“See that…” Amy whispered in my ear, adding the tip of her anxious tongue.

“Yeah?” I asked, staring with her at the vanilla-colored clapboard house.

“…that side door?”

I looked to where my girlfriend was indicating, or I assumed she was, to the front of the little house, left of the front door and at a long vertical window, shuttered and hidden partially by the single drooping tree on the front lawn.

“You know what that is?” Amy purred, stepping lightly up the front lawn.

I offered no resistance; she had told me we were welcome. Still, I felt slightly uneasy as we made the front stoop, something in Amy’s voice, the way her big chest was rising and falling so quickly, the way her blue eyes seemed still yet so intent as she looked at that house-and that window-rose a caution in me. And as this was not the first time I had felt this way around her, I stepped as calm as I could to the front door…which Amy just simply pushed open to my surprise and a well lit, well-kept living room.

“C’mre,” she said, dragging me across the doorjamb.

“Amy, aren’t we…?”

“Cece always leaves the door open.”

I had yet to meet Cecila but supposedly this had been her grandmother’s brother’s house. Amy, and by extension I, had been invited the two hundred miles south from our north New Jersey homes and I had taken this Saturday anticipating a nice drive with my girlfriend, finally meeting her friends and spending some time in what Amy described as a ‘wonderful old house, right out of colonial times’. So far I hadn’t been overly impressed with the quiet, slightly buggy suburban sprawl nor the outside of the tiny house, but as we stood there inside it, the clean smell and the well-stitched floral furniture created a welcome-ny air. I began to ease into the thought of spending the afternoon talking with Cecila and Amy’s other friends and whoever happened to own the house now (I assumed it was still Cecila’s family, as we wouldn’t have been given such access).

But Amy had another agenda as I was dragged across the high polished wooden floor to that damn window.

“See,” she prodded as we stood at the inside of the thing.

Still not that impressed with it, regarding it as I had before: a long vertical window, evidently an anomaly in modern homes, but one I thought well suited for this older model. The window ended at the floor and ran to the ceiling.

“Amy!” I exclaimed when she released my hand and walked over to the window, pushing it open. We might have been expected but I really thought she was taking a few too many liberties.

“You know what this is?” she asked again, standing there in the open window. With the noonday sun lightening her blonde bob and her perfect skin nearly glowing I tried to look anywhere at this girl who had and was transfixing me so much these past months.

Amy was the archetypal busty southern bell (she had moved from South Carolina when she was fifteen) with a light cream complexion, long legs and high cheekbones to a fault. But what fascinated me about her, ever since that first night I spied Amy at a friend of a friend’s party, was the muted glint of naughtiness in her eye.

These past two months of our dating the sex had not stopped; Amy was voracious. Truth be told at twenty-two I had not had as much experience with the opposite sex as I would have been comfortable have had meeting a girl as sexually aggressive as Amy. But God was I loving every minute of her attentions. The dichotomy of such a willowy American beauty harboring such lust kept me pretty much erect around her. And as I looked at her then, recalled her tongue in my ear and how Amy had literally raced to show me this window (and seemed to be chomping at the bit to explain it) I realized the sexual heat was once again coaxing flames around us.

It was a fire I both courted and feared.

“Mmmm,” Amy purred.

“Amy wh…” I attempted closing the gap between us by talking two steps to my girlfriend’s arched back.

She sighed, literally pushing back into me so I could do nothing but crush my pelvis into her bottom.

Amy bent far forward, her top half bending far out the window. I could just make out the back of her upper thighs coming into view from under the bunched-up skirt. I knew all I’d have to do was lift and expose her, catch the heat coming up off her flanks as it always did when I rubbed up against her like this.

“Amy…” I tried but I was stuck there…ok, I wasn’t truly stuck, but my lower half would have it no other way.

“I’m gonna co…” she squealed as reached down and lifted her skirt, exposing her wonderfully halved butt in a bright pink thong.

Orgasmic Amy was, more then any girl I had ever known…shit, more then any girl I had ever heard my friends brag about! She simply stood in that window while I pushed into her, clutched the walls and faced the slanted sunshine coming through that big tree in the front yard. As was per her usual, her knees began shaking and then she arched her back as she let go fully. I would have liked to have bolstered my ego with the rationalization that it was I who was making my girlfriend so hot, but I knew even as she turned from the window a minute later, smiling and red cheeked, her tiny nipples poking out of her shirt, that what ever it was she had to tell me about this damn window, it was that that had got Amy off so fast with me then.

*

“It’s a coffin door,” Cecila said as I stood there facing the very place Amy had orgasm-ed fifteen minutes before.

After Amy had turned to me, she and I had fell to the floor, tangled in kisses and fast rubbing, but when we heard the car door slam we hustled back into our clothes. Amy closed the window and we stood as if we had simply just arrived, in the center of the living room, as Cecila and Barney came into the house. Introductions were passed, Barney mumbled something about starting the grill out back, Amy excused herself to the bathroom and even before I had the chance to offer with the ‘manly duties’ of helping Barney, Cecila took me by the arm and walked me to the window again, which I was now learning was a ‘coffin door’. It had been built standard with the house, way back when it was common practice to have wakes at home.

“They used to believe transporting a dead body out of the house through the front door was bad luck,” Amy’s friend continued to explain. “The front door was supposed to be only for the living.”

I smiled at the petite black girl standing before me, trying to concentrate on what she was saying.

If the house sported such an oddity I was damn sure Cecila had told Amy about it, if even only in passing and the idea of ‘doing it’ in the coffin door doorway evidently made my girlfriend hot. Again that feeling of unease crept up my spine; I was challenged by Amy’s obvious fetishistic nature, but just as fascinated by this piece of Americana and the idea that my girlfriend would be so enticed she’d come while literally standing in ‘death’s doorway’. Shit, now that I thought over it, the first time Amy and I had had sex was on one of the low horizontal gravestones in the Elizabeth Township Cemetery.

“I’m the first friend of Amy’s you’ve met,” Cecila said, suddenly changing the subject. This didn’t sound like a question, more a confirmation and before I had chance to reply Amy walked back into the room.

“’Show him the coffin door?” she asked, knowing full well she had as we were standing almost where Amy and I had only minutes before. I smiled at Amy, letting her know I was well aware of her premeditation. I wanted her to think I was as thrilled by the idea of standing in the coffin door’s doorway doing the friction and bump-a-bump when actually it unnerved me.

“I was just asking if he’s met any of the others,” Cecila asked, turning to Amy and flashing her a blinding smile.

“No…he…has…not,” Amy mockingly scolded her friend, walked up to Cecila

and punched her lightly on the arm. “And don’t you go spoiling it.”

“Rokay,” Cecila sang, walking away from us then. “You have the rules set as usual.”

“Yeah, like you don’t with Barney?” Amy said and like fourteen year-old cheerleaders the pair chattered quick laughter at each other while I considered this odd exchange.

I know what it’s like when old friends get together, there are a whole host of secret handshakes never shown, innuendos, lost time made up memories and snippets of conversation that would take a translator weeks to decipher. I had to give the girls their moment, but still I didn’t like being on the outside of things. As uneasy as I was around Amy,-and despite how much that thrilled me-I wouldn’t get through this day if it was all snickered asides and knowing glances.

I made to leave the room to give the girls their moment as to give me a break. Barney had looked like a nice enough guy, maybe a bit sullen, but who was I to judge? I wasn’t sure if he was Cecila’s boyfriend, or just a friend, or how close he was in the circle of ‘the others’ I was supposedly meeting. He was another guy and that was all that mattered right at that moment of this sloshing sorority-like silliness.

“Tell him we’ll be ready to eat when Janet and Suzanne get here,” Cecila said, seeing me sneaking off. “They’ll want to eat so he should have it ready.”

“Ok,” I said over my shoulder, heading straight through the house, even though I wasn’t sure where I was going.

I wasn’t going to add the ‘have it ready’ part. It’s always the sweet, smiling one’s I thought as I made my way through the kitchen and to a screen door that faced me in the back wall.

“Hey,” I said stepping up to a brick patio at the back of the house. Barney was at the eastern lip of the spacious back yard, meandering around the grill, slapping what looked like mighty huge steaks onto the heat and wiping his big alabaster brow in the process.

He didn’t look up.

“Like ol’ home week back in there,” I started, taking a few cautious steps to the guy. “Thought I’d give them some time alone.”

“Yeah,” Barney said to the grill.

His chin was to his chest but when I reached him he afforded me a glimpse of his eyes and his stare stopped me cold; there was nobody home behind the dude’s bright baby-blues. He was vacant, holding me in a two second moment stare that drained the blood from my still pretty heavy penis and stopped me dead in my tracks.

“You know what you’ve got yourself into,” he said, like Cecila not a question and I just looked at his bent head, the way his curls lifted off his face and ears and tried to still my breathing.

Just then I heard another car door slam and Barney went back to the grill, working like a master, or a fiend,-I wasn’t sure which,-over the spit and sizzle.

“Hiya,” I heard a loud voice call from behind me and I turned not realizing that more then a few minutes must have passed as I watched Barney’s bent back and Janet and Suzanne evidently made their way into the house and to us. The girls who walked in front of Amy and Cecila were a matched set, perfect opposites in every way.

“Suzette,” the tall red head said extending her hand. She fixed me with a thin-lipped smile, rosy red cheeks and what seemed like quite the discernable stare. I hoped I wasn’t still hard.

“Janet?” I asked as the petite Spanish girl with the impossibly round hips sauntered to me and literally jumped in my arms. She had me lip-locked and as I heard the girls around me snicker (Amy most of all) it was all I could do to retrieve my tonsils when we came up for air a minute later.

“Hi!” was all I could manage, trying to catch up to the joke. The girls literally sprawled around the picnic table to our right and Suzette reached for the plastic bag she had been holding and I hadn’t noticed until I sat down at the table across from her.

“For you Barney,” she called, opening the bag and producing what I could only describe, in my shook and disgust, as a flattened-out possum, blood caked from its dead tail and mouth.

Amy, Cecila, Janet and Suzette stared at the thing as if it was a Gucci purse; I nearly threw up. Barney reached over, grabbed the road kill by its still warm tail and threw it on the grill!

“Jesus fucking Christ!” I said, jumping from the table.

Nobody seemed to hear me. Even as I moved to Amy she simply sat with her friends as Barney then came to the table and dropped steaming plates of redder then red stakes on their plates. The girls tore into the undercooked meal and I turned to see Barney scoop the sizzling rat from the grill, flop it into his own plate and sit down at a corner chair and dig in.

Dig in!

I ran for the screen door.

“You should stay and see this,” Amy said, getting up from the table and coming up close to me. She had meat juice, more like blood, at the corner of her mouth and for the first time since I ‘d known her I didn’t rise an erection with her that close to me.

She turned to look at Barney as all the other girls did. He was munching sweetly into his ‘meal’, not looking up. I could hear crunching, lip smacking and sucking as he pulled around gristle and into coarse hair. I again had to fight back the urge to wretch.

Amy was on my lips then, running her tongue into my mouth to taste the bile, as I broke from her too shocked to say a word.

“That’s enough,” Cecila said, evidently the mistress to Barney’s humiliation; he dropped the possum and stayed where he was at the table hunched over breathing heavily.

I could be into the kinky power play of dom/sub games as much as the next guy, but this was out of my league. But just when I thought it had gone too far, Janet stood from the table and walked over to Barney. As she had done to me, she lighted on the man, straddling him as they both sat with a ‘hurmph’, running her dark hands through Barney’s hair as he arched his back and she took him to her mouth.

The couple ate at each other, Janet’s skilled mouth over Barney’s lips, the poor guy bucking to get breath as much as control of himself.  I looked at the other girls and was not amazed to find Cecila leg’s on either side of the bench, she rolling forward hard with the her crotch against the wood; Suzette playing with her hair with one hand her right boob with the other and Amy turned to rub back against me again. I watched, transfixed as they all were, as Barney enjoyed-or I assumed he did-the lap dance of his life.

Janet opened her blouse as she French-ed Barney, then getting the halves of her shirt out from between them, she took her face off of Barney’s, lean back and presented her chest to the man. Barney suckled, clutched there, feeding as he had only seconds before on her lips. Janet screamed in what sounded like pain, Cecila smacked her crotch against the bench and Suzette starting bopping up and down on hers. Amy was close again too, rubbing her ass into me but I managed to push away from her.

Janet was leaning back even more, getting her hands down into her crotch, ripping at the snap on her long jeans shorts. Like an automaton, Barney stopped suckling the girl, let Janet lean back on his knees even more and then simply thrust his right hand down the front of the writhing girl, his eyes not moving or registering what was happening. Cecila sighed, Suzette gulped and Amy sat back. Barney was now touching Janet with the very hand he had held the steaming possum with! I got the connection; his soiled mouth and hands getting the girl off, but it still didn’t make me feel any better about what I was seeing.

“Guys, it’s been nice but…” I tried, the girls turning to me, rising off of picnic benches, Amy turning to me, even little Janet came off of Barney with a reverse squat that would have made any stripper jealous. Barney just sat in his chair smiling.

“Amy said you’d be worth it Kyle…” Cecila began.

I was shit damn scared, not just with the eating dead possum mombo-jumbo but the way in which these four girls looked, all needy yet at the same time like they were about to go for my throat…my girlfriend looking about as hungry as the rest of them.

“…hung,” Cecila began to list as in union the girls looked at my crotch.

“Intelligent,” she continued. “Open to new experiences.”

“He’s perfect,” Amy cooed and turned fully to me as if I should thank her for the compliment.

“Sorry…” I said stepping to the side of the house. “…can’t go there with you guys. Amy, it’s been real, but…”

I was trying to keep some levity in the situation, scared as I was. I knew if I could get out of the backyard I’d leave Amy like a drying come stain here in south Delaware and never see her again. Whatever these four friends and Barney, the dead meat-eating slave, were into was not my gig. Coffin doors, eating road kill, my big cock notwithstanding, I couldn’t travel the paths these chicks were traveling.

“You really should stay,” Amy said and she was up into my arms then.

I tried to fight her off, I really did, but I felt her fall into me hard. As I struggled I happened to look up and over her bent shoulder to see Suzette advancing, Barney’s big carving knife in her hand! Before I had a chance to shuck my hips, drag my girlfriend from harm’s way, Suzette plunged and Amy lay into my embrace not only like she had been expecting the attack, but more like she welcomed it.

“Kiss me,” she said, the pinpoint pain registering across her pretty wide features. For extra emphasis, the girl locked one leg up around my hip and began to dry-hump me, as we stood clutched there.

“Kiss me until I pass out,” Amy said, her lips brushing my ear. “They’ll get me to the hospital in time. Kiss me, let me feel…”

I left the girl sputtering there on the patio bricks. I turned from them all to make my leave.

“Kyle…” Cecila said from behind me. “…you leave and Amy dies, simple as that.”

I turned to them as the trio took their respective seats at the cherry-wood picnic table and my girlfriend lay still on the ground under us.

“I can…” I tried.

I went to Amy but I knew nobody he would let me just drag her out. They wanted me to stay for some evil reason and if I did then and only then would they let me or take Amy themselves for help.

“You ever wonder about extremes?” Janet cooed and I turned to the girl who I had not really heard speak before. I guess I was so shocked she was, coming to regard her as a mad-eyed, lip-locking cocoa-skinned slut, that I actually listened as she continued.

“That whole Goth movement, the Ann Rice vampire wannbe’s, that’s all suburban brats chasing hollow extremes. What we are after here is of an altogether higher order.”

Something in Janet’s voice was soothing me to listen, as if she gave this calming well-articulated lecture often. I was looking long at her pretty wide face, trying to imagine her locked on Barney only minutes before, offering her mouth, tits, pussy to him, so she could feel the gristle and stink of dead possum.

“We found one another because we all crave death,” the little girl continued. “Not to feel it, to die, but to touch it, tickle it, coax it. And while we live our lives as much on a razor’s edge as possible we have enlisted…” (and here the little girl stopped to smile across at Barney) “…and attractive and willing man to show experience through.”

“Willing?” I spat.

Dude, Amy is dying at your feet.

I looked hard at Janet tried to will her words to sense, to ignore what I had just seen, to really like Amy’s friends now that I had met them.

Dude, Amy is dying at your feet.

“In time, yes,” Cecila said at my side. “As you will be willing in time.”

I doubted that but didn’t protest. I’d hear her out if it meant the chance of saving the bleeding girl at my feet.

Then I’d be gone for good!

“We offer a variety in our foursome. You can experience everything you’ll ever need with our mix of body types, talents and approaches.”

This was Suzette waxing egotistical.

“We will give you everything you want, from food to shelter to companionship. In return we only ask you do our bidding. You experience death, from the small like road-kill to the gigantic, like fucking Amy now. All we ask is that you let us feel it through you.”

Did she say fucking Amy?

“The sexual urge heightens senses, so we much prefer to do it…”

Did she say fucking Amy?

“Amy,” I sighed to the girl lying prone and not a foot from me.

“Do it,” Suzette said, coming to the edge of the bench at me, Cecila was at my back and I knew I couldn’t retreat.

“She’ll die if you don’t,” Suzette offered. “She allowed me to stab her with the hope you’d agree.”

“Nobody’s taking her anyplace unless you fuck her Kyle,” Cecila added what I already obviously knew.

There had been calm in Janet’s voice. Her explanation was one I truly wanted to hear, to make sense of all I had seen this past half hour, maybe ever since meeting Amy, but there was my soon-to-be ex girlfriend lying at our feet soon-to-be ex! I hadn’t forgotten about her in the least, but for the moment my mind allowed the conversation with Janet to take me from the horror of all this, as if a pretty girl explaining things would make it all go away.

“Amy,” I said kneeling to her. Her usual liquid blue eyes were closed. She lay motionless if, like she said, they would get her to the hospital I knew the time had to be now.

“Do it and then we’ll take her,” Cecila said.  “It will be your first real step.”

I knew I had no other choice to save this girl’s life.

As I bent down, eased my body over my prone girlfriend I had a moment of fear that maybe I’d not be able to get it up under this scrutiny and circumstance.

This was not the moment for finesse. I rolled and pulled at my jeans, had them down just enough to roll my half-mast self over my underwear; somehow I was hard enough to get myself in hand. Amy was lying with her eyes almost closed, but there was smile playing across her lips as Cecila bent and lifted Amy’s skirt; I wasn’t shocked my girlfriend had come out of the bathroom sans thong. What had once been the most delightful sight to me for the past two months now looked like the maw of death…but still I was hard. Amy’s creamy taut thighs were calling to me to spread as they always did, and at any other time I would have wrestled my face down into her…at any other time before this twisted summer afternoon, that is.

For my own perverse pleasure or my mocking of this crowd of harpies over me I ripped at my jeans once again and got them good and off my white little ass so I’d be flashing a firm moon at them. I’d fuck her to fuck them, I reasoned. How else could I have rationalized my cock getting hard right then; I’d not think about any other reasons.

Amy was ready, silky wet. I entered her in a heat of insanity I feared I’d never lift my mind from, let alone my body. Amy had been counting on my moral center to perform this most immoral of acts knowing when faced with the proposition of her dying if I didn’t fuck her, I’d fuck her. I was as weak as they all wanted and needed me to be.

My girlfriend gulped as I thrust three times, then I was out of her, rolling full fetal next to the picnic table. I began to dry-heave as the girls moved quickly around me.

“Let’s go,” Cecila said, reaching down with Suzette and Janet to grab Amy.

“It’s Steve’s shift, right?” Suzette asked.

“Amy’s not stupid…” Cecila mocked the taller girl as they got Amy up into their carry. “…he knows we’re coming.”

I heard but did not hear this exchange. It was becoming clear to me that these girls had escapes routed, contingences figured, perverse strategies planned. I was a baby. I was a crushed and broken thing. My head was spinning and I felt tears coming. But as I lie there, smelled the citronella and high flowery air, felt the thin grease from the grill in the air I managed to look up.

I caught Barney smiling at me.

Jesus, was he mocking me? Was he taking pleasure in another slave born today?

I never wanted to hit somebody more in my life. To wreck his stained face, to…

Shit!

Wait! Shit!

It was literally like a light bulb flickering to light over my supplicant head.

Shit. Shit!

No.

Was it fucking possible? Did I dare even dream it?!

No!

In Barney’s smile, his wide-expression across the patio at me I suddenly understood. I can be dense, certainly with what I had just been through, but Barney’s intent was coming through loud and clear now.

My God!

Forget Janet’s try at an explanation, I suddenly understood this entire late afternoon…and what’s more, my role in it. Beyond what Cecila, Janet, Suzette…even Amy had informed me of, beyond probably what even they could understand, I understood in a way that no-one at this party could have informed me, except quiet, seemingly broken Barney, the strongest one of us all.

His wide smile was speaking volumes. I was centered. I suddenly understood why he had seemed so disconnected on first meeting, why his eyes showed no depth, no hunger or soul, no light. Could one man really be this crafty?

This inspired?

This cruel?

If this all was as I was starting to understand it might be, then Barney was most probably the strongest willed person I had ever met, and definitely the most perverse.

Careful what you wish for indeed, I thought to the girls as they opened the screen door and I stood and pulled up my pants. The submissive is truly the dominant, since the seeming slave actually dictates how much they will allow or be available for. Barney was available for it all: the girls were doing his biding, yet he had convinced them of the opposite.

God, talk about being one up on Amy’s seeming sexual expertise and perversity!

“They’ll be plenty to get to tonight,” Cecila said over her shoulder closing the screen on her high round butt. “Better clean up, when we get back we’ll continue with your initiation.”

“Yes we will,” I said under my breath.

I smiled back at Barney as the girls dragged Amy through the house and out the front door, or so I hoped and assumed.

“You know what you’ve got yourself into,” Barney said, as I walked across the patio to him. Again it was not a question.

“I certainly do,” I said and stood at the grill ready to help him clean up.

Futility is useless.

Yes, I can joke, but it’s a gallows humor. Although I have coded it well, I doubt this missive will even see a reader. Still, as I come to the end of it all, as my family and I are hunted even now, I feel I have to try and reach whoever might still be able to read this blog.

By now if you have avoided the vaccinations then you have come under the same persecution as we. All I can say is; had you the thought that you might stay and tough it out where you are, banish this hope from your head. You need to take flight, as my family and I have from our modest home in the suburbs of Paris.

That old quote of ‘first they came for…and I did nothing’ has never been truer, but in this case it was a decade-long world-wide conspiracy supposedly to make the world resilient to ever stronger strains of flu we have now learned was manufactured by our government (and if you don’t know it yet, you have a lot of reading to do after you get off this blog…though it’s going be hard to find evidence).

So my sweet wife and I, along with our two boys, seek sanctuary with the sympathetic few who leave messages across the sparkling ether that is my wife’s twitter account, coded strong but not so very far away from being infiltrated soon we fear. If you read this and can find safe haven, can avoid our zombie populace fooled that the pathogen inside them only prevents disease as opposed to controlling them, my best wishes are with you.

If history allows, one day our story will be told: how we resisted seemingly benign world leaders proposing humble agendas when in fact they were leading their citizens to mass control by continued application of drugs that made sheep to their policies. It will be a long road for any of us if we survive.

I have never been very good at expressing my feelings to those I love and if there is one aspect of my character I will change in these last remaining days, it will be to be more demonstrative with my feelings. I could never understand blogging for this purpose, to puke sentiment, regret or the mundane facts of one’s life, but I hope this last plea does not fall as the proverbial tree in the forest with no one hearing it. I hope my message and my heartfelt emotion is read and understood. And I hope my boys have a future to look forward to.

“My uncle says your magic will mix good with his magic,” Bon said.

Robbie left the hut. Stewy passed the joint to me. There laughed.

“Hell, I’m so stoned I’ll go along with anything,” I coughed and the old man coughed right along with me.

Again another rapid-fire conversation in Vietnamese and the boy turned to us all again.

“My uncle say you all magic men, good and ready.”

“Good and ready,” Stewy repeated, standing to attention and saluting the old man. I passed the joint to There and stood also.

“Don’t be too hasty,” There said, inhaling that sweet stick. “Never be too hasty.”

We stood on what should have been our moss-hilled encampment but was now a whiter-then-white sandy beach.

“Where is that fucking kid?” I shouted, my voice carrying out to the twinkling turquoise water. Half erect, my shirt sticking to my back I managed three waddling steps forward in the hot sand.

“Now ain’t this some shit,” There sighed.

He hadn’t acquired his nickname because he was given to excitement, as when our Sarge shouted down that rat hole: “Is there anybody there?” to which my friend had replied: “No, there ain’t no there here”! Like Stewy and I, the big black man was simply looking out at this impossible horizon now, knowing full well that even as stoned as we were shared hallucinations weren’t that common on the stuff we smoked.

Somehow the old man, who was as conspicuously absent as his fifteen year-old nephew, had just popped us here.

“Do we panic now or later?” I asked. There was a breeze tickling from someplace, it felt good, so I sat back down.

“Nah, we got time in,” Stewy said and lifted his white boots to the glint of the sun. Sixteen months in country you grow old and used with your bros just as the crust of your boots get blanched the longer in the jungles you are.

There is a sense of need when you have been in the shit, if not for the Nam for the men beside you. I had long ago thrown away my camera (traded it actually for two Doors’ tapes) so all I had to remember anybody by was what I saw and smelled of them on a daily basis. Crazy little Joe-Joe from Clifton New Jersey of all places, a curly-haired sprite of a guy with a runny right eye and the smallest feet on any man I’d ever seen. Benny Rails from San Diego and Zapo from Cincinnati were back there too, all great friends, tight stand-up guys I hoped I wouldn’t soon forget. There and Stewy were my best friends so it was cool they were with me, and I knew they’d want to get back to see all those other crazy crusty faces just as much as I.

“Okay,” I offered and my bros agreed. “But we do gotta get back.”

It just needed to be said before we went on here.

“So, how do we play this?” I finally asked after what could have been an hour or day really.

“Take a dip,” There offered, always the practical one. He stood then, lifted off his shirt and was fumbling with his boots as I looked up into the sun at his chocolate eclipse.

“Gonna swim back?”

“Maybe,” he chuckled at me as Stewy stood too.

“Water does look good,” I agreed.

“Yes, it does,” There said, now down to his skivvies.

“And I could use a bath,” Stewy offered, falling as he tried his left boot.

“Chill man,” Stewy said, down to his underwear then too. “Chill, we’ll be right back.”

He patted my curly-haired head like he always did and jumped right after There.

Over the past year and half we all had learned a whole new way of waiting. Sitting in a dewy jungle, smelling and hearing, wiggling, sweating, tasting, your senses are alive in a way you have never known them to be. I knew I could sit on this sun-bleached beach as long as forever…even longer since I knew we weren’t in any danger right then. But the fact that we were here was gnawing at me, not because of where we were and how we got here, but because I felt my sense of urgency about it slipping away.

“I got to find that old man,” I shouted, standing up again, this time with a fierce head-rush.

“What?” Stewy yelled back.

“I’m gonna go and find that…”I began, thought better and just waved to them beginning as they began to frolic in the high blue/green surf.

I turned to the light waist-high brush behind me and walked purposefully into it.

Ok, so I had no idea where I was going or why or what I would do if I found that old man, or anything at all for that matter. Far from being frightened, as I had been every day in the shit, I sauntered into that cool brush with a lightness in my heart I hadn’t felt since Judy snuck in that picture with her mail last week of July.

I could somehow still hear my two bros back splashing behind me as I walked deeper into the foliage. There was a consistent sound of low vibration, not of a machine running, but as if the earth was feeling good here and was humming about it. The insect sounds and the birdcalls were all wrong, or more precisely right for there, but not what I had grown accustomed to back in country. I knew if something was out of place, if I was being watched or a gun was being leveled at my ass I would never be able to hear the change in these odd surroundings enough to react.

But then again I knew I was safe and no gun or no eyes were stalking me.

“Come a long way,” the voice said as I came right upon the old man, Bon’s uncle, sitting cross-legged and smiling in the crotch of a low white-barked tree. Whether he or the tree, or both had just appeared or I had literally stumbled upon them at the last possible minute I couldn’t be sure, but I didn’t much care. I was just happy to see the guy…and that he was speaking my language now.

“You brought us here, right?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said and continued to smile. To hear my native tongue being spoken by this guy who I had never known to speak, let alone know anything but Vietnamese was probably the strangest aspect of all this to me so far.

“You hear what you want to hear,” he said as if reading my mind.

“Nothing has changed, really.”

“Well, we are fucking well not in the Nam anymore,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate for answers as I felt.

“And you want to be?”

“I’m not sure,” I said and sat fully then to the mossy earth floor. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is like a vacation I could never have dreamed, still…”

“You worry for your men,” he said. “You feel responsible for the safety of those back in your war.”

Well, it wasn’t my war, but I wasn’t about to quibble when this guy held all the cards. Bon’s uncle was speaking the truth though, responsible is exactly what I felt, but the sunlight did feel good and that water had looked inviting.

“How did you…”? I tried and here I paused, as he looked over at me hard with his piercing small brown eyes. “…I mean…”

“I said that your magic was strong, but I was merely the facilitator; it was you and your friends that had the desire.”

“And this place is where, exactly?”

“No place, ‘exactly’, but you are safe and as far from where we were as you could possibly travel.”

“Looks like another planet.”

“More like another plane, think of it that way. The miles you transverse were not across space, more across realities.”

See, this I could handle. In fact I could sit here all day talking to this wrinkled little guy about this stuff. Feed my head enough and I can sit in a stupor for days.

“Do you really want to go back?” he said and the question came at me as quick and warm as if I had been shot.

“I…” I began and still hearing the sounds of There and Stewy in the impossible blue water beyond, I stood and began to cry.

Stewy got it a day after we got back. We had somehow not lost a minute of real time in the Nam, but we had stayed on that beach that full day, into the night, catching fish with Bon’s uncle and it wasn’t until midnight of that night that we had all sobered up enough from the sea and the sand and the safety and asked to go back. So when we returned it was a new day back for us, but the same one we had just left as far as Nam time was concerned.

Either way you look at it Stewy got it the day after we got back.

There and I run on our own now. I mean, we are part of the platoon as we always were, but now that we have come back when we know we could have stayed on that fucking beach a lifetime, with a still-living Stewy, we are walking with a different spring in our step. It is more tempting now thinking about that impossible possibility then it was then when we were there.

Bon and his uncle have been nowhere in sight. Now coming to the end of the week we expected to see him in our usual hut, refusing the spliffs as he always did and imparting his wisdom through his ever faithful, translating nephew, but the pair have skedaddled. Maybe he’s just sauntered down the road to offer an impossible reality to another bunch of buddies who needed it. Maybe he is imparting his life lesson of responsibility to another cracked and bruised twenty-two year old with an itchy ass.

And maybe I will get back to that beach, if only in my mind, someday soon.

For now I keep Jenny’s topless picture in my pocket and my white boots to a high white shine.

For D.V. who was there.

Humans are known for both their cunning and their compassion, it is a stupefying combination to most species and the sole reason I was the one out of all the crew to dispatch you.

I was listening to the pod’s log. Outfitted as it was with panels and surfaces friendly to Ren I could access any one of the many accoutrements this tiny ship had to offer. This log was of the utmost priority, or so I assumed, so after regaining consciousness I checked for injury and finding none had engaged the message alarm.

As you have no doubt surmised, The Blitamo was on a dual mission, one of which was to leave you where you now are. And though the pod robot picked from a random selection, we do know that the ship was fixed to send you to one of the many safe worlds in the space we were last passing through. The ‘distress’ call you will have woken me for was simply a way to get you to rouse me without peaking your suspicion and for me to render you unconscious with a compound I passed to you when you were still in human form.

Remembering my teachings of human customs (and human ‘irony’) I realized a handshake is both a greeting and a dismissal gesture.

All members of The Federation have agreed over Ren usefulness for our deep space endeavors and planet colonization, but we have come to fear you greatly. From your contact with us this past half-decade you know of the various evil agencies that would love nothing better then to use Ren for nefarious purposes. We have done our best to protect your kind but The Federation fears its influence is slipping. With the Ren population as small as it is there are other ships like The Blitamo being engaged this very moment to exile the remaining Ren to other anonymous, yet friendly planets of the galaxy.

We believe this is best way to avoid further conflict.

Your species is the most resilient we have ever encountered…in fact it might be said, that in time we will come to see Ren are the most powerful creatures we will ever find. Therefore we leave you with no fear for your survival. Again, we know these planets to be hospitable, populated by the simplest of life forms.

Most species I have encountered and those I even work side by side with, don’t have what I would term a ‘God’, still I wish you what we humans call ‘God speed.’ Please understand, The Federation feels that complete genocide of the Ren race is not in our purview, we see this exile as the ‘humane’ if you will permit me the phrase, solution to silence your influence without undue cruelty.

Of course The Federation has made a pact with The Council of Planets to never again visit the quadrants of space your potential homes are in.

The recording ends there and I have not played it again. I understand why I have been sent here; I condone the deception. It was the only logical way to get me off the ship and further The Federations goal. It will indeed take no time for me to find, analyze and then morph into any one of the various creatures that the sensors indicate populate this planet. But The Federation, as usual, in its multitudinous political point-of views and varied species’ philosophies has acted out of ignorance and fear.

When the Blitamo captain spoke, as he was for The Federation and its agents, he said that Ren are the most resilient we have ever encountered…in fact it might be said, that in time we will come to see Ren are the most powerful creatures we will ever find. In their haste to remove us, to hide us from forces that could use us for nefarious purposes, The Federation failed to recognize a basic fact of Ren physiology.

Employed for our ability to morph into any creature, from the simplest virus to the most complex Extlit Cloud Priest; to survive the rigors of long space travel while a crew slumbers in a suspended state or have us land to make the often too-dangerous first contact with a new life form, the simple fact is that each Ren retains an imprint of the DNA of all the species that that Ren has encountered.

My remaining Ren brethren are now being spread throughout the galaxy on planets populated with simple life forms. And though, like me, those Rens will adapt to survive, we also can become whatever we have become before, and given the varied works we have been doing for The Federation this past half decade, the range of species we became to do those works are just as varied. In a very short time, maybe not to the captain-but then again humans live a relatively short lifespan in relationship to other species-one of my kind will summon one of the many encrypted DNA and set forth from the world they have been exiled to; surviving in the vacuum of space or flight is certainly no great feat for a being that has that ability.

Although Ren’s are not born with the concept of revenge, as I now have, we will certainly explore its various different applications through what we have learned from the species we have become.

To be defeated by yourself is another one of those very human ironies that I feel might very well someday come to pass.