Turn of the cards

Chapter Twenty-nine

They were crashing and tripping their way down through the dense underbrush of a jungle slope, alternately cursing the hill, the jungle, each other, and the clouds of tiny stinging bugs that swarmed around them. Even Croyd, humping along on all-fours behind Mark in the middle of the line, bitched about them. They were too small to catch with his tongue, and they got in his eyes and up his nose like everybody else’s.

Eye Ball, Second Squad’s point man, loomed up on the deer trail they were following. Walking first after him, bulky Haskell left off griping about being compelled to tote the squad’s big black M60 machine gun to point the weapon at him.

As soon as the column stopped, Mark collapsed by the side of the trail. His lungs pumped air that cut like glass. The muscles of his thighs felt like lye Jell-O. His pack straps were like a cheese slicer cutting him in thirds.

“Easy. Easy, dammit.” Sarge pushed forward from the third-spot to shore the M-60’s barrel skyward. His M-16 had a thick M-203 grenade launcher slung under its barrel; along with Haskell he was the squad’s heavy-weapons support. He alone carried ammo, for both components of the compound weapon. “Mario, what does he say?”

The point man had no mouth; his head was a mass of eyeballs, of various sizes and colors, with a boonie hat perched uncomfortably on top to keep the sun off. Mark had the impression the eyes tended to flow together and redivide over time, but he wasn’t sure. Eye Ball was one of the few jokers he had met whom he honestly could not stand to look at for any length of time.

Eye Ball was agitated, waving his hands frantically, and not just at the insects that must have been torturing him to the point of madness. He communicated solely by signing. Mario was his official interpreter. A significant percentage of jokers lacked the capacity for speech, so sign was the unofficial second language of jokers everywhere. Mario was the squad’s most fluent signer.

“He says he’s found something,” the slender young joker reported. “He can’t say exactly what it is.”

“Is it dangerous?” Sarge asked.

Eye Ball held up his right hand and made a motion like a chicken closing its beak with his thumb and index and middle finger. “No,” Mark panted under his breath as Mario translated aloud.

“What? You understand signing?” Croyd had sat up when the column stopped, and was craning around Mark to see what was going on. He wore a boonie hat, too, and because his skull wasn’t real ideal for holding hats, it was taped under his chin. The effect was of some sort of wharf dowager got up for hard weather. “I never knew that.”

“I have a cousin who’s hearing-impaired. I picked up some signs growing up. Stuff like ’I love you’ and, uh, ’bullshit.”

Commotion erupted behind, up the hill. Mark heard the voice of Spoiler, currently in the tail position, raised in an unusually shrill squeal of anger.

“Point man for First Squad must’ve bumped into the boy and scared poor little him,” Croyd said unsympathetically.

“Sir,” called Studebaker Hawk from just in front of Mark. “Sir, it’s, uh, Lieutenant Gilbert. He wants to know why the delay.”

“Candy-ass political motherfucker,” Sarge said, walking back to accept the radio handset from the former Killer Geek warlord, who had become subdued almost to the point of meekness around him. Nobody could quite figure out why; the joker Brigade vet was gruff and exacting, but even Mark, a highly sensitive kind of guy, thought he stopped well shy of abusive. “And that’s ’Sergeant,’ not ’sir.’ I work for a living. Yeah, Charlie Two Two Six, over.”

“He’s pissed,” Croyd said behind his hand. Mark nodded. The Sarge was a bug on radio discipline; for him an extra “yeah” was equivalent to a screaming fit.

The radio unit looked modern – newer than Mark would have expected, much more compact. The Brigade had castoff uniforms and an infirmary-dispensary that was a gesture at best, but they had the latest in weapons and commo gear. He didn’t know what to make of it.

The sergeant listened for a moment, then said, “We’re looking into it.” He handed the handset back to the Hawk. “Come on, everybody. We don’t want the lieutenant having himself a stroke.”

He didn’t much care for Luce’s officially sanctioned assumption of military rank either. Luce had no more training or experience than… well, than most of the rest of the New Joker Brigade.

Mark and Croyd and several of the others followed the sergeant as Eye Ball excitedly led them to his find. He stopped and pointed at what looked like a particularly overgrown patch of undergrowth.

Sarge frowned, and then his hound-dog features softened. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.

He reached up and began to tug at a strand of liana. It gave away, revealing a broken stub of blade.

Suddenly it all made visual sense to Mark – the patches of flat faded-olive surface glimpsed through foliage, fitting together to suggest a rounded form.

“It’s a slick,” the sergeant said. “An old Huey.”

Eye Ball stood by looking multiply expectant. Mario licked his pebbled lips, then spelled out H-E-L-I-C-O-P-T-E-R with his right hand.

They all gathered around, pulling at the brush and the vines enough to reveal the unmistakable sperm shape of a utility chopper, long deceased. Several of the youngsters crowded in to peer through the windscreen, which was totally devoid of glass.

“Shit,” Eraserhead said in disappointment. “No dead dudes inside.”

“Didn’t burn,” Sarge observed. He pointed at the streamlined housing humped above the crew compartment. “Looks like they caught a couple rounds from a twelve-seven heavy machine gun in the engine and auto-rotated in.”

“You look thoughtful,” Croyd said to Mark, settling himself down drowsily as First Squad came tromping down the trail to see. “What’s on your mind.”

“I -” He shook his head. “It just seems, like, real sad to me somehow.”

“What’s this? The Last Hippie wasting sympathy on a machine? All this indoctrination in dialectic materialism must be getting to you.” He put his head down on his forefeet and lay still,

Luce Gilbert came downhill in his natty cammies and posed for a picture with his foot propped on the dead Huey’s duckbill snout. Mark just stood there with tears coursing down his cheeks. He had no idea why.

Mark flattened himself behind the moss-grown log his rifle was propped on and willed himself to become one with the spongy mulch of rotting vegetation below him. Its smell, rich with decay and edged with fermentation, made his head swim. He had a bunch of branches stuck to his hat, which made him feel like a walking salad. The afternoon sun ricocheted among the leaves of the trees like a light-speed pinball.

“Damn!” Croyd exclaimed beside him.

Mark jumped. “Wow,” Croyd said. “For a moment there I thought you’d just found out you could levitate.”

“You scared me,” Mark hissed.

“What are you whispering for?”

“We’re supposed to be on ambush practice.”

“Yeah, but it’s broad daylight. Hard to take it all seriously. Aren’t ambushes supposed to happen at night? Isn’t that in the rules?”

“You can have ambushes in the daytime.”

Actually Sarge had grumbled mightily about having to run ambush drill during the day. But the platoon was only doing maneuvers in daylight, since they’d tried a nocturnal patrol night before last and Luce fell into a stream. For some reason it had taken the members of his First Squad almost fifteen minutes to haul him out, dripping and sputtering.

“Mark Meadows,” Croyd said, “jungle warfare expert.”

Mark grunted. At least Croyd seemed all the way awake today. Lately he seemed always on the verge of dropping off; yesterday Mark could have sworn he saw his outline began to shift, as if he were beginning to metamorphose right before Mark’s eyes. Croyd told him the sun was boiling his brain, which may have been so, but Mark was glad he’d roused him anyway.

He was settling his mind back on blending into the landscape when a scream raised him up off the humus all over again.

Croyd jerked as if startled awake. “Now what?”

Thirty meters away through the undergrowth Haskell was hopping around clawing at his stocky body. “Army ants! Army ants!” he shrieked. “I’m being eaten alive! Aieee!”

Mark jumped up, martial make-believe forgotten. They had encountered nasty stinging white ants before. If the machine-gunner had gone to ground in the midst of a swarm of those, he was running a serious risk of anaphylactic shock. That meant Mark would be needed in a hurry. The sergeant had received medic cross-training, but he wasn’t real current.

Haskell was dancing around his M60 as if paying it bizarre ritual homage. The pink cilia around his mouth waved like a stadium crowd at a playoff game. The ground around the heavy weapon, and indeed the machine gun itself, was alive with a white swarm.

“Whoa, look at the size of those suckers,” remarked Croyd, who was following Mark. “And check out the size of their jaws.”

The sergeant had one hand on Haskell’s shoulder, trying to get him to stand still, while the other brushed at the half-inch insects that covered him. “Here, here, settle down,” he said in a low, level voice. “You’re okay. Those aren’t ants.”

“They’re all over me, they’re all over me!” Haskell shrieked. “They’re eating me, Goddammit!”

“No, they’re not.”

All of a sudden Haskell stopped hopping and squalling. “They’re not?” he asked in a normal voice.

“Feel any bites?”

“Uh… no. Just them mosquito bites I been itching since last night.”

The sergeant picked one of the insects off Haskell with his fingertips, held it up before his face. The creature opened and shut sweeping mandibles that looked a third as long as it was.

“Soldier termites,” Sarge said. “They don’t eat people.”

He stuck the tip of his forefinger between the jaws. They pinched it, indented the skin deeply, then released. Mark thought the bug looked outraged at being had.

“The ’Yards – that’s short for Montagnards – use ’em to close wounds, instead of stitches. They pinch the wound shut, get a termite to close its jaws on it, then bust the body off and leave the head holding on. Works fine.”

“Wow,” Mark said.

“Bugs won’t eat you, but they will eat everything else that isn’t metal. Including the furniture on your pig, there.” He nudged the M60 with the toe of his cloth-topped jungle boot. The weapon was crawling with termites, all gnawing away to see what was edible.

“All right, everybody. Time to shift. We put our ambush right in the path of a swarm.”

Haskell grabbed up the machine gun and began to dust insects from it. The sergeant looked at Croyd. “What are you waiting for, brother? Chow down.”

Croyd reached out and tweaked the mandibles of the insect the sergeant held. “Too spicy for my tastes,” he explained.