The Men in the Jungle Read online

  What a feeling! Like being born again, coming forth from furtive scuttling in the jungle to stand shining in the light. For the first time since he had lost the Belt Free State, Fraden at last felt that the world was seeing him as the man he knew himself to be. The troops behind him marching, his flag waving in the sunlight, Sangrans falling in like little boys at a parade, and he was the center, the Rome to which all roads led—Fraden the President, Fraden the Liberator, Fraden the Hero of the People. So what if the unfolding legend of Bart Fraden was a conscious creation of his own rumor mill? A hero was a man who created his own myth, crawled into it, and then pulled the hole in after him. Was a lie a lie after you turned it into the truth?

  And the myth was on the verge of becoming reality. Every Brain in the area was dead. Surprisingly the Brotherhood had not tried to truck any new ones in—perhaps they too were turning propaganda into reality by actually using the newly created desperation of the villagers to feed the madness-pogrom.

  The propaganda campaign to blame the deaths of the Brains on the Killers was a total success—Willem’s masqueraders had made themselves all too conspicuous, and by now any Killer that wandered into a village would be torn to pieces. The madness-pogrom had sent the sky falling in on the Sangran peasantry, and now the death of the Brains had pulled the rug out from under them as well. They had nothing left to lose. There was only one way for them to turn, and turn they did. Recruits were pouring in almost faster than they could be counted. They wanted guns now, they wanted to fight. They wanted to kill.

  This tour of the countryside was less a recruiting drive than a public thumbing of Fraden’s nose at the Brotherhood, a show of the flag, a show of force.

  Now the road led past fields ringing the next village. In the field by the roadside, a few dozen wild-eyed men were futilely trying to kill thirty or forty Bugs, who were tearing mindlessly about the field, trampling grain, ripping it up with their pincers, chittering crazily.

  A great roar of rage went up from the mob of men behind the troops as they saw the rampaging Bugs. Fraden called his guerrillas to a smart halt, waved the men in the field aside. They trotted to the roadside as the guerrillas swung to their left, formed a long firing line along the shoulder of the road.

  “Kill y’Bugs! Kill y’Bugs!” the villagers began to chant, and the mob of recruits picked it up, and it became a great demanding roar. Fraden dropped his right arm sharply.

  The guerrillas began to fire on the Bngs, volley after volley into the huge green arthropods, again and again and again as the villagers cheered them on. “Kill y’Bugs! Kill y’Killers! Kill y’Brothers! Long live the Free Republic!”

  Bugs fell, waved their legs in the air, were still. In a few moments it was over, and the field was littered with broken green corpses, wet with dark green ichor. The men who had been fighting the Bugs joined the procession as it went forward into the village itself, shouting, “Long live the Free Republic! Death t’y’Brotherhood! Long live Bart!”

  As they passed through the circle of huts, men, women, children, their ribs showing, their stomachs bloated, their eyes mad with hate, joined the parade, and by the time they reached the open center of the village, the entire village filled the area, screaming, “Kill y’Brothers! Kill y’Killers! Long live the Free Republic!”

  Savoring the raw animal heat, Bart Fraden made his way to the center of the mob, mounted an old crate that someone produced from somewhere. He let the roars of his people wash over him for a heady moment, then waved his arms, gestured for silence.

  Silence they gave him, and he knew that they were at last ready to give more, to give all. He could see it in their sunken, red-rimmed eyes, in the grim set of their mouths. He could all but smell it on their sweat. They were with him now, waiting to hear him tell them what they wanted to hear. Eager to fight, eager to kill. He had seen this kind of mob before, but never so savage, never so feral, never so willing to follow where they knew he would lead. The bonds had burst. The dam had busted. The shit had hit the fan.

  “Long live the Free Republic!” he shouted.

  “LONG LIVE THE FREE REPUBLIC!” they roared.

  “They call y’Animals!” be shouted. “They kill you, torture you, eat your flesh! Now they’re out to torture and kill every Animal on the planet. But you’re not Animals, you’re men! Men! Men! You’re citizens of the Free Republic now, and the Free Republic protects its own. What do we do when the Killers try to make us slave for the Brotherhood while they starve us to death?”

  “DEATH T’Y’KILLERS!” the Sangrans roared. “KILL Y’BROTHERHOOD!”

  “That’s right, death to the Killers!” Fraden said. “But unarmed, untrained, unled men can’t defeat armed soldiers. Try to fight ’em yourselves, and they’ll mow you down, eat you alive! But you’ve got the People’s Army to fight for you. Those who want to fight, to hill Killers, join the People’s Army, The rest of you, stay in your villages and grow food for yourselves and for your army. And while you’re doing it, remember, do nothing to help the Killers or the Brotherhood, When the Killers come, the People’s Army won’t he far behind, and well know what to do to Killers—and to traitors, tool Soon it’ll take a whole army of Killers to venture into this district—but they won’t have a whole army for this one district, ’cause we’ll be hitting them in the next district and the one beyond that and the one beyond that one, all the way to Sade itself! We’ll hit ’em here and there and everywhere, all over the planet We’ll kill ’em and we’ll starve ’em out and then when the countryside is ours, we’ll march into Sade with a great army and we’ll take the Brothers, and we’ll take the Prophet himself, and we’ll—”

  “DEATH T’Y’PROPHET! DEATH T’Y’BROTHERS! DEATH T’Y’KILLERS! KILL! KILL! KILL!” The Sangrans began to chant scream, howl madly, savagely, for blood. Fraden found it impossible to stop them, or to make himself heard above the tumult. They were out of control now, they wanted killing and only the taste of blood would sate them, he knew. All right, he thought I’ll give to ’em, kill two birds with one stone, make sure they’ll never have the Bugs to slave for ’em again.

  He made a megaphone with his hands, shouted at the top of his lungs, “The Bugs work for the Brotherhood! Kill the Bugs! Kill the Bugs!”

  He signaled to his troops, stepped down from the crate, led the howling mob of villagers to the foot of the great mound of sun-dried clay that was the local Bughill. Here and there a Bug appeared at one of the many large holes which studded the ’Hill. The soldiers fired at the Bugs as they appeared at their holes. One or two were hit, tumbled crazily down the Bughill, but the rest ducked inside and stayed there.

  Fraden formed his men into a ring of guns surrounding the BughilL “Fire!” he called to the mob behind him. “Get torches, straw, and wood. We’ll smoke ’em out!”

  Minutes later, torches were carried to the holes in the Bughill, piles of wood and straw were ignited and shoved down every opening. For nearly five minutes, smoke wafted out of the holes in the ’Hill as the mob howled, screamed, brandished torches, knives, rude wooden clubs…

  Then, suddenly, like ants scuttling madly from a smashed anthill, Bugs began to pour forth. The crowd roared, cursed, pushed at the ring of soldiers preventing them from charging up the Bughill. The soldiers began firing, and huge green insects, spurting green ichor from holes in their chitin, rolled, dying, down the steep slope of the Bughill. The Bugs went down in droves, but still they kept coming, dozens, scores, from every smoking hole, pushing burning brands and straw before them with their shiny green bodies.

  The soldiers kept firing, but the Bugs were just too many and they were coming too fast Even as chitinous corpses tumbled down the hill by the dozens, leaving rivulets of ichor in their wakes, some of the Bugs, two here, three there, managed to break through the ring of soldiers and into the mob of Sangrans at the foot of the Bughill.

  Although he grimly realized that it was just what the situation called for, Fraden’s stomach turned as he saw the Sangrans
fall on the fleeing Bugs. Lacking Brothers to kill, lacking Killers, the mob vented its desperate fury on the hapless, dumb arthropods. The trickle of Bugs that got through the ring of soldiers disappeared from Fraden’s sight into the seething churning maelstrom of the mob, like tree limbs being fed into a buzz saw. All he saw of them after that was glimpses and broken fragments. Here a Bug was held high above the mob for a moment by dozens of green-spattered hands as more hands tore limbs from its firing body, tore it down again, stomped, ripped it apart. A green head torn from a body and spouting ichor bounced about above the heads of the Sagrans like some grotesque volleyball… limbs, heads, slimy slabs of broken chitin, seemed to fill the air… A Bug scuttled out of the periphery of the crowd for a moment, was pulled back by one of its five intact legs, stomped by a dozen naked feet, its carapace finally cracking to leak squamous, pulsating organs…

  Turning his back on the carnage, Fraden gathered five men around him, climbed the steep slope of the Bughill, stood at the summit, looked down at the horror that boiled below him.

  Lord, he thought woodenly, as he watched the Sangrans kill the last of the Bugs, dismember the bodies, rip even disconnected limbs to smaller fragments in their blind fury, it’s only Bugs! What if it were Killers? What if it were Brothers?

  Finally, the last Bug was dead, the last green corpse torn to pieces. The Sangrans milled about for a while hoping more Bugs would emerge from the ’Hill for them to kill, and when none came forth, and they saw Fraden standing high above them, they turned their eyes to him and began to chant:

  “BART! BART! LONG LIVE BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  The staccato cries echoed off the Bughill like machine-gun fire. Fraden looked down, looked down at the wildly chanting Sangrans, looked down at the soft naked earth covered with Bug ichor and littered with a thousand fragments of shiny green, chitin, looked down at the smoldering fires of a dozen discarded torches, looked down at the ruined green bodies, looked down at what the sound of his voice had wrought.

  “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  He could feel it coming up at him in pulsing, hot waves—the blood lust, the killer-urge, the will to fight, to follow him. Three centuries of torture, murder, un-guessable drives and frustrations, released at last and bursting forth like a foaming fountain of off tapped at last after millennia of dormancy in the dark quiet earth. And he was the torch that would ignite that gusher of blackness into a lance of fire that would sear the Brotherhood from the face of Sangre.

  He had released the demon at last, the djinn from its bottle, and now he would rule that mighty creature, break it to his will, mount it and ride it to the top.

  “BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART! BART!”

  He felt the power pouring up at him, filling his mind, warming his muscles, setting his being afire. Lead, the chanting Sangrans seemed to be demanding, lead and we will follow.

  Bart Fraden raised his hands high above his head.

  He began to speak to his people.

  CHAPTER NINE

  From the hilltop on which Bard Fraden crouched, the big column of Killers moving five abreast along the trail which snaked through the tall grass and intermittent jungle in the narrow valley below looked like a line of black army ants.

  Like ants on the march, Fraden thought, you can’t count ’em just by looking at ’em—though from scouting reports, he knew that there were something like three hundred and fifty Killers now moving toward the dense little clump of jungle where Willem waited in ambush with two hundred men. They were like army ants in more ways than one. Like army ants, the Killers were soldiers by birth, conditioning, and breeding. Like army ants on the march, they had to live off the countryside, and like army ants, their frantically carnivorous metabolisms required meat and plenty of it.

  And meat—in this case Meatanimals—Fraden thought, is something these Killers haven’t gotten very much of in the past two weeks. They had come to fight, and they had come to live off the countryside, and the Killers were doing precious little of either.

  It was the classic beginning of the second stage of a guerrilla war. The sneaky part of the first stage, Fraden thought, is that the Ins don’t realize they’ve got a war on their hands till it’s over. Had Moro sent in a few hundred Killers before all the Bugs in this district had been killed, when the “People’s Army” consisted of a hundred or so unreliable herogyn-heads and about an equal number of dubious volunteers, he could’ve crushed us very cheaply indeed. But of course Moro had been too busy with his madness-pogrom, and too generally complacent to get all that worked up over a mess of isolated ambushes, a few sacked estates. Even six weeks ago, after the Revolution had gained popular momentum, but before that momentum had been translated into an army of three thousand men, a district of six former estates permanently hostile to the Brotherhood and the Killers, a thousand Killers or so could’ve still destroyed the Revolution, or at least reduced it to a mere chronic nuisance.

  But now the invading force of two thousand Killers was already too little and too late. The irony was that the only thing that had finally gotten Moro off his fat ass was the same thing that was making his invasion a failure: the fact that at this point, the thousand Killers who had marched into the district in three columns two weeks ago were invaders, not policemen. For better than a month, this small district had been de facto territory of the Free Republic. Killer patrols that ventured in were annihilated. Moro got neither victims nor Meatanimals from this district, with the six estates sacked, the local Brothers and their Killers dead. Moro had lost the district to the Free Republic by bits and nibbles and hundreds of ambushes, piecemeal, so that only when the district was already lost, did the Prophet of Pain face the fact that he had a revolution on his hands.

  So before this expedition had arrived, stage one was already completed—the People’s Army had effective control of a district, had popular support, had a stockpile of captured arms and ammunition. The Killers had arrived just in time for stage two; the beginning of the destruction of the Killer army.

  Now Fraden saw that the forward salient of the Killer column was entering the woods. He tensed. As soon as half of ’em were in the woods, Willem and his boys would open fire, pick off a few, retreat, set up another ambush, kill a few more, retreat again, set up another little ambush, hit and run, run and hit, as they had been doing for the past two weeks…

  Two weeks ago, a force of two thousand Killers had arrived at the outskirts of the district, set up a base camp, left half their numbers to guard it. Then the other thousand Killers had split up into three columns, marched into rebel territory in three roughly parallel lines. The Killers’ strategy had seemed fundamentally sound, even to Willem, who had moaned and groaned and made much of the fact that a thousand Killers could easily outfight three thousand guerrillas, that any pitched battle would be an utter disaster for the People’s Army.

  It was a kick to read Moro’s mind—he figured that he had the guerrillas in an impossible either-or bind. With the rebel district bounded on the west by the mountains, there could be no retreat. The three Killer columns would advance toward the mountains, rounding up all the Animals and Meatanimals they could along the way, living off the land and shipping the surplus back to the impregnable base camp. Either the guerrillas would retreat until they could retreat no further, then make a stand and be wiped out, or try to concentrate their forces, attack one of the columns, banking on local superiority of forces to let them wipe ’em out. At which point, the other two columns would converge on the attacked column and destroy the People’s Army. Either way, the guerrillas were obviously doomed.

  But Moro had been blind to the third alternative.

  Now perhaps a hundred Killers had entered the patch of jungle, marched into the jaws of the ambush… Suddenly, there were several sharp screams from within the jungle. From atop his hill, Fraden saw three or four trees, all in a line, crash ponderously to the forest floor, pulling down a rain of leaves and branches with them. Willem had op
ened up with his snipgun, slicing through flesh and wood indiscriminately. Shots began to ring out—hard, tight volleys as the guerrillas blasted the Killers from their impenetrable cover, wild random fire as the Killers futilely fired back, trying to hit men they couldn’t see.

  Now the rear of the Killer column at the margin of the jungle broke ranks, unshipped their morningstars, began to scream, roared into the jungle like a maddened wolf pack.

  More purposeful volleys rang out, more random firing. Another line of trees crashed to the forest floor. Now, muffled by the heavy foliage and the distance, like a far-off keening, the battle cry of the Killers drifted up to Fraden: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”

  Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Fraden heard the Killers still firing sporadically, wasting more ammunition, but the guerrillas had melted away into the jungle to prepare the next ambush in the endless, harrying series.

  The other two Killer columns were getting the same treatment. For two weeks, they had advanced through the countryside, fighting phantoms. Prisoners were taken, shipped back to the base camp—but they never arrived, the Killers guarding them wiped out in a score of ambushes. The Killers found themselves forced to fight a dozen little skirmishes a day bogged down by hundreds of unruly Animals. They soon stopped taking prisoners.

  A scorched-earth policy frustrated the rest of the plan—the Animals herded the Meatanimals before the advancing Killers, or slaughtered and ate them on the spot. That was the only part of the whole business that gave Fraden pause—the Sangrans would not deny the Meatanimals to the Killers unless they could eat them themselves. Fraden’s plan to abolish cannibalism had to be temporarily shelved…

  But it had been worth it. It forced the Killers to call for food and ammunition from their base camp—and those convoys were easy pickings as they moved through the countryside. Now, hungry, low on ammo, living on the ragged edge of rage from the ceaseless ambushes, losing scores of men piecemeal, with nothing to fight, the Killers were getting desperate.