SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

by Jonathan Maberry

  Nancy Drew rattled off a series of Japanese words that stopped her in her tracks. They spoke for a moment, then she returned to her seat.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told her that everything Harvey said was true and I staked it on the honor of my family.”

  “Is that all you said?”

  “I also said that you are at times an indelicate asshole and love to get rises out of people.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “All true.” Then I turned to Rachel Nakamura. “Shall we be a little more forthcoming now?”

  SAN FRANCISCO

  CORONA HEIGHTS PARK

  JULY 18, 1969. AFTERNOON

  Harvey, Jakes, Brahm, and I entered Corona Heights Park from Roosevelt Way. We needed to consult with the Russian, and since he was forbidden to leave the park, we had to come to him.

  He was handed over to me by my predecessor. Neither of us knew his real name and he wouldn’t divulge the reason he was banished to this piece of land, but rumor had it that he was a Russian immigrant who’d come out in 1849 with the Gold Rush and had gone sideways with a nature spirit. Regardless of the reason, he had a fondness for vodka and Black Sea caviar, which I could get relatively cheap in the Russian neighborhoods of San Francisco.

  Rachel Nakamura had become amazingly forthcoming once she realized what kind of military unit we were. Doctor Adams had indeed been part of the Spartan Missile project. He was in fact the America’s leading authority on X-ray Flux. His death set back the program by years. She had little more to provide, but had brought up a point we’d all missed.

  “Why did they use a bat?” she’d asked.

  I thought about it and couldn’t come up with a suitable answer. But Nancy Drew did.

  “Maybe they were trying to hide something they’d done.”

  I’d contacted the morgue, but there was nothing they could discern. Whoever had beaten him had done an excellent job at crushing every bone in his face. Whatever had been done to him would remain a mystery, unless the Russian was able to provide some illuminating information.

  Jakes and Brahm took left. Harvey and I took right. Corona Heights Park wasn’t immense, but it did have unobstructed panoramic views of the city. In the end, we found the Russian at the pinnacle, staring out at the ocean.

  As I approached he said, “It’s like placing a meal of wild boar just outside your reach. You can smell it. You can see it. But you can never have it. What did you bring for me, Madsen?”

  His skin was the color of the terracotta red chert bedrock he sat upon, and pulled tight across high Siberian cheekbones. He could have been anywhere between sixty and a million years old. He wore a flowered shirt and had a Mexican blanket wrapped around him like a sarong.

  I brought forth the vodka and the caviar and placed them at his feet. He never took them from me, which made it feel as if I was making an offering at the feet of some strange Russian demigod. Still, I went through the motions, only because he was so attuned to the supernatural energy of San Francisco.

  He sighed. “You always know what to bring me.”

  “It’s easy when you never change your habits.”

  He shrugged. “Why change them when I know what I want.” He opened the vodka and took a deep slug. When he came back up for air, he gasped. After a moment he held out the bottle. “This tastes like Russia. It tastes like home. Here. Join me.”

  I took it and seared my throat with the white liquor. I fought to keep a smile on my face as I handed it back to him.

  But he didn’t miss much. He laughed. “I can tell you are not Russian. Even children learn to drink vodka at an early age.” He softened the V to give it a W sound. He took another slug, then capped the bottle and cradled it in his arms like a baby. “What is it you want, Madsen?”

  “We’re looking for some activity. Your people have done something to our people.”

  “Don’t call them my people. I’m a proud Tzarist. Whatever these communal gavnoyeds believe in has nothing to do with me.”

  I grinned. “Good, then you’ll have no qualms about telling me about their activities.”

  He eyed me for a moment. “Nice try. You know I must remain neutral and can’t take sides. One day I want to leave this place. To take a side means to make an enemy of the other.” He shook his head. “But then again, you knew that.”

  Jakes made shushing noise with his hand. The big Arkansas corporal turned and glowered at two girls and a young man. They carried a blanket, a picnic basket and a bota bag, so their intentions were clear. But right now we didn’t want anyone intruding on our mission. They stopped like deer when they saw him, their eyes wide. He took a step forward and they scampered back down the hill. If they wanted to picnic on the pinnacle, they’d have to wait until we left.

  “Not so nice.” The Russian stared after them. “They come up here often and invite me to join them. Peanut butter and jelly and red wine.”

  “You’re just going to have to struggle with caviar and vodka.” I squatted down and took a seat beside him. “Maybe you can help me another way using your encyclopedic knowledge. Here’s what happened.” I described the wounds to the face and postulated what possibly could have been done to the victim that needed to be covered up. When I mentioned the broken eyes he actually twitched. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been feeling something alien for the last week. Feels greasy… unclean.”

  “I’ve heard the term broken eye before over the years, but never made a connection. What does it mean to you?”

  He closed his eyes. “Have you heard of the satori?”

  I shook my head. Nancy Drew might know, but I had no clue.

  “How to describe them… think of an apelike man. They can’t speak, except to relay what the victim is thinking. They communicate through thought, only…”

  “Only what?”

  “They have to touch you.”

  “Do they touch your face?”

  He nodded. “I saw one.” He turned and pointed to a spot thirty feet away. “There. It grabbed a man by the head. When it was done, the man’s eyes were blanks. Everything inside him was gone like it was sucked free.”

  “When was this?”

  “1925.”

  “What did it do then?”

  “It looked at me.” He shuddered and seeing it scared me. “For the first time I felt like an insect. It was studying me. It was trying to decide whether to let me live or not.”

  “Clearly you survived.”

  “I’ll never know why.”

  “Do you know where they come from? Who they’re affiliated with?”

  He shook his head furiously and got up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He grabbed his caviar and stalked away.

  Jakes made a move to grab him, but I held the big man back. No sense in aggravating the Russian any more than he already was. There was no telling when I’d need him again.

  “What next?” Harvey asked.

  “You and Brahm get to a phone and call Nancy and tell him what the Russian said.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Taking Jakes to Lawrence Livermore Labs. I need to look at some files.”

  Harvey eyed Jakes. I knew what he was thinking. He’d be better suited to help me than the hulking corporal, but he had good sense enough not to say it. I had my reasons. If I wanted him to know I’d tell him.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE LABS

  JULY 18, 1969. AFTERNOON

  We crossed the Bay Bridge, skirted Oakland, and hit 580 going east when we hit Castro Valley. My thoughts were circling the idea of the inhuman creature described by the Russian. I didn’t doubt his veracity one bit. But that he didn’t want to discuss it further worried me. What wasn’t he telling us? What else did he know about these satoris? Could they be as terrible as he described?

  When they recruited me and read me on to the supernatural defense program, I was dumbfounded. I often still find myself wonderi
ng how we came to exist. It seemed extraordinary that the human race didn’t die off during the last three thousand years, especially considering the forces aligned against it.

  And not only were there supernatural threats, but threats humanity invented themselves.

  Even now we had almost six hundred thousand young men and women fighting in the Republic of Vietnam. I’d seen the brutal television reports of the Battle of Hamburger Hill back in May and couldn’t help remember Chosin and the Dantean sea of frozen bodies we’d created all because one group desired the land of another.

  Not all wars are for physical gain. Some are waged to cultivate fear. Barely two weeks ago a man calling himself the Zodiac Killer shot two people up in Blue Rock Springs, then called the police from what turned out to be a phone booth. Still on the loose, not a day goes by now without the media watering the bitter seed this monster planted.

  Then there are wars for the hearts and minds of the people, like the Cold War we were raging against the Soviet Union. I often wondered if they saw themselves as the good guys. Harvey laughs at the idea and says that only good guys have that sort of sentimentality. After all, how could they compare bread lines, starvation, iron-fisted authoritarianism, and gulags, against the open freedom of the Western World? To think that they knew themselves to be bad guys reminded me of the cartoon character Snidely Whiplash. And if the USSR was this caricature, then we had to be Dudley Do-Right. That would make Nell… what? The prize? The hearts and minds of the people?

  I shook my head and climbed out of the deep rabbit hole my wandering mind had taken me. It was simply a cartoon about a Canadian Mountie and his cohorts. It was not a metaphor, even if it looked like it could be.

  We pulled past a gate guard, who, after consulting our badges and a list of names on a clipboard, let us through. Although it was near seven in the evening, the parking lot was still nearly full. Jakes and I found a parking spot and headed to the nearest glass building. Before we could get there, Rachel Nakamura met us, running lightly in high heels.

  “That’s not the right building.” She smiled apologetically and gestured for us to follow her. “Come this way. I’ve arranged for you to look at his office.”

  I glanced at the building we almost entered, but relented and followed her. Jakes fell in behind us.

  “What’s in the other building?”

  “Projects. Research. All very hush hush.” Then she hurriedly added, “Nothing that Doctor Adams was working on, I assure you.”

  My curiosity wanted to confirm this, or at least see what was hidden behind the glass and steel doors, but it was merely that… curiosity. I needed to focus on the mystery at hand and determine why an satori had been involved in the murder of Doctor Adams.

  She took us to a well-appointed office on the second floor of the main building. The window looked out on the parking lot. The desk was almost clear of papers. The only things on the walls were the decedent’s diplomas and a San Francisco Giants calendar. This looked nothing at all like the desk of a working scientist. Jakes thought the same way.

  “Where’s all of the stuff?”

  Rachel blinked. “Stuff?”

  “Yeah, all the scientific stuff. Papers, books, folders, files… you know? Stuff.”

  She stared at the ground in that aggravating Japanese way that Nancy used when he didn’t want to meet my eyes. “We had to remove a few items. Proprietary information.”

  “And if I said I wanted to see them?”

  “I don’t know who took them or where they went. But if you want to submit the paperwork, I’ll see that it gets processed.”

  I tried not to glare at her – not that she could see me even if I did with her gaze fixed to a spot between my feet. “How long does it take for such a request to be processed?”

  “I can’t be sure.”

  “Has anyone ever been granted access?” Jakes rumbled.

  “Not since my tenure.”

  I couldn’t help but sigh. I pulled out the chair and sat at the desk, trying to occupy the space as the deceased might. I let my hands touch the surface, then pulled open one of the drawers. Empty. I could usually figure out something about a person by how they kept their desks organized. But there was nothing here of Doctor Adams. This was a simulacrum, an empty interpretation of his workspace.

  I pushed the chair back and stood. “This is a waste of time.”

  “Maybe not.” Jakes had removed the calendar from the wall. He’d flipped the month back to June. “Where did Doctor Adams travel to on June 26th?”

  She glanced at the calendar, surprise sneaking past her usually composed face. “I… I don’t—”

  “Let’s cut the bullshit, Ms. Nakamura. I know you’ve been told to keep us in the dark, but a man was murdered. Not just murdered, mind you, but interrogated in such a way he most assuredly told whoever asked the questions everything they needed to know. This is a Cold War, and American secrets have been taken.” I snapped my mouth shut. It was bad form to act this way towards this woman. She was merely doing her job. I was about to apologize when she spoke.

  “He was at an international engineering conference in Japan.”

  “Was that the last conference he attended?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Jakes asked, “Who went with him? I already know he didn’t go alone.”

  She glanced at me, then returned her gaze to the floor. “Doctor Crocket.”

  “Can we speak with him?”

  “He… he hasn’t been in this week.”

  “Did he call in? Is he sick?”

  She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

  Jakes’s eyes almost rolled out of his head. “Jesus. Don’t you think he might be in trouble?”

  She stepped back. “You don’t think…”

  “Give us his address. I’ll send the police over right away.”

  SAN FRANCISCO

  CROCKET RESIDENCE

  JULY 18, 1969. NIGHT

  The house at 737 Bay Street was a white midcentury shotgun two-story with a garage in front. Of note was its location in the Russian Hill Neighborhood of San Francisco. Canvassing the neighbors showed that they were predominately of Russian and Hungarian descent. Any one of them could have been a Russian informant; even unwilling. Many still had families back in the motherland whose lives could be leveraged for deeds done on American soil. I’d seen it often enough.

  Nancy and Harvey already had the Box Man there, although it might have been a wasted effort. We had no body, only a giant congealed pool of blood. Jakes and Harvey poured through the missing man’s things.

  “Have we checked the hospitals?”

  “And the morgue. Marshall and Evans are doing that now, especially concentrating on John Does.” Harvey glanced into a corner of the room and smiled. “There we go. I suppose we can at least try and see.”

  Harvey found a chair, but even that wouldn’t get him to the high ceilings. He grabbed two handfuls of shirts out of a dresser drawer and made a pile of them on the chair. Stepping on them, they afforded him the extra four inches he needed to swoop the glass jar over the spider. He got down, poured the spider into the box, then closed the lid.

  The Box Man began to twitch and shake, jerking his head inside the metal box to chew the little eight-legged morsel.

  “Spidle. Spidle. Momma says yumyum.”

  The metal rang with dull thuds as he battered his head against the inside of it. Finally he fell to the floor and used it to bang the metal box against it. Then he stilled, the only sound now one of languorous slurping.

  Harvey squatted before the Box Man. “Okay, Boxie. What have you got?”

  The sounds of slurping were his only reply.

  Harvey struck the box with the palm of his right hand. “Come on. Talk to me, Boxie.”

  “Ni sher shay? Weishemme?”

  Jakes approached the Box Man. “What’s that?”

  “Chinese.” Harvey frowned and glanced at me. “What do you think, is it a floate
r?”

  “Unless Doctor Crocket is Chinese, I’d say so.” I looked around the room, but didn’t see any spiders. I went to the headboard and jerked it from the wall.

  “Get the jar.”

  I made room for Harvey who cursed when he saw the web. “Damn. Recluse. This is going to be fun.” He moved the jar to several locations before he finally captured it and took it over to Box Man.

  “This one’s going to hurt, Boxie. It’s a recluse.”

  The Box Man reacted immediately and scooted himself across the floor. He slammed the top of his box cage against the wall and held it there so Harvey couldn’t open it. “No no cloosy! Puhleese no cloosy!”

  Harvey gestured to Jakes. “Give me a hand.”

  “Is it another floater?”

  “What? No. Floaters are just extraneous ghosts. This one could be old, young. Hell, it could have been the ghost of a coolie from a hundred years ago.” He held up the glass jar to show a tiny brown spider. “This is a brown recluse. It’s one of the only spiders who will stalk a human rather than run for it.”

  The Box Man let out a long ragged scream. “No cloosy!”

  Jakes wrinkled his nose as the Box Man let go with a bladderful of urine that soaked his pants and began to drip on the floor. “Why is he so afraid of it?”

  “You ever been bit by a brown recluse?”

  Jakes shook his head. “Not that I’d know.”

  “Oh, you’d know if one bit you. Not only do they sting, but then its venom paralyzes the skin around the injection point, then the skin turns necrotic and falls away.”

  “When you say falls away you mean…”

  “Falls the fuck away. Like off your body and onto the floor so you have a mini pool of you to step in.”

  United States Infantry Sergeant John Jakes gave the spider in the jar a look I’d never seen him give before. If I wasn’t mistaken, it was fear. Funny how a man like him could be fearless in the face of a well-armed enemy but a ten millimeter creature could cause him to worry.

  The Box Man began to scream, the sound of his terror punctuated by the occasional no cloosy! Then finally he was still.