Maggie was tucked in but restless, so Pete worked on the screenplay for a while, but he was pretty wiped out. His heart wasn’t in it. The trailer felt claustrophobic but he was afraid to go back outside. When he peered out the window the now unclean sand seemed to have been sketched with shadows wearing compasino white and faded straw hats, and among the boulders he saw beautiful young women with wet brown eyes and braided black hair. Enough. Pete had enough video, digital photographs and had taken copious notes. It was time to leave. They’d drive back to the set at first light.
Suddenly Maggie sat partway up, stiffened. Her lips moved, and for one suspended moment Pete thought she would speak to him from the depths of a bad dream, but then she slumped back down on the bed. Her eyes remained closed. Outside in the night a mournful wailing filled the hills, as real coyotes honored a full blood moon. Pete watched, heart aching with sadness for his daughter’s suffering. The familiar hatred returned. Fuck you, Gwen. Just fuck you for leaving us both. He sipped some scotch. Then dropped the glass on the carpet.
Maggie’s chest was still as stone. She was not breathing.
“Honey! Honey!” Pete rushed to her side, his heart thudding. Tried CPR, entered an almost comic state trying to both reach for the cell phone and continue to push and blow, wondered in the back of his mind if the law would come again, or simply consider him insane this time, and thus allow this sweet little girl to die.
He had punched in 9 and then 1 when she grunted and her eyes popped open. Her skin was pale as a church candle. She looked like an antique doll at a garage sale. Maggie moved her lips, tried to speak. Caught his eyes and held them tight like someone slipping from the ledge of a tall building.
“M..m..m…” Christ, she was going to talk!
“Thank you, God,” Pete wept. “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry, but Mommy isn’t here. Mommy is gone.”
The little girl struggled, kept trying to speak. Suddenly, the trailer grew unbearably cold and unnaturally still. Hope soured and rapidly turned to dread. Pete felt sanity slip away.
“Mama?”
the girl cried out in a flawless Spanish accent, face twisted, eyes abruptly flat and dead. Then she laughed, high and shrill. “Mama me a mondato!”
Mother?
Mother sent me to find you.
_______________
“‘twas not death for I stood up
and all the dead lie down.”
—Emily Dickinson
Thus Was His Death
The three young soldiers used a standard issue metal battering ram to bust through a metal gate placed between the two, slightly off-center pillars of concrete; the ram going clang and again clang like some macabre church bell. The cement had obviously been cut with sand, because the wall rapidly exploded into fine, white dust and the gate collapsed with a low booming noise and fell flat into the patio. Eidson and Garcia went in first, night vision goggles on, fanning left and right, ready to spray the hell out of the premises at the slightest provocation. Hayden waited outside, throat dry and bowels loose. The garden wall was a good ten feet high, so Hayden felt his shoulders bunch up in a vain attempt to defend against enemy fire directed from above, but the anticipated ambush didn’t happen.
Eidson and Garcia made short work of the front door. Hayden heard them explode loudly into the building; shouting and stomping, hoping to terrify any occupants into submission.
“Clear!”
That was Rudy Garcia, moving right through the Hajji’s kitchen, wearing night vision goggles and a Chicano ‘tude. To the left, silence. Outside, Hayden swallowed dusty air, swept the street behind them with his burning eyes. Not a raghead in sight, but that didn’t prove anything. He had to go inside, orders were orders; so against his own better judgment, Hayden slipped through the gate, trotted heavily across the patio tiles and peered through the front door.
“Eidson?”
Hayden heard a thundering crash half a second later, followed by swearing in English. “I’m okay, I just tripped,” Eidson called. “Jesus, it stinks in here.” And then, after a few long seconds: “Guys, we got bodies.”
Hayden felt his skin tingle and his gut go hollow. Bodies?
Garcia, wire thin and gang tattooed, whipped by like someone on roller skates. Hayden held his position in the doorway, eyes awash in glowing green images, busily shifting to the street and back.
“Holy shit, ese,” Garcia said, “Come on, check it out.”
Tom Hayden squinted through his goggles. He’d been in combat for two days. They were forty miles west of Baghdad; ostensibly chasing an insurgent named Mahajan through the streets of Fallujah. This whole section of the grid was cemetery quiet, even though half the First Battalion had been raising holy hell from door-to-door all night.
They’d been lost since 0320.
“Man, this is gross. What do you figure happened?” Jack Eidson sounded genuinely disturbed, and he didn’t rattle easily. “Do you think these were hostages?”
“Bad Hajjis just behead their hostages,” Garcia said, quietly. “Dude, these folks look like they got skinned alive.”
“You got to be shitting me.”
The stench reached his nose. Don’t breathe it in. Curiosity got the better of Hayden. He eased through the opening and took a look into the large, empty bedroom. The world turned white and his eyes slammed shut.
“Ouch!”
“Sorry,” Eidson said. “Take off your goggles.” He’d already used his cigarette lighter and placed two candles in a niche in the wall, causing a bright flare in the NV gear. Hayden blinked rapidly, took in the room. He pinched his nose shut to protect against the odor. The windows had been boarded up, and the walls were covered with dark blood and viscera that seemed to have been applied with a paint gun. He looked down, caught a quick glimpse of raw torso, flayed cheeks and grinning skulls. Hayden grimaced, shook his head.
Eidson belched. “Oh, man. I thought I’d seen some bad shit, but…”
Garcia laughed. “Don’t blow chunks, dude, this is like a crime scene now. If you’re going to hurl, you got to do it outside.”
Eidson stepped carefully around his comrades and moved back through the living room. He went out into the night. Garcia and Hayden heard his vomit splattering through the dirt of the abandoned garden.
“We’d better tell Captain Walden.”
“Com is still down,” Garcia replied. He looked at his watch. “It’s near sunup. I say we secure this location until then and pop smoke to call a chopper. They can mark the spot and take us home.”
“You’ve got rank.” Hayden shrugged. He was still pinching his nose shut and covering his mouth. “I suppose that’s as good a plan as any. I sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to hitting ten more houses on our own. Hey, Eidson, you okay?”
They heard another coughing sound, and then some dry heaves.
Hayden coughed. “Come on Rudy, let’s go outside.”
“No, let’s have a look around,” Garcia said, quietly. “Just make sure you don’t touch anything.”
Hayden felt a flash of adrenaline that made his body twitch. On the whole, he’d rather have slipped the NV goggles back into place and trotted back outside looking for trouble. He didn’t care for being trapped inside with a stack of naked, mutilated bodies, but orders were orders. He lowered his laser-modified, silenced Heckler & Koch 9mm MP-5 and found the flashlight clipped to his utility belt. He stayed back, swept the beam along the cracked, mortar wall. He tried not to breathe too deeply.
“Garcia,” Hayden whispered, “what the fuck is that?”
Garcia moved closer. In the shadows, the putrid stench seemed to creep up his nostrils like twin tendrils of foul smoke. The wall was covered with what appeared to be writing, but this was no language Hayden—who’d had some college—had ever seen before. The weird symbols were boldly and broadly rendered; created in myriad, macabre ways. Some were smeared in human excrement, many garishly painted in dried blood; others had been carved into the wall before being s
tuffed with twigs and strips of human flesh. A large pattern cut into the brick resembled a pentagram.
“Some kind of cult shit, maybe?” Garcia, closest to the scene, seemed oblivious to the horror, merely fascinated by their macabre discovery.
“Looks that way,” Hayden said. He shifted further toward the doorway. He was determined to stay as far away from the evil markings as humanly possible. Besides, his night vision was beginning to return, and having his back to an opening made him nervous. “Rudy, we made a ton of noise coming in here.”
“We ain’t seen a Hajji for almost half an hour,” Garcia said. Then he abruptly leaned forward from the waist, like a conductor taking a bow, and examined one of the arcane patterns from only inches away. His nose wrinkled, but this time only half in disgust.
“Damn, I wish I had a camera. This is some wild shit, dude. Newsweek would pay a fortune for a story like this.”
“MI would never let us tell it.”
“You got that right. You pricks would censor the Pope. What do you figure happened here?”
Hayden shrugged. “Like you said, looks like some kind of cult thing. Some folks got a little carried away, and a few others met Allah a lot faster than they wanted to. Let’s get out of here.”
“Fucking towel heads are all maniacs.”
“You ever hear of anything like this in Islam before?”
Garcia shrugged. “What’s that supposed to mean, ese?”
“Any religion spawns cults and weird offshoots,” Hayden said, still easing away. He pinched his nose again and his voice sounded almost comical. “Remember the Spanish Inquisition? Those good Christians cheerfully tortured people and burned them at the stake in order to save their souls.”
Garcia took a deep breath. He swiveled his head rapidly, and in the rippling shadows his eyes burned like coals. “You defending these pricks?”
Hayden flinched involuntarily, took another quick step backwards. He held his breath, shifted the MP5 and clenched the stock in sweaty hands. “I’m not defending anybody. I’m just saying that’s all.”
“Look at this shit, man. Look around you.” And by now Garcia was moving in a slow, loping circle, still bent at the waist, those large orbs still glowing, reflecting yellow candlelight. The shifts in position made his voice seem to deepen and then echo off the stained floor tiles. He was now panting heavily. Hayden followed carefully, cautiously, with very tired eyes.
It was the room. The markings. There was something else here, something that writhed with a fetid evil. The place was alive, weighted; grim as a Chicago slaughterhouse.
Hayden stared. Two female bodies were missing breasts, hands and feet; one old man had been blinded and castrated; genitals protruded from his toothless mouth.
“Savages.” Garcia was still pacing, looking around, working himself up, swearing under his breath like a man possessed. His panting had intensified.
“Look.”
One giant Arab man was like some medical exhibit; perfectly skinned from the neck to the ankles, all bled out; bulging tendons and rigid musculature perfectly threaded with bluish veins. His face was covered with a white sheet that had been badly stained and splattered. His hands and feet were bound tight with wire that had cut deeply into the slender strips of untouched flesh.
“And check this out.” Garcia leaned over the corpse. He was breathing so heavily his breath rocketed long, twin plumes into the morning air. Garcia reached down with his trembling right hand and yanked the cloth away, revealing a face still contorted by agony beyond description. The screaming mouth had been gagged with what appeared to be a tennis ball pierced with twine.
Hayden said, “Jesus.”
“Jesus had nothing to do with this,” Garcia hissed. “You know what I say? Let’s go find us a Hajji family or two, right fucking now. We’ll bring them in here and give them some of their own.”
“What?
“I said we give them some of their own. What do you say?”
“I’m not following, Rudy.”
“Yes you are. Let’s get some. I mean then do all of them, bro, just like this. Men, women and children.”
Hayden had finally arrived at the doorway. He kept his weapon at port arms and called out. No answer. Hayden took one deep breath, then recoiled a bit. He let it out slowly.
Meanwhile, Rudy Garcia dropped his weapon and straightened up. For a moment his handsome face appeared normal, Hayden even fancied a bit of sanity had reasserted itself; it was as if Garcia were asking himself why he’d just said what he’d said, but then that wickedness returned and he flattened himself against the stained wall, sniffing deeply at the smeared shit like a wild animal tracking prey.
As he snorted, Hayden saw a long string of drool fall from his mouth, then ooze down one sleeve to the leg of his pants.
“Eidson?”
Hayden’s voice startled Garcia, who spun around and issued an odd, crisp laugh, almost like the bark of a dog. He was bent over again, now down and to one side. His raised, empty hands had become claws, tense lips pulled back from clenched, white teeth. He grinned.
“Meat,” Garcia said, quietly. He repeated himself, like a demented child determined to be understood. “Meat.”
He seemed to have forgotten about the rifle lying in the dust, near his boots.
“Yo.” It was Eidson, outside in the night, finally answering the call.
“Get your ass in here,” Hayden said, as calmly as he could. “I think we have ourselves a situation.”
Eidson edged away from his own pool of vomit. He gathered up his rifle and canteen; the metallic sounds clanged faintly off garden walls and barely reached the gory room where the two men stood, eye to eye.
“Rudy,” Hayden said, “I am going to move on outside, now.” He raised his MP-5 for emphasis. “Come with me.”
Garcia’s eyes went crafty. Hayden saw him gauge the time it would take to reach his own weapon, aim and fire.
“We leave this to my MI guys,” Hayden said. “You were right the first time. We go into the yard, and come morning we pop smoke and take a bird home.”
Garcia chuckled. “You can’t feel it.” The sentence seemed oddly garbled, half statement and half question. “You can’t feel it from over there.”
“Oh, I feel it,” Hayden said. “Let’s get out.”
Garcia leaned back against the wall. He took another deep breath from nose and mouth, like a man inhaling the finest possible tobacco. “God at work,” he whispered. “Flesh returning to the earth smells so…sweet.” Thick saliva was now pouring from his half open jaws.
Hayden nearly shot him between the eyes, then and there, but Eidson appeared behind him, in the dark living room.
“I’m sorry,” Eidson said. “I just…”
Hayden’s attention wandered for a dangerous half second. Sensing the change, Garcia threw himself flat on the flayed male body and grabbed for his rifle. Hayden swung his MP-5 around and up, but Garcia had already aimed his own weapon, so Hayden backed into the living room without firing just as Garcia released a short burst that struck the doorway and left divots in the splintering wood.
“Shit!” That was Eidson, who was now right behind Hayden, too damned close, and the two collided and fell backwards into the living room. Hayden floundered on top of his friend, tangled in gear, arms and legs akimbo. He rolled away to position his back to the corner, fought back up to his knees.
Garcia appeared in the doorway and by this point something about him was both below and beyond human. His face was suffused with blood and contorted with a consuming lust for pain. He held his weapon too high and slanted, like someone unfamiliar with its design. When he pulled the trigger the rifle kicked up. He lost control of it and peppered the floor.
Three rounds caught Eidson in the lower leg. He shrieked and writhed, his own weapon forgotten. Garcia cocked his head like a demented parrot. He seemed to have forgotten Hayden. He dropped his gun, pulled his trench knife and came forward. Hayden let him move well in
to the room, drop to his knees near Eidson, who was just beginning to make sense of the situation.
Hayden’s mind raced. He grimaced. Suddenly, he lowered his weapon.
Garcia stabbed at Eidson, who cried out with pain and bewilderment. The first try glanced off the body armor.
“Rudy, don’t!’ Edison tried to scramble backwards. Garcia followed. Another stab slipped under the side of the chest plate and went in deep. Hayden figured it had struck a lung, because red froth bubbled from Edison’s open mouth. Garcia moved even closer, pulled his friend’s hair back and cut his white throat. A pulse of thick fluid popped out, another and another.
Garcia let Eidson fall to the floor.
Hayden waited.
Garcia seemed to remember Hayden’s presence. His face turned puzzled, then ecstatic. He turned slowly, on bloody knees, knife held low and wide.
“You do feel it,” he said. He smiled fondly, father to child. “You do.”
“Yes,” Hayden said, quietly, and nodded. “I do.”
He had left the MP-5 on automatic; his one, long burst tore Garcia’s head, arms and lower legs into several wet pieces. Hayden sighed. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears, took a deep breath. Orders are orders.
That stench…
Hayden reached into his belt and produced the small cell phone he’d been issued. He punched in ‘send’ with no idea what number he’d reach. A brusque female voice answered at once.
“This is……”
The woman cut him off. “We know who you are, soldier.”
“We found the site.” Hayden glanced at his GPS and relayed some precise coordinates. “Whatever it is, this is some scary shit, lady, just like I was told.”
“You are…alone now?”
“It’s done.”
“Stay put, soldier. Smash that phone.”
A Host of Shadows Page 10
