Excerpts from

Night in a Bad Place

 

 

 

FROM CHAPTER 10...

Nix was enveloped, the fog so thick he could feel it on his face and arms. He only knew he was still on the highway by kneeling to touch the blacktop. He kept moving, rifle across his waist cocked and unlocked, the long barrel of the M-fourteen almost swallowed by the white veil.

 

He had gone ahead for less than a minute when Nix froze. Even with the fog so dense, he sensed someone just ahead of him.

 

He was debating whether to fire or wait when the fog parted to reveal a figure standing on the road ahead.

 

It was a priest. Nix turned his rifle aside and moved toward him.

 

He was young with an intelligent peasant’s face, wearing the customary saffron robes.

 

“You are in a place of lies,” the priest said.Nix was caught off balance.

 

“What?”

 

“You face many dangers here,” the young priest said. “None more deadly than your own delusions.”

 

“What are you doing here, priest?” Nix demanded. He was short on patience at the moment. “You’d better get the hell off this road until we pass by.”

 

The priest gave him a look of admonishment, as if Nix needed to listen better. “The delusions that have shaped your life have led you in a bad way. Shed these lies,” the priest said sternly. “Cast them aside like the old filthy rags they are, or they will bring you to the end of your days.”

 

Nix laughed at this preposterous fool.

 

“What lies, priest?”

 

The young priest pointed behind Nix. Still amused, Nix turned to see.

 

When his dead brother opened his mouth to speak, dark river water gushed down his chest.

 

 

 

 

FROM CHAPTER 19...

“There’s an oriental symmetry to this war, you know,” Terhune said. “We’re locked into it, it never ends, never changes, and never makes any Goddamned sense. We massacre the innocents, including our own. We die for real estate we don’t intend to hold for five minutes and come back and do it over and over again.”

 

Terhune gestured out toward the pass, still visible in the fading light. “Fly across the Song Ba some days and it looks like a Bosch nightmare. That valley is a medieval horror, and right this moment, a medieval force is coming to wipe the slate clean.”

 

 

 

 

FROM CHAPTER 29...

Sergeant Watts had been standing upright behind the line of fighting holes which faced out into the valley between the Duster and Mendocino’s track near the river. He stood and stared out into the dark, as a series of small, uncanny revelations were just about to trip his switch.

Shellfire would hit one of the tiny hamlets not far off, illuminating what might or might not have been a mysterious mass of people, knotted up as if fleeing in panic.

 

Then they would vanish as the explosion’s flash died away. People. Out there where there should have been none.

 

Then the screaming. Mounting, protracted sounds of agony which seemed to move instantly from one point out in the valley to another far, far away.

 

Impossible sights and sounds in this damned place.

 

As Watts was turning this all over in his soldier’s mind, he heard a new sound.

 

This noise was of a very few people, fighting their way across a paddy out before him, legs battling the shitty muck, then the sound seemed to fold into dozens of pairs of legs moving toward Watts, and then this too folded into what sounded like an army.

 

Coming straight at him.

 

Running straight in on his position.

 

Watts turned and screamed for all he was worth: “Mad minute! Mad minute, Goddammit! Mad minute!”

 

In under five seconds, every weapon inside the laager came alive, blazing away into the night, laying down a deafening, withering sheet of fire.

 

Tracers crisscrossed in a blistering red arc and scythed along the entire perimeter. The Duster and Vulcan laid curtains of antiaircraft fire, up and down the line in a storm of metal.

 

Fifty-caliber and M-sixty fire hosed the paddies in a hot red arc which sliced from one end of the line to the other.

 

Riflemen pumped still more rounds out into the darkness.

 

Then it all stopped.

 

All eyes sought Watts, who stood cradling his rifle and gazing out into the paddies. All was silent and peaceful.

 

Was any of it real? He wondered.