Fire Zone Emerald

Ain't it weird, soldier boy?" said the voice in Quinn's ear. "There you are, strollin' along in that little ol' green suit of armor, feelin' all cool and killproof ... and wham! You're down and hurtin' bad. Gotta admit, though, them suits do a job. Can't recall nobody steppin' onna mine and comin' through it as good as you."

Quinn shook his head to clear the cobwebs. His helmet rattled, which was not good news. He doubted that any of the connections to the computer in his back-pack were still intact. But at least he could move his legs, and that was very good news, indeed. The guy talking had a crazed lilt to his voice, and Quinn thought it would be best to take cover. He tried the computer; nothing worked except for map holography. The visor display showed him to be a blinking red dot in the midst of a contoured green glow: 11 miles inside Guatemala from its border with Belize, in the heart of the Peten rain forest, on the eastern edge of Fire Zone Emerald.

"Y' hear me, soldier boy?"

Quinn sat up, wincing as pain shot through his legs. He felt no fear, no panic. Although he had just turned 21, this was his second tour in Guatemala, and he was accustomed to being in tight spots. Besides, there were a lot worse places he might have been stranded. Up until two years before, Emerald had been a staging area for Cuban and guerrilla troops; but following the construction of a string of Allied artillery bases to the west, the enemy had moved their encampments north and--except for recon patrols such as Quinn's--the fire zone had been abandoned.

"No point in playin' possum, man. Me and the boys'll be there in ten, fifteen minutes, and you (continued on page 164) Fire Zone Emerald (continued from page 100) gonna have to talk to us then."

Ten minutes. Shit! Maybe, Quinn thought, if he talked to the guy, that would slow him down. "Who are you people?" he asked.

"Name's Mathis. Special Forces, formerly attached to the First Infantry." A chuckle. "But you might say we seen the light and opted outa the Service. How 'bout you, man? You gotta name?"

"Quinn. Edward Quinn." He flipped up his visor; heat boiled into the combat suit, overwhelming the cooling system. The suit was scorched and shredded from the knees down; plastic armor glinted in the rips. He looked around for his gun. The cable that had connected it to the computer had been severed, probably by shrapnel from the mine, and the gun was not to be seen. "You run across the rest of my patrol?"

A static-filled silence. "'Fraid I got bad tidin's, Quinn Edward. 'Pears like guerrillas took out your buddies."

Despite the interference, Quinn heard the lie in the voice. He scoped out the terrain, saw that he was sitting in a cathedrallike glade: vaults of leaves pillared by the tapering trunks of ceibas and giant figs. The ground was carpeted with ferns; a thick green shade seemed to well up from the tips of the fronds. Here and there, shafts of golden light penetrated the canopy, and these were so complexly figured with dust motes that they appeared to contain flaws and fracture planes, like artifacts of crystal snapped off in mid-air. On three sides, the glade gave out into dense jungle; but to the east lay a body of murky green water, with a forested island standing about 100 feet out. If he could find his gun, the island might be defensible. Then a few days' rest and he'd be ready for a hike.

"Them boys wasn't no friends of yours," said Mathis. "You hit that mine and they let you lie like meat on the street."

That much Quinn believed. The others had been too wasted on the martial-arts ampules to be trustworthy. Chances were, they simply hadn't wanted the hassle of carrying him.

"They deserved what they got," Mathis went on. "But you, now ... boy with your luck. Might just be a place for you in the light."

"What's that mean?" Quinn fumbled a dispenser from his hip pouch and ejected two ampules--a pair of silver bullets--into his palm. Two, he figured, should get him walking.

"The light's holy here, man. You sit under them beams shinin' through the canopy, let' em soak into you, and they'll stir the truth from your mind." Mathis said all this in dead earnest, and Quinn, unable to mask his amusement, said, "Oh, yeah?"

"You remind me of my ol' lieutenant," said Mathis. "Man used to tell me I's crazy, and I'd say to him, 'I ain't ordinary crazy, sir. I'm crazy gone to Jesus.' And I'd 'splain to him what I knew from the light, that we's s'posed to build the kingdom here. Place where a man could live pure. No machines, no pollution." He grunted as if tickled by something. "That's how you be livin' if you can cut it. You gonna learn to hunt with knives, track tapirs by the smell. Hear what weather's comin' by listenin' to the cry of a bird."

"How 'bout the lieutenant?" Quinn asked. "He learn all that?"

"Y' know how it is with lieutenants, man. Sometimes they just don't work out."

Quinn popped an ampule under his nose and inhaled. Waited for the drugs to kick in. The ampules were the Army's way of ensuring that the high incidence of poor battlefield performance during the Vietnam war would not be repeated: Each contained a mist of pseudo endorphins and RNA derivatives that elevated the user's determination and physical potentials to heroic levels for 30 minutes or thereabouts. But Quinn preferred not to rely on them, because of their destructive side effects. Printed on the dispenser was a warning against abuse, one that Mathis--judging by his rap--had ignored. Quinn had heard similar raps from guys whose personalities had been eroded, replaced in part by the generic mystic-warrior personality supplied by the drugs.

" 'Course," said Mathis, breaking the silence, "it ain't only the light. It's the queen. She's the one with the light."

"The queen?" Quinn's senses had sharpened. He could see the spidery shapes of monkeys high in the canopy and could hear a hundred new sounds. He spotted the green-plastic stock of his gun protruding from beneath a fern not 20 feet away; he came to his feet, refusing to admit his pain, and went over to it. Both upper and lower barrels were plugged with dirt.

" 'Member them Cuban 'speriments where they was linkin' up animals and psychics with computer implants? Usin' 'em for spies' "

"That was just bullshit!" Quinn set off toward the water. He felt disdain for Mathis and recognized that to be a sign of too many ampules.

"It ain't no bullshit. The queen was one of them psychics. She's linked up with this little ol' tiger cat--what the Indians call a tigrillo. We ain't never seen her, but we seen the cat. And once we got tuned to her, we could feel her mind workin' on us. But at first, she can slip them thoughts inside your head without you ever knowin'. Twist you round her finger, she can."

"If she's that powerful," said Quinn, smug with the force of his superior logic, "then why's she hidin' from you?"

"She ain't hidin'. We gotta prove ourselves to her. Keep the jungle pure, free of evildoers. Then she'll come to us."

Quinn popped the second ampule. "Evildoers? Like my patrol, huh? That why you wasted my patrol?"

"Whoo-ee!" said Mathis after a pause. "I can't slide nothin' by you, can I, Quinn Edward?"

Quinn's laughter was rich and nutsy: a two-ampule laugh. "Naw," he said, mocking Mathis' corn-pone accent. "Don't reckon you can." He flipped down his visor and waded into the water, barely conscious of the pain in his legs.

"Your buddies wasn't shit for soldiers," said Mathis. "Good thing they come along, though. We was runnin' low on ampules." He made a frustrated noise. "Hey, man. This armor ain't nothin' like the old gear ... all this computer bullshit. I can't get nothin' crankin' 'cept the radio. Tell me how you work these here guns."

"Just aim and pull." Quinn was waistdeep in water, perhaps a quarter of the way to the island, which from that perspective--with its three towering vineenlaced trees--looked like the overgrown hulk of a sailing ship anchored in a placid stretch of jade.

"Don't kid a kidder," said Mathis. "I tried that."

"You'll figure it out," Quinn said. "Smart peckerwood like you."

"Man, you gotta attitude problem, don'tcha? But I 'spect the queen'll straighten you out."

"Right! The invisible woman!"

"You'll see her soon enough, man. Ain't gonna be too long 'fore she comes to me."

"To you?" Quinn snickered. "That mean you're the king?"

"Maybe." Mathis pitched his voice low and menacing. "Don't go thinkin' I'm just country pie, Quinn Edward. I been up here most of two years, and I got this place down. I can tell when a fly takes a shit! Far as you concerned, I'm lord of the fuckin' jungle."

Quinn bit back a sarcastic response. He should be suckering this guy, determining his strength. Given that Mathis had been on recon prior to deserting, he'd probably started with around 15 men. "You guys taken many casualties?" he asked after slogging another few steps.

"Why you wanna know that? You a man with a plan? Listen up, Quinn Edward. If you figgerin' on takin' us out, 'member them fancy guns didn't help your buddies, and they ain't gonna help you. Even if you could take us out, you'd still have to deal with the queen. Just 'cause she lives out on the island don't mean she ain't keeping' her eye on the shore. You might not believe it, man, but right now, right this second, she's all round you".

"What island?" The trees ahead suddenly seemed haunted-looking.

"Little island out there on the take. You can see it if you lift your head."

"Can't move my head," said Quinn. "My neck's fucked up."

"Well, you gonna see it soon enough. And once you healed, you take my advice and stay the hell off it. The queen don't look kindly on trespassers."

•

On reaching the island, Quinn located a firing position from which he could survey the shore: a weedy patch behind a fallen tree trunk hemmed in by bushes. If Mathis was as expert in jungle survival as he claimed, he'd have no trouble discovering where Quinn had gone; and there was no way to tell how strong an influence his imaginary queen exerted, no way to be sure whether the restriction against trespassing had the severity of a taboo or was merely something frowned on. Not wanting to take chances, Quinn spent a frantic few minutes cleaning the lower barrel of his gun, which fired miniature fragmentation grenades.

"Now where'd you get to, Quinn Edward?" said Mathis with mock concern. "Where did you get to?"

Quinn scanned the shore. Dark avenues led away between the trees, and as he stared along them, his nerves were keyed by every twitching leaf, every shift of light and shadow. Clouds slid across the sun, muting its glare to a shimmering platinum gray; a palpable vibration underscored the stillness. He tried to think of something pleasant to make the waiting easier, but nothing pleasant occurred to him. He wetted his lips and swallowed. His cooling system set up a whine.

Movement at the margin of the jungle, a shadow resolving into a man wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying a rifle with a skeleton stock--likely an old M-18. He waded into the lake, and as he closed on the island, Quinn trained his scope on him and saw that he had black shoulder-length hair framing a haggard face; a ragged beard bibbed his chest, and dangling from a thong below the beard was a triangular piece of mirror. Quinn held his fire, waiting for the rest to emerge. But no one else broke cover, and he realized Mathis was testing him, was willing to sacrifice a pawn to check out his weaponry.

"Keep back!" he shouted. But the man kept plodding forward, heaving against the drag of the water. Quinn marveled at the hold Mathis must have over him: He had to know he was going to die. Maybe he was too whacked out on ampules to give a shit, or maybe Mathis' queen somehow embodied the promise of a swell afterlife for those who died in battle. Quinn didn't want to kill him, but there was no choice, no point in delaying the inevitable.

He aimed, froze a moment at the sight of the man's fear-widened eyes; then squeezed the trigger.

The hiss of the round blended into the explosion, and the man vanished inside a fireball and geysering water. Monkeys screamed; birds wheeled up from the shore-line trees. A veil of oily smoke drifted across the lake, and within seconds a pair of legs floated to the surface, leaking red. Quinn felt queasy and sick at heart.

"Man, they doin' wonders with ordnance nowadays," said Mathis.

Infuriated, Quinn fired a spread of three rounds into the jungle.

"Not even close, Quinn Edward."

"You're a real regular-Army asshole, aren't you?" said Quinn. "Lettin' some poor fucker draw fire."

"You got me wrong, man! I sent that ol' boy out 'cause I loved him. He been with me almost four years, but his mind was goin', reflexes goin'. You done him a favor, Quinn Edward. Reduced his confusion to zero" -- Mathis' tone waxed evangelic--"and let him shine forevermore!"

Quinn had a mental image of Mathis, bearded and haggard, like the guy he'd shot, but taller, rawboned: a gaunt rack of a man with rotting teeth and blown-away pupils. Being able to fit even an imaginary face to his target tuned his rage higher, and he fired again.

"Aw right, man!" Mathis' voice was burred with anger; the cadences of his speech built into a rant. "You want bang-bang, you got it. But you stay out there, the queen'll do the job for me. She don't like nobody creepin' round her in the dark. Makes her crazy. You go on, man! Stay there! She peel you down to meat and sauce, motherfucker!"

His laughter went high into a register that Quinn's speakers distorted, translating it as a hiccuping squeal, and he continued to rave. However, Quinn was no longer listening. His attention was fixed on the dead man's legs, spinning past on the current. A lace of blood eeled from the severed waist. The separate strands seemed to be spelling out characters in some Oriental script; but before Quinn could try to decipher them, they lost coherence and were whirled away by the jade-green medium into which--staring with fierce concentration, gildy with drugs and fatigue--he, too, felt he was dissolving.

•

At twilight, when streamers of mist unfurled across the water, Quinn stood down from his watch and went to find a secure place in which to pass the night: Considering Mathis' leeriness about his queen's nocturnal temper, he doubted there would be any trouble before morning. He beat his way through the brush and came to an enormous ceiba tree whose trunk split into two main branchings; the split formed a wide crotch that would support him comfortably. He popped an ampule to stave off pain, climbed up and settled himself.

Darkness fell; the mist closed in, blanketing moon and stars. Quinn stared out into pitch-black nothing, too exhausted to think, too buzzed to sleep. Finally, hoping to stimulate thought, he did another ampule. After it had taken effect, he could make out some of the surrounding foliage--vague scrolled shapes, each of which had its own special shine--and he could hear a thousand plops and rustles that blended into a scratchy percussion, its rhythms providing accents for a pulse that seemed to be coming up from the roots of the island. But there were no crunchings in the brush, no footsteps.

No sign of the queen.

What a strange fantasy, he thought, for Mathis to have created. He wondered how Mathis saw her. Blonde, with a ragged Tarzan-movie skirt? A black woman with a necklace of bones? He remembered driving down to see his old girlfriend at college and being struck by a print hung on her dorm-room wall. It had shown a night jungle, a tiger prowling through fleshy vegetation and--off to the side--a mysterious-looking woman standing naked in moon shadow. That would be his image of the queen. It seemed to him that the woman's eyes had been glowing.... But maybe he was remembering it wrong; maybe it had been the tiger's eyes. He had liked the print, had peered at the artist's signature and tried to pronounce the name. "Roo-see-aw," he had said, and his girl had given a haughty sniff and said, "Roo-so. It's Roo-so." Her attitude had made clear what he had suspected: that he had lost her. She had experienced a new world, one that had set its hooks in her; she had outgrown their little North Dakota farming town, and she had outgrown him as well. What the war had done to him was similar, only the world he had outgrown was a much wider place: He'd learned that he just wasn't cut out for peace and quiet anymore.

Frogs chirred, crickets sizzled, and he was reminded of the hollow near his father's house where he used to go after chores to be alone, to plan a life of spectacular adventures. Like the island, it had been a diminutive jungle--secure, yet not insulated from the wild--and recognizing the kinship between the two places caused him to relax. Soon he nodded out into a dream, one in which he was 12 years old again, fiddling with the busted tractor his father had given him to repair. He had never been able to repair it, but in the dream, he worked a gruesome miracle. Wherever he touched the metal, blood beaded on the flaking rust; blood surged rich and dark through the fuel line; and when he laid his hands on the corroded pistons, steam seared forth and he saw that the rust had been transformed into red meat, that his hands had left scorched prints. Then that meat engine had shuddered to life and lumbered off across the fields on wheels of black bone, plowing raw gashes in the earth, sowing seeds that overnight grew into stalks yielding fruit that exploded on contact with the air.

It was such an odd dream, forged from the materials of his childhood yet embodying an alien sensibility, that he came awake, possessed by the notion that it had been no dream but a sending. For an instant, he thought he saw a lithe shadow at the foot of the tree. The harder he stared at it, though, the less substantial it became, and he decided it must have been a hallucination. But after the shadow had melted away, a wave of languor washed over him, sweeping him down into unconsciousness, manifesting itself so suddenly, so irresistibly, that it seemed no less a sending than the dream.

•

At first light, Quinn popped an ampule and went to inspect the island, stepping cautiously through the gray mist that still merged jungle and water and sky, pushing through dripping thickets and spider webs Diamond with dew. He was certain Mathis would launch an attack today. Since he had survived a night with the queen, it might be concluded that she favored him, that he now posed a threat to Mathis' union with her--and Mathis wouldn't be able to tolerate that. The best course, Quinn figured, would be to rile Mathis up, to make him react out of anger and to take advantage of the situation.

The island proved to be about 120 feet long, perhaps a third of that across at the widest, and--except for a rocky point at the north end and a clearing some 30 feet south of the ceiba tree--was choked with vegetation. Vines hung in graceful loops like flourishes depended from illuminated letters; ferns clotted the narrow aisles between the bushes; epiphytes bloomed in the crooks of branches, punctuating the grayness with points of crimson and purple. The far side of the island was banked higher than a man could easily reach; but to be safe, Quinn mined the lowest sections with frags. In places where the brush was relatively sparse, he set flares head-high, connecting them to trip wires that he rigged with vines. Then he walked back and forth among the traps, memorizing their locations.

By the time he had done, the sun had started to burn off the mist, creating pockets of clarity in the gray; and as he headed back to his firing position, it was then he saw the tiger cat crouched in the weeds, lapping at the water. It wasn't much bigger than a house cat, with the delicate build and wedge-shaped head of an Abyssinian, and fine black stripes patterning its tawny fur. Quinn had seen such animals before while on patrol, but the way this one looked, so bright and articulated in contrast to the dull vegetable greens, framed by the eddying mist, it seemed a gateway had been opened onto a more vital world, and he was for the moment too entranced by the sight to consider what it meant. The cat finished its drink, turned to Quinn and studied him; then it snarled, wheeled about and sprang off into the brush.

The instant it vanished, Quinn became troubled by a number of things. How he'd chosen the island as a fortress; how he'd gone straight to the best firing position; how he'd been anticipating Mathis. All this could be chalked up to common sense and good soldiering ... yet he had been so assured, so definite. The assurance could be an effect of the ampules; but then Mathis had said that the queen could slip thoughts into your head without your knowing--until you became attuned to her, that is. Quinn tasted the flavors of his thoughts, searching for evidence of tampering. He knew he was being ridiculous, but panic flared in him nonetheless and he popped an ampule to pull himself together. OK, he told himself. Let's see what the hell's going on.

For the next half hour, he combed the island, prying into thickets, peering at tree tops. He found no trace of the queen, nor did he spot the cat again. But if she could control his mind, she might be guiding him away from her traces. She might be following him, manipulating him like a puppet. He spun around, hoping to catch her unawares. Nothing. Only bushes threaded with mist, trembling in the breeze. He let out a cracked laugh. Christ, he was an idiot! Just because the cat lived on the island didn't mean the queen was real; in fact, the cat might be the core of Mathis' fantasy. It might have inhabited the lake shore, and when Mathis and his men had arrived, it had fled out here to be shut of them ... or maybe even this thought had been slipped into his head. Quinn was amazed by the subtlety of the delusion, at the elusiveness with which it defied both validation and debunking.

Something crunched in the brush.

Convinced that the noise signaled an actual presence, he swung his gun to cover the bushes. His trigger finger tensed, but after a moment he relaxed. It was the isolation, the general weirdness, that was doing him in, not some bullshit mystery woman. His job was to kill Mathis, and he'd better get to it. And if the queen were real, well, then she did favor him and he might have help. He popped an ampule and laughed as it kicked in. Oh, yeah! With modern chemistry and the invisible woman on his side, he'd go through Mathis like a rat through cheese. Like fire through a slum. The drugs--or perhaps it was the pour of a mind more supple than his own--added a lyric coloration to his thoughts, and he saw himself moving with splendid athleticism into an exotic future wherein he killed the king and wed the shadow and ruled in hell forever.

•

Quinn was low on frags, so he sat down behind the fallen tree trunk and cleaned the upper barrel of his gun: It fired caseless .22-caliber ammunition. Set on automatic, it could chew a man in half; but, wanting to conserve bullets, he set it to fire single shots. When the sun had cleared the tree line, he began calling to Mathis on his radio. There was no response at first, but finally a gassed, irascible voice answered, saying, "Where the fuck you at, Quinn Edward?"

"The island." Quinn injected a wealth of good cheer into his next words. "Hey, you were right about the queen!"

"What you talkin' 'bout?"

"She's beautiful! Most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

"You seen her?" Mathis sounded anxious. "Bullshit!"

Quinn thought about the Rousseau print. "She got dark, satiny skin and black hair down to her ass. And the whites of her eyes, it looks like they're glowin', they're so bright. And her tits, man. They ain't too big, but the way they wobble around"--he let out a lewd cackle--"it makes you wanna get down and frolic with them puppies."

"Bullshit!" Mathis repeated, his voice tight.

"Uh-uh," said Quinn. "It's true. See, the queen's lonely, man. She thought she was gonna have to settle for one of you lovelies, but now she's found somebody who's not so fucked up."

Bullets tore through the bushes on his right.

"Not even close," said Quinn. More fire; splinters flew from the tree trunk. "Tell me, Mathis." He suppressed a giggle. "How long's it been since you had any pussy?" Several guns began to chatter, and he caught sight of a muzzle flash; he pinpointed it with his own fire.

"You son of a bitch!" Mathis screamed.

"Did I get one?" Quinn asked blithely. "What's the matter, man? Wasn't he ripe for the light?"

A hail of fire swept the island. The cappistol sounds, the volley of hits on the trunk, the bullets zipping through the leaves, all this enraged Quinn, touched a spark to the violent potential induced by the drugs. But he restrained himself from returning fire, wanting to keep his position hidden. And then, partly because it was another way of ragging Mathis but also because he felt a twinge of alarm, he shouted, "Watch out! You'll hit the queen!"

The firing broke off. "Quinn Edward!" Mathis called.

Quinn kept silent, examining that twinge of alarm, trying to determine if there had been something un-Quinnlike about it.

"Quinn Edward!"

"Yeah, what?"

"It's time," said Mathis, hoarse with anger. "Queen's tellin' me it's time for me to prove myself. I'm comin' at you, man!"

Studying the patterns of blue-green scale flecking the tree trunk, Quinn seemed to see the army of his victims--grim, desanguinated men--and he felt a powerful revulsion at what he had become. But when he answered, his mood swung to the opposite pole. "I'm waitin', asshole!"

"Y' know," said Mathis, suddenly breezy, "I got a feelin' it's gonna come down to you and me, man. 'Cause that's how she wants it. And can't nobody beat me one on one in my own back yard." His breath came as a guttural hiss, and Quinn realized that this sort of breathing was typical of someone who had been overdoing ampules. "I'm gonna overwhelm you, Quinn Edward," Mathis went on. "Gonna be like them ol' Jap movies. Little men with guns actin' all brave and shit till they see somethin' big and hairy comin' at 'em, munchin' treetops and spittin' fire. Then off they run, yellin', 'Tokyo is doomed!' "

•

For 30 or 40 minutes, Mathis kept up a line of chatter, holding forth on subjects as varied as the Cuban space station and Miami's chances in the A.L. East. He launched into a polemic condemning the new statutes protecting the rights of prostitutes ("Part of the kick's bein' able to bounce 'em round a little, y' know"), then made a case for Antarctica's being the site of the original Garden of Eden and then proposed the theory that every President of the United States had been a member of a secret homosexual society ("Half them First Ladies wasn't nothin' but guys in dresses"). Quinn didn't let himself be drawn into conversation, knowing that Mathis was trying to distract him; but he listened because he was beginning to have a sense of Mathis' character, to understand how he might attack.

Back in Lardcan, Tennessee, or wherever, Mathis had likely been a charismatic figure, glib and expansive, smarter than his friends and willing to lead them from the rear into fights and petty crimes. In some ways, he was a lot like the kid Quinn had been, only Quinn's escapades had been pranks, whereas he believed Mathis had been capable of consequential misdeeds. He could picture him lounging around a gas station, sucking down brews and plotting meanness. The hillbilly con artist out to sucker the Yankee: That would be how he saw himself in relation to Quinn. Sooner or later, he would resort to tricks. That was cool with Quinn; he could handle tricks. But he wasn't going to underestimate Mathis. No way. Mathis had to have a lot on the ball to survive the jungle for two years, to rule a troop of crazed Green Berets. Quinn just hoped Mathis would underestimate him.

The sun swelled into an explosive glare that whitened the sky and made the green of the jungle seem a livid, overripe color. Quinn popped ampules and waited. The inside of his head came to feel heavy with violent urges, as if his thoughts were congealing into a lump of mental plastique. Around noon, somebody began to lay down covering fire, spraying bullets back and forth along the bank. Quinn found he could time these sweeps, and after one such had passed him by, he looked out from behind the tree trunk. Four bearded, long-haired men were crossing the lake from different directions, plunging through the water, lifting their knees high. Before ducking back, Quinn shot the two on the left, saw them spun around, their rifles flung away. He timed a second sweep, then picked off the two on the right; he was certain he had killed one, but the other might only have been wounded. The gunfire homed in on him, trimming the bushes overhead. Twigs pinwheeled; cut leaves sailed like paper planes. A centipede had ridden one of the leaves down and was still crawling along its fluted edge. Quinn didn't like its hairy mandibles, its Devil face. Didn't like the fact that it had survived while men had not. He let it crawl in front of his gun and blew it up in a fountain of dirt and grass.

The firing stopped.

Branches ticking the trunk; water slopping against the bank; drips. Quinn lay motionless, listening. No unnatural noises. But where were those drips coming from? The bullets hadn't splashed up much water. Apprehensions spidered his backbone. He peeked up over the top of the tree trunk ... and cried out in shock. A man was standing in the water about four feet away, blocking the line of fire from the shore. With the mud freckling his cheeks, strands of bottom weed ribboning his dripping hair, he might have been the wild mad king of the lake--skull face, staring eyes, survival knife dangling loosely in his hand. He blinked at Quinn. Swayed, righted himself, blinked again. His fatigues were plastered to his ribs, and a big bloodstain mapped the hollow of his stomach. The man's cheeks bulged: It looked as if he wanted to speak but was afraid more would come out than just words.

"Jesus ... shit," he said sluggishly. His eyes half-rolled back; his knees buckled. Then he straightened, glancing around as if waking somewhere unfamiliar. He appeared to notice Quinn, frowned and staggered forward, swinging the knife in a lazy arc.

Quinn got off a round before the man reached him. The bullet seemed to paste a red star under the man's eye, stamping his features with a rapt expression. He fell atop Quinn, atop the gun, which--jammed to automatic--kept firing. Lengths of wet hair hung across Quinn's faceplate, striping his view of branches and sky; the body jolted with the bullets tunneling through.

Two explosions nearby.

Quinn pushed the body away, bellycrawled into the brush and popped an ampule. He heard a thock followed by a bubbling scream: Somebody had tripped a flare. He did a count and came up with nine dead--plus the guy laying down covering fire. Mathis, no doubt. It would be nice if that were all of them, but Quinn knew better. Somebody else was out there. He felt him the way a flower feels the sun--autonomic reactions waking, primitive senses coming alert.

He inched deeper into the brush. The drugs burned bright inside him; he had the idea they were forming a manlike shape of glittering particles, an inner man of furious principle. Mats of blight-dappled leaves pressed against his faceplate, then slid away with underwater slowness. It seemed he was burrowing through a mosaic of muted colors and coarse textures into which even the concept of separateness had been subsumed, and so it was that he almost failed to notice the boot: a rotting brown boot with vines for laces, visible behind a spray of leaves about six feet off. The boot shifted, and Quinn saw an olivedrab trouser leg tucked into it.

His gun was wedged beneath him, and he was certain the man would move before he could ease it out. But apparently the man was playing bird dog, his senses straining for a clue to Quinn's whereabouts. Quinn lined the barrel up with the man's calf just above the boot top and checked to make sure it was set on automatic. Then he fired, swinging the barrel back and forth an inch to both sides of his center mark. Blood erupted from the calf, and a hoarse yell was drawn out of Quinn by the terrible hammering of the gun. The man fell, screaming. Quinn tracked the fire across the ground, and the screams were cut short.

The boot was still standing behind the spray of leaves, now sprouting a tattered stump and a shard of bone.

Quinn lowered his head, resting his faceplate in the dirt. It was as if all his rectitude had been spat out through the gun. He lay thoughtless, drained of emotion. Time seemed to collapse around him, burying him beneath a ton of decaying seconds. After a while, a beetle crawled onto the faceplate, walking upside down; it stopped at eye level, tapped its mandibles on the plastic and froze. Staring at its grotesque underparts, Quinn had a glimpse into the nature of his own monstrosity: a tiny armored creature chemically programed to a life of stalking and biting and, between violences, lapsing into a stunned torpor.

"Quinn Edward?" Mathis whispered.

Quinn lifted his head; the beetle dropped off the faceplate and scurried for cover.

"You got 'em all, didn'tcha?"

Quinn wormed out from under the bush, got to his feet and headed back to the fallen tree trunk.

"Tonight, Quinn Edward. You gonna see my knife flash ... and then fare thee well." Mathis laughed softly. "It's me she wants, man. She just told me so. Told me I can't lose tonight."

•

Late afternoon, and Quinn went about disposing of the dead. It wasn't something he would ordinarily have done, yet he felt compelled to be rid of them. He was too weary to puzzle over the compulsion and merely did as it directed, pushing the corpses into the lake. The man who had tripped the flare was lying in some ferns, his face seared down to sinew and laceworks of cartilage; ants were stitching patterns across the blood-sticky bone of the skull. Having to touch the body made Quinn's flesh nettle cold, and bile flooded his throat.

That finished, he sat in the clearing south of the ceiba and popped an ampule. The rays of sunlight slanting through the canopy were as sharply defined as lasers, showing greenish-gold against the backdrop of leaves. Sitting beneath them, he felt guided by no visionary purpose; he was, however, gaining a clearer impression of the queen. He couldn't point to a single thought out of the hundreds that cropped up and say, "That one; that's hers." But as if she were filtering his perceptions, he was coming to know her from everything he experienced. It seemed the island had been steeped in her, its mists and midnights modified by her presence, refined to express her moods; even its overgrown terrain seemed to reflect her nature: shy, secretive, yet full of gentle stirrings. Seductive. He understood now that the process of becoming attuned to her was a process of seduction, one you couldn't resist, because you, too, were being steeped in her. You were forced into a lover's involvement with her, and she was a woman worth loving. Beautiful ... strong. She'd needed that strength in order to survive, and that was why she couldn't help him against Mathis. The life she offered was free from the terrors of war but demanded vigilance and fortitude. Although she favored him--he was sure of that--his strength would have to be proved. Of course, Mathis had twisted all this into a bizarre religion.

Christ!

Quinn sat up straight. Jesus fucking Christ! He was really losing it--mooning around like some kid fantasizing about a movie star. He'd better get his ass in gear, because Mathis would be coming soon. Tonight. It was interesting how Mathis--knowing his best hope of taking Quinn would be at night--had used his delusion to overcome his fear of the dark, convincing himself that the queen had told him he would win... or maybe she had told him.

Fuck that, Quinn told himself. He wasn't that far gone.

A gust of wind roused a chorus of whispery vowels from the leaves. Quinn flipped up his visor. It was hot, cloudless, but he could smell rain and the promise of a chill on the wind. He did an ampule. The drugs withdrew the baffles that had been damping the core of his anger. Confidence was a voltage surging through him, keying new increments of strength. He smiled, thinking about the fight to come, and even that smile was an expression of furious strength, a thing of bulked muscle fibers and trembling nerves. He was at the center of strength, in touch with every rustle, his sensitivity fueled by the light-stained brilliance of the leaves. Gazing at the leaves, at their infinite shades of green, he remembered a line of a poem he'd read once: "Green flesh, green hair and eyes of coldest silver...." Was that how the queen would be if she were real--transformed into a creature of pure poetry by the unearthly radiance of Fire Zone Emerald? Were they all acting out a mythic drama distilled from the mundane interactions of love and war, performing it in the flawed heart of an immense green jewel whose reality could be glimpsed only by those blind enough to see beyond the chaos of the leaves into its precise facets and fractures? Quinn chuckled at the wasted profundity of his thought and pictured Mathis dead, himself the king of that dead man's illusion, robed in ferns and wearing a leafy crown.

High above, two parrots were flying complicated loops and arcs, avoiding the hanging columns of light as if they were solid.

•

Just before dusk, a rain squall swept in, lasting only a few minutes bit soaking the island. Quinn used it for cover, moving about and rigging more flares. He considered taking a stand on the rocky point at the north end: It commanded a view of both shores, and he might get lucky and spot Mathis as he crossed. But it was risky--Mathis might spot him--and he decided his best bet would be to hide, to outwait Mathis. Waiting wasn't Mathis' style. Quinn went back to the ceiba tree and climbed past the crotch to a limb directly beneath and opening in the canopy, shielded by fans of leaves. He switched his gun to its high-explosive setting. Popped an ampule. And waited.

The clouds passed away south, and in the half-light, the bushes below seemed to assume topiary shapes. After 15 minutes, Quinn did another ampule. Violet auras faded in around ferns, pools of shadow quivered and creepers seemed to be slithering like snakes along the branches. A mystic star rose in the west, shining alone above the last pink band of sunset. Quinn stared at it until he thought he understood its sparkling message.

The night that descended was similar to the one in the Rousseau print, with a yellow-globe moon carving geometries of shadow and light from the foliage. A night for tigers, mysterious ladies and dark designs. Barnacled to his branch, Quinn felt that the moonlight was lacquering his combat gear, giving it the semblance of ebony armor with gilt filigree, enforcing upon him the image of a knight about to do battle for his lady. He supposed it was possible that such might actually be the case. It was true that his perception of the queen was growing stronger and more particularized; he even thought he could tell where she was hiding: the rocky point. But he doubted that he could trust the perception--and besides, the battle itself, not its motive, was the significant thing. To reach that peak moment when perfection drew blood, when you muscled confusion aside and--as large as a constellation with the act, as full of stars and blackness and primitive meaning--you were able to look down onto the world and know you had outperformed the ordinary. Nothing, neither an illusory motive nor the illusion of a real motive, could add importance to that.

Shortly after dark, Mathis began to chatter again, regaling Quinn with anecdote and opinion; and by the satisfaction in his voice, Quinn knew he had reached the island. Twenty minutes passed, each of them ebbing away, leaking out of Quinn's store of time like blood dripping from and old wound. Then a burst of white incandescence to the south, throwing vines and bushes into skeletal silhouette ... and with it a scream. Quinn smiled. The scream had been a dandy imitation of pain, but he wasn't buying it. He eased a flare from his hip pouch. It wouldn't take long for Mathis to give this up.

The white fire died, muffled by the rainsoaked foliage, and finally Mathis said, "You a cautious fella, Quinn Edward."

Quinn popped two ampules.

"I doubt you can keep it up, though," Mathis went on. "I mean, sooner or later you gotta throw caution to the winds."

Quinn barely heard him. He felt he was soaring, that the island was soaring, arrowing through a void whose sole feature it was and approaching the moment for which he had been waiting: a moment of brilliant violence to illuminate the flaws at the heart of the stone, to reveal the shadow play. The first burn of the drugs subsided, and he fixed his eyes on the shadows south of the ceiba tree.

Tension began to creep into Mathis' voice, and Quinn was not surprised when--perhaps five minutes later--he heard the stutter of an M-18: Mathis firing at some movement in the brush. He caught sight of a muzzle flash, lifted his gun. But the next instant, he was struck by an overpowering sense of the queen, one that shocked him with its suddenness.

She was in pain. Wounded by Mathis' fire.

In his mind's eye, Quinn saw a female figure slumped against a boulder, holding her lower leg. The wound wasn't serious, but he could tell she wanted the battle to end before worse could happen.

He was mesmerized by her pervasiveness--it seemed that if he were to flip up his visor, he would breathe her in--and by what appeared to be a new specificity of knowledge about her. Bits of memory were surfacing in his thoughts; though he didn't quite believe it, he could have sworn they were hers: a shanty with a tin roof amid fields of tilled red dirt; someone walking on a beach; a shady place overhung by a branch dripping with orchids, with insects scuttling in and out of the blooms, mining some vein of sweetness. That last memory was associated with the idea that it was a place where she went to daydream, and Quinn felt an intimate resonance with her, with the fact that she--like him--relied on that kind of retreat.

Confused, afraid for her yet half convinced that he had slipped over the edge of sanity, he detonated his flare, aiming it at the opening in the canopy. An umbrella of white light bloomed overhead. He tracked his gun across eerily lit bushes and. ... There! Standing in the clearing to the south, a man wearing combat gear. Before the man could move, Quinn blew him up into marbled smoke and flame. Then, his mind ablaze with victory, he began to shinny down the branch. But as he descended, he realized something was wrong. The man had just stood there, made no attempt to duck or hide. And his gun. It had been like Quinn's own, not an M-18.

He had shot a dummy or a man already dead!

Bullets pounded his back, not penetrating but knocking him out of the tree. Arms flailing, he fell into the bush. Branches tore the gun from his grasp. The armor deadened the impact, but he was dazed, his head throbbing. He clawed free of the bush just as Mathis' helmeted shadow--looking huge in the dying light of the flare--crashed through the brush and drove a rifle stock into his faceplate. The plastic didn't shatter, webbing over with cracks; but by the time Quinn had recovered, Mathis was straddling him, knees pinning his shoulders.

"How 'bout that, motherfucker?" said Mathis, breathing hard.

A knife glinted in his hand, arced downward and thudded into Quinn's neck, deflected by the armor. Quinn heaved, but Mathis forced him back and this time punched at the faceplate with the hilt of the knife. Punched again, and again. Bits of plastic sprayed Quinn's face, and the faceplate was now so thoroughly cracked, it was like looking up through a crust of glittering rime. It wouldn't take many more blows. Desperate, Quinn managed to roll Mathis onto his side, and they grappled silently. His teeth bit down on a sharp plastic chip, and he tasted blood. Still grappling, they struggled to their knees, then to their feet. Their helmets slammed together. The impact came as a hollow click over Quinn's radio, and that click seemed to switch on a part of his mind that was as distant as a flare, calm and observing; he pictured the two of them as black giants with whirling galaxies for hearts and stars articulating their joints, doing battle over the female half of everything. Seeing it that way gave him renewed strength. He wrangled Mathis off balance, and they reeled clumsily through the brush. They fetched up against the trunk of the ceiba tree, and for a few seconds they were frozen like wrestlers muscling for an advantage. Sweat poured down Quinn's face; his arms quivered. Then Mathis tried to butt his faceplate, to finish the job he had begun with the hilt of his knife. Quinn ducked, slipped his hold, planted a shoulder in Mathis' stomach and drove him backward. Mathis twisted as he fell, and Quinn turned him onto his stomach. He wrenched Mathis' knife arm behind his back, pried the knife loose. Probed with the blade, searching for a seam between the plates of neck armor. Then he pressed it just deep enough to prick the skin. Mathis went limp. Silent.

"Where's all the folksy chitchat, man?" said Quinn, excited.

Mathis maintained his silent immobility, and Quinn wondered if he had gone catatonic. Maybe he wouldn't have to kill him. The light from the flare had faded, and the moon-dappled darkness that had filled in reminded Quinn of the patterns of blight on the island leaves: an infection at whose heart they were clamped together like chitinous bugs.

"Bitch!" said Mathis, suddenly straining against Quinn's hold. "You lied, goddamn you!"

"Shut up," said Quinn, annoyed.

"Fuckin' bitch!" Mathis bellowed. "You tricked me!"

"I said to shut up!" Quinn gave him a little jab, but Mathis began to thrash wildly, nearly impaling himself, shouting, "Bitch!"

"Shut the fuck up!" said Quinn, growing angrier but also trying to avoid stabbing Mathis, beginning to feel helpless, to feel that he would have to stab him, that it was all beyond his control.

"I'll kill you, bitch!" screamed Mathis. "I'll. ..."

"Stop it!" Quinn shouted, not sure to whom he was crying out. Inside his chest, a fuming cell of anger was ready to explode.

Mathis writhed and kicked. "I'll cut out your fuckin'. ..."

Poisonous burst of rage. Mandibles snapping shut, Quinn shoved the knife home. Blood guttered in Mathis' throat. One gauntleted hand scrabbled in the dirt, but that was all reflexes.

Quinn sat up, feeling sluggish. There was no glory. It had been a contest essentially decided by a gross stupidity: Mathis' momentary forgetfulness about the armor. But how could he have forgotten? He'd seen what little effect the bullets had. Quinn took off his helmet and sucked in hits of the humid air, watched a slice of moonlight jiggle on Mathis' faceplate. Then a blast of static from his helmet radio, a voice saying, "You copy?"

"Ain't no friendlies in Emerald," said another radio voice. "Musta been beaners sent up that flare. It's a trap."

"Yeah, but I got a reading like infantry gear back there. We should do a sweep over that lake."

Chopper pilots, Quinn realized. But he stared at the helmet with the mute awe of a savage, as if they had been alien voices speaking from a stone. He picked up the helmet, unsure what to say.

Please, no....

The words had been audible, and he realized that she had made him hear them in the sighing of the breeze.

Static fizzling. "Get the hell outta here."

The first pilot again. "Do you copy? I repeat, do you copy?"

What, Quinn thought, if this had all been the queen's way of getting rid of Mathis, even down to that last flash of anger; and now, now that he had done the job, wouldn't she get rid of him?

Please stay....

Quinn imagined himself back in Dakota, years spent watching cattle die, reading mail-order catalogs, drinking and drinking, comparing the queen to the dowdy farm girl he'd have married, and one night getting a little too morbidly weary of that nothing life and driving out onto the flats and riding the .45-caliber express to nowhere. But at least that was proved, whereas this....

Please....

A wave of her emotion swept over him, seeding him with her loneliness and longing. He was truly beginning to know her now, to sense the precise configurations of her moods, the stoicism underlying her strength, the. ...

"Fuck it!" said one of the pilots.

The static from Quinn's radio smoothed to a hiss, and the night closed down around him. His feeling of isolation nailed him to the spot. Wind seethed in the massy crown of the ceiba, and he thought he heard again the whispered word Please. An icy fluid mounted in his spine. To shore up his confidence, he popped an ampule; and soon the isolation no longer troubled him but, rather, seemed to fit about him like a cloak. This was the path he had been meant to take, the way of courage and character. He got to his feet, unsteady on his injured legs, and eased past Mathis, slipping between two bushes. Ahead of him, the night looked like a floating puzzle of shadow and golden light: No matter how careful he was, he'd never be able to locate all his mines and flares.

But she would guide him.

Or would she? Hadn't she tricked Mathis? Lied to him?

More wind poured through the leaves of the ceiba tree, gusting its word of entreaty; and intimations of pleasure, of sweet green mornings and soft nights, eddied up in the torrent of her thoughts. She surrounded him, undeniable, as real as perfume, as certain as the ground beneath his feet.

For a moment, he was assailed by a new doubt. "God," he said. "Please don't let me be crazy. Not just ordinary crazy."

Please....

Then, suffering mutinies of the heart at every step, repelling them with a warrior's conviction, he moved through the darkness at the center of the island toward the rocky point, where--her tiger crouched by her feet, a ripe jungle moon hanging above like the emblem of her mystique--either love or fate might be waiting.

" 'I got bad tidin's, Quinn Edward. 'Pears like guerrillas took out your buddies.' "