65 – Echoes of the past

The house looked and sounded vacant. The booming rock & roll of hours ago seemed an illusion now, like some dark nightmare Lance had dreamed up-- he half expected to wake to the scream of mortars and find himself in the jungle again, someone shaking him, someone telling him wounded men needed his services.

 He smelled death wafting down the stairs from the house instead of sound or light. He had come to know it at a distance.

 "Something's wrong up there," Lance said, pinching Bobo's shoulder in the dark. "There should be some kind of noise."

 "Maybe they're meditating," Bobo said.

 "Or dead."

 "Don't be so upbeat, pacifist." But Bobo sounded tired, and his gaze studied the house without its usual spark.

 "Why can't we go in, at least."

 "Because I want Mike and Dan here first," Bobo said. "The more of us the better. If Buckingham's in there, I don't want him slipping out the back when we charge in."

 Then, both heard the shooting, the echoes of the shots carrying off the sides of the valley the way they did in Vietnam, like voices crying of death in the distance. Bobo turned and stared at Lance, his gaze uncertain.

 "It's them," Lance said. "Mike and Dan are in trouble."

 "Bullshit," Bobo barked. "It's probably the cops shooting at each other. You know how armed men get having to wait."

 "But what if it is them?"

 "Shut up, damn it. You're giving me the jitters, too."

 "Maybe we should get out of the car. We're too easy a target in here."

 "And go where?"

 "The garage," Lance said.

 Bobo glanced across the street. "Is there an entrance into the house from inside it?"

 "I didn't notice. Maybe."

 "All right," Bobo said. "We'll go for it. But you do as I say-- no more freak-outs. Okay?"

 "I'm all right," Lance said. Yet things spun inside his head as if inside a moving top, swirling round and round. He could smell it. Not napalm or gun powder, but death itself. In the heat, the rotting started quick.

 "Out," Bobo said.

 Lance pulled up the handle with a click and pushed out the door, easing into the night. The silent night, in which the house and city seemed to have muffled itself. Even the gush of traffic on the freeway seemed subdued, the crease of earth in which Echo Lake hid had blanketed itself with quiet. No sirens. No cries from the trees. The pre-moments before a fire fight.

 Bobo kept close to the car, a pistol in his hand and another poking out of his belt. He didn't look the part of a western gunfighter, but more a Mississippi Gambler lacking only the string tie and brass-buttoned vest. Lance slid around to the driver's side and followed the man as he made the leap from the shadow on one side of the street to the shadow on the other, avoiding the pale blue islands of light that spilled from the street lamps. Then, they charged through the one remaining unavoidable island to the doors of the garage. It was closed but not locked. Lance could see the back of the van inside like an old friend's face.

 "You open it, I'll cover you," Bobo said.

 Lance reached for the worn rope handle and pulled the door up. It rose in a solid piece, springs groaning as the wheels moved along the track. It was loud in the silence, and for a moment, Lance hesitated. But nothing seemed to notice their small violation.

 The street light poured over the van, but the blue glow dampened the bright paint, leaving it more varying shades of grey. The side door jutted out slightly from Mike's visit perhaps, though Lance felt something quivering within, a sniffling sound like that of a frightened puppy easing out.

 "And what the hell are you doing?" Bobo hissed sharply.

 "Checking the van."

 "For what?"

 "Just checking," Lance said and swung the door open more, letting the light from outside fall in on the interior, upon the huddled and still-naked figure of Sarah.

 She leaped out, all nails and teeth, striking straight at Lance's throat like an animal gone crazy. "You won't get me!" she screamed.

 Lance fell back, but tripped over something on the garage floor, a suitcase abandoned earlier, and Sarah fell upon him, hissing and tearing at his face with her hands.

 Bobo moved, wrapping his arm around her throat. She struggled, yet couldn't reach back.

 "Leave me alone!" she screeched again, kicking at Bobo's shins.

 "Shut her up, Lance," Bobo growled. "She'll bring all hell down on us if you don't."

 Lance clamored to his feet, staggering forward, hushing Sarah. But the dilated woman's eyes stared back at him like the blank dark interior of a double-barrelled shotgun.

 "Leave me alone!" she screamed again, this time louder than before.

 "Shut her up!"

 "How?"

 "Hit her."

 Lance's open palm struck her once across the face. It was enough. Her body stiffened-- gaze focusing for a moment on Lance, then clouded as she sagged. She whimpered as Bobo lowered her to the ground.

 "Damned crazy stuff," Bobo said. "What the hell is she doing on here like that anyway?"

 "Hiding," Lance said. He had seen such things before, kids curled up in boxes and baskets hoping to escape the slaughter of their village, crying out first in Vietnamese, then in English, not total sure which side had come on them this time. All sides wore the same face after so many years. All sides brought bombs and misery.

 And stoned as she was, Sarah looked every bit a child, clutching her knees to her chest as she rocked back and forth on the cold concrete floor.

 "Something's happened in the house," Lance said suddenly. "Something ugly."

 "You can tell all that from here?" Bobo said.

 "Yeah."

 Bobo glanced around the interior of the garage. Two broken windows showed at the rear, half buried in leaves and trash. There was no door up into the house.

 "She must have come out the front door," Bobo said.

 "We have to go up and look," Lance mumbled, his hands shaking. He felt it now, the inevitable throb, not cowardice, but horror. He knew what he would find upstairs. He simply didn't believe it had come home with him on the plane, the ghost of war spreading out in his own country the way it had through theirs.

 "All right," Bobo said. "But you're not going up there unarmed."

 Lance refused the weapon. "I won't use it," he mumbled and tried to lift Sarah. She yanked her arm away from him, whimpering about not wanting to go back "in there."

 "Leave her," Bobo said.

 Lance nodded. It would take time to unwind her. Time and patience. And he had to see the thing upstairs for himself, to look at it, and then let it go again, as if it echoed in his head with the sound of dripping blood.

 Out he went with Bobo at his heals, and up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Had to see it. Look at it. Get it out of him. Then forget it. Had to exorcise it the way he had a thousand similar scenes from Nam.

 "Slow down, boy," Bobo said, grabbing his arm at the door. "You don't know what's...."

 Lance tore away from the grip and pushed the door in, feeling it stick on something soft, watching the limp hand fall free and the door swung in. The dead and naked body tumbled after it like some poor practical joke.

 But it was no joke. Nor was the body the only one. Such bodies filled the whole front room, pale flesh sprawled here and there in positions of love-making like dolls. They had moved on into some new cycle of life in which these carcasses were no longer needed and had been left this side of the cosmic door. In the heat they had already begun to stink.

 Death!

 "NO!" Lance roared as Bobo reached to flick on the light switch. "Leave it off."

 "But some of them might still be alive," Bobo said, retching himself as his face twisted with the horror, a green horn in this world despite his tours overseas.

 "Someone is alive," Lance said, feeling it. "But not in this room."

 "You seem to know an awful lot," Bobo said, stepping over the fallen limbs as if they were trees. "What exactly is going on here?"

 "I think they were poisoned," Lance said.

 "What?"

 "It might have been self-induced," Lance said, moving towards the curtain that separated the external orgy from the inner sanctum. "But I'm no expert on suicide. Let's look in the other room."

 Lance pulled aside the curtain. More bodies. Only these hadn't been poisoned. The floor, walls and ceiling were flecked with bits of flesh and speckles of blood. The figures had fallen in place, as if part of some frenzied dance, perhaps one celebrating their passage to the next world, celebrating the death of those outside. In the midst of it all and still seated on his throne, Dale sat, staring at Lance and Bobo, the bloody machete still dangling from his fingers. He looked exhausted, not stoned, though his face wore an oddly satisfied expression.

 "Welcome, pilgrims," Dale said with a laugh. "Have you come to pass on to the new world?"

 "Why you son of a..." Bobo screamed.

 "No, Bo!" Lance shouted and leaped at the upraised pistol. But the shots came, one after another, each bullet ripping through the unprotected chest of the seated man. Dale sagged forward, blood pouring out his still-smiling mouth.

 Lance fell against one of the stereo speakers as Bobo's arm lowered.

 "That's for Jake," Bobo whispered.

 "Who's Jake?" Lance asked, out of a daze.

 "The man this son of a bitch killed. But I got to Buckingham first," Bobo said with a laugh. "And paid up the debt in full."

 Lance shook his head. "Then you shot the wrong man. Dale's not Buckingham."

 Bobo looked up sharply. "But he has to be. What about all these people..."

 "Dale killed them. But that's the doing of a fanatic. Hardly the calculating soul everybody's been mumbling about."

 "If he's not Buckingham, who is?"

 Lance didn't answer; two shots did. The exit holes burst from Bobo's chest in another spray of blood and flesh. Bobo twisted around, his top half seeming to separate from his bottom as he fell, joining the carnage already on the floor.

 Lance rolled to the side, then crashed through one of the blacked-out windows. He landed with a thud on the side of the hill. The pistol fired again, splattering glass and wood above his head. Lance let gravity take him, rolling down the slanted ground along the side of the building, leaves and dust kicking up around his face, chasing the smell of death from his nostrils. He hit the trunk of a fallen tree, then rose, staggered over it, and ran.

 Flashes of color burst in his head. Explosions in his ears. The night had ripped open into jungle and flame, burning villages cropping up around him where L.A. had been before, and groaning villagers dying on either side.

 Choppers! Choppers!

 Machines guns and mortars.

 His heart screamed in his chest, begging for the mercy of death, wanting to slip out of it the way the junkies had, a mellow answer to the unmellow world. Maybe Dale had been right. Maybe man wasn't meant for this side of the door, that only on the other side was there any sense of peace.

 A hand grabbed him out of the darkness as soon as he fell to the street, a shotgun pushed its way up into his face.

 "What the fuck is going on here?" Demetre demanded.

 "Buck--" Lance groaned. "Bobo-- Dale-- all of them dead."

 "Buckingham?" Demetre growled. "In there."

 Lance nodded.

 "Fine!" Mike growled, moving around from behind the cops and towards the stairs. "It's about time all this shit came to an end."

 "No, Michael," Demetre shouted. But the man had already leaped up the steps.

 "We can't let him go up there alone!" Lance said and struggled to follow. But Demetre pressed down on him.

 "You stay with me," he said, dragging Lance back across the street and behind the line of parked cars. Bobo's car. His own car. Other cars likely those of the already fallen inside. Demetre positioned himself with the shotgun laid across the hood. He removed a pistol from his belt and put that on the hood as well.

 Shots sounded from inside. A surging series of shots that seemed more a conversation than a battle, first one, then another, repeated for a moment, then followed by silence. Demetre's hands tightened on the shotgun. A figure appeared at the front door and staggered down the stairs like a drunk, one hand holding closed a wound in the chest.

 "Halt right there," Demetre shouted. The figure paused half way down, lifted the pistol and fired. But only the sound of clicking empty chambers came.

 Demetre rose and moved around the front of the car, abandoning the shotgun for his pistol. The figure staggered forward again as sirens wailed from various directions.

 Choppers! Choppers!

 Police cars screeched as they turned down the street and stopped, headlights filling the broken asphalt with brightness, each catching the face of the figure as if fell forward from the stair.

 "Chris?" Lance yelped and charged towards the fallen woman. She looked up and smiled, and like Dale, bubbled blood from her lips.

 "Hello, pacifist," she mumbled and coughed. "One hell of a place for you to be, eh?"

 "But why, Chris?" Lance demanded. "What was all this about?"

 "I loved him," she said, through another series of coughs. "And he was going away."

 ""Mike?" Lance shouted and rose, letting go of Chris' clutching hand. "Mike?"

 Some cops tried to stop Lance as he mounted the stairs. But Demetre waved them off. He plunged through the door and over the carnage and found Mike slumped near the broken window, a stream of blood pouring from a cavity in his chest. His hand still gripped his pistol. But he had gone beyond the point of using it again. Dead. And yet his eyes and face still wore the expression of utter disbelief. He had met Buckingham and she had killed him. His was the expression of a man betrayed too many times.

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