By Matthew Cherry

A bright bead of fire lanced into the noon sky. Neither of them saw it; Miller was chasing sleep with his cover tilted low over his eyes and Winters was face-down in a George R.R. Martin paperback. When the sound came, low barrel thunder, Winters looked up and saw the chalky contrail off to the east. It was already spinning out of true, caught by the high Texas wind.

“That us?” Miller asked, unmoving.

Winters opened his mouth, and it came again: the red spark, pure against the blue day, almost too fast to track, etching its white needle of smoke into the stacked firmament.

“Yep,” he said. The thunder came.

*

The truck was an island in a sea of windmill grass. Mesquite and clusters of grama were alien archipelagoes that caught the morning fire and the evening redness and tore it into strange hieroglyphs which spelled uncertain and bleak fates. They both partook of what meager shade the cluttered cab offered, and shifted east to dodge the arc of the sun. They propped the armored doors open with cot bars or the fire ax and popped open the manhole on the gun turret above and still the stiff southern wind played in the paloverde but disdained their slick and heat-rashed skins. They anchored ponchos to the roof of the 7-ton’s cab with heavy gear and spread them over the tops of the open doors as awnings against the heat and their truck, fourteen feet tall at the top of the turret and fifty feet long from steel bumper to trailer mudflaps and festooned with lashed down packs and drying laundry and the mounted heavy machine gun and whole branches from small oaks that they’d squeezed by to get here, looked like some beached leviathan spat up from the throat of a Rumsfeld apocalypse. They rolled in the shade and opened their flak jackets and never wore their heavy helmets and pounded water and simmered in their own sweat.

That they even had water was a minor miracle. Theirs was a supply vehicle; strapped to the bed of the truck and to the trailer behind it were a total of four rocket pods. Each pod was a six-pack of painted fiberglass tubes inside a green steel frame. They set their cots on them at night and slept atop twelve thousand pounds of missile-propulsion and rocket fuel and high explosives.

The launcher vehicles, smaller, more expensive, and of infinitely greater concern to the brass, ran their fancy test patterns and diagnostics and trundled out to their open field firing points to fire dummy rounds into the cauterized bowl of the sky. The supply trucks hid, if your definition of hiding included painting a sixty-thousand-pound, off-road, armored flatbed that idled at 110 decibels with camo paint and driving it into a thicket of scrub oak and cedar. Miller’s definition of hiding included pointing the 7-ton’s nose west, punching the cross-country button on the CTIS panel, locking out one of the drivelines, and hammering the accelerator for about a kilometer. They had put a wide granite dry wash, a wild grove of lacey oak, and two low ridges between themselves and the rest of the unit, and Winters had not complained. On their first evening alone, the summer night had brewed up and spat down a storm healthy enough to flash-flood the arroyo behind them, and Winters had not complained. It had continued to rain, off and on, making the morning blessedly cool but the remainder of the day a quag of mud and humidity, and on the second night, they had lost radio contact with the unit, which effectively cut them off from all mankind. Winters had not complained.

On the third morning, he and Miller had left the truck on the high ground with the .50 wrapped against the dewpoint in a poncho and tramped down to the rain creek that now separated them from the unit as surely as a quarter-million miles of dead space separated the moon from the earth. They carried their rifles because if a Marine has a rifle he will carry it, though the only ammunition they had were the handful of loose rounds that Miller had smuggled in his blouse pocket. They wore their flak jackets but disdained to plant their helmets on their heads and hung them instead from field-blacked carabiners looped through the front of their vests besides chemical lights and headlamps and MRE spoons.

They stood beside the dry wash, now a wet wash, and looked across thirty feet of brown, branch-flecked water. Miller whistled low. Winters bent, picked a thumb-thick stick from the mud, and tossed it into the current. It bobbed away and was gone.

“Heavy rain upstate,” Winters said, looking in that direction as though he might see something, Poseidon himself perhaps, to justify this conjecture. The overnight river at their feet was evidence enough.

“Yeah,” Miller said, and stamped his boots on the muddy granite shore. “Tavro.”

Winters heard the last word, looked at his partner, and then followed Miller’s gaze across the water. Over the high bank there came a short, dark figure, dressed as they were in speckled, digitized tan camouflage fatigues and carrying a rifle.

No, a carbine. The M4 carbine was a lighter, shorter version of the M16A4, with a telescoping stock and truncated barrel; like all gear which is less of a pain in the ass than its traditional counterparts, the M4 was highly-coveted by Marines but only issued to those with the rank or the connections to wheedle one from the armory. The man who carried this one had mud on his the rolled cuff of his blouse and a dark smear of dirt on one kneefront and two days of stubble dark against a dark and unwashed jaw, and his rifle – carbine – was clean and spotless and dry and waited with a patient sleekness for its chance to kill again.

Tavro picked his way down through the weedy mud and muddy weeds and stood opposite them on the river’s bank. Winters had no love for the man, who was at best utilitarian and consistent and at worst a weak leader who covered it with hardassery and favoritism, but it was difficult to begrudge him his lighter, shorter weapon; Tavro was a lighter, shorter version of a Marine.

“What’ve we got, Sergeant?”

“Lost radio contact last night,” Miller said. He had to shout over the river’s churn.

“Where are y’all?”

Miller hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “About five hundred yards straight back, punched out west for the security perimeter and in good cover.” This was somewhat of an embellishment; Miller had taken them well beyond what might be called the security perimeter, which was generally formed by vehicles within sight and radio contact of one another: umvees, launchers, and 7-tons that could watch the open ground between them and cover that ground with machine-gun fire. Their truck was at least half a klick too far out to be part of the unit’s perimeter, but that was the point; they had put themselves beyond reach of most of the daily bullshit that any military unit in the field endures, and the flash flood river, thank God and Jesus and Texas rain, had put them beyond reach of the rest.

Tavro received this half-truth with equanimity. He probably didn’t give a shit that one of his supply crews had effectively seceded from his command for the time being, Winters thought, but when you were in the field and playing Marines for two weeks, you could never do things the easy way.

“Well,” Tavro said, “I guess y’all are fucked for now. You’re on high ground?”

“Yep.”

“Y’all got water?”

“Yep.”

“MREs? Fuel?”

“Got a full box. Three-quarter tank.”

Tavro frowned, not at the news but at the fact that there seemed to be nothing immediately available for him to bitch about.

“Well alright then,” he said. “Winters?”

“Yes-staff-sergeant.”

“You keep Sergeant Miller in line.”

Winters, probably a year away from corporal, smiled dutifully. “Yes-staff-sergeant.”

“Just stay dry. Don’t be stupid. If mast’sergeant or any of the Os find their way across that thing I don’t want them to catch you two half naked and asleep.”

“Roger that,” Winters said.

“You have my cell number?”

“I do,” Miller said. He patted his trouser pocket as though to ascertain that his iPhone had not absconded in the night.

And that was the last they saw of Tavro.

*

It was, for the next two days, all they saw of anyone. They huddled in the jungle heat, watched the day crawl across the rolling grass and colonies of prickly pear, stripped off their wet shirts and blouses and socks and strung them up on clotheslines from the high turret, pulled on clothes kept dry by white Wal-Mart bags inside green waterproofing sacks inside weather-resistant main-packs, scrambled out and on top of the cab to yank down these laundry lines and haul them inside when freak afternoon storms blew in, pulled the manhole back in place to keep the rain from the cab, played Bastard’s Bite with a pack of moldy Bicycles that had lost the three of clubs somewhere between San Diego and Tikrit, slept.

They moved once each day. They were surrounded by scraped hills with scalps of marble and forested horizons as primeval as the day of God’s birth and might have been the only men alive. In the rainwashed dawn they rose shivering from light sleeping bags, stowed their gear, and fired up the 7-ton. The diesel engine split the morning and they charted their course by having the man not at the wheel stand in the gun turret, eyes seventeen feet off the ground, hands anchored on the raised shields to each side, body rocking with each cataclysmic roll of the metal beast beneath. Left a hundred yards. Cut right, hit that draw perpendicular. Two o’clock, low. See that stump? Put her between that buckthorn and the dead elm.

On the fourth morning they pushed the 7-ton into a honeysuckle grove with a perfect alley carved out between lines of spruce and cedar. They were halfway down a shallow hill and could see out for miles but from more than a hundred feet away the truck was invisible. That was the morning they used the last of the water from their five-gallon can and Miller, who had been coming to these field operations for six years, hopped down from the cab, walked back to the gear box set under the trailer bed on the passenger’s side, unlocked it, and pulled out a 24-pack of 20-ounce Ozarka bottles, still bundled in cardboard and commercial-strength plastic wrap. He cut the plastic and retrieved two and replaced the treasure in the box and locked it away.

This was Miller’s last year, for which he was grateful and for which Winters envied him. Winters had two years left and had long ago absorbed Miller’s philosophy, which was to put as much distance, literally, between people with rank and yourself, the idea being that the Texas heat would do the rest and keep them from bothering you. There were 24 288-millimeter rockets strapped to their truck and trailer but there had to be roughly a billion such munitions in the bowels of the ammo supply dump back on the civilized side of the base; if the unit needed their rockets, they could cross Noah’s Flood to come and get them.

The truck was their world. Their packs were lashed to the exterior of the cab, behind the turret where they hung down out of the wind. The bench seat between them held a three-foot pile of flak jackets, helmets, daypacks, a half-empty box of Cheeze-Its, two thick packs of baby wipes and beaten paperbacks and from the roof of the cab on cargo straps and webbing hung toiletry kits and waterproof electronics bags and cellphone kits and a handheld windup field radio from which Miller sometimes conjured broken snatches of Tom Petty or AC/DC or Foreigner, overlaid with wasps’ nests of static. The actual radio – the one on which they had not been able to hail other vehicles from the unit – was under the bench seat, blinking and useless. Their gear was sun-bleached, rain-damp, speckled with mud thrown from the 7-ton’s four-foot tires and caked with the dust of a thousand roads. Every time Winters reached into the bottom of his mainpack his fingers brushed a thin layer of what he strongly suspected was Iraqi sand, even though the Desert had been thirty-four months ago and the pack had been dumped, washed, brushed, turned out, unpacked and repacked a dozen times since then. They put up laundry and it got rained on, laid out their bedding and awoke damp with dew, wet with tinea pedis, plucked wood roaches from their cots and ticks from their crotches, pissed off the side of the truck and ate cold meals with unwashed hands.

Only the rifles received real respect and were kept dry. Each night Winters played the charging handle back and forth and the sound of the bolt assembly running down the black throat of the receiver was a sweet, oiled whisper.

At noon on that day a great slate slab of cloud drew over the sun and brought wind from the south. It forecast more rain but for the time being the air became clear and swept free of the creeping humidity that lay on them sixteen hours out of the day. Winters crawled up the side of the cab onto the roof and unwrapped the poncho from the .50 and shook the moisture out of it and brushed down the big gun and rewrapped it. Like the rifle, it was without ammunition but it was a weapon and Winters was a Marine and so he kept it clean and dry.

He looked down through the turret manhole at Miller, who had a coffee-ringed Richard Matheson propped on his raised knees and one hand rummaging in the pile of gear in the middle of the seat. As he watched, this hand extricated itself with its prize: a much-beaten cellophane sleeve of Apple Newtons, last survivor of a family-pack that the two of them had picked up at Wal-Mart the day before they left.

“Hey.”

Miller looked up and made an incoherent noise that Winters recognized as an inquisitive acknowledgement.

“I’m gonna go sleep on the tires. Don’t move the truck and kill me.”

“Kay.”

Winters took his poncho from the driver’s door, shook it, shouldered it, and climbed down. He took the rifle in one hand, slung it over his other shoulder, retrieved his Martin novel, dropped to the ground, took two steps, then reconsidered and climbed back up. He plucked the box of Cheeze-Its from beneath one flap of a flak jacket – he didn’t know whose – and walked around to the passenger side of the truck. There, near the end of the truck bed, were axles two and three, close enough together so that the tires attached to them sat almost touching at their nearest points, like two great rubber gears just barely out of true. At the tires’ highest points, there was some fourteen inches between the treads and the underside of the bed. Into this space Winters went by hoisting his left leg up onto the apex of the front tire, holding onto the edge of the bed with one hand while he sat in the curved V between the tires, bringing his right leg up alongside his left and reclining his back along the rise of the rear tire. He propped his rifle up against the rear tire, looped its sling high around his arm so that it could not be stolen (by whom?) as he napped, ate Cheeze-Its and chased them with warm Ozarka, and slept.

*

When he awoke, Miller was gone.

There was nothing left of the day save the flat grey roil overhead with its promise of rain and a malefic orange rind of sky at the earth’s western end that peered through the high grove of spruce: the bloody meat of a jaundiced eye.

Winters’ back was stiff and in pain. He rolled, half asleep, but his killer’s body remembered where the stupid boy inside it had put it and his left hand shot up palm-flat against the warm metal underside of the 7-ton’s bed and so he avoided a bad tumble into the half-dried scrim of mud churned up beside the dormant tires. He rolled again and ducked and landed on his feet. He blinked away the cotton of dreams in which a single pair of yellow-gold eyes – wolf’s eyes – had gazed at him from a strange height in the dark and put one hand against his spine. He felt benumbed and slow in that unfriendly amber light. He put one hand out for the rifle and the rifle was there, unloaded but potent and reassuring nonetheless.

There are many like you but you are mine, he thought, and then: coyotes. We haven’t heard the coyotes at all this whole week. Do they migrate somewhere else during the rains? Are they silent because of the weather? And tagged on, as low and sinister and unwelcome as a drop of blood in the morning sink: maybe they’ve been driven off by wolves. Something half-formed and full of teeth turned its malformed head up from the black soup of his fading dreams and he shivered in the cooling day.

Cooling?

Winters looked at the sky, agape, and then at his wristwatch. It had cost twelve dollars and fifty cents at – where else? – Wal-Mart and had run uninterrupted and without a single battery change for three years, four months, seventeen days, six hours and three and a half minutes. It declared the time to be 6:16 – that’s 18:16 for our military friends.

That’s impossible, Winters thought. He looked at the sunset, that hazard gash atop the rim of the hills. I’ve been asleep for… for about six hours. He stowed the Cheeze-Its in one cargo pocket of his camouflaged trousers and the Martin paperback in the other, slung the rifle combat in front, and walked alongside the truck to the cab. The passenger door was open and it was then that Winters discovered that Miller was gone.

*

Their pre-operation trip to Wal-Mart, like the Indian manner of hunting buffalo, wasted nothing; they bought Ozarka and drank the water and saved the bottles for use as solar showers or toothbrush washers or Kool-Aid mixers; they bought crackers and Newtons, Fig and Apple and otherwise; they kept the plastic bags the goods came in and waterproofed their clothes and stored their trash in them; and they stole the most important item of all: one milk crate.

The 7-ton truck, known to our military friends as an AMK37 HIMARS RSV, came with two toolboxes, three if you count the one on the trailer (and Miller did). In the largest of these lived a long, olive-drab fire ax with a block on the back of the axe head and a cotter-pin-sized hole through the block. Onto the block, with the aid of cotter pins (included with the ax), one might fasten a pick, a broad pick, a rake, a hoe, or a mattock (also included). If one is headed into the largest military base in Texas and will not be within shitting distance of a restroom, toilet, latrine, outhouse, or privy for two weeks, it might behoove one to acquire a milk crate, use a fire ax to chop the bottom out the crate, append a plastic toilet seat to this hole using 550 cord, and strap this field-expedient toilet to the bed of one’s truck.

Winters craned his neck and looked into the space between the two-foot-high headache rail at the front of the bed and the front of the rocket pods. Both iso mats were wedged there, as were both black sleeping sacks. The milk crate was gone. Winters looked into the cab and although he was too low to see the other end he could tell from the fall of the light that the driver’s door – his door – was closed, which meant that the fire ax, which in shovel form was the tool of choice for field latrine duty, was also gone. Winters did not know if the jumbo roll of bathroom tissue that they kept beneath the bench seat was also gone, but faced with such overwhelming evidence on the point of the ax and the point of the crate – exhibit A and exhibit B, if it please the court, your honor – he did not feel obligated to check.

All around him, the darkling twilight hummed. In the fields, somewhere, a cicada began to whirr its deaths-head song. To the west of the honeysuckle grove, the hill on which they sat curved away into a long, broad valley which was itself populated with ravine-shot forests of desert willow and mesquite and huisache. It was lower land, swampland, but from afar looked as though it might drain well and thus would not become a stinking mire during wet seasons.

Low land, out of sight, loamy soil, not like that hardscrabble up on the hillside, Winters thought. Far enough away for comfort, close enough for comfort, maybe a babbling brook for conversation. That’s the direction I’d wander if I had to take my ease. He felt no trepidation at all about Miller’s fate and no worry and no fear. These things would come later, in the night, when his defenses against them were faded and thin as the membrane between man and murder.

Winters put a hand out for the vertical grab handle beside the door, meaning to hoist himself up, climb to the turret, and watch the day die, and that was when he heard the shot. It came from the west and it came from close and it was the high firm clap of a rifle and it was alone and in its solitude Winter heard everything a man spends his days closing his ears against, dear john and it’s inoperable and we regret to inform you and we did everything we could but and O Discordia god damn it Miller was gone. Not just gone but gone. The thought filled him with a strange sweet urgency, the kind of anticipation that dries your mouth and squeezes your bladder, but at the same time the flat slap of the rifle shot, like aural punctuation, made such a finality of it all that he did not rush. He left the truck where it stood, stone guardian against the night, monolithic and godlike, and he shouldered his empty rifle and walked west into the sunset.

He emerged from the honeysuckle-tangled oaks and crossed a wide field of waist-high buffalo grass. A line of ash and possumhaw delineated a creek to his left, at the bottom of the hill. To his right the ground rose in smooth folds to the bare crown, where broken granite shale stood like teeth in the breath of the wind. Ahead of him was the low ground and the broken mesquite forests that they had seen from afar on their way in. Locusts, some of them as big as mice, hopped away from him on whirring legs. The cicadas sang. He was the only man left on the earth, and around him the switchgrass plains spun and all the billion species of the world missed his kind not at all. The truck behind him sat on rubber that would rot and in its belly was diesel fuel that would break down and gather moisture and evaporate after all the seals in the tanks disintegrated and glass that would fog and cloud and someday the beast would be the only evidence of some indecipherable moonrot god, a dried and pitted mammoth skull to be genuflected to and draped with the entrails of enemies by some inchoate descendant of man in a thousand thousand years.

Winters reached the lip of the descent and looked out over the twilit boughs. He turned once and saw just the barest hint of the truck – high shoulder of the cab behind a screwbean branch, edge of one bulletproof windshield panel glimmering low in the day’s last light, the nod of reassurance from something dormant but alive, invincible and benevolent.

He went down. The way was steep and rocky with feldspar scrap and hummocks of bluestem but still more navigable than it had looked from up high. He slapped at a mosquito and cursed and only then realized that the evening had gone silent around him. He stopped and pondered this for a moment and decided he did not like it. The urge to charge the rifle hit him and he wished bitterly for a full magazine or for even one round.

The valley ahead was a wide expanse of river warrens, waterways that were either fast or sluggish or bracken but tended of late to be swifter than usual due to the rain. Winters reached the bottom of the decline, stepped over a patch of sumac, and pushed aside a thick swathe of mesquite, and thought, this is a maze. I’m stepping into a darkening maze and I’m never going to find him.

He saw the milk crate immediately. It was planted in the soft soil ten feet from the nearest waterway, which snaked toward Winters’ point of ingress and then away again in a burbling black horseshoe of wet earth. The ax was buried blade-deep in the ground beside the crate. Winters stopped with one foot in the dark soil of the creekbed and one outside the screen of uplifted mesquite. His left hand held the pistol grip of the rifle and his index finger was straight and off the trigger.

The stream talked. A mosquito alit on his neck and drank of him and flew away full of Irish blood.

Winters stepped through the screen of leaves and felt his boots sink an inch into the persistent mire. He felt expectant, as though he should feel something profound or foreboding or dramatic, but there was nothing save the inverted plastic shitter box with the pale white toilet ring lashed to it. The small strip of clear ground wherein the crate lay and the man stood was quiet and at peace. Behind him, a thousand years away, the field cicadas opened up again and filled the closing night with their alien ululation. It was a noise that Winters had always likened to long summer sunsets, lemonade, a hammock swing-

If I find his rifle, he’s gone. Dead? Was that what he meant? Perhaps, but the thought would not come, would not insert that final phase of mortality into the end of the statement. What was out here that could threaten Miller? No, the idea was more a basic evaluation of Miller’s nature: the man was a warrior, not in the pep-rally, 30-second recruitment commercial, remember-that-time-at-the-strip-club kind of way that military frat guys liked to jerk off about, but in a way that Winters had never been able to put into words. Miller was a Wellington; Miller was at the helm of a triple decker, spinning the wheel and calling for the guns to be run out; Miller’s tribe had built stonehenge and had defended it with their lives. Miller had come down here to perform that most vulnerable and private of rituals, but he had brought his rifle with him and would no more willingly part with it than he would with the dark chambers of his shooter’s heart.

Without really wanting to, Winters moved forward. The rifle barrel, at a 45-degree angle, tracked ahead in small sweeping arcs. Winters caught himself doing this and made his hands drop the unloaded weapon and let it hang by its sling. It took a surprising amount of will.

He reached the crate and glanced through the white ring of the toilet seat before he could stop himself. He grimaced, but it was only reflex – the earth beneath the crate was clear and undisturbed. Winters reached down and hefted the ax. It had the shovel head affixed and was top-heavy. He laid it across one shoulder and held it there. After a moment he lowered it, yanked the cotter pin, tapped the axe head to make the shovel fall to the ground, and hefted the lightened ax. Holding the ax like a man who expects a tree to come at him in the near future, he walked down to the creek. The last rays of the sun came through from the unknown country to the west and lanced into the clearing, blood red and holy. Winters walked the ground out from the crate, making first a five-foot circle and then a three-meter circle and then walking the entire perimeter of the horseshoe clearing. There was nothing but the crate and the ax and the black loam, which blended to gold sand as it neared the creek.

The sun crept below the horizon and as it did a fit of wind came through the forest’s edge. The sunbeam on the rippling water shifted and passed over the ground and a small glint leapt up at him from the dirt near the crate. Winters crouched.

It was brass from a 5.56 round and it was fresh. It was pale gold and stippled on its tiny round mouth was a ring of blackburn where the projectile had exited the cartridge. He didn’t know how he had missed it on his first pass except-

Except it was growing dark very quickly now. The sunbeam dried up even as he stood in it and the evanescence of its small warmth faded from his chest like the final hope of the unshriven, like the last pulse of a dying ember before a firebed resolves into a hill of ash.

Winters swallowed. He picked the casing up and put it in his left breast pocket. He opened his mouth to call out to Miller and only then realized how reluctant, how very reluctant, he was to break the strange silence of that place.

The silence of the tomb, he thought, and then on the heels of it: that’s a terrible cliché. Don’t ever use that in writing.

There’s no tomb, he thought. Miller is not fucking dead. He’s just…

Just what, exactly? Walked down here, realized he was constipated or that he didn’t have to go, saw something worth shooting at, and traipsed off after it? Silently? Making no noise now in this thick cypress swampland? How far could he have gone?

I would hear him, if here were anywhere around. He would hear me.

“Miller!” Winters cried. He hadn’t realized he was going to do it until it was out, and he startled himself, but his voice was stable and sharp and that was good.

There was no answer save shocked silence from the cicada brigade and the cold thrum of the wind, and that was not.

Cold? Yes, the breeze was quite cool down here, probably due to the proximity of the water and the lack of sunlight to heat the ground throughout the day.

Cold and dark.

Winters backed out the way he had come, feeling like a deserter but knowing that the alternative was to wade into the piled shadows of the acacia thorn and put himself at the mercy of… whatever Miller had shot at.

That was one thing, at least. Winters was quite sure that Miller must have fired the shot; the casing had been on the ground where Miller must have been and surely, if someone else had shot at Miller from that close they would have hit him, and that would have left blood somewhere in the clearing.

Miller had snuck some 5.56 rounds onto base from home – not really that surprising – and had seen… something… in the woods and had manually chambered one round and fired at it and missed and… had gone after it? Had run? Had sat down on the crate, shit out a pair of angel wings, and flown off into that lurid sunset?

Winters backed through the wall of mesquite and turned. As he did so, something in the stream jumped.

He spun, reaching for the empty rifle, but caught himself halfway. He raised the ax in both hands and pushed back through the foliage.

The ax was high and its edge caught the very end of the day and burned red therewith, an executioner’s blade. The stream was empty but he saw right away that nothing could have leapt from it; at the nether end of its horseshoe bend it spilled over a soggy cottonwood deadfall, upon which had accrued all manner of bracken and flotsam. The overspill was broad but very shallow, and the stream in the clearing was no more than a few inches deep. There were no fish in it nor were there room for any.

If that was a fish, he thought, it was a big one. He supposed it was possible that a river bass or trout or catfish or something had washed in here from the recent floods, but if so, where had it gone? It had sounded like… like a full-grown man planting a combat boot down into the creekbed with all his weight behind it, so if it had been a fish, where… the fuck… had it gone?

Winters began to turn away and this time what stopped him was the glint of water in the dark sand just outside the course of the creek. He crossed the clearing again and looked down at the edge of the water. There, some ten feet from the crate, was a broad delta of silt and shale where the smooth elbow of the watercourse turned back to the west. The spread of sediment was undisturbed save for one declivity pushed deep enough to have caused the wet earth to seep and fill it with the murky water that had caught his eye. The imprint was actually five smaller impressions, each at least a few inches deep and arranged in a rough round. There was a vaguely triangular impression at the base of the shape and it was punctuated by four ovoid prints and these in turn were tipped with thin spines. The spines were an inch long and very clear, even in that failing light. Each of the round prints looked as large as a jumbo chicken egg. As Winters looked down at it, the water in the prints rippled, just a bit. The wind picked up again and tugged at the hair along the back of his neck, and he was suddenly very cold.

It was a wolf track.

*

The moon, if there was one, veiled herself behind pitch clouds. Dark became total.

He hung his headlamp from the roof of the cab, set it to its tactical red night mode, and spent half an hour trying to hail various vehicles on the radio. Nobody responded. On the way back from the clearing he had pulled out his cell, intending to call Tavro, and had seen with no real surprise that his service was out.

He tried to read by that hellish light but could not. The windshields threw back the small glare and made looking out at the black countryside all but impossible, and the light pollution was so great that he could barely see the ground outside the driver’s door. He considered firing up the truck and running the headlights but didn’t think the small, illusory comfort of such light would be worth the knowledge that any wolves one within about an eight mile radius would hear the engine and see the beacon lights. He considered firing the truck up and scouting the river that separated him from his unit but he was unwilling to leave Miller. There were other considerations as well: night driving in the field was perilous under the best circumstances; Marines never drove tactical vehicles without an A-driver to ground guide or scout or just generally hold the driver’s ass out of the fire; the volume of rain over the past few days made it very unlikely that even the 7-ton, which Winters had taken across four-foot-deep watercourses with strong currents, could safely ford the floodwaters. Those were all good reasons and none of them mattered because Winters would not leave Miller and so he sat alone in the open cab and listened to the sibilant, necrotic hum of static in the radio mic that seemed to be the night’s own voice and huddled in his poncho blanket against the breezy chill.

He thought about the wolf track. He knew there were coyotes in this part of Texas – Winters, a native of the state for twenty years, doubted that there was a part of Texas to which coyotes weren’t indigenous – but wolves? Even on a base so wide open and untrafficked as this? He had seen herds of longhorn cattle, at least a few hundred head strong, roaming free on the base; had, in fact sat in the truck while such a herd passed around the cab the way a calm but deep river will pass around a tall rock. They had received a briefing back at home about how the cattle here were privately owned and government protected and to shoot them would be a federal offense (and who but redneck Marines might have a track record dubious enough to merit such a warning, anyway?). Would significant wolf packs still exist on land with so much cattle? Winters didn’t know, but he thought not; he thought they would probably have been killed off or warned away by the presence of so many people in the area for so long, and by so much domestic stock.

Obviously there was still at least one.

It crosses the creek fifteen feet upstream from Miller, headed toward the crate. Miller sees it coming and… has time to load a round manually into the chamber? No, maybe not. If it had wanted him, it would have gone for him, and he would have tried the ax… unless he already had the round loaded. Unless he’s had that round in his rifle for five days.

Was that possible? Winters supposed it was. It still didn’t wash, because if Miller had shot at something at that range, he would have hit it. Anything smaller than a bear would die almost immediately if struck by a well-placed M16 round at ten feet; it was a small bullet but very highly powered, reliant on its potential to twist and yaw and fragment inside its target’s body, rather than on brute size, to generate mortal wounds. At a few meters’ range, the muzzle velocity would be enormous; the round would burst; the wolf would die.

Wolves have wedged-shaped skulls, he thought, and this was true; it was possible, even at that range, for a shot to have sheared off the side of the animal’s head instead of piercing the skull. But there had been no blood, nor evidence of damage of any kind. There had been no cries, no howls, and no Miller.

Winters checked his wristwatch. It read 8:43, which meant Miller had been gone for-

There was someone outside the cab.

Beyond the limits of his little red lamp, the night spun in its black gyre and the eyeless clouds lowered near as though eager witnesses to some act of horror. The crickets were silent and through the bloody smear of light on the driver’s windshield Winters saw a man-shape standing in the buffalo grass in front of the cab. It was tall and thin and wore the torn ruins of what once might have been desert-colored camouflaged fatigues. Its head was strangely cocked as though it strained to hear the whisperings of some unspeakable voice and at that thought the susurrus of radio static leaking from beneath the bench seat suddenly leapt in volume and began to hiss.

The thing outside the cab rolled one hooded eye toward him and it was not the eye of a monster but of a man, some infernal parody of the human orb and its ovate iris was as yellow and as bright as a fever moon. Its face was cloven thrice with parallel gashes, the topmost of which split the dome of its pate from above the left ear to just beneath the orbit of that fell eye and in the inch-wide crevice, just at the edge of the thin crimson spill of lamplight, he could see the glistening coil of its brain. As he saw it, something behind that cloven skull shifted wetly, as though aware of his observation. He heard that shift as clearly as though it were transmitted via Bose headphone surround-sound, and in response he felt something shift in his own head, some small trapdoor swing open and gape and he felt something wet and raw and so very old slither up and out onto the floor of his mind. The voice of the radio rose to a roar and spat bursts of what might have been some hidden and viperous dialect of human speech and in its Latinate pulse he detected a high, hideous note of triumph.

Winters thought, this is a dream. And it was a comforting thought, because the thing in front of his truck opened its mouth then and uttered a high, yipping scream. It was the sound a wolf pup might make if you were to spit it and roast it alive over a cheerful hardwood fire.

A dream, he thought again, and as he thought it he reached for the headlamp, which hung from its cranial strap from the cargo webbing in the roof of the cab. In a dream he would paw for it blindly and send it spinning, and in the insane dancing light, that hellish red jamba and jive, the thing outside would crunch slow steps around the side of the cab, duck beneath the open driver’s door, reach up with hands that were not hands and pull itself creaking and hissing and yowling into Winters’ lap. It would open its mouth and the thing inside its broken skull would slide down the ramp of its tongue like some kind of grotesque living oyster and its kiss would be sensual and slick as the lichen on an unhallowed grave-

Winters reached for the headlamp. It unsnapped at once and his traitorous fingers grabbed it. He shined it forward but only succeeded in blinding himself with rebounded glare from the double-paned windshield. He shined it down and out, and in the reduced glare he saw the space before the truck’s cab. It was empty.

The night was silent. He played the headlamp about, illuminating brief slices of rustling honeysuckle and truck and switchgrass with the russet wash of its beam. The skirts of undergrowth outside rustled in the wind. The radio was a dead voice. His scalp broke into gooseflesh.

The wind blows over the dead and the living and the damned and it does not care, he thought, and the thought felt at home inside his dark skull.

Shht. Shhht-shht.

There – those were steps: the small, furtive movement of something that did not want to be heard. Winters leaned forward, trying in vain to play the red light toward the front passenger corner of the truck. All of the ground immediately surrounding the 7-ton was blind space except for the spot directly below the open driver’s door and he dared not lean out to look there; he wasn’t even willing to lean out and pull the door closed.

Something jounced against the passenger side of the truck. He felt it, ever so slightly, just a touch more force than the sway of the cab in the night wind, and he heard the cargo D-rings that hung from the bed of the truck jingle once, twice, go still. There was an organic noise, a single exhale, a glottal, slobbery rush of air that sounded as though the pipe that produced it was at least four inches in diameter. He had no idea how he could think that and he knew the thought itself was absurd, but it came at once and in the starless dark, bathed in that vermillion glow, it felt obscenely plausible.

Silence again. The breath of the night on his back and the patch of sweat beneath his collar that has gone cold and – Thunk.

It was a generic sound, something weighty and metallic hitting a hard surface, a sound that could be a thousand things. But Winters was a Marine and, though there were many 7-tons like it, this one was his and that noise, that noise, friends, Romans, countrymen, was the sound of the center ratchet on an AMK37 standard-issue cargo strap being dropped on the bed of the selfsame vehicle. The only cargo straps that were not locked away in the toolboxes were the two straps, one inside, one out, on the cab from which hung their personal gear and the eight straps that held down their payload of rockets. The straps were ratcheted down tight and the only way one of the big ratchets would hit the truckbed like that-

Is if someone cut the strap. The thought went through his head like a strip of white light and his crawling terror became smoke. As if to make manifest the image, he slipped the headlamp into place around his skull and slapped the toggle switch above the little bulbs. The red nightshade vanished in a blinding white glare and Winters reached up to vault himself through the manhole, turning as he went to face the bed of the truck and whatever dark offender had dared damage his gear. He had one job and that job was to deliver rockets and it did not matter that some kind of nightmare thing had slunk out of the woods to devour him and it did not matter that there was a raging flood-tide between him and the people to whom he might actually deliver those rockets. It did not matter that they were on a training exercise and it did not matter that his faith in the Corps was a thing of colored cloth. He had one job and he would not cower in the cab while some ghoul destroyed his cargo.

The impulse that drove him up through the turret manhole to bring his headlamp to bear on the offender was both absurd and irresistible. He came up with a hoarse cry and -

And the world spun beneath him. The compass of the night released its fulcrum and the truck careened as though Winters himself was the axis of the planet’s rotation and he fell, not rising through the manhole but plummeting through it. One hand banged spectacularly against the metal lip of the portal as he went into the sky and the third and fourth knuckles split open and threw a daisy chain of blood drops into the cloudshot void. The white cone of light let the lamp affix its beam spun free and the world, a tree-rimmed cavern roof upon which the truck was a strange and bitter stalactite, flashed in strobe waves of vision and darkness.

Winters fell into the sky.

*

Winters fell over with a hoarse cry and awoke half in and half out of the cab. His left hand swung down and caught air and his left boot scrabbled off the lower lip of the thick armored door and pistoned downward but his right hand found the black hoop of the truck’s steering wheel. He came to a halt with one ass-cheek half on the edge of the padded bench seat and most of the rest of him hanging in the night wind.

He levered himself back into the driver’s seat and put both hands on the broad wheel. The red headlamp glow filled the cab. He reached for it and this time he did blunder; he batted at it and it swung and bounced and threw lunatic shadows all over the cab. He grabbed it, pulled it free of the webbing, and clicked the switch above the bulb to OFF. Forty seconds later, his adjusting eyes told him that dawn was coming.

To the indigo darkness, Winters said, “the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” He had no idea what it meant, only that for some reason it had spun up from his dream like a fragment of a drowned ship’s hull cast onto the beach of the waking world. His voice sounded dense and thick to his own ears, and the inanity of the line struck him as incomparably funny. He laughed but did not like the sound.

I’ll stay awake and watch the dawn and somehow this will all make sense, he thought, and then he drifted away.

*

Morning. Low clouds and steel. Thunder in the east and the sound of rockets firing. The radio, unresponsive. The threat of rain and the smell of it on the coming wind like the memory of a woman.

The ground in front of the truck sloped gently down to the creek marshes. Winters slipped from his seat to the ground and walked along the truck and used the short ladder mounted behind the cab to reach the bed. He looked down into the slice of storage space between the headache rail and the rockets, thinking he would unroll his iso mat on the truck tires and hide from the rain.

The milk crate was there. Winters slipped, caught himself with one hand on the headache rail, and looked to the west.

Miller stood in the open field between the truck and the low creek woods. His back was to the truck and he was still. He was no more than a thin man-shape in dirty desert fatigues and for a bone-thin second Winters thought it’s moving, the red muscle behind that thing’s open head is moving and then he blinked and it was just Miller, a man whose silhouette he knew better than most men know that of their wives.

The wind, redolent of rain, laughed and wrestled through the wild oats and buffalo grass. The compass of the world was the mud-skirled alley of rainspace between the tips of Winters’ boots and the tall back of that implacable figure. He began to fill that space with himself and it felt like grabbing a rough-woven mental rope with both hands and tugging fist over fist toward the terminus of some unkind and alien narrative. There was an answer on the other side of Miller’s salt-ringed uniform blouse, the lower hem of which fluttered in little bursts of morning breeze. There was an answer and he wanted very much not to know it.

There was one moment during which his boot actually faltered in mid-swing, as though contemplating the idea of stopping, turning him around, and marching him back to the truck. In that second or perhaps half-second he was in a tiny shitless hovel-ring five miles outside Al Taqqadum that might have passed as a village around the time of the crusades and the sun was the white indifferent glare of a God whose children have misbehaved. He pushed through a dirty linen curtain from that blindlight and into total darkness. The Surefire lamp on his rifle was on but it had no more than painted a weak hoop of luminescence on one mud wall when the three men in the hut hit him in a rush. They might have been terrorists or they might have just been afraid and two of them had long bayonets and the third had a Kalashnikov. There was a ten second scrap of burst time like an overripe flower and then he was shifting and rolling and huge cargo plane rotors where in his head and he was laid out on a bunk held by cargo netting and someone in a green jumpsuit had him by the hand and then he was in a German hospital and every single thing everyone had ever told him about blond German nurses was true. They told him much later, when his jaw could open and he could urinate on his own, that he had shot one man twice but not killed him and that Miller had fired three rounds into another before his rifle had jammed and that he had thrown himself onto Winters instead of backing up to clear the jam and give himself safe space to fire. Miller had put his arm over Winters’ throat and taken two stab wounds there and the heavy plate in the back of his flak jacket had eaten three bullets and he had turned and hit them with his rifle and taken one of their bayonets and when the others from their squad reached them less than a minute later the three men were broken dolls and Miller had still been hitting them.

Winters reached Miller and put his hand on his sleeve and turned him. Miller turned and Miller was Miller.

“I missed him,” Miller said, and looked towards the low creekland.

Winters watched him. He looked thoughtful, uncharacteristically somber, but not uncoupled from whatever dark shelf of rock he anchored his heart to. Dark? Yes, Winters thought, dark and deep and of secret intent. Miller was friendly and courteous and quick of tongue and wit but there was something at his core that went unseen by the world of law and right of way and holding the elevator door: something that wrote quantum trigonometry on Himalayan limestone cave walls and brought down its prey bare-handed by the light of the moon and paid no worship to the garish sun.

“He was very fast. Quiet. He came out of the brush near the creek and I fired right away. I thought- I thought I must have hit him, high in the chest, but he came for me. I ran.”

Here Miller held up the sleeve that Winters had touched and Winters could see that it was speckled with thorns. There was a long, thin scratch through the dark stubble of one cheek and he was missing a button from the front of his blouse.

“I went up the creek, probably about half a mile. I kept thinking that he was slowed because I’d shot him, that he’d bleed out or go down; he surely would have caught me if I hadn’t hit him. But I went up a small rise and he was right behind me. I made it into a tree and went up as high as I could. I think he tried to come up after me but he was too heavy. So I spent the night in the tree. He prowled around for a long time but when I went to load another one of my rounds he saw it and took off.”

Miller laughed a little and it sounded sane. Winters felt both an irrational urge to join him and a powerful surge of envy. He began to smile and then stopped.

“You keep calling it a he,” he said. Miller looked at him.

“And you said it tried to climb the tree? And it was too heavy?”

“This guy was huge,” Miller said, “and definitely crazy.”

“How big can a wolf be, that a branch that held your weight couldn’t hold it? And how do you know it was a male?”

Miller, who had looked calm and sane for the duration of the conversation – for the duration of his life, as far as Winters knew – now looked uncertain. His face clouded.

“Wolf?” he said.

“I saw the tracks by the creek,” Winters said. “It was either a wolf or the biggest dog in the-”

But Miller was shaking his head, and now his face was more than clouded; now it was thunderous with bemusement.

“It wasn’t a wolf,” Miller said. “It was a man.”

Winters began to look at him and then stopped. Disbelief came off him in waves, and he felt sure that the other man could sense it.

“I’m going after him,” Miller said.

There was silence in the morning, broken only by the wind coming off the cypress swamp below. Winters smelled loam and decay and wet wood and thought slow thoughts. His mind felt puffed up and tender, like morning eyes, and his gears turned without their usual alacrity, but for this price he seemed to have received an almost Socratic clarity; he saw, and he saw everything.

Either Miller was crazy, or Miller was badly mistaken – or Miller was right, in which case the evidence that Winters had seen down in the clearing was misleading or obfuscatory. Winters thought these things with his new, slow mind and put each possibility in a box. Then he put these three boxes in a closet and shut the door.

Miller was going after him. It did not matter if Him was a wolf, or if Him was a man, or if Him was Jon Bon Jovi on unicycle with a monocle and a pirate hat. Miller was going, which meant Winters was going, because since that hot afternoon in Tikrit Winters had been Miller’s man. Part of him, the part that lay coiled beneath his waking mind in tight rings of steel scales, knew that Tikrit had nothing to do with it. He had always been Miller’s man, because some men were not just smart, not just proficient, not just good but great, and those men stood out like suns in oceans of ink. Those men burned and roiled and drew others toward them and the part of Winters’ mind that stayed awake and unblinking and cold long after the cumbersome engine of his consciousness had shut down each night felt nothing toward Miller except a blind gratitude so total that its circumference was beyond the shores of waking comprehension. In his daytime hours, Winters felt the shadow of that comprehension the way a man will feel a hard-fought football game two days later, but he felt other things as well – brotherhood and mystification and vague awe and occasional resentment and love – all the things a lesser man who is just clever enough to know he is lesser feels when he spends time in the wake of a greater man. Winters imagined that he felt around Miller the way people might have felt who were close to Theodore Roosevelt, or the Duke of Wellington, or perhaps Jesus.

Winters did not say any of these things. He did not, strictly speaking, even know he knew many of them. He turned and walked back to the truck and came back a minute later carrying two fresh bottles of Ozarka. He handed one to Miller and they both pushed the bottles into their cargo pockets. Somewhere a mockingbird crackled.

Miller dug his left hand into the breast pocket of his blouse and came out with a handful of rounds. No, not a handful – four. He passed two to Winters and they each loaded one round manually into their rifles, a process that took both hands and several seconds; the M16 is a magazine-fed weapon and is not made to take a single bullet at a time by hand. They did not have magazines because the higher-ups had not issued them for a field operation in which no live ammo was involved. They had to tug back the bolts and slowly work the round into the chamber while sliding the bolt back into place, and as they did so the day’s first heat worked into them and brought scrims of sweat and salt to their foreheads and backs.

The surrealism of what they were about to do – of what they had already done – entered Winters’ mind and he tossed it from hand to hand, taking his time. If he had ever needed a deeply-absurd and implausible experience to convince him that his loyalty to Miller was either infinite or very nearly so – and he hadn’t – then this was that time.

The sun found its way into a gap in the overcast. The low ground was silent, and it called. They descended in the morning’s stillness, their boots brushing the high whipgrass. They went as a pair, with five yards between them whenever they had five yards to give. Miller was on Winters’ right but as they approached the bulwark of mesquite and oak that fronted the marshland, they crossed one another’s path so that Winters, who was left-handed and whose rifle therefore pointed right, was on the right. They pushed through the vegetation and entered the creekside clearing as one and felt the cool shadows of the night past brush their skins. They carried their weapons half-raised and their eyes moved; one man looking for a man, one man looking for a wolf. Both of them had once hunted men but neither of them had ever hunted wolves, and if they found this ironic, they did not voice such thoughts. The dense underbrush closed behind them and they were gone from the world of men and bustle and self-importance and the madness of arrogant certitude. The low ground swallowed them like an alien womb.

They crossed the silt toward the creek and still they said nothing and they were shadows among shadows. Behind them, the truck caught the first pale fingers of sun on its high metal brow and began to warm beneath their touch.

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