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Authors: Michael Bunker

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BOOK: Digger 1.0
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Ellis moved to the south side of the stone
and looked closely at the place where the stone and cliff met.

This rock has been quarried… made to fit
flat against the wall!

He pushed against the rock and it moved, and
the crack between the stone and the wall increased by an eighth of
an inch. He pushed again and he realized that the heavy rock must
be sitting on pebbles or bearings because it was designed to
slide.

He shoved harder and the opening appeared,
and the big stone slid back more than a foot, exposing a tunnel,
pitch black and mysterious, which had been dug into the cliff
face.

A cool breath of air from the void touched
his face.
There’s air circulating somehow!
And then he heard
the voice of his father, long dead he‘d
supposed, and even though he knew it wasn
’t
his father speaking but the words of his conscience preaching to
him with the authority he longed to hear, the voice was that of his
daddy and it spoke with conviction and a warning…

 

Son. You best prepare yourself. You wanted a
change and now you have it.

Chapter 8

 

 

 

Bad Things Do Not Just Happen

 

The man in black rode his donkey into the
setting sun and no one followed him. At dusk, in the gloaming, the
sage thick and heavy and sweet to the taste of his nose, he started
a great and reckless bonfire.

The mule honked as the man drank thirsty
swigs from a large plastic bottle that once held honky-tonk grade
Jack. “Ah Clarice,” he screamed hysterically at the end of a maniac
laugh, “Let me enjoy my triumphs!”

Bad things don’
t just happen.

They’re made.

Call him the Man in Black. Or even Walter
o'Dim or Richard Fannin or Randall Flagg the Walkin’ Dude. It
doesn’t matter, call him whatever you’d like. Rasputin or even the
Witch King. Call him the kid everyone in the neighborhood was
afraid of. Or call him HAL. Every story’s got one. Stephen King
knows that. The maker of bad things, the doer of dirty deeds done
dirt cheap, the villain of stories, yours, mine and other people’s.
One of the 88.

The Man in Black.

Mayhem.

Oh how he loved to cause mayhem. He rejoiced
in it because that’s who he is, and tonight was surely a night for
rejoicing if ever there was one. He could still smell the smoke of
burning Summner on the night’s rising wind, a wind he was sure
would howl sometime around midnight when he would summon a demon.
He had run alongside the starving horde, run inside them,
whispering and tempting and in the end, dressed like a ragtag
lunatic like them all, he’d led them toward the walls of Summner
and when he was sure their ravenous course was straight and fatally
true on that sleepy, little walled hamlet east of the Basin, why,
he’d just faded away.

Disappeared. That was the way of the 88.

He’d watched from afar as they fell hard on
one of the last outposts of humanity.

Oh yes, he told himself, drunk on spirits
other than the one in the bottle, he knew all about hordes. Knew
all about Slenderex. Why once, in another life, long ago, he’d had
a little something to say about its design. Just a little something
about want and desire and unquenchable hunger. But he’d been more
interested in its marketing being overt rather than subtle. He
loved the lies he’d promised to everyone. Youth, vigor, fitness,
sex. All of it in a family-sized bottle for the taking.

He’d never said “
beauty
” and, as he skipped once through the
massive fire, his hobnail boots kicking up sparks while the wind
began to moan and Clarice honked in fear, he was glad he hadn’t
ever offered those suckers “
beauty
”.

Everyone knew you couldn’t get beauty out of
a bottle. Maybe one of the others in the 88 had sold that lie, but
not him.

And then the blindness had given him real
powers. Not just marketing and strategy, but the power over life
and death. The good stuff.

He laughed wildly.

The Man in Black laughed and laughed and it
was not a pretty thing. There was just something so wrong about
it.

Later, he fell to his knees in the sand,
drool stringing from his mouth as he rolled over onto his back,
recounting out loud how he’d told the Santeria Bikers to be ready
for the convoy coming out of the west. Why, he’d even salvaged that
old parcel truck and mixed up a little Oklahoma City Bomb for them
to run straight smack dab into it.

He cackled.

That had been delightful.

Simply delightful.

A mere appetizer for Summner while he waited
and watched the horde coming out of the desert wastes.

And now, tomorrow he was headed into the
Basin. He’d been listening to the tales told by deranged old
salvagers and whispering whirlwind demons out in the wasteland.
There were more Summners in the Basin and he was going to have some
fun once he got there.

Oh, what fun he was going to have with
whoever it was that was unlucky enough to be left in the Basin.

Oh, what fun he planned for those
survivors
.

He danced and cackled and drank, and at
midnight summoned a demon only he could see and the wind became a
storm and a whirlwind and sparks flew out into the night at the dry
sage all around.

Clarice
honked.

The moonless night wore on.

“Oh, what fun we’re going to have,” he cried
aloud into the darkness.

 

The End of Episode One...

 

 

 

Texocalypse Now
Episode
Two
Before Everything
You Know Ended

 

Chapter 9

 

 

West of Texas. East of Eden. 1982

 

“Where you at, S
ugar?
” repeated the platinum-haired fading bar
beauty, yesterday’s homecoming queen.

I’m in Tucson, Arizona
, thought Jim
Howard.

Not ‘Nam
.

Not Cu Chi
.

Not back in the tunnels
.

“You want another?” she asked sweetly,
holding up the empty beer bottle he’d been nursing. Just something
to get the taste of the road off the back of his throat.

He nodded once and mumbled, “Sure,” in his
never committing to anything ever again way. He’d been driving
since late last night. He’d left his job working the rigs down in
the gulf and gone home to watch his dad’s old place be sold by the
county land commissioner. On his way, the old truck he’d had since
getting back from ‘Nam busted down outside Central City, so he’d
thumbed it and caught a ride with some old boys he used to know
before the war. They’d taken him out toward his dad’s place, and
he’d walked the last five miles. He’d made it by dawn, and for just
a moment it was like the past was still present.

Like the boy he once was might appear,
leading the horses out into the yard at first light. Combing,
grooming. Gettin’ ‘em ready. Saddles and whispers. Dad coming out
with two old tin cups of coffee to start the day. Then another day
like all those uncounted and endless days of his youth that had
promised to last forever. Fencin’. Bustin’. Herdin’. Day in and day
out, and if you would’ve asked him, asked that boy he once was…

…If I woulda asked myself
, Jim
thought, trying to find the ghost of himself in that early morning
light,
if I woulda asked myself if I was happy...

He knew the answer.

Knew the answer the boy he once was would’ve
told him now.

“Nah, I got to see the world first.”

Idiot
, he thought of himself.
Idiot
.

Now the old place was gone. Bought up by a
big corporate ranching group. They’d knocked down the little white
house that leaned in the wind. The house that grandpa had built
when he was young, a boy like he once was too, helping a man called
Denton Howard. A man Jim had never known, but who was a county
legend and great-grandfather to him.

People still called him Dent.

Grandpa was Little Dent.

Dad was Bill.

He was Jim.

I am Jim Howard
, he remembered, and
took a long pull on the fresh cold beer just outside Tucson at an
old Air Force honky-tonk in the quiet of an afternoon in 1982. The
platinum-haired bar beauty faded on down to the end of the bar.

Yesterday morning he’d gone to the old place
to give Tom Childress, the banker, the keys to the ranch.

“Sorry, Jim. Ain’t personal and I don’t like
it.”

Jim told him to never mind.

No one liked it these days.

“Both you and your dad fought for this
country,” continued Tom Childress. “Somthin’ in that ought to let a
man keep his property, regardless. But what’s done is done, I
guess.”

Jim turned and walked toward the old barn
that still stood.

Where have all those horses who hated me
even though I loved them gone off to?

Later, as he drove away from his childhood
home down the dirty road throwing up chalk and dust, in the old sky
blue Cadillac his Dad had won in a back room poker game down in
Amarillo in ’58, he went over his plan once more, and probably for
the last time.

I tried hard to do it their way
.

And there was no answer back to himself,
telling him right and wrong, winning and losing.

He’d known lotsa guys back in Cu Chi who’d
tried hard. Real hard. But the tunnels had been stacked against
you. You went into those tunnels, you went into their country.
Their world. Charlie’s house.

You were as good as done. Even if you tried
real hard.

“I ain’t done yet,” Jim whispered softly as
he turned out onto the paved road. He could hear his own words. He
could hear the big engine in the Caddy and the gravel grinding
beneath the wide tires and the springs in the seats that almost put
a man to sleep. He could hear it all.

And the road took him and sent him west, and
he was still in Vietnam along all those countless miles.

 

~~~

 

1968.

 

“You see, we own all this,” shouted the
Public Affairs LT over the chop of the blades. A gray-haired
reporter in a khaki vest leaned forward and looked out the open
door of the Huey transport at the spreading jungle and intermittent
moonscape that was the Iron Triangle. Route 13 raced beneath them
suddenly. Squat green APCs, surrounded by infantry on foot who
walked the elevated road above the rice paddies. Jim noticed grunts
looking up and watching them go by overhead. SGT Jim Howard could
feel their hatred.

He tuned out both the Public Affairs officer
and the reporter the officer was giving a tour of the battlefield
to. Jim was just hitching a ride forward after some R and R and
treatment for an intestinal parasite he’d picked up in the
tunnels.

“Problem is,” continued the bellowing Public
Affairs LT, “is the Cong are below all that out there. That’s where
these guys come in.” The LT ducked his head toward SGT Howard,
aviator sunglasses flashing in the hazy sunlight. The gray-haired
reporter merely turned and looked at Howard. The reporter’s bushy
eyebrows accented the scrutiny Howard could feel himself under.

“These guys…,” yelled the LT as the noise of
the chopper’s blades suddenly turned staccato drum roll. The pilot
was bringing them into the LZ in a tight turn. “…they go down in
there, in those tunnels, after intel. Problem is, Charlie’s still
down in there, more often than not.”

So you’ve been told
, thought Howard
and grabbed his ruck off the deck with one hand, adjusting his grip
on his rifle. So are the scorpions, centipedes, and vipers. Not
just snakes. Vipers. Oh and make sure to tell him all about the
punji sticks and traps they make with those things. He’s got to see
what those do to a man.

Let it go
, he told himself.

“LZ’s secured, SGT,” shouted the LT as he
watched Jim get his gear ready. “Don’t worry about it.”

SGT Howard nodded and turned his back on the
stupid LT. The chopper landed and by the time he cleared the skids,
he could hear the whine in the turbine rising ever so slightly.
Just a subtle nod upward in the pitch meaning the pilot wanted out
fast.

Howard crouched and raced through the tall
yellow grass for Captain Dasher.

Then he heard the shot. Heard it a long way
off. He got down and crawled toward the edge of the LZ. When he
looked back, the legs of the LT were hanging out the door as the
helicopter pulled itself urgently skyward. The reporter was trying
to drag the dying LT back onto the deck of the aircraft.

“Can you believe it, Howard, he just stood
there!” roared Captain Dasher over the beat of the departing
chopper. “Some sniper out there had all the time in the world to
take his shot and get back into the tunnels. Stupid!” And Dasher
was leading him back through the jungle to a red dirt road and a
jeep, where both driver and gunner had their weapons ready,
watching the tree-line and the ever-present jungle.

Once they were moving, Captain Dasher turned
from the front passenger seat and held out a folded map. “We’re
going over toward Alpha Company today. They’ve got big problems,
Sergeant Howard. Real big problems. They’ve lost six in three days
trying to clear this complex they found outside some no-name
village that isn’t even on the map. Anyway, I told Battalion to let
me work on it and they said fine. So that’s where we’re headed.”
Captain Dasher turned and watched the road ahead.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Howard. Dasher turned
back to him, waiting. “How’d they lose the six?” asked Howard.

Without pause, Captain Dasher recounted the
six grisly deaths.

One shot in the head down tunnel.

Two found a trip wire and managed to set it
off, blowing themselves to shreds. One of those two lived through
that, but probably died when the tunnel caved in around them. The
VC helped out with that part.

BOOK: Digger 1.0
6.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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