John Adams - By Blood We Live

This story, which is original to this anthology, is the tale of a quartet of Iraq war veterans who were the only survivors of an encounter with a monstrous, blood-drinking creature during the 2004 Battle of Fallujah. "The story began with its title,” Langan said. "A couple of months later, I was watching an interview with an Iraq war veteran who was discussing having been in a Hummer that had been struck by an IED. He described being pinned by the Hummer’s flipping over so that he was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. That told me what the story was going to be.”

9:13pm

From the other side of the campfire, Lee said, "So it’s a vampire.”

“I did not say vampire,” Davis said. "Did you hear me say vampire?”

It was exactly the kind of thing Lee would say, the gross generalization that obscured more than it clarified. Not for the first time since they’d set out up the mountain, Davis wondered at their decision to include Lee in their plans.

Lee held up his right hand, index finger extended. "It has the fangs.”

“A mouthful of them.”

Lee raised his middle finger. "It turns into a bat.”

“No-its wings are like a bat’s.”

“Does it walk around with them?”

“They-it extrudes them from its arms and sides.”

“’Extrudes’?” Lee said.

Han chimed in: "College.”

Not this shit again, Davis thought. He rolled his eyes to the sky, dark blue studded by early stars. Although the sun’s last light had drained from the air, his stomach clenched. He dropped his gaze to the fire.

The lieutenant spoke. "He means the thing extends them out of its body.”

“Oh,” Lee said. "Sounds like it turns into a bat to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Han said.

“Whatever,” Davis said. "It doesn’t-”

Lee extended his ring finger and spoke over him. "It sleeps in a coffin.”

“Not a coffin-”

“I know, a flying coffin.”

“It isn’t-it’s in low-Earth orbit, like a satellite.”

“What was it you said it looked like?” the lieutenant asked. "A cocoon?”

“A chrysalis,” Davis said.

“Same thing,” the lieutenant said.

“More or less,” Davis said, unwilling to insist on the distinction because, even a year and three-quarters removed from Iraq, the lieutenant was still the lieutenant and you did not argue the small shit with him.

“Coffin, cocoon, chrysalis,” Lee said, "it has to be in it before sunset or it’s in trouble.”

“Wait,” Han said. "Sunset.”

“Yes,” Davis began.

“The principle’s the same,” the lieutenant said. "There’s a place it has to be and a time it has to be there by.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said. He raised his pinky. "And, it drinks blood.”

“Yeah,” Davis said, "it does.”

“Lots,” Han said.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said.

For a moment, the only sounds were the fire popping and, somewhere out in the woods, an owl prolonging its question. Davis thought of Fallujah.

“Okay,” Lee said, "how do we kill it?”

2004

There had been rumors, stories, legends of the things you might see in combat. Talk to any of the older guys, the ones who’d done tours in Vietnam, and you heard about a jungle in which you might meet the ghosts of Chinese invaders from five centuries before; or serve beside a grunt whose heart had been shot out a week earlier but who wouldn’t die; or find yourself stalked by what you thought was a tiger but had a tail like a snake and a woman’s voice. The guys who’d been part of the first war in Iraq-"The good one,” a sailor Davis knew called it-told their own tales about the desert, about coming across a raised tomb, its black stone worn free of markings, and listening to someone laughing inside it all the time it took you to walk around it; about the dark shapes you might see stalking through a sandstorm, their arms and legs a child’s stick-figures; about the sergeant who swore his reflection had been killed so that, when he looked in a mirror now, a corpse stared back at him. Even the soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan talked about vast forms they’d seen hunched at the crests of mountains; the street in Kabul that usually ended in a blank wall, except when it didn’t; the pale shapes you might glimpse darting into the mouth of the cave you were about to search. A lot of what you heard was bullshit, of course, the plot of a familiar movie or TV show adapted to a new location and cast of characters, and a lot of it started off sounding as if it were headed somewhere interesting then ran out of gas halfway through. But there were some stories about which, even if he couldn’t quite credit their having happened, some quality in the teller’s voice, or phrasing, caused him to suspend judgment.

During the course of his Associate’s Degree, Davis had taken a number of courses in psychology-preparation for a possible career as a psychologist-and in one of these, he had learned that, after several hours of uninterrupted combat (he couldn’t remember how many, had never been any good with numbers), you would hallucinate. You couldn’t help it; it was your brain’s response to continuous unbearable stress. He supposed that at least some of the stories he’d listened to in barracks and bars might owe themselves to such cause, although he was unwilling to categorize them all as symptoms. This was not due to any overriding belief in either organized religion or disorganized superstition; it derived more from principle, specifically, a conclusion that an open mind was the best way to meet what continually impressed him as an enormous world packed full of many things.

By Fallujah, Davis had had no experiences of the strange, the bizarre, no stories to compare with those he’d accumulated over the course of basic and his deployment. He hadn’t been thinking about that much as they took up their positions south of the city; all of his available attention had been directed at the coming engagement. Davis had walked patrol, had felt the crawl of the skin at the back of your neck as you made your way down streets crowded with men and women who’d been happy enough to see Saddam pulled down from his pedestal but had long since lost their patience with those who’d operated the crane. He’d ridden in convoys, his head light, his heart throbbing at the base of his throat as they passed potential danger after potential danger, a metal can on the right shoulder, what might be a shell on the left, and while they’d done their best to reinforce their Hummers with whatever junk they could scavenge, Davis was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough, a consequence of galloping across the Kuwaiti desert with The Army You Had. Davis had stood checkpoint, his mouth dry as he sighted his M-16 on an approaching car that appeared full of women in black burkas who weren’t responding to the signs to slow down, and he’d wondered if they were suicide bombers, or just afraid, and how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he’d imagined himself in, inevitably, he’d arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car’s engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn’t that Davis hadn’t discharged his weapon; he’d served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he’d sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn’t the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.

That was how the lieutenant had described their role. "Our friends in the United States Marine Corps are going to play the Hammer,” he had said the day before. "They will sweep into Fallujah from east and west and they will drive what hostiles they do not kill outright south, where we will be waiting to act as the Anvil. The poet Goethe said that you must be either hammer or anvil. We will be both, and we are going to crush the hostiles between us.”