Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

“David? Don’t you want to hear it?” Debora sounded peeved.

“Hear what?” He kept his eyes closed.

“About my dream. Weren’t you listening?”

He peeked at her. Everything was back to normal. She was sitting with her knees tucked under her, all her features in sharp focus. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking.”

“You looked frightened.”

“Frightened?” He put on a bewildered face. “Naw, just had a thought is all.”

“It couldn’t have been pleasant.”

He shrugged off the comment and sat up smartly to prove his attentiveness. “So tell me ’bout the dream.”

“All right,” she said doubtfully. The breeze drifted fine strands of hair across her face, and she brushed them back. “You were in a room the color of blood, with red chairs and a red table. Even the paintings on the wall were done in shades of red, and…” She broke off, peering at him. “Do you want to hear this? You have that look again.”

“Sure,” he said. But he was afraid. How could she have known about the red room? She must have had a vision of it, and… Then he realized that she might not have been talking about the room itself. He’d told her about the assault, hadn’t he? And if she had guerrilla contacts, she would know that the emergency lights were switched on during an assault. That had to be it! She was trying to frighten him into deserting again, psyching him the way preachers played upon the fears of sinners with images of fiery rivers and torture. It infuriated him. Who the hell was she to tell him what was right or wise? Whatever he did, it was going to be his decision.

“There were three doors in the room,” she went on. “You wanted to leave the room, but you couldn’t tell which of the doors was safe to use. You tried the first door, and it turned out to be a facade. The knob of the second door turned easily, but the door itself was stuck. Rather than forcing it, you went to the third door. The knob of this door was made of glass and cut your hand. After that you just walked back and forth, unsure what to do.” She waited for a reaction, and when he gave none, she said, “Do you understand?”

He kept silent, biting back anger.

“I’ll interpret it for you,” she said.

“Don’t bother.”

“The red room is war, and the false door is the way of your childish…”

“Stop!” He grabbed her wrist, squeezing it hard.

She glared at him until he released her. “Your childish magic,” she finished.

“What is it with you?” he asked. “You have some kinda quota to fill? Five deserters a month, and you get a medal?”

She tucked her skirt down to cover her knees, fiddled with a loose thread. From the way she was acting, you might have thought he had asked an intimate question and she was framing an answer that wouldn’t be indelicate. Finally she said, “Is that who you believe I am to you?”

“Isn’t that right? Why else would you be handling me this bullshit?”

“What’s the matter with you, David?” She leaned forward, cupping his face in her hands. “Why…”

He pushed her hands away. “What’s the matter with me? This”—his gesture included the sky, the river, the trees—“that’s what’s the matter. You remind me of my parents. They ask the same sorta ignorant questions.” Suddenly he wanted to injure her with answers, to find an answer like acid to throw in her face and watch it eat away her tranquility. “Know what I do for my parents?” he said. “When they ask dumbass questions like ‘What’s the matter?’, I tell ’em a story. A war story. You wanna hear a war story? Something happened a few days back that’ll do for an answer just fine.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said, discouraged.

“No problem,” he said. “Be my pleasure.”

The Ant Farm was a large sugar-loaf hill overlooking dense jungle on the eastern border of Fire Zone Emerald; jutting out from its summit were rocket and gun emplacements that at a distance resembled a crown of thorns jammed down over a green scalp. For several hundred yards around, the land had been cleared of all vegetation. The big guns had been lowered to maximum declension and in a mad moment had obliterated huge swaths of jungle, snapping off regiments of massive tree trunks a couple of feet above the ground, leaving a moat of blackened stumps and scorched red dirt seamed with fissures. Tangles of razor wire had replaced the trees and bushes, forming surreal blue-steel hedges, and buried beneath the wire were a variety of mines and detection devices. These did little good, however, because the Cubans possessed technology that would neutralize most of them. On clear nights there was little likelihood of trouble; but on misty nights trouble could be expected. Under cover of the mist Cuban and guerrilla troops would come through the wire and attempt to infiltrate the tunnels that honeycombed the interior of the hill. Occasionally one of the mines would be triggered, and you would see a ghostly fireball bloom in the swirling whiteness, tiny black figures being flung outward from its center. Lately some of these casualties had been found to be wearing red berets and scorpion-shaped brass pins, and from this it was known that the Cubans had sent in the Alacran Division, which had been instrumental in routing the American Forces in Miskitia.

There were nine levels of tunnels inside the hill, most lined with little round rooms that served as living quarters (the only exception being the bottom level, which was given over to the computer center and offices); all the rooms and tunnels were coated with a bubbled white plastic that looked like hardened seafoam and was proof against anti-personnel explosives. In Mingolla’s room, where he and Baylor and Gilbey bunked, a scarlet paper lantern had been hung on the overhead light fixture, making it seem that they were inhabiting a blood cell: Baylor had insisted on the lantern, saying that the overhead was too bright and hurt his eyes. Three cots were arranged against the walls, as far apart as space allowed. The floor around Baylor’s cot was littered with cigarette butts and used Kleenex; under his pillow he kept a tin box containing a stash of pills and marijuana. Whenever he lit a joint he would always offer Mingolla a hit, and Mingolla always refused, feeling that the experience of the firebase would not be enhanced by drugs. Taped to the wall above Gilbey’s cot was a collage of beaver shots, and each day after duty, whether or not Mingolla and Baylor were in the room, he would lie beneath them and masturbate. His lack of shame caused Mingolla to be embarrassed by his own secretiveness in the act, and he was also embarrassed by the pimply-youth quality of the objects taped above his cot: a Yankee pennant; a photograph of his old girlfriend, and another of his senior-year high school basketball team; several sketches he had made of the surrounding jungle. Gilbey teased him constantly about this display, calling him “the boy-next-door,” which struck Mingolla as odd, because back home he had been considered something of an eccentric.

It was toward this room that Mingolla was heading when the assault began. Large cargo elevators capable of carrying up to sixty men ran up and down just inside the east and west slopes of the hill; but to provide quick access between adjoining levels, and also as a safeguard in case of power failures, an auxiliary tunnel corkscrewed down through the center of the hill like a huge coil of white intestine. It was slightly more than twice as wide as the electric carts that traveled it, carrying officers and VIPs on tours. Mingolla was in the habit of using the tunnel for his exercise. Each night he would put on sweat clothes and jog up and down the entire nine levels, doing this out of a conviction that exhaustion prevented bad dreams. That night, as he passed Level Four on his final leg up, he heard a rumbling: an explosion, and not far off. Alarms sounded, the big guns atop the hill began to thunder. From directly above came shouts and the stutter of automatic fire. The tunnel lights flickered, went dark, and the emergency lights winked on.