The Scream (14 page)

Participation was.

So you played the game: endless cycles of mines and booby traps and spider holes that held opponents who nine out of ten times you never even fucking saw. Not that it mattered. The opponents were young and old, men and women, little kids and babies. The faces changed, but the name was always the same.

Victor Charley.

And he was a crafty little fucker. Believe it.

He made you play on his turf, by his rules. In the jungle, mostly: wired and tired and permanently strung-out. He'd turn your own body against you, forcing you to live for months with your skin rashing in the heat and your feet rotting in your boots and the ringworm and lice and fire ants and scorpions and snakes all around and over you and in you. He'd snipe at you by day and lob mortar rounds on you at night. He'd send his own fucking kids to beg for candy and cigmo with grenades taped to their bellies. Or maybe he'd just blow your pecker off when you paused on the trail to take a leak.

And always, after the tripwire or the ambush that left half your team splattered and dying before you could bind 'em tight enough to be Medevacked the hell outathere, he'd fall back. To the one place you'd never ever want to follow.

Straight into the bowels of the mother herself.

Into the jungle. Into the tunnels.

Jake popped the other can, fired up some Buddha grass, and leaned back on his pack. The gauze-packed pressure bandages made for a nice cushion. Comfy-cozy. He sipped and toked, watching the smoke rise up to mingle with the distant smoke lofting off the horizon. The Skyraiders had gone bye-bye, having shot their collective wad; a Spooky gunship was now cruising the trails, long tongues of flame licking out its side as its belly guns belched death. Munch munch. Winning hearts and minds.

In the funny papers, maybe.

In the bush it was another story. It was way too easy to die out there. Duncan had taught him that. Big, gawky guy with X-ray specks, King Nerd turned tough. Legally blind. It was Duncan who had taken Jake under his wing during his first-days in-country, when Jake was still a shavehead FNG.

Fucking New Guys were routinely scorned. They were always cut less slack than anybody, and Jake had geared himself up for his fair share of abuse.

Then Duncan came along.

Maybe he just felt sorry for him, maybe this was karmic payback; Jake never really knew or asked. Like or dislike happened instantly in the bush: it was a real pure kind of thing. Duncan took to him, showing him the ropes and keeping him from getting his butt shot off, until Jake could fend for himself. Even got him the corpsman position on his squad.

Hell, it was Duncan who pointed out the Silvertone on that long-gone R&R; at dusk, after a day of booney-humping, he'd liked to perch up on the sandbags, grinning and squinting as Jake pounded out the changes to everything from Creedence Clearwater to "Purple Haze."

And when Jake had first heard the distant wail of an alto sax answering back one night, it was Duncan who knew who it came from.

"Hempstead." He drew out the syllable in his native Louisiana coonass till it came out "Heyamp-staid."

Jake looked up at him: hunched over on the bunker like that, Duncan looked like a bird of prey in a Warner Brothers cartoon. His glasses caught a ray of waning sunlight, flashing amber in the shadow of his face.

"Say what?" Jake asked without breaking his rhythm.

"Hempstead, boy. Big black dude. Door gunner with the hundred and twentieth. Carries that horn with him absolutely everywhere. Plays it in the clouds on the way out. You ain't met him yet?"

Jake shook his head, still playing. The sax faded away.

"You will." Duncan nodded sagely and lit a joint. "Shoot, Doc, I b'lieve you are the only person in the entire world could get feedback outta a 'coustic guitar." He jumped down and held the doob up to Jake's lips.

"You gonna be a star, boy. Ol' Doc Rock. Yup, yup, yup . . ."

Jake laughed, erupting smoke. He'd had to stop playing. When Duncan wanted to he could seem like the stupidest person ever born.

Nobody ever fucked with him, though; it was a luxury he had earned. Because Duncan could just as easily run and hip-fire an M60 like most guys could shoulder-fire an M16 standing, all while carrying enough ammo to qualify as his own assistant. Could blow the titties off a field mouse at five hundred yards. He also had a knack for sniffing out booby traps and set-ups.

Duncan was a squad leader, scout, and one-man fire support team, all rolled up in one. His patrols had a higher survival rate, and that made him very very popular. He took care of his people. No one really seemed interested in winning, not anymore. The good guys were pulling out, the party was over. It was only a matter of time before the gears of the big green death machine ground all the way down.

And no one, but no one, wanted to get pinched in the last few turns . . .

Jake looked out into the darkness; the gunship was moving south. Fire-tongues licked the distant ground, going
brrrraaaaaaaattttttt
like big neon raspberries from hell. He snuffed the joint and leaned back, stoned again. The buzz was almost as strong as the fatigue that nailed his bones to the bunker. He wished he still had some morphine ampules, but he'd used them all up this afternoon. He watched the gunship till the darkness swallowed it completely.

When he looked back to the bunker, Duncan was gone. Of course. Jake wasn't really surprised; he was just back. He closed his hollow eyes and clutched the guitar to his chest like a dead puppy.

No one ever wants to get caught in the last few turns
, he thought.

But someone always does
. . .

It should have been another routine, nine-to-five search-and-destroy on some suspected VC cadres operating supply routes out of some butthole dinville near Chu Ci: chopper out, win the hearts and minds of the locals, burn down a hooch or two, and split. Snap snap.

Except . . .

Except that the lieutenant, that fucking brown-bar ROTC idiot no more than three days in-country, had to tag along for the ride. Which would have been tolerable, had he stayed out of the way.

But no; he had to go and pick up the fucking kid. Never pick up the kids. Especially near an unsearched ville, especially the ones that run up to meet you at the edge of the trail. Never. It was like a rule.

But he did it, a big shit-eating grin on his pink-cheeked, all-American face. They had barely spaced their line, coming off the trail. Brown bar had no idea of reality, was heavy into the hearts-and-minds trip, as if he really believed it. The kid was maybe five, maybe six. Mama-san nowhere in sight. Little high-pitched, reedy voice calling out Pidgin English, going "Numba One, GI! Candee, GI!" Couldn't even tell if it was a boy or a girl.

Didn't matter.

It blew up, just the same.

The lieutenant and the kid died instantly. So did the top-six and five grunts: Sanchez, Claiborne, Ricechex, Gomer, and Natch, the radio operator. Natch's radio was ripped right off his back, went flying ass-over-teakettle some thirty feet into the air and landed with a tube-crunching whump! The squad's remnants flattened into the earth in a split second.

Just as the automatic weapons opened up . . .

Jake cried out, as the fabric of time itself again went all rubbery and strange: too short here, too long there, stopped altogether in manic frozen-flashes of nightmare replay. . . .

Three more hit at once. Half the squad gone, stone-dead. Two still twitching in the undergrowth, desperately trying not to attract fire. The rest of the team falling back onto the trail, capping wildly on a ragged azimuth to the ville. Duncan and his A-gunner laying down clipped, suppressing fire. Jake tried to inch over to the wounded. No go. Answering rounds cut through the jungle canopy like a swarm of hot metal bees, whizzing inches overhead or pinging clumps of sod out of the packed earth of the trail. The wounded started screaming. Duncan's A-gunner, big black guy from Philadelphia named Willie, had to lift up a little to get one of the hundred-round bandoliers over his shoulder.

Willie from Philly took two rounds in the face: boom boom.

The A-gunner's brains blew all over him. His squad was getting greased.

And Duncan just freaked.

He opened up with the M60, rocking and rolling and screaming incomprehensibly, and just wilted the place. Answering fire from the ville momentarily halted in the onslaught of it; the rest of the squad seized the opportunity to let loose with M79's, willy petes, M16's, absolutely everything they had.

The fire cut a swath of destruction across the entire face of the hamlet, shooting up huts, animals, anything and everything that moved, stood still, bled or blew up. Judgment Day in dinville, and God was pissed.

Only trouble was, He couldn't seem to decide which side He was on.

Because the enemy had already disappeared in the confusion. Retreating back into their hooch-holes and tunnels, giving up the hamlet as lost.

But not before they found the big, bad M60.

Not before they found Duncan.

It came like a parting shot, tracking in slo-mo: a well-placed farewell lofting out of the smoke and burning debris of the huts and arcing toward the one thing they particularly did not want pursuing them. Jake saw it coming, tried to holler: his mouth complied, but flesh could not possibly
move fast enough to meet his needs. He wheeled, like a man dipped in a vat of molasses, toward Duncan.

Duncan stood, hip-firing, a weird shadow playing across his gore-flecked face, unaware of the long, smoky fingers singling him out for doom. At the last possible second, he turned to meet Jake's cry.

And the rounds caught him square in the chest.

Jake screamed. And he kept right on screaming long after Duncan fell. He screamed as he stared at his dead friend's face, the glasses bent and blasted and shattered. He screamed as he hunkered over him, ripping open the pressure bandages that would never, ever stop all that blood coming out of all those holes.

But he wasn't screaming at that anymore. His hands worked by rote as his attention remained transfixed on the burning huts of the ville. He was screaming at the smoke, which rose in greasy plumes to curl and mingle with the canopy of foliage, to flicker and shift as Jake's screams melded with those of the incinerating villagers ahead, to form what looked very much like an enormous mouth.

And then the mouth suddenly split open to reveal teeth in light and smoke and shadow, which flickered, and glistened, and grew.

And grinned, like a giant Cheshire cat.

The firing broke off, ordnance-echo ringing his ears like cathedral bells. The jungle grew very still for a split second.

And then the shelling walked in.

One-twenty mike-mikes started dropping through the trees, covering Charley's retreat, going
boom boom boom boom
like some invisible giant throwing the world's biggest temper tantrum. There was no way to call in their own fire-support; the radio had been blown clear to shit. The squad had, too. The shells came down in waves, blowing rocks and earth and trees into ten billion spinning splinters.

And there was no time.

To do anything.

But run.

And scream.

And run . . .

And then he was in the room, in the clutch of the cool dark air, with nothing but dim shape and shadow to see and nothing but his own scream in his ears.

He stopped screaming, and the pieces fell together.

He was sitting bolt-upright in the bed, covered with sweat, heart thudding from his toes to his temples. He caught a hitched breath, drowned for a moment in the silence that followed it, and then Rachel was beside him, sitting up and staring into his eyes.

"Jake?" she said, her voice a croaking whisper. He couldn't see her eyes, lost as well in pools of shadow, but he could feel the terror behind them.

Yes
, he tried to say, but again his flesh betrayed him. His mouth closed, opened, let out another razor breath. He realized that his whole body was shaking, and that his heart and left armpit were throbbing in unison.

"Oh, God." The words came out of his mouth before he knew it. His teeth began to chatter, and a rush of nerves-gone-haywire rippled through him. It was the dream, the fucking dream, come back again to rake him and destroy him if it could.

Rachel touched him, and he wanted to recoil, but his body was not his own. It ran itself, and it had programmed itself for another spasm, which came. "Nuh," he said. It was meant to be
no
.

Rachel pulled her hand away, and he sensed her click into focus. God, she was great. She was the best. She knew instinctively just what to do.

He tried to think about how great she was when the next spasm seared through him with jiggling hot hooks. It was called
anxiety attack
in polite circles; he preferred the term
nervous breakdown
. His kind thoughts about her gave him something to do while his body lost control again and his teeth continued to chatter.

Another breath rasped in. It was shallow and utterly unfulfilling. Another followed. And another. He might as well have not been breathing at all.
I could die right now
, said a voice in his brain. It was a rational voice. It was more terrifying than the pain. His heart let out a surge of agony and sorrow. His voice began to moan.

"Breathe," Rachel said. It was not a request. "Breathe deep and relax."

He tried to laugh. He tried to say the word
relax
. It didn't work. He tried to breathe and did a marginal job. Another tremor ran through him, volcanic. "Ah," he said. Tears began to well in his eyes.