Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [123]
We crawled across the forest floor, keeping behind bushes, sliding under piles of whispering leaves. An insane level of caution had become an unthinking instinct. There was nothing we wanted to see more than some of our own kind, but nothing we needed less than another firefight. As we got closer the singing became more distinct, and finally we were able to recognize the tune. It was from a song which was getting big airplay just before we went into The Gap, though the words seemed to be different.
Either way it meant the singers were some of ours, and we hauled ourselves to our feet and walked the rest of the way, Mal and I walking point. I don’t know what Mal was thinking—about noodles, probably—but I was fantasizing about cigarettes. I could almost feel the smoke in my lungs. I thought I might try having five at once.
The village was in a large clearing, and from forty yards away we could see soldiers in the remnants of the same army fatigues we wore. They didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, seemed in fact to be wandering around with a glazed look in their eyes. There was something odd about them, and I held my hand back to the others, urging them to be quiet and keep out of direct sight.
No one wanted to be in that village more than I, but I was getting a weird feeling. Instead of going straight into the front, I led them around the side and we carefully approached the village from a different angle. The closer we got, the easier it became to distinguish another sound, beneath the guttural singing and shouting. It sounded a bit like crying, or more precisely, like a number of people crying very quietly.
You didn’t see many tears in The Gap. People were either dead or glad to still be alive. I looked at Mai. We turned to the Lieutenant and he shrugged, clearly out of his depth. Then we walked into the village.
The first thing we saw was a little girl. Both of her legs had been cut off at the knee, and she was tied to a board which was propped up against one of the houses. She was crying quietly to herself, her eyes gazing without sight past us into some inner world. As the others stared at her I ducked my head into the house. I nearly vomited when I saw what was inside, and I thought I’d seen everything by then.
When I came back out I felt as if the world had changed, and as if it would never be the same again. I signaled dreamily to Mal and we walked a little farther along the village path, mouths open against the smell. We could see other soldiers, half naked, wandering around some of the huts a little distance away, but that wasn’t what we were looking at.
Gap children’s bodies lay all over the ground, broken across paths and lolling out of the doorways of huts, some little more than babies, others in their early teens. Some were recently dead, others had bloated in the heat until their guts exploded. Many of the corpses seemed to have a distinctive wound, a deep slash across the throat. The dust was crusted brown with their blood.
We came upon a makeshift pen in which about ten children squatted in the dirt. Some were missing limbs, their stumps hastily cauterized. Others were bleeding to death there and then, while the remainder stared hopelessly up at the sky, flinching as they heard us approach. Most of them had been blinded.
The rest of the unit caught up with us then, grinding to a horrified halt, and as we stood staring we heard a shout, and turned to see a soldier pointing at us. He was standing in the clearing at the center of the village, and it looked as if there were others there. We left the pen and approached him, passing walls stained with splatters of blood. Yards away we stopped, and this is what we saw:
Ten soldiers, most naked and dripping with sweat, others with strange scraps of clothes still hung around them.
A small pile of children’s bodies, the clearing red with what had escaped from them.
Three live children, two girls and a boy, held down on their knees by makeshift wooden frames.
And in the middle of all this, nodding his head in time to the song which