The smell of death was stronger now.
I was in another passage, maybe six, seven feet in height, twice that in width. It was dank and smelling. Water was dripping somewhere. I could hear things from time to time—skitterings in the darkness, clawing sounds, squeakings. Rats and bats, I figured. Such a place was perfect for them. I came upon a colony of greasy black mushrooms growing from a rent in the rock. A pool of gray slime was leaking from them. They were huge things, like footballs. I’d never seen anything like them before. I stepped over them and one brushed the back of my leg. It was oddly warm like a newborn, pulsing with life. It made my fucking skin crawl. I started wondering what else Laughing Man was mutating.
The walls were narrowing, the ceiling drooping. The air was so thick with damp it was hard to breath. There was moss growing everywhere. Although I saw no bats, there were puddles of guano I sloshed through, alive with roaches, black beetles. In places the stuff was four, five inches deep, a livid, crawling carpet of insects. But there were bones in there, too: human, animal, covered in fungi where they poked from the filth.
I came into another chamber that was huge and vaulted. The floor began to slope downward, black stinking water coming up to my knees. The surface was scummy with clots of graying mold and bat shit. Above, bats were roosting in the darkness. I could hear rats go splashing away at my approach. I played my light around and saw more bones bobbing in the water. Jawless skulls, shattered ribcages, femurs punctured with teeth marks.
I could hear a continual buzzing sound and soon saw why. Flies. Hundreds and hundreds of them lighting about the twisted forms in the water. I saw limbs, heads, gutted torsos. The remains of last night’s raid, no doubt. But bodies didn’t bother me; I’d been wading through them for nearly two years by that point.
What bothered me was that I was in a hive.
I panned my light around and I saw, yes, I saw them. I saw dozens of yellow eyes shining in the darkness, all glaring out at me with hatred. They were everywhere, the villagers. Two of them came splashing and hopping in my direction, screeching like birds of prey, their rabid jaws snapping open and close. I sprayed them down with the Stoner and they dropped into the water. But the thunder of gunfire had wakened the others. The sweating walls were honeycombed with passages, worm-holes. The rabids dragged themselves out, filthy and wild, black with dirt and dried blood. I started shooting and screaming, emptying the magazine of the Stoner quickly. There was no finesse in what I did; I popped off rounds like some cherry in his first firefight.
The water all around me (up to my hips by that point) began rippling and churning.
There were wet squealing sounds and growling noises erupting everywhere. Yes, they’d heard me coming and had been waiting for me in the water. They rose up all around me, those white faces swimming at me, fingers hooked and deadly, eyes livid with hunger. I started shooting with the AK and the shotgun, firing in a crazy arc. They would drop away, but not die. Nearly cut in half, they would not know death. I fought my way through their ranks and fell stumbling into that stinking water. I felt their white, clutching hands pulling at me.
I fought free and dragged myself out into the passage.
I saw Roshland and Barber now. Their pallid, bloodless faces were split by jagged grins. They called my name and pushed forward with the others. My skin went hot, then cold, then hot again at the sight of them. My head was thundering with noise. I pulled a pair of white phosphorus grenades from my belt, popped the pins, and threw them behind me, into the chamber. I ran maybe ten, twelve feet and then there was a heaving explosion, followed by another and the acrid stink of phosphorus. The cave was brighter than midday, fire belching in every direction, engulfing the rabids in blankets of flame. I heard them howling and mewling and it drove me nearly insane. But I only heard it for a second or two and then there was a huge, rending explosion and a wave of heat lifted me up and tossed me ten feet through the air. I crashed into the cave wall and went out cold.
I came to sometime later and all was quiet.
My head was bleeding and I was singed, much of my hair burned off… still hasn’t come back as you can plainly see.
The air was pungent with the sickening stench of cremated flesh. I figured the chamber must have been full of gases from the putrefying flesh and guano. Enough to trigger one hell of an explosion when the white phosphorus ignited. The chamber had caved-in, burying those things which men and women should never lay eyes upon. I got out of the cave, finally falling drunkenly into the morning air. The rain was still coming down and it felt so good.
I don’t remember much after that. Just running and running, night and day, sure they were behind me, whispering my name.
Somehow, they told me later, I bumped into a Lurp patrol and they got me out. The next four months I spent in a naval hospital in Hawaii.
Specifically, in the psych ward.
Nobody believed me.
Or so they said… but somehow that didn’t jibe with all the visits I got from the brass, the debriefings. And it sure as hell didn’t jibe with the visits I got from a team of doctors who I knew for a fact worked for the Agency or all the comprehensive medical exams they gave me. If I was in a psych ward being treated for battle fatigue, why all the goddamn tests? Did they really think I was fool enough to believe you treated such a problem with constant blood, skin, and bone marrow samples? What about all the antipsychotics—lithium, thorazine, phenobarbitol, other names I couldn’t even pronounce—why those specific drugs? And how about that team of Agency doctors (who, by the way, went by the sterile names of Smith, Jones, and Johnson) who pumped me full of drugs at one in the morning and dragged me away to some place that looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s wet dream and gave me brain scans for three days?
No, I’ve since talked with other vets who suffered battle fatigue and they never got the attention I got. They considered themselves lucky if a doctor stopped by every few days. Me? I had my own team of specialists.
There was this one grunt in the ward. Ramirez was his name. He knew what Laughing Man was. He said he’d heard through the grapevine that they’d quit spraying it because a handful of slopes that had been exposed went psycho and wiped out an Air Cav platoon up along the DMZ. A correspondent for the New York Times had been along on the patrol. They never did find his head.
I received an honorable discharge, the Navy Cross for reasons never made clear, and was sent home. Thirty years ago now. And that’s it, people, all I can tell you about what I saw, what haunts me to this day. Crazy? Maybe. But that don’t mean I’m wrong. Just look around you. Thirty years and half a world away.
Now it’s come home.
God bless America.
-TOXIC SHADOWS-
19
It was quite a tale.
Such a tale that for sometime nobody said a thing. They didn’t even look at each other. Had it been yesterday or even this afternoon, all concerned would have immediately dismissed it as pure nonsense. But after what they’d all seen, all witnessed… well, they took it in, mulled it over.
It was Lou Frawley who finally broke the silence. “That was in Vietnam, though. How… how could something like that happen here? I mean, shit, I’ll be the first one to admit I don’t know a thing about biological warfare or any of that crap, but why the hell would that stuff get sprayed here?”