The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  Oddy turned and ran faster than he’d ever run before. His feet skimmed across the snow so quickly he couldn’t be certain his boots left their indentation in the snow. Fear and exhaustion fought against one another; fear was winning at the moment.

  He reached the base of the hilltop. Something buzzed past his skull. There was a wet ripping sound and Oddy raised his hand to the stump where his ear used to be. He dug his feet into the hillside, unable to feel the ground beneath him, and started to climb. Noises gathered beneath him, clickings and gurglings and the sob of hungry infants.

  He snagged his foot on an exposed root and something snapped below his Achilles tendon and for a moment nothing and then pain roared up his leg, through his belly, through his neck. It seemed to rip the top of his head off and he puked a gut-wrenching stream into the snow but he never slowed, never gave pain the upper hand. He was thinking of Gunner and Tripwire and Crosshairs and Slash and how he owed it to them to reach that fucking whirlybird; he couldn’t save them but if he could save himself then maybe, somehow, he’d be saving them all. The concept made no sense but it was all he had and he clung to it like a drowning man to a life preserver.

  There was a snapping whiplike noise and sudden pain sang up his arm. Oddy stared down at his left hand to see that now, in addition to the stripped tendons, his ring and little fingers were gone. Well, at least I can still make a peace sign, he thought madly. He glanced over his shoulder at the creature who’d done it: small, the rough size of a monkey, the skin of its head peeled off in tiny ribbons that danced and circulated around its raw face in the manner of streamers tied to an oscillating fan. Its limbs were filament-thin threads, the purplish tendrils of an anemone, thousands upon thousands, lashing out to lick at his lower extremities.

  He spun awkwardly and fired. Through dumb luck or benign providence the slug struck the creature’s center and sent it tumbling backwards, filaments licking uselessly, where it was trampled by the advancing horde. Oddy’s peripheral vision was a blur of bizarre movement and streaking shapes, things beyond description, things nearly beyond conception, things his tautly-stretched mind rebelled stridently at the very existence of. Pain blossomed in his skull, a great burst-open flower, making his eyes water. He ran on senseless feet, legs pumping, arms pistoning, blinding blood in his eyes. The helicopter was ten feet away. The lowered gangway yawned like an open mouth.

  The time it took him to cross those remaining ten feet was a little under three seconds. Yet those scant moments unfolded into a lifetime inside his head. Unconnected images sprang, unbidden, into his mind: his mother chopping onions over the sink, the sun streaming through an open window to touch the blackness of her hair; a package of cigarettes, his father’s brand, half-open on a folding TV-tray, droplets of blood flecking the cellophane wrapper; a pretty girl on a city bus who had touched his knee and so he had touched hers and something had passed between them but now all he could recall was the narrow outline of her bra-strap beneath her blouse and the smell of her body like fresh-picked spearmint; the draft letter held in his twenty-year-old hands, his clean and unlined and somehow innocent hands, the letter’s folds machine-straight and the words stark on the bright white page; a dark trench in the jungle’s heart, the stink of terrified young bodies and tracer fire snapping overhead; Dade’s face blown wide open and his limp body rolling across the freeway. And he wondered, idly but earnestly, what his mother was doing right now, at that exact moment, who she was talking to or what thoughts might be occupying her mind as her son fought for his life in a place as foreign and remote as the dark side of the moon…

  The gangway made a hollow metallic sound as his boots struck it. Oddy thought it was perhaps the most wonderful sound he’d ever heard. He pounded up the ramp, overbalanced, and toppled forward into the cabin. Gunmetal-gray pain exploded like shrapnel in his leg and ear and skull; slivers of shooting light spun through his vision like formations of tiny burning sparrows.

  “Go!” he screamed. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The pilot—who, through some heroic feat of inattention, had failed to take note of either Oddy’s scrambling ascent or the monstrous daisychain attending him—turned to regard the cabin. The man he saw—black and filthy and wild-eyed, blood squirting from his hand and his head and a thousand smaller wounds besides—looked in no way like the man he’d dropped off seventy-two hours earlier.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Gone!” the bloody black man said with a rising note of hysteria in his voice. “Dead! GO!”

  “All of them are dea—?”

  It was then the pilot saw something fly through the gangway breech. For a moment it was just a blur—either that, or the only way his eyes and mind could cope with such a creature’s existence was to blur it out. But the blur rapidly fused into a solid shape and his heart trembled in his chest.

  The first thing that came into focus was the texture of its flesh: red and shifting, dimming and brightening like embers in a gusting wind, lumpen and pustulent and shimmering under the cabin’s bright lights. Next was its method of locomotion: a pair of wings, now nothing more than a black-boned exoskeleton, the ribs hung with moldering rags of flesh, and at its rear a fish-like tail, also fleshless, slashing the air. Then its head swam into clarity and the pilot recoiled as if slapped: petals of burning-ember flesh peeling back—no, not peeling back but blossoming outward, like some cancerous flower—to reveal the smallest of faces, wrinkled and wizened and aged beyond all fathomable bounds, a shriveled walnut face, tiny blind eyes and a mouth like a wound, sharp needlefish teeth and the sound of its body cutting the air was horrid, the sound of a dying child’s screams.

  The black man raised his pistol and fired almost casually. The flying thing was knocked against the cabin wall and a gout of ichor plastered the dull metal behind its body.

  “Stay or go,” the black man said. “Your choice now.”

  “Jesus,” the pilot whispered as the thing made a slow descent down the hull, leaving a shiny wake of itself behind. He thumbed the gangway switch.

  A pneumatic hiss and the gangway began to rise. Oddy struggled to a sitting position and leveled the Webley at the narrowing slit of darkness. His ears—his ear—rung with the concussive pistolfire and deeper inside his head there was another kind of ringing, huge and thudding and furious.

  Come on…

  The barrel trembled. He bore down hard. It stabilized.

  Bring it if you want bring it if you may oh can you just BRING IT…

  Shapes lashed and cringed in the murk outside, getting closer. The gangway rose: now five feet from closed, now four…

  “Holy fuck!” the pilot screamed as something slammed into the windshield. Blood and slaver exploded across the glass. The thing, small and toothy and determined, slammed into the glass again. Again. Again. The pilot jumped with every impact. The windshield splintered, then a big section of it went milky with cracks. Lacking any practical method of defense, the pilot switched on the windshield wipers, which, in slapping against the creature’s flanks, only enraged it further.

  The gangway was two feet from closed, one and a half…

  Come on come on come the fuck ON…

  A thick cable shot through the gap. No, Oddy realized quickly, not a cable. A tentacle. It was a tentacle, and there was a neat grid of suckers on the underside of its mucous-coated length. No, Oddy realized in an apoplexy of horror, not suckers. Faces. Each of the disks he’d assumed were suckers was indeed a twisted, screaming, sickeningly human face. The tentacle thrashed against the honeycombed metal grate and some of the faces burst open like overripe fruit. Shapes proliferated in nauseating abundance outside the helicopter, flukes and scraps and scabs, a whirlwind of colors and textures and scents. Oddy fired through the dwindling aperture; the bullet whined off the hull and out into the darkness. Then the gangway snicked shut. The tentacle, neatly severed, writhed on the floor like a cleaved earthworm.

  “Now!” Oddy screamed. “Now!”

/>   “The fuck you think I’m doing?” the pilot screamed back.

  He pulled hard back on the steering yoke and the Labrador started to ascend. Then something thwapped against its side with massive force: as if a giant redwood had been felled on top of them. Oddy was hurled against the airframe. His skull connected with a metal rib and his vision blurred. An explosion barked overhead and sparks jetted down around them. The windshield broke inwards and pellets of Saf-T-Glas sprayed the pilot’s face. The hull groaned and there was a sound like a beer can crushed underfoot and the lights flickered, then winked out. They flickered on and Oddy saw the pilot fighting the joystick, trying to stabilize the helicopter as something dark and gelatinous squeezed through the windshield hole.

  Oddy shook his head clear and staggered aftwards. The pilot was bug-eyed looking at the amorphous black shape expanding into the cockpit, billowing out of the hole, a shiny dark bulb. Oddy jammed the gun into it—the barrel dimpling its skin as if it were an over-inflated innertube—and pulled the trigger. It exploded with a wet plot, spewing noxious matter that burned their faces and hands. Oddy stumbled back and his ass hit the tape deck and suddenly “Manic Monday” by The Bangles reverberated throughout the cabin, Susanna Hoffs singing Just another manic Monday; wish it were Sunday…

  Oddy clubbed the Webley’s butt into the console and her voice cut out abruptly.

  The pilot flicked his stinking hair out of his eyes and bore down on the yoke with as much strength as he possessed. Things were pinging off the underside of the hull and the sound reminded Oddy of how Charlie would fire at low-flying Hueys in hopes of rupturing the fuel tanks but he knew this pinging was not bullets but claws and teeth and other appendages that defied all laws of nature and sense. Something slammed into the cockpit beside his head and the metal buckled inwards in a riotous outline of the thing that had struck it. Looking at that indent, the utter senselessness of it, Oddy’s heart sped up and his saliva glands spurted bitter juice into his mouth.

  The Labrador’s propellers labored heavily and the helicopter began to rise again. Then the back end jerked down alarmingly, like a bobber that’d been hit by a big fish, and canted upwards again. Oddy imagined an accumulation of monstrous limbs wrapped around the landing gear, bearing the helicopter down.

  This is it, he thought. Moment of truth…

  The engines whined. The tachometer redlined.

  A point of perfect tension was achieved: the moment when, during a tug-of-war, one team’s resolve slips and they tumble, headlong, into the dirt…

  Please please oh please God…

  …and then the Labrador was hurtling into the sky as if shot from a sling. Oddy and the pilot were thrown violently forward. The pilot’s head hit the console and for a gut-churning moment Oddy felt them lurch downwards again. Then the pilot shook away the cobwebs and steered the chopper into a stable ascent. Wind whistled through the hole in the windshield. It was sharp and stinging but also pure and cool and wonderful.

  Oddy slumped into the co-pilot’s jumpseat. Beneath him, in the rapidly-darkening forest, he saw, or believed he saw, Answer.

  He was standing at the bottom of the hill. Behind him, creatures hunched around Tripwire’s corpse. Oddy could not tell if they were eating him, or simply tearing him to shreds and scattering the pieces for what savage pleasure the act afforded.

  Answer was smiling. Half his face was destroyed, a mess of bone and red muscle tissue that resembled prime beef, but his mouth was intact and smiling. He raised his arm, casually, chummily, and waved goodbye. All around him were milling and massing and shambling atrocities that made many of the things Oddy had seen during the past few days, the werewolves and vampires and zombies, seem like pleasant daydreams. And there was Answer standing amongst them, perfectly in his element, arm upraised, waving, waving goodbye.

  Farewell—for now?

  Oddy leaned back in the jumpseat. He didn’t say anything. The pilot didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Cold air whipped through the cockpit and Oddy sucked shallow lungfuls. He was aware, vaguely, of an inability to feel any of his extremities: not a single finger or toe. The seatback and armrests were sticky with blood. He wondered if he was dying, and if it would hurt very much. On the heels of this came the realization that perhaps death wouldn’t be such a terrible thing—after all he had seen and done, what horrors could death possibly hold in store?

  Thousands of miles from home and hovering on the brink of death, Oddy closed his eyes. Warmth suffused his body. He recognized it as false warmth, shock warmth, but he didn’t care. He simply relished it, the elemental comfort of it.

  He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness and, as he approached that final black river, he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he sat in the middle of that blackness with the forest unfurling below him like a dark green sea.

  They lay on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific. Tripwire, Crosshairs, Gunner, Zippo, Slash, him. They wore cutoff camos and their young skin was bronzed from the sun. There was a bucket of cold Singha beer. Zippo grabbed a handful of ice and rubbed it on his chest and, playfully, tossed it at Crosshairs, whose face was whole and undamaged and smiling broadly. Tripwire was saying something, telling a story, his hands describing animated shapes in the air. Gunner and Slash watched him, pointing, laughing. He sat somewhere to the side, facing a setting sun, its fleeting warmth tingling his smooth dark skin. Although he could not see his face, he knew he too was smiling. Smiling because it was good to be with your friends, good to know that times of conflict are followed by times of serenity, good to know that the storm shall surely pass and the sky shall surely clear…good to find that safe warm place in the sun.

  Sitting in the jumpseat of a laboring helicopter, far from everything he knew or ever cared for, Jerome Grant sat in a widening pool of his own blood…smiling.

  — | — | —

  VI.

  one tin soldier

  Somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea

  November 12th, 1988. 7:54 p.m.

  It was once only the noble qualities of Odysseus I saw reflected in myself.

  Courage. Self-sacrifice. Leadership.

  Now only one similarity remains:

  We’re both the only member of our crew to return home alive.

  The frigate is a 120-footer, Monkey Sea, based out of Key Largo. Its hold is laden with eighty tons of rock salt for delivery to Syria. The captain tells me we are close to the southern coast of Albania, but as to exact longitudes and latitudes I cannot say. The waters of the Mediterranean are of the deepest and clearest blue; so perfectly blue it is impossible to chart the horizon’s curve, tell where water ends and sky begins.

  I am sitting on deck with my back against the bulkhead, watching the prow cleave the water before it. A deckhand brings me a cup of Turkish coffee. It is hot and sweet and its spiciness tingles my tongue. Warm crosswinds blow off the Albanian coast, carrying with them the scent of seaside commerce.

  As the ship carries my body forward, the slow rolling motion of the waves carries my mind back…

  The pilot dropped me on the helipad of the Yellowknife general hospital. Just rolled me down the gangway like a sack of dirty laundry and hit the friendly skies. I was unconscious at the time, though I do recall a sensation of tumbling over and over, shirts in a dryer. Imagine the E.R.’s surprise to see the big bloody black fellow lying in the middle of a painted white “H” while his mysterious good Samaritan dwindled into a tiny dot in the sky. Thinking about that scene, it always makes me laugh!

  They hustled me to the O.R.. I was intubated, ventilated, aspirated, ablated, even inoculated—some doc thought I’d been attacked by wild animals and contracted rabies. They sucked the bad blood out and pumped good blood in; I drained the blood bank of O-positive. I was EKG’d and EEG’d, transfused, stitched, and cauterized. I had machines breathing for me and purifying toxins for me and for all I know moving the mail for me. Every so often I’d swim up through the haze to see do
ctors and nurses clustered around, the light harsh on my eyes and their tools glittering wickedly. I distinctly remember a blue-masked doctor saying to a nurse standing beside him: “He pulls through this, I owe you dinner.”

  I want to believe she ordered the Lobster Newburg and a bottle of Dom.

  Other times I spiraled down into a deep, deep darkness that pressed upon my body with a profound weight and I knew I was very close to death. There were no bright lights or harp-strumming angels; thankfully I didn’t smell any brimstone, either. Just this solid blackness. And it’s my best guess that’s all death really is: this blackened consciousness where, for a while at least, you retain some awareness of who you were and the life you lived…then nothing. Zzzzap: a light bulb fizzling out.

  Tell you this much: it compels you to live for the moment.

  I mean, Carpe-fucking-Diem, you know?

  When the fog lifted I found myself in a white bed in a white room with a window that overlooked a snow-covered field beneath a cloud-swept sky. For a minute all that whiteness had me thinking I’d gone blind. Then I saw my hand and the contrast assured me that my sight, at least, was undamaged.

  My other hand was covered under layers of bandages but I could tell, just by looking, that it was useless to me. My feet, also heavily-bandaged, had a squared-off look confirming the fact that each and every one of my toes resided at the bottom of a medical waste bin. My face felt like it’d been submerged in an acid bath. I remembered, faintly, a struggling blackness bursting all over it. My right leg was set in an air-cast and elevated in a complex pulley system. My body—and I’m talking every square inch—ached like an abscessed tooth.