

### Outside the Wire

### by

### Richard Farnsworth

Published by Richard Farnsworth at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Richard Farnsworth

**ISBN:** 978-1-4661-8781-8

Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

The ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given to other people. If you would like to share this book please direct them to smashwords where they can download their own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's hard work.

Forward

Fallen angels, demons, lycanthropes, monsters and a disembodied hand (or is it), Outside the Wire is a collection of six previously published short stories about things we don't want to let in, all anthologized for your reading pleasure.

"Succumbing to Gravity" tells the story of Greg, a fallen angel and heroin addict asked to do more than he is able. It first appeared in an online magazine (now defunct) named "Nosse Morte" in 2008. I later expanded it to novel-length picked up by Reliquary in 2010. The novel is available on amazon as a paperback or ebook editions (shameless plug).

"The Gift of the Bouda" is the story of an Army Officer attacked while on a mission in the War on Terror by a were-hyena; the Bouda. It first appeared in the lycanthrope-themed anthology "The Beast Within", 2007 from Graveside Tales. I later expanded the story into my second novel of the same name, released in 2011 from Salvo (the Microbrew of publishing). It is also available as a paperback and ebook (second shameless plug).

"The Long Road to Sanctum" is a post-apocalyptic lycanthrope tale that appeared in the second lycanthrope-themed anthology from Graveside Tales in 2011; "The Beast Within; Predator and Prey". (I know you may find this hard to believe, but it is available from online too.)

"B.E.K.s" tells what happens when you mix an urban legend with the war on drugs. It appeared in the anthology "Abominations" in 2008 by Shroud.

"The Sacrifices of Automated Tabulation" is a steam-punk themed story, telling what happens when demonology meets the Industrial revolution. This was my best-selling short story, appearing in Steampunk Tales #7 (an iTunes app) and the "Cover of Darkness" anthology.

"Dougie's Hand" came out in the online journal "Rose and Thorn, in the spring 2010 issue. A fun story of perception.

"The Virtual Huntress" is a previously unpublished short story. It is a bit of a departure, as there are no monsters here. The inspiration came from a conversation relating to drone aircraft and the morality of war conducted at long distance. Given the advancements in UAV technology, it's only a matter of time before Soccer-Moms can telecommute to the battlefield.

Table of Contents:

Succumbing to Gravity (the short story)

Gift of the Bouda (the short story)

The Long Road to Sanctum

B.E.K.s

Sacrifices of Automated Tabulation

Dougie's Hand

Virtual Huntress

Succumbing to Gravity

A long, thin line of clouds stretched out across the azure sky all the way to the western horizon. I descended through the cool air above the Steppe and a teasing updraft bumped from my left. I dipped my wing to catch the uplifting thermal, but it dissipated before I wheeled into the column. With two strong beats of my golden wings I bought thirty feet of altitude.

Below me and to the right a bronze-colored eagle hung in a lazy upward spiral on a rising column of heated air. I stretched my left wing up and out and traced my own leisurely arc through the sky and down into his elevator. I could see the apprehensive tension in the raptor as we circled at opposite sides of the column.

"No fear, brother," I called to him. He winged over and away; I slipped sideways and found that snaky, tightly wound, central core of air that shot me upward.

With arms stretched out beneath my wings I flexed my fingers. I arched my back, tensed my legs and splayed out my toes. I tightened the long flat muscles along the cords of my wings. My long flaxen primary feathers stood out like individual fingers beneath the primary coverts of dark russet, flecked with black and bronze variegations.

I spiraled upward and held as much of the air around me as I could. Over the top, the column was gone and I soared. All the world was beneath me, all of heaven above.

A cloud front came up behind me and a sudden down draft caught me unawares. I dropped a few hundred feet and left my stomach above. Nausea took its place. Eight long beating sweeps of my wings and I regained half the altitude I'd lost. The air cooled suddenly and tight little patches of gooseflesh puckered on my bare skin.

The earth pulled at me. I beat my great wings again, not so easy now to stay aloft. I raced ahead but still the clouds overtook me, condensed and squeezed out a sheet of rain. Looking up as the drops fell was disorienting.

I beat harder, but I could feel the air settling around me in a down draft. Panic welled up with the bile in my throat. The dark, wet ground raced up to meet me. A whimper escaped as I unwillingly gave in to gravity's unforgiving embrace.

Hard wet asphalt pressed into my face. The impact wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I reached up to brace against the ground and saw the syringe still hanging from my arm, the stainless steel needle pointing to a spidery blue vein. I let my arm sink back down, and watched the rain dimple the inky puddle near my face.

I always relived that flight when I was lit. I flexed my atrophied flight muscles to feel the wing stumps quiver. So many, many things I had lost. The phantom pain along the missing cords of my wings made me wince. I was freezing, but I couldn't tell if it was the soaked clothing or the cold flashes that I got when I came down.

"Greg? There you are."

I tried to focus on the voice and brushed the needle from my arm.

"Oh Greg, you know you shouldn't shoot up in the open like this." That was Sarah's voice in the dark, my judgmental little runaway. Her smack habit wasn't as bad as mine so she felt comfortable lecturing me. Easy to do when she hadn't fallen as far as I had.

"I wasn't in the open, I was behind a dumpster," I slurred. Somehow I had ended up sprawled in the center of the alley, with the dumpster behind me.

"Someone could do something to you." Her genuine concern was both irritating and comforting.

I wanted to ask what they could do to me that hadn't already been done?

She grabbed my arm to help me sit up. I batted at her. It was easier to just stay where I was and to lay there in the filth and the muck. The rain pelting down on me.

"Come on Greg, up and at 'em. You'll get pneumonia if you lay out here in the street." She pulled me to a sitting position and I leaned against the dumpster. The streetlamp shed a little light into the alley and I could make out her profile kneeling beside me. She produced a crusty towel from somewhere and dried my face.

"I was flying." I closed my eyes and rested my head on her shoulder.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm flying too. But it's just the drugs, Greg."

She didn't understand what I meant and it would take too long to explain.

"Let's get you some coffee; I got someone I want you to read." She stood and walked behind the dumpster.

I rested my head back against the smooth, cold metal and let the drops run down my face. It was so real this time. So real. My tears were lost in the rain.

Sarah came back around with my threadbare overcoat. I guess I'd left it there before I launched. She shook it out and draped it over my shoulders as I leaned forward. Pressing her fingers to my temples, she pulled my head forward and touched her lips to my forehead.

"It'll be okay."

No. No, it would never be okay.

"Listen, I'm no good for a reading right now," I said. One of my residual gifts; if I concentrated I could see a mortal's soul. As the soul rested slightly out of phase with the physical world I could often see hints of past events, sometimes a bit of the future. Philosophers or theologians could debate how it worked, but the trick usually earned me enough cash to score some junk.

"She's scared and she can pay."

That last bit of information reached through the haze. "How much?"

"Dinner for both of us and fifty bucks too, I bet."

"Is dinner your booking fee?"

She smiled. I couldn't see it in the dark, but I knew she wore that little gapped-tooth grin. She helped me to my feet and we balanced awkwardly for a minute as I dry heaved. She reached up and wiped my mouth and chin before we started off. Though small in stature her soul was bigger than any two people.

I remembered the first part and said, "Scared of what?"

She didn't say. Didn't have to, I could feel it. Alone with the monsters in the dark, that's what everyone's afraid of.

I stumbled beside her with that kicking feeling in my left leg. She helped to support me and guide me as I shook the cobwebs out. Soon I'd be good for a few hours, maybe through until morning.

"How'd you know where I was?"

"Jimenez said she saw you get a score from Beenie when she was working sixty-third. I just checked every alley from Beenie's spot to the apartment until I found you." She sounded pretty proud of herself. The apartment to which she referred was a room we shared in what aspired to be a slum. Often no running water or electric, but it was dry.

We stopped a few times so that I could dry heave some more. Slow going, weaving between the deeper puddles. This wasn't at all like flying.

She shepherded me to a late night café. It was the nasty kind of place people like us could be served. I saw my reflection in the big plate glass window coming up. I had been radiant once. Now my wet straw-colored hair hung greasy and limp, framing those high angelic cheekbones that used to drive the women wild. Oh, what a different story my reflection told now. Gaunt and haunted, I looked like every other burnout in the city. Sarah looked a little better, but the dark eye make-up made her look more cheap than Gothy. What a pair we made.

The smell of stale grease greeted us inside and no heads turned when the little bell above the door announced our arrival.

The woman I'd come to meet was sitting alone, pretty and young, swathed in a heavy coat. We sat opposite her on the cracked vinyl seat of the booth, and she looked at Sarah, and then furtively at me. She complained about how long she had waited and Sarah made an excuse. Her soul was old and I saw a line from a poem I'd once read in her, something about wandering in eternal fear of falling into the indefinite.

She wouldn't make eye contact and didn't believe that I could really read her so I told her that.

"Is that all your magic?" she asked, a little flash in her chocolate brown eyes. A corresponding glint of light caught as she breathed, just above the top button of her blouse. A small gold cross on a chain rested at the little dip in the smooth flesh where the throat tucked in behind the collarbones.

"No, that's the surface stuff. Tell me what you want and we'll see if I can reveal your inner most."

Sarah's bony elbow nudged me. "Be nice."

"How nice?"

She didn't answer. She just looked at the pretty young woman and said, "This is Greg. Like I told you before, he's the guy that can tell if there really is anything funny going on with your dreams. Greg, this is Maria."

"He looks like a drowned junkie."

I half-shrugged. I suppose my appearance was an occupational hazard.

"Is that how you can see into the Santeria? Because you're on the stuff?"

"He's okay now, it's just cause of the rain," Sarah said. Her tone was between placating and matter-of-fact, she didn't want to jeopardize the deal.

"How long you been using?" She had a Latin accent. Maybe Puerto Rican, I couldn't tell.

"Heroin?"

"Yeah." Her hostility had an undercurrent of sadness. Maybe it was the wisps of loss I saw in her soul.

"On and off since eighteen-ninety, I think. Mostly on."

The young woman tucked a wayward strand of black hair behind an ear and gave a disbelieving cluck with her tongue.

"Like I said, Greg used to be an angel," Sarah whispered proudly.

Maria raised an eyebrow. She didn't believe.

"It's true, he still grows little feathers where his wings used to be."

"What happened? You get demoted?" The cross flashed as Maria tucked her elbows close to her sides, like a boxer ready to deflect the body blows. She looked into my eyes then. Such sadness.

"Judged. Judged and found wanting, with ninety-eight of my closest friends. Believe me sister, that was a really bad day."

The waitress came over to take our order. I saw the huddled tangles of unfulfilled dreams and fifty or so hard years there as she set the coffee pot on the table lip. She laughed as she took my order and with nicotine-yellowed nails biting into the pencil stub, she scratched it onto the notepad. She called me 'Hon', took Sarah's order and poured out the old smelling coffee before she moved on. I held the mug against my face to warm my cheek and took a sip. It was acrid but good enough that it made my stomach growl.

"The reading is fifty bucks on top of the meal, like we talked about," Sarah interrupted. "Remember how he helped your friend, Jessica? With her dreams? So he can do the same for you. Right"

I didn't remember a Jessica. I usually didn't remember any of them after I got a score though. Except Sarah. I couldn't get her out of my head after that first time I read her. Now she was my booking agent, and my best friend. She and Milton, who Sarah had brought into my life. Or was it the other way around?

Maria nodded and pulled a billfold out of her thick wool coat. She took out three dog-eared bills and rested them at the midpoint of the grime-covered table. Such a trusting soul.

I laid both my hands out, palms up. The sleeve of my overcoat pulled back to reveal blue veins, stark against my pale skin. The veins traced up and disappeared into the elaborate tattooing on my forearms. Marks that weren't meant for human eyes, but were just too much trouble to keep covered.

Maria glanced down and the look she gave made me feel she thought them dirty. She gently rested her two hands on top of mine. They were small. I ran my thumbs over the backs and she flinched a little, but didn't pull away. Hard. Sinewy. She took care to use lotions and the skin was supple. In another life maybe they'd be the hands of a wool sorter. Her dark eyes locked onto mine and I could see.

I closed my eyes quickly at the jolt of it. I tasted copper and suppressed a shudder. There was a hint of familiarity there in that strong soul. It was an old soul indeed, a soul that could really make a difference. The kind of soul a nether-worlder could really sink his teeth into. She had paid for a show and that's what I owed her. A show, not the proclamation of her damnation that I saw.

"You live with your Mother. Also Maria. You work as a seamstress on the lower east side. Three bus stops from home."

I felt her nod encouragement, but she was not convinced.

"You lost jewelry. A brooch. It belonged to your Grandmother. You had left it on the nightstand and it fell between the headboard and the mattress."

She didn't believe that either, but if she had time I knew she would check.

"Your little sister has passed on. Three years now. There is no fault there for you. Sometimes the little ones are just called home early."

She almost succeeded in pulling her hands away. I opened my eyes and could see it. She arched a raven black eyebrow. She didn't know what I saw.

The waitress came with our order. Sarah asked for extra crackers with her soup. I had a double stack of pancakes. I noted the ghost of a jagged white line there on the left wrist as I disengaged my hands from Maria's and cut into my stack.

"Ask him," Sarah said.

Don't ask if you don't really want to know. Most people don't really want their worst fears confirmed. They just want a pat on the hand so that they can continue with their delusions that everything will be all right.

Maria steeled herself and said, "There's this man, I see."

"There are many men, Maria. Billions in fact. The earth teems with them like locusts."

Sarah nudged me again harder.

"There's this man I see in my dreams. Not really a man, I don't see him so well. Mostly the eyes. It's not good though, you know?"

Sarah nodded encouragement for me. I speared a syrup-soaked wedge of pancakes. I loved pancakes; I could eat them at every meal.

"It's a bad thing. Sometimes I even think that I see him standing behind me in reflections, but when I turn he is not there."

I picked a piece of eggshell from my tongue and asked, "Reflections?"

"Yes, like in the mirror, a window or sometimes on the side of glass of water. He is there watching, behind me, and when I turn to see him he is not there. This man, he makes me worry."

She should. There is nothing good in this. In fact, within the next three hours or so, the harbinger for this _man_ would crack her open like a nut and extract the sweet meat of her soul. But what could I do about that? I only felt like a hero when I was lit and now I was almost all the way down.

She described the wicked strangeness of her dreams that I knew too well. Then she asked me, "Do you see what I should do?" I had indeed misread the sadness in her eyes, as it was despair.

"If you see this man, leave him alone. Get some salt on the way home. When you turn in tonight, pull your bed from the wall and pour the salt in a thick circle around it. That should keep the dreams away. Also, I'm told burning a fish will work, but I haven't tried it."

"Is that all?"

I tilted the plate, scooped up the extra syrup with an egg-yolk stained spoon and said, "Well, you'll find the brooch."

"I mean is there anything else I can do?"

"Are you Catholic?"

"No, I'm a Baptist."

"A Puerto Rican Baptist?"

"I'm Dominican. Why do you ask if I'm Catholic?"

"I was going to suggest confession and a candle to the Holy Mother along with the salt, but I don't know what Baptists do. I'm old-fashioned religion."

"We pray to our Lord and Savior."

Praying. Like that ever did any good. "Do that then."

I had nothing else for her and after a bit she left unsatisfied, but our stomachs were full. When we were alone I got a Styrofoam cup for the rest of my lukewarm coffee while Sarah gathered up the bills and stuffed them into her coat pocket.

The rain was over but the streets were covered in thin puddles. The reflection of lights on the floor of the canyon-like street gave the night a subterranean feel. Sarah stopped beside a homeless man wrapped in garbage bags lying on the sidewalk and dumped her extra cracker packets into his lap.

I stepped over his outstretched leg and said, "Someday that Good Samaritan thing is gonna bite you in the ass, sweetness."

The small smile she gave me made me feel even better than the full stomach.

After a few paces she reached out and took my hand in hers. We interlaced fingers and I pulled her hand up to brush my lips against the back of her fingers, her nails all chewed and covered in chipped black polish.

She asked, "What did you really see, Greg?"

Maybe it was the coming down, or the positive vibe I was feeling, but I still shouldn't have told her. In the three years we'd been together I had always told her the truth. I didn't want to lie to her now, so I described the highlights of my vision.

She didn't say anything at first. After the weighted pause she asked, "Why would they come for her?"

"I don't know. She's special, the fact she dreams of them like she does tells you she's got serious mojo. Funny they come in the flesh though. That's so old-school for them."

"You can't just leave her to that, Greg." Her voice caught a little, so she cleared her throat and said, "You need to help."

"I did help."

"The salt? Will that really do anything?"

"Hell no. For the dreams yeah, but not if one comes in the flesh. Maybe slow them down and give her time to pray. Perhaps the big guy will help."

She pulled her hand from mine and stopped walking to give me that look of hers. When I stopped and turned back she said, "Greg, think of what you used to be."

I shrugged and said, "Sorry, my hero days were over long ago."

"You can do something. I know you can. You have it in you to do great things."

I just shook my head and gave a little shrug. The look she gave me broke my heart, but I'd gotten used to letting people down. She turned from me and ran into the cavernous night.

I called after her to wait. To come back. I even threw my cup in frustration, but she didn't stop. The rain picked up to a misty drizzle now as I turned back the other way and started home.

The night was at its darkest. And I was alone again. A city of millions and I was alone. But then, I had been alone for a long time. Probably for the best, as the lives I touched never seemed to be better after, than before. The full stomach was a nice change so I focused on that. It would have been better without the ache in my joints so I started to plan my next narcotics offense while pretending not to think about Sarah.

Three blocks down from the café, I stepped off the curb and noticed something small near the gutter. I reached down to pick up a dead sparrow. I sat down on the curb with my legs over the rush of gutter water and cradled the little corpse in my left hand. With my right I teased out the little wing.

"No flying for you either, little brother."

I stretched out both the little wings and gently rested the bird on the stream of water and watched it not quite fly away. With the darkness the water was invisible but for snatches of reflected light. And the broken bird weaved first left then right on a glittering silver path through the detritus of the gutter.

I pondered that after I got my bearings and started back toward the pad. The dead bird pushed along involuntarily as if by an invisible hand, on his way to an appointment with a sewer grate. It was too cold and wet to philosophize and I just wanted to get back home and crash.

#

A working girl sheltered in the alcove that led into my building. Her soul was twisted and forlorn gray, shot through with little crimson rivulets of spite, all stuffed in an overweight body in fishnets and too much makeup. She'd turned at least two tricks already and her pupils were little pinpricks in the dark.

"Party, Greg?" With a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, she gave me her best impersonation of something desirable and I stifled a laugh.

I tried to be nice because she'd been someone's little girl once. I saw the father who died and the succession of her mother's boyfriends that turned the little princess into a whore. The last decade she'd spent on the street had polluted and poisoned the soul she'd been born with almost beyond recognition. I knew a monk who would have called all those hard lessons opportunities for personal growth. I called it a shame.

"All partied out, Miss Jimenez."

Her eyes roamed freely over me and she said, "For you it's half price."

"Hard to refuse, but you know how Sarah feels about that. Speaking of, why'd you dime me out to her about my score?"

"You know, she can be persistent. 'Sides, she was all proud, telling me you were cutting back on the smack. So I jus' had to say to her, no sister, you're man is a junkie to the core."

I nodded at her thoughtfulness and started toward the door. She stepped to intercept me and reached out a dirty hand.

I grabbed her wrist and wrenched it sideways. Hard enough to move her along, but not hard enough hurt. She smelled of cheap perfume, cigarettes and that musky pungency of stale sex.

"No touchy the goods, Anna." Skin to skin was rough on me. I was cool not being cruel to this broken spirit, but that didn't mean I wanted to be her friend.

The used-up woman shot me a spiteful look but didn't press it. Instead she looked away and said, "S'okay, your loss."

Loss. A common theme across the length and breadth of my existence.

I brushed past her, not inhaling, and pushed open the unlocked door.

Inside, I braced my hand against the wall where mailboxes were once mounted. I waited while the tingly little wave of post-high nausea swept through me. When I was sure I wouldn't puke up my pancakes I picked my way through the garbage in the dark hall to the room I shared with Sarah.

The hinges gave a screeching protest as I pushed the door open. I flicked the light switch, forgetting the electricity was off. Or maybe the bulb was burned out, I forget. Enough red neon came in from the no-name liquor store across the street that I could make my way through the sparse furniture to the kitchenette. The light started with one letter and added one until all were lit and then it blinked on and off twice before starting again. It wasn't quite a strobe, but the effect was great when I was lit. Not so good when I was trying to hold down my pancakes.

I opened the refrigerator and got a whiff of something old, but no light came on. So it must be the electric. I found a stash of fast-food ketchup packets behind the jug of vinegar I used to cut my smack, and slammed the door shut.

I should save them for when I was hungry, but I wanted to get the acidic taste of bile out of my mouth. I bit in and sucked a few down.

I spun at the sound of a little thump on the counter. Disembodied yellow eyes stared reproachfully at me. As the U-O-R blinked on, the rest of Milton came into view.

He gave me a low rumbling meow, followed by a shorter, louder one for effect.

"I'm not in the mood, cat."

Milton continued to stare and then slinked his inky-blackness across the counter, sitting on the edge, facing me but looking away. The cat pulled away as I tried to scratch him between the ears and repeated his short loud meow.

"Didn't Sarah feed you?"

I rummaged in a cabinet while the cat paced the counter, watching. I finally found the last little pull-top can of tuna and left it open on the counter for him.

The overcoat made a rustling swish as I dropped it in the hall. I went into the bedroom and flopped down on the thin mattress resting on the floor. I rolled over on my back and tried not to think of Sarah.

The blood red neon went through its brighter, brighter, off, and on routine and I stared at the archipelago of dark moldy splotches on the ceiling.

Sarah was liable to do something stupid. I didn't see it, but I knew she was going to warn that Dominican girl. This was a really bad time to play the Good Samaritan.

Milton padded in the doorway and hopped up on to my chest. His breath smelled of fish and his yellow eyes bored into me.

"She made her own bed cat," I said.

Sometimes I think cats are tuned into something the rest of us can't see. Other times I think they just serve as a really good vehicle for our own guilt.

"I'm not the hero she thinks I am."

Milton never blinked.

I rolled the cat off and said, "Fine. But you owe me for this one."

I grabbed my overcoat on the way out to rescue my friend. The friend that had saved me so many times from falling any further than I already had.

#

Five blocks and a bridge later, and I'd left the multi-storied tenements for a real neighborhood. A row of small frame houses huddled together in the dark.

I could tell Sarah was close, but not exactly where. I was good with general directions, but not so good with specifics. I slowed and tried to concentrate. Her soul was masked to me, so it was hard to place her. I recalled the image of the Dominican girl's soul and reached out with my mind to find it. The blinking lights of all of the other souls bound in flesh in this crowded city masked hers. Ahead and to the right. I skirted a row house blocking my way and went into the alley beyond.

I paused and closed my eyes. The crash of glass and a scream led me to where I needed to go. I stumbled on a length of rebar protruding from a tidy heap of garbage in an alley and grabbed it up. I vaulted over the sagging chain-link fence and stumbled through a cluttered yard to the rear door of a house. Locked.

Another scream, muffled and in pain this time, but it wasn't Sarah. I kicked the door in, ran through the empty kitchen and knew I'd be there again. Creaking floorboards indicated movement above. I rounded the corner and bounded up the stairs. There in the hall, half out of a doorway loomed a vision from Maria's dreams. Maria knelt in the hall beyond and called out to me.

It stood taller and broader than me. Great leathery wings stretched out from the second set of scapulas. One wing in the hall, the other reached back into the room. The smoky gray skin was thick and covered in oozing boils where the ancient words had been written. It turned to me and paused, the eyes were dead, the pupils blown. The skin of the lower face had torn away and the yellow-white mandible shown through.

"Araqiêl? Is that you, little brother?" His voice rasped like a file being pulled across a steel pipe.

"Semjaza. It's been a long time." I stood ready on the balls of my feet.

"You look terrible," it rasped.

"Yeah. Not so bad as you, though. You look like hell, Sem." The nausea, the after effects of the drugs, all extraneous thought drained away as my body readied itself for battle.

Semjaza shrugged and the upper half of the face smiled. The lower half didn't have enough skin to complete the expression and it leered. "What can I say? Brimstone is bad for the complexion."

"I can't let you take her," I said abruptly. I flexed my fingers on the rebar held down at my side.

The demon looked at the girl, and then back at me. "You always were a sucker for the pretty ones, Ara. Capital vices and all."

I shrugged and turned the motion into a twist as the demon shot out a twisted reptilian claw. Eight feet in an instant. It cut through the fabric of my coat, but didn't touch skin and I slashed down with the length of iron.

His skin blistered and hissed where the bar struck, leaving a thick wide burn. The iron rod smoked and glowed red where it had touched Semjaza. Iron was good for that with demons. Something about a fire elemental being struck with an earth element. Like a metaphysical game of rock-paper-scissors.

Semjaza hissed at me. I had seen him leading hosts of angels to war once, and now he hissed like a cat.

The hallway was too narrow for this slugfest. The demon was bigger and stronger than me. I wouldn't last long if I couldn't maneuver.

"How did you come to the middle world, Sem?"

"Crack in space-time, little brother. Same as before, you remember that Ara, don't you? What you did to me? To your brothers?"

I backed slowly to the head of the stairs.

"Ara, don't go away mad. Or is it Greg? Isn't that what the sweet-meat called you?"

"Yeah. It's sort of a nickname. Short for egregori." I didn't know whom he meant by sweetmeat. Sarah? The ward hid her soul, so that Semjaza and his friends couldn't take it but it also meant that I didn't see her well.

"Ah, the watchers. That was the job wasn't it? Before the fall?"

I nodded and felt for the steps.

"That is where you lost your wings. Did Gabriel take them from you? Clip you?"

"Nope. Gideon, with his terrible sword." I didn't care to rehash this with him. I just wanted to keep him engaged.

"Gideon. I hate that sanctimonious bastard. I was cast down by then though, wasn't I? Missed all the fun and games."

I took the stairs slowly. One at a time. I noted the inner phalange of his wings had a thick, hooked talon, two thirds up from the base to the end.

"We don't have to fight Ara. Sêmîazâz made you an offer to join us and it's still good. Bygones and all?" The laugh which followed was hollower than his speech.

"Sorry, I'm not interested in your team." He couldn't finish what he had come to do with me here. I would either have to be run off or destroyed.

"You owe them nothing Ara. They turned their backs on us."

I reached the bottom step and kept backing into the little foyer, and said, "We turned away, Sem. Not them."

Even though I saw it coming, I couldn't avoid the wing as it snaked out. The talon sunk into my neck with a wet sound. A thick rope of blood fell out onto the tiles as the talon retracted. The hole it left in me fizzed and I swung the iron rod at empty air.

The second wing snicked out impossibly fast, the talon sank into my shoulder, and back. Again I swung the length of iron at nothing. Bubbling ooze ran down from the holes in me.

"Time is coming to an end, Ara. We'll bar the crack and then we will feast on the children of clay."

He lunged at me again and I dodged. I saw a plastic grocery bag on a sideboard. Through the plastic I could see the little girl holding an umbrella on a blue background and knew it was the salt I had told Maria to get.

I feinted with the iron rod and twisted to grab the bag. Semjaza's index and middle fingers stabbed into my flesh below the ribs. I twisted away, but his talons scraped against the underside of my rib cage and pulled me in. The pain pulsed as I twisted like bait on a hook. The wing talon pinned me through the bicep as I tried to raise the iron rod.

"Where will you go when you die, little brother?"

I had no answer.

"It ends now, Ara."

"Yes," I exhaled. I briefly contemplated letting him have me. If only it could be so easy. I sank my fingers through the sides of the little round box and the salt spilled out of the holes I made. I slammed my hand into his face and packed the salt into his eyes, his shattered nose and the gaping hole of his mouth.

He screamed and released me. His flesh bubbled and fizzed where the salt touched him. It was like salting a snail. I held the iron rod with both hands and stabbed it into the left side of his chest as deep as I could. I rode him over, still holding the rod.

The flesh smoked. A red ring formed in his chest around the iron spike, and I pushed harder, pinning him down to the step like an obscene butterfly.

My hands burned. I had to hold. If he got the spike out, he might still heal. The hot red halo spread outward, leaving gray, charred coke behind.

He thrashed. The talons of his wings slashed my coat and sliced strips of flesh from my back. My hands blistered with the heat of the rod. Semjaza stiffened and let out a rasping exhalation as he emolliated. I leapt back and watched him turn to dust and ash.

I bounded over his outline of melted acrylic carpet and scorched wood and up the stairs.

Maria still knelt where I had left her. I hadn't seen it before, but she cradled the body of what must have been her mother in her lap. Her body wracked with sobs, but no sound escaped.

Where's Sarah?"

Maria didn't respond.

"Did Sarah come?" I asked with more conviction.

Maria didn't respond but instead cast a glance at the doorway in the hall. I followed her eyes and saw Sarah crumpled just inside the broken window.

"No. No-no-no." My wounds were forgotten as I crossed the small room and dropped to my knees. I reached down and pulled her broken little body to me.

"Oh no. Not her." I reached down and brushed the wild dark hair with the red-brown roots from her blood-smattered face.

"No," I keened. I pulled her body to me and rocked her slowly back and forth.

A friend. A confidant. A protector. An empty shell.

I cried and spoke of my bereavement in the ancient languages.

When I had no more tears to cry I laid her down gently. Then I riffled through her pockets with my blistered hands, until I found the fifty bucks.

I would need it later for Beenie.

Gift of the Bouda

I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair looking across an industrial steel desk at my new doctor. The black plastic nameplate read; Mark Capon, MD, FAPA, FACP, and below that Staff Psychiatrist, Veteran's Affairs Administration Hospital.

Before this impromptu appointment we had never met. His thin neck held up a too-round head. The thick titanium-rimmed lenses and beak of a nose accentuated his bird-like appearance.

"Good afternoon, Captain Rogers."

I hated to be addressed by my old rank. That had been an entire lifetime ago.

He seemed to be waiting for a response.

An old clock on the bookshelf audibly ticked the seconds away.

"May I call you..." He looked down at his notes. "John?"

I nodded. He could call me Bucky the Wonder-horse for all I cared, as long as I got my meds. I had been denied my prescriptions when I tried to fill them at the VA pharmacy and was told I needed to see this joker first.

"Well, John, I am Doctor Capon, and I have been assigned to your case." He affected a serious expression and said carefully, I am not sure if you've heard, but Doctor Roman passed away."

He looked at me for a response.

"Doctor Roman died in a car accident last month." He said it slowly as if to press the point home.

Everyone dies. Having only met my previously appointed Staff Psychiatrist once before, his loss made no impact.

"Well, I've been reviewing all of Doctor Roman's case files." He glanced down at my folder. "You have a diagnosis of chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with attending Obsessive Compulsive manifestations."

The clock ticked a few more seconds. He looked at me expectantly.

"I'm just here to refill my prescription. The pharmacy was closed yesterday and today I'm out."

"Yes, well I thought it would be a good idea if we met first, before I authorized release."

The low angle of the sun cast long shadows across the small office.

"Will this take long? I'd like to be home before it gets dark."

"No, it shouldn't be too long. I just need to go over some things with you before I feel comfortable with the current treatment modality." He smiled primly.

I nodded and he looked back down.

The small room contained new VA-issued furniture and boxes of medical texts on the floor. He hadn't been there long. The Medical diploma on the wall behind him was just four years old, so this was probably his first real job. He even smelled new.

"Alright, so Doctor Roman had pursued a primarily pharmacological approach. I have you here on Fluvoxamine at three-hundred milligrams with recommendations that you attend a VA-sponsored PTSD support group."

He looked up at me but I didn't respond.

"First, that dosage is extremely high, and second I can't seem to find any evidence of your attendance at a support group meeting, John." He leaned back in his chair expectantly, fidgeting with a gold Cross pen.

"Is that a question?"

He smiled slightly and said, "Not really. Should I be more direct?" He paused. "You've been treated her for almost seven years and not once have you participated in any sort of therapy. Why is that, John?"

I shrugged. A gusting wind keened against the window, warning of a change in the weather.

"I've found that in treating PTSD, especially presenting with anxiety disorders that exposure and response prevention therapy, combined with the appropriate medications is the most efficacious treatment. We teach ERP in several of our support groups."

"Great," I said, trying not to show too much enthusiasm. "Listen, I'm not good with psychobabble."

"In my residency at Cambridge hospital I actually co-authored a paper on anxiety disorders. It was a literature survey of various treatments for PTSD, following a cohort from Desert Storm," he said authoritatively.

"Your mother must be proud." I suppose my tone lacked sincerity.

For a full three ticks of the clock he looked at me expressionlessly before looking back down at my file.

"From the answers on your Yale-Brown, I question if the diagnosis was appropriate, John."

He paused expectantly again and seemed disappointed when I didn't respond.

"Listen John, I am going to need your help here if we are going to be able to provide you an effective treatment."

I could so easily snap that thin neck. But that would wrong, I supposed.

"We're on the same team here, John."

Hardly. Most of my team was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I sighed and then squeez

"Great. Let's talk about the images that you seem to focus on, and the behaviors which you feel compelled to perform, shall we?" He waved his little pen like a baton.

I nodded. A faint smell of metal hinted at his enthusiastic perspiration.

"So, would you say you engage in activities you feel compelled to perform, that occupy you for say, up to an hour a day?" he asked.

"No."

He wrote that down.

"Well, that's good. How about the obsessions? Do you feel that you spend a significant amount of time dealing with unwanted or unpleasant ideations?" He twisted the body of the pen to drive the point in and then back out.

"Yes. Images, mostly," I said. There, I could be forthcoming.

He wrote that down too.

"That's good, John," Capon encouraged.

"The meds help me keep the lid on."

He nodded at my progress.

"And how would you best characterize these images?"

"I try to avoid thinking about them. As I said, the medication keeps the lid on."

"It's okay; we're going to work through this." I didn't respond, so he continued, "What do you feel will happen if you give in to these obsessive thoughts?"

Again, I didn't respond. The clock ticked. It ticked again. I heard squeaks on the tile as someone walked down the hall beyond the office door. Probably going home for the day, it was after five.

Finally I said, "I may become unpleasant and hurt someone, badly."

He didn't have an answer for that. The frail little man could see from my records that I was capable. But my records didn't reveal everything.

"I see you were in Somalia?"

I nodded.

"Operation Restore Hope?" he asked.

"Continue Hope." He looked at me blankly. While I was undergoing my trial by fire he was probably still having his lunch money taken away by the big kids.

"Continue Hope, then. That was where this all started?"

I nodded.

"Why don't you tell me about it?" He folded his hands expectantly.

Through the window I could see the branches of a leafless elm whip with the gusts of wind. The clock ticks almost echoed in the austere little room.

"Well, in a nutshell, I was deployed to Somalia, injured, fixed and left with some problems," I said. "Medically discharged with one-hundred percent disability. PTSD with OCD. Don't you have it all there in the file?"

"I'd really appreciate your cooperation, John."

Left hand to his right mandible, right hand to his temple and twist. His long thin neck would break at the fissure between the first and second cervical vertebrae like a piece of dry wood. It would be so easy. I tried to think of something else.

"It's a long story."

"I have time." He smiled that prim little smile again and fidgeted with his pen. His fingers were long and slim. He probably played piano well.

"Listen John, I don't want to just go through the motions here. I really would like to get to the bottom of your troubles and see if we can't make some progress?"

"Cure me?"

"I have helped others with your condition."

"I doubt you've ever helped anyone with my condition."

"Well, how will I understand exactly your condition if you don't share with me?" he countered.

"My current _treatment modality_ seems to work. Wouldn't it just be easier to let me have my pills?"

"No. If you don't cooperate I am afraid that I will not be able to authorize any medications," he said.

"Holding them hostage?"

He shrugged assent. Though it would make me feel better, snapping him in half wouldn't get my prescriptions filled any quicker.

"Okay then. I was team leader with the Thirteenth Special Forces, Operational Detachment Echo. We deployed to Somalia to help keep the militias from interfering with international aid:" It came easier than I had thought it would.

"I saw Black-Hawk Down," Capon offered.

"Perhaps then you should explain to me what it was like?" I let the clock tick away a few seconds.

He seemed to get the point.

"That was Task Force Ranger's story, mine is a little different. In August of ninety-three my Special Forces team and I executed a number of small operations outside of Moge with the intent of eliminating the flow of arms into the city."

"Is that when you were injured?" Capon asked.

"Yes, on my team's last mission." I could see the thick seams between the tiles as I stared at the floor between my feet.

"Why don't you tell me about it, John?"

I sighed. And then told him. The telling wasn't the same as the seeing. And I saw it all again, vivid and real and tried my best to convey the depth my experiences in mere words.

#

I saw the Somali guide, Ahmed Ghedi, and the five members of my team couched low in the dry, brush-choked streambed. We crept up beside the compound of the clan leader named Samantar Afrah. The Walled compound had an open central courtyard, with a large, whitewashed, cinder-block building in the front, flanked by a cluster of smaller mud-brick and tin sheds- all covered in the ubiquitous ochre dust of East Africa.

During the intelligence summary that morning, Afrah had been described as an arms broker. He was a businessman with a large cache of weapons that he rented out to the various clan chiefs. They would in turn employ them against his other customers. Business was good.

Getting the intelligence was easy. The locals didn't like him. He extorted bullied, and stole. He didn't have his own territory, but picked at the fringes of the stronger clans. We thought that was how he earned his nickname, Waarabe, which means hyena in the local language, because of his tactics. I found out later that there was a different reason.

The shambles stood a few dozen meters from the road that led from Moge. We watched unseen as Afrah's mercenaries loaded trucks and prepared to leave. Attack helicopters would destroy them later on the road. Afrah should remain behind with a smaller contingent that we would neutralize. Simple snatch and grab.

Ahmed, fidgeting as the black flies sucked at the corners of his mouth, looked furtively up and down the loose line of mismatched soldiers. Desert cammo bottoms, tan aviator vests jammed with ammo and gear were stretched over black Kevlar vests. Black Pro-tec hockey helmets and matching knee pads, earpieces and voice activated flex mikes. No two soldiers were armed the same.

My CAR-15 carbine had a silencer that looked like a soda can. A new .45 caliber Heckler and Koch M23 was in my shoulder holster. A Randall Bowie knife and a few grenades completed my personal armamentarium for healing the enemy's ailments.

On the other side of our guide knelt my team ops NCO, 'Granddad'. He carried an old 7.62 mm M14 rifle he had named Chekov, with a 9mm Beretta pistol at his hip. I always thought it funny he carried the big-bore antique for its stopping power and then kept a plicker like the 9mm.

"Ahmed, we'll go in after the vehicles leave," I said.

The short dry grass trembled in the faint breeze.

Ahmed didn't look reassured. "Waarabe is of the Bouda," the thin young man said earnestly. He clutched his Maadi, an Egyptian-made AK-style rifle to his chest like it was a stuffed animal.

"Tribe?" I asked. Bouda didn't mean anything to me then. It would later, but then it was just another name. Isaaq, Hawiye, Habr Godr. Men with more similarities than differences that each found an excuse to kill one another.

"No, reer Bouda. Gelid of the Waarabe to Afrah," he said. He was trying hard to make a point, but I didn't get it. "When no longer the sun shines, he will be great danger."

I was looking forward to the sun no longer shining. We all had our night-vision-devices, NODs. Special Forces owned the night.

"Rogue-six, Bear, over," CW2 Bear Barron's voice said I in my ear. The team executive officer had the other half of my twelve-man team in an over-watch position across the road.

"Bear, this is Rogue-six, go ahead." I whispered back. I slowly wiped a trickle of sweat from the side of my nose.

"John, gates opened; looks like they're saddling up, over." From the compound I heard a cacophony of diesel engines turn over and then catch.

"Roger Bear." No one moved.

Then the convoy rumbled over the bridge that crossed our wadi. Old soviet trucks and mismatched equipment. The mercenaries chattered excitedly with their feet hanging over the vehicles sides like they were going to a picnic.

"I mark zero. We go in zero plus five mikes," I whispered. All of the highly choreographed events were timed in minutes, mikes, from the zero mark I made.

The last man checked his watch, raised a thumb and the signal was passed up the chain, until it got to Granddad, who modified it to a middle-finger. He stood to a low crouch with two others and peeled out of the line.

Razor alerted the aviators on a handheld High Freq radio. He and Justin stayed with me. Razor was a seasoned professional, but Justin was new and assigned to my team straight from the Q course. I wanted to keep an eye on him.

"Rogue-six, Bear again, over."

"Go-ahead, Bear again," I said.

"Be advised, our Sammy here is saying he's pretty sure these guys are hopped on khat."

Khat was a weed these people chewed like folks back home would chew tobacco. Except that it was an amphetamine and made them skittish, until they crashed. A bunch of high teenagers with automatic weapons, it was just like everywhere else on the continent.

"Roger, we go in three," I said. I leaned in close to Ahmed and reminded him again of the plan.

As I turned to go, he grabbed my camouflage-paint smeared forearm, pointed to the tired sun and repeated his warnings about Afrah. "He is of great danger."

I nodded and left him there.

The six-foot-high wall around the compound was made of rough mud bricks and rusted tin siding. It was the same sort of construction found in most third world shanty towns.

I grabbed the edge of the sun-warmed bricks and pulled myself up high enough to look over. Three men in the open, a half-dozen skinny chickens and a new, white, Toyota Land Cruiser, which was Afrah's ride. The place smelled sour, overlaid with pungent diesel fumes.

I slid back down and hand-signaled the scene. I could just see Granddad and his boys at the far end of the wall, half hidden in the shadows left by the setting sun.

We silently slid low over the wall and crept between rusted oil drums and refuse. Three shots made a muffled flash and crack. Three simultaneous thumps into the chests dropped the exposed mercenaries.

A slight breeze mixed the first whiff of cordite with the diesel fumes.

"Bear, Rogue-six. Inside, three down," I said into the mike.

A skinny young Somali, casually carrying an AK, rounded the corner of a shed. He saw me and stopped short. Razor dropped him and flashed me a smile; white teeth contrasting with his cammo-smeared face.

We closed the distance to through the detritus of the yard, and found two young Somalis by the vehicle. They stood with no thought of where their weapons were pointed. The sound of the brass casing bouncing off the gravel made as much noise as the shots. More cordite to add to the diesel fumes. The chickens clucked anxiously as they scattered.

We crept to the large central building and saw Granddad's team doing the same. I gave him a thumbs-up, he gave me the bird.

In operations of this nature speed is your best ally. Shock them, gain and maintain the initiative and keep the momentum. So far everything had gone exactly as planned.

We posted at our pre-assigned windows and tossed in the flash-bang grenades. Two, three, four, Boom! The grenades created a concussive wave. The force and light would incapacitate those inside. Razor kicked in the side door. He an I went through, weapons at the ready. Justin stayed outside, protecting the rear.

We entered into a large, dimly-lit room. Sammies staggered to the walls but none looked like the stocky Afrah. Granddad and Valentine came in through the other door, seconds behind. We made eye contact as one of the Somali's raised a weapon.

The Sammie started to fire before he aimed, the rounds bouncing off the concrete floor. He continued to raise the rifle toward me, spitting out a dozen 5.54 mm rounds at 900 meters per second. I snapped off two rounds, one to the solar plexus, the second ripped into his throat, and blunted his enthusiasm.

The other Sammies started to recover. There was a brief instant in which they tried to decide if they should fight. I screamed in Somali for them to drop their weapons. They were hired kids and there was no need for them to die. That seemed to tip the balance and weapons dropped as hands were raised.

"Justin, inside!:" He heard and obeyed. "Cuff them and then provide security."

We went through the house like ghosts. We popped a few more hostiles before we found Afrah in a back room. He was a heavily muscled, middle-aged East African and looked just like the photo from the briefing. The photo didn't prepare me for the pungent body odor though. He was unarmed and unimpressed when apprehended, watching as the sunset through the west-facing window.

"Ah, Americans. Come to save this world, but instead this night you will leave it," he said. He was standing there with two dead body guards at his feet and it seemed like bravado. While Granddad pressed his old M14 to the back of Ahfra's head, Valentine zipped the flex-cuffs on.

"Yeah, looks that way to me too," I said.

"I want no trouble with Americans, so if you leave now there will be time to forgive this offense," he said.

I smiled slightly at his confidence but shook my head.

"You do not comprehend your danger." He smiled broadly, displaying the worst teeth I had ever seen. They were yellow-brown chicklets with wide gaps between them.

As I looked at these horrible teeth one fell out onto the floor. And then another, the faint plink as it bounced off the concrete.

Not actually falling; the teeth were pushed out by thick yellow fangs, erupting up from the gums. His short dreadlocks dropped out in small patches as pale brown hair thrust up from the flesh.

He moaned and doubled over, dropping to his knees. Pulling his arms forward, the plastic cuffs snapped. Granddad stood frozen. Valentine leaned in to help and then stopped, his expression unsure.

"What the hell, Justin yelled. "Captain Rogers?" The pitch of his voice increasing as he watched the scene unfold.

Cracking sounds came from inside Afrah. His distorted body tore through the olive drab shirt.

"Calm down!" I snapped. I had no idea what was happening either.

Afrah's face stretched out as he flexed and snapped and writhed on the floor. An anguished guttural moan escaped the thrashing mess on the floor.

"Kill it!" Justin yelled.

"John, what's going on?" Granddad demanded.

In less than a minute Afrah had gone from an unremarkable clan chief to what looked like a hyena.

The sound of its gasping breath filled the room.

The beast stopped moving and when his eyes met mine I could see they glowed with an intelligence that was not the dull look of a beast.

A blur of motion.

The beast ducked under the barrel of Granddad's M14 and knocked him aside.

Valentine leveled his carbine and popped three individual rounds at the monster. None hit before his throat was ripped out. That fast.

I flicked the selector switch from semi to auto and sent every round in my thirty-round magazine at the monster. I don't think a single round connected. I pushed down the shock and compartmentalized my emotions. I had a job to do. Beside me Razor and Justin opened fire while I dropped the empty and slapped a fresh magazine into my weapon. Razor went down before I chambered the first round.

Small snicks appeared in it's hide as a few of my little 5.56 rounds passed through.

The Monster leapt for me. Granddad's rifle roared to life a few feet away. The large 7.62 mm round left a smoking hole just in front of the shoulder as it knocked the thing aside.

We all stood motionless. The sounds of weapon discharge making my ears buzz, the acrid smoke biting at my eyes.

Granddad crossed to where the monster lay.

"Careful!" I yelled.

The thing twisted, standing up on hind legs. Its mouth opened impossibly wide, and it bit down. The lower teeth came up through the Granddad's chin while upper teeth came down through the hockey helmet. The sickening sound was like throwing an apple hard onto the concrete.

Granddad's faceless corpse dropped.

"No!" Justin yelled. He flipped to auto and sprayed bullets at the thing. Another fresh magazine. We would kill it.

Focus, drop back and get stand-off distance. Aim center of mass, squeeze. Too many rounds for it to dodge, the monster crashed through the window and was swallowed by the night.

All I could hear was my heart throbbing. Then I heard a disembodied scream in my earpiece.

"Justin, retrograde," I said. To my mike I said, "All Rogue elements, be advised there's a..."

A what? Monster? Hyena?

Granddad, Valentine, and Razor down. Who else?

We turned to the door, find the thing and kill it. Justin turned to me, wide-eyed.

"Go! Now!" I screamed.

In the larger central room, the Sammies prayed. Outside the door, a bloody, lifeless corpse no longer provided security.

Bear's voice was in my ear. What was happening, should he send the team? Were we clear? No to all.

I sucked air, open-mouthed, huge gulps.

We were professionals. We could handle anything.

"NODs," I said, turning mine on as I pulled them from the case. I clicked them to the mount on my helmet. It took a few seconds to power up. Seconds were hours. When I was ready Justin clipped his on. A faint green glow under the cut-away faceplate indicated he was ready.

We scanned the perimeter together but found no beast. The breeze picked up the sour smell and raised goose bumps up on my flesh.

Justin fired at at movement. Dead chicken.

We heard staccato automatic fire from the over watch position a hundred meters away. The rounds looked like green flames licking at the sky through the monochromatic night vision goggles.

"Bear, Rogue-six, what's going on?" I demanded.

"Bear's down," someone said. I couldn't tell who it was. Confusion, obscenities, screams. We sprinted through the gate toward the rest of my team, the gravel crunching under our boots.

Too late, the beast had snuck up on them. Justin and I stood back-to-back intent on killing that monster.

Every sound was amplified. Keep fire discipline and shoot when you're sure.

We could see the over watch position, a now-silent cluster of shacks.

"Any Rogue elements, acknowledge!"

My order was answered with static.

No movement, we crept forward.

Before we made it to the shacks the beast hit me from the side and bowled me over.

Jaws snapping, I tried to shoot it. The carbine was too long to swing the muzzle to point at the monster, so I used it as a shield to bar it. I reflexively scissored my legs around its mid-section. In military combative training you learned to maintain contact. I needed to keep it anchored to buy Justin time.

I slid the knife from the scabbard. Bone crunched as the thing sank its teeth into my left bicep. The knife dangled loosely.

The pistol was out of reach in the shoulder holster with my hands full. Claws ripped at my my torso. The hole in the beast left by Granddad's rifle gaped, I dropped my carbine and stabbed my fingers into the wound.

The thing reared back in pain. I held more tightly with my legs, stabbing the fingers deeper.

With my damaged arm almost useless, I stabbed into the beast with the knife. The blade nicked bone and angled into the roof of the mouth. Its blood gushed down my arm and mixed with my own.

I pulled the fingers from the wound and pulled out my forty-five. Pushing the knife, I brought the pistol up beside it and sent round after round up through the throat and into the monster's brain, stopping only when the receiver locked to rear, empty.

The thunderclaps of the report rang in my ears and I collapsed into the enveloping mist of blood.

Shards of bone and brain fell slowly, like wet confetti as the monster went limp.

Then there was silence, but for my labored breathing and the ringing in my ears. The cold, numb feeling in my limbs told me that I was bleeding out.

Justin called for Medevac and an extraction team.

The beast twitched out its last bit of life on top of me.

To the beating sound of the rotors, the whine of the turbine, flying over that broken landscape, I died too.

I died and something altogether different came into being.

#

I stopped my narrative there. The images were all still so vivid. I rubbed my eyes with a trembling hand.

I looked up to see Capon with his mouth ajar.

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry, you said you died?" he asked.

I had? I suppose I had.

"Yes, I was dead for almost five minutes, or so I was told. They were able to get enough blood into me and then jump-started my heart on the aircraft."

Capon said nothing. Pondering.

"Well, John, that's quite a story. You were at Walter Reed for almost six months after that."

"Yes."

"So, let's see I'm getting this straight. You were attacked by a werewolf in Africa?"

"No, not a wolf. A hyena."

"A were-hyena?"

I'll admit, were-hyena lacks the alliterative allure of werewolf, so I said, "Bouda. It's something that is neither a man nor an animal. Bent into the shape of one or the other.

The diploma behind the little man reflected the final orange rays of the day's sun.

"Bouda then. So this Bouda bit you. Does this mean you turn into a monster, like when someone is bitten by a werewolf? The werewolf's curse?" He didn't sound like he believed me.

"It's supposed to be a gift, not a curse. It comes to you through the mother's blood, when you come into life."

I paused, but he didn't appear to get it.

"Usually, during birth, the mother has the gift and as you come into life you get the gift. Through the blood. In my case I was dead and came back into life through the blood. Afrah's blood was all over me."

The young psychiatrist didn't say anything at first. He started and then stopped twice, before finally saying, "And this is why you need your prescription?"

It was admirable how hard he tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

"The medication is important to keep the compulsions under control," I said.

The clock ticked off a few more seconds as the young psychiatrist processed the information.

"So, what exactly are these compulsions like, John? Please just use plain language to describe how you feel." He leaned back in his chair and neatly placed the gold pen on the desk. He steepled his fingers. Waiting.

"I obsess about transforming into a monster. And the compulsions, well, what do you think a flesh-eating monster would feel compelled to do?"

There was no answer as he nodded. He picked up the gold pen with my chart.

"Ideations of lycanthropy," he said as he wrote.

I shrugged out a slight sigh.

"So, when the moon comes up?" he asked.

I wasn't good at telling the difference between smug and condescending, but I knew I didn't like either.

"No. Wolves need the moon, the Bouda comes out in the dark. When the sun no longer shines," I said.

"Has anyone discussed schizotypal personality disorders with you yet, John?

I didn't respond, as I said, I'm no good with psychobabble.

"Magic and unusual perceptual experiences speak toward a schizotypal personality, much more than OCD."

"Does that get my prescription filled?" I asked.

"What? Oh, no no no. Anti-compulsive medication isn't the appropriate treatment. I think we have a lot of work to do here, John." He seemed very excited by the prospect. Perhaps he could even write another paper?

Through the window I could see the bright orb of the sun descending below the horizon. The elm jerked like a spasmodic as the wind gusted.

"We're done then," I said as I stood abruptly.

"John?"

I turned and walked to the door.

"Captain Rogers! We are not finished this assessment." His voice cracked just a little at his attempt at a command voice.

The psychiatric services staff had gone for the day. I couldn't hear anyone in the rooms beyond. Quiet as the proverbial tomb.

The door had an old-fashioned deadbolt that made a grinding clink as I locked it tight.

Apprehensive creases around the eyes of the spare psychiatrist was the only response o he made.

New shirts cost money and as a disabled vet I was on a fixed income, so I started to unbutton my shirt before I tore through it. My joints burned as I gave way to the transformation.

I've never seen myself transform before, but I saw it then in the reflective glasses of the doc. Through my own reflected image, I could see his eyes go wide.

"Now, don't you think it would have been easier all around, to just refill my prescription?" I growled a little on the last word as I spat out the first of my teeth.

The Long Road to Sanctum

From his vantage atop the broken overpass, Cadmus scanned the dead horizon.

He shifted his grip on the rifle and said, "Wolves."

The two young caravan guards strained their eyes in the direction the huge man indicated.

Eyes darting back and forth over the sunburned scrub and Domino said, "Are you sure? All's I see are heat shimmers." Sweat ran pale rivulets through the boy's dust-covered face. This guard was the taller of the two dark-haired brothers, not bent with a twisted spine like the other.

Cadmus nodded. "Three or four." He squinted his already hooded dark eyes and then inhaled deeply of the slight breeze. "Males. Probably a raiding party for the pack that ranges south bank Platte. Could be rogues, but I doubt it, being on the edge of claimed lands."

"They going to attack, maybe?" Checker asked. He was the smaller brother, bent and twisty-backed like so many of the normals born after the world began to die. The young man, boy not more than fourteen really, continued to shift his grip on the old single-barrel shotgun he held by his side.

Cadmus turned his massive head to the boy and laid an eye on him. "If I weren't here, they'd have tried you last night."

The two young guards exchanged a look as if contemplating an exclamation of youthful bravado. Cadmus knew it would sound impotent, with real monsters so close and them standing less than two-thirds his height.

He raised his pristine bolt-action rifle and sighted east through the scope for a better look. "Not just my scent boys, I'm sure they smell the silver in my gun."

"What should we do?" Domino asked. This boy's shotgun had two barrels, an old over-and-under, but Cadmus knew that neither of the brothers had silver on them.

"Long as they stay wolf and keep low in the swales I can't get a shot. So, press on toward Sanctum is all we can do. Hope it's just them and they don't bring more."

Cadmus lowered the long rifle and held it in the crook of his arm while he slipped covers back over the scope lenses to protect them from the dust and grit. Then he took a long drink from the water skin Checkers offered him.

"See anything?" the old voice called up from the cracked asphalt below the overpass.

Domino started to call back and Cadmus silenced him with a look. "No need to scream the bad news down and spook the pilgrims, we'll tell your father up close."

Cadmus leaned over and rumbled down at the old man at the head of the little caravan in his deep bass voice, "Clear for miles, but no time to lolly and gag!"

Before they started back down, Cadmus stopped the two boys. He pushed aside dead brush with the barrel of his rifle. Empty sockets stared up from a little pyramid of bleached human skulls that reeked of stale urine.

"What is it?" Domino asked.

"Totem. Marks the edge of the pack's lands we're skirting," Cadmus said.

"I'd have never seen if you didn't point it out." Checkers said.

"Wasn't there for you to see. Keeps other wolves out."

As they slid down the side of the embankment, their footfalls made small avalanches of scree and broken concrete, throwing up little clouds of dust. As he half-walked, half-slid down the dry slope to the cracked old highway, Cadmus caught the gaze of the old man and gave a come-here jerk with his chin.

The old man left his wagon and limped over. The vehicle had been an old flatbed Toyota pickup of indeterminate color with road-smoothed rubber tires, now pulled by two skinny oxen. The stained green canvas pulled up over bent aluminum stays hid the old man's mercantile and the special package he transported.

Cadmus could tell the oxen weren't really needed as the engine smelled like it had worked sometime in the last few months.

Joseph was probably middle-aged when the old world died, now he looked ancient. Funny a man that old with two young sons. He had organized this caravan and hired Cadmus to provide added security for the one hundred and something miles from Trade City to within sight of Sanctum. Just to within sight, as Cadmus wouldn¹t be welcomed in with the normals.

Behind the mercantile wagon, three other carts rested in the shade of the broken overpass. Two had been the chassis of cars at one time, now with sun-bleached timbers across the steel frames, piled with junk and pulled by sickly cattle. Five wasted men between them. The last was a light thing; tarp-covered, new-made cart of wood, rubber-less bicycle tires for wheels, being pushed and pulled by a band of five new-religioners. The two old men and three old women, with their shabby cloaks and helix pendants, were pilgrims going to Sanctum.

Cadmus hadn't seen the girl hidden inside, just her eyes in the shadow of the parted tarp. Her eyes and her promising smell. They thought he didn't know about her, but he did, and she was called Harmony.

Joseph came up close to Cadmus and his own two boys and quietly asked, "What'd you see? Is it shamblers?"

Cadmus smiled broadly and waved to the raggedly dressed bobble-heads watching from the shade. Most wore the pockmark-scars of Tyson's syndrome. One held a crossbow, one a makeshift spear. A scruffy goat, leashed to a wagon, bleated questioningly as if for the whole crowd. Quietly to Joseph, he said, "Raiding party of wolves. Maybe two miles up ahead."

Joseph sucked air through his remaining teeth and smacked his straw hat back on his head. Sweat beads, a deep red crease on his forehead and a look of real pain came up as the color rose in his cheeks.

"Easy, old-timer. Don¹t need a panic here."

Joseph started to exclaim loudly, then his head swiveled around on its ropey old neck and he looked behind at the crowd. He turned back and fixed Cadmus with his watery, old-man eyes. "You mean real ones?"

"When you ever hear of real wolves this far out on the plain?" Cadmus patted the old man's bony shoulder with a huge hand and turned him back toward his wagon.

"There's nothing to be done but keep going."

As they walked Cadmus said quietly, "Break out your silver-loads for the boy's scatter-guns, quiet like, and we'll keep it going. I'll walk on the top of the berm till the land flattens back down level with the road."

The highway had been cut flat, while the hill rose a good ten feet above. It was a prime location for a bushwhack and that's why Cadmus had chosen the overpass as a lookout.

"You busting out on us?" Joseph asked.

"Gave my word on the deal, old man. Security for you and deliver the new-religioner's package and that girl to Sanctum's my end and that I'll do."

The old man picked his way through the cracked asphalt, glancing up at Cadmus, but not meeting his eyes. "I just figure the deal was on the old highway. I understand if you might want to change your end, diverting south cause of the time-storm like we did."

When the old-worlders tried to kill the world, seams that held space and time had pulled hard and sometimes little cracks formed. They called the cracks time-storms. Soundless, black tornados, sometimes yards and sometimes miles high, and it was best to stay clear. That brought them a day's pull south to the old Interstate, to the edge of a wolf pack's territory. Cadmus had warned Joseph, but thought they just might make it through. This late in the summer though, dry as it was, raiding parties ranged far.

"We could turn back, and see if the way's clear?" Joseph offered.

"They have your scent now. They'll follow whichever way you go."

Joseph made an indecisive old man sound.

"I'm sticking. I made a point to point bargain, not a route deal." Cadmus gave him a smile he thought reassuring and added, "Perhaps next time I should include a clause."

Cadmus followed the old man into the overpass shade, out of the merciless sun, to the side of the old truck.

"A clause. Sound like a lawyerey-man," Joseph scoffed. He pulled and the passenger door groaned open.

"That's what my father did before the world died." Before the bomb shelter made for the wrong cataclysm, and the darkness and the chaos.

"Hmmm. I did the same then as now. Mercantile. I used to own a slew of stores, called seven-elevens. Remember those?" Joseph reached into the cab and pulled out a small cloth bundle.

Cadmus closed his eyes a second and thought back to a happier time. The scene accompanied by the sound of his father¹s harmonica. A skinned knee after a T-ball game, his father's big hand on his shoulder, a bell jingling as a glass door pushed open.

"Slurpees?"

Joseph's seamed old face cracked a little more as he smiled. He pulled a small handful of shotgun cartridges from the cloth and handed a few to each of his boys. They broke the guns open at the stocks and replaced lead loads with silver ones.

Cadmus had almost laughed when he met this troop on the road, and was challenged by these two with three rounds between them. Security indeed.

He gave them nods now, told one to go up front and one behind and then he headed back up the lip of the desiccated embankment himself, where he could see for miles. And be seen.

#

One of the cattle mooed piteously and set the others to twitching around in their makeshift corral. Cadmus stood motionless, bare-chested and ready just out of the circle of light cast by the watch fires.

He heard the same thing the oxen did. Soft pads on the hard dry ground. Three wolves not four like he'd thought earlier, less than a hundred yards away in the moonless dark.

Circling the camp. He had a silver-round chambered, but he wouldn't fire until he was sure of a kill. He slid the belt ax out, then slipped the leather loop around his left wrist and held it low. He'd get one with a bullet for sure, but that would leave the other two. He inhaled deeply and fixed the position of the group's alpha. Not enough of a location to get a bead yet, just a general direction. He growled a challenge at a pitch the normals couldn't hear.

A snuff-snuff-snuffing of rebuttal came back to him from the dark and pulled his bare flesh up in patches of gooseflesh.

Cadmus smiled to himself in anticipation of battle.

He savored the warm surge of adrenalin and said, "I am Cadmus of the Stove Bank Ursans. Come forward and we can parlay."

The alpha crept closer, using the half-buried car-hulks and other detritus of a dead world as cover.

The normals clustered somewhere behind him in the bay of what had been the garage of an old gas station. The burned-out building on the highway that headed north of the Interstate looked defensible against three or four wolves. The shell had no roof, but the walls were too high for a wolf to jump. The normals hid behind barrels and piled trash at the open side.

The makeshift corral of squared-up wagons stood forward of the stumps of broken gas pumps. Cadmus had stashed his shirt and gear there in the back of the pickup. The fires he set were at the four compass points outside their perimeter and he set the two brothers feeding those hungry flames with whatever scraps of wood could be found.

When there was no answer to his offer Cadmus said, "These normals are under my care, and if you come for them I will rip your heart from your chest." He meant no false bravado with his words, a promise, an invitation, nothing more as he stood alone, waiting in the dark.

He felt the alpha creep closer and shift partway back. Cadmus caught the metallic scent of blood as the flesh tore and reshaped.

"Leave them, Ursanthrope. We have no quarrel with you." The voice hissed from the darkness directly in front of him, but still too far to get off a clean shot.

Cadmus answered, "We can pay a toll in goat. Or steer. A full belly for their trespass."

"Their lives for the trespass. And the girl too," the not quite human shape growled in the dark.

Cadmus growled his own reply, waiting for the wolf to strike. But it didn't. He smelled the musky sweat and blood as it went back all wolf and moved off to the right. He shifted his one-handed grip on the big rifle and waited.

"Mr. Cadmus."

Poised as he was on the edge of battle, he hadn't heard the little human creep up behind. He whirled around at the sound of her voice.

Outlined by the fire, he could see she wasn't as young as he'd thought. Straight-backed and willowy tall, her helix pendant rested in the hollow between small high breasts. She was all the way into the first bloom of womanhood and smelled of health.

"Go back to the shelter, little one. This is no place for you."

"I think the wolf here is meant to distract you. The other two are around the back side. I thought you'd want to know."

"You a reader, little Harmony-girl?"

The young woman cast a sideways glance to the cracking fire. One of the new religioner women was calling for her in a fearful-shrill voice and headed this way.

Harmony looked back to Cadmus and said, "They call me an earth witch. I see the land and these wolves are like blank spots on it to me."

"Thank you, now on back. And tell the brothers to hold their shots, less they see what they shoot." And with that Cadmus left Harmony to the old woman's remonstrations while he stalked a slow circle to the opposite side of the camp in the dark.

#

His shot caught the wolf in the flank as it leapt, just behind the shoulder.

Even if the bullet weren't silver, it would be unlikely the wolf could survive. Hitting where it did, the big thirty caliber round punched through ribs and tore through both lung and heart. The wolf made a pitiful, surprised sound as it died, but the momentum of its leap carried it into Domino, knocking him over. The boy screamed as the fluid lupine form knocked him flat.

That left Cadmus with two more wolves in the dark.

Much better odds. With the belt ax dangling from his wrist he slid the bolt and chambered another round; waiting for the second to come. He strode into the light and kicked the smoking carcass off the sputtering boy.

"Get up!" he hissed. "Now's not the time to give way to panic."

Domino scrambled to his feet, fumbling to get a grip on his shotgun. He smelled of fear and urine.

"I told you to keep your head on a swivel." Cadmus sniffed at the night air again and couldn't place the wolves close.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Cadmus, I never saw it."

The throaty howl of the alpha rent the night air to his left and silenced Cadmus' reply.

The second wolf replied behind and to the right, raising all the hairs up on the big man's neck.

He waited. A third wolf howl came far off and to the right. A fourth, from the same direction and just a little closer.

"Oh, shit!" Cadmus bellowed. He turned to the makeshift stronghold.

"What is it?" Domino asked.

"I thought there was four, one must have gone for the pack." The boy looked at him without comprehension.

"They're coming."

"Who?" the boy said.

"All of 'em," Cadmus replied.

He waded through the paltry barricade and into the garage bay. He went straight to Harmony and brushed aside the new religioners that tried to block him. He slipped the rifle sling over his shoulder and grabbed her slender upper arm, pulling her up close.

"How many coming?" he breathed into her face. There was no time to do this gentle.

The big doe eyes were round and frightened, but under control. She was the only one but him that could know what was coming.

"I can't tell exactly, but I'm thinking more than ten, maybe twenty." She said it slow and deliberate.

The throaty sigh rumbled up from deep in his chest.

"They're not more than a mile off," she added,

The old new religioner man with the spear, leveled it at Cadmus and said, "Leave the child be."

Cadmus snatched the weapon out of the old man's hands and tossed it back against the cinder-block wall. The others protested but kept distance.

"Joseph!"

The merchant was at his side. Cadmus kept his hold on the girl and asked, "Your truck runs?"

"Well," Joseph started. His two boys were with him too, neither wanting to be out there with the howling wolves.

"I can smell the fuel in it." Cadmus cut him off.

"Yes, it runs. But ethanol is hard to come by, so the cattle. I only use it in emergencies."

"This is an emergency. Come with me." The huge man stalked back out as a cacophony of howls filled the night, coming closer.

Cadmus jerked Harmony along with him, the new religioners protesting in his wake. She pulled away, as if not sure of his intentions. He tightened his grip and when she started to scream he tucked her under his huge arm and jogged to the little truck. He put his back against the vehicle and pushed it out, opening the tight square that held the terrified oxen. When the truck was clear they stampeded past and into the night.

Shuffling up in a rheumatic limp, Joseph yelled, "What are you doing? We need them!"

"Perhaps they'll slow up a few of the hungrier wolves. Now get in your truck and get it started. It's a good forty miles to Sanctum."

"We can't fit everyone on this truck," Joseph protested.

"We're not gonna."

Harmony squirmed around and got her teeth into the hairy bare flesh of Cadmus' arm. He released his grip and when she relaxed her bite he grabbed her up by the hair and gave her a shake. He grabbed up the belt ax and brandished it at the new religioners that had followed them out.

"Joseph. There's no time to discuss this." He paused as the multiple wolf howls twined into a single song of death. "There's upwards of twenty lycanthropes and even I can't fight that many off."

"You can't leave all these people to that," Joseph pleaded.

"Not gonna. I'm staying. You and the girl and the package to Sanctum were the deal."

Harmony started to wail when she realized his intent and sank her fingernails into his forearms. Cadmus slapped her on the forehead with the flat of the ax.

As she went limp, he stuffed her in the front seat of the pickup and then made to swipe at the new religioners. He slid the rifle off his shoulder.

"Everyone back in the shelter!" Cadmus, tired of talking, pushed Joseph to the truck with the butt of his rifle. "They get a hold of an earth witch it'd be better she died. They'll try and turn her, you know. Now get out of here or I'll leave you and do the driving myself."

The first mirror pairs of eyes could be seen just past the fire now. Cadmus snapped the rifle to his shoulder and put a round between them. Between the crack of the bullet and the echo he heard that satisfying thunk as the round went through bone.

The smell of cordite masked the overpowering scent of wolf for just an instant before the breeze took it.

He turned back to the pickup as the engine turned over to see Domino and Checkers scrambling up onto the tarp covered bed. The new religioner woman that had come for Harmony earlier in the night scrambled on after. Cadmus stood between the truck and the panicking crowd, not letting them flood onto the truck and prevent it from getting out.

"I'll bring along whoever I can. I'll light a fire to the south of Sanctum two nights time. Maybe three. Bring my things and payment then. Don't make me come in and find you," Cadmus yelled to Joseph.

The old man nodded as he mashed the gears and tried to find the groove. The car lurched forward and sputtered dead with a popped clutch and a wash of dark exhaust.

Three sets of eyes and raspy panting now, past the fire. Cadmus took aim again and the eyes disappeared.

"Get back to the shelter!" he bellowed at the people milling about in panic.

The engine rasped and finally caught.

Cadmus snapped a round at another pair of eyes, but the bullet found only empty air.

The gears mashed again and the truck lurched forward without stalling.

Cadmus took aim at another pair of eyes and caught sight of the shape in his peripheral vision just as the jaws locked onto his bare right bicep. He roared indignant pain and held the rifle left-handed by the barrel. There was no way to use it in this tussle now, so he tossed it to Domino as the truck went past.

"I'll want it back," he yelled as the truck started to pick up speed.

Now with hands free, he flipped the ax on its thong into his hand and chopped through the back of the wolf's neck. The smashed vertebrae let out a dry wood crack and the limp form made a wet thump as he dropped it to the cracked asphalt.

A wolf leapt at the speeding truck and was hit with a shotgun blast. A second wolf caught one of the boys by the leg and pulled him to the ground. He was dead before Cadmus realized it was Checkers.

Bleeding, bare-chested, with the rage building in him he turned to the pack advancing.

Screams came from in front of the garage bay as the first wolf got in among the normals that hadn't made it to shelter.

Cadmus dropped his ax and made as if to hug the wolves. He called up the bear inside him and felt the burning and tearing as he shifted. He roared the pain. He roared the primal challenge.

"I am Cadm-," he growled as the massive teeth tore up through his gums. The thick, golden-brown fur of a grizzly erupted out of follicles and covered his rippling muscles. Man's flesh reinterpreted into an ursine form.

His world went to shades of red as the first wolf leapt at him and he sank claw and fang into the steaming warm flesh of his enemy. The bear roared and snarled, but the man inside laughed maniacally with the berserkers' joy of battle.

The rage-clouded brain no longer registered the human cries of pain and fear.

A wolf on his back, and he rolled forward. Wet snapping as he crushed it under his bulk.

Cruel jaws clamped on his leg. He raked claws over the ladder-slat ribcage, pulling the wolf to him when the claws stuck in something wet. He bit down and roared into the mouthful of coppery-wet wolf flesh. Shaking and ripping as he struggled back up on hind legs.

The pack parted from him and he saw the alpha.

Bigger, stronger, less wolf-like than the rest. Wicked teeth bared as it stalked him.

Swaying side to side, foamy red spittle dripping from his rage-twisted muzzle, the bear roared and then Cadmus lurched forward.

The alpha leapt. The circle of wolves closed, and the golden-brown behemoth disappeared under the gray wave.

#

Cadmus stood back from the fire, watching the walls of Sanctum. They weren't walls really, but rather old semi-truck trailers turned over on their sides and filled with dirt. This side was a snakey quarter mile long. Along the forward lip was an unbroken line of concertina and barbed wire and Cadmus could make out little guard shacks spaced out on top.

Silhouetted against the wall in the dark, a little trio ambled up.

"Mr. Cadmus, you out here?" It was the old man's voice. Tense. He carried a pack and the big bolt-action rifle. Another silhouette fidgeted with a shotgun.

For an instant Cadmus thought they just might plug him. "Joseph, over here."

The old man relaxed and loosened his grip on the rifle. He held it by the barrel and rested the butt on the ground. Only then did Cadmus let the bear rest and step forward into the circle of light.

The girl sucked in breath.

A huge nude man covered in fresh healed wounds must have been a sight. The blush spread up her neck, stopping only at the ugly red and purple bruise across the bridge of her nose and forehead. Looking past him now as if there might be someone else in the dark, a complicated expression of sadness formed when she saw no one.

Cadmus reached for his pack and then pulled out his shirt and faded jeans.

"Domino, Harmony. Glad to see you all made it safe."

Domino held his shotgun low, but ready. Cadmus could smell the silver in the barrel and see the fear in the boy's eyes.

Joseph handed the rifle over and asked with a pained expression, "Checkers?"

"He died well. They all did, man and wolf alike."

"I thought maybe some would have got out," Joseph said, his guarded eyes downcast.

Cadmus just shook his head.

Harmony made a sound as if to ask something, but the question died on her lips in a wave of sadness.

"Did you kill all the wolves?" Domino asked with a hard look.

"Most. The fight went out of them when I took the alpha. They'd no need to finish it. I couldn't carry off all the meat and wouldn't eat it myself, so they just waited me out."

"What meat?" Joseph asked.

Cadmus let his expression answer for him.

"Momma explained you were doing right by us, Mr. Cadmus, and I'm sorry I protested so hard. I came to thank you," Harmony said. "It was just the thought of the other mother and the fathers, there with the wolves." Her young woman's voice cracked and let the little girl show through.

"You deliver the package?"

She cleared her throat and said, "Yes."

"What was it?" Cadmus asked as he pulled buttons through holes on his shirt.

"It was a sciencey-thing, called a pea-see-are machine. It's for DNA, I'm told. There's sciencey folks here with the new believers," she said.

Cadmus nodded, let his eyes linger until she dropped hers, and then said to Joseph, "I'll take my pay now, if it's all the same."

"Sure, sure," said Joseph. "We need to get back inside before Miss Harmony's missed, she snuck out after us. Should we see if you might come in to the town? Seeing as you saved their sciencey thing, and the girl."

Cadmus shook his big head.

Joseph sighed and slipped another bag off his shoulder. He handed over two brick-sized boxes and said, "Sixty rounds of thirty-caliber, like I promised. No silver though, that's hard to come by."

Cadmus slipped the ammo into his pack. Joseph pulled a smaller box out and handed it over too.

"Really, don't seem this is enough for your trouble."

The old man slipped the little silver rectangle into his big hand.

"What is it?" the girl asked.

"It's called a harmonica," Joseph said.

Cadmus smiled as he ran the pad of his thumb over the etched letters. He glanced up and said, "It's more than that. It's a Hohner Chromatic. Just like my father's."

He picked out the notes to an old blues tune as he left the silent normals to their world and he returned to his.

B.E.K.s

Morales nodded slowly at the special agent's body which lay grey and tattered, half covered by a sheet on the stainless steel table.

"Yeah, that's Mamatez." He reached to cover his nose at the wet, ruined-meat smell, but stopped to scratch his face self-consciously instead.

The pathologist across the autopsy table gave a solemn nod and pulled the sheet back up over the body. The air-conditioning kicked in loudly, ensuring the room stayed mea-locker-cold.

"Most of him anyway. Crabs do that to him after he got dumped? I heard about how that can happen," Morales said.

An uneven stencil, proclaiming the sheet property of the medical examiner, settled over what had been the agent's face. Like they wanted to make sure nobody walked off with a sheet from the morgue. Morales had had his fill of Morgues lately, morgues and courtrooms both.

The body's smell subsided and the sharp disinfectant didn't seem that unpleasant after all.

"No, I don't think so. I've only done the prelim, but the wounds all appear to have been inflicted while he was alive. We called your office as soon as we ID'd him."

Light reflected off the pathologist's round lenses and for an instant the eyes looked as if they were covered with silver coins. Morales thought of the ferryman's toll for the dead and the other's he'd known who'd paid that fare.

"Those are some nasty tears. Dogs maybe?" That was a difficult thought. Mick was a good man. Had been a good man.

"I'm not sure. I emailed the digital images and measurements to the FBI's forensic lab. The technician I spoke to couldn't say."

Morales stood quietly, running a hand through his dark air. He whole-body sighed, but didn't speak.

After a brief, awkward pause the pathologist excused himself to leave Morales alone with the body. The agent didn't get any time though.

Before the stainless steel door stopped swinging, Supervisory Agent Daniels lumbered in. Another man, sharply contrasting with the older agent, followed closely. Close-cropped hair, crisply dressed with a rigid military bearing, the new guy carried a cheap briefcase and a whole lot of attitude.

Daniels glanced unwillingly at the autopsy table and then to Morales saying, "Frank, real sorry about Mick."

Daniels had that 'I'm going to tell you something you don't want to hear' look, fidgeting there with this other guy standing close.

Morales waited.

Daniels started to speak again as the other man pulled latex gloves from the box on the little rolling table. He snapped on a pair and reached for the sheet.

Morales grabbed the man's wrist and said, "The hell you think you're doing?"

The new guy tensed but didn't react immediately. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth and he snapped his wrist free.

The confidence and the way this new guy was put together made Frank Morales pause for the first time in a long-time, unsure if he could take him. Taller than Morales' five-eleven, and just a little broader in the chest, the guy was hard.

Daniels stepped forward and between the two men, crowding Morales away. With his ruddy complexion a little redder, he smiled like a pal, but nervously shaking his bulbous gin-nose.

"Special Agent Morales, Major Harden. He's investigating the circumstances surrounding Mamatez's death." Daniels' speech sounded too rehearsed.

The Major reached out a hand to shake. "Call me John."

Morales looked down at the gloved, outstretched hand but didn't take it. "Major John, hunh. What? State police?"

"No." The Major didn't elaborate, but instead dropped his hand and turned his attention from Morales back to the body.

Daniels took a few steps back, guiding Morales with him across the stained linoleum and said, "Frank, he's from the DOD. Army-something, I don't know what. He's investigating Mick's death in relation to an ongoing operation."

Morales frowned. He didn't like this. No respect coming in there like that while he was attending to the remains of an agent killed on duty. One of his men. What could be so damn important?

"Don¹t make trouble," Daniels said quietly, hand on Morales. "I know things been hard for you since little Frank..."

Morales flicked the comforting hand away and said between clenched teeth, "That's none of your damn business."

Daniels held the hand up, patting the air, placating, not meeting Morales' intensity. Morales saw the hurt in his supervisor's eyes, knowing he had snapped too quickly. With a softer tone, a little sarcasm to appease the man, he asked,

"This guy want to know what happened, or just come to ogle at the body?"

Daniels barked a little laugh. Conspiratorially he said, "Didn't say one way or the other. I got called into the field office at six o'clock in the frigging morning and he's there waiting for me. On a Sunday for Christ-sake."

Harden covered the dead man's face with the sheet, cleared his throat and said. "Special Agent Morales, I'd like to have a word,"

"Yeah, I got a word for you."

"Frank, no screwing around." Daniels stabbed his hand at Morales and then waved it open-fingered.

"Cooperate. Fully. You understand?"

Harden stooped to pick up the case from where he'd left it on the floor and stepped over

"What do you want? I just lost a good man," Morales said.

"I'm sorry. I know that can be hard."

"Do you?" As soon as he asked it Morales could see in the man's eyes that he did.

"I need to know the story. What he was involved with." Harden had the kind of eyes you'd use words like piercing and gunmetal grey to describe. They stared, unblinking, at Morales from a weather-roughened face.

Morales outlined the undercover operation they'd been working since he came back to the job. He explained how his team was infiltrating the organization of a Haitian cocaine dealer, gaining his confidence, and how his agent had posed as a dealer. He explained how his friend and colleague had disappeared two days ago, and been found late the night before, snagged on the lip of a culvert that emptied into the Baltimore harbor.

"So, you believe his last known whereabouts were with this dealer?" Harden asked.

"He was supposed to make a drop for Petite Louis, the Haitian. Mick reported he left, but never made it to his destination. His disappearance wasn't enough to float a warrant to search and we worried about blowing the investigation. But now."

"Now?" Harden asked

"With the body, I don't think we'll have a problem with a warrant," Daniels interrupted.

They both looked at the man as if they just realized he was still there.

"Anything unusual about this Louis?" Harden asked.

"Nope. Piece-of-trash drug dealer. A medium-big fish. We want the next level up."

"And this _house_ , anything unusual there?"

"A row-house on Rosemont. Like, maybe a hundred other crack houses in the city," Morales said, shaking his head.

"The people that live there, you ever see them yourself?"

"Ask me what question you're hinting at." Morales didn't like to beat around bushes.

The corner of Roger's mouth pulled back in a half smile. He looked like the kind that would rather torch a bush than beat around it too.

"Any children on the drug dealer's premises?"

"Kids in and out all the time. Lots of these guys use children to deal. So, yeah. I guess."

Kids dealing had been background noise to Morales, before it had touched his own world so completely.

Harden opened his military issue briefcase and pulled out a manila folder. He laid it open on the empty stainless steel table so that Morales could see the close-up photo of a preteen boy.

"Ever see one that looked like this?"

Morales studied it for an instant and said, "He looks like a kid. Maybe, what, ten? Twelve?"

"Really? Look at his eyes." Harden didn't look at the picture; he studied Morales.

Morales examined the photo. "Yeah, he's got eyes. Dark."

"How about the sclera?"

The way Harden was spooling it out frustrated Morales a little, but he looked again.

"What's sclera?"

"The whites. Can you see the whites of his eyes?"

Morales couldn't. The eyes were solid black, like the kid was wearing some kind of opaque contact lenses.

"That's freaky-looking." He looked up to catch Harden's half grin.

"We call them BEKs."

"Becks like the beer?"

"Like B-E-K. For Black-Eyed-Kids."

It pissed Morales off when Harden wouldn't explain more. It really pissed him off when Harden told him soldiers were going on the DEA raid to the crack house. And Daniels standing there in his cheap suit nodding, the guy that could intercede didn't say a thing.

#

Morales made his way through the urban effluvia to the crack house with the entry team. Half the agents would go in the front with him while the other half went through the back. The embroidered yellow letters D.E.A. stood out on the black fabric front and back of his body armor, all that over blue jeans and athletic shoes.

They had met Harden in an alley down the street and he and his men filed in behind Morales. The soldiers carried Heckler and Koch MP-5s on short slings, with body armor under pixilated camouflage. Morales felt his team looked a little shabby in comparison.

After the final equipment check in the assembly area, Morales went over the plan. He explained entry procedures, fire discipline, rules of engagement and several times reminded everyone that the soldiers had no authority to interfere with law enforcement operations under the Posse Commutates Act.

Harden watched with an almost amused expression as Morales drove home the point that he, Morales, and not the Army, was in charge.

Then it was Harden's turn to explain the high points of what he was there to do. He talked about the special ammunition, the communications plan, and then told the agents to watch out, call when they saw kids and not to look the BEKs in the eyes, and no, BEKs didn't mean beer.

As they started out Morales asked what Harden meant about his special ammo. The soldier popped a round from a spare clip.

"Teflon bean-bag filled with a silver nitrate solution," he'd said.

"I don't think those rounds are NATO-approved." Morales said.

"Our targets aren't members."

"Maybe for werewolves or something?" Morales asked it as a joke.

"Something," was all Harden said.

Now the sun cast a faint red glow over the rooftops to the east. Morales intended to enter before the Haitians woke up. Drug dealers weren't usually morning people.

The crack house had been grand once but now it was on the verge of being condemned. Urban settlers hadn't made it far enough into the city to start the gentrification of this neighborhood.

"If they're making so much money, why are these guys living in such a dump?" Harden asked softly.

"Bales of cash are hard to spend. Louis walks in somewhere with a wheel-barrel full of hundreds and we can put him down for tax evasion. As it is he has to limit purchases to less than ten grand."

At the front of the house Morales motioned to the two men that would go in first. Both wore bomb-squad vests with Plexiglas shields bolted to their helmets.

One carried the Hallagan tool, a device with a mallet on one end and a crowbar on the other, for breaking down the most stubborn of doors. The other carried a short-barreled shotgun with a rotary cylinder that looked like an old Tommy-gun on steroids.

All in place, Morales said, "Now," on the common frequency.

The door smashed in one practiced movement. The special agent with the tool flattened against the doorjamb and the rest crowded behind the one with the shotgun. Crouching into a tight mass, they poured in.

"DEA!" Those at the back door were doing the same.

The front foyer emptied into a long dirty hall, stairs and a big room to the left. A shirtless man on the couch, his dreads pulled into a loose ponytail, held up his hands and whimpered.

On his face, they zip-cuffed him. The agents flowed out through the room as Harden and his team entered.

Radio calls indicated the agents had come into the back through a kitchen. They found the basement door and part of the team went down as planned. The rest secured the back of the house while the front entry team went up the stairs.

Harden nodded to Morales like he was impressed.

"I'd have come down through the roof and flushed the targets out the front to snipers, but this works too. Different agenda's. I don't need my targets alive."

Shouts and loud thumps from up stairs, but no gunfire. An all clear call from the basement.

Morales had been right. The druggies wouldn't be trouble.

He let go a raspy post-adrenalin sigh, knowing this was a clean take down. He smiled at Harden, gave him a modest 'that's how it's done shrug' and then he heard the single shot fired from the basement. This followed by a short, staccato burst.

"Doughtery, what're you doing?" a disembodied voice said through the receiver.

Dougherty had been tasked with clearing the basement.

"We need to help them. They're scared, can't you see?" Another voice, followed by two more bursts of automatic fire and a confusion of calls.

"Shit, they found one," Harden said. He signaled to his team and the five men fell into line, trotting toward the rear of the house.

"Morales, I'm a go for the basement. Get your men out of there, now!"

Morales said on the common freq, "Dougherty, what's going on?"

Harden spoke over Morales, "All law enforcement agents, this is Major Harden. Get out of the basement. Now!"

They stopped in the kitchen, Harden telling Morales to stay back and not get in the way.

The Special Forces team moved like five fingers of the same hand. Through the hall and down the stairs.

Two moving three on watch. Then three moving and two on watch. They leapfrogged down into the darkness, their boots heavy on the wooden stairs.

Morales tried to keep up without getting in the way because he wasn't going to leave his men down there.

At the bottom of the stair Harden hand signaled and stepped over a dead agent on the landing. Multiple gunshot wounds, all above the vest's neckline. As the soldiers filed past and fanned out in the basement, Morales bent and found no pulse. The face obscured in a pool of meat and blood. He pushed down the panicky feeling at losing another agent; compartmentalize and focus on the job.

Another narcotics officer just beyond him on the rough concrete floor, twitching out the last bit of life. There should be two more.

Grey light from the small casement windows illuminated the cramped basement. Old brick walls and pillars with a hundred years of peeling paint cut the space into a gloomy rabbit warren of interlocking rooms.

Harden hand-signaled straight ahead. Morales saw the outline of Dougherty in a doorway, crouching to listen to a preteen boy.

The boy turned and Morales caught the unmistakable eyes from fifteen feet away.

Harden squeezed a short MP-5 burst. Three rounds tore through the grey, Old Navy hoody, lifting the boy into the air, propelling him backward. A split second later the squibs in the silver nitrate rounds went off and the liquid exploded outward.

Morales had his pistol out now, confused at seeing the big soldier spray a kid with automatic fire.

He heard Harden' voice over the radio saying, "My favorite part."

Holes burned from the inside out as the little body emolliated there on the floor. The burning chemical smell caught in Morales throat more than the cordite.

Satisfied, Harden turned his attention to Dougherty.

The agent stood confused, looking to where the BEK had been.

"He isn't released so there have to be more," Harden whispered into the mike.

Sergeant Douglas disarmed Dougherty and left him unconscious. Morales wanted to say something but it happened so quickly. Douglas dropped the clip from the agent's carbine, one handed, and tossed the gun toward the stairs. Never leave a loaded weapon unattended.

The five continued through the little doorway and stayed close to the wall. Old furniture, mildewed boxes of tattered magazines and things not easily identified in the gloom didn¹t slow their steady progress.

Douglas stopped in front of Morales, while the rest continued, bending to peer into a pile of trash. The soldier stood slack, his weapon pointing at nothing.

Morales called over the freq, "Soldier, what's wrong."

No answer. Morales flinched as Harden fired a quick burst into the trash heap.

The little monster in there screamed over the echo of the shots and then he saw the burnout between the boxes.

Douglas shook his head and gave a thumbs-up and mumbled. "Mary had a little lamb..."

"What?" Morales asked.

Douglas said, "The mantra interferes with the mind control."

All the soldiers repeated it together now. Familiar repetitive words helping to clear the mind as they continued their sweep. Two rooms down.

Morales went through a low doorway, and bumped into Douglas. All the soldiers stood quiet, weapons lowered.

The agent started to say something and then he heard the voices.

"Mary," someone said on the radio.

The calm, pleading voices. They just needed help.

"...had..." someone mumbled.

A good guy would help these kids. The clatter, as his pistol dropped to the concrete, didn't even register.

Three kids stood around him, one talking softly. Morales couldn't understand what was being said.

Looking into the bottomless wells of its eyes he saw his son, little Frank in them.

His son was caught in a gangland crossfire, dead three months now. His son was a drive-by victim because he stood in the wrong place after a little league game, eating an ice cream. But now little Frank was here asking for help.

"Will it be okay, Poppa?" That's what little Frank seemed to say.

"Sure, miho," Morales said.

He reached out to hold the little guy's hand. The sharp nails with the blood, spreading down the fingers, it made him freeze.

Someone made gurgling sounds. Like blowing bubbles through a straw into a milkshake.

"It's okay, Pop," little Frank said.

Morales' hand was stuck in midair. Douglas dropped to his knees. Thick, oxygen-rich blood from his opened throat blurred the muted greens and grays of the pixilated camouflage into a dark brown bib.

Harden, beyond Douglas, raised the MP-5 to his shoulder as if to fire, and lowered it.

Up.

Back down.

Up, then back down.

A kid stood beside the soldier, talking to him. Morales wondered how that man had looked into the BEK's eyes, because you had to make eye contact for the mind control to work.

His own arm wouldn't move. Little Frank was there and then he wasn't, like his son was coming in and out of focus. One minute the little boy he loved more than life, then something ugly was there instead.

It kept talking, faster now. Morales focused on the floor. A pool of blood spread into his field of view over the pock-marked concrete.

He saw his hand lowering. He willed it to draw his pistol, but the weapon was on the floor. When had he dropped it?

He concentrated hard on gaining control of his own body.

"Poppa, you really need to help us."

Morales did. He really needed to. The part of his mind that he still controlled knew he didn't, but the voices were so persuasive.

His son's voice.

He missed the boy so much and now they were together again. He meant to wipe the tear from his eye, but the arm wouldn't work for that either.

He needed to break this hold or he was dead.

A BEK held Harden by the elbow as he walked stiff-legged and continued to raise the weapon up and down.

Up and down.

Then he raised the weapon to point at Morales.

"Frank, we have to get these kids back to their Momma. They're lost and need our help."

Morales nodded. His arm still wouldn't move. Beads of sweat coated him. His breath was labored, like he'd been running all morning.

The MP-5 came up level with Morales face and he looked sidelong. If he held his head just so the radiant image of his son stayed and the ugly thing was gone.

Roger's weapon lowered a few inches this time. He wasn't getting a full drop now. The next time it just dipped, and came back immediately.

Harden sweating, looking confused. The index finger came out of the trigger guard and flexed in a pulling motion.

Morales could see that some part of Harden knew what was going on.

Morales had been shot before and knew the impact of those big forty caliber bullets would suck. Would the bullets ripping into him be worse than the little explosions though? Teflon and silver nitrate tearing through your body. What would that be like?

Little Frank, and at the same time not, beside him touched his elbow.

"It's almost over, Poppa. Just be still."

And it was. They were all dead, just like his son.

It was just a matter of playing out the hand.

Harden's weapon pointed at Morales head.

"It's for the best, right?" Harden asked.

Morales' head nodded on its own. All he could see was the gun now, no more than a foot away. The muzzle was a black eye staring at his mortality.

He looked back down to say goodbye to his son again.

The two images were superimposed now. Little Frank smiled a mouthful of pointy little teeth. Frank focused on them. He was able to see the teeth that didn't belong to his son. The mouth and the two noses that didn't belong together came apart.

He pulled the image of the BEK from that of his son with his mind and the two came apart like Velcro. Little Frank's face there beside the other but distinct, it smiled at his father and then was gone.

As Harden's willpower gave out, Morales pushed the MP-5 pointed at his head to the little monster that had tried to impersonate his son.

A spray of bullets and the hot muzzle flash deafened and burned Morales as the rounds tore past his face and through the BEK beside him.

Still holding the wildly firing machine pistol, Morales drew Harden' nine-millimeter Berretta from the shoulder holster. He flicked the safety off with his thumb and squeezed rounds into the BEK to Roger's left, the one controlling the soldier.

A spray of thick blood and the little monster went down. Harden released the MP-5 trigger immediately and blinked at Morales.

The other BEK broke for cover. Morales dropped into a two-handed weaver stance and put two bullets into one little beast as Harden took careful aim at another.

Sergeant Jepson got up from his knees and found his weapon. He started up with the nursery rhyme again and put controlled three to five round bursts into everything that moved. The three of them hunted the remaining BEK through the refuse, through crowded little rooms to the back of the basement. An old coal grate, the wrought iron cover pulled to the side, showed where the last BEK had escaped into the morning.

Now Morales could hear the radio traffic over the beginnings of a migraine. Funny how it had been mute before.

"Major Harden, over here Sir," Jepson called.

The two of them, tense, followed the voice to a pile of carpet fragments. There, covered with newspaper were three cantaloupe-sized pods. Sweaty and pulsing,

Harden blew each one apart with well-placed rounds.

"Intel was right, this was a nest," he said to Morales.

#

"I said, tell me what's going on, or I am gonna beat your ass," Morales said, his voice rising even though he was trying hard to keep it cool pointing his finger at this stone-faced soldier.

Hard to do with the post-adrenalin shakes, the splitting headache and this new crop of Gestapo bastards he found on the main floor after they stomped the nest.

The hard young soldier didn't rise to the bait. Right hand on the pistol grip of his MP-5, the other hand was held palm forward and even with Morales' chest.

"Major Harden will be with you shortly, now please just have a seat and be patient, Sir."

There were five or six of them, dressed like Roger's team, keeping Morales and his agents sequestered in the front room of the row house.

Others, dressed in tan, one-piece outfits, had gone down into the basement.

"Frank, I said for you to cooperate." It was Daniels' voice.

Morales hadn't seen him enter. But now that he saw the man, the pissed-off agent readied a barrage.

"These Army types have the area secured and they'll be done soon," Daniels said. He nodded a smile to the soldier who didn't respond.

"I come up from a shoot-out with those little monsters in the basement and these guys up here, say _they_ have the scene." Morales gestured over his shoulder to the other agents all cooling their heels.

"It's like we're prisoners at our own bust."

Through the tattered drapes covering the front window, Morales could see shiny black Suburbans blocking off the road. A few residents were milling around outside of the cordoned-off area.

"They say they just need the scene for a few more minutes and then they'll turn it back over," Daniels said. He was standing just inside the threshold of the room now.

Crowding past the soldier that held Morales in check, another one just behind Daniels.

"To hell with that. Where'd they take the drugees?"

Daniels tried that patting motion again and started another set of excuses, but was cut off by the squeaking of three gurneys being wheeled down the central hall past them. Thick, grey-green neoprene fabric covered the man-sized bundles. Harden was coming up behind the last gurney.

Morales, red in the face, wanting to draw his pistol, but jabbing his finger instead said, "And you, you son of a bitch, where you draggin' my men to in those body bags-"

Harden stopping, cut him off saying, "Human remains pouches."

"What?"

"You stuff garbage in a bag; you place a fallen comrade in an HRP."

That stopped Morales. He blinked a second trying to work his indignation back up.

"Listen-we have a protocol to follow when we take down a nest. We'll process the bodies for forensic evidence off-site and get them to the Morgue, no later than seventeen hundred. You have my word.

Morales, looked from Daniels, who wasn't helping, back to Harden.

"And the Haitians?"

"They'll be interrogated off-site and delivered to you at the Federal building. Also, no later than seventeen hundred."

Morales let out a heavy sigh, not sure where to go with this. He had jurisdiction, but thought the only way he could enforce it with these guys was by drawing down.

"That was a close one today. Thanks for saving my ass." This with a sincerity that Morales did not expect. Harden reached out his hand.

Morales took it grudgingly and said, "You gonna tell me what those things were?"

Harden shook his head. "I wish I could."

"Classified?"

"Not that. I really don't know. We've had the BEKs looked at by forensics guys and University eggheads. No one can tell me what they are exactly."

Morales shook his head in disbelief.

"Seriously. I've heard lost Amazonian primate species, old Nazi genetic experiments and Alien hybrids. We stumbled on these little monsters in counter-narcotics operations in Columbia back in ninety-six. Been finding them a little further north every year since."

"So now what?"

"Well, I find the next nest and stomp it. Then clean up the mess and move on."

Morales nodded again.

"You know, all the people I've worked with, no one ever broke a hold like that."

Morales guessed the memory of his dead son had a stronger hold on him.

Harden passed over a business card and said, "Might be able to find a place for you on the team, if you're interested."

Without looking, he took it from Harden and tucked it in one of the straps holding the soldier's body armor tight. With the cheap white card standing out against the pixilated grays and greens, Morales snapped, "I'm interested in you calling off your dogs and giving me back my crime scene."

Harden nodded with a tight expression. "Well, watch yourself. These little monsters can hold a grudge, and your performance today was certainly grudge-worthy."

Morales didn't respond and Harden gave the agent another apprising glance. He passed orders to his men and they stood together not talking.

The soldiers took another ten minutes to clear the scene. On his way out, Harden pulled the card from where Morales tucked it and left it on a grimy little table beside the front door.

"In case you change your mind," Harden said.

Morales didn't respond, just giving the man a get-out-of-here jerk with his head. When they were gone, the DEA agents went back to work, securing their scene with low comments and plenty of headshaking, none of these guys had been in basement.

The Federal investigation teams, now allowed access, came in and started their own forensic investigation.

Morales waved his boss's excuses away and went to the front door. Standing there, he slipped the card off the table and read the name and email address; all that was printed on it.

Something caught at the periphery of his vision and he looked up from the card and out the open front door.

There, in the milling crowd of rubber-neckers across the street, a kid dressed street. The look of hate in the coal black eyes was unmistakable, but the little monster was gone before Morales could get to it.

Standing on the buckled concrete sidewalk with all the lookie-lou's, he looked down at the card again.

"Yeah, Harden, maybe I will," he said and then went back to work.

The Sacrifices of Automated Tabulation

I froze at the metallic snick, as the door's steel lock bolt slid into place.

Holding the punched card suspended above the tabulator's input slit, I called out a tremulous, "Hello?"

There was no response.

I set the card down and stood abruptly from the little workstation. I straightened my skirt and crossed the small windowless room to the door and hesitated.

I cleared my throat softly, as it simply would not do to lose my composure, and then called again, "Hello?"

There was still no response.

I slipped off my earring and pressed my ear against the door. I listened for any indication of life in the hallway beyond, but heard only the dull thrum of the building's mechanicals.

A tingling panic rose up in my breast.

There was no slit of a keyhole in the door's lock plate or handle of dull-worn brass. I gently touched the knob with my fingers, twisted and felt resistance. I grasped the knob more firmly and wrenched it side to side. The small metal ball rotated but the door was fixed in place. I slapped the door with the flat of my free hand as I continued to jerk and pull with the other. It was quite a solid door.

"Hello! I say, this isn't funny! Mr. Nussbaum!"

This task did not require that I be left secured like this.

"Mr. Colund, Sir! I would prefer not to be locked in!"

I released the knob and oscillated between fear and indignation. I imagine at much the same periodicity as the knob had rotated with my manic twisting.

"Let me out!"

I started as the ticker tape device beside the tabulator sprang to life. I had attempted to engage the device earlier to no avail, so I had thought it was just a dead relic. But there it stood, spitting out a ribbon of white paper. The harsh mechanical whirring brought to my mind the image of tiny meat cleavers on bone.

I approached the machine and pulled back the tape so that I could read it.

The ribbon was pierced with little groups of dashes and dots that corresponded to four letters in Mr. Morse's code.

S*O*O*N

I am not certain exactly why, but that single word had the same effect a spider would have had tracing a path up the back of my neck.

I looked back at the door. This was not good.

#

Earlier that Tuesday afternoon I had sat in a small waiting room of the Chicago Tabulating Devices Corporation. I came with the tacit approval of my thesis advisor in the form of a letter of support. But in truth I was quite insecure in my thesis that a relay logic algorithm could be installed in the C.T.D.C.'s tabulator when the opportunity to put it into practice had come. But with Dr. Wireman's letter of introduction, my box of punched cards and enough enthusiasm to convince a legion of accounting executives that my theories could revolutionize the industry, I steeled my resolve.

The exterior room in which I had been retained was sparsely furnished. I could just detect the sounds of a busy autumn afternoon in the city. A clock ticked audibly. The clock's mechanism was visible through a wedge of glass, like a pie piece cut from the porcelain face.

I could make out my own distorted reflection in the glass overlaying the clockwork gears. I had worn a modest walking suit with a buttoned-shirt and coat. I had struggled all the morning before the mirror trying to find the right combination of professionally stylish yet femininely demure. I had even removed the decorative feathers from my hat in an effort to appear as one who should be taken seriously. I adjusted a hatpin that held the hat in question securely to my bun.

As I sat looking at the clock, I tugged and straightened my skirt in a vain attempt to keep my ankles covered.

"I'm sorry, but are you here with Tony Farragolo?"

I turned from the clock to see a nervous little man in a rumpled brown jacket that seemed a size too big for him. As he stood there blinking through his glasses I couldn't help but think of a little boy in a boatman's life preserving jacket.

I stood and proffered a hand.

The small man looked up at me and then down at my hand as if unsure what to do. Finally he reached to grasp me by the fingers but I slid my gloved hand forward to shake as a man would.

"I am Antonia Farragolo," I said with two firm shakes.

The man had a limp grasp and pulled his hand away quickly.

"Antonia?" the man asked.

I smiled with more confidence than I felt and nodded.

The little man seemed at a loss and then as if reminded by a nervous tick, regained his composure.

"I'm Teddy Nussbaum. I was told..." he trailed off.

I had no doubt that he must have expected me to have been a man, but I disingenuously said, "Yes?"

Mr., Nussbaum opened his mouth as if to speak and then appeared to think better of it.

He sighed.

I smiled warmly.

"Please follow me."

I felt a little jolt as I gathered my box of punched cards and ledger and fell in behind the little man. I had made it past the first obstruction and I felt unstoppable.

We traveled down a short corridor, one wall pierced by windows. Through the glass I could see rows of young men at desks pressing keys on arithmetic devices and pulling levers. Each pull of a lever resulted in an incremental release of paper from the top of the device. Manual tabulation.

Soon manual tabulation would be a thing of the past. In just a few years it would be the twentieth century and I could see a single machine and a few dozen punched cards replacing the entire room of accounting clerks.

The future was thrilling, but how unfortunate that it only came at you one day at a time.

I followed close behind Mr. Nussbaum and almost bumped into him when he stopped before a doorway. He turned to regard me with a peculiar, almost sad expression and then opened the door for me.

The room was sparsely furnished but for the large walnut desk swathed in accounting sheets. At the desk sat a squat, pallid man of middle age. Pale with a receding hairline and deep lines carved at the corners of his tight, lipless seam of a mouth. His gaze made me feel that I was the fly to his toad.

The little man introduced me awkwardly, and then the man behind the desk was introduced to me as Mr. Colund. I could see he held the letter of introduction that Professor Wireman had written.

I stepped forward, shifting my box and ledger to my left hand and proferred my right hand just as I had practiced. Mr. Colund gave me a flaccid, perfunctory handshake and a confused smile.

I stood in an awkward silence after disengaging my hand.

The man actually stared at the swell of my breasts and said in a flat tone, "You're a woman."

I wanted to comment on his keen powers of observation, but instead I did that little dip, where my eyes drop down to catch his and pull them back up to my face and said, "Yes, so I am told."

A little flush of red crept up his neck and he said, "I beg your pardon, but Dr. Wireman wrote that I was to be introduced to a student of his named Tony Farragolo." He waved my letter about absently.

"My name is Antonia. Dr. Wireman insists on shortening it to Tony."

Colund folded the paper and nodded.

"I assure you, Mr. Colund, I am well versed in the use of the Hollerith card. I have been studying the installation of relay logic algorithms by means of preconstructed punched-cards with Dr. Wireman for the past two years." When he said nothing I leaned forward and continued, "You see, Mr. Colund, I have this theory that by means of serial installation of the bits of data on punched cards one might generate complex codes through the use of your tabulator, the Magnotronic Tabulator..."

"Is that Mrs. or Miss?"

"Miss, Sir," I said.

Mr. Colund nodded and appraised me with dead eyes before he said, "I ask, as your brow is not quite so brutishly sloping as would be expected of one coming from the Apennine Peninsula, so the name might have been an unfortunate choice in marriage. And then there is the narrowness of the zygomatic arches, with the set of your eyes giving the illusion of an insightful nature."

I bit down on the inside of my lower lip and waited for him to finish his physiognomic musing.

"Though the insightful nature could well be a subversive element in your nature. Are you a suffragist, Miss Farragolo?"

I sighed quietly. As it has always been, must it always continue to be? "Sir, I have been fortunate to study with Professor Wireman and simply wish to be afforded the opportunity to test the theories we have developed."

"Yes, yes, Miss Farragolo, I am sure Dr. Wireman is convinced of your capabilities, but you see. Well, when I heard he wanted to send me an Italian I was hesitant to entertain his fancies. But a woman."

I smiled as coyly as I could and said, "Why, Mr. Colund, do you dislike women?"

Mr. Nussbaum cleared his throat behind me. Mr. Colund glanced from Mr. Nussbaum to me.

Before he could recover the momentum of his objection I said, "Sir, Professor Wireman has been collaborating with this firm in the automation of arithmetic processes for nearly a decade. Do you think he would have arranged for me to come down here if there wasn't something I could offer?"

Mr. Nussbaum cleared his throat again and said, "Mr. Colund, this is the initiate that Dr. Wireman has sent. I don't think there is time to find another."

I looked down at the little man and the disconcerting oddness of his words. He stared straight at Mr. Colund and wouldn't meet my gaze.

Mr. Colund nodded, tapping my folded letter on the edge of the desk. He pulled a watch from a vest pocket and nodded again. He said to Mr. Nussbaum, "It is the first night of the new moon."

"Excuse me, Sir, but I am unsure what this is about," I said.

Mr. Colund looked up at me again and said, "It's late in the day, Miss Farragolo, but would you mind trying this generation of complex code all in one day? It might require you stay past midnight."

I held myself in place so as not to execute a little jig right there. Then I nodded proudly. Two obstructions down. I would show these men that I could do it.

Mr. Nussbaum led me to a service elevator. One flight below the ground floor and down a deserted corridor. A light green discoloration to the industrial off-white paint hinted at mold taking root in the block walls.

"Goodness, but it's warm down here."

Mr. Nussbaum didn't respond. He stopped his slow march and turned into a small room. It wasn't much larger than a broom closet and smelled musty. A single electrical light bulb hung suspended on a cord in the center of the ceiling.

Against the far wall, the Magnotronic Tabulator rested on a solitary desk. Sleek, burnished walnut and polished brass, it was a sight to behold.

The box I carried prevented me from clapping my hands together at the sight.

An old model ticker tape machine sat beside it, coated in a thin layer of dust.

Mr. Nussbaum explained the basic operation of the device. It was much like the larger Hollerinth Tabulator I had worked with at the college. The largest and most thrilling difference was that the serial inputs could be converted into magnotronic impulses that would be carried much like telegraph signals through a large cable that led from the base of the device to a brass plate on the wall.

I placed my box of cards beside the machine and turned to shake Mr. Nussbaum's hand again, but the little man had gone.

The room and the behavior of the two men elicited in me an insecure feeling, but I would not let my own fears become an obstacle. There were no more obstacles but the time it would require to make the inputs.

I sat at the workstation and reflexively cracked my knuckles.

I spent the next few hours loading cards into the input slit, moving the lever first down to lower the cards and then back up to engage the pins that would pass through the slits and engage metallic contacts. This would load a small packet of information, much like a single sentence but spoken in a binary code of my own invention.

I lost myself in the work and, after I know not how long, I said, "Three more cards of coded data, my lovely device. Shall we see it you are able to perform the calculations?"

A waft of moist warm air blew up my skirt cuff and I jumped back. Under the desk, against the wall was an air vent that I hadn't noticed before. I leaned under the desk and could just hear the hum of machinery.

And there was something else. Something wet. The air coming up through the vent smelled acidic but foul, like too-ripe tomatoes.

I sat back up in my chair and took a deep breath.

I cracked my knuckles again and started to enter my last few cards, and that's when I heard the door lock.

#

I had once read a penny-dreadful's detective tale of how a lock had been picked with a pair of hatpins. However, standing there in the dim room it seemed an unlikely proposition.

I had used three long pins to secure my hat to my hair. I removed them then and set the fashionable little felt disc on the top of the tabulator after ensuring my bun was intact. I slid two pins along the doorjamb and twisted, poked and stabbed until I succeeded in lodging them both irretrievably. Despite my inspired attempt, the door remained solidly closed.

I felt quite foolish looking at the hatpins and holding the third. But in truth, I felt the dire circumstance allowed for more trepidation than self-reproach.

There was only the one locked exit. The wall vent appeared to be too small for me. The walls were concrete blocks. As I looked around my cell, I noticed for the first time that the ceiling had a vent as well.

I set the hatpin down and placed the chair on the desk beside the tabulator while both cursing my short Sicilian heritage and praising my forethought at wearing sensible walking shoes. Then I scrambled up onto the chair and balanced as I pushed up at the brass vent plate. On closer inspection I could see that were I to reach it there was still not enough space for me to wiggle through.

I heard a little metallic tap from under the desk. Then another. I shimmied down my teetering tower of furniture and searched the floor. Nothing unusual.

Then I noticed two little screws on the floor. I bent down and as I watched, another screw fell and made a metallic tap on the tile. They had come from the corners of the vent grate.

I watched as the fourth screw rotated counterclockwise of its own accord. And then it too plinked off the dusty tile. The grate was no longer secured, and it fell from the wall. I reflexively grabbed it half way to the floor. It shook violently in my trembling hand. The plaster around the vent looked puckered and reminded me of a fabricated sphincter. There were little flakes along the rough sides of the hole that looked like dried meat.

I looked closer and found a blood-soaked fingernail pulled out at the quick.

"Oh, no. Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no."

Something moved deep in the vent hole. Metallic rattling. Something small slid against smooth metal. Many somethings that I did not like at all. The rattle grew louder as something approached.

I grabbed the hatpin with one hand and slammed the grate atop the hole with the other. I held it tightly with both hands while the rattling continued. There was something just on the other side of the grate, but I couldn't see. The something brushed the other side. A rat?

Lord, but I hate rats. Maybe a snake? I hate snakes more.

My hand, pressed there against the little holes of the vent, was sliced. I pulled it back at the sharp pain and there was a thin, deep slash on the palm, little pearls of blood rising up. Whatever was on the other side of the grate pushed full force, and I almost lost hold with my one hand, still holding the hatpin. Then it was cut too.

I switched hands, trying to keep the vent from coming free and prevent another laceration.

What was back there? I pulled my feet up and pressed them against the grate. I had better leverage that way and I laid back.

"Help!" It was probably useless to yell, but I was wet-myself scared. I screamed it over and over again, not caring that I sounded too shrill.

I felt the bottoms of shoes being nicked time and again. The pressure against my feet increased. The corner of the grate bucked and I moved my foot to keep it down. And then the other corner popped away. Whatever was back there started to thrash against the grate.

I stared at the ceiling and tears blurred my vision. This was wrong.

The grate pushed away, and I stomped it back against the wall slightly askew. From the slim gap at the corner a thin, headless black snake slid out. No, not a snake. It was a length of insulated cable. There were thin slivers of copper wire poking out of the end where, if it had been a snake, the head should be. It waved back and forth seemingly of its own volition.

Then another slid out at the opposite corner. I kicked at them and lost my purchase on the barrier. The entire grate flew away as the hole expelled a Medusa's head of writhing black cables.

Thick strands wrapped around my ankles and undulated up my thighs, twisted around my waist. Securely bundled, they dragged me into the hole that had seemed too small.

I kicked. I screamed. I thrashed. I grabbed at the sides of the vent hole.

"Please! Please-please-please." I sobbed maniacally as I slid in through the puckered orifice.

I tried desperately to hold on, but the pulling was irresistible. I slid in and down the vent. I snaked down through spaces almost too narrow for me. I bumped and scraped and left patches of skin and a few shirt buttons as I twisted downward toward the rotting tomato smell.

The confinement fell away all of a sudden and I fell out of the conduit onto a concrete floor. Exposed electrical light bulbs dangling, girder ceiling, cinder-block walls, most likely the sub-basement. I looked down between my feet in the direction I was being pulled.

The cables ran across the floor and up into a hole in the bottom of a huge squared appliance. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but looking closely I could see that it was not an appliance at all, but rather a sweaty mass that writhed within an oblong crate of silver wire mesh. Three feet, by three and perhaps seven or eight feet long. An eye blinked and then slid beneath a twisting coil of flesh. Though I saw the thing I could not fix my mind on what it was. The mass of wires that held me ran through a gap in the wire mesh and into a floating darkness in the mass. The corners of the dark space pulled up and made that hole look like a leering grin. Twelve feet.

Colund sat to the left of the sweating device at a tabulator, a twin of the one I had been using. He looked over his shoulder and down at me.

"Help me!" I screamed and twisted. I tried to scramble up into a sitting position. Ten feet.

"We've almost finished Miss Farragolo," he said. He didn't turn from the tabulator and continued to jack the lever.

"What's going on?" I screamed. Eight feet. The hole at the bottom of the caged mass dilated open and then closed. Snick. Snick. I couldn't help but think of a dog snapping at a treat it was about to receive.

"Pishacha is our latest addition. He was enslaved in the Hindu Kush in eighteen forty-seven, but a use wasn't found for him until the tabulator was developed. These little devils can store ungodly amounts of information. And the speed of calculation once the proper algorithms are installed. Amazing. He's the fusion of demonology and automated tabulation, a perfect union, don't you think?"

"Help me," I cried. Five feet. I didn't want to sound so helplessly feminine. I cleared my throat; tears streamed down my face

"Teddy said using a woman so was unconscionable, and I had my reservations about a woman in this role as well, but all seems well with Pishacha. And though your algorithm won't be used, you're still serving a greater good here." Mr. Colund cooed to the machine-thing.

My feet slid up to the lip of the open hole. I could see now that it really was a mouth, pressed to an open square in the wire, eighteen-inches on a side.

A terrible bubbling feeling welled up in me.

Could stood and then squatted down an arm's length away and said, "We are preparing for the nineteen-hundred census, and expect with our latest addition here to be awarded the contract. Manual tabulation can't hope to compete with what we have here."

I thrashed side to side and could just touch Mr. Colund. He brushed my hand aside. I bucked and then remembered the hatpin I still held. I stabbed it into Colund's surprised face.

He squealed.

I shimmied and twisted and pushed him down toward my feet.

As his hands shot to his face, I grabbed him by the shirt-front and pulled him over and atop me. Questing cables snaked out of the demon's mouth and flailed blindly. They swept across Colund's blood-flecked face. He started to brush the cables away one handed, the other hand pulling at the hatpin, and the cables wrapped and twisted around his wrist.

More cables emerged and swept gently across the twisting man's face. Then they wrapped quickly around his head and neck. Colund let out a muffled scream and went rigid. The cables loosened their hold on me, and I scrambled away.

Colund's head and shoulders disappeared. A spasm rippled through his lower body.

The edges of the hole reached out as the man was pulled in and it reminded me of a child sucking down a wet spaghetti noodle.

The entirety of his body was gone in an instant. I sat on the floor listening to the wet crunching sounds over my sobbing gasps. Then silence.

I sat there with my back against the far wall. An old ticker tape device, identical to the one I had seen in the little room, sprang to life. I walked cautiously and read:

P*I*S*H*A*C*H*A*I*S*F*E*D

#

On the first night of the new moon, Mr. Nussbaum brought the initiate into my office and I stood from behind my walnut desk to greet him.

The Board of Directors had appointed me as Mr. Colund's replacement following his unfortunate incident. It may have seemed an unorthodox move, as I was the first female mid-level executive in the history of the Chicago Tabulating Devices Corporation, but the board had been quite impressed with my thesis for relay logic algorithms.

I had learned from them that my advisor had been one of several luminaries in the field that had sent unwitting, but promising students on to this industrial setting rather than continue to risk them remaining in academia and outshining their advisors. I don't believe Dr. Wireman knew the fate of the students he had sent before me, only that they had left the Ivory towers for a less distinguished career in the field of automated tabulation and were never heard from again.

Working with Pishacha was a different sort of challenge than working with my thesis advisor, though there were parallels. But at least with the demon you were prepared for the sacrifices. It was unfortunate that the demon required a human soul every accounting quarter, but such were the sacrifices one would have to make for the twentieth century and the future of accounting.

I reached out to shake the hand of the middle-aged man before me.

Mr. Nussbaum looked down at the floor and fidgeted.

I said, "Dr. Wireman, I am so pleased that you have agreed to help us with our little problem in automated tabulation."

Dougie's Hand

Sitting in the auditorium, I watched Dougie's hand flex.

_Just stop_.

An Anthro Grad student droned on about Yanamamos at the lectern as Dougie's hand shot out. Between thumb and forefinger, it snatched a long copper-red tress from the girl sitting in front of me.

I wrenched the thumb back, forcing the hand to release the hair. As she turned, I grabbed my left wrist and pulled Dougie's hand under the little flip-down desktop. The hand didn't like being subverted and it flopped around, making a terrible racket.

None of the other students seemed to notice, except for the redheaded girl who almost lost some hair. I always sat near the back of the big room just in case the hand started acting up. Like now. She had to go and sit right in front of me.

The chick looked back and shushed me, like she really wanted to hear this lecture. I smiled helplessly. What could I do? It wasn't my hand. I mean sure, it was on my wrist, but it wasn't "mine".

You see, it's really complicated, but I was a twin. I wasn't born a twin; my brother, Dougie, he died _in utero_. My Mom didn't agree. She had assured me there was no Dougie. Never had been. She tried to convince me that I had been the only occupant of her uterus. She even showed me faded copies of ultrasounds to prove that I was a singleton. They didn't convince me; he could have been hiding. Dougie was shy. I think that's part of why his hand acted out so much.

Overcompensation.

Her weak proof and incessant insistence aside, I'd always known the hand on my wrist wasn't mine, but instead belonged to my twin. It wasn't until I was six, sitting in the library with a big picture book of circus sideshow performers—freaks they called them—that I figured out how. There was this one grainy picture of a guy with his twin sticking out of his own torso. There was no head on the little body in doll clothes, but there were these little hands and feet. That's when I realized how Dougie's hand could be on my body. We were conjoined twins and part of him ended up on me. No idea where the rest of him went, I just got the hand.

It dug into the denim over my leg. It'd done this before. I had dozens of scars as proof. I pushed the hand down and held it with my thighs. Risky. The last time I'd done that, it had gotten hold of a testicle and I had to go to the emergency room. Imagine trying to explain that your brother's hand had squeezed your left nut almost to popping. ER doc didn't believe me. Of course, Dougie's hand had behaved then, giving a cutesy little finger wave.

Sometimes I really hated my brother's hand.

I slipped my belt off and wrapped it around the offending wrist. The denim was taut against my leg, the nails clipped short, so all it could do was make loud scratching sounds. The redheaded Princess got up, gave me a nasty look, and moved across the aisle. I guess it looked to her like I was going for a really good sphincter scratch. How could I explain that it was my angry dead brother's hand acting out?

I continued to wrap the belt around my wrist. It took too long to slide the belt through the buckle and pull. I just wrapped tighter and tighter, making an awesome tourniquet. When it slowed down, I could tell the hand was going numb.

Finally, it stopped and I tried to concentrate on the lecture.

The hand hadn't been this obtrusive in over a year. When I was young I could keep it under control. Until I went through puberty, then there were some really embarrassing, borderline incestuous, public episodes. I tried to explain to my parents about how it was the hand. Dougie's hand, not me.

I thought they understood when they agreed to take me to a specialist. I was thinking I'd see someone that specialized in conjoined twins, but Dr. Schlesinger was a psychiatrist.

How in the world could someone trained to deal with the human mind get Dougie's hand under control? Hands don't have brains. I pointed this out to him at our first session, and several sessions after. I tried everything, showing him how Dougie's hand didn't look anything like _my_ hand. The pinky finger on Dougie's hand was two-thirds as long as mine. And if that wasn't proof enough, I showed him how all the lines on the two palms were different lengths.

The hand behaved through every session with him though, and went nuts on the drive home after.

Schlesinger first told my parents I was lying to cover my impulse control issues. I spent three months sitting around a hospital rec room with a pack of chronic masturbators. I learned a lot, but it didn't help me with Dougie's hand.

Then he said I suffered from Body Integrity Identity Disorder. I suppose that conclusion sounded simpler than mine. But I didn't have any symptoms like the BIIDs-kids in my new support group. I didn't 'want' to be an amputee or lust after cut off limbs. I just had this hand that didn't belong to me, and I wanted it to behave.

The hand didn't behave when I was prescribed the anti-psychotics either, but I was real mellow about it. Schlesinger kept asking why I named the hand Dougie. I explained that Dougie was my brother's name. The hand didn't have a name; it was just Dougie's hand. What else could I call it? That's when I realized you don't have to be smart to be a doctor and decided to go pre-med in college.

Schlesinger switched to apraxia, alien hand syndrome, often caused by brain damage. I said "Bullshit!" It was my dead brother's hand and that was all there was to it.

MRIs showed no aneurysms, embolisms, or strokes. No indication of progressive neurological disease or trauma. In short, no physical evidence for my alleged apraxia.

But absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, is it?

I got SSRI's, and then back to anti-psychotics. A cocktail of both seemed to help me get Dougie's hand under control. The drugs never made me feel like it belonged to me, but it behaved. Until my second month away at college, that is.

This month.

I'd gone off the resperidone because it interfered with my freshman year love life. I mean, dorms are all about hooking up right? But not with Mr. Flaccid they aren't. Chemically-induced limpidity sucked.

Walking through the crowded corridor, I looked at the blue extremity. The only earthly remains of my dead twin brother.

I gave the hand a shake and pulled the rabbit's foot out of my pocket. Schlesinger told me to have Dougie's hand hold something and it wouldn't act out. I used to use a pen but it made me feel like a Bob Dole wannabe, so I switched to the rabbit's foot. I think it was really a forefoot, so if the rabbit were a person, it would be a hand, not a foot. Dead Dougie's hand holding some dead rabbit's hand. Freaky.

"Behave, Dougie's hand."

It didn't respond so I unwound the belt. The hand was thoroughly limp.

I stuffed the belt in my pack and closed Dougie's fingers around the lucky charm.

I left before the lecture ended and pushed out into the cool fall air to ponder my quandary. Go back on the drugs and no wood. Stay off the drugs and spend all my time explaining about the hand.

It started to twitch. I stopped and pulled an oven mitt out of my pack and stuffed it over the hand. I pulled out the roll of electrical tape and peeled enough off with my teeth to get it started around the base of the mitt. It looked hella-stupid, but usually helped.

#

I was having a serious heart to heart with Dougie's hand when Sylvia knocked. My roommate had vacated so that we could be alone. As alone as we could be with Dougie's hand, anyway.

"Brian? Are you there?" She wasn't over-the-top-hot, but she was available, interested, and lived the next floor up.

"I'm serious," I said one last time. I shook the mitt at it and said, "You mess this up and you're going in here for good."

I snicked the lock and pulled the door back.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, cool," I said.

"Were you talking to someone?"

I made like it was a sock puppet and said, "Just my hand."

She smiled and said something about giving my hand a rest tonight and I knew I was in.

"I'm glad you came. You know, I learned in Anthro that a warrior of the Yanamomo tribe would prepare a wicked feast for his woman?" I gestured to the bucket of Kentucky-fried chicken, original recipe, and a six-pack of Pabst, bottles, not cans.

Sylvia laughed at my bounty but ate the cold chicken and drank the warm beer anyway, sitting there in the middle of my bed and looking hotter than when she'd arrived.

She sucked a thighbone provocatively. I gave Dougie's hand one more pointed stare and reached out to Sylvia. I brushed her long dark hair back and leaned in for the fried-chicken-wet kiss.

She was accommodating until Dougie's hand reached out and snatched a hand-full of her hair.

"Damn it!" I yelled.

Sylvia cried out in confusion and pain.

"Let go!" I yelled as I grabbed at Dougie's hand.

"Brian, stop it," she screamed. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

I pried Dougie's fingers apart but the hand was on a mission. It didn't stop until it had a finger full of hair pulled out at the roots.

"Brian!" she screamed again.

She rolled back on the mattress, planted a vicious kick, and as the air whooshed out of me, I knew then that there was no way I was getting laid. She was crying, I was gasping, and the party was so over. I tried to explain about how the hand wasn't mine, but it made like a sock puppet and mimicked talking motions in time with each of my words.

"You stay away from me, you freak!" She slammed the door as Dougie's hand gave her the bird.

"That's it! I am done being your life support system!"

I hit an empty PBR bottle against the desk. I had to hit it three times before it smashed.

"Ungrateful piece of meat!"

It flopped around like a fish, intuiting—it couldn't know because we already discussed the whole no brain thing—that I was really pissed. I stomped on the fingers holding it down.

"I am done being held hostage to an appendage that isn't even mine!"

I touched the ragged broken glass to the invisible line at the wrist where my body stopped and Dougie's started. As the flesh parted and a little trickle of blood flowed, the hand went rigid.

"That's right; I am in charge of this partnership!"

Blood dribbled over the sharp edge of the glass, deep red and shiny. My blood, not Dougie's and I was done sharing.

I moved my foot from the hand, but kept the broken glass pressed hard.

"Behave, or are we parting ways?"

It twitched.

"You think I won't do it? 'Cause I will, I've had it."

The fingers rolled a gentle wave. It shot me the bird and made a lunge for freedom. Where was going? It was still attached.

I stomped down, screamed at the hand and stabbed deep.

I sawed. I sliced tendons, and ligaments. I cut muscle and sinew. The glass was heavy but broke off so I switched to a letter opener. Pressing hard, prying between the bones of the wrist joint Dougie's hand finally came loose.

It didn't hurt much, but God, there was a lot of blood. That's when I thought I should have started with a tourniquet before the bottle.

Some campus security punk smashed in the door. Sylvia with blood on her face and some other people behind him.

"What the—" the rent-a-cop said.

I showed Sylvia my wrist stump and said, "Look, I got rid of Dougie's hand. Now we can be together." A small arteriole gave a little comic spurt and she went pale. I didn't mean get together right then, just sometime. She just turned and vomited.

"Somebody call emergency," the security guy said.

"It's okay," I said. "You see this isn't my hand." I gestured toward the hand under my foot. "It was my brother's."

I gestured with the bloody letter opener and the security guy pulled a gun.

I dropped the bloody tool and said, "We're cool."

I took my foot off of Dougie's hand, but it just lay there, playing dead. I knew better and gave it a little kick.

I was feeling really light-headed, so I sat flat on my ass. Man there was a lot of blood. The security guy holstered his weapon and tried to figure out what to do about my stump.

I wasn't paying attention to him. I watched Dougie's hand. It made a slow finger wave and twisted over palm down. I tried to tell people to watch, but I was so dizzy and it was hard to speak. No one but me saw Dougie's hand tarantula its way across the floor and under the bed. It stopped before it disappeared into the dark and raised its middle finger. First I thought it was the bird, and then I realized it was a wave.

I didn't know where it was going to go, and it was already starting to get that bluish hypoxic cast, but I didn't want to part on bad terms so I said, "Good luck, Dougie's hand," and then everything started to fade out.

Virtual Huntress

The afternoon sunlight reflected off the hybrid Beemer's license plate, 'HNTRIS', as it slipped smoothly into the last open parking space. A man standing in the park noted the car and compared it to the picture displayed on his cell phone's screen.

He advanced to the next image and studied the attractive thirty-something American woman. There was no mistake that it was the woman sitting behind the wheel. He snapped the phone closed and slipped it into his pocket as he strolled back up the path to the soccer game in progress.

#

"I just pulled in now, Mom," Marcia said into the hands free cell phone. She checked the dash clock as she shifted into park and flicked off the ignition.

"They have at least fifteen minutes left, so technically I didn't miss Jake's game," she said.

"Yes, I know I've been working a lot, but I'm here now." She had gone overtime again on her last mission run and had been afraid she would miss the game altogether.

She checked her face in the rearview mirror while she listened to her Mother's reply and then continued, "You know I can't talk about the job. I'll call this evening, and I really have to go, Mom."

"Mothers," she said under her breath as she slipped the earpiece off and dropped it on the passenger seat.

Her new gig with Geodynamix was great, but no amount of overtime was worth missing out on Jake's game. Jake was the only good thing she'd gotten from her ex after all. Well, the settlement and the BMW were pretty nice too.

Leaving the car behind, she walk-trotted up the gravel path to the fields, a challenge in a skirt and low heels. She'd spent her day plugged into a temperature-controlled world of muted grays and greens, nothing like this beautiful day. Maples lining the path were swathed in scarlet and summer was giving one last gasp today before it gave in to fall.

She slowed as she came up to the sideline cluster of mostly Moms. A few she recognized checked their watches before they nodded and gave her small smiles.

"What's the score?" she asked of no one in particular.

"Three to one," a man's voice answered from beside her.

Marcia glanced sidelong at the man. Standing between her and the edge of the cluster, tall, in slacks and a sweater. Athletic. Tan with dark hair and a touch of stately gray at the temple. Nice. "Who's up?"

"Saint Paul's Prep." The man didn't look at her, keeping his eyes on the match.

Marcia checked her watch and said, "I don't know if we'll have time to beat them, then."

That got his attention and he turned to regard her with steady brown eyes. Crow's feet appeared at the margins when he smiled. "You have a boy playing for Connolly?"

Marcia smiled back, feeling a little spark. She nodded to the field and said, "My son Jake. He's the blonde kid, playing sweeper. Number twelve."

"Ah, yes. He is the one that kicks left footed. He's quite good."

She felt a little flush of maternal pride. Turning back to the field, she said, "Who's your son?"

"Steve. Saint Paul's jersey, number nine." He pointed out to the field and Marcia spotted the boy on the sidelines.

They watched as Jake thwarted a drive by a Saint Paul's forward and sent the ball back down field like it was fired from a howitzer.

"Nice," the man said.

Marcia smiled again; glad to be here in time to watch Jake play.

She caught the man looking at her left hand holding the keys. Noting the naked flesh of her ring finger produced the suggestion of a smile from him. She'd already seen he didn't wear a wedding band.

Marcia held out her hand. "I'm Marcia." He took it in his own and gave a little squeeze, holding on long enough, but not too long. The smell of his expensive cologne competed with fresh cut lawn.

"I'm Stefan."

She smiled again, ignored the looks from the other moms and turned back to watch a boy in a Connolly jersey throw the ball in bounds.

"You work for Geodynamix?"

Marcia started. "I'm sorry?"

"I said, that you work for Geodynamix." He pointed to the security badge she still wore clipped to her belt. The company's name and logo were displayed prominently below her picture.

She unclipped the badge and said, "Oh, yes. I forgot to take it off." She held it in the bundle of keys; her purse was in the car.

"I hear it's a good company."Stefan's eyes returned to the game while he said this. Guys always did that, holding conversations while watching something else.

"Yes. I'm happy there."

"I'm with Centromix, you guys beat us out for the contract for the UAH-9C. Quite a coup as that was a big contract."

Marcia didn't answer. It was a big contract. A contract she had worked for the Department of Defense for six months. A classified contract.

"I understand they're deployed to the Walach," Stefan said, still watching the game. When she didn't respond he turned to her and caught the closed-down look.

Tiny hairs prickled up along the back of her neck. Unsure if it was the slight fall breeze or the stranger's interest in her classified work that made her uneasy, she smiled and shrugged.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Operational security. Of course. You can't discuss it."

Marcia gave that terse smile again. She didn't want to shut him down; she wanted to keep this going.

"No, please forgive me. You see, Centromix hired me contingent on the program. When I was in the service I commanded a detachment that dealt with them in the Autonomous Tribal region back in the Stan," Stefan said.

Marcia made a sound that she thought came out encouraging but non-committal. He had that military look, and he turned to her now that she was more interesting than the game.

"But that was back with the alpha models. The unmanned aerial vehicle program office had just deployed them. They were still called Kestrels. Now they're what, hunters?" Stefan had that reserved animation men get when discussing glory days. It made them look endearingly boyish, regardless of their age.

_Game Hunters_ Marcia thought. The alpha models had been short-range recon.

"In my day, the operator would plug into the A.V., back in the shed, that's what we called the remote site, and uplink for full sensors. But the article said that they deploy now with sixth generation infrared and the Brimstone missile package. And with the new hafnium nuclear decay turbines they can self-deploy anywhere in the world. I would have killed for that kind of on-station time."

Marcia nodded again, thinking of her day plugged into just such a device. It was like a video game, linked into the most advanced tactical aircraft in the world, but the game-play was real play. Flying the designated route in an area of operations nine thousand miles away. Hunting along designated routes.

Finding the man-shaped gray-green outlines in a Walachi insurgent marshalling area. Clearance from higher headquarters, the flash of the squib as the Brimstone launched and the dark gray smoke trail as it corkscrewed into the cluster of figures. The flash and then the empty clearing as she flew low to confirm. She was glad the optics didn't pick up the charred remains and wet smears. And then there was more hunting. Always more hunting.

She saw the color in Stefan's cheeks as he recounted his glory days with the supped-up remote-control airplanes. Marcia just nodded wanting to tell him how much better they were now, but at the same time knowing she couldn't violate security.

"With the advances in uplink I imagine one can sit right here and link into the aircraft anywhere in the world."

Marcia zoned back in and made another non-committal sound. She liked his interest in her, but not so much the interest in her work. Had she still been an Air Force NCO she would have felt compelled to call base security. But the community of Beltway contractors, bandits some called them, was small. Everyone bid on the same contracts and everyone that bid had the same information about the work in their proposal packages. So these sorts of interactions weren't that unusual.

With a little glint in his eye he said, "I mean, if Geodynamix operated them, which of course you know nothing of."

They both laughed conspiratorially.

The little crowd screamed and Stefan turned to the field in time to watch Connolly score a goal.

"Oh, you're getting closer, one more." He checked his watch and said, "There may still be time for you."

"Time for two," Marcia said, looking at her own watch and smiling.

They watched in silence as the referee set the ball for the kickoff. Marcia bided her time, thinking of something to get the conversation going again.

"I must say that I was a little sad to see the Air Force outsource the mission as well as the service package to contractors, though. No offense."

"You don't like contractors?" She hoped she didn't sound too coy.

"Oh, no it isn't that. Some of my best friends are contractors."

Marcia laughed a little louder than she meant to. She wanted to be encouraging, not fawning.

"Since I'm on contract myself. The article I mentioned brought up some good points about having civilian contractors deploy ordnance against combatants. I don't know." Stefan's smile was uncertain and at the same time reassuring.

Marcia tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and made her non-committal encouraging sound again. She meant it as an 'I have no comment but please keep going' sound.

"Well, when armies of the state engage in combat then the rules are clear. When the military outsources combat to civilians, they seem muddled. Like in the current operation. Deploying UAV's to the Walach in support of the current regime against the opposition forces. I mean, whoever is operating the Hunters and servicing targets is really killing the insurgents, right?"

Marcia nodded. In the military she had come to peace with the ethics of war. As a contractor it was a bit muddled and she hadn't had to think about it. Far removed, they were just images on a three-D infrared telemetry read out. Besides, it was her job. A service provided under contract to the Federal Government.

Stefan turned a harder eye to Marcia and said, "What does that make the civilian operators? Combatants? Noncombatants? I don't know, what do you think, Marcia?"

A little uncomfortable now she pointed to the field and said, "Hey, I'm just a Soccer Mom."

Stefan's expression softened a little and said, "Yes. Of course, I don't mean to discuss philosophy."

The referee's whistle marked the end and Marcia congratulated Stefan. He smiled just before they lost each other in the after-game crush of people.

#

Marcia held the trunk open for Jake to deposit his gear in the car and said, "But you played a good game, and that's what's important. You're second in the league."

Jake rolled his eyes. "Dad say's second place just means your first among losers."

Marcia bit back the retort she had regarding Jake's father and what he knew about losers. Instead she ruffled his hair and said, "How about Chinese on the way home?"

Jake didn't brighten, holding onto his preteen, post-loss gloom. He opened the passenger side door and slid in sullenly.

The promise of mu-shu pork was not quite enough to pull him out of his funk. Marcia knew he'd snap out of it soon enough. As she grabbed her own door handle a figure loomed up from behind her car. She started until she realized it was her new friend, Stefan.

She had thought there might be a future flirtation. She pondered what she would say if the attractive man asked for her number. "Stefan. Hello."

Stefan said, "Marcia." His dark eyes were inscrutable.

"Hey, Jake and I are on our way to get something to eat, would you and Steve care to join us?"

His expression clouded a little more and he said, "No, I'm afraid that won't be possible."

"You sure. It's a nice dim-sum place?" She looked past Stefan into the thinning lot and saw Steve getting into an SUV. "Where's your son going?"

Stefan glanced in the direction of Marcia's gaze. He turned to her and his expression made Marcia want to back away.

"That boy is actually not my son."

Confused, trying to understand why this nice man was suddenly so cross, she asked what he meant.

"My son was killed a month ago with his compatriots in the struggle to free the Walach from an illegitimate and oppressive regime."

Marcia blinked, stepping backward. She hesitated, seeing Jake through the window. She hit the lock button on her key fob to keep Jake safe and fumbled for the emergency alarm button.

Stefan pulled a pistol from his waistband, the cold steel of it matching the expression in his eyes. He grabbed Marcia by the lapel. Pressed the muzzle to her chest.

"You Americans feel so removed from what you do, that Soccer Mom's feel no remorse at killing with the flick of a switch. I have sought you out to tell you that civilians who operate combat equipment are combatants. There are consequences for your actions and the war, the war it is real."

Marcia pulled away as the pistol went off. The protest died on her lips with the punch of pain above her heart.

She saw the satisfaction in her killer's eyes.

The smell of cordite.

The cold.

Jake's screaming as the world faded into darkness.

BIO:

Richard Farnsworth (genuineapocrypha@yahoo.com) is a scientist, soldier and writer of strange fiction. He has conducted experiments that would make Baron von Frankenstein shudder, cloned gallons of DNA, soldiered in Iraq, flown the venerable AH-64 Apache Attack helicopter and written these short stories and two novels (both of which were adapted from short stories in this collection).

_Succumbing to Gravity_ the novel came out in 2010 and _The Gift of the Bouda_ , in 2011. They are available through all online retailers in both hard copy and electronic editions.

His blog can be found at: http://genuineapocrypha.blogspot.com/

