Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (38 page)

As his vision and mind cleared, what Arnold first took for a ruined and cracked sky—some vast and crumbling firmament of heaven—turned out to be a fractured and fissured plaster ceiling, its white paint fading to sickly yellow with age and cigarette smoke. As his mind cleared enough to focus, something about the scale seemed wrong. The ceiling hung above him unnaturally, like an omen.

The ceiling was immense. It went on and on. Portions of it, water-soaked and crumbling, had sagged, revealing between the fissures the rib-work of the floor above.

Something very bad had occurred. An explosion—he recalled that much. A jungle. Natives hunting him in the jungle.

The ceiling looked down on him with indifference. He could smell the acrid aroma of burning cardboard and the thin, clear stench of heated plastic in the freezing air. They were not the smells he expected. He expected either the hospital or the jungle; ammonia and sulfur or plants and dung, not burning plastic and cardboard and a giant’s room.

Thomas Arnold sat up. He found himself in a tremendous bed which shrieked as he moved, the springs inside the thin padding crying out like an insane chorus of birds. His legs were shrouded beneath a ragged and stained sheet, which may have once been white but had seen so much use that it was covered in various organic blotches which almost looked deliberate. He felt very strange, almost uncomfortable. But even that was not the right word. He had no pain, no apparent wounds he could feel.

Still, something was wrong.

The ceiling hung at least twelve feet above the floor of what appeared to be a bedroom in some type of tenement building. A door, normal in all aspects except its massive size, stood opposite him. The door, at least nine feet tall, was open a sliver, revealing a rich, yellow light from the room beyond. The bed, the door, the ceiling, even the windows which hung behind his head were terribly out of scale. Everything was built for a giant.

Footsteps interrupted his reverie.

A gigantic, swarthy-skinned man, nothing more than a backlit shadow broken by glinty eyes and a ring-filled hand, stood at the crack of the door, which to the giant seemed to be normally proportioned. The stranger’s eyes shifted over Arnold momentarily and then he was gone, transformed to rapidly diminishing footsteps on old wood floors. A distant door slammed; a galloping sound of feet taking a series of steps two at a time from some far-removed stairwell.

Another distant door, somewhere below in Arnold’s nightmare, slammed shut.

He could feel the emptiness of the apartment. His breath flowed out in white plumes. Something about the prickling of his skin, the way his hair stood on end, the perfect and creamy white complexion of his arms resounded in his mind like a warning.

Something was wrong.

He wore no rings. His class rings were gone. His fingers looked plump, short, and held no deep creases, as if he had been in bed a long time and they had softened by the long convalescence—but his mind
whispered to him that this
was not the case. A coma, then? Something else about his hands were very wrong. Best not to think about it.

His feet found the freezing wood of the floor. The room was even bigger than he had imagined from his perch on the bed. The ceiling hung above him like the sky. Before him, at least thirty feet away, was the giant’s door, still ajar. A faint bit of music played from the other room. Arnold crept forward, coaxing a million different creaks and groans from the unusually thick and long planks on the floor.

Arnold slid the door open, pulling on the rusted knob with both, baby-smooth hands. He had to reach slightly up to do so. As the door swung wide to reveal the other room, Arnold held his breath.

Light flooded in from two immense, cracked windows, illuminating another huge room. As Arnold shuffled in and could see more clearly, the light sparkled off a million fragmented pieces of metal, glass and bits of mirror scattered on the floor. Outside the window, lost in the sun, was the facade of another tenement.

Arnold shuffled into the room. Some huge machine, like the inner workings of a Phillips radio, had been smashed beyond repair in the center of the room and spread about evenly. The destruction had occurred with great care, it seemed, reminding Arnold of his OSS training on how to destroy radios and code-books to avoid their capture. It was the room’s only feature except for an overturned table. From the room beyond, perhaps the next door neighbor’s, a radio played quietly. The male voice, thick and resonant and resoundingly controlled, trilled through the wall:

You must remember this:
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The sentimental things apply, as time goes by

He had never heard the song before.

As he moved forward, complex patterns of light rose from the wreckage on the floor, reflections off the debris spiraling in the air, distorting the room, giving him a feeling of disjointedness, adding to the dreamlike sensation which already permeated the scene. His breath leapt out of him, rising in the sunlight like steam, when he was no longer able to hold it in. He had nearly forgotten he was holding it at all.

Arnold stood near the edge of the debris, poised in the sunlight, naked and afraid. Afraid of something he already somehow knew. Afraid of something. Some fact which was already in his mind but which he could not see, would not see.

Thomas Arnold looked down on a hundred upturned pieces of shattered mirror which lay among the detritus.

A hundred reflections of the serene, blameless face of an eight-year-old boy looked back at him.

He began to scream.

Night fell on the western desert and Joe Camp fell with it. It was seven and a half hours since his departure from the safety of the cave and he now understood the severe mistake he’d made venturing out in the blazing Australian sun. An hour into his march, all the strength had left his limbs, leaving him a stumbling stick-figure in an endless sea of red-brown dunes. His lips were cracked, his eyes were sunblind and his water was nearly gone. Half caught up in some mad, internal monologue, he noted his knees giving way like a man marking time, simply watching for some only marginally interesting event—in this case, the end of his life. There was no pain. In fact there was no sensation at all when he hit the sand. His body was a numb appendage, a ragged waste of rapidly dwindling liquids which would surely be used up after tonight.

The cool darkness swept over him like a drug, lulling him into a dull stupor. Unmoving. Paralyzed.

Then—the light.

In the distance a dancing, ghostly light, red, green and purple, appeared in the darkness like a storm of color on the lip of the world. Camp found his feet slowly, first stumbling up to his hands and knees and then to a swaying, crouch as the world rocked and tilted around him. The light still shone in the dark, a beacon, drawing him forward to the edge of the map, the place where the cartographer might mark “here there be dragons.” The light was mesmerizing. It drew him, unmindful of danger, like he was being tugged forward on an invisible tether.

He staggered ahead, attempting to keep the light in his field of vision, his feet sinking into the greedy sand as soft dunes pulled on his boots, sucking them in to trip him. Twice he fell to his hands and knees; once he sank up to his wrists in the sand. The sand beneath him was lit by the sky and the ghost-light like snow in the moonlight. Golden, blue and red motes of solid color winked in and out as they caught the light like tiny mirrors.

Squinting and raising his head from the sand, Joe Camp focused his stinging eyes as well as he could on the distant light and saw shadows passing before them. Blurry man-shapes flitted back and forth, backlit by the brilliance of the blaze on the horizon. The light was real. It was there, an actual thing in the dark, not some figment of his thirst and exhaustion.

He fumbled with his canteen and drank the rest of his water in one long gulp. It was a gamble, but he would not make it to the light without more water, and even if it proved to be just as dry as the rest of the desert, so what? At least he would see it, whatever it was, before he was gone. What little energy he had left swelled within him as he drank, and the warm water assuaged some deep demand of his body which had kept him in a daze. Joe Camp stood and started forward once more, his feet rising and falling in an odd, loose rhythm.

The light winked at him from the dark, drawing him in like the embrace of an old friend.

Huge blocks of sandstone were lit in stark highlights by the light ahead. Camp could make out little on their black, shadowed surfaces except that they were wind-eaten and rough. Once perfectly carved and solid, he was sure, each was as large as a tank. They were spread about on the dunes like the immense wood blocks of some unimaginably huge child. It looked like someone had blown up a pyramid the size of Giza, and these rocks were the detritus from the horrific explosion.

He chews the stones of the earth for his food, those ‘at are too hard, he spits them out.
Old Muluwari’s voice giggled in the dark and Camp leaned against a stone for support, squinting ahead into the dark. He was here to see the Nulla now. Steuben and Peaslee were on their own; the OSS could look out for itself. The war was like some distant thing he had read of in a book once. He was here to see the Nulla. He was here to learn the truth about the world.

Through an immense thoroughfare of sand-blasted, randomly scattered rocks, over rolling red-brown dunes in the dark, the light stood out prominently on the hill ahead, like a colorful star fallen to earth, still sputtering. Closer than before. Much closer.

Without knowing why, exhausted and scarecrow-thin, Joe Camp began to run towards it.

The amorphous light, rich in colors too varying and fleeting to be individually identified by Camp’s wonder-filled eyes, swirled like a silent storm on the crest of the hill. It cast harsh, piercing highlights on the destroyed masonry and on Camp’s face, illuminating the Australian desert with an eerie, stop-motion flicker. But the light cycled too rapidly for the darkness to take hold even for a moment.

Camp watched in gape-jawed bewilderment as the silent spectacle continued before him.

There was nothing really to be done. He had no illusions about his chances. His weaponry was pathetic if he was up against something with access to the technology he had seen in the cave, and he would never survive a return trip through the desert. His choices had been made long ago. He was in free-fall now. He had been ever since he had been rescued in Port Hedland. All he could choose now was his point of impact.