SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

by Jonathan Maberry

  “So how long have you been using that glamour, Miss Hatcher?”

  My stomach leapt into my throat and my heart rate must have tripled. I was glad she couldn’t see my face. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Please. I know a conjured disguise when I see one. Can I give you some advice?”

  My fear soured to irritation. “Can I stop you, ma’am?”

  “You need better scent concealment,” Markey said. “I’m guessing that’s a fake bandage on your hand, to explain the smell of blood, right? But that trick won’t work every month. And you don’t want to get a reputation for being clumsy.”

  My hands were both behind my back, at parade rest, and I fidgeted with my bandaged left palm. “Do you have a suggestion, ma’am? Other than dousing myself with cheap cologne?”

  “Yes.” Markey stood and flushed. “But we should talk in private.”

  * * *

  The COB wasn’t happy about giving up his quarters for our visitor, but the captain refused to have a woman sharing rack space with a bunch of sailors. I wondered what he would do if he ever found out the truth about me.

  Markey interrupted the COB as he and I were preparing to carry his personal effects to a temporary bunk. “Excuse me, Master Chief. I’d like to speak to Seaman Hatcher alone.”

  I winced. The COB looked from Markey to me and back again, his eyes wide. I had no doubt I’d get a good yelling-at later. “Of course, ma’am.” He glared at me. “You know where to find me, Seaman.”

  “Aye, COB,” I said. He shut the door behind him.

  I turned back to Markey, who was already making herself comfortable on the COB’s bed. She kicked off her shoes and rubbed the soles of her feet.

  “With all due respect, ma’am,” I said, “I’m trying to not call attention to myself here—”

  “Relax,” Markey said. “I’m just a crazy dame from Washington. They won’t suspect anything. Now.”

  She reached into her wavy hair and pulled out a bobby pin. Then she twisted the metal – it looked like copper – until it became an impossible shape, and even I could see the energy rippling off its surface like a heat mirage.

  “You’re using a visual glamour,” she said. “This will extend the illusion to mask odors. Just keep it in contact with your skin at all times.”

  She held out the object and I took it with a trembling hand. If Lieutenant Markey could turn a bobby pin into a charged talisman, and if the Navy had sent her, alone, to locate a kraken, she would be one hell of a powerful friend to have.

  She also scared the shit out of me. People who seem too competent always make me nervous.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “This is – I mean, I don’t know how I can repay you.” What I really meant was: I don’t know why you’re helping me.

  “Well,” Markey said, “you can start by finding me some trousers and boots. I don’t plan to spend the next two weeks showing off my legs.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I tucked the hairpin under the bandage wrapped around my left hand. “If there’s nothing else?”

  Markey looked at me with dark, unfathomable eyes. “Tell me how you ended up here.”

  “In the Navy?” That was easy: I wanted to kill Japs. I tried to think of a nicer way to say it.

  “On the Bowfin,” she said.

  I frowned. “I didn’t exactly get to choose my posting.”

  Markey shook her head. “Why disguise yourself as a man?”

  I should have figured she’d ask that. “I knew Uncle Sam wouldn’t let a girl do any real fighting. And that’s bullshit. Pardon my French.”

  “Why do you want to fight?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I gaped at her. “They attacked us! Stabbed their damn aluminum planes through the Pacific defense screens and into Pearl Harbor. I was born in Honolulu. When I saw the photos – all that black smoke filling our sky – I hated them. I wanted revenge, I’m not afraid to say it.”

  I felt my hands shaking, and I folded my arms to hide them. “Not to mention their Nazi pals are killing or enslaving their way through all of Europe. If we don’t stop the Axis, ma’am, they’re going to take over the world, and I don’t want to live in that world.”

  Markey nodded and seemed to relax. “Sorry to interrogate you like that, Hatcher, but I’m never sure whether to trust people in disguise.”

  “Yeah, well, we can’t all look like movie stars.”

  “Don’t imagine for a second that makes things any easier for me,” she snapped. “And I will thank you to address me as ‘Lieutenant’ or ‘ma’am’, Seaman Hatcher.”

  I looked down at the floor, my face warm. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

  “This is not a costume I’m wearing.” Markey touched her uniform. “I earned my rank. I had to fight to get this job, and I fight every day to keep it.

  “Yes, there are advantages to men finding you beautiful, but that perception also limits you. They think all you are is a pretty face and a nice body. They only care about what they can see.” She shrugged. “But I don’t have to tell you how appearances can be deceiving.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Markey sighed. “What you’re doing now is very brave, Hatcher. But when this war is over, you’ll have to go back home – back to being a woman. Have you thought about how you’re going to handle that?”

  “Well, ma’am, since most of my time in the Navy’s been spent cleaning one thing or another, I expect I’ll be well trained to be a housewife.” My words came out sounding more bitter than I intended.

  “You have the talent, Hatcher,” Markey said. “More than that, you clearly have the will. These two things are powerful in combination.”

  This conversation was becoming very uncomfortable. “With all due respect, ma’am, why the hell do you care? You don’t even know me.”

  Markey stood and walked over to me. “I won’t be pretty forever. I’ll get old, and men won’t want me anymore. But this?” She held up a hand, then snapped her fingers to create an illusory flame bobbing in midair. “The talent will be with me until the day I die. And to know that, to have that and not use it for something good – that would be such a waste.”

  I couldn’t decipher the expression on her face. Was she feeling some misplaced maternal pity for me? Or did she have another agenda?

  After a moment, I decided I really didn’t care.

  “Thanks for the advice, ma’am,” I said, “but we both have to survive the fucking war first.”

  The floating fire winked out. “Dismissed.”

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  * * *

  I did my best to avoid Lieutenant Markey for the next several days. It wasn’t easy, since we were both stuck on the same three-hundred-foot, sixty-person submarine. And it wasn’t that I didn’t respect her. She clearly had major pull in OP-20-G to rate a teleport halfway around the planet. But she was calling as much attention to me as she was to herself, and I didn’t need that kind of exposure.

  Fortunately, she spent most of her time in the control room or the conning tower, doing whatever she did to track down the mythical kraken, and I was assigned to the aft torpedo compartment. The captain had decided we would fire the fish from there once we were ready to wake the beast – we’d be facing away and ready to run like hell.

  Markey had brought aboard divining bolts to replace the magnetic detonators in our Mark 14s. The magnets were supposed to explode a torpedo right underneath a ship’s hull, causing more damage than a broadside impact, but the damn things had never worked right. Markey’s instructions were to replace the magnets with D-bolts, which would make our fish detect monsters instead of metal.

  The plan was to find the kraken, poke it with a couple of torpedoes, then skedaddle before it was fully aware of its surroundings. The kraken’s reported location was close enough to populated areas that it should – should – hear the noise from those cities and move toward Japan instead of anywhere else. />
  Working on the torpedoes occupied me for most of the time, but Markey’s questions kept bugging me. What was I going to do after the war ended?

  Maybe I wouldn’t survive. Maybe that would be the best outcome for everyone: if I died in the line of duty, and my family didn’t find out until later what had happened to their daughter – that she’d given her life for her country.

  Maybe they’d be proud of me. And maybe the good ol’ U-S-of-A would stop questioning our loyalty then.

  I hadn’t thought about my future in a while – not since I first enlisted. It had always angered me to know how limited my options were, and now I was angry at Markey for reminding me, for making me worry about things I couldn’t change. That’s what I was thinking about that day, when the COB pulled Roseler and me out of the torpedo bay for another special assignment.

  * * *

  “We’re submerged in hostile waters, less than a hundred miles from enemy shore,” the captain said as I climbed into the conning tower. “We can’t surface, and we can’t outrun anything that swims. Anything goes wrong here and we are fucked.”

  He was talking to Lieutenant Markey. Roseler was already crowded into the tight space around the periscope. I handed him the Bowfin’s codex, which I had retrieved from the control room. He gave me a clipboard and a frantic look as I wedged myself into a corner next to the captain and the COB. It didn’t seem like all five of us needed to be here, but I wasn’t going to debate that.

  “This will be a one-way tunnel,” Markey said. She might actually have looked better in trousers than a skirt. I tried my best not to feel jealous and failed. “There’s no danger of us being detected.”

  “But why does Rosebud have to do the spell?” the COB asked. “Aren’t you the professional, Lieutenant?”

  “Seaman Roseler is doing the easy part,” Markey said. “We don’t have a focus object, so I’ll need to guide the far end of the tunnel.”

  The COB did a double take. “You’re going to be his crystal ball?”

  Markey sighed and looked at the captain. “We can spend all day discussing the finer points of scrying procedure, Captain, or we can get this done.”

  “Carry on, Lieutenant,” the captain said.

  I made as little eye contact with Markey as possible while she read off map coordinates for me to inscribe. I joined our target location and Bowfin’s mantic signature into the spell, combining sonants and inflects from the codex reference tables and triple-checking each finished sequence. In principle, writing up the scry tunnel was simpler than describing a teleport path, but I did not want to be on the hook if this thing went sideways.

  A few minutes later, Roseler and Markey were holding hands, their eyes closed as Roseler recited the full incantation.

  Next to me, the captain muttered, “I’ll be glad when we’re done with all this black magic bullshit.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  He glanced over as if noticing me for the first time. “Your family have talent, Seaman?”

  I thought of my grandmother. She had introduced me to the occult, sneaking some mystical instruction into my language lessons every week. We never told my parents. They would have disapproved, to say the least.

  I said, “Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

  “Thank fucking God,” the COB said, on my other side. “Give me science and engineering any day of the week. I don’t trust anything I can’t take apart and see how it works—”

  Roseler started screaming. It came suddenly, without even an intake of breath, and the sound was inhuman. He shrieked like an animal caught in a trap. I dropped the clipboard and covered my ears with both hands.

  “Get the doc!” Markey shouted. “We need a tranquilizer!” Roseler’s body began convulsing. She wrestled him to the deck. “Hatcher! Help me hold him down!”

  The captain leaned down the ladder and yelled for the corpsman. I jumped over him and grabbed Roseler’s shoulders. His eyes had rolled back into his head. He was still screaming, and his legs kicked around despite Markey’s iron grip.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” the COB asked.

  “He made contact!” Markey said. “Dammit, COB, you didn’t tell me he was a sensitive!”

  “How the fuck were we supposed to know?” the COB said.

  My stomach knotted. Not because I was concerned for Roseler, but because I was afraid if he died, Markey would order me to incant her spells.

  “As you were, both of you!” the captain said over the screaming. I could swear Roseler hadn’t taken a breath in more than a minute. “Doc’s on his way. Now how do we—”

  Roseler stopped screaming. His mouth closed, then opened again, and he said a word which was not a word.

  My head exploded with pain. No, pain’s not the right thing to call it. It wasn’t just that I hurt. When that not-word entered my brain, suddenly nothing in the world seemed right. What I saw, what I heard, what I felt – from the dinner I was still digesting to gravity itself – everything was wrong, and my body wanted it to stop.

  I saw the captain fall to his knees, clutching for a handhold. A dark stain spread across the front of his trousers. Behind him, the COB vomited all over one wall of the compartment. Markey doubled over, blood dripping from her nose.

  Roseler’s lips parted again. I slapped both hands over the bottom half of his face before he could make another sound. He kept shaking, and the only thing I could think was: I’ll kill him if I have to. How do I kill him? What’s the fastest way to kill him?

  “Good,” Markey grunted, pressing her hands over mine. She turned her head and spat out a mouthful of thick, dark blood. “Keep him quiet until we can sedate him.”

  “What the fuck just happened?” I asked.

  “Our intel was wrong,” Markey said. “They’re not kraken.”

  Some small part of me was happy that she’d screwed up. Most of me wanted to shit my pants. Then my brain finished processing Markey’s words.

  “Wait, ‘they’?” The urge to empty my bowels increased. “There’s more than one?”

  * * *

  By the time the corpsman had chloroformed Roseler and tied him down to the bunk in Markey’s quarters – she ordered him gagged and isolated; nobody argued – I had finished collecting all our gear out of the conning tower and cleaning it off. The captain and the COB had changed into fresh uniforms and regrouped in the control room. They argued with the XO in low tones as I stowed the codex above the weapons station, locked the safebox, and returned the key to the captain.

  I was just about to leave the control room when Lieutenant Markey came in, blocking my exit. Her face and uniform were still smeared with blood. Most of the officers and crew looked away. I backed myself into a corner and did my best to seem small.

  “Two knots, Captain,” the helmsman whispered. We had been running silent since we made contact with the monsters.

  “Very well,” the captain said. He turned to Markey. “Lieutenant, what are these torpedoes going to do to the kraken?”

  “I’m aborting the mission, Captain,” Markey said.

  The captain frowned. “Come again?”

  “We cannot disturb those things,” Markey said, lowering her voice. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Oh, we’re moving,” the captain said. “But we did not come all the way into the goddamn lion’s den just to have a look-see. We are going to do some fucking damage before we leave.”

  “Aft tubes loaded, Captain,” the weapons officer said behind me.

  “The intel was bad,” Markey said. “Those are not kraken out there. They are Elder Things. Two of them.”

  “Older than what?” the XO asked.

  “Elder,” Markey repeated. “Not ‘older’. Elder Things.”

  I didn’t recognize the name, but ‘elder’ usually refers to something supernatural that’s had centuries to develop its powers. And that’s always bad news.

  “That’s not real descriptive,” the XO said.

&nb
sp; “They are unlike any other life form in creation,” Markey said. “We don’t know what to call them, except... Things.”

  “I don’t care what fucking kind of sea monsters they are,” the captain said. “I just want to know what’s going to happen when we wake them up. The Mark 14s have a nine-thousand-yard range—”

  Markey stepped closer and glared at the captain. “I don’t know what will happen if we disturb those Things, Captain. But it’s going to be at least a thousand times worse than what happened to Seaman Roseler.”

  “I don’t care,” the captain said, “as long as it happens to the Japs and not us. Now how far away do we need to be when we shoot off these fish?”

  “No,” Markey said, her voice tight. “Elder Things are not just monsters. They are the worst monsters ever. They are beyond imagination. You saw – you felt what a single word in their language did to us.”

  I shivered at the thought of what might have happened if we hadn’t silenced Roseler. The sounds and symbols we use for magic aren’t human – they’re ancient, prehistoric – and we don’t even understand how most of them work.

  “Cults have worshipped Elder Things as deities – Old Gods,” Markey continued. “Do you understand? The mere sight of one can cause madness. If these two Things wake up, it could mean the end of the world.”

  The XO grunted. “You just said you didn’t know what would happen. Now you’re saying it’s Arma-fucking-geddon. Which is it, Lieutenant?”

  Markey replied without breaking off her staring contest with the captain. “We don’t know exactly how bad it would get. But I am not authorized to take that chance. And neither are you, Captain.”

  “Then you get authorization,” the captain said. “Use a comm spell to contact your superiors.”

  “I can’t,” Markey said. “We’re too deep. Too much water, too much iron.” She touched a pipe above her head. Both of those substances restricted the range of any enchantment. It was tough enough for me to maintain my glamour in this steel tube; there was no way she could send a message through several hundred feet of seawater.