Jason Frost - The Warlord

Eric touched his scar, felt its shiny unnatural smoothness. What were the last words he'd heard Fallows say that day of the Easter Massacre, the hot, bloody bayonet still clutched in the bastard's hand? He was laughing. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath, Eric ole buddy. King Lear, Act I, Scene i, line 124." Then he'd stopped laughing, grabbed Eric's hair and jerked his sagging head upright. Even bound as he was to a hitching post, his face seared and bleeding, Eric had tried to lunge at Fallows. Fallows' face had darkened, his voice sharp and hard, but so quiet only Eric could hear it. "You were different than the rest, Eric. I was patient with you, tried to teach you, confided in you. I tried harder with you than with anyone else. Ever." He'd tightened his grip on Eric's hair, forcing his head back against the post. He spoke rapidly now through clenched teeth, but there was a hint of sadness in his voice. "I've never looked for a friend, never needed one. But you might have been. We could've owned this pissant country. What would it have cost you? Some respect, that's all. Was that too much to ask?"

Eric's throat was leathery, dry, his face aflame with pain. But he managed to choke out one word. "Yes."

Fallows' eyes widened with hate, his lips curled back into a death skull's smile. "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." Then he snapped his knee into Eric's crotch, lifting him off the ground, driving him into the post. Eric had mercifully slipped into semi-consciousness, though he could hear some of the other Night Shift soldiers gasp. "Remember," Fallows had said, though at the time Eric wasn't sure whether he'd been speaking to the men or to Eric. It didn't matter. Neither forgot.

The worst part of the note had been signing it with Luther's name. More of Fallows' black humor, Eric had felt personally responsible for Luther's death, and no amount of rationalization had been able to lighten that burden. Fallows would know that. He was not a stupid hick ex-soldier. He was the cleverest, most resourceful man Eric had ever met. Also the crudest, most ruthless. As a young kid in Nam, Eric had been tempted to accept Fallows' friendship. The patronage of an older, more experienced fighter, regardless of his methods, could mean the difference in how you got home: alive and with all your parts working, or an ugly, rotting lump in a body bag. For Fallows protected his followers with the same enthusiasm with which he destroyed his enemies. But somehow Eric had sensed it was not the way to go. That it would be the first step down a dark, winding road from which there was no return. That had only made Fallows more insistent. It became an obsession, a crusade. Until that last day.

Eric let his fingers skate across the icy surface of the scar again. He had to forget the past, ignore the future. Just concentrate on the present. Protecting his family. Staying alive. Don't let the rest of them know how he felt. He pulled on a casual smile, turned to his mother. "What time's your boyfriend coming over, Mom?"

"For God's sake, he's not my boyfriend," she scowled, but her eyes crinkled with delight. "Trevor and I have known each other since graduate school, before I even met your dad. Hell, the old fart helped me get my job. And yours too, I might add, young man."

Eric held up his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay."

"Besides, Trevor's brilliant in the one thing everybody wants to know about these days."

"What's that?" Annie asked.

Maggie smiled. "Earthquakes."

Eric stood silently outside the door and listened.

"Cmon, one game. Please?"

"Get lost, creepface."

"Be a sport. Jenny. One lousy game, then I'll leave you alone. Promise."

"Grow up or get out. Can't you see I'm trying to make a phone call?"

"Big deal. Big deal phone call."

"I don't see anybody calling you up."

"Nobody's calling you either. You're the one making the call."

"At least I have friends to call."

"I have friends," Timmy protested.

"I mean normal friends, not those jerks you hang around with. Talking chess all the time. The Sausilito Defense and stuff."

"Sicilian Defense. And it's better than talking about who's wearing whose letter sweater at school. Or who kissed who."

Jenny giggled. "You won't think so in a couple years, gargoyle breath."

"How about a game after you're done with your call? I'll spot you a rook and a bishop."

"Unh uh, no deal. You'd win anyway. Why don't you play with that chess computer Dad got you? I thought you liked it."

"Yeah, I do. Only I like playing real people better." There was something sad in his voice that vibrated through Eric's stomach, caught in his throat.

Jenny must have heard it too. "Okay, as soon as I'm done talking to Lisa. But only if you're quiet while I'm on the phone. And one game, Timmy, I mean it. No begging afterwards."

"Great!"

"But I want a rook, a bishop, and a knight."

"Okay, but I get white. And no more-"

Eric moved away from the door and continued on down the dark hallway, smiling. This was one of his favorite pastimes, watching the kids from a distance, overhearing them playing or arguing. He wasn't spying, just delighting in their presence, an invisible observer to a world that made all others seem silly and useless by comparison. It wasn't innocence exactly; in Nam he'd seen enough of what horrors children could do under the right conditions. It was something else. Vulnerability? Trust? Yeah, maybe that was it, trust. Their innate trust that parents always knew what they were doing. It made you want to be more than you were, somehow better. To live up to their image.

It didn't matter that the kids weren't his biologically, he loved them as much as was possible, had even gotten used to thinking of them as if they really were his. They were young when he'd married Annie. Jenny was four and Timmy was two. Timmy had accepted him right away, curling up in Eric's lap every night and drooling on his pants. Jenny had been more reserved, even hostile, certain that her real father was coming home from Vietnam no matter what anyone said. Unfortunately, Eric knew differently because he had seen Lt. Stephen Finnegan's charred corpse still smouldering among the scattered pieces of twisted metal that once had been a helicopter. It was Lieutenant Finnegan's third mission as a chopper pilot. A barefoot woman not even five feet tall, with an AK-47 strapped to one shoulder and a three-month old daughter strapped to the other, had brought it down with three shots.

The Night Shift had come upon the scene just as the woman was poking through the wreck, stripping weapons and boots from the smoking bodies. Dirk Fallows had given her a burst from his M3A1 that disintegrated her left hand and arm up to the elbow in a pink explosion of blood and bone. Neither she nor her baby made a sound as she spun and dashed into the jungle, her left arm looking like a bloody shredded sleeve. They searched, but never found her.

Among the items that the woman had discarded as useless was a set of four drugstore photos of a young woman about twenty-one. In the first photo she was sucking in her cheeks and crossing her eyes imitating a goldfish. In the second she was nibbling a baby's ear; the baby was laughing. The third was of the woman's obviously pregnant belly, slightly out of focus from being so close to the camera. The fourth was the woman and baby smiling, holding a piece of notebook paper with "I LOVE YOU!!!" printed on it in lipstick.

From the dogtags on Lieutenant Finnegan's body, Eric managed to trace the woman in the picture, Annie, and wrote her his condolences. She wrote back, a chatty, friendly letter all about being pregnant, about her philosophy classes at San Francisco State, about the funeral. She seemed so healthy, adjusted. So damn normal.