Dark Fiction (30)

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?--> Chapter 1 <div class="element element-bodymatter element-container-single element-type-chapter element-with-heading" id="chapter-1"> <div class="heading heading-container-single heading-size-full heading-format-full heading-alignment-flexible heading-without-image"> <div class="heading-contents"> <div class="title-subtitle-block title-block-title-is-element-number"> <div class="element-number-block"> </div> <div class="title-block"> <h1 class="element-title case-mixed"><span class="element-number-term">Chapter</span> <span class="element-number-number">One</span></h1> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="text" id="chapter-1-text"> <h2 class="section-title subhead keep-with-next paragraph-follows case-mixed" id="subhead-1">Oh brother, what have you done</h2> <p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-after-subhead first-with-first-letter-t"><span class="first-letter first-letter-t first-letter-without-punctuation">T</span>he smell of death rode on the wind. John Altar crested the hilltop and brought his horse to a stop. He&rsquo;d smelled it a ways off, but the breeze had all but stilled some time ago. The stink remained. He whistled low and the dog that had been his companion for a while, some kind of wolf half-breed, sat on its haunches close on his left. The fat gray clouds overhead threatened rain, and no wind stirred the thick expectant air, which was hot.</p> <p class="subsq">As he stared down the slope, he cut a hunk of tobacco from his plug, sliding it off the blade directly into his mouth. The leaf was hard and dry. It had been wrapped in a cloth in his saddlebag for a time. Spit washed over the scrap and the bitter flavor crept into his senses.</p> <p class="subsq">Below, at the bottom of the slope, a series of double tracks had been worn into the earth by scores of wagons over the years. Upon that trail were the remains of some homesteaders who had been on their way to what they&rsquo;d hoped to be a better life. Nothing moved down there, except the black flutter of buzzard&rsquo;s wings as they fought over bloated corpses. He couldn&rsquo;t tell how many settlers there had been, and by the butchery, he figured more scavengers than just the buzzards had visited this site.</p> <p class="subsq">Being that it was going on late summer, this seemed kind of late in the season for pioneers to be this far down the trail. Unless of course, they were Mormons. They wouldn&rsquo;t be going all the way to Oregon or California.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Still don&rsquo;t see many Mormons moving west this time of year</em>, Altar thought, but there were always those late to the party. Seemed like most who&rsquo;d wanted to migrate had already done so, no matter how austere the conditions might be.</p> <p class="subsq">He had to wonder if he was going to find Bobby down there. He&rsquo;d been dogging his younger brother, and the collection of dirty, low-down, no-account Johnny Rebs Bobby had taken up with, for weeks. Could those ne&rsquo;er-do-wells be responsible for the carnage down below?</p> <p class="subsq">Could Bobby?</p> <p class="subsq">Or his brother might be among the dead.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Only one way to find out</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar steered his horse forward, despite the animal&rsquo;s reticence to approach the field of death. He reached out and patted the horse&rsquo;s neck in reassurance.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Easy, boy. I&rsquo;m not liking this any more than you do, but we got to go down there.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The inevitable dread of what he might find weighed as heavily on him as an anvil around his neck.</p> <p class="subsq">He yanked his blue handkerchief from his back pocket. Unfolding it, he rubbed the cloth on the horse&rsquo;s sweaty flesh and got it good and wet. The lather smelled strong, but it probably wouldn&rsquo;t help much gauged on the putrid odor lingering in the air from this distance.</p> <p class="subsq">He gave the chaw a grind with his molars to break it apart and moistened the results with spit. Then he spat some of the ground tobacco and juice onto the blue fabric and roughed it in hard. He fastened the cloth in place around his head, bandit style. He was hopeful, as the mixture of animal and tobacco odors made him wrinkle his nose, that the powerful smell would somehow mask the overwhelming stench of the charnel house below. But as he made his way closer, he knew it wasn&rsquo;t going to be much help.</p> <p class="subsq">The only sound was the buzzing of insects, the swish of his horse&rsquo;s tail, and the not-so-distant rumble of thunder.</p> <p class="subsq">A storm must be coming.</p> <p class="subsq">He looked at the dog. &ldquo;Stay.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The dog settled onto its belly and laid its head on crossed forelegs, ears ever alert.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar drew his Henry repeating rifle and laid it across his lap as his horse started forward with the slightest nudge from his knees. Nothing was moving on the horizon, no dust clouds. He wove his horse all the way down the incline through the scrub, all the while watching everywhere, alert for any movement or sound out of place.</p> <p class="subsq">Safe at the bottom of the slope, Altar studied the gruesome scene. The settlers had apparently taken no defensive posture, no circled wagons, no firearms strewn about, though those could&rsquo;ve been stolen to be sure. Not much of value remained after a massacre. The area was a wide-open expanse. They sure should have been able to see the attack coming. Why hadn&rsquo;t they at least circled their wagons?</p> <p class="subsq">But his gut spoke to him, and he suspected he knew what had happened here. God knows he&rsquo;d seen its like in the war. <em>Looks like they got bushwhacked</em>.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Bobby, what have you done?</em></p> <p class="subsq">As he neared, the reek grew worse, and he could practically taste it. Lots of distended green-blue bottle flies buzzed nearby.</p> <p class="subsq">He dismounted at the end of the carnage and looped his reins around a broken fragment of wagon wheel jutting from a groove in the dirt. The horse snorted and bucked at the pervasive odor of nearby death. Altar patted the animal once more and scanned the horizon again.</p> <p class="subsq">Nothing yet, besides the approaching clouds every bit as bloated at the feasting flies. His ever-alert dog was still quiet up on the ridge.</p> <p class="subsq">The clouds, and the flashes of lightning, were the only things that looked threatening. He pulled his slicker from his saddle and unrolled it. The heat was stifling, but he put it on anyway.</p> <p class="subsq">Prairie schooners, mostly covered, had been overturned, their canvas torn, and the cargo, what wasn&rsquo;t worth taking, was strewn across the trail. Oxen had been killed; and in a couple of instances, steaks had been cut from their flesh. There was even a dead dog. A horse or two had been killed, which was unusual, but he suspected most of the quality animals had been stolen.</p> <p class="subsq">A smattering of rough arrows, fletched with feathers he didn&rsquo;t immediately recognize, were prominent on some of the dead animals. Men lay dead, too, the tops of their blond heads shorn to the bone, and their soft bellies torn open.</p> <p class="subsq">He came across an old woman&rsquo;s body. She lay on her back with her skirts up around her head. She&rsquo;d also been scalped, and her lady parts had apparently been mauled, probably by some wild critter. They were only doing what any hungry critter would do, and he couldn&rsquo;t really fault them for that. Might as well get mad at the clouds for raining.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>But it wasn&rsquo;t no animal that hiked her skirt up like that</em>, Altar thought. <em>That was done by a two-legged kind of varmint.</em></p> <p class="subsq">A baby lay under her. It was dead too, but from what he couldn&rsquo;t tell.</p> <p class="subsq">These were among the worst killings he&rsquo;d ever seen, but he couldn&rsquo;t really hold no ill will with the animals.</p> <p class="subsq">A fat raindrop splattered on the back of his hand, and then another. It wasn&rsquo;t until the moisture brought his mind round back to the present that he realized he was gripping his Henry so hard his scarred knuckles were white. The skies unleashed a torrent of rain as he stood and stared at the butchery that lay before him. Even the cold rain didn&rsquo;t divert his attention from the slaughter.</p> <p class="subsq">He reckoned no amount of water would wipe away the stain of this massacre from the earth. At least nothing short of the forty-days and forty-nights rain that his momma read to him and Bobby about from the Bible. He stowed his rifle back in its saddle boot and covered the Henry with his blanket, even though some blue sky was already visible over the hills to the west. He turned back to the trail and set his teeth. He had a grisly task ahead of him.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>Oh, Bobby</em>, he thought, <em>were you a part of this? Am I gonna find you?</em></p> <p class="subsq">Would it be better if his brother were among the dead, rather than having participated in this slaughter?</p> <p class="subsq">Perhaps so.</p> <p class="subsq">But on to the task&mdash;time to bury the dead.</p> <div class="ornamental-break"> <div class="ornamental-break-block ornamental-break-aspect-wide"> <div class="ornamental-break-size-container ornamental-break-width-281"> <img alt="" class="ornamental-break-image" src="images/break-dinkus-palatino-screen.svg"> </div> </div> <p class="ornamental-break-as-text">* * *</p> </div> <p class="first first-in-section first-full-width">He hadn&rsquo;t stopped for anything but water until the sun was about set, then he cobbled together a fire halfway to the top of the rise, upwind from the dead. The material for burying them all had been almost conveniently close thanks to the nearby rocky expanse, but any appetite he&rsquo;d worked up was long gone. He settled for some pan coffee and hardtack soaked some in the dark liquid.</p> <p class="subsq">All of the dead looked to be pilgrims. At least none had been his brother, nor had any of the others appeared to be the ne&rsquo;er-do-wells he&rsquo;d heard Bobby was now running with. While that was a relief, it also made him ask what the hell had happened to his brother. The boy he once knew would never have participated in anything like this. What had happened to him in the war?</p> <p class="subsq">The war.</p> <p class="subsq">The damn war&hellip; So many lives ruined.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar had served with the Union, and Bobby had gone with the South.</p> <p class="subsq">The brutal conflict between the states had divided his family and how many others?</p> <p class="subsq">He fished the oilcloth-wrapped locket from his saddlebag. He cradled the bundle in his hand for a long moment, and then opened it. The orange-red flames flickered in the reflection on the small metal oval. He thumbed it open and gazed at the shadowed picture within, not really seeing her likeness as much as some remembrance, though those had faded, like the picture, to near nothing.</p> <p class="subsq">How many times had he opened this same locket in the field?</p> <p class="subsq">When he fought in Missouri or out west, after some battle or skirmish, when his thoughts were dark with death and dying, he&rsquo;d found comfort by opening it. At one time, memories of her had driven some of the horror from his mind. Though the time apparently had driven memories of him from her mind as well. She&rsquo;d married someone else while he was away fighting.</p> <p class="subsq">Married some farmer with a hundred head of dairy cattle or some such. Why couldn&rsquo;t those images fade with time, as was the case with his memory of his love?</p> <p class="subsq">That thought brought him back around to the massacre. He hadn&rsquo;t found anything that led him to believe the wagon train had been herding any livestock, other than a few oxen. That was strange. Most of the wagon trains he&rsquo;d known had at least a hundred head of cattle or sheep with them.</p> <p class="subsq">He replaced the locket in his saddlebag and went to sleep with his freshly oiled rifle next him and his revolver tucked partially under the saddle upon which he laid his head.</p> <p class="subsq">The wind shifted in the night, and he awoke with the death stench heavy in his nose and mouth. He rose and hiked up to the top of the hill. The sun&rsquo;s rays were breaking over the hilltops in the east, but the bottom of the slope was still obscured in darkness.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>A shadow for the dead</em>, he thought. <em>Just as well</em>.</p> <p class="subsq">The dog loped up to him and sat, its tongue lolling out. Altar stood there and let the rays reach him, warming him against the chills of the past night. When he turned to go back to his makeshift camp, he gazed again at the ruins below, now basked in radiant sunlight.</p> <p class="subsq">The way he read the signs<span class="strikethrough">,</span> these homesteaders had died with their killers most likely hiding among them. And not like they were overrun by Indians or butchered by marauding men on horseback. Even though scavengers had been at the bodies, they hadn&rsquo;t done enough harm to make it look any different than it was. It didn&rsquo;t seem as if these people had time to even panic, let alone run, just die.</p> <p class="subsq">And what about the smattering of random arrows?</p> <p class="subsq">Indians?</p> <p class="subsq">Some of the folks had been scalped, but the arrows in some of the animals hadn&rsquo;t been what killed them. The feathered shafts weren&rsquo;t driven in deep. It was more like they were stabbed in by hand, not shot from a bow. No, this hadn&rsquo;t been the work of Indians, although measures had been taken to make it look that way. All the tracks of the living he&rsquo;d found had been wearing boots, nary a moccasin among them. And the horses that had rode off were all shod. He&rsquo;d never known an Indian to ride a shoed horse.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar knew what had really happened. And he had a real good idea of who was responsible. It made him sick to his stomach. He reckoned these pilgrims had been killed by the men he&rsquo;d been tracking, and they&rsquo;d tried to make it look like savages had done it.</p> <p class="subsq">The men he&rsquo;d been trailing&hellip; The men his brother had joined up with after being released from the prisoner of war camp in Chicago. Up until now, he&rsquo;d only thought of them as outlaws, stealing and the like, not murderers. The tactics were like what he&rsquo;d seen the guerillas in Missouri use during the war, infiltrate and destroy from within.</p> <p class="subsq">As he stared at the debris a while longer, the way the wagons had been overturned seemed more suited to men doing it deliberately as opposed to panicked animals. The battleground didn&rsquo;t look like any Indian attack he&rsquo;d seen in his years in the army. But it sure did look like how the Confederate guerillas had burned some communities to the ground in and around Missouri. And the people killed.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;These folks got bushwhacked,&rdquo; he said aloud. The dog looked up at him. Altar nodded as if the animal understood.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;A damn shame,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But there&rsquo;s something eviler if men make it look like someone else done it, getting people all riled up at the wrong folks.&rdquo; He started down the incline, back to his fire and bedroll.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;If we hadn&rsquo;t of happened along, Dog,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;whenever this here got discovered the Indians would&rsquo;ve been blamed. And people would&rsquo;ve been happy to believe it.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">He shook his head as he kicked dirt onto the coals.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Talking to a damn dog, guess I been on my own too long.&rdquo; He grinned. &ldquo;But it ain&rsquo;t like them homesteaders been talking much.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">He looked in the direction the tracks led off. It didn&rsquo;t seem right that no one was doing nothing about these people.</p> <p class="subsq">Hell, once he left here, would anyone even know?</p> <p class="subsq">Altar sighed and placed the blanket and saddle onto his horse&rsquo;s back. The nagging question remained in his gut like solid stone.</p> <p class="subsq">Had Bobby been a part of this?</p> <p class="subsq">When Altar had begun this journey, he&rsquo;d just been looking to bring his brother back home to their farm in Missouri while their mother was still alive. But now, he didn&rsquo;t know what to think. The little brother he knew before the war would never have been involved in anything like this, but the war did strange things to people. Still, he didn&rsquo;t want to think it had turned Bobby into the kind of man that could do what he&rsquo;d seen these last two days.</p> <p class="subsq">He took his hat off and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve and looked at the dog.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Mama always said I looked for trouble, even when it wasn&rsquo;t none of mine to begin with.&rdquo; He twisted in his saddle and looked back at the site of the carnage. &ldquo;I know it would kill her, for certain, if she thought Bobby was involved in some way. So would his hanging for it.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">A grim smile suddenly overtook him as he mounted his horse.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>There I go talking to that mutt again</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">But as he rode away, his mother&rsquo;s reproachful voice kept echoing in his mind: <em>Go find your brother, John. Bring him back to me before I die.</em></p> <p class="subsq"><em>I&rsquo;ll do my best, Mama</em>, he thought.</p> <p class="subsq">Altar pulled his reins over and set off after the tracks of the killers, including his little brother.</p> </div> </div>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c4">LAST CALL</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc"><i>December 1943</i></h2> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Private First Class John Rondello closed the door behind him and turned to face the barroom. As he stamped snow from his shoes, he allowed his eyes to scan the smoky dimness before him. The place was small for a soldiers’ bar, barely forty feet across with the actual bar running down the side to Rondello’s right. To his left, scattered indifferently, were eight small, round tables, and he was relieved to see that only two were occupied. The room’s flooring consisted of worn, wooden planks under a sprinkling of pale yellow sawdust, the bare grey walls scarred with sporadic spottings of water damage. An oddly pleasant odor of beer, whiskey and cigarettes wafted in the warm air. A scrawny Douglas fir stood in a corner, its needles already drying, growing brittle against red and green Christmas lights.</div> <div class="indent">Ten G.I.s stood at the bar, scattered and clumped in small groups along its length, a few looking up from their drinks or conversations as Rondello entered. Two hookers sat at the far end, one sipping without pleasure at a flat looking beer, the other engaged in tee-hee chit-chat with a red-faced soldier of about nineteen.</div> <div class="indent">More than an hour to kill in this dive, thought Rondello.</div> <div class="indent">Moving toward one of the empty tables at the rear, he slipped the overseas cap from his head, unbuttoned his green uniform overcoat and tucked the folded cap into his belt. He could feel the appraising eyes of the beer sipping hooker as he crossed the room. Rondello imagined she liked what she saw. He kept his eyes purposely from her and sat at a table with his back to the bar facing a small, snow encrusted window which looked out to the Wrightstown Bus Depot directly across Main Street. He glanced at his Timex. Ten forty. The bus to New York City was due in from Philadelphia after midnight. He sighed and gazed into his watery reflection in the darkened window glass.</div> <div class="indent">At twenty-three, Rondello was the oldest man in his platoon. His sergeant was only twenty-two, although in many ways he seemed much older. The rest of the guys were eighteen and nineteen with a sprinkling of twenty-year-olds. Rondello had been drafted late, and he knew exactly who to thank for that. Or blame.</div> <div class="indent">Good old Willie Cosentino, Rondello thought. Willie the Widow Maker. There hadn’t been much Willie couldn’t get done even before the war, but once the conflict produced depression-busting paychecks for everyone and a thriving black market, Willie had grown godlike within the old Brooklyn neighborhood known as Red Hook.</div> <div class="indent">It was Willie who had arranged Rondello’s gig at the Alimony Prison, a popular Manhattan night club. Sure, he deserved the spot, but hell, there were lots of guys deserving of that job; it was Willie himself who spoke to the owner, an ex-prize fighter and bootlegger who had founded the Alimony Prison as a speakeasy many years earlier and then taken it legit once prohibition was repealed. When Willie spoke, people tended to listen. Willie the Widow Maker had grown up on President Street, just off Fourth Avenue, with another kid everyone called “Allie Boy.” The grapevine wise guys never tired of relating how it had been Willie who suggested a more fitting nickname for a tough kid like Alphonse Capone: “Scarface.”</div> <div class="indent">“‘Allie Boy’ sounds like one of them new peanut butters they’re selling,” Willie reportedly told Capone.</div> <div class="indent">Now Rondello smiled at the legend. He had never particularly liked Willie, but had always been pragmatic; if a guy wanted to amount to anything on Red Hook’s mean streets, working for Willie was the best way to do it. And if a guy dreamed of being a big-time singer like Sinatra, he needed someone to grease the wheels a little. Hell, thought Rondello, his Alimony Prison performance was reviewed by <i>The</i> <i>Times</i> just last year, <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>, for Pete’s sake. “Promising young crooner,” they said. “Dark, sensual good looks,” the guy had written. Johnny Rondello was a big hit.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello had been living on Sixteenth Street in Manhattan at the time, just a few blocks from the Alimony Prison’s Greenwich Village location. He was booked there for a long-term engagement. And then came the telephone call from Brooklyn.</div> <div class="indent">“Hey, Johnny, how ya doing?” Willie had said. “You with any a’ that high class Manhattan tail at the moment?”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello laughed. “No, Willie, not right at the moment. What’s up?”</div> <div class="indent">“I need you to go take care of sumthin’,” Willie said casually. “Nothin’ heavy, just the usual.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello had stiffened. He’d been hoping these little instances of “taking care” of something were finally behind him. How long, he wondered, would he be in Willie’s unrelenting debt?</div> <div class="indent">“What’s that?” he asked, forcing a mirroring casualness into his tone.</div> <div class="indent">“Matty the Milkman. He’s inta me for almost two c’s, and he’s been duckin’ me. Time he gets a little message.”</div> <div class="indent">“What kinda message?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s chuckle came through the line. “Relax, kid, I know you’re lightweight. Just go and see ‘im, that’s all. Smack ‘im around a little. Warn him next time it won’t be <i>you</i> comin’.”</div> <div class="indent">“Sure, Willie. I can put a little scare into him. He still live over on Dean Street?”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah. He leaves for work at two-thirty in the morning. That’d be the best time to catch him. Give ‘im the whole day drivin’ around in that milk wagon a’ his to think about the position he’s in.”</div> <div class="indent">“Consider it done, Willie. Anything else ya need?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, kid, I got some bad news. My guy at the draft board called. Seems he’s lost his nerve; he thinks the FBI is hidin’ under his friggin’ bed. Says he can’t keep misplacin’ your draft call up notice. He read about ya in the newspaper, the whata-ya-call-it…”</div> <div class="indent">“<i>The Times</i>?” Rondello suggested.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, yeah, <i>The</i> <i>Times</i>. He says pretty soon somebody’s gonna start wonderin’ why a gettin’ famous guy like you ain’t humpin’ around shootin’ at foreigners like the other losers. So we gotta get you fixed.”</div> <div class="indent">“Fixed?”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, fixed. By some doctor up on the Grand Concourse, up in the Bronx.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook his head and frowned. “Willie, what do you mean, ‘fixed’? I ain’t a Cocker Spaniel, for Pete’s sake.”</div> <div class="indent">For a moment there was silence on the line. Then Willie laughed. “Oh, I get it. No, Johnny, relax. It’s your ear, just your ear.”</div> <div class="indent">“You wanna cut my ear off?”</div> <div class="indent">“No, but now that you mention it, I did cut a guy’s ear off once. With one of my old man’s barber razors.”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie,” Rondello said, his stomach knotting a bit, “What’s this about <i>my</i> ear?”</div> <div class="indent">“The doc owes Jimmy Buttons, a friend of mine. Jimmy says no problem, he’ll just squeeze him a little and he’ll help us out on this.”</div> <div class="indent">“On what, Willie? What are we doing here?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, you go see this doctor, he’s a’ ear doctor, and he pokes a hole through your eardrum. Then you go for your draft interview. You tell them at the board, you say, ‘Hey, it’s about time you guys called me. I been waitin’. Where are those Nazis, I’m gonna kill them all.’ Then they say, ‘What a nice boy this one is. Set up his physical.’ You go for the physical, they find the punctured eardrum and bingo! Four-friggin’-eff. It’s back to the Alimony Prison and all them Manhattan Protestant broads you been bangin’, thanks to your buddy, Willie.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello didn’t like the sound of this. “And what am I? Deaf then? A deaf singer? I have to know tone, I have to know pitch, I have to—”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh, pipe down,” Willie said. “Listen, kid, you ain’t gonna be deaf. Is Sinatra deaf? Can he tone and pitch and whatever the hell? He got the same condition, he’s four-eff just like you gonna be.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello felt himself relax. “Sinatra? Sinatra’s got a punctured eardrum?”</div> <div class="indent">“Damn right. Probably got it the same way you gonna get yours.”</div> <div class="indent">And so Willie would make the arrangements. Rondello would be 4-F and skip this war. Sorry, folks, too busy. Maybe next time.</div> <div class="indent">“One more thing,” Willie said, “you been a little out of touch with the neighborhood lately. You should get to Brooklyn more often. The guys are startin’ to mumble about it.” Rondello thought about “the guys”—the dreamless, imagination-less pool shooters and card players, boozers and bums and skirt chasers, chain-smoking Luckies and greasing back their hair.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, sure, Willie, as soon as I get some time. Maybe next week sometime if I can—”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s voice cracked like a pistol shot through the phone. “No,” he said. “No, kid, not maybe. And not next week. You get here in a day or two, and you do the right thing, act like ya supposed to act, like a man. Don’t get fancy on me, Johnny, don’t play with me.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello paled. “Yeah, sure, Willie, tomorrow’s good. Tomorrow night’s good, after the late show, tell the guys. I’ll see ‘em down at the hangout, okay? Then after that, I’ll walk over to Dean Street and see Matty the Milkman.”</div> <div class="indent">Willie sounded placated. “Okay.” He paused. “One more thing. I guess you should hear this from me.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello frowned into the phone. “What?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie’s voice softened. “Your friend. Your friend Bobby. He ain’t coming home, kid. I’m sorry. I just heard about it this morning.” Rondello could feel his head begin to swim. Bobby Arena, his childhood best friend from the neighborhood. Bobby, like Rondello himself, had been a little different, a little smarter, maybe, than the other kids. In their special friendship, Bobby had once confided his deepest, darkest secret: Bobby liked poetry. He liked to read it. He even liked to write it.</div> <div class="indent">Bobby had flushed red when he told Rondello. “You think maybe I’m like some kind of sissy, Johnny?” he had whispered, his eyes welling with tears.</div> <div class="indent">“Bobby’s… <i>dead</i>?” Rondello asked.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, kid. I’m sorry. But he should never have gone and joined up. He got all pissed off after Pearl Harbor, remember? He took it real personal—like those Japs had bombed the Brooklyn Bridge.”</div> <div class="indent">“How? Where?”</div> <div class="indent">“How-where what?”</div> <div class="indent">“How’d he die? Where’d he die? What happened?”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh. I think he got shot. A place called Tarawa, some island somewheres. Too bad, the kid was okay. And I gotta give ‘im this much. He was tough. Hard as nails.”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, a tough guy,” Rondello said dully.</div> <div class="indent">“‘Arena the Cleaner,’ the terror of Guadalcanal. Every Jap mother’s nightmare. Whata ya gonna do? Nobody gets outta here alive. I’ll see ya, kid.” Willie hung up.</div> <div class="indent">Two nights later Rondello found himself standing in the second floor walk-up foyer of a battered Dean Street tenement. He dropped his cigarette butt, crushed it out against the black-and-white tiled floor, and he waited.</div> <div class="indent">Matty the Milkman was forty-two years old. He lived alone in a three-room apartment. Each morning, he woke at one-thirty a.m. and fixed a breakfast of farina, jellied toast, and black coffee. He then donned his white uniform and walked two blocks to the BMT subway on Fourth Avenue. He rode to the sprawling dairy in Long Island City where he would load his milk truck with thick, heavy bottles of cold milk, cream, orange juice, and cardboard boxes of butter. By mid-morning his day’s work was done, freeing him to return to the neighborhood and purchase a racing form. By seven p.m. Matty would retire for six hours of sleep before repeating the same daily routine.</div> <div class="indent">As Rondello waited, he found himself pondering the pointlessness of such an existence. It was why, he supposed, Matty took his scant earnings and wagered them on horses and baseball or anything offered by the local bookie, an associate of Willie the Widow Maker. Anything, Rondello supposed, to provide some excitement would be preferable to doing nothing. A sad choice made by a sad, lonely man.</div> <div class="indent">At precisely two-thirty, Rondello saw the apartment door swing open. The foyer where he stood was ten-by-ten-foot square, a steep staircase to the left. An anemic twenty-five-watt bulb was affixed to a far wall, Rondello positioned away from it in shadow. He watched as Matty locked his door and turned toward the stairs.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello stepped forward. He wore a dark trench coat and a black Fedora pulled low on his brow. His hands were jammed into the coat pockets, his shoulders hunched. He had done this before. He knew how to stage it.</div> <div class="indent">“Hey, Matty,” he said, lightly touching the man’s shoulder, a slight snarl to his voice. “You got a minute?”</div> <div class="indent">Matty, deeply startled, gave a gasp and turned toward the voice. Rondello stepped closer, manufacturing an evil smile. Matty took a quick step back in fear.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello sneered. “Willie says hello,” he snarled, then lashed out a backhanded slap, catching Matty hard across his right cheek.</div> <div class="indent">And that was it. John Rondello, aspiring radio star, headliner at Manhattan’s swinging Alimony Prison—now a murderer.</div> <div class="indent">Matty the Milkman fell backward from the top of the stairwell. Halfway down the steps, his neck broke. When his tumbling body finally slammed onto the tile entryway floor, his skull split with a sickening, wet sounding thud. Dead because John Rondello needed to keep Willie the Widow Maker happy; appease him in order to ensure the continued success of his own career.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello, initially frozen in terror, had finally fled. A death occurring during the commission of a felony is legally classified “felony murder.” It carries the same penalty as first degree murder: life imprisonment or death by electric chair; in mob-related cases the latter usually being the punishment of choice.</div> <div class="indent">When Rondello told him what had occurred, Willie was displeased but not particularly concerned. “Stuff happens, kid,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just write off Matty’s debt and set you up with an alibi. If the cops ever figure this for somethin’ more than an accident, which I doubt will ever happen, you’ll have three witnesses ready to say you were with them. Forget about this.”</div> <div class="indent">Now, sitting in the New Jersey bar, Rondello lit a cigarette and tried to force thoughts of Matty the Milkman from his mind. Instead, he thought of Bobby Arena. Poor, pale, skinny Bobby. Sometimes Rondello believed it was Bobby’s secret love of poetry that had propelled him to the Marine Corp recruiting office that December day two years earlier. Bobby Arena, “Arena the Cleaner,” the street guys nicknamed him after Guadalcanal. Bobby had used a flame thrower on the Canal, moving under fire from rat-hole to rat-hole, burning to death the pitiful, half-starved Japanese kids who huddled down in those holes, chained to their machine guns. Bobby had sprayed the liquid fire into the holes then listened for screams. He cleaned them out alright, scores of them, and thus the nickname “Arena the Cleaner,” for the gentle, quiet boy who proved to himself and everyone else that he was no sissy.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook his head to clear it of the haunting ghosts and ordered beer from the slight, pimply-faced waitress who had suddenly materialized next to his table. He watched her shuffle away.</div> <div class="indent"><i>And I’m no different</i>, thought Rondello. What am <i>I </i>trying to prove? Here I sit dressed in this costume waiting to catch a bus from Fort Dix to New York City for thirty days’ Christmas leave. And then what? Europe for sure. Rondello had heard the rumors. He had sized up the situation. The Wehrmacht was collapsing. The Russians were already kicking them back to Germany. An allied invasion was imminent, the glory-seeking generals had figured out a surefire way of getting themselves into the history books. Invade Europe, probably from England and probably soon<i>. God almighty why didn’t I just have my damn eardrum punctured?</i> he thought. <i>What was </i>I<i> trying to prove?</i> His thoughts slipped back to Willie Cosentino’s reaction when he told him he hadn’t gone through with the procedure. While Rondello attempted to explain that which he couldn’t fully understand himself and most likely never would, he had seen the fury ablaze within Willie’s muddy brown eyes.</div> <div class="indent">“You didn’t do it?!” Willie had screamed. “You stupid moron, you didn’t do it!”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie, I… I couldn’t. Everybody else is going. I gotta go, too. I don’t know why exactly, maybe for Bobby, I don’t know. It’s just bad luck that I’m draft age in nineteen forty-three and there’s a war going on. I <i>gotta</i> go.”</div> <div class="indent">Willie reached out a stub-fingered hand covered with coarse black curly hair. He took hold of Rondello’s shirt front.</div> <div class="indent">“You stupid sucker!” he hissed, his eyes slit and his breath sour and foul. “You just don’t get it. You think they won’t have a war for slum kids to fight in 1953? 1963? 1973? Didja check out Ford’s profits last year? Kaiser’s? General Electric’s? They found their answer, kid, same as we found ours. <i>Our</i> future is dope: heroin. It’s the new bootleg, the future gambling and prostitution, ‘cause that’ll all get legalized someday. But never heroin. That’s <i>our </i>future, and we’re gonna eat up and spit out dead a whole bunch of slum kids with that dope. And Ford and them others, they do the same thing with the same slum kids. War, Johnny, that’s <i>their</i> answer, that’s their future. War.” He pushed Rondello away from him. “Go fight for them, kid. Go get killed. But believe me, if you survive it, you can forget about singin’ in <i>this </i>town. You wanna kiss up to the citizens, kid, you go ahead. But I’ll see you dead before you ever get a job in this town again. You’ll be finished. Now beat it.”</div> <div class="indent">“Listen, Willie,” Rondello pleaded, “this war, it’s the defining event of my lifetime. Of my whole generation. Twenty years from now, what am I going to say, what do I tell people? Bobby went and died—what do I tell people <i>I</i> did?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie shook his head. “You ain’t no different from the politicians who started this mess, Johnny. You’re just looking for a place in history, and you’re too damn stupid to see that it don’t make a rat’s ass bit a difference to nobody what you do.”</div> <div class="indent">“But Willie…”</div> <div class="indent">“No!” he hissed. “No. Save it. I had big hopes for you, kid. You’re with me or against me. You do this, if you go, you’re against me. End of story.”</div> <div class="indent">Rondello leaned his head back and brought both hands to his forehead. He slowly massaged his brow before lowering his eyes back to Willie’s stone chiseled face.</div> <div class="indent">“Why, Willie? Why does it have to be like that?”</div> <div class="indent">Willie sighed. “You really don’t know, do you?”</div> <div class="indent">“No. I don’t.”</div> <div class="indent">“Because, kid, you were gonna make me legit. You were gonna be a star, a big star. On the radio. All the best joints, gigs with the real big-timers—Dorsey, Miller, all a’ them. You were gonna go places I could never go, meet people I could never meet. That’s why I helped you, that’s why I used up favors and promised out favors, leaned on people. You were gonna make it real big, kid, and it would be because a’ me. And then someday maybe I’d live in some big house out on Long Island somewheres, and all my neighbors would have their noses up in the air every time they seen me. But then I’d call on you, Johnny Rondello, the big star, and you’d be right there for me. Maybe sing at my daughter’s wedding even. And all them people, all them white bread bastards, they’d all know I was <i>somebody. </i>They’d know I was somebody <i>big</i>! Somebody they would have to respect.”</div> <div class="indent">“Willie, please…”</div> <div class="indent">“No, kid, that’s it. Beat it. You was selling shoes when you came to me for a break, and I set you up in Sally’s club in Flatbush. Remember? You was sellin’ shoes. And if them krauts don’t kill ya first, which I hope they do, then that’s how you’re gonna die—selling shoes.”</div> <div class="indent">The waitress’ reappearance pulled Rondello from his memories. She set the bottle of Pabst down in front of him.</div> <div class="indent">“Twenty-five cents,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">He dropped a dollar on her tray. “And bring me a double shot of J &amp; B, too,” he said, realizing a sudden need for harsh liquor in this throat.</div> <div class="indent">After she had come and gone a second time, Rondello drank the scotch quickly, washing it down with the cold beer. There had been a time when he avoided hard liquor, fearful of its ravishing effect on his vocal cords, but those days were long gone.</div> <div class="indent">Now his fear was of the future, a steeped, utter fear, and it was a new experience for him. His future had always seemed so bright, so promising, and now it loomed black and bleak before him. He had been so very much afraid lately. It was hard for him to sleep even after long, grueling days of Advanced Infantry Training. The nights would enhance his terror, and it would creep across him with an icy liquidity, stirring loosely in his bowels, knotting the muscles of his jaw.</div> <div class="indent">Because he knew what was coming. His imagination had often been cruel to him growing up as he had on the streets of Brooklyn, and now that imagination stabbed at him without mercy. In the senses of his mind, he heard the combat, smelled it, even tasted it. He was just too imaginative for the infantry. It was that simple.</div> <div class="indent">He sipped at his beer and thoughts of Bobby Arena returned to him. They had grown up together, sharing a magical secret bond of imagination. They dreamed their dreams together, each one separate, different, yet so alike and so sweet. Bobby with his dreams of poetry, Rondello with his dreams of singing, performing, becoming a star on the radio. And now Bobby lay rotting, buried raw and bloody in some distant volcanic ash of a grave, his poetry silent, dead forever on his decaying, maggot-ridden lips.</div> <div class="indent">The other kids had no idea about the poetry—not Jake or Zoot or Little Danny. Bobby’s eyes had often twinkled with their secret as he and Rondello moved into their teens, cocky and swaggering, exploring the girls, testing the waters…</div> <div class="indent">Rondello shook the memories from his head and drained his beer. He called to the waitress and sat blank eyed as she brought the second round. He lifted the scotch to his mouth. “For you, Bobby,” he said, and knocked the liquor back into his throat.</div> <div class="indent">And now it was his own dream which lay dead and gone. Even if he did come away from the war undamaged, which he seriously doubted, there’d be Willie to deal with. Willie the Widow Maker did not make idle threats; he did not change his mind. He had the means to make good his threat to Rondello. If Willie got on the phone to Manhattan, Rondello would be through in New York. Not one club, not the Copacabana, not the Latin Quarter, certainly not the Alimony Prison would touch him with a ten foot pole. Not if Willie said no. Not if they wanted their linens cleaned, their waiters at work, their liquor delivered. No, Johnny Rondello was finished in New York, even if he managed to survive long enough for it to matter. And if he dared re-locate to Chicago or Los Angeles or anywhere, the ultimate threat still existed: Matty the Milkman and that horrible tenement staircase.</div> <div class="indent">Rondello’s thoughts then turned to his last show at the club. A scout from NBC had been there watching, listening, assessing him. The guy had come away impressed.</div> <div class="indent">“Call me,” he had said. “When you get out of the service, call me. I really like your style.” Rondello smiled a bitter smile and drank his beer dry. Would the guy still like his style when some bent-nose walked into his office and asked for a special “favor” for “the boys”? When a police detective came in voicing allegations and alluding to murder? No, style wouldn’t be enough then. There were plenty of guys with style, and they would come with no strings attached.</div> <div class="indent">He called for yet another round and glanced again at his Timex. It was just after eleven, and he was drinking much too fast. He shrugged away the thought. So what? Maybe he’d manage to get some sleep on the bus ride if he were drunk enough.</div> <div class="indent">He was just finishing off another scotch when the shadow fell across his table. He looked up to his right and saw her standing there. It was the hooker from the bar, the beer sipper. She smiled at him.</div> <div class="indent">“Hiya, Johnny,” she said. He frowned. They always call a guy Johnny, these bimbos. An unfortunate coincidence in his case.</div> <div class="indent">“I’m not interested, sister, beat it,” he said, reaching for his beer and dropping his eyes from her.</div> <div class="indent">She didn’t move. Rondello let five seconds pass then looked back at her face. He saw that she was about his age, slightly younger. She had short, strawberry-blond hair that was almost natural and high cheek bones. Her nose was small and cute, and she had nice green eyes. It came as a surprise to him that she was pretty. He blinked the surprise away.</div> <div class="indent">“Look, honey,” he said in low, cold tones. He wanted to hurt her, drive her away, make her leave him to his scotch and beer and dead friends and dead dreams.</div> <div class="indent">“Look,” he repeated, his eyes hard, “it ain’t my problem you’re all dressed up with no one to screw, okay? Just leave me alone. There’s fifteen other guys in here for you to impress. You don’t need me.”</div> <div class="indent">He could see hurt come into her face and waited for her anger. He had dealt with pushy whores before, ever since he was seventeen and just starting to work the bars and clubs. He knew the routine. He figured now she would curse him and call him queer and then buzz off. But the hurt remained. There was no anger in her eyes. He frowned. What the hell…?</div> <div class="indent">“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked in a tiny voice, a girl’s voice. “I thought maybe you just didn’t see me when you first came in, but that’s not it. You <i>really</i> don’t remember.” Rondello slid his chair back and looked at her hard. His memory stared back at him blankly as he scanned her features, her mannerisms. She stood still before him almost like a child, clutching her purse against her stomach, eyes wide.</div> <div class="indent">“Look, sister, let’s not waste each other’s time,” he said, using a softer tone than before. “If this is some kind of hustle, let me tell you, you ain’t in my league. You’re a small-town kid playing dress-up, okay? So if it’s a hustle, you better just forget about it.”</div> <div class="indent">The girl looked at him, and he could see a slight defiance come into her face. He felt a sudden deepening of his sadness and wondered why and tried to push it away. He knew he was already drunk.</div> <div class="indent">“I’ll go, Johnny,” she said, and this time he realized she knew his name, he wasn’t just another john to her. “If that’s what you want. But you should remember. You said you would.” She seemed to brace herself then, throwing back her shoulders. “And anyway, I don’t care if you forgot. I almost forgot, too. I woulda forgot except for, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again.’ Except for that, I woulda forgot, too.” She began to turn from him.</div> <div class="indent">He reached out a hand, grabbing her arm.</div> <div class="indent">“Wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. What, ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’? What does that mean?”</div> <div class="indent">She turned to face him again. He could tell that although she was trying not to, she began to smile at him.</div> <div class="indent">“You sang it for me, Johnny,” she said softly. “You sang ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’ just for <i>me</i>.”</div> <div class="indent">His face remained blank while his thoughts swirled behind his eyes. If he had a nickel for every broad he had sung to…</div> <div class="indent">The girl slipped her arm from his light grasp.</div> <div class="indent">“I’ll ne-<i>ver</i> smile a-gain until I smile at you.” She sang slowly and off-key in low tones as he watched and listened. He found himself beginning to remember.</div> <div class="indent">He stood up slowly. “I’ll never laugh a-gain—what good would it do?” he crooned in a barely audible voice.</div> <div class="indent">“You’re… Linda, right?” he said. She slapped lightly at his chest. “Lucy,” she said. “Not Linda, Lucy.” She put her hands on her hips and glared at him.</div> <div class="indent">“Well, hell,” he said, pulling out a chair for her, “don’t get mad. At least I had the right letter of the alphabet.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed and sat down. “I’ll bet that’s better than you usually do,” she said happily.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny sat and looked across the table at her. Lucy was smiling serenely. It was as though nothing unpleasant had just occurred between them. She appeared totally pleased, completely at peace with being there with him. Rondello called for the waitress, and while Lucy ordered beer, he took the opportunity to remember her more fully.</div> <div class="indent">Although he couldn’t quite place the face, and indeed the woman across from him could very well be a complete stranger, he had at least recalled the particular event. It had been about two months earlier, while he was in Basic Training. His company had received a twenty-four-hour pass for high performance on the rifle range, and Rondello, like most of the others, headed for this small town nestled just beside the sprawling Fort Dix.</div> <div class="indent">He remembered drinking quite a lot, something he rarely did. It seemed to him now, thinking back, that he had been trying to drink away his need for a woman. By that point he had been confined to one or another Army post for a long time and was thoroughly sick of unrelenting male companionship. In retrospect, he found his logic questionable; he wondered if it was, in fact, even possible to drink away the need for a woman. It certainly seemed unlikely at best, counterproductive at worst.</div> <div class="indent">And so he had found a woman, and they had a pretty good time in whatever bar they were in. He felt fairly certain that it hadn’t been this bar, the one they were in now, but he couldn’t be sure. They wound up in a room somewhere, and he vaguely recalled some discussion about price and nature of services. Now he fought to push away the blanketing dark fog on his memory.</div> <div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said as he watched her sip at a fresh beer, “I’m a little shaky on the details, you know, about that night, but I do remember I had a good time.”</div> <div class="indent">She smiled around her glass. “So did I, Johnny,” she said.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny had heard enough tactful chatter from pros to smile at her answer. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll just bet. But what I want to know, if you don’t mind me askin’ is, well… did I <i>pay</i> you?”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “Well, we weren’t exactly on a date, you know. I <i>was </i>working.”</div> <div class="indent">“Oh,” he said. The information disturbed him. He had only paid for sex once. He was sixteen and he and Bobby had gotten themselves hooked up with two older guys from the neighborhood. He remembered the stark tenement on Pacific Street and the haggard, bleached-out old whore that had taken the four of them. He shuddered. Damn shame he hadn’t been blind drunk <i>that </i>night.</div> <div class="indent">“Oh,” he repeated and drank more scotch.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy looked across at him. Her eyes were twinkling. “You really don’t remember much about it, do you?”</div> <div class="indent">He shrugged. “I do remember singing to you. ‘I’ll Never Smile Again,’ one of my big numbers.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy giggled. “Oh, I shouldn’t even tell you, you’re so silly. But I will anyway.”</div> <div class="indent">Johnny cocked his head to one side. He could never remember a hooker using the word ‘silly’ before, and it had an innocently appealing ring to it. He suddenly began to worry. <i>How lonely am I? </i>he thought.</div> <div class="indent">“Tell me what?”</div> <div class="indent">“Well, you did pay me. Three dollars.” She shook her hair and brushed a strand from her forehead. “And then I paid you. Three dollars.”</div> <div class="indent">“What?” he asked, his brows arching.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy laughed. “It was <i>your</i> idea. You said, ‘I’ll pay you for sex, and you pay me for a song. You’re a pro, I’m a pro.’” She began to giggle. “Then you said, ‘Tit for tat, tit for tat,’ and got all hysterical laughing. You were so <i>silly.</i>”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “Remind me never to switch to a comedy routine.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy was still giggling. It seemed the more they talked, the more animated her features became, the prettier she seemed to become.</div> <div class="indent">“You were really nice,” she said. “A real gentleman. At first I was a little scared, you know. When we went into the room, you led me right to the bed and made me sit down. Your hair was all messed up, and you kept muttering about something and then you would laugh. I knew you were from the city, from New York, and some of you guys from <i>New York</i>! Well, I could tell you some stories, believe me. But you turned out to be nice. Really swell. But so <i>silly</i>!”</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, that’s me, nice guy all the way.” He looked at her. “But don’t you get scared lots of times? I mean, with some of these guys?” he jerked his head towards the bar and the sullen, hunched shouldered group of G.I.s. “Some of these guys are really animals, especially these rebel rouser characters from Ole Miss’ or wherever.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy shook her head. “The worst are you New York guys. Believe me, I could tell you some stories.”</div> <div class="indent">They sat and drank for a while. Johnny could feel a strange conflict developing within himself as he grew more drunk. There was such an easy lack of tension between them; it was so comfortable to sit in silence with her that he ironically found himself beginning to tense up. He didn’t <i>want </i>comfortable silence; it seemed dangerously intimate to him. What he wanted was slick conversation and false bravado, the phoniness he usually brought to his always transient female relationships. It was what kept him free and in charge and out of danger. Yet, he found himself enjoying this. His thoughts suddenly returned to Bobby. He and Bobby had spent much time together in comfortable silence. Sometimes, when they were kids, they would hop on the Third Avenue trolley and ride up to Shore Road and the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. They would climb down the ridge to the edge of the Narrows and sit with their backs against huge rocks and gaze across the flat water to Staten Island. Sometimes they would smoke two-for-a-penny cigarettes, and Bobby would read silently from his battered book of Whitman poetry. When was the last time he had thought about Walt Whitman? It seemed very long ago.</div> <div class="indent">Now he sat and drank for a while longer before leaning slightly forward across the table toward Lucy. He felt the sudden rush of the beer and scotch envelop him. <i>Damn</i>, he thought, <i>I’m scared and very drunk and lonely and sitting with a whore that could be somebody sweet. Careful, careful, don’t talk, don’t speak.</i></div> <div class="indent">But he did. He seemed to be observing himself from somewhere off in the corner beside the sad Christmas tree. He imagined Bobby there in the corner with him, amused. “Go ahead, Johnny,” Bobby whispered to him, “go ahead, Buddy, open up. Open up. It won’t <i>kill</i> you.”</div> <div class="indent">“Lucy,” he said softly, his eyes pleading. “Lucy, I’m scared. Really scared.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy saw the change come over him. She put her glass down. Her face grew serious, yet, at the same time remained oddly soft. “I think maybe you’re pretty drunk, Johnny,” she said into his sad brown eyes.</div> <div class="indent">“Yeah, okay, I know, I’m drunk. But I am scared, Lucy, scared real bad.”</div> <div class="indent">She reached out a hand and gently touched his cheek. “I know, baby, I know. All you guys are scared. It’ll be okay. The war can end soon, real soon, maybe even before you get there.”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “Not without an invasion, Lucy. They won’t let it end without that. It’s what they want, a big, flashy invasion for the newsreels and the history books. These guys, these presidents and generals and premiers and kings, they don’t live for their <i>lives</i>—they live for history, for some scatterbrained idea of immortality. They don’t care about people’s dreams, your dreams, Bobby’s dreams, my dreams. They just care about history, <i>their</i> place in history, nothing else.” Through the banging now suddenly sounding in his head, Johnny could hear an echoing of his words, an echoing of Willie the Widow Maker’s words.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy didn’t know who Bobby was, but she knew about dreams. She had her own dreams once, and they hadn’t included whoring in some run-down bar in New Jersey.</div> <div class="indent">She couldn’t think of anything to say that would be comforting and still carry truthfulness. It occurred to her that truth rarely held comfort for anyone anyway; certainly not for her. So she remained silent, taking his hand and rubbing it gently between her own.</div> <div class="indent">Johnny raised squinted eyes to meet hers. “Lucy,” he said softly. “Do you believe in fate? Some intervention from God or the universe or something—some force that evens up the score? Do you think there’s an ultimate justice to everything, like we all get what’s coming to us?”</div> <div class="indent">She pondered it, instinctively aware of, without fully understanding, the deep need in him, the sudden importance of her opinion.</div> <div class="indent">“I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “But—from what I’ve seen so far in life—I’d have to guess, no. No—there is no ultimate justice.” She found herself tensing, her throat seeming to close on itself. “No justice at all.”</div> <div class="indent">He gave a slight head shake. “I’m not so sure about that. I think, maybe… I’m gonna get what’s comin’ to me.”</div> <div class="indent">“You’ll be okay, Johnny, you’re not going to get killed.”</div> <div class="indent">He looked deeper into her eyes. “Killed?” he asked as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Killed? It’s okay if I get killed, Lucy. If I get killed, the show’s over, that’s it, goodnight Irene. I can get killed, that’d be okay; I’m not leaving anything behind. But there’s worse things than that, things I’m <i>really</i> scared of. What if they blow my legs off or shoot my arms off? What if they burn me up, Lucy? I saw a guy back in the neighborhood, some kid I never liked, he’d been a tank gunner. They cooked him in that tank like a roast pepper. He came back lookin’ like a monster. He had no eyelids, Lucy, no eyelids! He had to wear special glasses that made him look like a giant house fly.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy felt her eyes tearing up. “I know, Johnny, I know,” she said. “It’ll be alright, you’ll be alright.”</div> <div class="indent">He sat back in his chair. Johnny could feel his heart racing. He looked quickly at his watch. It was nearly time to go across to the depot, catch that bus, get out of here. Get back to the neighborhood, maybe go see Willie. Yeah, he thought, that was it. Go see Willie. Tell Willie that he made a mistake, what a fool he had been not to listen. Get me out of this, Willie, please get me out of this! All I wanna do is sing, that’s all, I got nothing against the krauts, the Japs, or those Italian clowns! Just let me stay home and sing. The bartender suddenly cleared his throat harshly. “Okay, folks, drink up, drink ‘em up. Last call, this is it, last call. Closin’ time is midnight, and this here is the last call.”</div> <div class="indent">Johnny looked at Lucy with panic in his eyes. She forced a smile across to him.</div> <div class="indent">“It’ll be okay, Johnny. You’ll see, it’ll be okay.”</div> <div class="indent">He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t. I’m not afraid to die, Lucy, ‘cause I’m already dead. My <i>dream</i> is dead. All I got left are my arms and my legs and my eyes, but no dream. Just like Bobby has no dream left. It’s over, Lucy.”</div> <div class="indent">Lucy felt a flutter of fear and pity in her heart and believed he was right, sensed somehow he knew what was coming. Her eyes over-brimmed with moisture as she leaned across the table and squeezed his trembling hands.</div> <div class="indent">“It’ll be okay. You’ll have your dreams, Johnny. It’ll be okay.”</div> <div class="indent">But cool, hip, smooth-talking Johnny Rondello knew better. It wouldn’t be okay. Maybe it had never been okay.</div> <div class="indent">He pulled his hand away from Lucy’s and drained his beer glass. As he set it down with trembling fingers, he could feel tears running freely down his cheeks.</div> <div class="indent">Lucy stood and moved to his side. She took hold of his arm and helped him to his feet. He was unsteady, very drunk.</div> <div class="indent">“Come on, Johnny,” she said gently. “It’s last call. Let’s get out of here.”</div> <div class="indent">She took a final look around the barroom.</div> <div class="indent">“It’s last call,” she repeated.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} s {text-decoration: line-through;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c2">Prologue</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent">Jolo, Sulu Archipelago</div> <div class="indent">The Philippines</div> <div class="indent">The Battle of Bud Bagsak</div> <div class="indent">July 15, 1913</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <h2 class="center sigil_not_in_toc">Day Four</h2> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>It was like being wide awake and being caught in the middle of a nightmare.</div> <div class="indent">How many hours had it been?</div> <div class="indent">He wished he knew. It was as if time itself had stopped.</div> <div class="indent">The sweat poured out of Jim Bishop so copiously that it felt like a steady stream of water being poured over his face. His eyes burned and he had to keep blinking to try and clear his vision, but it was no use. The cloying moisture clung to his eyelids. His lips tasted the constant saltiness. It was their third trip up the mountain that day, and once again, their advance stalled as the crater came alive once more. One moment it was all green bushes, thick shrubbery, and clusters of trees and temporal placidity, and the next instant it gave way to a surging wave of brown men dressed in red loincloths and accompanying red headbands, their veins bulging out in bas-relief along limbs bound tight by constricting ligatures and vines. The Moros, or the <i>pulajans</i> as the Filipino Scouts called them, seemed to rise up from behind every bush, every tree, virtually from the dark earth itself. The surge of humanity descended from the lip of the crater, brandishing their razor-sharp <i>talibongs</i>. The rhythmic chant, “<i>Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac</i>,” sounded in unison like an advancing drumbeat.</div> <div class="indent">Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac—Tagalog for Cut-cut, cut-cut, cut-cut.</div> <div class="indent">And that’s what they did.</div> <div class="indent">Jim stopped and raised the muzzle of his Winchester 1897 shotgun, racking the slide back and then forward to chamber a round.</div> <div class="indent">The man next to him, a young lieutenant who’d just arrived in the country two weeks ago, turned and darted to his right toward the cover of a cluster of trees perhaps ten yards away. From the corner of his eye Jim saw the young officer’s foot snare the elongated vine trigger.</div> <div class="indent">“Sir,” Jim yelled, taking his eye off the enemy for a split second. “Don’t move!”</div> <div class="indent">But his warning was a millisecond too late.</div> <div class="indent">The vine trigger snapped and released a twisted branch in a horizontal arc, sending a row of sharpened spikes into the lieutenant’s body with a sickening thump.</div> <div class="indent">The officer cried out, but the sound was reduced to a pathetic gurgle as he went limp, bouncing off the branch and flopping down onto his back. A trio of gaping holes, already filling with blood, was stitched across the front of his brown uniform shirt. His legs convulsed, like he was still on his feet, still trying to move away, but with each movement more blood and slithering intestines seeped out of his wounds.</div> <div class="indent">Jim ran to the man, but could tell he was dying.</div> <div class="indent">He wanted to offer some comfort, some assurance that it would be all right, but he couldn’t bring himself to lie. A few seconds later, he saw that it didn’t matter anyway. Vacuous eyes, still wide open from the shock, stared directly upward, unflinching under the unbearably bright sun as it shone down.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Dead</i>, Jim thought.</div> <div class="indent">There was no time for sentiment or mendacious words</div> <div class="indent">The ominous mantra continued unabated: “Tac-tac, tac-tac, tac-tac . . .”</div> <div class="indent">The Moros were almost upon them. The sons of bitches were savages, fighting with bows and arrows and spears and traps. They had some guns, but not a lot, and those huge talibong knifes could chop you apart with one solid swing. They gave no quarter, nor did they expect any. Worst yet, they kept the families with them like human shields—old men, women, children. It was sickening.</div> <div class="indent">Shots rang out to Jim’s left.</div> <div class="indent">From his kneeling position by the dead lieutenant, he raised the shotgun, aimed at the nearest advancing <i>pulajan</i>, and pulled the trigger. The double-aught buck load ripped into the Moro’s side, tearing a large swath of skin and a hunk of meat away. The Moro stumbled for two steps as his mouth twisted into a scowl, the talibong still raised above his head.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Damn, these Moros are tough</i>, Jim thought as he worked the slide and chambered another round. The oblong blade caught a glint of sunlight for a moment before descending in an oblique arc.</div> <div class="indent">The shotgun discharged again and this time the pulagam went down, enveloped in a crimson mist.</div> <div class="indent">Jim felt the flecks of blood and body tissue dapple his face as the world suddenly went silent for several seconds.</div> <div class="indent">Another one came at him.</div> <div class="indent">A shotgun boomed off to his left.</div> <div class="indent">Larry Rush was next to Jim now, the trail of smoke trickling upward from his shotgun muzzle as the advancing Moro’s head exploded like a muskmelon struck by an axe handle. The man did an awkward, headless pirouette as he went down. Rush chambered another round and moved next to Jim.</div> <div class="indent">“The lieutenant dead?” Rush asked. He was shouting, but his voice still sounded far away.</div> <div class="indent">Far away . . .</div> <div class="indent">If only they could all be far away.</div> <div class="indent">Jim grunted a response as he sighted in on another rushing Moro and fired.</div> <div class="indent">Three more advanced from the left. Rush swiveled and blasted one, but the second one did a stutter-step, leaned back, and hurled a long bamboo spear. It sailed toward them. The next instant Rush dropped his weapon and grabbed his thigh as the pointed tip of the spear tore through the inner part of his pant leg. He toppled over, his eyes rolling back into his head.</div> <div class="indent">Jim turned and fired. The rounds took down the assailant, but two more were closing in on them. He fired once more. One of the oncoming Moros took the hit in the side, but kept advancing, taking three slack steps before collapsing. Jim racked the slide back and then forward, chambering what he knew was his last remaining round, and fired again. The blast hit the closest man. He jerked forward, then curled into a fetal position as he fell to the ground.</div> <div class="indent"><i>No more ammo</i>, Jim thought, gripping the Winchester’s hot barrel and stock. Despite the overheated metal searing his skin, he managed to bring the rifle up just in time to block the descent of another Moro’s two-foot-long talibong. The solid blade chunked into the wooden slide, splintering it. Jim twisted the rifle free and simultaneously rammed the base of the stock into the Filipino’s face. The man’s jaw jerked out of alignment and he paused just long enough for Jim to kick him in the groin as hard as he could. The Moro grimaced but drew back the large knife, ready to take another deadly swing.</div> <div class="indent">A split-second burst of fire and smoke whipped between them, and the Moro’s head snapped to the side as a shot rang out. Rush had managed to pull out his long-barreled Colt .45 revolver and fire it. Jim dropped the Winchester and drew his own revolver. Cocking back the hammer, he fired at the next group of advancing Moros. A burst of red blossomed on one man’s upper torso, just under his clavicle, but that didn’t stop him. A diagonal constricting loop of twine bisected the man’s chest, limiting the bleeding and enabling him to keep moving. Jim adjusted his aim, lining up the rear, M-shaped sight on the revolver with the single bar of the tip of the barrel.</div> <div class="indent">“Keep them damn sights flat across the top,” his drill sergeant had yelled at him in basic training.</div> <div class="indent">He squeezed the trigger. His next round pierced his adversary’s right eye.</div> <div class="indent">He fired four more times with undetermined results. The short, sweaty bodies kept coming, like a brown tidal wave capped with red. Jim turned to reach for Rush’s gun but saw his was empty, too.</div> <div class="indent"><i>The lieutenant</i>, Jim thought. He sidestepped to the right and knelt beside the fallen officer. His fingers scrambled to undo the dead man’s flap holster before feeling a textured grip. He pulled the weapon out and saw it was one of those new 1911 semiautomatic pistols, something only a few of the officers had. They were supposedly sitting in crates in New York Harbor or someplace, their distribution to the troops in the Philippines delayed by yet another layer of bureaucratic inefficiency. It was rumored that a few, a very few, of the officers had managed to sneak a special shipment in, and that was apparently true. The magazine purportedly held seven rounds, but Jim had never fired one.</div> <div class="indent"><i>No time like the present to learn</i>, he thought as he brought the pistol up, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.</div> <div class="indent">Nothing.</div> <div class="indent">In desperation he cocked back the hammer and tried again.</div> <div class="indent">The next trio of Moros was almost on top of them.</div> <div class="indent">The hammer clacked down and still the weapon didn’t fire.</div> <div class="indent">Was it a dud?</div> <div class="indent"><i>No</i>, he thought. <i>It’s just like a shotgun.</i> <i>There’s no round in the chamber.</i></div> <div class="indent">Gripping the row of vertical lines on the rear of the slide, he racked it back, felt it catch, and then whip forward.</div> <div class="indent">The Moro was raising his talibong over Rush’s supine body when this time the Colt’s round pierced the area just under the pulagam’s left armpit. The Moro fell like a marionette whose strings had been abruptly severed. Jim adjusted his aim and fired two more rounds, putting one into each of the advancing would-be killers. He dropped to one knee and frantically searched the dead lieutenant’s pouch for more magazines.</div> <div class="indent">Suddenly the sound of distant thunder rumbled accompanied by a screaming sound. Another set of rumbles along with more whistles and a burst of explosions echoed further up the ridge, by the mouth of the crater.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Artillery</i>, Jim thought. <i>Blackjack’s got the 40th zeroed in on them</i>.</div> <div class="indent">He felt a surge of hope as the area along the lip of the crater, where he knew the last Moro stronghold was, erupted in more roiling clouds of dust.</div> <div class="indent">The Moro advance suddenly halted, their heads rotating back toward the spiraling dust clouds farther up the hill, their eyes widening in horror.</div> <div class="indent">Jim knew their families, the women, the children, the elderly, were all up there in this last cotta. They had nowhere left to run. Orders were to wipe them all out.</div> <div class="indent">A company of Filipino Scouts, their brown uniforms drenched with sweat, streamed forward from the right flank and the left, their rifles barking fire, their bayonets fixed. They’d taken the brunt of the Moros’ attacks before and now they’d regrouped. From the look on their faces, no quarter would be given.</div> <div class="indent">Nor none expected.</div> <div class="indent"><i>Thank God</i>, he thought. <i>Maybe this nightmare is going to be over with now.</i></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">***</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="indent"><i>Historical Note</i></div> <div>The final siege then started at seventeen-hundred-oh-five hours. Three hours later it was over.</div> <div class="indent">Or was it?</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?--> <div class="element element-bodymatter element-container-single element-type-chapter element-with-heading" id="chapter-1"> <div class="heading heading-container-single heading-size-full heading-format-full heading-alignment-flexible heading-without-image"> <div class="heading-contents"> <div class="title-subtitle-block title-block-title-is-element-number"> <div class="element-number-block"> </div> <div class="title-block"> <h1 class="element-title case-mixed"><span class="element-number-term">Chapter</span> <span class="element-number-number">One</span></h1> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="text" id="chapter-1-text"> <div class="inline-image inline-image-kind-photograph inline-image-size-small inline-image-flow-center inline-image-flow-within-text inline-image-aspect-tall block-height-not-mult-of-line-height inline-image-without-caption inline-image-begins-section inline-image-before-element-end"> <div class="inline-image-container"> <img alt="Creepy Cattle Skull" width="210" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0301/3604/1571/files/skull-3163496.png?v=1728592403" height="280"> </div> </div> <p class="first first-in-chapter first-full-width first-with-first-letter-t"><strong><span class="first-letter first-letter-t first-letter-without-punctuation">T</span>HE SIGN SAID WELCOME to Sunnyvale.</strong></p> <p class="subsq">It was a large sign, the size of a family car, and it was showing its age. The passing vehicles had kicked up the dust from the road, which had reacted with the rain and trickled down its fa&ccedil;ade in little rivers, leaving a trail of sediment behind. Some of the kids from the village had taken potshots at it with their BB guns, leaving angry welts in the surface of the metal. It was plastered with bird shit and the facility&rsquo;s cartoon mascots&mdash;all animals, of course&mdash;looked like they were suffocating beneath the weight of it all. Sunnyvale&rsquo;s tagline was right there beneath it: <em>The Home of Good Food</em>.</p> <p class="subsq">Tom Copeland stared at the sign as it grew larger in the windscreen, floated softly past on the passenger side, then disappeared as the path rolled away beneath them. Calling it a road would have been like comparing a burger van to a McDonald&rsquo;s. At best, it was a narrow dirt track that had been worn into the grass by the passage of vehicles and time. Copeland was glad he was in the back of a Land Rover and not on foot or bouncing up and down in his Vauxhall Corsa.</p> <p class="subsq">It had been an unusual day so far. This was his first time visiting the facility, and he was following the strict instructions that John MacDonald had given him when he was offered the job. He&rsquo;d met the three men he was sharing the Land Rover with in the car park of the Red Lion.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll need to hitch a lift until you&rsquo;re given security clearance,&rdquo; MacDonald had explained. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t have a key card, you can&rsquo;t get in.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The Land Rover hit a bump in the road and the driver, a dour-faced Scot with a bristly ginger beard, smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and shouted, &ldquo;Come on, ya bastard.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland turned his face to the window again. He was sitting in the back behind the passenger seat because it was the only seat left when they&rsquo;d picked him up. There had been no time for introductions. That had come later, once the Land Rover had started to worm its way through the back roads and, eventually, the countryside. Sunnyvale was tucked away in a natural dip in the Chiltern Hills, a good ten miles away from the nearest major town or village. There had been plenty of time for them to talk during the commute.</p> <p class="subsq">The driver had introduced himself as Big Jim Benton, and Copeland had made an immediate mental note not to mess with the guy. Big Jim had a mess of scars poking out from beneath his fiery beard, deep, sunken eyes, and a fat face. He was built like a brick shithouse thanks to twelve years of professional hooliganism and ten years before that of amateur street fights in downtown Leith. His right arm was a mesh of tattoos, and they caught and reflected the sunlight when he hung it out the window. His hair had started to recede and he had a small mole on the left side of his face. He was a little overweight, but he was far from obese. The excess was from the cheese, the beer, and the kebab meat, and it clung mostly to his face, his waist, and his stomach. It was the kind of bulk that belonged to professional wrestlers, a slowly cultivated weight that came in handy when he needed to use it. He could turn it into a weapon when he got in tussles with unexpected vandals or trespassers. It&rsquo;s what his job was all about.</p> <p class="subsq">The passenger seat was taken up by Big Jim&rsquo;s second-in-command, an Irishman called Darragh O&rsquo;Rourke. He wasn&rsquo;t as muscular as Big Jim, but he had the look of a wiry street dog with a bruised muzzle. He wore his greasy brown hair down to his shoulders, where it grazed his skin and brought blackheads and spots out in angry welts. He had a disconcerting habit of reaching beneath his Kevlar jacket and scratching at his skin, then bringing his hands back out and investigating his fingernails for blood and pus. He also bit the damn things, which Copeland thought was nothing short of cannibalism.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Darragh&rsquo;s from Belfast, ye ken,&rdquo; Jim said.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; the Irishman confirmed. &ldquo;I came over to Liverpool during the recession and ended up moving here for work.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Ah worked with Darragh afore Sunnyvale,&rdquo; Jim continued. &ldquo;Eh&rsquo;s a good lad, ye ken. Eh&rsquo;s goat a dog. Ye&rsquo;ll like tha, Mr. Vet Man.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Yeah?&rdquo; Copeland said, raising an eyebrow. He&rsquo;d never much cared for dogs, but he was socially adjusted enough to know when he was expected to say something more. &ldquo;What breed?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;She&rsquo;s a little Jack Russell called Milly,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke said. &ldquo;She&rsquo;s got a lot of energy. The missus says it&rsquo;s good practise for when we have kids.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Take mah advice,&rdquo; Jim grunted. &ldquo;Git yeself tha snip afore it&rsquo;s too late. Ah cannae stand wee bairns. Ah&rsquo;d rather stick ma dick in a blender thun huvtae raise some wee shite ah didnae want in tha first place.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bear that in mind,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke replied, but he was laughing.</p> <p class="subsq">The Land Rover&rsquo;s final passenger sat to Copeland&rsquo;s right, slouching back against the leather seats. He couldn&rsquo;t have been out of his teens. He was an Englishman from Bootle with a thick accent who looked as out of place in his security gear as a bum in a shirt and tie. He had short black hair with zigzags shaved into the back of it, as well as big lips, big ears, and a massive nose that looked as though it had been broken a dozen times. The kid&rsquo;s face reminded Copeland of a cross between a cauliflower and a bowling ball.</p> <p class="subsq">The young man nodded at him. &ldquo;First day?&rdquo; he asked.</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland nodded, then flashed a glance at the man&rsquo;s name badge. &ldquo;Sure is, Chase,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The first day of the rest of my life.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Yeah,&rdquo; Chase replied. &ldquo;Something like that. What are you doing here, anyway? You working the line?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;I&rsquo;m a veterinarian.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Jesus,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke said. &ldquo;What the shite are you doing at Sunnyvale?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;What do you think?&rdquo; Copeland replied.</p> <p class="subsq">That killed the conversation, at least until Big Jim hit a button on the radio. He&rsquo;d matured into adulthood while grunge was on the rise and was still listening to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains all these years later. Kurt Cobain was dead. Layne Staley was dead. Chris Cornell was dead. And in a lonely hotel room somewhere, Eddie Vedder was shitting himself at the prospect of being next.</p> <p class="subsq">As they cruised towards the entrance to the complex, they were listening to L7, an all-female riot grrrl band. Benton was nodding along to the beat, the feminism wasted on a man with a Hibs tattoo and a history of casual domestic violence, but O&rsquo;Rourke was lying back in his seat with his eyes and ears closed, and Chase looked like he&rsquo;d tried to swallow a pickled onion without bothering to chew it.</p> <p class="subsq">Tom Copeland looked at himself in the rear-view and took stock of what he saw there. Back in the day, when he&rsquo;d been running his own practice instead of &ldquo;working for the man&rdquo; on a factory farm, he&rsquo;d shaved every morning and gone to great lengths to make sure that he smelled of expensive cologne. But he&rsquo;d lost all that when he&rsquo;d been dumb enough to steal ketamine from storage. His partner had called him out on it and given him two options: either sign over his share in the company or be reported to the police. For Copeland, that was no choice at all.</p> <p class="subsq">A shadow passed across his face as he stared at the mirror. It was an ordinary face with a large forehead and a receding hairline. He had short black hair that flicked up from his head because of the way he slept, and he had thin, weedy eyebrows that looked like he waxed them, although he didn&rsquo;t. He also had big, flat ears that hung to the side of his head like two strips of bacon, but his face wasn&rsquo;t fat and neither was his body. He kept himself in shape, but it didn&rsquo;t come easy to him. And he&rsquo;d let himself go since Linda had left him all alone in the big, empty house that he could no longer afford.</p> <p class="subsq">When he thought about stuff, he started squinting, and he saw from the mirror that he was squinting then. He was a good guy. He <em>knew </em>he was. But he&rsquo;d made some bad decisions, and sometimes he felt like an asshole. But he did his best, especially for the animals. His fellow humans chose to be evil and corrupt. The animals had no choice.</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland had only stolen the drugs because a very unpleasant man had forced him to do it. He recognised the man by sight&mdash;he&rsquo;d seen him in the practice&rsquo;s waiting room&mdash;but he didn&rsquo;t know his name. The name didn&rsquo;t matter too much when he had his metaphorical knife to Copeland&rsquo;s throat and his mouth full of threats against his family. The irony was that when he&rsquo;d been caught in the act and kicked out of his own veterinary practice, Copeland had lost his family anyway. But at least no one had lost their life.</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland looked away from the mirror. A stilted silence hung heavy on the air. He fiddled uncomfortably with his seatbelt and shifted position to try to get comfortable.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Jim,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke said. &ldquo;Be a top man and put something else on.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Like what?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;How about some grime?&rdquo; Chase said.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Fuck ya grime, ye wee gobshite,&rdquo; Big Jim snapped. He flashed a glance at Copeland in the rear-view. &ldquo;Chasey boy thinks eh&rsquo;s a rapper, ye ken.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland smiled. &ldquo;Is that so?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Yeah,&rdquo; Chase replied. &ldquo;Opened for Devilman a couple of months back.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;And how come you&rsquo;re working at Sunnyvale?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got no choice,&rdquo; Chase said. &ldquo;I need the money. Used to work as a labourer, and before that I was at a warehouse. Then I saw Sunnyvale was hiring and I thought I&rsquo;d give it a shot. Besides, women love the uniform.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; Jim conceded. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s true. But ah&rsquo;d appreciate it if ye could keep yer trap shut fae a while. Ah cannae be dein wi yer chat today, ye ken? Ah&rsquo;ve goat a hangover. If ah hear another peep, ah&rsquo;m gonnae drop ye off and let ye walk tae work.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Chase opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. Copeland stepped in to fill the silence. &ldquo;An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What is this, some sort of joke?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Big Jim fixed him with another penetrating stare in the rear-view, but said nothing. A hundred yards or so in front of them, two of Jim&rsquo;s men were working a checkpoint. A high chain-link fence stretched to the left and the right of the checkpoint as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the trees and following the curve of the land. The fence was festooned with &ldquo;danger of death&rdquo; signs, their black lightning bolt insignias popping out from their bright yellow backgrounds. Other signs, white ones this time, warned of guard dogs patrolling the premises. Curlicues of barbed wire lined the top of the fence. Copeland spotted the feathered remains of a bird&mdash;a pigeon, perhaps&mdash;caught amongst the metal.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Welcome to Sunnyvale,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke murmured.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; Big Jim added. He glanced at Copeland in the mirror again and caught his eye. &ldquo;Ah&rsquo;m guessin&rsquo; this&rsquo;ll be yer first look at the place. It&rsquo;s a shithole, but it&rsquo;s our shithole.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">He idled the car to a stop at the barrier and leaned his head out of the window. &ldquo;Open the gate, ye whoresons,&rdquo; he shouted. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s me, Big Jim.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">One of the men on the gate shouted an acknowledgement and held his thumb up. The other raised the gate and waved them through. Copeland got a good look at the gatekeepers while Jim was revving the engine and easing the vehicle back into its slow, inexorable crawl towards the complex. They were wearing army greens with Kevlar vests and heavy truncheons on their belts.</p> <p class="subsq">Chase caught Copeland&rsquo;s eye and said, &ldquo;Sunnyvale&rsquo;s got the best security this side of the Mersey. Top lads.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Why so much security?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;It&rsquo;s more than my job&rsquo;s worth to tell you that,&rdquo; Chase said. &ldquo;Especially not with Big Jim at the wheel.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; Jim said. &ldquo;Eh&rsquo;ll find oot fae hisself soon enough.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Copeland nodded. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m looking forward to it,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I love a challenge.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Is that why you&rsquo;re here?&rdquo; O&rsquo;Rourke asked. &ldquo;The challenge?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Something like that,&rdquo; Copeland said. He sighed. &ldquo;Ask me about it some other time.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">The Land Rover was slowing again, and Copeland peered over O&rsquo;Rourke&rsquo;s shoulder and out through the windscreen. They were approaching something else, another mess of metal. As the vehicle drove closer, scattering dusty pebbles every which way across the dead ground, the terrain levelled out. At the same time, a wave of brutal fragrance pierced the vehicle and Copeland started coughing.</p> <p class="subsq">It was the kind of smell that lingered in the nostrils. There was a certain stickiness to it, like second-hand cigarette smoke. It reminded Copeland of a kid he&rsquo;d gone to school with who reeked of starch, fat, and vinegar because his parents owned a chip shop. Sunnyvale didn&rsquo;t smell like starch or vinegar, but it did smell like fat. It also smelled like sweat and fear, blood and bile. There was a not-so-subtle hint of rotting flesh and a fishy aroma that put Copeland in mind of bad sushi. It also smelled like desperation. It was a depressing smell, and Copeland couldn&rsquo;t help turning his nose up at it.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the famous Sunnyvale stench,&rdquo; Chase said.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Do people get used to it?&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Nah,&rdquo; Chase replied. &ldquo;They just accept it. Ain&rsquo;t no use holding your nose, pal. You&rsquo;ve just got to get on with it. It&rsquo;s part of the job. It&lsquo;s what we get paid for.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Smells like shit,&rdquo; Copeland observed.</p> <p class="subsq">O&rsquo;Rourke laughed from the passenger seat. &ldquo;Smells like a whole lot more than that,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But Chase is right. That smell won&rsquo;t go away no matter what you do.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;It gets in yer heid,&rdquo; Jim said. This time, he didn&rsquo;t look back at Copeland in the rear-view. His eyes were firmly on the road ahead. They&rsquo;d reached the second mess of metal, and now they were closer, it was clear what they were looking at.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Is that another checkpoint?&rdquo; Copeland asked.</p> <p class="subsq">&ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; Jim replied. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like Chase seid. Sunnyvale&rsquo;s goat the best security this side ay the Mersey.&rdquo;</p> <p class="subsq">Big Jim reached forward and turned the music off. The atmosphere in the Land Rover had changed, probably because the great facility was looming in front of them on the other side of the formidable fence. It blocked the sun and cast the approach into shadow, reminding Copeland of a Transylvanian castle in some old vampire movie.</p> <p class="subsq">The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. <em>It&rsquo;s a far cry from the old practice in Chalfont St. Peter</em>, he thought. It was followed by a second, more urgent thought, something that came from somewhere deep within him. It was a primal thought, like the urge to eat or drink or ejaculate, and it came on suddenly and without warning.</p> <p class="subsq"><em>We&rsquo;re being watched</em>.</p> </div> </div>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Untitled</title> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> <style> /* ePub CSS */ h1 {padding-top: 15%;} .indent {text-indent: 5%;} .center {text-align: center;} .right {text-align: right;} .margin {margin: 0 5%;} .margin-indent {margin: 0 5%; text-indent: 5%;} .bigmargin {margin: 0 5% 0 10%;} .bigmargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 10%; text-indent: 5%;} .hugemargin {margin: 0 5% 0 15%;} .hugemargin-indent {margin: 0 5% 0 15%; text-indent: 5%;} img {max-width: 94%;} body {margin: 0 3%; text-align: justify;} .spacer {padding-bottom: 1em;} </style> </head> <body> <h1 class="center" id="c2">CHAPTER ONE</h1> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div>Specialist 4 Dwayne Morton woke with a snort and looked around him. The small office he sat in was no different than when he had drifted off. His clipboard still lay at his elbow, the security log attached to it awaiting his next entry. His last simply noted the departure of the civilian cleaning crew at 4:00 AM, or 0400 hours military time. He was relieved that the duty sergeant had not discovered him during his inadvertent nap. Glancing up at the large clock hung on the wall, Dwayne saw that it was now 0517 hours. There remained almost three hours in his shift, a fact that did little to lift his spirits.</div> <div class="indent">“Army sucks,” he whispered with feeling. This was not supposed to have been his assignment—he had just completed a week’s tour of midnight to eight shifts, and by rights, should have been rotated to the much coveted day duty. But, as usual, the army, or more accurately, his first sergeant, had screwed everything up for him when Danny Boyle came down with appendicitis.</div> <div class="indent"><i>It wasn’t his fault that Danny’s appendix burst</i>, he thought, and there were plenty of other MPs to choose from in their company. It was just that Dwayne was having a little trouble with the company runs lately, was falling behind during PT sessions. Top was a fitness fanatic—the old fart had to be forty, and he still ran five miles a day—who does that?</div> <div class="indent">Glancing down at his waistline, Dwayne had to acknowledge that he had readjusted his duty belt twice since arriving in-country six months before—the damn beer and pastry diet here in Deutschland was kicking his ass and he had been no lightweight to begin with.</div> <div class="indent">Standing, he stretched and yawned widely, then snatched up his flashlight. Standard Operating Procedure on site security stated that foot patrols of the parking lot and office complex should occur hourly, though not at regular intervals, in order to avoid establishing a predictable pattern. Sleeping on duty was punishable by Article 15 regulations and could result in loss of pay or demotion.</div> <div class="indent">Slapping on the iconic white helmet liner with MP printed in black on the front, Dwayne threw open the door and staggered out into the parking lot. His last check had been almost an hour and a half before. He expected the duty sergeant to be rounding the corner any moment, as he always checked the sentries at least twice a night and Dwayne had not seen him since shortly after coming on duty.</div> <div class="indent">Noticing that one of the sodium lamps that lit the parking lot had burned out, Dwayne made a mental note to log the observation and complete a work order to have the bulb replaced. Satisfied with the lot, Dwayne turned to his left and began to walk toward the three story office building that overlooked it. Then he saw the car, a Volkswagen Jetta, parked in front of the entrance, and his steps faltered in surprise. The lot had been empty earlier, he was sure of it.</div> <div class="indent">Was it possible that one of the German cleaning crew had forgotten something in the building and come back for it? Had they driven past him as he slept? <i>But it could have happened while he was making his last rounds</i>, he thought, <i>desperate for a preferable alternative</i>.</div> <div class="indent">This was one of the faults in the procedure—he couldn’t be in two places at once. Each time he was inside checking the offices he was away from the lot. Of course, he was supposed to check the lot each time he returned, but he had exited the building from the rear after his last inspection and come back to his office from the other side and hadn’t bothered. For Christ’s sake he wasn’t supposed to be on nights anyway!</div> <div class="indent">Switching on the flashlight, he shined it at the windows, the beam revealing an interior empty of occupants. That was a relief, at least. He gave each of the vehicle’s four doors a tug, finding each locked in its turn, preventing him from getting inside and finding the registration. If he could only discover the owner and give them a call, maybe he could get the damned car out of there before it was discovered by his supervisor. He kicked a tire with his spit-shined jump boots. “Goddamnit,” he muttered.</div> <div class="indent">Walking to the rear of the VW, he played the light across the registration plate. It was German alright. Wedging the flashlight between his elbow and his body, he pulled out pen and pad with his free hand to jot the number down.</div> <div class="indent">Headlamp beams swept across the small lot, accompanied by the familiar grind of a jeep’s engine. When they came to rest on Dwayne, the vehicle raced across the asphalt, skidding to a halt just feet from the MP, and transfixing him in their illumination.</div> <div class="indent">“Whose fucking vehicle is that, specialist?” Duty sergeant Calvin Auster demanded, leaping from the jeep. He was hardly older than Dwayne, no more than twenty-eight, but every inch the lifer, his uniform immaculate, his leather polished and gleaming. Having enlisted to escape the Brooklyn ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant, it was his firm intent to never return there. Black and lean, he glared at the chubby specialist as if he had placed the car there himself in order to thwart the sergeant.</div> <div class="indent">“I just found it, sarge,” Dwayne began, hastily coming up with a plausible chain of events. “It was here when I came out of the office building.”</div> <div class="indent">“And when was that?”</div> <div class="indent">“Just now—I finished making my rounds in there and found it here with no one around. I was writing down the registration number to call it in,” he lied, holding out his notepad as proof of his honorable intentions.</div> <div class="indent">Sergeant Auster looked unimpressed. Glancing at his watch, he snapped, “In less than an hour personnel will begin to arrive here, specialist, and in less than an hour I want this fuckin’ piece of civilian shit towed out of here and impounded. Is that clear?”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, “Yes, sergeant.”</div> <div class="indent">“I will not have some goddamn colonel climbing up my ass today because you let some German loser ditch his car in our lot, do you hear me, Specialist Morton?”</div> <div class="indent">“Loud and clear, sarge,” Dwayne responded.</div> <div class="indent">The irate sergeant turned on his heels and began to climb back into his jeep. As he fired up the engine once more, he stared at the VW for a moment, then said, “Have dispatch run that vehicle thoroughly before you remove it, specialist. HQ’s been warning everybody to be extra cautious since that German officer got whacked in Hamburg a few weeks ago.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne nodded, though it was not entirely clear to him what he was expected to do—tow the car, or not?</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant began to reverse at the same high rate of speed he had arrived, then slammed on the brakes once more. He studied the VW in silence as if something was troubling him. “Get on the radio and request a bomb-sniffing K-9, Morton,” Auster said quietly. “Tell them I said so. You stay here and keep everybody out of the parking lot until it’s been swept.”</div> <div class="indent">“Not let anybody get to their offices, sarge?” Dwayne asked. He could already picture the ass-reaming every officer that showed up was going to give him. “Not even officers?”</div> <div class="indent">“You heard me correctly, specialist,” the sergeant snapped, then added in a softer tone, “I’ll be back as soon as I finish up doing spot checks—twenty minutes, or so. I’ll be back long before the brass arrives in any case, so don’t worry, I’ll handle the heat.”</div> <div class="indent">Dwayne was both relieved and grateful.</div> <div class="indent">The sergeant sped off in the direction of the Staff Duty NCO’s office.</div> <div class="indent">With a sigh, Dwayne removed his portable radio from its belt holder and called in the request to dispatch, placing heavy emphasis that the order came from Sergeant Auster. After only a very few minutes he was told that the K-9 officer and his dog would be enroute shortly, and that he was to hold the fort in the meantime.</div> <div class="indent">“Wilco,” he replied, fishing a package of cigarettes from his cargo pocket and firing up a smoke. He could see that his hands were shaking a little. Taking a deep draw to settle his nerves, he plopped his wide rump onto the trunk lid of the Jetta. He was not surprised to hear the springs groan a little at his formidable burden, but the loud click that followed was puzzling.</div> <div class="indent">Rising and turning, Dwayne was only in time to witness the fireball erupting from the car and engulfing him like a blowtorch, the explosion blowing out every window of the office building. Like a flaming comet, he traveled some fifty yards to land smoking and smoldering outside the same door he had stepped through only minutes before, his leather boots the only bit of clothing left intact, his body charred black, his face burned away. He had only two and a half hours left in his shift.</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="center">#</div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> <div class="spacer"></div> </body> </html>