Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  He looked at the fly and saw all of his faces looking back.

  “Yes,” he said as if in answer. “Yes, of course I will.”

  Orson got out of the car. No umbrella, no hat, not even a collar turned up against the wind. He walked to the trunk, opened it, removed the brand-new Remington 20-gauge and the box of buckshot. The gun had a four-shot capacity. Orson didn’t think he’d need more than that, but stuffed his pockets with more shells.

  He stood for a moment looking at the weapon. A Model 870, with a receiver machined from a solid billet of steel, with a custom-quality satin finish on both stock and fore-end and walnut woodwork. The receiver and barrel were richly blued and highly polished. The rain plopped on the gun, beaded, and rolled off.

  “Nice,” said Orson aloud.

  Before he racked the slide he watched the fly crawl down from his knuckle and flatten out against the back of his hand. It flattened and flattened and flattened until it was thinner than a dime, thinner than a postage stamp, and then no thickness at all. It was part of him. A tattoo of a fly on the back of his hand. The eyes, though, they were still mirrors.

  “Nice,” he said again.

  He did not bother to close the trunk. Nor had he turned off the engine or closed the driver’s door. None of that mattered. Orson slogged through the mud toward the house, climbed the steps, paused to wipe his feet, and then knocked on the door. When it was opened an inch, he saw an inquiring blue eye. A voice asked something, but Orson could not really hear her, or understand. That part of Orson was going away. Nearly gone.

  He raised the barrel very quickly—a round black eye to stare into that blue eye—and then he fired.

  There were screams from inside he did not hear. There were voices begging, but he couldn’t hear those, either. The shotgun boomed and boomed and boomed. A silence while he reloaded, and then a last boom.

  The door stood open. The lights stayed on. The rain fell.

  Everything else was utterly still.

  22

  Monk dreamed himself into hell.

  There were a lot of nights like that.

  Iraq had cooled off for months and there was a lot of talk about the United States pulling its troops out.

  Talk. There was always a lot of that kind of talk. Mostly it was either someone on a campaign trail, some pundit misreading the political moment, or some handwaving to distract the public eye from something else no one wanted seen.

  That was Monk’s world, once upon a time.

  Back then, of course, Monk wasn’t Monk. Not yet. He was just Gerry, or Big Ger. Twenty-four years old. One of the youngest ever to join Delta Force, and they kept sending him to combat hot zones, mostly in the Middle East. Pulling triggers and cutting throats for Uncle Sam. When he walked away from that, he got picked up as a PMC-private military contractor. Running ops in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and some off-the-books gigs in Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Small jobs, the kind that don’t make headlines in any way that reveal what really happened. Monk was part of a cleanup crew. Go in, eliminate a target, and wipe out all traces. Collateral damage was part of that.

  He dreamed about the night before he left.

  The op looked simple. Go into a small village and take out a team manufacturing a more sophisticated version of roadside IEDs. This new design was almost certainly Russian, though no one was ever going to be able to prove it. No materials traceable back to Russia were ever found. Instead, local teams used their own metals, plastics, ceramics, and explosives based on designs emailed to them from dummy accounts. All instructions were in Pashto, even down to idiomatic phrasing. These new explosives were made to look improvised but were actually quite sophisticated—a lethal subtlety—and they were racking up more kills than should be possible during a troop drawdown.

  Monk’s team had a really good sniper and spotter on overwatch, nestled into a weedy cleft in the hills. The rest of the ten-man team went in by squads, moving like ghosts through the darkened streets, night-vision goggles turning the village into a funhouse of green and gray and black. The intel was that all civilians had been moved out more than a week ago, and that everyone here was a tango. A terrorist.

  Although that made the job more dangerous, it simplified the math. No friendlies. No worries about collateral damage.

  They deployed from their vehicles more than a kilometer out and then proceeded toward the objective—a large house off the town square—making maximum use of cover, following a route they’d memorized from the briefing. None of them were virgins about gigs like this. The entire team had done jobs exactly like this one eight times before. Not a single injury sustained and a body count of hostiles that kept the CIA and the officers higher up the food chain very happy.

  The spotter’s voice came over the team channel and the lieutenant raised a fist. They all stopped and sank to one knee in banks of shadows thrown down by town walls, weapons tucked into their shoulders, fingers laid along trigger guards, eyes watching.

  “Seeing two armed sentries on the top of the target building on the southeast corner of the square. Rifles slung.”

  “Take them,” ordered the lieutenant.

  Monk could not see the sentries from where he crouched behind a withered bush, nor did he hear the shots, muffled as they were by sound suppressors. But the spotter said, “Clear.”

  And they moved on, entering the square and running along the sides, still clinging to the cover of the buildings. There were only a few small lights on inside the building, though they were likely left on all night. With the sentries on the roof, the people inside probably thought they were safe.

  In some cases a target like this would simply be erased by a drone strike, but the orders were to bring back laptops, papers, cell phones, and at least one person with a pulse who might be induced to answer questions. Once the entire hostile presence was accounted for and eliminated, helos would come in for extraction. Charges would be remote detonated and good luck to whoever had to sift through the ashes to determine what the hell happened.

  That was the plan.

  Even while he slept Monk remembered that old phrase.

  Man plans and God laughs.

  Or maybe it was the Devil who laughed at what happened that night. The last night he had been truly Gerald Addison. The night before he began the journey to become who—and what—he was.

  Monk, dreaming, twisted and writhed as memories tore at him.

  The nightbirds on the telephone wires twitched at the sound of gunfire and explosions. And the awful screams from long ago and far away …

  INTERLUDE FOUR

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  Owen Minor lay in a ball in the upper corner of his bed, which he’d pushed against the walls. He loved the security of that nook. There were a dozen pillows of various firmness, and big blankets. The TV was on, but he wasn’t watching it; he merely liked the noise and motion on the big flat-screen. Sometimes he had music playing on his iPad in the other room, and even the TV in the living room. He did not like silence. It scared him. Silence was when you thought about things, about people and places. About memories. And he had very few of those left. Already everything before his mother died was gone. Completely. Photos didn’t trigger even so much as a flicker or a shadow on the walls of his mind.

  He had some school memories left, but only a fraction of what he knew he should remember. Pieces of those days seemed to peel like paint and flake off, falling away to leave bare spots in his life. There was a girl he liked once, a little redhead in the seventh grade. He searched for her on Facebook and found her page to see how she grew up. Very cute. Biggest green eyes. Owen saved some images from her photos section and printed three of them out. They were on his corkboard in the basement, but early last week he lost every memory of her that he ever had. All of it … just gone.

  He wondered what would happen when all of his memories were gone. Would he simply go away, too? Would he fade like a mist and simply not be there anymore. There, or anywhere?

&nb
sp; Would it hurt?

  Would it be like falling asleep?

  Would he vanish from other people’s memories?

  Or would he exist only in the eternal now, like a monk or a lama?

  Owen lay curled like a grub in his bed and wondered what would happen when his mind was emptied of everything.

  23

  Dianna stood outside the tattoo shop, rain hammering down on her umbrella. The lights were on, including the WALK RIGHT IN sign in neon, but the door was locked. No little sign with a clock saying BE RIGHT BACK. If Patty was planning to close early, she could have texted.

  “Well,” she said, “damn.”

  She was feeling tired, a little sick, and glad to be away from the shop. After that first client, the day had canted sideways and fallen off the rails. No psychic was right all the time—if they were, all they’d do would be to play the damn lottery—but sensitives like Dianna were right more than they were not. Especially with her regulars. Not today, though. She’d been so completely off that she’d had to fake her way through readings, relying on the face value of the tarot cards, rather than interpreting their meaning. Most of the newbie customers couldn’t tell the difference, though she doubted they’d come back because the readings had had all the energy of a dead battery. The regulars, though, had given her odd looks. They knew she was off. It felt like she was cheating them, and some of them had that awareness in their eyes. No one said anything, but they knew.

  They knew.

  Maybe Patty would cheer her up. She was a new friend, but Dianna felt like she’d known the tattoo artist forever. Not her type in a romantic way—skinny to the point of looking emaciated—but kindred. They both had baggage and even though that was never the topic of their conversations, it was there. To a degree that was a comfort. Fellow travelers through the storm lands.

  Plus, Patty was a real artist. Dianna had several tattoos, but until she’d met Patty Cakes, the ink was just symbolic. Phases of the moon, an LGBTQ rainbow. That sort of thing. She’d come into the shop the day it opened, stopping by on a whim, or maybe pulled there. Guided there. The small Vietnamese woman had been cleaning her equipment and simply stopped, turning to look up as if Dianna had called her name. Then Patty walked over to her and held out a hand. Not to shake, but palm up, nodding toward Dianna’s left arm. Without even a flicker of confusion Dianna placed her forearm on the upraised palm. There was no tattoo there, but it was where Dianna wanted one.

  Patty placed her other hand over the unmarked skin and then began rubbing it very gently. It was in no way sexual. It was so much like the way Dianna held crystals or an unshuffled deck of cards. Reading potential. Letting the moment speak to her.

  “The moon,” said Patty.

  “I have the…” began Dianna, but trailed off, embarrassed because she’d spoken before listening to her heart. There was even a flicker of disappointment in the artist’s eyes. There and gone.

  Patty let her arm go. “Show me the one you have.”

  Dianna hesitated, momentarily losing her grip on her confidence. She glanced at the big picture window. Patty nodded, walked over and lowered a privacy shade, then turned, hands clasped lightly.

  “Show me.”

  Dianna nodded. She felt her throat and cheeks burning a little, which was odd. She was never embarrassed. Not anymore, and not in this town. But she felt oddly naked. Exposed. Her fingers moved to the top button of her blouse, trembled, then Dianna took a breath and undid the buttons. All of them. She slipped out of her blouse and turned to show her spine. She reached back to unclasp her bra, but Patty made a small dismissive sound.

  The tattoo of the phases of the moon ran from midback to a few inches below the nape of her neck. With anything more than a tank top it was hidden. The work was good and the job had been very expensive.

  “Brooklyn Jack?” asked Patty.

  “Yes, how did—?”

  “It’s good work,” said Patty, “but it’s a man’s art. Jack tries, but he isn’t…” She let the rest hang, then after a moment added, “And it’s in the wrong place. Not the back for the moon. Never there. It should be on your arm. Left arm. Heartline.”

  “Yes,” said Dianna.

  “Put your blouse on.”

  Dianna picked it up from the chair where she’d dropped it. She buttoned it quickly.

  “It’s not the phases,” said Patty. “You know that, right?”

  Dianna nodded. “I know it now. Didn’t then.”

  “Phases are transition. You’re not becoming something. You’re there. You’re not bi, you’re pure.”

  Pure. The word was so beautiful. Once, long ago, her mother accused her of not being pure because Dianna liked girls. That was high school. Later, after a disaster of a marriage, Mom had told her she was impure because she’d left her husband for a woman. That was six years ago, when Dianna had realized she wasn’t bisexual but a lesbian going through the motions of being bi in order to try and fit in and make an ill-considered marriage work.

  “Pure,” said Patty again, nodding as if in agreement with her own judgment.

  Dianna held out her arm and they both looked at the pale skin.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “There are other symbols…”

  Patty made that face. “Are you campaigning?”

  “What?”

  “Are you looking for a slogan? ‘Come join the lesbian army’?”

  Dianna laughed. “No.”

  “No,” agreed Patty. “You’re not recruiting and you’re not uncertain anymore, are you?”

  No,” said Dianna, “I’m really not.”

  “Right.”

  “So…?”

  Patty held out her left hand, palm down, to show the exquisite tattoo on the back of it. It was of a lovely little girl with huge eyes and a smile that could melt all the ice in the world. But when Dianna glanced at the artist’s eyes, she saw a sadness so deep that it clawed a hole all the way down to the blackest darkness. Dianna did not have to ask. She did not need the details. Her sensitivity clicked on like a switch had been thrown and she felt the pain, heard the echo of screams—the child’s and the mother’s, but not screamed at the same time. Separated by a wall of horror that was too high for anyone to climb. In that instant Dianna knew that this little girl was dead, and that she had died apart from her mother; and that she had died in the most ugly way possible.

  Just as she knew it was her mother who had, through a process of heartbreak, need, and the deepest artistry, inked that face on the back of a hand that could never touch the lost girl. Dianna felt her heart break and tears burned in her eyes. But Patty said, “No.”

  Patty took the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it up to just below her chin. Around her neck she wore a small glass vial filled with a pinkish liquid. Her breasts were tiny, the nipples dark. But between the areoles was a flower Dianna recognized—a white climbing rose. Or a Cherokee rose, as it was known in the States, whose history was forever tied to the Trail of Tears, the forced and brutal migration to a reservation in Oklahoma. The delicate petals were believed to represent the tears the women had shed along the way. But Dianna knew that it was an invasive species, brought to the United States by travelers from China and Vietnam.

  The flowers on Patty told their own story. The ones closest to the nipples were withered and crumbling as if they, like the milk that once fed the little girl, had dried up never to blossom again. But as the other flowers got nearer to the small woman’s heart they burst with color and detail and looked so real that Dianna could almost smell their fragrance. She slowly raised her eyes as Patty let the shirt fall. They stared at each other for a long time. Some conversations didn’t need words.

  Dianna held out her arm again, and Patty smiled.

  The artist turned off the OPEN neon, locked the door, and began. It took hours. They talked some, but not of the tattoo. They talked about the town of Pine Deep, about its energies. The ley lines that ran like streams of power—light and dark—along irregular path
s through every part of the town, the farms, and the state forest. They talked of the new streets that had been built, and which had come to form the Fringe. Boundary Street, which ran like the main street of the growing community. Mercy Street, where the best music could be found. Autumn Lane, with all of its specialty shops. Coyote Court, where the children played, with different members of the community volunteering to watch them, including one of the locals—the big, red-haired cop named Mike. He wasn’t inked or pierced, was a straight white male, didn’t even drink. But he wasn’t a Norm. He was accepted there more than in the town he grew up in.

  They talked about seeing and knowing. About the burden of understanding.

  There were tears and laughter, and a few pauses to hug or hold hands.

  It took four hours for Patty to finish, and when she was done, they both wept.

  A green vine, delicate with the sweetness of early spring, seemed to sprout from a blue vein near Dianna’s wrist. It curled and coiled up Dianna’s forearm, sprouting roses in dozens of shades, as if all of the colors of nature were gathered there, part of that single vine. Each flower was larger and more vibrant than the last, and also subtly different—more realistic, more defined—until a final rose, whose lush petals brushed against the tender inside of her elbow. This final rose was ripe and full, with a red so deep that it was black in places, and so luscious that it seemed to rise from her skin and perfume the air, insisting on its own immutable reality. Not a flower in transition, but one that was so clearly itself that seeing it was a celebration of joy.

  They both stared at the tattoo, smiling, sobbing, as tears ran down their faces. Dianna kissed Patty on both cheeks and the lips. A sisters’ kiss, but the kind of kiss only real sisters could ever hope to understand.