a Czech CZ-75, serial number ground off. This information had been forwarded to Washington, but the stuff felt as though it came from the immense pool of surplus weapons held in obscure warehouses the world over and belonging to no country but only to the fraternity of international arms dealers. It could have all been bought from
The clothes and personal effects were easy, too, though Uckley had felt a little ghoulish going through them. As for the personal effects, there were none. Each of the three dead aggressors had gone into battle without pictures of loved ones, without Bibles, without even wallets, with nothing tiny or human to sustain them: they were men who seemed to have never been. Their clothes were well-washed but equally vague: heavy black boots of obscure manufacture, also picked up somewhere on the military surplus market. Also, black fatigue pants with huge bellows pockets at the thighs; blue watch shirts, perhaps naval in origin; black sweaters and watch caps. They had gloves, found stored in the shot-up house, and heavy parkas, perhaps for outdoor work. All of the clothes would perhaps in time yield their secrets to the sophisticated microscopic textile testing the Bureau had back in its labs in Washington; but that would take weeks, and in hours the world would be ending. The clothes were therefore of no immediate help.
This left the bodies. This left the hard part.
The three naked men lay on a tarpaulin in the middle of the Burkittsville fire department. Sooner or later a doctor would surely get there who could do this thing more professionally than poor Uckley, the mother killer with the black and blue stomach, but he had not arrived yet and nobody else particularly wanted to do it. So there was Uckley, alone with the three bodies.
Look at them, he told himself.
The big one who’d died upstairs seemed the worst. He’d put the Czech pistol into his mouth and squeezed off a round. The bullet had blown out the back of his skull, leaving his head queerly deflated in appearance, like a melon halved by an ax. But more amazing was his right shoulder, which looked as if a buzz saw had hit it; one of Delta Three’s bullets had really ripped it up. God, how could he go on, hurt like that? Yet Uckley had seen him, climbing the steps, firing, the whole works. In pain like that? This was some kind of Superman. Even the corpse grinned a little at him. What was there in that white-toothed smile? Was it superiority?
Yeah, okay, Uckley thought. So you were the better man.
The other two had taken more hits but looked better. They were just dead men with what looked like red scabs the size of quarters scattered across their bodies, three across the chest of one, eleven spread randomly across the other. Bullet holes, lovely, Uckley thought. He thought of a picture from a history book of proud townspeople standing next to some old-time desperado, hit about a dozen times and now propped up like a cigar store Indian in his coffin, his mustache drooping, his bullet holes shining like buttons in the sun.
Think, Uckley told himself.
Okay, all of them were lean, strong men. They had the flat bellies and sinewy muscles of well-trained professional military men, elite troopers. Their hair was all cut short; one of them had nicked himself shaving that day. They looked to be in their late twenties. All three had patches of scar tissue on their upper arms, and one had quite a few on his wrists and chest. Tattoos? Yes, tattoos, somebody had surgically removed their tattoos!
And goddamn, they were tan. Their faces and their arms were tan; they had the burnished deep color that fishermen get, men who spend their lives in the sun.
Uckley went back to the first one. He looked more closely at his body. Yes, there was a lacework of stitches running up his chest, intersected by another line of stitches.
You’ve been hit before, he thought. You’ve had a very adventurous life, my friend. I’ll bet you could tell me some things if you were alive.
He checked the others for wounds. The one was clean, but the other had a pucker of scar tissue up high, near his collarbone on the right side. It was another bullet hole.
These were clearly tough customers, all right. Somebody else’s Delta.
He wished he knew what to do next. He walked back to the leader. What am 1, a forensic pathologist? I just look and see dead guys, their heads shot away. He remembered the man standing above him, the little girl squirming beneath him. Let the girl go for crissakes, he’d said, and the man had just stared at him.
You had me cold, pal.
Instead, you walked back and blew your brains out.
Uckley knelt. Something in that smile, something mysterious and bright. A commando with movie-star teeth blowing his brains out in the back room of an old house in Burkittsville, Maryland.
Almost involuntarily, Uckley put his finger out. It was the unnaturalness of the dead man’s smile that disturbed him. The teeth were so white. He put his finger in the dry mouth, felt the dry lips and the dry, dead tongue, reached up, pinched, tugged and—
Yes, they were false.
The porcelain bridge came out in his hand.
He checked quickly. All three men had completely false teeth, and almost brand new bridges placed in their mouths.
Witherspoon began to chatter.
“Wow, did you hear that? Man, that sounded like gunfire. You suppose.”
But then Walls’s hand stole over his mouth and pulled him down with more strength and will than the larger, younger man ever thought the smaller, older one possessed.
Then he heard the whisper in his ear.
“Okay, now, man, you just take it easy, you just keep it quiet. Okay, man? Okay?”
Witherspoon nodded and Walls let slip his mouth.
“Shit, you—”
“Shhhhhh. Old Charlie, he in the tunnel. Yep. Charlie here. Charlie come a-hunting. Yep, old Charlie, you can’t hold him back. He’s come a-hunting.”
Witherspoon looked at him, feeling his eyes bulge and his heart begin to triphammer.
“Hey—”
“Hey, nothing. You listen to Walls. Walls knows Charlie Walls and Charlie, man, them two go way back.”
Walls seemed, queerly, to be fading on him, to be transfiguring into some other creature: he slid back, as if to allow his blackness to be absorbed by the tunnel. At the same time, Walls had unslung Mr. Twelve, and adroitly peeled off the black tape that masked the muzzle and the ejector port. With one swift metallic
“Okay, you listen,” Walls said softly. “Time to gear up. Get your shit on, get your piece ready. Tunnel be hot. Charlie hunting us, man, we got to hunt Charlie. Only way to stay alive.”
Witherspoon threw on his flak jacket and picked up his German machine pistol. He cocked it, drawing back the knob that ran through the housing over the barrel; it clicked locked and solid. He slid the night vision goggles down across his face, popped off the lens cap, and turned on the device from the battery pack at his belt. As he diddled with the image intensifies and the focus, the tunnel leapt to life in a kind of aquamarine as the electro- optics picked up the infrared beam from the lamp atop the goggles; he had a sense of being underwater, everything was green, green and spooky. He turned to Walls and faced a man on fire. The convict’s face burned red and yellow like some hideous movie special effect; Witherspoon almost laughed at the strangeness, the comedy of it all, but it was only that Walls, excited, had begun to pulse with blood, and from so close, all that heat, all those agitated molecules, came through the lenses like a movie monster.
“Okay,” said Walls soothingly, “now, this is how it got to be. We got to move forward, and make our contact as early as we can. Okay, we hit Charlie, we fall back. We hit him again, we fall back. See, in a one-way tunnel, you got only one chance, man. You got to hit that sucker and hit him over and over. You got to hope he runs out of men before you run out of tunnel. Because if you run out of tunnel before he runs out of men, you’re one trapped rat. Man, the tunnels I been in all had holes at
“Okay, I’m with you.”
Something flashed in Witherspoon’s psychedelic vision: it was Walls’s teeth.
He was smiling.
“Whistle while you work, man,” Walls said merrily.
