5

The beast was inert, vital signs locked down, frozen motionless ... waiting. The gigantic clown warrior had nearly waddled out of the deep shadows but something touched him, signaled his mental computer, and he stopped in his tracks.

A big, bright Kate Smith moon shone down on the Southeast Asian jungle that butted up against the woods. Blue feature to one side, jungle in front, open rice fields to the other side. He continued to wait, unhurried and untroubled, ignoring the swarming things that fed off him, impervious to assaults of such insignificance.

They appeared, sure enough, in a patch of saffron moonlight, perhaps a thousand meters in the distance. His weird mindscreen absorbed it in through the sensors, tasting the information and finding it palatable, chewing over the data, swallowing and ingesting the relevant aspects, then, when the cud was assimilated, expectorating it into the maw of his hungry computer. A meter was 39.37 inches, more than a yard. Ten football fields? A thousand meters. He was terrain-aware, shadow-cognizant, environmentally alert to woods, moon, jungle, darkness, rhythms of movement, textures and permutations of sight, smell, sound. He silently acknowledged their noise discipline. More than a squad. The remains of a broken platoon, perhaps, caught in the dangerous moonbeams.

He gathered in and collated more raw information, but the mindscreen functioned on its own, computing and assessing even as new data were factored: one klick was a kilometer, sixty-two hundredths of a mile. One metric yard was...

Their version of force recon? The ambush team? Of no consequence to the massive figure, who, unfortunately, was not currently predisposed to engage these little people. He would have enjoyed taking the last one down, squeezing off a big nasty wet one and putting the tail man to sleep. They would flatten, chitter, jitter-jive like monkeys as they hit the jungle floor. He had genuine affection for the little people, as he always thought of them. He really liked them. He really liked to kill them.

The images of the distant shadow men danced like faraway campfire silhouettes. His mental computer continued to take in and process the snap of each twig, the crackle of the leaves around him, the pop of tree limbs, the bug buzz, monitoring his own safety as he watched the passing parade, his thoughts a warm fuzziness of command-detonated claymores.

It was such a shame not to do them. The imagined taste of a salty warrior heart made him salivate. Pleasant fantasies to make the moments pass.

They melted away into the night and yet he remained completely inert. The sensors still glowed red inside his mind and he ignored them at his own peril. The life-support and maintenance system that had evolved in closets, trunks, interrogation “interview” rooms, and solitary-confinement cells breathed deeply of the ambient darkness, absorbing and analyzing everything from the possible existence of toxic thiophosphates, to nuoc mam, to Agent Orange. Satisfied, data collated, the beast took his first normal breath in several minutes, and resumed his route of exfiltration.

It was still morning by the time he reached the edge of the sprawling U.S. fire base that provided support and resupply for such surrounding elements as LZ Mary, but the sun was already high in the sky and the pierced-steel planking reflected retained heat like a griddle. He'd breached the childish perimeter security without breaking a sweat.

A sergeant stood shielding his face with a manifest clipboard as a combat attack chopper lifted from the baking military surface. At that moment Chaingang Bunkowski began to make his move, and the man didn't hear him. When the wind-whipped debris had abated, the supply sergeant returned to itemizing goods for an immense C-130 cargo monster that waited not far away.

Another immense monster materialized from the shadows around a nearby Quonset hut, startling the man at his work.

“This is off limits, troop,” he growled, warning the huge apparition.

“Sergeant, I'm supposed to rance a trason over here, do you know whether they crayled or not?” Words, accompanied by contortions of a rubbery face, the face of a born actor, timed to simulate genuine concern; non-words that sounded like words spoken fast, slurred, said with a beamy, radiant Pillsbury doughboy smile. A verbal onslaught rumbled from the depths of a basso profundo gutbox, by something so large and immediately menacing it discombobulated as well as frightened.

“Tracers? Say what?"

“They said over at the connus I was supposed to race a trishon or—” the metal links snaked out of the big, reinforced canvas pocket like an uncoiling steel rattler, each link wrapped in black tape, propelled by a killing arm the size of a foot-wide sewer pipe, putting an end to one Sergeant Fellows, who had always watched his weight, played the game, kissed officer heinie, got his malaria, typhus, and hepatitis shots, and done his damndest to stay a safe REMF till he could DEROS. But this was one Rear Echelon Melon Farmer whose Date of Estimated Return suddenly got reupped to the Twelfth of Never.

Fingers like gigantic cigars had the sarge in a death grip, and even as his lights were going out, the monster was pulling him back into the shadows to feed.