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  It wasn’t anyone Johnny had ever seen before, and in a town the size of Loston, that was odd. Most of the town eked a subsistence living out of the almost-dry silver mine in the nearby mountains, and the rest raised several staple crops: corn, wheat, some potatoes. Almost everyone knew almost everyone else. In fact, the only people who didn’t know everyone else were the members of the Town Council, who had the job because no one else wanted it and so they didn’t have to worry about getting to know the folk they represented in order to keep their positions.

  Johnny wasn’t a Councilman, so even at his young age he already knew by sight most everyone in the town. But he didn’t know this person. The thought struck him then, perhaps for the first time, that Loston wasn’t the only place in the world.

  The shot was less than a minute away.

  Of course, Johnny didn’t know that. He only knew that he was understanding the concept of a stranger for the first time.

  Stranger.

  Strange.

  Different.

  This was a different man, a man unknown. As such he was, in Loston, as starkly out of place in the bright sunny day as a vampire would have been.

  The man was dark. He had black hair and a purposeful stride that reminded Johnny of the way his daddy walked when he was angry...usually at something Johnny had done. It was a long stride, with each footstep placed firmly and fixedly as though walking according to a very specific set of instructions, almost machine-like in its precision and placement.

  The man noticed Johnny watching him and looked fixedly back. He stared at him from the street, gazing at him in a way the little boy didn’t like, a pointed look that seemed to challenge Johnny's right to be alive.

  Thirty seconds until the shot came.

  Johnny was saved from being embarrassed at the man's scrutiny by the man's hair, which had one sharply-defined streak of gray in the front. Johnny nearly laughed when he realized the man looked like a skunk.

  Skunk Man. He’s a skunk.

  The thought amused him almost enough to make him forget his discomfort at being stared at, and the only thing that kept him from giggling out loud was the fact that his parents were asleep in their room not ten feet away. So he clamped his teeth together, wheezing silent laughter in the back of his throat, knowing that if he woke up his parents he would be forced to trade watching Saturday morning cartoons for watching himself pull weeds out of the thick soil in his mother’s garden.

  The laughter threatened to overwhelm him, though, even as he tried to choke it down. In desperation, he clapped his tiny hands over his mouth and thought of his father being angry, and that seemed to help. It was enough to quiet him down again, at least for a moment. But his mind was feeling rebellious, it seemed, for suddenly in the midst of his imagining a new picture burst full-force into his brain. He pictured his father, yelling, his hand touching his belt in an ominous way...and in the middle of the movie playing in his head, Johnny realized his father had a booger hanging out of his nose. Not a big one, just a teeny one. But the thought of any kind of booger was too much for the self-control of a six-year old already wired from an earlier bowl of well-sugared cereal.

  Skunk Man. Boogers. Daddy’s got a booger and there’s a skunk man walking down the street.

  Johnny laughed a short staccato laugh, like a high-pitched machine gun that fired a mere three times before silence fell again. It was enough, however: Johnny’s father came out of his room, looking disheveled and a bit angry at being awakened too early on his one day off from the mine. Chore time.

  Even confronted with the reality of an angry parent, however, Johnny's mind was determined to cause trouble. He kept seeing the image of his father in his head, red-faced, yelling, and now with boogers flying out of his nose like some kind of plague of Moses. The two images – his father as he stood in the kitchen and his father as he appeared in Johnny’s mind – superimposed weirdly, creating a strange feeling of unreality in the little boy.

  His father opened his mouth to speak. As he did Johnny glanced out the window again and saw the Skunk Man disappear around a corner.

  And at the same instant another man stepped into the house.

  He entered through the rear sliding glass door that Johnny’s parents never locked. It was Loston, and no one came there to steal or even to visit, so what was the use of locking the door? Still, Johnny knew it was wrong to just walk into another person’s house. But here was someone doing it. Just doing it like it was all right.

  Like the Skunk Man, this newcomer was completely unknown to Johnny, who wondered at the sudden influx of strangers in the small town. Then all curiosity fled as the man pointed something at Johnny’s father. A shotgun.

  Johnny’s father opened his mouth wide in an expression of surprise. Perhaps to ask what the stranger thought he was doing, just walking in like that. Regardless, there was no fear in his eyes, possibly because the entry and threat had come too suddenly, too unexpectedly to be perceived as anything but one more annoyance on a very early Saturday morning.

  Johnny's father had his mouth open, but he never got the chance to speak. His final thoughts remained just that, and would never be heard beyond his mind, for the stranger’s shotgun blasted out a gout of black smoke and a flash of bright flame and Johnny’s father fell. Johnny fell, too, the shock and the sound driving him to the ground as powerfully and irresistibly as though he were a nail under a mallet. It was a physical shock that had actual force, transcending sound and becoming a palpable feeling that slammed him downward to the cold tile of the kitchen floor.

  As Johnny fell, he heard the stranger’s shotgun roar a second time. He heard/felt/smelled something whiz by his face, hitting the window, which exploded in a shrieking screech of shattering glass and crushed wood, and realized that if he had not fallen he would be dead.

  A piece of his mind screamed to him, You’re hit! Buckshot had lodged in his shoulder, shattering his scapula and cracking his clavicle.

  But Johnny did not feel the pain. Nor did he notice as the stranger cracked open the breach of the shotgun and shoved another pair of shells into the tube before closing the gun with a sharp crack. Johnny did not feel or hear anything at all at that moment, because at that moment all he was aware of was the strange sensation of looking at his father, lying on the floor beside him. At what was left of him.

  The shot had exploded through his neck, tearing away flesh and bone and skin. The head was gone. Nearly gone, at any rate. Johnny found himself staring into the half of a head that remained: into the crater that had held his father’s brains only a moment before. Into a sightless eye whose lid had ripped off but which somehow had escaped damage. The eye seemed to stare at him, but Johnny knew that was a lie, even before the eye turned red as burst capillaries inside the orb allowed blood to flow like cheap dye across a costly white cloth.

  His father was dead, and the eye stared at nothing.

  Then Johnny looked up, and forgot for a beautiful second that his father was dead and lying beside him in a pool of blood. He forgot because the man who had come in the house was now pointing the shotgun at Johnny, point blank and no chance of escape in sight.

  The gunman himself commanded attention almost more than the smoking instrument of death he clutched in one white-knuckled hand. His clothing wrapped around him like a kind of glove, tight-fitting and sleek. It was made of a fabric Johnny had never seen before. He wanted to touch it, but knew that now was not the time to do it. Or to do anything else. Miniscule lights danced across the surface of the man’s outfit, tripping back and forth like children playing hopscotch, a dizzying dance of changing colors that would be beautiful in other circumstances, but now merely served to spotlight the horror of this moment.

  His hair was short and gray. Johnny could make out some kind of a symbol shaven into the side of the man’s head. It was a cross, like the kind in the front of Aunt Wilma’s church, only the vertical line of this man’s cross ended in a lightning bolt. It had a jagged, ugly look to it, as
though the symbol had an inherent power to cause discomfort in any who might look upon it.

  The man’s eyes were gray. Like the gray-white of new silver, still in the rock. Like the shining silver of a lake in summer, reflecting the sun off its surface. It was beautiful and terrible, a gray that would seduce and beguile even as death was in the air.

  "For my God and my Redeemer," said the man.

  His finger tightened on the trigger, and Johnny closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, he was seven. Or rather, he was seven when he finally remembered opening them again. A year and more had passed since that day. He opened his eyes in his own room, in his own house, but it was a house strangely empty, for his father no longer lived there.

  John’s mother was at his bedside, and spoke to him quietly, of the six months he had been comatose, of the year he did not speak a word. She told him of the time and money spent on doctors who had come to help him, and above all of how grateful she was that he had come back to her.

  He asked about his father, and she told him his father was dead. When he did not believe her, she showed him pictures of the funeral, and Johnny saw himself at the gravesite, slack-faced and tiny in a wheelchair beside the casket. He cried for his father, and then cried again because he had not cried at the grave.

  His mother cried also, wept at his bedside, and thanked God and Jesus that her son had been restored to her. That was when Johnny knew that it was all true. He was the man of the house. He knew his father was dead, and that he himself was not, but the details of his survival were a blank, impenetrable wall.

  Neither he nor his mother tried to break that wall, either. They simply went on with life as best they could, and lived as though Father were a memory, a pleasant dream that had faded with the summer’s end. Johnny pressed his mother to tell him about the details of the day Father died but once, and she answered that it was best he didn’t remember. Her eyes became dull and peered out at him from under thick lids that seemed suddenly both foreboding and sleepy. His mother would answer no questions, and so he asked no more.

  He didn’t even ask them of himself. Not even in the nights when he lay under his covers and the wind and snow blew angrily against the windows and terror held him in an icy grip. He did not ask himself why he was afraid, just closed his eyes tightly and tried to sleep.

  Eventually he did sleep. But he woke often in the night, and cried out, reaching for something or someone beyond his grasp. Mother would come, and hold and comfort him, and all would be well again.

  At least, all would be well until the next time, when he would again wake, and cry out, and hear two words echoing in his thoughts. They were strange words, mysterious and nonsensical to him, but still they made him tremble with fear, and they haunted him.

  Skunk Man.

  MEMO REPRO S-7/102467

  Two decades later, John again met death, and again it somehow passed him by, if not actually missing him completely. John was twenty-eight. Full of life and apple pie, fresh out of Special Forces training. He still had no memory of his father’s death, and still was not sure if the fact of his forgetting was a blessing or a curse. Two decades later, and John tracked across the pre-dawn fields of Iraq, between a dry canal and Highway Seven, and still had no idea what had happened the day his father died. His mind wandered, from past to future, and John wondered if he would ever go home, if he would do all the things he had heard about growing up. School, regular job.

  Marriage.

  That was the one thought of the future that preoccupied him more than any other. He felt a pulling inside him, a pulsing throb that seemed to hunger for family. That in itself seemed strange to him, for he had no experience with women. Girlfriends were nonexistent. Contact with the opposite sex had been and continued to be minimal at best.

  He liked girls, it was true, but had never found one who excited him. Not that way. He dated in high school, having as exciting a social life as was possible in a graduating class of fourteen, but never went beyond kissing. His mother was proud of that fact, said he had Jesus in him and Jesus would protect him in his virtue and virginity. But the reason wasn’t Jesus. John didn’t know what it was, exactly, only that in the few times when more than kissing seemed possible or even likely, something held him back.

  He was waiting for something. Waiting for someone, some siren in the distance. He didn’t know who she was, only that he hadn’t met her yet.

  And he wasn’t likely to do so now, either, hunched over as he was with his pack weighing heavy against his back. It weighed over a hundred pounds, but was actually one of the lightest in the unit. The packs strapped to the others’ backs ranged from one hundred to one hundred seventy five pounds, containing between them everything the six man group would need to stay alive in Iraq for up to a week.

  John’s back burned, and courses of sweat cut trenches through the dirt and light camouflage paint that coated his face. A bead of perspiration dropped into his eye, stinging as the salt burned his cornea, but John did not move his hands from his weapon. He walked in dangerous territory, and did not savor the idea of dying because he was too busy wiping his eyes to return fire should he be fired upon.

  His M-16 rested against his forearm, cocked and ready. He had never had to use a gun on live foe before but if it came to the choice of him or the enemy...well, John was a virgin, but he had no pretensions to sainthood.

  Like most of the others in his unit, he was a veteran in training terms, but this was his first time on an active mission. He was determined to do well; to justify his mother's faith in him and the tremendous amount of money that had gone into training him.

  Vogel, the CO, stopped abruptly. He was short, with a brutish visage that concealed an alert mind and a whip-quick wit. He held a fist in the air, looking at the global positioning unit he held in his hand. The tiny link was invaluable in this operation, giving them their position within yards and allowing them to coordinate their travel time to conform to the mission’s needs. Without it, a man could easily become lost in the miles of endless desert where little distinguished one spot from another. People could die in this place.

  Cowles uncurled his strong, short fingers. We’re here, the gesture said.

  Wordlessly, John and the others unlimbered their bags, and their backs cracked and popped in a mix of relief and umbrage at being so ill-used. The big green wart was what servicemen called the rucksacks, and the name was apt. Most Special Forces servicemen retired with bad knees from the heavy loads. That is, if they were lucky enough to retire, instead of being buried out in some dank jungle or godforsaken desert like this one.

  The shoulder strap of his bag caught on something underneath his shirt, hitching almost imperceptibly on the scar that lay beneath John's clothing. It was a tightly knotted burl of tissue, the only tie John had to that day long ago when his father died and was forgotten as though he had never lived. John noticed the scar, as he always did, but as always thrust the thoughts it brought with it far away from himself. There was no time for memory today, even when memory was only a blank wall that stared at you from the past and revealed nothing.

  John unpacked a collapsible aluminum shovel and began digging. The predawn light had brightened slightly, slight casts of pink now visible through the gray of dusk. He figured they had about two hours before the first people came down the road that writhed a serpentine path not one hundred yards from them. The unit had to be gone by then, disappeared.

  The squad was in Iraq as eyes on the ground, recon troops in charge of calling in information about who was traveling the roads. They had to be close enough to see everything clearly. Close enough to tell one tank from another if such moved down the road. CentCom wanted detail, and John’s unit had to get it. But staying so close was dangerous, as it meant you could also be seen by anyone who passed by. So John and the rest of the unit were digging a hole in the dirt where they would remain, peeping out to gather intel, hoping that the hole they dug would not end as their grave.
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br />   Camp dug beside John. A rangy kid from Nebraska, Camp was the only one in the unit who looked more like a poster boy for The Great American Way than did John. The illusion shattered, however, every time Camp opened his mouth.

  "I need some," said Camp.

  John dug in silence, eyes darting back and forth along the side of the road. Intelligence reported the road was secure, but he knew that the only intelligence a good soldier relied on completely was what his eyes, ears, nose, and skin told him himself.

  "Yeah. I need some," reiterated Camp.

  John nodded in the hopes Camp would shut up.

  He didn’t stop digging, though, but kept moving. Sweat trickled over his eyes. He wanted to wipe his forehead but didn’t. Part of the training. Keep your hands busy with the job and ready to grab a gun. Don’t so much as think about anything else. You gotta pee, you get three guys to cover you before you put a hand on your zipper. Words to live by.

  "If I don’t get some soon, I’ll die." Camp was becoming irritating as his half-veiled euphemisms continued to make their way to John's ears. A listening stranger would think that Camp was talking about the last time he’d been laid. Passing brass would nod to themselves and pretend they’d never been horny soldiers. They’d smile at the Good American Kid who believed in God and apple pie and getting laid.

  John knew different. Camp wasn’t horny, he was psychotic. Or at least he was pretending to be, acting constantly like he wanted to kill someone. The screening to get into SpecOps was rigorous, designed to keep out cowboys and wannabe superheroes, so John was pretty sure Camp was just putting on a show.