How does it smell?

It's cow brains. How you think it smells?

Please, Michael?

It smells... okay. All right? I could eat them. It would be okay.

Okay is what will keep you out of the ground. You stick with okay and no bullet in the head. You get too far away from okay, and you're gone, no matter how good a plumber you are. Okay?

[Pause.] Okay.... c.r.a.p.

I want you to do thirty meetings in thirty days. Here's the card. I want it signed every day by your sponsor. You need to have some long talks with him.

Aw, man! I haven't had to do that stuff since when we first started.

You ate some brains this week. If you think that was a good plan, let me know. I'll shoot you myself.

It wasn't a good plan.

Pee test every week until you get to the other side of this.

Fine. Just... fine.

I'm on your side, Michael, but you've got to be on your side, too. I believe in you. You're a good man. You can do this.

I know.

I'll see you next week, Michael.

Not if I see you first.

[Pause.]

Just kidding.

There's a meeting at Beth Israel at seven tonight. I'd like to see a signature on your card that says you made it.

Yeah. I'll try.

Just remember: there's a bullet in the head waiting for you if you don't.

He Said, Laughing By Simon R. Green

Simon R. Green is the bestselling author of dozens of novels, including several long-running series, such as the Deathstalker series and the Darkwood series. Most of his work over the last several years has been set in either his Secret History series or in his popular Nightside milieu. Recent novels include The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny and and The Spy Who Haunted Me The Spy Who Haunted Me. A new series, The Ghost Finders, is forthcoming. Green's short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Mean Streets Mean Streets, Unusual Suspects Unusual Suspects, Wolfsbane and Mistletoe Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Powers of Detection Powers of Detection, and is forthcoming in my anthology The Way of the Wizard The Way of the Wizard.

Apocalypse Now is a strange, wild movie. In it, director Francis Ford Coppola retells Joseph Conrad's cla.s.sic Colonial-era novel is a strange, wild movie. In it, director Francis Ford Coppola retells Joseph Conrad's cla.s.sic Colonial-era novel Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness by transposing the story to the Vietnam War. In one scene, American soldiers attempt to seize a beachhead while simultaneously blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and surfing. Robert Duvall, playing the mad Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, stands tall as mortars land all around him, and declares, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." From there things only get stranger and more surreal, as Martin Sheen's character Captain Willard travels farther and farther upriver, seeking a rogue colonel named Kurtz. by transposing the story to the Vietnam War. In one scene, American soldiers attempt to seize a beachhead while simultaneously blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and surfing. Robert Duvall, playing the mad Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, stands tall as mortars land all around him, and declares, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." From there things only get stranger and more surreal, as Martin Sheen's character Captain Willard travels farther and farther upriver, seeking a rogue colonel named Kurtz.

But the process of filming the movie was as mad and out-of-control as anything that appears on film. Drinking and drugs were rampant among the crew. A storm destroyed the sets, and the borrowed helicopters were called away to fight real-life battles. Star Marlon Brando had become grossly obese and refused to be filmed except from the neck up while standing in deep shadow. Someone on the production had obtained real cadavers to use as props, which turned out to have been stolen from local graves. And director Francis Ford Coppola, who stood to lose everything if the film failed, threatened repeatedly to kill himself.

Sounds pretty insane. But on the other hand, at least they never had to deal with zombies.

Saigon. 1969. It isn't h.e.l.l; but you can see h.e.l.l from here.

Viet Nam is another world; they do things differently here. It's like going back into the Past, into the deep Past-into a primitive, even primordial place. Back to when we all lived in the jungle, because that was all there was. But it isn't just the jungle that turns men into beasts; it's being so far away from anything you can recognize as human, or humane. There is no law here, no morality, none of the old certainties. Or at least, not in any form we know, or can embrace.

Why cling to the rules of engagement, to honorable behavior, to civilized limits; when the enemy so clearly doesn't? Why hide behind the discipline of being a soldier, when the enemy is willing to do anything, anything at all, to win? Why struggle to stay a man, when it's so much easier to just let go, and be just another beast in the jungle?

Because if you can hang on long enough...you get to go home. Being sent to Viet Nam is like being thrown down into h.e.l.l, while knowing all the time that Heaven is just a short flight away. But even Heaven and h.e.l.l can get strangely mixed up, in a distant place like this. There are pleasures and satisfactions to be found in h.e.l.l, that are never even dreamed of in Heaven. And after a while, you have to wonder if the person you've become can ever go home. Can ever go back, to the person he was.

Monsters don't just happen. We make them, day by day, choice by choice.

I was waiting for my court-martial, and they were taking their own sweet time about it. I knew they were planning something special for me. The first clue came when they put me up in this rat-infested hotel, rather than the cell where I belonged. The door wasn't even locked. After all, where could I go? I was famous now. Everyone knew my face. Where could I go, who would have me, who would hide me, after the awful thing I'd done? I was told to wait, so I waited. The Army wasn't finished with me yet. I wasn't surprised. The Army could always find work for a monster, in Viet Nam.

They finally came for me in the early hours of the morning. It's an old trick. Catch a man off guard, while he's still half-drugged with sleep, and his physical and mental defenses are at their dimmest. Except I was up and out of bed and on my feet the moment I heard footsteps outside my door, hands reaching for weapons I wasn't allowed any more. It's the first thing you learn in country, if you want to stay alive in country. So when the two armed guards kicked my door in, I was waiting for them. I smiled at them, showing my teeth, because I knew that upset people. Apparently I don't smile like a person any more.

The guards didn't react. Just gestured for me to leave the room and walk ahead of them. I made a point of gathering up a few things I didn't need, just to show I wasn't going to be hurried; but I was more eager to get going than they were. Finally, someone had made a decision. The Army was either going to give me a mission, or put me up against a wall and shoot me. And I really wasn't sure which I wanted most.

I ended up in a cramped little room, far away from anything like official channels. My armed guard closed the door carefully behind me, and locked it from the outside. There was a chair facing a desk, and a man sitting behind the desk. I sat down in the chair without waiting to be asked, and the man smiled. He was big, bulk rather than fat, and his chair made quiet sounds of protest whenever he shifted his weight. He had a wide happy face under a shaven head, and he wasn't wearing a uniform. He could have been a civilian contractor, or any of a dozen kinds of businessman, but he wasn't. I knew who he was, what he had to be. Perhaps because one monster can always recognize another.

"You're CIA," I said, and he nodded quickly, smiling delightedly.

"And people say you're crazy. How little they know, Captain Marlowe."

I studied him thoughtfully. Despite myself, I was intrigued. It had been a long time since I met anyone who wasn't afraid of me. The CIA man had a slim gray folder set out on the desk before him. Couldn't have had more than half a dozen pages in it, but then, I'd only done one thing that mattered since they dropped me off here and bet me I couldn't survive. Well, I showed them.

"You know my name," I said. "What do I call you?"

"You call me 'Sir.'" He laughed silently, enjoying the old joke. "People like me don't have names. You should know that. Most of the time we're lucky if we have job descriptions. Names come and go, but the work goes on. And you know what kind of work I'm talking about. All the nasty, necessary things that the Government, and the People, don't need to know about. I operate without restrictions, without orders, and a lot of the time I make use of people like you, Captain Marlowe, because no one's more expendable than a man with a death sentence hanging over him. I can do anything I want with you; and no one will give a d.a.m.n."

"Situation entirely normal, then," I said. "Sir."

He flashed me another of his wide, meaningless smiles, and leafed quickly through the papers in my file. There were photos too, and he took his time going through them. He didn't flinch once. He finally closed the file, tapped the blank cover with a heavy finger a few times, and then met my gaze squarely.

"You have been a bad boy, haven't you, Captain? One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children, including babes in arms, all wiped out, slaughtered, on one very busy afternoon, deep in country. You shot them until you ran out of bullets, you bayoneted them until the blade broke, and then you finished the rest off with the b.u.t.t of your rifle, your bare hands, and a series of improvised blunt instruments. You broke in skulls, you tore out throats, you ripped out organs and you ate them. When your company finally caught up with you, you were sitting soaking your bare feet in the river, surrounded by the dead, soaked in their blood, calmly smoking a cigarette. Was it an enemy village, Captain?"

"No."

"Did anyone attack you, threaten you?"

"No."

"So why did you butcher an entire village of civilians, Captain Marlowe?"

I showed him my smile again. "Because it was there. Because I didn't like the way they looked at me. Does it matter?"