Grunt Life (8 page)

I nodded.

We pulled to a stop in front of the home. It looked normal, like a place a family might be happy in. Flowers grew in pots on the patio. A bicycle had been left by the front steps, as if dropped by a kid dashing to dinner. Several newspapers had been tossed onto the porch.

The driver got out and stood by the vehicle. A team of four shooters stood ready on the porch, wearing Kevlar vests and arm pads. Their heads were covered with helmets I’d never seen before, with no openings to see and hear. They must have been using HUDs, about as high-tech as I’d seen short of a science fiction movie.

As we moved towards them, I saw signs I’d missed. The pile of newspapers. Leaves covered the back wheel of the bicycle and a spider had made its web between two spokes. The flowers, once bright orange pansies, were now brown, water-starved, and sagging against the sides of the clay pots.

The team was stacked at the door, one behind the other. I’d been in their place a hundred times before, clearing buildings in other shithole countries. Each doorway represented the possibility of life or death or something in between. No one knew who—or in this case, what—was on the other side. Bad guys could be pressed against the wall, just waiting for someone to pass, to show a vulnerability. Sometimes all they wanted to do was kill one of us, their own lives already forfeit. Sometimes, they waited with bombs strapped around their bodies

One Hajji—we never knew where he was from, because there wasn’t anything left of him—had welcomed me and my three soldiers when we stacked onto a landing on the second floor veranda of an old German hotel in Baghdad. His smile had been the same one I’d seen on the face of every smartass I’d ever known, ever wanted to punch, ever wanted to shut up. Only this one held a remote control in his right hand. His hand was raised beside his face, so we wouldn’t miss it, along with his cock-and-balls smile.

My M4 was already against my cheek, and I raised it an inch, sighted, and removed his smile, his face, and his right hand in a blistering peel of rounds that emptied my magazine. I’d been ready for him to explode, ready to die even as I killed him. What I wasn’t willing to do was stand there and take what he was about to give. If I was going to go, he was coming with me, and on my terms. We stood, eyes slitted behind our goggles in anticipation of the explosion, but nothing happened. The dust settled, as did pieces of his hand and face. A slop of something that could have been a cheek hit the floor, and we were left watching the body, still standing. His handless arm had fallen forward, blood sliding down his pant leg. His face was a cartouche of my violence. But he was upright.

Then we saw it. The suicide bomber had been leaning back against the railing at the edge of the veranda. I stared at his bulging, compartmented vest, at the daisy chain of wires going from one bundle to the other. Anywhere near that sort of power meant instantaneous death, bodies pummeled by enough force to render each of us to our separate molecules.

Then Williams took a step forward, spun and kicked him in the sternum, sending the Hajji up and over the rail.

I remember flinching, but nothing happened.

Williams turned and grinned. “Welcome to the war, motherfucker,” he said.

Then the bomber hit the stairs three stories below and his vest blew.

Williams was flung forward, his Kevlar ripped away by the force of the blast, his back and legs a flat mass of red muscle and meat. We caught him as we were forced back into the wall. Protected from the blast by space and distance, we held Williams in the last moments of his life, long enough to love him, long enough to see his smile fall into something less victorious.

The team at the door of the house in Dothan were my brothers. I knew their each and every mission. One high, one low, one left, one right, sweep, change, move. Close Quarters Battle drill, or CQB for short, was both an art and a science whose only metric for success or failure was to come out alive.

Their rifles were different from any I’d ever seen. Between the wires and LED readouts, I couldn’t figure out how they worked, until I saw the lead running from inside a jacket into a socket just forward of the magazine well. Electrical. Which must have meant that beneath their Kevlar vests were rigs of batteries—looking, perversely, similar to the explosive vest of a suicide bomber.

“Status,” Mr. Pink whispered into his cell phone.

“Everyone’s in place. Family is still at the table.”

Mr. Pink glanced at me once, then tapped the last man on the shoulder.

The first man placed a device into the lock and pressed a trigger, and within five seconds the door was open. The team stacked inside, connected and close. Mr. Pink and I allowed them room to maneuver, aware that if there was any firing coming from inside the house, the closer to the action we were, the more liable we were to get hit.

They cleared the living room, then moved into the dining room, where they fanned out.

Mr. Pink and I followed them. A stench hit me, causing me to bring my hand to my face. Rot and feces and something else. I’d pulled out my pistol and held it ready. As I walked through the living room with pictures of a family vacation to Yosemite prominently displayed on a wall, I felt like I was trespassing.

As we turned into the dining room I saw what had happened. How this all-American family had been chosen or how they’d become what they’d become was something I might never learn. But for now I was transfixed, my jaw fallen open, the pistol dipping dangerously as I observed father, mother, son, daughter, held in place with pink and white filaments.

The father was bald, had a tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil on his right arm, and had creases around his mouth and the corners of his eyes as if he liked to smile.

The mother wore blonde hair in a bun, although judging by her tan lines she usually wore it down. Ample breasts pressed against a bright orange-and-yellow paisley tank top.

The girl was a miniature version of her mother, including the way she wore her hair, although hers seemed more an affectation than utilitarian necessity. Probably trying desperately to grow up and be like her mother, even while wearing a sparkly
My Little Pony
T-shirt.

I could barely look at the boy. While the others seemed to have been caught unawares, he’d known what was going on. His face was twisted in horror. His vacant milky eyes twisted towards his father, as if to warn him, or beg for help, or merely so he could watch him succumb to the same raw beast that had them all breathing and shitting and pissing themselves on what had once passed as high-end dining furniture.

Plates of rotting food sat in front of each of them. Worms crawled through something that had once been a casserole. Flies swirled above the family’s last meal.

“Look but don’t touch, Mason,” Mr. Pink said. He eyed my pistol. “You’re not going to need that.”

“It makes me feel comfortable,” I whispered, unable to take my eyes off the scene.

The filaments held the family in place, affixing their wrists, arms, legs and ankles to the chairs, and disappeared into the floor. I bent to see a circular orange growth pulsing with light beneath the table, several thick orange trunks running right into each of their abdomens. The surfaces of the trunks held millions of fine white cilia.

Then I saw it. As the growth pulsed, the family breathed, in unison, their chests rising and falling in a mockery of life.

I found myself taking aim at the orange growth. I didn’t know what sort of damage my bullets would do. They might not do anything. But firing at the damn thing would surely make me feel better.

“Not here. Let’s go downstairs,” Mr. Pink said.

“What about them?” I asked.

I’ll give the man credit. He could have said any number of one-liners, but instead he told me the truth. “It’s too late for them. We don’t know what they’re doing or what’s been done to them. Best guess from the experts is their brains are being used to transmit data on a frequency we don’t normally use.”

“Are you talking telepathy?” I asked.

“One man’s radio is another man’s telepathy. There’s too much of the brain we don’t understand.”

“The aliens sure seem to have figured the shit out.”

Mr. Pink grudgingly nodded. “If we could communicate with them, maybe we could ask them.”

“How many have you found like this?”

“With aliens in residence like this one?”

I nodded.

“Sixteen.”

No shit.
“And how many others?”

“We were too late twenty-three times.”

“So on thirty-nine separate occasions, you’ve never figured out what they’re doing?”

“Not exactly, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they’re prepping for an invasion.”

“How can you even know that?”

Mr. Pink pointed at the four family members. “We don’t know
what
they’re broadcasting, but NSA satellites have picked up their outbound transmissions. Attempts to decode them have fallen flat, but that the aliens are landing and setting up transmissions out of the ionosphere is enough to convince me that they’re doing
something
, and invasion’s the top candidate.”

“How do they get here? Is there a spaceship on the roof?”

Mr. Pink gave me a sharp appraising look.

“What?”

“You asked the right question almost right away. Then again, military men always do. It never occurred to the early scientists studying this event to wonder how they got here.”

“You’ve been detected,” came the voice of the tech team through the comms.

“Shit.”

One of the orange trunks had released the young girl, who was now slumped onto her rotting meal. It waved in the air, millions of white cilia twitching.

Mr. Pink began moving across the room. “Downstairs, and fast.”

The team found the stairs and stacked down them.

Mr. Pink followed. I ran to catch up.

The stack was already moving down into the basement when I arrived at the door. The uncarpeted wooden stairs creaked with their weight. The walls were lined on one side with canned vegetables and on the other with old license plates. A bare light bulb dangled from a length of cord at the bottom of the stairs, low enough for the second man in line to brush it with his head.

As bad as the air had been in the dining room, it was far fouler in the basement.

“We have positive contact,” said one of the men.

Mr. Pink put his hand on my shoulder. “I want you to see this.” Then he descended the rest of the way and walked out of sight.

I crept down a few stairs and leaned out. I could see something moving on the other side of the picket of men, a flesh-colored mass about three feet high, from which a thick trunk rose through the broken ceiling above.

“Is it like the others?” Mr. Pink asked.

“Yes.”

The word had been said quickly, but held a finality to it that I couldn’t understand. That is, until the men stepped aside to let Mr. Pink see what was in front of them. And in that moment, I saw the babies, at least a dozen of them, rising and falling in a sea of alien flesh, like they were bobbing, or maybe sinking, in and out of the substance. Their eyes were closed, but their mouths were open, emitting a chorus of low-pitched hums.

Mr. Pink fell back, his hands over his ears.

I watched him, wondering what was happening. Then I saw him for what he was. He was an intruder. He was causing the babies pain. They’d done nothing to harm him, yet here he stood, ready to kill them. I looked down at the pistol in my hand, then brought it up, and aimed at Mr. Pink. He was so close I didn’t even need to align the sights. The humming grew and embraced me, and I could hear screams hidden inside the sound. The screams of babies. Mr. Pink was killing babies. I had to—I pulled the trigger as fast as my finger would move. Never once did my aim waver. Never once did I hesitate. But the sound continued unabated.

I watched in stunned amazement as Mr. Pink turned to me, raised his own pistol, and pressed it against his head. He squeezed the trigger over and over, his mouth open in a silent scream.

The sound of the alien children was cut off as the four men fired their Taser rifles. Four, eight, twelve lines of electricity sunk deep into the alien flesh. Suddenly the babies were gone, replaced by a frozen sea of spikes.

I realized I’d been screaming, and I shut my mouth. I made eye contact with Mr. Pink, just as he lowered his pistol, and just as I stopped firing my own weapon at him. Except neither of us had loosed a shot. I didn’t check, but I was sure that my rounds were dummies, as were his. I put my pistol away with a shaky hand. Probably the reason the team wore their sensory-deprivation helmets.

Mr. Pink passed by me, pulling me along as he went.

We moved back through the dining room and living room and out of the home. I didn’t even glance at the family this time. My mind was on what I’d almost done. What I’d done. What would have happened had there been real rounds in our weapons.

Back at the SUV, Mr Pink lit a cigarette. I hadn’t known he smoked. His hand shook slightly, but I made no comment. He inhaled half of the cigarette before he spoke.

“The first teams killed themselves. We didn’t know why, until we were able to film the second team.” He shook his head, making the smoke swirl. “They know what scares us. They know how to get to us. Most importantly, and something we have yet to crack, is they can make us do things to each other, to ourselves.”

“Is it always like this?” I asked, not knowing how to voice the thousand other questions I had.

“Pretty much. I don’t normally carry, nor do I participate in the clean-up, but you had to see it. I knew this was going to happen.” His hand shook as he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “It’s fucking terrible.”

I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea that this whole thing had been a lesson. Nor did I like the fact that I’d essentially killed Mr. Pink. Had there been rounds in my Sig, he would never have made it out of the basement.

“Don’t look so pissed. Some lessons you can’t learn by tablet. You have to see them for yourself.”

Finally I managed to say, “I had no control over what I was doing.”