Finally, the infant’s voice grew still. James turned, ever so slowly in case the boy’s father came after all, and then began to stride back towards the camp.
Stephanie hurried after him, leaving Andrea to nurse her son, pleased.
“So?” Stephanie said. “What now?”
“I’m going back. I’ve got to find this Henry guy and see what the score is.”
“I guess we got our test results just now, didn’t we?”
James stopped walking. “Yeah. We did. We know what that kid is.”
“So why didn’t you kill him? Wasn’t that what you were all fired up to do?”
James looked away. “I’ve got to find out what Henry knows. If he knows the score, he might not be alone. If we start taking terminal action now, we could blow everything. It’s too soon.”
“There’s something else. You’re waiting for something else.”
“Yes.”
“The father.”
“Yes.” No, James thought to himself. I’m waiting for something different. I’m waiting for the moment when what I have to do doesn’t come at the expense of your hatred. God help me, I’m waiting.
“Well, get going then. I’ll stay here with her.”
James was still looking away. Stephanie touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Okay?”
James turned towards her sharply. His inner shell was in pieces. Their eyes met, and Stephanie saw what he was really waiting for.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.” He walked off.
Stephanie watched him, a hand to her lips, then headed back down the slope to the beach.
Henry lived away from the rest of the squatters, in a makeshift tent of canvas. He was in his eighties, with crinkled, leathery skin and a body hardened by a hard life. His eyes were intelligent, but with a hunted look that James had rarely encountered. Henry was nursing a bottle of muscatel. He hadn’t bathed in days or longer. Clots of dirty clothes littered the ground of his living space. Incongruously, a tattered astrological star chart was pinned to one wall of the tent, alongside a torn poster of an eighteenth-century sailing vessel on the high seas.
James came to the opening at the front of the tent. “You Henry?” he asked.
“That’s me,” the man replied drunkenly. “Come on in, son. Get comfy.”
James thought it unlikely he could comply with that last, folksy command, given that the tent reeked of unwashed human. Still, he ducked and entered, then sat cross-legged across from the old man.
“I was just down at the beach with Andrea. We were talking about the father of her child. She said you taught her the song to call him from the water.”
“Yep, I did. I did do that.”
“How did you know it? What do you know about—about those people, the ones in the water?”
“Oh, I picked it up here and there. You know.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“It’s nothing, fella. Forget about it. Have a drink.”
James shook his head, uncomfortable with how welcome the suggestion had struck him. Then he reached out for the bottle anyway and took a long drink.
“It’s not nothing, old-timer.” He pulled his shirt out and lifted it up, revealing the old scars on his chest. “I know these things. They’re not human. They’re not kind. They only exist to hurt, to destroy.”
Henry took back the bottle of muscatel, had a slug, and laughed. “You’re with that nice government lady, aren’t you? Seems to me that you folks said those same things about the Indians, way back when.”
James felt his face harden. He lowered his shirt. “It’s not the same thing.”
Henry’s glazed eyes regarded James regretfully. He shook his head and looked down at the ground. “No. It’s not.” He took another drink, then gave James one.
“So what’s the story, Henry? The real one?”
Henry sighed. “Well, shit,” he said.
“Back thirty-odd years ago, I was a sailor. Worked for merchant ships, small fry. Loved it. Loved the sea.
“One boat, there was this captain, a real drunken bastard. He knew about them things, them folk out of the sea. Had traffic with them. They would scavenge wrecks for him sometimes, sabotage other boats some other times. But he was holding out on them. Seemed he’d promised them his crew someday—us—on account of how they needed a fresh batch of men for something. So finally he gave in, said, ‘Okay, you can have my crew. I’ll give them a big party on the beach, get them drunk, and you can come in and take them. But I want something in return.’ See, they had this jewelry—weird stuff—made of gold and other things. They were gonna bring him a whole big bunch of this stuff to seal the bargain when the trade went down.
“But this captain, he was a real drunken bastard. We knew about those folk, about his dealings with them. He told us the score. We planned an ambush. We’d fake a party, but when they came out of the sea, we’d be ready for them. We’d kill ’em all, and take their gold. When we were docked in Haiti, we got it all ready. The captain passed out guns and knives. We went to the beach late at night and raised a ruckus.
“Of course, the men got into the liquor. By the time those things came, everyone was three sheets to the wind anyway. They were clever. They ambushed us. Came by land, by sea, over rocks. Tore into us. Men were dying everywhere. They just tore us right up.
“I saw what was gonna happen. I was sober—had been sober a long time. Back then. As soon as the shit hit the fan I clambered up a bunch of rocks where the captain was hiding. We hid out there while those things killed every man there on the beach. When they were done, they started dragging the bodies out into the surf, and checking around to make sure they got us all.
“That’s when I did it. I stood up all of a sudden, hoisted the captain up with me. All them critters looked up at us, and I cut that drunken bastard’s throat right on the spot. Kicked him down to the beach below. Then I jumped down, dropped my knife, held up my hands.
“They coulda killed me. But I’d made them happy. Plus, the captain was dead—and they could always use somebody on land to help ’em out. So they let me walk outta there, and said that someday I’d owe them one.
“I came back home, got a job on a railroad, never set foot on a boat again. Never heard from them again till last year, when I started having these dreams.”
“So Andrea—that was the one you owed them?”
“Yep. She’s a sweet girl. Not right in the head. But she loves her man. She’s got a beautiful boy. Hell, maybe her man loves her, too.”
“No. He doesn’t love her. He doesn’t love the boy.”
“Well shit, how do you know? Maybe he do! And if not, at least she loves him. Love’s worth something, ain’t it?” Henry’s voice grew plaintive, drunken, and guilty. “Love’s worth something, ain’t it?”
James rose, standing only halfway up in the confines of the tent, and stepped outside.
He was so tired. So very tired. Tired of all the little corruptions, the little tragedies. Tired of all the misery, all the sorrow. He couldn’t think clearly. The muscatel was buzzing in his head. His training would see him through. Delta Green’s driving policy was simple, after all.
Containment. Containment of threat, containment of disaster, containment of knowledge.
He crouched and stepped back into the tent. He leaned over and took the bottle of muscatel from Henry, took a long drink. Set the bottle down. Threw a punch into Henry’s gut that knocked the wind out of the old man, who fell back wheezing. Grabbed the man’s pillow and shoved it down over his face. Held it there. Kneeled on his chest. Stayed put for three full minutes. Until he was dead.
James pulled the pillow off Henry’s stricken, still features.
He sat down heavily and picked up the bottle. He drained the rest of it. There was quite a lot. He tossed the bottle to one side. He arranged Henry to look as if he’d been sleeping and died peacefully. No one was going to look at this old bum too closely. He sat back again and watched the dead man’s f
ace drunkenly. He put his face in his hands. He wanted to cry. He failed.
He wasn’t cleared for this.
On the beach, the sun was gone and the moon was rising high. Stephanie and Andrea had been talking for what seemed like ages. James had not yet returned, and Stephanie wondered where he was. Andrea talked about her life: the orphanage, the foster parents, the reform school, the arrests, running away from home once, twice, a final time. How she’d read this article in a magazine about a place where you could go when you had no place to go. She’d torn it out, read it again and again, dreamed about it, loved it, loved the idea of it. When she’d run off that final time, eighteen months ago, she’d gone there. To the squatter camp.
Stephanie shook her head, shivered in the cool night sea-breeze. Their lives were so different, but only as different as what you see in a mirror: opposite, but otherwise the same. She’d spent so much time searching, unhappy, trying to find her place in the world, wondering why she was always so miserable, always so full of pain. She put her hand on the girl’s knee.
“It’s okay; it is. Some of us have to make our own way in life. It’s not easy.”
Andrea looked her full in the face. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s right.” Her face held something back, some suspicion, or some secret knowledge, that Stephanie could not place. Perhaps this was jailhouse reserve.
Then Jamile began to sing.
It was the song again, his father’s song. He started it up all of a sudden, jarring them both, his uneven but unbroken tones rolling out across the beach. His mother joined in, singing in her strong, clear voice that nevertheless had to pause for breath every so often, her very humanity damaging the purity of the song. Jamile’s singing betrayed no such fragile allegiances to the human race. He sang—as simple as that.
Stephanie felt a chill go up her back. She shuddered. The song was just as beautiful as before, heartbreakingly so. But this time there was something else. It was, she decided, a strange potential. A feeling obvious to them all that this time, the song would be answered.
It didn’t take long.
He broke the water, a ways out from shore. His head was powerful, thick, set low into his hunched shoulders. He strode forward, his arms and legs massive, his chest a barrel, his whole body ripe to burst with vitality and the savor of the sea.
He was singing.
The voices of the three joined in song, calling higher and louder. The song was so beautiful, the moment so ethereal, so transcendent, that all of Stephanie’s suspicions and fears melted away in the rapture of the moment. There was nothing wrong here, nothing unnatural. Everything was right.
Then she saw his eyes.
His crystalline eyes, which never seemed to close, were the most terrifying sight she had ever seen. They’d seen all the secrets of the cosmos a hundred times over and yet he knew his place among those secrets from the very start. His eyes betrayed him: he was the proper product of the universe, whereas humanity was but incidental. His eyes had no emotion, no spirit, no nothing—they were as blank as a starless sky, and just as deep.
Stephanie froze as the man from the sea, the true son of nature, came striding out of the foam with the awful surety of a god. She could not move. She could barely breathe. His gaze held her hypnotized, and then he was standing before her where she sat upon the beach. The song the three sang came to an end, its awesome sense of joy belied by what she saw in his eyes: the song was not meant for the ears of humans and its beauty was an accident; it appealed to a different aesthetic sense altogether, and to that sense it was not beautiful. It was proud and terrible.
She would have sat there, frozen, lost in the trackless wastes of his eyes, but for Andrea’s voice.
“Yes,” the girl said. “I brought her here for you.”
Something large swelled between his legs.
The spell was broken. Stephanie spun, stumbled up, tried to run. A massive webbed claw grabbed her shoulder, dug in, ripped her windbreaker, shoved her down roughly onto the sand. She rolled over, threw a punch, he caught it, held it, swung with his other claw and clouted her in the side of the head. She fell back, stunned. He dropped to his knees, moved the claw that held her to her throat, pinned her; then his other claw grabbed for the waistband of her jeans, while the distended thing between his legs bobbed erect and grotesque in the sea-breeze.
Her hands freed, Stephanie reached in the pocket of her windbreaker and pulled out the taser, another item left by the courier that morning—was it just that morning?—and jammed it against the beast’s gut.
He croaked, a terrible sound like bones breaking, froze, then fell onto her, dead weight.
Stephanie was pinned. The beast was incredibly dense, three hundred pounds and more. She struggled to get him off of her.
“No!” Andrea cried. Stephanie looked to the girl with relief. Her relief died. Andrea had set Jamile down on the sand and was picking up a large rock. She staggered quickly over to Stephanie, raised the rock, and prepared to smash her face in with it.
A single shot rang out. It struck Andrea in the left side of her chest, spun her to one side, dropped her to the sand, her heart pierced and broken.
Bang, thought James.
He stood perhaps sixty feet away, both arms cocked out steady, the Desert Eagle perched in his hands. He breathed heavily.
The beast atop Stephanie stirred. The taser would have made short work of a human. It only brought the beast down for a few precious moments. As he pushed himself up, groggy, Stephanie scuttled back, out from under his weight, and ran. She ran up the slope, into the grass, straight towards James, who lowered his left arm and gestured to her to come, to run, to run to him. His other arm remained out, trying to get a shot around his fleeing partner in the dim twilight.
The beast had scuttled onto the beach, still weak, and then rose to its feet and started to run away just as James took aim and squeezed the trigger. The slug went wide, drunkenly wide in the dark. James walked forward as fast as he dared, still aiming, trying to get a shot that would count.
Stephanie reached him. He warded her off with his left hand, then brought it up to steady the other. With two hands on the gun, he continued walking forward swiftly, closing the gap.
The beast was running now, crouched more than usual, into the surf.
James fired again. Again. One of the shots punched into the beast’s back. The .44 magnum slug carved through the beast’s flesh, and blew out the other side. The beast staggered, ducked tighter into itself, arms clutching its chest, up to its knees in water now, pressing on through the surf.
Again. Again. Again. The grouping was tight, the muzzle blazing as fast as James could fire. In the space of a breath, all three shots caught the beast in the back. It staggered, roared, dropped to its knees, fell face down into the shallows.
James ran forward, releasing the magazine and putting another one in its place, the gun held out before him like a flashlight illuminating a violent path. Stephanie ran with him.
They reached the surf. James planted one foot on the beast’s back, leaned down swiftly, put a final slug into the back of the beast’s head. The sound was like a crab shell bursting in a restaurant.
Stephanie stopped just short of running into him. She put a hand on his shoulder.
James lowered the weapon, then put it back into its holster. His trouser cuffs were soaking wet. He turned to her. They embraced clumsily, revolved slowly in the shallow water.
Stephanie’s view danced from the far horizon of the water to the near line of the shore as they turned, she saw Andrea’s body atop the rocks and sand.
There was something else—something she didn’t see. Because it wasn’t there.
She gasped, withdrew from the embrace. “Turn him over!” she cried.
James looked at her dumbly, then leaned over and grabbed the beast’s shoulder. He pulled hard, straining against the weight, and flopped the dead thing over onto his back, the crystalline eyes meeting the limitless night sky.
&
nbsp; Where the beast had lain, lay Jamile. A hole the size of Stephanie’s fist gaped from the back of the boy’s head. One of James’ shots had blown through the beast’s body and struck the infant—the infant cradled in the hunched beast’s arms as he fled for the sunless sea.
Jamile was dead. His father was dead. His mother was dead. The path from her discovery to its conclusion was littered with corpses.
Stephanie looked up, into James’ eyes. She smelled the wine on his breath. He looked at her, silently pleading for her to understand. The things that separated them were not important—not nearly as important as the possibility of their being together.
Stephanie looked away. To look any longer would be to understand James. To look any longer would be to understand herself. To look any longer would be to understand everything. She looked up into the night sky, into the far stars. The dark above held no secret. It held no hope. It would not help her understand. The cosmos radiated ignorance, and she accepted it greedily, for the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
James watched her face for a long moment, hoping against hope that she would return his gaze. She did not, could not, dared not. Finally he looked down at the bodies, slick with surf. He crouched slowly, his knees coming to rest on the dead beast’s back. He put his face in his hands. He wanted to cry.
He did.
By the time the sun rose, a Delta Green sanitation crew had disposed of all the corpses. When morning stood firm, Stephanie and James got into the land rover and headed for Roscoe. At the small airport, James would board a commuter flight back to San Francisco. An attorney, arranged for informally by Harley Patton of the ONI, awaited his return so they could prepare for the trial. A flock of reporters were waiting, too; in James’ absence, his crime had become national news. The novelty of drill sergeants raping female recruits had faded, and a nation hungry for the degradation of its own spirit now turned its attention to this latest pairing of lion and Christian to enter the arena. Across the country, talk-radio hosts invited callers to ring in and express their profound disgust for this man, this Captain Forrest James of the United States Navy, prestigious commander of SEAL Team 7, who was a drunk and a woman-beater and unfit to serve his country or his species.
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 7