exposing himself at the pocket park? C’mon, Liss, I think we can all use a good laugh right now. See, I almost made a funny, too. When you capped those rounds, I almost blew mud in my fatigue pants and you jokers would have gotten a few good chuckles off that until I started shaking my shorts out on your heads. So, tell me about this funny individual.”
Liss looked like he was trying to swallow down something that just wouldn’t stay put. “Just funny…weird… strange, I don’t know.”
But Oates didn’t believe that. Liss knew, all right.
“C’mon, Liss, spill it. Funny/weird/strange how? Was it a man or a woman? Were they juggling balls or waving an Israeli flag or dressed up like one of the Village People?”
Liss shook his head. “I don’t know…I think it was a man…but…but his face was all white and blobby, Sarge… looked like it was melting off the skull underneath.”
Well, that landed pretty hard. There were a few angry dismissals of it, then just a lot of silence. Oates told Liss they needed more than that and Liss just repeated what he said. That when he’d shot, he didn’t know if he hit them. Only that they went under.
“Like…like they just sank, Sarge,” Liss managed. “Like they were…like a window dummy or something. Not real.”
“All right, let’s get the hell out of here,” Oates said. “But before we go, no goddamn shooting. You understand me, you idiots? Because if you kill someone, not only will you be screwed but also yours truly as your squad leader. And that’s not going to happen to me, you little dickwads. So understand what I now say: If there’s any fucking to happen, I’ll be the horny fucker and you squirts will be the happy fuckees! Understand? You will now do as I say or I will dump your asses overboard! If I say bend over, grab your ankles and grin, boney-maroney, and maybe if I like you I’ll use Vaseline and if I don’t I’ll dryfuck you like a one-nutted hound humping a gopher hole! Do we understand each other, gentlemen, good and good. Now let’s move out.”
The pump jets were started again and the boats moved off further into the desertion of River Town. And the further they went, the more Oates was getting that feeling that he did not like. He had been on some battlefields in his time, but nothing like this. River Town was a graveyard and there were no two ways about that. All the buildings and houses rising from the murk were like monoliths and dead trees rising up from a misting, poisoned lake. A light rain had begun to fall from the scarred clouds overhead. Now and again, they would catch of glimpse of motion just out of the illumination of the lights and that was what was really worrying Oates.
That and what Liss had claimed to have seen.
15
“This is just getting weird,” Neiderhauser said, maybe feeling it, too.
“There’s worse duty than this,” Oates told him, though he did not think there honestly was. “You boys could be going up to that prison to put down the riot, but instead you’re getting a nice boating trip.”
Ahead, some trees had fallen over the road creating a deadfall that was impassable. The branches and limbs were interwoven like a mesh of reed. As the lights splashed over them, Oates was certain there were people hiding in there, shadows moving in the shadows.
“Okay!” he called out. “Let’s try down that alley!”
The boats banked to the right and slid down an alley between two warehouses. Even the wan glow of the sporadic streetlights and the filtered moonlight did not reach here. The searchlights washed over those high brick walls, splashing them with the gigantic, distorted images of the men in the boats. Ahead, nothing but a clogged sluice of dark water, cast-off branches, and leaves.
But then something else.
“What…what the hell is that?” Hinks said.
But Oates wasn’t sure until they got up real close. Elongated, bobbing shapes in the water covered with silt and dead leaves. The boats moved into their midst slowly, bumping them aside. And after the first and then the second did a slow dead man’s roll, exposing white underbellies to the sky, there was no doubt.
“Bodies,” Neiderhauser said. “Fucking bodies. Just like I told you.”
The cadavers were buried in leaves, but there had to be nearly a dozen humped shapes floating around them. As the bows disinterred them, the hot-sweet stench of bacterial decay started bringing stomachs into throats. The smell hung in the alley like a gaseous envelope.
“Just keep your nerve,” Oates told them. “They’re dead; they can’t hurt you.”
Rain was flying thick as snow in the beams of the searchlights now and the wind, so long absent, was picking up, beginning to howl along the roofs and eaves of the deserted buildings as if it were blowing through a subterranean catacomb. You could almost imagine it skirting shattered crypts and blowing through the empty eye sockets of heaped skulls. It whipped and moaned, making rainspouts rattle and loose signboards creak. And the boats kept chugging along, the stink of overturning bodies simply green and nauseating. They kept thudding into bows and scraping along the neoprene hulls like they were moving, dragging splintered fingernails along the sides.
“Well, Peter Piper poked a peck of pickled peckers,” Oates said under his breath. “What have we gotten ourselves into now?”
The guardsmen were bitching and complaining and a few were just gasping and sobbing.
You cry your eyes out and throw your guts out, Oates thought at them. Get it out of your systems: you get used to the bodies, you might turn into soldiers yet.
The alley was long and winding with lots of hard turns and Oates figured it must have been very old, the buildings and the alley part of some nineteenth century industrial area. Not only just the bodies, but floating planks and soaking cardboard boxes and empty drums. Lots of things poking from the mire. High overhead, there were boarded-up windows and others that had simply been bricked over, ancient hooded loading docks and rotting timbers poking out with rusting winches that must have been part of some pulley system for loading freight. They moved around a panel truck that was sunk to the top of its cab and a series of decrepit loading bays off to the right. And that’s another reason that Oates knew this area was old?there was no possibly way a modern truck or tractor- trailer rig could have backed into those bays in the tight confines of the alley. These were from the days of draft horses and wagons.
“It’s like we’re being drawn into a trap,” Neiderhauser said.
Oates wanted to slap him, but he didn’t. He had to get control of this situation one way or another. His command was disintegrating around him.
“I been thinking the same thing,” Hinks said.
“Thinking, eh? Well, I thought I heard a few marbles rattling around in a coffee can. We’ll be out of this alley in no time. You pussies want to hold hands, feel free. But no heavy petting, just like the sign says.” Oates was trying to sound tough, trying to get them feeling confident again. “Sure as shit, Hinks, we’ll be out of here anytime now. We’ll be out of here and cleaner than a country lane after a spring shower…or however that douche commercial goes.”
Hinks tried to laugh, but it just wasn’t happening.
The atmosphere was just going bad. Like opening up a corpse, the farther you went in, the more it stank. Oates was thinking that was applicable, because this place not only smelled like a morgue, it felt like one. It was like they were digging their way into a black grave shovelful by shovelful, pawing deeper into that wormy soil, just waiting for their spades to scrape against the lid of the coffin beneath. And when they did, when they did and that box started opening?
“What was that?” Neiderhauser said.
“What?”
It came again and Oates heard it this time, too. A thudding sound beneath like something had bumped the bottom of the boat and then bumped it again.
Oates swallowed, his brain filled with clutching, evil shadows. “We…we bumped into something. Christ, Neiderhumper, you don’t have to be born a coal miner’s daughter to figure that one.”
But even as he said it, a cold trickle of fear ran down his spine. And it really started to run when it happened
