New Title 1 (29 page)

“I know, Zip.” Crosshairs’s eyelids fluttered. “It’s…it’s alright.”

The men geared up quickly. They had to keep moving. Oddy knelt beside Crosshairs and pulled the pins from each grenade.

“If I could call a med evac for you, I would. I’d call that fucking Huey down, load you onto it, watch it carry you away someplace safe.”

“I-it-it’s okay, S-Sarge…”

“You hold on as long as you can, son. When it gets too cold, or starts hurting too much, just let go.”

“I c-c-can feel my f-feet, Sarge.” Crosshairs waggled his toes as proof of this claim. The blood in his divot was thinly rimed with ice. “Feels so good, y’know? Just feeling.”

Oddy kissed his palm and pressed it to Crosshairs’s forehead. Crosshairs closed his eye and listened to their footsteps crunch through the snow, receding, getting farther and farther away.

Soon he was alone.

Or…not quite.

««—»»

“Go go go!”

The men crashed through the underbrush like crazed rhinos. They ran heedlessly. They ran as if simple distance might somehow erase all they had seen and done. They ran to beat the devil.

They did what soldiers did best.

Ran from the past.

“Go go go!”

Had they looked down, they would’ve seen shrubs growing at their feet. Had any of them possessed a knowledge of herbs, they might have identified the shrubs by their purplish, furred leaves:

Wolfsbane.

There was no way they could’ve seen the creature perched in a tree high above. A small, stunted creature who watched their progress with interest and amusement.

Watched with one large, red eye.

“Go go go!”

««—»»

Neil Paris, who would later be known as Crosshairs, shipped out for Vietnam at the age of nineteen. He left behind a girlfriend, as most servicemen did. Her name was Maria, and they loved one another with a depth and breadth that thrilled and terrified them both.

He took her to Coney Island for hot dogs and birch beers at Nathan’s. He remembered the ocean wind blowing through her hair, whipping it around her head, catching in her mouth, between her lips. He made all sorts of excuses to touch her. Being with her made the hard truths of the world bearable, even nonexistent; when he held her, he believed, however briefly, that there were no such things as hatred, or cruelty, or pain. And when she kissed him, he knew he never wanted to kiss anyone else again, ever.

She said she’d wait. She sent letters. In one she enclosed a sea shell. The young soldier, hunkered in a pillbox near Quoy Non, had licked it, tasting the brine. Although his mind tried to resist it, he couldn’t help wondering who might have been with her when she collected it. He punched a hole through the shell and wore it on a strip of rawhide around his neck.

Nights in the jungle, blackness so absolute it became a living entity, he would dream of a reunion with her. She would be waiting at the bus station, hair tied back with a yellow ribbon. He would step off the Greyhound and walk to her, taking her head in his hands, kissing her small, sweet mouth. Her hands would slip around his waist, then up to encircle his neck. He would place his lips to her ear and say—these
exact words
, rehearsed over three Tours of desperate yearning: “Tell me anything. Tell me everything. I have crossed ocean and land to be with you. Help me forget. Help me remember.”

Then the injury. Suddenly all those dreams seemed foolish. Maria wouldn’t want him now, not with half his face blown off. He tried to imagine them together but found he could not: his face had become a black smudge she refused to look at. He knew what she would say:
I still care for you,
but
… and he would let her off easy, for perhaps he might have done the same, had the situation been reversed.

She continued to send letters. They were forwarded to him at the institution in Coldwater. He would read them aloud to Eugene while he traced the cracks of his room with syrup. Letters full of love and compassion and infinite hope. But they were addressed to a man who no longer existed. He wrote back, long and searching letters on yellow foolscap, much of it lacking commas or periods—a furious outpouring of emotion. He would address the envelopes, stamp them…and burn them.

Better she thought he’d found someone else.

Better she thought him unfaithful. Better she thought him dead.

Help me forget
.
Help me remember
.

Now, as he lay dying, his thoughts turned to Maria. In that stillness, in that quiet, he wondered, Where was she? How was she? Had she found the love she so dearly deserved? Had she forgiven him? He thought of the way the wind caught her hair, the way her fingers traced his body in the darkness, his ribs, the fortune-lines of his palm…

Pain crested and ebbed, crested and ebbed, in great waves. He rode them, a ship in the storm. The moon curved upon the maples, brightening the ground, hardening the stars. The grenades in his hands felt weightless, blown-glass globes.

Just let go
.

No. Not yet. Such a beautiful night.

Movement on the far side of the clearing. Something tottered to a standing position. Whatever it was, it looked horrible: naked and white, most of its face blown off or eaten away, guts hanging in a loose ball above a clean-picked groin.

“Glaaa…” it said.

“Glaaa yourself,” Crosshairs croaked.

It advanced with aching slowness. Its guts bounced and slapped.

Just let go
.

Not yet.

It fell at Crosshairs’s feet. Its hands—one of them fingerless—caressed Crosshairs’s flanks as if an exotic meat. It made a loud clicking sound deep in its throat, like a nun’s clacker. Its eyes, the sole unscathed feature on its face, were alive with mindless hunger.

“Are you hungry?” Crosshairs said.

“Glaaa…”

It reached across Crosshairs’s face and dipped a finger into the divot’s pooled blood. It crammed the finger into the wet red hole in its neck.

“That’s a filthy habit.”

Its gaze lowered. “Glaaa…”

The finger dipped again, greedily. Crosshairs stared skyward. So wonderful, the stars in their orbit. “I want to forget,” he whispered.

“Glaaa…” it said, predictably.

JUST…LET…GO.

Yes. Alright.

For a moment he was gripped with panic as his hands refused to open. Then the appropriate nerve centers received the appropriate messages and his fingers slowly unclenched. Grenade clips pinwheeled before his eye on a spinning trajectory. It was one of the most oddly beautiful things he’d ever seen. Spinning metal. Over and over, and over and over. Beautiful.

Crosshairs smiled and said, “Let me take you away from this.”

It was slow to comprehend. “Glaaa…?”

Then it saw the grenades. Its eyes widened in fear.

The breeze on my face,
Crosshairs was thinking,
feels so fine. Feels like—

BOOM.

The reverberation of the detonating grenades rose above the treetops, carrying for miles and miles.

— | — | —

War Zone “D,” South Vietnam

July 15th, 1967. 21:02 hours.

“Sit. Talk.”

The fire spread. Blazing tongues licked at the overhanging palms, setting them ablaze. Flame unfurled across the jungle canopy like lit gasoline across calm waters. A huge black bird rocketed from a burning palm, wings and tail feathers robed in fire. It rose into the night sky, phoenix-like, before arcing into a tight tailspin, crashing in a shower of flaming plumage, withering and writhing as it died.

Answer sat less than five feet from the creature. Its burning flesh threw a pleasant warmth. Flies congregated on the stump of Slash’s neck.

“What are you?” he asked.

“What do you think I am?”

“Some kind of monster.”

The creature’s long tongue reached out and licked its remaining eye in the manner of a gecko. “A monster? Perhaps. I’ve been called such before. But I do not see myself as one.” A rueful smile. “Then again, I suppose no monster sees itself as one.”

“If not a monster, then what?”

An expression of vexation crossed its face. “I am not exactly certain. You see, I have no parents—or, if so, I have never met them. I was not raised as you were, taught acceptable modes of behavior, shown my role in this world. Of course, I was born before even the most rudimentary societies existed, at a time when the Americas were no more than timberland and desert.”

Answer crossed his legs and planted his elbows on his knees, resting his head on his balled fists. His posture echoed that of a young child listening, rapt, while his father spun a tale.

“Nevertheless,” the creature continued, “I have come to some understanding of what I am, and my place in the world.”

“And what’s that?”

“I am War,” it replied. “Or perhaps more properly Chaos. Anarchy. Discord. I am the living embodiment, the ultimate personification of these ideas.” A scream rose above the fire’s roar. The creature shivered delightedly at the sound. “Wherever there is anger, or strife, or suffering…I am
drawn
to such places, inexorably, like lead filings to a magnet.”

Images flickered through Answer’s mind in jerky, Nickleodeon-style stop-motion: Neanderthal men fighting with teeth and nails and blunt rocks; Genghis Khan and the Mongols cutting a bloody swath across the East, leaving fatherless children and ravaged women in their wake; Nero fiddling madly on the minaret while Rome burned beneath him; dead-eyed Jews being led to the gas chambers at Dresden, and Auschwitz, and Treblinka; soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land for a cause they would never fully understand. The images held a single commonality: in the background, or on the periphery, swathed in shadows, a form watched, bearing witness and urging humanity on to greater atrocities.

“Why?” Answer said. “Why do you
exist
?”

Chaos shifted. The smell of pork barbecue, unpleasant given the setting, wafted off its body. It said, “Every living thing has a reason for existence, be it to provide the world beauty, or to create great things, or to see beyond the borders of what is to glimpse what could be. But the most important role any of us can play is to maintain the balance.”

“Balance?”

Chaos nodded. “The nature of balance is of utmost importance. When an infant boy is born, an old man must die. Whenever a tree is struck by lighting, a sapling must grow in its shadow. Any act of kindness must be equalized by an act of malice. Love offset by hate. Happiness neutralized by despair. Order balanced by…me.”

“Then you are a monster,” Answer said, “because Chaos is evil.”

Chaos issued a choked gurgle that in some alternate universe may have passed as mirth. “This from a species responsible for such suffering and bloodshed as I could only
wish
to wreak. When you have lived as long as I, you come to understand very little in this world is truly good or evil. It is a matter of shades, of degrees. If I am evil—and yes, I am—it is simply because evil is my nature. But my evil is a necessary one.”