by Myke Cole
Schweitzer swore he smelled the faintest whiff of rosewater.
The guards along the walls lowered their weapons for a second time, visibly relaxing as Eldredge waved a placating hand. “We thought that . . . a focus from an Operator’s life would help them maintain control. It never worked.”
“It works,” Schweitzer said, grappling with grief, feeling the phantom touch of Sarah’s hair. Ninip went silent under the onslaught of memory: cool sheets against his skin. Patrick laughing as Schweitzer tossed him in the air, a tattooed arm hooked through his. Paintings. Haunting watercolor marshscapes of the land rolling around their home, populated with sunbursts and puffs of flame that hinted at serene intelligence, knowing faces hiding in the flickering luminescence if you just looked hard enough.
“It works.”
CHAPTER VI
ROSE TRAIL
Sarah Schweitzer floated above a field of rose petals. Her body was folded, a budding flower yet to bloom, legs intertwined, heels nestled against her crotch. Her hands were loosely curled, thumb and forefingers touching, resting on her knees.
It was quiet here, the gentle dark shutting out grief and loss. Somewhere in the distance, water trickled. She relaxed into the cotton comfort of half sleep. A vague sense of urgency tickled her, a feeling of loss, the knowledge that something terrible had happened to her. But that was outside this sphere of calm, this blanketing dark, broken only by flickering starlight and the low moan of the wind.
She pushed away from the horror, burrowed deeper into the peace she had found. But the wind would not let her be. It swept across the plain, sweeping the loose petals into the air, spinning them into a broad path, arcing out from where she floated, moving off into darkness.
The wind carried the petals’ scent to her, faint and sweet. It reminded her of something. Something wonderful she had known, a piece of who she was. But it brought the horror with it, carried her a step closer to the knowledge of what lay beyond the protective walls of the dark.
She shook her head, her center lost. She tried to push the petals away. She shut her eyes tight. She pinched her nostrils shut against the smell.
The wind picked up, behind her now, drilling between her shoulder blades, pushing her a step forward.
When she opened her eyes, the path of rose petals was still there. She stood on it, her nose filled with the rose scent, the horror of what had happened drawing nearer. She pulled away, trying to retreat back into the dark, but the wind would not be denied. It howled across the field, pushing her forward again, knocking her a couple of steps farther down the path.
“Fine,” she said. “Give it a rest.”
She walked, the path rising higher and higher, the petals giving slightly, a tight weave that kept her steady, springing gently with each step. The darkness, the stars, the wind, the water, the field all vanished, and she walked through a nothing filled only with the path and her body, the only sound the steady pulse of her beating heart.
There was no light at the end of the path. The void merely stopped, the nothing becoming a tiny patch of something, a dot in the distance, growing larger.
The horror swirled around it, convalesced into a knot of pain and memory. She tried to pull away, but the wind was there, waiting to drive her on. It howled urgently, icy against her neck.
She stepped forward, the something growing larger still. A child was crying in the distance, calling for his mommy. She knew that child, loved him. The horror coiled around his cries, the memory she struggled not to face.
And then she was close, and the something resolved into a man. A lean line of jaw. Soft gray eyes. A dimpled chin. Strong shoulders.
The man grew, blotted out her vision, the child’s cries becoming screams.
The petal path connected them, a wavering umbilicus, the steep scent of the roses nearly overwhelming her.
She knew the smell. She’d daubed it behind her ears, on her wrists. A daily ritual to welcome the sun.
She knew the man. His name was Jim.
She loved him.
—
Sarah woke crying, the dream reverberating in her mind, making her bones ache.
Jim. She lay back on the pillow, shut her eyes, willed herself back into the dream. To see his face. She hadn’t had a chance to say anything to him.
Patrick’s screaming. She bolted upright. Leapt out of bed. She couldn’t go back there. Couldn’t hear that sound again.
Patrick.
She raced down the hallway of their Navy Lodge suite, threw open the door to his room.
Patrick lay on the little bed Steve had bought for him, a tiny thing in the likeness of a dark blue car, headlight eyes shining, grill of a mouth grinning welcome.
His body was covered in gauze bandages, the burn gel beneath staining them yellow. He’d managed not to upset them in his sleep, and that was good. His arm was lashed along his side, looking tiny despite the huge cast enclosing it, cartoon animals cavorting across its pink-and-orange surface.
Sarah restrained the urge to kneel beside him, to hear his breathing, to smell his hair. She couldn’t risk disturbing his sleep. Not when it was so rare these days. She stared at him a moment longer, her little boy who must now grow up without a father, who must learn too soon what horrors the world had in store for him. She bit back tears at the thought, sadness over Patrick’s losses, the scars he would bear into adulthood, rage against the nameless, faceless enemy that had done this to them, against the government for asking her to be silent, for denying her the voice she needed to grieve.
A gentle knock on the door, almost a brushing of fingers, scarcely heard. Sarah went rigid, adrenaline dumping into her system. She winced as her tightening abdominals aggravated the gunshot wound, healing cleanly but slowly.
Don’t be an idiot, she said to herself. Do you think that if someone were coming to hurt you, they’d bother to knock?
She shook her head, biting back tears again, absorbing the realization that she would always be like this, jumping at shadows, looking for the enemy hidden behind every corner. Like Jim. Oh God. Sweetheart, how did you do it?
She shook herself, took a deep breath and went to the door, looking through the peephole, fighting back the premonition that she would see men on the other side, prepping assault weapons while they tightened the straps on their body armor.
Instead, it was Steve Chang, looking winded and sad, a brown paper shopping bag dangling from one hand. She tried to square the image of this man, lost and bewildered, with the grinning warrior who’d spent half his weekends drinking beer with Jim on the apartment stoop or walking alongside the Chickahominy, Patrick squealing from his shoulders. Seeing his strength fade in the wake of this tragedy terrified her, galvanized her to be strong. He wasn’t an enemy, and it was good to not be alone. That was something.
She opened the door, relief flooding her, swept him into a hug. “You idiot, you scared the shit out of me. Why didn’t you ring the bell?”
“Little guy’s sleeping, right? Didn’t want to wake him.” Of course he didn’t. Steve might have been hurt badly by Jim’s death, but it didn’t change who he was at his core, summed up by the tattoo along his rib cage, alongside his blood type and serial numbers, block letters reading SO OTHERS MIGHT LIVE.
“How’s he doing?” Steve asked, setting the bag on the counter, the contents making a clinking sound.
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know, Steve. How can I know? He’s breathing. He eats. He poops. He knows who I am. I’m grateful for that much.”
Steve frowned. “He screaming? Crying? Nightmares?”
She shook her head. “That’s what scares me. He’s . . . not catatonic. He talks, he asks for things . . . food, the potty, but he doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t ask what happened. He doesn’t ask about his bandages. He hasn’t . . . he hasn’t asked where his father is.” She swallowed hard, bit back tears
. She was so damned sick of crying.
Steve pulled her into him, stroked her hair as she cried against his chest, feeling the valve of his air tube tickle her nose. Being so close to the wound should have put her off, but it only made her feel closer to him, a reminder of their shared experience.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s okay. It’s normal. You can’t expect him to be . . . like he was after this. It’s going to take time.”
She leaned into him, so grateful for the warmth, the solidity of his body. Weak and broken-looking as he was, it still held the fear at bay. Steve knew her grief, truly shared it, the only man who was remotely as close to Jim as she had been. “I’m going to take him to see a child psychologist, but the doctor said he needed to heal more first.”
Steve nodded. “That sounds about right.”
She cuffed at her tears with the back of her hand. “What’s in the bag?”
“Mixed greens in a bag, couple of chicken breasts. Bottle of cheap wine. I figured you wouldn’t be up to cooking.”
“Oh, Steve. Jesus. You didn’t have to do that. I’m not an invalid.”
Now it was his turn to bite back tears. “I didn’t do it for you. I just . . . I don’t want to be alone.”
“Of course,” she said. “Let me just grab a recipe off the Internet. You know what a lousy cook I am.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Enough not to trust you with the recipe selection. Get your laptop and leave the rest to me.”
He watched her while she went to the couch to retrieve her computer. “You been sleeping?”
“Too much,” she said. “All I want to do is sleep. I know that’s the first sign of depression, so I’m fighting it. Only allowing myself eight hours a night, no matter how I feel.”
“Not sure that’s the best plan. What do you do when you’re up?”
“Stare at blank canvas. Stare at Patrick. A lot of staring. Besides, it’s the dreams.” She shuddered. “They’re awful.”
“Nightmares? That’s normal.”
“Not really nightmares. Just . . . vivid dreams. They’re more sad than scary.”
“About Jim.”
“Of course. I never talk to him, I never even really see him . . . I just . . . I keep feeling . . .”
“What?” Steve asked, folding his arms across his chest, taking care to keep them clear of his wound.
“I dream of roads, Steve. I dream of paths that always lead to him. I know it’s crazy, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s alive.”
CHAPTER VII
OP TEMPO
The armor was almost as light as clothing. Schweitzer could feel the thin layer of liquid beneath the fabric, weight shifting gently to redistribute itself with his movements.
“Shear-thickening fluid,” Eldredge said, “stronger than any Kevlar or ceramic you’ve ever worn. Light and completely maneuverable when you’re not under fire, but the moment it gets hit, it goes solid. The harder you hit it, the harder it gets.”
This is not armor, Ninip said.
Yes, it is, Schweitzer replied. They were experimenting with this stuff before . . . before all this went down. It’s the best stuff there is.
He could feel Ninip’s contempt. The jinn flashed him a mental image of a man, soaking wet, pierced by arrows. Schweitzer flashed back an image of a raging torrent, sweeping those arrows aside. Ninip dismissed the image. We do not need it. We cannot be killed.
Eldredge went on. “We hope that, without trauma, you can last forever. We’ve never had an Operator with us long enough to . . .”
“Rot?” Schweitzer asked.
Eldredge looked embarrassed. “We’re reasonably certain that the magic prevents it, but we’re equally sure that your body no longer heals. It can be damaged beyond repair. It can be shredded or burned. You can be destroyed.”
Schweitzer felt Ninip’s disdain. Never.
“Then?” Schweitzer asked.
“We don’t know. Jawid has never recalled the same jinn twice, so it stands to reason that you go on . . . somewhere else.”
Was he talking about heaven? Religion had always come to Schweitzer through preaching and reading, rendering God into some textual abstract. He knew what God was supposed to look like, what heaven was supposed to be like, if his Sunday-school readings were to be believed, but the resonance was never there. Sarah’s open contempt for religion was the final nail in the coffin.
Ninip crept forward as Schweitzer thought about it, leaning in to probe at the memories of the pictures in the young Schweitzer’s Vacation Bible School Primer. Schweitzer didn’t bother to fight as the jinn followed the thread, starting with John 3:16, then down the rabbit hole through sermon after confession after Bible study. He drew back, aghast. This is the faith of your people?
One of them, but the biggest.
You worship a wounded weakling nailed to a piece of wood and bleeding out his life. He is no warrior.
That’s kind of the point.
How can you be so mighty, have such incredible weapons, then sway in a cult that reveres peace above all things, ruled by a broken dead man?
Schweitzer shrugged internally. We’ve never gotten a whole lot of points for consistency.
You worship a jinn. Like me.
It’s not the same thing.
Is it not? He was slain. On the third day, he rose again. How is that different?
Schweitzer paused. The truth was that he didn’t know anymore. He’d always taken all these things for granted: Magic wasn’t real. Dead was dead. There was no heaven.
He was wrong about the first two. Maybe he was wrong about the third.
He was about to ask Ninip where Jawid summoned him from when Eldredge spoke.
“Now, your targets are on the other side of that wall.” Eldredge gestured to a seamless barrier of cinder block, some twenty feet high, extending the full width of the room. Cameras were set into the corners of the ceiling, tiny black insects hiding in pockets of gloom. “Get over there, assess, and discriminate. Only take down the red targets. Beat thirty seconds.”
An LED readout on a display at the far end of the room was just visible over the top of the wall. The face lit up with huge red block numbers indicating the countdown.
Schweitzer hefted the carbine slung across his chest, nestling the stock into the sweet spot of his shoulder, finger indexed along the upper receiver. The carbine had been modified to accept .50 caliber rounds. The huge bullets required an extended magazine, not just long, but wide, a plastic drum extending from the weapon. Schweitzer hefted it. He knew that it would be impossibly heavy for any normal man to fire accurately, but those days were behind him now.
Schweitzer looked up at the wall before them, eyes roving across the seamless surface. They clearly expect us to get up that.
Leave it to me, Ninip answered.
It’d help if you . . .
A buzzer sounded and the LED numbers began to tick down. Ninip engaged the shared muscles of their legs and set their body leaping forward, barreling toward the wall, head down. Schweitzer lifted their head, tried to slow them, turn them aside before their skull shattered against the hard surface. Ninip growled and pushed back.
Schweitzer pictured their lowered head smashing into the wall, coming apart like an eggshell. Ninip swatted the image aside, showing Schweitzer only blackness.
He said we can’t heal, this is a really bad . . .
Ninip’s presence contracted, pulsed, channeled into the muscles of their legs. They took a galloping leap, squatted deep, and sprang.
Schweitzer felt the ground vibrate as they left it, saw the walls of the room rush by. The length of the wall shot past them, five feet, then ten, then fifteen. Schweitzer marveled as he planted their hand on the top, felt the gritty, uneven surface of the cinder block take their weight, and vaulted over to the other side. Then the world rush
ing past them again as they fell, landing in a crouch on the dirt floor just as the first targets popped up.
No, not targets. Black shapes, low and surging like waves, deep rumbling rising from sable throats.
Eldredge had set them down in a pack of dogs.
They were the same animals Schweitzer had run a dozen ops with, sniffing out explosive materials, turning corners for the team, risking their lives to distract dug-in enemies, drawing fire so their human masters could bring their guns to bear in safety.
Their names had been deliberately meek: Tripoli and Jennifer and Strawberry. They’d been a mix of breeds, mostly Belgian Malinois, happy and playful off the job, steel-eyed killers on it.
Schweitzer knew how his new form must smell to them, the thick reek of chemical preservative riding over the more familiar smell of dead flesh. Alien, threatening.
They lunged.
Ninip seized control of their arm, thrusting it forward and up, claw extending from a rigid finger, angling for the animal’s belly. Schweitzer pulled the claw in, curling the hand into a fist that slammed into the dog’s chest, cracking a rib and sending it rolling and yelping across the floor.
He could feel Ninip’s attention turn to him, coiling with contempt. It is a dog, the jinn said.
They were full members of our unit, Schweitzer replied, conjured images of the SEALs jumping with the animals strapped into their harness, playing with them at unit barbecues, pinning medals on their collars after successful ops. They were family.
You were fools, the jinn spit.
Another dog lunged for their ankle, fastening his teeth around the armor, biting down hard.
Schweitzer kicked the leg back and forward before the dog could put pressure behind the bite, moving even as the jinn began to drive their hand down.
The dog whipped through the air, jaws ripping free with an audible click, teeth flying out of its mouth, trailing threads of blood. The rest of the pack hung back, snarling threats that masked fear.
Kill them, Jawid’s voice rang in his mind.
