The colonel made a circle with his arm, and his men stopped chasing chickens and started grabbing children from their mothers or herding them toward the gate. The shadows of flames burned across Dinh's face and hands, making an aura of their own for him.
The children were lined up at the village gate, facing the mined path as if they were to run a footrace. Dinh took two of the oldest by the shoulders and pointed across the minefield to my dead patient. His arm dropped as the roof of one of the houses collapsed in a fountain of sparks and flying, flaming thatch straw, and the boys half ran, half stumbled through the gate.
I closed my eyes to focus. When I looked up again, Hien's agonized face covered the opening of the hole. His lip was swollen so that his back teeth were bared. Firelight caught the gold in one of them. His eye was cut and swollen, too. He had given up on trying to be gentle. He put his hand on top of my head and tried to shove me back in the hole. He must have been sitting behind it, or to one side, so intent on watching the village it had taken him some time to notice that I'd opened the hole.
The force of the next explosion startled both of us. He jumped away from the mouth of the hole. Earth and rice tumbled to the floor of the hole as the vibrations shook the ground and the smell of gunpowder joined the acrid stench of burning thatch. A woman screamed short, staccato screams. I poked my head back out the hole again.
The colonel stood in the midst of the executed villagers, who lay at his feet like so many disassembled store dummies. Four of his men held aut omatic weapons on the adults of the village. Four more held automatic weapons on the children who had been walking cautiously down the mined pathway. For a split second, the children froze as if they were playing a grotesque game of statues. Then one of the smaller ones, a little naked boy of about three, began crying and tried to run back to his mother. He and his screeches were lost in the flash from another explosion.
I knelt back down in the hole and vomited bile down my legs and onto my feet. I didn't want to look back, but I did. The guards stood menacing the two older boys, who had reached the dead VC and were now trying to drag him between them back to the gate. Only one of them made it.
I didn't watch the rest. I retched and retched into the hole while the crackling of a fire, the sobs of the bereaved, were punctuated eight more times, I counted, with fresh explosions and shrieks.
After a very long time Hien pulled me, dizzy and shaken, from the hole.
The colonel and all but one of his men stood nearby, with several new recruits from the village. Some of the new people were the mothers of the children; one I recognized as one of the boys who had been hauling the body. He was reeling from shock but trying to smoke a cigarette and look as if he'd been plucked from the unemployment line for some routine job. No one would ever be able to tell the difference between him and a regular Vietcong, and in time he wouldn't be able to tell, either.
The fires from the houses were burned out and I did not look for the auras of either the dead or the living. I did not look in the direction of the village at all. I allowed myself to be led away from it, through a lesser nightmare of biting insects and vines and tree roots that tripped me and made me fall. Toward morning, Hien dragged me after him into another tunnel bunker. I felt him shaking beside me, as if he were palsied. Even after he grew quiet, I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to.
I could not believe, when Dinh had done such terrible things to his own people, that he would let me live much longer. My God, what if he had found Ahn? What would he have done to him? He'd never find out from me. And neither would Hien. Poor Hien. He was too damned scared of Dinh to really be of any use to me. But maybe he would send some last words to my mom, if I could think of any.
On my other side, the colonel flopped restlessly. I pulled as far from him, as close to Hien, as I could get. I could still smell the blood, the gunpowder, the smoke, on Dinh's clothing. He rolled toward me once and I flinched away. He sat halfway up in the tunnel, and tugged my rope.
He pulled me after him into the open, where he lit a cigarette and put it to his mouth as if it were an Aqua-lung and he were underwater.
He handed it to me after a puff, but I waved it away. I was already coughing so hard my sides hurt. "Hien saved your worthless life last night, woman," he said.
I nodded listlessly. I had dragged myself through most of the trip away from the village. Of all the terrible things that happened, the deaths of the family and the children, I think what did the worst harm to me was when Dinh shot my patient out from under me so soon after I had poured all of my energy into his cure. Part of me was still gone, out there in the twilight zone somewhere with the augmented aura of my former patient. I don't know if it was the same for Hien. Maybe. I never found out.
I looked down at my filthy feet and ran my tongue around my blood-and-bile-fouled mouth. It tasted as if it had been stuffed with filthy dressings. I couldn't stand to look at Dinh. Never in my life had I hated anyone so much. The way he had butchered that whole family.
Those poor babies in the minefield. That helpless man who thought we were going to help him. It made me thoroughly sick to think I had ever regarded such a monster as a human being, much less a protector.
I was chilling so badly it felt as if a winter wind were blowing straight into my marrowless bones. When he touched me I felt I'd been thrown into a pit full of rattlesnakes. I couldn't seem to stop shuddering.
I thought he winced ever so slightly as he withdrew the cigarette, as he had not winced at killing children in front of their mothers and one of his owrmo, two of his own men. His aura was little more than a thread of light around him now, the colors so smudged and muddied it was hard to tell what they had been.
But he only smiled and blew a smoke ring that was immediately dispersed by the drizzle. And he spoke quietly, almost off handedly, in Vietnamese, as you might speak to a dog or a cat, or perhaps to a total stranger when you have something so terrible to say that you don't want anyone you know or care about to hear. "You were displeased by what happened in the village, co. I could not allow you to undermine my authority there-it would have proved fatal for you if you had even attempted to intervene. But now you can tell me what you would have told me then."
I licked my lips, and flicked the rain into my dry mouth. One of my teeth was loose. I started to speak and he casually leaned over and touched the amulet. I pulled away, resenting the gesture as fiercely as if he had stuck his hand in my crotch. I didn't want this man to know me any more. I didn't want to know him. He grimaced, trying to make me think he was amused at my repulsion, but he wasn't. I relaxed just a little with a sense of revenge. He had already known I hated him.
Touching the amulet wasn't a sadistic act toward me-it was a masochistic one for him.
"I was just going to say stop," I said. "I was going to say, don't do it. They're your own people. How could you?"
"But I had to do it. By sparing you, by sparing the village that harbored you, by sparing my backsliding daughter, I was already in grave error. Believe me, I would not have done so if it was not that I think certain influential men will be pleased to have you among us."
I wondered then if he intended to lie for Hue and the village, to say that they captured me and had the foresight to keep me alive and hand me over. I hoped he was that human, anyway.