Blood on the Page: The Complete Short Fiction of Brian Keene, Volume 1

by Brian Keene

  The woman smiled.

  “Three miles that way,” she pointed down the road, “is Al-Qurna. Is believed to be Garden of Eden, where Adam came to pray to God. Today it is, how you say— destroyed? Paving stones are broken, the walls full of bullet holes. The eucalyptus we call Adam’s tree is dead. Every generation is taught that this was true Garden of Eden and this was Adam’s tree, where he first spoke to God. Now is ruined.”

  “What happened to it?” Bloom asked.

  “Saddam,” she answered.

  At the name, the man spat on the ground.

  “The Baath party built shrine,” the woman said, “for pilgrimage of tourists. After last time Americans come here, Saddam punished Al-Qurna for supporting you. They drained the water. Now the walls and floor of the shrine are cracked. The Garden is mud. Children fight with dogs there. But village elders will help you. Seek for them. Just do not go in the shrine. It is no place for uniforms and weapons.”

  “I understand,” Myers assured her. “We’ll be respectful.”

  Bloom gently asked, “Do you believe it’s really the Garden of Eden?”

  She was quiet, and Bloom worried that he had offended her. Then she nodded.

  “I am Muslim, and I believe. No harm shall come to you there, from any Muslim. The Koran say ‘if the Muslims capture them and take them to a place that has been prepared for them, they should not harm them or torture them with beatings, depriving them of food and water, leaving them out in the sun or the cold, burning them with fire, or putting covers over their mouths, ears and eyes and putting them in cages like animals. Rather they should treat them with kindness and mercy, feed them well and encourage them to enter Islam.’ The village elders are Muslim, so this they believe, too.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Myers said.

  She smiled. “In Al-Qurna, you shall find rest.”

  • • •

  “I liked her quote from the Koran,” Bloom said as they approached the village. “Reminded me of the way my Grandma used to quote the Bible.”

  Before the others could reply, gunshots rang out, followed by a woman screaming. Four more gunshots echoed in rapid succession, and then silence.

  “What the—”

  Four white SUV’s roared over the hill and slid to a stop behind them. The tires gouged trenches in the mud. As the Americans pulled their weapons, nine figures dressed in black uniforms, their faces covered with black scarves, leapt from the vehicles, brandishing rifles of their own.

  “Fuck,” Myers screamed. “It’s the Fedayeen!”

  “Hold your fire,” a voice called.

  The old man who they’d passed on the road before the storm, stepped out from behind one of the vehicles.

  “Hold your fire,” he said again. His English was clear, and though he spoke softly, they could hear every word. “If you shoot, your friends die.”

  There was a commotion behind him, and several of the Fedayeen pushed forward, shoving O’Malley, Jefferson, and Williams ahead of them. The three were bound, and had been beaten badly.

  “Drop your weapons,” the old man said calmly, “or they die, and then you join them.”

  Cursing, Bloom considered their options. They were easily outnumbered. Myers must have realized the same thing, because he reluctantly ordered the others to lower their rifles.

  Bloom put his hands up and turned to Myers. “Just remember the part of the Koran that the woman quoted to us.”

  As their hands were bound behind them and their rifles were collected, the old man smiled at him.

  “Here, we do not read the Koran. Our book is much older. Come, we will show you.”

  • • •

  Bound, gagged, and beaten, the Americans were brought to a building in Al-Qurna, and then herded through an underground passage in the basement beneath it. The

  complex beneath the village was staggering in its size. The prisoners soon lost all sense of direction as they were shoved down a maze of winding passageways and tunnels.

  Finally, they came to a bunker built out of white sandstone. They were crammed together into a tiny jail cell with a red door and a rusted grate window that looked out on what could only be an interrogation chamber. Aside from the bloodstains on the floor, and a pile of dried feces in the corner, the only other thing in the cell was a coffee can for

  a toilet.

  The men stood together in a tight knot as the door slammed behind them. When the bolt clicked into place, they realized that Jefferson was still outside

  “What are you going to do with us?” O’Malley demanded through split lips. “I’m in command of this squad and I demand to know!”

  The old man peered through the bars in the window.

  “What we are doing? Electric shocks. Cigarette burns. Pulling out of fingernails, castration, rape, cut off your eyelids, your lips, hang you by your limbs from the fan in ceiling. Beating you with cables and hosepipe. Or maybe Falaqa, yes?”

  “What’s Falaqa?” O’Malley asked.

  “We beat the soles of your feet with metal rod.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Sanchez muttered. “I got calluses.”

  “We will cut them off first,” the old man said.

  Williams stepped forward. “Hey, douche-bag. Ever hear of the Geneva Convention? You can’t treat prisoners of war this way. They’ll try you for war crimes!”

  “But you are not prisoners of war,” the old man answered. “You are sacrifices.”

  He nodded at the guards, and they immediately shot Jefferson in the back of each kneecap. As he collapsed to the ground, shrieking in pain, they pumped more bullets into his elbows, his hands, his legs, and finally his face. Gore sprayed across the alabaster sandstone.

  O’Malley gripped the bars, unable to look away, while the others cursed and screamed. Bloom closed his eyes, turning away.

  “That is one sacrifice,” the old man told Williams. “Now, let us see about your mouth.”

  • • •

  Before deploying to Iraq, the men had learned all about the Fedayeen. The name meant ‘those ready to sacrifice themselves’. They were Saddam Hussein’s most trusted paramilitary unit. Their duties included assassinating his enemies, and the capture, imprisonment, and torture of anyone deemed a dissident. The majority of their recruits were composed of criminals, pardoned in exchange for their service. One of their endurance drills was to survive on snake and dog meat. Their training included urban warfare and suicide missions. They reported directly to Saddam’s eldest son, Odai.

  “I want to speak with Odai,” O’Malley shouted. He was strapped to a chair next to Williams, who had been tied to a gurney. Both men had been injected with a pharmaceutical grade of speed, so that they wouldn’t pass out from the pain.

  Ignoring him, the old man wiped blood from Williams’s chin.

  “This doesn’t have to happen,” O’Malley continued. “I demand that you let me talk to Odai. He’s in charge!”

  “No,” the old man said. “Odai has been in hiding since the start of the war. The Fedayeen report to me, now.”

  “Okay...” O’Malley paused. “Then talk to me. Tell us what you want.”

  “I want you to be still,” the old man said. “It is not your time to scream yet.”

  He nodded at two of the guards, one of whom was smoking a foul-smelling cigarette. The two stalked toward O’Malley, and forced his mouth open. As he struggled, the smoking guard snuffed his cigarette out on O’Malley’s tongue. O’Malley shrieked. Calmly, the guard lit another cigarette and then repeated the process. O’Malley’s tortured cries turned to moans.

  “Much better,” the old man said, and with a yank of the rusty pliers, pulled another tooth from Williams’s ruined mouth.

  His gurgling scream echoed throughout the cells.

  Bloom closed his eyes again and tried to think of home. Summertime on South Clinton Avenue. His father’s extermination company. He was going to work for him when he got out. Jill, with her long, blonde
hair. The week before he’d shipped out, they’d gone to see Linkin Park in concert. Afterward, they’d done it in the back of his parent’s car...

  Williams’s shrieks, O’Malley’s moans, and the old man’s laughter shattered the visions.

  “Leave them alone,” Sanchez pleaded. “Stop it! O’Malley, hang in there, man.”

  O’Malley tried to answer, but the cigarette burns on his tongue made him hard to understand. He bunched his muscles, pushing against the restraints binding him to the chair, but the leather straps were stronger.

  “Hey!” Myers rattled the bars of the cell.

  The old man paused, dropping one of Williams’s molars to the floor.

  “You can’t do this,” Myers said. “It’s not human.”

  The old man nodded. “Correct. Is not human.”

  He turned back to the quivering soldier and wrenched out the last tooth. Williams convulsed on the gurney, blood running from his mouth, but this time he made no sound. He was beyond sound. The old man appraised his handy-work. Satisfied, he selected an ice pick from the tools laid out on the table next to him.

  “Now, we take your eyes, yes?”

  Williams did not scream, so the others screamed for him.

  The old man turned to the guards, and cocked his head toward O’Malley. Then he turned back to the prisoners.

  “His eyes, too,” he said.

  His gnarled fingers reached out and held Williams’s eyelid open. Slowly, hypnotically, he waved the ice pick back and forth in front of the soldier’s contracting pupil. Then, he jabbed it forward. At the same time, the two guards extinguished their smoldering cigarettes in O’Malley’s eyes. Both men shrieked.

  Myers turned away and vomited.

  “You motherfuckers,” Bloom shouted. “Oh you motherfuckers are so fucking dead when I get out of here! You are so fucking dead you sons of bitches—”

  He stopped in mid-ramble, spying something hovering in the air, directly above the old man. Something formless and dark. It looked like a cloud, the size of a baseball. Colors for which there were no name swirled in the blackness.

  The old man looked up, smiled, and then glanced back to the men in the cell.

  “You see? It begins. He is coming.”

  Calmly, he plunged the tool into Williams’s other eye. Williams’s back arched up off the gurney, and this time he screamed so loudly that something tore in his throat. Blood poured from his mouth and eyes, pooling onto the floor. His mouth gaped like a fish as he continued to scream, but all that was generated was a tiny mewling whimper.

  Then he was still.

  “Why?” Bloom sobbed.

  “We summon Kandara,” the old man explained. “You are in Iraq. This was once Babylon. All of the great gods came from here. Dagon and Baal and Purturabo— all these belonged to us first. And there were others—Ob and Apu, Meeble and Kat—who came from elsewhere but resided here for a time. This is where magic was born. There are many books, much knowledge. You have bookstores in America where you can buy them in paperback. All this came from our lands.”

  “Magic...” Bloom’s voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” the old man said. “Kandara is demon—what we call Djinn. There are

  many Djinn. Some control animals or humans. Some grant wishes and others destroy dreams. Kandara is great among the Djinn, and powerful. He commands the desert winds. You think the storm last night was bad, yes? Kandara will show your friends what bad storm really is! Even now, the rest of your army drives north. Kandara will go to meet them, and there he will destroy them. The desert will swallow even their bones.”

  “This motherfucker is crazy,” Myers whispered.

  “And you are the next one, I think,” the old man answered. “Kandara must be summoned with pain, fed with suffering and anguish. Each of you feeds him until he is whole. When the last one is sacrificed, then may he be controlled, to obey the torturer’s commands. The rules of summoning tells us this. The one who causes the most pain, the most suffering—this is the one that will bind Kandara to him, and Kandara will grant his wishes. And I wish for you to be gone from our lands. I will command him to destroy your 3rd Infantry. They will not reach Baghdad.”

  He wiped his bloody instruments on Williams’s gore-stained uniform, and then gave orders to the guards. Williams and O’Malley’s bodies were dragged away, and two Iraqi’s approached the cell, their weapons drawn.

  “Now you,” the old man said to Myers, “and if the rest of you resist, we shoot.”

  “You’re going to kill us anyway,” Sharp said. “What does it matter?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. We see how many more Kandara need. Maybe I not need to kill you all. He is getting big already, yes?”

  Still floating in the air, the black cloud had tripled in size.

  Bloom stepped forward. “Take me instead. Not him.”

  “Bullshit,” Myers said calmly, and grasped his friend’s shoulder. “You’ve got to get back home to that girl of yours. What’s her name?”

  “Jill,” Bloom sobbed.

  “Right. Jill. You get out of this and when you two have some rugrats, you name one after me, okay?”

  He smiled, but Bloom said nothing.

  “I need you to be strong for me, Bloom,” Myers whispered. “Please.”

  Then they took him out of the cell.

  The thing in the air swelled again. When Bloom glanced at it, he could see two small red dots in its center.

  They blinked at him.

  • • •

  Myers was strapped naked to the gurney, and then a thin glass rod was shoved into his flaccid penis, via his urethra. After the tube had disappeared inside, the old man grabbed the organ with both hands and began to wring it like a dishrag, shattering the glass. Myers bucked against the restraints, grunting and hollering in the same breath.

  The old man snarled, and one of the soldiers began to pummel the prisoner in the kidneys. Again and again the savage blows landed, until Myers’s bladder let go. He howled in agony as the bits of glass were ejected with his urine.

  “Listen,” Sanchez whispered in Bloom’s ear, “we’ve got to make a break for it! I’ve got my hands loose.”

  “How? Myers—they...Myers...”

  “Get it together, man! Ain’t nothing we can do for Myers or any of the others, except make these bastards pay.”

  “They’ll shoot us if we try it,” Sharp whispered.

  “And they’ll torture us if we don’t,” Sanchez said. His words were masked by Myers’s screams.

  In the torture chamber, three guards struggled with a hand-truck, on which sat a massive, industrial-sized battery charger. When they reached the gurney, the charger was plugged into an outlet. The room’s single light bulb dimmed as they applied the first shock to Myers’s nipples.

  “I ain’t going out like that,” Sanchez continued. “When they open that door again, I’m rushing them. If you guys are with me, cool. If not, I’ll try to do what I can for you.”

  “Fuck it,” said Sharp. “I’m with you.”

  Sanchez began to undo the ropes around Sharp wrists. “Bloom? You in?”

  Bloom stared in horror as Myers began to smoke and char. A long, keening wail came from his throat as his teeth shattered from the electricity jolting through him. After a horrifying second, Bloom recognized what Myers was saying.

  “Trying to find, trying to find where I’ve beeeeeeeeeee—”

  Myers was singing “Kashmir”, just like aboard the M-88.

  “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—”

  Simultaneously, they applied the jumper cables to his testicles and slashed his bulging throat with a box cutter.

  “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

  With his final breath, Myers hit that perfect Robert Plant wail that he’d always sought.

  “Bloom?”

  “I’m in,” he snapped, so fiercely that both Sanchez and Sharp took a step back. “Goddamn it, I am so in!”

  “Quick, l
et me see your wrists. Don’t let them see us, though.”

  Above the gurney, Kandara took shape. Much bigger than a baseball now, its arms and legs were clearly visible, as were the malevolent red eyes, glowing like cinders in an otherwise featureless, obsidian face.

  “You hear that, you fuck?” Bloom screamed at the creature. “I’m in!”

  “Okay,” the old man answered, as Myers’s body was disposed of. “You can be in next.”

  Everything happened very quickly. Despite his time in country, Bloom had yet to experience real up close and personal combat. The only fighting he’d seen had been done from far away—bombing runs and artillery strikes. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He thought that perhaps time would slow, like in a movie, and that everything would transpire in slow motion.

  There was the click of the bolt on the door being thrown, and two guards entered, reaching for him. Then—chaos. Sanchez and Sharp were shouting, and Bloom was surprised to find himself shouting as well.

  “Jersey in the house, you motherfuckers!”

  They rushed forward, desperately grappling with the armed men. Even as Sanchez wrestled the rifle away from one of them, there was a loud explosion, and Sharp’s stomach disappeared. He gasped, choking on his own blood, and then toppled onto his enemy, crushing him to the floor. The Iraqi struggled beneath him. Sharp clawed at the man’s throat.

  Bloom snatched a fallen rifle from the floor and glanced around. The other two guards scrambled, and Sanchez opened fire, mowing them down.

  Bloom charged into the torture chamber. The old man backed toward the exit, hands raised in fear.

  Kandara swelled, unmoving.

  The door opened and two more guards ran in, spraying bullets indiscriminately. Sanchez lurched as rounds slammed into him, destroying flesh and bone. He slumped against the wall.

  Crouching, Bloom fired back, the rifle jerking in his hands. The heavy staccato of automatic gunfire and the stench of cordite filled the room. The two guards fell beneath the barrage.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” Bloom hollered at the old man. “Get away from that door!”