by Jeff Long
It was not a good time to be playing cat and mouse. Even as Beckwith and his men were creeping about through the subplanet, the ocean and sky above were full of taunts and provocations. Chinese Migs shadowed F18s, and vice versa. Brinksmanship was the order of the day.
And so stealth ruled Beckwith and his men. Nestling into their aeries overlooking the caravan route, they let the darkness and quiet settle on them like leaves. They waited.
Beckwith’s ledge held the stuff of a vanished empire. With the tip of his knife, delicate as a mine hunter, he unearthed small artifacts and arranged them alongside his rifle. There were tiny scraps of papyrus with odd marks, and bits of colored glass, and a zinc spoon pitted with age, and—his favorite—a scrap of chain mail like Crusaders might have worn. Only it was probably ten thousand years older than Christ.
Haddie had not always been the demon. At various times these cliffs had held hadal scholars, artisans, and holy warriors. Now was Beckwith’s turn to add a few relics of his own to the mix. Someday in the far future, someone would find his brass shells. What would they make of them? Would they puff on them like whistles?
Lightning flickered high above. The stony silence bore down on them.
On the tenth night, Beckwith started hearing voices.
At first he thought they must be wisps of subterranean breeze. The wisps became whispers, though, and he quietly racked a round, certain the enemy must be drawing closer. But the sands lay empty. And those whispers continued.
“Miggs,” he hissed. “Is that you?”
“What’s wrong?” said Miggs. But his whisper was different from these other whispers. It was clearer and more diligent. More joined to the present.
“Nothing,” said Beckwith.
The whispers grew louder, even though Miggs didn’t seem to hear anything. Over the coming days, the whispers came and went. There were all kinds of voices and accents, male and female, old and young. Some spoke English, some German, and some Spanish. He knew a tiny bit of Swahili from an African gig, and a tiny bit of Arabic, and those were part of the strange fusion. Most of it was completely foreign. “Alien” would be the better word.
Beckwith tried dialing the whispers down and out. He imagined a game of chess. He cleaned his rifle. He pondered his ex-girlfriend. None of it worked. The voices went on.
On the fourth day Miggs whispered, “Becky.”
“What?” said Beckwith.
“Who are they?”
Beckwith could have messed with Miggs’s head a little, and denied hearing anything. But he was too relieved. He wasn’t cracking up after all. “Echoes, maybe,” he said. “Geological noise.”
“Those aren’t echoes. That’s not geo background.”
“Sensory deprivation then,” tried Beckwith. “We’re going stir-crazy.”
“You heard that woman crying?”
“That was yesterday.”
“And that old man who wants to go home?”
“What about him?”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Miggs.
“Hit me.”
“What about, like, ghosts?”
That, too, had occurred to Beckwith. “You’re playing old movies in your head. Don’t do that.”
Miggs went on. “But we’re in hell, right? They could be, like, dead souls.”
Beckwith had thought of that, too. But he wasn’t about to admit it. “Square it away, Miggs. We’ve got a job to do.”
After that Miggs kept to himself. Which left Beckwith alone again to deal with the voices. As far as he could tell, the voices people seemed to be talking to themselves. It was a hodgepodge of monologues, a whole graveyard of them if Miggs was right about the dead souls.
Beckwith did what he could to distract himself and stay alert. He tried humming Phish songs without actually humming. He hunted for Casper the bird. He cleaned his rifle again and again. He did push-ups. He rebuilt the little wall of bricks at the front of their ledge. It was like solitary confinement.
On the fifteenth day he spotted pink flamingos in his sniper scope.
They were standing one-legged in a pool of water. Beckwith rubbed his eye and tried again and they were still there. He tried the other eye, same thing. Phoenicopterus ruber. The American flamingo. Black tips on their pink wings. Pink.
Beckwith did not record them in the life list in his sniper log. He absolutely did not try to bring them to Miggs’s attention. They were mirages, they had to be. Sure enough, an hour later they were gone. It rattled him. He was too meticulous to be seeing things. Too conditioned to hardships a hundred times worse than this. Above all, he was a SEAL. SEALs didn’t see pink flamingos.
He did ten sets of fifty push-ups as punishment. He made sure to get enough sleep, no more no less. He read the contents label on his Meals Ready to Eat to see if there might be some weird chemicals to avoid. The pink flamingos stayed away.
On the nineteenth day he felt a tap on his leg. It was Miggs at the spotting scope. “Alpha 746,” he whispered.
Beckwith manned his rifle and scanned the point seven hundred and forty-six yards away. In his scope the temperature variations flowered as dark blues and hot pinks. Tongues of flame—plumes of heated gas—rose and fell back into the green dunes. Hundreds of feet overhead, a spike of cold purple air stabbed down from a hole in the ceiling. SOS. Same old shit.
Then he saw them.
The column was approaching at two o’clock, a long, strung-out line of cherry red globules. They were well within the mile zone, but their shapes kept blurring. Normally his optics were crisp, especially in this latest scope from Unertl with a computer chip that kept distances focused. All he could say at the moment, though, was that there were lots of them coming closer in appallingly sloppy formation. Obviously they weren’t anticipating what was about to crash down on their heads.
Beckwith felt an electric charge. He had resigned himself to finding no one at all, or at best bagging a few stray hadals with maybe a child or two roped among them. But now it appeared the marauders had gathered all of their stolen flock together and were driving the children en masse across the green sands.
The prospect of saving the children awed him. It was as if all his training, indeed, his entire life, had just received its hidden purpose. He was not a particularly religious man. But he suddenly found himself praying for guidance. Lord, guide my hand. Make me steady. Let me be true.
The column wove between the dunes. The closer it came, the more Beckwith cursed his scope. What was wrong with the thing? The imaging was distorted. It was like watching molten red plastic creep across hot green waves. Here and there he grabbed momentary details from the shapes: a flash of teeth, a shambling gait, a stolen baseball cap even. He built them into a simian portrait. He identified his enemy.
And the children? They were there. He couldn’t make out their faces, but their smaller shapes were surrounded by the taller shapes. They were being herded like cattle.
Thunder growled. Gas plumes belched from the sand. The column inched closer.
Someone stumbled in the line, and that caused a commotion. Tall figures rushed back. In Beckwith’s mind, some weary child was being beaten. The commotion ended. The line resumed its motion.
They had plotted the ambush before taking to their hides. It was relatively simple. Different teams would cherry-pick different sections of the column. The children would fall to the ground. Their captors would run away into the minefield. Beckwith’s assignment was to begin at the front and work back. His shot would initiate the others. He would start the killing.
A baby began crying.
Beckwith thumbed his safety off.
Suddenly the boggy shapes became distinct. Beckwith’s worst nightmares sprawled before him. With sallow flesh and knotty horns, the hadals loomed over the innocents. There were the children. Here were the wolves.
He locked on the face of evil.
He squeezed the trigger.
You were trained to squeeze so smoothly and without antici
pation that the shot took you by surprise. His rifle—launching a huge .50-caliber round capable of piercing tank armor—kicked hard. The creature’s head smoked with the proverbial pink mist.
On to the next target. Beckwith squeezed the trigger. Took the kick. Next. On down the line.
To either side and above him, the other snipers let loose. In the old days of bolt-action sniper rifles, the rate of fire was tediously slow. These new $14,000 semiautomatic sniper rifles dealt death as fast as you gave them targets. Beckwith finished his first clip before the approaching column had a clue they were being killed.
Miggs switched on the recorded message.
“Kids, get down,” the loudspeakers trumpeted. “We are USA. Do not run, boys and girls. USA. Fall to the ground, children. USA. Do not run, boys and girls. USA. Get down, kids…”
Beckwith locked on one of the children, a girl. She was screaming. Maybe the loudspeakers were too far away. She wouldn’t lie down.
They only needed to separate the predator from his prey, and the day would be saved. But the hadals wouldn’t run, and the children wouldn’t drop. Instead they all bunched together. Ramp up the chaos, Beckwith grimly thought. Kill more.
Remote-controlled flash-bangs detonated on either side of the column, sparkling like stars. At last the column broke, but not the way it was supposed to. Everyone—hadal and child alike—surged into the minefields.
“What are they doing?” said Miggs.
The sand belched. Figures flew, small and large. The dead and wounded landed on other mines and jumped again with fresh detonations.
Beckwith could only watch as their deadly handiwork took its toll.
Dry lightning sizzled in veins along the ceiling.
“Flares up,” someone yelled.
They lit the place like an opera house. Flares dangled where they caught on rock spurs high overhead, or floated under little balloons.
The Green Barrens chamber was immense. This was Beckwith’s first real look at the place. It spread so high and wide that their lights could not fill it. At the far edges, the false horizon rocked and swayed with shadows.
The desert smoldered. A pall of smoke hung above the kill zone. Screams issued from the ugly murk.
Hardly anything was moving down there. The loudspeakers went on shouting. “Do not run, boys and girls. USA. Fall to the ground, children.”
The children lay on the ground. In the exhausted minefield.
Beckwith stood and tossed the rappel line. To his right and left, ropes arched through the air. Men went racing down the cliff face.
He was in shock. The children were supposed to have lain down. The ambush had gone terribly wrong.
They advanced into the dunes through dust and smoke. The shadows grew long. The flares were sinking.
“More flares, damn it, more light.”
The chamber lit bright again. Beckwith glanced back at the cliff that had been their home for almost a week, and was surprised to see giant glyphs carved into its face. They had arrived here in darkness and this was their first good look at the cliff that had hidden them. Their ledges and caves were part of some inscription. All these days they had been living inside a word.
“Here,” a man said.
Beckwith smelled the blood before he reached the body. Except for boxer shorts, it was naked. The bullets and shrapnel had mangled the thing.
“So this is what Haddie looks like,” someone said.
One of the young guys pressed his rifle muzzle against an open eye, and it blinked. He fired. “Thought so,” he said.
They moved deeper into the smoke, rifles switching back and forth.
“More flares,” said Beckwith. He needed light. The light of day. This place was so dark.
He came to Miggs, standing above a body, facedown. Flat in the sand, he could have been sunning at the beach, his arms and legs, his torso, his thin neck, all hairless and smooth. No monster scales. No horns. No body art.
“They look like us,” Miggs said. “Kind of.”
Beckwith didn’t like it. Something was even more wrong than he’d thought. These were supposed to be the creatures of hell, savage and fearless to the point of suicidal. They had folded too goddamn easily. Was this a head fake? Was there more to come?
“Eyes wide,” someone said. “Watch the flanks.”
“I’ve got one of the kids,” a man called.
Beckwith went over. The remains were little more than a pile of rags. Her legs were gone. Beckwith’s dread mounted.
They walked the line through thickets of dead and wounded. Moans and screams issued from the smoke. “No prisoners,” a man reminded them. “Put them down. All we take are the children.”
Rifles popped in the smoke. Bit by bit, the volume of suffering lessened. Beckwith came to one of their women. She was still alive. Her face was painted red from a head wound. She bared her red teeth and started cursing him.
He lifted his rifle, then paused. He’d never heard the hadal language. In his imagination, it would sound unearthly. But as the words poured from her, strange as they were to his ear, they held a familiar ring.
He knew better than to kneel beside her. The hadal females were furies. Ghouls with total attitude. But she was chopped up and dying and this was his chance to hear her alien tongue. It would be like meeting an extraterrestrial. He hunkered to one side, finger on the trigger.
Wipe the blood away, he thought, and she would look downright human. Where were the beetle brow and the fangs? And weren’t they supposed to be white as maggots? That was always the operative term, “maggots,” as if they were not just another race, but another life-form.
She drew a ragged breath and continued her curse. He listened attentively, like a confessor. For all her defiance, he heard a tone of sorrow. As brute simple as it must have been down here, she loved her life. Beckwith pulled the trigger.
Onward. The children. Find them. He stood.
“Something’s not right here,” he heard a man saying in the smoke.
“This is not good,” said another.
Beckwith found three troops picking through a pile of cheap suitcases, plastic bags, packs, and cardboard boxes. He went cold. Everywhere he looked, the luggage bore Chinese lettering. There were photographs of Chinese families. Passports of Chinese citizens. Chinese newspapers. Chinese money. All Chinese.
“Settlers?” whispered Beckwith. “Chinese settlers?”
That was why they seemed so human. Because they were.
ARTIFACTS
DESERTER/ABSENTEE WANTED BY THE ARMED FORCES
NAME: Ian Lincoln Beckwith Form DD 553
GRADE/RANK/RATE: E-5, Petty Officer, Second Class
SEX—M
PLACE OF BIRTH: Bartlesville, OK
DATE OF BIRTH: 1995/03/06
HEIGHT: 5′9″ WEIGHT: 164
RACE: White EYE COLOR: Hazel HAIR COLOR: Brown
BRANCH OF SERVICE: Navy CITIZENSHIP: U.S.
MARITAL STATUS: S
MILITARY OCCUPATION: SEAL
ESCAPED OR SENTENCED PRISONER: No
REMARKS: Ian Lincoln Beckwith, a member of the United States Armed Forces serving on active duty with NAVSPEWARGRU-ONE, platoon 2, navy SEAL, went missing three days after Operation Silent Mercy concluded. He was a participant in the Green Barrens incident, sector 3, Marianas Zone, involving Chinese civilians. His absence from duty was noted at the time of his unit’s exfiltration, and it is believed he may be hiding in the proximity of the incident. According to regulations, any U.S. special operative who goes missing must automatically be listed as a deserter, not AWOL. Be aware that Beckwith may be suffering from psychotic episodes or bipolar disorder, as he and teammates at the Green Barrens reported delusions and voices concurrent with the incident. Be aware that Beckwith took all weaponry and other field issue with him. He is considered unstable, lethal, and a national security risk.
14
DIALOGUES WITH THE ANGEL, NUMBER 4
“Until the first bacteria tric
kled down to me, I thought the molten rock and fiery gases of the young earth were my only family. Then came these tiny living creatures. I was overjoyed. You’ll be amused. In my eagerness for companionship, I actually thought I was one of them, that they were my brothers and sisters. I lay among those seeps of microbial snot, and listened to them fizz and rustle and feed, and I was convinced they were speaking to me.
“Ridiculous, I know. But useful. Because out of their primordial noise, I imagined whole symphonies of life. I heard epic poems in their warfare, and sang to them, and my grunting became words, and my words ideas. Do you understand? Language precedes thought. In speaking, I began to think. My imagination went wild.
“My next guest was a spider. It had taken a billion years for her to gain her eight legs and come creeping down. It took countless generations for your world to issue that single creature into my dungeon. Have you read Byron’s poem, The ‘Prisoner of Chillon’? (I whispered it to him in his sleep.) It’s about a prisoner learning freedom from a spider.
“When my spider companion died, I wept and my tears were like acid. I thought my chest would break open. For the first time I realized what mortality was.
“So it went over the millennia. One little creature after another found its way into my domain. I delighted in these occasional insects and reptiles and fish. I considered them gifts of the stone, tiny random events—like bubbles in water—that lived to entertain me until they died. I marveled at their scales and pincers and antennae and gills with the curiosity of a child, as indeed I was, an innocent. I treated them as toys. I took them apart. I put them back together. Yes, I created things. Living things.”
“You have that skill, Lord?” asks the disciple. “You can create life?”
“Well, perhaps not create,” says the angel. “But conceive. Manipulate. Enhance. Yes.”
“I don’t understand, Teacher.”
“Are you aware that segments of the DNA on the human Y chromosome form perfect palindromes?” asks the angel. “In other words, the genetic code reads the same forward as backward. Who do you think wrote that? Monkeys with typewriters?”
“You, Master.”