The gods Are All Terrorists: Dark Fiction - Horror

By Mack McColl

He finds out he couldn't have picked a worse place to get away. The story revolves around a nefarious plan to operate a contraption that wreaks havoc on all who come near.

 

"It was hot this afternoon, every afternoon, as he walked in the bewildering valleys of shadows of death. He crossed the darkened corridors everywhere in a jungle journey, able to discern where chaos would explode over and under, inside and out, and, he faced this constant peril in the hundreds of kilometres in his path. He had been ambling through intense peril for an amazingly long time and his body went south at this moment while his mind unravelled in various directions."

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mack McColl
• Release date: Jun 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227138644

Mack McColl

Mack McColl was born in Edmonton, Alberta, during the height of the baby boom. He went on to become a writer, author and inventor. He lived and worked in many distinct corners of his beloved Canada, learning what makes her unique. He went to Quebec and took a crack at learning French. His career in journalism took him to over 200 Indian Reserves where he made friends in Indigenous communities from coast to coast. This life provided Mack with the grist to compose most of the characters found in the pages of his fiction. Most of his fiction is set in Canada. Interests People, stories, the pursuit of happiness

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Prologue

Facts are mere accessories to the truth, and we do not invite to our hearth the guest who can only remind us that on such a day we suffered calamity. Still less welcome is he who would make a Roman holiday of our misfortunes. Exaggeration of what was monstrous is quickly recognised as a sign of egotism, and that contrarious symptom of the same disease which pretends that what is accepted as monstrous was really little more than normal is equally unwelcome."

Max Plowman, from Subaltern on the Somme

Chapter one: Hot dark damp forest dreams

Pham Van Dong picked his way through the world's largest contraption, which is more than vicious. He had said it before and he'll say it again, loudly, like a descending spiral, for Dong spoke to no one but himself while he bypassed the flourishing danger (invented) and nature's traps (created and evolved).

It was hot this afternoon, every afternoon, as he walked in the bewildering valleys of shadows of death. He crossed the darkened corridors everywhere in a jungle journey, able to discern where chaos would explode over and under, inside and out, and, he faced this constant peril in the hundreds of kilometres in his path. He had been ambling through intense peril for an amazingly long time and his body went south at this moment while his mind unravelled in various directions.

The construction of a contraption like this wreaked carnage on thousands upon thousands of square kilometers. The belligerent device operated under the careful scrutiny of its constructors and would chafe at and kill reams of population unfound and unlost in an unaccountably dark region of the world. Contraption engineers like Dong fooled minds and forged a machine to shred the flesh and smash the bones of undisclosed numbers of (scrupulously counted) unsuspecting people. Dong was not alone in this task of course (except at this moment and even then not for long), for he worked inside a legion of like-minded 'Dongs' who carried sinister threads of inside knowledge, some with enough to survive. The need for this struggle to create a miazma of perpetual carnage was, nevetheless, a mystery to themselves as much as anybody else. If there was a reason, it was long forgotten.

The countryside was a slaughterhouse of the deceived and blood was shed in more than one jungle. The jungle where Dong was walking was the former Truong Son of the French Associated States of Indochine. Dong knew it would now be called the Central Highlands of someplace else. He drifted down invisible paths this afternoon in a mortifying jungle and sweat a lot as anybody would in this heat (and he was under the weather in a self-inflicted way with a damned hangover).

Up to this very day, July 20, 1956, Dong had been carousing in the City of Hanoi at victory celebrations whereas in hindsight he should have foreseen the difficulties that lay ahead and confronted him today, should have seen them even as late as last week, or sooner, like when his fancy coat and top hat were confiscated when he came back from Geneva a few weeks ago. Now he returned to these invisible trails in the Annamite Cordillera for a miserable trek through immense danger and intense heat. He carried a canvas sack that bounced off an area of thick skin on his hip as he stepped over gnarled flora on valley floors and watched a tightly sprung trap coiling around him. Aah oui, il est un grand malaise, and the trick is to make it fatal. These are the things he considered as he walked in the Annamite Cordillera, a mountainous maze that divided the land of his forefathers into two geographical extremes. These two extremes were situated on a subcontinent that possessed neither repute nor disrepute and virtually no world recognition, and it was on this very day one-third of his native land disappeared. No outside speculators could say where it went; a few might have blamed the suddenly occurring Central Highlands while others might have argued whether Annam ever existed. Dong was very much at the forefront of the duplicity and subterfuge of this nature groaning in perpetuity through the constant waft of mysterious, repulsive odours.

From this day forward therefore Dong would propagate new names for opposite ends of this uncommon principality, his home and native land. Elders could say about these new names they had a familiar ring, and perhaps the 'new' names had occurred in a previous long-forgotten age. Now to clarify the confusion which arises from there being two, well, North Vietnam would lie to the north and a South Vietnam would lie to the south and nothing could be simpler. These two 'extremes' contained their share of the most fertile soil on earth, a fact the most ignored of all in political discourse always ending abruptly after correspondents endured overtures onto occult avenues (and down which they would never go and ever come back to talk about).The way everything grew around here was a hint of the supernatural fecundity in the land; the proof was in stuff accidently growing stupendous yields, including cultivations of rice. Dong ate a big bowl of rice every day (and lately twice a day) but Dong was no simple rice farmer. He was sowing a homicidal harvest.

He worked for the wizards behind the mechanical horrors that ruled Tonking and these wizards had raised a new spectre, an even nastier one, of new contraption terror. As party to creating perpetually dreary prospects in a forgotten part of the world, Dong reflected upon today's momentous turn that put him on this trek. First thing he and everybody had to swallow, was Nationalism had been suddenly replaced by Communism. Immune to dread, Dong knew the place contained tricky images of paradise like the beauty of the people, the ferocity of nature, the bounteous harvests from earth, rivers, and surrounding seas. Ancestors who once ruled over these gifts were long gone as were their intentions and whatever else was possessed of history.

Dong hiked with open mouth, catching flies, spitting a lot, and breathing hard, but keeping a steady pace and occasionally wiping the sweat from his brow, not without thinking about the Congress of North Vietnamese nouveau-communists in Hanoi. The north's centuries-old 'Walleyed' city had been seized and turned into the new capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The ruling cabal of petrifying leaders to this end included Ho Chi Minh, Le Duc Tho, General Giap, and a few other fossils that had generated the contraption. The ringleaders sat ominously atop a new Politburo holding its First Party Congress.

Formerly concealed evidence, surely truncated in content, and taking a newly apparent form, indicated varieties of interlopers encountering misfortune over the centuries when unwittingly (but somehow inevitably) falling into these parts. Dong knew it was propaganda designed to obscure historic, existing, and future deeds that could be construed as serious contraventions of new conventions in Geneva. Propaganda abounded to be sure but Dong reflected on his own role in the current malodorous century, which happens to be long after his forefathers contracted to build the contraption.

Simplicity governed the function; a strange pragmatism governed the thinking behind it. Dong and his cohorts roamed the countryside free-booting from villages and decorating the realm with knots of string, fishing-line, rope, and wire; digging holes, pits, and tunnels, and fashioning tonnes of bamboo into various shapes designed for lethal force, including thousands of strategically placed punjii sticks smeared with shit, pits often filled with poisonous snakes. Explosives were used on occasions when the comptroller splurged. One way or another the legion’s machinations made segments of earth and chunks or heaps of creation move to take out every living thing in the way. Spongy ground soaked up the remains.The contraption was a trap and worked as traps are wont to work, on the basis of deception. It’s about catching them when they least expect it and it doesn’t hurt to bait and switch once in a while, being the bait, pushing the contraption to strike. With this trap it even works to catch them when they expect it the most. Yes, this works too, but this works with a fully assembled contraption. The surprise attack, the atrocity by stealth, is the most exciting, of course, and the most recent explosion of surprises happened in a tumult which had transpired at the end of World War II. The contraption had been trained on a few divisions of Walleyed and squarehead barbarian longnoses who came to be known for their deeds and destined to disappear into the unknown, which was right here, IndoChina, part of which itself had recently disappeared.Immediately prior to this, a decade-long operation, Dong and cohorts spent a few years ripping apart a motley crew of Nipponese who were lured into the vast network of jungle traps for feeding to the great grinder. It wasn't complicated, not in the least. Put simply it was atrociously evil and a whole lot depended on it. Heirs to four centuries of continuous slaughter had finished a workup on the Walleyes. Those days were gone. 'Ferme le porte,' on your way out.

Operating the contraption was drudgery despite the havoc of these deeds and the days were filled with arduous, subtle, and tricky tasks. Dong himself was a rare entity, a long suffering stick-in-the-mud, and sure he stood up to his knees in the gore. But not as often as he used to. Seniority had launched him onto the world stage for a moment only to have fame flicker out like a falling star and pass away instantly. He was once again made to meander a nameless jungle with an aching head and bones, this time regretting a week of smoking, drinking, and carousing, ending abruptly this very day, yet which seemed so long ago.

He had attended the last day of the First Party Congress this morning. (There had been another first party congress a long time ago that nobody talked about.) The leaders had recently moved from Tan Trao, the hamlet in the jungle, to downtown Hanoi. It was a culture shock and Dong lived there in a fog. The ruling mob had fewer dreadful bugs and other surprises to deal with. Dong's memories of the past week were incomplete but 'comrades' had taken over the assets to appraise them and suddenly a bunch of Communists replaced a former Walleye-hating mob called Viet Minh. It was in the Minh that Dong had rank. A new region called South East Asia began to slink in the darkness under control of North Vietnam's 'Planning Council', which administered the Politburo. Some of this was important news to pass along.

Higher authorities in the Politburo were the usual accountants and botanists and a few councillors were field engineers and none of this would ever change. Dong belonged on the trails, yes, and equally belonged at the first (or apparently even third) party congress. He was a long-time servant of stench and last May his seniority took him to Geneva, Switzerland, and when he got there nobody knew who he was, or what he was there for. They seemed to go out of their way to ignore him, then the Geneva Convention was over and he left. Dong journeyed through the jungle where he was important and the contraption knew it and left well enough alone.

He ought to have attended more of the endless sessions of the First Party Congress at the Reunification Hotel (formerly Hotel Hanoi). Nobody on the council missed the all-encompassing summary address by the peerless defacto leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) delivered this morning in downtown Hanoi. During the last day of the First Party Congress, Dong had briefly envied the Walleyes for leaving when Uncle Ho began a long rumination about 'borders' and Dong tried to act interested like he tried earlier in the week when he, Dong, chaired a committee called, 'Preparation of a Rudimentary Map of the Annamite Cordillera.' He trudged into another volcanic gorge cogitating on Uncle Ho's arrival at another point in the agenda (where naturally he stayed for a long time. . .). The endless topic of peerless defacto leader's speech was feeding the contraption, for the contraption was rice and salted fish heads to this gang. A future of gigantic atrocities would surely dry up and disappear without the trap. Peerless defacto leader Ho Chi Minh (aka Nguyen Ai Qouc, Nguyen That Than, Nguyen That Thanh, Nguyen Van Than, C.M. Moo) was the latest in a long line of contraption confederates or collaborators and Uncle Ho spoke to an attentive audience, This device was designed for the Walleyes that have departed and with whom went the old borders . . . . And everything they could carry went with them on a flotilla of rust buckets. Whispers surrounded Dong who had been looking sympathetic and hanging on every word and thinking to himself that he didn't miss the stuff taken down the Red River to Haiphong by the huffy Walleyed longnoses when they left the region, yelling at anyone who would listen (nobody) that they already lost more than their share. Pas encore.

The time has come to dismantle the contraption, peerless defacto leader continued, then paused.  Dong pondered a few enduring summary addresses preceding this all-important (second) First Party Congress address, until peerless defacto leader made this infamous announcement: And move it! which stunned the crowd.

Move what?

A short burst of laughter broke in the room but died instantly (probably at the end of a blunt instrument). Then silence fell over the crowd and Dong recalled this because the silence occurred when an ache in his own head began.

We will move the contraption from one new country to another new country, said peerless defacto leader, from one No-Man's-Land to another No-Man's-Land.

Ho Chi Minh’s arms were wrapped in a floppy black sleeves flapping like black flags or bat’s wings in the direction of a few cluckers. The speech would destroy all doubt in would-be scorners simply by luring them out for destruction. Hundreds of confused councillors fell under the withering gaze of Ho Chi Minh including Dong and no doubt a few withered back regarding the idea of the Nguyen. None would dare to protest dismantling and moving the contraption just because it might be a delusion coming from a man who was doing too much celebrating. Nobody questioned Uncle Ho. Nobody knew of any surviving person who ever questioned Ho Chi Minh to his face.

Parts of the trap in the Phuong Dong will move to the other end of a new jungle, said Uncle Ho, and some parts on the cordillera do not move far. We trusted the contraption in Tong King and Annam! Those names are gone with the Walleyes and now the contraption will be dismantled and restored at the end of a new road. Let no one doubt we will build this road through, and sometimes around, the Central Highlands.

Dong recalled thinking, almost outloud, 'Build a what?'

Down this road we will move the contraption at great expense and at the end of it we will raise a stench to make the world retch.

Road?

Rich?

Would you settle for a trail?

Ferme la bouche! And make the necessary adjustments! Get used to it! There will plenty more merde to go around! We will make it happen. You can do this if you try.

It was Uncle Ho's job to cheerlead for the crowd before making the operation proceed.

In their spare time (of which they had too much nowadays) out on the trails (for there would never be roads) a new breed of argumentative types might suggest dismantling the contraption. No one would suggest moving the garrulous and unwieldy thing except the consummate Councillor who stood in front of the conference room full of mass murderers. No one could say where peerless defacto leader came by his ideas. The prospect of entering an impenetrable (newly coined) Central Highlands to build a road where you can barely find a trail practically floored everybody. (Nice carpet to land on for a change.) On the other hand, raising a stench with the contraption was nothing new.

Dong recalled a glimpse he had taken of the fancy room and the weary looks he had seen through his own bleary eyes. A lot of heads nodded but there were hisses on a few of those lips. Dong failed to conceal his own look of stupefaction (and probably wore it long into this forest trek. He wouldn't know because there weren't a lot of mirrors out here).There was one brief glimpse at terror when peerless defacto leader Ho Chi Minh glowered in Dong's direction. You look dismayed, Comrade Van, he said, in a lower and slower voice, a murmur, We will move the great grinder inside your non-existent lines on your useless maps! he shouted, I heard a special criticism (dialectic) of the rudimentary committee you chaired. I suggest you go and make it a real map this time! For this is what we require. Dong held his breath so long he almost passed out waiting for the blow to the back of his skull. Renovate the contraption! The cardinal vulture must have stuck his neck in a faraway vault because the money to build a road was not found here, certainly not in the wads of worthless Walleyed francs filling bullet holes in walls of the hamlet huts. Dong asked himself, why pick on old Dong for hunching too close to the front, both literally and metaphorically? Was he not behaving as one of the few doubters not hissing and whispering? He knew to avoid the argument and remain silent about his role as cartographer highlighted by peerless defacto leader. And the morning dragged like it does for a guy who spends most of his days in the dark.

Uncle Ho had a windy streak given to endless speeches filled with malevolent detail (and if they knew who to kill it would be the death of a speech-writer). Dong pondered the extraordinary moving announcement. He had to, since his day took a turn for the worst. Yes, Pham Van Dong, peerless defacto leader had hissed, vehemently, you would be one of the would-be scorners. For agonizing  seconds he had waited for the bludgeon to fall, instead his headache grew worse.

This time, gentlemen, we play for higher stakes, although we are accustomed to laying the risks! Behind the bewildering contraption lay Uncle Ho’s viperous intelligence and a dragon had less blood on its fangs. They needed a guy as smart as peerless defacto leader Ho Chi Minh to concoct a plot to put perpetual killing on a centre-stage nobody could see. Worth recalling was the mood of the crowd, however, swaying with an unexpected level of pessimism. Where was the sense of victory blowing in the wind? Perhaps they like Dong were too exhausted after decades running in jungles to 'evade' long noses. Dong recalled one particular inquiry made by a wizened-to-terror (therefore invisible) neo-Communist, Is the soil in the south as fertile as the north?

What do we know of the soil in the south? echoed another voice, timidly. What does soil have to do with anything? came Uncle Ho's gruff repy. I have issued orders to dismantle the contraption!

The new Politburo stuck with a sure bet. This crowd of head-hunters would agree to decisions belonging to Uncle Ho regardless how merciless the outcome. They were scared of him for he was known to instigate many a harrowing episode going back to the 1930s when he used a sharp red pencil at a railroad station in Kiev, Ukraine, and later for imparting the same starvation economics to Chairman Mao in China who took much inspiration from Comecon's despotic auditor. When famine arrived in Tong King in 1944 and '45, during a previous brief fling with Communism, it coincided not surprisingly with the homecoming of the peerless defacto leader. Starvation followed this guy everywhere he went.

Pham Van Dong was still alive and outside the inevitable circular dialogue swirling about peerless defacto leader's decision. But of course he heard gossip swirl of an occlusion on Dong's horizon, and that was just noise. He heard a surprising amount of opposition to peerless defacto leader's announcement. To many if not all councillors the idea of moving the contraption was preposterous and depended on building a road through the previously unheardof Central Highlands, which was impossible. The Annamite Cordillera was a barrier that was never crossed except by a few tiger hunting expeditions and now Dong's specific duties. The trails in the flora were made by the fauna. As for human trails, the question had always been, why bother?

The First Party Congress this morning contained a bazaar of macro-engineering professionals, each with a lifetime spent in the design, construction, or maintenance of the meat-grinding contraption. It was originally conceived and built in the northern half of IndoChina, most of it in Tong King, but a small section operated in northern Annam so everybody appreciated the difficulty of constructing things on the cordillera. Viets mostly figured it would be redundant to add danger to already imminent danger, but eventually an avid gathering of Viet Minh came to appreciate the harvest on these tiny trails, for such a contraption is not the creation of idlers (who ultimately learned that a long nose would chase you anywhere to kill you).

Dong knew that none of these councilors could imagine their lives without it; furthermore the contraption itself would fulfill the wrath of Nguyen Ai Qouc, the big Nguyen, the number one (and only) peerless defacto leader. Dong, approaching his mid-50's, and a lifetime inside the Nationalist Movement, the idea remained difficult to imagine, moving a thing of such monstrous girth, contraption fighting you all the way down a sinew of non-existent trails through a nightmare of Annamite jungle (Was that asking too much?) to perpetuate the name of one  man who spent most of his leisure time surrounded by naked children playing with rubber balloons.

Dong averted his eyes from the infamously hard stare raking over the First Party Congress. Uncle Ho stood in with a row of ringleaders who blinked owlishly at everybody: General Nguyen Vo Giap, Truong Chin, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, Le Duan, and Le Duc Tho, all products of the French Surete of the former Associated States of Indochine. They were silent like everybody else while Uncle Ho raved at the would-be scorners. Dong ranked as high as any, in terms of seniority. Political footing in this tiny corner of the known world, and unknown world, never came with a golden parachute.

In taking our decision, we asked. . . , (Oh yeah? Asked who?), would it be worthwhile to expand and spread the contraption if such possibilities exist? And peerless defacto leader had known the answer, which was happily shorter than the question. Heads nodded, for otherwise they would roll, plus there was general agreement that the contraption was immaculate and irreplaceable. In his address Uncle Ho blamed the Walleyes for a worthless currency that reflected their lackadaisical approach to feeding the monstrously sized device recently.

From a technical point of view, we know the contraption works perfectly. First we agreed, he had paused, as at many moments in the summary address, that moving our contraption is a laudable goal. Then fellow Communists we merely faced the job of relocation. He allowed his crypt-piercing remarks to sink in. Ol' Whatzisname should be expected to employ a single-minded purpose in coming to his carnivorous conclusion (having the sort of single mind that promotes human sacrifice). Dong had survived long enough to learn a few dark secrets regarding ownership of the Nguyen contract, and Dong buried any further contemplation, except he knew a practically alien hypocrisy cloaked a huge stake in an utterly carnal enterprise thriving in their midst. The contractor abided in a rare atmosphere furnished by stratospheric wealth and made Uncle Ho an agent with a sharp pencil used to cipher the tricky details weighing-in on a large-scale rendering of humans.

Dong actually knew his cartography job without faking, no matter what the peerless defacto leader proclaimed, dialectics aside, and this was both fortunate and unfortunate circumstance because it kept him alive but for what? More insults and threats? Couldn't we just leave it where it is? asked another invisible councilor. (Who was it luckier and further from the front than Dong?) The foolish question from behind failed to recognize the saturation point of the north and exhaustion of population. Nor did it recognize deeds like these are done to people by planning. The previous plan had been fulfilled once the Nationalist movement obtained a nation after years of continuous battles raging in the north. Naturally peerless defacto leader made the former Minhs mob break hard on the Walleyes. Two things remained after 300 years of Walleyed '‘colonialism': a legion of long nose ghosts haunted the jungle habitat (near the rivers), and vaults were abandoned containing ghostly francs collecting dust (or loads of laughs when offered to the world's bankers). The Walleyes themselves mocked the worthless papiere, Ho, we will simply make a new franc, so fuck you.

During the past 10 years of unbridled terror, Walleyes grew snooty and spiteful, especially once the predecessor to the Politburo cobbled together pieces of the modern contraption and perfected its function. Timed perfectly with contraption operations came the arrival of hundreds of thousands of barbarian long noses hired by local Walleyes (called Colons) to create an incomprehensible escalation. Viets rose to ferocious scale on their own behalf, casting themselves in a new form of warrior called a guerrilla. Behind the carnage, wizards steered combatants into the contraption, which devoured until the remaining Walleyes sailed away taking everything they could carry. Oh, faceless inquisitor, peerless defacto leader replied to the faceless inquisitor, Walleyes are gone and never coming back, he said, sort of lamentably, and he hardly moved except to blink, delivering every word with terrible gravity (except Uncle Ho didn’t need words to be a menace). Who else knows the value of our possessions? Have we learned nothing from these tricks ? We will invite another greater long nose!

Dong imagined he and his fellow Viets had taken control of IndoChina because his eyes and ears told him so, and everybody was eating lots of rice and smoking lots of opium, and no long noses roamed around the countryside stealing the lion's share of an endless supply (best rice in the world) and constant flow (second best opium in the world). Of course it was too good to be true. Why not invite another horde of obnoxious round-eyed bastards to proliferate another huge stench in the midst of an exploding population, highest growth rate in the world? To Dong, who was well-schooled in Uncle Ho's Nationalist rhetoric, the new direction simply revealed a contraption-sized compulsion for baiting long noses. To Dong (and most of the rest of the council) sending an invitation to the United States of America would seem to be an astonishing way to proceed.

Dong was feeling overwhelmed, as surely the rest of them were, at the pace of change. On any given day, he had stumbled through an urban grotto searching for an entrance to a sweet-smelling opium den, fresh off the stinking trails from sucking Walleyes into the trap. Suddenly, or so it seemed, he was sat in a Swiss hotel room holding forth a phoney map nobody wanted to see. A few days later he roamed an ornate (in a gauche way) hotel and conference centre in Hanoi. This morning he stood with bare feet buried in plush carpet in an opulent ballroom of the Reunification Hotel and he became the ghostly centre of attention, his turn to feel the terror devised by the mind behind the contraption. How is that for startling change?

Or try swallowing this malaria pill, Pham Van Dong! Some comrade! Your pitiful sneer informs us how entirely unfortunate we are to continue to require your services. They probably hit him with a sock filled with buckshot because he fell unconscious.

No doubt the Nguyen went on in great hoary detail about the grinding path to the future. Details of a brand new paradigm pertained to a brand new agenda and Dong was perhaps an accidental Councillor who unconsciously knew it was more of the same old shit. He became aware of the youthful cadre slapping his face and saying he wasn't hit that hard and telling him nobody was going to carry him, and then he was elbowed off the steps of the hotel into the streets heading toward the river. Dong knew the luck to be pushed in front of a firing squad when it happened to be unarmed. They tossed him in the tepid puddle on the floor of the sloop on the banks of the Red River. A gang of three launched the boat and he heard them chatting about Dong's duty to create a map of a place called the Central Highlands.

They shunted him down the Red River onto the Gulf of Tonkin, and the party sailed south along the coast to an indistinct point until they drew parallel with the Truong Son. Dong bore the brunt of a thoroughly dull a lecture during the hundreds of kilometers until the political dogmatics ended after a number of hours and the conversation turned to a sarcastic discussion about Dong's worthiness as bait. They told him Ho Chi Minh ended the summary address with complete termination of the Viet Minh Nationalist movement as if it never existed, and he had missed it. They told him about executions taking place after the meeting. Then they informed Dong if he so much as mentioned the Minh movement ever again, Communists like they would cut out his tongue and mince it and fry it and eat it without sharing one piece with him.

So the bait changed and Dong was informed Communists are it. This new political fiction was fabricated from a litany called Causal Doctrine. It went like this (slap), and like this (slap), and like that (slap), and like this (slap). They spat on him one point at a time and he could have replied he heard it all before. Uncle Ho speaking of communist causal doctrine old news, heard long ago around a fire, straight from the horses mouth, and Dong recalled thinking it was slightly more brutal and destructive than the Minh model for contraption deployment. The Walleyes hated national aspirations. The Longnose Americans hated ideological aspirations. In fact, Dong didn't distinguish a difference. Passing endless rivers pouring into the South China Sea, water sometimes cascading from tremendous heights as they neared Annam, (There is no such place, commanded one of the cadre who ensued with an insane rant about Dong lucky he was mapping the Central Highlands, or he was nothing but a smear. Now honestly a mapping assignment like this one compared to delivering letters to non-existent people who are never to be found in the most remote corners of the world.)

His assignment involved traveling the Phuong Dong or Central Highlands of the Annamite Cordillera (which is a chain of severely grumpy mountains to form a bent spine on the IndoChinese peninsula) where even tigers are scared to roam but do anyway.

Those snotty young pups tossed him and a sack at the mouth of a river in the waning afternoon and departed presumably back to Hanoi and the easy life. Dong laid alone for a spell disgusted by what he had heard and eventually rose from the red muck to doff wet shorts and lean into a tree and take a piss. He looked for a trail down which he started the trek. He was on his way with his tongue, a former Nationalist reborn a Communist, and facing a long climb back up the hierarchy and a long walk south and west. This late afternoon he will meet a group of jungle-bound Viet-Muh, Communist cadre. Then he was off to Saigon City.

It was Dong's intention to be the most terrifying of all things in the bowels of a mortifying jungle. He scared the wildest creatures with his frightful image of sunken eyes set in hoods of skin that sun had browned and years had wrinkled into leather. His jutting teeth were black from chewing betel nut and smoking and a lack of dental practitioners in the Phuong Dong or other jungles. He was wiry and strong and still the heavy sack was a burden that made him hunch forward and list in the direction of the weight. Clumps of red muck from the riverbank matted his hair and the thinning pate was greying, for Dong had seen more than a few ghosts. He always ate a lot of salted fish and had breath that smelled rotten, which was enough to slam a tiger in the face and send it howling. Years ago, around the turn of the century, a couple of fingers went missing from his strong-side hand.

Dong took great care with a sack of gifts that came from a crazed American in Geneva to be delivered to South Vietnamese (defacto) President Ngo Dinh Diem. John Foster Dulles had supplied an assortment of colorful long nose American magazines representing something previously unseen and equal to a fortune in the black markets of Saigon City, South Vietnam, South East Asia (except this collection was spoken for).

A few Viets in the former Associated State of Cochin China, now South Vietnam, postured obscenely and acted in a completely facile way to attract foreign attention and placate long noses. These pragmatists were called Catholics, there was a few, and their fawning had been encouraged. One was named Ngo Dinh Diem and he ran an organization called the Catholic Labour Union which in turn funded a bunch of brutal sects in the south, the largest of which was called Cao Dai.

Dong stopped to catch his breath and have a smoke, maybe two. He stooped to pull on his dried shorts in the widest part of the trail and spied a stump in the dark to brush off a place to sit. He retrieved a pipe from the sack and a little purse of cultivated marijuana and fished for a magazine, which he held toward a slash of light and opened to browse the colorful pages and he lit the bowl of weed. In an instant the crazed scouts from a colony of flesh-eating ants struck pay dirt at his bare feet and Dong stomped the earth and blew smoke at the ground hoping to cause a retreat. He turned his gaze to the mesmerizing long nose nymphs reposing in glossy life-like color. Rather than thoughts of pleasure his head filled with memories of belligerence and he sat astride the trail in the relative dark of day puffing until the bowl was consumed. Four centuries had passed since the walleyes stuck their long noses into the region. Dong's reclusive ancestors had hidden in jungles like this one where forests provided seclusion to leaders in those centuries of ceaseless and inexplicable carnage perpetrated by Walleyed interlopers. In these constricting quarters the nobles escaped fatal inculcation by the French until Gia Long became first Nguyen emperor in the early 19th century. Gia Long was revered for making the best of a bad situation.

Dong's parents conceived him (and Ho Chi Minh conceived an industrial age contraption) in a wild and forbidding jungle much like this one except somewhere else in the former Associated States. Dong reconsidered his own life-long service, which obviously added up to nothing for him personally, which he now understood was the ultimate objective.. He had missed the glorious moment of victory in the tiny village of Dien Bien Phu, being stuck in Tan Trao and then sent to Geneva while the opium growers stood back to watch General Giap spring into action. General Giap used up two million Viet Minh to annihilate half a million Foreign Legionnaires. The stench of Dien Bien Phu smelled all the way to Hanoi and was a coup de grace and denouement for the mighty Viet Minh army. Pictures of French officers Colonel Langlais and General de Castries taken on a wharf at Haiphong harbour show them wearing long faces.

Dong was destined to fill his days watching an apparently redundant (and still hungry) contraption. Others suffered this monotonous fate and soon they would meet and welcome the announcement by peerless defacto leader. They knew little about the grandiosity of the new assignment. Dong knew the contraption would take all of a decade to re-assemble. More worrisome was the choice of long noses to take the bait.

Dong's thoughts had turned to the immediate concern of meeting this group of Viet, uh, Communists who were expecting rumours from Hanoi. He tucked away the pipe and dope in their containers and the magazine in its sack, and rose to continue moving to the south west. That snootful of weed had performed magic and the trail was wider and the jungle more commodious. The contraption moved back on both sides and ahead and above and below. A short while later Dong's trustworthy senses informed him of an encounter coming down the trail. But one has to ask, was this the one he was expecting? The meeting was imminent with those Viet Mi—er—unists.

Dong stepped off the trail to conceal himself and wait for shadows to approach. First he observed silhouettes passing through ribbons of light and wondered if there shouldn't be more of them. He fingered the pistol in the sack the cadre had given him at the end of the boat-ride. Then more memories of belligerence flooded his mind. The excitement of potential bloodshed subsided after Dong identified the lead coming down the trail. Nevertheless he barked from the shadows, Who goes there?

It was Ha Van Lau who stood on the trail smirking at the bushes, Finish up in there, old fella, said the fast rising Viet Min-uh-U'nist, and I will introduce you.

Dong groused, Very funny, and stepped out to chuckles and stared into the battle-hardened eyes of Ha Van Lau.

Who were you expecting? asked Lau. Dong replied, Where are the others?

Red dust, said Ha Van Lau.

Dong corrected him, Stench first. Ha Van Lau was a youthful northerner and future leader of the Viet (uh) Communists, "Of