Of Gods & Grunts

by Kyrell Kendrick

  He shrugged, "I'm not saying the big guy, but He doesn't let anything happen that He doesn't want to. So someone else might be helping you out, and He's OK with it."

  "So, there is a God?" I asked, trying to coax more out of him.

  "Of course there is," the barkeep said.

  "Like a creator of the universe type being?" I asked, "Like the Bible and Torah type thing?"

  "Considering how we mess up everything He teaches, I would argue that no one on Earth has it right. So no is the quick answer, not like the Bible or any other book. But yes, there is a creator, and yes He, or more accurately It, is an all-powerful entity who gets involved, and allows others to get involved."

  "What about these little gods that are traveling with me?" I asked.

  "Not sure," he said, "You're the first to come here from a place other than Earth. There are demons and other powerful creatures that used to get involved."

  "Not anymore?" I asked.

  "No, they are too scared now. Also, more people slide into the dark when they think nothing is watching them," he said, pouring yet another shot.

  "So," I paused, trying to find the words.

  "It's a respite for you," he said, anticipating the question. "All of your injuries, all of your pangs, your wariness, are vanishing as quickly as my bottle of Khatija," he said as he looked into his shot glass, and then slammed it back.

  "But why?" I asked, "And don't say because I impressed someone."

  He shrugged. "The powers that be," he opened his arms and looked up, "want to weigh the dice in their favor. They won't interfere directly, but they can make sure you are as ready as can be."

  "So there's a fight coming up," I said anxiously.

  "Yes," he said flatly.

  "Any words of advice?" I asked.

  "You won't remember it anyway. No one remembers this place. I met many people during your World War Two, sometimes more than once. None remember anything."

  I sighed a little.

  "So that's it? I just leave or, do I say something to God? Like what do I need to do?" I asked.

  "You've already done what is necessary," he said. "Khatija is all you need."

  "OK," I replied.

  I wish I had said more, asked more, or at least showed some fucking empathy towards Kane. Instead, I just kinda stared off into the distance, wondering why I was getting special treatment.

  Kane went back to washing his dishes.

  "I guess I better leave," I said awkwardly.

  "Good luck," he replied in that thick accent.

  "Thanks," I said solemnly. Was I supposed to be polite towards him? Was I supposed to pity him?

  I got up and swept the room one final time, taking in all of the good people with little blemishes of hate.

  Chapter 21

  I woke up ready to take on the world. I wasn't hungry or tired, and I was in good spirits. My aches and pains were all gone.

  I must have hit the sleep hard, and Arsch allowed me to rest for a full cycle because he hadn't awakened me in the night.

  Arsch was a good scout and would not have fallen asleep on shift, so I knew he was just mothering me a little. I would repay the favor by letting him get a full rest too. We needed it. Plus, I felt amazing.

  "Arsch!" I said in a stage whisper.

  There was no reply, and I began to get worried.

  "Where you at, man?" I said rhetorically. By instinct, I checked my M4 and all of my kit. Everything was there, but no Arsch.

  The bottom of the caves are not slick rock. Millenia of water rushing through, crickets pooping, and dust settling has created trails of sand.

  I started a cloverleaf pattern to try and tell where he had gone. I'm not a tracker, and following footsteps is a lot harder than the movies make it look, but in the sand, it's not that terrible.

  My adrenaline hit me hard when I found what I was looking for. There was a puddle of wet sand with drips, showing where Arsch had taken a piss. There were some strange footprints behind where he was standing.

  I cursed myself for not waking up and for letting him take the first shift. There was no way Arsch would have been taken by surprise if he hadn't been so damn exhausted.

  I looked closely at the footprints.

  They were nothing like I had ever seen before. Whatever creature left, it had three toes, but not like a bird, like some sort of malformed human. The inner toes were the largest, with the middle toe about three quarters the size of the largest, and the outer toe was just a tiny speck. The overall foot size was about half that of a human, but noticeably larger than a gnome.

  There was no blood, no drag marks, nothing. Arsch had left under his own power.

  I checked back by my area, but so no strange prints around my covey.

  I guessed they didn't see light. I vaguely remembered Arsch saying something about that.

  My options were pretty limited. I could wander around the caves until I died from starvation, or more likely a cricket swarm, or I could find my little buddy. OK, it wasn't like I had an option. I mean, what type of person would I be if I just left?

  I followed the footprints through a series of winding tunnels. At more than one point, I thought I lost the spoor. When that happened, I just double backed, picked up the trail where I left off, and went a different way.

  Two miles later and I noticed the walls were smoother, the ground more disturbed, and the signs of old tools.

  Stop, look, listen, smell, or SLLS, is a tactic grunts use to get to know their surroundings or see if they are being followed. I needed to know both, so I took a knee, removed my ACH, and slowed my breathing.

  Ten seconds later and I could hear the rhythmic pounding of metal against stone.

  In the army, like once every two years or so, we have to do those stupid fucking audio tests. If you have never had the displeasure to attend one of these fine military events, I will describe it in detail.

  First, you go in drop your ID card off to the civilian audiologist who doesn’t give two shits about your readiness status or whether or not you are taken off the readiness list. That list, by the way, determines if your brigade sergeant major, and by the laws of rolling fecal matter on inclined surfaces, your platoon sergeant ruins your weekend.

  After you get through the bureaucratic mess that seems to never end, you are stuck into a small vault-like booth with six hanging sets of earphones, a little button on the end of a cord, a small curtain for privacy, and the most uncomfortable bench taxpayer money can buy.

  You are probably not by yourself though; no, you are stuck in the booth with at least one fat fucking asshole who has never even heard of AR 600-9 and breaths like a whale in labor.

  Fatty isn’t the only one in there making noise though, there will be some pour asshole who has the plague, but his dumbass first sergeant said he couldn’t miss his appointment because the dumbass sergeant major has a list, and on his list is a bar that is not the immaculate green of the United States Army, no it is amber. Amber is a color by which no sergeant major can abide.

  So Coughy McPlagueAss, who is actively disposing of a lung, is sitting next to Emphysema McFatty, and you wouldn’t be able to hear a Trip Seven fire if you were on the muzzle brake.

  You put on your headphones, grab the button, and hear the most boring voice ever explain the instructions of the test you have taken twenty times before.

  The test starts, and you think you can hear a beep in your ear, but you’re not sure, but the voice said to hit the button no matter how faint. Before long, your headset hurts your ears, and you are pressing the button in a pattern.

  You exit, get your results, and the civilian tells you that you have to come back because there was a discrepancy between that result and your previous result.

  Yeah, so, like I said, I thought I heard the rhythmic pounding of picks on stone. I closed my eyes and focused.

  Sound reverberates through caves weirdly, but if you spend enough time concentrating, you can make out which tunnel the sound tra
vels down.

  I took my time.

  I’m not sure if it was an hour or five minutes, but eventually, I figured out the way.

  I replaced my ACH, checked my M4 to ensure I had a round in the chamber, and double-checked my frags.

  I wish I had an iPod or something to listen to. Before we left the wire, we usually had some kickass music blasting over the intercom. Bodies by Drowning Pool was my go-to, but now I just hummed or whistled. Six months since I’ve heard any type of decent music.

  “Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor,” I sang, barely audible. “Flooooor!”

  I stopped singing as I came up to a wider tunnel. The walls were smooth, and I could see the small mounds of stalag things that came up, not down. Someone had improved the passage.

  That’s when I saw them. Five crickets, lined up perfectly, in the center of the tunnel. Their antennae swayed and pulsed, but they didn’t move. They hadn’t noticed me yet, which was a fucking miracle, because my torch was still active.

  I extinguished it, pulled my NODs, also known as night vision, out and mounted it to my helmet. Everything was pitch black with speckles of green. I turned up the gain and made sure I had the cover off. I looked down and around to see if there was light behind the giant insects. There were five tiny little balls of light, kind of like old cigarette butts, but they were hovering at the exact location of the crickets.

  Behind the crickets were four lights, two bright ones spaced like eyes, and two feint ones swaying almost like antennae, but they were below the eye looking ones.

  The floating lights spread almost no illumination, so my NODs were next to useless without another source of light.

  The Army-Navy Personal Viewing System Fourteen, or AN PVS-14, is a light amplification device that can see into the near-infrared spectrum. It, however, cannot see if there is no light. For that, we have a few things we can do. We can turn on our infrared laser or floodlight on our weapon, or we can turn on the floodlight on the NODs.

  I pulled the nob out and turned it to illuminate the hall.

  The IR light reflected off the cricket carapace, making them look like they were made of glass.

  The four lights had disappeared behind the crickets. I turned the IR flood off, and the lights were visible again.

  This time, I turned the laser on my PEQ-15 on and aimed it towards the four lights. The beam was intercepted by something. I moved the beam from left to right and could make out the form of a humanoid about four feet tall.

  I slid back around the corner to troubleshoot the problem.

  This was obviously an outpost: a traffic control point or TCP. A TCP always has communication with higher.

  I needed to identify the problem. The problem was simple yet apparently insurmountable. Simple in that it was well defined. Insurmountable in the same way that Everest is well defined, but you can't exactly climb it without the right equipment.

  I needed to be on the other side of the squid head without him or others knowing. That meant no shooting, frags, or vociferous objections to his musk.

  The crickets were spaced neatly about two meters apart, arrayed in a perfect line from edge to edge. I wasn't sure how good their senses were, but I was pretty sure they were better than my ability to sneak past.

  I looked back around the corner and saw the subtle glow of the nine lights. The crickets hadn't moved an inch, but the four lights behind them had traveled to one of the sides.

  A bored sentry is like an unlocked door.

  If I couldn't sneak past them where they were, then I just needed to make sure they weren't there.

  A distraction isn't exactly a novel concept.

  My problem was I had no idea how to distract a sentry without having him call for more guards.

  What does a squidhead eat? Do they take a piss? Do squidheads bitch about sentry duty to other squidheads?

  In the army, the standard is to only pull sentry duty for two hours at a time. That, of course, never happens, and shifts are typically four to eight hours each. Of course, no one pulls sentry duty on their own; they always have a buddy.

  Guard shift was the most boring thing a soldier could do, so buddy teams usually talked or played the name game.

  I got good at the name game.

  The squidhead guarding the tunnel had no buddy that I could see. Of course, I wasn't even sure he was a squidhead.

  Sometimes the simplest method is the best.

  I grabbed a rock and threw it at the far wall.

  It took a few seconds, but I heard the awful sound of a cricket walking on stone.

  As it got closer, I dared to take a look. I turned my floodlight on and observed the strange movement of the giant insect.

  It wasn't natural. The rhythm of its walk, the clunkiness of its movements all gave the impression that it was a puppet.

  When talking with Arsch, he told me the squidheads couldn't read people's minds, just control their bodies. They could control everything except the eyes. Now I'm no physician, but from what I remember, people who are paralyzed from the neck down can still control their eyes and nothing else.

  The cricket walked up to where the stone had landed and did several turns.

  I did my best to hide against the wall.

  I was stupid for not realizing the squidhead might just send a cricket.

  The insect walked back and forth, making a lot of unnecessary noise. After five minutes or so, I heard the scraping of four more crickets, or at least I assumed the remaining four were headed my way.

  I also heard the obvious sound of footsteps.

  I let my M4 hang and pulled out my knife. I needed to be quiet. I turned off my floodlight and practically freakout.

  Asshole squidhead was less than one meter away, the two smaller lights reached out for me.

  I reacted quickly.

  I jumped up and slammed my knife between the two bright lights.

  The knife felt little resistance, and I heard a weird groan.

  I'm not a greedy man. I had a lot of stabs to give, and as such, I decided a decent baker's dozen was enough.

  After turning the squidheads face into a colander, I dropped my knife and raised my M4. There were five crickets that I was pretty sure were going to come over and eat my face.

  My M4 was in my shoulder at the high ready; I pressed the pressure switch on the side of my gangster grip, which illuminated the cavern enough to see the six-legged spawns of hell.

  They were frozen in place.

  I let out a long stream of air, which I was holding tight in my lungs.

  Ensuring that the crickets were, in fact, not moving, I illuminated my torch.

  The creature on the cave floor in front of me was brown with white straps. I could see it clearly now, and it was strange, to say the least.

  The creature had no clothing on, and no weapons or accouterments, except a very small thread of black cord that led to a large pouch on the things back.

  Keeping an eye on the crickets that were standing there like statues, I slowly worked my hand through the pouch.

  I found a few various coins, some mushroom caps, and some stones.

  These things were important to fuckhead, so I assumed I might find them important.

  The crickets remained as still as statues.

  I wanted to go examine them closely and try to figure out if there was a way to undo whatever the squidheads had done to them, but I also wasn't sure if fucko with the holy face had sent off some sort of red star cluster to tell the other bastards he was checking out a disturbance.

  I wasted about a minute checking out the body of Squidward. The average high-speed QRF is ten minutes. I figured I had five total.

  If you are wondering where I got these numbers from, I extrapolated them anally.

  With four minutes in my mind, I rushed down the trail dumbass was guarding. I followed the trail fast, not caring if I was discovered for at least a few hundred meters.

  Now running with NODs on can
be dangerous, so I kept them flipped up, hanging out on top of my ACH. I had my torch tucked into my ruck so I could see in front of me.

  After a quarter-mile or so, I turned down a small crevice, took off my ruck, extinguished my torch, and dropped my NODs down over my left eye. I ensured the flood was off, more out of habit than actual tactical awareness. I turned the gain all the way up and focused on the path I had come down.

  It took those fucking octopus pieces of shit, at least an hour before I saw a single squidhead leading five crickets towards the way I came.

  So the asshole hadn't shot the metaphorical flare into the sky; instead, he died without telling a single soul he was investigating something.

  I decided to wait until his relief was a minute past me and continue my route.

  If they didn't know the squid was dead, they would in a few minutes.

  The trail spat me out into probably the largest cavern I have ever seen. You could literally fit a mountain in the hollow.

  I wish I had a picture.

  I'll do my best to explain it, but I know I will fall short.

  First, there was light. I had expected it to be pitch black, considering everything I had seen, but I was wrong.

  Luminescent fungi covered every vertical surface that wasn't near stairs or a door. They cast a strange light blue glow that was surprisingly calming.

  The fungi looked like those weird mushroom things that grow out of the sides of trees. Like they don't have stems, just half of a cap sticking straight out the side. The light emanated from the gill bottoms, and nowhere else.

  Gnomes, dwarves, and a lot of other animals I couldn't identify were everywhere.

  They were all going about their merry way, doing menial chores. Some were chipping away rock sections, others were polishing stone, some were carrying sacks with fungi, while others carried weapons.

  Every single animal had a growth on the back of their neck. The growth was dog vomit orange with a distinct brainy fungi look to it.

  Every corner also had a brown and yellow squid that seemed to stand still, concentrating on something.

  The architecture was integrated directly into the stonework. There was no wood or other supports. Stalactites and stalagmites were hollowed out with stairs or ladders carved into the sides.