The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(160)

There was no dock, as such. Just a natural protrusion of dull gray earth, thrusting out into the water. I eased the Suzie Q in beside it, and she lurched fitfully to a halt as her prow slammed against the earth dock in a series of slow, slowing bumps. I left the boat and stepped cautiously out onto dry land. It felt like stepping out onto an alien planet and leaving my spaceship behind. The tall earth banks were lined from end to end with flaring lights now. I craned my head back, and dozens of natives looked down at me, holding crude flaring torches. None of them moved, or spoke. They just looked.

A set of rough steps had been cut into the tall earth wall beside me, curving slowly upwards. They didn’t look in any way safe or dependable, but I hadn’t come this far to be put off by anything less than a gun in my face. I started up the steps, pressing my left shoulder hard against the yielding clay and earth of the river bank, careful not to look anywhere but straight in front of me. The steps squelched loudly beneath my boots, and my arm and shoulder were soon soaked with slime and seepage from the earth wall. I paused beside the first great opening, peering into the dark tunnel beyond. I seemed to sense as much as hear movement within, of something much larger and heavier than a centipede. I pressed on, stamping my boots heavily into the slippery steps to keep my balance. The natives were still looking down at me, saying nothing.

I was out of breath and aching in every limb when I finally reached the top. I took a moment to get my breath back, and coughed harshly on the rank air. The usual jungle stench of living and dying things pressed close together was overwhelmed here by a heavy stench of death and decay, close up and personal. It was like breathing in rotting flesh, like sticking your face into the opened belly of a corpse. It was a smell I knew all too well. For a moment I wondered whether all of this had been nothing but a dream, and I was still back in my village, cooling my bare feet in the river and smoking a cigarette, as I waited for them to come and find me, and all the awful things I’d done…. But this stench, this place, was too vile to be anything but real.

The natives stood before me, holding their torches, and every single one of them was dead. I only had to look at them to know. They stood in endless ranks, unnaturally still, their eyes not moving and their chests neither rising nor falling; flies buzzed and swarmed and crawled all over them. Some were older than others, their flesh desiccated and mummified. Others were so recent they still bore the dark sticky blood of the wounds that had killed them. Some had no eyes, or great holes in their torsos, packed with squirming maggots. Everywhere I looked there was some new horror, of missing limbs, or dropped off lower jaws, or pale gray and purple strings of intestines spilling out of opened-up bellies. They carried knives and machetes and vicious clubs, all of them thickly crusted with dried blood. They wore rags and tatters, almost as decayed as their bodies. Some wore what was left of army uniforms, north and south.

And then it got worse, as two of the dead men dropped their torches uncaringly onto the wet ground, and moved towards me. They did not move as living things move; there was nothing of grace or connection in their movements. They moved as though movement had been imposed upon them. It was horrible to look at; an alien, utterly unnatural thing, as though a tree had ripped up its roots and lurched forward. I started to back away, and then remembered there was nothing behind me but the earth steps, and a long drop. I wanted to scream and run and hide.

But I didn’t. This was what I had come here for: to learn Major Kraus’ awful secret.

The two dead men took me by the arms and hauled me forward. I didn’t try to fight them. Their hands were horribly cold on my bare skin. They didn’t look at me, or try to speak to me, for which I was grateful. I didn’t think even I could have stood to learn what a dead man’s voice sounded like.

They led me through the army of the dead, across an uneven ground soaked with blood and littered with discarded body parts. There were great piles of organs, torn away or fallen out, revealed suddenly as great clouds of flies sprang into the air at our approach. There were hacked off hands, and broken heads, faces rotted away to reveal wide smiles of perfect teeth. My dead guards walked right over them, and did not allow me time to be fastidious. By the time we got where I was going, my boots and trousers were soaked in blood and gore.

I should never have taken this mission. I only thought I knew what Hell was.





I’d never felt so scared, or so alive. After the village, after what I did there, I didn’t feel much of anything. But now, surrounded by death, and the fear of something worse than death, I felt alive again. My heart hammered in my chest, and every breath was a glorious thing, despite the stench. I was here among things that couldn’t be, shouldn’t be…and I wanted to know more.

The men I killed never got up again. That would be awful, if they should rise up again and look at me with knowing, accusing eyes. The men who served beside me, who were cut down by an often unseen enemy—they never rose up again either. In Viet Nam, death was the one thing you could depend on. Except…not here. What had Major Kraus done, here, so far from civilization and sanity? Who knew what might be possible here, so far from science and logic and all the other things man depends on to make sense of his world? Perhaps…if you went back far enough, into the past, into the jungle, you could leave reality behind in favor of a whole new world where anything, anything at all, was possible.

My dead guards brought me to a great hole in the ground and stopped. They let go of me, and just stood there, looking at nothing. I rubbed my arms hard, where their cold flesh had touched mine, without menace or care or any feeling at all. I looked down into the hole. It seemed to fall away deep into the blood-soaked earth, but there was light at the bottom. A metal ladder had been roughly attached to one side of the wet earth. I started down it. I wanted, needed answers; if answers there were to be had.