Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

Nancy and Harvey already had the Box Man there, although it might have been a wasted effort. We had no body, only a giant congealed pool of blood. Jakes and Harvey poured through the missing man’s things.

“Have we checked the hospitals?”

“And the morgue. Marshall and Evans are doing that now, especially concentrating on John Does.” Harvey glanced into a corner of the room and smiled. “There we go. I suppose we can at least try and see.”

Harvey found a chair, but even that wouldn’t get him to the high ceilings. He grabbed two handfuls of shirts out of a dresser drawer and made a pile of them on the chair. Stepping on them, they afforded him the extra four inches he needed to swoop the glass jar over the spider. He got down, poured the spider into the box, then closed the lid.

The Box Man began to twitch and shake, jerking his head inside the metal box to chew the little eight-legged morsel.

“Spidle. Spidle. Momma says yumyum.”

The metal rang with dull thuds as he battered his head against the inside of it. Finally he fell to the floor and used it to bang the metal box against it. Then he stilled, the only sound now one of languorous slurping.

Harvey squatted before the Box Man. “Okay, Boxie. What have you got?”

The sounds of slurping were his only reply.

Harvey struck the box with the palm of his right hand. “Come on. Talk to me, Boxie.”

“Ni sher shay? Weishemme?”

Jakes approached the Box Man. “What’s that?”

“Chinese.” Harvey frowned and glanced at me. “What do you think, is it a floater?”

“Unless Doctor Crocket is Chinese, I’d say so.” I looked around the room, but didn’t see any spiders. I went to the headboard and jerked it from the wall.

“Get the jar.”

I made room for Harvey who cursed when he saw the web. “Damn. Recluse. This is going to be fun.” He moved the jar to several locations before he finally captured it and took it over to Box Man.

“This one’s going to hurt, Boxie. It’s a recluse.”

The Box Man reacted immediately and scooted himself across the floor. He slammed the top of his box cage against the wall and held it there so Harvey couldn’t open it. “No no cloosy! Puhleese no cloosy!”

Harvey gestured to Jakes. “Give me a hand.”

“Is it another floater?”

“What? No. Floaters are just extraneous ghosts. This one could be old, young. Hell, it could have been the ghost of a coolie from a hundred years ago.” He held up the glass jar to show a tiny brown spider. “This is a brown recluse. It’s one of the only spiders who will stalk a human rather than run for it.”

The Box Man let out a long ragged scream. “No cloosy!”

Jakes wrinkled his nose as the Box Man let go with a bladderful of urine that soaked his pants and began to drip on the floor. “Why is he so afraid of it?”

“You ever been bit by a brown recluse?”

Jakes shook his head. “Not that I’d know.”

“Oh, you’d know if one bit you. Not only do they sting, but then its venom paralyzes the skin around the injection point, then the skin turns necrotic and falls away.”

“When you say falls away you mean…”

“Falls the fuck away. Like off your body and onto the floor so you have a mini pool of you to step in.”

United States Infantry Sergeant John Jakes gave the spider in the jar a look I’d never seen him give before. If I wasn’t mistaken, it was fear. Funny how a man like him could be fearless in the face of a well-armed enemy but a ten millimeter creature could cause him to worry.

The Box Man began to scream, the sound of his terror punctuated by the occasional no cloosy! Then finally he was still.

“Come on, Boxie. Talk to us.”

A bass monotone came metronomiocally from the box. “It was driving in the rain and it saw its waiting on the porch and it let its in because its had a gun but then the it with a broken eye began to move towards it and it screamed and it screamed and it said everything it ever knew and then they cut it up and rolled it into a blanket and took it away.”

I exchanged glances with Harvey. It didn’t take a brain scientist to figure this one out.

“Do you have names, Boxie? Do you know names, Mr. Crocket?”

“It was driving in the rain and it saw its waiting on the porch and it let its in because its had a gun but then the it with a broken eye began to move towards it and it screamed and it screamed…”

“Clean, rinse, repeat.” Harvey shook his head. “Standard recluse run-on.”

Jakes stood beside him. “Is that all there is?”

“Recluse have a way about them. They don’t even use any personal pronouns. They refer to everything as an it. When it says its it really means them.”

I stepped over and kicked the box. “We need more, Crocket.”

“… it went to a party where it had many naked its who served drinks to it but it wouldn’t talk even when it got drunk because it is a loyal it and it went to a party where it had many naked its who served drinks to…”

They tried for several more minutes, but other than the two stream of consciousness memories, there seemed to be nothing else.

I sighed heavily. We barely knew more than we knew this morning. Maybe with it all together we could make some sense of it. “What do we know, Nancy?”

“Adams and Crocket are scientists who are working on a top secret government missile project for Lawrence Livermore Labs. They recently traveled to Japan for a conference. Within weeks of their return, each dies at the hands of a creature with a broken eye, one we believe to be an satori. Additionally, Crocket recently attended a party where drinks were served by naked women.”

Jakes laughed hollowly. “This is San Francisco. I can’t toss a dead Chinaman without hitting a place where drinks can be served naked.”

I gave Jakes a look meant to convey that his words weren’t appropriate but he wasn’t paying attention. “He’s right,” I said finally. “Can we trace Crocket’s steps in the last two weeks?”

Nancy nodded. “We can do that, but we might not have to.”

I gave him a look of surprise. “What did you find?”

He produced a card and I took it. On one side it had a stylized calligraphy-painted Japanese butterfly. On the other was Japanese lettering.

“What is it?”

“An invitation to a party corresponding to when they were in Japan. This particular invitation is from Countess Mizuki.”

My heart stilled. “Haven’t heard that name in an age.”

Nancy nodded. “We thought she was dead.”

“That was Colonel Hermann’s operation ten years ago. Why would he lie?”

“Maybe he didn’t lie.”

“Remember what the purpose of the mission was?”

I scratched my head. “Wasn’t there something about a geisha house-vampire hive?”

“Exactly.”

“I think I need to contact Colonel Hermann. Harvey, take Jakes with you tomorrow and see if any other coworkers have interacted with Countess Mizuki. Nancy, I want a dossier on her, and make sure to include her pattern of movement.”

“What are you going to do?” Harvey asked.

“Talk to the Russian again.”

I didn’t like the way we’d left it. His disclosure of the satoris had certainly freaked him out, leaving him acting more like one of the hippies tripping on Haight than a hundred and fifty year old Russian. The fact that he’d been so scared actually scared me. I couldn’t remember a time when the Russian had been scared. And why should he be? He’d been cursed to live forever.

The introduction of Countess Mizuki into the mix gave it a definitive Russian connection. I didn’t know a lot about her — after all she was supposed to have been ancient history — but I did know she was the daughter of an exiled Russian count and his Japanese geisha wife. Although her father and his father before him had been firmly Tsarists, she’d been linked to several Soviet operations, providing them instrumental support through her geisha vampires.