Thirteen Specimens Read Online Free Page A

might even have used his bayonet to carve the words “C Company” into a corpse’s chest. Or to cut the hands off a body. Or its head. To slice out its tongue, or pry off its scalp. To slit the throat of a toddler. To disembowel an elderly grandmother. Candle had seen all this creative artistry today, rendered by the soldiers’ sculpting blades. But they had also adopted other imaginative means of exterminating the villagers. Some bodies hung from trees by their necks. One victim of a “double veteran” rite had clearly had a gun fired inside her vagina. And watching it all, sucking it all in like a vacuum cleaner, the camera made not a sound, except for the very faint swishing of its encircling centipede limbs.
         Early in the massacre, Candle had caught the medic by his elbow and stopped him temporarily from dispatching wounded buffalos. “These are civilians!” he had ranted. “No one is shooting back at us! There are no VC in this fucking village!”
         “Our guys are fired up...they want revenge for the men we lost in that minefield...”
         “The villagers didn’t even set those mines! It was our allies , the Koreans – I thought everyone knew that now!”
         “Candle, this was the order at the briefing. You think I like it? I don’t like it any more than you do! But what can I do, tackle all these kids and wrestle their guns away? What can you do, except do your job?” He had nodded at the organic camera in the photographer’s fist. “You know that thing is in absolute heaven today.”
         “I thought I saw Sergeant Wrench around here,” Candle had continued fuming, glancing about him.
         “Yeah, I saw him. He went into one of the hootches, dragging a girl by the arm.”
         Candle had known then that it was senseless seeking out and appealing to the officer, to any of the officers. And wasn’t the medic right? As much as it repulsed him, outraged him, didn’t he have a job to do? If he didn’t catch as much of this incident as he could for the Guests, and for the newspapers, he was sure to be summoned by his superiors. Maybe even arrested for insubordination, dereliction of duty, going AWOL from his contracted function...
         Now Candle drifted onward, through wafting gun smoke from hot rifle barrels and the rolling sooty smoke from burning dwellings. His boots ground spent cartridges against each other like gnashing teeth. Out of the eye-stinging black fog an old woman shuffled toward him. He saw, with such disbelief that he almost forgot to raise the camera until its wriggling legs brushed his thigh, that an unexploded M-79 grenade was embedded in her belly. For the first time today, he felt the impulse to tear from its holster the .45 Colt he wore but had never once fired. He was actually grateful, though startled, when an M-16 on fully automatic rattled and the woman went down. Fortunately for Candle, perhaps, the slugs hadn’t hit the grenade.
         One of the nine airships of the 174 th Assault Company came hovering overhead, the thumping of its four dragonfly wings – moving so fast they were a nearly invisible blur – making the ground smoke swirl and coil. The smoke cleared enough to expose a stand of bamboo trees, and the three people who had hunkered down behind them. They bolted. Someone on the ground opened up on them at the same time that the ship’s gunner let loose with his mounted M-60. The three Vietnamese – a man, woman and boy holding hands – were cut into pieces, the father’s head literally chopped off his body. Candle flinched, half-expecting to get hit by some of the wildly spraying rounds, but already the huge insect was wheeling its body to point in another direction, and lifting somewhat higher so the gunner could thoroughly strafe a dwelling that thus far had escaped burning.
         Candle’s first real frames of the day (a trigger on the camera’s metal handle sent a mild electric jolt into the