Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  Luke’s eyes fell on a short row of metal cots bolted to the floor and then the women, or more accurately in most cases, girls, who looked like they’d rather have been elsewhere. At least, that was what Luke judged from the chains affixed to their ankles. He counted six cots, five of them occupied, and the shapes of what he took to be three soldiers, making use of the brutal amenities. Only a single forty-watt electric bulb struggled to shed light on the grim scene.

  In any other situation, Luke might have hesitated. The risk of exposure ran high, but the young sergeant couldn’t afford to bypass these three men now and chance running into them later. Yes, the girls might scream if he acted, but now that he was nearly in the room, he could already hear one of the victims crying out in a mixture of pain and despair. Yes, Luke thought these things, but the hate burning in his gut decided the matter.

  Glancing over at Gus, Luke merely nodded once before exploding into the room, propelled by the mad energy he now knew powered his berserker tendencies. He’d pulled his other knife, the KaBar he’d received from his father, strapped for a left-handed draw across the front of his harness. Breaking into a sprint, he silently covered yards in an eyeblink. Luke drove the point of the KaBar into the side of the neck of his first target in passing, ripping the blade free before launching his body at the second.

  This second man was heavily-built, tall and wide with the body of a pro wrestler gone to seed, and Luke bounced off the side of the stout fellow, but not before he’d planted the kukri handle-deep into the left side of his chest. Jammed through the layer of fat and sliding between two ribs, the long blade bisected the heavy bruiser’s heart before the man could utter a sound. That left just one target left, but the collision with the large soldier caused Luke to lose his footing. Teetering for his balance, Luke made a desperate underhanded throw with his left hand as he skidded to the filthy floor.

  The third man, occupied as he was, holding down the girl in her bed, barely had a chance to look up before the KaBar, still dripping blood from the first victim, thudded into his right upper chest. A stunning blow, and painful, but not a lethal one.

  Gus, following closely on Luke’s heels, charged to confront the last man as he opened his mouth to release an agonized cry, but Gus knew he would arrive too late. Before that could happen though, the injured man suddenly toppled off the bed and onto the floor, and Gus braked suddenly to keep from plowing into his partner.

  Luke, when he went down, desperately reached out, managing to dig the fingers of his left hand into the last man’s knee and pull, overbalancing the shocked soldier. He barely had time to hit the floor before Luke swarmed him, withdrawing the KaBar and plunging the high carbon steel into his chest again and again. By the time Luke stopped, the dead man resembled something run through the blender, set on puree.

  Gus took a step back and saw one of the women, the one trapped under the body of the heart-struck big man, open her mouth with a panic-filled scream on her lips. Catching her eye with a frantic wave, Gus shook his head and touched a finger to his lips. Incredibly, the trapped woman seemed to understand and stopped in mid-shout, cutting her eyes to Luke when she did so.

  “Is this…” she started, then stopped as if frozen. Gus was puzzled until he caught a glimpse of Luke, when he finally sat back on his heels and gave a sigh. Covered from head to toe in successive gouts of blood, the young man’s ghastly appearance gave Gus a sudden shiver. What is it about this kid that makes me so nervous, the man wondered? Major Keller said Sergeant Messner was a good fighter, smart and conscientious. But now, Luke seemed to be someone else entirely. An engine of destruction.

  “Ladies,” Luke whispered, his soft voice at odds with his grisly appearance. “We are here to help, but first we need to neutralize the radio room. Don’t want them calling for reinforcement. Anyone know where that’s located?”

  For a second, silence held, and the girl chained to the first cot lifted her head.

  “I…I think it’s a few doors down on the left,” she croaked, her weak voice cracking. “I saw a big radio set up in there, toward the back, when they brought me in.”

  “Thank you,” Luke replied, struggling for sincerity, despite his flat, emotionless tone. “We’ll be back shortly to get you folks loose.”

  Stepping over to the empty cot, Luke used the dirty blanket to wipe some of the blood off his face, smearing the tacky fluid on his goggles. No help there, he realized.

  “Crap,” he whispered and removed the eye protection, then used a splash of water from his canteen to clear his goggles. Seeing the state of the trapped women, he tossed the nearly full canteen to the woman nearest to him, and then proceeded to wipe the blood off the KaBar on the blanket instead. While his partner was thus occupied, Gus helped the trapped woman lift the large corpse off, dropping him unceremoniously onto the bloody floor, and then he wrenched Luke’s kukri free from the man’s side.

  “Here you go,” Gus said, handing over the large, blood-covered knife to Luke. “You planning on leave any for me? And who the hell taught you to fight like that?”

  Luke shrugged before answering. “Just picked it up. Sounds like we’ll have some work for you soon, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Confident now of the women’s cooperation, or at least, silence, the pair crept close to the exit, and Luke hunkered down and studied the hallway. Even in the poor light, if any Commies entered the room now, then the obvious signs of struggle would give away the secret.

  “Fuck,” Luke whispered, rethinking their situation. “We need to hide those bodies.”

  “On it,” Gus replied, and quickly turned words to action when he hauled the three cooling corpses over to the side of the room and draped them with the filthy blanket from the unoccupied bed. Luke listened, but strained his eyes further down the hall. No movement that he could discern, and Gus was patting his shoulder.

  Luke crept out, staying as low as possible and duck-walking most of the way until he could rest his back against the door jam, leading into the next room. On his belly now, Luke crept inside to find a makeshift bedroom, with three beds and two soldiers stripped down to their thermal underwear and snuggled under the covers. Cozy, he thought. They’re nice and warm while their playthings are down the hall.

  Gesturing to the sleeping men, Luke drew his kukri and gestured for Gus to follow suit as they ghosted closer to the beds. In the weak light of the single overhead bulb, Luke could see the men sported thick beards. One was a dark color shot through with gray, while the other was the ginger of a true redhead. Luke pointed to the younger man, gesturing to Gus, while he moved to the older man’s shoulder and bent at the waist. Stopping so his meager shadow would not cross the sleeper’s face, Luke stabbed once, twice, and yet again for a third blow. Glancing back, Luke watched as Gus stood, wiping his blade on the rumpled blanket and held up a finger as he strained his ears.

  He could hear voices now, low but frantic, and at first, he worried all their stealth had been for naught. Then he began to piece together the conversations, though he could only hear one side of the exchanges. Even so, he could tell the presence of two people in the other room. The voices sounded peculiar, but the information grabbed Luke’s attention. A grim smile split his face, but no one was there to see it in the dark.

  “What?” Gus finally hissed, and Luke gestured, moving further back along the hall.

  “I heard two voices in the other room,” Luke explained, his voice softer than a whisper. “Pretty sure that’s the radio shack, like the girl said. From what I could tell, our boys are giving them hell. Calling out for reinforcements, but so far, they’re leaving us alone here. Nobody wants to strip guards from the food stores.”

  “That’s good news all the way around, right?” Gus murmured, still giving Luke a curious look.

  “As long as they don’t change their minds,” Luke confirmed, his voice soft. “We don’t want to draw any attention. Our job is to dig in and hold these facilities, but the call still may go out any
minute to send the guard forces from here to relieve their headquarters.”

  “What will we do then?”

  “Kill ‘em as they load up,” Luke replied coldly. “Same thing we’re planning to do anyway.”

  “Guess we need to neutralize those techs, and take control of that system,” Gus concluded.

  “Got it in one,” Luke agreed, then continued. “Let me count noses to be sure, but if there’s less than three, I think I can take them without raising a fuss. While I’m doing that, I need you to set up out here to welcome our boys when they get here. Be ready to defend the door if the bad guys get here first.”

  “You think they’re okay? Frank and the rest of your men, I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Luke replied confidently. “Frank’s with Dwayne, and he’s good. Before he ever joined up with the Guard, he was already learning to slit throats in the dark and creep around.”

  “What? That’s…”

  “Civilian militia,” Luke said, cutting the other man off, and embracing the term he’d been fighting for months. “Same as you were, if I could take a guess. Anyway, Dwayne and his guys have gotten plenty of experience in the last few months with my squad. They should be fine.”

  Mollified somewhat by the young sergeant’s explanation, Gus moved off to take up his position while Luke snaked back down the hall to complete this part of the mission. No calls for help were coming out of this rathole, not if he had anything to say in the matter.

  Luke realized they eventually would have found the communications center by simply following the trail of cables leading from the forest of antennas outside. Crouching by the wall, Luke peeked quickly around the corner, taking in the scene. The radio cubicle occupied a corner of the manager’s old office, separated by a waist-high partition wall. Lit by a pair of forty-watt bulbs, the glow barely illuminated the ten-foot-by-ten-foot office, but after navigating in the near dark for so long, the light seemed stronger. There, huddled around the bulk of the stacked radios and gear, Luke made out the tops of two heads tipped closely together around the lightly glowing array of dials and meters.

  Moving back into the hallway, Luke snapped his fingers once, getting Gus’s attention from farther down the passageway, and Luke held up two fingers. Luke’s partner nodded somberly and drew his own blade, an eight-inch Bowie knife that looked old but well-preserved. Gus took a knee, laying his carbine down on the floor and tapped it once, memorizing the location. He waited, ready to guard the approach with his life.

  Luke nodded to himself, an old nervous habit, and drew his kukri yet again. Every time his hand closed around the wrapped leather hilt, Luke found himself thinking about Gaddis. He missed the old man, and he thought about the lessons taught to him by the blacksmith when they’d crafted the blade together. Mind on the mission, he chided himself. Things to do, and people to kill.

  Low-crawling like a leopard, Luke eased into the room on all fours, sliding silently on the worn pads protecting his knees. He followed the sound of the radios crackling, and the voices he heard while he moved. Something about the voices triggered a touch of caution in the teen, and he slowed again as he strained his ears.

  That voice sounds strained, Luke realized, and he wondered if his own people had beaten him to the radio shack. He paused, then dared a quick peek over the edge of the desk he was using to shield his advance. Like looking at the sun, Luke risked a split-second of exposure before descending once again. He’d caught sight of two figures sitting side by side in the plain wooden chairs, hunched in front of the racks of radios. Short, he realized. Their earphones looked funny. Hugging the backs of their small skulls, like those silly Mickey ears Paige had worn for years after their visit to Disney World. The facts began to fit together as Luke sat and thought. The strained, gruff voice of the one speaker, the small stature, and the way they leaned forward precariously in their chairs to adjust the manual tuners. Either they were little people, or really little people. Children.

  Luke shifted his grip on the leather wrapped tight around the kukri, but his mind refused to cooperate. He needed to neutralize the radio here, and time was working against him. His people’s lives depended on carrying this raid out without being detected. Waiting now risked the lives of not only his friends, but his father as well.

  And what do I do when my father sees where I’ve killed a pair of children, sacrificed on the altar of expediency? Though they seldom discussed such things, Luke knew from a few careful comments, his father still felt guilty for having to kill some of the younger insurgents he’d faced over the years. He’d had no choice, but still, the senior Messner recognized their inability to overcome the brainwashing that’d driven what he thought of as children to commit their attacks.

  While Luke sat and debated the merits of murdering these two children, he had another thought. A memory, more accurately. For some reason, his mind flashed back to the desperate attack on the armory back in McAlester. He’d been terrified then, trying not to flinch when tracers flashed around his position. I’d been terrified for most of that trip, Luke realized, and then, he had to wonder when he’d stopped feeling the fear. Stopped feeling much of anything, if he admitted the truth to himself. Not counting that first helicopter ride when he was convinced the pilot was trying to find a power line to hit, Luke realized he hadn’t felt real fear since his mother was murdered.

  Was that the explanation? he wondered. When did the killing and the threat of being killed become so commonplace, as to no longer elicit even the most basic of emotions?

  The question stumped Luke, and he felt his fingers grow numb from the pressure. He thought more about that fight at the armory. About how Amy and Lori fought so bravely against overwhelming odds, and how the two young women willingly shifted Summer, so the thirteen-year-old girl wouldn’t have to shoot the men attacking the perimeter.

  What the hell happened to me? Luke pondered. Had all the deaths finally dulled his sense of fear and his humanity? He knew he had a monster inside, one he embraced at times, but when did the monster grow to the point, he was nothing more than the monster? He suddenly felt like Mr. Hyde, but there was no Dr. Jekyll, and hadn’t been for some time.

  Hell of a time for an existential crisis, Luke finally concluded, but the decision had to be made. Killing these two kids would be the easy thing to do, but not the right thing. He already knew his father worried, and not just about his safety. The death of his mother, and so many family and friends, ate away at Luke, and he feared he was no longer much more than an empty shell animated by his killing hate. Time to see if there was anything left of his humanity.

  He slid the kukri back into its sheath and slowly rose to his knees, drawing the suppressed pistol as he straightened up. A softer heart didn’t mean a softer head, after all. They might be kids, but kids could still pull a trigger.

  “Freeze. Don’t say a word.”

  Luke spoke matter-of-factly, his voice low but understandable. The silence that followed rolled through the room like a cold front, sending chills up the children’s spines. Neither turned, though both twitched with what seemed like a static charge.

  “Hands off the transmit key, and arms over your heads,” Luke continued, his words slow and direct. When the children complied, Luke noted the rail-thin limbs and the swollen elbows and wrists. The two were dressed in rags layered atop rags, a rough form of insulation from the ever-present cold, but not what Luke expected to see inside one of the enemy installations. These two kids looked to be starving, which was a shockingly common enough occurrence these days, but not something the Commies did even to their lowest recruits. There was a reason they were called food volunteers.

  While Luke inspected the emaciated duo, he kept an ear cocked for noise outside, so when he heard the deep bass of Dwayne at the door, he didn’t even glance back.

  “So, what have you caught this time, boss?”

  “Pair of youngsters manning the radio,” Luke replied. “Everybody okay out there?”

  “Pretty
much,” Dwayne confirmed. “Well, Frank managed to cut himself, but David’s patching him up. Haven’t heard anything from your father or Major Keller yet on their mission to take over the barracks. You need any help here?”

  “Yeah, give me some cover while I secure the prisoners,” Luke said, his voice still confident, despite the ethical dilemma he wrestled with. This was the job he’d volunteered for, and he still hated the Commies and their thugs. He just couldn’t see these children in that light.

  “I thought we couldn’t take any prisoners?”

  Unlike the earlier questions from Gus, Luke didn’t feel aggravated by his subordinate’s question. Probably the tone, he decided, as he framed his answer. Plus, the corporal had a lot of credit accrued with Luke for all the crazy times they’d shared so far.

  “Not killing kids, Dwayne. Got my standards. Not much, but that’s all I got to live by.”

  Dwayne didn’t laugh at the statement, which Luke took as a good sign. Most of the time, he tried not to think about what he’d been forced to do and become, in order to survive just one more day. He’d committed what others might consider barbaric acts, such as desecrating the bodies of his enemies, but lately, even those actions no longer haunted his sleep. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Luke wondered as he withdrew two sets of zip-tie restraints from his web belt. Even after stripping down his gear to the bare essentials for this insertion, he always kept a small supply of paracord and zip-ties because they proved to be awfully handy in multiple situations.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Brady, sir,” the boy replied in little more than a whisper, his tone now subdued. So different from the fake announcer voice Luke heard him use on the radio just minutes before.