I ducked low and darted off toward a fat jackfruit tree, a tall son of a bitch, with several watermelon-sized fruits sprouting from the trunk like malformed, cancerous growths. One of the first rules of a gunfight: find cover and evaluate the situation. It would do no one a lick of good for me to stand out in the open like a jackass waiting for someone to put a bullet in me. I pushed past a clump of vegetation near the base of the tree and pressed my back against the trunk, the whole while my heart beating like mad inside my chest. For a moment there, it was hard to tell the difference between where my clamoring heartbeat ended and the driving bass line began. For a moment they were one and the same.

I heard more shouting off in the distance, both too close and too far, followed by a burst of gunfire and the whomp of what was probably a grenade going off. This was all wrong—there was too much gunfire, too much movement and noise out there in the bush. The six of us combined couldn’t make that kind of commotion on our own, at least not without blasting rounds into the air for the fun of it and tossing around grenades just for a hoot. Which meant we weren’t the only ones out here. Shit. That meant the VC, which was just exactly what we needed. It seemed like a break just wasn’t in the cards for us.

I mean sure, we hadn’t seen any sign of Charlie since leaving on this shitty mission, but it was stupid to think that we wouldn’t ever see them. Had to happen sometime.

I heard a rustle in the undergrowth and instinctively brought my rifle up to ready. This wasn’t my first rodeo, and I wasn’t about to get caught off-guard.

It was only Greg, with Rat close on his heels, both of them crouching low and moving with purpose. Greg had his rifle up in his shoulder pocket, ready to put down fire. Rat had his M-16 slung across his back, his beefy .45 Colt in one hand, while his other hand roamed nervously over his grenade pouch.

“You hit?” Greg asked, crouching down beside me while his eyes scanned the trees surrounding us.

“Fine. I’m fine,” I whispered. “We need to circle back around, try to get behind this crapalanche and find Stanton and the others. Any idea where the gunfire’s coming from?”

“I thought I saw muzzle flashes coming from over there,” Rat said, gaze shifting as he waved his free hand back and vaguely left. “Hard to say though.”

“Damn,” Greg said. “I was gonna say I thought the fire came from the other side. Could’ve been from one of our guys, though. No way to tell. Ought to split up. Yancy, you and Rat circle back and right, I’ll go left—see if we can’t outmaneuver these commies, box ’em in. Rendezvous back here once the action dies down. And don’t shoot me—I’m looking at you, Rat. I know that .45 works great in the tunnel, but if you put a careless round into me, I swear I’ll hang you up by the toes right over a punji pit.”

“Don’t sweat it, man,” Rat said. “I’ll keep things on lock down.”

Greg nodded once, then moved into a low crouch and slipped off into the jungle, quickly lost to the dark. I turned to look at Rat. “I’ll take point. You cover our asses, okay?”

“Yeah, man, yeah. I got it,” he said, though I could see the jitter in his hands, the tremble in his pistol barrel. Normally Rat was a pretty steady hand in a firefight—couldn’t go through as many crazy missions as he had without getting a little numb to it. It was the music working on him. I could see it encircling his throat, glowing first metallic silver, then shifting to a burnt red as it tickled at his skin. Looking at those strands of music sent a chill running up from my guts—and that’s when it hit me.

It really was the music that was doing it—it was bringing out the fear in him. In Moody, Wilson, and Lewiston it’d brought out their anger, and believe you me, in Nam there was a lot of anger to go around. Shit, if anger were snow, Vietnam would’ve been experiencing an ice age. But Rat wasn’t an angry guy, he was a laid-back stoner with the backbone of a squid. There’s a reason he ended up as a tunnel rat: he couldn’t say no to anyone. Ever. Even when they told him to grab a friggin’ handgun, crawl into a black hole by himself, and go hunting for VC.

I thought back to Ox. I’d caught a glimpse of him before he went off to take a piss and wound up planting a bullet in his head instead. The music had danced around him in shades of vibrant purple.

Though the fear might not seem as bad as maddening fury, it would certainly get Rat killed in its own way. Sure, maybe he wouldn’t go on the warpath, picking fights and shooting rounds into the night, but if he froze up when the heat was on—like, say, right now—he’d catch a bullet, no doubt about it.

The music glided over to me, apparently sensing my own anxiety, twirling around me like a hazy, low-hanging cloud of cigar smoke. It brushed up against my skin, exploring me, crawling over me like an army of spiders—a million faint swishing legs caressing my body. I shuddered, goosebumps running over my arms and legs, sprinting up my spine. So gross. So dirty. I’d never experienced any kind of sensation with the music before. Up until this point, it had only been a visual thing … this feeling was new. And I liked it about as much as I’d like having an actual army of spiders crawling through my clothes.

I reacted instinctively, in the same way you might react to a mosquito landing on your arm—I lashed out, flexing some mental muscle I’d never used before, a muscle I wasn’t even aware I had. The motion sent a fraction of the mounting pressure within me spinning outward in a spasm of force, like some kind of internal knee-jerk reaction …

The music retreated a step, its tendrils easing away from me, focusing entirely on Rat once more.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

The music had retreated a step. The music had reacted to me—I’d changed it, influenced it somehow.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.

What the hell did this mean? I was sure I’d done something, though the exact details were unclear to me. But I’d done something. The real question was, could I do it again?

I glanced back at Rat, watching as the music hammered on him, a construction worker banging away at a demolition site.

A thought hit me like a baseball bat between the eyes. If I’d pushed the music away from myself, then maybe I could push it away from Rat, too. Sure, maybe it didn’t work like that, but if there was even the slightest chance I could help the poor schmuck, I couldn’t just leave it be. Besides, what harm would it do to try? We weren’t exactly loaded down with good choices at the moment.

“Give me just a sec,” I said over my shoulder. “Feeling lightheaded again, just thirty seconds to catch some air.”

He offered a weak smile, almost impossible to make out in the dark, then bobbed his head in acknowledgment.

I moved into a crouch and let my eyes go slightly out of focus, keeping Rat in my peripheries. It seemed to hurt less if I looked at the wavering music out of the corner of my eyes instead of straight on. The thick coils of energy still surrounded him, squeezing at his throat and boring into his nostrils, but now I could feel the music in a way I hadn’t been able to before. It was like the thrum of a high voltage wire filling the air with its barely controlled energy.

I reached back inside myself, exploring the new sense I’d discovered a moment before, poking at it the way a kid might poke at a scabby knee. I could feel something inside me, alright. Worming around. It wasn’t so much like having an extra sense as it was like having an extra pair of clumsy, undeveloped limbs. Some kinda weird internal mind-arms—man, was that just about the weirdest thing I’d ever conceived of. But there it was. I flexed those invisible limbs again, feeling them surge and stretch according to my will. Moving those new muscles kinda felt like trying to roll a busted-ass Ford up the side of Mount Everest, but move they did.

It was like some kinda unseen, but very real, extension of my will. And it was time to see what I could do with it.

I pushed the mental arms outward, an inch at a time, sweat beading on my forehead and rolling down my face as I strained toward the thick strands of music wrapped around Rat. After what felt like a couple of lifetimes—but which was actually only a few seconds—I managed to pry my mental finger into the shining ropes of energy. They were slick, oily things that wriggled in my mental hands. The music fought against me as I tried to pull it free, resisting my interference, subverting my attempts to manipulate and control it. Manhandling all those separate strands was about as productive as herding a room full of pissed off jungle cats.

Focus, I needed focus. The no-good music actively fought against my intrusion now, irritated at my meddling. I breathed deeply, trying, only somewhat successfully, to block out the clack-clack-clack of rifle fire and the muted shouts and screams of the wounded and dying. The coils of music tried to wriggle free, but still I held, digging in my metaphorical heels. Not today, you slimy son of a bitch, I thought. You’re not taking someone else.

My head was a boiler on the verge of explosion as I grappled with the music, but I muscled through it and, after a handful of seconds, the pent-up tension migrated down from behind my eyes, through my chest, and up into my extended preternatural limbs. A gray, semi-translucent mist leaked out from my skin in a cloud, bubbling and wafting into the air, drifting right into Rat’s face.

The mousy guy seemed completely oblivious to what was going on, which made me think he probably couldn’t see the gray mist any more than he could see the music. The metallic-red strings of music, however, sure as shit sat up and took note—the tentacle of power recoiled and melted away from the mist, slinking back like a mangy dog before darting off into the jungle to seek easier prey, leaving Rat free from its intrusive manipulations. The mist oozing from me slowed to a trickle and died completely.

The whole thing had taken a grand total of maybe twenty seconds, but I felt like I’d just run a marathon on my hands with an eight-hundred-pound gorilla attached to my back. I also felt a damn bit better, the way you sometimes feel after getting epically sick: gross and exhausted, but relieved down to your core.

“Lazarus,” Rat finally said, a confidence in his tone that I swore wasn’t there a minute ago, “we gotta go. We can’t just ride it out here. The other guys need us, man.” He slid his free hand up under my armpit and dragged me up with a tug. I groaned and shifted to my feet, knees wobbling beneath me, but other than that I felt about a bijillion times better.

“If you can’t do it,” he said, “it’s alright. I get it. I can leave you here, come back for you once we put these zipperheads into a shallow grave.”

I didn’t say anything, but rather just pushed forward, moving past a clump of brush and stealing for a palm tree not far away. Rat swore softly under his breath behind me, but then followed my lead, padding forward on nearly silent feet. I pushed on, moving as quickly as I could manage while still keeping an eye on the surrounding jungle. I knew from personal experience that the VC could hide themselves away in a patch of shadow that didn’t seem big enough to conceal a lawn gnome. They were scary good in the bush—it was their backyard after all.

Another few minutes brought us right into the heat of things. Muzzle flashes tattooed the night with strokes of white while their harsh sound ripped through air. I pressed my back up against a thick, gnarled tree and cautiously peeked my head out from the side. There was a little clearing, and a shaft of moonlight was shining down on the crumpled form of a body missing most of its lower jaw: Phillips. He’d been shot in the back at close range. The round had traveled through his spine and upwards, punching through his teeth and leaving devastation in its wake.

I was cold, detached from the scene, numb inside. That was the shock setting in. Eventually the gravity of things would come back to roost, but for now my body was running on autopilot, co-opting the controls so I might have a chance at survival.

I pulled my head back behind the tree trunk, lungs laboring, as my mind worked away at the scene, like a math problem that needed solving. The VC hadn’t done that, I was nearly positive. Corporal Stanton had assigned Wrangle as the rear guard, and Wrangle was damn good at his job. He wasn’t a killer, not the way you might think; he was more like a machine. Some guys got addicted to the killing, got the bloodlust inside of ’em and took a certain pleasure in death, made a game out of it even. But Wrangle was as solid as the gnarled tree I had my back pressed to.

He was sharp and vigilant, with his head on straight, the kind of guy who did the work because it needed doing, but took no joy from it. There was no way the VC slipped by him and put one in the back of Phillips’ head. So either the VC had crept up behind Wrangle and slit him from ear to ear—unlikely as winning the lotto—or the music had pushed Wrangle over the edge and he’d taken Phillips out. The thought of Wrangle dead made me cringe on the inside, made me want to set the whole jungle on fire and watch this country burn, but the thought of him alive and raving mad was almost worse.

I didn’t want to be the one to have to put him down. I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it again, not with one of our own. And the notion that Wrangle might be hunting us was a thought too scary to entertain. Better for him to be dead, than that.

We needed to find Greg and Corporal Stanton, then we needed to get our asses gone.

Steeling myself to move, I glanced back toward Rat, only to have a round whizz by my face—the rush of displaced air brushing against my skin—while another round smacked into the tree with a thunk. Rat let out a squawk followed by a string of highly creative profanity, and then the blast of his .45 entered into the fray. I dropped to a knee and spun out, keeping my body low and close to the trunk, raising my gun muzzle in the same instant. A slight man, maybe late thirties, wearing the telltale gray uniform of the VC, crouched amongst some jungle shrubbery, his AK47 raised and ready to deal in lead.

He pulled the trigger the second I came into view, his reflexes cat-quick. It probably should’ve been end game for me—the guy had me dead to rights. But instead the gun seized up, a glint of brass protruding at an odd angle from the ejection port. The unlucky son of a bitch had a double feed—two rounds simultaneously sliding up from the magazine, jamming the bolt. Double feeds happen to us all at some point. A dirty weapon, a bad mag, a chamber blockage, lots of things can cause a misfire, and you just gotta hope it doesn’t happen when it really counts.

Right now, it really counted. Lucky for me, very unlucky for him. He wouldn’t even live long enough to regret his misfortune. I sighted in, smooth and practiced, not fast mind you—as the saying goes, slow is smooth, smooth is fast—and pulled the trigger. I placed a pair of shots into his chest and a third into his head. His body bucked and jerked as the rounds plowed through his uniform—gobs of blood staining the gray, dirty fabric—then he toppled over and back as the third round passed into his cheekbone, shattering his skull and dropping him for keeps.

I ducked behind my tree, adrenaline tightening my muscles, making it hard to breathe with the flak jacket weighing down against my ribs. There was a lull in the gunfire, a lull which pointed me to the fact that the music had shifted and changed. The Andrew Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” had faded out, only to be replaced by the fast bopping swing tune “Sing, Sing, Sing.” This was a dance number, and the players were frantic on their instruments, horn-men wailing like mad, the piano man tinkling keys fast enough to make my fingers ache just thinking about it. I know music, and the tune was definitely building to something.

I leaned back onto the tree, taking in Phillips’ dead body, scanning the area for either more enemies or any of our guys who might have survived the attack.

“Shit! Contact rear! Contact rear!” Rat hollered from my right. His .45 threw up a flare, but he wasn’t firing toward the clearing, he was shooting back into the jungle behind us. I pivoted and spun, just in time to see a trio of men, who hardly looked human at all, slinking through the trees in our direction. They were Vietnamese, sporting dirt-caked cammies with unit patches that marked them as Dac Cong, or DC, the Vietnamese Special Forces.

Those cats were crazy sons of bitches to a man. Everyone had heard the rumors about them—damn near legends, really—which made them out to be some kinda jungle spirits. I’d talked to some Army dogs who’d run across the Dac Cong once. Guys said they didn’t make a noise, never spoke a word, could disappear and reappear at will, and faded right into the trees. I could believe that shit. Hell, the regular VC could do most of that stuff. One story told of a whole platoon—thirty men—that had been ambushed by a handful of DC. Three of our guys came out, without a single confirmed DC death. The DC moved like mist and wind and darkness.

The men before me were worse than anything my mind could’ve ever dreamed up on its own. Whatever they’d been before, they were something more now, something worse. The music had taken the latent insanity and cranked it up another level, introduced that insanity to crack and steroids, then gave it a machete. These men were feral, skin pale and gaunt, eyes a little too large, dirt smeared across faces and hands, and yes, they actually had machetes—though no rifles, thank God. These men were animals. I could see it in the way they moved, slinking through the bush without making a noise, without breaking a twig or rustling the undergrowth. They moved like a pack of wolves. Hungry, hungry wolves.

And all the while, the music danced around the approaching forms, great clouds of angry gold energy, which flared black and then silver as it filled them up.

The clatter of gunfire came from the clearing. I glanced back, just a brief look, and saw Greg burst through the trees, dragging Corporal Stanton behind him, a small pack of DC materializing behind them. Well, shit.

“Run!” I yelled at Rat, lurching to my feet and scurrying into the jungle, headed in the same direction I’d seen Greg and Corporal Stanton going.