“Muppet! You coward! Just fucking do me.”
I threw away my shotgun. Pulled out my sidearm.
Deeming him more trouble than he was worth the creature lanced Hooky through the gut, the tip spearing out of his lower back, dripping with his viscera. Blood flooded his mouth, but he turned to me, his eyes pleading. You can do it, his expression said.
OK, Sarge, mine said.
I shot him in the face.
The creature must have sensed his instant demise, because it suddenly whipped half a dozen lances into him and they scissored, chunks of bloody flesh and splintered bones flying overhead. Then those lances whipped towards me.
I tripped, but good job, because my fall took me back out of the door and I slid down the short incline to the pavement. Before I’d got my arse under me, the monster was forcing its gelatinous bulk out of the doorway, reminiscent of the way an octopus can contort and constrict to negotiate seemingly impossible places. As its compressed form cleared the doorjamb, it grew exponentially, almost flooding the ground around the exit with barely recognisable shapes. The heads had absorbed into the mass, but now they began popping out on those stalks. Rolling eyes searched for and then fixed on me. Sitting there, I fired, and my rounds took some of those faces, some of those bilious eyes, but for each one I obliterated a couple more oozed out of hiding.
It began pouring towards me, and those waving arms that came through the door reached out. But they didn’t snatch at me; they simply wavered overhead, the fingers moving like an impatient pianist’s.
I didn’t run.
Why bother?
Something squirmed in my chest and I knew.
I allowed my handgun to slip from my fingers and reached down to fasten it over the splinter of rib bone that had pierced my vest when Brainpan let loose with that first grenade. The bone was red with gore as you’d expect, but the red was too jellified to be human. I pushed down on the rib and felt a corresponding scratch against my own sternum.
Sonofabitch…
The bone had punctured my vest, got through my fatigues to the skin beneath, made a shallow groove in my flesh. The wound was so inconsequential that it hadn’t really registered when I’d expected to be torn to ribbons by the detonation. Shit, at the time I’d only been thankful that the rib hadn’t sliced through my windpipe. Now I wasn’t as sure.
The squirming was in my throat in the next instant, and in my gut and groin. I felt as if I needed to shit. I did pee; there was no controlling it. I rolled back my head and peered up at the hands above me. They now gestured, coaxed me, soothed me with their gently waving motions.
Now…
I am becoming.
Bill Grover is a memory, one that will be forever lost, forgotten, no more. Muppet barely exists anymore. I can’t recall the names of my teammates. They aren’t important. They were a threat but they have been dealt with. I shouldn’t be troubled with their memories. They… are… no… more…
I look to the greater part of me. Those welcoming hands, those faces that are me, those lancing spines that will protect me, and I reach up to accept.
A noise.
Some dim recollection tells me what it is.
Something called an ‘officer’ once watched me.
Abandoned me.
Called in this rocket strike.
I don’t know what a rocket is any more.
I don’t even recognise these final words that play through my fleeting conscience, but I know they are dangerous.
Offsuuu… I moan in warning to my beautiful brethren.
Rohcutt…
My words lose meaning.
I am become.
White and heat and burning…
I am…
THE SLOG
Neal F. Litherland
Vietnam smelled like an off-season slaughterhouse. It had been washed by rain and perfumed by flowers, but even after Mother Nature scrubbed and polished the sprawl it was impossible to forget what was underneath. Impossible to forget the sharp tang of cordite and the fresh shit smell of bladders and bowels being emptied. The jungle had blood on its breath, and once that abattoir stink got in the nose you never forgot you were in a cattle chute.
They all coped with that the memory of that smell in different ways. Baxter stripped and cleaned his 60 from belts to barrel every night, his hands assembling and disassembling the pins and latches like it was a lethal rosary. Hawkins read and re-read his letters from home until they were smeared and smudged, tattered around the edges like he’d sucked all the well-wishes out of them. Big Billy Watts built card houses in the moonlight, and before he rolled into his fox hole he knocked ‘em down like a kid with building blocks. They brought their rituals and their talismans, their whispered prayers and their good luck charms. They didn’t really believe those things would keep them safe, but they needed something to hold fast to when the sun went down and the shadows grew bold.
“So there I am, one big bastard on either arm, my hands cuffed behind my back, and my dick still hanging out of my fly,” Johnny drawled, carefully arranging the crown of royals in his helmet band from Jack to King. “They haul me in, and dump me on the bench like a sack of taters. I drop right on my nuts, and for a minute I swear I can hear bells ringing and angels singing.”
“Must have been a lucky drop,” Jenkins said, running the razor edge of his Bowie knife down his left cheek. He had a dozen scars attesting that blade shaving hadn’t always been so easy for him. “Ain’t much of a target to hit.”
“When my eyes uncross the chap’s staring down at me, his greens pressed and his little collar on,” Johnny continued, wiping his florid face on his sleeve and ignoring the commentary. “He tells the monkey patrol to take the bracelets off. Problem is my hands are still numb, so I’m trying to tuck myself back in still half a sheet to the wind and I can’t even bend my fingers.”
Simms was rolling up his poncho from the night before, Gardner was scraping the rest of his MRE between his yellow teeth, and Cooper was going through a last check on his med kit before slinging it over his shoulder. Nobody was really paying attention to Johnny; he was a radio with one station. He faded into the background more often than not, but his stories about what he did once his pretty Susan broke up with him were still better than silence.
“Finally I get my gun holstered, and the chap’s giving me that hellfire and brimstone look.” Johnny turned down the corners of his mouth so they cut deep grooves in his sweaty cheeks, and narrowed his eyes so his forehead wrinkled up. The expression added thirty years to Johnny’s face, and made him look like the chaplain’s red-headed younger brother. That got a chuckle out of some of them.
“The old man say anything?” Luke asked. His back was against a tree stump, and he was rolling a smoke just as thin and dark as he was. A smile played around the corner of his lips, like he’d heard it all before and still found it just as funny the second time around.