Turn of the Cards by Victor Milán

Author:Victor Milán [Milán, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780553561524
Google: u0nJAQAACAAJ
Amazon: 0553561529
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1993-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

“Village is deserted, Sarge,” Mario called back from the point, leading the squad out of the rice fields. He was a slight, intense kid with a Rambo rag tied around his temples. His skin was covered with pebble-like protrusions, which gave rise to the name Mark had briefly known him by back on the Rox, Rocky.

The sergeant stopped. Still strung out single file after coming off a paddy dike, the squad did an inchworm thing behind him.

“Is it, now?” Mario was shifty and smart and had seen some combat during the nightmare siege of Bloat’s stronghold. The sergeant thought he had potential to be a good troop, which was why he’d put him in the crucial — and, in an actual wartime situation, highly dangerous — point position.

The sergeant pointed at a pen where a heavy-horned water buffalo with a calf nuzzling her side eyed them with deep suspicion. “Think they’d leave their animals behind?”

He started walking again. Mario stood there slumped, with the consciousness of having fucked up just beating off him like heat off sun-warmed blacktop.

“Mario, my man. Walk with me.” The sergeant put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and urged him along into the village. He didn’t go by “Rocky” anymore; he had fallen under the influence of Lucius Gilbert, otherwise known as Luce, who held that joker names were bogus-slave names.

Moving with egg-walking care, Mark followed along with the others. Mark felt dumb; he’d thought the village was deserted too. He hadn’t noticed anything but these funky bamboo hootches, like he’d grown up seeing on the six o’clock news. They gave him a sense of déjà vu.

“Maybe they’re off working the paddies,” suggested Slick.

“With a big old pot of rice bubbling on the fire out front of one of their hootches like that?” the sergeant asked, pointing again.

The hair started to rise on the back of Mark’s neck. Where are they? Are they watching us? He felt like a trespasser.

“There!” Eraserhead screamed, so shrilly it made everybody jump. He flung out a hand to point, so fast his arm stretched to half again its normal length. “I saw somebody there in that hut!”

Mark snapped his head back and forth as if watching a tennis match on speed — him or the players, it didn’t make much difference. Yes, he saw them. Faces in the shadows. Some sullen, some openly hostile. Most of them wore a blank resignation he imagined a rape victim got when she knew she couldn’t fight back.

“Why are they doing this?” Spoiler demanded in a high-pitched voice. “Why the hick are they hiding from us?”

“They’re afraid of us,” the sergeant said. “They think we’re monsters — even Meadows, who looks about two feet taller’n any human they ever seen before. Also, we got these.”

He slapped the receiver of the M-16 he, like the rest of them, had been issued that morning. They were the reason Mark was being so hypercautious. He was afraid the thing would go off by itself.

The sergeant chuckled.

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