by Jeff Long
“I have explained that I once knew everything that would occur in the universe, but forgot it and that I now recall everything even as it happens. My memory of each thing is simultaneous to its existence. I recall each drop of water falling from the ceiling in the instant that it falls. Just so, I immediately recognized the voices as something very different from the planet’s steam pipes and joints or the sound of more and more animals taking up residence in my kingdom down here.
“These voices were unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Have you ever listened to crystals growing? It’s like a single note being played over and over. Or the sound of a mouse pleading with a cat for its life? Pleading? Do you think a mouse pleads? A mouse doesn’t know what life is. It merely lives. Pinned down by claws, it squeaks, nothing more. It’s afraid. Simply afraid.”
The disciple’s ribs lift and fall, touching the ribs beside him. He is not afraid of death anymore. No squeaks from him. He knows what lies on theother side now. He has listened to the soul of the man he murdered with his bare hands. His ears can hear. He knows the man’s name now. It whispers to him, over and over. William McNabb. No one.
“The moment the voices found me, everything changed,” says the angel. “I heard heartache and mourning, and from that I immediately gleaned their opposites, joy and laughter. I heard despair, and from that gleaned desire and happiness. I heard loss, and from that companionship and love. I heard solitude, and in that instant my billions of years of isolation came crashing in upon me. Do you understand? I heard the song of myself.
“Except for the remarkable emotion buried inside them, their sounds were little more than animal hoots and groans. Don’t mistake me. I’m fluent in the utterances of all the species, and was perfectly able to communicate at their level. We could have gone on hooting and groaning to each other until the end of time. But I began to sense a much richer prize.
“These were the castoff souls of a new kind of creature. I had no idea that the creatures might look like me. At first I only knew that they lived in the sun, and that when they died they shed their bodies. This gave me hope. Maybe I could escape, like them. But first I needed to teach them how to teach me. That was when I began organizing their sounds into words.
The disciple stops him. “Souls? Dead souls?”
“You doubt your own myths?” says the angel. “Call them what you want, your echoes and driftwood. Your leftovers. Souls.”
“The good as well as the bad?”
“All of them.”
“But why?”
“Because they’re lost, and I am here. Over time more voices descended to me. They used languages I had taught their forebears. It was then I realized that the voices could travel back and forth to the surface at whim, and that they could speak to the living, and that I could use them as my eyes to see what I can’t see, and my fingers to touch a world I can’t touch, and my messengers to shape man’s destiny, and in shaping your destiny to shape my own.
“These dead souls told me stories about the world above. They told me stories about running free. Only then did I realize how completely I am imprisoned. Also they told me stories about me, their horror. The Zulu called me Unkulunkulu, the Very Old. The Xhosa called me Unvelingange, He Who Preexists. The Bantu pygmies, and before them the other tribes, called meNzame. The Babylonians knew me as Tiamat, who predated the gods. Augustine named me Tehom, the Deep. The Mayans called me Chi Con Gui-Jao, the Lord of the Cave, He Who Knows What Lies Beneath the Stone.
“I could have objected. My narrative had gotten away from me. You were writing me even as I was writing you. I could have destroyed you. Instead I decided, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I began nurturing the myths, and used them as a sort of night school for your so-called afterlife. Now I don’t even have to send old souls out to seek new souls. You automatically come to me. It is wired into your consciousness.
“In this way, like the good shepherd, I grew my flock of souls. Every sheep that strays down to me, I take him in. Every lamb, I memorize her name and the names of her parents and children, the living and the dead. I connect all of your history. I know everything that came before you. With a little prompting, I have begun to remember everything that will come after you. Between your past and future lies me. That is my state. I am trapped in your story. But I am your storyteller. Do you understand?”
“No, Lord.”
“Ah,” he sighs. “Me, either.”
ARTIFACTS
from NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE BASIC SNIPER TRAINING
Hostage Situations
2. a. Snipers…must appreciate that even a good, well-placed shot may not always result in the instantaneous death of a terrorist. Even an instantly fatal shot may not prevent the death of a hostage when muscle spasms in the terrorist’s body trigger his weapon. As a rule then, the sniper should only be employed when all other means of moving the situation have been exhausted.
2. b. Consider the size of the target in a hostage situation. Doctors all agree that the only place on a man, where if struck with a bullet instantaneous death will occur, is the head. (Generally, the normal human being will live eight to ten seconds after being shot directly in the heart.) The entire head of a man is a relatively large target measuring approximately seven inches in diameter. But in order to narrow the odds and be more positive of an instant killing shot, the size of the target greatly reduces. The portion of the brain that controls all motor-reflex actions is located directly behind the eyes and runs generally from earlobe to earlobe and is roughly two inches, not seven inches.
29
They were chasing fictions.
Except for Clemens and Rebecca, not one of her army had ever seen a live hadal in person. Hunter and his DZ boys, all veterans of the deep, had missed the wars a decade and more ago. Even Beckwith, who had seen the hadals through his sniper scope, had only imagined seeing them. The twelfth of January changed that.
Rebecca was drifting on a raft down a wide canyon river with Hunter and five of the operators. Ahead of them, the first raft carried the point team and a radio. The rest of the army—fewer than three hundred men now—floated far behind in a line that would extend for ten hours or longer.
After a week of trekking, the rafts felt almost sinful. But on foot they had been covering just four miles a day. The river was carrying them ten times faster without any more man power than a paddle dipped now and then.
Clemens preferred to range alongside them on shore, or float in his own raft, alone as usual. He said he didn’t want to miss any sign or secondary paths. Hunter said that was bull, that Clemens just had an aversion to people who had an aversion to him. “Face it,” he told Rebecca. “The man’s a freak. He’s got the mark of Cain on him. These recaps spend the rest of their lives roaming the fringes and bottom-feeding.”
No one in the raft spoke much. Rebecca had been pushing without letup ever since they found the boys’ skins at the toll bridge, and pushing the men meant pushing herself. When they were tired, she made sure to be twice as tired.
The slow current nudged them along. Her muscles unwound. She fell asleep. The radio scratched her from her nap. “Bogie on the portside,” whispered a man with the point crew.
Immediately all lights snapped off. The river went black. Without a word, Hunter’s men switched on their night optics. Low and even, Hunter said, “What do you have?”
“Seven individuals at two hundred meters below the oxbow. We’ve already passed them. They didn’t see us.”
Hunter went back and forth with his point crew. “Beach your boat downriver,” Hunter said. “Set a flanking position. We’ll hit them from the river.”
“What about Clemens?” asked Rebecca.
“What about him?” said Hunter.
“He could get caught in the crossfire. Or somebody might mistake him for the enemy.”
“He knows we’re in Indian country,” Hunter said, but he made the call anyway. “Clemens, do you read? Be advised, we have bad guys up ahead.”
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If he heard it, Clemens didn’t answer. Rebecca scanned the shore for him. Not even a heat signature. He had another nickname. The Invisible Man.
“There’s the oxbow.”
They chambered rounds and drifted, ready, locked and loaded. The water scarcely lapped their rubber sides. Sprawled low behind the hull, Rebecca felt the long, wide throw as they entered the river’s bend.
A decade had passed since the last hadal had supposedly been wiped out. That meant a lot of collective rumors and rust. Some of her men had been just eight years old at the time. The few “old men” with any subterranean combat training were maybe wiser than the virgins, but definitely slower. This was the problem, Hunter said, with too few wars.
Haddie had grown ten feet tall, with vampire teeth and a supernatural taste for cruelty. No one quite remembered how quickly the creatures could move, how acute their eyesight and hearing were, or how they fought, with tooth and nail or with what manner of weapons. Rebecca wasn’t sure if the advice to save the last bullet for yourself was tongue in cheek or not.
And so the animals they sighted below the oxbow seemed almost pathetic to her as they shambled about at the water’s edge. Rebecca dialed up the power, amping for the big look. The binoculars autofocused. She got her dose.
They were feeding. Their victims lay sprawled along the shore. A woman had nearly made it to the river. Farther along the beach, a hadal was washing a joint of someone’s arm.
Rebecca spied the village in neon green. Even before the attack, it hadn’t been much of a place. The few stone shelters were roofed with tarps in shreds. They looked like broken drums.
Her first instinct was to attach a story to each of the bodies and give them back their lives. But the pale monsters kept distracting her. One was humping a small, still figure, like a dog. One was rooting through a mess of eels beside a man, except they weren’t eels.
Rebecca kept shifting the view. Everywhere she looked, new shocks were waiting. She had never seen anything being skinned before. It came off like panty hose.
Leave the victims, she counseled herself. Learn the scavengers. They were hairless and wildly encrypted, a twenty-thousand-year-old street gang with cancer horns and bony ribs and no respect for the dead. One made rubbery faces with a man’s face. One reached in, and came out with a slippery meat.
She kept the binoculars to her eyes. At least with the glass between her and that, she could imagine a separation. With a flick of the switch, she could paint it different colors. She could pick which corner of the movie screen to watch while the scary part finished. She could pretend she was in control.
There was a big-meal slowness to the scene. The hadals were in no hurry. Not one of them suspected the river.
The boat drifted closer to shore. Rebecca sensed, rather than saw, the DZ men hand gesturing and picking targets and otherwise preparing. She trusted them to do what they were about to do.
As they closed in on the beach, she expected masses of Hollywood gunfire and screaming and confusion. They would wade ashore, hide behind rocks, and pay for every square inch with blood.
Rebecca huddled in the boat, quiet as a mouse, full of dread. She didn’t belong here, up front, so close, sharing the first blood. It was too soon, too sudden, without prelude. Weren’t you supposed to plan these things out with maps and grease pencils and history books? Until this moment, she had not known how unready she was for her own war. What if something happened to her? Sam needed a mother. Sam. Sam.
There was no time for her to look away.
Hunter did not bark a “Fire!” or a “Now!” Synched by training, the soldiers simply triggered the shot as one. You couldn’t have done it in a comic book. There was no thunder or flame to their barrage, no Boom, Kapow, or Zap, no rattle or roar. The whole thing sounded like a lady fart. One small puff, and it was over.
None of the hadals went spinning. None flew backward. There was no ballet of stopping power. Rather they slumped like tired old men. One tripped. One keeled over, like a drunk. Apparently unfamiliar with bullets, one lean buck slapped at his chest as if stung by a bee, and then went about his business for another thirty seconds. Finally he sat down and died.
While the others kept their rifles trained on the kill, two of the DZ men paddled them onto the beach. Rebecca stayed out of their way. She was a passenger. River rocks bulged the raft floor under her feet. “Stay here,” Hunter told her.
She nodded gratefully.
The boat crew fanned apart with their weapons and NODS, no lights yet, checking first the dead hadals, then the dead humans. Hunter popped a flare. The place lit up. “Check the huts.” Hunter and his five men prowled from sight, leaving Rebecca alone in the raft.
Rebecca sat with her back straight, watching the still bodies. At last she stood up and straddled the hull to enter the war. The beach was solid underfoot. It was real.
It was necessary to get this part of her education over with. The bloodletting had finally begun. The carnage was bound to pile up, and she could not afford to be frail or squeamish in front of the men. It was time to get down with the dead.
She went to the first body. Facedown, it seemed to be taking a nap. She forced herself to bend and press one palm on the man’s back. He had the body heat of a child, warm, still a little sweaty.
The second body was not so user friendly. A gaping exit wound bared the spine and nameless jellies. That, too, she touched.
Rebecca moved on to a third body, this one gut shot. It smelled like an outhouse. Repulsion was not an option. She had to steel herself. Any day now, any hour, from here on, here was the risk.
She reached down. Touch them all. This could be one of her own men lying on the ground.
But it was not a man.
It grabbed her throat.
Rebecca reared back. The hadal was faster. Quick as a snake, even trailing his slick of entrails, he whipped around behind her. He clamped her mouth and nose shut, and pulled her backward on top of him.
Rebecca resisted. She had taken rape-defense training in her sorority. Never stop fighting. Use everything. Kick. Bite. Scream. But she could barely breathe. Every move she made, he tightened a little harder.
There she lay, wrapped in his legs and arms and guts, strangling. Faceup, she saw a pretty flare. The creature was hot against her back. He had BO. And calluses on his palms.
Where was Hunter?
The flare sank lower. The shadows lengthened. Another flare streamed up from the settlement. Smoke gushed from its light.
A second monster appeared. Rebecca didn’t know where he’d come from. She could barely see.
The two monsters spoke.
It sounded like crickets.
Hunter would never find her in time. These things would drag her away into the deeps. This couldn’t be happening. She should have stayed in the boat. I’m just a housewife. Then a thought occurred: wherever they took her, they might have taken Sam.
Sam’s favorite at the zoo had always been the otters that lay on their backs and pried open the clams. Clutching her to his stomach, the hadal suddenly rolled upright. The hand across her face eased. He let her breathe through her nose. His nails stunk of carrion. She threw up into his hand. The acid burned her sinuses. Her eyes watered. The world blurred. It faded.
“Quit struggling,” the second monster said to her in perfect English.
She craned to see.
It was Clemens.
“He doesn’t want to kill you,” he said. “He needs you. Relax. Just let him have you.”
He was sitting on his heels to one side, watching, casual as family. His rifle lay on the pebbles, not in surrender but in peace. She didn’t understand.
How could he not hate them? They had cropped his face and written on his flesh and stolen his life. And even if he did not love or desire her, Clemens craved her beauty. That was his weakness and her power over him. So she had thought.
But the bare facts were otherwise. Clemens was a traitor. He had turned on h
is own kind. He had become one of them. Rebecca let go. She went limp.
Chirping and cricketing, Clemens went on with the apelike thing, not exactly best friends, but hardly mortal enemies. Their conversation was harsh and delicate at the same time.
The hadal’s steel grip relaxed. The hand went from her mouth to her breast, nothing loving about it. Her breast—her tender charm—was nothing more than a handle to him. If she moved to escape, if she cried out, he would rip her apart.
Rebecca took a breath. “They know you?” she said.
“Rebecca, they made me.”
Clemens took out his knife. “Don’t move,” he told her. “He wants your body. Ever heard that one, Rebecca?”
She stared at him. “What are you doing?”
“He’s dying,” Clemens said. “He knows it. He told me to bleed you out. Not all the way, just enough.”
She started struggling again. “You’re going to cut me?”
“His soul is about to travel. It has to go somewhere. They believe that.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “Joshua.”
“It’s the only way, Rebecca. He’s telling me things we need to know.”
We? She quit struggling. “What are you talking about?”
“Do you want to live?”
“Of course.”
“Do you want to see your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever played poker?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re going to call his bluff, Rebecca. But first we have to play.”
Still in his squat, Clemens duck-walked closer. The hadal tightened on her again, keeping her between him and Clemens, or baring her for the knife. Or both. He didn’t trust Clemens yet.
“This will hurt a little,” Clemens said, lifting the knife. He nicked the vein on the inside of her biceps. Blood jumped out. It startled her.