He was bound around the ankles with a length of hemp rope and suspended two feet off the ground from a bamboo tripod, his hands tied behind his back. His skin looked like old cheese and his eyes were sunken in. He was dead, but I had to make sure. I prodded him a couple of times with the barrel of my rifle… and he moved. His lids snapped open and he leered at me with yellow, venomous eyes.
“Davis,” he croaked. “Cut me down, man, cut me down…”
It was then I noticed his throat was slit.
It was open beneath his chin, like a grinning, lipless mouth. I could see the tissues in there, dead and bloodless. As I aimed my rifle at him, I imagined what it must have been like for him. The slopes tied him like that, cut his throat, and fed on him like a bunch of fucking vampires. But he wasn’t allowed to die, to rest, Laughing Man had seen to that.
Clenching my teeth, I put the barrel of my AK against his forehead and emptied the clip.
I staggered back outside and threw up.
I thought about going to get Roshland and Barber, but I knew it was pointless. If my gunfire hadn’t brought them charging through the jungle, nothing would. Pulling off my boonie hat, I wiped the sweat from my face. After a good pull from my canteen and a couple of salt tabs, I felt a little better. Functional, at any rate. I dug in my breast pocket and got out my pack of Lark’s. I slipped one between my lips and sat there smoking, not thinking about a thing. When I was done, I butted it against a stone and buried it.
Then I went back into the hut.
I cut Thurman’s mangled body down and rolled him into the corner. There was a straw mat on the opposite side of the floor and I tossed it aside. I was looking down the throat of a tunnel. I dropped my pack and rifle and shotgun, took out my .45 and went down.
The walls were sticky and damp. It wasn’t made for a larger body, so I barely fit. I slithered through there until my back was sore and I was slicked with clay. All I had for a flashlight was a small penlight. Down there, it seemed pretty bright. It was hard moving, crawling through there. My head kept bumping into the low ceiling and my shoulders brushed the walls. After what seemed about an hour, I came to a room.
It wasn’t very big. Only about four feet from floor to ceiling and twice that in area.
I could smell the bodies before I saw them.
Their reek was awful. There were about three or four of them sprawled on the floor, chewed to shit. Their faces were gone, nothing but skull left. They had been VC once. I saw what was left of their black pajamas and a few AK-47s half-buried in the mud.
Then I saw the girl.
She was crouched among them, hugging herself. Her blue-black hair was tangled over her face. She looked at me. A crusty blob of snot hung from one nostril and her eyes had no pupils. She was drooling.
“You boom-boom me, numba one?” she asked.
I put two slugs between her eyes and left the dead alone to do whatever they do in the darkness.
Out in the sunlight, I headed back toward the village.
I went back to where I left Roshland and Barber, but they were gone. I was close to panicking now; it had all been just too much. I ran from hootch to hootch shouting their names. But they were gone. I found Barber’s Stoner machine gun lying at the edge of the forest, but nothing else. They’d gone through the jungle, I could see that much. Either gone or been taken. Maybe if I’d been sane, I would’ve gotten out of there right then. But all that training was too ingrained in my mind; I couldn’t leave my comrades. SEALs didn’t leave other SEALs behind. I’d dragged the bodies of fallen team members through miles of jungle more than once.
I spent the next hour looking for Barber and Roshland.
I patrolled through the jungle in an ever-widening search grid, but I didn’t find jack shit. Just more and more jungle, all dead and silent as a mortuary. I went back to the vil and made my plans. I should’ve evaded to the LZ, but Barber and Roshland, they were my friends. I couldn’t leave them. I found a ridge outside the vil that was heavy with undergrowth. I hid in there, set up a nice little OP, observation post. I told myself I’d give them until dark to show, then I was outta there.
Just after sunset, I was still there. I was watching the village with my Starlight scope, expecting something. Before too long, the villagers started showing up—singly at first, then in twos and threes, and finally in roving gangs. I could hear them down there howling and hissing and shrieking. Like animals. I saw Barber and Roshland in their company. Even in the murky green field of the Starlight it wasn’t hard to pick out a tall Caucasian and a heavy Negro amongst those small Asians. After a time, they wandered off into the jungle.
But I didn’t sleep.
I kept watch, waiting for dawn. It was the longest night of my life, just waiting and waiting for sunup so I could get out of there. The night belonged to them; there was no question of that. They were hunters. Even with all my training, all my experience, I knew I was no match for them. Off and on I could hear screams, gunfire, shouting. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Maybe some gook patrol had run into the villagers. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know.
Just before dawn, it started to rain. Before long it was pouring, turning the landscape muddy and sloppy. At first light, I went down into the village. It was dead and empty. Thurman’s body was gone. I started patrolling through the jungle again, ankle-deep in mud, soaked to the skin, and finally I found a path beaten through the knife-grass. You had to be really paying attention to see it. I followed it for about three clicks to the top of a forested rise. In the distance, I could see other villages spread out. But I didn’t bother with them. If there were still people in them, then it was best I stay away. One heavily-armed man is still one man.
But I knew they were empty.
I figured that’s what all the commotion had been in the night, those things attacking the villages.
I followed the trail up and down through the hills until I finally found what I was looking for: a cave. It was set into the wall of a craggy, overhanging bluff. Creepers grew over the rock like ivy, they hung in knotted ropes over the entrance. I almost missed it. But when I saw it… yeah, I knew where the things, those rabids, were hiding.
I brushed aside the dangling jungle and peered inside. It was very dark, so I checked it out with my light. The slopes were real good with caves, tunnels, that sort of thing. You’ve heard about that. You give ’em a nice deep hole and pretty soon they’ve got themselves a dandy ammo dump or ordinance drop. Sneaky little fucks even ran hospitals and weapons factories, command posts and intelligence networks right out of the ground.
I was armed to the teeth, but I wondered if it was enough.
I had my pump shotgun in a sling at my side, my AK slung over my back, and Barber’s Stoner LMG. I could do a lot of killing, but I knew that eventually they’d overrun me by sheer numbers and ferocity.
It was good to be out of the rain, but it stank in there—age, mildew, a wet rotting smell. I didn’t like any of it; I knew I was wading into the shit. But I had to see, had to find out, before I killed them and maybe myself, too.
The entrance was barely five feet in height. The first hundred feet or so you had to crawl on your hands and knees, but then it opened up. It was huge. A shadowy, gigantic mausoleum. Stank like death, like blood, like things much worse. I kept my mind on the task at hand; once you got the spooks, you were done.
There were pooled columns of volcanic rock, stalagmites and stalactites, shattered slabs of stone that had fallen from above. But what you really had to watch for were the sudden chasms in the floor that dropped down farther than my light would reach. But the cave itself wasn’t really too dark: there were crevices and cracks in the rock above and fingers of sunlight filtered in, sickly beams clotted with dust. I found a natural archway at the far end and slipped through.