Oasis of the Damned Page 6

  “Of course they do.”

  “I hope so.”

  A large thud against the door below…

  Owens tensed and raised his gun in response, but when nothing more came of it, he slowly returned the machine gun to his lap. His bloodshot eyes looked her over a moment. “What about you?”

  “Never been married,” she told him. “No kids. I had a younger brother but he died a few years ago, right before I left for my second tour in Iraq.”

  And it’s my fault, I should’ve been there. I should’ve stopped it.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, truly sorry.”

  “Thank you.” She ran a hand through her filthy hair. “My father’s dead, but my mother’s still alive, still living in the same house I grew up in.”

  “If we make it out, are you going back?”

  “I don’t know. Only thing I’m sure of is I’ve had my fill of deserts—the last one, this one, you can keep them all—and about all the death and sorrow I can stand.”

  “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure,” she sighed, “why not?”

  Several seconds came and went before he did. “You like boys?”

  Despite it all, Richter felt a slight smile crease her lips. “Well I guess it depends on the boy, but yeah, I like boys well enough.”

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. Why, you asking me out on a date, Owens?”

  “Nah,” he said, “you’re not really my type.”

  “Hate to break it to you, but you’re not exactly mine, either.”

  “I had a feeling.”

  “Did you, now? Maybe it’s just gas.”

  “Look, Richter, I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it, but—”

  “I’m not playing games.”

  “Didn’t say you were, I just—”

  “It may not seem like it, but we’ve both got things to live for.”

  “You sure about that?” he asked.

  “No,” she admitted. “I’m not sure about anything anymore. Haven’t been since the day I buried my little brother. Since I watched a bunch of kids in uniform die for what far as I can tell turned out to be nothing but money and oil and making the rich richer, since I held their hands while they cried and choked to death on their own blood in a bunch of sand and dirt and rock that didn’t mean a fucking thing, in a place none of us belonged and should’ve never been. The only thing I know for sure is I don’t want to die here. Not here. Not like this and not from them.”

  “Rather die a husk out there on the sand?”

  “I’d rather not die at all.”

  “Maybe we’re already dead.”

  “Then we’ve got nothing to lose.”

  He shook his head. “You sure like getting that last word in, don’t you?”

  “What can I say? I lettered on the debate team in high school.”

  “This isn’t a joke. I wish it was, but it’s not.”

  “Never said it was, just that we need to go. We’ll lose our minds here, Owens, and then our lives. There’s no other choice. We’re not exactly loaded up with options here.”

  He grimaced. “My mind, it…sometimes I can’t think straight anymore, I…things get all confused and jumbled, you know?”

  “Yes, I do know. I get it, and I haven’t been here anywhere near as long as you have. Bottom line is if we stay here, we die. If we make a break for it, we probably die.” She licked her dry, cracked lips, but it did little to help. “Given the two choices, I’ll take probably.”

  In the near dark, their eyes met, locked.

  “You’re going with or without me, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “This is a nightmare, and you’re exhausted and confused and frightened even worse than I am, and I’m a goddamn basket case at this point. But you don’t want to die any more than I do, Owens, not really. If you did, you wouldn’t be fighting so hard to stay alive.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?”

  Two bloody hands entwined…

  “Like you said…devil we know, right?”

  His expression became stoic, and he offered no response.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “If we make it out of here—when we make it out of here— do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “When you get to that bar, save me a stool, okay?”

  “First round’s on you.”

  “Deal, but—”

  “Listen,” he said, holding up a hand.

  She did. Silence. Beautiful silence.

  They’d made it through another night.

  * * *

  That old tree next to the house, I can’t take my eyes off it. Slowly, it blurs through my tears, but I refuse to wipe them away. Let them fall; let them roll down my cheeks, what difference does it make? Malcolm will never again appear in the distance, running through that field. I will never see his smile again, or hear his laughter. I will never again feel his presence here or anywhere.

  “You’re going back, aren’t you?”

  I turn and see my mother standing on the porch behind me. So lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t heard her come through the screen door. “Yes,” I answer softly. “I’m going back for a second tour.”

  “But you don’t have to.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Doesn’t matter how far you go, you can’t run from this.”

  I adjust the sleeve on my uniform. “I know.”

  “Then why try?”

  “Doesn’t seem like there’s anything else to do now.”

  “Stay.” My mother moves closer, the old porch boards creaking beneath her feet. “You could just stay.”

  Our eyes meet, and although I see only a glimpse of the horror my mother is experiencing, the depth of it is startling. Pain beyond anything she’s ever known—even now—is written across her drawn and weary face.

  “I can’t.”

  “I buried your father,” she tells me, “and now I’ve lost a child. I can’t lose another. The Devil’s taken all he’s going to get from me.”

  I look away, to the garden, wanting—hoping—so desperately to see Malcolm crouched down there like he often was, smelling the flowers and taking it all in with his typical sense of wonder and awe. But he’s not there. Even the flowers have died. “It’s not the Devil,” I say. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Call it whatever you’d like. What else would kill an innocent child?”

  “Innocent children die every day, Mama.”

  “And what kind of beast would do that?”

  “What kind of beast would allow it?” I close my eyes, but even in darkness my brother eludes me. If only I could see that brilliant smile just once more. “One thing war taught me,” I explain, “is that it’s not always clear which is worse, those who do the killing, or those who stand by and do nothing to stop it.”

  “Maybe they’re both devils.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s already such death and darkness in the world, why seek out more?”

  Forcing myself to turn back to my mother, when I open my eyes, I see a woman who appears well beyond her years, a woman who has lost so much weight she’s begun to look skeletal. “War’s different,” I tell her.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the mother who buries her child killed in war feels any less pain than I do?”

  “Of course not, but hopefully the person killed in combat dies for a reason.”

  “Everyone dies for a reason. Problem is it’s hardly ever a good one.”

  Or maybe, I want to say, there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. Maybe my brother’s dead because he’s unlucky, because he’s weak. Maybe I’ll die in the desert thousands of miles from home or maybe others will and I’ll be spared for no reason whatsoever. Maybe it’s all chaos and nonsense and means absolutely nothing, we’re just mice running a maze…dice thrown to a board…tears falling on an ocean. Maybe it—and we—are all
those things…everything…and nothing at all.

  I want to say that, but don’t. Instead, I hug my mother and hold her tight. So impossibly tiny and unsubstantial, she’s become little more than a fusion of emaciated skin and brittle bone. There’s hardly anything left of the woman, but then, why should there be? “I love you, Mama,” I whisper in her ear.

  My mother begins to tremble in my arms. Gently at first, but then more violently until I can barely hold her still, and I realize then that it is no longer my mother I’m holding, but someone else, something else.

  And as I lay the body down, the porch becomes rock and sand…the field becomes desert…and the blood begins to flow from us both…so much blood it doesn’t seem real even though I know it is. It has to be.

  We don’t belong in this place. And now we’re going to die here.

  It all falls away to nothing, then drags me back to the desert, to the harsh sunlight and unbearable heat…

  The Blackhawk swoops down and across the valley at high speed.

  Moments from escape—a safe distance from the danger zone—there is a deafening blast, a burst of flame and smoke, and then the entire aircraft shudders and tilts, spinning and losing control amidst the sounds of screams and moans, panic and mayhem.

  I struggle with the controls, try to slow the fall, but it’s no use. We’re falling and nothing will stop that. Now it’s all about the crash. The copter is coming down, and I can only hope I still have enough control to lessen the impact, but despite my best efforts, we continue to tumble from the sky at an alarming rate like the mortally wounded bird we are.

  “Finch!” I call to the crew chief. “Get an SOS out!” I think I hear him respond but cannot be certain, as my attention is solely focused on the controls. “Hang on to whatever you can!” I scream to the others.

  Seconds later, the Blackhawk smashes into the desert with furious violence, the fuselage snapping in half as bodies are thrown free and pieces of the craft spray the area in a shower of fire, smoke, blood, screams and horror.

  And then…silence.

  Seconds later it is broken by a little boy’s ethereal voice whispering to me from the darkest corridors of my mind…

  “Are you a hero?”

  I remove my dual visor helmet and toss it aside, doing my best to draw some deep breaths of the hot desert air. The moment my head clears enough for me to get my bearings, I instinctually reach down to my thigh and yank free the Beretta M9 pistol strapped to my leg.

  Smoke and dust fill the cockpit, and a small fire burns nearby, I can smell it. Next to me, Hernandez, the copilot, is slumped forward. Blood leaks from his helmet and his visor is badly damaged. His head is twisted at an unnatural angle. I release myself from my chair and quickly check his neck for a pulse. Nothing. “Goddamn it,” I groan, rolling away from him and out of the aircraft.

  I taste blood as I fall to the dirt below, and something sticky and wet blurs my vision.

  Bodies of the wounded we just medevaced lay scattered about like broken, bloody and bandaged mannequins, a couple still moaning and alive, but several already dead. Among them, several feet away, is Finch, the crew chief.

  On hands and knees, I wait a moment until the ringing in my ears eases, and then I wipe my face with a gloved hand. It comes back slick with blood. My scalp, just above my hairline, begins to throb. Still somewhat unsteady, I force myself to my feet and stumble over to Finch.

  Thrown from the aircraft in the crash, he is badly hurt, staring at me helplessly as blood erupts from his mouth. He coughs, gags, reaches for me and falls, unconscious.

  “Medic!” I scream. “Windsor!”

  But as I whirl around in search of him, I find the medic lying a few feet from the back section of the Blackhawk, his body twisted and pinned beneath the wreckage, legs hidden from view but arms and torso bent impossibly, and a good portion of his upper body burned and mangled. His eyes stare into the sun, lifeless and wide with horror.

  Within seconds, Finch dies, leaving me as the only member of the crew who has survived the crash. And because of where we’ve gone down, this is likely only the beginning. The dead may very well be the lucky ones here.

  A sergeant I’d gotten out along with the wounded—Blount—appears from the other side of the craft, crouched and scrambling toward me, rifle clutched to his chest. “You see what took us down, Captain?”

  “Negative.”

  “You get an SOS out?” he asks breathlessly.

  “No time,” I tell him, looking back into what remains of the cockpit. “And my radio’s trashed. But I think the crew chief did, so they know we’re down and where we are, they’ll get us out.”

  “Is anyone else alive?”

  “Few of the wounded. For now anyway.”

  “The medic?”

  I shake my head no.

  “It’s just us then?”

  “Yeah, it’s just us.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Yours, crew chief’s M16 and my sidearm. That’s it.”

  “Got to find that M16.”

  It lies in the dirt a few feet from Finch’s body. I point to it and Blount quickly retrieves it and begins checking it over.

  Satisfied, he motions to me with his chin. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Sergeant, you tend to the wounded best you can, I—”

  Suddenly something pings the side of the aircraft. I dive into the dirt, roll closer to the fuselage for cover. “Blount!” I call to him. “You hit?”

  “I’m good, but we got company!” he calls back from the far side of the fallen chopper.

  “Numbers?”

  “Five, six, maybe more…just beyond the closest ridge.”

  “They moving?”

  “Right for us.”

  I slam shut my eyes and wrestle back the panic. “Do your best to conserve ammo, make every shot count.” I open my eyes; catch the glint of sun bearing down on us. “No way of knowing how long it’ll be before help arrives.”

  Staying low, I crawl around to the edge of the fuselage and see that Blount has made his way over behind a large boulder for cover. And then I see the enemy, a band of ragtag Iraqis that number ten or more running toward us. Within a minute or two, they’ll be so close I’ll be able to see the color of their eyes.

  Blount fires a series of quick bursts from the M16, dropping two of them and scattering the others, who take cover behind large boulders and outcroppings of rock formations. And then another wave of them emerges over the horizon, running to join their brethren.

  Christ, I think, there must be thirty of them.

  I know then that we’re doomed. We’ll never make it out of this godforsaken valley alive.

  I’m sorry. I’m so goddamn sorry.

  * * *

  Bodies everywhere…so many they hardly seemed real. Yet there they were, scattered about the outpost, piles of massacred heads, limbs and torsos, bloodied and destroyed, the spoils of unimaginable violence and death. Richter and Owens stood there a while, taking it all in beneath the blistering sun of a new day.

  “We go today,” Richter finally said.

  Owens gave a slow nod. After a moment, he grabbed a can of gasoline and began moving through the field of corpses, dousing them as he went.

  Richter climbed back over the sandbags and ventured into the shade of the domed building to retrieve a torch that had long since burned out.

  As she bent to pick it up, something shifted in the shadows deeper in the building. She froze, still bent at the waist, and slowly turned her head in the direction of whatever had slid along the edge of her peripheral vision just seconds before.

  A creature, badly wounded and collapsed against the wall, moved about as if looking for a way out, its clawed hands flush against the wall.

  Owens had said they only came at night.

  It can’t run, she thought. It’s trapped here after sunrise and it can’t run, it has nowhere to go.

  Richter slowly slid the knife from her
belt and stood up straight, forcing herself to keep eye contact with the hideous being. “Owens,” she said, keeping her voice even so as not to further agitate the creature. But she couldn’t be certain if she’d spoken loud enough for him to hear her. “Owens,” she said with a bit more volume.

  The creature snarled, drool dripping from its horrible jaws. It pressed its back tighter against the wall and spread its arms out, the talons poised and ready to strike. But the movement brought enough of it out of the shadows for Richter to see it had sustained a substantial injury below the waist. Blood soaked its groin and the upper portions of its legs from what appeared to be gunshot wounds to the lower abdomen and pelvic area. It was still alive and obviously dangerous, but couldn’t walk, couldn’t get away, so when the others left it behind with the dead, it evidently crawled into the building and settled in the only patch of darkness it could find.

  Richter still couldn’t believe what she was looking at. “What the hell are you?” she whispered.

  It cocked its head, eyeing her with its bulging yellow orbs.

  Despite its horrific appearance, there was something there, something in those strangely alien eyes. Something almost, but not quite…human…

  So different, and yet much the same, it was doing what she would’ve done, what Owens would’ve done, what anyone would’ve done. It was trying—fighting—to stay alive, to survive.

  What do you want from us? She wasn’t entirely sure if she’d actually spoken the words aloud or only thought them, but she was certain the being could hear her thoughts.

  “What the hell are you?” it said, mocking her in a voice eerily similar to her own. “What do you want from us?”

  “This isn’t happening,” she mumbled, the creature blurring through her tears. “This isn’t happening, it…”

  The creature snarled again, opening wide its mouth. Two rows of razor teeth glistened in the shadows as its eyes glared at her.

  And in those eyes she saw something else…hopelessness. The same hopelessness she’d felt those years before while lying in the desert in Iraq, sure she’d never make it out alive. It was a kind of acceptance, really, an acknowledgement that you were going to die—that there was no other way—and you’d come to grips with that. You understood and it was no longer about why or how. It just was.