Black Maps Read Online Free PDF Page B

him.
    â€œNot tonight, Charlie,” Jackson moaned, “I’m having me a wet dream.”
    They listened as the mortars walked in closer and closer. At first there was only a distant pop, then a closer thud. Then they heard the whistling of a round and the roar of an explosion.
    â€œShit,” Freeze said. And he and the rest of the men scrambled out of their racks, grabbing their M-16s, and double-timed in their skivvies out into the cold pounding rain. Through the rain’s thick odor of rot, they could smell the sharp scents of gunpowder and cordite. On the perimeter of the camp, M-79 grenade launchers and mortars were thumping into a sky green with star flares, punctuating the nonstop sentence of an M-16 on rock-’n’-roll.
    In the platoon bunker, they huddled behind the wet sandbags, shivering, staring out at the dark. Konieczny was next to Freeze. “Are they gonna come through the wire?” he asked. When a star flare burst, his face turned green, a Martian’s, and Freeze felt the urge to laugh. Then he heard the whistle of an incoming round. He ducked and waited for the burst. It seemed to take forever. Looking around, he saw that everyone was still, as if they’d been frozen. He remembered the game he’d played as a kid back in Arkansas. Statues. It was like they were playing Statues.
    Then the shell exploded nearby, raining shrapnel into the bunker, and everybody came alive again. Somebody started screaming.
    Reynolds stood up at his end of the bunker. “Who’s down?”
    Everybody looked around. But no one was hurt. Then the screaming started again. It was coming from outside the bunker.
    â€œI’m dying!” the man yelled. “Help me!”
    Before anyone could say anything, Reynolds had crawled out of the bunker and started to run in a crouch toward a man lying in the mud halfway between the second platoon hootch and bunker. Under the light of the star flares, Freeze watched the brown-bar drag the man toward their bunker. For a second he admired Reynolds for rescuing the soldier when he could have ordered someone else to do it, but then he felt the comforting return of hate. The hotdog , he thought. He’s bucking for goddamn Eagle Scout .
    The moment Reynolds made it back, they heard the whistle of another mortar and ducked, holding their breaths until it exploded. Then they looked up.
    Someone shined his flashlight on the man. “Jesus H. Christ,” Reynolds said then, and turned away, disgusted. The man was all right. He hadn’t been hit at all. Still, he was moaning as if he were dying.
    â€œSave me,” the soldier pleaded. “Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die.” It was clear that he wasn’t talking to anybody there. He was staring up at the sky, his eyes blank as milk glass, and whimpering. And he wasn’t even a twink. He’d been in the bush long enough to get a bad case of jungle rot. It had invaded his face, and though he’d tried to hide it by growing a scruffy beard, it made his skin look raw.
    They told him he was okay, but he kept on moaning and crying. Even after the mortars stopped falling and the machine guns faded to random bursts, he would not stop.
    The rest of the men looked away, embarrassed, but Freeze couldn’t take his eyes off him.
    The next morning, the other soldiers were laughing about the man who thought he was wounded, calling him a snuffy, a wuss, and praising Reynolds for risking his butt to save him. They even had a nickname for Reynolds now. “Man, did you see the look he gave that pogue?” Jackson had said. “It was righteous rabid.” And it stuck. All the while they prepared for inspection, the men talked about Righteous Rabid and The Wuss. A week before, Freeze would have joined in. But he wasn’t one of them anymore.
    At inspection, Reynolds stopped in front of Freeze and poked him in the gut with his finger. “Private Harris,” he