Cards in the Cloak

by Jeremy Bursey

  Chapter 2

  “Dafodil”

  Norman, who had carried his rifle with him since he’d gotten off the boat, was now in a position to use it. And, unlike his math skills, which he had labored hard to master in his final year of high school, he was eager to see what he remembered about firing it—not that he was in a hurry to kill the enemy, but because he was in a hurry to keep himself alive. Even if friends and his own country had forced him out to this awful-smelling, bloody and smoky battlefront, he still wanted the chance to go back and see them.

  Until he was fourteen, he hadn’t believed much in death. But now, as a near nineteen-year-old who could hear guns cracking around him and bodies occasionally falling dead into the bunker beside him, he believed in death very much, and he was feeling genuinely afraid of it.

  But he didn’t want that to show. Instead, he checked his rifle, made sure it was fully-loaded, attempted to steady his trembling hands, then climbed out of the bunker and shot at whatever moved at the other end of the field.

  He was pretty sure he had hit a tree.

  In training, the commanding officers had told him to keep his head down at all times. He was to look up only when he wanted to see what he was shooting at. He was told time and again that a dead soldier wasn’t particularly useful to good ol’ Uncle Sam, so he was encouraged to stay alive, if possible. They’d told him that keeping his head down was the best way to make sure that staying alive happened. No guarantees, of course. He had watched as a soldier from another company climbed out of the bunker, put his head down, as instructed, and then had his helmet explode from the bullet that came out of nowhere and pierced his skull. Norman’s brain throbbed as he thought about how easily that could’ve been him.

  But, of course, he didn’t come all the way out here to France just to chicken out. His own father, after all, had come out here to support the war effort, and him, and the last thing Norman wanted to do was to prove to his father that he was too young to fight for his country, especially when his father, at the age of thirty-nine, was probably way too old to be crawling around through mud while dodging fire and shooting Germans. Perhaps his father was thinking the exact same thing. (His father was actually thinking about how much he wanted to shoot his son for talking him into this situation, but Norman wouldn’t hear about that until after the war.)

  Norman had spent the better part of that morning climbing in and out of the bunker, loading, reloading, shooting, and wincing at the image of his comrades-in-arms falling to the wayside, when he felt a headache coming on. While he had his back to the stone wall adjacent to the battlefield, watching chips of plaster explode off the opposite wall as bullets zinged into it, a fellow soldier from another company dropped down to his side.

  “You’re not looking so hot,” the older soldier said.

  “Neither are you,” Norman said. The soldier was probably in his mid-twenties, but his face was hard and his skin gnarled as if he were closer to fifty. His left eye squinted more than his right. Norman meant every word he had said.

  “Battle fatigue already? You been here, what, an hour?”

  “Feels like a year.”

  “Yep. Try two months straight. That’ll really screw with your head.” He held out his hand, the one not holding a rifle. “Maxie McWalter.”

  Norman shook it.

  “Norman Jenson.”

  Maxie reached inside his coat and removed a large leaf folded over several times into a tight package. A piece of vine was wrapped and tied around it.

  “Illness maybe? Think you got that nasty influenza thing going around?”

  Norman hoped not. His throat felt fine, but the more he thought about it, the more he wasn’t sure. The flu had already killed many that year, and the thought of him catching it now, here in this disgusting trench, made him nervous.

  “I have a headache.”

  Maxie handed him the folded leaf.

  “Try what I’ve got in here. Miracle cure. You take it and you’ll never catch the flu. Promise.”

  “Why? Will it kill me?” Norman tried to laugh off his stupid joke, but Maxie wasn’t going for it.

  “No, better. It’ll keep you strong, healthy, and resistant to many immune deficiencies. Get rid of that headache for you, too.”

  Norman carefully unwrapped the leaf to find a dozen small roots bunched together with some type of purple pollen, some crushed insects, and a ball of dried blood. He had no idea what he was looking at.

  “That, my friend, is a suite of healing agents all working together to form the wonder drug of the ages. Don’t have a scientific name for it yet, but I’m gonna trademark that combo as ‘Dafodil.’ Take one of each and you’ll be good as new for years to come. Guarantee it.”

  Norman looked at him, skeptical.

  “You screwing with me?”

  “No, not at all. Can’t tell you how I found this combination, or why it works, but I can tell you how quickly my health problems went away. I’m telling you, this stuff is a miracle cure for just about anything, especially that awful flu.”

  Norman wasn’t sure what to think.

  “Why are you giving these to me then?”

  “Need proof, of course. And I’m not giving them to you. I’m giving one of each to you. And it’s not free, my friend. You owe me nothing in the trench here, but once we’re out, I’ll want something in return. Man deserves payment for his hard discoveries, you know?”

  Norman nodded. He understood business. When it came to business, money often validated quality. As much as he thought Maxie was a nut, he entertained the idea that maybe he was trustworthy. What else did he have to lose out here in the trenches?

  “How much you gonna charge me when we’re out?”

  “Depends on how long it takes to get the word out. By accepting this, you commit to me your time in helping me get the message out. That simple.”

  Norman didn’t see much of a problem in that. As long as he didn’t tell people he was pushing drugs, he figured he could make the commitment work.

  “One of each, huh?”

  “Yeah, then I want the rest of them back. Gotta work on getting the cure into the hands of the public. Can’t do that if you’re hoarding them.”

  Norman took one of the roots between his fingers and stared at it. The root was hearty but small, fit with green berries the size of pellets. There were still traces of soil flaking off the edges.

  He glanced at Maxie as if he were crazy. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to eat this stuff, especially for a test. Even if he were entertaining him on the speech, he wasn’t actually considering the job. No one would ever swallow this weirdly-matched inedible stuff.

  “Just shove the whole thing in your mouth,” Maxie said. “Take a pinch of the purple dust, mix it with the bug guts, and powder the blood ball with both, and then pop the sugared hemosphere right in there with the root. You’ll be feeling better in minutes.”

  “Really? You want me to swallow all of these? From in my mouth? Where my tongue still works?”

  Maxie slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Would I steer you wrong, friend? Trust me. This cure works like a charm. If you have the flu, it’ll vanquish it. If you don’t, it will prevent it. Sometimes you have to sacrifice taste for quality. You won’t regret it.”

  Norman shook his head. Maxie was a great salesman. But he still had to think about it. War affected many things in a man’s life, but not his taste buds or his stomach, not usually. Stuffing these unusual items in his mouth sounded like a horrible experiment.

  Then again, his headache was getting worse, and given the circumstances of the environment around him, he didn’t think not taking the “cure” would make him better, so he shut off his brain, took Maxie’s advice, and swallowed the combination whole.

  He gagged at first. The taste of blood and dirt on his tongue did not agree with him. But he managed to force it all down. Then he handed the leaf back to Maxie.

  “Thanks, I hope,” Norman
said.

  Maxie winked.

  “Just endorse me when I’m famous. Remember, it’s called Dafodil.”

  Maxie retied the vine and stowed the leaf back in his coat. Then he hiked his rifle over his shoulder, climbed the ladder to face the battlefield, and then fell back down a few seconds later with a hard impact to his back and blood gushing out of his chest.

  “Maxie?”

  Maxie stared at him and smiled. Then he gave him the thumb up.

  “Doesn’t stop bullets, of course,” Maxie said in his weakening voice. “But it stops the flu dead in its tracks. Dafodil.”

  He didn’t speak again after that.

  Norman freed the leaf from Maxie’s coat and tucked it in his own pocket before Maxie’s blood could ruin it. Then he ran his fingers over Maxie’s eyelids.

  Norman’s heart pounded. This was the war he had volunteered to fight. Casualties were happening all around him, but this made it personal. And he still had to take more turns to face the enemy.

  Yes, he had been climbing in and out of the trenches for more than an hour before he finally stared death in the eyes. He was expecting the possibility of facing it, of course. But he figured the reality of staring death in the eyes would’ve been a little less…literal.

  Just after eleven o’clock that morning, Norman climbed out the bunker, for the thirtieth time, aimed his rifle, sighted an enemy to shoot at, and nearly froze. His finger was on the trigger, but he was finding it difficult to squeeze. Across the field, amid the living and dead Germans looking for people like him to shoot at, was a soldier who was dressed in a uniform vastly different from that of his fellow fighters. Norman couldn’t tell if he was a general, a captain, or something else entirely, but he was pretty certain that the man wasn’t wearing the regulation uniform for any rank in the German Army, or really, in any army. The man, Norman could see, was wearing a black hooded cloak. And even stranger, his hands were bony, and he was holding a farmer’s scythe.

  Norman wasn’t sure what to make of this unusual soldier, but he quickly put his head down, as instructed, when he saw the dark soldier cock his hand back and fling the scythe right at him.

  He wasn’t daring enough to watch it fly over his head, but he could feel the wake of its slipstream rushing down his spine. It was cold, so very cold. With winter not far off from the Argonne Forest, he suspected that the flying weapon was just recirculating the air made hot by all the nearby gunfire. But no, he knew there was more to it than that. The feeling was much more ethereal than that.

  Norman dared to look up. He marveled at how far the soldier was able to throw the unsanctioned weapon of war. Curious, he glanced behind him to see where the weapon had landed, if it was possible to even climb down into the bunker and emerge at the other side to retrieve it. What he saw was a dead German soldier who had sneaked up from the forest behind, clearly trying to ambush him. The man had his rifle drawn, but he was never given the chance to fire. The scythe had struck him dead.

  When Norman glanced back at the field, stupidly remaining in plain sight of the enemy, he saw the cloaked soldier literally flying toward him, like a kite caught in a strong gust of wind. He could see the soldier’s face—it was almost skull-like, but with a ghostly visage of a man overlaying it. It was so very strange—perhaps a victim of bad German experimentation.

  Norman hopped down into the bunker as the soldier flew over him. The world in that moment had gone into slow motion. The soldier tried stretching his hand out for him initially, but gave up when Norman fell out of reach. In that frozen second, Norman could see his face clearly. He had this awkward expression on his mouth that said, quite plainly, “Hi.”

  And that was it. Norman, in his sudden defiance, found himself flipping the soldier off as the soldier flew to the other edge of the bunker. The soldier, surprised by his sudden use of an obscene gesture, wrinkled his face in shock. He must not have been expecting anyone to defy him that day.

  When Norman finally hit the bottom of the bunker, he blacked out. When he awoke, he was in a tent somewhere. When he left the tent, Armistice had taken place and the war had ended.

  In the entire skirmish, Norman had missed every shot. But he stayed alive, and he was proud of that. And his headache had gone away, even as he slammed his head against the floor of the bunker.

  When he made it back to the United States in early January 1919, after participating in some minor cleanup around Europe, he had made a decision that he was going to keep cheating death until his body essentially fell apart. He figured he could even make it into the next century if he took it seriously enough. But he wouldn’t do it aimlessly. He would fulfill his promise to Maxie McWalter and get Dafodil onto the market, somehow.