Run (3 page)

The man’s eyes were gray.  Like the gray-white of new silver, still in the rock.  Like the shining silver of a lake in summer, reflecting the sun off its surface.  It was beautiful and terrible, a gray that would seduce and beguile even as death was in the air.

"For my God and my Redeemer," said the man. 

His finger tightened on the trigger, and Johnny closed his eyes. 

When he opened them again, he was seven.  Or rather, he was seven when he finally
remembered
opening them again.  A year and more had passed since that day.  He opened his eyes in his own room, in his own house, but it was a house strangely empty, for his father no longer lived there.

John’s mother was at his bedside, and spoke to him quietly, of the six months he had been comatose, of the year he did not speak a word.  She told him of the time and money spent on doctors who had come to help him, and above all of how grateful she was that he had come back to her. 

He asked about his father, and she told him his father was dead.  When he did not believe her, she showed him pictures of the funeral, and Johnny saw himself at the gravesite, slack-faced and tiny in a wheelchair beside the casket.  He cried for his father, and then cried again because he had not cried at the grave.

His mother cried also, wept at his bedside, and thanked God and Jesus that her son had been restored to her.  That was when Johnny knew that it was all true.  He was the man of the house.  He knew his father was dead, and that he himself was not, but the details of his survival were a blank, impenetrable wall. 

Neither he nor his mother tried to break that wall, either.  They simply went on with life as best they could, and lived as though Father were a memory, a pleasant dream that had faded with the summer’s end.  Johnny pressed his mother to tell him about the details of the day Father died but once, and she answered that it was best he didn’t remember.  Her eyes became dull and peered out at him from under thick lids that seemed suddenly both foreboding and sleepy.  His mother would answer no questions, and so he asked no more.

He didn’t even ask them of himself.  Not even in the nights when he lay under his covers and the wind and snow blew angrily against the windows and terror held him in an icy grip.  He did not ask himself why he was afraid, just closed his eyes tightly and tried to sleep.

Eventually he did sleep.  But he woke often in the night, and cried out, reaching for something or someone beyond his grasp.  Mother would come, and hold and comfort him, and all would be well again. 

At least, all would be well until the next time, when he would again wake, and cry out, and hear two words echoing in his thoughts.  They were strange words, mysterious and nonsensical to him, but still they made him tremble with fear, and they haunted him.

Skunk Man.

MEMO REPRO S-7/102467

Two decades later, John again met death, and again it somehow passed him by, if not actually missing him completely.  John was twenty-eight.  Full of life and apple pie, fresh out of Special Forces training.  He still had no memory of his father’s death, and still was not sure if the fact of his forgetting was a blessing or a curse.  Two decades later, and John tracked across the pre-dawn fields of Iraq, between a dry canal and Highway Seven, and still had no idea what had happened the day his father died.  His mind wandered, from past to future, and John wondered if he would ever go home, if he would do all the things he had heard about growing up.  School, regular job. 

Marriage.

That was the one thought of the future that preoccupied him more than any other.  He felt a pulling inside him, a pulsing throb that seemed to hunger for family.  That in itself seemed strange to him, for he had no experience with women.  Girlfriends were nonexistent.  Contact with the opposite sex had been and continued to be minimal at best.

He liked girls, it was true, but had never found one who excited him.  Not that way.  He dated in high school, having as exciting a social life as was possible in a graduating class of fourteen, but never went beyond kissing.  His mother was proud of that fact, said he had Jesus in him and Jesus would protect him in his virtue and virginity.  But the reason wasn’t Jesus.  John didn’t know what it was, exactly, only that in the few times when more than kissing seemed possible or even likely, something held him back.

He was waiting for something.  Waiting for someone, some siren in the distance.  He didn’t know who she was, only that he hadn’t met her yet. 

And he wasn’t likely to do so now, either, hunched over as he was with his pack weighing heavy against his back.  It weighed over a hundred pounds, but was actually one of the lightest in the unit.  The packs strapped to the others’ backs ranged from one hundred to one hundred seventy five pounds, containing between them everything the six man group would need to stay alive in Iraq for up to a week.

John’s back burned, and courses of sweat cut trenches through the dirt and light camouflage paint that coated his face.  A bead of perspiration dropped into his eye, stinging as the salt burned his cornea, but John did not move his hands from his weapon.  He walked in dangerous territory, and did not savor the idea of dying because he was too busy wiping his eyes to return fire should he be fired upon.

His M-16 rested against his forearm, cocked and ready.  He had never had to use a gun on live foe before but if it came to the choice of him or the enemy...well, John was a virgin, but he had no pretensions to sainthood. 

Like most of the others in his unit, he was a veteran in training terms, but this was his first time on an active mission.  He was determined to do well; to justify his mother's faith in him and the tremendous amount of money that had gone into training him. 

Vogel, the CO, stopped abruptly.  He was short, with a brutish visage that concealed an alert mind and a whip-quick wit.  He held a fist in the air, looking at the global positioning unit he held in his hand.  The tiny link was invaluable in this operation, giving them their position within yards and allowing them to coordinate their travel time to conform to the mission’s needs.  Without it, a man could easily become lost in the miles of endless desert where little distinguished one spot from another.  People could die in this place.

Cowles uncurled his strong, short fingers.  We’re here, the gesture said.     

Wordlessly, John and the others unlimbered their bags, and their backs cracked and popped in a mix of relief and umbrage at being so ill-used.  The big green wart was what servicemen called the rucksacks, and the name was apt.  Most Special Forces servicemen retired with bad knees from the heavy loads.  That is, if they were lucky enough to retire, instead of being buried out in some dank jungle or godforsaken desert like this one.

The shoulder strap of his bag caught on something underneath his shirt, hitching almost imperceptibly on the scar that lay beneath John's clothing.  It was a tightly knotted burl of tissue, the only tie John had to that day long ago when his father died and was forgotten as though he had never lived.  John noticed the scar, as he always did, but as always thrust the thoughts it brought with it far away from himself.  There was no time for memory today, even when memory was only a blank wall that stared at you from the past and revealed nothing.

John unpacked a collapsible aluminum shovel and began digging.  The predawn light had brightened slightly, slight casts of pink now visible through the gray of dusk.  He figured they had about two hours before the first people came down the road that writhed a serpentine path not one hundred yards from them.  The unit had to be gone by then, disappeared. 

The squad was in Iraq as eyes on the ground, recon troops in charge of calling in information about who was traveling the roads.  They had to be close enough to see everything clearly.  Close enough to tell one tank from another if such moved down the road.  CentCom wanted detail, and John’s unit had to get it.  But staying so close was dangerous, as it meant you could also be seen by anyone who passed by.  So John and the rest of the unit were digging a hole in the dirt where they would remain, peeping out to gather intel, hoping that the hole they dug would not end as their grave.

Camp dug beside John.  A rangy kid from Nebraska, Camp was the only one in the unit who looked more like a poster boy for The Great American Way than did John.  The illusion shattered, however, every time Camp opened his mouth. 

"I need some," said Camp.

John dug in silence, eyes darting back and forth along the side of the road.  Intelligence reported the road was secure, but he knew that the only intelligence a good soldier relied on completely was what his eyes, ears, nose, and skin told him himself.

"Yeah.  I need some," reiterated Camp.

John nodded in the hopes Camp would shut up. 

He didn’t stop digging, though, but kept moving.  Sweat trickled over his eyes.  He wanted to wipe his forehead but didn’t.  Part of the training.  Keep your hands busy with the job and ready to grab a gun.  Don’t so much as think about anything else.  You gotta pee, you get three guys to cover you before you put a hand on your zipper.  Words to live by.

"If I don’t get some soon, I’ll die."  Camp was becoming irritating as his half-veiled euphemisms continued to make their way to John's ears.  A listening stranger would think that Camp was talking about the last time he’d been laid.  Passing brass would nod to themselves and pretend they’d never been horny soldiers.  They’d smile at the Good American Kid who believed in God and apple pie and getting laid. 

John knew different.  Camp wasn’t horny, he was psychotic.  Or at least he was pretending to be, acting constantly like he wanted to kill someone.  The screening to get into SpecOps was rigorous, designed to keep out cowboys and wannabe superheroes, so John was pretty sure Camp was just putting on a show.

But not so sure he would turn his back on the guy. 

"Yeah, gotta get me some.  Feel the power."

 "Shut up," hissed John.  His eyes kept moving between Vogel, the other team members, and the roadside.

"If I don’t get me some, I’m gonna –"

"If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna kill you myself."  The sentence burst suddenly out of John and he knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to say if he was trying to quiet Camp down.

"Yeah, that’s it, you gonna give me some?  You want to be my friend?"  Camp had one hand on the knife he always wore: the one marked Mr. Happy in bold letters across the hilt.  He unsnapped the sheath, caressing the finger-worn hilt with fondness.  Camp slept with that knife.  Even when he was picking up a hooker in the little bars the unit visited, even when the woman gazed at him with half-bored eyes, holding up her fingers to indicate how much, even when he chose one and took her, even then the knife stayed with him.  That more than anything caused John to wonder if Camp wasn't faking it.  If, somehow, he had managed to convince SpecOps that having a certified lunatic in the unit could be useful.

"Camp!"  Vogel’s voice was a tight whisper that nonetheless carried across the dry air like the sound of a cracking bone.  Camp’s hand dropped from the knife.  He looked at Vogel.

"Camp, you talk another talk and I’m gonna eat your heart out through your ass.  Hear?"

"Sorry, Cap.  Just edgy."

That was the end of it.

The pit appeared quickly, deep enough for the men to hide in, and they each unlimbered the aluminum rods they would use to hold up the roof.  The roof of the pit had to be undistinguishable from the surrounding earth, invisible.  They had practiced the whole maneuver for weeks, getting non-SpecOps servicemen to look for their hideouts.  The only way they were ever found was if one of the troops got lucky and walked across it.

Still, this wasn’t base camp.  This was behind enemy lines, and though CentCom Intelligence reported that it was winter and the road shouldn’t be in use, none of the unit wanted to trust that information with their lives.

The roof went up, and the hole disappeared.

Vogel looked at it, carefully scrutinizing the area for any signs that the earth was anything other than hard-pack and sand.  He glanced around the tight circle of men around him.

"What are the rules?" he whispered.

The five men whispered back, "Always know where you are.  Always be cool."

"And if you don’t know where you are?"

"At least try to look cool," said the men, grinning at each other.  It was a ritual, Vogel’s way of telling the rest of the Green Berets in his unit that the job was acceptable.

They all slipped through the small opening in the roof, closing it up soundlessly behind them, and it was as though the desert had swallowed them alive.

John took first watch, looking through a mini-periscope focused on the road.  There was no traffic, and so his mind wandered a bit, thinking how odd it was that a small group of men with enough schooling to run a country and enough armaments to blow one up were crouching in a hole near a deserted road. 

What few people realized was that "special forces" wasn’t just a euphemism for a bunch of killers.  Special forces meant a highly trained
thinking
machine.  Right now Vogel was getting out a small pad and paper, ready to jot down notes on anyone or anything that traveled the road: direction, appearance, any cargo, passengers.  Any and all.  The information would be radioed back to Intelligence, where it would meet thousands of other bits of information, all waiting to be sorted and sensed. 

They didn’t have long to wait before the first travelers came along.  It was a small band of Bedouins, their cloaks wrapped around them loosely, looking like dark phantoms moving heavily through the early morning light.

"Bedouins," murmured John.

"How many?" asked Vogel.

"Six." 

"Armed?"

"Cloaked, so could be, but nothing apparent."

Vogel radioed the information in on the SATCOM radio they carried.

"They’re nuts," said John to himself.  It had to be over a hundred degrees out there, yet the heavily-wrapped men showed no sign of noticing the dry, dusty heat.