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Prisoners of War
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The Vietnam War ended 35 years ago. It feels like a milestone, but it doesn't even really register. I just arrived in country, and it's barely even on my radar. I work for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command based out of Hawaii, and somehow out of all those words the military managed to get JPAC. Our highest priority is finding Prisoners of War- of course, in the same breath our command says that it doubts very much that there are any POWs remaining from past conflicts.
I'm a forensic anthropologist, a fancy way of saying I tell you whose bones you've found, so my highest priority has nothing to do with people who are still alive. I'm still pretty new to the job; I was on it for a couple of years before they found out the FA based out of Hanoi with Vietnamese language skills was pregnant and planning on retiring, so they put me through a crash course in the language. She popped out her kid a week before I got here, and I think she's already on a plane back to the states. I know what I know about the country from war movies I haven't seen since I was a kid. I keep expecting Marlon Brando, or for other strange things to happen, and I keep reminding myself that this is a normal country, now, that people live here, and it's actually one of the more digitally-advanced nations in the world- it even has its own creepy robot with Albert Einstein's head. But up until I arrived, basically everything I knew about Vietnam came from movies, travel brochures and Wikipedia. I hate being in-country; that feeling of being not just foreign, but American, in Vietnam, wasn't pleasant- or at least I'd convinced myself that everyone was looking at me sideways. It was on a rainy night, when I couldn't help but think about 1984 and being watched by everyone around me, that I received my first visitor. Three knocks, spaced evenly apart, hard and heavy, taller up on the door than I'd expect in a country where the average height is 5'4”. I'm already on edge, so it doesn't take much to convince myself that I should take my sidearm, but once I have it in my hand I curse the bastards who switched to the M9 from the 1911. I open the door quick, and standing there is a man who fills the doorway, over 6' and I'd swear half as wide, wearing fatigues. He takes a step into the door, and I realize even the 1911 wouldn't do me a damned bit of good; I feel sheepish about the pistol, and hope I can holster it before he notices. “Won't need that,” he says, and his voice is as deep as you'd expect off the size of him, but heavier, like he's talking through smoke. I chuckle to myself, set the M9 down on the table. He looks out the window, at the rain. “You're the solution to a problem I've had,” he eventually says. “Most forensic anthropologists are civilians. Takes too much schooling for a soldier. But you're the exception.” He was right. I'd gone into the reserves to get money for college, but once I'd gotten my degree, I started looking into the military's FA program. They liked to hire contractors, but I reasoned I could convert my part-time status to full and retire early with pension and benefits and stay on as a contractor. I convinced one of the JPAC COs that it made sense, and that's how I'd gotten the gig. “What do you know about the fall of Saigon?” he asked. “Next to nothing.” He smirked. I could hear it in his eyes, him complaining about my goddamned generation and how we had no respect for history. “These were the last days, the few remaining Americans in country. Kissinger was holding out for more aid to the South Vietnamese. They figured if we finished evacuating before then, the South would go belly up. So we were holding the airport in Saigon, when on April 29th we started getting shelled and hit by rockets. By 11 AM we'd lost all our runways, so they kickstarted Operation Frequent Wind, a fullscale helicopter evac of all US personnel and at-risk Vietnamese. By 5 AM the next morning, it became apparent we weren't going to be able to get everybody out, and Ambassador Martin was ordered to get himself out of the embassy and cease the airlift by President Ford.” “A group of us were the last marines left guarding the embassy. There were twenty-four of us- just enough to fill up the belly of a CH-46 Sea Knight. But there were still hundreds of South Vietnamese in and around the embassy. We didn't feel right just leaving them behind, so we gave our ride to some women and kids and decided to walk the rest of them out on foot. The NVA had been ordered to let the airlift happen- they wanted the Americans gone, but nobody'd said a damn thing about letting us walk away. We ended up pincered; an NVA group came up on our north flank, and Charlie came up from the south.” “I might be new around here, but I've reviewed all of our pending cases, and we've only got 53 MIA cases. I think I'd have noticed if half our files were on one incident.” “From what I've gathered, our Sea Knight suffered some engine trouble. It's possible the pilot took on too many people, maybe one of the NVA got twitchy and put some AA fire into it- but it went down. We were all declared KIA. Nobody came looking for us.” “Uniformed NVA didn't want us. Said if they took custody, they'd just have to give us right back, so they sent us home with Charlie. The VC were happy to have us. They were terrified of assassinations, that the CIA was gunning for each and every last one of them. It was just impossible for them to fathom they'd beaten us. So they wanted us for collateral, bargaining chips.” “That night, they put us up in a game of poker. There were four of them, senior VC, each putting his claim on six of us. We all might have gone to whoever the victor was, but it got heated, and one of them shot another man's 'chip.' After that they all just walked away from the table. I was only in captivity for a while, couple of months. I ended up getting traded down to an errand boy in exchange for who knows what kind of favors. He wasn't bright, got too close to my 'cage' and I killed him.” “I tried to go to CINCPAC, but Admiral Gayler didn't want to hear it. Vietnam was a fresh wound, and they didn't want anybody picking the scab off it over a lousy 23 men; I suspect they even made a clumsy attempt at having me shot, though that could have just been post-conflict Vietnam.” “I've been working ever since. The VC went back to their lives, hide who they were and what they'd done, and more than ever blended back into the population. Made it tough to find them. And it's taken years- but I had years to give.” I finally found my breath, “Wait.” He cocked his head to the side, like an aggressive dog not used to anyone trying to tell him how things are. “You're saying you've been hunting old VC since the war ended? Like a Nazi hunter?” “I've found 22 of the men we lost that day, or in most cases what remained of them. And I've met the men responsible.” He looked away from me for a moment, towards the window, and I shuddered- and I think he knew I needed to and that was why he gave me the moment. “The last one, I don't know if he died with the NVA commander who took him. That commander 'died' in a plane crash, had a funeral, and they buried what was left: this.” He pulled a small plastic baggy out of his pocket. In it were a few teeth and some ashes. “And that's why you need me, to tell you if that's your VC commander.” “He was NVA.” “But I thought you said they were Viet Cong.” “Same fucking thing- they all marched to the beat of Hanoi's drummers.” I took the bag from him and looked at it. I'd heard of him. The OiC here in Hanoi, he said he was like an urban myth, a story the VC tell to their children: the Ghost of Saigon. But he was real, inside my apartment, larger than a man ought to get, the infamous murderer-Marine, dripping rain on my rug. I thought a moment, about who he was, and what helping him might mean, then I brushed it aside and looked at the bag.“Well, the teeth are your best option. Teeth are durable, keep their shape well; they might even house mitochondrial DNA, which wouldn't necessarily identify him, just tell you whether or not it's from the same family line. But what you've told me about these bastards, if one of them were going to fake his death, I wouldn't really put it past one of them to kill a relative to really sell it.” He glowered at me. “Which doesn't actually matter anyway. All of our DNA sequencing is done out of the AFDIL lab in Rockville, Maryland, and since this isn't an official JPAC case they'd never look at it, and like I said, it's no smoking gun anyway. But the teeth could give us our identification- if we had dental records.” He paused for a moment. “I can get dental records.” And he left. I don't have anything close to a full lab in my apartment, but I do keep a few magnifying glasses and a cheap microscope, because work has a way of coming home with me (at least it always did on Oahu). He came back three hours later, a small cut, from broken glass, I think, on his left wrist. I'd already half come to a conclusion, but I didn't let on until I'd looked at the records. “This is ridiculous. Clumsy, stupid. They tried to mock up the teeth to look like, what'd we say this guy's name is?” “Hoa Lo.” “Yeah. At first I took some of these markings as just the lousy state of Vietnamese dentistry in this guy's lifetime, but look here, you see this tooth? See how it's supposed to have a chip from the records. You can see these marks here where they just put it into a clamp and took a file to it. I mean, the texture's all wrong. This was strictly amateur hour. And this filling that's supposed to be halfway through the dentin, I mean dangerously close to the pulp chamber in the center of the tooth, well in this recreation it's right through the enamel. This is shoddy enough work that it could qualify as a transformative creation inspired by the original. So where does that leave you?” “With a dentist in my trunk,” he said, and my eyes got wide. He stepped out into the rain, and I had to follow him. We walked down the steps. He had a small blue car that looked like a Honda hatchback knock-off and could easily have belonged to anyone in country- at least anyone well off enough to own a car in the first place. “I went to him first, and he told me that the teeth belonged to Hoa Lo.” He put his keys into the trunk and opened it up, and seemlessly slipped into Vietnamese. “So why'd you lie to me?” The dentist's mouth was duct taped, as were his wrists. He threw the dentist over his shoulder like he weighed nothing at all, and started back towards my apartment. I was about to protest about conducting an interrogation in my room- The dentist's brains exploded out a hole in his skull and splattered across my shirt and face. I started to gag, because a little of it had gotten in my mouth. The dentist dropped head-first onto the concrete, and I think his neck snapped. A big hand grabbed me and pulled me against the wall of the building beside my apartment complex, and he stared into me, and mouthed, “stay here.” I've never really been in combat. I know how to fire a weapon, and I've seen more than my fair share of corpses, but that was the first time I'd ever seen someone killed like that- certainly the first time I'd taken a brain bath. And I couldn't keep myself from staring at the dentist's corpse as the rest of his shattered gray matter fell out of his head like shit from a prolapsed colon. I'd gotten to the part where I wondering, maybe even fantasizing, about what it's like to have a bullet go through your brain, what that last part of a second is before the shock wave from the bullet destroys every mechanism in your brain needed to think about it, and I think I'd decided it would be like the worst headache possible mixed with a stabbing pain when a second-story window erupted above my in a shower of glass. The body of the shooter landed on the edge of a dumpster, bent over it unnaturally in the stomach, and I thought, wow, two corpses. And then the body arched as the shooter tried to breathe around several broken ribs- at least one, from the sound of it, poking a hole in his lung. And suddenly the big hand was on my shoulder again, and I nearly soiled myself. “Your apartment's been compromised. We'll go to my hotel.” I followed him over to the shooter. “Where are you staying?” “Where else? The Hilton.” “They built a Hilton in Hanoi?” I asked, incredulous. He gave a slight smile, then hefted the shooter onto his shoulder. He loaded them both into his trunk, the shooter beneath the dentist, and we got in and started to drive. It amazed me how normal the night suddenly felt. We might have as easily been two friends on the town, and for the first time it felt like I could see myself living here, that there was a side to the city I'd locked myself away from inside that room, and not just buildings, or a nightlife, but people. Then we were at the hotel, and he opened the trunk, and the night returned to its former strangeness. He picked up the shooter, and I offered to hoist the dentist. “Leave him, he said; we'll dump them later.” My eyes caught the shooters at that, but strangely I reacted and he didn't. He taped the shooter to a hotel room chair before he bothered saying a word. The shooter was older, and didn't even bother denying he'd been NVA by way of VC, or that he knew Hoa Lo back in the day, but then he clammed up. Then he heard that voice in his ear, “I spent time as a VC prisoner. Your kind taught me how to make you talk. So it's your call how much this gets to hurt.” After that we couldn't shut him up, but when we'd heard enough from the shooter, he produced a syringe. “Simple mercies,” and the shooter nodded his head, and closed his eyes as the needle pierced his neck, only barely winced as the plunger went in. We left. As we were waiting for the service elevator he said, “Overdose of methadone. It's gentler than the way the dentist went, maybe better than he deserved.” I couldn't stand one thing. “He was willing to risk his life, willing to kill, for his former commander, but he gave him up without any kind of a fight.” He sighed before he spoke. “Every man has his breaking point. Days, weeks, sometimes years, he'd have told me what I wanted to know. He knew that- he's lived that.” He pushed in the elevator's emergency stop button, and a tiny bell rang. “You can stay here. Shooter'll go quiet. You can push him into the bathroom if you like.” “Do you honestly think I'm safer here alone than with you?” I asked. “Fair point,” he said, and pulled the button back out, and the elevator resumed its descent. As the elevator hit the ground floor, something struck me. “You likely saved my life back at the apartment-” “Though I likely endangered it to begin with,” he corrected me. “Uh, no, my point is, what do I call you.” “Jack'll do.” He put out his hand, and I shook it. At his car he opened the door for me. “In the backseat, there's a box of files. The address he gave us belongs to one of the men I've been watching- I suspected him. He's a smuggler, drugs, women when he can get away with it. He has enough money and resources that, once he knows I'm this close, he can put an army between him and me- a proper one. The only advantage I'm going to have is surprise- he likely won't expect me this soon.” He crawled past me into the car. The back seats are hollowed out. In them he's got an old M16A1, and the other, he explains, “Is one of them new M16A4s, so you don't get lonesome for home. I didn't think things would shake this way, but I'm a man who cares to be prepared.” He's also got body armor in the truck where the spare ought to be, and he hands me one he figures “Ought to fit;” I guess being prepared is how you wage a one-man war on what were to his era underground terrorist cells. I can't imagine that life, and even if I tried, I somehow think I'd whitewash and sugar-coat it, and do his experience no justice at all. I squirm in the armor in my seat while he drives, trying to skim the file he pointed me at. Hoa Lo's idea of a nom de guerre is a mash-up of Vietnam's two most recent leaders, Nguyen Tan Luong. No wonder Jack had him flagged already. Underneath Lo's file is a service record for a Marine, marked KIA. “That's the one we're looking for,” he tells me. “I made sure I had dental records.” I flip to the page and sure enough, a very thorough history for Sergeant Robert Gordon. I realize we're driving up an incline, and I look up, and on top of this hill there's only one house. Lo's home is big, with a ten-foot fence around the perimeter, and a big metal gate with a keypad. “Seatbelt,” he says, and I thank God I'm already wearing it because before I can even reach down to check we hit it at speed and it snaps open like a wishbone. The front-end of the car is shattered, engine crumpled in on itself. Jack doesn't seem surprised, but still he mutters, “Piece of Asian shit,” as he slams the door on his way out. My face hurts, and that's because the seatbelt didn't engage fast enough and I smacked my face into the dash- not the head, so no split open skull, but my face feels like stepped-on gum. Jack pulls me out of my seat. He fared better, whacked his forehead on the steering wheel, and feels bad I got the worst, “Shit, sorry,” he mutters as he hands me the M16A4. Lo seems to have assembled whatever dumbfucks he knows and thinks he can trust, because the yahoos who run out into the front lawn obviously aren't security, and don't know the thumb up their ass from the safeties on the M60s they're slogging around. Jack cuts them apart before they even have a chance to stare dumbly at us before realizing they're supposed to be firing from cover. “Magazine,” he says to me, and while I'm fetching one from the duffel he tells me, “need to be more cautious with bullets. Otherwise things'll get more personal than they have to be.” He doesn't jinx it by saying what I think we both know, at least suspect from the quality of those men: this might be easier than he thought. “Lo likely has the local cops on his payroll; they're paid to stay away, so we should have some time to ourselves.” I'm about to step away from the car when he puts his hand up. “Hold, thought I saw something.” A bullet hits him in the arm, the one he was holding up, rips through meat and buries itself in the car's trunk next to me; I think the shooter was going for a two-fer. Maximum effective range for an M16 is 550 yards, but maximum means what it says, that's ideal conditions, in daylight, without a bullet in your arm, with a decent scope. Jack's got iron sights and a leaking hole, and we might be within 400 yards of the house, but it's dark and I can't see shit. “Missed the muzzle flash,” he says, “but the idiot's scope reflected, and he ain't moved.” He's talking, but it sounds more like a meditative chant, and with every word the rifle sways a little less, hones in a little more, then: Krak. There's a tense moment, where we wait for return fire or for something to happen, before the sniper tumbles off the roof of the house. “Duct tape,” he says, and I hand him the roll out of the duffel; he wraps one length around his arm, over the bullethole's entry and exit, and tears if off. “That'll do,” he says, and hands it back to me. We run for the front door, because there's shit for cover between the car and the front steps, just an open kill zone, and while I keep expecting a bullet without warning it doesn't come. We get to within twenty feet of the house before another M60 barrel pushes through one of the front windows, clears the pane of glass, then starts firing. Jack fires suppressing shots at the window while strafing, pushing me out of their line of fire. We end up behind a big cement column at the foot of the front steps and stop. “Bandolier,” he says. In the duffel is a shoulder belt lined with grenades that he throws over his arm. He thinks a moment, then says, “Frag,” to himself, selects a grenade without looking down, pulls the pin and flings. It goes into the window right next to the M60 poking out. There's a very loud, “Shit!” that's immediately drowned out by the explosion. He starts up the stairs and says, “Indoors, the M16 can get a little cumbersome, but remember it's not an M4- it'll punch through furniture and walls just fine. Stick behind me. And try not to get shot.” I'm already getting numb, that combination of fight or flight and shock, and he stops right before the front door and I walk into him. He points to the other window, already slightly ajar, just like the door was. I pull my M9, and point it at the man huddled next to the open window, waiting, pull the hammer back so he knows I have the drop. Jack steps over the tripwire he'd seen, bends over and picks up the claymore that was rigged to the door. “Front towards asshole,” he says, handing it to the man. “That'd have killed you, too, if we tripped it.” He shoots him in the head, and he falls to the ground with the claymore still in his hands. I walk in, careful of the wire. We walk down the front hall, and he pushes me into the first bathroom, because even big as it is it's a dream kill zone- roll a grenade down, wait for the explosion then fill the smoking remains with holes. But these amateurs keep up their nonsense, actively avoiding good tactical decisions. Then again, nobody ever said smugglers made for good soldiers. Jack's just crossing the threshold into the kitchen when a couple more guys flip over a table for cover, holding their MP9s to their chests like they're infants in need of coddling. Jack just shoots through the wood, quick bursts on either end of the table where the men had been. He scoffs. I pop out of the nearest room and follow him in, when suddenly there's movement to the side of me in the nook to my left and I spin and fire my M16. It's only as the muzzle flash casts a shadow against the wall that I realize there's a flurry of hair, too much hair, definitely a woman, and a rush of fabric- a dress. And I know what I'll see even before I look down. And Christ, it's his wife or a whore, some innocent gold-digger who didn't need to die here. Jack looks down, turns her hand over, and she's got one of those corkscrew bottle-openers; she was going to stab me. “Lousy way to die, that in your guts” he says. “Was his wife, but trust me, she wasn't innocent.” I don't think I should trust him, because he's probably lying to keep my head in the game, but I do anyway, because it's convenient to. I follow him, stepping over the three men's bodies in the kitchen on the right, when Jack stops and asks, “How many you shoot in the kitchen?” “Just the one.” He sees it just a second before me, the pin on one of his grenades is gone. He grabs it, flings it, but it's barely three feet in front of us, suspended in the air like time's stopped, and suddenly the room is all light and sound and pain. First thing I'm aware of is I'm coughing uncontrollably, doubled over on the linoleum. Next thing Jack's shaking me, asking if I'm all right, but it feels far away, and he's a blurred-black blob in an unfocused world. But things are starting to make sense. Jack's talking too loud, cause I can feel the force of his words on my face, but I can still barely hear him. “That was genuine VC; unlucky for him it was a flashbang- and I got to my knife before he got to his.” He helps me to my feet. We don't say how lucky we are, but we know if it had been a frag we'd be dead. There's a door down to the basement, and a set of stairs going up. Way Jack figures, we leave one to check the other and we might lose Lo, maybe Gordon, too, if we're getting optimistic and thinking he's still alive. “So I need you to stay here. Nobody comes out of that basement. He takes two magazines for the M16, and heads upstairs. He's gone a while, and at first it's quiet. Then there's a burst of M16 fire, and silence. Then more fire, a pause while he reloads, firing again. There's another gap of 5 minutes, where I think about calling up the stairs, only the moment I get up the nerve to I hear his M16 again, and I figure he's about out. Then his 1911, and I count the shots, seven, eight. He's out, and so far as I know, he doesn't have another magazine for either. Several more minutes pass, and I'm getting antsy and thinking about running upstairs with the duffel when his big boots come clomping down the stairs. “Saved the real VC for last.” He reaches into the duffel for another mag for the M16 and the 1911. He's got blood soaking through his shirt from somewhere on his back. “More tape?” I ask him. “It's not deep,” he says. “Yeah, and I bet you ain't got time to bleed,” I say, and immediately I wonder if he'd have actually seen Predator, as I rip off a section of tape. “Roll up your shirt.” He doesn't protest, just does it, and I push the cut together and tape it without another word. Then he reaches for the handle to the door down into the basement, but pauses. I'm about to ask what's wrong when he says, “This has been a long time coming, the end of this.” He takes in a deep breath, holds it, then grabs the knob and twists, letting the breath go as the door opens. He's saying goodbye to a life he's lived longer than he'd lived any other, but I don't have time to reflect on its poignancy because in the basement it's likely somebody's going to die. At the bottom of the stairs there's a single, reinforced metal door. There are two men standing guard at it, and we make a lot of noise clomping down the steps, enough that they've had more than enough time to ready for us. But they're green, so green the one on the left drops his rifle while the other pulls his fingers off the trigger and raises his MP9 above his head to try and surrender. Jack pulls a bayonet from its sheath and slices the right man's throat in a single motion; he doesn't take prisoners because he's got no place to take them to. It seems like all at once I notice inconsistencies; the other guard is skinnier, and then I notice in the dim light that he's older, but he's moving, moving fast. He's got a little pistol, a derringer or something. I want to move, but he's closer enough to Jack I think I'll hit him- but Jack's faster anyway, jams the bayonet into the other guard's temple and he goes slack and falls with the blade still stuck in the bone. Jack kneels and grabs the knife, wipes it across his pant leg and sheaths it, but before he stands back up he notices a key around the guard's neck and takes it. Sure enough, it opens up the metal door, and suddenly I remember what it smelled like at my uncle's farm, where they slaughtered pigs; it smells like shit, entrails, and death. There's no concrete on the floor, just an earthen pit, and I'm reminded of a news story I saw about a dog-fighting ring. I can hear breathing that doesn't sound like it should be coming from anything God created, and I raise my M16 just a little. Jack pushes my barrel back towards the ground; “Hold fire” he whispers. The air is full of dust and dirt, and there's only a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling, and suddenly I can see the outline he's seeing, the vaguest hint of something nearly human, kneeling in the dirt. As the dirt settles, we can see it's a man. His left eye's gone, along with the eyelid and flesh around and in the socket. His jaw's been broken and rebroken, allowed to heal up wrong and broken some more. He's got three or four teeth left in his head, and at least one seems like it's been put in backwards, and the jaw's so mangled that the tooth keeps stabbing a hole into the skin around his mouth where he should have lips. He's naked, but I can't see a single strip of flesh that hasn't been burned or scarred somehow; his genitals are gone, but there must be some kind of open wound there because it's still dripping. His left arm's been severed just below the elbow, then sewed into his back; it must be a newer procedure, because every few seconds he forgets and yanks on it, then screams in pain and frustration at the result. His right leg is gone from just above the knee- that's why he's kneeling. He's got part of a finger left, just below the first knuckle, on his right hand. I think it's his ring finger, but there are so damned many scars and protrusions where broken bones healed up bad that it's impossible to tell without getting closer- and I know if I get any closer I'm going to seriously lose it. He snarls and yelps at us like a sick, frightened, confused old dog; he isn't human anymore, hasn't been human for a long fucking time- he's even past feral to a point where, without some kind of care he'd up and die. Then he loses interest in us at all, dives at the ground into a mound of human feces, rotting meat and spoiled vegetables and begins to gorge itself. Jack takes a step forward, and the movement makes him sit up and take notice. “Robert? Sergeant?” The creature stares blankly at him. Jack lets out a sigh that comes out as “Fuck.” There's no coming back from that- I don't know if any human being has ever been so thoroughly broken as that. Jack takes out his 1911, and for an instant I think in the eyes he sees just enough of Bob recognize him, understand, and give his blessing before Jack shoots him in the head. For what it's worth, he has a smile on his face as he died. The silence in the room is worse than the unease had been. I want to do something, pat him in the shoulder, or- I don't even know. But not doing anything seems inhuman, though I suspect it's more for me than him. Jack kneels down by Robert, starts in on him with the knife. I feel like I'm going to vomit, because I can't for the life of me imagine what the hell's going on. Then he stands up, stretches out his hand to me, and I'm reminded of hunting with my dad, and he cut out a deer's eye and tried to talk me into eating it to gain its strength and I barely choke back vomit. Jack opens his fingers, and I see Robert's remaining teeth. “I need to know,” he says. I'd only glanced at the dental records for a few seconds, but I don't have much doubt, and even if I did, the teeth match, at least on a cursory glance. I shake my head to affirm it. And then Jack turns and fires a shot from his 1911, and in a dark corner of the room a man cries out, falls into the dirt. Jack walks quickly over to him, and pulls him into the light. He's older, fatter, maybe meaner, but it's Lo. He knows Jack, knows what comes next, and is trying for all the world to be defiant. His jaw sets in a snarl, and he's about to say something snarky, one last parting shot to try and unman Jack or Robert or both of them; Jack grabs his jaw in one hand and Lo's skull in the other and pulls them apart. Lo's eyes widen and he starts to whimper until there's a loud, wet crack as his jaw breaks on its way out of the socket. He screams in pain, tears already coming out of his eyes. Jack turns to me. “Leave. You don't want to see this. If you feel the need to stick around, you can watch the door for me.” Wild horses pulling in the opposite direction couldn't keep me here, but before I get two feet away he says, “Wait- duct tape.” I hand him the roll and he tears away a strip. “He doesn't get to scream. The men you took, didn't get to be heard- Bob didn't get to die with a free word on his tongue- so neither do you.” He puts the strip of tape over Lo's distended mouth, and he's thankfully muffled as I close the metal behind me. A lot of time passes. I try to focus on the noises in the house, creaking stairs, settling foundation, not the sounds of bones broken, meat falling into the dirt. I realize I haven't slept since last night, that I'm fatigued, but I know I can't rest now- and worse, knowing that the paranoia at every whispered sound grows. I'm midway through an elaborate fantasy about my own tortured death by the hands of Lo's associates when Jack emerges. He takes the duffel from me without a word, and leads me upstairs. He hot wires one of Lo's cars, a yellow Jag, and I'm edgier than I've been since the last time somebody shot at us, convinced that this is too close to the end for something horrible not to happen to one or both of us. And then the car turns over, and he opens the passenger side for me and I get in and close the door. A Jag might not be bullet proof, but it's a cocoon, a safe place from which I'll emerge clean and new and unrelated to all the horror of the past few hours. And I realize as we wait at the first stop light off Lo's property that so will Jack. “It's over now, isn't it. You can go home.” He stares at me, with eyes that shove into my guts and carve out a cavern; he doesn't need to tell me it's been a long time since he's had a home to get to. He wrinkles his nose, like he'd stepped in something foul, then forces his face back into the same, dead mask he's been wearing since this started. “Lot of mad men in the world. Think they ought to meet me.” The light goes green, but he doesn't go anywhere, instead he fixes me with a look, and it's the first time his eyes have betrayed anything like humanity. “The wife- she was bad people. Don't let it weight too much on you.” I sigh; my shoulders are heavy and I tell myself it's the heft of the M16 I'm not used to. “What's too much?” “I don't know,” he says, as he eases on the gas. |
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