SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

Nothing had changed, but everything was different. The jungle was still there, but in the flat light its deep, rich green was two licks from black. Simms’ bedroll was half-undone, sodden with mud like a bad memory of some forgotten summer camp. Jenkins’ mirror hung from a low branch, swaying and flashing as it swung in and out of shadow. The King of Hearts stared at the sky, his placid face covered with fat, red spatter and tiny chunks of gray meat. Three sheets of notebook paper with ragged edges fluttered from underneath a root like crippled birds. There were no other holes.

Luke’s brain tried to process what he was seeing. A hundred synapses fired in a thousand directions, trying to shine a light on the answer. Luke’s legs decided it would be a question better considered from a distance, and his heart agreed. His lungs fell in line, and in less than three seconds all of him was into the trees and away.

He didn’t run like a soldier, with his eyes up and his ears sharp. He didn’t run like a civilian either, bulling through anything that got in his way. Luke moved like a swamp rabbit, panting as his arms and legs pumped in a perfect rhythm. He leaped over outstretched roots, swung around skinny trunks, tucked down under clutching branches, and vaulted over dead falls without thought or hesitation. It was graceful, even pretty in a desperate sort of way as he defied gravity to put the unnamed terror behind him.

He stopped running when he came to a blasted tree. The thing had been a cypress once upon a time, until God had laid it low. Black and twisted, with gnarled fingers severed at the second knuckle, the tree sat alone like a woodland pariah. Words had been carved into it by a hundred hands, and they were written in nearly as many languages. Luke saw English and French, Vietnamese and Dutch nestled side by side in ways their mother countries never had been. He saw short, choppy characters he didn’t recognize, and letters that made his eyes hurt to try and follow them. Poetry, profanity, and the worst parts of the bible ran helter-skelter over the tree’s lightning-struck skin, blending into a cacophony of carpentry. In the bloody light of late day it looked like the Maypole at a devil’s social.

Luke took one step into the no-man’s-land that surrounded the blasted tree. His nostrils flared, and he silently mouthed the words he could make out. Closer to the tree the smells of char, damp, and rot lingered in the air. There was something else, too; something sharp and tangy, like a sock full of pennies accidentally thrown in the wash. Luke socked his rifle to his shoulder and took a careful, quiet step around the tree. On his third step he found the source of the smell.

The body still wore the black pajamas of a Viet Cong soldier. The cloth was shredded, and it hung like a tattered flag at a hobo’s funeral. Beneath the cloth the flesh had gone bloated and sallow, sagging off the bones like the corpse had been a hundred years old when someone put him out of his misery. The legs were gone at the knees, and only a grisly shard of red bone poked out of the remains of the left sleeve. A colony of beetles nested in the stump of the neck, and the noises as they ate sounded like wet radio static. The ghastly sack of flesh was nailed to the tree, and its one remaining arm pointed off into a thick wall of unbroken tangle. In big, bold letters where the head should be were the words Checkpoint Charlie. Above the hand, little more than a bony puppet held together by strings of gristle was carved one word: Slog.

Luke stood there with his mouth open, and the sour taint of the decaying road sign sitting heavy on his tongue. His guts clenched, and his rifle lowered, but those things seemed far away and unimportant. He stared transfixed at the mangled effigy while mud soaked through the vents in his boots. A centipede as thick as his middle finger and nearly as long as his forearm burrowed out through the hollow of the throat. Charlie sighed, and a rush of thick, black blood burbled down his skinny chest.

Luke turned his head, and vomited. It was thin and yellow, like polluted river water. He heaved three times, hands on his knees and his asshole puckering every time his belly knotted up. Cold, greasy sweat ran down his cheeks, and dripped from the tip of his nose. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and spit. When he looked up, he saw what Charlie was pointing at.