Chapter 4

The next cave was tricky, but not for the expected reason. There was close to 100 feet between the path and the cave, and the sand looked too smooth to be true. Most of the time, the sand around the trail had marks in it as if it had been disturbed, but the wind had broken down the sharper edges.

On the other hand, this sand looked like it had been swept smooth like it had been dressed to remove telltale markings. That scared the shit out of me! I talked it over with all of the men, and they agreed that we would be stupid to take the empty looking sand at face value. We needed something to stir up whatever was hiding under the sand, but I sure as hell was not going to send a man across there to be the bait.

Charley suggested that he toss a grenade out there to see what would happen. That sounded good to me, so I ordered everybody to lie down on the trail while we ran the experiment. I wanted to try one of the fragmentation grenades because of the amount of extra shit it threw out. That might be more likely to attract whatever was hiding there.

Everybody but Charley lay down to provide as little a target as possible. Charley pulled the pin and tossed the grenade as far as he could toward the cave entrance. As soon as he turned it loose and long before the grenade landed, Charley had dug himself a pretty effective slit trench in that trail. Charley had talents that I had never dreamed of!

The grenade landed and exploded, throwing a lot of fragments all over the scenery. The result was what I had hoped for. Suddenly, something erupted from the sand. There were spikes about two feet long and an inch in diameter. The spikes had sharp points at the top and looked to me something like asparagus. Hell, that was as good a name as any. The Asparagus seemed to look around for a minute in confusion because there was nothing there to eat, then it retracted into the ground. A minute or so later, a long tentacle came out of the ground with a feather-like brush at its end. The feather duster brushed the sand back to the pristine smoothness that it had before the hand grenade went off.

OK, now I thought I knew what we were facing. I called Hank over to get his flame thrower ready. I told him to try to burn off the Asparagus when it showed up again. Charley tossed another grenade and the Asparagus showed up when it went off. Hank immediately started spraying the burning liquid at the spikes, and they burned quite satisfactorily, thank you.

After a minute or so of this burning, there was a tremendous roar, and a beast bolted up from under the sand. The Asparagus seemed to grow from its back, and it was still burning. Hank poured fire on the beast while the rest of us shot everything we had at it. It took a while, but we were finally able to kill the beast—at least, it looked dead.

Damn, that Asparagus beast was impressive and a thing that nightmares were made of. I knew that I was not going to set foot on that sand as long as there could be any more such beasts under it. Everybody got ready, and Charley tossed another grenade to a different section of the sand. Yeah, there were some more of the spikes. We poured in fire until the creature rose out of the ground, whereupon we shot at it with everything we had.

Well, there were two more of the Asparagus creatures between us and the cave that we had to get rid of before it looked safe enough to approach the cave, itself. My light showed one of the Medusas in the cave, but it seemed like a pushover after our experience with the Asparagus. The flame thrower and a couple of fragmentation grenades finished it off.

We were taking another cigarette break when we got a real scare. Three of the King Kong monsters showed up at once. We couldn't face all three of the monsters at the same time out in the open, so we rushed into the cave that we had just cleared. The monsters chased after us, and we were forced to fight all of them at the same time.

I had Chester, with his BAR, concentrate on the one on the left. The riflemen I directed to shoot at the one on the right. Hank, with his flame thrower, concentrated on the King Kong in the middle.

It was nerve shattering to be forced to let the King Kong get close enough for the flame thrower, but we had no choice. At first, Hank aimed at the creature's eye stalks, but they proved such elusive targets that he moved down to work on the creature's body. When his fur caught fire, the King Kong tried to slap it with his hands to extinguish the flames, but that did not seem to do any good. Finally, the beast dropped flat on the sand, and that was what it took to put out the flames on its chest. However, it also put its eye stalks and mouth within range of Charley's hand grenades. The stupid beast swallowed one of the grenades and that was the end of it.

The bullets were doing some good with the other two King Kongs, but they were just not working fast enough. Hank turned his flame thrower toward the one the riflemen were working on, since it did not seem to be slowed as much as by the BAR. Anyway, Hank had learned a little bit from his first encounter, so he was now aiming the flame at the creature's knees, which was where all of the bullets had been aimed.

Once the fur on this beast caught fire, Hank aimed at the other King Kong's knees. The legs seemed to be more sensitive than the torso of the beast, and both beasts fell on their chests and were having considerable difficulty moving, except from the use of their arms and hands. The damned things were still crawling toward us, so we tried the hand grenades again. Charley was actually able to throw one down the throat of the monster on the left, but the one on the right obliged us by gulping down the grenade that Charley tossed at it.

In both cases, the monster was killed by the fragmentation grenades. Shit! We needed a rest after that! We sat around, talking and smoking, while we heated some C-rations. Beef Stroganoff!?! I never heard of it, but it was damned good. I suspected that Voice was freelancing with the C-rations, but as long as they came out this good, he could freelance all he wanted to!

Speaking of freelancing, I wondered if Voice could come up with a version of the British PIAT, an antitank weapon that used a spring instead of rocket power like the American bazooka did. Actually, the PIAT was a piss-poor weapon against tanks, but, with a little work, should be a marvel against King Kongs. Anyway, I would ask tonight. I didn't want to depend on a rocket device like the bazooka because the back blast from the rocket could be a man killer in a confined location like a cave. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that a modified PIAT could do a better job than the flame thrower against a Medusa. Well, I didn't want to get my hopes up too high.

It was time to move on, we still had two more caves to look into. The time involved would depend on whether we had more of the Asparagus monsters to deal with, or even worse things, for that matter.

The next cave was like the previous one with the Asparagus in front of the cave. I suddenly wondered what was hidden in the depths of the cave that warranted so much protection for it. Dammit, I wanted to know! We had moved on before I had that thought, so I would have to wait a few hours for the answer.

The next cave was the last one on the list for the day, so we could knock this one out and go home, so to speak. Well, let me tell you, this one was not all that easy! Yes, there were two Asparagus monsters that we had to eliminate, but there was another monster before the cave that I don't have a name for yet. Maybe something will come to me, but right now, all I can think of is the many-headed Hydra. This one was sort of like the Medusa inside the caves, but the Hydra was outside where we could see it and get nauseated from the sight.

The monster consisted of a multitude of round stalks about a foot thick with an alligator or crocodile head attached to the end of each stalk. Saliva continually drooled from each mouth, and this saliva was the yellowish color of bile. One of the stalks shook its head and a drop of the saliva landed on the back of my bare hand. God! Talk about pain! That stuff burned like concentrated battery acid. I was afraid that it was also going to poison me, so I poured a whole canteen of water over the spot where the drop landed. The pain finally went away, but I was scared shitless while I was fighting the pain!