The Reckoning (18 page)

“It's a dead end, I'm telling you,” Kleat said. He fished a cigar butt from his shirt pocket and whistled at Vin, who brought a lighted twig.

Molly frowned. Kleat was acting so oddly, so detached, even hostile to the possibilities. But, to borrow Samnang's French, this was her
spécialité.
She was a journalist, a detective. “We know the approximate date of their arrival. We know they left at least one of their vehicles here. They took gear and weapons and barbed wire, and some or all of them climbed into the city and apparently made a decision to hide here.”

“A bad decision.” With the stogie and the flak jacket, Kleat made a poor General Patton.

“Once the decision was made,” she went on, “they were stuck with it. They tried to radio for help, but the radio was dead. They tried to signal passing aircraft, but no one saw them.”

“A lot of nothing.” It was as if he were trying to sabotage her.

“Seven weeks later,” she said, “at least one of them was still left to carve his name on the tower. We know they were hungry, and despairing. There's that fragment about darkest before dawn and God's false promise. The boy sounds so desolate, like there's no hope on earth.”

“The only relevant question is where they died,” said Kleat. “I need teeth, whole jaws, the entire skull if possible. Pieces of bone for DNA analysis. Wedding bands, class rings, wristwatches with initials. Words don't matter.”

“Of course they matter,” Molly said. “They're our best clues at this point.” She continued scrolling through the images on her display, landing on the photos of the journal pages. The LCD was chewing through the batteries, stealing from the future to pay for the past, so to speak, using up power she could be saving to take more pictures. But she justified it as part of the interview process. The evidence was speaking to them.

She studied the images, goosing the light, enlarging sections, penetrating the inky ruins of the manuscript. “There's more,” she said. “I can't tell what order the pages go in. And anyway, he seems to have written things wherever there was space”—she turned her camera—“even upside down. Here's more of the inventory list. And some words to fill in around the segments, and a number on this page, ‘7/17/70.' ”

“Three weeks after they arrived,” said Duncan. “A month before C. K. Watts carved his name.”

She tilted the display, straining to see. “ ‘We can't not stay anymore,' ” she read. “ ‘Where else could we have gone? It was finished the minute the TC took the wrong turn. Now we have to live with what we've done. The TC gets the tower for his tomb, the first of us to go. And now we know it's not true that he loved the city more than us. He was only trying to preserve us all.' ”

“The TC?” she said.

“The team commander,” Kleat said. “There would have been two of them, one for each ACAV. But one would have had seniority. He was the fool who brought them here.”

She returned to the display. “ ‘There is death in the life of the stone. We see that more every day. We try not to notice, but the walls talk to us. The statues speak. The city sings. The eyes see. The rain is killing us. Every day gets worse. We hide from each other, not sure who is who now. I've never been so lonely.' ”

“Out of his mind,” said Kleat.

Molly scrolled to another section. “ ‘…he was right, but we were more wrong to become his rebels. It was mutiny…' And this. ‘We let him go like Cain, but west from Eden on foot. Maybe we should have killed him for it. But we let him lead us into sin. So we were part of it, and now it's done. And now we are scattered.' ”

They were quiet for a minute.

“And?” said Kleat.

“They were at war all right,” she said. “You want glory. You want heroes. They were scared. They were boys trying to deal with an ugly, dirty little dead end. And they had themselves a mutiny. A revolution. And then they died off like animals.”

“Journalists,” Kleat snorted.

“Something happened here,” she said.

“How about this?” Kleat said. “Their commander fucked up. They believed in him, and he betrayed them with his stupidity. They could have killed him, but they spared him and drove him out like Cain. The man who led them wrong. He's lucky they didn't put a bullet through his head.”

“There are other ways to read this,” said Molly. “This says the commander got the tower for his tomb.”

“Whatever that means.”

“Part of this was written three weeks into their confinement. The rest of it sounds like it was written later, maybe over the coming weeks or months. But one thing is clear, they were at odds with one another. He talks about rebels,
his
rebels. There was a troublemaker. Tensions must have been running high. Nine men found themselves caught in a cage. Think about it. They were bound to start laying blame for their troubles. And somehow their commander died. Whoever wrote this sounds guilty. He talks about sin.”

“He also talks about talking statues and a singing city,” said Kleat.

Molly stopped. “Which is it, Kleat? Either the writer was insane and none of it mattered, or his words are fact, but muddled by time. You can't have it both ways.”

Kleat released a cloud of smoke. His steel rims glittered. “None of it matters.”

The brothers had finished the turtle. They were passing the shell back and forth, sipping the gray broth.

Molly flipped the off switch. The camera display went black. “I'm going to bed,” she said.

She fit her camera into the bag, got her shoes and flashlight, and climbed down from the hut. Duncan started to follow. “Please don't,” she said. She didn't want to talk anymore.

He lagged back. “Don't give up on us, Molly,” he said. “You're right. I don't know what, but something happened here.”

She woke suddenly, in the middle of the night. Samnang's fire cast a glimmer on her tent wall. Hours had passed. Her clothes had dried. Some second sense told her not to move.

It was raining again. Water grazed the outer skin of the forest with a muffled hiss. A rain to sleep by, she thought, drifting off.

Then she saw the shapes. The fire animated them. Their silhouettes trickled across the panels of her dome tent, bent low and ranging their rifles back and forth.
The brothers.
They'd come for her.

Crouched like cats, they stole along the terrace edge. She held her breath, looking for Vin's thin figure. Maybe he could stop his brothers. Then she saw that there were more than three out there. That made no sense.

Just then, gunfire crackled up from the depths of the camp. Molly huddled behind her screen of nylon and fiberglass poles, thinking these stalking men must be the target. She braced for the explosions they would unleash in turn.

But none of the silhouette men returned fire. Instead they grew more misshapen, even their rifles, twisted and melting. Their arms trailed tendrils and became vines. The metamorphosis left her wondering what she'd seen in the first place. Pieces of the forest, nothing more.

The gunfire rattled again in the distance. That much was real. Her knees drew up against her chest. Her eyes squeezed shut.

The tent wall rustled. One of them was trying the door.

She willed herself invisible.

“Molly,” the man whispered.

He was the dark apparition of Oklahoma. She couldn't help herself.
Be a good girl.
Fear squeezed the air from her lungs.

“Molly.”

Quiet, she instructed herself. Stand aside. Don't be part of it. Return when all is safe again.

More gunfire.

“Molly.” Louder this time.

The door unzipped. She saw herself backed as far as possible into the corner. She saw herself with her eyes squeezed shut.

“It's me,” he whispered.

She saw herself open her eyes. In the scant, cold light, Duncan hunkered at the doorway. His hair hung in long, wet strands.

The rifles crackled, on full automatic. She glanced at the tent wall. The images had fled. He was alone.

“Don't be afraid,” he whispered.

She began to return to herself.

“I thought you might be afraid.”

She was shaking with fever fits. Her jaw unlocked. “Duncan.”

“Keep your voice down. They're drunk. It will pass.”

She was convulsing. He couldn't see it from out there.

“I just wanted to make sure you're okay.”

She wasn't. She had demons.

“Lie low,” he said. “Keep your light off. The bullets fall back to earth, but the canopy will protect us. You're safe.”

He started to raise her door to seal her inside with herself again. “Don't,” she said.

He paused.

“Don't leave.”

“If you need me, I'm here.” He started to zip the door shut again, still outside.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I'm here, I promise.” His chivalry bewildered her. He meant to sit in the rain like some warrior monk? She needed more.

“Come in.” It was so cold.

Backing inside, he zipped the door closed and sat beside her with his legs crossed.

Her teeth chattered. It finally occurred to him. His palm covered her forehead. “You're sick.”

“I'm cold.”

“I can't take you to the fire,” he said. “Not with them like this.”

“Hold me.”

It surprised him. She read his surprise. The halting way he opened his arm for her to lay her head on was like a remembered act. He had forgotten human touch.

She pressed her back to him. He was warm. They didn't talk. Eventually the gunfire tapered off. She quit shaking and fell asleep in his arms.

The birds woke her.

The rain had stopped. The city waited. She opened her eyes.

Duncan startled her. She startled herself.

During the night, she had twisted. In her sleep, she had thrown one arm across Duncan. She had one ear against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat. His ribs rose and fell in slow waves.

She never woke this way with a man, holding him and being held. It did not happen, even with lovers she trusted. And while he wasn't a stranger, he wasn't a lover either. She barely knew him. And yet her sleeping self had folded against him.

Molly lay very still, trying to sort out this new development. He was warm, and she'd been afraid. She remembered the gunfire, and those silhouettes. But they weren't enough to explain her trust.

He looked almost boyish sleeping in the blue-green light. There was a powerful scent of flowers. Her eyes traveled to his shirt pocket. He'd collected an orchid yesterday.

Part of her wanted to shake him and climb back into the city. They knew their way into the ruins. She had dreamed about them last night, dreamed madly. The city was starting to inhabit her.

But she lingered, reluctant to shatter this remarkable contact. Twice men had proposed marriage to her—seriously proposed—thinking they could overcome her nightmares. As gently as possible, she'd spared them their gallantry. They couldn't save her. The rape had burned her. Molly had resigned herself to her clenching scars.

What could explain this? She was a serial disbeliever. She required truth, good, bad, or ugly. Offer her a wound for proof and she would plunge her fingers right in. Which had made the search for the bones so fitting. The missing soldiers were an unhealed wound, like a hand-hold, both a story and, deeper, an appeal to her missionary instinct. So how did Duncan fit into that?

It wasn't that he could protect her from the perils. The plotting brothers and the typhoon and Kleat's paranoia endangered him as much as her. Was it that she seemed to occupy him the way the ruins occupied her? He had been her welcome to Cambodia. When she was at her weakest, he had shielded her from the sun with his scarf. When the guns started going off last night, his first thought had been for her safekeeping. He'd crawled out into the rain to guard her.

He looked twenty-something this morning. The soft light smoothed his crow's-feet and softened the hawk profile, but it was something more. Years had melted from his face. His beard line looked…diminished. There was just stubble on his chin and upper lip. His throat was smooth. The jugular throbbed. It was like watching her own heart beat.

A long, welted scar ran in a line above his left ear. She'd never seen it before. Normally his long hair hid it. He'd survived some terrible violence, but had never mentioned it. She'd have to ask him about that someday.

She wondered.
What would he be like in Boulder?
With his long hair and seven-league boots, they'd take him for one more globe-trotter with an athlete's veins. Every other man and woman you met there seemed to be in training for some imaginary Olympics or Everest. She'd written an article on the legend of Boulder, average age 29.5 years, average body fat 11 percent. She'd dubbed it an orthopedist's paradise, with all the skiers' knees and climbers' shoulders you could wish for. Duncan would move among them like an aging lion. They could go to the movies on snowy afternoons, drink tea at Turley's, chart new travels. With Duncan, she might finally feel at home.

But there were the ruins to decipher. His destiny was here, and hers, too. She felt it powerfully. She had not ended up here by accident.

Her thoughts wheeled pleasantly.

Slowly she noticed the bamboo. It stood on the far side of his face, a slender, glossy green shoot poised almost like a snake. The trespass surprised her. The forest had invaded her tent.

She lifted her head from Duncan's chest. The bamboo had pierced the tent floor and pushed right through the thin sleeping pad. Its point was hard and sharp, the shaft slick and phallic. They could have been impaled in their sleep. That was too dramatic, of course. They would have woken at its first touch.

Only then did she notice her tent wall. It was deformed. Half caved in. A tree limb must have fallen across them.

A wall tent or pup tent would have collapsed altogether. Her dome tent had spread the weight through a system of poles. The rain must have torn the limb loose from the canopy and it had dropped during the night.

Duncan woke. He started to smile, then jerked his head away from the bamboo. He saw the deformed tent wall. “How could we have slept through that?” he said.

He pushed at the branch with his foot, but that only tightened its pressure. The tent creaked.

“These poles might not hold it,” she said.

Despite the quiet destruction of her tent, Molly was grateful for the quick exit. It was too soon for pillow talk and holding hands. In escaping the tent, they would be escaping any awkwardness.

They couldn't sit upright. Then they saw more bamboo shoots sticking through the floor. Duncan got over her on his hands and knees, and put his back against the tree limb. She slid between his legs.

Unzipping the door dumped the dome's remaining strength. One of the long poles snapped, then another. She slid out and helped Duncan crawl from the shambles. They faced the wreckage.

It wasn't a fallen branch, but a vine. The thing had come untethered from the ledge above and was strapped across the tent. Its tip had burrowed into a joint in the stone. In the space of a few hours, it had muscled down and broken her tent. Molly looked around at the mist and its shapes. A giant god floated with his serene smile, and sank away.

“It's like a tidal wave, a green tidal wave,” she said. “Do things really grow so fast here?”

“The forest must have been thirsty. The first taste of rain and it takes off like a rocket.” Duncan aimed for levity, but it troubled him.

“I'll come back for it later.” Who was she kidding? The tent was a write-off. She felt violated and put on notice. This place was not her friend. She jerked her camera bag from the collapsed doorway.

Duncan had to use his Swiss Army knife to free their shoes. A filament of roots had invaded a rip in the floor and corded them to the ground. He pretended it was normal. “Man versus monsoon,” he intoned. “Who will win the primordial struggle?” But it bothered him, she could tell.

They walked along the ledge around little pickets of bamboo growing through the joints, and stepped across cablelike vines. His tent was collapsed as well. Lowering himself to what remained of it, Duncan cut an opening through the side and extracted his steel briefcase.

They finished descending to the terminus floor and wended their way through the mist.

Molly kept looking for the names carved into the trees. “There they are.” She tugged Duncan after her, but then she got a closer look.

The letters were bleeding.

“It's tree sap,” Duncan said.

“But they weren't like this before.”

“The forest is having a growth spurt. The bark pulled apart. It's only sap.”

Thick and crimson, it seeped down from the beloved names. She regretted waiting to take the picture. Yesterday morning, they had been radiant on the gleaming bark. Now they wept, though maybe that was the more appropriate mood for the photo.

Farther on, they heard a low roar building.

“Is that the truck running?” she asked.

They hurried, thinking the brothers were leaving.

But the roar was the sound of the fire. Kleat was there, piling logs onto a small inferno. The flames leaped taller than the hut, eating a jagged hole in the fog, throwing sparks with pistol shots of sap.

The furnace heat had him pouring sweat. He'd shed his shirt, but was wearing the flak jacket. His face and scalp were as bright as mercury. He looked insane.

“What are you doing?” asked Duncan.

Kleat loaded on another fat log and straightened on the far side of the flames. His glasses reflected the light. He had showers of red and orange sparks for eyes. Inside his fury, he looked afraid. “Up late?” he yelled at them.

Molly had been almost ready to pity him. “We heard the shooting last night,” she said.

His chest hair was singed to black steel wool. She smelled the burned hair and Caucasian sweat, but also caught other smells in the smoke, potent smells, the scent of different kinds of wood, of ferns, flowers, nuts, coconut, even cinnamon. Once part of a royal garden, spices grew wild here. The fire was opening up the forest's abundance.

“You missed the hunt,” Kleat said.

“Is that what they were doing, hunting?”

Kleat looked at them. “He should have known better.”

The fire forced her back with its hot breath. Her chills were gone. She felt fine this morning. Molly glanced around. At the edges of dissolved mist, half-formed shapes moved between the vaporous white Land Cruiser and the larger bulk of the truck. She counted three shapes with rifles. There was only one man unaccounted for.

“Where's Samnang?” Duncan asked.

“He brought it on himself.”

“Be clear,” said Molly.

“He fucked up.”

“What happened, Kleat?”

“He waited until they were drunk, then he got his revenge. But there was no way he was going to get away with it. Of course they found out.” He toppled a decaying stump into the flames. White termites came flooding from its cavities.

“What revenge, what are you talking about?”

“He destroyed their artifacts, smashed them to pieces, the pots. Hid the rest. All the heads, they're missing. That's what they were trying to beat out of him. Don't ask me. I don't speak the language. One thing led to another.”

“You saw it? They beat him?” While she slept soundly.

“I only came for the bones.” Kleat glared at her. “You know that.”

“But you were down here.”

“I heard them arguing. I came down and they had him. They were pushing him around, hitting him with their rifles. He's KR, I keep telling you. They hated him enough as it was. Then he pulls a stunt like this.”

They'd gone hunting.

“What did they do to him, Kleat?”

“I didn't see anything.” He bent for more wood.

It was obvious. “They killed him.”

She cast around for bloodstains, but the rain must have flushed them into the earth. It occurred to her that they were scorching the evidence out of existence. That would explain this manic bonfire at the crack of dawn.

“They were working themselves up to it,” Kleat said. “But then I came down. They weren't going to do it in front of me. So they gave him a head start. That's the last I saw of him.”

“Where is he?”

“He went off into the night. He's a slippery old bastard, and they were drunk. They chased him and came back and went out again. They were afraid to leave the fire for very long. It went on for hours. You heard the gunfire, they were all over the place.”

“And you just sat here?”

“I kept the fire going. That was my job. They made it clear. A big fire. That's the important thing. I kept them on our side. Someone had to make sure they wouldn't leave us. They could have driven off. They still could.” He threw on more wood. “But not for a while.”

“This is murder,” she said. “And you did nothing.”

Kleat's glasses flashed. “I stopped an execution. I came down and they set him loose. I saved his life.” He had it all worked out in his head.

Samnang was dead somewhere, she could picture it, floating in the
baray
pools or slung over a root. “How did you save him? They hunted him. You said so.”

“Three street kids against an old killer. Some hunt. They lost him.” Kleat stood on the far side of the flames. “Or he left, like Luke, out the front gate. Or he's dead, okay? He's gone.”

He shoved in another log. It struck her suddenly. “What's in the fire?” She dragged the log out. She reached for another.

Duncan took her arm. “That won't help, Molly.”

“He's under there,” she said. “They're burning his body. They're burning the evidence.”

“Molly…” Duncan murmured.

“Get a grip, woman,” Kleat said. “First cannibals, what next?”

“He was an old man.” She turned away, tears blurring her vision.

“He was KR. They think he killed their mother and father, I got that much. You must have heard them,” he said to Duncan.

“How would they know?” said Molly. “Vin would have been an infant. Doc would have been four.”

“They've got it in their minds,” Duncan said. “They say it's the reason they agreed to come along, to confront him and get the truth. I'm kind of surprised Samnang invited them. It's almost like he wanted to get it over with.”

“They're thieves. They were beating him to find their plunder, not to ask about their parents,” Molly said.