Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (24 page)

    In the hour before dawn, the platoon they had been tacked onto hit a private home, set back in a grove of palms, with a white stucco wall around the yard, and a wrought-iron gate across the drive. The house was stucco too, and had a swimming pool out back, a patio and grill, wouldn't have looked out of place in southern California. Delta Team drove their Hummer right through the gate, which went down with a hard iron bang, hinges shearing out of the wall with a spray of plaster.

    That was all Mal saw of the raid. She was behind the wheel of a two-and-a-half ton troop transport for carrying prisoners. No Hummer for her, and no action either. Carmody had another truck. She listened for gunfire, but there was none, the residents giving up without a struggle.

    When the house was secure, Corporal Plough left them, said he wanted to size up the situation. What he wanted to do was get his picture taken, chewing on a stogie and holding his gun, with his boot on the neck of a hog-tied insurgent. She heard over the walkie-talkie that they had grabbed one of the Fedayeen Saddam, a Ba'athist lieutenant, and had found weapons, files, personnel information. There was a lot of cornpone whoop-ass on the radio. Everyone in the 82nd looked like Eminem - blue eyes, pale blonde hair in a crew cut -and talked like one of the Duke boys.

    Just after sunup, when the shadows were leaning long away from the buildings on the east side of the street, they brought the Fedayeen out and left him on the narrow sidewalk with Plough. The insurgent's wife was still inside the building, soldiers watching her while she packed a bag.

    The Fedayeen was a big Arab with hooded eyes and a three-day shadow on his chin, and he wasn't saying anything except, "Fuck you" in American. In the basement, Delta Team had found racked AK-47s, and a table covered in maps, marked all over with symbols, numbers, Arabic letters. They discovered a folder of photographs, featuring US soldiers in the act of establishing checkpoints, rolling barbed wire across different roads. There was also a picture in the folder of George Bush, Sr, smiling a little foggily, posing with Steven Seagal.

    Plough was worried the pictures showed places and people the insurgents planned to strike. He had already been on the radio a couple times, back to base, talking with CI about it in a strained, excited voice. He was especially upset about Steven Seagal. Everyone in Plough's unit had been made to watch
Above the Law
at least once, and Plough claimed to have seen it more than a hundred times. After they brought the prisoner out, he stood over the Fedayeen, yelling at him, and sometimes swatting him upside the head with Seagal's rolled-up picture. The Fedayeen said, "More fuck you."

    Mal leaned against the driver's side door of her truck for a while, wondering when Plough would quit hollering and swatting the prisoner. She had a Vivarin hangover and her head hurt. Eventually she decided he wouldn't be done yelling until it was time to load up and go, and that might not be for another hour.

    She left Plough yelling, walked over the flattened gate and up to the house. She let herself into the cool of the kitchen. Red tile floor, high ceilings, lots of windows so the place was filled with sunlight. Fresh bananas in a glass bowl. Where did they get fresh bananas? She helped herself to one, and ate it on the toilet, the cleanest toilet she had sat on in a year.

    She came back out of the house and started down to the road again. On the way there, she put her fingers in her mouth, and sucked on them. She hadn't brushed her teeth in a week, and her breath had a human stink on it.

    When she returned to the street, Plough had stopped sweating the prisoner long enough to catch his breath. The Ba'athist looked up at him from under his heavy-lidded eyes. He snorted and said, "Is talk. Is boring. You are no one. I say fuck you still no one."

    Mal sank to one knee in front of him, put her fingers under his nose and said in Arab, "Smell that? That is the cunt of your wife. I fuck her myself like a lesbian and she said it was better than your cock."

    The Ba'athist tried to lunge at her from his knees, making a sound down in his chest, a strangled growl of rage, but Plough caught him across the chin with the stock of his M4. The sound of the Ba'athist's jaw snapping was as loud as a gunshot.

    He lay on his side, twisted into a foetal ball. Mal remained crouched beside him.

    "Your jaw is broken," Mal said. "Tell me about the photographs of the US soldiers, and I will bring a no-more-hurt pill."

    It was half an hour before she went to get him the painkillers, and by then he had told her when the pictures had been taken, coughed up the name of the photographer.

    Mal was leaning into the back of her truck, digging in the first aid kit, when Carmody's shadow joined hers at the rear bumper.

    "Did you really do it?" Carmody asked her. The sweat on him glowed with an ill sheen in the noonday light. "The wife?"

    "What? Fuck no. Obviously."

    "Oh," Carmody said, and swallowed convulsively. "Someone said-" he began, then his voice trailed off.

    "What did someone say?"

    He glanced across the road, at two soldiers from the 82nd, standing by their Hummer. "One of the guys who was in the building said you marched right in and bent her over. Face-down on the bed."

    She looked over at Vaughan and Henrichon, holding their M-16s and struggling to contain their laughter. She flipped them the bird.

    "Jesus, Carmody. Don't you know when you're being fucked with?"

    His head was down. He stared at his own scarecrow shadow, tilting into the back of the truck.

    "No," he said.

    Two weeks later, Carmody and Mai were in the back of a different truck, with that same Arab, the Ba'athist, who was being transferred from Abu Ghraib to a smaller prison facility in Baghdad. The prisoner had his head in a steel contraption, to clamp his jaw in place, but he was still able to open his mouth wide enough to hawk a mouthful of spit into Mal's face.

    Mal was wiping it away when Carmody got up and grabbed the Fedayeen by the front of his shirt and heaved him out of the back of the truck, into the dirt road. The truck was doing thirty miles an hour at the time, and was part of a convoy that included two reporters from MSNBC.

    The prisoner survived, although most of his face was flayed off on the gravel, his jaw rebroken, his hands smashed. Carmody said he leaped out on his own, trying to escape, but no one believed him, and three weeks later Carmody was sent home.

    The funny thing was that the insurgent really did escape, a week after that, during another transfer. He was in handcuffs, but with his thumbs broken he was able to slip his hands right out of them. When the MPs stepped out of their Hummer at a checkpoint, to talk porno with some friends, the prisoner dropped out of the back of the transport. It was night. He simply walked into the desert, and, as the stories go, was never seen again.

    The band took the stage Friday evening, and didn't come offstage until Saturday morning. Twenty minutes after one, Mal bolted the door behind the last customer. She started helping Candice wipe down tables, but she had been on since before lunch, and Bill Rodier said go home already.

    Mal had her jacket on and was headed out when John Petty poked her in the shoulder with something.

    "Mal," he said. "This is yours, right? Your name on it."

    She turned. Petty was at the cash register, holding a fat envelope toward her. She took.

    "That the money Glen gave you, to swap for his wedding ring?" Petty turned his shoulder to her, shifting his attention back to the register. He pulled out stacks of bills, rubber-banded them, and lined them up on the bar. "That's something. Taking his money and fucking him all over again. You think I plop down five hundred bucks, you'd fuck me just as nice?"

    As he spoke he put his hand back in the register. Mal reached under his elbow and slammed the drawer on his fingers. He squealed. The drawer began to slide open again on its own, but before he could get his mashed fingers out, Mal slammed it once more. He lifted one foot off the floor and did a comic little jig.

    "Ohfuckgoddamyouuglydyke," he said.

    "Hey," said Bill Rodier, coming toward the bar. He carried a trash barrel in one hand. "Hey."

    She let Petty get his hand out of the drawer. He stumbled clumsily away from her, struck the bar with his hip, and wheeled to face her, clutching the mauled hand to his chest.

    "You crazy bitch. I think you broke my fingers."

    "Jesus, Mal," Bill said, looking over the bar at Petty's hand. His fat fingers had a purple line of bruise across them. Bill turned his questioning gaze back her way. "I don't know what the hell John said, but you can't do that to people."

    "You'd be surprised what you can do to people," she told him.

    Outside it was drizzling and cold. She was all the way to her car before she felt a weight in one hand, and realized she was still clutching the envelope full of cash.

    Mai held it in her hand, against the inside of her thigh, the whole drive back. She didn't put on the radio, just drove, and listened to the rain tapping on the glass. She had been in the desert for two years and she had seen it rain just twice, although there was often a moist fog in the morning, a mist that smelled of eggs, of brimstone.

    When she enlisted, she had hoped for war. She did not see the point of joining if you were not going to get to fight. The risk to her life did not trouble her. It was an incentive. You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.

    But it did not occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn't just a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. For her two hundred dollar bonus, she had left naked and bound men in stress positions for hours, and told a nineteen-year-old girl that she would be gang-raped if she did not supply information about her boyfriend. Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her. She felt now that she had been crazy there, that the Vivarin, the ephedra, the lack of sleep, the constant scream-and-thump of the mortars, had made her into someone who was mentally ill, a bad dream version of herself. Then Mal felt the weight of the envelope against her thigh, Glen Kardon's payoff, and remembered taking his ring, and it came to her that she was having herself on, pretending she had been someone different in Iraq. Who she had been then and who she was now were the same person. She had taken the prison home with her. She lived in it still.

    Mal let herself in the house, soaked and cold, holding the envelope. She found herself standing in front of the kitchen counter with Glen's money. She could sell him back his own ring for five hundred dollars, if she wanted, and it was more than she would get from any pawnshop. She had done worse, for less cash. She stuck her hand down the drain, felt along the wet smoothness of the trap, until her fingertips found the ring.

    Mal hooked her ring finger through it, pulled her hand back out. She turned her wrist this way and that, considering how the ring looked on her crooked, blunt finger.
With this I do thee wed.
She didn't know what she'd do with Glen Kardon's five hundred dollars if she swapped it for his ring. It wasn't money she needed. She didn't need his ring either. She couldn't say what it was she needed, but the idea of it was close, a word on the tip of her tongue, maddeningly out of reach.

    She made her way to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and let the steam gather while she undressed. Slipping off her black blouse, she noticed she still had the envelope in one hand, Glen's ring on the finger of the other. She tossed the money next to the bathroom sink, left the ring on.

    She glanced at the ring sometimes while she was in the shower. She tried to imagine being married to Glen Kardon, pictured him stretched out on her father's bed in boxers and a T-shirt, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom, his stomach aflutter with the anticipation of some late night, connubial action. She snorted at the thought. It was as absurd as trying to imagine what her life would've been like if she had become an astronaut.

    The washer and dryer were in the bathroom with her. She dug through the Maytag until she found her Curt Schilling T-Shirt and a fresh pair of Hanes. She slipped back into the darkened bedroom, towelling her hair, and glanced at herself in the dresser mirror, only she couldn't see her face, because a white sheet of paper had been stuck into the top of the frame, and it covered the place where her face belonged. A black thumbprint had been inked in the centre. Around the edges of the sheet of paper, she could see reflected in the mirror a man stretched out on the bed, just as she had pictured Glen Kardon stretched out and waiting for her, only in her head Glen hadn't been wearing grey-and-black fatigues.

    She lunged to her side, going for the kitchen door. But Carmody was already moving, launching himself at her, driving his boot into her right knee. The leg twisted in a way it wasn't meant to go, and she felt her ACL pop behind her knee. Carmody was right behind her by then and he got a handful of her hair. As she went down, he drove her forward and smashed her head into the side of the dresser.