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ever get attached to a machete.
As useful as they can be, and as much as I use them, I long ago learned that they come and go, and when you use them hard, they mostly go. Just like cars.
I like mine short and heavy. The long ones are best for grass and bushes, and besides, I often have to carry mine in a sheath to free my hands. A 26-inch blade is damned clumsy at your belt. That’s why the campesinos carry theirs in their hands, and you don’t encounter scabbards often.
So, when my foot-long Tramontina went spoing and bounced off a rock with about four inches of the edge missing, I didn’t start to cry. I did stop to wipe my face and unlimber the square ended Martindale on my backpack. Then I looked at the GPS, confirmed my heading and moved on.
The fer-de-lance I had cut in two felt a lot worse than I did—out of mercy I beheaded it with the damaged blade, and tossed the broken thing into the undergrowth.
Hay foot, straw foot, traveling on.
I took off my high cuffed work gloves for a moment, dug out my satellite phone and called in to the office.
“How far is this thing?”
“Let me look, I have to query the computer. . . . What’s it like down there?”
“Bugs, heat, bad footing, black palm trees . . . I just killed a fer-de-lance.”
“What’s that?”
“Dirty great pizenous snake.”
“OK, you’re about a kilometer out, stay on a bearing of 187.”
“Call you in about an hour.”
Sympathetic soul.
I put my gloves back on—the God-Damned-To-The-Lowest Circle-Of-Hell black palms were thick as dandelions. If there was ever a tree that ought to be extinct, it’s the black palm. At six inch intervals along the trunk a band of greasy black darning-needle thorns oozed a miserable venom. The jungle floor was a thick black mung, slick as deer guts on a brass door knob. Slip on it, grab a tree to save your balance, and guess what you took hold of.
This part of Panama is like a crumpled sheet of paper, mostly straight up and straight down. Nobody lived here. Sir Francis Drake marched a force of pirates across this God-forsaken stretch of ground to ambush the Spanish Gold mule train in 1573. I must say, I have to admire the man.
I stopped well before sunset to make camp. My target was no more than a quarter mile away, but the jungle has strict rules, and not trying to set up your shelter in the dark is one of them. The machete sang in the forest as I found two suitable trees, cut a couple of columbines and tied off a length of nylon rope. I rigged my mosquito bar, stretched my hammock and blasted the area inside with insecticide.
I lay down on the hammock with a bag of trail mix and munched away.
I called Washington, told them I’d be entering the target area first thing in the morning, then made a quick call to Lisa. I had to conserve the battery.
“Hey sweetie!”
“How’s it going there?” she asked.
“The insertion went well, I’ll be done tomorrow.”
“Good. When you get home, I want to try another insertion.”
“Won’t be long, now.”
“Lover, it’s plenty long enough for me! Hurry home!”
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Darkness came to the jungle, the insects and bats began their aerial ballet, things let out blood freezing cries in the night, and the stinking monkeys were out there, too. They wanted to fling shit at something; it seems to be their hobby. I didn’t give them an excuse, I was asleep in a few minutes.
Next dawn came, a mixed blessing as always. I got up, stretched, put my boots on, and heated an MRE with one of those flameless packs. After that I broke down my shelter, pissed into a clear plastic bag with some powder in it, and watched it inflate with hydrogen gas. I let it rise and pull an antenna wire up with it.
Washington was ready for my call.
“It’s full light, I’m going in.”
“We’re ready to take your video.”
The day shift guy was all business, I liked him a lot.
I gave my machete a few strokes with one of those carbide sharpeners they sell on TV. Too sharp an edge will turn, but this thing was just what I needed for a practical touch up.
I sighted my bearing, and stepped out with my jungle knife in my hand. Chopping the occasional vine, I thought about just how I got roped into this one.
The Defense Department has radars looking for things in space. Now and again, they spot a “fast walker,” something coming in from way out there. Common meteors, mostly; but sometimes, they behave oddly enough to attract notice. This one jinked and decelerated enough to require an examination. It impacted in Panama, in the old Canal Zone.
It seemed best to have a very quiet look at it—and since I’m Mr. Weird for them, I got tapped to slip in, look, and slip out. I got a nice ride up the Chagres river in a Zodiac boat with a SEAL team and started hiking. One day to my campsite, the night, and now, a very discreet sneak and peek, at probably just a rock.
The object was sitting in a shallow crater. It was a pitted, blackened globe, looking like a model of the Moon in a high school science project sprayed with flat black paint. Meteorites usually arrive with a black outer shell—the outer layer is heated to incandescence, but below that the main part of the object is nearly at absolute zero, so it turns stone cold almost at once upon impact.
The crater was not big enough for a rock that size.
I kept the camera on the scene, moving around it.
The casing was broken open from the inside, like an egg.
“OK, that’s it for me.” I told the guy in Washington.
“Give us a quick look around.”
“While I wait for the extraction, sure, but I need out of here—this isn’t a one man job any more.”
“Agreed, now, tell me what you see, and keep the video feed open.”
“There are tracks, but they don’t make much of an impression in this slop, just smears.”
I dug the small tape measure I always carry out of my pants pocket and measured the prints, and the stride length. The prints were too indistinct to make much of them, but they were big and very wide. They led off into the bush. I wondered what the thing would make of black palms as it blundered along. And it surely blundered, it left a trail of broken vegetation that a blind Boy Scout could have followed with ease. A quick calculation gave me the idea it might be eight feet tall.
I headed back to my little campsite, moving briskly.
“ETA on the helicopter?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Hurry.”
“What happened to the patient guy I was used to?”
“Duh? One word: monster?”
“I see your point.”
Back in the States, a debriefing. I hate those things, same questions over and over, like you might be lying.
“You have the pictures, the video and the measurements,” I said. “And you know what I saw, which was the same thing. It’s all up to Panama, now. Their territory, their problem.”
“No good,” the Company rep said. “We don’t want to trust this to some tin-pot Central American sideshow.
“This is important.”
I had to agree, but what else was there to do?
Back home, after a love-mauling by the dogs and a similar assault from Lisa, I went to bed, and slept the clock around.
During that black time of deepest sleep, Sonya visited me. First time in many years.
She was sitting on the beach, near our little house, the house where she died, hard as wood, dark as dusk and cheery as a bird.
“I like the new chica,” she said. “She’s pretty, and she’s smart. She makes you happy.”
“Just like you did.”
“You made me happy, too,” she said. “Sometimes it seemed like the sun was shining just for us.”
“I miss you.”
“Life is for living,” she said.“Enjoy the now.”
“Thanks for letting me know this is OK with you.”
“Another thing you should know: you’re not finished with this business in Panama.”
“I don’t know what else I might do.”
“There’s still a part in the play for you, and you have to play it.
“What you must do for your woman is go see the ones over the hill. If she doesn’t know, she will carry no stain from it—nor will you, because you acted from love.
“Go forward, my love, be the man you are, and enjoy your life with this new one—but remember, I still love you.”
“I love you, too, Sonya!”
I woke up with an inarticulate shout, tears on my face, an ache in my heart.
I’ve spent too much of my life in moldy stacks of books, among strange and forgotten artifacts, learning things that no one should know but that someone has to deal with. Somewhere among the piles of obscure devices and shunned books, a part of me got lost. My innocence, I think.
Once, I spent six months examining an arcane contraption of brass gears, lenses and black steel dials marked with incomprehensible characters, aligning them, turning the carefully devised components, listening to the thing rasp and whir to life for a few seconds, then become inert again. Then one day, I achieved a different configuration, and it began to move on its own. A tube with a lens lighted up, and I looked into it. I wished I had taken a ball peen hammer to it. I saw a series of phantasmagorical landscapes where living creatures so hideous they scarred my memories flopped and slithered against an alien sky.
Another time, I opened a rat-chewed codex to discover secrets of a world deep under the sea, a world that jealously loathed humanity, and maintained a cankering envy of our existence, longing to possess all that was ours, and do us to death, not quickly or cleanly.
I had sworn to myself that Lisa would never know a tenth part of the true secret. But I was greedy for more time with her, and so I crossed the ridge, and spoke to Elder Smoot.
Turner had finally died a few months ago—he was buried in a piano crate, his amoeba bulk far too large for any casket, and his successor was a younger man.
The bargain I struck was no clean thing.
One day, a woman from the compound showed up at the door with a steaming dish of stew, smelling of unusual herbs and rare spices. We ate it, and even gave some to the dogs.
“That stuff has a powerful aftertaste,” Lisa said. “I don’t think I’ll want it again.”
I said nothing.
News from Panama told of a small fishing settlement on the coast destroyed by some awful force of nature, the few inhabitants gone with little trace except for splashes of blood. Pirates were suspected. I suspected something a lot worse.
A mixed force of Marines, SEALs and Army Rangers were sent to investigate, and I was sent with them.
I saw the same tracks in the jungle muck, and we followed the trail of the thing into the forest. Along the way we discovered the skeleton of a puma, bones gnawed and splintered, the skull smashed open for the brains, and gory fragments of monkeys and coatis. The den was on a ridge, with more bones, most of them human, and a stench that marked it like a flag.
Once we caught sight of something, big, hairless and green, a glimpse of scaly hide made hideous with hornlets and scutes of bony material, but it was out of rifle range.
Finally we lost it, and had to turn back.
Tales of the Chupacabra were rife that summer.
It destroyed another village during the rainy season, so a second attempt was decided upon. It was a ten-man party, same mixed unit of snake-eaters. I was packing a sniper rifle this time.
We acquired its trail and followed deep into the bush. This thing was not hard to track—in fact it was as easy to follow as a cow. It stopped in a small grove of banana trees and ate at least a hundred of them, which gave us a chance to close on it.
But that night we heard gunshots and saw fire in the jungle—not a campfire but a real fire with a plume of smoke hundreds of feet high and a glow you could see for miles. Next day, we followed the trail.
There was a finca there converted into a dope lab, with a crew of maybe a half dozen pistoleros and some technicians. We figured it for nine men. It was still burning when we got there.
The thing was dead. I think it tried to eat the cocaine, and it had enough bullet holes in it to qualify as Belgian lace.
It had eaten most of the people there, or at least eaten parts of them, more than half of them. It was a shambles, blood and body parts strewn around.
We let the fire burn, wrestled the thing into a tube tent, secured it with nylon ties and waited for the helicopter to extract us. Mission accomplished, game over.
What was it? I’ll tell you what it looked like: an allosaurus with four arms, and lots of extra flaps and spikes.
It also looked starved, the skin of the thing was sagging over its bones. I don’t think it could properly digest the food it found on our world; ravenous, it killed and devoured in desperation.
That’s what I put in my report, and I wonder if anyone read it. |
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