Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (32 page)

People were moving through the underbrush. Arnold could hear them, a group crashing through the undergrowth without apparent concern, a short distance away but growing closer by the second. Arnold poked his head up and looked back at Jackson and Hauewell, who were hunkered down, guarding the explosives. Behind them the PISCES intelligence analyst, Morgan Kitely, squatted clutching his Delisle carbine, his eyes as big as saucers. Dr. Smith was nowhere to be found. He had been walking behind Kitely just minutes before, but now he was gone. The alien was gone and an unknown force of men was approaching them.

Shit.

Arnold trotted up the slope towards Rai, his Thompson submachine gun clutched to his chest like a prayer. Rai’s eyes met his in the dark of the underbrush. The little Gurkha held his Sten in one hand and grip of his sheathed kukhri in the other. He raised his thick eyebrows in a questioning expression. The racket in the jungle grew closer.

“Rai,” Arnold whispered. “C’mon.” Arnold, in a crouch,
dashed
over the crest of the slope towards the noise, head safely below the plant cover, and Rai followed. The only thing to mark their passage was the ghostly whisper of the plants that parted in their wake. They crossed a small ravine and then went up another rise, pushing their way quietly through the brush. When they reached the crest of the second hill, Rai touched Arnold’s shoulder and pointed through the openings in the undergrowth to the bowl-shaped, vegetation-choked terrain beneath them, a small portion of which was illuminated by a break in the canopy. From where they were, about a quarter mile from where they’d left their team, Arnold and Rai could see a small troop of natives heading straight for their comrades. Beyond those men Arnold could also spy singular intruders, nothing more than wakes in the high grass, converging on the slope on the far side of which Jackson and the rest of team were hunkered down.

“Shit,” Arnold said and then they heard the harsh reports of submachine guns, a Sten and then an M3. The chatter intertwined and sent hundreds of small animals crashing through the underbrush, letting loose a wave of colorful birds from their near-perfect hiding places, each racing for the safety of the sky. Arnold leapt up, poking his head over the plant cover as he saw the natives running for the sound of the gunfire, which was coming from where they had left Jackson and Hauellwell. The natives wore the garb of the local tribe, the N’Bangu, but moved with no grace through the jungle. Instead they bolted forward, oblivious to the racket they were making. They held no recognizable weapons, but something like dread slipped into Arnold’s heart when he saw the cylindrical metal shafts each held in his arms. The featureless gleam of the silver devices spoke of untold advancement.

They reminded him of the child at the hotel room.

Arnold and Rai charged towards the firefight. The tribesmen had already disappeared over the crest of the slope and were out of sight by the time Arnold and Rai had rushed up the hill, less than a minute behind them. Arnold quickly removed a grenade from his pack and hooked it through the spoon onto his shoulder harness. Rai cocked his Sten. As they ran both men looked at each other, and Arnold could see through Rai’s illusion of invulnerability, but only for a moment. The little Nepalese man’s eyes flinched each time a submachine gun blared from the far side of the hill, an unconscious reflex. Rai was ready, though, and Arnold had no doubt the man would follow him into the jaws of hell itself without hesitation.

Strange sounds answered the bursts of submachine gun fire from over the hill. Ear-splitting cracks like the snaps of a giant bullwhip. In time with these cracks, the darkness of the canopy was illuminated suddenly by stark bursts of white light which left harsh afterimages on Arnold’s eyes. In those bursts of light each tiny aspect of the dark canopy above was illuminated in perfectly. As they reached the top of the rise that stood between them and the fire-fight Rai started forward, but Arnold jerked the little man back by the strap of his backpack. Something, some warning, danced across Arnold’s mind. The sound—the light—lightning? Electricity?

For a split second they stood, heads just barely over the crest of the hill, listening to the sounds of the ambush. Then Arnold’s mind finished the equation: Electricity + Composition B = ... With all his strength, Arnold slung the Gurhka back down the slope by his equipment harness.

“What—” Rai began to say, and then the world was lost in conflagration.

The buffeting, torturous wind ripped by Arnold’s head like a train, missing him by inches, followed by the sharp burning needles of a million tiny splinters hitting his skin. Flight, just the feeling of being in the air, of being upside down. The terrible feeling of falling upside down towards an unknown point of impact, afterimages of the flash obscuring his vision as he hit. Leaves first, then a small tree which split and cracked under his weight, and finally a breath-stealing, muddy deadfall. The sounds of a thousand creatures the size of elephants crashing through the woods, the domino-like crashing fall of a hundred trees. A rasping overpowering wind, a pounding like a hammer on his skull—his breath, his heartbeat. Then a rain of tiny flaming pieces of wood, dropping from the sky as if by magic.

Something dug uncomfortably into his shoulder as he lay in the smoldering underbrush, and Arnold sat up, dazed, pulling an inch of pulverized blackened tree out of his arm in the process. The portion of wood fell to the ground but made no sound. The entire world was silent except for his pulse in his ears.

Blood began to cascade out of the gaping, black wound in his arm, but he felt nothing. Arnold put his hands to his legs and found them both intact. He clutched his face and found nothing amiss, though his sight was shot through with blotches of white and red and his face felt heavy. His submachine gun was beneath him, he was sitting on it, and the strap had broken. His grenade had rolled away somewhere into the jungle. He would have to fix that strap, he thought numbly, and began to slowly gather up the remnants of his gear with his good arm.

Rai was over him then, saying something, looking as fit as always, somehow miraculously untouched by the apocalyptic event. The little Nepalese man grabbed Arnold’s arm and looked at it. Pulling a case from his
improbably large
pack, which he settled on the ground like it was weightless, he tore a length of bandage out and began to wrap Arnold’s arm, but Arnold shook him off and stood up shakily. The world rose and fell around him, like he himself was not even moving but the world was moving for him. Like a drunk he stumbled up the rise that he had been thrown down, and crumpled to his hands and knees on the crest in the middle of a gap in the underbrush. Rai ran up next to him. Arnold stood again with the man’s help, but the world kept careening from side to side crazily, like he was watching it from the deck of a ship in rough water.

Where Haulewell and Jackson and Kitely had been at the bottom of the hill, where the natives had rushed, where the jungle had once grown, was now simply a wasteland. A huge, circular ditch of deep black more than fifty feet across cut into the earth like a giant pockmark, and the trees surrounding it had been knocked flat in concentric circles, some still on fire, others uprooted and flung about like matchsticks. The canopy itself had been violated, and the sun now shone down so brightly that Arnold, looking up into it, flinched away and found his eyes drawn again to the scene of devastation. Nothing lived within the circle.

A hundred yards of jungle had been incinerated by the explosion, the underbrush aflame or just gone, the ground rent into blast zones of black, grey and brown. Nothing of the team remained. Nothing of the natives remained. Nothing remained at all. Arnold felt his legs give way, finally, like a rusty hinge forced to open. His body was suddenly liquid and loose. The shock of his head hitting the ground felt like falling onto a pillow of feathers. He stared up at the sky past the burned remnants of trees to the unearthly glow of the sun. Beyond the haze, into the glow there was more. Past this world, was there respite? Was there some place where he might find peace? Rai was yelling at him from far away.

Was he staring at the same sky that left a smile on Karl Bruning’s ruined, dead, face? Was it so wrong to want it all to be over? Didn’t he deserve that peace, too? Hadn’t he done his part? Something seeped into his mind like shame, spilling over his thoughts and tainting any dream he might have had of escape with the blackness of guilt.

No. He was the last vestige of hope in this abused world. He was all that was left, and Smith was loose and alive in the jungle. Arnold still had his part to do. A shiver ran through his body and shook it like a rag-doll. Rai was screaming at him now, but there was no sound. Arnold tried to focus on something, some little thing to bring him back, to bring him up out of the tunnel which had surrounded his vision. A green plant hung over his head, over Rai’s head. Like Rai it was miraculously untouched by the explosion.

On it a small, luminous silver bug crawled over the huge expanse of the leaf, oblivious to the carnage around it. Everywhere else, everything past the leaf was gone, was void, but the bug crawled forward unmindful of larger events. The bug was alive, surrounded by nothing but disintegrated forest and an endless field of blast-ravaged dirt. Yet it continued forward. Arnold’s hands limply tracked across his chest, a shaft of pure pain rippling up his body as he shifted his blood-covered shoulder. His hands searched on their own for something which was gone, something which was important, something so vital that his hands, independent of thought, knew to search for it.

The sky began to flicker before his vision, shuttering in and out like a film sputtering to a stop on a screen. Black, then the sky, black and the sky. Arnold tried to pull his eyes wide, but realized too late that his vision was not obscured by his eyelids but something inside his body was wrong. Arnold’s last thought before unconsciousness clutched his struggling mind was:

The box.

And then the rushing darkness.

“Sit down, Alan,” Major Cornwall said in a subdued voice, distractedly considering a conglomeration of photographs on his huge desk. Weak, yellow sunlight spilled in the vaulted window, leaving everything facing Alan Barnsby in shadow. Barnsby walked swiftly into the room and stood at the front of the desk, as stiff as the suits of armor which flanked Cornwall. Barnsby’s thin, gaunt face was set in sharp angles. The tiny zig-zag, white scar traced its way across his brow, rippling with the tension in his frame. His anger was a vibrant thing, alive in the room like the hum of a tuning fork. The major looked up slowly, his face fixed in a frown which brought the edges of his waxed mustaches up at a strange angle.

“Alan?”

“Major. I wish to know your plans regarding the information I uncovered in America... sir.” Barnsby’s voice was high-pitched and unsure, like that of a boy confronting his father for the first time, and his eyes darted uncomfortably around the room.

Major Cornwall settled into his seat deliberately, letting out a small grunt. He glanced up at Barnsby and then down again at the photographs on his desk. In the grainy black and white photos huge stone blocks stood in limitless desert, looking as old and timeless as the sand itself. Aborigines and white men posed around the stones, looking windblown and lost, as small as ants in front of the huge masonry.

“Lieutenant, you are the last person I— “ Cornwall began, his voice filled with quiet, angery disbelief.

“Stop, please, sir.”

Cornwall glanced up and something shifted behind his blue-grey eyes. He let loose a long, drawn sigh and pointed at the chair implacably with a single taut finger. Barnsby sat suddenly as if commanded by God himself.

“It really doesn’t do any good posturing with a ‘talent,’ does it, Alan?” Cornwall stood and stiffly straightened his starched uniform. He looked away from Barnsby and something like emotion bled through his voice as the sentence died on his lips. He cleared his throat and stared out the window onto the moors.

“What have you heard, Alan?”

“About the disappearances in Australia, sir. The American agents,” Barnsby sputtered.

“Who told you this?” Cornwall turned his head, looked Barnsby over once and then, realizing the frail man did not mean to answer, turned back to consider the window.

“What are you doing with my information, sir?”

“I am doing my best for England, Barnsby.” Cornwall’s voice was muffled and he drew a deep breath in, straightening his shoulders squarely, like he was at attention. A cloud passed over the muted sun.

“What are you doing with my information, sir?”

Cornwall turned suddenly.

“Your information simply pointed us in the direction of something we were searching for since 1940.”