Slade in the back three times.
"Thank God!" Polly whispered as she and Sam embraced "At last.
he's gone and we are free, my darling!"
Yeah," Sam growled "How are things going Polly?"
tYou don't know how terrible it's been," she sobbed "Not only was
he killing everybody, but he was queerer than a three-dollar bill."
"Well it's over," Sam said.
"Like fun!" Slade said. He sat up and blasted them both. "Good
thing I was wearing my bullet proof underwear," he said lighting a
new Mexican cigar. He stared at the cooling bodies of Sam
Columbine and Polly Peachtree, and a great wave of sadness swept
over him. He threw away his cigar and lit a joint. Then he walked
over to where he had tethered Stokely, his black stallion. He
wrapped his arms around Stokely's neck and held him close.
"At last, darling," Slade whispered. "We're alone."
After a long while, Slade and Stokely rode off into the sunset in
search of new adventures.
THE END
Squad D
Stephen King
Written for
Dangerous Visions #3
Billy Clewson died all at once, with nine of the ten other members
of D Squad on April 8, 1974. It took his mother two years, but she
got started right away on the afternoon the telegram announcing
her son's death came, in fact. Dale Clewson simply sat on the
bench in the front hall for five minutes, the sheet of yellow flimsy
paper dangling from his fingers, not sure if he was going to faint or
puke or scream or what. When he was able to get up, he went into
the living room. He was in time to observe Andrea down the last
swallow of the first drink and pour the post-Billy era's second
drink. A good many more drinks followed - it was really amazing,
how many drinks that small and seemingly frail woman had been
able to pack into a two-year period. The written cause - that which
appeared on her death certificate - was liver dysfunction and renal
failure. Both Dale and the family doctor knew that was formalistic
icing on an extremely alcoholic cake - baba au rum, perhaps. But
only Dale knew there was a third level. The Viet Cons had killed
their son in a place called Ky Doe, and Billy's death had killed his
mother.
It was three years - three years almost to the day - after Billy's
death on the bridge that Dale Clewson began to believe that he
must be going mad.
Nine, he thought. There were nine. There were always nine. Until
now.
Were there? His mind replied to itself. Are you sure? Maybe you
really counted - the lieutenant's letter said there were nine, and
Bortman's letter said there were nine. So just how can you be so
sure? Maybe you just assumed.
But he hadn't just assumed, and he could be sure because he knew
how many nine was, and there had been nine boys in the D Squad
photograph which had come in the mail, along with Lieutenant
Anderson's letter.
You could be wrong, his mind insisted with an assurance that was
slightly hysterical. You're been through a lot these last couple of
years, what with losing first Billy and then Andrea. You could be
wrong.
It was really surprising, he thought, to what insane lengths the
human mind would go to protect its own sanity.
He put his finger down on the new figure - a boy of Billy's age, but
with blonde crewcut hair, looking no more than sixteen, surely too
young to be on the killing ground. He was sitting cross-legged in
front of Gibson, who had, according to Billy's letters, played the
guitar, and Kimberley, who told lots of dirty Jokes. The boy with
the blonde hair was squinting slightly into the sun - so were several
of the others, but they had always been there before. The new boy's
fatigue shirt was open, his dog tags lying against his hairless chest.
Dale went into the kitchen, sorted through what he and Andrea had
always called "the jumble drawers," and came up with an old,
scratched magnifying glass. He took it and the picture over the
living room window, tilted the picture so there was no glare, and
held the glass over the new boy's dog-tags. He couldn't read them.
Thought, in fact, that the tags were both turned over and lying face
down against the skin.
And yet, a suspicion had dawned in his mind - it ticked there like
the clock on the mantle. He had been about to wind that clock
when he had noticed the change in the picture. Now he put the
picture back in its accustomed place, between a photograph of
Andrea and Billy's graduation picture, found the key to the clock.
And wound it.
Lieutenant's Anderson's letter had been simple enough. Now Dale
found it in his study desk and read it again. Typed lines on Army
stationary. The prescribed follow-up to the telegram, Dale had
supposed. First: Telegram. Second: Letter of Condolence from
Lieutenant. Third: Coffin, One Boy Enclosed. He had noticed then
and noticed again now that the typewriter Anderson used had a
Flying "o". Clewson kept coming out Clewson.
Andrea had wanted to tear the letter up. Dale insisted that they
keep it. Now he was glad.
Billy's squad and two others had been involved in a flank sweep of
a jungle quadrant of which Ky Doe was the only village. Enemy
contact had been anticipated, Anderson's letter said, but there
hadn't been any. The Cong which had been reliably reported to be
in the area had simply melted away into the jungle - it was a trick
with which the American soldiers had become very familiar over
the previous ten years or so.
Dale could imagine them heading back to their base at Homan,
happy, relieved. Squads A and C had waded across the Ky River,
which was almost dry. Squad D used the bridge. Halfway across, it
blew up. Perhaps it had been detonated from downstream. More
likely, someone - perhaps even Billy himself - had stepped on the
wrong board. All nine of them had been killed. Not a single
survivor.
God - if there really is such a being - is usually kinder than that,
Dale thought. He put Lieutenant Anderson's letter back and took
out Josh Bortman's letter. It had been written on blue-lined paper
from what looked like a child's tablet. Bortman's handwriting was
nearly illegible, the scrawl made worse by the writing implement -
a soft-lead pencil. Obviously blunt to start with, it must have been
no more than a nub by the time Bortman signed his name at the
bottom. In several places Bortman had borne down hard enough
with his instrument to tear the paper.
It had been Bortman, the tenth man, who sent Dale and Andrea the
squad picture, already framed, the glass over the photo
miraculously unbroken in its long trip from Homan to Saigon to
San Francisco and finally to Binghamton, New York.
Bortman's letter was anguished. He called the other nine "the best
friends I ever had in my life, I loved them all like they was my
brothers."
Dale held the blue-lined paper in his hand and looked blankly
through his study door and toward the sound of the ticking clock
on the mantelpieces. When the letter came, in early May of 1974,
he had been too full of his own anguish to really consider
Bortman's. Now he supposed he could understand it - a little,
anyway. Bortman had been feeling a deep and inarticulate guilt.
Nine letters from his hospital bed on the Homan base, all in that
pained scrawl, all probably written with that same soft-lead pencil.
The expense of having nine enlargements of the Squad D
photograph made, and framed, and mailed off. Rites Of atonement
with a soft-lead pencil, Dale thought, folding the letter again and
putting it back In the drawer with Anderson's. As if he had killed