Help me, he begged, into the darkness of his imagination. But no one responded. The phantoms were gone. The captain was gone. All his good buddies were gone. From whence would cometh the magic? He had never felt so alone, trapped and terror stricken inside the ice-cold walls of silent, crushing pain.
“God Six Actual, this is Bounty Hunter One,” he whispered in desperation. “Do you have a copy on me, God?” Heavenly Father, who gave your only begotten son, Jesus, please forgive me for my sins.
Staunchly devout agnostic Raymond Meara prayed that God would make the magic happen, that He would forgive him and save him.
He wanted to hear the thunder crack, see the clouds speared by shafts of gold, hear God's majestic voice shatter the block of pain.
“Ray!” he wanted God to say “I didn't recognize you."
Meara tried to attach some thread of reason to this newfound ability of his to suddenly suspend all disbelief. For the first time he was quite prepared to believe in the power of prayer, and that one might obtain a miracle. What about the weeping religious icons? Those magical pictures that teared up and cried on cue? Weren't these miracles? He thought about the power of secret incantations. The shroud. The ark. The mystery of the robe. The laying on of hands. The dark virgin of the basilica of Guadalupe, whose fabled tears had been witnessed, impossibly, in the cornea of the Virgin Mary's weeping eye. Surely not all of these inexplicable miracles were ecumenical hoaxes.
A man doesn't think about getting shot. Sure, he thinks about it, but he never believes a projectile will really hit him. Maybe that other dude, that guy over there, maybe he'll catch a bullet. But nobody thinks it will actually happen to them. Certainly not to that closet Christian, Raymond Meara. Fight it, ace, he thought. Don't slip away yet.
The monsoons had cut through the woods like a giant backhoe and there was a good-size slough, there at the edge of what would have been called a deep ditch bank back in the little Missouri country town he was from.
They'd been moving parallel to it when Charlie hit them from the woods, coming through the other side soundlessly, underlining the oxymoronic nature of the phrase military intelligence once again. First and second squads. Recon—what was left of it—totally lit up.
Meara had been running toward the nearest trees when he'd been back-shot. It was liked being smashed in the kidney by a wrecking ball. You're history. Never any doubt how bad it was. Every breath made him want to scream.
The moon that had been far away, hanging out there in the black velvet so pale, back when they were moving along the ravine's lip, now seemed to shine like a searchlight pointed at him. He kept listening for his bros, listening for returning fire in the mad minute of noise.
I know why you weep, dark virgin. I, too, cry from a weeping eye. Hail, Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Mary, Mary, quite contrary. A steel door slammed on the irreverent doggerel before it could utter a sacrilege. Reverent Ray.
An inane loose thought.
It snakes across his brain.
From out of left field.
A thought-burst from a girl whose name he's forgotten.
Mary, Mary...
“It's almost Christmas,” she's telling him. It was December back in the world. “Wal-Mart's is like a battlefield,” she tells him.
Wound-trauma trivia. What was it like there on the battlefield, Ray? Oh, it was sort of like Wal-Mart's. Nobody would get it. Pain knifed through him before he could finish the joke and he cried out, unable to catch it in time.
Still noisy. That's good. But all the same kind of fire, and that's not so good. He could only hear the Soviet-made AK-47s cracking away nearby. He tried to force himself to think about something other than the pain and his mounting fear.
AK, he thought to himself. Spell it out. He tried to see a piece of paper and write the letters AK with his mind, but he couldn't spell Avtomat Kalashnikov and midway through the exercise the fear broke through and took over again.
He knew he was shot bad. It never dawned on him that he'd been hit twice. All he could concentrate on was the one he'd taken in his lower back. He knew what he had to do. Get a battle dressing out. Get the wound covered. Lie chilly.
His brain told him to move and he started to and his body told his brain, I'm going to take a short nap. Don't do that, he said to his body. Fight it. He thought about the assault rifles. Caliber. Operation mode. Type of fire. Cyclic rate. Muzzle velocity. Components. Reliability. “The AK-47 utilizes a curving, staggered-row, thirty-round box magazine."
He would survive. Go into publishing. Become a competitor of Playboy. His publication would be called Box Magazine.
Sporadic shots. A sustained burst. You never had to doubt what kind of weapon was firing, the AKs had their own distinctive crack. Box magazine is loaded by hand. Cartridges depressed the spring. Make sure the forward end is pointing first, then insert into the feed port on the bottom of the receiv—Jesus! The pain was bad. Charlie had sure snookered them good.
How easy it would be to go to sleep. The pain jolts were coming closer together, but that was a good sign, no? He wondered how much blood he was losing. He knew he should fight the dizzy feeling.
Another snaky image—he felt his heart pumping, and for an instant his heart was his enemy—as he visualized his blood squirting out into the night.
Move the operating handle to the rear. He was seeing the words recoil spring guide in a weapons manual just as he heard the footsteps. They were coming through the woods. No sixteens. No forty-sevens. Just feet.
Move, his brain told him. Can't, his body replied. Do it or die, it told him, and he started moving, inching forward.
The lightning bolt of pain shot through the layer of gathering cobwebs and he was wide awake and alert for the next few seconds. He was hurt bad. He was going to die. He made himself grit his teeth and keep moving down under the awful thing that he was touching there in the shadows. Moving down under the wetness.
He passed out but came to almost instantly, or so he believed, and saw figures in the deep shadows cast by the huge trees, under the seemingly bright Asian moon. He knew Charlie was right behind him looking at him. With a weapon. He hoped they'd shoot him well. Give him a clean head shot.
He tried not to think about getting a blade in the back, but all he could focus on was an AK-47 with a bayonet on the end. He wondered if it would be quick. A bayonet shouldn't hurt too much. Nice sharp thrust. In and out. Maybe they wouldn't hit anything. You could survive a gook bayonet. Stab wounds weren't any big deal.
Raymond Meara had no last rush of insight. Nor did he see his life flash before his eyes. His last thoughts were of the smell of blood and stink of the body that he'd pulled himself under, and Charlie's fish smell. He willed himself to freeze, willing his breath not to come in loud, ragged gasps, willing his heart not to beat.
And it was then that a huge, soft, swift-moving black thing came fluttering over him, enveloping him like some immense black Manta Ray swimming over a tiny fish, and he went under completely.
5
The beast was inert, vital signs locked down, frozen motionless ... waiting. The gigantic clown warrior had nearly waddled out of the deep shadows but something touched him, signaled his mental computer, and he stopped in his tracks.