Savage Nights Read online

A strange dizziness overtook her a second later. Shouldn't have shaken my head so hard, she thought. Knocked my brain loose.

  She giggled. That wasn't possible.

  Was it?

  Marissa seemed to be swinging back and forth in her vision. As if they were on a ship, like some old cornball comedy movie, and Marissa was making her sick by swaying back and forth.

  Kit laughed once then shook her head again, and again the spots started to dance in front of her eyes.

  Spots? That was new.

  Between the spots and the swaying, Kit suddenly felt nausea rising. "S-s-stop that, M-m-maris-s," she heard her voice but it sounded distant, the final hiss fading away.

  Jesus. This wasn't normal. This was weird and it was making her —

  From far away, a lucid part of her brain realized what was happening.

  Marissa smiled at her with mock sympathy.

  As Kit looked at her, Marissa split into two nodding and smiling red-haired girls. They were both annoyingly made up, and they wore the same clothes.

  "Twins!" Kit heard herself say.

  Her head was drooping now, settling down onto the floor.

  No, not the floor. The bunk.

  Kit heard the bolt slide open and the door swung out and she giggled again as Elmer Fudd and Daffy entered. They both wore boots, so maybe one of them was Mr. Boots, too.

  This made her giggle again.

  Kit knew they were wearing Halloween masks, but they seemed a whole lot funnier than she first thought.

  They unchained Marissa and she walked out of the room —

  (cell, dammit)

  — on her own, but Kit herself was too loose-limbed to make it, so the Warner Brothers — giggle! — helped her and she slid along with them and out into a hallway, and then into a room next door somewhere, and Kit's eyes now seemed to multiply everything like those of a fly, but there were two beds and two Marissas and two more hooded masked men standing nearby, one holding something, and Kit was way too giggly and loose to really notice or care, but there was something niggling at the edges of her consciousness, something jabbing her right where all this seemed funny, and then she was allowed to slide down into an armchair and it was so comfortable that she sank in and barely noticed the bright lights that went on and aimed at her.

  TWELVE

  Fucking Cu Chi.

  It had him in its hold again.

  A half hour of crawling, inch by inch, and he had no idea how far he had come.

  The tunnel stretched out before him, long and narrow, an endless black intestine. The walls scraped his shoulders even though he had squeezed them as close together as his collar bone would allow. The clammy soil, the insects he knew squirmed just centimeters from his face, his nose, his mouth; the throbbing nests of spiders that could be disturbed by his passing, could touch his skin, could scuttle down his soaked shirt — all these he put out of his mind in one physical effort, like closing a door or sweeping a kitchen floor. He moved them and tried to block them from returning.

  Darkness enveloped him, but it was not comforting darkness. It was cold — and that was weird, wasn't it? Cold, here in the goddamned hot fucking jungle.

  Twelve, sixteen feet below the surface it was freezing cold, or at least damp and slimy enough to seem freezing. The low water table in the Cu Chi area, as much as ten to twenty meters below the surface, meant that the tunnels could sink as low as four levels, but the Tunnel Rats wouldn't learn that for a while yet, and not easily. Not fucking easily at all.

  He crawled slowly, an inch at a time, using the hunting knife to feel his way forward, alert for anything that could signal a booby trap. His nostrils wide open to the dank smells of the underground, he moved completely by feel, with his flashlight off but ready. His Smith and Wesson revolver was taped to his forearm. He had just started to do that. A holster impeded his movement, and tucking the firearm anywhere else made it impossible to retrieve when needed. His second boot knife was a desperation weapon, but the Smith he could rip from his arm and fire in a fraction of a second.

  The tunnel walls crowded him, squeezed him, as he crawled lower into the complex. He sensed the incline, wondering how soon the first bend would come up. It would be sixty degrees or more, a zigzag, and a VC tunnel fighter could be waiting in ambush, with an AK-47 or a bayonet, a spear or even a garrote in hand. Suddenly the cold turned to unbearable heat as the stifling air finally closed his nasal passages and the sweat ran cold down his back and through the already soaked undershirt.

  The Lieutenant felt the twitch start in the short hair on the back of his neck. Jesus, would he ever get used to this shit?

  He had left strict orders not to send a second rat down the hole unless they heard gunfire or explosions, and then it would be to drag his corpse back out.

  He tried craning his neck slightly, but there wasn't enough space to turn his head. The blackness was absolute and would not grant him a view of anything.

  A scuttle near his nose made him twitch.

  A spider. Fucking huge, a monster the size of his hand.

  He hoped it was only one. He had heard the stories of other Tunnel Rats getting nearly devoured by swarming spiders. Or was that a myth? Didn't matter. He didn't want to find out. He felt the furry legs on his forearm now and he swallowed hard and forced himself to lay still and let it find its own way off his skin.

  He started to tremble and bit down hard on his tongue.

  The sharp, lancing pain slowed his rising panic.

  The bend, it had to be here soon. The zigzags added tunnel stability as well as defensive positions. Most tunnels were entryways into vast maze complexes. Trapdoors might be hidden below, above, or on either side — and sometimes they could only be found by accident, and by dying at the point of a gun or booby trap.

  The tomb-like quiet was oppressive. But experienced tunnel rats were learning to use the stillness as an advantage, contributing as little sound to the tunnel as they could. His experience was still developing, but he had learned from one of the best original Tunnel Rats, a sergeant with the Big Red One. Now that part of the 1st Engineer Battalion had been designated point with regard to tunnel warfare, he had begun to use his learned knowledge and lanky body to good benefit. Already he was a better tunnel man than any in his squad, who were more than willing to let their Loot risk his hide underground. As for him, he didn't know why he was drawn to the duty — in fact he professed to hate the endless dirty and dangerous missions into the bowels of the enemy tunnels. But he always went back into the holes, always beating back claustrophobia and fear of the dark, to find himself locked as if in a struggle against the grave itself.

  Now his ear pricked at the slight movement in air, a subtle tap on his ear drum, not far and retreating fast.

  The other tunnel visitor was quiet. And he was running – crawling — as fast as the tunnel's narrow waist allowed.

  The Lieutenant made his decision in a split second and was barely aware of it. He ignored the tingle that might signal trouble from behind and scuttled forward like a spider himself, silent but faster, paying less attention to his surroundings as if he somehow knew there would be no booby traps or ambushes.

  Later, he would recall sensing almost no thought, no anxiety, no fear — as if his brain had gone silent, shutting down all communication. As if he were being drawn in by some form of magnetism.

  Ahead of him, he heard the barest of sounds.

  Escape. It was the sound of fear.

  Whoever was ahead of him had a reason to escape, to avoid capture or death. The Lieutenant instinctively decided to pursue. His knife blade probed the clay walls less often; the flashlight stayed off. In the pure darkness, he could almost see his way – or perhaps it was an illusion, and he only thought he could. Still he followed the soft sounds, convinced he would overtake the enemy.

  Time was fluid. He never wore his luminous watch underground. He stopped to listen every few minutes, or what he thought was every few minutes, heard his prey still ahead
of him, and continued his belly crawl, oblivious to insects but knowing there would be traps.

  Later, he stopped.

  Silence lay heavily throughout the length of the black intestine ahead and behind. The Lieutenant held his breath, nearly hyperventilating, waiting for the tell-tale scraping of his quarry.

  Silence.

  Grave-like silence.

  The Lieutenant gulped down some stale tunnel air, swallowing the limey, sand-like grit that seemed to hang in a mist about him, though he couldn't see it, so he couldn't be sure it was a mist at all. Maybe another illusion.

  Now the Lieutenant heard his brain re-enter his awareness. What if there had never been any quarry? What if he'd been following a ghost?

  The Lieutenant almost barked a laugh that bubbled up his throat.

  Charlie often stored his battle dead in tunnels temporarily, until the corpses could be carted away without discovery. Charlie wanted to bury his dead near their ancestral home for religious reasons, an interpreter had explained to the Lieutenant. He had barely been interested, because who cared about the VC's culture? The practice also stymied body counts, and the Lieutenant had paid attention to that, because Command wanted body counts daily, sometimes hourly. The enemy was too smart to allow body counts, and the tunnels were one method to keep the Americans from counting. You couldn't count what you couldn't see.

  Often the Lieutenant had crawled past half-rotted remains, victims of mortar or M-16 rounds above and the damp tunnel climate below, their skulls grinning in the flashlight beam as strips of maggot-infested flesh peeled from their cheeks. He'd smelled the finality of the grave in them, had recognized how close he was himself to calling these tunnels his long home, and he had moved on.

  But today he had not smelled any VC corpses in this tunnel. And he wondered just how long he had pursued his ghost. The decline had continued, but then had become an incline, so he figured he was at about the same level as where he had entered the complex. He had made a few zigzag bends, of that he was certain, but he had done so during the near-haze of dogged pursuit, and now he couldn't quite recall how many he had sensed.

  The Lieutenant lay prone in the tunnel and considered his options. There was forward, and there was reverse.

  But how far back to the spider hole where he had gone in — when? How long ago? A half hour? And hour? Two hours?

  He did not risk using his light, but allowed his instinct to take charge.

  Reverse.

  Laboriously he began to pick his way laboriously backward in the tunnel, feeling its closeness suddenly more stifling and more oppressive. His breath scraped in his throat as if the oxygen level had dropped.

  Percussion grenades sometimes burned off all the oxygen in a tunnel. But he hadn't heard any explosions.

  A constricting panic bubbled up in the Lieutenant's throat again, like hot bile.

  A thin line of acid drool spilled from his lips, but he barely noticed. The panic had gripped his intestines and he scuttled ever more desperately backward. He felt as if he himself were being pursued.

  Time flowed as if trapped in molasses. He came to a stop. Forced to lead with his legs, thereby aborting his ability to probe with the knife, he found that both his feet had encountered empty space — but that was impossible, with the tunnel's narrow dimensions. Normally a tunnel was less than a meter and a half wide, and often much less. It was impossible for his feet to find space so far apart.

  Unless...

  Unless, in his haste to chase the unknown prey, he had missed a chamber that opened to one side.

  He risked the flashlight beam for a short two seconds, preparing his body for bloody impact, the sweat now rolling off him in waves.

  Light, blinding him as he blinked tears from his eyes.

  It was a three-way fork in the tunnel complex, and each hole looked identical. He swore and flicked on the flashlight again, trying to see whether his passage had left marks. But the tough red Cu Chi clay appeared immaculate, untouched.

  Jesus, he had lost track of time. And when he had advanced so rapidly in the wake of the sounds, he'd paid no attention to the layout. He could be a mile from where he'd gone in. If he thought about it, his body would start to ache and cramped position and the darkness would come crashing down on him like a curtain of fear and paranoia, so he thought strictly about his exit. Which tunnel?

  The claustrophobia was beginning to build, suffocating him like the stale air in his lungs. He fought it off, trying to calm his mind. But he began to shake. A ghostly hand pinched his nostrils shut and covered his mouth and he forced himself to breathe through the unreal constriction. He had to keep moving.

  He chose the middle route, where his feet pointed naturally, and slowly, methodically performed a crawling Y-turn. He entered a side tunnel feet-first, then folded his body until he could squeeze his shoulders through the narrow passage that seemed to suffocate his lungs. Fully aware of his vulnerability in four directions, his body was wedged so tightly that he could barely breathe. He sweated through the maneuver, resting a minute to gulp in some stale air, then continued again in the blessed dark. After using the flashlight and calling attention to himself, he felt safer without light despite the claustrophobic jabs beneath his conscious defenses. He didn't wait for the glow to disappear from his sight, starting his scuttle back down the middle tunnel even though his vision was shot.

  He wasn't even certain he'd made the right choice.

  Panic was only moments away, if he let it in.

  Soon, he was again squeezed in by the dark. His muscles screamed from his awkward feet-first crawl. He felt squirming movement on his face and brushed off a chitinous body, then another, then dozens. He wanted to scream at the feel of thousands of pointy legs, but he kept his mouth closed and slitted his eyes and scuttled faster, brushing the creatures off as he went. They stung his exposed skin and his mind screamed in disgust and fear but he kept moving and soon he'd left them behind.

  An amber glow appeared before him, sliding into view sideways as he negotiated a gentle bend in the tunnel. He stopped hastily. It was either a chamber or an exit, but the glow seemed to be artificial — a lantern or candle.

  The Lieutenant swallowed drily. He had no choice. If it was an exit, he had to take it. If it was a chamber, it might lead to an exit. If it was occupied, then he was in deep trouble.

  He stripped the pistol from the tape and gently cocked the hammer, aware of its loudness in the grave-like silence, then he lay the flashlight where he could find it again, and approached the light. If it all went bad, he'd never need the flashlight again.

  His movements were damnably slow, due to the cramped quarters and his shaky limbs. He couldn't burst from the tunnel mouth, but he did manage to arrive unannounced, .38 in one hand and knife in the other. He slid down into a chamber almost four times wider than his tunnel, lit by two air-starved candles that sputtered on clay ledges.

  He had no time to enjoy the sudden lifting of claustrophobia that lightened the weight on his lungs.

  A voice cut through the silence and in flashes the Lieutenant saw an old Vietnamese man lying on a pallet which rested on another ledge dug out of the clay sides of the chamber. His clothing was shredded, a bloody mess pooled underneath. Over him crouched a younger Vietnamese man who held an IV bottle high in one hand and brandished a surgical instrument with the other. The voice was his — jabbering at the Lieutenant in rapid Vietnamese, gesturing with his head and hand.

  They were only a few feet away, and the Lieutenant trained his pistol on them, scanning the dim chamber for anyone else hiding in the shadows. Past the two Vietnamese, another tunnel mouth headed off into blackness beyond. The Lieutenant tried to stand, but his cramped muscles crippled him, and by the time he rocked to his knees he found that the roof of the chamber, a lattice of clay mortar and thick bamboo logs lashed together, was barely a foot above his head. The doctor's voice rose in anger and held up the instrument, a scalpel.

  The old man sprang up and faced
the Lieutenant, eyes boring into his, and grabbed the doctor, holding the younger man back. He was weak, however, and the doctor shrugged him off. His eyes blazed with hatred.

  Hands shaking with fatigue and fear, the Lieutenant brought the pistol to bear on the doctor.

  The two Vietnamese spoke to each other in their clipped, sing-song language, watching the muzzle trained on them.

  "You're coming with me," the Lieutenant muttered. "All this trouble, I'm taking some prisoners back with me." He waved the gun barrel, an unmistakable command.

  The candles flickered madly. The Lieutenant became aware of a rumbling overhead, getting rapidly louder.

  The two Vietnamese rattled sentences back and forth and pointed up. The old man grabbed the doctor despite his bloody side, gritting his teeth. He seemed to be begging. The doctor shrugged him off and turned toward the Lieutenant.

  "Jesus, back off!"

  The rumble increased overhead and the chamber's side walls started to vibrate. One of the candles tipped off its ledge and sputtered out in the clay, while the other danced wildly.

  "I said stay back!"

  The doctor advanced slowly, but the old man wrapped his arm around him and was partially pulled off his pallet. To the Lieutenant, it was as if a four-armed monster had crawled from the pits of hell and approached him, its open mouth a pit of hatred and hunger.

  The scream of engines and treads above them reverberated through meters of hard-packed earth. Tanks and bulldozers, and probably armored personnel carriers, were being used to destroy swaths of the Iron Land in a new operation the brass hoped would destroy a number of tunnel complexes. Problem was, the Lieutenant had gone into the tunnel nowhere near where Operation Cedar Falls was scheduled to begin.

  How far had he followed his ghost?

  The red clay walls, black in the dim and wavery light, shook around them and the hunched-over Lieutenant lost his balance. His finger tightened on the trigger and the Smith fired as he went down, pieces of the bamboo roof starting to collapse around him. When he looked up, the doctor was sprawled a couple feet away, the top of his head a pulpy red mass.