by Lee French
“Yeah. You make eight. If Turtle’s still alive.”
“I’m here,” a voice called out, reedy and in obvious and extreme pain. “Sort of.”
Great, just great. Bobby leaned his forehead against the door, trying to cool the rage in the dragons. His own anger worked against him. Before he went on another murdering spree, though, he wanted to be able to say they’d deserved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. “Why ain’t they just killed ya?”
The first voice huffed out what might have been a laugh if he had more energy for it. “I think these sonsabitches just like torturing us. They ask questions, but it doesn’t matter what we answer. Might as well be asking what time it is for all they seem to care about the answers. Face facts, kid, you’re in for a long, slow, painful wait for the day when they finally decide to let you die.”
“Butler got out.” This voice came from a cell deeper down the hallway, and had a mild East LA accent
“Butler killed himself,” the first guy snorted.
“How long you guys been down here?”
“Who the fuck knows.” The first guy coughed, it sounded wet and unpleasant. “Shit, I’m spitting blood again.”
Now, he’d heard enough. The swarm burst violently out and poured through the window. Dragons attacked the other doors, pulling, pushing, burning, and scraping. They ripped apart hinges and handles, and the doors fell into the hallway with clangs that had to echo up the stairs. Men would come, soon, to investigate the noise. The swarm flowed to the only exit—the stairs he’d been brought down—to ravage whoever came down. He had enough presence of mind to send five dragons to get Stephen.
Frothing, burning rage carried the dragons through the entire building, spreading out to make sure no one escaped. They churned through every human in the building, except those seven prisoners, and Bobby let them do it without reservation. Whatever had happened to those men down there, it had been gratuitous and cruel and unnecessary. What happened to Riker and his men almost seemed reasonable and justifiable in comparison.
When Bobby re-formed in the middle of the worst of it on the ground floor, he could hear Stephen outside the door, probably there to get better reception for his earpiece.
“Cant and Mitchell reporting in. There are seven wounded men here. The building has been cleared. So far as we can tell, there’s no one else in this town. None of these men can walk on their own, so we need on-site evac and it’d be best if you send at least one medic to bundle them up for travel…I didn’t get names. Some of them can’t talk in their current condition, and the ones that can aren’t in good shape. It’s questionable whether they’ll all actually survive until you can get someone here…You maybe want to inform the evac people that the site is—” He coughed. “They should be prepared for carnage.”
Bobby stared at his handiwork, empty inside. “Carnage”, Stephen called it. This time, he had no urge to throw up and no idea what that meant. Maybe he’d been born for this, designed by those scientists to be an unstoppable killing machine. Up until this trip, he’d thought of the dragons as scouts, not machines of death. Now he knew better.
“We’ll do what we can,” Stephen said, still talking to Klein, “but we aren’t medics and have no idea what will make things worse. In fact, it might be in our bests interests to leave before anyone gets here. They’re in the basement.” He stepped back inside. Bobby heard more than saw him. “Are you okay?”
Yeah, he was all full of peaches and sunshine. Bobby’s expression went sour as he noticed his stomach growling. At a time like this, surrounded by bodies destroyed by his dragons, he was hungry. “No.”
“Maybe you should get some air.” Stephen headed for the stairs. “I’m going to do what I can to make sure these guys last until help gets here, but then we should go.”
He could turn his back on all of this and put it behind him. No one expected him to do more than he already had, not even Stephen. He rubbed his face with both hands and heard his daddy’s voice in his head, telling him to stop being a weak, lazy lump. Fleeing now would be just that: fleeing. Momma didn’t raise a coward, and he could face this.
He stepped over a charred pile of shredded meat and pulled a protein bar out of his pocket. “I want to see them.”
“Didn’t you see them already?”
“No, we weren’t looking. Kinda focused on bad guys.”
Stephen glanced over as they took the stairs down together, his eyes flicking from food to face. He said nothing, though. They reached the bottom and the vampire pointed at one door.“That one’s the worst.”
Nodding his understanding, Bobby stopped before he could see inside any of the doors and let Stephen go ahead. Despite his certainty upstairs, he hesitated now. The vampire continued on and disappeared into one of the cells, unruffled by any of this. It seemed that he had no problem stomaching anything he hadn’t caused himself.
Bobby frowned at the ground, trying to figure out what bothered him more about the men down here than what he’d done upstairs. He didn’t do any of this. He couldn’t have prevented it. He hadn’t failed to act. Someone did, someone could have, someone had, but not him. What, then, was he afraid of? He stood there, trying to figure it out and listened to Stephen talking to one of the men.
“They’re on their way. No idea how long it will take. I think you’re in decent enough condition I could move you, but I’m not sure it’s wise.”
“It’ll probably hurt a lot.” The other voice was that Bronx guy. “Then the medics will come and do more. Yeah, maybe I should just stay put. How’s Turtle?”
“Turtle’s screwed, that’s how he is.” Turtle sounded worse now, as if his condition had deteriorated since Bobby last heard him. His breaths came out ragged and labored, and every word cost him something to force out. “Would you guys tell my mom I’m sorry I didn’t listen to her when she begged me not to join?”
“Tell her yourself,” Bronx called back.
Turtle made a noise that could have been a strained laugh or a stifled sob. “Not likely.”
Either Stephen or Bronx muttered something too low to be understood, then the vampire paced out of that first room. He paused in the hallway and looked over Bobby questioningly. He opened his mouth to say something, but stopped and closed it, then shook his head with a sigh and went for the next room.
Whatever his intention with that, the gesture made Bobby’s feet take him to the first room, where he looked in and saw a cell no different from the one he’d been tossed into. Bronx wore a pair of khaki pants ripped off at the knees and nothing else. He sat with his back against the far wall, covered in dried blood and dirt. His left foot—Bobby knew was no other word for it than “mangled”. If he had to guess how it’d been done, he’d say someone shoved it into a meat grinder, then let it heal that way. Strangely shaped burn marks and acid scars covered his chest. They chopped three fingers off his right hand and split the big toe on his right foot in half. Bobby’s brain refused to figure out what had happened to the man’s right knee, but it looked wrong.
That didn’t even qualify as the worst. “Hey,” he said to Bronx, because the man noticed him there. “I’m, uh, the guy what was in that cell.” The dragons wanted to burst out and kill those men all over again. And again and again, until nothing remained but pulpy piles of sludge.
“You busted us out?”
Now, he wanted to throw up. Swallowing bile back down, he gave a vague little nod of his head with a shrug of his shoulders. “Yeah, with Stephen. It was kinda an unplanned jailbreak kinda thing. I weren’t rightly expecting what I done found here.”
Bronx’s mouth lifted in a strained, lopsided smile. “Thanks, man. I dunno how you did it, but you did.”
Looking down at the floor, Bobby scuffed a boot and tried not to show what he actually felt. The damage done to this guy’s body repulsed him, and hated himself for it. Pity filled him for what he’d go through starting tomorrow, and he hated himself for that, too. Worse, he couldn’t figure out what to say.
Everything that came to mind seemed stupid or pointless. “Wish I’d’a been here six months ago.”
“You and me both.” Bronx coughed. It might have been a laugh. “I figure I’ll be in a wheelchair when I get home, but hey, at least I won’t be here or dead, right?”
“Yeah, that’s something.”
“It’s okay, man, I know it’s hard to look at. I been living with it for a while and I don’t want to look, either.”
“There anything I can get you?”
Someone else called out, “You got a girl in your pocket?”
Bobby got a ghost of a smile. “Nah, sorry. If it makes you feel any better, though, I ain’t got laid in a while, neither.” He cringed, not sure if that was an okay thing to joke about, not sure if it even came off as one.
Bronx cough-chuckled. “Big damn hero like you doesn’t have ‘em lined up around the corner? Must be doing something wrong.” Bobby also heard a few pain-spiced sounds of amusement from the other rooms.
“Yeah, I reckon so. Guess I gotta brag more or something. Any of you got girls back home already? ” Was this helping? Talking to them about stupid crap—did that help, or make things worse? He had no clue, but at least, he supposed, he had them thinking about something besides their own misery.
“I got a wife,” a new voice said, strained and kind of soft. “She was pregnant when I left. I have a little girl I’ve never met. I guess I’ll get to spend some quality time with my girls now.”
“I had a girlfriend,” Hispanic said, and he sighed. “I expect she’s long gone by now.”
“I got a girl back home, but she’s…” Bobby paused and breathed, trying to get the anger to drain down. None of that was for Lily, he only had frustration about her. “Man, it don’t matter. I don’t think it’s gonna work out anyway.”
“Oh, come on,” Bronx cajoled. “What’d she do? Bite your dick? Sleep around? Get pissy about you joining up?” A few of the others echoed his interest, trying to get Bobby to open up and tell them what happened.
It made no sense to him. Why did they want to hear about his love life? All that seemed stupid and petty compared to what they’d lived with for the past few months and would deal with for the rest of their lives. Enough of them piped up and urged him, though, that he told them. “She was married right outta high school, the guy was some kinda bigger damn hero than me. He come over here in the Army, I think, got himself killed a few years ago. She’s got his little boy, and she’s still in love with him. Last time I saw her, she called me by his name. Ring ain’t there, but it is, you know? Private First Class Thatcher, might as well be Saint Sebastian for her.”
“Thatcher?” Hispanic asked. “The wife is a hot brunette with these kinda funny blue eyes?”
Bobby blinked a few times. Bronx beat him to answering. “From the look on his face, I’d say that’s a ‘yeah’.”
“Huh, small goddamned world. Thatcher was in my unit when I first got here. We were both green as shit. He had a picture of her he kept in his helmet. Didn’t even know the baby was going to be a boy. Good guy. He got off easy. Pushed me out of the way and took the hit that shoulda taken me out. No idea why. If I had a girl like that back home, I wouldn’t have done that.”
Now he knew how the guy died, and it made things worse. He was a real hero, the kind Bobby wasn’t and would never be. “Thanks, I feel tons better now,” he grumbled. Rubbing his face with a hand, he sighed heavily and tried not to think about her. It didn’t work.
Bronx cough-chuckled again. “I think you done a little better than saving one guy.”
“I guess that depends on how you look at it.” Bobby glanced at Bronx and shook his head. “Pretty sure she ain’t taking me back after I left like how I did.”
Several of them laughed at him, and he decided they’d more than earned the right to do it. It all faded away into coughing and then quiet until he could hear Stephen murmuring to Turtle in that second room. Bobby had a thought to try another subject to keep them entertained. When he opened his mouth, Stephen’s voice rang out.
“I’d really appreciate if you guys could convince Turtle he wants to live.”
The request forced Bobby to move, bring him to the doorway where Stephen sat with his back against the wall, unhappy and exasperated. The other guy’s body had been broken in so many ways Bobby couldn’t even comprehend what they did to him to make it happen, or how he’d managed to survive this long. A long list of thing that guy could never hope to do again filled his head, starting with walking and rolling through everything imaginable that would be fun. In his opinion, the man ought to be allowed to die if he wanted to.
“Turtle,” Bronx called out, “you still got your mind. Whatever they did to your body, they never took away what’s in your head.”
Whatever happened to a man’s body, it didn’t have to happen to his head. Bobby stood there and thought about that, wondering if it rightly applied to him. Was he still the same guy as before? No, not at all. A month and a half ago, he had a decent job and didn’t cause any— Except for how he went over and punched Mr. Peterson in the face for what he did to Momma. If he had the dragons then, would he have killed the man? Did he blame the dragons for his own anger? If all they did was make it more obvious and easier to give in to, what did that really mean?
Vaguely, he heard Turtle respond. “Like none of us has nightmares every night, like any of us is ever going to be okay. I’m not— I’m not strong enough for this.”
He opened his mouth for Stephen’s sake, not Turtle’s. “I ain’t rightly sure what comes after. I been raised to think it’s Heaven, that we all get to see folks we lost and be happy all the time and all that. More I see and do, though, more I wonder if’n that’s true. There’s lots of things that’re just as likely as what the preacher done told me, including nothing. I know you done suffered a lot, and I don’t think nobody’d really blame you for wanting that to end.
“Thing is, what if there’s a girl waiting to meet you, maybe in the hospital or something, or a doctor what needs to see what happened to you to make some kinda leap in logic or something to make a new kinda thing for a kid what needs help? What if you’re stronger than you think and it ain’t a nightmare ahead of you?”
He felt cheap and slimy for trying to talk Turtle into living. The guy was crippled, wouldn’t have a real life ever again, and Bobby plain didn’t have to ever consider the prospect of facing that. If he got mangled up like that, he’d go swarm and re-form and everything would be put back. He had no right to try to guilt someone else into living with something he’d never have to.
Turtle didn’t answer. Stephen looked up at Bobby in surprise. It was in his expression; he could tell Bobby only said all that to try to spare him, and couldn’t decide how to feel about that. The vampire looked back at Turtle and sighed heavily. “It’s your life, your choice.”
Unwilling to watch the guy choose, Bobby walked away and peered into the next door. He paused and nodded to the guy there, then moved on to the next one and continued until he reached the last one. Most of them had similar problems as Bronx. One of them lay unconscious, breathing with a wet raspy sound to it. He might never wake up.
“Somebody tell my mom this isn’t her fault,” Turtle rasped.
Bronx answered, voice shaky, “Yeah, I will. Rest well, buddy.”
A gasp came from Turtle’s room, then a little moan with no pain in it. “Thank you,” he whispered.
Bobby hurried for the stairs to get away from that. He and Stephen needed to get the heckbiscuits out of here and move on to the next mission. That one would be simpler, and they’d handle it and move on, and it would only take a few more until Privek would let them in. They’d find Jasmine and free her and go home.
Outside the door, he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, wishing he could unsee everything inside. The dragons still wanted to destroy people, or was that him? Either way, he only held them back because they’d already killed everyone here.
Stephen stormed out a few minutes later, throwing the door open hard enough to tear it off the hinges and send it flying several feet away. He didn’t want to talk. It seemed to Bobby that he needed a trenchcoat billowing out around him to go with that angry swagger. The vampire took to the air and Bobby followed him as dragons, keeping them all out of arm’s reach, just in case. For both their sakes.
Chapter 8
The flight to the next target lasted long enough for Bobby to get frustrated by his failure to collect his thoughts into true coherence. He wanted to specifically not think about what had happened at that warehouse. More than that, he needed to exact revenge for it, yet all those responsible had already been killed. That minor detail irritated him, and he flicked it aside.
Of course, all these people, the ones who lived here and thought the same way and looked the same and followed the same religion should be held responsible. They hadn’t prevented it, they hadn’t stopped it, they hadn’t condemned it. The only way to save more lives, the lives that mattered, would be to kill them all. None of them deserved to live, and all of them had to die to protect Jasmine and Liam and Paul and the rest.
They descended on an armed compound. Neither Bobby nor Stephen cared about double-checking on the mission. Not this time. Both had frustration and anger to vent, and nothing could stop them. Since all of these people bore guilt, Bobby wasted no time with scouting.
Stephen started on one side, and Bobby went from the other. They moved through it and slaughtered everyone, meeting in the middle. Bobby re-formed in time to watch the dragons that made up his hands burst out through the chests of three different men, all of them screaming as they fell to the ground.
It didn’t bother him. These men had tortured Bronx and Turtle and Riker by proxy. Given the chance, they’d do the same thing to someone else. The fact they found no American soldiers here meant only that they hadn’t managed to capture any for whatever reason, or the ones they captured were already dead and the bodies disposed of. These people had blood on their hands, he knew it.