Thirteen Specimens (3 page)

     Early in the massacre, Candle had caught the medic by his elbow and stopped him temporarily from dispatching wounded buffalos. “These are civilians!” he had ranted. “No one is shooting back at us! There are no VC in this fucking village!”

     “Our guys are fired up...they want revenge for the men we lost in that minefield...”

     “The villagers didn’t even set those mines! It was our
allies
, the Koreans – I thought everyone knew that now!”

     “Candle, this was the order at the briefing. You think I like it? I don’t like it any more than you do! But what can I do, tackle all these kids and wrestle their guns away? What can you do, except do your job?” He had nodded at the organic camera in the photographer’s fist. “You know that thing is in absolute heaven today.”

     “I thought I saw Sergeant Wrench around here,” Candle had continued fuming, glancing about him.

     “Yeah, I saw him. He went into one of the hootches, dragging a girl by the arm.”

     Candle had known then that it was senseless seeking out and appealing to the officer, to any of the officers. And wasn’t the medic right? As much as it repulsed him, outraged him, didn’t he have a job to do? If he didn’t catch as much of this incident as he could for the Guests, and for the newspapers, he was sure to be summoned by his superiors. Maybe even arrested for insubordination, dereliction of duty, going AWOL from his contracted function...

     Now Candle drifted onward, through wafting gun smoke from hot rifle barrels and the rolling sooty smoke from burning dwellings. His boots ground spent cartridges against each other like gnashing teeth. Out of the eye-stinging black fog an old woman shuffled toward him. He saw, with such disbelief that he almost forgot to raise the camera until its wriggling legs brushed his thigh, that an unexploded M-79 grenade was embedded in her belly. For the first time today, he felt the impulse to tear from its holster the .45 Colt he wore but had never once fired. He was actually grateful, though startled, when an M-16 on fully automatic rattled and the woman went down. Fortunately for Candle, perhaps, the slugs hadn’t hit the grenade.

     One of the nine airships of the 174
^th
Assault Company came hovering overhead, the thumping of its four dragonfly wings – moving so fast they were a nearly invisible blur – making the ground smoke swirl and coil. The smoke cleared enough to expose a stand of bamboo trees, and the three people who had hunkered down behind them. They bolted. Someone on the ground opened up on them at the same time that the ship’s gunner let loose with his mounted M-60. The three Vietnamese – a man, woman and boy holding hands – were cut into pieces, the father’s head literally chopped off his body. Candle flinched, half-expecting to get hit by some of the wildly spraying rounds, but already the huge insect was wheeling its body to point in another direction, and lifting somewhat higher so the gunner could thoroughly strafe a dwelling that thus far had escaped burning.

     Candle’s first real frames of the day (a trigger on the camera’s metal handle sent a mild electric jolt into the creature he carried, commanding it to transmit a particular image onto the film roll) had been shot from inside the living airship that had transported him here, and of the eight other organic craft as they began to lift off. They were huge creatures with stiff tapering tails, blind, guided by the men who rode in the hollow backs of their humped carapaces. They had been developed and shaped by the Guests – who had even made them a camouflaged olive green like Candle’s instrument – as if they were gods guiding animal species through their evolution, adapting them to a certain environment.

     It was easy for Candle to despise the loudly humming monster he saw floating above him, as if it were the insect itself and not the human gunner that was unloading those pounds upon pounds of metal projectiles through the roof of the fragile home. But he didn’t hate all the organic technology the Guests had bestowed upon humankind over the decades, this technology more and more complex every year. Gifts in return for the...entertainment...these humans provided, with their rapes, murders, their wars. He was actually rather fond of the organic automobile he himself owned, a dome-shaped beetle-like creature popularly nicknamed the VW “Bug” (their sort grown on farms in Germany). But it was hard to remember, sometimes, that these living machines were not the Guests themselves. That the true nature of the Guests was unknown...anonymous...

     And over the past couple of years, though in form the various mutated creatures had become more advanced, it had been noted that their life spans were not as long as they once had been. After only a year or two, an organic TV might begin to stop receiving images, rot while alive and quickly die. The living buildings that had sprouted up in greater and greater profusion in the cities, barely recognizable as having their origin in the world of terrestrial invertebrates, were dying off and decomposing as if they had contracted some mysterious disease. And then there were the Mediums – those human hosts, to some degree always in a position of authority, who carried a parasite insect which enabled them to be more directly linked to the minds of the Guests. Yes, look what was happening to some of the Mediums, lately...

     Was it too much for Candle to hope that the influence of the Guests was waning, or becoming infected, corrupted? Did some interference between the dimensions now make it difficult for them to master the cells of their tools? If so, did that mean it was also harder and harder for them to peer into the realm the humans dwelt in? Candle could only pray it was so.

     But what then, anyway? Humans would still want to see the staring dead eyes and the sundered flesh he caught on film. Humans would return to their own wars over politics or religion or natural resources, instead of being directed like chess pieces for the amusement and titillation of an unseen force. Either way, it would be the same...just the same...wouldn’t it?

     And if the Guests faded away altogether, and every last one of their instruments decayed, could he still earn his living with a purely mechanical camera? Or would he, in essence, decay too? Candle wondered if he himself were a kind of parasite...

     Three soldiers were heading toward Candle; they tended to separate into such small groups in their sweeps. He figured it was one of these men who had fired upon the family that had been hiding behind the bamboo trees. As they came, one of them made an exclamation and raised his M-16 a little higher. Candle glanced around behind him. He saw that the small boy who had been struck down with his parents was staggering dazedly after him, somehow still alive despite having had his nose torn away and one arm broken off at the elbow, hanging by only a few rubber bands of tissue.

     “Jesus Christ,” Candle breathed, as if that were the person he had seen so miraculously resurrected.

     Of course, the soldiers spattered him with bullets and he crumpled without a whimper. Candle spun to glare at them, but saw one of the GIs had tears streaming down his face.

     “This is too much, too much,” he blubbered, sagging, and one of the other GIs took him by the arm to support him. The man yanked himself free. “Too much,” he said, as he and his buddies veered off in another direction.

     Candle forced himself to temper the overall hatred of his countrymen that had suffused him today. He reminded himself that the Vietnamese could treat their own people with shocking brutality. And, he had seen three American soldiers early on in today’s attack herding a small group of civilians out of the village, urging them to flee for their lives. He knew he did not walk amongst devils or angels. Just humans. That was bad – and good – enough.

     As if he himself were one of the patrolling soldiers, moving from one scene of murder to the next like pollinating bees, Candle resumed his wandering of the village the Americans had dubbed Pinkville, in reference to the target-like red dot that denoted its place on their maps. Tramping briskly along, lest he miss some tasty tidbit to feed his pet, he squinted up at the dragonfly monster as it swivelled again, rose higher, fluttered away like a pollinating bee itself.

     He came upon a man he knew as Rivet, who was shouting at a cowering knot of women and thrusting a .45 at them. “Come here! Come here, you. VC Boom, right? You a VC Boom?” He was asking her if she were a prostitute, despite the fact that she held an infant. He was unzipping his fly with his free hand, trying to get the woman to understand with gestures of flicking hand and waggling penis and pointing gun that if she didn’t go down on him he would shoot her baby. Sobbing uncontrollably, the woman nevertheless handed her child to one of the other weeping women. Candle stopped clicking frames once the woman actually knelt down in front of the American (a shoving hand on the top of her head). The photographer denied his camera more than that; not just the oral rape, but the “double veteran” ritual that was sure to follow.

     Still, he soon chanced upon a “double veteran” in progress. A girl of about 14 lay nude on the ground with a soldier atop her and another standing by, buckling his equipment-laden belt. As Candle approached, the GI rose from the girl, planted a foot on her belly when she tried to sit up, and let loose a brief volley into her head.

     Their different appearance and language made them seem less like humans, more like
things
to these men, Candle mused. But they were not so alien that they weren’t sexually arousing...just alien enough to slaughter.

     On, he walked. He could almost feel his camera tugging at his arm like a bloodhound. A Ouija board’s planchette, pointing itself at the urging of the ghosts they called the Guests. But he knew he alone was the camera’s legs, however much its cilia-like limbs rippled. He was the driver
of a getaway car; just as culpable. Right? He was an accomplice...

     He passed a buffalo fallen on its side, still snorting defiantly as it lay dying. His trigger was depressed, but instead of releasing a merciful killing bullet he merely recorded the beast’s suffering.
Click.
In front of the smoldering ruins of one of the first houses burned he aimed his camera at a blackened corpse, a cinder in the shape of a woman, her arms raised in the air as if she waited for someone to take her hands and lift her to her feet.
Click.
A heap of maybe thirty bodies, intestines disgorged from burst bellies; at the top of the pile like the crowning cherry on a sundae, the body of a naked baby with one soft buttock blasted away.
Click.

     It’s history, Candle told himself, pointing the camera at the mound of bodies stacked up like rubbery mannequins. He knew, from experience, how far away to stand, how best to align the camera (it had two horny fin-like ridges on its back that he liked to sight between), despite the lack of a viewfinder. Yeah – I’m a real artist, he thought. Real talented. But it was history; he must preserve it. It would make a difference. All titillation of Guests, of newspaper buyers, of TV watchers aside...someone would learn a lesson from this, wouldn’t they? These images would serve a different and greater value – right? It was an awesome responsibility; he was
obligated
to transcribe the very worst of these atrocities onto film. Because otherwise, one day it wouldn’t seem real anymore. It would be forgotten. New atrocities would replace it, like a dune in the desert swept away as the next dune formed. It would have never happened at all.

     It was history. It was history. And this was the only way he could will the strength into his finger to squeeze that trigger again.
Click.
Again.
Click
...

      He was surprised that he hadn’t vomited. Dismayed at himself that he hadn’t even shed a tear. God; even some of the murderers had shed tears. But tears would blur the lenses of his eyes, and his brain was as much a roll of film as the one jammed up his camera’s ass. And he was like that little boy who had come tottering along with his nose gone and his arm swaying by a tether. Shell-shocked. Traumatized. Numbed beyond real comprehension.

     But he wished he
could
cry...if only to reaffirm that he was still sane, still alive, still human.

     The camera seemed almost to know that they had reached a kind of destination. Ahead of him, Candle recognized one of the officers with two of his men. At some point or another, they had rounded up a group of what Candle judged to be fifty or sixty Vietnamese – primarily the very elderly, women, children and infants – and had them all squatting close to the ground. The villagers gazed up in dread at the tall, uniformed men speaking in an alien language, carrying bulky weapons...stared at one individual in particular. The man Candle fixed his attention on.

     His name was Lieutenant William L. Broom, and he was a Medium.