weeks. Even with communications, they couldn't have called in artillery or reinforcements or evacuation. They were deep and alone and beset by bogeymen, some imagined, some not.
Branch paused beside the prehistoric bison painted on the wall. The animal had spears bristling from its shoulders, and its entrails were trampled underneath. It was dying, but so was the hunter who had killed it. The stick figure of a man was toppling over backward, gored by the long horns. Hunter and hunted, one in spirit. Branch set the last of his claymores at the feet of the bison and tilted it upon little wire tripod legs.
'They're getting closer, Major.'
Branch looked around. It was the radioman, with a pair of headphones on. One last time he perused his ambush, saw in advance how the mines would flower, where the shot would fly true, where it would skip with terminal velocity, and which niches might escape their explosion of light and metal. 'On my word,' he said. 'Not until.'
'I know.' They all knew. Three weeks in the field with Branch was enough time to learn his lessons.
The radioman cut his light. Around the fork, other soldiers doused their headlamps, too. Branch felt the blackness flood them over.
They had pre-sighted their rifles. Branch knew that in the terrible darkness, each soldier in his lonely post was mentally rehearsing the same left-to-right burst. Blind without light, they were about to be blinded with it. Their muzzle flash would ruin their low-light vision. The best thing was to pretend you were seeing and let your imagination take care of the target. Close your eyes. Wake up when it was over.
'Closer,' whispered the radioman.
'I hear them now,' Branch said. He heard the radioman gently switch off his radio and set aside his headphones and shoulder his weapon.
The pack advanced single file, of course. It was a tubular fork, man-wide. One, then two passed the bison. Branch tracked them in his head. They were shoeless, and the second slowed when the first did.
Can they smell us? Branch worried. Still he did not give the word. The game was nerves. You had to let them all come in before you shut the door. Part of him was ready with the claymores in case one of his soldiers startled and opened fire.
The creatures stank of body grease and rare minerals and animal heat and encrusted feces. Something bony scratched a wall. Branch sensed that the fork was filling. His sense had less to do with sound than with the feel of the air. However slight, the current was altered. Their mass respiration and the motion of bodies had created tiny eddies in the space. Twenty, Branch estimated. Maybe thirty. God's children, perhaps. Mine now.
'Now,' he uttered. He twisted the detonator.
The claymores blossomed in a single colorless buck of shot. Pellets rattled against the stone, a fatal squall. Eight rifles joined, walking their bursts back and forth among the demon pack.
The bursts of muzzle flash seared between Branch's fingertips as he held them before his glasses. He rolled his eyes up into his skull to protect his vision. But the lightning streaks of auto-fire still reached in. Unblind and yet not seeing, he aimed by
staccato stroke.
Confined by the corridors, the stink of powder filled their lungs. Branch's heart surged. He recognized one yell of the many yelling voices as his own. God help me, he prayed at his rifle stock.
In all the thunder of gunfire, Branch knew his rifle ran empty only when it quit hunching at the meat of his shoulder. He switched clips twice. On the third switch, he paused to gauge the killing.
To his right and left, his boys went on machining the darkness with their gunfire. Maybe he wanted to hear the enemy beg for mercy. Or howl for it. Instead what he heard was laughter. Laughter?
'Cease fire,' he called.
They didn't. Blood up, they strafed, pulled dry, fresh-clipped, strafed again.
He shouted once more. One by one, his men stopped firing. The echoes pulsed off into the arterials.
The smell of blood and freshly chipped stone was pungent. You could practically spit it out of your mouth. That laughter went on, strange in its purity.
'Lights,' said Branch, trying to keep the momentum theirs. 'Reload. Be ready. Shoot first. Sort it out later. Total control, lads.'
Their headlamps came alive. The corridor drifted in white smoke. Fresh blood spoiled the cave paintings. Closer in, the carnage was absolute. Bodies lay tangled in a foggy distant mass. The heat of their blood steamed, adding to the humidity of this place.
'Dead. Dead. Dead,' said a troop. Someone giggled. It was that or weep. They had done this thing. A massacre of their very own.
Rifles twitching side to side, the spellbound Rangers closed in on their vaporous kill. At last, thought Branch, behold the eyes of dead angels. He finished refilling his spare clips, scanned the upper tunnel for latent intruders, then got to his feet.
Ever cautious, he circled the chamber, threw light down the left fork, then the right. Empty. Empty. They'd taken out the whole contingent. No stragglers. No blood trails leading away. One hundred percent payback.
They gathered in a semicircle at the edge of the dead. Over by the heaped kill, his men stood frozen, their lights casting downward in a collection pool. Branch shouldered in among them. Like them, he froze.
'No fucking way,' a troop darkly muttered.
His neighbor refused the sight, too. 'What's these doing here? What the fuck these doing here?'
Now Branch saw why his enemy had died so meekly.
'Christ,' he breathed. There were two dozen or more upon the floor. They were nude and pathetic. And human. They were civilians. Unarmed.
Even mauled by the shrapnel and gunfire, you could see their awful gauntness. Their decorated skin stretched taut across meatless rib cages. The faces were a study in famine, cheeks parsed, eyes hollowed. Their feet and legs were ulcerated. The sinewy arms lay thin as a child's. Their loins were cased in old waste. Only one thing might explain them.
'Prisoners,' said Spec 4 Washington.
'Prisoners? We didn't kill no prisoners.'
'Yeah,' said Washington. 'They were prisoners.'
'No,' said Branch. 'Slaves.' There was a silence.
'Slaves? There's no such thing. This is modern days, Major.'
He showed them the brand marks, the stripes of paint, the ropes linking neck to neck.
'Makes 'em prisoners. Not slaves.' The black kids acted like authorities on the
subject.
'See those raw marks on their shoulders and backs?'
'So?'
'Abrasions. They've been humping loads. Prisoners, labor. Slaves.'
Now they saw. Cued by Branch, they fanned out. This had just gotten very personal. Spooked, high- stepping, the troops moved among the limbs and smoke. Most of the captives were male. Besides the neck- to-neck rope, many were shackled at the ankles with leather thongs. A few bore iron bracelets. Most had been ear-tagged, or their ears had been sliced or fringed the way cowboys jingle-bobbed cattle.
'Okay, they're slaves. Then where's their keepers?'
The consensus was immediate. 'Gotta be a keeper. Gotta be a boss for the chain gang.'
They went on looking through the pile, absorbing the atrocity, refusing the notion that slaves might keep themselves slaves. Body by body, though, they failed to find a demon master.
'I don't get it. No food. No water. How'd they keep alive?'
