We stood there for a long time, staring at the three dead men from Rattlesnake Team. We all felt lost, confused. Damaged in ways that resisted identification and definition.
Top told me that after I’d left earlier to walk the scene, he’d checked the perimeter of our camp while Bunny made some food. A figure cut right in front of Top. The little boy, running at full speed. Top immediately gave chase and caught up to the kid three hundred yards down the valley. However, when he grabbed the boy’s shoulder, the robes tore away and a woman was there. For just a moment, Top thought that it was a young woman.
“Really friggin’ beautiful, too,” Top told me. “Dusky skin, and built like Beyoncé. Naked and all shiny like she was covered in oil. Got to admit that it floored me. Absolutely fucking floored me. Then I blinked and she wasn’t like that at all.”
The creature who stood facing Top was the same one—or same kind of thing—that had attacked me. Wrinkled, emaciated, with sagging breasts, jagged teeth, and hands that made Top shiver as he described them.
The thing knocked the rifle out of Top’s hand, slammed him against a wall, and kept saying the same thing.
The bargain needs to be completed.
Top didn’t try to figure out what that meant. All he did was try to fight, but the woman slammed him face-forward into the rock.
When Top woke up, he ran back to the camp. Bunny was on his hands and knees, his face covered in welts, coughing blood from a split lip. His story was the same as Top’s.
The same as mine.
It was an impossible story. Bunny is six foot seven and can bench-press four hundred pounds in sets of twenty. And he’s a top SpecOps shooter trained to kill in every way known. Nobody ever manhandled him. Not without a lot of help.
Until that day.
He was no more effective against this thing than me or Top.
All three of us had been defeated easily. Mastered, humiliated.
Discarded.
But Sergeant Michael “Finn” O’Leary was gone.
And Rattlesnake Team had been returned.
What was left of them, anyway.
We all wanted to compare our stories, to sit down and work out what it meant. Hallucinogens. Some kind of spore in the air that was screwing with our minds. Maybe an electrical field from some kind of science fiction gadget.
We wanted to make sense of it.
There wasn’t time.
We had to find Finn.
For a moment, though, we stood there, back-to-back in a defensive circle, weapons in hand, looking out at the vast darkness around us.
“Fastest way to cover the area is to separate,” said Top.
Bunny looked at him. “Fuck that.”
After a few seconds, I said it, too: “Fuck that.”
Top just shook his head.
So, we stood our ground.
We are three of the toughest, scariest fighters around. That’s not a joke. The DMS scouts the top players from the SEALs, Delta, and other groups. We are actually the best of the best.
But all we could do at that moment was stand there, huddled together for the warmth and assurance of human contact, holding our guns and praying that the night would end.
We tried very hard not to look at the three dead men who lay nearby.
Thirty-six minutes later, we heard the distant whup-whup-whup of our helicopter returning to find us. We popped flares, but we still stood together while we waited.
When we saw the Black Hawk pop its landing lights, I very nearly broke down and cried.