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  Skunk Man, he thought.

  The memories he had suppressed hit him with the force of an anvil dropped from the Empire State Building, cracking the sidewalks of his mind. He staggered, almost falling from the chopper before one of the other Berets caught him. John’s mouth opened and shut, but no sound came out. Words floated back to him.

  Daddy’s got a booger.

  Skunk Man.

  John stared at the man, who stared back, and for a moment John remembered what had happened. He remembered his father being killed. He remembered why he himself hadn’t died.

  He remembered his father standing and walking after having his head blown off.

  Then he blinked and the memories were gone again, fled behind whatever wall had protected his sanity for these years. John looked at the serviceman in the other chopper. At the stranger. At the Skunk Man. John did not remember anything after seeing the Skunk Man on his sidewalk on the morning his father died, but that memory was now as clear and clean as a pristine photograph in an album. John remembered the Skunk Man.

  The man looked the same. Not close, but exactly the same. Twenty years hadn’t aged the man, nor had his expression changed. There was nothing to show that he had passed through twenty years and more. He might have stepped right out of John’s memory as a perfect reproduction of himself, and John wondered just what the hell was happening to him.

  John would have dived right out of the chopper then, leaping for the other helicopter’s strut - a suicidal move - had not one of the Pave Low navigators clacked a carabiner to his belt, securing him to the deck. The navigator reached out to slide shut the side door.

  "No!" screamed John.

  He pushed the man aside, his total attention still focused on the man. On Skunk Man, who had been on his street when his father died. Who had been there and looked exactly the same.

  Then the Black Hawk exploded.

  John saw the white contrail of a hand-held rocket - probably black market Russian hardware - an instant before it hit. The small missile streaked through the open side hatch of the Black Hawk, and then there was a tiny snatch of fire, almost pitiful really, followed by a great gout of yellow and red flame. The incendiary tongue licked forth, singeing John’s hair, as the Black Hawk exploded from the inside out, the machine dying along with its crew in an instant. Blackened machinery and the charcoal corpses of the vehicle’s occupants fell the short distance to the ground, exploding outward in a wash of shrapnel that sent the Iraqis scurrying for cover.

  "No!" John screamed again. He wasn’t sure if he screamed for the loss of the chopper and its firepower, his friends who had been in it, the men piloting the saving machine...

  Or for the loss of the man.

  Skunk Man.

  The Pave Low pilot pulled back on the yoke, and the chopper jerked high into the sky as though yanked by a great hand. Bullet fire continued to snap below them, the sounds growing thinner as the chopper ascended, until finally they were gone, lost in the endless desert where half of John’s friends would remain forever, molded and joined to the helicopter that had come to save them.

  The trip back to base camp was uneventful. The Pave Low kept below radar level, easily following the contours of the earth. The land rolled below them like a sandy sea dotted with bits of scrub that had somehow divined the secret of eking a life out of the death of the desert. John glanced at the pilot from time to time, noting how seamlessly the man moved with the machine, how melded they were, as if there was no chopper and no man, but only a weird hybrid of both. Then his eyes closed, and fear and terror fell away from him like a rush of water from a waterfall, leaving him dry and suddenly sleepy.

  When the return trip ended, he asked the Pave Low pilot and a few others on base about the Black Hawk crew, trying to find out who the Skunk Man had been. But the two chopper crews didn’t know each other: both teams had been recruited from different units.

  He asked the base officers about the Black Hawk crew. Classified, they said. Per military protocol, they reminded him, Black Ops operatives were not known to anyone outside their unit. They smiled and shook his hand and told him to forget about them; they had never officially existed, anyway.

  John received an award. A bronze star. Vogel got a silver one, posthumously, as did the other fallen men. John almost expected them to give one to the Black Hawk. But no, not to a machine. Only to the dead and those who had seen death.

  John had seen death twice now.

  And both times came with the strange man. The man who was now gone, a corpse that would smolder forever under the hot sun of Iraq.

  The Skunk Man.

  DOM#67B

  LOSTON, COLORADO

  AD 1999

  3:30 AM FRIDAY MORNING

  John woke up from the dream, and could not move.

  In the movies, when people had nightmares, they always sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat and panting like a beaten dog. John never did that, though nightmares were his constant companion. When they came, the personal, unremembered demons of the night, he woke feeling heavy. His eyes would snap open, but he couldn’t sit up if he wanted to. Two-ton weights seemed to press each limb to the rumpled sheets of his bed, and movement was impossible for a time after waking. All he could do was lay there, every muscle quivering from unremembered exertion, every joint sore from unknown strains, and feel the bed beneath him.

  The bed was too large. It had been ever since Annie died.

  He looked into the darkness, past the fuzzy outline of the pillow that half-poked him in the eye. A digital clock on his nightstand glowed like an iridescent monster of the night, deep laser-red eyes staring out with anger and bloodlust. Unblinking. Unmoving.

  Gradually the monster’s eyes resolved themselves into readable numbers as John’s eyes cast off the lingering effects of sleep and his brain cast off the lingering effects of his past.

  3:30 a.m.

  He woke every night, and though the times varied, they were always at the half hour. Never 4:31 or 2:16. Always 2:30 or 4:30 or sometimes even 5:30 if he was lucky. Sometimes, when he cared to think about it, it frightened him that he woke with such precision; such exact timing. Biological clocks were generally well-tuned instruments, he knew...but that tuned?

  The digital eye blinked. 3:31.

  He still couldn’t move.

  Sleep had fled, and he knew that it would not return. He never slept again after waking in the night. When his eyes closed, the demons were real, and though he braved them every night, twice in one night would be too much to face.

  Strength gradually returned as his heart ceased to pound against his ribcage. He sat up.

  The covers fell away from his naked torso. Though nearing forty, John’s body closely resembled that of an active twenty-five year old. His chest was still firm and muscular, athletic without being bulky. His stomach was flat, with traces of a washboard musculature showing through from time to time. Annie used to tease him about that, telling him he was vain for keeping up so. But he never worked out. He was just born with it.

  Annie.

  He felt the scar, as he did every night, and as he did every night he allowed himself to think about the dark flesh and the darker past it signified. The gnarled skin curled around his shoulder like a monkey tail wrapped around a tree. The scar tissue on his chest was smaller. The entry of the shot when he was young had left a mark, but it was barely the size of a silver dollar above his right pectoral.

  On his back, though, the wound and scarring were greater. There the scar was a large fist of curled matter, darker than his olive skin. It seemed to swallow light, hunching like a malignant mass that turned in on itself, like a malignant black hole above John’s scapula.

  He still didn't know where the scar had come from.

  The whole shoulder had been shattered, he knew that much. He knew that his father had died, that he had somehow survived the aftermath of a bloody attack, and that he had taken a long time to recover from the day. But he had no memories of those
facts. They were gone, not faded away but barricaded somewhere deep and secure, with thick walls that would serve equally well to keep intruders out...or to confine the occupants within.

  John took several deep breaths, and as always tried to remember what he had dreamed. What he had seen. What he had been.

  That the dreams were important was a foregone conclusion. They started soon after Annie died. Every night he woke (always at the half hour!), feeling heavy, feeling the heart pound within his body, feeling...

  (afraid.)

  ...alone.

  That was how he knew the dreams had started after Annie was gone. He never felt alone when she was near. And she had always been near.

  Now, as he struggled to remember his dream, the feeling struck him that tonight’s sleeping journey was something of crucial import. It meant the end of something. Or the beginning.

  Someone is coming.

  He frowned as the thought echoed in his mind with a concrete firmness that was unusual. Where had that come from?

  John stood, letting the covers fall to the floor. Annie wouldn’t have scolded him for that, he knew. She would roll her eyes, and make some comment about living with a pig instead of a man, but her eyes would smile lovingly as she spoke so that he would know she was joking and that she loved him. But she would not scold. Annie had never been a nag.

  He went into the bathroom, flipping on the light that hung over the sink. Seven bulbs were affixed, but only three glowed when the light was turned on. It was a vanity mirror, with enough light for Annie to apply her makeup or do her hair. But now that she was gone, there was no need for such a large amount of light. John's lip curled in bitter almost-laughter as a thought struck him: "How long has my wife been dead?" And the answer: "About four light bulbs."

  It was better with dim lights, anyway. Dim lights were less like hospital lights. Just thinking of that pushed him back into a place he preferred not to be. He suddenly could smell antiseptic cleaning solutions, with the strong undercurrent of feces and death that always hung in the air of the terminal patients unit.

  Annie weighed seventy-two pounds when she died. At least John was there when it happened. No surprise, there, he had been with her almost constantly. He remembered that he held her hand, and kissed it. She made no sound – she had been asleep for almost a week – but he fancied he could see her lips upturn ever so slightly. He imagined she was smiling as she died. And so he kissed her lips, and tried to smile, too, so that she would not feel bad for leaving him. She always got upset when he was feeling sad, and he didn’t want to send her away thinking she had made him anything but happy. He kissed her, and left a trail of bright tears on her soft, sunken cheek.

  John shivered, and tried to force his mind away from the image of his dead wife; tried to focus on his dream and attempt to recall that instead. Nightmares, to him, were often safer and far less terrifying than reality.

  The dream had frightened him, he knew. In fact, it still frightened him. His heart was still racing, and sweat kept beading at his hairline. But though the fear was real and palpable, he could not find what he was afraid of. As always, the dream was hiding in one of the many locked-away portions of his mind. John had no way to bring it back.

  He turned on the faucet and wiped his face with cool water, letting it wash away the last vestiges of a dream that was already more ethereal than most. Down the drain, to mingle with all the other bad dreams that people washed away, a palpable mass of nightmares that swirled and roiled and was finally swallowed up by the darkness below the town.

  That image struck him, and for a moment he expected a hand to reach out of the drain and pull him in. A scaly hand, like a half-man, half-crocodile. It would pull him down, through the drain, into the sewers. And John would never actually see the thing’s face. Fear had no face. That was why it was so frightening, because it could never be seen. But he would know that the thing was there. And that it was hungry for him.

  He stared at the drain.

  Nothing.

  Words entered his mind, unbidden and unwelcome, but no less real for all that.

  Someone is coming.

  He shook his head, trying to cast the words from his mind, trying to give himself peace from an unremembered past that he could neither escape nor embrace.

  Nothing is so well-remembered as the aching emptiness of something forgotten.

  He looked through the bathroom door, into the bedroom beyond. The bed lay there, rumpled and damp from sweat and fear.

  It was empty.

  He shook his head once again, and then moved to a chair, and took up a book and read. The words passed obediently before him, straight as parade lines marching before the grandstand, but they left no mark in his mind. He could never remember what he had read in these nighttime sessions. He just read because it was better than laying awake in an empty bed and thinking of a time when it had been full.

  At 8:20 that morning John drove his Pathfinder down the winding dirt road that led to the town’s main street. The SUV thunked as it hove up over the concrete lip and then shuddered with relief at being on the only paved road that continued for more than two hundred feet in the entire town. John cracked the window to enjoy the breeze that blew through the town. It was a cool breeze that hinted of winter to come, though the cold season was still months in the future. It cut John's nasal passages pleasantly, leaving him physically invigorated, though it did little for his mindset, which was always dark as he drove to work.

  He looked over to the seat beside him. No one was there, and somehow that still surprised him. It had been long enough that the shock should have been past, but somehow it remained. The ache was always there, but in spite of that fact and the myriad reminders of Annie's departure, he always expected to see her beside him, smiling and laughing as she reached out to play with his hair.

  He drove past the sign the town council had put up some five years before: Welcome to Loston, Pop. 1472 and counting.

  The mountains loomed behind him. Colorado was nothing but one large mountain, it seemed, but parts of it stood higher than the rest. The mountains that guarded Loston were solid sentinels, vigilantly aware of all that transpired before them. The mountains had always made Annie feel safe.

  John turned into the driveway of the high school, located right next to Town Hall. He parked the Pathfinder, got out without locking the door - no one had ever had a car broken into in Loston - and went into the office.

  It was quiet inside, which was normal. The office was a well-oiled mechanism that functioned with the smoothness and efficiency of a luxury automobile. That was due in no small part to the woman whose flashing and - to the students - highly intimidating gaze now focused upon him.

  Mertyl Breckman, the office secretary, noticed him immediately upon his arrival, as she noticed everyone who dared to brave her domain. Though she had lost the last of her teeth some four years previous, it seemed the two hundred students at Loston High still lived in mortal fear that she would bite them. Not even the principal commanded the respect that Mertyl did. When she was especially agitated her mouth firmed into a line that was colder than a Nordic glacier, and slower to warm. Rumors abounded that the reason LHS had such a small graduating class each year was that Mertyl ate anyone who was found wandering into the office without a pass.

  John had no pass, but in spite of that Mertyl did something that would have shocked the collective student body.

  She smiled at him.

  He smiled back at her. When Annie died, Mertyl was one of the first people at his door, bringing a party platter of meats and breads. "You won’t want to eat any of this, and you’re a big boy, so I won’t make you," she’d said, "but you remember that people will be calling on you and they’ll want something to eat."

  She had been right on both counts. Food had tasted like dry ash to him, burning and soiled. But the party platter didn’t last through the day, as well-wishers and mourners came to pay their respects and visit with one another and then eat a sa
ndwich, as though Annie's death marked the grand opening of some strange new restaurant.

  "How are you, John?" she asked.

  "Same as yesterday, just a day older. You got anything for me?" He nodded to the orderly mail slots behind her. She kept them clean and tidy, just like the rest of the office, and, by extension, the school.

  "Just a smile," she answered.

  "You know what I like."

  He continued his walk through the office, veering around the filing cabinets and out the back door, leaving Mertyl to her world of typing and clerical work.

  It was less than twenty feet to his classroom, and as usual, the room was already full. John was a popular teacher - perhaps the only popular teacher at LHS - and his kids usually beat him in there each morning.

  He stepped in just as the bell rang, a bell that was more likely to signal his tardiness than that of the students. Before Annie died, he tended to arrive an hour to an hour and a half early, turning on the computers and preparing for the day ahead. He would also be there so that any students who might be having problems with their schoolwork, home life, or anything else could come by and get his advice.

  No longer. He just didn't have the strength. But he still loved the kids he taught, and they knew it and loved him back. The nightmares were what got him out of bed each day, but these children were the only thing that convinced him to leave his house. They needed him, almost as much as he needed them.

  "Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said, sitting down at his desk. The role sheet had already been filled out by one of his pupils, and he didn’t bother double-checking it.

  Their computers were already up and running, as well, the screens seeming to roll a bit under the phased light of the fluorescents overhead. They waited for nothing but him. He looked at them for a moment, then a quick smile flitted across his lips.

  "Let’s lock and load."

  Almost as one, the children slipped their disks into the computers. Hard drives whirred (a few of the older ones made a raspy noise, like the discs were being scoured by brillo pads), and the new web pages they were designing appeared on their screens.