Lycan Fallout: Rise Of The Werewolf (47 page)

I made more than one man cry out for his
uhm-ma
, but only so that I wouldn’t have to, not because I hated them. The first, well, he’s the one that haunts me some hundred and seventy years later. I had emptied my magazine; ducked back down around the corner of the hut and reached into my cargo pocket, grabbing my last remaining magazine. At the time, we were told to carry only one extra. Going forward, I would make sure to carry five times what was authorized, but right now I had to make it through the night. My bayonet was by my bunk which right now might as well have been in Boston. I had my knife strapped to my side. I truly hoped it didn’t come down to that, hell, the only reason I wore the thing was because I thought it looked cool. I was eighteen, tell me you didn’t do shit because it was cool, or at least you perceived it that way. I can bet that girl Henna didn’t think peeling rubber in her folks’ driveway was cool. Or that crap-tastic tattoo your buddy did on your arm…bet you thought that thing was AWESOME! Let’s face it, as young men, we do a lot of stupid stuff we think is cool. But, when I strapped that knife on, it was never with the intention of getting close enough to the enemy to actually use it. I was thinking it was a much better deterrent.

I heard footsteps approaching even as I shoved the magazine in its well. The words they spoke might as well have been from another planet they were so foreign. My heart, which I figured was already getting ready to explode, might just stop. I can’t imagine any muscle being able to work that hard and not just up and fail. I wondered
, for a flash, if it would feel like a charley horse when it quit. I stood so quickly with adrenaline-fueled legs that I nearly hopped. I poked my head around the curved corner of the hut. Three men were coming my way, they were looking around wildly, and I would imagine just as scared as I was, but I didn’t see it that way at the time. I brought my rifle around and pulled the trigger…nothing.

No loud bang, no force into my shoulder as the round exploded out, and definitely no enemy falling as it caught my high
-speed offering. What I figured was a jam was merely the fact that I had never pulled back the charging handle on my rifle, thus putting a round in the chamber. The funny part about it (okay, not truly funny, I guess just a bad expression) but the funny part about it was that not a one of them realized I was there or that I had attempted to fire on their position. Two of the men were looking back towards where they had just come and the third was now coming up to my corner. I had ducked back down and was about to do emergency procedures on my rifle to get it firing, I did not have the time, and they would certainly hear the noise.

And then I got pissed, I’d be fucking God-damned if I was going to die with a useless rifle in my hands. I stood, flipped the clip on my knife, and quietly slid it free from its sheath. The brown of a Chinese boot just became visible as I brought my right fist up to right under my chin, the blade pointing outwards – otherwise that night would have really sucked for me. I flexed my elbow out as hard and as fast as I could. The Chinese soldier’s eyes got huge as he watched my black metal blade swing towards him. He was ducking down to his left and simultaneously bringing his rifle up. My blade clipped off the top of his front sight post slowing me down marginally…and that was it, the tip of my blade pierced his forehead.

My arm shivered from the force of the strike. His eyes crossed for the briefest of seconds to try and focus on the steel that was even now scrambling his thoughts. The weight as he fell pulled my arm down, almost making me lose my weapon. I yanked it free, somewhat stunned at how little blood there actloo now ually was. I had been kind of expecting it to spurt out like a geyser. Quentin and another Marine had come up behind me and quickly dispatched the two remaining enemy soldiers.

“Hard core, man,” Quentin said to me after he checked the soldiers to make sure they were dead. I had pulled my knife free, wiping it on Bobbie-fucking-Chen’s uniform. “Right in the forehead, fuck that must have hurt. You alright, Talbot?” he asked.

Right there and then the world took a hard left turn, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be right again. But I nodded to him, seemed the right thing to do. I’d kill more men before the night was through and many more before the veil of death will enshroud me; but like any first, he would linger in my thoughts. I searched his body quickly, grabbing what I had originally thought was Intel and shoved it into my pocket. I would forward it to someone with shiny shit on their collars as soon as I found any of them. Probably riding the whole thing out at the Officer’s Club.

The element of surprise was long past, but the forces attacking us were winning by sheer numbers. If not for our battleships parked on the peninsula’s doorstep, we would have been screwed and overrun. Rounds whistled overhead, the ground shook with each impact
. The North side of the line was getting hammered into the Stone Age. I waited for their response, figuring missile strikes would be incoming at any moment. They never did; all I can figure is that they didn’t want to escalate to the next level. They had given it a shot, and when it fell short, they decided to cut and run. I don’t know, it made no sense to me then, and still doesn’t. They were winning.

The sun was coming up by the time we drove the yellow devils back underground or for the truly unlucky ones into the ground. Not that I cared at the time – or could even tell – but most of the paratroopers were North Korean and the men coming up through the sewers were Chinese. Media on all sides had completely quashed the notion that anything extraordinary had happened that night. The thirty-two Marines and eighty-six South Koreans that had died were apparently due to a training accident. A troop transport Marine helicopter had collided with a Galaxy transport plane that had been taking the South Koreans on a training exercise in Japan – that was the official report.

The two hundred and seventy-four North Koreans and Chinese that died that night were never reported, at least not in papers I had read. It was like they had fallen into a black hole never to be heard from again. What did those regimes tell the grieving families? Anything? Probably nothing. Probably told them they never had a son, and if they wanted to live out the rest of their natural lives they’d never talk about the mythical boy again.

We were on high alert that entire
next day and night. I was straddling the line of wanting to fall asleep and thinking I would never be able to do so again. The army finally came in and relieved us, five divisions. Never seen so many men holding a rifle in my life. I think I slept a full twenty-four hours straight. Time had been severely skewed for me during this time frame; surreal, I guess, would be the appropriate descriptor. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt. As humans, I’m fairly convinced that we are hardwired with the ability and want to kill other men. Only as a means of self-defense, I’m not saying all Hannibal Lecter-style. But morality, religion, common decency, civilization, they all scream with
Thou Shalt Not Kill
. I got some commendation for killing Bobbie-fucking-Chen, cuckr-stylouldn’t even begin to tell you where it ended up. Never seemed right that his life boiled down to a combat ribbon. I could bet he felt the same.

Sorry…digression. So there I am sleeping off the effects of a major adrenaline rush, and I start coming up from the depths of my tiny death with this thing poking me in the side, couldn’t get comfortable to save my life. I finally moved enough to where I could reach my hand into my pocket. I pulled out this notebook
that was about six-by-nine. What I had thought was Intel was actually Bobbie-fucking-Chen’s journal. No biggie, who among us can read Chinese? Only it’s not in Chinese, it’s English and the handwriting is meticulous. Seems my first kill went to school in Chicago. He was going for his doctorate in Engineering when his government had called him back to die uselessly at the hands of a troubled teen.

He was twenty-six and actually had a fiancée back in Chicago, not sure what his parents were going to think of Lillian Fraser…didn’t sound Chinese to me. I read that entire journal. Probably simultaneously the smartest and most stupid thing I had ever done in my life. I got to know Bobbie, his dreams, his hopes, his love. But on the flip side, it gave dimension to a nameless, faceless enemy. I think I could have more easily forgotten about that night if not for the journal; but then, should I really have been let off the hook that easily? It’s important to know that the person you are killing is indeed human. Bobbie-fucking-Chen was the reason I started writing journals, I figured if someone were to kill me I would want them to know who I was. Kind of a guilt hand-off if you will.

I went to see Lillian on my next leave, almost eighteen months later when I got rotated back to the mainland US. She lived in a brownstone apartment in downtown Chicago. I thought long and hard about what I was going to say if she would even talk to me. I figured it would be a slap followed by a litany of accusations, curses, and tears. It was a cold Wednesday when the cab dropped me off by her apartment – forgot the rest of the world was on a different schedule. I loitered around the front of her building for a good five hours before I finally saw her walking down the sidewalk. Bobbie-fucking-Chen’s drawings did her no justice. She had long, blond hair, looked like worked gold with the sun setting behind her. From this distance I could see a sadness in her features even when she smiled and talked with some of her neighbors as she approached.

I had thought out an entire speech. I said not one word of it as she came within three feet of my location. She said nothing to me, my dress greens probably not stirring any kind of patriotic musings in her. She went past and I let her
. She had gone up most of the five stairs leading into her building. I had turned and was berating myself for being such a coward.

“You knew him didn’t you?” she asked.

I spun, thinking she couldn’t possibly be talking to me. How could she know?

“Not really,” I said. “Not at first anyway.”

“You were there the night he died, the night the government denied anything happened?”

“I was,” I told her.

I couldn’t tell her much more than that without potentially putting myself in judicial harm. If I so much as breathed a word of what happened, I’d find myself in Leavenworth and I had no desire to make small rocks out of big ones for the rest of my life. I dipped my hea di as brd, I wanted to confess, I wanted her to absolve me of his death. I approached her; my hands were trembling. She looked like she wanted to dash into her building and I couldn’t blame her. I handed her his journal. She took it, her eyes never leaving my own.

“He loved you, and I’m sorry,” I told her.

She took the notebook from me, her hands beginning to tremble as if the book was the source of the shaking. I turned and left. She didn’t say anything else. I could only hope the words he wrote would give her some measure of solace and perhaps closure, although, the only thing that would ever make it right was if she could hold her love again. I found a bar close by. Didn’t even have to show my fake ID. I let a bunch of the patrons buy me free drinks; enough so that I could attempt to wipe the stain of events clean from my mind. Alas, I never did find an elixir potent enough to do it. I tried…I tried really hard. Bobbie-fucking-Chen would haunt me all of my days.

Figured I’d expand on Mike’s couch fiasco at the age of 16.

I grabbed up my stuff and jammed myself between the couch and the wall. Heather had stuffed her things under the couch and pulled the throw blanket over herself.

“Hey, honey, what are you doing all bundled up?” her father asked. He was a cop and I’d had more than one run in with him. He’d forbidden his daughter from dating me; I should have silently thanked him, that just made me all the more desirable to her.

“Don’t feel too good,” she told him.

“You do look a little flushed,” he’d replied, coming over I think to feel her forehead. “That’s why I came home early, don’t feel too well myself. I think something’s going around.”

“You should go lie down,” Heather said. I could hear the desperation in her voice, I hoped he couldn’t.

“Nonsense, misery loves company. I’ll go brew us some tea,” he said.

Some might think this would be a perfect opportunity for escape. No such luck, the kitchen had a knee wall which gave a full view to the living room – fucking open floor plans. We were both stuck, Heather had more reason to be where she was, but she couldn’t get up naked, that would surely raise red flags with her father.

“Great,” Heather said, trying to add some cheer.

“Let me turn the heat up, it’s a little chilly in here,” he told her.

It was then I realized my entire backside was pressed up against the radiator. I could hear the pops of expanding pipes as hot water began to find its way to the register.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I lamented.