And sober, his memories came without mercy. Funny how some recollections work. Some you can never recall the details, just the impressions. Like, ‘Ole what’s his name from such and such, man, he’s a real dick.’ And then some recollections are so strong you’d swear you were there. Bobby was having one of those strong recollections now. The taste of sand in his throat made him gag. Luna hummed, oblivious.
Somewhere, he could hear the terrifying rattle of gunfire. Of people yelling. Speakers blaring prayer chants. The muted sound of a donkey-pulled cart making its way across the dirt and trash. The smell…oh God, the smell. Human waste pooling together with the other monstrosities, the smog of diesel engines, the goats and balding chickens flitting about, defecating everywhere. The roar of mopeds stacked with propane tanks.
Bobby shook his head. Pulling away from the vivid images of things past he wished not to see, not here, not now.
Another flash. Beneath this recollection, a fresh mountain breeze. He was somewhere else. Goosebumps crawled over his skin. Bobby knew where. He knew this memory very well. This was Kurdistan in northern Iraq. The streets were clean, the traffic minimal. Check points secure, or as much as they were going to be. Better than Baghdad, that’s for sure, he thought. The barbed wire fence line and the crappy brown tents around him could mean only one thing. This was Zaytun, the South Korean base camp. Bobby recalled working missions from here for a period, helping, at first, with the fuel tankers and the refinery. But now something else was going on, a new mission. His unit was gearing up. Lock & load. One in the chamber, safety on. He remembered, before heading out, he traded his Meal, Ready to Eat for the South Korean equivalent with some private named Jo. It was basically just ramen noodles, but it was better, in Bobby’s mind, then the frankfurters, the four fingers of death he had in his pack.
Mission was a standard patrol. It was vague, some locals had been attacked by…reports were unclear. Their bodies had been maimed, mutilated, and partly eaten. It was vague, but it was something new, better than guarding the refinery, in Bobby’s opinion. It was night when his unit went out. Radio communication was strict. The moon was full that night.
Bobby shivered from the memory. Sipping his coffee, he looked at Luna who had just thrown several cuts of bacon into the pan. The fatty pork sizzled and popped. The smell of thick grease pooled with the foul memory of the corpses. He recalled the very moment when his squad had found a group of the missing locals, two men and a woman, mangled together on the outskirts of town, face down in a ditch, bloated with insects and bacteria.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell did this?” Private Pierce moaned, kneeling beside the ditch. Blood painted the sand in an eerie yellow-crimson tone.
Bobby was standing there now. His beard was just filling in, nearly black with a few streaks of grey, as was the custom when working this closely in a Sunni province. You adapted to fit in with the customs. You adapted, became invisible. Or so, that was how he’d been trained.
“Okay…okay, calm down. Let’s wait to call this in until we find out more,” ordered Johnson, a staff sergeant who’d been around the block a time or two and had more experience than the entire Ranger unit put together.
“What the hell are we waiting for?” bitched Pierce, fixating on the mangled mess in the ditch. His hands shook terribly.
“Radio silence, you turd. You want to catch whoever’s doing this, right? We gotta keep it quiet. We don’t want to spook ’em.” Johnson began sweeping the area, following the blood trail.
“Right. Spook them. Whatever.” Pierce stood, clutching his gut.
“How in the hell did a pansy like you ever make it out of Fort Benning alive?” whispered Murdock, a sly smile nearly hidden beneath four inches of stubble.
“Kiss my ass, Dock,” snapped Pierce, taking a sip of water from his Kani water bottle.
Bobby and Murdock burst out laughing, giggling above the blood painted ditch.
“Okay, ladies. Are we going to get back to business or would you rather keep security ’til the Kurds show up to collect the dead?” Johnson asked, though he already knew the answer. They’d been working in Northern Iraq for a few months now, trying to establish a rapport with the local Hajis. The relationship had been precarious, to say the least. The Kurds were a difficult bunch. Trust had to be earned. With reports of locals disappearing, some being found torn all to hell, mutilated by—something, the Rangers saw a golden opportunity, a chance to get a foot in the door, so to speak. Find whoever, whatever was responsible, take them out, and then maybe they would gain trust.
“Trust was a hard thing to come by out there,” Bobby whispered, recalling the memory as he sipped on his coffee at Luna’s kitchen island. He hovered above this quasi-dream, like a specter replaying his own demise.
“What was that?” asked Luna, not really paying attention as she flipped another slice of bacon.
“Nothing.” Bobby looked at the small grits of coffee collecting at the bottom. Further below into the mug, a ripped fence appeared. A chunk of black fur caught on a piece of gnarled wire.
He recalled pinching the fur between his fingers, examining it. His stomach knotted. His gut screamed at him. Something’s not right, here. Something is very off about all this. Dusk had settled upon Kurdistan. The moon rose high above his Ranger unit, full and fat and yellow, perched on a froth of dark grey clouds.
A howl tore into the silence, echoing from the abandoned factory beyond the fence. The building was dark.
“Okay—what the hell was that?” whispered Pierce. “I think we should radio this in. Shouldn’t we radio this in? I feel like we should radio this in.”
“It’s just a dog, don’t shit your pants,” teased Murdock, cutting away more fence for them to squeeze through.
“Sounded more like a wolf to me, man.” Pierce gazed at the factory, his eyes wide with horror. The name Ergill was just visible in one of the fading signs on the side of the building. Bobby had recalled something about the place, how back in the late 1980s the warehouse was used to house the dead, the thousands slain by Saddam’s chemical strikes. Known as Blood Friday by the locals, the Halabja Massacre by CNN reporters worldwide, the genocidal act was orchestrated by the Iraqi Government under Hussein’s leadership at the close of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. It had been abandoned ever since. Never used. Never visited. The local Kurds kept their distance, but never thought of demolishing the place.
I suppose some places are kept as a reminder of the past. Warnings of what could be.
“An Arabian wolf? Not this far north. Maybe it escaped from the zoo,” offered Murdock, tugging on the cut fence.
“Shit…” Pierce moaned.
“Can it. The blood trail ends here. No sense turning back now. Let’s get in, take a look, huh?” said Johnson. He motioned for Bobby to take point.
Bobby moved up, crawling on his belly through the torn fence. Coming out on the other side, he popped to a knee, scanning the area with his M4 at the ready. He motioned an ‘all-clear’ with his free hand.
Johnson motioned for Pierce to move up next, who grumbled, but followed the order. Johnson went through next. Murdock picked up the rear. The group huddled together, scanning the darkness for any kind of movement. Another howl erupted in the quiet night, followed by a scream—a human scream.
“That wasn’t a wolf,” reported Pierce matter-of-factly.
“No shit,” snapped Johnson. “Okay, Weeks, take point. We need to get in there.”
Bobby moved up, walking heel to toe as quietly, but quickly, as he could. The other Rangers followed closely behind. The main entrance was up ahead, bolted together by a thick, rusted chain. The metal door looked pried open by something strong, powerful. Aggravated gashes were cut along the handle. Another scream pierced the cool night air. Louder. Closer.
“Break it,” ordered Johnson.
Murdock moved up and then cut the chain with ease. The rusted metal fell to the ground in a puff of sand and dust. Pierce swung the door open with hi
s boot heel. They filed in one after the other, cutting portions of the room with their rifles like a pie. The warehouse was dark, but that was to be expected. Why bother running electricity? No one had used this building in years. A dank odor of mildew hung in the air. Pipes dripped, echoing off the walls in the warehouse. A pungent stink took shape, as if something had died here recently. Despite his focus, Bobby thought of the late ’80s and how the corpses might have looked after the chemical attacks, images of red ash frothing over tanned skin, swollen lips burnt black and crisp, yellow eyes…Stay frosty! He chided.
Back in the kitchen, Luna hummed something pleasant as she began plating the breakfast. Bobby watched with little interest, wobbling between memory and the here and now. Her spatula pinged faintly on a ceramic plate, the one with purple flowers in bloom. He could see the scrambled eggs and near black bacon, but he could also see the warehouse that had once housed the dead. She set the plate down in front of him. The smell tickled his stomach. Growling…
Growling…there was growling, yes. And yellow eyes in the shadows. He could see in his eggs now, clear as day, Pierce discovering the owner of the scream, another missing local, now found, bruised and freshly bled. We were examining the body, the evidence, when Pierce backed out of the room. He stood at the entry. He was there damn it. And then he wasn’t. A blur whipped by us and he was gone.
Luna took Bobby’s cup and then refilled it with more coffee.
We looked for him…and there he was, throat torn open. Unwrapped like a gift. The way dogs or even cats leave dead mice or birds on the back porch.
“Bobby?” Luna said, sitting down in front of him on the kitchen island.
Bobby heard her, but didn’t understand. His mind was pulled back like a rubber band. He could see her face and the warm food wafting up from his plate juxtaposed with the faces of his team.
Murdock was next. Another flash. Another yelp. And Bobby remembered those yellow eyes looking at him from the shadow. He aimed and fired his M4. Johnson joined in. They unloaded into the unknown, hoping to God they’d hit whatever it was, to kill it good as dead for what happened to Pierce and Murdock.
“Bobby…?” Luna whispered.
Bobby couldn’t respond.
It growled. Whatever it was, it growled, a hoarse, deep howl penetrating the cold lump in his heart. Bobby aimed again, but the creature lunged forward from the dark, knocking him down. Sharp pain shot up his arm. He looked and watched as this enormous, fur-coated head with vicious teeth clinched into his flesh, tearing him open. And then Johnson was firing at this…monstrous wolf, trying to get it off him. But it turned and ran back into the dark places they couldn’t see. It was a wolf unlike anything Bobby had ever seen before. Large. Too large.
“Bobby…?”
Johnson was standing over him. Telling him everything was going to be all right. ‘Just hang in there, Weeks. Hang in there.’ He fumbled for the radio. ‘Fuck radio silence.’ He pushed down on the receiver and called it in. When the radio dropped back to his vest, the beast was upon him, smiling with its wicked fangs. It came from the shadows with a speed Bobby, until that day, thought impossible.
It tore off his hand, licking the blood that gushed from his stump from the floor.
Johnson was crawling…to his rifle. It had been knocked away. The wolf, man, thing crept toward him.
Bobby watched in horror, reaching blindly for his M9 Beretta. The beast slashed at Johnson’s back, tearing off his vest, leaving deep trenches of flesh and gore in his uniform.
Johnson screamed.
Bobby aimed and fired.
The beast howled.
“Bobby?”
He fired again and again, watched the hideous thing fall away, whimpering. He crawled toward Johnson. Blood sprayed upward in a mist from his lips, coughing crimson, painting his uniform in gore. ‘Don’t you die, you asshole,’ Bobby recalled saying. But it was too late. Johnson was gone. And the beast was gone as well.
“Bobby, earth to Bobby Weeks, come in, Bobby!” Luna yelled.
“What…?”
“What’s wrong? Bacon overcooked or something?”
“Yes—I mean, no. It’s not that.”
“What?”
“Just…nothing. Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. Everything is fine.” Bobby lied. His reassurances seemed less than convincing, but in the end the act to which he was well accustomed. He’d wear a smile, while beneath stirred a pit of grief and sadness and loneliness. Anguish festered with his alienation, his self-prescribed separation from the world. Despair ruled in a chasm of lost normalcy and contempt for the thing he had become.
“Bobby…come on. You can tell me. It’s okay. It’s safe here,” Luna whispered. Her breath was pleasant and warm. The smell of her lavender overpowered the eggs and bacon. She leaned forward and touched his hand.
Bobby jerked away. “Sua Sponte,” he wheezed. The cold lump was working its way up. He refused to look at her. He could feel hot tears itching behind his eyes.
“What?”
“It’s a Ranger saying.”
“And?”
“Nothing. Listen, thanks for breakfast and…for everything. But I’ve got to go.” Bobby fled from the table, ignoring as best he could the hurt look painted over Luna’s face. He slung his ruck over his shoulder and then went outside, letting the screen door slam closed.
***
Luna
Luna watched Bobby as he trotted off down the driveway toward Highway 6. She watched and she cried. In her heart, or perhaps it was from that spark, the thing her grandfather coined regarding her abilities, her visions, she had a terrible feeling she’d never see him again. She hoped it wasn’t true, but there was something there she could not quite get her feelings around. Some dread rolling upon the horizon, black as death and cold as a coffin nail. The approaching storm was the wickedest thing she’d ever felt, almost, if not darker than, the night her parents had died.
She closed her eyes.
Breathed deep.
Exhaled slow and long.
In her mind’s eye she could see row upon row of golden-brown stalks of wheat, the sun warm and healthy. She walked in this vision, a specter on some untold plane of existence; the place that was not yet, but would be soon enough. Or perhaps never would. It was hard for her to predict the future. It was in constant motion. Anything could set it off balance and change the course of events, even her telling Bobby about the house. Or like her parents…calling in the middle of the night about her nightmare, the tractor truck and wreckage. Could it all have been avoided had I not said anything? Would they still be alive?
She shuddered at the thought.
Focusing, she walked the stony path towards a dilapidated house. Once it would have been bright and new and white and full of life and happy memory. Now the house looked haunted and vile and unnatural. It looked like a house, but it didn’t feel like a house.
Luna gazed upon the structure, baffled by its existence.
The porch and paneling looked like it was made of wood, but it didn’t feel like any wood she’d felt before. Not like her own house, the one her grandfather gave her. Her home felt…earthy, the only way she could think of it. But the house here, in her mind’s eye, the one she warned Bobby about, this place didn’t feel earthy.
More like a glimmer.
Or a place out of time.
Luna took another deep breath and aimed her thoughts on the inside.
Something stirred within.
She jerked.
What was that?
Something…slithering in there?
She tried to look again.
Floating darkness swallowed her, and from the abyss the sound of buzzing clicks erupted around her. Somewhere she could sense, the fields suddenly turned to ash and decay, and the porch and panels rotted into dust. From the shadows of her mind, the slithering rose inside the house, the presence, thousands of them, chirping and buzzing and clicking in unison, dark deep red eyes glaring at her from a mill
ion different places. They did not laugh. They were not angry. There was no emotion, all but for one…
Hunger.
Luna screamed.
Awake now, panting by her kitchen window, clutching her breast with a quivering hand.
Bobby was now long gone. The sun had moved slightly higher in the sky.
How long have I been standing here? she wondered, pondering her vision. That house…it’s…
Her thoughts were broken by a rapping at the front door.
She jumped.
Catching her breath again, Luna cautiously went to see who it was.
It was the postman with an envelope.
“Hey there, Brian,” Luna said as she opened the door.
“Howdy, Luna,” smiled Brian, sweat poured from his safari hat, his cheeks a rosy red and plump like swollen bee sting. “Mighty fine morning, isn’t it?”
Despite his greying hair, his bright blues and fair complexion always marveled Luna by its childlike quality. “Sure is. Whatcha got there for me?” she asked.
“Oh yes, here you go. Special delivery.” Brian handed Luna a thin envelope.
“Thanks, Brian,” Luna said as she took the small parcel.
“You got kin in Mississippi?” Brian inquired quizzically.
“Maybe. Why?”
“Noticed the postmark is all.”
“Thank you, Brian.” Luna closed the door, partially waving goodbye, partially studying the address. Mississippi? The envelope was postmarked with a Lafayette, Mississippi address and the name Ronna Blanche scribbled with an aged handwriting she hadn’t seen in years.
Memaw?
CHAPTER 3
MAGGIE’S LETTER
Jake
Jake was sure he’d been down this road before. He was somewhere between Route 96 and Dickinson Ave, just past Highway 3. He’d hoped to find Bobby at the Hometown Heroes Park. They were having some kind of cookout, free hotdogs and burgers for the neighborhood, according the signs. Though, how folks there were dressed, he may very well have been shooed away. Given a hotdog or two and a Diet Coke and asked politely to vacate the premises. It was an awful thing to think, but Jake had seen it happen before, even at his own church. Sometimes people had a hard time welcoming the downtrodden among their midst. He had his own theory that perhaps because we’re taught at an early age the ragamuffin folks in scruffy, torn jeans and dirty t-shirts were dangerous, we instinctively kept them separate. Now, if one is wearing a Ralph Lauren polo and an unsoiled pair of jeans, that’s a different story. Or so they say. Jake had heard enough confessions in his tenure to know better.
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