by Myke Cole
“Yeah, well. I just haven’t been fit to talk to anyone.”
“I understand, ma’am. I don’t think I’d want to talk to anyone either.”
“Right . . .” She lost her words again, stammered.
“Ma’am, is everything all right? Did you want me to send the chaplain, or did you need . . .”
“Where’s Steve?”
“Ma’am?”
“Steve Chang. Where is he? He’s not answering his phone.”
There was a long pause. The engine coughed and died. Someone cursed.
“He didn’t tell you, ma’am?”
“He told me he’d meet me at my apartment. He didn’t. That’s not like him.”
“Well, he can’t, ma’am. He’s deployed.”
“He’s . . . what?”
“Petty Officer Chang is responding to a contingency, I figured he’d have let you know, but maybe there was something in the spin up that precluded that.”
“That’s . . . that doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t say anything before that would . . .”
“Ma’am, you’ve been in this community long enough to know that sometimes things pop off awfully quickly. I’m sure he’ll get in touch as soon as he’s able. Now, why don’t you let me get a chaplai . . .”
“I don’t need a fucking chaplain!”
Another pause. “Sarah, I understand you’re . . . stressed right now. Tell you what, there’s a Starbucks on post. Can I meet you there? We can talk. No Chief Ahmad, just us girls.”
The thought of a “just girls” conversation with the hard-as-nails chief actually brought a smile to Sarah’s face despite her fear and frustration.
“No, thanks. Just . . . if you hear from him, just tell him I’d like to know that he’s okay. Get a message to me.”
“Of course, ma’am. He’s fine, I’m sure. You just sit tight. Call me at this number if you need anything. I’m on watch all night.”
“Okay, thanks.”
She hung up the phone and doubled over, the fear becoming a spike twisting in her gut.
Because she knew it was all wrong.
She wasn’t one of the old-hat navy wives, women who’d spent decades trailing their husbands from station to station until they practically wore the uniform themselves. But she’d been with Jim long enough to know a thing or two.
First, she’d never heard of a chief getting stuck on watch. It was a duty reserved for junior personnel.
Second, Jim had left suddenly before, but never so suddenly that there’d been no word. There’d always been a short phone call, a cryptic text message or e-mail. Never this.
And lastly, something in Ahmad’s tone that she’d never heard before. And those words: You just sit tight.
Second Sarah swam to the surface, blooming into a shimmering warning in the back of her mind, finishing the sentence.
You just sit tight. We’re coming to get you.
She raced to the bedroom and snatched up a blanket, threw it over her shoulder before going to retrieve Patrick. He nestled against her shoulder, made a questioning sound in sleepy tones. “We’re going to see Auntie Peg. Won’t that be fun?”
But Patrick was silent, chasing the quiet corner of sleep that shut out the world. She left him to it as she raced out of the house, not bothering to lock the door, getting into her car, buckling him in, and heading out for the highway as fast as she dared.
The sodium lights of the parking lot receded, taking the shadows with them, leaving all washed in gray. The clouds had pulled back from the sky, and the stars lit everything desert bright, laying down miles between her and what she only now realized she’d considered home.
CHAPTER XXI
REDEMPTION
Schweitzer watched his body shrink in the distance, the cold of the void giving way to numbness, the chorus of screaming sliding through the range from buzz to silence in the space of a few moments. There was peace in it, of no longer having to fight to hold on to himself.
The room, the women and children were all gone. He floated in the darkness, looking down on his animated corpse. He’d never seen himself from this angle before, broad back and strong shoulders straining the STF armor, arms swinging deliberately. Enjoy it, buddy. He knew the jinn could not hear him. Use it in good health.
Ninip didn’t answer, and he noticed that he felt a pang of loneliness at the realization. The jinn might have been a monster, but it was impossible to share such tight quarters and not grow connected.
He spun into the storm of souls, his view of himself tumbling away, replaced with something white and narrow, shutter-flashing by. It was followed by another flash of white, then another. A torso? A leg? They spun past so quickly, he couldn’t focus on any single one. It was a film shown in stop-motion, the frames moving just quickly enough to keep him from locking on to any single image. A face, oddly familiar, eyes deep and haunted. A hip. Another arm. The images taunted him, flashes of possibility, a promise of an end to isolation, of other people with whom to connect, if he could only slow down enough to see them.
He could feel the magic all around him, a current like Jackrabbit’s but a thousand times more intense. He could feel the force of it bathing him, pushing through him. Was this what had turned Ninip’s human soul into a jinn? And if Schweitzer tarried here long enough, would he become the same?
It is the wellspring, Jawid had said. The source.
He felt a tugging, a faint but definite current drawing him backward, slowly and unceasingly deeper into the storm. He kicked against it, rolling himself over, catching a glimpse of his body again, this time shrouded by the whirling bodies of the other souls in the chaos around him. He kicked again, felt himself move forward slightly, the current putting on strength like a living thing, petulantly refusing to let him go.
The storm seemed to turn on its side, his body spinning like a fighter jet doing a barrel roll. His body receded to an oblong black dot, covered and uncovered and covered again. His bearings flew away as he tumbled, the current becoming more and more insistent.
Why was he still fighting? What was there to swim for? A place in another fight? That bare room full of blood and the screams of children? The other bodies folded over him, and the first tendrils of shuddering exhaustion began to make themselves known. This was simply a different horror than what he’d just known. There was no reason to resist it. The thing was done.
No. The thing was not done. He kicked harder against the current, straining back toward his body. He cast his mind out toward the world fading in the distance. There was something there, something he had to do. The bodies whirled around him, the current spun him, the screams buzzed in his ears, addling his brain. He couldn’t focus. He drifted deeper, battered more incessantly by the other souls whirling past him, through him.
At last, even the black speck that was his body vanished, and he turned away, spinning deeper into the morass. A knee coursed past, followed by an earlobe, torn where some jewelry had been savaged out. A disembodied hand, long fingernails cracked and blackened. A throat, the hint of an Adam’s apple bobbing. A face, something stuck over one eyelid. The back of a knee . . .
Schweitzer spun, trying to turn back to the face, to find it in the spinning throng. Something had been stuck to its eye, something that wasn’t part of its body. He didn’t know much about the rules that governed this haunted expanse, but he hadn’t seen anything that wasn’t a body part in all the time he’d looked on it. The souls lost here carried nothing but their bodies, no jewelry, no clothing.
He grasped, swam, clawed his way through the throng. The screaming intensified, as if the storm sought to drown out his thoughts. The sounds began to push deeper, until they crystallized as the shreds of thoughts filling his own mind, threatening to pull him away from himself.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
Why did I do that so stupi
d
Oh father think kindly of me
That yellow bastard I can’t believe he got the drop on me
Schweitzer gritted his teeth, trying to hold to his own consciousness, to pick it out from all the others. The spinning mass of limbs stretched out in all directions now, endless. He’d probably imagined that spot over that eye. Even if he hadn’t, he’d never find it.
He rolled over onto his back, was it his back? All sense of direction was lost to him now.
And there it was again.
It was clear to him now, a tiny spot of crimson in the midst of the whirling chaos. Set against the semiopaque pallor of the whirling dead, it glowed like a star. It moved counter to the invisible currents that crossed and recrossed, whipping the souls along. Where the dead cascaded and eddied, this thing slowly swayed, gently falling, a late-spring leaf finally succumbing to the rigors of autumn.
A rose petal.
And there, cutting through the sound and the tumult, a gentle scent, slight but unmistakable, the soft rosewater that meant wife and love and home.
The voices pressed into his mind, the invisible wind and current dragged his spirit, but nothing assailed his smell. The trail was stark, definite.
It could be followed.
He knew it led somewhere important, back to a thing he’d left undone. He tried to focus. He’d been good at focusing once, before the legion of voices had crowded into his mind, passing themselves through him, drowning out his own thoughts. But the smell was enough. He didn’t remember what it was for anymore, but it was different, something other than the chaos around him. He latched onto it, kicked off.
The current bit hungrily into him, the tugging now shifting into something akin to pain, as if it were a thinking force, angry at the thought of losing him. He clung to the smell, a rope now, a lifeline, drove himself along it inch by agonizing inch. The storm continued unchanged, the bodies and faces flashing before him, his mind full of the regrets and shock of last moments spanning centuries. And then the chaos thinned, the screaming receded, and he could think again.
There, far distant, was that speck he knew was his body, growing steadily. The smell had gone, but he no longer needed it. He had the bit in his teeth now, each moment bringing him closer to himself, the memories of who he was. Sarah and Patrick and Peter and Chief and his first kiss and his first day of school and on and on and on. All the hard-won skill from Coronado. How to focus, how to fight.
With a final shout, he broke free, threw himself down the intervening distance, rocketed across the void, scrabbling along the edges of himself, feeling the jinn’s presence filling the space beyond.
Ninip was drunk on carnage, bent on slaughter and unready for Schweitzer’s bulling himself back inside, stretching himself into a small pocket of the darkness, spreading out, pushing against the jinn, racing up to their shared eyes, looking through them once again.
What felt like eons had been a fraction of a second. Their shared body still stood over the split remains of the boy, the assault rifle at his side, tendrils of gray smoke still curling up from the barrel. The screams of the void were once again replaced by the screams of the women and children, racing out through the open door, Ninip even now turning to go after them.
Schweitzer instantly felt the drunkenness, the addictive high of the jinn’s feral hunger. But the chill of the void was still in him, the echo of the shrieking souls still ringing in his ears, the smell of Sarah’s perfume still a hint in his memory. He still felt the magic tingling in the fibers of his soul.
One of the girls bolted the wrong way, racing away from the door, toward the open window. Ninip twitched out a clawed hand to intercept her, and Schweitzer hauled it back, pinning their arm flat against their side. The jinn noticed him now, screamed, pushed against him, but Schweitzer was dug in. Ninip abandoned his efforts and turned back to the girl as she ran to the window and threw herself out.
Schweitzer let Ninip have rein then, knowing the jinn would follow.
But not before he forced them to reach out a hand and retrieve the dog tags from where they lay on one of the few remaining dry spots on the floor. He thrust them back behind the armor’s breastplate, felt them slide down his chest to lodge behind the tight fit of his web belt. It would have to do.
They dove through the window, the girl already falling, arms waving madly, eyes closed. She hit the ground a moment before them, her shattering bones audible through the slim envelope of flesh around them.
They landed beside her in a deep crouch. Ninip saw her dead, looked up for other prey. A bullet sang through the air, kicked up a pocket of dirt beside them, and the jinn was off. Bullets meant living people and the predator’s high the jinn sought.
The gate to the compound was open, a small knot of men running through it. Four in the middle were clustered tightly around another figure, herding him along. Schweitzer had seen those tactics from dedicated Protective Security Details throughout his career. Hardened men, willing to give their lives to protect their charge.
Nightshade.
Eyes on target, Schweitzer sent to Jawid, engaging, then Ninip had them up and running.
One of the figures detached himself from the column, steady and calm. He stopped, raised his weapon, and took careful aim.
The round caught Schweitzer and Ninip in the throat, striking just an inch above the collar of the armor. Schweitzer felt the round punch through the hollow of their throat, through the dead remains of their esophagus and larynx, piercing the vertebrae beyond.
It was an incredible shot, one Schweitzer would have been proud of. In a world that made sense, Schweitzer would go down and the shooter’s skill, training, and dedication would have been rewarded.
But Eldredge had said it best: The world was changing. Schweitzer and Ninip reached the shooter in three strides and bit his head off.
Two rounds thudded into their armor, both center mass, knocking them back a couple of paces, the fluid cells going hard and heavy from the impact. They needed to lower their profile. Schweitzer shot Ninip an image of a loping gait to the target, and Ninip obliged, all too happy to revert to his preferred means of getting to the fight.
Ninip galloped them forward on their haunches and knuckles, snarling now, imitating Schweitzer’s bellows dance when he tried to speak. The battle cry went out internally first, as Ninip channeled it up their shared windpipe. Alalai! Ashtar! But the punctured larynx let the air out before the sounds could be shaped, so Ninip’s words twisted into wheezing barks, a coughing shout.
Then they were through the compound’s gate, out among the neat rows of parked cars, starlight dappling dented hoods, piles of spare tires and junked parts piled on clumps of tough grass that defied the dry soil.
The group splintered.
Schweitzer knew immediately that this was rehearsed. This was not a mad scramble, it was a scripted retreat, the wings of the escort flanking out to put them in enfilade, the High Value Target pushing on while his PSD dropped back one by one to delay the pursuit.
Schweitzer flashed the images to Ninip, showing him the tactics classes he’d learned in SQT, the shoothouse scenarios where mistakes like this got a team wiped out in less than a minute.
But the jinn had the bit in his teeth. He charged them on, lunging for the first of the escorts, while Schweitzer stretched their peripheral vision, trying to track all the contacts at once. Two of them were digging in the open bay of a golf cart to his right, pulling a tarp aside. Schweitzer didn’t like the look of that, but Ninip was already on, the line of sight broken, and Schweitzer was forced to look forward again as they snatched up a man who fired uselessly over his shoulder and brought him down on their knee with enough force to snap his spine.
Ninip had them toss the body aside, as Nightshade threw open the door of a jeep and dove inside.
And then the world exploded.
He’d been bl
own up before, and not far from here, knocked off the top of an MRAP on one of the few godforsaken lanes of broken stone in this part of the world laid smoothly enough to be called a road. He’d tumbled through the air, end over end, his ears ringing, his vision gone white, the stars exploding in his eyes and his head too thick and too bright to allow him to get his situational awareness back. If not for his teammates, he would have died.
Schweitzer flew now, but there was no ringing, no stars. His vision was clear. Their right side was burning, the armor coated with gasoline from the car struck by the explosive round. Spalling glass and metal fragments had punched through the liquid cells too fast for them to react, peppering their legs, hand, the side of their head. Were he living, the agony alone would have sent him spiraling into shock, followed closely by death.
But as it was, Schweitzer rolled them into the momentum of the blast, letting their body glide through the air, landing roughly on their stomach, the shock spreading out across their body. Some ribs snapped, he could feel cracks in their cervical vertebrae where they’d been weakened by the bullet, but that wouldn’t impair their functionality. The rest of the bones, the ones they needed to keep moving, held. Ninip had them up again in an instant.
The escort was good. Schweitzer could see the shooter kneeling alongside the golf cart, keeping his eyes on the sights of the RPG, his companion already fitting another rocket in place. Schweitzer knew they couldn’t cover the distance in time, that their body, even charged by magic, would be shattered by the explosive charge, the copper lining inverting, melting into a metal carrot that would be propelled through them at over a klick a second, the hypersonic speed alone grinding him to powder.
He pressed them down, trying to force their shared body flat on the ground, knowing it would be futile, that they’d be incinerated regardless. The irony wasn’t lost on him, he’d fought his way back into his body from the void, only to enjoy his body for a few brief moments before losing it again.