CHAPTER 4
I woke up and couldn’t move.
The fire had died and the room was dark, but I could sense someone standing in the corner. I could almost see their silhouette. They didn’t move, but I knew they meant to hurt me in some way. I tried to speak, to ask who was there, but my voice didn’t come. I was transported back to being a little kid, eyes darting around the bedroom, searching the shadows for monsters. I didn’t even consider grabbing my rifle. I just wanted to run. But my legs wouldn’t move.
The thing in the corner remained, watching me.
This wasn’t the first time I’d experienced sleep paralysis. It wouldn’t be the last. It always happened the same way. I’d wake suddenly and feel a malevolent presence and wouldn’t be able to move. Reading about it later, I found out a lot of other people had experienced the same thing. My situation was not unique. It went all the way back before recorded history, eventually being explained scientifically. Everything was, given enough time and focus.
My family is Catholic and as a kid I swallowed religion like soda. The first time this happened I thought a wraith or demon had come to possess me, scratch me, or do whatever demons do. I remember lying in bed, paralyzed with fear, and claiming the blood of Christ over me. It seemed gross to ask for a deity’s blood to coat you like barbecue sauce on a chicken wing.
Even a demon wouldn’t threaten something so depraved. But that’s what my abuela would always say: “I claim the blood of Christ!” So that’s what I said in my mind over and over. I didn’t know what else to do.
To make it less yucky, I imagined Christ’s blood to be a golden light enveloping me like rays of sunshine. Not the crimson splatter of real blood. For some reason, it would always work. I’d begin to move and the shadowy presence in the room would disappear.
I got older and less superstitious, but the fear never changed. Each time it happened, I would forget every notion of scientific fact, any form of reason and logic. I’d be alone in whatever room I’d fallen asleep and would wake with the fear and the presence. I might not have been close with Jesus, but I’d take any help I could get. I would claim Christ’s blood over me, though I hadn’t prayed or gone to confession in years.
I did it there in my room in Waukesha.
But it didn’t work.
After a few seconds of realizing I was awake, I still couldn’t move or speak and the presence in the corner began to move toward me.
Oh shit! I thought. My abuela was right and the demon finally broke through the veil.
The shadow in the corner didn’t float. It walked like a man. But it wasn’t. And soon I saw the glowing blue of its eyes as it stepped closer. It placed one of its metal hands against my mouth and I fought to breathe through my nostrils.
“I’m here to test you Private Contreras.” Sergeant 5-90 had turned his voice to its lowest setting. “Order sixty-seven. All suspected smoke eaters will be tested with fire or smoke and be detained if deemed valid.”
I’d meant to say,” You crazy metal fucker! Let me go!” But it only came out as mumbles against his metal palm.
I’d thought the acid dragon had damaged my sergeant in the fight, put him out of commission, but he was obviously well enough to walk and attack me. The fall must have shaken his circuits loose. He’d gone crazy. Haywire. He was taking it out on me. I tried to scream for help but he had his hand clamped so hard against my mouth there was no way I’d be able to alert anyone.
“I’ve been watching you, maggot,” 5-90 said. “I suspect you of being a smoke eater. I must implement the proper testing.”
“I’m not a smoke eater!” I tried to say. More muffled nothings.
5-90 lifted me off the bed and dragged me toward the door. “I’ve shocked your body with low-level diodes. You’ve been temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. A smoke test would be preferable, but I will implement a fire test for expediency.”
The sonofabitch was going to burn me to death via procedures and logistics. I doubt Calhoun or anybody else knew I was about to be incinerated. In the morning they’d find a pile of ashes that used to be me. This was like what the Puritans did at the Salem witch trials. If I survived, 5-90 would kill me. If I didn’t… better safe than smoky.
The sergeant’s metal feet moved quietly. He was in no hurry. We were moving at a foot a second. My rifle lay against the wall by the door. If the droid didn’t think of grabbing it I was going to do my damnedest to get my muscles working and blow this bastard’s head off before he could fry me like a campfire weenie.
I was dragged past my rifle. I could barely move my eyelids, but I was able to watch my weapon disappear from view.
Just because I couldn’t move didn’t mean I couldn’t feel. When 5-90 had dragged me outside I felt the snow against my back, the roughness of the ground. Where was he taking me?
“I aim to make this quick, Private,” the droid said. “I hope you understand, I’m just doing my duty.”
Stars filled the sky. They were all I could see. I remembered a time when light pollution was so bad the only thing you saw at night was an empty void. Back when I was growing up, it seemed like the human race had killed the rest of the universe for our own benefit. No one gave a damn about astronomy or exploring other worlds. We had too many problems happening on our own planet. And soon society broke down and allowed the stars to return. Now they were my only witnesses.
I wasn’t supposed to die like this. To be fair, I’d never considered when or where I’d kick the bucket, but I didn’t think it would be this soon, nor at the metal hands of my own sergeant. Not because of a false assumption of superpowers I didn’t have.
5-90 threw me into something hard. All the air in my lungs rushed out. Lying on the ground, I looked up and saw that he’d shoved me against Tank 1. It was a smart choice. The metal was flame resistant and the tank was wide enough to prevent me from escaping.
He lit his flamethrower, and moved closer with short, clanking steps. “Thank you for your service.”
I didn’t give a damn if I was a smoke eater or not, I’d do anything, say anything, whatever this metal asshole wanted. Just leave me alone! Turn the fire off! I could feel the heat, the biting, radiant tingles. Didn’t that mean I would be in worse pain when the flames actually touched me? Didn’t that mean I wasn’t a smoke eater?
I had to beg, plead. Something to change the machine’s mind. In thinking this, my body somehow reacted and I found myself kneeling on the ground with my hands pressed together as if in prayer. The shock from the diodes must have worn off.
The droid stopped and looked down at me, confused. I was in shock about it myself. It had been a long day.
“Sergeant,” I said, but he didn’t seem to care what I had to say.
He marched faster forward.
“Wait!” I spun around. I couldn’t run because the tank was in my path. I grabbed one of the many handles welded into the frame and began to climb.
“Running implies guilt,” 5-90 called behind me. “Don’t be chicken shit, Contreras. Face the fire like a soldier.”
“I’m not a smoke eater, you crazy machine!” I stood on top of the tank. My lungs burned and I couldn’t stop gulping air. Box-like cabins surrounded us, dozens of them stretching out as far as I could see. They were all dark inside. All of the platoon had been trained to have lights out by twenty-one hundred hours and everyone kept to it. No one was awake. No one would know what 5-90 was trying to do to me. “Help!”
5-90 shot his flamethrower just over my head. I smelled singed hair as I flattened against the top of the tank. The droid lowered his arm to follow me with his firestream. I rolled away and grabbed onto the handle of the tank’s hatch. I was vaguely aware that lights were appearing inside the nearest barrack cabins. Someone had heard me screaming. I just had to survive long enough for them to come stop the droid.
I opened the tank’s hatch and fell inside. My knees hit something that left them stinging. Bare metal caught my back and heels, and I felt just how wet the snow had made my robe. But I was inside. I was away from the fire.
Metal clanked against the side of the tank. Tink. Tink. Tink. I felt a slight shift of weight. 5-90 was climbing after me. I stood and reached for the hatch. Flames flickered over the opening, inches from my face as I closed and sealed the hatch.
The droid banged his metal fist against the top of the tank. “Open up, Private.”
“You’ll have to get in here and drag me out,” I shouted back. I instantly regretted saying it. He could have very well pried the tank open like a can of peaches.
“Sergeant!” Another voice came from outside. I couldn’t hear it well through all that metal. “Disengage that flamethrower. What are you doing on top of that tank?”
Metal scraped against the hatch, followed by two thuds. I imagined 5-90 had gotten up and stood at attention. “Colonel, sir. Private Contreras has sealed himself inside Tank 1, disobeying my direct order.”
There was a second of silence.
“You’ve been put on temporary leave, Sergeant 5-90. Why are you not charging your battery? Why is Private Contreras not in bed? What orders are you giving him at oh two hundred hours?”
“The order to burn, sir.” He said it so plainly, so matter-of-fact. But what else would you expect from a droid?
I looked over the controls inside the tank. I had to figure out how to turn it on, use the PA system to tell Calhoun just how messed up 5-90’s operating system had become. The view screen in front of me was dark. The smooth panels below it were just as blank. I began poking fingers all over the panels, hoping to bring the tank to life. As I was punching frantically, my eye caught a red switch to my left.
I shook my head – fuck it – and flicked the switch.
The tank jolted once and began to hum. Blue, sparkling lights sprang up from the panels with a hundred different operating commands. The view screen flashed on. I could see snowy ground and a few cabins where soldiers stood watching. They had their rifles against their shoulders and had obviously thrown on their fatigues in a rush. One guy only wore his coat and boxers.
“Private Contreras,” Calhoun called. “Can you hear me?”
Turning the viewer around was easy enough. There was a camera icon and a left arrow. The tank hummed a little louder as it moved. I stopped it when Calhoun was in sight. The rest of the platoon was with him, including Reynolds. I found the button for the communication speaker, but missed it by a hair and accidentally hit the control to reverse the tank. It surged once.
5-90 dropped from the top of the tank, past the screen, and landed in the snow.
Served him right.
I hit the correct button the second time. “Colonel, Sergeant 5-90 isn’t in his right mind. Er, whatever droids have. He attacked me in my sleep and dragged me from my quarters. He was attempting to burn me alive when I managed to escape in here.”
Calhoun sighed in the only way a man of his position could, through his nose while he tightened his jaw. He looked down at the droid picking himself up out of the snow. “Sergeant, what the hell were you doing? Do I need to power you off until we get back to HQ-1?”
HQ-1 was Big Base. Pangs of excitement and disappointment sprang up in me at the same time. Things had turned around and now I found out we were heading to the promised land. The droid had messed everything up.
The soldiers behind Calhoun raised their rifles a bit toward 5-90. They didn’t want to be the next victims of a haywire robot.
5-90 turned toward the tank. His eyes burned with digital hate. I knew he didn’t have it in him; emotions weren’t in a droid’s operating system. But if he could despise a human, I’m sure I’d be the first on his list.
He turned back to Calhoun. “I was operating under Order Sixty-Seven. I suspect Private Contreras of being a smoke eater. The only option was to test my theory by putting a flame to his flesh and seeing if he burned.”
“If you suspected that,” Calhoun said, “why didn’t you inform me immediately?”
“All privates are under my direct command.” 5-90 twisted his head to pop out a cinch in his neck. It sounded like a gunshot. “You also ordered me not to disturb you unless it was absolutely necessary. I believed I was in my rights as a superior, dealing with the situation as I deemed appropriate.”
The soldiers behind Calhoun lowered their rifles. The colonel looked back to them, then to the guys on the other side of the camp. Everyone had lowered their guard. The droid was making sense and that didn’t bode well for me. I realized this was a trial, only no one was saying so.
“Colonel,” I shouted into the speaker. “I’m not a smoke eater. He has no reason to do this to me. This is harassment. I’m a soldier in the New United States Army. I took an oath to serve and I don’t see the reason for any of this. I’d just like to go back to sleep and back to my duties in the morning.”
Calhoun looked toward me in the tank and then back to 5-90. “What gave you suspicions that Private Contreras was a smoke eater?”
Reynolds took a step back, farther away from Calhoun. She couldn’t save me. No one could. But the colonel couldn’t have been taking any of this seriously.
“This morning in Wraith’s End,” 5-90 said. “When he interfered with your order and prevented me from testing the civilian. His hand passed through my flame and touched my arm. I couldn’t determine if he’d suffered injury from it, so I set an internal appointment to inspect him when we had stopped at the next settlement. Due to the dragon causing me damage, I was unable to do so until after my functions were at one hundred percent. That didn’t occur until two o’clock this morning. Upon my inspection, Private Contreras’s hand had no injuries, so I determined further testing was necessary. You know I cannot lie. And you also know my systems are sensitive enough to record when something has come in contact with either my body or my ammunition.”
Everyone was looking at the tank now. At me.
“Contreras,” Calhoun rubbed the back of his neck and stepped into the snow. “Come on out of there and we can get this whole mess cleared up. Just show us your hand. Even droids make mistakes sometimes. Reynolds can wrap it up and then we can all get a few more hours of sleep.”
He was seriously taking the droid’s side on this one?
I looked all around me for somebody to help, but it was just me inside a tank.
A tank that could move faster than they could run. One that packed some serious firepower… if I ever figured out how to operate it.
I began to tremble. If I went outside, I was dead. At best, if by some fucked-up cosmic joke I turned out to be a smoke eater, I’d be locked away somewhere in Big Base and experimented on until I was dead. That’s what I’d heard they used to do to smoke eaters the Army captured on the road.
The other option would be just as bad, even though it would give me a little more time. I’d be killing everything I’d been working toward the last year. It was also the only choice that offered any hope.
“Did you hear me, Private?” Calhoun called. “Don’t make yourself look bad. You proved yourself today. Get out of that tank right goddamn now.”
I backed the tank up and turned it toward the road.
“What the hell are you doing?” Calhoun shouted.
I hit the button to move forward but I must have done something wrong. It was moving at the same pace I would have walked.
“Stop him!” Calhoun shouted.
Lasers began pelting the tank from every direction. The view screen lit up with multi-colored streaks. Tank 1 supposedly had great armor but I didn’t know how well it would hold up against a continuous attack like that. Given enough time, lasers can cut through anything and I was still moving at the pace of a one-legged Wyvern. My vision started going blurry. I could hear my pulse pounding between my ears. Breathing felt like inhaling through a strainer.
But good training always takes over in situations like this, and I’d been trained to return fire when I was attacked.
I engaged the tank turret.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” I could hear Calhoun shout once the lasers quit. “You dumbasses, that’s the only tank we have. He’s only going two miles per hour. Get on top and open that hatch.”
On the screen, crosshairs blinked, top half yellow, steadily filling to all red as the power charged. I spun the viewer around. 5-90 was coming for me, not so much at a run but a slow, inevitable jog. The rest of the platoon followed at a distance. Tank 1 was in autopilot and steadily gliding along while I put 5-90 in my sights.
I know droids can’t smile, but I will swear to my dying day that his metal cheeks rose with glee. Maybe it was the tilt of his head as he closed in. The sergeant brought his arm across his chest and engaged his flamethrower, but this time he’d shrunk the cone of the flames down to a fine torch.
A chime sounded inside the tank, sounding – weirdly enough – like an egg timer. The turret was charged.
I fired.
5-90 blew apart. I didn’t even see where most of his pieces went. A starburst of black char covered the ground where he’d been standing.
Calhoun hadn’t left his spot in front of the cabin. He had a pistol in his hand now. Raising it toward me, he shouted, “Surround him!”
They knew I’d need another few seconds for the turret to recharge, and maybe they knew a deeper truth – I wouldn’t fire on them. Destroying an asshole droid was one thing, but even though every one of them had treated me like gum on the bottom of their boot, I didn’t have it in me to kill a human being. I’d joined the army to slay dragons. But that didn’t lift the noose from around my neck.
Where was the goddamned acceleration control?
I turned the viewer back to the road. Several soldiers had rushed ahead and gathered in a blockade attack position. The ones in front were on their knees while those in the back were standing. They all had their rifles aimed and ready. Reynolds stood tall in the middle of the rear section. She looked sad, angry, and disappointed all at once.
“Sarah,” I said, though I’d turned off the speaker.
“Contreras,” Calhoun shouted. I couldn’t see him. He probably hadn’t moved from the cabin, letting the grunts do the dirty work. “This is your last chance. I don’t know if you’ve lost your damn mind or if you have something to hide. I frankly don’t give a shit. We need that tank but don’t think for one second I won’t order this whole platoon to fire upon you. We can survive the road without it if we need to. Because, unlike you, we aren’t lazy cowards. We know how to tough it out.
“We’ll take out the turret first. And judging by how slow you’re going, all we’ll need to do is ride on top until we’ve cut our way in. Save us all that grief and you’ll make it easier on yourself.”
Yeah, that was bullshit.
But he had a point. They’d just surround me and keep at it until I was dragged out into the snow, whether I’d been filled with laser holes or not.
I hung my head. A headache was worming its way into my skull. The glowing controls lay in front of me and I didn’t have the time to learn them all. But I saw one I’d been looking for earlier, much earlier, when I’d been riding with Calhoun to Waukesha. When my eyes had passed over it before, I thought it was just a blob with two small circles in it, but now I could see it was the image of a traditional-white-sheet ghost.
Well ain’t that something.
“I’m going to give you the count of three,” came Calhoun’s strained voice.
He began counting but I didn’t get all dramatic and let him get to the last number. He’d made it very easy for me. I released the wraiths.
I wasn’t able to see exactly how they came out. There was a sudden popping at each side of the tank that felt like the metal rods had ejected. Then came an eerie white glow and undead moaning. Soldiers all around began swearing and screaming and firing their lasers. None of the lasers came anywhere close to Tank 1.
The blockade in front of me scattered.
Reynolds was the last of them to run. She took one last look at the tank and I could see how terrified she was. I felt horrible about it. I could never fire on another person, but I guess releasing a bunch of murderous ghosts wasn’t much different. They had more of a chance this way. You could outrun a wraith… if you tried hard enough. Hell, I would have offered Reynolds a ride, but I knew she wouldn’t have taken it.
As she ran toward a cabin, a wraith flew past the viewer. It had its claws dug into the underside of a soldier’s jaw. Blood poured down his uniform. He screamed and flailed as the ghost dragged him away.
What had I done?
I finally found the acceleration control, but first I muted the horror show going on outside. I couldn’t take it, hearing the screams.
The tank zoomed forward and I felt how much power the thing really had. I went from tortoise to hare in two seconds. The view screen was dark, as if it had been turned off, but no. That was just the night and the lonely road ahead. And that’s why they make night vision. I found the appropriate button and engaged it.
Still, seeing where I was going didn’t make me feel any safer.