Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  “You are going to get us noticed, then killed. I don’t care how good that shit was last night. You have to get it together.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. But don’t you think this is interesting?” Devon gestured to the flow of humanity in the camp all around them, the commerce and warring and whoring that bustled like an anthill.

  “Interesting?”

  Devon looked dismayed. “It’s not interesting?”

  “Man, you are entirely too high. Save some for me next time.”

  Devon looked at his feet, and Abel just knew he was going to make some kind of damn fool comment about being high. Abel cut him off and pointed to an olive drab cargo truck with canvas stretched in a half-cylinder over the bed. The markings matched the photo Springbok had provided.

  It was their truck. Abel motioned Devon to stand in the crowd and watch the camp, looking for the man he knew he would find.

  Abel had robbed military outfits from both sides since the war had started. He knew that every single squad had at least one of the right kind of man for the job he was doing. The kind of man who doesn’t cut it. The kind of man who, in civilian life, would have been a mediocre clerk in a mediocre office doing mediocre work. The man who doesn’t want to be in the army, and wouldn’t be if there wasn’t a draft. Those men never go to the front, because real officers and soldiers knew that would get people killed. Instead, they end up behind the lines minding trucks full of supplies miles away from any real danger.

  This particular man was wearing lieutenant’s insignia and drinking greedily out of a field canteen. He looked about as comfortable as a pregnant whore in a Catholic church.

  “Okay. I’ll talk to him. You steal the truck,” Abel said. He was careful not to stare at the lieutenant, but Devon looked at the man with frank interest.

  “Do what you did before, with the car?” Devon asked, still standing.

  “Seriously? You’re asking me how to hotwire a vehicle? Man, I need you to straighten up and fly right or we’re gonna get nicked.”

  “Okay. I will do what you did before, with this truck. Then what?”

  “You have got to be kidding me. We drive like hell right back to Cairo, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Abel slapped Devon on the back and walked toward the lieutenant at the brisk pace military types used. Without a uniform, he knew he would have to make every other part of his story look exactly right if he wanted to confuse the officer long enough to get away with the cargo.

  “Hey, Lieutenant…” Abel checked the nameplate on the man’s wrinkled uniform shirt. “Smith. You the man in charge of this truck?”

  “That’s right,” said Lieutenant Smith.

  “I have orders to requisition it for the front. There’s another wave coming in and the top brass wants it up there pronto.”

  “Why didn’t I hear anything about this?”

  “When does the brass tell us anything besides when to jump and how high?”

  “Situation Normal…”

  “Got that right. So I can take her?”

  The lieutenant’s face kept smiling, but Abel saw an officious cruelty in the man’s eyes. “Sure thing. You got your papers in order?”

  “Man, I lost them somewhere on the road. It’s hours back to Cairo to get new orders and there are guys counting on that gear. I need the truck and I need it right now.”

  “I can’t help you. I need to see your paperwork.”

  “I’m telling you I need to get this truck to the front or men are going to die.”

  “No paper, no truck. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  “I told you I lost it. Help a fella out, there’s a war on or haven’t you heard?”

  The truck coughed into life. Abel shoved Lieutenant Smith in the chest, knocking him backward and over a knot of Arab food vendors. While the officer struggled and cursed, Abel ran forward and leapt into the back of the truck. He struggled through the cargo compartment, between piles of supply crates threatening to topple over on him with every bump and turn. He wrestled his way to the front and slid through the window into the cab.

  “Where am I driving this to?” Devon shouted over the noise of the engine.

  “Back to Cairo!”

  “How?”

  “That road! Go east!”

  They were followed by plenty of sound, but little fury, as Abel had learned to expect. During war time, anybody who is competent and motivated is at the front. Rear-echelon men had little authority or the initiative to use it. By the time an organized chase could be mounted, the truck would be on the other side of the camp and barrelling down the sandy road looking like any of a thousand other trucks running supplies and men to and from the front lines.

  Daylight was seeping over the horizon by the time Devon drove them into Cairo. It painted everything with a warm pink that threatened the heat of the day even as the dawn held onto the chill of the night. Abel gave directions from the map Springbok had provided, and they drove from a slum, through some industrial buildings, past a row of abandoned warehouses to a single warehouse standing alone in a desiccated field.

  As they pulled off the road, the warehouse doors opened and a man in civilian clothes motioned them inside. Abel wasn’t fooled by the hula shirt and khaki shorts. The man moved like a soldier, like a man who had fought and killed and had done it more than once in his time.

  You can always tell, Abel thought. Some things leave a stain that never washes out.

  Two more soldiers waved him forward to park at the centre of the empty warehouse. As Abel climbed out he noticed that it was completely, meticulously bare. Even the corners had been swept clear of cobwebs. There was absolutely nowhere to hide. He climbed out and down from the truck’s cab.

  On any other day, they would have walked in the same direction, counterclockwise around the vehicle, staying on opposite sides for the cover it provides and staying out of any line of fire. This time, Devon came clockwise and met Abel standing at the front of the truck.

  Four of the soldier types formed a rough semicircle around them. They didn’t point the Sten submachine guns they wore on slings, but stood in a way that suggested they wouldn’t hesitate to do so if the situation demanded it. Abel heard movement and footsteps at the back of the truck. When he saw Springbok come around the rear corner, he knew the sounds were for his benefit. Judging by the way he handled the stairs, Springbok could have approached in absolute silence if he had wanted to.

  “This all looks right,” he said.

  “Happy to be of service,” Devon responded. Abel and Springbok both looked at the man quizzically.

  Abel said “Don’t mind him. He had a little too much last night.”

  “A little too much of what?”

  “That, I’m not sure about. Where’s our payment?”

  Another man came around the truck. He was tall and pale, dressed in a faded yellow suit whose colour seemed to bleed into his skin. The demeanour of the soldiers, even of Springbok, changed. This Yellow Man was in charge, the one everybody was afraid of. He handed a leather satchel to Springbok, who slung it underhand to Abel.

  “That bag once belonged to Thomas Edward Lawrence. It’s worth five hundred pounds if it’s worth a shekel. Consider it a bonus, a gift from one lover of antiquities to another.”

  Abel untied the leather strap holding the satchel closed, peeked inside to see a stack of wrinkled notes and a sealed envelope.

  “The photos, the negatives, and a little to cover your expenses,” Springbok said. “Isaac will drive you home.” He pointed to an older passenger car parked just outside of the warehouse door. Abel led Devon to it before any of the men surrounding them got it in their minds to lend a helping hand.

  Devon sat beside him, gazing out the window at the crowds and buildings that rolled past. After a while, he opened the leather satchel. His face screwed up in a look so confused it might have been funny under other circumstances.

  “You think it’s not enough money?” Abel gr
owled, “Screw you. They would have shot us dead.”

  “Would they have?”

  “That or given us to the army, who would have shot us dead.”

  “Would they have?”

  “Oh for amor de deus.”

  The car slowed to a stop at the foot of their building. The driver somehow motioned without moving that they were to get out.

  “Obregado, ilho da puta cavalo,” Abel swore.

  “Obregado, ilho da puta cavalo,” Devon repeated. Devon spoke no Portuguese, and showed no sign that he knew how badly Abel had just insulted the driver.

  Fortunately, the driver didn’t speak Portuguese either. He gazed straight ahead as the pair climbed out of the car and ascended the creaking stairs at the side of their apartment home.

  Exhausted and filthy, Abel poured water from a gallon jug into his washbasin. He scrubbed his face and arms, pulled off his shirt and collapsed onto his mattress in the corner of the room. It was thin, little more than a quilt, but on top of the layers of carpets he and Devon had collected, it was like lying on a cloud.

  After more than a day of continuous movement, his body was ready for a deep and dreamless sleep, but Devon was busy in the small room. He moved around, spoke to himself, and explored the corners of the apartment like he had never really been there before. The noise and motion in the tiny place kept rousing Abel from his doze. He thought to ask for some of whatever his friend had been smoking, but sleep at last overcame him before the words left his mouth.

  * * *

  He woke in total darkness, eyes open, unable to see even the ceiling above him. That was wrong. Of all the cities in the world, Cairo was the noisiest, it never slept. Now it was dark and silent but for a low humming. Cairo was never either of those things, not since the ancient Pharaohs worshipped their strange and terrible gods.

  Abel tried to wave his hand in front of his face, but his arm did not respond. Neither did the other, and he could not feel his legs. A trickle of fear ran through his mind, paralyzed there in the dark. He had heard rumours about what black operators like Springbok and the Yellow Man did, about experiments the Nazis had run in Germany and Argentina. He tried to scream, but his nerve endings found no mouth with which to do so.

  Real terror spiked through him, then. It ripped his breath until lungs that didn’t feel like lungs palpitated in ragged gasps. It tore through a body that felt wrong, alien, unwholesome beyond its inability to move. The fear built and built within him until it had the weight of the pyramids themselves, crushing down on his mind, grinding at his sanity.

  Then he heard Devon’s voice from somewhere in the black saying “Relax, mate. It’s all right.” There was something different in the voice from the rambling speech of the past day. This voice, terse and Australian and mellow, was the Devon he had known and worked with. Devon, his only real friend.

  His mind seized the voice like a drowning man grabbing at a ruined spar. He couldn’t respond, still could not see, but he could hear his friend. Devon’s voice was all of space, all of time. “It’s all right, mate. Weird, but all right. Just breathe. Breathe.”

  Abel breathed. He knew from his training with Mestre Bimba that breathing formed the cadence of thought, the rhythm of life. Though he could barely feel his paralyzed lungs, he focused on the in and out motion, felt the pulse move through his body. Through habit of training and force of will, Abel calmed his breathing and through it, calmed his mind.

  “All right. He’s all right,” came Devon’s voice. It was speaking to somebody else, and for the first time Abel realized he and Devon were not alone.

  “Ready?” Devon asked.

  For what? Abel wanted to say, but still he could not move.

  “He’s ready,” Devon said from behind.

  The humming ceased and Abel felt that he could move if he wanted. At the same time, dim light somewhere behind him grew in brightness to illuminate part of a blank, bare wall of stone perhaps ten feet in front of him. Something indefinable gave the sense of vast, subterranean spaces behind him.

  A creature floated into his vision, conical in shape with the narrow end at the top. From this apex extended four thin, ropy appendages. One sported a globe of four eyes, one an organ that looked like the bell of a trumpet. The other two ended in large, yellow pincers like those on a scorpion. The entire monster was scaly and grey, with rounded pustules ringing its lowest edge.

  It spoke with Devon’s voice, and Abel’s mind snapped.

  He punched the thing in front of him. A thin part of his mind noticed that the limb he swung was not a proper arm, but a thin and ropy tentacle ending in a claw. It rocked the creature backward and he sprung away, though he couldn’t feel his feet hit the ground. Sparing a downward glance, he saw that he had no legs. His body moved forward despite this, driven by his mental impulse to run.

  He glided forward, floating in a conical body identical to the one that had spoken with Devon’s voice, through the chamber and along an upward-slanting corridor. It ended too soon, at a blank wall Abel knew had to be a door but could not determine how to open. He was still striking it futilely with his alien claws when the creatures caught up with him.

  Claws gripped his body and the ropy appendages wrapped around him from all sides. He struggled, tried to fight, but didn’t know how to use the body that had trapped his mind. Years of training and experience with two legs and two arms could do nothing for him. The creatures dragged him, screaming, back into the chamber.

  Panic seized him then, fear dark as the ocean, twice as cold and as deep as time. He swam and sank and drowned in it, his mind thrashing in its depths. Only Devon’s voice, speaking more words than it had in the past year, brought him back to the surface. Slowly, slowly, his thoughts came back into order until he heard not just the sound of Devon’s voice but the meaning of the words.

  “Calm down. Calm down. It’s weird, mate, but it’s not that bad, stay calm and you’ll get used to it.”

  Abel’s senses expanded until he could take in the room around him, observe details instead of just assessing the best route of escape. He took in four of the strange creatures, not counting himself, all spaced about a stone-walled room with ceilings too low for its width. The walls were carved with patterns of warped triangles that seemed to twist and writhe even as he stared. Similar patterns descended from the ceiling in grotesque metal mobiles. He felt nauseated at the sight of them, even though he had no stomach.

  “Mate, listen. I’d tell you to sit, but we don’t have legs,” Devon said.

  Fear lurched forward in Abel’s consciousness again. It pushed away thought and reason for a moment, but he breathed again in long, slow writhings of his curtain-like body. The rhythm calmed him and he was able to hear what Devon had to say.

  “This here is Tnoth.” One of the creatures drifted forward. “He’s one of the Yith…a Yithian…the blokes who own these bodies. Well, they don’t really own them. It’s…it’s confusing.”

  Tnoth began to speak. The sounds emanating from its trumpet were more like cacophonous music than human language, but Abel understood perfectly. “Over 400 million years before your time we moved our minds from far distant stars to inhabit these bodies. Our race can move our minds through time and space. Thus we have explored the galaxy since before your sun began to glow.”

  “They took our minds,” the being with Devon’s voice said. “Moved them to this time. Two of their minds are in our bodies now.”

  “Okay,” Abel said, wondering how he was able to make his body conduct speech. “I see five of us. You and I are human, and Tnoth is a…Yithian…what about these two?”

  “Knatt is one of us,” Tnoth gestured one pincer toward a Yithian with a dark purple body. He pointed at a greyish form, “Arlington Bowles is from some decades in your own future.”

  “But here’s where it gets weird,” Devon broke in.

  “Here?!” Abel somehow made the trumpet shout. “Here is where it gets weird is what you’re telling me?”

&
nbsp; “Yes. What Tnoth has been telling you is how it was for a long time, but it’s different now.”

  The purple Yithian, Knatt, spoke up. “For more than one billion years we have cast our minds forward to explore and understand. We could invade a species to continue our own existence, but we never sought destruction.

  “But Lord Pnarria has changed that. He sends not scientists to explore, but agents to destroy. He seeks to end all life in the universe that is not Yithian. He has gone mad, and has turned much of our race mad with him.”

  “These blokes,” Devon said, “they want to put a stop to it.”

  Another body glided into the chamber in a way that suggested haste, even though the body was not capable of running. Clicking, hissing noises emanated from the trumpet appendage, and Abel still understood the language.

  “They are coming. We have been found.”

  Even as the newcomer spoke, a pounding echoed through the chamber. It was not the sound of a hand rapping or a claw tapping, but a deep resounding boom.

  Abel had heard that sound before. Even long eons past and far from Rio or Cairo he knew it for what it was: the solid, inexorable boom of the shorta hitting a door with a battering ram.

  “This way,” Tnoth said.

  Tnoth twisted one of the dangling mobiles, causing the shapes to twist in a way that made Abel’s mind shiver with nausea. As it turned, a section of the wall opened in a hidden door. Tnoth slid through the opening, followed by Knatt and the others.

  The group fled through downward-sloping hallways until the sound of the police behind them faded to silence. They continued through the dimly lit labyrinth, following Tnoth down and down and further down.

  Deep in the catacombs, they passed an enormous basalt door covered with symbols Abel had never seen before. As they passed, every Yithian pressed hard against the opposite wall and made not a sound. It might have been his imagination, but from the beyond the door, Abel believed he heard bubbling, phlegmatic words repeated over and over.