Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

“Sergeant Fowler is on the other side of town, standing his ground and waiting, sir!” The man that spoke to him was just out of his sight, but he recognized the voice of Private Herbst. The voice was as distinct as the man himself, a red haired brute nearly as strong as an ox. He turned to bark an order at Herbst and saw the private’s body jerk twice, saw the blast of meat and bone that came off his left shoulder and then saw the man hit the ground, screaming.

Damned foolish of him to look away from the conflict. He looked back toward the crush of Indians charging into town and the chaos of people getting away from them. The civilians ran, as well they should. The soldiers stood their ground.

Folsom drew his revolver and took aim at the closest savage, a lean old man on a black horse. The old man saw him and charged, riding hard to reach him. The bullet Folsom fired caught the old man in his thigh and blew through the leg and the horse under it with ease. The old man screamed, the horse screamed, and both collapsed in a sliding heap. Neither was dead, but he intended to remedy that. One step closer, and the bullet from the next Indian caught Folsom in the chest, tearing through the rib above his heart and then through the organ itself. He tried to aim his weapon but his traitorous fingers dropped it. The pain, when it showed up, was as large as a mountain and crushed his chest in its grip. Folsom tried to scream, tried to do anything at all, and managed only to fall backward and land hard on the ground. The horse and rider stomped over his body as they continued into the town, followed by several other natives.

Crowley watched on from a distance, his face calm and almost expressionless, his eyes intensely focused. Slate did his best to ignore the man, which, considering the nightmare in front of him, was not that difficult.

“You have questions,” the thing said. It was a statement rather than a question. Again it was spoken in a language other than English, one completely unknown to Slate, but he understood just the same.

“What are you? What am I?”

Those vile teeth flashed and the impossibly thin, tall man chuckled. “You were given a seed. It was planted in your body. I do not see it.” It stared for a moment and then pointed to the small bump almost perfectly centered in its own forehead. When he touched it the skin parted like an eye blinking and for just an instant a greenish-gray stone showed before the skin sealed itself again. “It would be similar to this, but not exactly the same.”

Slate remembered touching the stone, feeling it; remembered that pebble, too, had a song to sing. He nodded but did not speak.

“That seed is what you are. What you are becoming. We are not many, there have never been many, but we are powerful.”

“What do I do about it?” Slate asked.

“Embrace the changes. I fought mine and in the end it caused me nothing but pain.”

“What is the song I hear?”

“That is magic trying to tell you how to grow and become strong.”

“Do you hear that same song?”

The thin man looked at him with a cold, sly expression. “I am the song.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We are a part of the world. This world and others. We can listen to the song and we can sing notes from the song and create wonders. But we must feed if we listen to the song.”

He wasn’t sure if the thing was being deliberately vague or simply lacked the ability to explain itself. Either way, he was starting to dislike the thin man.

“What do we have to feed on?”

“Mostly pain, and others like ourselves.” That smile grew larger.

Then the thin man reached for him and placed a hand on his chest and something inside of him pulled and twisted and shook through his body like a tree’s roots being ripped from the ground. Lucas Slate tried to step back, tried to break free, but the thin man’s hand on his chest burned at him and left him unable to move a single muscle. He stared at the yellowed teeth in darkened gums surrounded by white, smiling lips, and felt hatred rip into his heart.

In a lifetime full of predatory people who thought he was easy prey Lucas Slate had proven more than his share of people mistaken. He could not make his body move. He could not make his anger known by any of his previous methods. He could not, by God, even call out to Jonathan Crowley a dozen strides away. Instead he listened to the song that called to him and tried to understand the things it was saying.

The pain fought for his attention. The song had been trying to get his notice for longer.

He let the song win.

Crowley stared hard at the two pale men, waiting as they stood face to face and spoke. He could not understand a single word they were speaking and that, too, was something he was unaccustomed to. He did not understand because the words were new to him, but they were also not words, not exactly. Damned if it didn’t sound like to two of them were harmonizing.

As a counterpoint to their song, the battle raged close by and drew closer. The Cavalry was fighting against the invading Apache and by the sounds of screams, cries, and gunshots the conflict was in a full fury.

Crowley stared toward the sound of battle and saw the soldiers retreating, heading at a slow crawl toward where he stood and watched another war taking place.

Sometimes the conflicts seemed impossible to escape.

The gaunt man facing off against Lucas Slate slapped Crowley’s companion in the chest and Slate started jittering where he was, standing still and twitching, seizing again and again. The usually calm face pulled down, drawing into a pained expression and Slate’s eyes raged silently.

Crowley’d planned on doing nothing at all about this. He made it a habit not to get involved in several different sorts of situations, not the least of which were cases when one monster fought another.

Did he think Slate was a monster? That was the question.

Not far away the dead boy kept screaming his anger to the skies. He refused to be placated by whatever it was the afterlife was supposed to offer him. From the corner of Crowley’s eye he could see the vaporous spectre of Molly Finnegan, dead since the previous winter, buried by none other than Lucas Slate, and whose body once pushed itself out of the ground at the behest of whatever sort of creature Slate was becoming.

Behind Molly a Cavalryman’s head snapped back violently and he flopped to the ground without making a sound that could be heard from the distance. Molly looked at the body expectantly. Crowley looked away.

Helping Slate would be a hideous mistake. The events of the last summer had proved that beyond a doubt. The man had muttered words and shattered the ground at his feet. He was no longer human.

And yet, as Slate asked for help in the tent earlier, Crowley was still allowed to respond now. He was freed from his usual constraints when asked for assistance by a human being.

And he was freed when asked by Lucas Slate.

“Damn me,” he muttered.

The gun was in his hand in a second. He cocked the hammer, aimed and fired. Aimed, fired. Aimed, fired, and then again.

All four bullets slammed into the thin man. The first shot surprised him. He had apparently forgotten Crowley was there. The bullet tore his right arm apart, dragging it from Slate’s chest. Slate staggered backward, gasping. The second bullet took the thin man in the left shoulder blade and spun him where he stood so that he was looking toward Crowley’s feet. The third round punched into the thin man’s chest and blew a hole through his left lung. The fourth round hit him in the stomach and doubled him over as sure as if he’d been kicked by a horse.

The thin man gasped and grunted and then fell to his knees, trying to balance himself on his hands. He bled from each wound, streams of blood flowing to the ground. Crowley took three strides forward and looked down at where Slate lay on the frozen soil. Slate looked at him then sat up, wincing. Where the thin man had touched him, his shirt was torn and the skin underneath was already bruising, showing an amount of red that would have been alarming on most people, but for all Crowley knew, the color was perfectly normal in an albino who got himself bruised properly.