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.
The rain blew straight at us and I took my poncho from my ditty bag and tried to cover us both with it. I couldn't bear it in the heavy jungle.
It was too hot. Now, however, as a wind and rain break, it was inadequate. Clouds like gray scouring pads blew across the top of the valley, squirting squalls every few minutes. The bomb craters, already full, flooded and ran into one another. I felt dizzy and headachy, as I did when I was catching cold. I wanted my mother again. I wanted her to bring me aspirins and antihistamines and a vaporizer with Vicks and comic books and fresh orange juice. The fact that she hadn't done that since I was about ten made no difference. Sick adults regress too.
"Dear Mom," I mentally wrote while carrying Ahn down the valley, "Ahn and I took a walk today-well, mostly I walked. He got tired. William had some business to take care of, and when he returned he wasn't in a very good mood, so Ahn and I decided we'd give him time to cool off. I bet we'll find a rice paddy today. William wants to avoid people, but I think the paddies are a good sign. They're so normal and agricultural, like wheat fields. William doesn't want to visit a Vietnamese village, but then, he's a city boy. I feel that, after all, these people are rice farmers just as the people where we're from are wheat farmers, so what really is the difference? I'm getting Ahn to teach me to say, 'Hot enough for you?" and 'Nice day if it don't rain,' in Vietnamese."
Thinking about home probably wasn't the best thing in the world, because my mind began drifting. just because I didn't want to be in Nam, I started dreaming, with my eyes wide awake and my feet walking, that I wasn't. I imagined I was walking through the woods by my Aunt Janet's cornfield carrying my cousin Sandy, who was now about seventeen years old, though to my mind she was still as I had last seen her, younger than Ahn. It was like a mirage except that I didn't actually see anything that wasn't there, I just reinterpreted what I was seeing so that it seemed instead to be something I wanted to see. I have no idea how long or how far I walked thinking myself back in good old dull Kansas. It's a wonder I didn't mistake a booby trap for cow fence and kill us both.
Ahn pulled me back to Southeast Asia by suddenly rousing to point out what looked like a brilliant sunset. Indulging him, I stopped so we could admire the reds, oranges, and yellows of the sun, as I thought, reflected in the sky.
Around the next bend, I felt the heat, smelled the smoke, and watched tongues of fire lick at the sky as the field below us spouted flames.