Midian Unmade (15 page)

The butt of Wisnewski's HK416 scraped the ground ever so slightly as he shifted, causing me to spin to the sound.

“This is bullshit,” the big Polack grumbled.

“Keep your game face on,” I ordered, my voice barely audible. I understood their doubt. I'd had it on my first mission to the cave three years ago. We'd been attacked and forced into the mountains, where a man pulling mules carrying scrap metal told us a terrified story of a creature living in the mountains who killed Taliban. What the old Khyber Pass peddler couldn't have known was the creature killed everyone. The Taliban were just its most recent victims.

I willed the silence to descend once again. The only way I'd hear it coming would be if everyone would shut the fuck up.

But Wisnewski wanted to be heard and simpered, “I still say this is bullshit.”

Segrest shifted slightly on the other side of him.

Beside him sat Perez and then Dobler, the Agency man we'd picked up from the slick ten klicks north. The newcomer had made a career studying the Nightbreed. The incident in Midian hadn't gone unnoticed and eventually an analyst buried in the labyrinth of cubicles in America's secret palace latched on to it. Since then, Dobler had been peeling back the onion, trying to determine everything he could about the mysterious group. So this opportunity wasn't something he could pass up, especially when my after-action report hit his desk last year.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO—SOJTF DETACHMENT

SPECIAL OPERATIONS JOINT TASK FORCE—AFGHANISTAN:

AFTER ACTION REPORT FOR MISSION 32-0073-12

EXSUM: ODA 32 ENCOUNTERED RESISTANCE ALONG ROUTE YELLOW OF COMPANY-SIZED ELEMENT OF INS. DISENGAGED PRIOR TO CONTACTING OVERWHELMING FORCE. UNABLE TO MAKE ALTERNATE ROUTES. E&E TOOK ODA 32 ALONG TORA BORA BACKBONE WHERE ADDITIONAL HOSTILITIES OCCURRED, INVOLVING NON-COMBATANT CREATURE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN. MEDIVAC REMOVED THREE AC KIA, ONE KIA AND ONE AC WIA. MSG JOHN HERSHEY GILLAM, ODA 32, SOJTF-A, SOLE SURVIVOR.

AAR 32-0073-12 IS CLASSIFIED XX XX X XXX.

NON-COMBATANT CREATURE OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN.

After both the debriefer and I had signed nondisclosure agreements, three Army colonels and a Navy SEAL lieutenant commander at Camp Integrity had argued for hours about the after-action report, finally settling on that term. They'd tried MONSTER, BOOGYMAN, FIEND, DEVIL, even dallying with UNIDENTIFIED CREATURE. They'd finally settled on NCCOUO, afraid that any other reference might bring undue attention to what otherwise had been a disastrous mission.

“Disastrous.”

That was a word to describe it, I supposed.

In the end, I'd been forced to fight for my life, my thumbs pressing through the pupils of my best friend's eyes as the Non-Combatant Creature of Unknown Origin laughed and giggled and danced, using the entrails of my other two soldiers as party favors for his own celebration. Ben had almost strangled me before I was finally able to kill him. I'd pressed so hard I'd bruised the soft parts of my hand between thumb and forefinger, beating it against Ben's ocular bone as my digits sought to clear a deep enough path so I could skull-fuck him. There were times when I could hear the sound of my penis moving in and out of his head with sickening clarity.

That hadn't made it into the report. But I had tried to explain things. I'd tried to tell them what had really happened, but the psychologists got involved and began making excuses for me that I never could have made on my own. So I let them. I got some R&R and blew off some steam. Then I came back, ready to become who I once was until Dobler contacted me and had to remind me of who I'd been.

I stilled my mind. I closed my eyes and heightened my hearing. I felt it.

Any moment now.

My eyes shot open as a feeling descended upon me. A fear, born when the earth was young, enveloped me in a hollow grasp. I breathed but my breath went nowhere, sucked into the void growing inside of me.

Perez began to weep.

I wanted to do the same, but choked back my emotion.

“You come again,” said a voice as close to my ear as the French hooker had been in Morocco when I was on R&R.

I dared not look. I didn't have to. A misshapen face materialized next to me, lingering like the smoke from a cigar before it dissolved.

Watson began to giggle. The slap of flesh on flesh came faster and faster as he unmistakably masturbated in the dark, his grunts of pleasure coming with metronomic frequency.

“We have a mission.” My throaty rasp was calmer than I believed it could be.

“Children playing at war. Finger guns. Bang. Bang,” the monster said, words surging in disjointed whispers.

Segrest whimpered. “Wha-at is ggg-going on, momma?”

I'd told them not to show fear. I'd explained how the monster fed on it. They hadn't listened.

Segrest screamed.

I rolled over and placed a hand over his mouth. I watched the starlight reflect in his feverish and darting eyes. “STFU, soldier.” I glared at him, trying to explain with a look that Segrest needed to shut up to save himself, but he was staring at something not there.

The monster sighed. “You bring children to me.”

My eyes watered as emotions seeped past, memories of my youngest sister dead in a post-prom car accident, my old friend Baker gut-shot and dying in my arms, the crying of my own sons on the telephone after my wife had stolen them away to some Montana farm, and Ben screaming at me to stop.

“We are all children to you, Rook,” I managed to say, biting back the memories the monster sucked free.

Umbra, penumbra, and antumbra, the three distinct parts of shadow, coalesced into a dark figure sitting next to me. A single horn rose from its head like a rhinoceros's. I knew better than to look directly at the monster, instead keeping it in my peripheral vision.

“One of you will die tonight,” it said.

“Then take me, but first let me tell you why I came.”

I felt it regarding me. I was almost positive it couldn't read my mind, but I hid the truth behind memories, knowing it would relish these first.

“Tell me what it is that makes you want to die.”

I paused, knowing that everything hinged on my next words. Then I said it, the culmination of too many ideas and my own desire to finally discover the truth. “We've found another of you and we want you to kill it.”

The words had the desired effect.

Within minutes the monster had gathered us in his cave. Lined up as though we were the guests of honor at an execution, we were pitiful representations of humanity. I was the least affected. Still, I trembled a little, knowing that things could get much worse, and absolutely understanding that no one would be able to stop the runaway train called Rook if we let him get going.

Watson still pulled at himself, his face cut into a permanent leer.

Wisnewski's eyes fluttered, caught in the memories of a deed he hadn't told anyone about, telling us the tale over and over in a dead man's monotone. “And I took her face in my hand and held it before I shoved it into the dirt and then I ripped free her clothes and then I…”

Segrest shook, urine blackening his pants, the stench the only recognizable aroma in the monster's lair besides dead and rotting flesh.

Perez gripped his crucifix in his right hand so tightly his skin bled. He recited “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s in barely audible whispers, interspersing them with profanity and explicit descriptions of what he wanted to do with the holy mother, each utterance making him speak faster, trying to rid himself of the monster's terrible influence.

Dobler's reaction was the opposite of everyone else's. His face was fat with anger, red cheeks, creased forehead, and rippling sneer. Hatred bled from his eyes as his hands clenched over and over, invisibly strangling infants, the weak, and the infirm.

What I could see of the oval-shaped cave was lit by a small lantern that sat on a slat of wood balanced across several smaller rocks. From the ceiling hung several hundred heads, each one another version of the previous one—black hair, Caucasian features, head scarf, and an oval gash of terror for a mouth. Several Afghan rugs lay on the floor, creating a livable space. Their rich reds and blues made the room less a cave and more a parlor. A stack of pillows rested against one wall, and it was upon these Rook now reclined. The only piece of clothing he wore was a kilt, tartaned in red and blues. His body was long and well muscled. If a man hadn't seen his head, they might mistake him for tall lean human. But the horn atop his overly large and misshapen skull relegated him past the category of circus freak, firmly into the encyclopedia of monsters. Then there was the color of his skin. A dead color. The unmistakable gray of a cadaver.

Dobler was the expert. He'd studied the Nightbreed and had shared his doctoral dissertation on the subject of Midian, the last place they'd gathered in any strength. The CIA agent believed them to be Fomorian, the race that preceded humans in Ireland. I'd been forced to read passages of the scholarly supposition, and remembered a translation from an ancient Irish tome called
The Book of the Dun Cow
: “with the body of a man and the head of a goat, they were terrible in their beauty.” Whatever Dobler thought they were, he'd have a chance to find out for real this night.

Rook wore spectacles and thumbed a well-worn book, its cover a glossy leather the color of old blood. He occasionally stared at the soldiers, who stood in a perfect line, seemingly incapable of shooting him, even though their weapons were loaded and at hand.

He let his finger follow a line in the book, then put it back down. “They called Byron ‘sublime.' I like that word. Do you like it, Gillam?”

“I don't know that word,” I said.

“The Greek poet Longinus compared it to establishing ecstasy. I know you understand
that
word. I do think that stuffy old Edmund Burke said it the best, however. ‘Sublime is whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger.… Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.' Am I not sublime? Am I not operating in a manner analogous to terror?”

I'd forgotten how much Rook loved to talk. “You are indeed sublime,” I said, agreeing like anyone would to a preposterous question posed by a monster.

He smiled happily to himself, then put down the book. “So tell me of this other monster.”

“He calls himself Jupiter.”

Rook nodded. “I remember an old fat piece of sewage called Jupiter. I cut him up and left him to die in Midian.”

“He's been sewn back together.”

The idea of it startled Rook. “He has? Sewn back together, you say?”

I nodded, then leaned over and backhanded Watson across the face. When he didn't stop jacking off, I did it twice more. Watson let go of himself and brought his hands to his cheeks.

“Leave it the fuck alone,” I said, then added, “I think you broke it anyway.”

My activity caused the others to begin returning to themselves. The deleterious effect of our fear was still there, but it no longer seemed to hold them so terribly—not exactly a switch being turned off, but a rheostat being turned down.

“I warned you not to return,” Rook said.

“I never wanted to.” I shrugged and broke from the line. I carried an AK and laid it on the floor next to where I squatted. “But this other monster, this Jupiter, he's fighting us, supporting the Taliban.”

“You know the same thing's going to happen again.” It was a statement rather than a question.

I sighed at the memory of what had happened before. “We're prepared,” I said. What I didn't tell him was that
I was prepared,
because as much as I wanted to think I was, I wasn't. Shit was starting to come back to me I'd thought long buried. My fa
ç
ade of being the good guy was tarnishing by the second.

Rook didn't seem to notice my indecision. Instead, he took one look at the group and let his head roll back as he laughed. “You're like a bunch of kids waiting for the principal to eat them. You're not ready. You're not even close.” Suddenly Rook was no longer reclining and was instead standing eyeball-to-eyeball with Dobler. “And what is it with this one? He wants to kill me so badly I can taste it.” He licked the side of Dobler's face with a tongue that looked like it was made from twelve inches of green and red velvet. “Delicious.”

“He's a born-again Christian. He thinks your kind are all devils.”

“He's probably right,” Rook said, putting his arm around Dobler's head and petting it. “I'm the devil until the credits roll, then everyone scrambles to see who I really am.”

“Doesn't make sense,” Dobler said.

“Doesn't it? Think about it, my little Jesus freak.”

“Which one of us is it going to be?” I asked.

Rook gave me the same look as a man appraising a new hooker. “We'll see how you all function, then I'll decide. So how does this work?”

“What do you mean?” Dobler asked.

Rook ignored the CIA man's question and asked one in return. “What's your plan? How am I going to kill old Jupiter?”

“What do you mean?” Dobler asked again.

Rook made a disappointed face and wagged his finger. “That's not good. I counted two ‘what do you mean's and one ‘that doesn't make any sense.' You're going to have to pay a penalty for that.”

Dobler's eyes went wild. “What? What penalty?”

“A penalty. If you're not going to open your mind and pay attention there are sublime penalties that have to be paid.” Rook glanced at me and grinned. “And God, but don't I love the sublime.” Then he opened his mouth and clamped down on Dobler's left arm. Rook shook his head and twisted, coming away with a huge chunk of the CIA man's triceps, spraying blood across the cave.

Dobler screamed and screamed and fell to his knees. He stared at the blood gushing from his arm, unable to do anything.