Thirteen Specimens (4 page)

     In the early days, beginning at the turn of the 20
^th
Century, the Guests had only been able to create a more direct link with these selected individuals – always, with the host’s consent – by means of a large, tick-like insect affixed to the back of their skulls like an immense tumor. As the decades had progressed and the biotechnology had evolved, however, the parasites had become less bulky and grotesque, until now the creatures were so small (secreted away inside a host’s head) that one could not tell a Medium by appearance alone.

     And yet, lately there had been the decline and decay of
so much of the Guests’ organic technology. The Mediums had not gone unaffected. Candle had noticed earlier today that Lt. Broom had been wearing a patch of gauze taped over his ear, and had assumed at the time he was suffering a draining infection or perhaps a wound. But now he realized the truth. The patch of gauze was in need of changing; it was soaked a dark brown color. Also, a band of fluid too dark and seemingly too thick to be blood was running out of one of the man’s nostrils. He licked the little hollow above his lip, unconsciously. As the photographer approached them, the officer was raging at his two men.

     “I thought...I thought...damn it,” he was bellowing, his face flushed red, pacing back and forth in front of the hunkering villagers, “you idiots...I thought I told you to take care of them!” He was visibly trembling. Quaking, as if he might flop to the ground in a full-fledged seizure.

     “We are – we’re watching over them,” one of the two soldiers answered a bit meekly, cowed by his commander’s display.

     “No! No! No!” Broom shouted, suddenly only inches from the man’s nose, spraying him with spittle and flecks of the syrupy brown blood. “I didn’t ask you to babysit them...you...you...you fucks...fuck...fucking kill them. I meant for you to k-k-kill them!”

     “Sir...”

     “Form a line. You too,” he barked at the other soldier. And he looked at Candle and started to command him to join the firing squad, also, until he saw that he was carrying an avid camera, not a dispassionate gun. There had been attempts by the Guests to create organic guns, perhaps transmitting images from the very instruments that spewed killing projectiles – maybe even transmitting brief snapshots from each tiny beetle-like bullet itself – but none of these mutations had been viable.

     “C’mere, c’mere, c’mere...c’mon, c’mon...we’ll line up here...here...here, you stupid fucks...line up...we’ll fire into them...we’ll...fire when I tell you. When I tell you, you fire, understand? Huh? Answer me!”

     The first soldier lifted the grenade launcher he carried. “Ah, sir, if I...if I shoot this, we could get hurt, too. And, it would be a waste of ammo, sir. I’ll just hang back – watch out for anyone trying to escape...”

     Broom didn’t contest what to Candle was clearly a ruse by the soldier to avoid taking part in the firing squad. The officer instead wheeled at the second man and roared. “You! You fire with me! Now, damn it, now! Now! Shoot them, kill them, fucking kill them!”

     Then Lt. Broom and his man turned and opened up on the people squatting before them, not even a dozen feet away, their M-
16s flicked to fully automatic. Candle pointed the camera at the villagers like a third gun, after all. Some of the victims tried to stand up and run, but they were sprayed with lead and went down fast...clumps of flesh, chips of bone, tatters of clothing and a mist of blood rising up like fragmented ghostly effigies in their place.

     He saw arms shot off bodies. Heads torn from their necks by the bullets. The soldier Broom had commanded to join him broke off after a while, his face awash with tears, and tried to push his steaming gun at the soldier with the grenade launcher, but that man would not accept it. The man with the grenade launcher even began yelling curses at the officer, but heedless of his traitorous men, Lt. Broom went on firing alone...reloading his weapon with magazine after magazine...swearing or yelling but his words incomprehensible beneath the chattering of his rifle.

     “God help us,” Candle himself uttered. But he couldn’t hear his own words, either. “God help us...”

     When the officer’s gun ran empty for the last time, not a
single one of the heaped bodies so much as twitched. Candle could see that mothers had made themselves into shields over the bodies of children. He could think of no braver act for a parent, for a human being, to perform than that. But it had been to no avail.

     Facing his men, trembling less violently, as if some domineering lust had been assuaged, in a surprisingly composed tone Lt. Broom said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

     “Fucker,” Candle muttered, trudging along after him and the two infantrymen, staring at the back of Broom’s head as if he expected to see the parasite part the hair there to gaze back at him mockingly. He felt he had no choice but to follow him; his camera’s legs were practically swimming in the air to keep up.

     As they marched, they passed yet another dead buffalo lying by the path, and a butterfly fluttered up into the air from behind it, so that it looked to Candle as if the insect had emerged from the body of the torn animal itself. The butterfly put him in mind of an article he had read in a magazine recently. There was an insect native to Asia referred to as a tear-sucking moth, more formally known as
Lobocraspis griseifusa
. This moth would poke a buffalo in the eye with its proboscis, causing tears to form, which it would then drink for the salt and white blood cells they contained. The drinking of tears was called “lachryphagy”. Reading about this moth had reminded Candle of the Guests – nourishing themselves on human tears instead...

     Eventually, they arrived at an irrigation ditch on the eastern edge of the village. Here, Candle estimated another fifty or so prisoners had been herded together and made to stand down in the ditch itself, this gouge in the earth looking like a trench dug for soldiers. Candle saw Broom sit and rest for a little bit as more soldiers arrived. In the mean time, the officer rubbed at his temple and looked at
his fingers, repeatedly, as if he expected to see more blood leaking from the very sutures of his skull. Finally, as if drugged into slow motion, he looked up at his men and slurred, “We’ve got another job to do.” He rose.

     Broom became increasingly animated again after his brief stupor. Candle was unable, or afraid, to take his eyes off him. The officer began attempting to interrogate an aged Buddhist monk. Candle himself could barely make out the officer’s shouted questions, and knew the monk was understanding none of it. Finally, in disgust, Broom drew back his M-16 and used its butt to hammer the monk directly in the teeth. The man managed to remain on his feet, pathetically dignified.

     Candle peripherally saw a toddler, maybe two years old, climbing up the side of the trench as if he might escape unnoticed. Broom did notice, however, and broke off from his interrogation to snatch the child up into his hands, throw it back into the ditch, and fire a burst from his M-16 into its body. He then stormed back to the monk, ignoring the screams and wails rising as if from the very pit of hell.

     But Broom was getting nowhere with the holy man – and suddenly, impatiently, shoved him into the ditch and riddled him with bullets, too.

     More villagers were shepherded to the trench, struck with rifle butts if they hesitated too long in scrambling down to join the others. Not long before, a couple of the soldiers had been playing in a subdued way with some of the village children, as if to soothe them, but now these children had been added to the ditch, too. Candle could read dread in the faces of these GIs. It was strangely reassuring to him, to see that emotion there.

     In fact, Candle saw one of the soldiers, a black man named Hinge, bluntly refuse when ordered by the lieutenant to prepare to fire upon the prisoners in the ditch.
Broom’s face went a shade of purple, as if he were asphyxiating on his own rage, and he leveled his rifle at the man’s eyes...but several other soldiers leaped in front of Hinge.

     “You fucks...you cowardly fucks...you fucking traitors...I’ll court-martial you, I’ll kill you...k-k-kill you...” He began to stamp over to the lip of the trench.

     Candle had flicked his eyes from the officer to the people massed down on the floor of the ditch. He saw a tiny elderly woman in a red shirt, her face twisted in anguish, a younger woman hugging her from behind with her face pressed against the back of the old woman – her mother? Beside them, a woman in black pajamas held her son, a toddler with his eyebrows raised in confused trepidation, on her hip. On the other side of the old woman, a little girl in a white shirt and black pants – her hair cut into a black helmet with a fringe of bangs – clung to another adult woman with a look of absolute terror on her face, like the theatrical mask of tragedy, and Candle found himself jerking the camera in their direction to capture forever that ephemeral mask of flesh.

     “Wait!” he heard himself yell. But although he was instinctively, professionally doing his job in pointing the camera at this knot of victims, he had not called “wait” so that he might get his shot before they opened fire. He had called “wait” as an involuntary exclamation – as if at the last moment he might stop them from what they were about to do.

     But Lt. Broom began discharging his weapon down into the ditch. Several other men took this as their signal to open fire, as well, and the chorus of gunfire became deafening. The little group of people Candle had specifically focused his attention on were cut down out of his sight, lost in the smoke and flying blood and dropping bodies. An image on the retina, a blink, and then gone.

     One rifle ran empty...then another. At last, the fusillade had ended. Candle’s ears felt muffled; it would be hours before his hearing would clear.

     Lt. Broom staggered backwards, away from the edge of the ditch – suddenly dropped his gun to the ground and collapsed onto his knees. None of the men watching him went to his aid as he reached up, gaping dazedly, to his ear and peeled the dressing from it. It came away in sticky strands. He held it before his eyes, and Candle could see that a small insect lay dead in the middle of the gummed blood. Whether the parasite had died before, during or after the killing, he would never know.

     Slowly, Lt. Broom rose, and tossed the bandage with the insect into the ditch, too. Candle watched him stagger away from the scene as if again in a stupor. He took a shot of Broom’s receding form, but he could tell from the slowed churning of its legs that his camera was less interested in the man without a gun in his hands...

     A year later, and there would be no more Mediums. And the last of the Guests’ organic machines would have died. The Guests would no longer be a presence in this world, in this dimension. As far as anyone could tell, at least.

     Without the parasite in his skull, without the Guests behind him, Lt. Broom would be brought to trial for what he had done that day, and Candle would follow the events closely in the newspapers. There was no longer TV. After these decades of dependence on Guest biotechnology, purely electrical, inorganic televisions would be several more years in coming.

     Many would revile William L. Broom. Many, many would support him. Some would call him a victim of the Guests. Others would point out that the Guests had not controlled the Mediums, merely used them as intermediaries. In a sermon, one minister would liken the martyred scapegoat William L. Broom to Jesus Christ.

     Candle’s camera began to grow ill over the weeks following the massacre, oozing brownish fluid from its rear orifice and often prematurely ejecting the loaded film cylinder.

     He had heard that several dragonfly copters had expired while in flight, crashing with their occupants still on board...and for this reason, he was glad that planes had not become organic yet. After several weeks of persistence, he had finally won in his efforts to fly home, citing mental exhaustion as one of the reasons.

     He was testily ordered to pass along his gear to a replacement photographer once he reached stateside, but his camera breathed its last on the plane carrying Robert Candle back to the USA. Though he would have to turn its carcass over to his superiors, to prove he had not killed the important creature himself, he wanted nothing more than to hurl its body from the plane while it was still in flight...as he had heard helicopter crews were fond of doing with prisoners, while high above the jungle treetops.

*     *     *

     “That never happened,” said Linh, seated across from him in the restaurant. Later – soon – when she became his girlfriend and his lover, she would make it her habit to slip off one shoe under whatever restaurant table they sat at, and rub his legs or even his crotch with her sole, her eyes glinting at him mischievously. She had the most remarkable eyes; he could not separate pupil from iris in them, they were so black. And in one picture of her he took, with a mechanical camera that he had been using for two decades now, he even thought he saw himself reflected in her eyes. Sure enough, when he blew the photo up in the lab in his
apartment, he could clearly see himself standing there on a pathway in a park with his camera brought up to his face, captured in both of her eyes. Later he would wonder if he had been reflected in the eyes of any of the people, dead or soon to be dead, he had photographed twenty years ago in her country. If he enlarged any of those photos now, would he discover himself secreted within them – in a way, as much a part of the photographs as the victims themselves?