New Title 1 (22 page)

The creature stood in the bath of flame. One of its eyes drooped like a half-inflated balloon, the membrane withered like an apple gone to rot. Its mouth and surrounding flesh were pocked with blackened perforations where double-aught buckshot burrowed home, streams of greenish fluid trickling from the holes. Fire lived on its shoulders and limbs, swirling eddies and flaming dust-devils pouring out of its mouth and rising from its back in fiery wings.

And yet, if its remaining eye could’ve been said to reflect any emotion, that emotion would be wry amusement.

It’s been so long, young one,
a faraway voice chimed in Oddy’s head.
So long since I’ve been tested.

Perhaps it was a need for cover that made Slash duck into the central hut. Perhaps it was simple curiosity. Inside it smelled primal and hostile: if it were possible to breathe blood, Slash felt he was now doing so. Sarge’s shotgun barked outside, then Zippo screamed something over the gale of his flame-thrower. The ground beneath Slash’s feet was uneven and slippery. Felt like standing on a pile of wet latex. He lit a flare, illuminating the hut in stark orange light.

Skinned bodies—ten, fifteen, more—hung suspended from bamboo poles. Robbed of their flesh, the bodies were sickeningly skinny. On the floor beneath them, their skins lay in yellow pools. It filled every one of his senses: the stench of opened entrails, the sight of the bodies, the feel of their flesh under his boots, the creaking sound as they spun on copper-wire garrotes, the air salty with blood. The majority were children. Their underdeveloped penises were flaccid red knobs, skinned vaginas the petals of scarlet flowers slicked with dew. Slash reeled. His face brushed a flank of tacky meat. He could remember nothing of his life before this moment: he’d been born into this horror, reared in it, knew nothing but.

He unhooked a body, a young girl, from the garrote…

Tssst
, Crosshairs’ rifle whispered.
Thuup
: a flaming wedge disappeared from the creature’s scalp. But it would not go down. Was this something that could be killed using the customary tools of warfare, bullets and fire and black rage? Or was something greater required: faith, holy water, a sacrificial virgin? Crosshairs ejected the spent shell from the rifle breech, jacked a new round, exhaled.
Tssst
.

Zippo jettisoned the LPO-50 in favor of a pair of Magnums. He held one in each hand, firing them one at a time, right hand, left hand, right, left. His eyes were huge and he was thinking,
What the fuck’s it gonna take
?

“Duck, Sarge!”

Oddy hit the dirt as Gunner opened up with the Stoner. Set on full autofire, the gun sounded like a jackhammer. Bullets slammed into the creature, stitching its torso and ripping gobbets of melting flesh from its sides. Oddy saw, for the first time, an expression cross those nightmare features to give him hope.

Ouch,
the expression said.
That fucking hurts
.

So it did something about it.

One second the creature wasn’t there and the next it was on top of Oddy. He thrashed against its seething strength, but his arms were quickly pinned to his sides with the ease of a mother restraining a fretting infant. The creature’s smell—wet rawhide burning in a campfire—filled his nostrils. Up close, its features were a lunatic mishmash of animal, human, monster. One insectoid eye was now completely deflated, corneal jam sizzling down a flaming cheek. Its teeth were those of an extinct species, some giant carnivorous lizard. Its skinned nose was pert and upturned, a schoolgirl’s nose. Oddy was suddenly aware of how full his bowels were.

A claw-tipped limb ripped through his fatigues, shredding his flak jacket like it were tissue paper. Oddy sucked his stomach in, but one of the claws pulled a sizzling line of pain across his chest. Blood gushed out of him to spatter his pants, his boots, the dirt. It hoisted Oddy as if he were no more substantial than a seamstress’s dummy and hurled him toward the fire pit. Oddy hit the ground hard, saw stars, struggled to a sitting position, and saw his thighs were coated in blood.

For the past forty-seven seconds—the time that had passed since Oddy stepped into the clearing—Crosshairs had been in “the zone.” A preternatural calm had settled over him. The world receded until all that remained was the pinprick of existence seen through his Gewher scope. His hands did not shake, and he fired as smoothly and easily as he had at the firing range in Duc Phong. His fingers worked the bolt crisply and his shots, give or take an inch, hit their mark. He chambered another round and squeezed the trigger as Oddy sailed through the air. The slug struck the creature’s flank, tearing loose a knotted network of muscle. The creature turned sharply, clawing at the spot where the slug had tore through, slitting its remaining eye at the sniper hunkered behind a copse of mangroves.

Then it came for him.

When Crosshairs was a small boy, he’d once rolled a flaming, kerosene-soaked tire down a hill. It was night, the hill steep. The tire wobbled as it rolled downhill, picking up speed, flames spun by centrifugal force to resemble a glowing buzz saw, wild and uncontrolled and unstoppable, strangely beautiful, strangely terrifying.

This is what the creature reminded him of as it closed in on him: a flaming dervish rushing headlong at top speed. He squeezed off a final shot. Then it was on him.

This is how a gym rope must feel
, he though crazily as the creature shimmied up his body. Fire-tipped claws ripped into his flesh; octopus-like suction discs, blazing hot, leeched to his skin leaving blistering circles. A wall of gnashing, blood-stained teeth reared. A brittle
crunch
. Crosshairs crumpled to the ground, the top-left portion of his head gone.

The creature turned to Gunner, who was slamming another clip into the Stoner. Zippo continued to fire the Magnums: flaming plugs of tissue leapt off the creature’s body, dotting the ground like glowing coals. The creature moved slower, badly wounded, less assured but more enraged.

Oddy’s pants and underwear were soaked against his skin with blood. He had no idea how badly he was hurt. He heaved himself up and stumbled towards Crosshairs.

“Come on!” Gunner screamed at the thing. “Come get some!”

The hydrostatic shock of the Stoner’s .223-inch rounds were capable of killing a bull moose. In the three seconds it took to cover the distance between Crosshairs’ body, Gunner plugged no less than eighteen rounds into the creature, many at point-blank range.

He might as well have been armed with a pea shooter.

The creature lashed out. Gunner’s weapon fell to the ground. Unfortunately for Gunner, his arms were still attached to it. “Oh god,” Gunner mumbled.

Darkness prevented the others from seeing Gunner backing into the jungle. They could only hear screaming, and the spraylike sound of blood. Then, for a heart-wrenching moment, Tripwire saw Gunner illuminated by the flickering flames that rose off the creature’s body. The armless machine-gunner’s face was ghost-white, his eyes wide and terror-filled, like a child face-to-face with the monster lurking beneath his bed.

“TobyNancyHollyBradTobyNancyHollyBrad,” Gunner said, retreating further into the jungle. The names were those of his children. He’d been a poor husband and a poorer father, disrespectful of his marriage vows and neglectful of his children. Yet he had hoped, with the sincerity of feeling not unusual in those who’d faced death, to turn over a new leaf upon his return. There would be little league games and soapbox racers, school plays and piano recitals. Now, the blood from his madly-jetting stumps plastering his face, he knew this would never be. This certainty, the bitter clarity of it, filled him with a depth of regret so profound it was as if his heart had been seized in a cold fist and compressed into a tiny red agate. He thought, senselessly, that if he continued backing away he might somehow retreat in time—return to yesterday, last week, last year. Perhaps, were he to retreat far enough, he could return to the exact moment of decision and choose differently, make a choice that ensured he wouldn’t die here, like this, half a world removed from everything he knew and loved.

The creature lashed again. Gunner’s perspective suddenly dropped two feet as his legs were cut from under him. He turned, this armless, legless thing, running clumsily, running on shredded stumps, running until equilibrium deserted and he fell face-first into the dirt, leg-stubs kicking feebly.

“TobNantyHoddyBlad,” he whimpered, mouth filling with dark jungle soil.

Something slashed the back of his neck. Then nothing.

By the time Oddy reached him, Crosshairs had two morphine syrettes jutting from his chest. He was uncapping another. Oddy eased it from his fingers. “Pacify, son,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine. Fine as cherry wine.”

He removed his shredded flak jacket and propped it under Crosshairs’s head. Then he covered his face with his fatigue vest. The damage was too gruesome to contemplate. Huts blazed all around them, bright orange shafts holding the night at bay.

“We need a med evac now!” Oddy shouted into the PRC’s mouthpiece.

“
What’s your twenty
?” dispatch asked.

Oddy fed the rough coordinates. Dispatch spat out a landing area one klick east.

“How soon?” Oddy asked.

“
Give it twenty
.”

“Better make it faster. We got some KIA’s, another one on death’s door.”

“
Give it twenty,
” came dispatch’s impersonal reply.

Answer had not moved when Oddy stepped into the clearing. It had nothing to do with fear, or apprehension, or panic. If Answer felt these emotions at all, it was on a remote and rudimentary level, the level upon which lesser gods and demons experience emotion. He didn’t engage because he was certain the creature they sought to kill was intrinsically unkillable. But, more importantly, he suspected that on some level, possibly cellular, he and it were identical. It would be as counterproductive as attempting to destroy one’s mirrored image.

Slash stepped from the hut. Blood ringed his neck like a sunburn. Something was draped around his shoulders, something slack and greasy resembling a small animal turned inside-out. Answer realized it was a child’s body. Slash began walking into the jungle.

Answer stepped into his path. He recognized, with perfect clarity, that Slash had gone insane. Something about the set of his mouth and the way he’d wrapped the child’s arm around his neck like a scarf.

“What do you think?” Slash shrugged. The tiny body flapped.

Answer said, “Keen…fashion sense.”

Slash unsheathed his knife. He shaved a ribbon of flesh off the dead girl’s thigh with slow deliberation. It landed in the dirt, stuck with pebbly soil the color and texture of coffee grounds. “There’s more inside,” he said. “Hanging. Some kind of altar.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Answer said.

“Why didn’t you help?” Slash pushed the knife-tip into one of the girl’s eyes. “Why are you still
here
?”

Answer said, “Why aren’t you helping?”

“I got…sidetracked,” Slash said. “We needed you. I think Gunner’s dead, and Crosshairs…where the fuck
were
you?” Slash jabbed the knife in Answer’s direction. “We got to stick together, man. We don’t, what are we? Animals, man. Fuckin’ animals.”

“Put the knife away.”

“You ain’t my C.O., man.” The knife weaved in front of Slash’s face like a hypnotized cobra. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m not telling you anything.” Answer flicked his wrist and the carving chisel he’d loaded up his shirtsleeve dropped into his waiting palm. “I’m asking you. Nicely.”

Slash sneered. “You little prick. So young, so righteously fucked up.” Jab-jab went the knife. “I’d be doing the world a favor.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”

Slash chopped sideways with the knife, but clumsily, the flayed corpse screwing with his balance. Answer deflected the blade, taking a deep gash across his fingers, and brought the chisel up in a tight arc, stabbing it into the flesh between Slash’s second and third ribs. Slash made a barfing noise—
braaak!
—dropping the knife. Answer pulled the chisel out. Very little blood.