"What are you doing out, Brown?" Tick said roughly.
Sam took a deep breath, determined not to let the manic feelings rushing through his veins come out in his words.
"I went for a walk."
"You didn't sign out."
Sam shook his head. "Forgot. Needed some space." If they were going to make a big deal out of his failure to sign out, Sam couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Arguing or lying about it would only make it worse.
"Where did you go?"
"Guard tower." Tick's expression flickered briefly and Sam knew he had him. "I went looking for the dog. There's blood on the wall, Top." Tick said nothing for a long moment. "I swear to you, Top. It's there. Go look." Sam barely kept the edge of panic out of his voice. If Tick didn't believe him—if he wouldn't even go look—
Sam shook the thought off. There was no way Tick wouldn't at least look. He'd give Sam that much benefit of the doubt, right?
Tick sighed heavily. "When's the last time you slept?"
"I'm good." The lie was easy and smooth and didn't even leave a bad taste in Sam's mouth.
"I'm worried about you, Brown. You've been through a lot the last few days. Losing Lewis and all that."
Sam swallowed, his tongue swollen in his mouth. "I'm good. I—I just need you to believe me about the dog."
"I do." The hesitation was gone. "I wrote a sworn statement. You need to go inside and get your weapon back. I can't afford to have you go down, son. I need you to get some sleep and get ready to roll again." Tick gripped his shoulder, near the juncture of his neck. "You don't do anyone any good if you go down. Get some sleep. Your boys need you in the fight."
Sam nodded and this time, the relief was warm and wet over his sticky skin. A cleansing.
Tick believed him.
Sam wasn't crazy.
He breathed out a hard, shaky breath.
It was going to be okay.
22
A pounding pulled Sam from any hint of sleep he might have achieved.
It echoed on the walls of the aluminum container and bounced around his head. Sam stumbled to the door, tripping over the sling of his weapon.
Jinx stood in the pool of light from the spotlight overhead. His eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring with each breath. "Hale's gone."
Sam frowned and glanced at his watch. Just past midnight. "What do you mean, Hale's gone?"
"No one can find him. He signed out to go to the morale tent, but that was hours ago. The commander just initiated a recall."
Alarm pushed away the last remnant of sleep. "Have we checked the call trailers?"
"Yeah. Everywhere he normally hangs out."
"Give me five minutes to get my boots on."
They were on in less than 30 seconds. "Where have we looked?"
"Everywhere. They're searching trailers now and if we can't find him, they're going to call a base-wide alert," Jinx said. As a rule, Jinx wasn't prone to panic but a wildness to his movements made Sam worry.
"Has anyone checked the migrant workers?" Third country nationals. Brought in for cheap labor by the big contractor companies looking to suck off the war effort for profit.
Jinx looked at him funny. "Why the fuck would Hale be there?" No one went there. Americans didn't hang out with the workers and the workers avoided the Americans except when their jobs brought them into contact.
"I don't know." Sam's voice sounded funny to his own ears. "But I've got a bad feeling about this."
"No shit." Jinx drummed his fingers on the butt of his weapon.
They walked together toward the migrant workers’ living quarters.
Sam had thought GIs lived bad on his last deployment; stacked into tiny trailers on bunk beds living assholes to elbows. This? This was fucking inhumane. Twenty men were living in a space for maybe five, packed into tiny spaces. The top bunk was barely a foot from the ceiling in most of the trailers they walked by.
Toward the end of the slum was a bevy of rusted-out shipping containers, shrouded in shadows and reeking of old metal and mildew. A graveyard.
Clouds moved and the containers were illuminated in eerie soft light.
He tapped Jinx on the shoulder.
A flash of movement caught his eyes. A quick flash of light. The thud of a body hitting the ground.
Sam got there first.
Jinx took one look and whirled away, violently throwing up anything that had been in his stomach.
Sam's own guts threatened revolt at the carnage within.
Hale's eyes were white against the blood on his face. His lips were curled in a feral smile as he ran his hands over the walls with manic fury. Blood smeared beneath his hands.
"Jesus Christ, Hale!"
Hale didn't react to the sound of Sam's voice. Sam felt rather than saw Jinx come in next to him, his weapon raised. He reeked of fresh vomit. Sam's stomach threatened to spin.
Hale turned slowly, lifting his weapon where it had been stacked against the wall.
"This is the price, Sam." Hale's voice sounded different: warped and twisted, like metal grating on metal.
"What. The fuck. Are you talking about?" Sam growled, holding his own weapon low and ready.
At least three bodies were lying at Hale's feet. Three dead men, slashed and bloodied by a man Sam had called brother. Blood was smeared on the walls of the shipping container and seeped into the wooden floor.
"Jesus," Jinx whispered next to him.
"We were all supposed to die out there," Hale whispered. His eyes gleamed as the moon shifted free of the clouds again. "I saw it."
"Saw what, you fucking psycho?" Jinx asked.
"Stop it," Sam whispered. "Saw what, Hale?"
"Saw our deaths. It started with Lewis. And then they were going to blow the trucks. You'd die. Jinx. All of us were supposed to die." He rubbed his hand lovingly down the handgrip of his M4. "But I made a bargain. I wanted you to get home, Sam. To Faith. To your kid. Jinx, your mom would have been so pissed if something happened to you."
"My mom's going to be pissed if she finds out about this," Jinx whispered.
"Shut it, Jinx." The coppery smell of blood burned Sam's nostrils, coated his tongue. "This is really fucking bad, Hale."
Hale shrugged. The man who'd been like Sam's little brother lifted shoulders covered in blood. "It's the price. You'll get to go home now. You'll get to see Faith again." His thumb flicked over the selector switch, but he didn't flip it.
“Put the weapon down, Hale.” Sam didn't panic. At least not any more than he already was.
"I don't want it to be like this," Hale whispered. "But it's the price we had to pay."
He moved before Sam realized what he was doing. Sam lunged for Hale's weapon, but slipped in a puddle of blood and piss.
The flash of Hale's weapon was the last thing he saw before his skull exploded in pain and the darkness pulled him under.
* * *
Promise me, Sam. Promise me you'll do whatever it takes to come home to me.
Sam looked down at Faith, her breasts heaving as her body moved beneath his. Her fingers dug into his shoulders and dragged him down, drawing her mouth to his. "Promise me," she whispered.
Sam's balls tightened and he lifted her hips, driving deeper into her warm wet heat.
"I promise."
Sam opened his eyes, the sound of his own voice pulling him out of the dream and into a fucked up reality.
The first thing he noticed was that he was not in his trailer. He opened his eyes, seeing a blinking, bouncing light on a heart monitor. The end of that monitor was stuck to a shaved spot on his chest just above his nipple. The beeps grated on his ears in time with his heartbeat.
He swallowed and his tongue protested the movement.
He blinked. His eyes felt gritty and the bright lights burned.
Then he tried to move. His entire body was weighted down. The blanket might as well have been made with lead.
He blinked, wishing he could rub his eyes. Why couldn't h
e rub his eyes? He tried to lift his hands but they were heavy. So heavy.
He hadn't felt this way since the first time he'd smoked a joint with Tommy. Tommy had laughed his ass off, but Sam had just lain back on the hay bale and let the world spin around him. Tommy had sounded very far away, and Sam? Sam had floated.
That was how he felt now: heavy. Stoned. He tried to lift one hand. Just one hand. His arm moved slowly, weighted down as if it was coated in lead armor.
His hand moved toward his face. Slowly, slowly it filled his field of vision, getting bigger and clearer as he continued to blink.
Then it stopped. Halfway between his face and the bed, it stopped. Something tugged at his wrist, like a band pressing on his skin. It was heavy. It was thick.
His vision cleared. His wrists were bound with thick leather straps. Dark brown leather bit into his skin.
Holy fuck. He'd gone crazy. This was what they did to crazy people. He knew that. He'd taken one too many soldiers to the funny farm. This was what they did to people who tried to hurt themselves. Jesus, had he cut his wrists? Why couldn't he remember what he'd done?
Why was he even in the hospital?
Oh God, what had he done? What had he done?
He heard someone screaming from miles away, an echo over the pounding of his heartbeat, the steady beat of the heart monitor.
A skinny, bald, black-skinned nurse rushed into the room.
And Sam realized the screaming came from him.
* * *
The next time he awoke, he felt the bindings on his wrists. They were heavy and reminded him of the crazy he'd embraced.
Something fierce and wild burned into his lungs. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't think. The pressure on his wrists seared up his arms, wrapping around his lungs like a constrictor.
"You don't have to be afraid."
The voice penetrated the fear. It was soft and soothing and way too familiar. Sam frowned and blinked and opened his eyes.
The skinny Bible Kid lay in the bed next to his. His eyes were the deepest blue and utterly calm.
"I never asked you what your name was." Sam's voice was broken, cracked from disuse.
The skinny kid smiled. "My name is Bill." He shifted beneath his blanket and Sam caught a glimpse of white gauze against the translucence of his skin.
"Sam."
The skinny kid smiled. "I know."
Sam swallowed and tried to find any moisture in his mouth. His bottom lip was split down the center. He bit down, needing the pain to prove that this was real.
Warm blood coated his tongue.
"Why are you here, Sam?" the kid—Bill—asked.
Sam ignored his question. "When you were on the plane, where did you go?"
Bill tipped his chin, his eyes dancing in the bright hospital lights. "What do you mean?"
"When we landed. You weren't on the plane. I never saw you in Kuwait." At least, he didn't think he had. It was only now that it was dawning on him that the kid had disappeared until that firefight. "Where did you go?"
Bill smiled. When he did, his lips pulled apart, exposing a dark hole where his tongue should have been. His smile was simple; his words, not so much. "To and fro and back again."
Sam frowned. "I've heard that before."
"I thought you said you knew your scripture, Sam?" Bill licked his lips, his tongue reminding him of a snake. "Have you figured it out yet?"
Sam rolled onto his back, trying to ignore the bindings on his wrists that protested the movement. "Figured what out?" He wasn't in the mood for word games. And even though he felt bad for never asking the kid's name, he still wasn't in the mood to listen to him preach.
"The game of souls."
Sam closed his eyes hard and tried to ignore the whisper along the back of his neck that said he'd lost his mind. Or worse, the one that said nothing had ever been clearer.
"You can deny it all day long," Bill said. "But that doesn't make it less true. The lie doesn't become the truth so long as you repeat it often enough." He paused. "Just because it's believed doesn't make it true."
Sam opened his eyes and looked past the heart monitor to the kid lying in the bed next to his. There was a distant crash, a boom that rattled the walls around them. But Sam said nothing.
"It's all a game," Bill said. "He who has the most souls wins."
"That's not in the scripture you claim to love so much," Sam said. “That's not how it's supposed to go. We're supposed to be the good guys."
"Really?" Bill asked, his eyes narrowing into hard slits. "You think there's a greater good that comes out of this war? Out of any war? The only thing that comes from war is death. Death of humanity. Death of souls. Death of good men who should have gone home to their wives and mothers. You think it's some noble cause, some good fight?" He leaned up on one arm and Sam saw it: his arm, bound in thick white gauze.
Bill kept talking, ignoring Sam's scrutiny. "There are no good fights, no just wars. You strike a bargain, you shake a hand, one promise and that's all she wrote." Bill pinned him with a hard look. "You made your promise," Bill whispered. "Now you have to live with the cost." He smiled thinly. "Can you live with the promise you made, Sam?"
"I didn't make any promises," Sam said softly. But the drugs washed over him in an unexpected wave and pulled him back down into sleep, the word “promise” echoing in his ears in time with his heartbeat.
* * *
Promise me.
Promise me you'll do anything you have to. Just come home to me.
Faith's whispered plea bounced from puffy cloud to puffy cloud. Sam wanted to go running after it, but the cloud wrapped around him and held him warm in its embrace.
Promise me.
So what if he'd promised Faith he'd come home to her? That couldn't be what Bill was talking about. It couldn't be. A promise to his future wife couldn't be wrong. Certainly not evil. That wasn't a deal with the devil. How could a simple promise be evil?
He turned in the bed, but it was dark. No sound came from the other bed, just a quiet rise and fall of the lump. Bill must have been sleeping. At least, Sam thought he must have been sleeping. If that was what you could call it when the drugs burned through your veins. Sam didn't really think so. Not without stretching the truth something fierce.
He shifted again. His hand burned hot and he rubbed it against the sheet, trying to make it stop. It was the first real thing he'd felt since he'd woken up in the hospital.
He almost didn't want it to stop.
He wanted the reminder of what was real. Could anything be real if he was high?
And what did it say about his mental state if he was feeling a fire that wasn't there? He rubbed his hand again, hard enough for friction to heat his skin.
He froze.
Burn. His hand burned. He’d taken Merrick's hand.
A thousand images flashed through his memory.
What would you do to go home, Sam?
Anything.
Anything? Anything is a lot when you're at war.
Cold flooded his veins and he shivered violently. He'd told Merrick he would do anything to go home to Faith. Denial rolled through him and he curled into a ball, ignoring the bindings on his wrists.
He closed his eyes again, shaking his head and mumbling it was a lie. He hadn't done anything wrong.
He was vaguely aware of someone coming into the room. Bill hadn't moved.
And then the puffy white clouds were back. Merrick sat on one, his lips curled in a feral smile, his sharp bones spearing the clouds and tainting them with darkness. His arms were wrapped tight around Faith, dragging her farther and farther from Sam. No matter how hard he struggled, Sam couldn't reach her.
He couldn't save her.
All the promises in the world, and she was still out of reach. Forever out of reach.
* * *
When he woke the next time, Chaplain Cloud was sitting next to his bed. Sam wasn't sure how he knew that, but as his vision cleared and the effects of the dr
ugs faded, he knew.
He didn't question how he knew. But he was damn glad to see him. He tried to smile but the split in the center of his lip opened up again, tearing the thin scab from the fragile skin.
"Sam." Chaplain Cloud's eyes were calm. The lack of judgment or fear was a balm to Sam's frayed nerves.
"It's…" Sam's voice cracked and he cleared his throat weakly. "It's been a rough couple of days, huh, Chaplain?"
Chaplain Cloud's smile was warm. "Indeed it has." He swallowed and patted Sam's forearm briefly. As though the contact wasn’t allowed. "How are you feeling?"
"High?"
Chaplain laughed quietly. "That's to be expected. You've been having nightmares."
Sam frowned and the muscles of his face were tight from lack of use. "Oh." He wanted to deny it, but what was the point? Everyone was going to know he was crazy. He'd probably be evacuated out of theater, sent home in disgrace.
"No one is judging you."
Sam looked away. "I'm judging me. I fell apart."
"Under the weight of a very heavy trial." He reached forward and patted Sam's lips with a towel, wiping away the blood.
Silence hung on for an hour, maybe more. Chaplain didn't leave and Sam didn't speak. He couldn't. The thoughts racing around his head were legion, unmoored. Violent and angry. Sad and crushing. But they all circled around one question.
He cleared his throat. Chaplain Cloud looked up at him from his book. "Do you believe in the devil, Chaplain?"
Chaplain sighed and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. "Yes, Sam. I believe in the devil."
"Like a real devil. A real evil, not a TV demon."
"I know what you mean, Sam. And yes, I believe in real evil." He closed his book. "No, that doesn't make me crazy," he said.
"Really?" Hope. Hope that maybe he wasn't crazy. Hope that maybe he wasn't slipping off the edge of reality and into a world made up of padded rooms and fuzzy walls. "Does the devil whisper in your ear, too?" The question danced on the edge of madness.
"The devil can only work on you if you've given him the opportunity," Chaplain said. "We must always be on guard against the temptation of this world. The devil is always trying to lure us from righteousness."
The Long Night Page 18
