The Men in the Jungle Read online

  The Killers formed a solid wedge, hurtled fearlessly straight at the guns of the guerrillas, and Vanderling heard a new sound, a terrible sound, a guttural yet somehow shrill rhythmic chanting like the cry of some monstrous carnivore: “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!”

  Chanting this horrid animal sound, the wedge of Killers charged straight into the now-hesitating guerrillas, flinging aside their rifles as they closed and unshipping the morningstars, the wicked blade-studded steel balls on the ends of rigid rods. Like a rabid wolf pack, they fell on the hapless Sangrans.

  For a long, long moment, Vanderling could not think. He had seen plenty of no-quarter fighting in his day, but nothing remotely like this. Foam flecked the Killers’ lips, turned scarlet as they gnawed their own lips in a howling rage. They tore into the guerrillas like living buzz saws, bashed heads like so many watermelons with their morningstars. They kicked, stomped with their heavily booted feet, shrieked like fiends gone mad. And there, incredibly, a Killer sunk his razor-sharp teeth into a human throat, bright blood gurgling over his face and shoulders as his hands tore gobbets of flesh from arms and torso. Another Killer clutched at a man’s face with both hands, ripped features away like a bloody Halloween mask. Here a guerrilla was down, and a Killer stomped at his neck while another sunk his teeth in a leg and a third smashed the man’s rib cage with his morningstar.

  Vanderling went mindless for an instant as the melee became a senseless churning of tortured bodies, ripping limbs, flashing morningstars, a screaming pack of mindless, desperate animals tearing each other to shreds in the blood-red Sangran sun. He felt something calling to him in that writhing horror, in the ragged chanting that still went on—“KILL! KILL! KILL!” Something that fascinated him, yet turned his blood to ice, something that beckoned, heaved within him, struggling to be born…

  Abruptly, the fearful moment passed as he saw that his second line, instead of stopping and firing, was screaming, howling, and rushing insanely toward that hideous, lethal human meatgrinder.

  “Stop, you cretins!” he yelled. “Hold your ground and fire! Stand and fire, you morons!”

  It was hopeless. Vanderling realized that he was the only man left with a working mind on the entire battlefield. It would be an utter disaster. Those crazy fiends would tear his men apart like so many grasshoppers, once they closed with them. It was no use, there was nothing…

  Or was there?

  As his second line rushed pell-mell toward annihilation, Vanderling broke into a furious run, off on a diagonal, toward the left flank of the battle. It was a race against his own men. Could he get into position in time? The guerrillas were less than, thirty yards from the battle now, but now…

  Now, his breath coming in sharp pains, Vanderling was in position, off to one side of the battle and within snipgun range, with a clear line of fire past his own second line and into the writhing screaming melee of Killers and dying guerrillas.

  Still panting, Vanderling dropped to one knee, raised the snipgun, pulled the trigger, kept it down, fanned the gun back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

  It was as if he were swinging a gigantic sword straight through the heart of the battle. Heads, arms, legs, seemed to leap from bodies in fountains of blood. Back and forth, back and forth. Bodies split in half, at the navel, at the chest, at the groin. Back and forth, back and forth. His knuckles went white around the snipgun grips. Like the Grim Reaper, he scythed a field of human grain with the infinitely thin, irresistible snipgun beam. Killers and guerrillas alike seemed to fly apart like shattered glass. Back and forth…

  In the few moments before the guerrillas closed with what was left of the Killers, the battle had already been decided. Armless, legless, half-men, hardly a Killer was left whole. As the guerrillas fell upon them, those left alive fought madly and futilely on, minus limbs, minus everything but life itself and the will to kill, It seemed as if even severed heads were sinking their teeth into legs in a last paroxysm of blood-lust and hate.

  Carnage unthinkable. Lacking arms, mutilated Killers kicked, lacking legs, they lashed out with their teeth, flopping about convulsively like beached and dying sharks. It was more like a battle between two schools of voracious piranhas than between men. The ground was littered with bodies, limbs, grisly gobbets of flesh, sodden with blood. Killers maimed beyond belief fought on and killed, taking guerrillas with them as they died.

  But the snipgun had made the difference. The dying Killers, every ounce of their flesh imbued with blood-lust, were no match for the guerrillas; in five short minutes of horror it was over.

  Piled in front of the open gate was a vast bloody garbage heap of pulped and bleeding dead flesh, great pools, of blood, bodies twitching in their death throes and nothing left alive.

  A pack of rabid animals, the remaining guerrillas poured into the compound, and Vanderling followed behind, dazed and numbed.

  The next half-hour was a red fog, a boiling madness that Vanderling remembered afterward only in bits and snatches. Somewhere, someone found a torch, and palisade, outbuildings and main house were set ablaze. Strange, fat, vacant-eyed little children, naked little bleating things cowering in a corral were shot and slashed and torn to pieces. Slaves, women, children were dragged out of buildings and summarily butchered.

  Vanderling raced around the courtyard trying to stop it, but the guerrillas had scattered on myriad gruesome errands and he could do nothing but rant and wave his snipgun.

  Finally, them was a great shout, and from everywhere in the maze of carnage and burning buildings guerrillas converged on a small knot of men who had dragged a fat man dressed in a black robe out of the main house—Brother Boris.

  They dragged Brother Boris, kicking and screaming, down the small flight of steps. He began to blubber as he was kicked into the churning mob of guerrillas.

  Vanderling retched, tried not to look, as the guerrillas pulled the fat man down, ripped at him with scores of hands, tore chunks of living flesh from his body with their teeth. Then he disappeared in a swirl of stomping bodies, and in another moment his screaming stopped.

  Vanderling ran to the mob of guerrillas, waving his snipgun. “Enough!” he roared. “Next man that so much as twitches, gets no more herogyn! It’s over! Gather up the weapons and let’s go!”

  For a long, pregnant moment, the guerrillas faced him, covered with blood, their eyes blazing, hungry for one more thing to kill.

  “Anyone who tries anything dies,” Vanderling said, pointing the snipgun straight at them, “I’ll kill you all if I have to.” And his voice and his eyes said he meant it.

  And they knew he meant it, they had seen what the snipgun could do.

  Half an hour later, Vanderling found himself trudging through the tall grass behind seventeen men heavily laden with captured arms and ammunition—all that had survived the day’s slaughter. Far behind, a pillar of billowing smoke was all that reminded him of those short minutes of horror, a horror that already seemed distant and unreal.

  And at that moment, with his men bearing the booty before him and the estate of Brother Boris a burning ruin far behind, Willem Vanderling smiled.

  For what had happened was, after all, a victory.

  Victory, Sangran style.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Ah, Brother Bart, the source of infinite pleasure,” the short, lean, hawk-faced, black-robed Brother said. “Have some wine, nice wine, delicious wine, precious wine…” he lifted a brimming jug of wine from the low table before him, his hand shaking as he raised it, the pupils of his eyes abnormally full.

  Bart Fraden smiled as he declined the wine with a negligent motion of his forearm. Brother Theodore was nicely swacked on Omnidrene. It was going nicely, most of the Brothers were lapping the stuff up like a cat laps milk, and some, like old Teddy here, were practically perpetually stoned.

  Fraden sat down on one of the low cushions in front of the Japanese-style table, which was piled high with jugs of wine, local fruits, bread, and a ghastly c
enter-piece—a roasted whole human infant already half-consumed. He took a small polybag of Omnidrene out of a pocket nicely tailored to the inside of his black Brother’s robe and dropped it on the table.

  “That should hold you for a while,” he said.

  Brother Theodore snatched up the polybag, ripped it open, took a pinch of the white powder, shoved it into his left nostril, inhaled, sneezed, giggled like a schoolgirl, and said, “For a while, Brother Bart, for a little, little while.”

  His eyes rolled, he leaned back: in bis nest of cushions and bellowed: “Woman!”

  Almost instantly, a tall, well-built, fine-featured young redhead appeared. She was naked, Theodore grabbed one firm young buttock viciously in a clawlike hand, yanked the girl down onto his lap, “Amuse me,” he said, “but slowly at first.”

  Obediently, totally ignoring Fraden, the naked woman reached beneath Brother Theodore’s robe. Theodore smiled.

  “Very accomplished, this one,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to try her, Brother Bart? I’d certainly like to try that slave of yours. She seems quite… exotic. You know, breeding these female creatures to our taste has one drawback—one seldom gets to enjoy the unusual, the unpredictable, the exotic. Now that slave of yours…”

  “Er… a peculiar creature,” Fraden said quickly. “I’m sure you’d find her more trouble than she’s worth.” And that, he thought, has to be the understatement of the century. “I can handle her only because I’ve… shall we say, conditioned her to obey me.” And that one had to be the lie of the millennium.

  Brother Theodore laughed. “Conditioning the creatures is half the pleasure,” he said with an unpleasant grin. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your… disciplinary program. Increase the tempo, woman!” he ordered. He began to lick his lips and rock rhythmically back and forth. Fraden found his gorge rising, but he knew he couldn’t show it. Public masturbation by slaves was the least of the Brothers’ vices, and this stage of the game required that he be “one of the boys.”

  “Shall I send for a woman for you?” Theodore inquired, “Perhaps some entertainment? A contest, yes indeed, a contest! With knives? Fists? Whips? Two males? Two females? A mixed event? Name your pleasure, Brother Bart! Anything for the purveyor of pleasure… Perhaps a small torture-pageant? Yes indeed, a pageant by all means!” He laughed boyishly.

  “I’m afraid I must be going,” Fraden said quickly. “Got to give some Omnidrene to Brother Leon and Brother Joseph and… Busy, busy, busy…” he said, rising, and moving with poorly concealed haste toward the door.

  But Brother Theodore was past noticing such subtleties. He was breathing heavily, and cruelly kneading the naked body of the woman. “Too gentle!” he snarled. “Much too gentle. More fire, woman!”

  Fraden heard a series of sharp slaps of flesh on flesh as he backed out the door and into the hallway. Get it while you can, you greasy bastard! he thought. You won’t be getting it forever.

  The air of the open courtyard cooled Fraden off a bit, but the sights appalled him. There was no getting away from nausea in the madness of the Palace of Pain. The courtyard was a busy display of grotesqueries. Here, a Killer led a string of naked women, all young, all similarly beautiful, all bred to please, chained together by collars around their necks toward the entrance to the Palace proper. Near the concrete wall, another Killer was drilling a squad of young cadets. The small boys were all dressed in miniature Killer outfits, down to the rifles and the morningstars and the filed teeth. Four more Killers were herding a group of the obscenely fat, semi-imbecilic children they called Meatanimals toward the slaughtering shed behind the Palace. On impulse, Fraden called one of the Killers over to him.

  The Killer, like all Killers, was tall, lean, with receding brown hair and filed teeth. He wore the bars of a captain—fairly high rank in the Killer hierarchy.

  He came to attention in front of Fraden, “You require a service, Brother,” he said laconically.

  “Just some, information, Captain,” Fraden said. “Those boys drilling over there—where do you get them? You recruit them, or what?”

  “Recruit, Brother?” the Killer said. “They are purebred Killers of course. I myself as an officer have been permitted to sire two cadets in the past year. It is a high honor, the third highest honor possible.”

  “And the first two…?”

  The Killer looked faintly scandalized that even a new Brother should ask such a question—but then, he had never encountered an off-worlder before, “The highest honor is of course to kill,” he said evenly. “The second highest is to die in battle. The fourth highest is to be permitted to enjoy a female slave. I myself have been permitted this lesser pleasure ten times in the past year. I have served the Brotherhood well.”

  It figured, Fraden thought grimly. A totally celibate army would figure to fight furiously, but would be kind of hot to handle. But if you made occasional sex a reward for service, you kept ’em under control and still perverted their sexual drives into battle-frenzy. Logical. If you accepted the basic premise that anyone who wasn’t a Brother wasn’t a human being, everything the Brotherhood did was all too logical.

  “That will be all, Captain,” Fraden said. Fraden shook his head as the Killer disappeared behind the Palace. The Brotherhood was utterly ruthless and to defeat them would require an equal lack of scruples which was not really his bag at all.

  “But in this case,” Fraden muttered to himself, “I’ll be happy to make an exception,” The Brotherhood of Pain did not know the meaning of mercy. They would get none from Bart Fraden.

  “Bart Fraden, this just isn’t like you,” Sophia O’Hara said scooping up a big mound of the rice and vegetable pilaf that was the staple of their diet on Sangre. With no Terrestrial animals on the planet and no edible native fauna, it had been a long time since either of them had tasted meat. Neither of them were quite ready to try the traditional Sangran solution to the chronic protein shortage.

  Across the table in the main room of their Palace suite, Fraden washed down a mouthful of the boring stuff with a swallow of the rather rancid local wine. “So who is it like, Soph?” he said.

  “Don’t play your snide little word-games with me,” she said, wrinkling her nose as she gulped down a slug of the resinous wine. “I’m not Bullethead and I’m not that greasy oaf Moro and I’m not one of these hooded refugees from a funny farm either. I’m Sophia O’Hara, remember? Don’t try to con me. The Belt Free State was not exactly the Model Social Democracy, and you didn’t grab it by thinking Pure Thoughts and thus obtaining the Strength of Ten. But dope pushing is a new line of evil for you, isn’t it?”

  “Omnidrene isn’t ‘dope’ as you so crudely put it,” he said defensively, not meeting her eyes, “It’s physically non-addictive and has no adverse physiological effects whatever.”

  “No doubt it also stimulates the flow of liver bile, cures dandruff, builds strong bones and healthy bodies, and increases sexual potency—as if these swine needed an aphrodisiac to whet their perverted appetites. Nevertheless, I notice that most of our so-called Brothers seem to be spending quite a bit of their time in wall-eyed stupefaction—which would be fine by me if it kept them off the streets. But instead, it seems to increase their jollies—like fights to the death, and torture-orgies, and other good clean fun. This mudball makes the Black Hole of Calcutta seem like a Quaker prayer meeting and you seem bent on making it that much worse,”

  “Nice guys finish last,” Fraden said. “Revolution is a dirty line of evil and the fouler the regime you’re out to do in, the less scruples you can afford. The more thoroughly hooked they are, the less killing later. Let ’em stay bombed and happy till it’s too late, and it’ll save lives in the long run. Or do I detect a certain softness on your part toward these filthy swine? Just remember the kind of pigs we’re fighting. Moro makes Caligula and Hitler and De Sade look like little Lord Fauntleroy. So if some innocent people get hurt in the Revolution, just remember that this time the planet as a whole stands
to benefit. For once, I find myself in the peculiar position of being on the Side of the Angels, and you know, it doesn’t feel all that bad.”

  “Come off it, Bart,” Sophia said. “You look utterly ludicrous as a Knight in Shining Armor. A Knight in Shining Armor pushing dope, at that. It’s something personal, isn’t it? Just what did they make you do in that Initiation Ceremony?”

  Fraden choked down a huge swallow of wine. What… what he had been forced to do during the initiation was something he had tried hard to forget, but something he knew was festering within him, and something he was determined not to let come between Sophia and himself. As far as he was concerned, with the possible exception of Willem, off in the jungle, Sophia was the only other human being on the entire planet. He longed to share the burden with her, but was deathly afraid of losing her. He was not about to make the gamble of telling her the truth.

  “Told you a hundred times,” he said, “Just a lot of stupid mumbo jumbo.”

  “You’re lying to me, Bart,” she said quietly. “Look at me and say that again.”

  He met her big, neutral green eyes and tried to read what was behind them. Compassion? A willingness to understand the truth, whatever it was? Or simple female suspicion, an eagerness to condemn?

  “All right, Soph,” he said slowly. “I… They… They forced me to kill! With an ax, with my own hands! Just… just an animal, but I had to kill it, with my own hands. Me or it. I killed it, or they killed me.”

  “You’ve been responsible for plenty of deaths before,” she said cynically. “Human deaths. So why should—?”

  “This wasn’t an order, it was me doing it! Me, listening to the screams, seeing the blood, feeling flesh come apart under my ax!” he found himself shouting. “I’ve never killed before. This wasn’t war, it was…” He caught himself short The word he had been about to say was “murder.”

  Her face suddenly gone tender, Sophia reached across the table, held his cheeks lightly in both hands. “I’m sorry, Bart,” she said. “I won’t mention it again. There’s a heart in them somewhere; I can feel it beating however faintly. You’re the boss, Peerless Leader.”