Red Vengeance

by Brendan DuBois

  “I’ll be right there!” I call back, and give a glance to the rear, where Serena is following about three meters back, holding onto Buddy’s hand.

  I move to the left, dodging the picket hole that had been dug here last night at my command. I slog through some thick grass and reach the lean-to Dad had described. He pokes his head out. I say, “They’re right behind me.”

  “Good.” Dad looks up and says, “Heavy weather coming in.”

  True enough. The clouds are dark, full, threatening. There’s a rumble of thunder out there, and a flash of lightning in the clouds that reminds me of debris from LEO coming in and burning up. A rusted-out lawn mower is in the middle of the lean-to, along with a jumble of broken tools. A small workbench has fallen over, and nailed up on the wall, faded and soiled, is a calendar from an outfit called Irving Oil. The calendar is ten years old and is set to that year’s October. The very faded photo shows an attractive young blonde woman driving a red convertible.

  More thunder.

  Serena walks in, almost out of breath, still holding Buddy’s hand. Both of their clothes are patched, dirty, held up by lengths of string. Only the footwear is the same from when I last saw them.

  Dad says, “What happened?”

  Serena’s face is dirty, eyes puffy. Buddy moves to pull his hand away but she won’t let go.

  “The Langley guy…Cranston.”

  Dad nods. “Hoyt Cranston. Go on.”

  “We drove for a number of hours, got to this old base…up in the hills. Decommissioned except for a couple of buildings. Run by the Navy. Never even got to know its name. We got first class treatment, private rooms, showers, food like you wouldn’t believe. Separate rooms for me, my dad, and Buddy.”

  “What went wrong?” I ask.

  Serena takes a deep, shuddering breath. “A day later, the mood changed. Cranston demanded that Buddy tell him about his language training, where he learned the Creeper lingo, how much of the language did he know, why did he come up with the exact phrasing that made those Creepers surrender. Buddy just…sat still, smiled.”

  Dad says, “Thomas…I mean, Major Coulson, was he there? What did he do?”

  “Dad didn’t know what was going on,” Serena says. “He had gone off with General Scopes after the first day, and I couldn’t find him. Nobody would help me. The Langley guy…he cut off my food. Hot water. Put me on a cot in a dirty room the size of my closet. Told me I had to cooperate, tell Buddy to talk to him, or things would get worse.”

  She wipes at her eyes with a free hand. “Finally I told Cranston that Buddy wasn’t going to cooperate unless Dad came back, and Cranston said, fine, we’ll set up a special room for your brother, and we’ll go on from there.”

  Another lightning flash and a few seconds later, a deep rumble of thunder. Serena says, “The few Navy guys at this base…I played dumb. Like a little lost girl, confused about what was going on. I was taken to a bathroom and I asked my escort—a Navy gal younger than me—could I please see the room where Buddy and I were going to be in tomorrow? This girl…couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, but she was an ensign, she took me to the room, and I think she knew it was a mistake, the moment the door was open.”

  Dad stays silent but I say, “What was in the room?”

  Serena’s eyes swell up and tears start rolling down her cheeks. “A padded table. With restraints on both ends. Folded cloths. Buckets. A sink.”

  I look at Buddy’s plain, smart yet scary face. My stomach feels like it wants to slide out of my mouth. “They were going to waterboard him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s why you ran off.”

  “Right again.”

  Dad moves closer and then there’s a very bright flash of lightning, and one chest-thumping boom of thunder, and the rains start. I don’t know what to say but that’s okay, because somebody else steps in.

  Captain Kara Wallace, looking very pissed-off, followed by an equally pissed-off-looking First Sergeant Hesketh.

  * * *

  She says, “Is this a private party, or can anybody pop in and take part?”

  Dad says, “Kara, look—”

  She snaps, “Colonel, it’s Captain Wallace. I’d ask you to remember that.”

  “Captain,” I start out, but she won’t have anything to do with me. She steps closer and says to Serena, “I recognize you. You’re the specialist from back at the Dome surrender…and your younger brother, the linguist.” She gives them both a good, piercing stare. “You two were assigned to General Scopes and the man from Langley. What the hell are you doing here? And why are you out of uniform?”

  The tears from Serena are really rolling along her dirty cheeks, and her lips are trembling, and I say, “There was an event.”

  Wallace cocks an eye. “An event? Pretty slippery word there, Knox. That can mean anything from a surprise birthday party to a hundred Creepers marching up the Hudson River Valley.”

  “Serena and her brother were taken to a Navy base. Buddy was interrogated by Hoyt Cranston, the man from Langley. When Buddy wouldn’t cooperate, Cranston was getting ready to torture him.”

  “Torture him how?”

  “Waterboarding,” Serena whispers.

  “I see,” Wallace says. “And what would be the point of the waterboarding?”

  Dad speaks up. “Kar—” and I wince, wondering if Wallace is going to snap at him, but no, she lets him be. “Cranston was looking for information on how Buddy learned the Creeper language, what phrases he knew, how did he know to speak the right way to make those Creepers surrender.”

  Wallace crisply nods. “Very well. You say your brother was going to receive enhanced interrogation to pass along information that would help Mr. Hoyt of the CIA tell his superiors about the best way to get the Creepers to surrender? Am I correct?”

  “Hey,” I say, and Dad speaks as well, and Wallace holds up her hand. “Enough.” The contempt in her look is something that chills me right down to my ankles. “To get this war ended…by interrogating this boy…I…what I would do…”

  She turns to Hesketh. “First Sergeant, escort this…group back to my tent.” To us she says, “I don’t have the capabilities, or arrangements, or anything else to put you under arrest. But I’ll make sure that if any one of you leaves my side or sight, you’ll be shot.”

  Wallace heads out into the rain, and we follow. Serena comes past me and I take her free hand, and I’m pleased she doesn’t pull away. So we walk, me holding Serena’s hand, she holding the hand of her brother.

  * * *

  As we get to her tent there’s a burbling grumble and a mud-splattered motorcycle rolls up nearby, and an equally mud-splattered courier gets off, wearing BDU pants, a leather jacket with the 10th Mountain Infantry Division on the back, black wool cap and goggles. He passes over a dispatch case to Wallace and I hear her say, “Go take a break. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  Hesketh points us to a rotten pine log and we all sit down, and I’m still holding hands with Serena, not a gesture—I realize now—of affection, but of reassurance. Dad is Dad, looking up through his glasses, and I wonder why he doesn’t just take command, as a colonel. But he’s a colonel in Intelligence, not the infantry, and I can’t see Kara’s Killers following his lead because of his rank.

  Wallace drops the dispatch case on a wooden table, opens it up, reads the message. She sits down, stretches out her legs, reads the message again. When she stops reading I say, “Captain Wallace.”

  She doesn’t say anything back. Just tilts her head up and looks at the dark green canvas overhead, which is dripping water. Hesketh stands to the rear, hands clasped behind him, like some sort of guardian angel or android, ready to do whatever his princess requires.

  “Please,” I say. “Captain Wallace.”

  Now she pays attention to me. “What is it, Knox?”

  “The recorded Creeper message, the one that was broadcast back at the farm, that was supposed to be Buddy’s
voice. It wasn’t.”

  “So you’ve made clear.”

  I say, “Maybe Buddy knows what message was really recorded, what was really sent out with that PsyOps Humvee.”

  She crosses one muddy boot over the other. “Seems to be quite the stretch.”

  “Perhaps,” I say. “Maybe so. But with all due respect, ma’am, I think it would be a better approach than threatening to take a twelve-year-old soldier, out on disability, and turn him over to the CIA to be tortured.”

  Hesketh scowls but Wallace doesn’t move. Serena squeezes my hand. Dad stays still.

  She says, “One hell of a nasty shot there, Sergeant.”

  “No offense meant, ma’am. Just wanted to point out another approach.”

  Wallace lowers her feet to the ground, looks again at the dispatch notice. Water has dripped on a corner. “Specialist…am I right? Specialist Coulson. You seem to be your brother’s keeper, your brother’s defender and translator. Is that possible?”

  “Yes,” she says, her voice so faint.

  “So do it.”

  Serena says, “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was at Buddy’s side all the time before we left with the general and Cranston. We didn’t hear about any recording. Not at all.”

  Wallace nods. She swivels in her chair, crooks a finger at Hesketh, and he comes over, bends down. Some whispers are exchanged. Hesketh shakes his head a few times, until Wallace says, “That’s an order, First Sergeant.”

  Hesketh looks like he’s going to explode, lips tight and white, but in his raspy voice he says, “Yes, ma’am. I’m on it.”

  “Thank you, First Sergeant.”

  Hesketh goes out into the rain, which has settled down to a steady downpour. For some reason Wallace seems relaxed after leading us out from that lean-to, and I can’t quite figure out why. Back there she seemed ready to shoot us. Now, it seems she’s content to wait.

  Something to do with the dispatch she just got?

  “Captain?” I ask.

  “Sergeant,” she says.

  “Permission to ask a question.”

  A very tiny smile. “Aren’t you the questioning one this morning. Go ahead.”

  “Back at the horse farm, just before the two Creeper Domes were approached with the PsyOps Humvee, I saw you talk with the squad that was going out there in the field.”

  “Go on,” she says, voice even.

  “There were four of them,” I say.

  “I know. I was there.”

  “Well, begging the Captain’s pardon, ma’am, those four…they seemed old. Wounded. All of them had prosthetics. Not the type of soldiers you’d expect to be lead on approaching a Creeper Dome, not to mention two, anticipating that Creepers are going to come out and surrender. Ma’am.”

  Wallace nods. “You seem to want to make a point, Sergeant.”

  Dad leans forward from his perch on the pine tree log and gives me a warning look, which I instantly ignore. “It seems you were preparing for something…to go wrong. Perhaps a trap. Perhaps a misunderstanding. Perhaps the Creepers coming out in full force like they did and opening fire.”

  Wallace’s voice is now bleak. “How long have you been in command of First Platoon?”

  I know she knows but I answer anyway. “Not even a full day, ma’am.”

  “Then welcome to the joys of command. Sometimes…you have to prepare to make sacrifices.”

  Hesketh comes back out of the rain, bearing a dull metal suitcase, not too large, maybe big enough to hold a few changes of clothes. He puts it down on the table and steps back, and he looks fidgety, like something is wrong, something is bothering him.

  I don’t like it.

  Anything that might disturb this first sergeant is something I don’t want to see.

  Wallace says, “Thank you, First Sergeant.” She looks around the encampment, and says, “Now might be a good time to…move a few of the personnel.”

  “Ma’am,” he says.

  “And you may join them, if you wish.”

  “No, ma’am,” he says, and he steps out in the rain, bellows a few orders, and around us, soldiers are gathering up their gear, moving away.

  My throat is suddenly dry.

  By the suitcase handle there’s something that looks like a built-in combination lock, and Wallace quickly flips through the numbers. “Let’s see if we can get this started before the first sergeant comes back,” she says. “I’d let the rest of you join him, but unfortunately, circumstances don’t allow that.”

  The lock snaps open and the lid comes out, and from within the padded interior, she pulls out a rectangular, metal and plastic object. It looks so very familiar, and then the top flips open, she presses a round switch above a small keyboard, and there’s a ping! noise and it comes alive.

  A functioning laptop computer.

  Serena screams and I force myself to stay put, though I so desperately want to run away.

  An Excerpt from the Journal of Randall Knox

  My memories of the first years of the war—which began when I was six—are fuzzy and incomplete, and probably for a very good reason. Dad didn’t share much and as a real young kid, I don’t have that many memories of what happened after the war started. The memories before the war…I don’t like to think about them that much. After the war began…it’s a jumble, of moving around a lot, sleeping under itchy wool blankets in a smelly canvas tent, or doing lots of walking, or being carried on Dad’s strong shoulders.

  I remember being hungry a lot, and crying when I couldn’t get anything to eat, but then it got a bit straightened out. Our family grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, right on the coastline of Massachusetts, and Dad was a history professor at Boston University, and Mom drew pictures for children’s books. We lost our home due to the tsunami strike, and in the confusion later, we slipped over the border into New Hampshire. Dad could claim New Hampshire citizenship because of a cabin we had on Bow Lake, during the time when it wasn’t clear if there was anything left of the Federal government, and most states sealed their borders with their own National Guard and state police units.

  Eventually, though, things settled down—and I don’t mean anything went back to normal, no, not that—and we moved around some, as Dad reupped in the Army, having been in the Reserves. When I turned eight, I joined the local Cub Scouts, and with the rations assigned both to the military and outfits like the Scouts, we managed all right, although food was pretty thin, especially during the famine years. But there was a Federal government, damn weak, but a government, and we were fighting back against the Creepers, in desperate battles that saw the deaths of thousands at a time as we began to learn their weapons and tactics.

  Dad worked lots of long hours, days and weekends, when the armed forces were trying to keep up the fight and try to adjust to the new reality, and in the Cub Scouts, we were doing a lot more than its original mission of learning citizenship, knot-tying, and the like. We worked with the Boy Scouts—older boys—who in turn were under the command of local National Guard units, and we were doing survey work.

  Sounds pretty fancy, but we would go into some abandoned suburban neighborhoods in New Hampshire or in Massachusetts border towns, checking out the homes. If they were locked we’d mark the mailbox at the end of the driveway, letting follow-up crews know that this was a house that needed a more secure follow-up, to break in and remove clothing, bedding, canned food, bottled water, stuff like that. Anything unlocked or having signs of being broken in were left alone, the thought being that the places had already been robbed.

  We worked in our little Cub Scout dens, associated with our Cub Scout Pack, and usually led by an old and out-of-shape National Guard soldier who was armed with a rifle, or shotgun, or something in case we ran into looters or other gangs. We had two rules while working: don’t break into locked homes, and do not, on any occasion, retrieve or try to start up any electronic device.

  Steam the Creepers left alone. Coal they l
eft alone. Diesel—if it wasn’t used in a military application—was usually left alone. But anything electronic, from computers to cellphones to power plants to…well, almost anything and everything, would be spotted from LEO and destroyed by their killer stealth satellites, controlled by their orbital base.

  Anything electronic.

  Anything.

  So we were told to leave electronics alone, for they were like waving a big bullseye target, begging to be struck.

  One summer day, we were in a suburban area north of Boston—I don’t remember the name now—just trudging along, going from house to house. It was a hot day and our water bottles were getting low. There were five of us, plus Bobby, a retired mechanic who was in the New Hampshire National Guard and who carried a shotgun and wore a camo jacket—the only real sign he was in the military—and a Boy Scout named Keith, who was tagging along and seeing what we were doing.

  The homes were nice big ones, with three-car garages and wide lawns and stone walls. Three years into the war, the lawns were overgrown, most of the driveways had fancy cars that would no longer run and were resting on flattened tires, and the occasional dog would trot by, probably still wondering what had happened to his or her family.

  We had passed by three houses that were locked and secure, and Bobby had tied yellow bits of cloth on the tilting mailboxes, and he called for a rest break, and we plopped ourselves down underneath an oak tree that gave us lots of shade.

  After a while Bobby sat up and said, “Hey, anybody see Keith?”

  We all looked around. The five of us were in ragged clothes, sneakers or shoes kept together with gray duct tape or black electrical tape, the only real sign that we were Cub Scouts being the kerchiefs around our necks.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know where he went.”

  And nor had anybody else.

  Bobby said, “Shit,” and got up, holding his shotgun out, and he said, “You guys stay put, all right? Any trouble, run into the woods, try to get back to the church hall.”