Johnathan gasped.
“Tell her…Johnny-Boy. Tell her not to listen…”
“What?” Johnathan cried. “To what?”
“Nashirimah…” his dead friend hissed in a deep gurgling whisper. The word sounded native and raw.
“What? I’m confused…what’s going on?” Johnathan ignored the onlookers who now stopped and stared at them, at him.
Do they not see Ricky?
“Tell Maggie to stay away…!” Ricky screamed. His breath was horrible and hot. His eyes turned opaque. Puss ran down in tears. Monstrous smoky-brown oriental cockroaches crawled across his burns and burrowed in his nostrils.
Johnathan let go. He gazed transfixed into his dead friend’s eyes. His mind shattered. Stepping back, arms, legs—leg—shaking violently. Deep within Ricky’s foggy iris’ Johnathan could see grey smoke giving way to something impossibly large with needle-like hair. Thunder boomed without lightning. Somewhere in the milky depths he saw red, bulbous eyes and sharp hooked mandibles smiling at him. It’s the devil, the devil that took my leg, and murdered Ricky, the best of us, the best of our club, our Suicide Squad.
He teetered, lost his footing, and fell backwards. People in the crowd began moving toward him with fear, concern, and pity written across a sea of strange faces. In the gathering herd, he lost track of his dead friend. Amidst the growing murmur, Johnathan faintly heard the echo of Ricky’s voice whispering the name ‘Nashirimah, nashirimah’ over and over before succumbing to the heavy pull of darkness.
CHAPTER 9
PRIVATE RENFIELD
Jake
St. Hubert First Presbyterian Church was a heralded structure with grey stone walls, tall, stained-glass windows, and the best landscaping money could buy. The voluminous church sat on the corner of Christopher and Mullen, just two blocks shy of Clear Lake City Boulevard. Home to some five-hundred parishioners, St. Hubert, above all else, prided itself on its strict appearance. Sharply trimmed green, American holly hedges and skillfully marble-shaped boxwood shrubs were a clear sign of a master craftsman, and the pristine serenity invoked a sight that was hard to ignore. If the exterior is managed well, so must be the interior, right? From Christopher Street, pedestrians were greeted by a beautiful arched, red and purple, oval stained-glass image of Christ on the Cross. From Mullen Street, the stained-glass images of Moses, Mary, and Gabriel were visible along the side of the church, as well as an impressive black as coal parking lot, still smoldering from last winter’s paving. The same winter Jake Williams began his priestly duties at St. Hubert, fresh from completing seminary.
Jake was inside, alone, praying, “My suffering is terrible, Father…my sin is horrendous.” He knelt at the foot of the altar, his knees padded against the thick red carpet. His eyes were sullen, at first, downcast. Now they rose to meet the wooden cross that hung above the baptistry.
“I’ve been running for a long time. If You could just give me a sign, tell me I should move on. Abandon my post. Seek solitude. Please, I need to know, I cannot make this decision on my own. Too many count on me to be here.” Jake stretched his arms out in a gesture similar to the image of Christ. He waited.
“Why? Do you…?” Jake trembled. “I cry out to you and still this emptiness persists inside me. I’ve waited for something, anything, but found only more evil, more vice. I’ve searched myself for light, but have found only darkness. Why? Why must I go on? Purge me of this demon…How long, Lord? How long will You ignore me?”
Jake dropped his arms, which flapped to his sides. His gaze turned downcast to the floor. Tears boiled. His breath quickened. He let the flood open, pouring out his sorrow onto his shirt that stunk of booze and sex. “Please, Lord, take this cup from me,” he mumbled.
Jake hid his face in his palms and then sobbed woefully. Between frantic breaths, he moaned.
“Please…are you even there? I need you…I need you…I cannot do this anymore. The booze isn’t working, or the countless women, the whores in Bayport, nothing. None of it helps…”
He fell prostrate to the floor, thrashing in uncontrollable torment. He shouted curse words and pleas, laments and alleluias of every color. His hands turned to fists and pounded the floor. Jake, in his pitiful prayer, let slip the terrible memory of the boy that died in front of him, before he had come to St. Hubert’s, before finishing seminary, before he was yet a minister.
Jake remembered telling his parents, mid-seminary, years ago now, as the family watched the frantic reports on TV about New York City and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers how he wanted to help…in the panic felt worldwide Jake felt called by God to help. They had not been as thrilled as he would have liked, serving was not part of their plan for him. Jake believed his service in the United States Army was a calling, more important than the disapproval of his parents. He joined a few weeks after 9/11, but decided on a fruitless effort to appease both parties and enlisted as a Chaplain’s Assistant instead of infantry as he originally intended. The boys of Suicide Squad had snickered when they found out.
Bobby was the only one who really gave him shit about it. Ricky and Johnathan were still finishing up high school and had yet to join themselves. Maggie, Jake recalled, looked grave…
Perhaps she understood then that the last threads of their little group, their club, Suicide Squad, was coming apart in one final tug. The world had changed on 9/11, but so did this little group of childhood friends. The events of the world scattered them, and though they would stay in contact, it would never be the same, not as it had been when they were kids.
Renfield!
Jake’s sobs ceased. His body grew cold. The moment of dread was not far away. In his mind, Jake walked the graveyard as a spectral soldier called to relive the wrong and horrible things that happened on that terrible day. He recalled Camp Ferrin-Huggins, a camp not far outside Baghdad. Why any XO would want to have their name plastered on that mud pit is beyond me, he recalled. He remembered the base well enough, despite the years between. How could I forget…if only…?
The face of the boy, the soldier, who died in front of him came without want. But that’s how memories are, or at least the ones we hate the most. They come without warrant or care, and despite our best efforts to bury them inside or drown them with booze or women or drugs or food or any other kind of vice, they come all the same.
Renfield!
Jake saw himself in his mind’s eye, leaving the DFAC, just finishing a large plate of Surf & Turf, the best night of the week. The sirens came as he was leaving. Jake could hear the sound of trumpets blaring in some make believe biblical battleground. Armageddon is what the old southern preachers called it. Bodies ran by him, other soldiers, contractors both local and KBR, everyone heading toward the large, rectangular cement bunker layered with sandbags.
Jake made his way inside before the mortars fell. He’d had his combat bible in hand. He was going to say a prayer over the herded and trembling flock, as a shepherd might during a turbulent thunderstorm. Perhaps in his mind, that’s how he imagined it all; the mortars were nothing but thunder. He had stood at the entrance, waving people inside, a John Wayne prototype, leading his Green Berets in the Battle of Da Nang.
Jake was about to turn and begin his offered prayer when he noticed a soldier off in the distance running towards them. Immediately the air ripped in a nightmarish and deafening whistle—a soul harvester, as he had later called it. The ground came apart. Mud was flung upward into the air. The soldier kept running. Stumbling. Running. Jake wanted to go out and get him, bring the soldier back safely, but froze. He stood there waving his arms in a manic-panic; “Come on, come on, get inside,” he’d yelled. But it was too late.
An explosion erupted in front of the troop. Jake watched as the boy’s body was tossed sideways landing somewhere in the mud soaked ground. The smack of his heavy body coming down was a chilling memory that had yet to fade. Jake recalled vomiting up his shrimp and steak meal and then running out to find the soldier. Another long and aggr
avated whistle loomed above and came crashing down beside him, throwing Jake to his side. He saw stars. His breath knocked out.
He struggled to his hands and knees. He was fine. No visible wounds. Everything was wet, but it was warm. Jake looked. He was crawling in the remains of the soldier he’d run after. Warm entrails squirting between his fingers like bloated purple noodles. Jake sprung back to his knees. Instinctually, he smeared the gore painted ground over his face. In shock, he looked for something alive. People were shouting in the distance, but they seemed so far-far away. Jake finally found the soldier. His body had been torn in half by the mortar. He was still breathing…somehow. Cruelly, the boy was still drawling gurgled gulps of air. Jake sat with him. Holding one hand and with the other placed on his gnarled chest. The boy soldier screamed and spit up dark red mist. He thrashed. Jake held him. The soldier grunted one last time and then lay forever still.
Within the stone grey walls of St. Hubert Episcopal Church, Jake sobbed horribly…
Renfield!
And he prayed.
And prayed.
“How much longer,” Jake screamed. He could taste the expensive fur of the carpet. “How much more? When will you take away this pain? I thought it would make me stronger, a better priest, but it hasn’t, it’s made me worse. Jesus…my God, why have you forsaken me…?”
Jake sobbed until he had nothing left inside. Numbness returned. And he welcomed it. In his mind, he was planning on where to have drinks, which bar to hop. And while he made plans to get wasted and to find some willing partner to have sex with, Jake thought of his friends, his Suicide Squad. The memory of his childhood was never far away, though he had yet to reach out to them, not since Ricky’s funeral.
Jake hushed. A heckling whisper vibrated off the cold stone walls. Frightened, Jake rolled to his back and searched the church pews.
No one, he thought.
He was getting to his feet when the whispers came again.
“Who’s there?” he called.
No answer.
Jake dried his face with the coat tail of his sex stained garment, eyes still searching the shadows for some movement.
“If anyone is there…?” Jake started.
“And then what?” sung a heinous voice from the dark corners of the church. “Will you take my confession, father?”
“What…?” Jake reeled. His head spun. The voice, he thought. It sounds…
“But aren’t you tired, preacher? Tired of thousands of confessions knowing your sins are worse than theirs? Don’t you hunger for something with a little more meat?” teased the voice cruelly. “More purpose?”
“Why…? Come out so I can see you,” Jake pleaded.
“Let’s,” said the voice.
And out from the shadows came the heckler. A soldier in muddy ACU attire. His Kevlar helmet was missing. His uniform matted in mud and dark black mire. His midsection seemed cruelly sown together. His skin bluish-grey and purple. His eyes swollen, ready to burst. Across his nametag Jake was able to make out, Renfield. Private Renfield.
“You can’t…? This can’t be real. You’re…you’re…” Jake stuttered.
“Dead?” offered Renfield, smiling, revealing black moldy gaps where teeth should have been.
Jake backed away, bumping into the altar, spilling the contents, the candles, and the bowl for bread and the chalice for communion, clinking to the floor. He looked, unblinking, at the face of the boy soldier who had died in front of him, in his arms, gurgling on his own blood in the mud pit of Camp Ferrin-Huggins.
“Listen,” started the dead and walking Renfield, “I don’t think this is going to work out.” The corpse stepped closer, his stench becoming stronger.
“What’s not?” asked Jake, he didn’t dare breathe.
“You’re not much of a priest, Jake. You know that, right?” Renfield asked.
“What do you mean?” asked Jake. Silently, he agreed.
“You asked for a sign, well here I am.” The dead soldier smiled. His left eye finally burst. Pus ran down his grey cheek.
“My sign?” Jake whispered. He bit his lip to keep from screaming.
“It’s the least I can do. You were kind enough to sit with me in the mud, so this is the least I can do for you,” the dead soldier heckled.
“To do what?”
Laughter echoed off the cold stone walls. Renfield, dead, but here all the same, laughed and laughed, but then the laughter sounded something like clicks, chirps almost, like the swarms that came during the summer months to suck on the sap of trees. The echo became a thunderous wail, rattling the stain-glass windows. Jake cupped his ears and watched as Renfield danced in circles amongst the torrent, watched as the pews shook against the violent storm. The dead man danced impossibly up the walls, baring all the horror that was his power, hopping from one foot to the next, gore and entrails raining down from the ceiling, out between the loosened gnarled thread stitched along his gut. And he laughed, merrily so, his voice rattling like snake in a jar.
“Renfield!” Jake ran screaming toward the large double doors and out into the street, knocking into an elderly woman who fell to the well-maintained grass, without stopping, without looking back.
“Father?” called out the old woman, dazed. There was pleading in her voice.
But Jake heard none of that as he ran for the church owned Volvo.
CHAPTER 10
SUICIDE SQUAD
Maggie
The television was blaring, yet Maggie continued to turn up the volume, hoping to drown out Moxie, who had been barking nonstop in Ricky’s room (tomb) for the last hour. She contemplated getting a couple Aleve from the kitchen medicine drawer, but decided it was too far away. Instead, she continued turning the volume up with Anderson Cooper on CNN. Today, the near white-haired, short-cropped reporter with ocean blue eyes was talking about the high rate of suicides among veterans and how the Veterans Affairs hospital in the desert baked capitol of Arizona had tried to cover-up prolonged wait times.
Why am I watching this? Maggie wondered. She looked at the remote and her hand. Whatever…nothing else is on. A sympathetic Cooper sat opposite a teary-eyed middle-aged woman, the supposed whistleblower of the entire fiasco. She watched indifferently as the woman talked on a number of different issues with how the VA is run. Maggie huffed with the same indifference that floated from the decomposing sympathy flowers on the kitchen table.
The vibrant blues and purples and yellows were now black and moldy. She would have to throw them out eventually, but for now she was content to have the ‘sorry your husband is dead’ gifts on the table, along with all the letters and greeting cards and eviction notices. Eviction from base housing…what a crock! Anderson droned on about the spike of suicide among younger veterans. His voice seemed muffled as Maggie fell into distant memory. She thought of the boys, her best friends, and their club, Suicide Squad.
“At this rate, an average of twenty-two veterans under the age of thirty commits suicide per day. That’s one every sixty-five minutes,” said Cooper from the box. “And you’re claiming the Phoenix office hid the number of suicides with their veterans?”
“Yes…that’s right,” said the nervous woman.
“Why the cover up?” asked Cooper.
“They died on the waiting list…they wanted to keep it a secret. Bad press, I guess,” said the woman.
Maggie heard none of this. In her mind she pictured the gang. She could see a younger, chubbier Bobby Weeks before the war, before he disappeared. She could see Johnathan, complete, whole, before the RPG took his leg. And there was Jake, a real Poindexter, but the most honest and kindest of them all. She saw herself clad in jeans and Nirvana t-shirts. And then she saw Ricky as well.
Ricky stood young and handsome on some imaginary dock licking the waves of recollection. He was a natural-born leader whom she first began to really love, not just as friends, but romantically, in high school. Maggie swallowed the hot anger of this memory. Hope seemed so far away. B
ut who cares, right? Who cares…?
“New requests for treatment were stuffed into a desk drawer…to make,” the woman stopped between sobs, “…to make the books look better! These people are real and they never got treatment and now who can they trust? Who…?” The woman cried. Anderson Cooper looked placid.
Maggie ignored the TV. She peeled back the fabric of her mind, looking deeper into her memory. Searching for the moment their club had taken on the name Suicide Squad. As Cooper and the sobbing woman continued to drone on, Maggie felt herself fall some nineteen years into the past. The memory she found was of the summer of 1995, a week before the trip to Giddings and the abandoned house in the little town called Jotham.
It was the start of the summer, school had just ended, and thankfully none of them had to do any remedial work in summer school. Before Jotham, the gang, as best Maggie could recall, had spent most the first few days of summer messing around the back roads and alleys of Piper’s Meadow in Houston. Once, near the drainage canal by their neighborhood, one of many canals carved into the earth from Houston, feeding into the Gulf, Ricky had found something dead. They weren’t sure what.
Could never properly identify it, Maggie remembered. The creature, as Bobby had whispered, was as large as a dog, maybe a lab, but its face had been mushed with decay. The fur looked slick and black with mud or whatever else it had collected from floating down from the city. Its legs seemed too short and fat to be a lab. ‘Maybe it’s a rat?’ Jake had suggested. The group was in awe by the concept. ‘There are rats this big downtown?’ Johnathan had cried. ‘Bigger,’ Ricky said matter-of-factly. ‘No way…you guys are messing with me,’ Johnathan had protested. ‘Don’t have a cow, man,’ Bobby teased. In her living room, Maggie smiled. The memory felt warm and comfortable, safe. It’s been so long. Too long. Even for Ricky’s funeral, they all weren’t there. Johnny-Boy has been hiding behind Karen. Bobby…? Jake…? Maybe we need to get back together. Have a little reunion. Doesn’t that sound nice?
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