C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

Well, no, it’s not the only thing I hope. I hope you’ll come home to me soon,

too, so we can be a family. I love you.

Letters like that could keep a guy going a long time, and I got a stack of ‘em every time there was a mail call. Resta the guys gave me grief, but it was envy, not meanness, that drove ‘em. I took it without complaint, knowing too many of ‘em didn’t have anybody writing them at all.

Korea wasn’t what I expected, truth be told. I couldn’t have said what I had expected, but I guessed I had this kinda blank slate in my head for it to fill in. Except it was really blank, sorta nothing more than sand and sky, so coming halfway around the world to find out the same kinds of wildflowers grew in Korea as in my back yard in Washington kinda threw me. They spent a lotta time in Basic telling us about the enemy not being like us, but the folks I saw looked tired and afraid, and that was how me and my buddies felt a lot of the time. ‘course, my commander woulda said I was looking at the South Koreans, our allies, but the only reason I could tell Northerners from Southerners was which end of the gun they were on.

One of the guys had it worse, though. He was an America-born Korean called Danny. Danny Kim, our ghost-man. He went in and out behind the lines like nobody’s business, disappearing for days and weeks and coming back with intel. Mosta the time when he showed back up he tried to slip into camp quiet-like, so he could shower and get into uniform before anybody laid eyes on him. We knew what he did anyway, ‘cause he wore his hair longer than reg so he could blend better with the locals. Still, it was one thing knowing and another thing seeing him come in, dusty and broody, wearin’ local-style loose pants and t-shaped shirts or torn-off jeans and bare feet. I caught him coming in one night when I was on perimeter duty. I was staring out at the dark, listening to the sound of a crying baby needing help, when he came outta the trees and said, “It’s not real.”

For an ugly minute him and me were on opposite sides of the war, and I was the only one with a gun. The baby’s crying got louder, and something wrong came through it, a kinda nails-on-chalkboard sound for real, not figuratively. “It’s not real,” Danny said again. “Don’t go out there, Muldoon. You won’t come back.”

“Shit, man, I don’t know if you’re real.” I waved him by, and stood my ground. After a little while the screaming faded, and I went out at dawn to have a look around. There wasn’t a baby, and there wasn’t any kinda sign there’d ever been one. I went back to camp feeling uncomfortable. At breakfast Danny showed up in the mess hall looking crisp as any soldier, and sat down next to me. “Thanks for not shooting me.”

“Thanks for not letting me go out there. What was that screaming?”

“A demon,” he said so easy I almost believed him. “It’s been suckering guys in some of the other platoons, and they’re going home in body bags, so don’t listen to it. Not ever.”

“Right.” I stared at him a minute, then shuddered. “What’s it like out there, all alone?”

Danny said, “Hell,” reflexively, an’ we both laughed. He said, “Confusing,” under the laughter, though, and I wasn’t surprised to hear it. It couldn’t be easy spin’ on your parents’ people, but it wasn’t something to talk about in a mess hall with a buncha officers nearby, either. So he said, “Where are you from, Muldoon?” instead, and we got to talking about the west coast and places we’d like to visit. “Assuming we make it out of here,” he said, and I shrugged it off.

“You gotta assume that, Danny. All of us are gonna make it out except,” and I raised my voice, “except you, Dandy, right? You’re gonna end up married to three Korean wives and never go back to Milwaukee.”

There was two Andies in the unit, my old pal Alabama Andy, and the newcomer Dandy Andy, who was maybe the best-looking guy I’d ever seen. Even Annie’d paused when she’d seen him the first time, and only smiled when I asked her about it, so I knew he was good-looking. He was like some kinda Viking with yellow hair and good shoulders, and a face that coulda starred in the movies. Instead he’d worked his way into and outta a lot of hearts back home, and seemed to be doing the same thing here. I guessed handsome was handsome, whether a girl was American or Korean. He said, “Three?” deadpan. “I was hoping for five or six, but I should leave some for the rest of you, huh?”

“Not for Muldoon,” Alabama Andy said. “He’s got Annie waiting for him.” A bunch of good-natured bickering went up, but Danny leaned over toward Dandy and said, “Be careful out there. My mother and father used to tell me stories about the Korean demons who wouldn’t approve of your easy way with the girls. You don’t want to make them angry.”

Dandy Andy grinned wide. “Yeah? How do I know if I’ve got one’s attention?”

“You just keep an eye out for a woman so beautiful even you don’t think you stand a chance, and stay away from her.”

Dandy kicked back, arms folded behind his head and leaning on a wall that wasn’t there. “Now that’s a problem, see, ‘cause there’s no such thing as a girl too pretty for me.”

I said, “You oughta listen to him, Dandy,” without knowing quite why I said it, except that voice at the back of my head wanted to warn him, and sounded sad about it. But he didn’t hear me, ‘cause somebody else was saying, “Hey, you’re a poet and don’t know it,” and another guy was finishing it up with “His feet do, they’re Longfellows.”

Then we got called up to fight, and for a few weeks there wasn’t any joking except the gallows humor that kept us sane. Danny was with us that whole stretch, always muttering warnings that nobody took seriously ‘til another one of the guys, Reckless Rick, got himself drowned when there was no water for miles from where we were. Then Dandy found the one pretty girl on the war front, and came back to the camp to die the next morning. Me and Danny stood over his body awhile, counting the bite marks, all small and perfectly round, like vampire leeches had fastened onto him. I counted more than a hundred, and finally said, “What did that to him?” to Danny.

He shrugged and said somethin’ in Korean, a word I couldn’t say back. “An avenger of women wronged. Like a banshee, except they suck a guy dry like a vampire. They lure men in by offering to suck, um.” He trailed off, looking uncomfortable. “You probably don’t want to look at his Johnson, if you know what I mean.”

I hadn’t wanted to in the first place, but Danny walked away an’ curiosity just about killed this cat. I took a look down Dandy Andy’s shorts.

Danny was right. I hadn’t wanted to. Pale an’ sick, I staggered off to throw up, and every damned one of us in the unit listened hard to Danny’s warnings after that. I wrote letters to Annie where I told her about the strange things in the night, an’ then I tore ‘em up and wrote new ones not mentioning it. I hated to think she might be doing the same thing at home, picking and choosing what to tell me so I wouldn’t worry, but she’d had enough heartbreak with her daddy in the institution. I didn’t want to add to it.

It musta been around Christmas when Danny came out from behind the lines again and shook me awake one night. Didn’t say a word, just knelt there with a hand over my mouth and a finger to his lips, waiting for my eyes to get less round and my heart to stop pounding so hard before he let me go and put his mouth next to my ear. “I need help, Muldoon. There’s something out there I can’t handle and you were the first one to believe me about the demons, so I’ve got to ask your help.”