The transcript, p.10
The Transcript, page 10
A horrifying, gurgling scream interrupted him. It was somewhere close. The marines snapped their rifles toward its direction. Maybe fifty feet away lay a mound of dirt. In its center gaped a large opening, big enough to fit a small truck through.
A bunker.
The marines had been told that Saddam had built hun-dreds of bunkers and miles of tunnels all over Iraq. Ammo dumps, motor pools, barracks, hangers, roads; He even bur-ied warplanes and helicopters in the ground hidden for later use.
The source of the scream was revealed to be an Iraqi man crawling from out of the bunker. It was obvious he was one of the insurgents from earlier, the marines could observe him bleeding from gunshot wounds. On his stomach, he crawled on his hands and knees. Martinez couldn’t see much, but that he was groaning and clawing into the dirt, crawling towards the marines. He raised a hand, almost in a pleading like manner, mouth open.
Before the marines could react, a long arm reached out of the darkness. It grabbed the doomed man by the ankle and pulled him back into the bunker. The marines heard a human scream, and noises of struggle before a sickening crack…followed by a disgusting tear. Then silence.
The four marines looked at each other.
Martinez spoke wearily into his radio mike, “Atlas 17, this is 13, we found a bunker of some type…I …I think the tangos could have fled in there.”
“Roger, Atlas 13, we’re oscar mike to you now,” the radio crackled.
Martinez’s voice was shaking when he keyed the mike again, “Atlas 17, I think those things are here too.”
“Roger, hold position. Anything comes out of that bunker, engage. Atlas 17, out.”
Didn't have to tell him twice. Martinez kept his eyes on the entrance. If there was an abyss, he felt he was staring into it, and it was staring back at him.
“Spread the fuck out and keep your eyes on that bun-ker,” he said to his team. “I’m going to get a better look.”
They spread and took cover. Fingers were on triggers as Martinez crept closer and closer.
He could barely see anything in the darkness, but as he neared the bunker’s entrance he saw movement. He paused, reaching for two IR ChemLight he kept molle’d into his flak. He cracked them, and with a quick shake, they came to life. Casting a glow invisible to the naked eye, he tossed them through the entrance, soon revealing to his NVGs a cramped tunnel.
There, in a group, several figures crouched over some-thing; their backs turned to the entrance. They were feasting. One ChemLight had landed at the heels of the closest ghoul, who stopped its activity and turned to stare back at Mar-tinez.
More glowing eyes now locked on him. They all had the same faces; like the ones they’d taken out with grenades. They stared at him like those at a dinner party, having been rudely interrupted mid meal.
Cpl Martinez felt his heart beginning to thunder. Everything in his head told him to scream and start pulling the trigger. Fear, yes, but also terrifying fascination held him in place. He was out of grenades and he could count at least seven of them staring back at him.
Then the ghouls began to move slowly away, grabbing their corpses and moving deeper into the tunnel: huffing and groaning, casting glowing glances at Martinez and scowling at him as they departed.
All except one. One creature stepped forward, towards Martinez, glowing eyes locked. It stepped over the ChemLights and it was larger than the others, muscular and covered in scars.
It stopped just shy of the entrance. Keeping constant eye contact with Martinez, its face twisted into a disturbing smile, and it flung something from the tunnel which landed with a wet thud at Martinez’s feet.
Martinez looked down. A human arm. He looked back up, towards the ghoul standing in the bunker. It looked almost smug.
It waved its mammoth hand and began to speak, lips contorting on its gaunt face. Its voice sounded like a twisted mockery of a human’s. Cpl Martinez could make out there was language, but he didn’t understand what it was saying.
It finished its speech with a final wave, then it turned and vanished, leaving Cpl Martinez and his marines in stun-ned silence.
Part VII
The marines would complete their mission that night, but the battle for Fallujah would continue to rage for several more days. The marines never saw the creatures again, in fact their command would pull them from all missions. The platoon was regulated to base defense, which was fine by Martinez. But when they returned from the city, they each conducted a debrief with an “intelligence specialist” who seemed to care more about the strange humanoids than the mission.
“You’ve seen something like this before? Haven’t you?” Martinez asked the man, who only identified himself as “Barton.”
The man just smiled in a way that made Martinez’s blood go cold. “You can go now, Corporal.”
The marines were ordered to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements, never to discuss their odd mission under pen-alty of UCMJ. But they would whisper among each other about what they saw that night, a ghost story to tell in the smokepit and nothing more.
But Cpl Martinez couldn’t forget about what he saw: glowing eyes and haunting smiles. Strange creatures stalked the dark corners of his dreams. He carefully asked around, risking the punishment for violating the NDA he’d signed. But he didn’t care, he wanted to know what he’d seen. Were they really ghouls?
He would learn that other marines had seem something similar during Phantom Fury, strange figures that prowled the night streets of Fallujah. Ghoulish creatures that resembled twisted humans. Creatures that lived below ground, moving across Iraq in a system of tunnels and infes-ting Saddam’s bunkers. They prayed on insurgents and civilians in the darkness. Eaters of the dead and living alike.
But what really kept him up at night, was what the creature had said to him. While he didn’t understand it, the words were somehow seared into his brain. Most inter-preters would wave him away once he began describing what he remembered, like they were terrified to even speak about it. The ones that were willing to listen to him could not figure out the strange language either, but pleaded with him to keep his voice down.
But soon more pressing matters, such as the ongoing war, took his attention elsewhere.
Years later, after Fallujah and after Martinez had left the Marine Corps, he turned his search online, scouring the internet for answers. He found stories and legends of the ghouls; ancient humans who worshipped dark gods and twisted themselves into monsters. Devourers of their fellow man.
By chance, he connected with a member of a chatroom who claimed to know the language that Martinez had heard. It was Sumerian. Upon looking at the translation, Martinez snapped back to that fateful night. Seeing a ghoulish face contort as it spoke its message to him in the shadow of a burning city: “Blessings upon you for providing a feast un-seen in ages.”
How many times had these creatures emerged to feed on the living? In all of man’s folly and conquests and wars, had these things always been there, waiting with greedy hands?
Martinez closed his computer as he took a long swig from his drink. He let the whiskey burn down his throat as he became lost in thought.
He stood and stared out the window at the uncertain dark outside, but after a few moments he began to feel un-nerved and looked away. He sat back down, musing to him-self. He picked up a pen and fetched his notebook as a poem came to the front of his mind:
“The eaters of the dead must dance for joy,
among the bountiful harvest,
of fields of ripe corpses,
unlike any they have seen,
nurtured in the fog of war.”
The Pointman
The jungle was alive. Bugs, frogs, critters; all creatures joined together in their tropical cacophony. Until suddenly—silence. A new thunder filled the air.
The rain fell like a wall from the heavens. A damp, oppressive curtain that soaked into every pore and crack leaving no place for sanctuary from the downfall. The rain swapped the oppressive jungle heat for a suffocating hum-idity, creating a haze that draped a sinister cloak over that hellscape.
A man stalked forward, crouched low to the ground, each step deliberate, and soft into the quickly dampening mud. He held an M16, slick from the rain, in his pruned, callused hands. A gold embroidered patch, resembling a crimson leaf bearing a lightning bolt, adorned his left shou-lder. He was following the path of least resistance, hoping that this was a path well-traveled. Thinking like his enemy. A hunter after the most dangerous prey.
His eyes were wild from exhaustion and adrenaline. A junkie addicted by force. His eyes scanned left to right. Up and down. His ears strained for any sound out of place in the pouring rain. He sniffed the air, hoping to sense some sign. He soaked in all his senses could muster. His uniform was a soaping mess; ruined and destroyed from weeks out in the field. Web gear chafed him raw, but he kept it tight to him, preventing any noise while he moved. The jungle was the last place the twenty-two-year-old from the mean streets of Detroit ever expected to find himself. But after months in country, he was a natural moving within it. It felt like home.
He stopped and took a knee. Though his olive-drab boonie was soaked to its brim, instinctively he reached up and wiped the sweat and rain from his brow.
“Stop. Look down.”
He shifted his gaze to the ground before him, scanning slowly, cautiously; looking for a hidden danger he now knew was there.
“The stone…do you see the pattern on the leaves?”
Sergeant Josiah Blackburn locked his eyes on a curious stone. It sat out of place in the middle of his path, and there were no other stones like it. In fact, there were no stones around him at all. It was a river stone, precariously placed on the jungle ground. To the right of it was a pile of leaves that looked too perfect, too deliberate to be happenstance. He unsheathed his bayonet and slowly inched forward. Carefully he began to poke the bayonet into the mud, there could be a mine or something waiting to be triggered. The last thing he wanted was a face full of shrapnel or to be impaled by some grotesque bamboo trap.
He moved, even slower, feeling for any resistance or something other than jungle mud. So far nothing solid. He slipped the blade just under the outer array of leaves and began to wiggle its tip. He lifted it ever so slightly and the mass of leaves rose. Reaching forward and grabbing a hold of the net hidden under the leaves, he pulled. The leaves had been sown together: a makeshift camo net. It had been covering a hole; a good four-feet-deep hole, wide enough for a man to stand in.
Blackburn looked down into the deadfall and could only admire with grim respect the ingenious of it. A simple camo net disguised to look like refuse on the jungle floor covering a hole. An unassuming step would have sent him falling feet first onto a dozen wooden stakes sharpened to deadly poi-nts. A trap like this would have turned his feet and legs into Swiss cheese. If he was lucky he’d bleed out in minutes, if he was unlucky the trap would immobilize him and turn him into deadweight. To add insult to injury, the smell wafting up suggested that the muck waiting at the bottom wasn't just mud; mixing that with your blood would guarantee a nasty infection…if you made it out of the jungle at all.
Blackburn tossed the camo net aside. He reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out a length of white engineer tape. Carefully laying it on the ground, he made an X shape on either side of the deadfall. His platoon, who carefully foll-owed his footsteps some one hundred meters back, he knew they’d appreciate this heads up.
A trap like this could also mean something else…
“You’re not alone.”
He quickly sidestepped from the deadfall taking cover behind a log. He peered through the haze and rain, scanning for an unseen foe.
“They haven’t noticed you yet. The rain is too thick.”
Josiah had been in Vietnam for six months now, that whole while a member of a Long-Range Surveillance team. LRS had put him on countless missions; deep behind enemy lines. Hard lessons had taught him many of the Vietcong’s tricks. He had a reputation for his seemingly keen sense of where and what Charlie was working—hence why he was on point for his platoon right now. His platoon mates held him in high regard as a tracker and point man. They all be-lieved he had a sixth sense or something, and that it would keep them alive and breathing, their flesh free of bullets, and their feet unpunctured by vile bamboo.
If only they really knew, he mused to himself as his platoon crept behind, fascinated by “the pointman.”
If he was a betting man, that deadfall was simply a distraction. Charlie was nearby, probably waiting for some hapless GI to fall into that shit-filled pit. The screams would alert more GIs, who would come to his aid, which in turn would tell the Viet Cong their trap had been sprung.
Blackburn cursed himself under his breath. How could he have been so stupid, sitting out there in the open for so long? He was lucky that the rain was falling and, in turn, had created a jungle fog. That and the fact he was alone probably saved him. Charlie was nearby, but he hadn’t fallen for their trap nor had he been seen. But that wasn't going to last for long. Soon the fifty-two soldiers behind were going to catch up, and fifty-two GIs moving through the jungle was going to be hard to hide.
“There’s only two of them.”
Good. That means just a rearguard, Blackburn thought. An unknown-sized element of VC had bloodied a patrol in an ambush not far from here; the same group had allegedly shot down the medevac bird that came to retrieve the wounded. Blackburn’s platoon was selected for a search and destroy mission: to eliminate this group with prejudice. Intel had determined that this group was made up of veteran fighters; they knew the Americans were coming for them. They most likely were counting on this ambush to buy them enough time to vanish deeper into the jungle.
“In front of you.”
The rain was beginning to lighten and the fog beginning to dissipate. Blackburn scanned to his right, and he saw it. A fighting position sat about one hundred feet in front of him. It was a half crescent of dirt with palm fronds and large leaves thrown over it. The unmistakable barrel of a RPD light machine gun protruded out between a gap in its dirt. The position was off the trail, but it would block the platoon from moving forward.
“Look to your right. Follow the path.”
The rain suddenly picked back up. Fat raindrops fell like artillery, drowning out the noise in the jungle with a steady roar. Blackburn quickly understood. The brush got thick to his right and a fallen tree provided concealment. However, there was a break in the thick vegetation, most likely a trail used by some native fauna…and by the Vietcong. He shea-thed his bayonet and got low to the ground, he had to move quick before his platoon caught up. He didn't have time to warn them or wait. They would either run into the trap or he would run the risk of alerting their enemy. He crept deeper into the jungle now, following the natural path that weaved its way between thick vegetation and the trunks of trees. He knew where the path would take him.
Soon he reached his destination as he took cover behind a towering tree. The jungle path had led him to a position right behind the machine gun nest. Blackburn could make out two men laying in the prone under a makeshift canopy of leaves.
The impacts of rain on the foliage created a gentle thunder, and Blackburn crept forward, towards his targets. He gently slung his M16 across his back, carefully tightening the sling so the rifle would’nt flop around and generate noise. He didn't want to start shooting to only to have his platoon gun him down by accident. He would have to do this the hard way.
Blackburn unsheathed his bayonet once more and held it in an icepick grip. He crept closer and paused some ten feet away from the nest, holding his breath, remaining motion-less in the rain.
“The one on the left is asleep.”
He crept closer and closer until he was almost on top of the nest. The rain fell in a roar and thunder boomed overhead, but he could only hear the beating of his own heart. He could clearly see the two men in front of him now. Blackburn readied his blade and made his moved.
Blackburn lunged and fell upon the man behind the machine gun. Blackburn plunged his bayonet into the base of his enemy’s neck. Skin and muscle gave way as the blade struck the spine. Blackburn felt the blade slide to the right along the spine into the meat of the neck, he twisted the edge and ripped it to the right. Blood squirted in a sickening spectacle. The surprised man struggled, and in the throes of this death, Blackburn followed up with three quick stabs.
“His friend is awake.”
Blackburn pivoted and jumped, diving at the Vietcong whose face was beginning to contort in shock and horror. Blackburn’s bayonet slid home, into the ribcage of this second man. Blackburn kicked the rifle out of the doomed Vietcong’s hands as he brought it up to bare. Blackburn stab-bed and stabbed until the man stopped moving.
“He’s dead. You can stop now.”
The pointman sheathed his bayonet and unslung his rifle. The rain was subsiding. He stood over the dead men, covered in their blood, panting. And he heard a shout.
“Your platoon can see you.”
“Dole!” a shadowy figure shouted from behind a tree.
“I’d kill for a pineapple now!” Blackburn shouted back. “In fact, two Charlie KIA.”
Blackburn’s lieutenant ran up as the rest of the LRS pla-toon emerged, forming a perimeter.
“I don't have a pineapple, sergeant. I hope a cigarette will do.” The LT half-smiled, passing a cigarette to Black-burn before taking one out for himself. The platoon leader lit the pointman’s before lighting his own. The LT took a drag and surveyed the bodies and the nest, nudging the RPD with his foot. “Damn,” he said, “we would have walked right up on these two. They could have done a number on us if you didn't catch that deadfall and get the drop. You’re really something…or you just have the best damn luck.”
