Xeno Sapiens (28 page)

The big man with the bolt rifle, they
said, never missed.

The bounty paid by the Sandinistas for
American snipers was upped on him especially from one thousand
dollars American, to five thousand. More than one Contra grunt had
thought of claiming the reward for themselves, but all it took was
one look at Hall to know that if the scheme went queer somehow,
they were already dead. As the old saw went, if you intended to
kill the king, you’d better make sure he’s dead. Hall’s reputation
burgeoned from cold killer to bloody, jungle legend.

Hall had requested and been given a
transfer away from the citizen militia and to a unit of career
Contra insurgents as a forward observer.

On his first day with the new unit,
they had entered a village no different than a thousand others. The
commander, a slight, lizard-eyed Nicaraguan was well known and well
feared in the village. The locals had retired to their homes,
hoping they wouldn’t be singled out. The commander’s entourage
included Hall and three soldiers.

These men were outfitted in serious
combat garb and carried automatic weapons at port arms. There was
no sign of innocence or enjoyment in their faces. They were
hardened veterans, remorseless, jaded, some of them having been
fighting since before Hall was born.

With no preamble, the commander kicked
open the door of a shanty. The soldiers entered to find a terrified
man of about thirty clinging to his five year old son.

The commander began in his musical language, too beautiful
for the business at hand. The questions never changed.
Where? Who? How
many?

“
Who are the guerrillas in the
village?” The commander’s saurian eyes were like stone.

“
I don’t know,” the terrified man
quavered.

“
I think you do.” The commander barked
an order. Almost quicker than Hall could take it in, a soldier
delivered a cracking wallop against the man’s head with the butt of
his rifle. The man fell backward, a candle of blood lighting from
his temple. Another soldier wrenched the man’s son away and held
him, a bayonet poised above his throat.

The man leaped up painfully toward his
son but was quickly put back down with a hard kick to the groin,
administered from the steel toe of the commander’s boot.

When the man looked up again, he was
staring into the business end of an M-16.

“
Who are they,” the commander
purred.

Hall’s horror and outrage were real
enough, yet he was fascinated at the callous, insensate brutality
being carried out without the slightest compunction. He could help
being mesmerized no more than he could help his rage. The uneasy
blend of emotions held him still and silent.

“
Who are they,” the commander asked
again.

“
I don’t know,” the man pleaded, tears
filling his eyes.

There was the dry, brittle crack of
small bones breaking. The man’s son squealed with pain.

“
Who,” the commander
hissed.

“
I would tell you if I knew,” the man
wailed.

Another snap from the boy’s other arm.
Another scream. Hall was convinced the man didn’t know anything.
Surely they would leave him in peace and stop torturing his
son.

But they didn’t.

The man cried and screamed and pleaded.
Through the breaking of his son’s arms he said he knew nothing.
When the soldiers sliced off the boy’s fingers and threw them at
the man’s feet he said he knew nothing.

Through it all, Hall had watched in
ambivalent detachment, wondering how far they would go, wondering
when some voice inside him would say enough and allow him to
intervene. But the voice never came.

“
One last chance,” the commander said.
The man couldn’t, speak through his tears.

The commander reached down and yanked
the man’s bowed head up so he could watch one of the soldier’s slit
his son’s throat.

The man closed his eyes and sobbed. The
commander pushed him backward and shot him.

“
Burn it.”

Hall and the three soldiers left the
shanty. The fire was lit and they watched the flames licking high
in the humid air, obliterating all traces of the day’s
work.

A tour on a river patrol boat, or PBR,
followed. PBR’s were heavily armed and it was a rare day when one
was attacked. Any unit with balls enough to attack a PBR had teeth
of their own.

On one memorable occasion, a second
looey straight out of OCS came aboard, throwing his weight around
and strutting his stuff until the craft drifted into an
ambush.

Machine gun bullets whizzed overhead
and a grenade or two clattered off the metal hide of the boat
before exploding harmlessly in the water. The crew, conditioned to
such experiences, sought cover below the gunwales until they
drifted out of range.

The looey, not so wily, did just about
the dingleberry thing Josh expected. The looey stood straight up,
to get a better look, maybe, and an RPG vaporized the upper half of
his body. The looey’s lower section slumped into the
boat.

At the time he had been aghast, but not
sickened. It was, after all, God’s- the God of the Carriage Man’s-
will for man to suffer. Thinking of it now was funny. It made him
realize that any peabrained nitwit without enough sense to keep his
ass down in a firefight deserved to have what little brains they
had blown to the heavens.

Hall’s training had taught him the
mechanics of death, the war had taught him the coldness. The
coldness that allowed him to start collecting ears from his kills.
The coldness to take a dead soldier’s dog tags (Hall himself, like
other SecureCom members, carried no identification), place them
between their two front teeth (providing they still had a face
left) and kick the jaw shut, wedging the tags for
identification.

Every day that passed made him witness
to more horrors. In his journal he wrote “...the war has made me
revise my ideas about God and other assorted supernatural beings. I
still believe in God, but I do not believe he is to be found among
any of the organized religions.”

He had prayed and his prayers were
answered with napalm and Bouncing Betty’s. His only recourse was to
revise his God to one of death, destruction and suffering. The
Carriage Man had been right, all along. Hall embraced
him.

His tours of Nicaragua finished and
with too many quirks on his service record- quirks which had been
covered up to protect one of SecureCom’s finest weapons- Josh Hall
was shipped to Atlanta for ‘reevaluation’. Pure horseshit.
SecureCom was trying to salvage him.

One of the first people to capture his
attention at his new post in Atlanta was Jon Merrifield. Something
about Merrifield appealed to him. A man much like himself, that
much Hall could see. But he had one basic flaw that would not suit
Hall’s purpose. Merrifield had a streak of conscience in him. A
small streak to be sure, but there.

This man is crafty. This
man could embrace my plan and push it through. He hides it well,
but he has a flaw. This man believes in a basic goodness to God’s
plan, despite what he and his rag-tag army of geneticists are doing
here. Such a man could be a great asset, were it not for that
flaw.

But isn’t it strange how he
looks at me from the corner of his eye, as if he could read my very
thoughts? I could have cultivated this man, turned him to a more
useful purpose. But he suspects. He dislikes me and is almost good
enough not to show it.

An accident with his funny
little potion would do the trick.

But the plan could not be rushed. There
was one more small matter to attend.

They will not follow me.
They have been misled too long. But I am clever. I will sweep them
into my web and turn them little by little to the true way. I will
be seen as a great instrument of God, the killer turned savior and
they will cleave to that. A miracle, they will say, and raise their
hands in hallelujah, God’s work is great!

From the time of that epiphany, Hall
‘went crazy’. He broke every rule at the CBW facility. He
threatened employees. He quoted madly from the bible. Nothing
seemed to be working well enough to get him fired until the
abortion that came to be known as the attempt on Merrifield’s
life.

He was discharged into the service of
the Lord.

There had always been the slim chance
he might have been prosecuted for murder, but the government knew
that he knew too much for them not to keep a hook in his mouth.
Even if Merrifield had died, Hall felt his chances of walking away
from it would have been eight in ten.

He still wished he had succeeded in
killing Merrifield. There was and always would be a personal grudge
against him. Merrifield and his little fiefdoms which he ran like a
feudal lord, no matter where he was.

His one glaring failure in twenty years
had come back to haunt him. The one man who could wreck his plan
was still alive, and still trying to do just that. And now he had
the perfect weapon; his own pet Chimera he could unleash on a whim
for his missions of murder.

But Hall was ready. If he couldn’t pull
down the temple of the Philistines with his words, he would silence
their weapon with his guns.

Ingrid was in a sleepwalker’s trance.
She stared into the distance outside her window. Peaks covered with
dark evergreens shouldered their way from the earth. They didn’t
rise majestically like the Rockies, but gave the impression of
being old men comfortable with their lot in life. They sat placidly
on their patch of ground, rubbing elbows and smoking pipes that
wreathed their summits in a foggy haze. Partial patches of snow
crowned their crests like the thinning, white hair of elderly
southern gentlemen.

If she thought about it long enough,
she could zero in on a particular patch in the mountains and see a
lone figure inching his way through the sharp holly bushes and
sticky fir needles. He was hungry, naked, and cold, breath like
icicles coming from his mouth.

The figure pushed aside an ice-covered
branch. Soft snow whumped behind him in a fountain of sparkling
lights. He squirmed into a dark hole set into a sheer rock face,
back muscles shuddering in appreciation of the relative warmth of
the cavern. He lay down and went to sleep almost
immediately.

Ingrid’s consciousness fogged in and
out as she drowsed deeper into her waking dream. She saw the world
outside the Alamo through eyes rested from a good night’s sleep. An
endless field of roiling green grass stretched before her; grass as
green as stained glass. A warm, March sun, the warmest she had ever
felt, fell across her shoulders. It was her first day of new life
after a long, bitter winter. It was a day to hop into your ’33
Stutz Bearcat convertible and cruise the highways with the top
down, your hair chasing you, and Robert Plant screaming out Led
Zeppelin’s classic blood and iron montage,
“Heartbreaker”.

The hills streamed by. A limitless
fence of split rails marched by like a London picket line. The
Alamo was in her rear view mirror and she sped away from it. But
when she looked ahead of her, it was still there, less than a
hundred yards away.

It was too early to go back. She made a
leisurely right turn and cruised into the mountains, going higher
and higher, hearing the engine whine on the steep
upgrades.

Featureless, gray clouds overspread the
sky like a shade being drawn across a sunny window. The land
darkened until only the snow alongside the road showed plainly,
like a huge, narrow field of cotton. There were footprints in the
snow. They looked to have been made by a weary traveler. Some of
them had smears of frozen blood in their hollows.

Snow began to spit from the sky and
Ingrid had to switch on her headlights. The narrow beams picked out
the way on the winding road. The lazily falling snowflakes built up
speed and intensity, settling on her shoulders and blond hair
before melting.

She crested a hill and stopped
suddenly. A feeling she could not categorize settled over her.
Ahead of her, about fifty feet away, the figure of a man stood in
the road.

He cut an imposing sight, his right leg
angled out from the left. Her headlights reflected back from a
height of seven, seven and a half feet. The figure was featureless,
like a shadow in a doorway. There was something so imploring in the
figure’s solitude, but something else as well. Could it be
arrogance? Yes. And vanity. The vanity of a creature impossibly
beautiful. Corkscrews of whirling snow fell through the beams of
her headlights like miniature, twin tornadoes.

They stayed that way for a few moments,
advocate and antagonist locked in an endless showdown. She wanted
to go closer, but that arrogance froze her. The snow fell more
heavily, slowly hazing her view of the figure until it was lost in
chaotic white.

Her inner eye closed. Her own eyes
returned her to her first view of the Smoky Mountains. The
beautiful Smokies with an as yet unseen figure prowling through
their many hidden pathways.