Mark’s fingers were scrabbling in the dark soil for the fallen magazine like the legs of some giant jungle insect. Suddenly he stopped, took a deep breath. Then he carefully picked up the full magazine and pushed it into the well with a click.
“How come you know all this stuff?” he asked Croyd.
Croyd popped a huge pale beetle into his mouth with his tongue and rolled over onto his back, as if bullets weren’t passing with miniature sonic booms inches above his nose. “I read books. I never did finish my education, but I can read.” He looked at Mark. “All the fear went out of you just then, didn’t it? What happened?”
Mark stared at him. He had studied the workings of the mind enough to have no sentimental notions about the insights of the crazy. Crazy people thought crazy things. But amphetamine intoxication or no, Croyd was being very perceptive, out here on death’s green edge.
“Yeah. I let go my fear. Now I feel calm.”
Croyd eyed him with glittering gold interest. “How’d you accomplish that?”
“I died. On Takis – off Takis, I mean. In orbit. I – part of me died. I died.”
“No white light?”
“No. Just dead.”
“So what happened just now?”
Mark shrugged. “I panicked when Eye Ball came running back and those people opened up. But talking with you, I suddenly thought, ‘What the heck? What’s it matter?’ They can’t do anything to me that hasn’t been done before.”
The attempt to make the enemy keep his head down had failed, unless they were hip to that blind-firing trick too; a brisk little firefight was in progress. To Mark it all seemed to be happening to someone else, far, far away. As if he were watching it all on TV in his parents’ den in smug southern California safety.
Croyd was studying him with speed-freak intensity. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“Why ‘uh-oh’?”
“Holy shit!” It was the normally calm Slick, his voice sliding on a glass sheet of panic. “Sarge, they’re getting around behind us!”
“Excuse me, man,” Mark said, unbuttoning a pocket of his camouflaged blouse. “I’m gonna roll behind this bush…
“Hey, it’s cool. I’ve seen you change before.”
Mark stared. Only K.C. Strange and Tachyon had actually seen him turn into one of his “friends.” Well, yes, about half of New York had seen it on the evening news, at that apartment fire the last night with Sprout and Kimberly Anne, but that was an accident. The only reason the jumper girl – Blaise’s main squeeze of that moment – who had befriended him on the Rox had gotten to witness the change was that Mark was half-convinced it wouldn’t work.
“Remember that night we both did up some windowpane? You tried this new batch of powder you’d been working on and turned into this giant raccoon. I thought I’d flipped out totally.” Mark stared at him. A friend he didn’t even know about? He shook his head. No, he was tripping…
Fresh gunfire from the left – the heavy, slow clatter of an AK. Mark slammed the contents of the tiny vial in his vest.
Croyd yelped and rolled away from the flames that enveloped Mark. “Jesus! What’s in that stuff?”
“Me,” said Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Esquire, flexing his fingers. Orange flames capered from tip to tip.
He looked at Croyd, who was flat on his belly several meters away. “So what was that ‘uh-oh,’ anyway?”
“You ever read Joseph Campbell? Hero with a Thousand Faces?”
“Yeah. I thought it was pretentious jive.”
He swooped up ten feet in the air and hovered, arms akimbo. “All right, you jerks, you haven’t hit anything yet. Try your luck with me.”
For a moment all was silence except for the dripping of rain from a billion leaves. Then gunfire reached for him from behind the huge fallen tree.
“Your aim still sucks,” he said. He rolled his left palm open. A line of fire stabbed into the heart of the great trunk.
The tree exploded as the water trapped in it flashed into steam.
J. J. Flash laughed as half a dozen black-pajama-clad ambushers went rolling backward from the blast. They picked themselves up and ran off into the bush, elbows pumping.
Shots from the left. J. J. felt the shock waves of their passing slap his face. He pivoted, jetted flame from his palm. Another tree, this one standing, blew up, fragments black against an expanding ball of plasma. As the top half of the tree crashed down, another set of ambushers fled.
Laughing, Jumpin’ Jack Flash cast his fire-lances far and wide. Miniature suns flared. Trees fell. Ambushers ran for their lives.
Then all was still. A few birds began tentatively to sing.
Wreathed in smoke, J. J. Flash looked down on his fellow squad-mates. They stared up at him, faces blank.
He conjured a guitar, a Fender o’ Flame, alive in his hands. He struck a chord, reverberating off through the jungle. The smoke whipped away. He floated against a low, cement-colored sky.
“It’s a gas-gas-gas,” he said.
A raindrop struck his shoulder. He yelped in sudden pain. “This is what I get for being overconfident,” he said, and darted for the cover of an intact stand of trees.
When the squad, still pale and unsteady on its feet – whether from the ambush or J. J. ’s demonstration – reached the point where Flash had vanished, they found Mark sitting in the rain, humming “Give Peace a Chance.”
Chapter Thirty-three
“Hey, bay-bee!”
Moonchild ignored the wolf calls from around the bonfire that leaped higher than Giraffe’s mottled mauve head. Normally she would have stopped to upbraid the young men for their sexist behavior. Not tonight. She would have to fight one or many of them, and they would come at her with such ferocity that she was afraid she might hurt one inadvertently. These war dances, which had begun after the gloves came off and the New Brigade was put on combat status, put the boys in a badger-savage mood.
As she walked on, a fight broke out behind her. The non-participants gathered around to urge the fighters on with howls and jeers and the throb of Public Enemy for soundtrack. Beer had been banned from the camp, but she doubted that the youths had tea or the heavily chemical-flavored water in their cups and canteens. Even pariah Mark had heard rumors of secret stills inside the wire. And the raggedy army of vendors that had gathered outside the gates, despite Sobel’s fulminations and the best efforts of the Vietnamese authorities, were willing to provide anything at all for a wad of Vietnamese dong or, better, a few dollars carried across the water in a back jeans pocket.
She owed her very presence to that enterprise, in sad fact. The store of potions Mark had mixed in Athens was running low. And there were limits to the kind of drugs he could get his hands on as camp pharmacist. He was severely worried about the purity of what he was able to scrounge; given the powerful effect of his potions, he didn’t even want to imagine the possible effect of a bad trip caused by tainted components. But so far his luck had held.
She veered in the other direction then, to carry herself wide of the Boxes and their reek of human filth marinade. Sobel had five of them now. They still had a waiting list.
Behind her someone started screaming. Her reflex was to turn and run back, to help. But to interfere would be anti-communitarian – acting against the popular will. She kept walking.
She was learning a lot here in the struggle-capital of Fort Venceremos. All Mark’s personae were.
She reached the entry to Eric’s solo bunker, paused. From inside came sounds of conversation, male laughter, hard as brass. For a moment she concentrated on centering herself. Then she rapped on the peeled-pole lintel.
“Come,” Eric’s voice called.
She advanced into gloom that seemed more intensified than diminished by the low-turned kerosene lantern. Eric the Dreamer sat with three young jokers, new arrivals. The one sitting cross-legged with his back to Moonchild when she entered still wore Killer Geek colors – a violation of New Joker Brigade policy. It surprised Moonchild; Eric was a vocal upholder of Sobel’s discipline, one of the few among the young bloods who was.