He jumped up and shrieked. His mind became disjointed, fractured. He struggled to beat back the sense of madness that flooded his brain as a mental dam broke inside.
The baby – simply – wasn’t.
And never had been.
He had spent hours talking to a phantom, carrying the ashes of a dead child in its car seat all those lonely miles from Brooklyn to Queens.
His mind fought back: No, no. There had been a baby. Something must have happened while you were in the apartment. Something must have happened …
But he knew better. No matter how much he wanted to believe otherwise, he knew better.
The baby had never been alive.
And for a second time, the horror of realization swept over him.
He beat the sides of his head in anguish.
A dark shape moved overhead, flapping against the blood sky.
His hand fell to the gun.
Sergeant Zach Miller saw the gremlins on his third night shift.
One was scampering along the wing of a skeletal C-130 transport plane that hadn’t yet gone to its aviation afterlife. The creature seemed spry and boisterous despite the grey growing on its scales. It was taunting another – who was in hot pursuit – with a chunk of chicken.
The pursuer slipped and tumbled on the aircraft’s fuselage. It fell to the dry Arizona dirt below. Dust and gravel burst upward around it with a hushed ffmp. The fallen critter shook a boney claw at its tormentor, “That’s my goddamn dinner, you jackass!”
“Oh, really?” the tormentor said as it rubbed its butt against the meat and farted.
The fallen started screaming, “You bastard! You rotten bastard!”
Miller shifted his weight from one leg to the other, grimacing with discomfort.
“Shit,” Miller said to himself. “They do look a lot like scaly, lizard-faced chimps.”
The gremlins turned at the sound of his voice.
The fowl-holding two-foot-tall something-on-the-wing grinned, holding out its stolen slab of farted-upon butt-meat.
“Chicken?”
The day Zach Miller got blown up had been hot.
Hellish, in fact.
Miller and his squad were supporting a larger operation to clear out a suspected opium manufacturing center. The road they traveled was only a road in the sense that it had been burdened with enough foot and vehicle traffic to beat back any form of vegetation. Dust and dirt much like the Arizona earth that Miller would later find himself on shot up around the troops’ feet in hushed chufs.They marched in staggered formation, scanning the area for threats, fully aware of the fact that doom could come anyway and from anywhere.
Then, it did.
The world exploded.
Miller was knocked on his ass.
There was a sharp, high-pitched crack and a low thrum – the deepest bass note Miller had ever felt. The chaos dissolved into silence. He worried that his eardrums had ruptured and checked the sides of his head to see if there was blood. His gloves came away clean.
Miller shouted to his squad through the thick brown cloud that enveloped him. They were his men. They were under his care. Many just boys, eighteen if they were a day.
The squad yelled back.
They hadn’t been anywhere near the IED. They were fine. Shaken, but physically fine.
Gunfire, then. Probably one of the privates, Miller thought, firing into sheds and shacks nearby. Letting loose high-caliber hell on anyone who might have triggered the bomb.
Confusion and anger were a dangerous combination.
Need to be careful. Don’t want to hit a civilian.
Miller had that enlightened idea a split second before he looked down.
His left side was a sheet of red. Blood pooled around him. Numbness. He assumed he was in shock. Understood he was in shock in a distant way. The terrifying idea of a destroyed dick entered his mind, but a pat with his hand relieved him of that fear.
He was all right. Alive. He’d been cut up, but the wounds weren’t deep. The damage, Miller wrongly assumed, was from flying debris he’d taken at a distance. He thanked an insurgent’s itchy trigger finger for that. He was lucky. Really lucky. The bomb had gone off too soon.
Miller took inventory.
Head fine. Chest fine. Abdomen fine. Right arm fine. Left arm fine. Crotch fine. Right leg fine. Left leg…
His left leg looked as though it had lost a fight with a deli slicer. He was meat. Worse, shrapnel from the bomb had impaled his thigh and calf in a terrifying zig-zag way. The skin above his knee bloomed like fleshy flower petals. Small spires of metal stood erect in his flayed muscles. Blood spurted and poured.
As his hearing returned, so too did his body’s physical senses.
Miller screamed.
He wasn’t fit for active duty.
The news was terrible, but not unexpected.
At best he had a slight limp. On bad days, he couldn’t walk.
He was broken.
With no prospects and no family to support him, Miller stayed on. Quitting didn’t suit him. Hell, he’d volunteered. He believed in being one of the Good Guys. He wanted something. Anything.
“Got a spot for a night guard at Davis-Monthan Base. The Boneyard, as folks call it,” his assigning officer said. “Arizona. Nice and dry. Climate should help with your leg, maybe – I’ve got arthritis, humidity kills me – and it’s quiet.”
Miller nodded in his seat, not quite responding in kind to the officer’s smile. If there was something to say, he couldn’t think of it. He absent-mindedly rubbed his left leg.
“You’d be on guard duty. Nothing to get a boner about, but still in the family. Watch the planes. Make sure no kids get in to mess with crap. Keep it as quiet as it always has been.”
Miller nodded, eager to have a place.
“They like farting,” Duffy, the base’s aging mechanic, told Miller. “You know why as well as any twelve-year-old might. It’s hilarious.”
Duffy was the one person Miller had developed a friendly relationship with. The cause seemed relatively simple: they both kept weird hours.
The old wrench monkey tossed a smoking cigarette butt into a trash heap, glaring at the mess with a look that almost dared it to catch on fire so he could either stomp or pee it into submission.
Miller turned his eyes from the potential blaze and focused on Duffy. “So, you’re telling me that all the little gremlins that pilots thought they saw – during World War II and Korea and Vietnam and whenever – are real. And they have decided to retire here like Florida-bound Jews because it’s where their old planes ended up.”
“Yep.” Duffy nodded without looking at Miller.
“It was my leg that got screwed up, not my head,” Miller said. “It’s not like a friggin mine went off in my helmet.”
Duffy shrugged. “You’ll see them soon enough. And when you do, try not to make them mad. Or annoyed. We don’t bother them, they don’t bother us. Generally. They’re tired. Old. Maybe you don’t understand. Wouldn’t expect you to. You’re young. But trust me, sometimes, you just want quiet.”
The gremlins didn’t attack him.
They made fun of him instead.
“What’s wrong with your leg?” the one holding butt-chicken on the airplane wing asked. “Is everything in that crap body limp?”
The gremlin on the ground snickered.
“I got blown up,” Miller said. “IED in Afghanistan.”
“Not impressed,” the one on the ground said, shaking his head. “Was a guy here a couple years ago who lost both legs and an arm after being shot down in Iraq. Had metal implants all over.” The ground gremlin studied Miller and then looked up at his pal. “What’d we call him?”
“Iron Man,” the gremlin on the wing said.
“Oh hell! I can’t believe I forgot! He was great. Brought food out sometimes.”
“Well, you’re old and stupid and you smell bad so forgetting is perfectly natural.”
“Bite me.”
> The gremlin on the wing jumped down and promptly did. Not hard. Just a playful nip. “And I will make you suck my farts before this night is done, I swear.”
The bitten gremlin threw a claw up in a back off gesture, “OK, fine, whatever. What do we call the new meat? I still want my damn chicken by the way.”
“Not going to happen. I claimed it, rubbed my beautiful behind on it, it’s mine. As for the new meat … Hmm.” The butt-chicken gremlin tapped a long nail against the scales on its chin. Click click click. “Stumpy?”
The bitten gremlin rolled its dark green eyes. “Man’s still got both his legs”
“Ffffff, uh … oh! Lefty! Bum left leg, we’ll call him Lefty.”
”Yeah … yeah, all right, that’ll work for now.”
Miller shifted his weight again, wincing. He’d been on his feet for far too long.
The scaly ones regarded him with a general wariness. It wasn’t hate. It wasn’t annoyance. It was a look that said, We’ve seen guys like you come and go and we don’t have a single reason to trust you. He hadn’t freaked out, hadn’t pulled a gun – that was all good. But still, he was new. And new could be scary.
Miller felt strangely comfortable around them. They were pranksters. Chuck Jones cartoon characters. Not harmless, but not aggressively violent, either.
“You want to sniff my ass or something to get to know me better?” Miller asked.
The creatures turned to face each other and broke into hysterics.
“Maybe you’re all right, Lefty,” one said between cackles.
Miller smirked. “And what do I call you?”
The chicken-holder stepped forward. “We don’t use names, ourselves. We go by smell and scale-distinction. But, some of you hairy apes gave us names a while back. You can call me Einstein.” He bowed. “My clumsy compatriot here is Faraday.”
Faraday started to bow as well, but then used the distraction of conversation to snatch the chicken butt-meat from Einstein’s claw. He smirked and then bolted deeper into The Boneyard.
“Son of a bitch!” Einstein screamed before giving chase. “This is your goddamn fault, Lefty! I will make you suck my farts!”
They evacuated with haste, loping along like excited simians.
Miller smiled.
Dinner (or whatever the meal was supposed to be – the night shift had destroyed Miller’s sense of time) was a weird amalgamate of mashed potatoes, rice, lumpy fat and something that could be mistaken for turkey medallions if a man squinted enough.
Miller asked for seconds, then thirds, anyway.
He wanted to bring Einstein and Faraday a treat.
He didn’t know why, precisely. He just did.
The base’s aging, corpulent cook leaned over the counter and pointed his words at Miller. “I know you’re the new night guy. And you know you’re not supposed to feed them, right? They’re like pigeons. Bosses don’t want nobody giving handouts to the things. Bad enough they get the run of the airfield after dark. Rotten, filthy. Don’t want to encourage them. Freaks.” Spittle flew from his jowly mouth. “If I had my way, we’d be painting the trucks with their freak blood.”
The cook gave Miller a grave stare.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Miller said.
The cook furrowed his brow. “We’ll see about that.”
Miller shrugged and sat down next to Duffy.
“Be mindful of that one,” Duffy said. “Guy’s a moron , but don’t turn your back on him. There are stories, oh yeah, there are stories. No reason to make enemies. You’re too new to make real enemies here. Off the record, not many here’d blame you for friending the gremlins or feeding them. They’re nice enough if you listen. Play along. Stay loose. Don’t get serious. They got great tales. Some of them, the oldest, are hundreds of years along. Crazy.
“But the cook? Sometimes, like with a stupid dog, you have to let a man chase his own tail around till he bites his own ass and snaps outta his lunacy. All he sees is asshole, but he doesn’t know it’s him.”
Miller raised his cup of root beer. “Amen. You should have been a preacher.”
“I shoulda been an at-home Erin engineer and stayed outta this militaristic crap,” Duffy said as he shoveled a spoonful of turkey mush into his mouth. “Miller, just be sure the bastard doesn’t bite you instead.”
“I’m not really scared of a fat old guy,” Miller said. “The Iraqis couldn’t kill me. The Afghanis couldn’t kill me. What’s he gonna do?”
Duffy looked solemn, and a little disappointed. “You know what they say about oldies like the cook? They’re survivors. That don’t mean honorable. But if they ain’t dead, they been dodging it.”
Miller nodded silently.
And then he started sliding food into small plastic bags hidden in his pockets.
“Grub has definitely gotten worse since the fifties,” Einstein said as he glared at the goop dripping from his claw. “Food got worse, security got better – otherwise we would steal our own stuff from the mess hall. What in unholy hell is this, precisely?”
Miller shrugged, “Enjoy it. Gotta be better than armadillo brisket or whatever junk it is you creeps usually eat. And I obtained it for you at great personal peril. An obese man-thing kept staring at me like he wanted to toss me in a broiler. Didn’t have many kind things to say about you, for that matter. Made noises like he wanted to splatter your green hides all over the field.” He looked out upon the great circle of elderly gremlins that sat amongst the metal bones of World War II bombers. “Still, better than baked bugs, yeah?”
“Not by much,” Copernicus, the oldest of the old gremlins, said as he licked mashed-something from his reptilian jaw. “Before I leave this world, I would very much like to chew on that fat cook. He’s been making our lives difficult for a long time.”
Dozens of greying gremlin faces nodded in the light of the fire they sat around.
“Bear this in mind, Lefty: You might be marked,” Faraday said.
Miller raised a quizzical eyebrow.
The little monsters turned their attention to the friendly sergeant.
Faraday cleared his throat over and over, making sure to get everyone’s attention. “We all agree that Miller’s on the up and up, right? Been bringing us food for like a month. Hasn’t tried to shoot us. Didn’t scream that first time. No shooting, no screaming. He acted … civil to us. Acted all right, right?”
Gremlin eyes looked to the cooling desert floor and the heads that housed those ocular appliances began to nod.
“All right, glad we agree!” Faraday said, overcome with enthusiasm. “You’re fine by us, Lefty. We like you. We want your help. And we want to help you. And we have some info for you. But! I’ll only tell this story if you”–he pointed to Miller –”promise to get us all some girly magazines. The ones with the females who totter around with their milk glands out. We like those. At least, Einstein does.”
There was tittering and chuckling among the greying male gremlins.
The females hissed.
Miller nodded. “Whatever I can steal from the bathroom.” The mission was silly, but some part of his brain considered the task with grave seriousness.
Faraday looked to Copernicus, who nodded his approval. Then he turned back to Miller.
“The cook deserves to die,” Faraday said. “Do you know why he’s here? We know why you’re here. You’re a delightful sort of an idiot who doesn’t know when to call it quits. But with you, Lefty, that’s almost endearing. As for the cook … do you have any idea what he’s done?”
There was no way Miller could answer that question in the affirmative, of course, so he sat on the ground and shook his head.
“Didn’t think so. You’re a kid. Too young. Anyway, that crazy cook was moved out here because he’s a goddamn murderer. A serial, compulsive, murderer. Capital-M murderer. He killed other humans and your army pushed him under the rug like unsightly dirt.
“When he started screwing with us, we started di
gging up goodies on him. Turns out the guy served actively from age eighteen to forty-five. That’s a lotta years to rack up a body count, lemme tell you…”
Miller frowned at this. His mind jumped back to Afghanistan and Iraq before that. He, too, had joined when he was eighteen. In fact, he’d served on the frontlines just shy of ten years. And while he’d never kept an accurate kill-count, he was acutely aware of what the wonders of technology could do on a battlefield.
Some of the gremlins were staring at him. Others were watching Faraday intently. Their ears flicked back and forth with the narrative as a cat’s might when certain words were annunciated.
Copernicus was staring at the night’s stars.
A strange image leapt to the front of Miller’s brain.
The gremlins. Black figures on an enormous pier in the sky waiting for flying whales to come and ferry them off somewhere else. To guide them to lands of life.
“In Vietnam, he killed two of his own guys because they wouldn’t shoot civilians. He killed seven civilians himself,” Faraday said. “He had more ‘accidents’ and ‘collateral’ murders in other combat zones across the world. Man, he took the top off some Iraqi kid’s head because of a ‘cartridge misfire’ during that proto-war you probably watched in awe as a baby. Then he shot the mother because she presented a ‘potentially hostile’ threat.” The gremlin made little quotation marks in the air for emphasis. “They gave him an apron and moved him here to keep things quiet after that.”
“Why do you care, exactly?” Miller asked, surprised at the curtness of his own voice. “You jerks have tormented and killed pilots, brought planes down for generations. That’s kind of what you guys do.”
“No,” Copernicus said, turning his gaze from the sky. “We’ve only ever played on the arms of your aircraft. We never destroyed anything. We never brought any to the ground. We never hurt anyone.
“You have to understand that your machines are interesting to us. We never developed a way to fly, but you did. You didn’t grow anything – like the birds or the dragons or the gargoyles – but you built wings. We wanted to feel the cold wind on our scales. We wanted to look down on the world that we have merely run through and see things the way the others might.” Copernicus paused, considering his words. “We are some of us philosophers, even if our boisterous, freewheeling nature gets out of hand occasionally.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 7