Hounds of the Lord - Chapter 8
Day in and day out the patrols continued. Our company moved farther and farther beyond Santiago, chasing bandit gangs through the vast system of trails that crisscrossed the valley’s mountain jungles like a thousand swollen veins laid among the boney ridges and sallow draws of an old woman’s hand. We patrolled in our small squads to cover more ground, you and me and Corporal Duncan always together. We spent our nights far from Fortaleza San Luis, from the safety of its thick stone walls and elevated sentries dedicated to the task of watching. We laid our bedrolls upon the soft earth, among the forests’ portly millipedes stuffed into their lacquered jackets of black and yellow, and the blunt-nosed vine snakes seeping through the thick underbrush like rivulets of liquified emerald. But you and I both preferred the wildness of those unpopulated trails, where we were no longer awkward disruptors of civilian life.
We struggled to navigate the terrain, to keep our bearing and our footing. And of course the bandits knew those jungles well, and they moved through the mountains like a cold mist. Weeks passed with few sightings and fewer skirmishes, and the tally of miles marched ticked up and up. The tempo took its toll, on our minds and our backs and our tired legs, but most especially on our feet. The tender skin there never seemed to toughen in our dank boots, and we grew vicious blisters like boiled pearl onions on our heels and our arches and between our toes. Filling, bursting, filling, bursting, over and over each day until we pulled off our boots in the humid night and scraped our skin clean of the yellow plaques of congealed fluid that clung to us like a stinging rust.
Near Christmas, word came to us to be on the lookout for two American civilians, engineers with a private outfit come to advise on public works. The men had been kidnapped by a local bandit gang, likely taken for ransom. But it was some weeks later, in the wet heat of the afternoon, that we discovered those men at an abandoned camp. They had been stripped naked and lashed to a tree, their heads gone. They had been gutted too, by man or animal we didn’t know, but soggy offal tumbled from their open bellies and lay in their laps like loose bundles of fetid yarn. You and several others stumbled away and brought up your last meals. We buried the men there in that spot, unceremoniously sliding their bodies into shallow graves with our entrenching tools. We never did locate their heads.
A kind of fire spread among the marines of our 26th Company in the days after those men were found. We moved faster along the trails, covered more distance each day. We weren’t quite like the mist, but there was something ethereal about our movements, we began to move with the economy of predators. And whether by luck or true improvement of our methods, we came upon the bandits’ campsite in the late hours some days later.
We fired upon their night watch from the encampment’s northern edge, then upon the waking men. There were more of them than we had realized, perhaps twenty men in all. But in the scramble of shadowed forms there was a different kind of body, more slender than the others, softer, unmistakable. She ran straight through the center of the camp, heading for a steep embankment with the fleeing men. Dark hair down her back, past the shoulders, and in her frantic sprint the hair parted the nape of her neck, revealing a pair of little arms and little hands wrapped tight. And then her body fell, and the little hands fell with her, into the orange coals of the cooking fire, and up bloomed a thick cloud of smoke and there was a great spray of embers. I expected a noise, some terrible scream, but I was grateful to hear nothing, for that small mercy. I stood there in the strange silence, following the rising embers up and up until the moment they crested the dark treetops, and then you took me hard by the neck and brought me to the ground. Sounds were coming back then, and you pointed to the top of the embankment where muzzles were flashing. The bandits had regrouped and were firing upon us then. We moved back into the safety of the dense trees and found our trail again.
In the morning, over breakfast back at the company camp, you asked Corporal Duncan about the woman and the child. Why had they been there, were they captives, did the bandits live in the jungle with their wives and children here in this part of the country? But Corporal Duncan only stared at you, in a way that was unfamiliar to us until that moment. His eyes bore into yours and he held them there. You were uncomfortable but you knew better than to look away, and he said to you, as much as to me, with a strange voice stripped of all human affect, as if a typewriter could voice its stark black print, that there was no woman and there was no child at that camp. And the Corporal kept his eyes on you as he rose from his seat and left us there with our cold meal.