Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

His bullet blew it off its feet, spinning it doll-like across the floor to land face down on the debris-strewn carpet.

“Cover.”

Harper and Benson came up behind Monroe, facing away from him, scanning the room for movement. Monroe knelt to examine the creature. He kicked its weapon away, placed one huge boot on its back and pressed down. It groaned. They were small, the same size as a three year old, but slim and perfectly formed. A helmet was pulled down over its face, and even though it looked to be wearing some sort of body armor, he saw that it was no match for the slug that had obliterated its shoulder.

He used the barrel of his gun to turn it over — it groaned again. He reached out and lifted the visor off its head. There was a rush of weird smelling air, and then a face from a nightmare. Monroe grimaced — it looked like a hairless, deformed child, with no nose, large eyes and small shovel-like teeth. The skin looked transparent with pumping veins pushing dark blood into a large pulsating brain inside its potato-shaped head. It glared at him with a boiling hatred and revulsion that Monroe had never experienced before in his life.

One handed, he lifted the small being and stared into its face. His own features twisted in disgust. “What the fuck are you?”

There came a disgusted noise from the back of its throat and it bared its teeth. The eyes still burned into his own.

“Yeah, feelings mutual, buddy.” Monroe pointed the big gun at its face. “Got something for you from Felzig — open wide.”

The small being began to smirk and reached up with its remaining good arm to punch a button on its belt.

“I’m Jax. Die, Gimp. It’s clean up time,” it hissed at him.

Monroe’s eyebrows shot up. “So, you can talk.”

A blinding light engulfed the small smashed body, then Monroe, then Benson and Harper, the room, and then the entire building. In another moment there was just a crater where the brownstone had stood for fifty years.

A month later, Detective Heisen sat in a taxi across the road from the empty lot where the brownstone used to be. His eyes were glazed.

“What do you want to do, buddy.”

“Huh?” Heisen blinked at the sound of the driver’s voice. “Give me a minute.” He got out and crossed the road to stand at a line of police tape still strung across the sidewalk — he didn’t know what it was there for — there were no clues, there never was to begin with. There was nothing to see, and nothing to steal — nada, zero, zip — case closed.

He flipped up the tape and ducked under, groaning as the back-brace cut into his waist. He was out of work, pensioned off at thirty-eight — a one armed detective, with several separated discs in his back from the blast that had thrown him out the window that night. The injuries, along with the potential therapy for the rest of his life, wasn’t exactly Officer of the Year material. His former squad hadn’t been real supportive. That’s the guy who saw hobbits, elves, leprechauns , they’d sniggered. Well, fuck ‘em all. His curse turned into a groan; his salad days had turned to boiled cabbage nights in the blink of an eye.

Heisen walked in to stand in the centre of the vacant lot. Beneath his feet, pumic-like material crunched. The boffins had told him the bricks, the steel, everything, had been super-heated to a point of molecular transformation. He looked up, trying to judge where he had fallen from, trying to remember what happened; what was real and what was the result of impacting with a sidewalk after a thirty-foot fall. He lifted his stump, staring for a moment. A gas explosion had been the official explanation. A gas explosion that had been as hot as a sun had neatly cut away his arm and cauterized the wound so cleanly that an industrial laser could not have been so efficient.

Heisen blew air through compressed lips. Nothing left but ghosts and memories. The agents, the Defense they had called themselves, had all vanished in the blast, as well as the tiny creatures he knew existed. For all his digging, no reference to the special agents, to the tiny beings, to Klaus, or to the case was on file anywhere. Even Sergeant Amos had been reassigned, and wouldn’t take his calls. Someone way above even his superintendent’s pay grade had shut this down and zipped it up so tight that even thinking about it was a dismissible offence.

This case had been buried and him along with it. No loose ends, nothing to see here, move along folks, and enjoy your new life as a crippled ex-detective, Mr. Heisen.

The cab honked and he turned to wave. But there was something they all forgot. He used to be a detective, and a damned good one. Agent Carter had said there was a strange radiation present. Xenon-135 he had called it. He had an in-law that worked for the university in the physics lab. If anyone could trace Xenon-135, it would be her, and if that material turned up again, then he was going to be there, waiting.

After all, everyone knows that if you capture a leprechaun it’s good luck. He’d be waiting all right.

I was torn from the ethereal green fields of England and slammed back into the heathen sweat of India by the sound of musket fire and screaming. I thrashed against the mosquito nets as I sat up.

“Lieutenant Crawford!” One of the ensigns — I had yet to learn his name — stood outside my tent. I peered at him through the mask of nets. His features seemed distorted in the growing light of morning. “What in bloody… What is going on?” I demanded.

“I… uh… Captain Dartmouth. We request your presence—“

“You bloody moron! Fetch me Sergeant Stuart and get the hell out!”

“Y-Yes, sir!” The ensign fled with due haste and I took the opportunity to dress. The sound of combat made my fingers clumsy. As I tied my stock, Stuart appeared.

“Yes, sor !”

“What the hell is everyone firing at?”

“Enemies at the walls, sor .”

“Have they brought up guns or attempted to scale the walls?”

“No, sor .

“Who are they? Whose men?”

“We haven’t been able to determine that, sor . It’s still dark out.”

I pulled on my leather boots and slung my sword. Last, I checked my pistol and pulled the hammer to half cock.

“Join me on the wall, Sergeant.” I walked through the parade ground of our wooden frontier-fort and climbed a ladder to the fire steps.

“Hold fire,” I ordered.

“Hold your bloody fire!” yelled Sergeant Stuart. He whacked a few privates with his halberd, yelling until there was relative quiet on the walls. The light of the torches flickered, pushing against the dark. When the powder-smoke cleared, I spotted a handful of corpses in the ditch surrounding the fort. A few men still shambled around the glacis of piled dirt abutting the ditch. They didn’t move like normal soldiers. They didn’t come in waves; they didn’t run for cover; and they didn’t scream or yell challenges. They just… walked about, as if on a stroll.

“Sergeant, has their disposition been like this the whole time?”

“Aye, sor . They spooked the boys, but they ain’t been at the walls like they mean it,” he said.

I scanned my surroundings. “Sergeant, where’s Captain Griffin?”

Stuart made a show of checking the muskets of some of the men on the walls.

“Sergeant, where is he?”

Stuart looked supremely uncomfortable. One of the privates finally spoke up; a tall man with a wicked scar that ran the length of the right side of his face from forehead to jaw line. “Buggered off ‘e ‘as. No good for anythin’, that git.”