Blood Forged Read online

  He’d been a good-looking fellow once, too, yes siree. In his memory he saw himself the night he’d asked Martha to marry him all those long years ago. She’d been a beauty, too, in her day. Where had that young fellow gone? Martha had been dead for nearly—what was it—twelve years, and his father for almost forty. His brothers, Chad and Mosely, were dead too. More friends and relatives than he could keep count of anymore, all dead and gone like dust. Except his and Martha’s boy, Rodney. Todd never saw much of him, though, ‘cause he lived in another state with his own family where he owned a construction business.

  Rodney. A good boy, but distant. Always had been, and in more than only miles too. Rodney had been closer to his mother than to him.

  Since Martha had passed away he hadn’t seen much of their son. Short telephone calls at the holidays, and postcards; a hurried visit with the family, a wife and three girls, once in a great while.

  Well, the old man sighed aloud, what else could he expect? He hadn’t been much of a daddy to the boy as he was growing up. Always too damn busy in his gun shop or at his gun-making to have time for the boy. He didn’t blame his son for the way things were between them. He’d long ago gotten used to living out here in the woods by himself, just him, the squirrels, and his workshop in the back, where he still made the damn best guns in the county, even if his eyesight wasn’t what it once was and everyone told him he should retire and take it easy.

  Humph! If he took it any easier, he’d be in a coffin sleeping the long sleep.

  No, he needed his workshop and his guns. His work. He wasn’t really old. He straightened up, and a couple of bones cracked in his back. His arthritis was flaring up real bad today, even if it was hot enough outside to fry an egg on the sidewalk. You’d think a body would have some relief in the warm times, wouldn’t you?

  He made a childish face at the old man in the mirror...that old bag of bones! That wasn’t him.

  Inside he was still young.

  He shuffled into the kitchen and couldn’t help but steal a proud, possessive glance at the shiny gun laying in the velvet box on his kitchen table; the one he’d just finished.

  An exact replica of the spanking brand new 357 Magnum Colt Python, a six-shot weapon with a lovely blue cast to its sleek metal. He’d loved the original design so much he’d made himself one, or as close to it as he could get. He chuckled as he leaned over and softly caressed the cold metal.

  In his youth, during a real lean time for his family, he’d held down a job in an automobile factory as a tool and die maker, and that training, that valuable knowledge, along with his natural born talents, had left him in good stead. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t make. He had the feel for it.

  This gun was a beauty all right.

  Later tonight, after supper, he’d have to put the finishing touches on it; carve his initials in it somewhere real tiny. Leave his mark. Like a true artist, he thought.

  He grilled himself a couple of toasted cheese sandwiches and found the newspaper he’d brought home. Turning on the radio that sat square in the middle of the scratched kitchen table, he leaned back comfortably in the one red chair in the kitchen that wasn’t ready to collapse and grunted with satisfaction as he drank his cold beer and munched his drippy sandwiches.

  Life was so easy when you only had yourself to care for. But awful lonely, too, he reflected morosely as he finished his sparse meal and gulped down his beer. The radio was too low, and he reached over and turned the knob until the volume was just right.

  God, he loved that Milton! What a funny, funny man. He found himself chuckling at the jokes. He got up and came back with a wet rag to wipe the crumbs off the table.

  The sun was falling behind the trees and night was coming. He hoped the dark would bring cooler temperatures. It was still ungodly hot for almost eight-thirty. He wiped the sweat off his face and reached up to tug at the heavy string attached to the ceiling fan. That helped some.

  He turned the light on in the kitchen and sat down in front of the gun. Last night he’d sat and blued it until the shine was a deep midnight cobalt. For a moment as he laid his hand on it lingeringly, he toyed with the idea of going on down to Sadie’s Bar in town and hoisting a few cold ones with the boys; maybe even taking it along and showing it off. You’ve outdone yourself this time. He proudly studied his work.

  No. He lifted the gun in his gnarled hands and inspected it up under the light. I think I’ll just stay here tonight and polish her one more time. Maybe etch my initials in her stock.

  Suddenly, as he stood alone in his kitchen holding the gun, he had a terrible feeling that someone, or something, was watching him. A cold shiver traveled through his body, and he turned and looked over his shoulder at the black squares of the dirty windowpane.

  His eyes peered, squinting, into the darkness through the glass and the lower screens, but there was nothing out there. Nothing except the lush woods and the black sky of night. He listened to the katy-dids and the crickets singing out in the limbs and shivered again when a strange hush fell over the woods.

  Total silence.

  He made his way to the open rear door and, with the gun still in his hands, walked outside behind his house. Still no sounds. No night animals calling to each other, no crickets or birds rustling around in the bushes. Nothing.

  Strange, isn’t it, he mulled. Then he turned and reentered the house, shaking his head.

  He took a large brown bottle and a bundle of white cloths down from an upper shelf in the kitchen and strolled back to the table. He sat down again and with his head cocked as if he were listening for something out among the trees, he undid the bundle of stained cloths and extracted a thin glass etching tool he used to lay in designs in metal. He took the cap off the bottle of hydrochloric acid and dipped in the narrow piece of glass.

  Tediously, because his eyes weren’t what they used to be, he started to carve a tiny bird on the end of the barrel of the gun, rinsing the area every so often with water from the pump to clear it off. He was about ready to add the finishing flourish, his own initials TJC, when he heard peculiar noises outside in the woods. A sort of hissing sound; at first like bees far away, it grew steadily in intensity until he almost wanted to cover his ears and flee.

  It was as he stood up in confused shock, his eyes darting to the windows that he carelessly knocked the bottle of hydrochloric acid over and watched in genuine dismay as the light yellow liquid spilled across his beautiful gun.

  Damn!

  The acid began to hiss and steam and, cursing aloud at his stupidity, he snatched up the dissolving hunk of metal using the closest thing at hand, two knives, and tossed it into the sink.

  It was ruined. He gasped, his hands grabbing at the sink as he stared at what was happening to the gun. He couldn’t believe it. It was impossible. That amount of acid should have melted the metal, instead of....

  He glared at the gun after the water had washed away the sizzling steam. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, closer.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, unsteady, backing up a few steps. The gun lay there, not destroyed or even really scarred. But something had happened to it. Something weird.

  There, along the sleek barrel, instead of his tiny bird there was something else etched, beautifully and intricately branded into the hard steel of the gun ...a snake coiling around the barrel, in such precise and realistic detail, it could only have been etched by an artist. It was perfect, exquisite, and the most frightening thing he’d ever laid eyes upon.

  At the end of the twisting long tail that ran along the spine of the gun there was something still smoldering and taking ghostly shape—he’d seen something like it before—it was a...what was it called? A pentagram. The six-sided star of Satan. The symbol of ultimate, incarnate evil.

  Stunned, he stumbled away from the sink and the atrocity inside it.

  How had it happened? The acid should have eaten the gun up. Where had that picture come from?

  He moaned out loud as a bitt
er coldness permeated his very being and suddenly, beyond the night windows, he heard again that strange hissing out in the forest. This time it was so loud and grating, he covered his ears and cried out. He didn’t know what he was crying about, only that he couldn’t stand that noise! Then it dawned on him. The thing in the sink was causing it.

  He had to get away. Run. It made no sense, yet his eyes desperately sought an escape route. The door.

  Suddenly there was a green glow all around him in the small kitchen. With a startled wail, he turned, knocking a chair to the floor as he scrambled over it and out the door into the night woods.

  He ran and ran through the black, hulking shapes of the foliage, feeling the sharp tree limbs tear at his clothes and skin...ran...but still that hissing sound followed him; still that feeling of being watched by something malevolent and hungry slithering along close behind him.

  He ran, gasping in agony at the strain and holding his aching sides, for what seemed like forever. The full moon snickering down at him and the woods he’d known all his life was suddenly a fearful place in which he couldn’t hide.

  Something was chasing him. He had to get away.

  The hissing gained on him, coming closer, closer, and with one final scream he felt the world fall out from under him. He fell head over heels into what seemed to be a bottomless pit.

  His last prolonged screams of terror and pain were never heard by anyone.

  There was no one there to hear.

  Chapter 1

  An August night in Korea, 1952

  DAVID WILLOWS WONDERED for the hundredth time what he was doing there.

  In Korea. Damn!

  He was an artist. Or, at least, that’s what he’d hoped to be; not a soldier. Not just some set of dog tags; not one of these tired-looking dogfaces sneaking through the woods of an alien, hostile land and having potshots taken at them like they were wooden ducks in a penny arcade.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  Sweating and bone-weary, he stretched his aching muscles under the stiff fatigues and inhaled a gulp of the Korean night air, heavy with the pungent aroma of freshly dug earth that was heaped up in piles around him and his buddies. Fox hole. They’d dug into the warm earth as quickly and deeply as they could as the woods plunged into blackness in the oppressive heat that never seemed to leave this ravaged land.

  Korea, torn and bloodied, fought over like a prize bone with no meat left on it; a foreign hell that David Willows had swiftly grown to hate in the few long months he’d been there.

  God, how he ached to go home. Collect up his rusted gear and run to the nearest train, plane, wagon, or army Jeep and get the hell out of this nightmare.

  A series of white flashes shrieked across the inky sky above their lowered heads. Rockets. Mortars tearing into helpless villages and killing more victims of a useless war. The innocent always paid the dearest price. While the generals and politicians sat safely behind the lines and took body counts like it was some damn game or something. Didn’t they realize that the pawns they so easily sacrificed were human beings with feelings, needs, and dreams, families, just like them? People, not cattle, there to slaughter.

  Why didn’t they see how futile war was?

  He sighed above the digging sounds around him. This wasn’t a nightmare, he thought. This was real. He wiped the sweat from his brow and reset his helmet upon his aching head and continued his digging like the others around him. In the darkness he could hear, could almost smell, because of the perspiration of fear, his fellow soldiers as they silently scooped out the dirt of their deepening bunker and piled it higher above their heads. David wondered if they were silently praying to God for their safety as he was. Promising Him anything if He would just let them get home in one piece.

  David cringed inside as he remembered the way Jeffers, one of the newer recruits, died the week before. A hidden punji pit. No one had seen a thing until after the whistle of the released trap and then there, suddenly and horribly, was that bloody pointed thing sticking out of Jeffers’ face, impaling him. How the poor devil had screamed until their stone-faced CO, Colonel Marsh, had mercifully shot him. He’d had no choice. The stakes had ripped Jeffers’ guts out, and they’d no facilities to take care of such a horrendous wound. Jeffers was better off dead; they all knew that. But still, David thought, the look on Jeffers’ face before he died was hideous, he would never, never forget it.

  It could have been any of them. It could happen to any of them at any time.

  Every so often insidious whispers haunted the night around them as they dug in, out beyond the perimeter of their camp. Above the swaying trees, behind the trees, under the trees; embedded in the very air around them like the stars in the night sky.

  The enemy.

  Always out there. Waiting, watching. Scheming their little surprises and planting their pointed sticks. Hiding their mines and baiting their traps. Out there crouching behind the lush bushes and dead trees. Grinning with dirty teeth.

  They were sitting ducks.

  David stopped digging, his entrenching tool paused in mid-air, and listened, cocking his head to the left. Was that them? He heard suspicious rustlings beyond the looming shadow that was a tree. Were they coming for him now? Far away he could hear the artillery advancing. The front. Was it theirs or ours and what the hell difference did it make? He’d heard stories about how their own men were dying from friendly fire.

  He snorted in disgust. Friendly fire? What difference did it make? Dead was dead, no matter whose bombs they were. Under his fetid breath David swore viciously.

  It was so crazy. Being here. Skulking and hiding in the woods at night, digging filthy holes in the ground to disappear into like some damn mole. Your stomach growling and your muscles clenching in agony as you slithered through the damn weeds in the heat trying to kill an enemy you really couldn’t even call an enemy because you were in his land and he didn’t want you here. Losing limbs that could never be replaced and spilling your blood in a God-forsaken pest hole like this...dying. And for what?

  He was barely twenty. Was he going to die before he’d had time to live?

  If you asked him, Pvt. David Willows of Little Rock, Arkansas, who’d always dreamed of going to Paris to learn how to paint, an artist, who’d never in his short life had the slightest desire to hurt anyone, he didn’t think anyone could give a decent answer to why they were really in Korea. Not the green boys quivering in their mud-caked army boots or the civilians back in the States. Not the enemy out there in the woods simply trying to get the invaders the hell out of their land. Only the damn righteous fat cat politicians and statesmen safe and far away from the front might be able to give reasons, not that any of them made any sense anyway.

  They weren’t here.

  Hell, if the lousy politicians wanted a war, let them get their butts over here and take his place in the stinking bunkers. Hell, let them put their butts where their loud mouths were. It was easy to talk; not so easy to do the actual fighting and dying.

  He must have sworn louder than he’d thought because someone behind him hushed him with a sharp hiss of air and a brutal shove to the back with a rifle butt. David jerked his head to the side, but it was so damn dark he couldn’t tell who it was even though the guy’s frightened white face hovered not more than a few inches from his. All he could see was the gleam of the other soldier’s eyes.

  David resumed his digging though his hands were bloody and aching from what he’d done already. Wasn’t the hole deep enough yet? But he knew better than to complain or say anything until Sergeant Conners, their leader for this mission, told them it was. He’d be razed too much by the others. Once or twice he’d been stupid enough to question something he’d thought at the time seemed pretty idiotic and had been openly ridiculed for it.

  He’d learned to keep his mouth shut. He wasn’t stupid. Not like some, who ended up either in the stockade or dead for their trouble, or worse yet, ostracized from the other men. In combat that could be the
kiss of death for a soldier.

  No, not him. No way.

  So he kept digging. Harder, wilder strokes, and the dirt crumbled and cascaded around his hands as he pitched it out into the weeds. The strenuous labor helped him keep his mind off the futility of the whole thing; the almost uncontrollable anger he’d begun to feel lately for the whole bloody mess. It’d seemed to escalate immensely and he couldn’t understand why.

  For a second his fingers brushed the butt of his pistol, snug in its holster, and a cold wave of fresh anger hit him.

  So he dug in angry silence. With an unseen, sadistic smile shaping his lips, he mused: we’re probably digging our own graves.

  A couple of days ago the CO had picked David and five other men to go on a search-and-destroy mission. There’d been incidents with snipers around camp lately, and he wanted the surrounding area cleaned out of any enemy activity.

  “Men,” their CO had grunted as he stood them at attention before they left that morning, “go out there and find those damn Commies. Kill ’em! That’s right, for Mom and our great country, do me proud. Shoot ’em so full of holes their own mommas won’t know ’em. Kill ’em good for me...and Jeffers. That’s all, men. I know you’ll do us all proud.”

  He’d spun on his polished heel and marched away. The punctilious bastard. It was easy for him to say, he was staying behind. Nice and safe in the protected compound. The bastard.

  So out they’d marched, six toy soldiers, to find and kill the elusive snipers in the woods. Six young men, none any older than twenty, except Sergeant Conners, who was almost twenty-two. Six scared children, really. Into enemy territory. So far only the sergeant had actually seen real combat. David hadn’t; none of the others had either.

  None of them knew what the hell they were doing. None of them had killed a man yet.

  It was ridiculous, David fumed. After three days traipsing through the bush in what David could have sworn were large rambling circles he was convinced beyond a doubt that they were lost. Lost! They never should have gone out this far without someone who knew the territory.