Croyd came slithering down next to him. “You’re such a showoff, Meadows. Can’t you just walk downhill like everybody else?”
Not trusting himself to reply, Mark let Croyd help him to his feet and out of the torrent. Croyd’s skin felt clammy, and for all Croyd’s banter he seemed sluggish and strange.
“You doing okay, man?” Mark was taking inventory and finding to his amazement that he hadn’t lost anything: hat, nick, rifle, wits.
“Fine. I’m fine.”
The rest of the squad reached the bottom of the hill. They were on their own today. For some reason Luce had stuck close to First Squad since the village raid, and sent the two squads out separately.
Sarge had memorized their route so that he wouldn’t have to take his map out of its sealed pouch and have it melt in the rain. He sent Mario, today’s point, down the hollow along a trail following the temporary stream. The rest of the squad trudged after.
“You don’t sound fine, man.”
Croyd half shrugged and half shivered. “I don’t think I’m entirely warm-blooded. I react to changes in temperature a lot more severely than I usually do. It’s all a matter of heat economy, I guess. I don’t really know what that means, but I read about it somewhere, and it seems to me it applies.”
He looked at Mark. His gold eyes lacked their customary shine. “You know all this stuff, you’re a scientist. I wish I’d gone to college. Hell, I wish I’d finished high school. I’m always making these plans to continue my education, but I never follow through.” He shook his head. “I guess it’s tough to go to school when you sleep for months at a time.”
“Have you ever thought about video courses, man? I mean, you can, like, order VCR cassettes, watch ’em whenever and then take the tests when you’re ready.”
“Say, that’s a really good idea. Didn’t think of that one. That’s another trouble with this stop-and-go lifestyle, you tend to lose the ramifications of all this new technology.”
Mark was about to remind him that VCR technology was not exactly new when someone behind them began to scream.
Chapter Thirty-one
The latter half of the squad was clumped on the trail like a gall on a tree-limb. On the ground in their midst someone was flopping like a fish and screaming as if he didn’t ever have to breathe. Mark shed his ruck and went racing toward them. Sarge arrived the same instant, ordering the squaddies to stand back and let him through.
Eraserhead writhed in the mud. His right leg bent like a bow – not a bad sign in itself; though his body and limbs would bend and stretch, they wouldn’t break. But the leg disappeared into a hole in the mud beside the trail.
Haskell and the Hawk had him by the shoulders. They pulled on him. His right leg stretched until his bloused pant leg pulled out of his boot and his leg, thinned like a rubber band under tension, was bared. His lips skinned back from his teeth and his head thrashed from side to side. Only the whites of his eyes showed.
“Lay off that!” Sarge barked. “You’re doing more harm than good. Dig him out, dammit!”
“With what?” Only Mark and Croyd still had their entrenching tools. The others had covertly thrown theirs away.
“Meadows, Croyd, use your E-tools. The rest of you, use your belt knives or use your bare hands. Just get him out.”
They attacked the sodden earth. Eraserhead began to thump in a circle around his trapped foot, shrieking hysterically. Haskell and Mario had to pin his shoulders.
“A pot,” gasped the Hawk, clawing up mud though his hands bled from nicks by shovels and knives. “He’s got his foot in a fucking pot.”
“Careful, careful,” Sarge urged. “Get it out of there slow. Somebody – no, fuck it. Spoiler, gimme your Ka-bar.”
As pale as the rest of them, Spoiler handed over his heavy knife without argument. “Sheath too.” The former gang member unfastened his sheath from his harness and gave it to him.
The sergeant sheathed the knife, reversed it to grip it by the sheath. “Hold that sucker steady,” he murmured. Mark and Eye Ball reached in to hold the pot firm. Sarge rapped it carefully with the knife pommel. Eraserhead screamed.
On the third hit the crude pot cracked. Sarge tapped it a few more times to extend the crack. Blood spilled out. The fired clay was thick, and bore the marks of the fingers that had shaped it.
They opened the pot. It was a vicious kind of egg. The inside of the shell was lined with sharp bamboo splinters, smeared with chocolate-brown shit.
They had to hump Eraserhead back to the old church on a stretcher fashioned out of rain-slicks and long black M-16s. It took seven hours. Eraserhead sobbed the whole time, though Spoiler raved and threatened to kill him if he didn’t shut up. Mark thought he was crying more from fear and a certain outrage than pain, but by the time they got him to their base camp, his foot had swollen to twice its normal size, and streamed clear serum from a score of red-rimmed holes.
The rain broke not long after they arrived. Just before sunset a polliwog-shaped Mi-8 Hip utility chopper motored in from Da Nang. It touched down beside the church, and a crew of khaki-clad medics bundled the now-quiescent Eraserhead aboard. They seemed to be trying to hold the stretcher at arm’s length, to avoid all contact with the patient. Most dinks – uh, Vietnamese – don’t think black people are human, any more than they think jokers are, Sarge had told him once. Eraserhead was both.
Mark had wanted to ask Sergeant Hamilton why, if the Vietnamese were so prejudiced against jokers and blacks – and Sarge was both those things too – he had volunteered to come back and fight for them. He hadn’t had the nerve.
“Stay hard, man,” Mario called after Eraserhead. “The Rox lives!” Some of the old-timers sneered, but none said anything.
As the Hip lifted off, Croyd came out of the apparent trance he’d been in since they finally stumbled back up the hill. He rose from the base of the church’s pocked wall and wandered over to stand next to Mark.
“All right, everybody,” Sarge told the quiet crowd after the chopper’s rotor thunder had dwindled enough to permit speech. “We all got better things to do than stand around with our mouths open collecting flies. Or if not, I can sure as hell think of a few.”
“But, Sarge,” Slick said, “that thing the kid’s foot got stuck in”
“Punji trap. Old piece of shit, left over from the last war. Like that old crashed Huey we found, remember? It don’t mean nothin’.”
He walked off. The crowd began to break up. Mark watched with single-minded intensity as the helicopter lost itself against a distant slab of slate-colored cloud that seemed to be balancing just above the horizon with the half-set sun for a blinding fulcrum. He felt a sense of isolation and dread. There were monsters thronged around them, in all that evening green. One of their youngest and most vulnerable was being taken away into the land of monsters, and there was nobody to look after him.
A star came out, visible just above the band of cloud. Mark shivered.
Croyd yawned, stretched, and took a cigar from the camo fanny-pack he wore in front of his smooth-scaled belly. “Penny for your thoughts.”
Mark shuddered. “I wonder what’ll happen to him.”
Croyd scratched a match alight on his pectoral scales and fired up his smoke. “If we’re lucky,” he said between puffs, “we’ll never find out.”
He whipped the match out and dropped it into the red clay at their feet. Glaring at him with ecological fervor, Mark bent over to pick it up.
“What’s your sweat, man?” Croyd asked. “It’s organic.
It’s just wood. Soldier termites think it’s a tasty hors d’oeuvre. Something exotic, a break from the same-old same-old.”
“Oh.” Mark straightened, feeling sheepish. He also felt surprise. He thought the trendy activist side of him had died with Starshine, in orbit around a far, cold world.