by Lee French
While he concentrated on what the dragons saw, one of the soldiers tapped him on the shoulder and leaned in to whisper to him. “We can lure one or two down here and ambush them. I speak the language.”
Finding the plan better than anything he’d come up with so far, Bobby nodded. “The other choices are waiting for my partner to reach us, or making lots of noise.”
The soldier frowned at that and flicked his eyes back to the rest of the group. He nodded and led Bobby to the huddled group. They welcomed him to join with only a sidelong glance or two. “Sarge, we can set up an ambush, wait for cavalry, or go guns blazing.”
Sarge was apparently the one with the cut up feet. “Ambush for as long as we can, then switch to guns blazing. We’re here, we should take advantage of that fact to take this base out.”
“That ain’t really my mission.” The moment the words came out of his mouth, he knew them to be a complete lie. Klein said it would be full of traps. He never used words out loud that demanded the deaths of everyone inside. His meaning had been clear, though, and Bobby had been stupid not to realize the true purpose of the mission. Obviously, they had been sent to verify the cave was full of bad guys, then kill them or make it easier for someone else to kill them.
He wasn’t cut out for this stuff. For the first time, with his eyes on Sarge, Bobby realized that his daddy’s job had been, more or less, killing people and not being bothered by it. How so many managed to handle it seemed more unbelievable than how many fell apart like Matthew. Clenching his jaw, Bobby nodded. “But let’s do this. Call up for them whenever you’re ready and I’ll take care of it.” He broke apart into the swarm and surrounded the ladder hole, spread out in the darkness and ready to engulf whoever dropped down into the trap.
The soldier called out with a request of some kind. Bobby heard the men upstairs mutter to each other. A chair scraped on the floor and one squatted beside the ladder hole. He called out in response and the soldier answered him. The man grumbled and climbed down the ladder.
Bobby waited until he had reached the ground and taken two steps away from the ladder. Dragons flung themselves at his face, intending to do tiny acts of violence to his eyes and neck. The man opened his mouth and one dove inside, shooting down his throat to shut him up. It reminded Bobby of digging around in Dan’s shoulder to get that bullet out back in Salt Lake.
Killing a man happened to be easier from the inside than the outside. Bobby didn’t want to re-form after the dragon on the inside burst out through the man’s chest, mostly because he feared he’d throw up, which wouldn’t help anything right now. The dragons, though, found the new knowledge invigorating. They shoved Bobby aside to get the job done, surging through the hole and diving at all four men at the table at once.
Streaking back through the place, the dragons went wild, gleefully forcing themselves down throats in small groups and bursting out through chests and stomachs. They found Stephen, who watched dragons explode out of two men with a stony expression, one he couldn’t read. Not that he cared. Bobby managed to wrest control back and re-formed on all fours, violently heaving up what little had been in his stomach.
“I see you found something worthy of killing all these men,” Stephen said as he crouched down beside Bobby, offering the canteen. His words came out gentle, without judgment.
Taking the water, Bobby spat out bile, then sat back up on his heels. His mouth tasted horrible. A mouthful of water swished around and spat out helped that. “They were holding some soldiers, five. Back thataway.” He jerked a thumb to indicate the direction.
Stephen nodded. “Give me a dragon to lead me, and I’ll meet you outside.”
“All them on the way here dead already?”
The vampire’s mouth went thin. “Yes. I assumed the dragon getting all excited meant I should.”
“Yeah. Okay.” He popped a dragon off his thumb, and it whirred off with instructions to show Stephen where to find the soldiers. Bobby got up and stumbled to the entrance, hand on the wall to steady himself and trying not to look as much as possible. He kept going until the cool air outside slapped him aside. Falling to his knees, he clutched his face with both hands. “What’d I do?”
He could feel them, the weight of their tiny minds pressing on his. They didn’t understand. “A life is a life,” he said aloud, trying to explain to them because he knew they could hear it, and he didn’t feel coherent trying to think it at them. “I ain’t saying these guys didn’t deserve to die, but we ain’t s’posed to be judge, jury, and executioner all at once. It ain’t right to just take it all in our hands. Claws.”
He pushed his hands up and through his hair, winding up with them grabbing the hair at the nape of his neck and tugging on it. “I’m the one in charge, you hear? Y’all are part of me, I ain’t just another bit of you! I’m made of dragons, you’re parts of me. You do what I tell you, not whatever you want.”
His arms dropped to his sides and he stared up at the impossibly starry sky. It looked about the same here as at the farm. Maybe it was different, but not enough that he could tell. Right now, he should be there, not here. No one there would ask him to kill anyone. Not only would they not think he would in the first place, but if they did, they’d actually ask him not to kill anybody. How many men did he murder in that cave? He had no idea, and no intention of going back to count.
How was he supposed to look anyone in the face now, most especially himself? He had to remember that he came here for Jasmine, for all eleven of the ones they couldn’t save. This was for them, because he and Stephen were sure if they could just get the damned suits to trust them, they could find out where those eleven had been taken and get them out. There wasn’t supposed to be all this killing, wasn’t supposed to be anything like this. When Privek said they’d be doing missions, he thought it would be a lot of spying, watching people and reporting back and not thinking. So stupid, he was so stupid. Both of them were monsters. Privek saw that and deployed them accordingly.
“I gotta be in control. I’m the person here. Y’all are just little pieces of me, and ought to act like it. Nobody else dies on account of me ‘less I say so, and that’s that.” Until he could be sure they’d listen to him, he was a danger to anyone around him, even those soldiers, but he had no idea what to do about that. He heaved a heavy, despairing sigh and got to his feet, keeping his back to the cave entrance.
“I should report in,” he heard Stephen say as they stepped outside. Bobby’s dragon trilled and zoomed over to reattach to his thumb. “Can I get your names and ranks to let them know who we have? ”
“Buffalo Soldiers Sergeant Riker and Privates Hansen, Carson, Platt, and Hegi. Tell them like that. The rest of our unit is dead, so far as we know.” Bobby recognized Sarge’s voice.
Feet slapping the earth filled the silence that must have been Stephen putting on and activating the earpiece. “Cant and Mitchell reporting in. The cave has been cleared, we found five men.” He relayed the names, as Riker told him to, then paused. Bobby glanced back to see Stephen carrying Riker on his back. The other four looked around, maybe just happy to be outside, maybe trying to unsee all those gruesome dead bodies. None of them looked at him, he could tell that much for sure. “Yes, Riker is injured, they’re all beat up and probably dehydrated. We don’t have enough water to walk through this come daylight, but we’ll get as far south as we can.”
“You heard the man,” Riker barked. “Move out.”
“Bobby, let’s go.”
He sighed again and stayed staring off into the darkness. “I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t oughta go back.”
“I will admit the cave is nice and cozy, but the decorating isn’t to my taste, and it’s definitely a fixer-upper.” Stephen left a short pause, then dropped the jovial tone. “At least walk with us, Bobby. We can talk later.”
Rubbing his chin, Bobby nodded. “Yeah, I reckon.” He turned and followed along behind the others, trying not to think much. His belly started to rumble angrily wi
thin a minute, and he bolted two of those gross protein bars without tasting them. As he stuffed the second wrapper in his pocket, it occurred to him that he maybe ought to offer the other bars to these guys. Then again, they seemed alright, and it would probably be better for them to get real food instead of this crap.
“Is it okay to ask…” One of the four Privates said it tentatively, and the statement hung there without him finishing it.
“No, it’s really best if you don’t,” Stephen answered. “It would be even better if you forget we exist. Because we don’t. We’re figments of your imagination to be redacted from any retelling of this event that only sort of happened.”
“Understood,” Riker said. “Whatever happened in that little base, we didn’t see it. Hansen wasn’t tied up very well and managed to free himself, at which point we discovered we were clear to leave. Anyone have a problem with that?”
“Why’s it gotta be Hansen?”
“I got double jointed thumbs.” Hansen held up his hands and demonstrated the unusual way he could bend his thumbs. “All of you owe me your freedom,” he grinned, “because without me, you’d have all starved to death down there.”
From there, they fell to joking. Bobby listened in and couldn’t figure out how they could see all that and move on so effortlessly. Maybe it had to do with their lack of involvement in the…butchering. They’d probably seen a ton of gruesome bodies before. Beyond that, freedom had to taste plenty good enough to ignore it all. As he’d done several times already, he rubbed his face with both hands. Imagining what Momma would say about all this didn’t help in the slightest. Substituting Lily in there made things worse.
The thp-thp-thp of a helicopter nearing jarred him out of brooding and he looked up to see the lit up bird dropping down nearby. The soldiers rushed while Bobby slowed. He stopped dead a good forty paces away, watching two of the men climb in and help Stephen get Riker up and strapped in. Stephen turned and noticed Bobby. The vampire rolled his eyes and nodded to get Bobby to join them.
That look, the one that suggested Stephen considered it stupid for him to hang back, made him move. He couldn’t say why, exactly, but his feet jogged over and he grabbed on. The helicopter lifted off without waiting for him to sit down or strap in. That was fine. If he fell, he’d just fly alongside. In a lot of ways, hanging out felt good, like someone blasted him with sand to scour away a layer of him, the layer that couldn’t handle it all.
Did he want to be that guy? The one who could do something like that and move on? Was it enough that they deserved it? Did they ‘deserve’ it? What right did he have to judge something like that? He could only wonder if men like Klein thought about all the lives they ordered others to take for some greater good, if he wondering whether he’d done the right thing kept him awake at night.
About an hour later, the bird set down in a smaller camp than Klein’s. It had most of the same features, and Bobby forced himself to follow his nose to the food. He ate mechanically until his belly filled, then found a rock to sit on and stare at nothing. Orange and pink announced the impending sunrise, and he watched it climb up over the horizon.
By all rights, he ought to be tired. His mind buzzed with the things he’d seen and done in that cave, from the first corpse to the last, and all their innards. Some of those things, he’d never wanted to know what they actually looked like, because they belonged on the inside. Of course, that bothered him a lot less than the rest of it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Stephen’s voice, muffled by the cloth protecting his face from the sunshine, came from behind him.
“I ain’t even got any blood on me. I oughta have a little, a few smudges or something.”
“I expect all the stains are on the inside.”
Bobby had no answer for that. He scratched his chin, the stubble rasping against his fingertips.
“I reported in, Klein is ecstatic. As part of the report, I informed him we aren’t interested in continuing to pursue these sorts of missions. He pouted, but said he’d pass that along.”
“How d’ya know he pouted?”
Stephen chuckled lightly. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard anyone pout over the phone.”
The slight change of subject brought out a bare hint of a smirk. “Can’t say as I have. Had girls roll their eyes at me over the phone, though.”
“This is sort of like that, only more amusing to listen to.” The vampire let silence hang between them as he moved closer and sat on the next rock. “I won’t lie to you, Bobby. You scare the crap out of me. I can kill people pretty easily, but only one, maybe two at a time. Right now, I’m wondering if you could kill me by crawling down my throat and ripping your way out. A massive amount of damage? I might not be able to heal that before I bleed out. I’m not actually afraid of you, though, because I know you’d never try it unless I needed to be put down.”
Nodding, Bobby tried not to take it as a stinging indictment. “Did those men need to be put down? ”
“I really don’t know. I’m fairly certain that, if given the chance, they would’ve tried to kill us. They would’ve failed, though, so I can’t say where the balance there is. Is it justified to kill someone who shoots me? What if he only points the gun? How about if I only know he would but kill him before he can? Does that really make either of us any better than paranoid serial killers? I just have no idea.”
He paused and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I do know this is a war zone, and in war, it’s us against them. No matter who’s right or just more right, we have to pick a side. Staying neutral back home is fine, but staying neutral out here isn’t possible. We chose us, so they want to kill us, and out here, that means we kill them first so they can’t kill any of us. It sucks, but that’s war.”
That did pretty well sum up the whole situation. “You think I’m being a whiny pansy-ass twit.”
“No,” Stephen laughed, “I think you’re being human. But then, we aren’t really human, are we?”
No, they sure weren’t human. If this whole thing didn’t show him that, nothing could. “We back out now and they’re gonna come after us.”
“Probably. I propose that if our request to be utilized differently is refused, we make for Albuquerque to meet Hanamidi’s daughter. From there, Roswell is probably the next stop.”
“We should go back to the farm and get reinforcements for Roswell.”
“Or send someone else, yes, good point.”
“There probably ain’t nothing in Roswell, though.” Glad for the true change of subject, Bobby thought about it. “I mean, they got tourist stuff there. It’d be kinda dumb to keep a secret base or whatever in a place what gets so much traffic.”
“Yes,” Stephen nodded thoughtfully, “it’s more likely to be in some kind of Area 51.”
Huffing out a light snort, Bobby shook his head and grinned. “That ain’t really real, is it? ”
Also amused, Stephen smirked. “It’s probably not called that, but yes, I assume we have at least one secret installation somewhere that pursues projects best kept away from public opinion.” Gloved fingers of one of his hands drummed idly on his knee. “You know, I’m curious why they decided to put us out in the real world instead of doing this whole thing as a controlled experiment. It would have been easier to get us to do whatever they want if we were all raised to just be soldiers.”
That notion hadn’t coherently occurred to Bobby, but now Stephen said it out loud, he agreed. “Momma said she was part of a program, they helped her clean herself up. Lots of women were in it, though, and she was the only one what got knocked up that she knew of. Maybe…” The gears turned in his head as things fell into place and made more sense than they had before. “She said it was still a new process then. What if that was the best way they could think of to try lots of times? I mean, look, we’re all from all over the country, right?
“Momma was born and raised in Atlanta, she ain’t never left much, and didn’t say nothing about going far
away for that testing stuff. I got the feeling Lizzie and Dan ain’t never been outta Arkansas, Javier and Tiana was from LA, Alice was from San Francisco, and on and on. So, say they done did this in lots of places, hid it as a ‘social program’ on account they were helping women. Heck, it mighta even been part of the war on drugs stuff. Momma said they offered to get me adopted, but she said no. Maybe the ones what the momma decided to keep ‘em, they couldn’t do nothing about. Maybe it weren’t something they thought about before starting the program.
“But more, what if they didn’t have no idea what we’d turn into? If they didn’t know if it would rightly work, maybe they didn’t know what would happen when it did work. Momma also said they told her to watch for ‘anything unusual’. She thought they meant sickness. Maybe they did mean sickness, and this was a big surprise. Ain’t none of us got picked up until recent-like, and all of us started having superpowers around the same time. What if…what if they picked the four of us—me, Jayce, Alice, and Ai—by random offa that list because one of us what got their superpower came to their attention already by then?”
Stephen kept his mouth shut, letting Bobby ramble until he finished. “We’re all in a small age range, eighteen to twenty-two. They may have had to cut something because of funding issues, and chosen our program, viewing it as a failure. This is all just guessing, though, Bobby. It could be a lot more sinister than you think.”
He had a point. Bobby shook his head anyway. “You know, I didn’t do so hot in school or nothing, but it seems to me that most of the time in the real world when science gets used like this, it’s less ‘I wanna take over the world’ and more ‘I wanna see what happens’.”
“Fair point. But where did they get the DNA they crossed with human to wind up with us?”