Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set Page 17

  The Man shakes his head.

  So I tell him the only joke I know, but the Man doesn’t seem to appreciate Death Cat humor, because he doesn’t even smirk once.

  I sigh.

  Then I notice the notches on the cabinet wall.

  “It’s my birthday,” I say.

  “So?” the Man says.

  “I want to hold Sal.”

  And my muscles ache with hope and the power of my birthday wish.

  Finally, the Man says, “It’s my birthday too. Therefore, my wish cancels out your wish. You get nothing.”

  I want to cry, but my mason jar can’t hold any more tears.

  So I watch in silence as the man pours hot water into you.

  Then, after all my years of waiting for you, you scream.

  And I want so much to hold you in my arms.

  “It hurts!” you say.

  And I know what it’s like to burn, because a strange fire always flares up in my face whenever I think about what happened to my parents.

  “Help me!” you say. “Help me!”

  I realize now that you’re more than my friend.

  And of course I want to save you, but I don’t want to face the Man outside. I recognize him now. I recognize myself in him. And if I leave this cabinet, I’ll probably end up becoming him.

  I’m better off locked up. If I ignore your pleas and my heart long enough, all my suppressed emotions will transform me. And become me. And in this state, I’ll never feel anything ever again.

  I imagine myself as a monster, and part of me wants to embrace a life without fear.

  But I love you enough to love myself.

  So I kick open the door. Easily.

  And I say, “Pour out the water.”

  “Never,” the Man says.

  “I’ll fight you if I have to.”

  “You don’t stand a chance.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You’re a Child. I’m a Man.”

  I feel the urge to close myself off again, so I face my cabinet. But instead of climbing inside, I reach for a container of piss and shit.

  Then I change my mind.

  So I throw my jar of suffering at the Man’s face.

  And he bleeds and shrinks and cries my tears.

  And maybe he feels happy for me, because he smiles, too, even when Holly pounces from the shadows and rips him apart.

  And in the Man’s place comes the Man With a Cup for a Son.

  So I dump out the hot water, and fill you with love.

  THE END

  Learn more about the author at www.jeremycshipp.com

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  ###

  DOWN AMONG THE BOSNIAN DEAD

  By Joseph Nassise

  They were being hunted.

  After this morning’s events, Sergeant Michael Raines, U.S. Special Forces, was convinced of it.

  The only question he had left to answer was who, or what, was doing the hunting.

  It had begun innocently enough. The Fourth Cav had arrived by convoy over the swollen banks of the Drina River two months ago. Camp Walton, or “Wasteland” as it was unofficially known among the troops, had quickly been laid down on an area the size of three football fields laid side by side, smack dab in the middle of what the Dayton Accords had labeled the ZOS – the zone of separation that divided the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims.

  Concertina wire, claymores, and tank traps had quickly surrounded the camp, as if that muddy stretch of barren terrain had some inherent value that needed protecting from the broken remnants of the population that surrounded it. Barracks and command bunkers swiftly followed, and the US military had hunkered down to do what they had come here to do.

  Which, in Raines’ view, was nothing.

  The US Army was being used as a show of force, carrying out a political saber-rattling exercise, and had absolutely no intention of doing the citizens of this war-torn land the least bit of good. Like Mogadishu, Haiti, and a hundred other shitholes he had been in over the last few years, Raines knew that this place would go right back to the way it had been less than five minutes after they pulled out.

  What a waste, he thought, and wasn’t even certain himself if he meant the presence of the US military or the condition of the country around him.

  Not long after the camp had been established, the UN Peacekeeping forces had sent in the forensic teams, tasked with investigating the reports of wartime atrocities that the press had begun to leak to the world at large. Walton had become a focal point for one such group, as it sat at the center of a stretch of ground that contained not one, not two, but four major burial sites where the Serbs had done their best to hide the evidence of their atrocities against their fellow countrymen.

  The latest excavation had begun earlier in the week at a site designated on the map as Kilo Two-Zero. When he’d first heard the name, Raines had idly wondered if that meant this was the twentieth such site the forensic team had excavated and catalogued. After spending a day flying over the site in an Apache and estimating that there must be over eight hundred bodies concealed in that pit, Raines quickly came to the conclusion that he really did not want to know the answer to his question.

  The prospect, if he was right, was too horrifying to contemplate.

  He was better off not knowing.

  The killings had begun shortly after the forensic teams had opened up K2Z.

  In the last four nights, they had lost five men. After the first one, the Colonel had sent out a search party, assuming the missing private had simply strayed into town or had gone AWOL. The party itself has come back one man short. The following night they had lost the two men working the listening post just beyond the camp perimeter. Their relief had found their equipment strewn about the ground, but no sign of the men remained. Convinced that the Serbs were up to no good, the Colonel ordered a full sweep of the town yesterday, but still no trace of the missing men could be found. Last night, a fifth man had disappeared on his way back from the latrine.

  The fact that he had vanished inside the camp perimeter had thrown the troops into a frenzied panic.

  The Colonel had been on the phone all afternoon with his superiors, but Raines had not waited to hear what the outcome of those conversations had been. He’d been in the army too long to expect headquarters to be much help in this situation. Instead, he’d checked into things on his own, talking to the troops, walking the perimeter, even making a few forays into the surrounding area to talk to the locals.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t learned a damn thing.

  This morning, when the watch had changed, they’d discovered the partially eaten remains of Private Daniels, the second man to go missing, jammed in among the concertina wire on the west side of camp. The brass probably would have been able to make a case for the existence of a marauding pack of wolves with a taste for human flesh, which is just what they tried to do, if Daniels’ head hadn’t been discovered propped on a stake outside the east side of camp half an hour later.

  The rest of the day had been sheer confusion, with the troops too afraid to leave the camp and the brass completely clueless as to what to do next. Fear and superstition ran amuck and everything from the Serbs to vampires was blamed for the attacks.

  Now, about three hours after sundown, the camp felt deserted. Every building, tent, and bunker had been locked down for the night as best its inhabitants could manage and only those required to work sentry duty could be seen outside after dark. The rain was still falling steadily, obscuring vision and turning the camp into a sea of mud.

  Snubbing out his cigarette, Raines turned away from his visual study of the camp perimeter and made his way through the maze of tents to one of the command bunkers. For a moment his form was silhouetted against the lights of the nearby tents and then he descended several steps between large mounds of sandbags and entered the scientific station in the bunker below.

  “Ta
lk to me, Simmons,” he said as he walked inside.

  The civilian technician seated at one of the computer consoles shivered at the sound of his voice, most likely in memory of what Raines had threatened to do to him earlier in the day if he did not agree to use all that fancy equipment to figure out what was happening, but his fear didn’t stop him from trying to help. He knew it eventually might be his head shoved onto a stake just outside the perimeter of the camp if Raines couldn’t stop whatever it was that was out there. “Just a second, Sergeant. I’m bringing up the KH-10 images now.”

  KH-10 was one of the government Keyhole satellites, presently swinging past Eastern Europe on its nightly patrol. A moment later and the set of monitors surged to life. A computer in the depths of the bunker overlaid the ghostly green images being fed from the satellite with known radar date and provided a ghostly map on the screens in front of the two men.

  “Gotcha!” the tech said beneath his breath with satisfaction. In order to help Raines, he’d hacked into the KH data feeds, no easy feat. Once he was in, however, the system became much friendlier and in moments he had a variety of views laid out on the flickering screens. He pointed them out to the Sergeant.

  “Okay, we’ve got UV over here. Gamma on that one. Spectro here. Infrared.on the last screen to the left. The other three are real-time, low-light images.”

  It was these that Raines was interested in. He looked over the images, then pointed to a particular set of coordinates on the map. “Can you bring this in closer?”

  Confident now, Simmons shrugged nonchalantly. “No sweat.” He typed a series of commands into the keyboard. On screen, Raines watched the image jump closer in measured amounts, until it showed the area as if you were looking down on it from a height of about 5000 feet. The mass grave the scientists had uncovered earlier in the week before the rains had begun showed up on the image as a large area filled with water. From this height, the bodies that Raines knew were piled more than ten deep in that pit were no more than dark, featureless shapes that occasionally broke the water’s surface.

  While Raines was studying the images, Simmons wandered over to another workstation. After a moment, he swore beneath his breath and rushed back over to the console beside Raines. He frantically stabbed a series of commands into the keyboard and the screen to Raines’ right suddenly blossomed with a cloud of pink light.

  “What the hell is that?” Raines asked.

  “Nitrogen,” Simmons answered. “A big cloud of it. We planted spectrometers around the excavation site to try and understand just what we might be facing in there in regard to biological or chemical threats.”

  Raines pointed to the cloud on the monitor. “Is that normal?” he asked.

  The tech continued to fiddle with the equipment, trying to further define the data as he answered. “The human body has a fair degree of nitrogen in it. When it starts to decay, some of that nitrogen releases into the air around the corpse. In this case, you’ve got several hundred bodies, maybe more, suddenly disturbed by us and by the rains. You’d expect to see some sign of that release on the graphs, but that cloud is way too big for it to be natural.”

  “Can we get in for a closer look at what might be causing it?” asked Raines.

  “Not with the Keyholes. But I can probably have one of the spy boys’ Predator drones overhead in about than ten minutes.”

  “Shit! Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Do it.” Raines ordered.

  In a short time the drone was sending back images from less than 5,000 feet. At Raines’ command, the tech ratcheted the image even closer until they were showing images in a 10-meter square from less than 1,000 feet off the ground.

  In the strange green light of the drones’ night vision lens, Kilo Two Zero looked even worse than it did during the day.

  The incessant rains over the last four days had flooded the massive pit with several feet of water. The bodies that had filled the pit to near capacity now floated on the surface of the water or lay beached on its edges, like so much casually discarded waste. The steady downpour caused the image to shimmy and shift, as the camera lens did its best to filter out the interference. Every few moments the image would disappear altogether as lightning flashed across the sky, only to flicker and return seconds later as the equipment compensated for the light. The two men watched the screen for several long moments without seeing anything out of the ordinary.

  “What’s so special about this place?”

  Raines shrugged. “Just a hunch, I guess.” It was more than that, but he didn’t have the energy to explain the connections.

  Abruptly, on screen, a form surged up out of the water.

  “Fuck!” Simmons cried, flinching away from the sight in surprise. Raines, having seen much worse during his time in the Army, barely flinched. His gaze stayed glued to the screens.

  The man had probably once been a school teacher or a shop owner, though since he’d been dead for many months it would likely be difficult to tell conclusively at this point. What remained of his clothing showed he’d taken care with his appearance, dressing fashionably but inexpensively. Raines noted the baling wire that was twisted savagely around the corpse’s hands, as well as the entry wound just above his right eye, as if he had decided to face his fate and had looked up just as his executioner had pulled the trigger, and knew without a doubt that this man had never been a soldier.

  The corpse bobbed upright for a moment in the water, face thrown back is if looking directly at the drone taking its picture overhead, and then twisted to the side and fell back into the water with a silent splash.

  Raines looked over at his companion. “Are you gonna give me some natural explanation for that?”

  The technician swallowed nervously and looked away, trying to regain his composure. “Expanding gases? A sudden shifting of the bodies? There are probably a dozen I could come up with.”

  Raines listened with only half his attention. A sense of anticipation had swept over him the moment the corpse had popped into view. It was the same feeling he got when he was out on patrol or before he dropped into a firefight, that sixth sense veterans develop that says, “Here it comes”. Something was about to happen, he was certain of it, and it didn’t matter what type of explanation the technician came up with, not really.

  A moment later another body surged up from down below, followed closely by a third.

  Beside him, Raines heard the technician mutter, “That’s not caused by expanding gases, I’ll guarantee you that.”

  Raines’ combat alarm was ringing full blast by now and he had little doubt that his companion was right. He impatiently drummed his fingers against the tabletop. ‘Come on, come on, show yourself, you bastard,” he whispered at the screen.

  As if in response, something else suddenly emerged from that stagnant pool of water and death.

  The rain and the lightning conspired to prevent them from seeing clearly, but it looked almost human. It was even dressed in the tattered remains of what had once been a business suit and had a few wisps of thin hair on its skull. That is where the similarity ended, however. Its fingers were longer than normal and even in the poor light Raines could see the claws that extended from their tips.

  As they watched, the creature rose up out of the muddy water like an apparition from the depths of hell. It glanced cautiously, left and then right, before rising to its feet and moving toward the corpses it had just rescued from the pit. It shook the water off itself like a dog and then grabbed one of the corpses by the arm, dragging it further away from the water before squatting down beside it. Raising the dead flesh to its mouth, the creature tore off a chunk with its ragged teeth and began to eat.

  “Jesus Christ!” Simmons exclaimed in disgust. “What the fuck is that?”

  Smiling grimly, Raines answered, “It’s dead meat. It just doesn’t know it yet.” He moved to the other side of the console. “Can we get thermal and UV from the drone as well?”

  Without a word Simmons activate
d two more screens.

  Under the thermal imaging, the newcomer looked nearly identical to the corpses on the ground beside it, removing any doubt that what they were dealing with was even remotely human. If it had been human, it would have shown up under the infrared light. The ultraviolet light gave them no more information than had the infrared. Raines had Simmons go to the night-vision lens, but that proved even less satisfactory than the other options they’d tried so far.

  Frustrated, Raines went back to watching the creature under normal light conditions. It was enjoying its dinner and didn’t appear inclined to move soon, which was something the sergeant was pleased to see. The creature also seemed oblivious to the weather, squatting there in the mud while the thunder boomed and the lightning flashed overhead.

  As Raines watched, a sudden flash of lightning lit the scene once more, revealing something metallic hanging about the creature’s neck. Just to be certain it hadn’t been a trick of the eye, Raines waited until the next flash before turning to Simmons.

  “Can you get any closer with that camera?”

  Simmons thought about it and then answered, “I can bring it all the way down on the deck if you want. Thing is, that baby’s pretty damn big. Its wingspan is something like fifty feet. Too much lower and that thing out there will know we’re watching.”

  “I thought I saw something around its neck. Bring it down another 100 feet and let’s see if we can get a better look.”

  Simmons complied. The picture improved only slightly, but the two men decided it would be best not to bring the drone any close to the ground and chance scaring the creature away. After watching the thing for a few more minutes, Raines suddenly pointed at the screen. “Can you freeze that?”

  The technician did and then printed a hard copy image. The picture was taken from the creature’s left and slightly over its shoulder. Its face was turned away and tucked down out of sight, but the image clearly showed what it was that Raines thought he had seen earlier.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” both men said at the sight.

  Hanging around the creature’s neck were five sets of US military dog tags.