Monkey Brains

by

Kenneth James Crist

It rained the day we buried Freddy Tyrone. It was a cold, windy time, especially for Atlanta. I had driven twelve hundred miles to attend the funeral of the big black soldier whom I had called my brother. He would have done no less for me. In fact, we had both done the same for Couch, Hollywood and Sandoval. We were six men when we started, sharing a bond that only those who have survived combat can know. After Freddy, we were only two.

It was a military funeral, with all the pomp and ceremony due a warrior who had served his country so gallantly. After all the bullshit from the government over Agent Orange and its related diseases, it was good to see that they could at least bury him well.

After Taps had blown and the rifle squad had fired the salute, the officer presented Freddy’s widow with his ceremonial flag and it was over. I stayed around to try and say a few words to her, not that I could really offer much in the way of comfort, for I know my time is coming, too.

But then, when everyone had left the grave site, she did an amazing thing. She stepped up to the grave and threw his flag in with him and walked away clean. Whether this was a form of protest or a way of ending something so that she could begin anew, I never found out.

As I was leaving the cemetery, I heard a familiar, low trilling whistle that instantly yanked me backwards through a tunnel of time into Southeast Asia of twenty-five years ago. As I turned, I felt my skin crawl at the thought of other days of rain in the triple canopy jungle. Then I saw Chessie standing next to a faded blue Monte Carlo. I hardly recognized him, he was so thin and gaunt. The bones in his already lean face stood out, giving him a death’s-head look that was startling and more than a little scary. The eyes were the same though. They still held mockery and still showed his condescending attitude.

“Hey, you fuckin’ REMF,” he croaked. His disease was affecting his vocal cords, I supposed. We shook hands as we drew close together, then found that a handshake wasn’t enough. Not by half. We hugged each other in the rain like a couple schoolgirls, then finally we moved apart and he said, “Just us two now, huh, Cage?” He had always called me that, “cage” being a diminutive of my first two initials, K. J.

“Yeah,” I said nervously, “just us two.”

“Hey, got time for a drink? I saw a nice little tavern on the way out…”

I wasn’t planning to leave for home until next morning, so I said, “Yeah. Hell yes. Why not?”

“Okay,” he said, then he had a fit of coughing and when it had run its course, he smiled that Halloween, jack-o’-lantern smile at me and said, “Well, don’t just stand there, troop, go get yer car. I’ll wait on ya.”

I followed him several miles to what we used to call a roadhouse. Clapboard frame structure painted at least three colors, gravel parking lot, pink neon sign. “Cocktails”, with the little tipping stemware glass.

We sat away from the other six or so customers and as far from the juke as we could get. Bad enough to be drinking in the early afternoon on a rainy day in Georgia without listening to trucker shit on a Wurlitzer.

We hadn’t been there ten minutes before Chessie asked me, “Hey Cage, do you remember the monkey brains?”

It was a subject I had been afraid he would bring up. How could I forget?

I think the worst thing about the jungle was the smell. Everything dies and everything decomposes, but in the jungle the heat and humidity make it happen much more quickly. Often it was like the air was a solid rather than a mixture of gases, that had to be forcibly dragged into the lungs, and the oxygen wrenched from it. It would be so still that one of the guys could fart, way back at the end of the line and somebody up front would giggle. The humidity was a constant cloying drip of moisture that promoted fungal growth and all its related discomforts. And there were the bugs. Things that whined and chewed, flew and stung, scuttled and bit. And some that just sat and looked stupid.

Snakes and “fuck-you” lizards. Even the occasional tiger, so they say, not that I ever saw one. If you see one, you’re probably meat. You kind of get used to all of it, in a tight-assed, on-edge sort of way. You walk on the balls of your feet and you learn to always look for cover, so that when you start taking rounds you have somewhere to jump.

Long-range recon was a bitch. We couldn’t wear our own uniforms, so we made shit up. I had German boots and a French pack. No I.D. at all. They called it recon. Actually, we just went out after Charlie and the NVA, in the jungle, on their terms. We got to know our way around almost like the natives. And we met the Montagnards. The people of the mountains. They were as different from the other Vietnamese as they could possibly be. Primitive. Uncivilized, according to the Viets of the cities and the farms.

They had resisted the occupation of the French and the Chinese and the Catholic Church, and God only knows who else. Largely they had been left alone to practice their own culture of strangeness back in the very depth of the dripping dark closet that was Vietnam and Laos. Theirs was a stone-age culture in a turbo-jet world, surviving through isolation and superstition and plain toughness.

We spent a lot of time stoned. I offer that not as an excuse but as a reason why we did some of the things we did. Like taking the ears of the soldiers we killed. We should have known better, but we were kids and most of the time we were scared shitless. The ears were a form of bravado, I guess. Showing everyone, ourselves mostly, how tough and cold we were. What a bunch of stone killers we had become. We strung the ears and wore them as medallions. In the stink of the jungle, you could hardly smell them at all.

Chessie’s real name was Charles Rogers. He came from Chesapeake Bay and he was a hell of a soldier. He was on his second tour when I joined the company and he had no use for REMFs or office pogues. Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers. That took in almost all officers, most of the Army and all of the Air Force. He would walk point as much as everyone else, even though technically he was our leader and he didn't have to.

Freddy Tyrone Jackson was the M-60 machine gunner when we were on regular ops. He could hump that heavy gun all day like it was nothing and carry a shitload of other stuff, too. When we went on long range ops, though, he carried a Chinese AK-47 like the rest of us. We did things for the CIA, although they don’t admit it, and we never carried American weapons when we did.

Couch, whose name was pronounced “cooch” was small, red-haired and vicious. In a firefight, he had the coolest head and used the least ammo of any of us and he still got his share of kills.

Hollywood was James Vine. He came from California and he had a thing for sunglasses. Must have owned thirty pairs. He was stoned a lot and he supplied most of the company with weed. Sandoval was his buddy and they hung together really tough, back to back against whatever came to us. It’s good, in those conditions, to always know your back is covered.

We were within a few miles of the Laotian border on one of our ops. Trouble was, we weren’t real sure which side of the border we were on. There was no reference point anyhow and Charlie didn’t care, so why should we? We weren’t politicians.

We had seen a lot of signs indicating Charlie was in the area and we were being damned careful. One thing about being stoned on weed, you can do it and still be alert and cautious. I found that when I smoked, the jungle colors became more vivid and anything that didn’t belong stood out more. I think it also augmented my hearing and maybe my sense of smell. I got to where I could smell Charlie anyway. It was their diet, I think, all that hot shit they ate, sweating out of their pores.

We had just waded a small stream when Chessie raised a hand and everybody squatted and froze. There was a trail right there and we had almost stepped onto it, but now he was holding us up. Behind me, I heard Freddy’s safety click off.

Then, I saw Chessie slowly stand and lower his weapon and two Montagnards stepped out of nowhere and into our midst. Their garb consisted of loincloths and cast-off bits of uniform and gear. Soon we were joined by six more tribesmen and Chessie actually began to converse with them, using signs, a few French words and some of their own strange dialect, filled with clicking consonants and sounds I couldn’t hope to duplicate. We were invited to come to their village and stay for supper. They said their hunting had been good this day and there would be a feast. By the time we reached their village, it was getting dark and there was little to see anyway, just a few primitive huts and some cooking fires. Kids running around entirely naked and as comfortable in their nudity as the pigs that were always rooting around and underfoot.

We sat with the village elder, or father and they passed around some of their own liquor. It was potent shit and after we had already had a few swigs from the old skin, Chessie told us they made it by chewing up leaves and spitting the result into a bottle to ferment. Hollywood got out his stash and we passed around smokes until dinner time. By the time we ate, everyone was pretty well in the bag and it wouldn’t have mattered what they fed us.

We ate off of big dark green leaves that we laid across our laps. There were no utensils, other than fingers. We had given them what rations we had, so there was a strange mixture of things like tiny slices of pound cake alongside huge beetle shells stuffed with a gruel made of rice and spices. Eventually, some roasted meat was added, and Freddy Tyrone asked what it was. He knew they sometimes ate dogs, and he was being distrustful.

There was an animated conversation, then Chessie told us the meat was monkey brains. Tyrone was going to set his aside, but Chessie quietly warned us that what we had before us was several day’s worth of meat for these people and to refuse it would be a dire insult. So, that night, we all cheerfully ate monkey brains. I didn’t think it was too bad, really. A little undercooked, maybe.

Late in the evening, I stepped away a few feet into the jungle to piss and I saw the skulls of the monkeys, roasted and broken open to get at the brains, then discarded. Pretty damn big monkeys, I thought, but then I was pretty well stoned and not everything I saw that night really sunk in until later.

We slept there in the village that night and got up and moved out in the first gray light of morning. The humidity was thick enough to see as a thin fog between the trees. Also between the trees, a sight we hadn’t seen the night before. Seven North Vietnamese bodies, hanging upside down, minus their heads.

“I see those fucking Dink bodies in my dreams, man.” Chessie said, deep into his third shot and beer.

“I think we should talk about something more pleasant.” I said.

“Do you have the dreams?”

“What dreams?” I wasn’t admitting anything at that point.

Chessie leaned across the table, bringing his cigarette smoke closer and staring into my eyes. “The dreams about the jungle and running from the Montagnards.”

“No,” I lied, “I never have those.”

“Yeah, bullshit. Freddy Tyrone had ‘em. Sandoval had ‘em. They told me so.”

“Freddy Tyrone had brain cancer. Agent Orange got him.”

“Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.”

“What’re you tryin’ to say, Chessie? Spit it out, man. Don’t play with my dick.”

He leaned back and huffed out a lungful of smoke, then glared at me. “We ate their fuckin’ brains, man! Are you stupid, or what?”

“Those were monkey brains. Nothing more.”

“Then why are we all fuckin’ dyin’, man?”

“I told ya. Agent Orange. Goddamn defoliant shit they sprayed over us.”

“Then why do I dream in Vietnamese, with the Montagnards chasin’ me through the forest? Huh? You got an answer for that?”

“I don’t know, Chessie. Nam was a traumatic time for all of us—we were young, and away from home for the first time…”

“Yeah, maybe it was your first time, ya fuckin’ REMF.” He signalled the barmaid for another round. “I’m tellin’ ya, we got some kinda curse or somethin’.”

“Bullshit.” It was all I could think of to say.

The dreams have become more frequent now. You’d think that the longer a guy was away from that place, the less he’d see it in his dreams. It doesn’t work that way.

Chessie was right, I’m afraid, and for that reason, I didn’t go to his funeral. I used the excuse that the pain was too bad for me to make the trip, but like my opinion about the monkey brains, it was all bullshit. I knew what we really had for supper when we dined at the pleasure of the Montagnards. I guess I knew it the morning after we ate there.

When I dream now, I’m a small, frightened Viet Cong guerrilla and I’m always running. The Montagnards are back there, somewhere in the jungle, stalking, chasing, whistling and calling in their soft voices, closing in, always getting nearer. My terror is complete.

I’ll just be glad when it’s all over. And I most fervently hope the dreams can’t follow me to my grave.

The Dream Machine

Kenneth James Crist

The hot wind of the desert carried the stench of rotted meat, reminding Kara of the breath of some great carnivore.  Overhead, the sun glared down, heavy and oppressive and totally without mercy.

Too hot, she thought.  The sun alone can't be this hot.  Not our sun, anyway.  Sweat trickled down the backs of her thighs and between her breasts.  The heat was so thick that she found just the act of breathing to be a chore.

Kara was blonde, as only those of Nordic descent can be, with ice-blue eyes and a figure that had been described as goddess-like. She suffered in the sun, turning quickly red and burning terribly if not fully protected with sunscreen or shade. She had never had anything like this happen to her in all her twenty-seven years. It was surreal.

And there stood the reality of the recurrent nightmare, that wherever she was, it was not the familiar sun of Earth.

Silence prevailed, save for the wind, but she did not need sound to tell her of the menace that was soon to approach.  She had been though this many times before, but somehow she could never quite remember just what it was that was coming.  She felt the fear building within her breast, even though up to this point there was nothing overt to be concerned about.

Then she felt the slight tremor in the ground and she knew.  And she began to run, gasping, tripping, falling, scraping a knee, getting up again, pursued by nameless dread even as she struggled to remember what it was that she feared.  When she screamed, strong arms enfolded her and someone spoke, close to her ear.

"Kara!  Kara!  Honey, it's okay.  You're fine, you're in bed.  Shhh ... it's just a nightmare."

In Jim's loving arms she trembled and moaned.  "God, thirty-four nights now.  Thirty-four nights in a row.  I can't sleep, I can't eat ... oh, God, I can't even make love to you any more.  Jim, I need help."

Jim looked noncommittal as he said, "It was only a nightmare. It can’t hurt you. You've sweat clean through your nightgown, babe."

She slipped out of his embrace and headed for the bath, where she peeled the damp, clingy gown off and stood before the mirror.  She didn't like what she saw.  In the last month, she'd dropped at least twenty pounds and there were dark, puffy circles under her eyes where the flesh looked almost bruised.  In contrast, her cool blue eyes burned like those of a junkie a few minutes late for his fix.

She hugged herself in the chill of the air conditioning and thought back to the heat of the nightmare.  What was it?  What thing, animal, or disaster came next?  Jim woke her tonight, but she had been farther into it several times.  Far enough to know, but not to remember.  And where was she supposed to be?  Somehow, it all felt familiar, not just because she went there every night, but from before, at some past point in her life.  Or, perhaps another life ... Then she shivered and turned on the shower. As she stepped into the hot spray, she winced and looked down at her knee. It was scraped raw in one spot just below the kneecap.

In twenty minutes, she was back in bed with Jim.  He had joined her in the shower and then persuaded her to join him naked in the huge old four-poster and, even though she only felt exhaustion, he soon had her aroused and they made love, tenderly and not at all strenuously.  It seemed only moments later, she was falling asleep.  Jim's attentions were definitely therapeutic, she thought, as she dozed off ..

and felt the heat of the glaring sun on her skin.  This time she was naked.  She had never been nude before in this place and the sun was even more oppressive than she remembered.  The stench was stronger, too.  Everything seemed to be tuned up a notch from the times before, the wind stronger, the sand more abrasive and almost immediately the ground tremors started.

Then she was again running and this time the ground was heaving, being raised up behind her and whatever it was, it was gaining on her as she sprinted through the silent heat.  She ran swiftly, desperately, aware of her unfettered breasts bouncing painfully and the heat and the unevenness of the baked, cracked ground. As she galloped along, feeling the earth rumbling through the soles of her feet, even then she told herself, it's just a dream, it can't hurt you, Jim said so. Don't you want to know?  A part of her mind urged her to slow down, or even stop and find out what it was that she feared, but she ran on, too frightened to manage it.

Soon, as she had before, she felt the presence of the unknown rising up. She felt the ground cracking open as it birthed some horror she dare not look at and at last, she felt the touch of one claw on her shoulder and smelled its rotten breath inches from her neck. She felt her bladder let go and the hot urine on her legs and suddenly she was awake again and the bed was wet with her urine and Jim was sitting up, saying, “What the fuck?”

“Oh, God, no!” she said, as she bailed out of bed and bolted for the bathroom.

Behind the locked door she sat on the throne and trembled and cried miserably while her husband of six years changed their bedding. At last he tapped on the door and she let him in. He held her for a while, then they shared another shower. It was four in the morning and when they returned to bed, they didn’t make love this time.

Kara lay awake until the alarm at seven, thinking about that single claw. Jim hadn’t noticed the mark, already starting to fade, but it had been there. A single welt atop the shoulder where the claw had struck, but not broken the skin. Whatever she was dreaming about, Kara had now become convinced that it was real, at least in some skewed, tilted reality, some somewhere, some somewhen.

Her job at the daycare center had become as routine to her as taking care of kids could ever be. She swam through as she always did now, in a daze from fear and lack of sleep. She had been to the doctor. What a joke. He gave her sleeping pills. Told her they would deepen her sleep and she wouldn’t dream. What a crock. They had deepened her sleep, alright, and deepened her dream-state along with it, making it more difficult for her to wake up. That had been at the beginning, when the desert was just empty beneath the burning sun and there was nothing to threaten her.

It had almost been charming then, spending all night in the desert. And even then, a part of the dream came home with her. She had started getting very tan and Jim had asked her about it. She had lied, saying she had joined a tanning salon on a trial basis. He had told her it made her look prettier, but to be careful of skin damage.

Within a few days, however, the danger began to present itself and as time went by it had become more menacing. She thought of her dreams as a record on a turntable, being played over and over, but always starting back a ways from where she left off, then going through the parts she recognized and adding a few bars of the music on the end each time. This music, she reflected, was ominous, indeed.

Kara curled up on her right side and hugged the revolver close to her belly. To actually believe that it could save her was ludicrous, of course, but somehow in its steely, impersonal coldness it made her feel better. More in control. She had “borrowed” it from Jim’s gun room, reasoning that he would never miss it from his vast collection. Sometimes it seemed that he’d set out to collect one of every gun on the planet, though, of course, that would be impossible.

Now, with him out of town on one of his mysterious trips, she faced her nightmare alone. And ‘nightmare’ was the correct term. Not ‘nightmares’. Nothing plural about it, for it was always the same-the desert, the sun, the heat and…the beast.

It seemed she had no sooner dropped off than it began. And the thing had gotten smarter. This time it was waiting for her. She tried to run as she had so many times before, but it was smarter and it trapped her against a sheer rock wall and as it came up out of the ground, she saw it fully for the first time and realized the true extent of her fear and loathing. A psychologist friend had told her the dream was a reflection of the fears in her life and if she would just face them, it was a way the mind had of dealing with those fears.

Well, she reflected grimly as she faced the monster, if this was true, she must have some badass fucking fears, ‘cause this cocksucker was truly fearsome. She gazed in frozen wonder as the black creature, the epitome of children’s bad dreams, rose to its full height. She took in the six spider-like eyes across the black dome of its skull and the leering, fang-infested mouth that spewed breath like a sewer. Its front four legs reached toward her, claws open and greedy to rend her flesh. Then she remembered the gun.

Funny thing about the gun. She glanced down at her hands and realized she couldn’t see it, but she could still feel it, as solid as the monster before her. She had just a split second to decide how she would die and she made the best decision she could, under the circumstances. She quickly placed the gun under her chin and squeezed.

When “Jim” arrived home from his trip, he called out into the silent house, then walked through to the master bedroom. He viewed Kara’s remains and the mess on the bed coldly. No problem here. The coroner would be able to establish time of death and he had been miles away, at his meeting. He picked up the phone and dialed 911.

The creature that cloaked as “Jim” slid the dream machine out from its hiding place under the bed. In the six years he had been married to Kara, he had grown tired of her and he had recently decided it was time to find a new mate. Of course, Earth mates weren’t as satisfying as those from his own world. For one thing, they could only bond on one level. All the tedious sex with no other outlet for his libido merely sharpened his need for his mate from the home planet.

As he tuned the dream machine from the setting that matched Kara’s brain waves to the settings of his own, he thought about the quaint human saying, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’. Well, he could only stand so much. His assignment required him to be here for several human lifetimes, tracking their progress and making sure they posed no threat to the rest of the galaxy, but he didn’t have to suffer. He would take a break and visit home this very evening. The dream machine made that as easy as going to sleep.

Just as he was reaching for the keypad to input the destination sequence for the home planet, the doorbell rang. Damn! He quickly cloaked himself, so the feeble-minded humans could not see his real form, and hurried to the door.

A few minutes later he was back. Typical human cultural display. “Reaching out.” “Bonding.” “Sharing his grief.” The neighborhood women had sent a covered dish. Something he couldn’t possibly eat, of course.

Back in the bedroom, he uncloaked and set the dream machine’s timer for eight hours. Then he curled up on the bed, right next to the dried mess of his wife’s blood and brains, his opossum-like nose inches from a bit of scalp tissue. He folded his hand-like paws and closed his slightly goggled eyes as the dream machine kicked on. Soon, the soft, furry body relaxed and his breathing became rhythmic.

The hot wind of the desert carried the stench of rotted meat and “Jim” stared about stupidly in the merciless glare of the sun. It was as alien to him as it had been to Kara, his own world being a planet of perpetual twilight. As the ground tremors began, signaling the arrival of Kara’s nightmare monster, he realized that the interruption of the doorbell had caused him to forget to change the destination on the dream machine and that he was therefore trapped here for eight hours.

When the black creature broke from the ground and examined its prey, cowering in nearly the same spot Kara had died in, it found this animal remarkably different in appearance from its last kill, even though it soon realized appearances could be deceiving-they seemed to taste just about the same.

Kenneth James Crist is Editor of Black Petals Magazine and is on staff at Yellow Mama ezine. He has been a published writer since 1998, having had almost two hundred short stories and poems in venues ranging from Skin and Bones and The Edge-Tales of Suspense to Kudzu Monthly. He is particularly fond of supernatural biker stories. He reads everything he can get his hands on, not just in horror or sci-fi, but in mystery, hardboiled, biographies, westerns and adventure tales. He retired from the Wichita, Kansas police department in 1992 and from the security department at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita in 2016. Now 80, he is an avid motorcyclist and handgun shooter. He is active in the American Legion Riders and the Patriot Guard, helping to honor and look after our military. He is the owner of Fossil Publications, a desktop publishing venture that seems incapable of making any money at all. His zombie book, Groaning for Burial, has been released by Hekate Publishing in Kindle format and paperback late this year. On June the ninth, 2018, he did his first (and last) parachute jump and crossed that shit off his bucket list.