I just wondered about the wisdom of leaving him draped across the tunnel entrance. Wouldn't that announce our presence? But if they didn't know how many of us there were, maybe that would make them abandon the tunnel.

Which shows you what an incurable optimist I am.

Ahn's face was next to my ear. "Mamasan, we didi now, huh?

"No can do," I mumbled back. "We wait for William."

"William dinky dao, mamasan, we didi."

Well, that was one vote in. Ahn, who had taken to William at first, was scared of him. And though I hated to admit it, I was, too. What kind of a nut would go unarmed after seven-well, six-VC?

That was movie stuff, not what your practical, I-want-to-go-home-alive grunt would customarily do. The only reason I could imagine him doing such a damn-fool thing was to get supplies and weapons. Personally, when it came to getting supplies that way, my overwhelming hunger became a niggling little sense of peckishness, but nothing I couldn't handle till I found a particularly tasty-looking rat.

And William's behavior had been so erratic-the coolness that I at first admired I now saw as what was referred to in psych training as a bland affect, which meant simply that his face was usually expressionIcss and he didn't show much feeling. Of course, that figured, considering the trauma of watching his friends killed and being left to make it by himself in the jungle. But the blandness alternated with swings into irritation and I didn't know enough to be able to tell which was more dangerous: the agitation or the numbness.

The mist blew clear across the trail. I scooted back into the deeper shade of the root canopy, dragging Ahn with me. Normally I would have thought of snakes, but I really didn't care at that point, because I was convinced I was not going to live much longer anyway. It was just a question of when and how-a bite from one of those little bamboo vipers called two-step snakes because their venom could kill you before you'd taken two steps might be the easy way out under these circumstances.

A curse blew toward us on the breeze. The voice was so muffled the curse could even have been a Vietnamese one, though I didn't think so.

What did it mean? Had they caught William and strangled off his last defiant words? I wished I could see what was happening-not as me, of course, but maybe as a bypassing lizard.

Ahn's small body shook silently and I thought how different he was from what he had been in the hospital, when he bawled so much the other patients were 'ready to throttle him. Maybe he'd been saving it up for then, when he thought it was safe, because now he knew without anyone telling him that weeping aloud could be fatal. I considered crying myself, but I was already losing too much water sweating.

The rain intensified, rattling the leaves, misting through the screen-of interlocking growth, driving through the occasional opening where collective drops plopped like fat slugs from overburdened meaty green leaves. The jungle floor, steaming with recondensing moisture, reminded me of a cannibal's boiling kettle, with us in the stew.

An overhanging branch dropped one slow drop at a time on the crown of my head, reminding me of a story I'd read about the Chinese water torture, a procedure that involved letting water drip one drop at a time on the same spot on a victim's skull until it eroded skin, bone, and sanity. I decided not to think about that. The ground fog once more formed an opaque veil obscuring the faint path between us and the body. I could still see the outlines of the plants and the body, because of the auras.

The fog hid Ahn and me from anyone else, however.

Ahn shivered again and emitted a small whimper. When I looked down, his eyes were closed. He'd fallen asleep. His skin felt hot against mine.

His rag of a bandage had come off completely and the wound was draining again. Damn. There was nothing I could do about that now.

The glow of the jungle shuddered and wilted to a shade ever so slightly brown moments before blood-red and pitch-black light strobed through like the lights on a police car, silently broadcasting death, hatred, fury, malice, and murder.

One of the VC, I thought. They'd caught William, he'd told them about us, and now they were circling back to get us. Before the malignant aura broke onto the trail, I pushed and prodded Ahn up over the root tangle and scrambled over after him. He whimpered once more, but as soon as I reached to cover his mouth he shut up, flipped over the top of the tangled root and decayed log, and cowered on the other side. I landed heavily beside him and lifted my face just far enough to reach a hole in the woven roots.

Like fire and char the aura burned in the clearing, then headed straight for where we had been. In the center of it, his face impassive except for eyes watchful as a jaguar's, and as impersonal, William stalked toward us, a machete in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other.

I was relieved to see him alive, but on the other hand he looked as if he was searching for us where he knew we ought to be, but did not look as if he was going to be happy to see us. He stepped across the corpse and began stalking up the trail, slashing at impediments. If we had been hiding in the jungle beside the trail we would have been spaghetti before we could say hello. I suppressed an urge to stand up and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing; didn't he know he could hurt somebody that way? I didn't because obviously he knew that very well.

And it looked as though he no longer cared.

This was a bit of a dilemma. William was a swell guy when he was in his right mind. Even though he could get killed as easily as Ahn and me, he was a man, larger than me and with all that reassuring extra upper-body strength. I felt protected by him. He had training and know -how and had already showed me a couple of things that might help keep me alive.

And now he had weapons with which he could protect us all, if he was so inclined. The trouble was, I was pretty sure, from the look of him and all that riot-squad energy shooting from him, that his inclination was to kill anything that moved, including us. Face it, William was nuts and I wasn't feeling so stable myself, which was why I sat back down, very slowly, and huddled with Ahn while William poked and prodded and eventually leaped over us, quite literally overlooking us. He stalked away, his aura blazing so intensely that he looked like a walking forest fire.

I watched until he was a mere flashlight beam in the greenery, then drew a deep breath. I tried to rise, but my knees wouldn't support me for a long time. When I put my hands out to brace myself on a log, they shook so hard it looked as if I were trying to play the bongos. Ahn pulled himself up beside me.

Ahn's aura was shallower than it had been, a washed-out sParrow brown with little veins of red. He looked as tired as I felt. "What we do now, mamasan?"

"We follow William," I told him. I didn't want to lose him entirely.

Not only did we need him, he might need us. I didn't really think I'd be able to trail him for too long, but maybe I could until he was in his right mind and the three of us could band together again.

"William beaucoup dinky dao, mamasan."

"No shit," I said. But we didn't seem to have a lot of other options.

We lost him in less than an hour. Not that we didn't know where he'd gone. We only had to follow the machete slashes to figure that one out.

But we couldn't keep up. Even with the support of his stick, Ahn fell often. Sometimes I carried him, but at others we both needed both hands to climb or brace ourselves for steep descents down muddy slides. We drank often from the rain pools on the leaves and stuck our tongues out at the rain, but it was a far cry from having a whole cool glass of water from mama's tap at home.

Soon the trail started heading mostly down, and when we finished sliding down muddy, root-riddled banks, the ground below was less overgrown, we stumbled less often, and none too soon we began treading on grass once more. The machete marks dwindled with the vines, and so did our ability to follow William.

Remembering what William had said about the other flatlands, I kept us in the trees. I kept thinking that soon the valley floor would turn into rice paddies.