Burning Sky

by Weston Ochse

  “Shut your cunt,” one of the men hissed.

  Now all three were sitting up straight, staring at Boy Scout.

  “Excuse me?” he said again, eyes narrowing, about ready to throw the ROE out the window. While he’d expect such behavior from a drunken colonel, he’d never seen or heard embassy personnel speak this way.

  “He told the cunt to shut up,” the woman said, the Caliban grin flicking in and out of existence.

  “Let us go,” said the remaining man.

  “Yes, let us go,” the woman said. Caliban grin, then back to normal.

  Suddenly the man who’d first spoke began to bang on the window next to him and started to scream unintelligibly.

  The inhuman sound sent simultaneous shivers of confusion and fear down Boy Scout’s spine.

  While the man screamed, the other man and woman chanted, “Let us go, let us go, let us go, let us go.”

  “Uh, boss, still waiting on orders,” came McQueen’s voice over the coms.

  But Boy Scout was too stunned to reply. His gaze was locked on the woman’s, whose mouth kept flicking back and forth from normal to Caliban then back again as she chanted let us go at the top of her lungs. He became aware that Lore was staring at him and saying something, but he couldn’t hear it over the cacophony of screams and chants.

  Then sudden silence as the back doors clicked unlocked.

  “You want out?” Lore growled from the front seat. “Then get the fuck out, you fucking cunt.”

  The three lowered their eyes, grabbed their briefcases, and exited the vehicle. The second they were outside, they returned to normal, suddenly chatty with the ANA as they started walking towards the front steps of the ministry.

  The ANA soldiers who’d been aiming at the lead vehicle lowered their weapons and moved back into position.

  The ANA major greeted the woman with a handshake.

  She shook his hand, then followed him up the stairs into the massive, Soviet-built cement building.

  Boy Scout had been waiting for the woman to turn around, to give him one last Caliban grin, even acknowledge them, but it was like once the embassy personnel were out of the vehicle, the TST had ceased to exist.

  He caught Lore staring at him from her seat.

  “Boss, I am so sorry I said that. I don’t know what came over me, it’s just that—”

  He held up a hand and she stopped talking.

  “Call the J3 and get another detail here. We’re heading back to the house,” he said.

  He contacted the rest of the team and they backed out of the compound. They were soon heading to their team room. Boy Scout knew he was shaken but wouldn’t admit it. What had gone down had been the strangest protection mission he’d ever been on. Even now, as they re-entered the Green Zone, the woman’s crazy monster smile remained as the ghost of an image in his mind. With her smile superimposed over much of what he saw, he still noticed that everyone was waiting for them, everyone was watching, eyes on them as they moved from place to place to place, as if life was a television show and they were the stars.

  What was it that Joon had asked him? Ever wonder if you’re a character in the wrong story? What would happen if Tarzan suddenly showed up in an Alice in Wonderland tale? What would happen if Godzilla showed up in The Hunger Games? What would be the result of Harry Potter showing up in Fifty Shades of Gray? As characters in a story, they knew their place. They knew their part. No matter how many times the story was told, they knew and expected an outcome defined by the story’s creator. So when Harry Potter or Tarzan or Godzilla appeared out of synch, wouldn’t the characters in the original story notice and wonder why they were there? Is that what was happening? Was Boy Scout an armored-up Harry Potter? Was the TST Godzilla? Were they living in the land of Fifty Shades of Gray and didn’t know it?

  While it was all metaphor, just thinking along these lines made his brain hurt. He definitely had trouble thinking straight. When they pulled into their own compound, the memory of the woman’s smile was all but gone, but what lingered was the idea that they were definitely in the wrong story, even though it looked exactly like the one they should be in.

  Chapter Seventeen

  HE LAY IN bed remembering the vitriolic heat of their argument. It had been just short of a knock-down, drag-out fight. In fact, it’d been so bad that Boy Scout knew he’d lost them as a leader, which was why, despite the exhaustion and alcohol, he couldn’t sleep.

  It could have begun earlier, after they’d returned from the Ministry of Finance, but each of them had gone to their own compensating devices.

  McQueen had gone to work out in the RS gym.

  Lore had gone on an eight-mile run.

  Narco had disappeared but had ultimately found a 4th Infantry Division soldier selling Mollies.

  Criminal had gone to the embassy pool for a swim.

  And Boy Scout had gone to talk to the chaplain… something he hadn’t done since his mother had died while he’d been deployed to Iraq and his company commander had made him go. On that occasion, the young chaplain from Vermont had levied the necessary platitudes, signed a paper which allowed a young Starling to return home and bury his mother, then gone on to talk about how everything was part of God’s plan.

  God’s plan.

  If there were two words in the English language Boy Scout hated more, it was someone sliming the memory of something wonderful with the ridiculous platitude that his mother’s death had been part of God’s plan.

  If the chaplain had been right, then God’s plan sure was complicated.

  His mother had been sitting in a Starbucks drinking a macchiato mocha. She liked extra foam and she liked cinnamon. He imagined that at the moment of impact she’d been checking Facebook on her phone, a freckled dollop of foam on the tip of her nose, probably getting ready to post a comment on one of her friend’s dog pictures. He liked to tease her that the only reason she was even on Facebook was the pet porn. She’d poo-poo his attitude and remind him that if it wasn’t for Facebook, she wouldn’t even know where he was and what he was doing. Although her comment stung, she was right, and he took the velvet-gloved slap to the face with his head down and his heart large. Facebook really was their only way to connect, and after her death he’d spend the rest of his life regretting the missed phone calls and the simple perfection of a short letter addressed by hand and sent the way all letters from war had gone since the beginning of time.

  They said she hadn’t felt a thing, but he’d always wondered if that were true. Did God’s plan always allow for painless deaths? It didn’t seem so. He’d seen enough dismembered children to know that was at least a very bad ecumenical joke.

  The Starbucks she’d been sitting in was in a stand-alone building next to Northgate Mall. They’d found the Go-Pro camera later and pieced together the scenario. His name had been Damien Wayne and he’d been at the helm of a lime green Kawasaki KLX 140. The police video forensics unit said he’d begun filming at the bottom of a parking garage. They traced his line of travel up the five stories of the garage, then across the top level. He’d accelerated there, hit his prepositioned ramp and soared the thirty feet between the garage and the roof of the mall. He’d landed on the roof, wobbled a bit, but held his seat despite the rooftop gravel that had come loose from the pitch.

  As to what had happened next, no one knew whether it was planned or if it had been a spur of the moment decision. After traversing the mall’s roof back and forth a few times, he inexplicably accelerated, jumped off the roof and onto the roof of an empty parked vehicle transport that had recently unloaded cars for nearby Kelly’s Nissan. Damien hit the roof and roared down the truck’s vehicle discharge ramp like he’d been possessed by the ghost of Evel Knievel. And like the super stunt biker himself, he made the jump... but he couldn’t stick the landing. When he’d hit the pavement at what the vehicular forensics unit gauged to be fifty miles an hour, he’d gone into a skid. Instead of crashing, he’d laid the motorcycle down. Wearing armored cycli
ng gear, he would have survived had not a speeding BMW M5 picked that moment to skid around the corner and run him over. Although it wasn’t much of a speed bump, Wayne’s helmet tore the muffler housing free, and with it his head, where it rolled underneath a parked Jeep Cherokee to be found later by an elderly man and his dog. The motorcycle continued in a divine trajectory, hitting a curb that sent it airborne and crashing through a window and then straight through Julie Suzanne Starling’s face.

  Later, when Starling had found out the Go Cam had been attached to the handlebars and there was rumor that there’d been footage of the accident, he’d gone to the police and begged to see it. At first they’d absolutely denied the existence of the footage, but with the help of a former Army Ranger who was now a police sergeant, Starling had been given a USB with the complete footage of the wreck from start to finish, including the beginning where the excited voice of Damien Wayne addressed the camera, donned his helmet, then took off to kill Boy Scout’s mother.

  With only a few staticky seconds missing, sitting in his Trans Am in the parking lot in front of the very same Starbucks his mother had died in, he’d watched Damien’s transitory journey from adventurer to murderer, or what the News 11 team had called an unfortunate and freaky death. Boy Scout had barely breathed as he’d journeyed with Damien from the parking structure jump to the top of the mall. He’d been impressed with the landing on the roof of the truck, then had watched with dread as the view of the camera shifted with the bike. Grinding across the pavement, the view was off to the right. He caught the Starbucks' sign and a glimpse of a couple leaving the coffee shop.

  Then miraculously, or callously—he still didn’t know which—the bike shifted as it hit the curb and he was given a straight on view of his mother. She had been on Facebook doing her daily session of pet porn before work when something had caused her to look up, probably the breaking glass. He saw in her eyes not fear, but confusion. After all, lime green motorcycles weren’t supposed to come flying through the window of her favorite coffee shop. Her eyes were wide. He could see the band of freckles across the top of her nose that she’d had since the summer of her thirteenth year when her mother and father had taken her for a holiday in the Adirondacks. Pausing the video for the hundredth time, he could almost count them. But what got him was the expression on her face. Sure, her eyes showed a galaxy of confusion, but her mouth held a small smile, one she’d eagerly give to anyone. She seemed curious. She was smiling as if greeting the motorcycle that was coming to end her life was the most common thing. It’s easier to be polite than it is to be mean, little man. Smile first and ask questions later. You’ll see how well it works. Sage advice for the third grader who wasn’t getting along with his new classmates, but little protection against a hundred pounds of metal and plastic flying at you.

  Boy Scout had stared through the new window to where a teenager was sitting on a square patterned couch. His mother had been sitting there. For a brief moment he juxtaposed her image from the video to that of the boy’s through the window. Then the boy looked up, as if he felt the attention. For a second the boy smiled, as if the ghost of Starling’s mother inhabited him, then he frowned and looked away, irritated in the way only teens can be when someone disturbs their universe, even if it was merely by looking at them.

  Attention again on the video feed, Boy Scout watched as the image from the Go Cam shifted to a barista whose face was a mask of horror. Evidently the impact with the glass altered the bike’s trajectory, because it was through another’s eyes that he saw the bike’s rear tire intersect his mother’s face.

  Instantly said the coroner.

  Unfortunate and freaky said the award-winning TV news team.

  God’s plan said the chaplain.

  Boy Scout hadn’t thought about his mother’s death in months, but his current visit to the chaplain had given it new life. The chaplain himself hadn’t been much help. In fact, he’d barely said a word as Starling recounted the events of the morning and the way the woman’s smile seemed inhuman and monstrous.

  Finally, the chaplain had said, “What do you want me to do about it?” then had added, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe you should let us go!” Then he’d excused himself and had hurried out of the room.

  With the death of his mother still fresh in his mind, Boy Scout returned to the house and found a bottle of Jack Daniels. Grabbing a coke, he made the first of a dozen half and halfs, drowning the memory of his mother, the events of the morning, the father with only his son’s foot, and a hundred other terrible memories soldiers in faraway places are unable to organize into neat little memory boxes.

  No longer did he feel like the Boy Scout he’d once again become. His skin felt like a Halloween costume or Spiderman pajamas that every other ten-year-old boy liked to wear. The idea that the guy who’d been popping pills, snorting coke, and leaning on deadbeats to get them to pay at least the vig for what they owned Larrson could somehow be transformed into a lean, mean, TST-leading machine was fucking ludicrous, and somewhere between his second and third drink he’d decided that he was going to return to merely being Starling the Fuck Up.

  But now, as he lay in bed, twisting and turning with the memory of slapping McQueen across the face, he’d wished he’d found another outlet for his confused misery.

  The look on the man’s face, the devastation he’d caused in his friend and follower’s belief, trust and faith in Boy Scout was antithetical to the last moment of his mother’s life. Where she’d looked up with an honest smile, ready to welcome even the harbinger of her own death, McQueen’s glare of anger had dissolved into something akin to disgust, a mask that matched the single word he’d launched back in retaliation: pathetic.

  Then the room-clearing confrontation between Criminal and Narco. There were two kinds of fights among friends. There was the half-hearted slap-punch that led to an apologetic exchange of hugs that occurred often enough after a harried mission where they were blowing off steam and needed to purge the adrenaline that had built up. Then there were the titanic brawls, where neither would give up an inch of metaphorical or real territory, their punches and kicks harder and worse because it was a friend perceived to have become an enemy, the presumed treachery the fire for even greater anger.

  It was the second that had fueled their clash, each one trying to own the low ground. The problem between the pair was that they weren’t the best fighters when they were drunk and high. Haymakers came from the constellation of Orion and kicks came from somewhere south of Australia. The more they missed, the angrier they became, and it wasn’t until Lore tried to intervene and was kicked in the crotch by Narco that the fight switched into overdrive.

  The moment the accidental kick connected, Narco froze, clearly freaked by the inaccuracy of his assault.

  Criminal took advantage and clocked him on the side of the head with a right cross.

  Feeling that the fight should have been stopped because of Lore’s pain, Narco took the blow the same way England took the bombing of World War II: he launched his own Normandy Beach invasion, which was actually a fast and furious flurry of punches and kicks, accurate only because Criminal wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way. Their friendship flipped to hatred only as friends were able, hating each other because each knew the other better than anyone.

  The lovely evening had ended with everyone cursing everyone else and promising that in the morning, they were voiding their contracts and heading back to America, regardless of what law enforcement agency was looking for them… And fuck that goddamned girl and her goat! Lore cried, the last and final words of an extraordinary and terrible evening.

  That would have been that except someone began banging on the door of the team room at 3:53 in the morning. Everyone had their own bedroom and Lore was the one to open the door just as Starling exited his own room, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers. Lore had on a pair of black shorts with a T-shirt bearing the Army of One logo.

  Their night guard apologized for waking the
m, then informed them that someone wanted to see them. He admitted that he’d tried to turn the person away, but the person wouldn’t go. When asked who it was, the guard said it was a strange child.

  The idea that a child was trying to contact them at almost four in the morning intrigued Lore, so before Starling, who really no longer had a right to say anything, could open his mouth, she told the guard to let the child in.

  Criminal and Narco came out next, each one eyeing the other, their faces and bare chests quilts of multicolored welts and wounds.

  McQueen came last, completely dressed, a pistol at his side, ready for whatever the rest weren’t.

  Right after that, the guard led a girl into the room. She had long brown hair and wore a Robin’s egg blue dressed. They knew her at once.

  Lore backed away as the girl entered the room like she owned it, walking with far more authority than a child ever should.

  The girl stared openly at each of them for a moment, then said, “As-Salaam Alaikum.” Her speech was a world-weary tenor.

  “Alaikum as-Salaam,” replied Lore in a trembling voice. “My name is Ms. May. And you?”

  The girl sighed and smiled sadly. “I am you and I am here to fetch you.”

  Starling felt a pit open in his stomach and he knew right then that something terrible was about to happen.

  “Fetch us?” Lore turned to Starling, but he had no answer.

  “Who are you? What are you?” Narco asked.

  “It’s time to come home,” the girl said.

  “Come on, kid. What the hell do you want with us?” Criminal asked, tears appearing in his eyes.

  The girl turned to him. “You need to separate. You need to be a part.”

  “Where’s the goat?” McQueen asked.

  The girl turned to him. “That’s a much better question.”

  Then Narco disappeared.