The Scream (36 page)

"
Wahl-kerr
. . ." creakingly langorous this time. He saw the smile distend, like the stretching of old rubber bands. He stared at it, watching the long shafts of light that spilled out when the shadow-lips parted. It moved like the crudely animated images in a flip book: there, not there, there, not there. Flick flick flick flick. It was mesmerizing.

"
You're dying
.
" It smiled reassuringly. He heard a snap to his right, turned and pumped two bullets into another sniper who was trying to flank him. A baker's dozen answered back, chipping huge divots out of his sanctuary. They were gradually whittling it down, yessir. Arts and crafts with automatic weapons, yup yup yup . . .

He could hear them calling to each other, could feel the dull moist thud of metal in his back every time he moved. More were certainly on the way by now. Twilight was fast approaching; the forest was filled with the myriad sounds of the food chain in motion. Chirping, creeping, crawling. Beckoning him to join them. The morphine-induced mercy was hinting of its inevitable fade. To agony.

To death.

"
I can help you
.
" It purred, a low-pitched rumbling that filled the space between his eye and brain.

Walker grinned, tasting blood. "Fuck you," he said.

"
We can help each other
.
"

"I don't need your help." He laughed weakly, coughing up a bubbly red froth.

"
Check your ammo
.
"

He felt for his ammo pouch. Empty. Shit. The last clip was already in, already half gone. Time flies. He had a survival knife and a couple of frags and that was that. Maybe two to throw and one to hold. Funny, he hadn't figured on such an ignominious end. Oh, well.

Walker looked up. It had changed shape, it wasn't quite a smile anymore. It looked tense, fretful. The shadows were lengthening; it was getting harder to discern in the gloom. The sounds seemed louder. "I don't need you," he repeated, somehow lacked the defiant conviction of a moment earlier.

"
Oh, yes, you do
,
" it whispered. "
Just as I need you
.
"

A pause. A tremor of pain. Finally, "What do you want from me?"

The smile broadened. "
Everything
.
"

. . .
and it touched him, ethereal fingers sliding in to linger in his mind and eye and heart. Revulsion passed through him in spasms, his body shaking, his throat dry and raw. He saw the rupture from whence it came, heard a tremendous buzzing in his ears, saw the enormity of its intent in a vast, lurid gestalt of grotesque ambition
. . .

Walker reeled from the seizure, looked up again. The smile was assured, more defined. "What the fuck's going on here?" he mumbled.

. . .
and the grip tightened, became a fist around his heart. He felt his spirit wrenched from its mooring, yanked upward into the trees. He could see his body back on the ground, wedged in its crumbling niche of stone. It didn't look long for this world. He felt no pain, though, felt utterly detached from the goings-on below. His consciousness hovered, disembodied, before the giant grinning lips.

"
Your dying is what's going on
,
" the demon said, "
and there's not much time. Do you want to die?
"

"Not particularly." His defiance rallied.

"
Then serve me
.
"

"Yeah, right." And slipped.

"
I'm serious
.
"

"You're a hallucination." And faltered.

"
Not if you believe in me
.
"

Walker blacked out again. He came to, weak and in pain and on the ground. The food chain was feeding. The blood was congealing in the heat, sticking to his face and side and back. The snipers were still sniping. Even if they didn't get him, the flies and the worms very shortly would. Thoughts of new life in his ruined socket flooded his mind; the images were increasingly hard to fight off. God seemed very far away, indeed, and he sure as shit didn't believe in spooks. What he did believe in, though, was survival. At any cost.

"OK, fucker," he said to the shadows in the trees. "You got yourself a deal."

"
Then prove it
.
"

"How?"

"
Simple: surrender to me
.
"

Easy enough; it was an effort to even keep talking. Walker grunted and went limp, slumping into the earth.

And the demon did the rest.

It was like letting someone else slam down on the gas pedal and steer when you were strapped in the driver's seat: his right arm jerked suddenly, fingers clutching toward the left shoulder strap of his Stabo-rig. Grasping the handle of the blade and putting it free. Six inches of razor-edged steel slid down and out into the hand, which moved of its own accord now, waving the blade in front of his face like a snake ready to strike. He stared helpless as the left hand came up and splayed, fingers stretching till the thin skin webbing between them seemed likely to split. The two limbs wavered there momentarily, a ritual puppet-dance before his solitary bugging eye.

And then they jerked even further, hauling him into an agonizingly upright position. More shots fired from the trees, pinging all around him. His left hand slapped down and clutched at the rock. The right hand hovered over it, quivering. Walker heard the scream welling up deep inside him, rumbling out from the pit of his soul like a runaway freight train. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a belch of smoke that marked the bullet with his name on it . . .

. . . and the knife came down . . .

. . . and time stopped dead in its tracks. There was a sharp thwop! as the blade severed the first joint of the third finger of the left hand.

The scream died.

The shooting stopped.

The bullet with his name on it fell out of the air an inch from his face as if slapped by an invisible fist. The jungle went utterly still.

And Walker trembled, watching the blood.

It flowed, in thick runnels, down the trunks of the trees. It dropped from unseen sources. Branches snapped as things fell thudding to the ground. First, the rifles, the grenades. Then the hands that held them. Then the arms. Then more, and more: jumbled pieces, unidentifiably mangled. Walker watched, incapacitated, as the grisly rain fell. And fell. And fell.

Warm gouts spurted out of the hole where his finger had been. Control of his body was returned to him; he fell over immediately, crawled right back up. The finger lay right where he'd left it. The demon chuckled as he stared aghast, chuckled again as he picked it up.

And then it said with great relish and solemn dignity, "
Take this
.
"

It chuckled some more.

"
And eat it
. . ."

Walker crushed the butt of the Lucky into the ashtray. Momma was humming, over and over, the refrain from Carly Simon's "Anticipation."

"You're so perverse," he muttered.

Momma cackled. "
I understand they even made that one a catsup commercial. How apropos
.
"

Walker shuddered. The memories were an endless repetition of freak show images: the severed finger, pressed to his lips. The bloody flesh, falling chunk-style. The food chain, resuming its twilight call.

And in the distance, the cry of a child.

He found her. The demon directed him, and he found her. A half click away, nestled in her dead mother's arms. Screaming.

It was the babe from the ville. Walker's aim had apparently been close enough for rock 'n' roll: he'd wounded the girl, she'd fled this far back into the jungle, she'd hidden, and she'd died.

Leaving behind her legacy, such as it was, on the jungle floor. Hurt, by his hand. Crying, in his arms.

He carried her back to the clearing, shambling like a zombie, sobbing shamelessly, stray bits of metal falling out of his back and neck. It was full twilight by the time he found the team's radio. It was in perfect working order, which was more than he could say for the radioman. He broke squelch and sent a distress call. No one answered. He was about to do it again when the voice came like smoking neon letters in his head.

"
Relax. It's taken care of. Help is on the way
.
"

"Oh, really?" He was trying desperately to affect an air of blithe indifference. It was useless. He'd opened the door for a moment.

And now he had company.

In his arms the baby made a rasping, wheezy, sick-child noise. Walker looked at its face, distinctive even in the gloom. Almond eyes in a European face; a little half-breed, the bastard by-product of strangers in a strange land. Tiny little legs wriggled tiny little toes, tiny little arms clawed weakly. With all nine tiny little fingers.

In his head, that dust-dry laugh.

"WHO ARE YOU?!" he screamed, falling to his knees.

"
My name is legion
.

"
But you can call me Momma
.
"

Walker howled, laughter mixing with the tears until he couldn't be sure where the one left off and the other began. Not that it much mattered. Eventually he looked at the waif in his arms again. She was feverish, trembling. "
And who the hell are you?
" he croaked.

The sky smile opened wide. And the voice told him, immensely pleased . . .

The fire was burning brightly when Cody came upon them. He had a bag of prime smoke that he'd saved for a special occasion, and though this wasn't what he'd hoped for, he figured it qualified.

Cody sat down, lit up, and passed a joint over to Slim Jim, who grunted thanks and sucked in a man-sized lungful of sweet, musky smoke. He held it in and stared at Cody as if seeing him for the first time.

"Tell me sumthin'," he said upon exhaling, voice slum only slightly. "What d'jou do during the war?"

"Which one?" Cody asked.

"Fuck you. You know which. Where d'jou go? College? Canada?"

"College, some. Jail, mostly."

Slim Jim snorted. "Jail, huh? What, d'ja get popped dealin' or sumthin'?"

"Got caught standing up for my lofty principles."

"Hmmph." Jim belched and took a parting hit off the joint, washed it back with the pint. "Me an' him did our bit. fightin' for the damned country."

"Yeah, that's the funny thing." Cody exhaled a fat cloud of smoke. "That's what I always figured I was doing, too."

"Hrrmmmph." Jim was reasonably blasted at this point; it lent a well-lubricated verbosity to his feelings. "So what'd we get for it, all our duty and honor and patriotic fucking freedom-fighting?" he said, more to himself than anyone else. "
Screwed
, is what." He looked back to Cody with a mixture of braggadocio and remorse, as if explaining the fundamentals of fine wine to a connoisseur of the screw-top set.

"We were supposed to be the good guys. We were real good at what we did, I'll say that much. We were trained to go in there and clean up. We
believed
that we were going to go in there and clean up. And we had the goods to do it, too." His eyes flashed with the fires of rekindled memory.

"But by and by, we found out that that's not what we were really there for. Uh-unh. I don't think anybody even fuckin' knows the
real
reason-one that Nixon or Ho Chi Minh or Dow or the Rand Corporation or God Himself would ever even cop to. Do
you
know?!"

Cody shook his head. Slim Jim leaned closer like a great bearded Buddha, smelling of dope and sour mash and Marlboros. "Neither do I," he said.

"But I'll tell you what I think. I think that we were there to raise Hell. Literally. Raise. Hell. Inch by inch. Every day was like a fuckin' Judgment Day back then. Can you imagine that? I mean,
really
imagine it??"

Cody shook his head some more. Slim Jim
harrumphed
triumphantly. "Course not," he muttered, "'cause you weren't there. But it's the truth. You get past all the moralistic poly-sci
crap
and that's all war is." He sucked back the rest of the and laid the bottle in the flames. "It's a chance to make hell on earth. We take everything dark and wormy inside us and turn it loose like wild dogs on a long chain. And we always figure that the chain will hold, that it'll keep the hounds at bay . . ." He trailed off then, as if lost on the track of his own thoughts.

"You can send a man through hell, you know, and he'll go singin' all the way," he continued almost brightly, switching tracks. "
If
you give him good enough reasons. Somethin' worth killing for, say, or dying for. Charlie had 'em, sure enough."

"And we didn't." Cody said. The fire popped.

"Bullshit!" Slim Jim spat. "College boy.
Hmmph
. We had
plenty
.

"But in the long run," he amended, "Charlie's were better. And it don't have nothin' to do with capitalism or communism or any of that horseshit. It runs a lot deeper than that. It's personal."

Hempstead didn't say anything, but he was nodding his head. Jim was on a roll now, the mix of alcohol, tetrahydrocannabinol, and leftover adrenaline acting like a verbal diuretic. "Hell, I guess everybody's experience of it is different, but after a while I just gave up on trying to figure it out and settled for just trying to keep my ass and my crew in one piece. I wasn't fighting to
build
anything anymore. But Charlie was. Charlie still believed.

"Shit, in the end Charlie beat me by out
believing
me."

"So why'd you stay?" Cody asked.

"Try and leave." He laughed. It was the laugh of the righteous lunatic: sharp and hoarse and fast. "You get caught up in a machine like that and you find out real quick that it's got a mind all its own, and you're just along for the ride. And if you've got to do all kinds of terrible things, and there don't seem to be any
reason
for doing 'em, other than to survive and avenge and survive and avenge and survive . . ."