Gone South (31 page)

He had taken a wrong turn somewhere. He had taken many wrong turns. Wasn’t there some way out of this filth, back toward the road that led him to the clean white mansion? Dear God of deformities and wretchedness, wasn’t there some escape?

He knew the answer, and it made him afraid.

The cards have been dealt. Play or fold, your choice. It’s late in the game, very very late, and it seems you’re running out of chips.

Play or fold. Your choice.

Flint stopped. He felt the blood burning his face. His mouth opened and out swelled a shout that was bitter anger and pain, wounded pride and feverish determination all bound up and twisted together. At first it was a mangled, inhuman sound that scared Pelvis into believing a wild animal was about to leap at them, and then words exploded out of it:
“Lambert! I’ll follow you till you drop! Understand? Until you drop!”

The swamp had hushed again. The sound of Flint’s voice rolled away across the wilderness like muffled thunder. Pelvis stood a distance behind Flint in the green flarelight, both his arms clutching Mama close. Slowly, the insect hums and buzzes and strange chittering birdcalls weaved together and grew in volume once more, the dispassionate voice of the swamp telling Flint who was master of this domain. When Flint drew a long, ragged breath and continued wading southward with the sluggish current, Pelvis got his legs moving, too.

Flint held the flare high, his eyes darting from side to side. Sweat was trickling down his face, his clothes drenched with it. He heard splashing ahead, but how far, it was hard to say. The channel took a leftward curve, and suddenly Flint realized the water level had risen three inches above his knees. “Gettin’ deeper,” Pelvis said at about the same time.

“Gettin’ deeper for him, too,” Flint answered.

The mud gripped their shoes. Pelvis watched the surface for gliding shadows. The air was rank with the odors of wet, rotting vegetation, and breathing it left the sensation of slime accumulating at the back of the throat.

Behind them, the two edges of disturbed darkness the light had passed through first linked tendrils, grew joints, and then silently sealed together again.

Up ahead, barely twenty yards beyond the light’s range, Dan was down in the water with Arden. She was fully conscious now, though her vision kept fading in and out, and she could remember everything up until when they’d hit the warning sign; her bell had been rung hard, a bloody inch-long gash just past her hairline where her head had glanced off something on the dashboard, a cut inside her mouth, and a bruised chin, courtesy of a flying knee.

Dan could see the blotch of dark wetness in her hair. He figured she might have a concussion, and she was lucky she hadn’t smashed her skull. “I want you to stay right here,” he whispered. “They’ll take you back with ’em.”

“No!” She’d spoken too loudly, and he put his finger on her mouth.

“Comin’ for you, Lambert!” Murtaugh called. “Nowhere else to run!”

“No!”
Arden whispered. “I’m all right! I can keep goin’!”

“Listen to me!” He had his face right up against hers. “I’m headin’ into the swamp, just as deep as I can get! You’ve gone far enough with me!” He saw the flare-lit figures wading slowly and steadily nearer. In another minute the light would find them.

“I’m goin’ with you,” Arden said. “I’m too close to turn back.”

She was out of her mind, he decided. Her eyes had taken on the shine of religious fervency, like those of the walking wounded who flocked, desperate for a healing miracle, to television evangelists. She had come to the end of her rope and found herself dangling, and now all she could think to do was hold on to him. “Stay here,” he told her. “Just stay here, they’ll get you out.” He stood up and began sloshing southward, the water up to the middle of his thighs.

Arden saw the circle of green light approaching, and the two figures at its center. Her distorted vision made them out to be monsters. She tried to stand up, slipped, and fell again. Dan looked briefly back at her and then continued on. Arden got her feet planted in the mud and pushed herself up, and then she started fighting to reach Dan with the light glinting on the frothy water just behind her.

“He’s tirin’ out,” Flint told Pelvis. “Hear him strugglin?” The splashing was over on the right, and Flint angled toward it.

Pelvis suddenly jumped and bellowed, “Oh Jesus!”

Flint whipped the flare around. “What the hell is it?”

“Somethin’ swam by me!” Pelvis had almost dropped Mama in his jig of terror. “I think it was a snake!”

Flint’s gaze searched the water, his own skin starting to crawl. The light showed something dark and about three feet long, sinuously moving with the current. He watched it until it slithered beyond the light. “Just keep goin’,” he said, as much to himself as to Pelvis, and he started wading again. The sound of splashing had quieted, but Lambert couldn’t go on much longer.

Dan looked back. Arden was still straining to catch up with him, but she’d found her balance and her strides were careful and deliberate. The water was almost at her waist. He started to turn and go on, but like a flash of shock the moment took him spinning back in time.

He remembered a night patrol, and a wide, muddy stream that cut through the jungle. He remembered the crossing, and how almost all but the grunts guarding the rear — of which he was one — had climbed up a slippery bank when the first white flare had exploded over their heads. The enemy had gotten around behind them, or had come up from hidden snake holes. “Move it, move it, move it!” somebody began yelling as the second white flare popped. The rifles started up, Dan was standing in knee-deep muck and tracers were zipping past him out of the jungle. Other grunts were running and falling, trying to scramble up the bank. Within an instant the situation became as all night combat did in that jungle: a confused, surrealistic montage of shadows fleeing from the flarelight, blurred motion, screams as bullets thunked into flesh. He couldn’t move; his legs were frozen. Figures were falling, some struggling up, some thrashing in the mud. It seemed pointless to move because the others were getting cut down as they tried to climb up the bank, and if he stood still, if he stood very very still with the tracers passing on either side of him, he might make himself disappear from the face of this hellish earth.

Someone gripped his shirt and yanked him.

“Go,”
a voice urged; it was not a shout, but it was more powerful than a shout.

Dan looked at the man. He had the gaunt, sunken-eyed face of a hard-core veteran, a man who had seen death and smelled it, who had killed after hours of silent stalking and escaped being killed by inches of miraculous grace. He had a blond beard and eyes of cornflower blue, only the eyes seemed ancient now and lifeless. They had been lifeless since that day months ago at the village.

“Go,” Farrow said again. Farrow, who since that day had retreated into himself like a stony sphinx, who suffered in silence, who always volunteered with a nod for the jobs no other grunt would dare take.

And now, in this little cell of time, Dan saw something glisten and surface from Farrow’s eyes that he hardly recognized.

It might have been joy.

Farrow pushed him hard toward the bank, and the push got Dan moving. Dan reached the bank and started up it, clawing at vines and over the bodies of dying men. He dared to look over his shoulder, and he saw a sight that would stay with him all his days.

Farrow was walking to the other side, and he was sprayfiring his M16 back and forth into the jungle. Dan saw the enemy’s tracers start homing in on Farrow. The young man did not pause or cringe. One bullet hit him, then a second. Farrow kept moving and firing. A third bullet knocked him to his knees. He got up. Somebody was shouting at him to come back, for the love of God come back. Farrow staggered on, his M16 tearing down the foliage and scattering blackclad figures. Either the weapon choked or the clip was gone, because it ceased firing. There was a stretch of silence, broken by the cries of the wounded. The Cong had stopped shooting. Dan saw Farrow jerk the clip out and pop another one in. He took two more steps and his M16 blazed again, and then maybe four or five tracers came out of the jungle and hit him at once and he was knocked backward and splashed down into the muddy water that rolled over him like a brown shroud.

All of it had taken only a span of seconds, but it had taken years for Dan to digest what he’d seen. Even so, it still sometimes came up to lodge in his throat.

He watched Arden pulling herself toward him, as resolute in her decision as Farrow had been in his. Or as crazy, Dan thought. There had been no doubt in his mind that Farrow had gone quietly insane after that day at the village, and had been — whether he was aware of it or not — searching for a way to commit suicide. How the death of those children had weighed on Farrow was impossible to say, but it must’ve been a terrible burden that ultimately led him to choose a slow walk into a dozen Viet Cong rifles. If Farrow hadn’t taken that walk, Dan and at least three other men might have been cut to pieces. Dan’s life had been spared, and for what reason? For him to be tainted by the Agent Orange and later pull the trigger that killed an innocent man? For him now to be standing in this swamp, watching a girl with a birthmarked face struggling to reach him? Life made no sense to him; it was a maze constructed by the most haphazard of hands and he, Arden, the bounty hunters, all humanity alike, were blindly searching its corridors and banging into walls.

She was almost to him. The green flarelight was chasing her.

“Give it up, Lambert!” Murtaugh shouted. “It’s no use!”

Maybe it wasn’t. But the girl believed it was, enough to trust a killer. Enough to fight her way into the unknown. Enough to make Dan think that if he had half of her desire, he might find his way through this wilderness to freedom.

He waded to meet her and caught her left hand. She looked at him with an expression of amazement and relief. Then Dan started pulling her with him, racing against the oncoming light.

T
HOUGH FLINT STILL COULDN’T
see Lambert or the girl, he knew they must not be more than fifteen or twenty yards beyond the light’s edge. He was moving as fast as he could, but the channel was hard going. The water had crept up toward his waist, and it had occurred to him that if it deepened to his chest, Clint would drown. He was dripping sweat in the hot and clammy air. In another moment he heard Pelvis’s lungs wheezing like the pipes of an old church organ.

“Mr. Murtaugh!” Pelvis gasped. “I’m gonna have to … have to stop for a minute. Get my breath.”

“Keep movin’!” Flint told him, and he didn’t pause.

The wheezing only worsened. “Please … Mr. Murtaugh … I gotta stop.”

“Do what you want! I’m not stoppin’!”

Pelvis fell behind, his chest heaving. Oily beads of sweat were trickling down his blood-gorged face, his heart furiously pounding. Flint glanced back and then continued on, step after careful step. Pelvis tried to follow, but after a half-dozen more strides he had to stop again. Mama had sensed his distress and was frantically licking his chin. “Mr. Murtaugh!” Pelvis called, but Flint was moving away and taking the light with him. Terror of the dark and of the things that slithered through it made Pelvis slog forward once more, the blood pulsing at his temples. He couldn’t get his breath, it was as if the air itself were waterlogged. He wrenched one foot free from the mud and put it down in front of him, and he was pulling the other one up when his throat seemed to close, darkness rippled across his vision, and he fell down into the water.

Flint heard splashing and looked back. He saw the mutt, paddling to keep her head up.

Pelvis was gone.

Flint’s heart jumped. “Christ!” he said, and he struggled back toward the swirling water where Pelvis had submerged. The dog was trying to reach him, her eyes wide with panic. Bubbles burst from the surface to Flint’s left, followed by a flailing arm, and then Pelvis’s butt broached like a flabby whale. Flint got hold of the arm, but it slipped away from him. “Stand up, stand up!” he was shouting. A dark, dripping mass came up from the water, and Flint realized it was Pelvis’s hair. He grabbed it and pulled, but suddenly he found himself gripping a pompadour with no head beneath it.

A wig. That’s what it was. A cheap, soaked and sopping wig.

And then something white and vulnerable-looking with a few strands of dark hair plastered across it broke the surface, and Flint dropped the wig and got his arm underneath the man’s chin. Pelvis was a weight to be reckoned with. He coughed out a mouthful of water and let go a mournful groan that sounded like a freight train at midnight. “Get your feet under you!” Flint told him. “Come on, stand up!”

Still sputtering, the baldheaded Pelvis got his muddy suedes planted. “Mama!” he cried out. “Where is she?”

She wasn’t far, yapping against the current. Pelvis staggered to her and scooped her up, and then he almost fell down again and he had to lean his bulk against Flint. “I’ll be all right,” Pelvis said between coughs. “Just gotta rest. Few minutes. Lord, I thought … thought my ticker was givin’ out.” He lifted a hand to his head, and when his fingers found nothing there but pasty flesh he looked to Flint, his face contorted with abject horror, as if he indeed might be about to suffer heart failure. “My hair! Where’s my hair?” He started thrashing around again, searching for it in the froth.

“It’s gone, forget it!” Flint registered that Pelvis’s naked head was pointed like a bullet at the crown. On the sides and back was a fringe of short, ratty hairs. Flint spotted the wig floating away like a lump of Spanish moss, and he sloshed the few feet to it and plucked it up. “Here,” he said, offering it to its master. Pelvis snatched it away from him and, holding Mama in the crook of an arm, began wringing the wig out. Flint might’ve laughed if he hadn’t been thinking of how far Lambert was getting ahead of them. “You okay?”

Pelvis snorted and spat. He was trembling. He wiped his nose on his forearm and then carefully, reverently, replaced the wet wig back on his skull. It sat crooked and some of its wavy peaks had flattened, but Flint saw relief flood into Pelvis like a soothing drug, the man’s tormented face relaxing. “Can you go on, or not?” Flint asked.