SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

The place was wrong. It looked wrong, it sounded wrong, and it smelled wrong. There were no sulfur swamps in their patrol area. There were no rivers big enough to make a clogged drain like this one for at least a hundred kilometers in the opposite direction. No one in the area had reported stone landmarks to the map crews, and nowhere in the entire fucking country from bombed out tunnels to defoliated drop zones was ever this fucking quiet. It was like a library, in a church, in the middle of a graveyard, on Mars.

Luke flicked off his torch and belly-crawled over the rise. His ankle pulsed like a parade-ground hangover, and his canteen was nearly empty. His skull felt naked, and his eyes throbbed as he tried to see through the murk. The skin between his shoulders puckered, and his gut wouldn’t unclench. Everything in him said there were eyes out there, and whoever owned them was none too friendly. He glanced back the way he’d come, but saw nothing but darkness. When he turned back he saw something scrawled over the stone below the grass line. Luke held his kerchief over the torch to cut the glare, and leaned in for a closer look.

Now Entering Spook Central, the stones proclaimed in letters that had been written in an unsteady hand. Below that, the printing slanting the other way, was the missive Kilroy was here. Luke touched his tongue to the pad of his thumb, and ran it over the last e. It smeared, and when he sniffed his thumb there was no doubt about what the words had been written in. They were fresh, but not that fresh. A gunshot rang out somewhere in the darkness, and Luke’s shoulders twitched. He remembered Baxter telling him once that if you heard the shot you weren’t dead yet, and that if you weren’t dead it was time to get a move on before you were. Forward or backward, Luke couldn’t stay where he was.

The world came in flashes. Luke was halfway down the hill, scooting on his ass like a little kid and trying to look everywhere at once. Then he was at the bottom of the hill, bent over like a runner getting ready to put his feet in the blocks. He was scuttling through the grass, breathing through his open mouth, trying to hear something other than the slamming of his heart. He zigged and zagged over the open land, keeping his head down and his eyes wide open in the dark. He felt with his feet and his fingertips, slithering and scrabbling over ground he could barely see. He used the torch sparingly, kept its flashes brief, and managed not to run into anything. The fourth time he flicked the switch there was a crack in the near distance, and the torch exploded.

Luke dropped the flash, and rolled to his right. Three more sharp barks followed, and gray grit flew as rounds buried themselves in the dirt around him. Luke let out a moan, and coughed. He let it trail off into silence, going limp in a patch of scrubby grass. His left hand felt hot and wet. He spider-walked his right hand to his hip, making the muscles in his arm relax. He waited. No one approached. There was no more shooting, either. A minute went by, then a friend came to join it. The clock party had just gotten started when he heard whistling.

The notes were flat, tone-deaf things; the ghosts of murdered music. At first Luke thought it was the wind, but the sounds were too regular. Too human. The atonal dirge drifted, and something moved in the mist; a skinny shadow with its weapon held at port arms. Luke drew and fired, squeezing the trigger twice. A firebrand burned the back of his right shoulder, and the figure went down with a sound like laundry being dumped on a concrete floor. The whistling continued, but there was a wet, wheezing quality that said it no longer came from a mouth. Luke stood and approached, weapon leveled.

The shooter was lying on her back. Her frizzy blond hair stuck out like a halo in the dimness. Ugly, puckered worms of scar flesh squirmed at her temples and along the shaved sides of her head. She had a junky’s tan, and the skin around her nails was cracked and jaundiced. One or two of the nails still had chips of yellow paint on them. Her lips writhed over pale gums filled with loose teeth, and her breath hissed through the hole the copper jacketed slug had torn in her chest. She wore busted sandals, cut-off jeans, and beneath the mud and blood her tee shirt was stamped with the letters for Ohio State. She raised empty hands, and squeezed a trigger that wasn’t there. The whistling stopped, and her hands flopped in the dirt like dead starlings.

Luke didn’t recall sitting down. One minute he was standing over the girl, staring into her dead, hazy eyes, and the next he was on his ass. His face was wet, and clear snot dribbled from his right nostril. He flicked his Zippo, and noticed several, deep gashes along his left hand. Shards of plastic stuck out of a few of them. He pulled them out, grunting with each chunk.