David Drake - Balefires

Bloody faces washed black with smears of napalm, the winged men struggled toward Ginelli implacably. His mind barely functional, the soldier threw open the hatch and staggered onto the zippo's deck. Unseen, one flyer still hung in the air. It struck him in the middle of the back and catapulted him off the vehicle. Ginelli somersaulted across the dusty, flame-lit cauldron. The napalm's gluey tenacity fixed the creature firmly against Ginelli's flak jacket; its hooked claws locked into the fabric while its teeth tore his scalp.

The huge torch of the god tree crashed inward toward the laager. A flaming branch snapped with the impact and bounded high in the air before plunging down on the napalm-filled flame track. Ginelli staggered to his feet, tried to run. The zippo exploded with a hollow boom and a mushroom of flame, knocking him down again without dislodging the vengeful horror on his back.

With the last of his strength, Ginelli ripped off the unfastened flak jacket and hurled it into the air. For one glistening instant he thought the napalm-soaked nylon would land short of the pool of fire surrounding the flame track. His uncoordinated throw was high and the winged killer had time to pull one van loose as it pinwheeled. It struck the ground that way, mired by the incendiary that bloomed to consume it.

Ginelli lay on his back, no longer able to move. A shadow humped over the top of the wall: Hieu, moving very stiffly. His right hand held a cane spear. The Meng was withered like a violet whose roots had been chopped away, but he was not dead.

"You kill all, you… animals," he said. His voice was thick and half-choked by the napalm that had hosed him. He balanced on the wall, black against the burning wreckage of the god tree."All…"he repeated, raising the spear. "Cut… poison… burn. But you-"

Herrold's greasegun slammed beside Ginelli, its muzzle blast deafening even against the background roar of the flames. A solid bar of tracers stitched redly across the Meng's chest and slapped him off the wall as a screaming ball of fire.

It was still four hours to dawn, Ginelli thought as he drifted into unconsciousness; but until then the flames would give enough light.

Best Of Luck

As I mentioned in discussing "Firefight," in 1973 Marvel Comics started a digest fantasy/horror magazine titledThe Haunt of Horror. When they killed Haunt as a digest, they bruited the possibility of reviving it as a B amp;W horror comic with two pages of prose fiction. (I believe the purpose of the prose was to meet mailing criteria for a reduced postage rate.)

Two comic pages amounted to 1600-1800 words. I sat down to write a story which would fit that length. The result was "Best of Luck," another standard horror story using Viet Nam for its setting (as I'd done with "Arclight" and "Contact!").

The length was a problem. My first version of the story came to 2,000 words, short even for me but too long for the space. Even at the start of my career I understood something many writers fail to grasp: if there's a fixed amount of room available, turning in a story that is the fixed amount plus more is a sure route to rejection. I therefore cut out 200 words that really shouldn't have gone. I was never satisfied with the story after that final edit.

And Haunt wasn't revived in any format, so it'd all been wasted effort anyway. The story dropped completely out of my mind.

In 1977 Gerry Page, editor ofThe Year's Best Horror Storiesfor DAW Books, changed the previous reprint-only format (to which Karl Wagner reverted when he took over from Gerry in a few years). He asked me if I had a new story to submit; I told him I didn't.

Whereupon Kirby sold Gerry "Best of Luck." As I said, I'd forgotten about it.

Frankly, I wasn't thrilled to sell a story which I felt I'd crippled in the editing, but shortly afterward I got another surprise: NBC developed a horror anthology show, whose producers optioned "Best of Luck." Not only that, they later renewed the option. For quite a long time, "Best of Luck" was my most profitable story in total terms, let alone on a per-word basis.

I still wish I hadn't taken out that last 200 words.

A Russian-designed. 51 caliber machine gun fires bullets the size of a woman's thumb. When a man catches a pair of those in his chest and throat the way Capt. Warden's radioman did, his luck has run out. A gout of blood sprayed back over Curtis, next man in the column. He glimpsed open air through the RTO's middle: the hole plowed through the flailing body would have held his fist.

But there was no time to worry about the dead, no time to do anything but dive out of the line of fire. Capt. Warden's feral leap had carried him in the opposite direction, out of Curtis' sight into the gloom of the rubber. Muzzle flashes flickered over the silver tree-trunks as the bunkered machine guns tore up Dog Company.

Curtis' lucky piece bit him through the shirt fabric as he slammed into the smooth earth. The only cover in the ordered plantation came from the trees themselves, and their precise arrangement left three aisles open to any hiding place. The heavy guns ripped through the darkness in short bursts from several locations; there was no way to be safe, nor even to tell from where death would strike.

Curtis had jerked back the cocking piece of his M16, but he had no target. Blind firing would only call down the attentions of the Communist gunners. He felt as naked as the lead in a Juarez floor show, terribly aware of what the big bullets would do if they hit him. He had picked up the lucky Maria Theresa dollar in Taiwan, half as a joke, half in unstated remembrance of men who had been saved when a coin or a Bible turned an enemy slug. But no coin was going to deflect a. 51 cal from the straight line it would blast through him.

Red-orange light bloomed a hundred yards to Curtis' left as a gun opened up, stuttering a sheaf of lead through the trees. Curtis marked the spot. Stomach tight with fear, he swung his clumsy rifle toward the target and squeezed off a burst.

The return fire was instantaneous and from a gun to the right, unnoticed until that moment. The tree Curtis crouched beside exploded into splinters across the base, stunning impacts that the soldier felt rather than heard. He dug his fingers into the dirt, trying to drag himself still lower and screaming mentally at the pressure of the coin which kept him that much closer to the crashing bullets. The rubber tree was sagging, its twelve-inch bole sawn through by the fire, but nothing mattered to Curtis except the raving death a bullet's width above his head.

The firing stopped. Curtis clenched his fists, raised his head a fraction from the ground. A single, spiteful round banged from the first bunker. The bullet ticked the rim of Curtis' helmet, missing his flesh but snapping his head back with the force of a thrown anvil. He was out cold when the tree toppled slowly across his boots.

There were whispers in the darkness, but all he could see were blue and amber streaks on the inside of his mind. He tried to move, then gasped in agony as the pinioning mass shifted against his twisted ankles.

There were whispers in the darkness, and Curtis could guess what they were. Dog Company had pulled back. Now the VC were slipping through the trees, stripping the dead of their weapons and cutting the throats of the wounded. Wherever Curtis' rifle had been flung, it was beyond reach of his desperate fingers.

Something slurped richly near Curtis on his right. He turned his face toward the sound, but its origin lurked in the palpable blackness. There was a slushy, ripping noise from the same direction, settling immediately into a rhythmic gulping. Curtis squinted uselessly. The moon was full, but the clouds were as solid as steel curtains.

Two Vietnamese were approaching from his left side. The scuff of their tire-soled sandals paused momentarily in a liquid trill of speech, then resumed. A flashlight played over the ground, its narrow beam passing just short of Curtis' left hand. The gulping noise stopped.