by Weston Ochse
I’m there when he pulls into the parking lot in his Trans Am. He gets out wearing shorts, a T-shirt that reads Army of One, and sleek orange running shoes. As he stretches, I notice the high school track team beginning to show up on the other side of the track. They are an obstacle I am hoping not to have to contend with. Normally, Staff Sergeant Reyes is done before they even start, but they seem to be early today. I watch them, wondering if they might get in the way. But I’ve already made my decision. I won’t be stopped. It’s an interesting conundrum. I watch them as they form up and begin their stretching. It isn’t long before I come to the conclusion that it isn’t my problem.
Hey, Asshat, the dog says. Don’t look now, but the Po-Po’s here.
I turn at Mutt’s urban slang in time to watch the policeman on the bicycle riding towards me. With a sense of foreboding, I realize it’s the same police officer. I finger the telephone in my pocket. All I have to do is hit speed dial number six and it’ll call the other phone attached to the device. The detonator is attached to the ringer. One call, one ring, then BOOM! Killed by the same method as my son.
“Morning,” the cop says, slowing to a stop, until he was resting his arms over the tops of his handlebars.
I stare at him a moment, then hastily return his greeting. Then I half turn towards the track and try and act like I’m interesting in something there.
“You going to get that dog registered?”
“What? Yeah. When they open I’ll be there.”
Staff Sergeant Reyes finishes stretching and begins his run. He starts with a swift pace. He normally runs eight laps, which is two miles. Based on his earlier times, he’d be done in about fifteen minutes. I glance at the kids and see they’re about ready to start. Butterflies dance through my chest.
“One of them yours? Grandson?”
I shake my head.
“Then why are you here?”
“Excuse me?”
He raises his voice as he says, “I asked why are you here.”
“Uh...”
Come on, Asshat. Tell him why you’re here.
Staff Sergeant Reyes runs past the pizza box on the far side of the track. He doesn’t even give it a second glance... just like he never gave signing my son into the Army a second thought. My index finger hovers over the call button.
The policeman gets off his bike. The crunch of gravel as his kickstand bites the ground. His footsteps. Then I feel his presence over my shoulder.
“My son died in Iraq,” I say, the words coming from some strange accord between my brain and my thrumming heart.
This stops him.
“Sometimes I just like to watch the kids run.” Yeah. That sounds right. “My son was a runner in high school. Ran the 800 meter. He used to be fast.”
“Let me see your hands,” he says.
Staff Sergeant Reyes completes one lap. The kids join him and are soon running in a gaggle with him orbiting the center from the inside lane.
“Turn around,” comes the order.
I turn. My throat is so constricted I can barely breathe.
“Hands,” he says, as his thumb unclips the snap on his holster.
I remove both my hands from the jacket. The phone is inside my right hand. My left is empty.
“Hold them up.”
As soon as I comply, he grabs me by the shoulder, spins me around and frisks me. He finds nothing, then turns me back.
“You can put your hands down.” He examines me. “There’s something off about you.”
“Haven’t been the same since my son died.”
His face remains hard for a moment, then softens. “That’s probably it.” He snaps his pistol back in the holster. “Where’d he die?”
“Iraq. Haditha.”
The policeman shakes his head. “Tough luck. How’d it happen?”
“Friendly fire,” I say, staring at Staff Sergeant Reyes as he separates himself from the others and pours on speed. He whips past the bomb.
“Doubly tough. Were they punished?”
“It’s an ongoing process,” I say.
“Just tough,” he says, as he turns back towards his bike.
I can’t help but giggle.
He turns back to me and gives me a baleful stare. He speaks low into his mobile radio, his eyes never leaving me.
Asshat’s going to arrest you, Mutt says. Asshat cop thinks you’re a crazy asshat pedophile and is going to call backup.
I can feel it coming. In a desperate ploy, I point towards the pizza box. “Look at that!”
The policeman follows the direction of my finger to where the pizza box lays alongside the track.
“There. See it?”
“What about it?” he asks, suspiciously.
Asshat thinks you’re crazy, Mutt says.
Asshat is right, I think. Crazy as a fucking loon. I can’t help but giggle. I’ve come to love the term ASSHAT.
That was your outside voice, Mutt points out like I’m the King of All Asshats.
“What’d you say?” the policeman says.
Everything goes into slow motion. He looks to the pizza box and the kids running past, then he looks at me. I can see his mind spinning furiously but unable to fathom what is about to take place. He takes a step towards me.
I step back and shake my head. “Sorry. Like you said, I’m a little off.”
He stops.
I watch as he seems to come to term with the idea that I may be insane. I mouth the word BOOM!
Staff Sergeant Reyes is approaching my bomb. I press the speed dial. I wait three seconds, wondering whether it will be confetti or skin raining down on the gaggle of boys twenty meters behind him.
Kawhoomp!
The shockwave knocks us back.
I turn in time to see the red-tinged cloud rise into the air like Ezekiel’s own mushroom cloud of righteous destruction. The boys struggle to their feet. Most of them are holding their ears and screaming. The open-jawed policeman stares blankly at me, I shrug, then he takes off running towards the carnage, shouting for help into his mobile radio.
Asshat, I say or don’t say to his back. Should have arrested me when you had the chance.
It’s nothing for me and Mutt to get in my car and head down the road. I’m aware that sooner or later I’m going to have to get rid of the car. I’ll miss it, but maybe I can get another Bwik, one in which the ghost of my son can ride, as me and his mother, whom I’m certain is locked within the fluffy skin of a dog, trundle on down the road of righteous redemption to deliver four more bombs.
Daddy! Come out and play war with us, he said once when he was seven or eight years old.
I remember asking who he was going to be, the good guys or the bad guys.
He gave me one of those looks like Mutt would give, but without calling me asshat. We’re always the good guys, Dad. Come on, dad!
And I remember that exact moment, standing on the porch with a glass of ice tea sweating in my hand, wondering about all the children of bad men in the world, if when they played war if they played at being bad guys. Somehow I doubted it. At the end of the day, everyone’s a good guy. It’s just that some can be even more good, especially if they’re righteous.
And I am about as righteous an asshat as there ever was.
Look out world, here I come.
* * *
Notes from the Author: I’ve always felt that people should at least be aware of second and third order effects of their actions, if not be responsible for them. Our living father blames himself for inculcating the idea of patriotism in his son. He also blames the recruiters for actively recruiting him. It’s a funny thing to be a recruiter. I don’t think I could ever be one. Sure, I joined the military, but that was my choice. To be the agent of access for others to join who then might possibly die would leave me wrac
ked with guilt. And yes, there is such a thing as secondary PTSD. It’s a terrible conundrum that one so far removed from the incident can still be so terribly affected. This is one of my favorite stories. It appeared in the Blackdog and Leventhal anthology Psychos, edited by John Skipp. Righteous was also a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in Short Fiction in 2012.
Tarzan Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
“Me Tarzan. You Jane.”
– Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan the Apeman, 1932
THE EARTH WAS rent as if a leviathan had burst free to sail the galaxy for better worlds to chew. Four miles long, hundreds of feet at its widest point, and more than a thousand feet deep, the Sonoran Rift was one of a hundred fissures that had cleaved the Earth in the past three years. No one knew where they came from nor why they happened. Most had been kept a secret, but those like the Baltimore Scar and the Edmonton Crater couldn’t be ignored. The Sonoran Rift was the largest of them all, and if it hadn’t been for a disenchanted soldier spilling his guts to the network, no one would have ever had an inkling about it.
Andy’s network had tried four times to get someone near enough to corroborate the unbelievable statements the dying soldier had made, and each of their reporters had failed to return. The idea that another rift existed would be a news coup for the network that could garner millions in advertizing. It was a no brainer that he’d have to try and find it.
“Do you think what they say is true?” asked Leon, who rose from checking one of the seventy claymore mines in their sector.
That there are monsters in there? Andy didn’t even want to give voice to the thought, so he just stared.
“Hey vato, I’m talking to you.”
“I don’t know what to think,” Andy said.
“This isn’t a test, maricone. I was just asking your opinion.”
Looking at the way the sun sliced into the Rift, then met an impenetrable wall of shadow, Andy Friarson would have to say that yes. If there was anywhere in the world where monsters existed, this was the place. He’d been to Baltimore, Edmonton and even the tiny crack in the earth in France they called the Vallée de la Mort. All of them were interesting, but they lacked the sense of foreboding the Sonoran Rift inculcated in those who observed it. There was a feeling about it that reminded him of the time he was in Croatia, hiding in a ditch with his camera clutched to his chest while Serbians lined up an entire village, shot them, and shoved them into a mass grave. Andy had known that at any moment he would be found and added to the ditch. When one of the killers had turned to stare directly at his hiding place, Andy had known the end was near. He’d closed his eyes and waited to die, unwilling to meet it face to face. He’d inexplicably survived that day, but had been left with the memory of the certainty of death he’d felt — which he felt again now, walking so near the place where monsters were born.
The relief battalion had met in an old silver mine east of Bisbee, Arizona. Three hundred souls — many were ex-convicts, with the rest ex-military, fresh from the war but unable to stop killing. With the promise of $100,000 for six months work and the opportunity to protect the sovereignty of America, they showed up in droves. The advertisements were posted on the internet, Field and Stream, Gun and Rifle, and Soldier of Fortune. Everyone was vetted in Phoenix first. With the help of a friend in the FBI, the network was able to create a criminal history for Andy, and with it, a desire to get out of Arizona. With a faked military record, his bonafides fit right into the model soldier the US government was recruiting to guard the Rift and the American way of life.
EVERYONE HAD their own responsibilities. Andy and his partner, Leon Batista, were in charge of maintaining the landmines in sector six, an area just north and east of the Rift and one of twenty-two sectors. The mines were the last line of defense. If anything or anyone clawed its way free of the Rift, it would encounter seven rows of ten claymore mines, positioned far enough apart so that each row could operate independently, creating a cataclysmic explosion of ball bearings traveling at 4,000 feet per second if detonated.
But if anything got to the claymores, they were all in the shit. Andy had been issued an automatic pistol with the reminder that the bullets would be best used on himself so that when he was eaten, he wouldn’t know, or care. Eaten. The word seemed so terribly wrong when applied to him.
The first lines of defense were right along the edge of the Rift. There was evidence where they’d tried to cap the crevice. Some of the steel webwork remained. But all attempts to cover the mighty hole had been halted by the monsters. It seemed that as soon as anyone got within a few feet of the darkness, creatures would stir and come out to feed. Andy had been offered a tour of the area, but even his professional craving for information couldn’t defeat the fear that locked his joints and filled his guts with lead-heavy dread.
Many of his network colleagues thought he was a coward. He’d returned from Croatia three weeks into a three month assignment. He’d tried to explain to them what had happened, but they didn’t want to listen. They were reporters, they’d told him. Their job was to go into the mouth of hell itself and report what the devil was having for dinner. If you weren’t willing to do that, why be a reporter?
Why, indeed.
Towers with Vulcan Cannons were interspersed a hundred meters apart along both sides of the Rift. If anything tried to escape, the cannons could create a deadly web of interlocking fire. Each 20mm pneumatically-driven, six-barreled, air-cooled, electrically-fired, Gatling-style cannon was capable of throwing 7,200 depleted uranium rounds each minute into anything that moved. Each tower had their own specified field to fire which kept the gunners from aiming directly at another tower. The very idea that anything could survive such a fusillade was unimaginable, but as Andy reminded himself, this was only the first line of defense. By definition that meant the tactical experts who’d created the Rift Defense System planned on things getting through.
Above the towers flew Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with laser targeting for the offsite medium range missiles, as well as video cameras capable of operating in Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR), Starlight, optical spectrum and radioactive modes. As another line of first offense, each carried three AGM-114K II Hellfire missiles with High Explosive Metal Augmented Charges.
Satellites were rumored to be in geostational orbit even farther above, capable of reigning down Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles if they became desperate. Andy occasionally found himself glancing skyward, but he could no more prove the existence of satellites than he could prove the existence of God. Still, he hoped that all the conspiracy theorists and evangelists were right and that there was something watching over them other than the hot desert sun.
THAT NIGHT ANDY dreamed of his childhood. Tarzan cavorted through the trees high above a forest, where he swung from vine to vine. Beneath him the earth was rent in much the same manner as it was in Sonora. But where in Sonora the darkness hid everything from the visible eye, Tarzan’s gaze pierced the shadow, revealing converging armies of Ant Men, Golden Lions, Leopard Men, Snake People, and Winged Invaders, just as they’d appeared on the covers of his old, cherished paperbacks. These creatures, first introduced to Andy from Edgar Rice Burroughs books and the unauthorized Barton Werper volumes, glittered in the darkness as they stared back at their Lord of the Jungle nemesis. But fear found home in their eyes. Tarzan was too much for them. He’d done battle with each of their ilk and cast them back into the dusty confines of their paperback prisons long ago.
Andy turned in his sleep and groaned happily, safe with the knowledge that as long as Tarzan watched over them, he’d be safe.
Then he awoke to screams.
He twisted free from his blanket and crashed from his upper bunk six feet to the concrete floor. The claxons and emergency lights had sent everyone into frenzy. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed his boots, and struggled into them, trying to hop and run at the same time. The door to the bunker had
been left open to let in the breeze. As he approached it, he bumped into the guy in front of him who’d stopped to stare at the sky.
A hundred black silhouettes shot from the Rift into the night, tracer rounds from the Vulcan cannons stabbing them as they rose. Great black insects with glowing orange wings, each as large as a World War II Japanese Zero. Rising, falling and slashing sideways, they twisted and twirled to get away from the fusillade of angry rounds fired from the air-cooled Gatling cannons.
Transfixed by the aerial death match, everyone jumped as a Predator drone strafed the action, unleashing its payload of three Hellfire missiles that exploded in awesome tornadoes of orange, red, and green fire. They stood for ten minutes watching the life and death struggle as the creatures tried to make their way free of the Rift. Each man wore only boots and underwear, expressions agog at a sight that only made sense to little boys with Tarzan dreams who spent their Saturday mornings watching cartoons.
While everyone’s eyes were on the creatures, Andy’s gaze rested on the darkness from whence they came. He felt the Rift watching him. The great gaping hole in the earth was like the eye of that Serbian soldier who’d held Andy’s life in his hands. The capriciousness of Andy’s existence wasn’t lost to him. He wondered if the soldier of his memory wouldn’t decide to fire, the bullet transporting through time to jerk him back to that moment where he’d die and be buried in the ditch with all the other villagers.
One minute the night was filled with unearthly screams and the sounds of battle, the next all was silent. Two Predators took off south after something, but otherwise everything was still. Sometime during the battle the claxons had been turned off but Andy hadn’t noticed until now. The desert was suddenly quiet as a grave, the only sound the breathing of the soldiers standing in the doorway of the bunker, all in rhythm as they stared into the night.
Finally someone chuckled.
“Let’s get some sleep,” someone else said.
