SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

The GIs helped the doc get the patients loaded into a personnel carrier, Young and five others, plus a handful of camp workers who’d been injured in the attack. All around them chaos reigned. Groups of soldiers ran and fired, yelled and died. A goodly number were getting out, trucks and jeeps heading in all directions. Cakes kept up a steady screen of Willie Petes, the white-hot burning chemicals keeping the gangshi away from them. They wouldn’t jump through one, anyway. Burtoni helped the orderlies carry the patients out, while Lee and the medical officers ran supplies. West watched their backs toward the north, the black hill where the lanterns had been. Outside the brilliantly lit corridor of hissing phosphorous, dimly glowing gangshi hopped and darted silently across the dark land.

There were hundreds of them now, tearing through the MASH buildings, demolishing the tent town on their way to wherever. Main power went out — the generators were dying — and the wailing siren finally wound to a stop. West saw a Jeep whip by with Sanderson peering out the back, dull confusion on his useless face. West didn’t salute.

The doctor made his last trip out of the sagging post-op building holding a clinking duffel bag. Burtoni ran alongside him, holding up a metal instrument tray like a shield.

“We’re bugging out, Sergeant West,” the doctor said. “Get your men in the truck.”

“Yeah, Sarge, we gotta go,” Burtoni said, nodding emphatically.

“What about the priests?” West asked, gesturing vaguely towards the dark hill north of the camp, where he’d seen the lanterns. “If we don’t stop them, they’ll keep calling up more of these things, won’t they?”

“I don’t know anything about any priests,” the doctor said. “I’m getting these men out of here, now. We’re going south to the 124^th.”

The Korean kid was looking at West. “The man from the village, he said the temple is rotten. He said the priests follow a bad man.”

“Bad how?” Burtoni asked.

“He is michin,” Lee said. “Ah, wrong in the head. Stark staring bonkers.”

“You know where this temple is?”

Burtoni was shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter about no temple, we gotta go, Sarge. We should stay with Young, right?”

Lee pointed. “North, they said. High on the hill, in the woods.”

West imagined bugging out with the doctor, with the other MASH refugees. Maybe it was safe at the 124th, maybe not. The way these things moved, where was safe? And how long would it take, to convince someone with the authority to call in a strike this far south?

And then hope we hit the bad temple with the bad priest, and hope that actually stops the dead from hopping around. For Pete’s sake, he was looking at the goddamn things and he didn’t believe in them. Who would listen? How many more people would die before they could talk the brass into believing ghost stories? They had a chance to stop this here, now.

“Burtoni, Cakes, bug out with Young,” he said, making the decision as he spoke. Fuck Sanderson, anyway. The buck had to stop somewhere.

“I’m going with you,” Cakes said. West had known he would.

“I’ll go with Young,” Burtoni said.

“Aw, don’t break a heel running,” Cakes sneered at him. “We’re going after ‘em, aren’t we, Sarge? Gonna prang those hoodoo gooks!”

Cakes’ enthusiasm was both disturbing and welcome. “We’re closest and we’ve got the news,” West said. “May as well be us.”

“I go with you,” Lee said.

“Forget it, kid,” West said. “You bug out with the captain.”

Lee shook his head. “You need me, to talk to the priest. To stop the gangshi.”

The kid gestured at the darkness beyond the stuttering Willie Pete. “It is wrong to make them walk again.”

The simple words seemed to resonate with all of them. Two years of men dying for scraps of territory, to be on the side with the most when the agreements were finally signed. It was all so pointless, so crazy.

Burtoni gripped his metal tray and his M1 and looked between West and the truck, the kid and Cakes. His struggle was clear on his hang-dog face, stark black and white by the light of the hissing grenade.

“Don’t go bleeding all over everything, making up your mind,” Cakes said.

“Fuck you, Cakes,” Burtoni said, then sagged. “Okay. Okay, I’m in.”

“Let’s get a ride,” West said.

* * *

A tiny little fleck of white phosphorous had landed on Cakes’ right leg when he’d blown the shit out of that monster in the hospital ward, and that little piece had burned deep. It wasn’t bleeding but it hurt like hell. Cakes was limping by the time they snagged a Jeep, lighting their way to the motor pool with Willie Petes, dodging the blindly hopping gooks through the ruined MASH. Sarge made him sit in the back with his leg up and had Burtoni drive. The gook kid was the only one small enough to fit in the back seat with him.