John Adams - By Blood We Live

The weeks and months to come would bring the inevitable nightmares, the majority of them the Shadow’s attack replayed at half-, full-, or double-speed, with a gruesome fate for himself edited in. Sometimes repeating the events on his own or with a combination of the others led to a less-disturbed sleep; sometimes it did not. There was one dream, though, that no amount of discussion could help, and that was the one in which Davis was plummeting through the sky, lost in an appetite that would never be sated.

12:26am

Once he was done setting the next log on the fire, Davis leaned back and said, "I figure it’s some kind of stun effect.”

“How so?” Lee said.

“The thing lands in between two groups of heavily armed men: it has to do something to even the odds. It hits us with a psychic blast, shorts out our brains so that we’re easier prey.”

“Didn’t seem to do much to Lee,” the lieutenant said.

“No brain!” Han shouted.

“Ha-fucking-ha,” Lee said.

“Maybe there were too many of us,” Davis said. "Maybe it miscalculated. Maybe Lee’s a mutant and this is his special gift. Had the thing zigged instead of zagged, gone for us instead of the insurgents, I don’t think any of us would be sitting here, regardless of our super powers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lee said.

“For a theory,” the lieutenant said, "it’s not bad. But there’s a sizable hole in it. You,” he pointed at Davis, "saw the thing’s coffin or whatever. Lee,” a nod to him, "was privy to a bat’s-eye view of the thing’s approach to one of its hunts in-did we ever decide if it was Laos or Cambodia?”

“No sir,” Lee said. "It looked an awful lot like some of the scenery from the first

Tomb Raider movie, which I’m pretty sure was filmed in Cambodia, but I’m not positive.”

“You didn’t see Angelina Jolie running around?” Davis said.

“If only,” Lee said.

“So with Lee, we’re in Southeast Asia,” the lieutenant said, "with or without the lovely Ms. Jolie. From what Han’s been able to tell me, he was standing on the moon or someplace very similar to it. I don’t believe he could see the Earth from where he was, but I’m not enough of an astronomer to know what that means.

“As for myself, I had a confused glimpse of the thing tearing its way through the interior of an airplane-what I’m reasonably certain was a B-17, probably during the Second World War.

“You see what I mean? None of us witnessed the same scene-none of us witnessed the same time, which you would imagine we would have if we’d been subject to a deliberate attack. You would expect the thing to hit us all with the same image. It’s more efficient.”

“Maybe that isn’t how this works,” Davis said. "Suppose what it does is more like a cluster bomb, a host of memories it packs around a psychic charge? If each of us thinks he’s someplace different from everybody else, doesn’t that maximize confusion, create optimal conditions for an attack?”

The lieutenant frowned. Lee said, "What’s your theory, sir?”

“I don’t have one,” the lieutenant said. "Regardless of its intent, the thing got in our heads.”

“And stayed there,” Lee said.

“Stuck,” Han said, tapping his right temple.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. "Whatever their precise function, our exposure to the thing’s memories appears to have established a link between us and it.”

Davis said, "Which is what’s going to bring it right here.”

2004-2005

When Davis was on board the plane to Germany, he could permit himself to hope that he was, however temporarily, out of immediate danger of death-not from the injury to his back, which, though painful in the extreme, he had known from the start would not claim his life, but from the reappearance of the Shadow. Until their backup arrived in a hurry of bootsteps and rattle of armor, he had been waiting for the sky to vomit the figure it had swallowed minutes (moments?) prior, for his blood to leap into the thing’s jagged mouth. The mature course of action had seemed to prepare for his imminent end, which he had attempted, only to find the effort beyond him. Whenever word of some acquaintance’s failure to return from the latest patrol had prompted Davis to picture his final seconds, he had envisioned his face growing calm, even peaceful, his lips shaping the syllables of a heartfelt Act of Contrition. However, between the channel of fire that had replaced his spine and the vertiginous sensation that he might plunge into the sky-not to mention, the lieutenant’s continuing monologue to Manfred, the pungence of gunpowder mixed with the bloody reek of meat, the low moans coming from Han- Davis was unable to concentrate. Rather than any gesture of reconciliation towards the God with Whom he had not been concerned since his discovery of what lay beneath his prom date’s panties junior year, Davis’s attention had been snarled in the sound of the Shadow’s claws puncturing Lugo’s neck, the fountain of Weymouth’s blood over its arm and chest, the wet slap of his entrails hitting the ground, the stretch of the thing’s mouth as it released its scream. Despite his back, which had drawn his vocal chords taut, once the reinforcements had arrived and a red-faced medic peppered him with questions while performing a quick assessment of him, Davis had strained to warn them of their danger. But all his insistence that they had to watch the sky had brought him was a sedative that pulled him into a vague, gray place.

Nor had his time at the Battalion Aid Station, then some larger facility (Camp Victory? with whatever they gave him, most of the details a variety of medical staff poured into his ears sluiced right back out again) caused him to feel any more secure. As the gray place loosened its hold on him and he stared up at the canvas roof of the BAS, Davis had wanted to demand what the fuck everyone was thinking. Didn’t they know the Shadow could slice through this material like it was cling film? Didn’t they understand it was waiting to descend on them right now, this very fucking minute? It would rip them to shreds; it would drink their fucking

blood. At the presence of a corpsman beside him, he’d realized he was shouting-or as close to shouting as his voice could manage-but he’d been unable to restrain himself, which had led to calming banalities and more vague grayness. He had returned to something like consciousness inside a larger space in the CSH, where the sight of the nearest wall trembling from the wind had drawn his stomach tight and sped a fresh round of protests from his mouth. When he struggled up out of the shot that outburst occasioned, Davis had found himself in a dim cavern whose curving sides rang with the din of enormous engines. His momentary impression that he was dead and this some unexpected, bare-bones afterlife was replaced by the recognition that he was on a transport out of Iraq -who knew to where? It didn’t matter. A flood of tears had rolled from his eyes as the dread coiling his guts had, if not fled, at least calmed.

At Landstuhl, in a solidly built hospital with drab but sturdy walls and a firm ceiling, Davis was calmer. (As long as he did not dwell on the way the Shadow’s claws had split Petit’s armor, sliced the lieutenant’s rifle in two.) That, and the surgeries required to relieve the pressure on his spine left him, to quote a song he’d never liked that much, comfortably numb.

Not until he was back in America, though, reclining in the late-medieval luxury of Walter Reed, the width of an ocean and a continent separating him from Fallujah, did Davis feel anything like a sense of security. Even after his first round of conversations with the lieutenant had offered him the dubious reassurance that, if he were delusional, he was in good company, a cold comfort made chillier still by Lee, his meds approaching the proper levels, corroborating their narrative, Davis found it less difficult than he would have anticipated to persuade himself that Remsnyder’s head leaping from his body on a jet of blood was seven thousand miles away. And while his pulse still quickened whenever his vision strayed to the rectangle of sky framed by the room’s lone window, he could almost pretend that this was a different sky. After all, hadn’t that been the subtext of all the stories he’d heard from other vets about earlier wars? Weird shit happened, yes-sometimes, very bad weird shit happened-but it took place over there, In Country, in another place where things didn’t work the same way they did in the good old U.S. of A. If you could keep that in mind, Davis judged, front-and-center in your consciousness, you might be able to live with the impossible.