Chapter 18 - A Day of Quiet

BEN

Ben eased out, looking forward to a long walk down Broadway.  He went off towards the mountains, cut left down 14th street so as to avoid the County Public Health building - one of the last refuges, stinking with the Totenschaum flecking the high-water line of the tsunami of death.  They surged towards refuges, and there they died, dropping like little iron filings aligned with their futile refuge.  Stank.

Broadway was more or less clear - somebody's run a street sweeper up and down the curbs recently, after shooing the cadavers out of the gutters with peaveys and cant dogs, putting them in the middle of the sidewalk to scoop up with the skiploader trailing a big ol' offroad pickup.  Most of the juice had run out and dried up, so there wasn't much spatter, but some of them dried down hard like spilt coffee, and couldn't be moved into position.  Broadway was fairly clear; you could almost forget that the Captain had come calling, except for the ever-present sweet ghastly perfume on the air.

You know how pork chops cooking smell like pork?  And lamb, well, you can't miss the scent of lamb?  Humans have a human smell, one that we're all used to - but when you scent it in droves, like a locker room or a morgue, it's unmistakably.  Then you can't shake it out of your mind when it's there.

Dead folks lying around didn't bother Ben in the slightest.  He had seen the human body in all states of terminal undress - he'd gotten used to it. "Combat Recovery," they called it. Also "Post-Combat Recovery," which meant nary a fucking thing in Vietnam. Like it was a gentleman's duel. There's no such thing as "Post-Combat." Even after you get home. Jaws and bones, brains; you never could retrieve brains, no matter what you tried.  They just spilled all over.

And that was just us guys.  The....Asians, is what he learned to call them, among nice people - the Asians, little ones, old ones, pregnant ones opened up with a shovel.  these here Captain Trips residue, they were tidy and dry, and nix on the blowflies.  No dark veil of flies to open up and show the grislies underneath.  A dead....Asian... was just like some jungle flower or leaf, kind of friendly familiar, because a dead...Asian... was a good Asian, unless they were boobytrapped, which some of the ratfuckers used to do.

Now and then, you run across one where the head come off.  Sometimes the Vietcong had hanged them, and dropped them too far.  Six feet's the magic number to break a neck, but nine feet will yank the fucker right off.

Some of the memories started to drift in around the mask.  That's why he didn't drink any more.  You drink until the memories go away - but they don't.  So better not drink.

He enjoyed his friends who did military service, after Vietnam, but it was kinda like an office job, and you got out all chipper and refreshed.  Nice guys, really are.

Boulder smelled pretty human that morning.  Ben kept up a brisk, martial walk for the two miles down to the University.  The wreckage was appalling - but in a charming way, an alive way.  Bodies, of course - the bleary and the hungover revelers, cheering on the living, and spiraling into a midsummer night's bacchanal for people.

Ben was happy, and aghast too, that people could be so senseless and vulnerable to lay around after the party, pass out out-of-doors.  Virgins.  They didn't scan the rooftops, they didn't look for traps.  The worst thing in their lives was Captain Trips.  Lucky bastards.