by Paul Emil
Dubois handed me one of the lanterns. I held it like a frightened child clutching a doll, drawing some sense of security from it.
“Do you know where you are now? Do you remember what we’re doing here?”
A blur of memories flashed through my mind, but I summed up our purpose with one word: “Kaz.”
“That’s right, Holmes.”
Paco looked at Dubois and said, “He’s back. He’s ready to go.”
Then he looked at me and said, “Back to work, Holmes.”
“How … How long was I out?”
“About 10 minutes, Holmes, though it felt a hell of a lot longer than that.” That was the understatement of the year.
Dubois said, “Alright. So. Are you cool? We need to go.”
Like a person trying to recall a fleeting dream, I struggled to remember where I was and what I’d been doing. And just like a dream that seemed so real moments before, the memory was already melting away into nothingness.
I got to my feet. I was starting to buy into this reality, just as I had the others. This one felt the most real. This situation had a complete history leading up to it, where as the other episodes seemed like scenes of my past that had been edited and spliced into the docudrama of my life. Bizarre as this situation was, this was the only one that made sense.
Dubois said, “We thought about splitting up. Paco was going to stay right here and watch you, and I was going to go get Kaz. He was my search partner. He’s my responsibility.”
Paco said, “That’s right. But I talked him out of it. I said, ‘That’s what they want: for us to split up.’ But now that you’re back, there are three of us. We need to find Kaz now and get out of here.”
I agreed. I didn’t want to be responsible for any more delays. “I’m good now,” I said. “Really. Let’s go get him.”
–––––
Dubois led the way down the other hallway opposite from the one with the room that had tried to trap him. I followed behind him, holding the lantern. Paco took up the rear. Despite not having a gun, I felt OK, knowing I was in the safest position. If a patrol line is going to be attacked, the man in the middle is usually the safest. In a surprise attack, the person in the front or the back is usually going to get hit first.
We came to a corner and Dubois shot a glance down the hall and declared it clear. He advanced. Paco and I followed. The hall was dark, and at the far end was a door with a blade of light underneath it.
“Shit! You see that?” Dubois said.
Paco and I grunted in agreement.
“Fuck! That must be where he is! Let’s go!”
We hurried down the hall. We took positions outside of the door.
“We have to warn him,” Paco reminded Dubois.
“Yeah, I know,” Dubois said, irritated. In a routine mission, we wouldn’t announce to occupants or terrorists inside that we were there. The whole idea was to catch them off guard. But there was a chance that Kaz was in there. We didn’t want him to freak out and have him start shooting when we burst in.
“Kaz!” Dubois said. “You in there?”
There was no answer.
“It’s us, Kaz. Be cool. We’re coming in!”
Dubois tried the door. It was locked.
“Fuck,” he said. He looked at us. There was a wordless question on his face, and a silent agreement: We had to break down the door.
“Door’s locked, Kaz. We’re coming in. Don’t shoot us.”
Dubois kicked in the door with a powerful blow. We spilled inside and swept the room with our eyes and gunpoints.
“What the fuck?” babbled Dubois.
“Dios mío,” gasped Paco.
“Oh God,” I said, confirming that we were all looking at the same thing.
We were in a large room in the corner of the house. It was eerily lit by about a dozen candles spread around the room. There was a large queen size bed in the middle of the room. Passed out on top of it, nearly naked, was Kaz.
“Kaz?” Dubois said, nervously.
I had a bad feeling about this. This room seemed cleaner, somehow, like somebody lived there. It didn’t smell musty at all. There was a slight breeze coming from somewhere. I could smell the candle wax, and something else. I think it was a faint trace of perfume.
We approached Kaz on the bed. He was wearing nothing but his underwear. He was bulging under it, showing the most obvious sign of sexual arousal.
There were other things wrong. In fact, these were worse. There were double-puncture marks on his neck, chest, and arms. There were reddish smears on him – some I knew were blood. Others I guessed were lipstick.
My first thought was, It was her!
I thought of the female “ghost” I had seen downstairs. I told myself that I hadn’t really seen her, but that lie came back to haunt me. I thought, I’m responsible for this. There’s somebody in here and I didn’t tell anybody. This is my fault.
“Is he … Is he …?”
I couldn’t even bring myself to say it.
Dubois put a finger alongside Kaz’s neck. He looked pleasantly surprised and said, “No! My boy’s got a pulse!”
“We’ve got to get him out of here now,” I said.
“This is my fault,” Dubois said. “We were a team.”
“No,” Paco said, “If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine. I should have let you go after him. We didn’t need two people to watch Abrams.”
“Yes, you did,” I said truthfully. Then I said words I didn’t expect to come out of my mouth. “It’s nobody’s fault. Or at least it’s not ours. It’s the house’s fault. Or Command’s, for sending us in here. Let’s just pick him up and go.”
Everyone agreed. We were all tense while Dubious lifted Kaz out of the bed. Sometimes, terrorists booby-trap the bodies of fallen American soldiers, knowing that Americans will move them and not leave them lying there. Thankfully, Kaz’s body did not set off a bomb.
We left the room in a new order. Paco left first, holding his weapon. Dubois followed, carrying Kaz in his arms. I was last, carrying the light. I felt very vulnerable. Paco, now the only man left holding a gun, seemed far away in the front of our line.
I was the last one in the room when a gust a wind came from nowhere and blew out all of the candles at once. Although I was only a few steps away from the door, I vaulted out of the room. I was in midair, barely out, when the door slammed behind me like a trap snapping shut.
“What the hell was that?” Dubois shouted.
“It … It was the wind,” I said, trying to catch my breath, and realizing I had just used a cliché found in almost every horror movie.
We all keeping moving and didn’t look back.
We continued back the way we came down the dark hallway. It seemed longer to me than when we had first come down it to the room. That was probably just my imagination.
I remember feeling a sense of relief when we had made it to the balcony area at the top of the stairs. I was practically ecstatic when we reached the bottom of the stairs and the foyer in front of the front door. I was strangely giddy, as if surprised we had actually made it that far.
Paco tried the front door. He tugged at the handle and started swearing is Spanish. We were locked in.
“Oh, no,” Dubois groaned.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. The house wasn’t going to let us go that easily.
“Holmes, we didn’t come this far to get stopped here. I’m tired of this shit. Stand back.”
We all backed away. Paco aimed his weapon at the windows. He popped off a few shots. The windows sparked, but didn’t shatter.
Visibly frustrated, Paco fired at them, holding down trigger. He sprayed the windows, the door, and the walls with gunfire.
Dubois and I ducked, fearing for our lives. We yelled at Paco to stop before we all got killed by ricocheting bullets.
Eventually, he stopped firing and lowered his weapon. I don’t know whether he heard us or not, or whether he just finally gave up.
“No,” I said. “There has to be another way.” I think Paco and Dubois were reassured by my strong conviction. I could see it in their faces. I meant what I said. I was going to find a way out. Kaz’s life depended on it. Probably all of ours did.
I knew what I wanted to do, just not how to do it. I had to come up with a plan to maintain the confidence of the troops and to achieve my goal.
I didn’t have a plan. I knew I had to come up with one fast, but that could wait. We had a new problem. There were noises down the hall near us. Something was coming up from the cellar.
20
We heard the wood creaking as something came up the stairs. Two shadowy figures emerged from the darkness.
At first I was excited. These were our guys. One of them still had his rifle with the flashlight. I expected a third to join them, but that didn’t happen. Three men – Boudreaux, Barnes, and Stillman – had gone down to the basement. Who was missing?
I held up my light to a get a better look. The man with the gun across from us did the same.
“C Team! Identify!” I ordered. There was no answer. I immediately knew was something wrong.
“You hear me? Identify yourself! Now!”
The soldier’s flashlight flickered and died. Without his light in my eyes, I got a better look at him. My excitement turned to terror. The soldier had no legs. His body just disappeared below the waist. Paco aimed his gunpoint and light beneath the suspect. The spotlight swept the floor unobstructed. This “man” was a floating torso.
“What the fuck? Do you see that!?” Paco yelled. “DO YOU SEE THAT!?”
“Oh hell no,” Dubois said, not so much as an answer but as a denial of the whole situation.
“Identify!” I screamed, trying to sound powerful but hoping my voice wouldn’t crack. I clutched my light. I really wanted a gun.
The response came from the other figure with legs.
“Abrams,” said a horrible, raspy voice. “You don’t remember me? Look at my face!”
The figure clicked a flashlight under his chin like a child scaring his friends in the dark. The light illuminated a ghastly face. Half of it was badly scarred and the eye was a dead, opaque white. It looked like eye of a blind, monstrous fish at the bottom of the ocean where sunlight never reaches. The side of his face was covered in blood. It looked fresh, glistening in the light.
The figure let the flashlight drop to the floor. It clanged loudly and rolled away. Then I noticed that he had no right arm.
“Gunner!?”
“You did this to me!” he shrieked, raising a stump of an elbow that was still dripping blood. “YOU DID THIS TO ME!”
I felt like a swimmer who finds himself face-to-face with a great white shark. I wanted out. I wanted away. My legs shook uncontrollably and I fell to my knees. Gunner, or whatever it was, pulled out a pistol with his remaining arm and aimed it at my head, meaning to kill me execution-style.
Paco fired his rifle and blasted the bloody body backward. The floating ghost returned fire. Dubois went down, dropping Kaz. The fall was so hard I knew he’d been hit.
I sprawled on the ground. I reached over and felt around the floor for one of the guns Dubois dropped. He had relieved me of my weapon earlier but it was within reach now. My fingers found it and wrapped around it.
Paco yelled out a line heard in every zombie movie: “Shoot ‘em in the head!”
The hallway flickered with muzzle flashes. Gunfire assaulted my eardrums.
“Take that motherfuckers!” he shouted. “Take …”
Paco went down.
“No!”
I rolled into position and raised my weapon, but the hovering thing crashed to the floor before I had a chance to fire. It convulsed, coughed up blood, and lay motionless.
All of the machine gun fire stopped.
Slowly, I got to my feet. The bodies of our enemies were lying on the floor. With my gun trained on them, I carefully closed in on them to make sure they were dead.
I stared down in horror. Everyone had all of their limbs. These weren’t mutilated bodies or personal demons. These were are our own guys. I was looking at the bodies of Barnes and Boudreaux.
Barnes was dead. Paco had shot him in the head. I couldn’t see Boudreaux’s wound. I expected him to sit up suddenly like a B-movie monster that can’t be killed. I pointed my gun at his head, focussing my flashlight beam on his face to check what I already knew. He was dead. There were no signs of breathing. His face was covered in blood. Then his eyes snapped open.
I cried out and jumped back. It’s a miracle I didn't pull the trigger.
“FUCK!”
“A-Abe? Is that you?”
“Fuck! B-Boudreaux?”
I moved cautiously towards him. Then I put down my gun and knelt beside him. There were tears in his eyes now, and blood in his mouth.
Gasping for air, he asked, “W-Why?”
I wanted to say something, but I simply shook my head. I had no answer.
Then he said, “We thought ... We saw vampires carrying Kaz’s body.”
I nodded. He still didn’t really understand what was going on. I had to let him know it wasn’t his fault.
“They’re testing drugs on us,” I said. “We’re all on acid.”
Boudreaux looked at me with confusion, then I could see the painful realization sink in. He hadn’t been shooting at monsters. We were the “vampires.”
“Abe,” he said, “Abe … D-Don’t let it be like this. Don’t let them get away with it. Abe …”
I was waiting for more. I held his head and moved my ears closer to his mouth. His eyes stared intently into mine, pleading. He whispered, “Don’t …”
I said, “They won’t get away with it. I swear.”
Boudreaux’s intense gaze lost focus and he slumped in my arms. I eased him on to the floor. He was gone.
I remember Sgt. Coles telling us a story about how weird war was. He said you could be talking to guy one second and the next he’s dead. Forever. “Just like that,” he said.
Now Boudreaux was gone. I had given him some measure peace, I told myself, by telling him what he what he needed to hear.
I heard a low moan behind me. I snatched the gun off of the ground and spun around.
Dubois’ body was moving slightly.
Oh God, I thought, Somebody’s still alive. I put the gun down and rushed to kneel beside him. He looked bad.
“Those guys … Are they …? Who …?”
I shook my head. Dubois stared at me, and I could see the realization sink in.
“No,” he groaned. “C Team?”
I nodded.
“No!” he breathed. “They were ...” He started convulsing.
“Let me help you up,” I said. I put my arms around him and tried lift him.
He cried out, “No! No! No! It’s not supposed to be like this!”
I set him back down on the floor. My arms were covered in blood. He was worse than I thought.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I said.
“I’m done, Bro. Promise me you’ll get out of here. Swear …”
I looked into his watering eyes and said, “I swear.”
Dubois closed his eyes and started to cry. I heard him softly muttering, ”Died for nothin’ … died for nothin’.”
He opened his eyes again. They found mine. I saw a moment of peace. He was happy I hadn’t left him alone. The life in his eyes was like a light, and I watched it fade away and go out completely. I closed his eyes with my palm.
I checked the others. Paco was dead. He’d been shot in the head and neck. Kaz was gone too.
I stood up slowly. There I was, covered in blood, surrounded by dead bodies. I half expected the front door to crack open. Congratulations! You’re the last man standing! Or maybe all of the guys would stand up again and laugh. We were using blanks the whole time! This is fake bl
ood! You’re on a reality TV show and didn’t know it!
I waited. I really expected something like that to happen. But it didn’t. I took off my helmet and shouted at it.
“Happy now!? Seen enough?”
I waited for an answer. There was none. I ripped the camera and microphone off. I threw them on the ground and stomped on them.
It seemed like my ordeal should be over, but I knew it wasn’t. I had just made two promises to dying friends – that I would get out of here, and that I would get whomever or whatever did this to us. I intended to keep those promises.
–––––
I looked around. It might have been my imagination, but the windows looked smaller.
It’s sealing itself up, I thought to myself. It can taste the blood, and it’s getting ready to consume the bodies. But there’s one left who’s still alive – me. Maybe it doesn’t care. Maybe it’s going to start feeding anyway. Maybe if I stood here, I could watch it.
But I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to stay there. I had to think. The doors and the windows were sealed on this floor. Upstairs, there had been a draft in the room where we found Kaz. At least, I think it was a draft. That meant there was an opening, apparently one large enough to let in a big gust of wind.
I was kidding myself. As soon as I thought of it, I knew I wasn’t going back upstairs, and certainly not to that bedroom.
I also knew that it was pointless to try to shoot out any more windows. Hell, in the front room, there probably weren’t any by now. I wasn’t going to anywhere near the library, the kitchen, or the moonlit hall where I encountered the “girl.”
What did that leave? I didn’t like the answer. In fact, as soon as my brain answered, “The cellar,” another part of it yelled, “Are you kidding me!?”
I didn’t like that idea at all. But in the “playback” mode in my mind, I saw the open cellar doors that I had noticed while approaching the house hours ago – an event that seemed so long ago it was like it happened to somebody else. But that was my exit. There was a way out.
There was another problem with going down to the cellar. Stillman might still be down there. He was unaccounted for. He could be alive or dead. If he were dead, it would be good to confirm that. If he were alive, he might be tripping and might try to shoot me. But why would he still be down there? Wouldn’t he have come up by now? If he were wounded, wouldn’t I hear him screaming down there?