The Nightmare Frontier Read online

  THE NIGHTMARE FRONTIER

  By Stephen Mark Rainey

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2010 by Stephen Mark Rainey

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Mark Rainey is author of the novels Balak, The Lebo Coven, Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (with Elizabeth Massie), The Nightmare Frontier, and Blue Devil Island; over 90 published works of short fiction; five short-fiction collections; and several audio dramas for Big Finish Productions based on the Dark Shadows TV series, featuring several original cast members. For ten years, he edited the award-winning Deathrealm magazine and has edited anthologies for Chaosium, Arkham House, and Delirium Books. Mark lives in Greensboro, NC. He is an avid geocacher, which oftentimes puts him in some pretty scary settings. Visit his website at www.stephenmarkrainey.com.

  Book List

  The Last Trumpet

  Balak

  Dark Shadows: Dreams of the Dark (with Elizabeth Massie)

  The Lebo Coven

  Blue Devil Island

  Other Gods

  The Nightmare Frontier

  The Gaki & Other Hungry Spirits

  Legends of the Night

  Song of Cthulhu

  Evermore (with James Robert Smith)

  Deathrealms

  The Gods of Moab

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  THE NIGHTMARE FRONTIER

  Tay Ninh Province, South Vietnam (War Zone C)

  June 1967

  Technically, it wasn’t jungle. Its official military rating was “triple-canopied rain forest,” which meant visibility through the trees and undergrowth exceeded thirty yards, at least in places. In the past hour, the platoon had hacked its way through more than a thousand yards of matted vines, creepers, thorns, and bamboo clusters—half again the limitation of “jungle” terrain. Still, even if sunlight penetrated the leafy tiers only sporadically, the temperature hovered around the 100-degree mark, and at 99 percent relative humidity, the air quickly left a man feeling as if he were drowning in hot bathwater. Moving little faster than the ants that marched to their own drumbeat, the 39 Americans advanced single file through the brush, foregoing the standard parallel columns, which offered Charlie not one but two tantalizing groups of targets should he be in the mood to spring an ambush.

  Since the First Infantry Division had been deployed, he had been in the mood an awful lot.

  On point, PFC Ryan Cortland was making decent time and actually seemed to have a cool head on his shoulders—doubtlessly because he was the FNG (fucking new guy) and hadn’t learned yet that, out here, showing initiative more often led to a bad end than a promotion. Hell, though; if there were snipers in the bush, your odds were about the same whether you were the point man or the tail-end charlie. Or anywhere in between.

  The last time there were no snipers in the bush, Lieutenant Glenn Martin had been Mister Glenn Martin, sipping vodka and tonics on his back porch in Huntington. The VC always hit hard and then turned invisible with shocking suddenness, largely because they could pop in and out of concealed entrances of their tunnels, which formed an ominously impressive network between Tay Ninh and Svay Rieng, Cambodia. Today, Martin’s objective was to rout the vermin out of the ground and into his sights.

  He had brought along his best tunnel rats for the job.

  Cortland slowed his pace, and Martin moved forward, leading with his M-16. Softly he asked, “Smell something, private?”

  The young man, his eyes brilliant amid black greasepaint, shrugged uncertainly. “Looks like a break ahead. Think I saw something moving.”

  Martin immediately held up a fist, halting the column. A broad swath of daylight split the hardwood pillars some fifty yards ahead, and within it, a wisp of shadow swayed slowly back and forth—which he finally identified as a bunch of creepers caught in a breeze too feeble to penetrate the tree line. The air smelled of rotten citrus and sour loam, but it bore no trace of cordite, petroleum, or other human detritus. Of course, out here, that meant diddlysquat; if Charlie didn’t want you to know he was around, you didn’t know he was around. Simple as that.

  Where the trees ended, Martin could see pale gray stone—either the face of a tall cliff or the wall of some hulking structure, though the latter seemed unlikely. He raised his hand, waggled one finger in the direction of the clearing, and the line started moving, very slowly, only slightly louder than a band of Cherokees. As they neared the break, sure enough, Martin could make out the irregular outline of a massive stone edifice, overhung with vines and deeply stained from God knew how many years of exposure to the elements. No sound trickled from the building, and birds, insects, and other unseen noisemakers kept up a constant chatter in the distance.

  Good sign, that.

  From what he could see, the structure resembled nothing he had previously encountered in this country. Definitely not one of the ubiquitous Cham temples, which featured tiered, intricately sculpted walls, friezes, and porticos. This one was obviously ancient and built to last for ages, but its contours were simple, its ash-hued walls featureless, though severely pitted with age. Off to the left, he could see a row of thick gray pillars, maybe twenty feet high, apparently all that remained of a long, covered entranceway. Above the broken green canopy, a tall spire the color of bone rose high into the sky, which superficially lent the building the appearance of a European cathedral.

  A relic left by the French?

  He paused to allow his second-in-command, Sergeant Matt Collins, to catch up to him, then whispered into the shorter man’s grease-painted ear, “Send Sieber’s squad to the left, Wiley’s to the right to secure the entrance. For God’s sake, watch out for traps.”

  Collins’s eyes flashed, and he rushed to carry out the order. Martin then crept up beside the stocky, simian figure of Sergeant Samuel Barrow, his senior tunnel rat. Like Martin, Barrow was a West Virginian, but came from some podunk town in the mountains that probably subsisted on coalmining. A vulgar, supremely ugly hillbilly, Barrow ha
d damn near become a company legend for scurrying recklessly through tunnels, blasting everything fore and aft, burning Charlie out of his hive with the zeal of a crazed exterminator. Martin admitted to a grudging respect for the man because, like himself, Barrow was on his second tour of duty and—also like Martin—had never qualified for a Purple Heart.

  “Sergeant,” he said, immediately getting that quizzical, cockeyed gaze from Barrow that slightly unnerved him. “Ever seen a place like this before?”

  Barrow shook his ungainly, oversized head. “Nawsir. But if they’s Charlie in there, we’ll roust ’em out.”

  Martin nodded. His men had assumed attack formation expertly and stealthily; if they were going to take fire, it would come as soon as they were in the open.

  Now he could now see a tall, rectangular doorway beneath a bizarrely tilted porte-cochere, so caddywhompus it looked as if a strong wind might topple it. A narrow apron of rubble-choked, sharp-bladed grass girded the structure.

  Just the place to find punji pits, toe-poppers, or other extremely nasty booby-traps.

  Martin felt the presence of an enemy as plainly as the scalding sun on his shoulders. He glanced at Sergeant Collins, raised his right arm, and gave the signal to move.

  Corporal Sieber’s squad went first, fast and low, the leader’s eyes on the ground, the rest scanning the tree line, the rubble around the building, the looming black entryway. They reached the first row of pillars and pressed close to them for cover, half their guns pointing at the trees, the other half at the building entrance. Martin’s finger tightened on the trigger of his M-16, expecting to hear the lethal clatter of AK-47s at any second; but even as Sergeant Wiley’s squad rushed for the entrance, the forest remained eerily still.

  Martin tapped Barrow on the shoulder and said, “Let’s move, Sergeant.” Then they were hauling pell-mell across the apron of knifelike grass, skirting waist-high blocks of stone rubble, Sieber’s men closing up to form a cordon behind them. Martin screeched to a halt just shy of the weirdly angled porte-cochere, realizing its floor might be counterweighted to give way beneath them.

  Holding back his troops, he thrust the butt of his M-16 against the floor, which solidly deflected the blow. He took a tentative step forward, found the surface steady and unyielding, and with a few long strides, crossed the floor and slid up next to the yawning black rectangle.

  The rest of the rats followed, several with their heavy-duty flashlights in hand. The first pair leaped into the darkness, lights blazing, the second pair covering them with their M-16s. Still no enemy fire.

  As flashlight beams played wildly on gray stone walls, Martin stepped through the uncannily tall door, averting his eyes from the lights to keep from being temporarily blinded. The walls rose higher than the beams could reach, all bare stone, cracked in places, splotched with green-gray mold. The air reeked of mildew and something vaguely sulfurous. He counted six walls, all of varying widths, and two arched portals, both nearly as tall as the main doorway. No furnishings, no adornments—nothing to indicate that this place had been used by human beings for a very long time. However, the distinctive pressure at the back of his neck, a sure warning of an enemy presence nearby, grew more insistent.

  He tapped the nearest man—PFC Cortland. “Private, let’s have a look through one of those doors, shall we?”

  Cortland nodded and crept to one of the archways, flashlight in his right hand, the muzzle of his M-16 balanced on his forearm. At Martin’s signal, he crouched and quickly thrust his flashlight through the opening. When the yellow-white beam fell upon the thing in alcove to his right, Martin’s heart almost stopped.

  For a disturbing second, he thought it was alive: a twenty-foot-tall wormlike beast rising from a broad, bulbous base, numerous whip-like tails curling around it, multiple rows of needle-like spines running the entire length of its body. Atop a gnarled, spindly stalk that protruded from the base, a bright, cyclopean, sapphire eye glared at him with the disconcerting illusion of sentience. When he took a few steps toward it, the glittering eye appeared to follow him.

  “God awmighty,” came a low whisper from behind him, and he glanced back to see Sergeant Samuel Barrow leaning in to study the grotesque figure. “That is one ugly motherfucker.”

  “Not that I’m an expert on local culture,” Martin said, “but this looks like a whole lot of nothing I’ve ever seen anywhere.”

  Mesmerized, Barrow knelt to peer at the brilliant, egg-sized stone. “How much would you say that’s worth, Lieutenant?”

  “Doesn’t matter, since it’s not going anywhere, Sergeant.”

  Barrow snorted. “Just askin’.”

  Martin was about to order Barrow to move on when the first blast of gunfire rang from beyond the chamber. He automatically ducked and swiveled, just in time to see the strobing flashes of machinegun fire in the anteroom, the reports shattering the silence of the enclosed space like the clashing of deafening cymbals. He scrambled toward the towering archway just as the body of PFC Guiliano hurtled past him like a broken marionette and struck the floor with a moist, sickening thud. A long, arrow-like shaft protruded from the young man’s neck, and it dawned on him then that the gunfire had come only from M-16s.

  Through the ringing in his ears, he made out Sergeant Collins shouting, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  Confusion reigned as men whirled uncertainly, evidently deprived of their targets. Martin clambered through the portal and grabbed Collins by the shoulder. “What the hell happened?”

  “The bastards are in here! They just appeared out of nowhere and cut loose with—something. Arrows, blowguns, something. Quiet as hell. But they were in here all along.”

  A few of Sieber’s men had rushed in from outside, but Collins held the rest of them back. “Stay put. If there are more outside, we don’t want them getting in here.”

  Then, from the adjacent portal, a deep thrumming sound, like a heavy engine warming up, reverberated from the building’s depths. Martin peered through the arched opening and for a second glimpsed a distant flicker of light—a reflection perhaps—as something large but indistinct began moving slowly toward them.

  “Don’t know what that is, sir,” Collins said, “but I’ll make book it ain’t about to wish us good day.”

  “Let’s pull back and pin them inside,” he said. “We’ll see how this big rock candy bastard holds up to a couple of thousand-pounders.” He nodded suggestively at the ceiling.

  “You heard the man!” Collins sang out. “Fall back to our original positions. Squad order. Move it, move it!”

  Martin glanced around and realized Sergeant Barrow had never emerged from the secondary chamber. He quickly thrust his head back through the opening, realizing too late how careless he had just been; he was almost surprised when nothing streaked out of the darkness to spear him. Beyond Guiliano’s prone, twisted body, he could discern the errant sergeant’s back. Barrow was kneeling as if in prayer before the tall, monstrous-looking statue in the alcove.

  “Sergeant, let’s move. Now!”

  “Just coming, sir,” came the low, gruff voice. The figure straightened and ambled unconcernedly into the dim light that shone through the archway. “No worries, Lieutenant. Everything’s under control.”

  “Good. You can carry Guiliano’s body out of there. Make it fast, Barrow; I reckon we’ve got ten seconds before anyone left inside this place ends up in a few more pieces than he’s accustomed to.”

  Like a gorilla lifting a sack of bananas, Barrow hoisted the dead man to his shoulders and lumbered through the door. With a mocking leer, he growled, “Come on, Lieutenant, time’s a-wasting.”

  Martin saw a discarded flashlight on the floor, picked it up, and on a whim, shone it into the dark room Barrow had just vacated. As the deep, pulsing beats of the approaching engine bore down upon him with increasing intensity, he stood peering at the thing he had come to think of as the demon god, and his anger began to seethe.

  The giant, sapphire-hued s
tone—the god’s eye—was gone.

  Now, he was forced to turn and face the heavily thrumming apparatus—for machine it must be—which at any moment would burst from the dark opening into the anteroom. Something was moving slowly up the passage, just beyond the range of his beam: an erratically writhing shape, still indistinct but larger than a man, issuing deep thudding and chugging noises like a locomotive.

  He felt a sudden tug on his bicep and whipped his head around to see Sergeant Collins glaring at him in warning. “Come on, Lieutenant. Standing your ground don’t look like the best plan today.”

  Before he could react, he felt a bone-numbing impact and found himself hurtling awkwardly through the tall portal, into the blistering sunlight. He landed heavily on his back, his breath exploding through his mouth, his helmet clanking sharply against a stone in the tall sawgrass. Without pausing to catch his breath, ignoring the God-awful pain at the back of his head, he struggled to his feet, just in time to see an obviously wounded Sergeant Collins crawling through the doorway toward him.

  At that moment, his eyes began playing tricks on him. He knew they were because the serpentine cables that sprang like grappling hooks out of the darkness, instantly encircling Collins’s body and dragging him back inside, precisely resembled the spiny appendages of the sculpted demon god in the alcove. Collins cried out in pain and disbelief, his hands scrabbling desperately but vainly at the rough stone floor; then his body vanished into the rectangular black maw. The long, mortal wail that rang mournfully out of the darkness was silenced a moment later by a sharp, wet ripping sound.

  Gunfire erupted around him, and half a second later, two of his men yanked the pins on a pair of grenades. The cry went up—“Fire in the hole!”—and Martin lowered his head as the pineapples sailed into the abyss beyond the door. Three seconds later, with a gut-wrenching boom, a huge blossom of orange flame roared from the opening, sending a hail of prickling shards over the crouching men. Then the tilted porte-cochere groaned like a dying elephant and slowly toppled, throwing up a thick cloud of gray dust, which quickly cloaked the structure. Inside the building, something—the ceiling of the anteroom, perhaps—collapsed heavily, sending a tremor through the ground beneath Martin’s feet.