by Myke Cole
The screaming of the goats had been nothing. The tight quarters of the spartan room reflected high-pitched terror at them, their amplified hearing sorting through the sounds, pinning down individual voices. For a moment, Schweitzer was reminded of the chaos waiting for him in the storm of souls. The thought was sobering, granting him a fraction more sense of self. He pushed deeper into the shared space, grounding himself to resist the jinn.
And realized he would have to stop him right now.
The room held three women, none of them over twenty, and at least twice as many young children, now dashing behind the skirts of their mothers, or sisters, or cousins. The girls’ faces were tear-stained, eyes wide with terror. Schweitzer had seen scenes like this on every op he’d run in this area. The scum whose actions merited a visit from the SEALs always bedded down with women and children, knowing that it was a better defense against American forces than any hardened bunker.
Ninip coiled to spring, Schweitzer tried to shrug off some of his torpidity, forcing himself into control of their shared limbs.
He didn’t stand a chance. The jinn’s blood was up, the thrill of the hunt singing through him, while Schweitzer was still drunk on the heady sensation of violence and endless power.
The jinn launched them forward, breaking through what little resistance Schweitzer offered as easily as a fist through paper. The girl before them stumbled backward, reaching out to yank on a cheap table, moving it into their path. They tripped over it, claws slicing through air, bare inches from the girl’s nose. The rest of the children scattered. The girl backed away, alone, until she hit the wall hard enough for her head to rebound, her eyes huge and red-rimmed, cheeks wet. Schweitzer could smell the salt tang of her tears, it was intoxicating. He could feel phantom saliva in their dry mouth.
Ninip paused to revel in her helpless terror. Schweitzer feebly yanked against the jinn, akin to hauling on a mountain in his drunken state. He watched in open horror as Ninip slowly lifted their shared clawed hand, reached for the girl’s neck.
And suddenly she was dancing, red flowers blooming across her chest, spraying across the wall. Schweitzer felt their armor go hard as rounds tore into it, staggering them a few steps forward until they pinned the girl against the wall, looking into her eyes, the terror gone from them now, staring sightlessly into the distance as her death rattle sounded.
Ninip made them toss her corpse aside, whirl to face the new threat.
One of the boys, Schweitzer guessed he was about nine, stood holding a smoking assault rifle. It was a cheap Chinese knockoff of the old Russian favorite, long, curving magazine straining the boy’s scrawny arm. The sling trailed at his feet. He was awkward, gangly, all scabs and sharp angles, the kind of boy that Patrick would have become if he’d lived.
The thought should have made Schweitzer angry, vengeful, but it didn’t. It wouldn’t bring his son back. Nothing would. The sadness was sobering, he shook himself and leapt after Ninip, trying anew to drag the jinn aside.
The boy ignored them. His eyes were locked over their shoulder, on the result of his attempt to shoot Schweitzer and Ninip in the back. The body of his sister, or his mother, slid down the wall, leaving a sheet of trailing gore as she went.
“Khoor!” the boy sobbed, dropping the gun as if it had turned into a poisonous snake. “Khoor!”
Ninip made them lunge.
Schweitzer’s rage galvanized, he leapt at the jinn with everything he had, hauling the presence back from control of their body, stopping them cold. The jinn raged and pushed, but their shared form only shook. He battered against Schweitzer, trying to break free, then suddenly stilled, silent. The silence troubled Schweitzer more than the insensate rage. It meant the jinn was thinking.
Schweitzer reached out to try to read those thoughts as the jinn turned on him, not battering him out of their shared body this time but assaulting his senses with imagery of slaughter. It was a pastiche of horror, a flood of still images ranging across time. Here was a man Ninip had tied to a wagon frame, his executioner working with a curved skinning knife, slowly and deliberately. Here was a woman buried up to her chest, her head slowly deforming into a red slurry beneath a growing mound of stones. The visuals were accompanied by a flood of smells, the sweet scent of corruption, the fetid stink of an opened stomach. And under it all, the now-familiar metal tang of blood.
His earlier inebriation had been nothing. Schweitzer’s senses exploded in response, every wisp and tendril of soul vibrating in rapture. He drowned, swooned; gone were all thoughts of right and wrong, of Patrick and lost youth, of anything other than the paradise he wanted to last forever.
In that moment, Ninip could have killed the world. The jinn could have gored Sarah and Patrick, and Schweitzer would only have looked on in stupor. He thought no more of restraining Ninip than he did of planting turnips.
Ninip grinned, Ninip turned.
And Ninip cut the boy in half.
The horror blossomed in Schweitzer, the sudden realization of what had happened, of what he’d allowed to happen. The child was no threat. Each life he took in the past had been part of operational contingency, the eggs broken to make the omelet that kept his family alive.
But his family was gone. And each life he took carried him further from himself, pushing him by inches to the edge of the slim territory that tethered him to the living world.
In the darkness they shared, Ninip faced him, and smiled, and gave a final push.
Schweitzer tumbled.
The edge of himself slipped and passed, the cold and screaming gripped him.
And then he was drifting, watching his own body fall away, seeing himself from above, standing over the child’s corpse, turning to pursue the others. Ninip rose, alone in Schweitzer’s skin, reaching a clawed hand behind his armor, pulling out the engraved dog tags that were the last of Schweitzer’s wife and child. Even through the growing distance, Schweitzer could see the surface was completely marred with rust, the etched lines that sketched the image of his family now filled in and covered up. With a quick jerk of his hand, Ninip snapped the chain and tossed them aside.
And then Schweitzer was tumbling, drowning in screams, tangled in the hordes of shrieking dead, spinning end over end into the pooling dark.
CHAPTER XX
RUN
Sarah exited the movie theater in a daze. For an hour and a half, she’d bundled Patrick against her chest. All her life, she’d hated mothers who brought their young children to the theater. How the hell had she become one of those people? But it hadn’t mattered. Patrick had sat silently, gazing at the seatback in front of him for a solid hour.
Steve’s departure had left her alone with a churning stomach and a dreadful certainty. It was as if the attack on her family had split her in two. There were twin Sarah Schweitzers living side by side now, sharing a body. One of them was the Sarah she knew, the one everybody knew. This Sarah was as focused as a scalpel, wary of the institutions to which she belonged, ordering the world around her. This was the Sarah who had been brave enough to pursue a career as an artist, good enough to be successful at it, strong enough to keep with it in the face of patronization masked as concern for her welfare, the tone-deaf questions: But what will you do for money, dear? You know, during the day? That Sarah eschewed the metaphysical, rejected religion, superstition. She didn’t have time for it, didn’t need it.
But the other Sarah, the new Sarah, had one foot firmly rooted in the weird land of shifting shadows that haunted her dreams since she’d first woken in the hospital. This new Sarah’s gut spoke to her, not in the language of hunches but in clairvoyant certainty. This new Sarah knew things, was sure she knew things, without ever seeing them. This new Sarah kept the old Sarah awake long into the night, pinned her wrist behind her back and whispered in her ear. Your husband is alive, this new Sarah said. Here is the path that leads to him.
Your son is dyi
ng. If you do not figure out a way to reach him, you will lose him forever.
And now, ever since Steve had walked out the door, The only real friend you have left is gone. You will never see him again.
This new Sarah was a stranger to her, and as with all strangers, she wasn’t sure if she could trust her. She still allowed herself a moment to sift through the strange sense of dread, of certainty. There was no way she could know that Steve was gone, truly gone, in the way that Jim was, but she was. It was as real to her as the night sky, the solidity of the parking lot under her shoes.
Bullshit. She’d call him, set it right. Put this new Sarah in her place. She reached into her pocket and brought out her cell phone. The screen displayed a missed call and voice mail.
Steve.
The feeling of certainty swamped her again. She shook it away. Of course it’s him. Who else calls you these days?
She punched through the selection screens to replay her voice mail, conscious of her fingers fumbling across the virtual keyboard, forcing her to type her passcode three times before she got it right. Steve’s voice was tinny, hesitant. He told her there’d been a mix-up, that Jim’s unit was going to look into whatever caused the mistake. A routine visit, an old shipmate asking for a favor from his colleagues.
So why did he sound so frightened?
“Anyway,” he said, “this is getting long, but I’m coming over. I want to finish our conversation, and not about Jim’s ashes this time. We need to talk about us. If you’re out, I’ll wait. See you in a few.”
The message had come about an hour ago, while she was sitting in the theater, trying to pretend her son was interested in what was unfolding on the screen. Steve would be outside her apartment now, waiting in the dark. She swallowed, equal parts relief and apprehension. She was glad to know he was okay, that this strange new Sarah didn’t have complete control of her life, but neither was she ready for yet another tense heart-to-heart about where he stood in her life. She didn’t have the energy.
She opened the car door, began arraying the Gordian knot of child-seat straps over Patrick’s chest and hips. He was already nodding off to sleep, sucking contentedly on the side of his hand. He used to make getting him tied into the car seat a challenge that made her wish she had double the arms. She’d have been grateful for that problem now. But just as there was a new Sarah, there was a new Patrick as well, sullen, silent, withdrawn.
She held the phone to her ear as she started the car, vaguely conscious that this was against the law in Virginia, thumbing the REDIAL. Steve’s phone went directly to voice mail without ringing, his old gravelly voice, Steve Chang before the wound and the death of his best friend had cracked his spine. “Chang, speak.”
“Steve, it’s Sarah. Look, I . . . I don’t have the energy for another fight right now. If you want to talk sanely and quietly, then fine. But if you’re looking to get laid or have some kind of crying marathon, then it’s going to have to wait. You also have to take ‘no’ for an answer, okay? See you in a few.”
He was probably playing games on his phone, or dealing with the intermittent signal that came along with living outside a major city.
She navigated the winding road through the woods back to her apartment, shadows coiling around the tree trunks, pressing as close as they could before the blades of her headlights cut them away. The darkness shifted as it folded over and under the light beams, shifting until the woods around her seemed alive with movement, all of it malevolent, all of it aimed at her. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder. Patrick was pale and still in his car seat, his lips blue in the gloom.
She faced forward, her stomach clenching. Don’t be stupid. He’s fine. This is just the other Sarah fucking with you. Don’t let her win.
But she knew she’d lost even as the thought crossed her mind. She put gentle pressure on the brake, slowing the car to a stop on the shoulder, then turned. “You okay, baby?”
Patrick didn’t answer, his head had slumped forward. The shadows outside the car ate up the space left by her headlights, until black smoke seemed to waft over the windows.
“Baby?” She didn’t like the shrill panic in her voice, couldn’t stop it. She undid her seat belt, reached back, lifted her son’s chin, gently rocked his shoulders. “Baby? Come on! Wake up!”
He screamed then, kicked feebly at her hands, bawled. Awake all right. He’d been sleeping peacefully and was now scared into consciousness by his panicked mother. Nice going.
She cursed herself and crawled into the backseat, gently rocking him until his crying subsided. “Mommy scared me,” he said over and over.
“I know, baby. I’m sorry. Mommy just got scared. That’s all. Everything’s okay.”
But everything was not okay, and Patrick knew that as well as anyone. She swallowed the ball of dread as she slid back into the driver’s seat and started the car.
She had to get out of here. She had to find another place to start over. She didn’t know what she was doing waiting here, in the same old place around the same old people. There was nothing in Little Creek but memories and what few contacts she’d made in the tiny sliver of an art world that clung on tenaciously in Norfolk. She’d talked to Jim before about the possibility of Austin, or Asheville, or even New York City. She’d panicked and stewed and grieved long enough. Look at what it was doing to her. She’d tell Steve tonight. Saying the words to someone else would help make them real.
This thought was definitely first Sarah, the one she wanted in charge. It comforted her as she turned the last corner and pulled into the dark parking lot outside her apartment door. She watched the headlights wash over the vinyl siding, clouds of bugs racing for the false moonlight. She waited for them to illuminate Steve, shoulders leaning against her doorjamb, face set in a welcome smile.
Nothing.
She parked, busied herself with unstrapping Patrick, her mind only half on the task, the other half busy with a sweep of the parking lot, looking for Steve’s beetle green sedan, gray blue under what little moonlight penetrated the clouds.
Again, nothing. His car wasn’t here.
First Sarah was simply disappointed, but second Sarah seized her opportunity, choking her with a combination of a surreal sense of drifting outside herself along with a dreadful certainty that something awful had happened, was about to happen.
Why? Were you looking forward to seeing him after all? Was it just because you didn’t want to be alone?
Patrick buried his face against her shoulder as she hoisted him on her hip and carried him inside. He’d said he’d be there, that he’d wait for her. That meant he’d be there. She’d never known Steve to not do a thing he’d said he would.
Maybe he’d just gotten fed up with waiting. Maybe he got a call and had to take care of something else. She dug in her pocket for her cell phone, looked at the screen. No voice mail.
Steve would never have left without leaving a voice mail.
First and second Sarah agreed with a suddenness that churned her stomach. Something was wrong.
She kept it together as she unlocked the door, fighting the urge to rush inside and lock it behind her. She kept the smile on her face as she gave Patrick his bath, read him his story, his favorite picture book about a pig who wanted to be kosher. Patrick asked no questions, only staring at the ceiling, his hand firmly planted in his mouth.
When she finally tucked him in and gently kissed his forehead, he stirred, kissing her back and throwing his arms briefly around her neck. She stifled a sob of relief.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“Can Daddy come give me a kiss?” It was the first time he’d spoken of Jim since his silent reaction to the news of his death.
“No, sweetheart. Not tonight.” She cursed herself for being unable to make the words definitive, for leaving the door open to the possibility of Daddy’s coming la
ter. But he might come later, second Sarah said, because he’s still alive, and you know it. Just as you know Steve is dead.
Patrick only rolled onto his side, wadding the blanket into a ball in front of him.
Sarah returned to the living room and slid open the counter drawer below the spot where the can of Jim’s ashes had once stood. A thick folder lay inside, untouched since she’d first put it there. He’d given it to her a week after their honeymoon. I don’t want to scare you or make a big deal about this, he’d said, his eyes taking on a darkly serious cast, but you know what I do is dangerous. Everything you need is here. If I go missing. If I get zapped. Put it somewhere where you won’t ever see it, but always know where it is.
So she had. She’d labeled it with red magic marker: YOU WILL NEVER NEED TO OPEN THIS, and of course, during one of Jim’s deployments, when she was stuck on a project, she had, just to see what was inside.
Nothing surprising. Power of attorney, a will, account numbers, phone numbers, everything she’d need to make the unthinkable run smoothly. She sorted through the papers, ignoring the irony that she was opening them now, after weeks of failing to deal with Jim’s passing, after doing everything but applying for death benefits, transferring funds, making sure that the navy gave her her due.
The paper was right where she remembered, third from the top, a phone number circled, with Jim’s crabbed handwriting below: CALL IF YOU CAN’T FIND ME. Above the number where the words SPECIAL WARFARE DEVELOPMENT GROUP—OOD.
She looked at the green ghostlight of the digital clock over the microwave: 9:00 P.M. Nobody would be able to help her now, but hadn’t Jim said that his people never slept?
Second Sarah would not be denied. She lifted the phone and dialed the number, listened to the faint ringing. One, three, five. Weren’t these people supposed to be alert at all hours? What the hell was . . .
“Watch, Ahmad.” Ahmad’s voice was stony, hard.
