Wet or Dry, Chapter 1: The Listening Room

by DC Bourone

  Me too. What is done, is done.

  “And just now, ten minutes ago, ITD Japan,” Michael leaning back, studying his father. “'Coincidence shows us the patterns we have missed,' you've always said. 'There is no such thing as coincidence, only a truth, unrevealed, and unexplored, which we must find.' Your words. Toshi, there have been rumors, for years. And now ITD Japan. Two men died,” Michael explained.

  Yes. There is no such thing as coincidence. Not in our world.

  What would he do to protect his son?

  From the future he knew was coming.

  And Sarah, his son's only friend.

  The two innocents he knew best.

  Innocence. A word. A concept.

  He could still define.

  What would he do?

  Anything.

  He would do anything at all.

  Perhaps he already had...

  He remembered the voice of his muse.

  What had she said?

  Written. Inscribed.

  What was it he must find?

  “Balance.”

  His place within it.

  His son's, within it.

  Innocence, within it.

  “Come inside, Dad,” he heard as Michael took his hand.

  He would find it.

  Balance.

  *****

  A NOTE FOR READERS:

  Digital fiction, indie authors clamoring for recognition, the ebook phenomenon, a new experiment in the multi-century arc of information history. Gutenberg risked the wrath of the Church, the failure of a gear, fading ink, disintegrating parchment...

  You, the reader, have already risked your time.

  So if you enjoyed, this chapter, we have a proposition for you: presently the DCBourone novella “Injured Reserves” includes the first four chapters of book “Wet or Dry.”

  Following is a seventeen page sample of “Injured Reserves.” Enough that we hope you will have no doubt about what we are trying to accomplish.

  And if you made it this far....

  Thank you.

  *****

  “INJURED RESERVES”

  *****

  DEDICATION

 

  For the essential man.

  That he should be remembered.

  For Reasons.

  And Reason.

  That should be reacquired.

  For the Deep History.

  That you must find.

  For two Reds, and a White,

  Who had the grip,

  But not the time,

  And for the Black,

  Who saw the Future.

  And said, let's shop...

  For Laity, in all her grace,

  Who has it all.

  And will find her place.

  And above and beyond,

  For all the brothers.

  And now, our sisters.

  Who are gone.

  *****

  SKINNING THE DEAD

  *****

  All ships should be so swift.

  All waters, so calm.

  All nights.

  So bright...

  The smuggler's boat thundered across the southern Adriatic Sea, a skipping shadow over low waves silvered by a full moon. No lights showed from the steering cabin or the rusted decks.

  Deep in the forward hold, Billy Spears lay curled on his side, spitting blood into his oxygen mask. His medic wore green scrubs, white Nike trainers soaked red to the laces and the steady gaze of a man trained in a burn ward.

  "We're 30 klicks west of Dubrovnik. Running max at fifty-two knots," the medic leaned close to shout over the roaring diesels, glanced at his PDA. "Tier one trauma staged Catania Sicily just left the dock, six hour ETA. Means six hours, that's how long you gotta hold on. You understand? Nod 'yes' if you understand."

  Billy understood. He was dying.

  "You took at least two rounds through-and-through entry low left scapula exit ribs left one and two, and I'm seeing bone chips and lung tissue on my swabs," the medic continued, his hands busy through a glistening curtain of IV lines. "Try and save your lung, keep your O2 stable, I'll have to put at least three drains in. You've swallowed a lot of blood, when you puke it up make sure you lift your mask and turn your head or you'll suffocate. No pain meds, your BP is too low."

  The medic's face convulsed, brief as a shimmer of heat lightning but he was a professional and composed himself, leaned even closer. "I'm stepping way out of my lane here. But we all know who you are. And we know what you do. So you gotta hang on, OK? Hang on. Ready? On three. One, two, three--"

  As the first needle punched into his chest Billy's eyes ranged across the collapsible litters of their temporary aid station. Bolted three on a side of the boat's narrow hull, each litter held a figure, slick and pale as wet marble, splayed under white lights and bright shears which stripped away clothes and boots in a manner indistinguishable from skinning the dead. In Admiral Nelson's day ship surgeons threw sand on the decks, now they used friction tape or rubber mats but there was no way to see what lay beneath the deep crimson pools already going dark at the edges.

  Blood.

  Blood of his men.

  Billy had always imagined his own violent death as both distant and certain, like the pinwheel galaxies seen in the deepest images of space. But losing his men, that would be the supernova which extinguished his soul.

  He was losing them now.

  On the closest litter a tiny female surgeon with a sleek cap of white hair rode like a jockey, plunging her knees into Dylan Tate's chest to pump life into his heart and fluid out of his lungs, grunting with every pulse of her body. Not a technique she'd learned in medical school, Billy knew. Something she might have learned in Balad, Iraq in 2004 when the Black Hawks were bringing in men blown limbless by IEDs and they sluiced off the litters with hoses.

  Tate's right leg had been shot off at the knee by a Dushka heavy machine gun, and he had hopped and crawled and squirmed his last fifty feet to the water, running belt after belt through his weapon to cover the crew. Now his face twisted over, pink foam jetting from his nose and mouth into his oxygen mask.

  Only Tate's eyes could still speak. Bright blue and staring and Billy was sure they were saying "It's time to go, brother."

  "Combat is the control of your adversary in the three dimensions of space, across the fourth dimension of time. Control the rhythm, control the tempo, control the pace of movement through time, that is where you win or lose in the fight. Lose it? Lose the rhythm, lose the mission, lose your life. If you've made it this far, if you've made it to me, you've seen this yourselves and know I speak the truth." The poetry of war described on a rocky beach in Wales by an ancient Scot, old enough to have served with the SAS in Malaya. His glass eye in its ravaged socket, his empty sleeve pinned high on one shoulder, his proof that some poetry is permanent. Billy and his men, shivering under a misting rain, had known there were aspects of combat approaching the occult, and known they were listening to a master.

 

  "Lose the rhythm. Lose the mission. Lose your life."

  They had lost the rhythm on another rocky beach, in Croatia, where they had just been shot into blood puppets. And Billy knew they were losing it here as the voices of the medics, normally clipped and dry as pilots landing a plane, grew increasingly frantic. Strangled curses, shouts for O negative and Ringer's solution and Hespan blood extender rang high over the howl of the engines, merged with a rising crescendo of chirping Braun monitors Billy recognized as the last song of dying hearts.

  He could hear the sound of rhythm lost and rhythm broken in the gasping voice of the surgeon as she rocked her knees into Tate's chest, "Stay here, right here, look at me, look at me, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME--," the crucifix at her neck swinging with each lunge of her body as if Christ meant to leap from the chain.

  A monitor's shrill beat collapsed to a piercing whine, and then another, and yet one more, as t
hree of his men flatlined. Tate's bright blue eyes blinked once, then settled on a horizon only he could see.

  Billy's men were leaving.

  The crucifix at the surgeon's neck finally came to rest. Chiseled in red coppery gold, as if the miniature Christ stared into a setting sun. A last monitor, very close, sounded a long final tone, Billy knew it could only be his own. As his vision faded he hoped that Christ had experienced enough of mortal life to appreciate the beauty of a sunset.

  Because he knew where his men were going.

  He closed his eyes and followed them.

  *****

  TO DREAM ACROSS THIS RIVER STYX, OR DIVE INTO THE STARS

  *****

  He found his men perched high on the diving plane of a Los Angeles class attack submarine, watching a boiling red sun drop into the Pacific. The submarine's great black sail rising to their right, the wedge of the diving plane beneath, a massive green curl of water over the hull roaring below and behind them. The immense machine itself silent, the only sounds, water and wind. Perhaps Jonah was swallowed by his whale, because he tried to ride it. They were not the kind of men who commonly spoke of such things, but in later years when anyone referred to "The Sunset" or "The Night of Stars" they all understood.

  Billy knew he was dreaming, dreaming death, dreaming some transition. His men had no weapons, no uniforms, the rubber Zodiac craft they used for insertions was missing. Naked was not the right word, they were simply themselves, unequipped and unadorned, lumpy with muscle, sitting on the edge of the diving plane like five boys on a bridge, watching a sunset.

  Diego Morales spoke first.

  "Good to see you, Billy," Morales said.

  "We knew you'd find us here," Nate Tanavasu added.

  "We've always known we'd end up here, someday," Tate said. "Still, good try. Getting us to the boat."

  Billy had arrived standing behind them, one hand braced against the cool textured metal of the sail. Lost in the wonder of his dream he struggled to speak.

  "It's OK. Just glad you made it," Keith Barrett nodded to the horizon, the last sliver of sun blazing a long fiery path across the water. "Because here it comes, right about..."

  "Now," and Lou Dillon pointed as the sky blazed orange and purple. Billy recognized the colors of Turner's painting 'Fighting Temeraire', memorial and lamentation to another passage of past to future, and his heart ached. A long timeless moment while purple shaded to velvet black, then black bloomed with the light of infinite stars. The Milky Way a series of bright coils and swirls so thick Billy felt he could reach up and stir them with his hands.

  "I can't see it now," Nate said. "But I remember. This was where we knew we would be a crew. Beautiful."

  In the pale light Billy found symbols of the great wounds his men had suffered. A deep crescent shadow across the brow had taken Nate Tanavasu's eyes. Stars reflected on water through the empty spaces on Lou Dillon's chest and back. Tate's right thigh ended in a pale stub, Keith Barrett's legs ended at the knee. Morales was missing his right hip and most of the fingers on his left hand. His men didn't seem concerned. They had the composure of statues, carved by a sculptor who had made the best use of flawed stone.

  "Who thinks we're dead?" Morales said.

  "We're not dead. We're passing through," Keith mused.

  "We should stay here. Right here. This was a good place for us," Lou said.

  "No. We can't stay. Look--," and Morales pointed to the horizon. Bright stars and the heavens they made luminous dipped into absolute blackness where sky met sea. A void, endless and remote.

  The last mystery.

  Morales, smallest in a group of big men, always eager for the point, pushed off the diving plane and the others followed. They had to help each other up. At last they settled with Nate Tanavasu cradling Keith in his arms like a child, Tate leaning heavily between Lou and Morales.

  "Morales is right. We don't belong here. Not yet," Keith said. "We belong out there, Billy. In the sea. That's home."

  Morales leaned forward, placed his shattered hand on Billy's shoulder. "You're dreaming us. So you're dreaming the best of us. Because that's who you always were. And you know we don't quit. We never quit. I think we can still swim. I know we have to try. We'll wait for you."

  They should have have perished when they jumped, sucked along the hull and minced by the great spinning screw. But this was, after all, a kind of dream. When they launched themselves with a single step Billy felt no surprise when they lifted against the sky in a long arc ending in a flash of blue as they dropped into the water.

  A Los Angeles class submarine can cruise almost as fast as a horse can run, and leaning into a brisk salt wind Billy studied the void on the horizon, tried to understand its depth like a man poised over a well into which he cannot help but fall. The void promised simplicity, and peace. A forever cushion of deepest shade, the big sleep. But his skin prickled in the wind, the touch of Morales' hand on his shoulder burned like a brand of conscience, he could not help but witness the beauty of a sea unruffled by breeze or bow of the great metal beast he rode, leaving the waters around him a perfect mirror reflecting the spark of every star in the sky above.

  He could choose to dream across this River Styx.

  Or dive down...

  Down into the stars.

  Behind him he could hear the voices of his men, calling.

  He took one step and dove.

  Deeper.

  *****

  IF PURGATORY COULD BE THIS DREAM

  *****

  And found himself back on the beach.

  Wedged between rocks the size of picnic tables under limestone cliffs shielding a deep, narrow inlet on the Croatian coast. Water the color of sapphire under a declining sun, rubble, rock, and cliffs the color of Rome. A brief pebbled slope down to the gently lapping sea and a temporary dock like a slim tongue unfurled, no more than sixty yards of bleached plank lashed over rusting barrels.

  Salvation entering the inlet with a low murmur of diesels and a deep-v hull, hugging the cliff to his left. As the boat cut hard, swung the stern to kiss the dock Billy wondered if purgatory could be this dream, where he relived perhaps his finest moment and most certainly his greatest despair, and tried to find the balance.

  On the stern deck Commander Gretzky sat against the low steering cabin, one hand hooked in a white canvas tarp draped over an odd and ominous silhouette. With his broad bulk, his ever-present pipe and watch cap Gretzky reminded Billy of a New England whaler attending a shrouded harpoon gun. Commander Gretzky, their icon, their master, their Hammer of Thor. Be there a monster? Gretzky would kill it. Burn it. Cook a feast on the coals.

  They waited.

  The diesels idled.

  Gretzky sipped at his pipe.

  Blue smoke drifted out over the water.

  Beach pebbles clicked like metronomes in the soft waves, ticking seconds to mark the depth of Billy's exhaustion.

  They had lost the rhythm months, no, years ago, the tempo relentless as they scoured Eastern Europe for the nuclear debris of the old Soviet Union. Billy and his men the ultimate enforcers, always in the shadows, observing countless duffels of 500 Euro notes the festive pink of cotton candy, crates of corn yellow Krugerrands, Pamps and Pandas, greasy currency and traceless gold traded for poisonous artifacts real and fake alike.

  The most refined and brilliant fakes manufactured and sold by the United States to itself. Putting a floor on the market, it was called. Establishing value.

  Setting the price.

  Setting the price, for the real market.

  Setting the price, for the real buyers.

  Billy and his men always there at the end, to see those buyers quietly into the dark, where they belonged.

  Within their singular shadow war a unique artifact had appeared, shocking as a new star igniting in a familiar constellation, a revelation so profound it sounded the shrillest sirens in the quiete
st corridors of Fort Meade, Maryland, Langley, Virginia, and Washington.

  They called it "the package," and often, "The Bitch," and ten feet away Keith lay beside her ribbed steel sheath the size of a child's coffin, spot welded bolts and wire clips with lead seals every three inches around the stamped rim. Oh, how she had been loved. Cherished. Multiply buried and at least once poured into, and then chipped out of concrete, judging by her scabbed and sandy skin. A leprous queen, waiting decades for the right price and her crown bright as the sun. One of the fabled Six Sisters, lost in a distant age when the flagging Russian Bear had relaxed his grip. Her rough shell the cradle of a 150 kiloton fission fusion device, excised heart of a single Ukrainian SS-20 warhead.

  Lost, and now found.

  Death.

  Of a city.

  Of a nation?

  When the sirens sound?

  Will our shadows be our shepherds?

  At least Billy and his men would deliver The Bitch.

  *****

  PRELUDE TO A FIGHT

  *****

  Remember, this is a dream, Billy told himself. A dream. I will suffer this again, and if I live, if something of me lives, I will find a value.

  This is the prelude to a fight.

  And I have been here before.

  He watched Gretzky.

  Knew he and his men watched Gretzky from their stony beds like earnest children wait for a mother's cue. Jut of chin and tilt of head showed Gretzky’s interest directed high on the cliff to Billy's right, where a pair of gulls swooped and whirled in a widening gyre, shrieking their dismay. Incandescent white as they lifted into the last rays of the sun, pearly gray when they dipped into the shade.

  The gulls would not land.

  Something in the dense scruff of green at cliff's edge warning them off. When they broke their noisy orbit and flew out to sea Billy felt the beat of their wings tapping on his soul. Rhythm lost. Rhythm broken. The natural world had given a last warning, which the machinery of men always ignore.

  Gretzky scraped out his pipe.

  Packed it full.

  Lit the first match.

  Bright in the new dusk.

  *****

  PRELUDE TO A FIGHT, THE TIP OF THE SPEAR