By Blood We Live

I

9:13pm

From the other side of the campfire, Lee said, "So it’s a vampire.”

“I did not say vampire,” Davis said. "Did you hear me say vampire?”

It was exactly the kind of thing Lee would say, the gross generalization that obscured more than it clarified. Not for the first time since they’d set out up the mountain, Davis wondered at their decision to include Lee in their plans.

Lee held up his right hand, index finger extended. "It has the fangs.”

“A mouthful of them.”

Lee raised his middle finger. "It turns into a bat.”

“No-its wings are like a bat’s.”

“Does it walk around with them?”

“They-it extrudes them from its arms and sides.”

“’Extrudes’?” Lee said.

Han chimed in: "College.”

Not this shit again, Davis thought. He rolled his eyes to the sky, dark blue studded by early stars. Although the sun’s last light had drained from the air, his stomach clenched. He dropped his gaze to the fire.

The lieutenant spoke. "He means the thing extends them out of its body.”

“Oh,” Lee said. "Sounds like it turns into a bat to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Han said.

“Whatever,” Davis said. "It doesn’t-”

Lee extended his ring finger and spoke over him. "It sleeps in a coffin.”

“Not a coffin-”

“I know, a flying coffin.”

“It isn’t-it’s in low-Earth orbit, like a satellite.”

“What was it you said it looked like?” the lieutenant asked. "A cocoon?”

“A chrysalis,” Davis said.

“Same thing,” the lieutenant said.

“More or less,” Davis said, unwilling to insist on the distinction because, even a year and three-quarters removed from Iraq, the lieutenant was still the lieutenant and you did not argue the small shit with him.

“Coffin, cocoon, chrysalis,” Lee said, "it has to be in it before sunset or it’s in trouble.”

“Wait,” Han said. "Sunset.”

“Yes,” Davis began.

“The principle’s the same,” the lieutenant said. "There’s a place it has to be and a time it has to be there by.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said. He raised his pinky. "And, it drinks blood.”

“Yeah,” Davis said, "it does.”

“Lots,” Han said.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said.

For a moment, the only sounds were the fire popping and, somewhere out in the woods, an owl prolonging its question. Davis thought of Fallujah.

“Okay,” Lee said, "how do we kill it?”

II

2004

There had been rumors, stories, legends of the things you might see in combat. Talk to any of the older guys, the ones who’d done tours in Vietnam, and you heard about a jungle in which you might meet the ghosts of Chinese invaders from five centuries before; or serve beside a grunt whose heart had been shot out a week earlier but who wouldn’t die; or find yourself stalked by what you thought was a tiger but had a tail like a snake and a woman’s voice. The guys who’d been part of the first war in Iraq-"The good one,” a sailor Davis knew called it-told their own tales about the desert, about coming across a raised tomb, its black stone worn free of markings, and listening to someone laughing inside it all the time it took you to walk around it; about the dark shapes you might see stalking through a sandstorm, their arms and legs a child’s stick-figures; about the sergeant who swore his reflection had been killed so that, when he looked in a mirror now, a corpse stared back at him. Even the soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan talked about vast forms they’d seen hunched at the crests of mountains; the street in Kabul that usually ended in a blank wall, except when it didn’t; the pale shapes you might glimpse darting into the mouth of the cave you were about to search. A lot of what you heard was bullshit, of course, the plot of a familiar movie or TV show adapted to a new location and cast of characters, and a lot of it started off sounding as if it were headed somewhere interesting then ran out of gas halfway through. But there were some stories about which, even if he couldn’t quite credit their having happened, some quality in the teller’s voice, or phrasing, caused him to suspend judgment.

During the course of his Associate’s Degree, Davis had taken a number of courses in psychology-preparation for a possible career as a psychologist-and in one of these, he had learned that, after several hours of uninterrupted combat (he couldn’t remember how many, had never been any good with numbers), you would hallucinate. You couldn’t help it; it was your brain’s response to continuous unbearable stress. He supposed that at least some of the stories he’d listened to in barracks and bars might owe themselves to such cause, although he was unwilling to categorize them all as symptoms. This was not due to any overriding belief in either organized religion or disorganized superstition; it derived more from principle, specifically, a conclusion that an open mind was the best way to meet what continually impressed him as an enormous world packed full of many things.

By Fallujah, Davis had had no experiences of the strange, the bizarre, no stories to compare with those he’d accumulated over the course of basic and his deployment. He hadn’t been thinking about that much as they took up their positions south of the city; all of his available attention had been directed at the coming engagement. Davis had walked patrol, had felt the crawl of the skin at the back of your neck as you made your way down streets crowded with men and women who’d been happy enough to see Saddam pulled down from his pedestal but had long since lost their patience with those who’d operated the crane. He’d ridden in convoys, his head light, his heart throbbing at the base of his throat as they passed potential danger after potential danger, a metal can on the right shoulder, what might be a shell on the left, and while they’d done their best to reinforce their Hummers with whatever junk they could scavenge, Davis was acutely aware that it wasn’t enough, a consequence of galloping across the Kuwaiti desert with The Army You Had. Davis had stood checkpoint, his mouth dry as he sighted his M-16 on an approaching car that appeared full of women in black burkas who weren’t responding to the signs to slow down, and he’d wondered if they were suicide bombers, or just afraid, and how much closer he could allow them before squeezing the trigger. However much danger he’d imagined himself in, inevitably, he’d arrived after the sniper had opened fire and fled, or passed the exact spot an IED would erupt two hours later, or been on the verge of aiming for the car’s engine when it screeched to a halt. It wasn’t that Davis hadn’t discharged his weapon; he’d served support for several nighttime raids on suspected insurgent strongholds, and he’d sent his own bullets in pursuit of the tracers that scored the darkness. But support wasn’t the same thing as kicking in doors, trying to kill the guy down the hall who was trying to kill you. It was not the same as being part of the Anvil.

That was how the lieutenant had described their role. "Our friends in the United States Marine Corps are going to play the Hammer,” he had said the day before. "They will sweep into Fallujah from east and west and they will drive what hostiles they do not kill outright south, where we will be waiting to act as the Anvil. The poet Goethe said that you must be either hammer or anvil. We will be both, and we are going to crush the hostiles between us.”

After the lieutenant’s presentation, Han had said, "Great-so the jarheads have all the fun,” with what Davis judged a passable imitation of regret, a false sentiment fairly widely held. Davis had been sure, however, the certainty a ball of lead weighting his gut, that this time was going to be different. Part of it was that the lieutenant had known one of the contractors who’d been killed, incinerated, and strung up at the Saddam Bridge last April. Davis wasn’t clear exactly how the men had been acquainted, or how well, but the lieutenant had made no secret of his displeasure at not being part of the first effort to (re)take the city in the weeks following the men’s deaths. He had been-you couldn’t say happy, exactly, at the failure of that campaign-but he was eager for what was shaping up to be a larger-scale operation. Though seven months gone, the deaths and dishonorings of his acquaintances had left the lieutenant an appetite for this mission. Enough to cause him to disobey his orders and charge into Fallujah’s southern section? Davis didn’t think so, but there was a reason the man still held the rank of lieutenant when his classmates and colleagues were well into their Captaincies.

The other reason for Davis ‘s conviction that, this time, something was on its way to him was a simple matter of odds. It wasn’t possible-it was not possible that you could rack up this much good luck and not have a shitload of the bad bearing down on you like a SCUD on an anthill. A former altar boy, he was surprised at the variety of prayers he remembered-not just the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but the Apostles’ Creed, the Memorare, and the Hail, Holy Queen. As he disembarked the Bradley and ran for the shelter of a desert-colored house, the sky an enormous, pale blue dome above him, Davis mumbled his way through his prayers with a fervency that would have pleased his mother and father no end. But even as his lips shaped the words, he had the strong sense that this was out of God’s hands, under the control of one of those medieval demigoddesses, Dame Fortune or something.

Later, recovering first in Germany, then at Walter Reed, Davis had thought that walking patrol, riding convoy, standing checkpoint, he must have been saved from something truly awful each and every time, for the balance to be this steep.

III

10:01pm

“I take it stakes are out,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir,” Lee said, "I unloaded half a clip easy into that sonovabitch, and I was as close to him as I am to you.”

“Closer,” Han said.

“The point is, he took a half-step backwards-maybe-before he tore my weapon out of my hands and fractured my skull with it.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” the lieutenant said. "I figure it has to be…what? Did you get your hands on some kind of major ordnance, Davis? An RPG? A Stinger? I’ll love you like a son-hell, I’ll adopt you as my own if you tell me you have a case of Stingers concealed under a bush somewhere. Those’ll give the fucker a welcome he won’t soon forget.”

“Fucking-A,” Han said.

“Nah,” Lee said. "A crate of Willy Pete oughta just about do it. Serve his ass crispy-fried!”

Davis shook his head. "No Stingers and no white phosphorous. Fire isn’t going to do us any good.”

“How come?” Lee said.

“Yeah,” Han said.

“If I’m right about this thing spending its nights in low-Earth orbit-in its ‘coffin’-and then leaving that refuge to descend into the atmosphere so it can hunt, its skin has to be able to withstand considerable extremes of temperature.”

“Like the Space Shuttle,” the lieutenant said. "Huh. For all intents and purposes, it’s fireproof.”

“Oh,” Lee said.

“Given that it spends some of its time in the upper atmosphere, as well as actual outer space, I’m guessing substantial cold wouldn’t have much effect, either.”

“We can’t shoot it, can’t burn it, can’t freeze it,” Lee said. "Tell me why we’re here, again?” He waved at the trees fringing the clearing. "Aside from the scenery, of course.”

“Pipe down,” the lieutenant said.

“When we shot at it,” Davis said, "I’m betting half our fire missed it.” He held up his hand to the beginning of Lee’s protest. "That’s no reflection on anyone. The thing was fast, cheetah-taking-down-a-gazelle fast. Not to mention, it’s so Goddamned thin… Anyway, of the shots that connected with it, most of them were flesh wounds.” He raised his hand to Lee, again. "Those who connected with it,” a nod to Lee, "were so close their fire passed clean through it.”

“Which is what I was saying,” Lee said.

“There’s a lot of crazy shit floating around space,” Davis said, "little particles of sand, rock, ice, metal. Some of them get to moving pretty fast. If you’re doing repairs to the Space Station and one of those things hits you, it could ruin your whole day. Anything that’s going to survive up there is going to have to be able to deal with something that can punch a hole right through you.”

“It’s got a self-sealing mechanism,” the lieutenant said. "When Lee fired into it, its body treated the bullets as so many dust-particles.”

“And closed right up,” Davis said. "Like some kind of super-clotting-factor. Maybe that’s what it uses the blood for.”

“You’re saying it’s bulletproof, too?” Lee said.

“Shit,” Han said.

“Not-more like, bullet-resistant.”

“Think of it as a mutant healing ability,” the lieutenant said, "like Wolverine.”

“Oh,” Han said.

“Those claws it has,” Lee said, "I guess Wolverine isn’t too far off the mark.”

“No,” Han said. "Sabertooth.”

“What?” Lee said. "The fuck’re you going on about?”

“Sabertooth’s claws.” Han held up his right hand, fingers splayed. He curled his fingers into a fist. "Wolverine’s claws.”

“Man has a point,” the lieutenant said.

“Whatever,” Lee said.

“Here’s the thing,” Davis said, "it’s bullet-resistant, but it can still feel pain. Think about how it reacted when Lee shot it. It didn’t tear his throat open: it took the instrument that had hurt it and used that to hurt Lee. You see what I’m saying?”

“Kind of,” Lee said.

“Think about what drove it off,” Davis said. "Remember?”

“Of course,” the lieutenant said. He nodded at Han. "It was Han sticking his bayonet in the thing’s side.”

For which it crushed his skull, Davis could not stop himself from thinking. He added his nod to the lieutenant’s. "Yes he did.”

“How is that different from shooting it?” Lee said.

“Your bullets went in one side and out the other,” Davis said. "Han’s bayonet stuck there. The thing’s healing ability could deal with an in-and-out wound no problem; something like this, though: I think it panicked.”

“Panicked?” Lee said. "It didn’t look like it was panicking to me.”

“Then why did it take off right away?” Davis said.

“It was full; it heard more backup on the way; it had an appointment in fucking Samara. How the fuck should I know?”

“What’s your theory?” the lieutenant said.

“The type of injury Han gave it would be very bad if you’re in a vacuum. Something opening you up like that and leaving you exposed…”

“You could vent some or even all of the blood you worked so hard to collect,” the lieutenant said. "You’d want to get out of a situation like that with all due haste.”

“Even if your healing factor could seal the wound’s perimeter,” Davis said, "there’s still this piece of steel in you that has to come out and, when it does, will reopen the injury.”

“Costing you still more blood,” the lieutenant said.

“Most of the time,” Davis said, "I mean, like, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a million, the thing would identify any such threats long before they came that close. You saw its ears, its eyes.”

“Black on black,” Lee said. "Or, no-black over black, like the corneas had some kind of heavy tint and what was underneath was all pupil.”

“Han got lucky,” Davis said. "The space we were in really wasn’t that big. There was a lot of movement, a lot of noise-”

“Not to mention,” Lee said, "all the shooting and screaming.”

“The right set of circumstances,” the lieutenant said.

“Saved our asses,” Lee said, reaching over to pound Han’s shoulder. Han ducked to the side, grinning his hideous smile.

“If I can cut to the chase,” the lieutenant said. "You’re saying we need to find a way to open up this fucker and keep him open so that we can wreak merry havoc on his insides.”

Davis nodded. "To cut to the chase, yes, exactly.”

“How do you propose we do this?”

“With these.” Davis reached into the duffel bag to his left and withdrew what appeared to be a three-foot piece of white wood, tapered to a point sharp enough to prick your eye looking at it. He passed the first one to the lieutenant, brought out one for Lee and one for Han.

“A baseball bat?” Lee said, gripping near the point and swinging his like a Louisville Slugger. "We gonna club it to death?”

Neither Davis nor the lieutenant replied; they were busy watching Han, who’d located the grips at the other end of his and was jabbing it, first underhand, then overhand.

“The people you meet working at Home Depot,” Davis said. "They’re made out of an industrial resin, inch-for-inch, stronger than steel. Each one has a high-explosive core.”

“Whoa,” Lee said, setting his on the ground with exaggerated care.

“The detonators are linked to this,” Davis said, fishing a cell phone from his shirt pocket. "Turn it on.” Pointing to the lieutenant, Han, Lee, and himself, he counted, "One-two-three-four. Send. That’s it.”

“I was mistaken,” the lieutenant said. "It appears we will be using stakes, after all.”

IV

2004

At Landstuhl, briefly, and then at Walter Reed, at length, an impressive array of doctors, nurses, chaplains, and other soldiers whose job it was encouraged Davis to discuss Fallujah. He was reasonably sure that, while under the influence of one of the meds that kept his body at a safe distance, he had let slip some detail, maybe more. How else to account for the change in his nurse’s demeanor? Likely, she judged he was a psych case, a diagnosis he half-inclined to accept. Even when the lieutenant forced his way into Davis ‘s room, banging around in the wheelchair he claimed he could use well enough, Goddamnit, Davis was reluctant to speak of anything except the conditions of the other survivors. Of whom he had been shocked-truly shocked, profoundly shocked, almost more so than by what had torn through them-to learn there were only two, Lee and Han, Manfred bled out on the way to be evac’d, everyone else long gone by the time the reinforcements had stormed into the courtyard. According to the lieutenant, Han was clinging to life by a thread so fine you couldn’t see it. He’d lost his helmet in the fracas, and the bones in his skull had been crushed like an eggshell. Davis, who had witnessed that crushing, nodded. Lee had suffered his own head trauma, although, compared to Han’s, it wasn’t anything a steel plate couldn’t fix. The real problem with Lee was that, if he wasn’t flooded with some heavy-duty happy pills, he went fetal, thumb in his mouth, the works.

“What about you?” the lieutenant said, indicating the armature of casts, wires, weights, and counterweights that kept Davis suspended like some overly ambitious kid’s science project.

“Believe it or not, sir,” Davis said, "it really is worse than it looks. My pack and my helmet absorbed most of the impact. Still left me with a broken back, scapula, and ribs-but my spinal cord’s basically intact. Not that it doesn’t hurt like a motherfucker, sir. Yourself?”

“The taxpayers of the United States of America have seen fit to gift me with a new right leg, since I so carelessly misplaced the original.” He knocked on his pajama leg, which gave a hollow, plastic sound.

“Sir, I am so sorry-”

“Shut it,” the lieutenant said. "It’s a paper cut.” Using his left foot, he rolled himself back to the door, which he eased almost shut. Through the gap, he surveilled the hallway outside long enough for Davis to start counting,

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, then wheeled himself to Davis ‘s head. He leaned close and said, " Davis.”

“Sir?”

“Let’s leave out the rank thing for five minutes, okay? Can we do that?”

“Sir-yes, yes we can.”

“Because ever since the docs have reduced my drugs to the point I could string one sentence after another, I’ve been having these memories-dreams-I don’t know what the fuck to call them. Nightmares. And I can’t decide if I’m losing it, or if this is why Lee needs a palmful of M &Ms to leave his bed. So I need you to talk to me straight, no bullshit, no telling the officer what you think he wants to hear. I would genuinely fucking appreciate it if we could do that.”

Davis looked away when he saw the lieutenant’s eyes shimmering. Keeping his own focused on the ceiling, he said, "It came out of the sky. That’s where it went, after Han stuck it, so I figure it must have dropped out of there, too. It explains why, one minute we’re across the courtyard from a bunch of hostiles, the next, that thing’s standing between us.”

“Did you see it take off?”

“I did. After it had stepped on Han’s head, it spread its arms-it kind of staggered back from Han, caught itself, then opened its arms and these huge wings snapped open. They were like a bat’s, skin stretched over bone-they appeared so fast I’m not sure, but they shot out of its body. It tilted its head, jumped up, high, ten feet easy, flapped the wings, which raised it another ten feet, and turned-the way a swimmer turns in the water, you know? Another flap, two, and it was gone.”

“Huh.”

Davis glanced at the lieutenant, whose face was smooth, his eyes gazing across some interior distance. He said, "Do you-”

“Back up,” the lieutenant said. "The ten of us are in the courtyard. How big’s the place?”

“I’m not very good with-”

“At a guess.”

“Twenty-five feet wide, maybe fifty long. With all of those jars in the way-what were they?”

“Planters.”

“Three-foot-tall stone planters?”

“For trees. They were full of dirt. Haven’t you ever seen those little decorative trees inside office buildings?”

“Oh. All right. What I was going to say was, with the row of planters at either end, the place might have been larger.”

“Noted. How tall were the walls?”

“Taller than any of us-eight feet, easy. They were thick, too, a foot and a half, two feet.” Davis said, "It really was a good spot to attack from. Open fire from the walls, then drop behind them when they can’t maintain that position. The tall buildings are behind it, and we don’t hold any of them, so they don’t have to worry about anyone firing down on them. I’m guessing they figured we didn’t know where we were well enough to call in any artillery on them. No, if we want them, we have to run a hundred feet of open space to a doorway that’s an easy trap. They’ve got the planters for cover near and far, not to mention the doorway in the opposite wall as an exit.”

“Agreed.”

“To be honest, now that we’re talking about it, I can’t imagine how we made it into the place without losing anyone. By all rights, they should have tagged a couple of us crossing from our position to theirs. And that doorway: they should have massacred us.”

“We were lucky. When we returned fire, they must have panicked. Could be they didn’t see all of us behind the wall, thought they were ambushing three or four targets, instead of ten. Charging them may have given the impression there were even more of us. It took them until they were across the courtyard to get a grip and regroup.”

“By which time we were at the doorway.”

“So it was Lee all the way on the left-”

“With Han beside him.”

“Right, and Bay and Remsnyder. Then you and Petit-”

“No-it was me and Lugo, then Petit, then you.”

“Yes, yes. Manfred was to my right, and Weymouth was all the way on the other end.”

“I’m not sure how many-”

“Six. There may have been a seventh in the opposite doorway, but he wasn’t around very long. Either he went down, or he decided to season his valor with a little discretion.”

“It was loud-everybody firing in a confined space. I had powder all over me from their shots hitting the wall behind us. I want to say we traded bullets for about five minutes, but it was what? Half that?”

“Less. A minute.”

“And…”

“Our guest arrived.”

“At first-at first it was like, I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. I’m trying to line up the guy who’s directly across from me-all I need is for him to stick up his head again-and all of a sudden, there’s a shadow in the way. That was my first thought:

It’s a shadow. Only, who’s casting it? And why is it hanging in the air like that? And why is it fucking eight feet tall?”

“None of us understood what was in front of us. I thought it was a woman in a burka, someone I’d missed when we’d entered the courtyard. As you say, though, you don’t meet a lot of eight-foot-tall women, in or out of Iraq.”

“Next thing… no, that isn’t what happened.”

“What?”

“I was going to say the thing-the Shadow-was in among the hostiles, which is true, it went for them first, but before it did, there was a moment…”

“You saw something-something else.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. "This pain shot straight through my head. We’re talking instant migraine, so intense I practically puked. That wasn’t all: this chill… I was freezing, colder than I’ve ever been, like you read about in polar expeditions. I couldn’t-the courtyard-”

“What?”

“The courtyard wasn’t-I was somewhere high, like, a hundred miles high, so far up I could see the curve of the Earth below me. Clouds, continents, the ocean: what you see in the pictures they take from orbit. Stars, space, all around me. Directly, overhead, a little farther away than you are from me, there was this thing. I don’t know what the fuck it was. Big-long, maybe long as a house. It bulged in the middle, tapered at the ends. The surface was dark, shiny-does that make any sense? The thing was covered in-it looked like some kind of lacquer. Maybe it was made out of the lacquer.

“Anyway, one moment, my head’s about to crack open, my teeth are chattering and my skin’s blue, and I’m in outer space. The next, all of that’s gone, I’m back in the courtyard, and the Shadow-the thing is ripping the hostiles to shreds.”

“And then,” the lieutenant said, "it was our turn.”

V

November 11, 2004, 11:13am

In the six hundred twenty-five days since that afternoon in the hospital, how many times had Davis recited the order of events in the courtyard, whether with the lieutenant, or with Lee once his meds had been stabilized, or with Han once he’d regained the ability to speak (though not especially well)? At some point a couple of months on, he’d realized he’d been keeping count-

That’s the thirty-eighth time; that’s the forty-third-and then, a couple of months after that, he’d realized that he’d lost track. The narrative of their encounter with what Davis continued to think of as the Shadow had become daily catechism, to be reviewed morning, noon, and night, and whenever else he happened to think of it.

None of them had even tried to run, which there were times Davis judged a sign of courage, and times he deemed an index of their collective shock at the speed and ferocity of the thing’s assault on the insurgents. Heads, arms, legs were separated from bodies as if by a pair of razor blades, and wherever a wound opened red, there was the thing’s splintered maw, drinking the blood like a kid stooping to a water fountain. The smells of blood, piss, and shit mixed with those of gunpowder and hot metal. While Davis knew they had been the next course on the Shadow’s menu, he found it difficult not to wonder how the situation might have played out had Lee-followed immediately by Lugo and Weymouth -not opened up on the thing. Of course, the instant that narrow head with its spotlight eyes, its scarlet mouth, turned in their direction, everyone else’s guns erupted, and the scene concluded the way it had to. But if Lee had been able to restrain himself…

Lugo was first to die. In a single leap, the Shadow closed the distance between them and drove one of its sharpened hands into his throat, venting his carotid over Davis, whom it caught with its other hand and flung into one of the side walls with such force his spine and ribs lit up like the Fourth of July. As he was dropping onto his back, turtling on his pack, the thing was raising its head from Lugo ‘s neck, spearing Petit through his armor and hauling him towards it. Remsnyder ran at it from behind; the thing’s hand lashed out and struck his head from his shoulders. It was done with Petit in time to catch Remsnyder’s body on the fall and jam its mouth onto the bubbling neck. It had shoved Petit’s body against the lieutenant, whose feet tangled with Petit’s and sent the pair of them down. This put him out of the way of Manfred and Weymouth, who screamed for everyone to get clear and fired full automatic. Impossible as it seemed, they missed, and for their troubles, the Shadow lopped Manfred’s right arm off at the elbow and opened Weymouth like a Christmas present. From the ground, the lieutenant shot at it; the thing sliced through his weapon and the leg underneath it. Now Bay, Han, and Lee tried full auto, which brought the thing to Bay, whose face it bit off. It swatted Han to the ground, but Lee somehow ducked the swipe it aimed at him and tagged it at close range. The Shadow threw Bay’s body across the courtyard, yanked Lee’s rifle from his hands, and swung it against his head like a ballplayer aiming for the stands. He crumpled, the thing reaching out for him, and Han leapt up, his bayonet ridiculously small in his hand. He drove it into the thing’s side-what would be the floating ribs on a man-to the hilt. The Shadow, whose only sound thus far had been its feeding, opened its jaws and shrieked, a high scream more like the cry of a bat, or a hawk, than anything human. It caught Han with an elbow to the temple that tumbled him to the dirt, set its foot on his head, and pressed down. Han’s scream competed with the sound of his skull cracking in multiple spots. Davis was certain the thing meant to grind Han’s head to paste, but it staggered off him, one claw reaching for the weapon buried in its skin. Blood so dark it was purple was oozing around the hilt. The Shadow spread its arms, its wings cracked open, and it was gone, fled into the blue sky that Davis would spend the next quarter-hour staring at, as the lieutenant called for help and tried to tourniquet first his leg then Manfred’s arm.

Davis had stared at the sky before-who has not?-but, helpless on his back, his spine a length of molten steel, his ears full of Manfred whimpering that he was gonna die, oh sweet Jesus, he was gonna fucking die, the lieutenant talking over him, insisting no he wasn’t, he was gonna be fine, it was just a little paper cut, the washed blue bowl overhead seemed less sheltering canopy and more endless depth, a gullet over which he had the sickening sensation of dangling. As Manfred’s cries diminished and the lieutenant told-ordered him to stay with him, Davis flailed his arms at the ground to either side of him in an effort to grip onto an anchor, something that would keep him from hurtling into that blue abyss.

The weeks and months to come would bring the inevitable nightmares, the majority of them the Shadow’s attack replayed at half-, full-, or double-speed, with a gruesome fate for himself edited in. Sometimes repeating the events on his own or with a combination of the others led to a less-disturbed sleep; sometimes it did not. There was one dream, though, that no amount of discussion could help, and that was the one in which Davis was plummeting through the sky, lost in an appetite that would never be sated.

VI

12:26am

Once he was done setting the next log on the fire, Davis leaned back and said, "I figure it’s some kind of stun effect.”

“How so?” Lee said.

“The thing lands in between two groups of heavily armed men: it has to do something to even the odds. It hits us with a psychic blast, shorts out our brains so that we’re easier prey.”

“Didn’t seem to do much to Lee,” the lieutenant said.

“No brain!” Han shouted.

“Ha-fucking-ha,” Lee said.

“Maybe there were too many of us,” Davis said. "Maybe it miscalculated. Maybe Lee’s a mutant and this is his special gift. Had the thing zigged instead of zagged, gone for us instead of the insurgents, I don’t think any of us would be sitting here, regardless of our super powers.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lee said.

“For a theory,” the lieutenant said, "it’s not bad. But there’s a sizable hole in it. You,” he pointed at Davis, "saw the thing’s coffin or whatever. Lee,” a nod to him, "was privy to a bat’s-eye view of the thing’s approach to one of its hunts in-did we ever decide if it was Laos or Cambodia?”

“No sir,” Lee said. "It looked an awful lot like some of the scenery from the first

Tomb Raider movie, which I’m pretty sure was filmed in Cambodia, but I’m not positive.”

“You didn’t see Angelina Jolie running around?” Davis said.

“If only,” Lee said.

“So with Lee, we’re in Southeast Asia,” the lieutenant said, "with or without the lovely Ms. Jolie. From what Han’s been able to tell me, he was standing on the moon or someplace very similar to it. I don’t believe he could see the Earth from where he was, but I’m not enough of an astronomer to know what that means.

“As for myself, I had a confused glimpse of the thing tearing its way through the interior of an airplane-what I’m reasonably certain was a B-17, probably during the Second World War.

“You see what I mean? None of us witnessed the same scene-none of us witnessed the same time, which you would imagine we would have if we’d been subject to a deliberate attack. You would expect the thing to hit us all with the same image. It’s more efficient.”

“Maybe that isn’t how this works,” Davis said. "Suppose what it does is more like a cluster bomb, a host of memories it packs around a psychic charge? If each of us thinks he’s someplace different from everybody else, doesn’t that maximize confusion, create optimal conditions for an attack?”

The lieutenant frowned. Lee said, "What’s your theory, sir?”

“I don’t have one,” the lieutenant said. "Regardless of its intent, the thing got in our heads.”

“And stayed there,” Lee said.

“Stuck,” Han said, tapping his right temple.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. "Whatever their precise function, our exposure to the thing’s memories appears to have established a link between us and it.”

Davis said, "Which is what’s going to bring it right here.”

VII

2004-2005

When Davis was on board the plane to Germany, he could permit himself to hope that he was, however temporarily, out of immediate danger of death-not from the injury to his back, which, though painful in the extreme, he had known from the start would not claim his life, but from the reappearance of the Shadow. Until their backup arrived in a hurry of bootsteps and rattle of armor, he had been waiting for the sky to vomit the figure it had swallowed minutes (moments?) prior, for his blood to leap into the thing’s jagged mouth. The mature course of action had seemed to prepare for his imminent end, which he had attempted, only to find the effort beyond him. Whenever word of some acquaintance’s failure to return from the latest patrol had prompted Davis to picture his final seconds, he had envisioned his face growing calm, even peaceful, his lips shaping the syllables of a heartfelt Act of Contrition. However, between the channel of fire that had replaced his spine and the vertiginous sensation that he might plunge into the sky-not to mention, the lieutenant’s continuing monologue to Manfred, the pungence of gunpowder mixed with the bloody reek of meat, the low moans coming from Han- Davis was unable to concentrate. Rather than any gesture of reconciliation towards the God with Whom he had not been concerned since his discovery of what lay beneath his prom date’s panties junior year, Davis’s attention had been snarled in the sound of the Shadow’s claws puncturing Lugo’s neck, the fountain of Weymouth’s blood over its arm and chest, the wet slap of his entrails hitting the ground, the stretch of the thing’s mouth as it released its scream. Despite his back, which had drawn his vocal chords taut, once the reinforcements had arrived and a red-faced medic peppered him with questions while performing a quick assessment of him, Davis had strained to warn them of their danger. But all his insistence that they had to watch the sky had brought him was a sedative that pulled him into a vague, gray place.

Nor had his time at the Battalion Aid Station, then some larger facility (Camp Victory? with whatever they gave him, most of the details a variety of medical staff poured into his ears sluiced right back out again) caused him to feel any more secure. As the gray place loosened its hold on him and he stared up at the canvas roof of the BAS, Davis had wanted to demand what the fuck everyone was thinking. Didn’t they know the Shadow could slice through this material like it was cling film? Didn’t they understand it was waiting to descend on them right now, this very fucking minute? It would rip them to shreds; it would drink their fucking

blood. At the presence of a corpsman beside him, he’d realized he was shouting-or as close to shouting as his voice could manage-but he’d been unable to restrain himself, which had led to calming banalities and more vague grayness. He had returned to something like consciousness inside a larger space in the CSH, where the sight of the nearest wall trembling from the wind had drawn his stomach tight and sped a fresh round of protests from his mouth. When he struggled up out of the shot that outburst occasioned, Davis had found himself in a dim cavern whose curving sides rang with the din of enormous engines. His momentary impression that he was dead and this some unexpected, bare-bones afterlife was replaced by the recognition that he was on a transport out of Iraq -who knew to where? It didn’t matter. A flood of tears had rolled from his eyes as the dread coiling his guts had, if not fled, at least calmed.

At Landstuhl, in a solidly built hospital with drab but sturdy walls and a firm ceiling, Davis was calmer. (As long as he did not dwell on the way the Shadow’s claws had split Petit’s armor, sliced the lieutenant’s rifle in two.) That, and the surgeries required to relieve the pressure on his spine left him, to quote a song he’d never liked that much, comfortably numb.

Not until he was back in America, though, reclining in the late-medieval luxury of Walter Reed, the width of an ocean and a continent separating him from Fallujah, did Davis feel anything like a sense of security. Even after his first round of conversations with the lieutenant had offered him the dubious reassurance that, if he were delusional, he was in good company, a cold comfort made chillier still by Lee, his meds approaching the proper levels, corroborating their narrative, Davis found it less difficult than he would have anticipated to persuade himself that Remsnyder’s head leaping from his body on a jet of blood was seven thousand miles away. And while his pulse still quickened whenever his vision strayed to the rectangle of sky framed by the room’s lone window, he could almost pretend that this was a different sky. After all, hadn’t that been the subtext of all the stories he’d heard from other vets about earlier wars? Weird shit happened, yes-sometimes, very bad weird shit happened-but it took place over there, In Country, in another place where things didn’t work the same way they did in the good old U.S. of A. If you could keep that in mind, Davis judged, front-and-center in your consciousness, you might be able to live with the impossible.

Everything went-you couldn’t call it swimmingly-it went, anyway, until Davis began his rehabilitation, which consisted of: a) learning how to walk again and b) strength training for his newly (re)educated legs. Of course, he had been in pain after the initial injury-though shock and fear had kept the hurt from overwhelming him-and his nerves had flared throughout his hospital stay-especially following his surgery-though a pharmacopeia had damped those sensations down to smoldering. Rehab was different. Rehab was a long, low-ceilinged room that smelled of sweat and industrial antiseptic, one end of which grazed a small herd of the kind of exercise machines you saw faded celebrities hawking on late-night TV, the center of which held a trio of parallel bars set too low, and the near end of which was home to a series of overlapping blue mats whose extensive cracks suggested an aerial view of a river basin. Rehab was slow stretches on the mats, then gripping onto the parallel bars while you tried to coax your right leg into moving forward; once you could lurch along the bars and back, rehab was time on one of the exercise machines, flat on your back, your legs bent, your feet pressed against a pair of pedals connected to a series of weights you raised by extending your legs. Rehab was about confronting pain, inviting it in, asking it to sit down and have a beer so the two of you could talk for a while. Rehab was not leaning on the heavy-duty opiates and their synthetic friends; it was remaining content with the over-the-counter options and ice-packs. It was the promise of a walk outside-an enticement that made Davis ‘s palms sweat and his mouth go dry.

When the surgeon had told Davis the operation had been a success, there appeared to be no permanent damage to his spinal cord, Davis had imagined himself, freed of his cast and its coterie of pulleys and counterweights, sitting up on his own and strolling out the front door. Actually, he’d been running in his fantasy. The reality, he quickly discovered, was that merely raising himself to a sitting position was an enterprise far more involved than he ever had appreciated, as was a range of action so automatic it existed below his being able to admit he’d never given it much thought. He supposed the therapists here were as good as you were going to find, but that didn’t make the routines they subjected him to-he subjected himself to-any easier or less painful.

It was during one of these sessions, his back feeling as if it had been scraped raw and the exposed tissue generously salted, that Davis had his first inkling that Fallujah was not a self-contained narrative, a short, grisly tale; rather, it was the opening chapter of a novel, one of those eight-hundred-page, Stephen King specials. Lucy, Davis ‘s primary therapist, had him on what he had christened the Rack. His target was twenty leg presses; in a fit of bravado, he had promised her thirty. No doubt, Davis had known instances of greater pain, but those had been spikes on the graph. Though set at a lower level, this hurt was constant, and while Lucy had assured him that he would become used to it, so far, he hadn’t. The pain glared like the sun flaring off a window; it flooded his mind white, made focusing on anything else impossible. That Lucy was encouraging him, he knew from the tone of her voice, but he could not distinguish individual words. Already, his vision was blurred from the sweat streaming out of him, so when the blur fractured, became a kaleidoscope-jumble of color and geometry, he thought little of it, and raised his fingers to clear his eyes.

According to Lucy, Davis removed his hand from his face, paused, then fell off the machine on his right side, trembling and jerking. For what she called his seizure’s duration, which she clocked at three minutes, fifteen seconds, Davis uttered no sound except for a gulping noise that made his therapist fear he was about to swallow his tongue.

To the lieutenant, then to Lee and eventually Han, Davis would compare what he saw when the rehab room went far away to a wide-screen movie, one of those panoramic deals that was supposed to impart the sensation of flying over the Rockies, or holding on for dear life as a roller coaster whipped up and down its course. A surplus of detail crowded his vision. He was in the middle of a sandy street bordered by short buildings whose walls appeared to consist of sheets of long, dried grass framed with slender sticks. A dozen, two dozen women and children dressed in pastel robes and turbans ran frantically from one side of the street to the other as men wearing dark brown shirts and pants aimed Kalashnikovs at them. Some of the men were riding brown and white horses; some were stalking the street; some were emerging from alleys between the buildings, several of whose walls were releasing thick smoke. Davis estimated ten men. The sounds-it was as if the soundtrack to this film had been set to record the slightest vibration of air, which it played back at twice the normal level. Screams raked his eardrums. Sandals scraped the ground. Guns cracked; bullets thudded into skin. Horses whickered. Fire snapped. An immense thirst, worse than any he had known, possessed him. His throat was not dry; it was arid, as if it-as if he were composed of dust from which the last eyedropper of moisture had long been squeezed.

One of the men-not the nearest, who was walking the opposite direction from Davis’s position, but the next closest, whose horse had shied from the flames sprouting from a grass wall and so turned its rider in Davis’s direction-caught sight of Davis, his face contracting in confusion at what he saw. The man, who might have been in his early twenties, started to raise his rifle, and everything sped up, the movie fast-forwarded. There was-his vision wavered, and the man’s gun dipped, his eyes widening. Davis was next to him-he had half-scaled the horse and speared the hollow of the man’s throat with his right hand, whose fingers, he saw, were twice as long as they had been, tapered to a set of blades. He felt the man’s tissue part, the ends of his fingers (talons?) scrape bone. Blood washed over his palm, his wrist, and the sensation jolted him. His talons flicked to the left, and the man’s head tipped back like a tree falling away from its base. Blood misted the air, and before he realized what was happening, his mouth was clamped to the wound, full of hot, copper liquid. The taste was rain falling in the desert; in three mighty gulps, he had emptied the corpse and was springing over its fellows, into the midst of the brightly robed women and children.

The immediate result of Davis ‘s three-minute hallucination was the suspension of his physical therapy and an MRI of his brain. Asked by Lucy what he recalled of the experience, Davis had shaken his head and answered, "Nothing.” It was the same response he gave to the new doctor who stopped into his room a week later and, without identifying himself as a psychiatrist, told Davis he was interested in the nightmares that had brought him screaming out of sleep six of the last seven nights. This was a rather substantial change in his nightly routine; taken together with his recent seizure, it seemed like cause for concern. Perhaps Davis could relate what he remembered of his nightmares?

How to tell this doctor that closing his eyes-an act he resisted for as long as he could each night-brought him to that yellow-brown street; the lime, saffron, and orange cloth stretching as mothers hauled their children behind them; the dull muzzles of the Kalashnikovs coughing fire? How to describe the sensations that still lived in his skin, his muscles: the tearing of skin for his too-long fingers; the bounce of a heart in his hand the instant before he tore it from its setting; the eggshell crunch of bone between his jaws? Most of all, how to convey to this doctor, this shrink, who was either an unskilled actor or not trying very hard, the concentrate of pleasure that was the rush of blood into his mouth, down his throat, the satisfaction of his terrific thirst so momentary it made the thirst that much worse? Although Davis had repeated his earlier disavowal and maintained it in the face of the doctor’s extended-and, to be fair, sympathetic-questions until the man left, a week’s worth of poor sleep made the wisdom of his decision appear less a foregone conclusion. What he had seen-what he had been part of the other week was too similar to the vision he’d had in the courtyard not to be related; the question was, how? Were Davis to summarize his personal horror ride to the psychiatrist-he would have to tell him about Fallujah first, of course-might the doctor have more success at understanding the connections between his driver’s-seat views of the Shadow’s activities?

Sure, Davis thought, right after he’s had you fitted for your straightjacket. The ironic thing was, how often had he argued the benefits of the Army’s psychiatric care with Lugo? It had been their running gag. Lugo would return from reading his e-mail with news of some guy stateside who’d lost it, shot his wife, himself, which would prompt Davis to say that it was a shame the guy hadn’t gotten help before it came to that. Help, Lugo would say, from who? The Army? Man, you must be joking. The Army don’t want nothing to do with no grunt can’t keep his shit together. No, no, Davis would say, sure, they still had a ways to go, but the Army was changing. The kinds of combat-induced pathologies it used to pretend didn’t exist were much more likely to be treated early and effectively. (If Lee and Han were present, and/or Remsnyder, they’d ooh and aah over Davis ‘s vocabulary.) Oh yeah, Lugo would reply, if they don’t discharge your ass right outta here, they’ll stick you at some bullshit post where you won’t hurt anyone. No, no, Davis would say, that was a rumor. Oh yeah, Lugo would say, like the rumor about the guys who went to the doctor for help with their PTSD and were told they were suffering from a fucking pre-existing condition, so it wasn’t the Army’s problem? No, no, Davis would say, that was a few bad guys. Oh yeah, Lugo would say.

Before he and the lieutenant-who had been abducted by a platoon of siblings, their spouses, and their kids for ten days in Florida-discussed the matter, Davis passed his nightly struggles to stay awake wondering if the psychiatric ward was the worst place he might wind up. His only images of such places came from films like

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Awakenings, and K-PAX, but based on those examples, he could expect to spend his days robed and slippered, possibly medicated, free to read what he wanted except during individual and group therapy sessions. If it wasn’t quite the career as a psychologist he’d envisioned, he’d at least be in some kind of proximity to the mental health field. Sure, it would be a scam, but didn’t the taxpayers of the U.S. of A. owe him recompense for shipping him to a place where the Shadow could just drop in and shred his life? The windows would be barred or meshed, the doors reinforced-you could almost fool yourself such a location would be safe.

However, with his second episode, it became clear that safe was one of those words that had been bayoneted, its meaning spilled on the floor. Davis had been approved to resume therapy with Lucy, who had been honestly happy to see him again. It was late in the day; what with the complete breakdown in his sleeping patterns, he wasn’t in optimal condition for another go-around on the Rack, but after so much time stuck in his head, terrified at what was in there with him, the prospect of a vigorous workout was something he was actually looking forward to. As before, gentle stretching preceded the main event, which Lucy told Davis he didn’t have to do but for which he had cavalierly assured her he was, if not completely able, at least ready and willing. With the second push of his feet against the pedals, pain ignited up his back, and his lack of sleep did not aid in his tolerating it. Each subsequent retraction and extension of his legs ratcheted the hurt up one more degree, until he was lying on a bed of fire.

This time

VIII

2:15am

“my vision didn’t blur-it cracked, as if my knees levering up and down were an image on a TV screen and something smacked the glass. Everything spiderwebbed and fell away. What replaced it was movement-I was moving up, my arms beating down; there was this feeling that they were bigger, much bigger, that when I swept them down, they were gathering the air and piling it beneath them. I looked below me, and there were bodies-parts of bodies, organs-all over the place. There was less blood than there should have been. Seeing them scattered across the ground-it was like having a bird’s-eye view of some kind of bizarre design. Most of them were men, twenties and thirties; although there were two women and a couple, three kids. Almost everybody was wearing jeans and workboots, sweatshirts, baseball caps, except for a pair of guys dressed in khaki and I’m pretty sure cowboy hats.”

“What the fuck?” Lee said.

“Cowboys,” Han said.

“Texas Border Patrol,” the lieutenant said.

“So those other people were like, illegal immigrants?” Lee said.

The lieutenant nodded.

Davis said, "I’ve never been to Texas, but the spot looked like what you see on TV. Sandy, full of rocks, some scrub brush and short trees. There was a muddy stream-you might call it a river, I guess, if that was what you were used to-in the near distance, and a group of hills further off. The sun was perched on top of the hills, setting, and that red ball made me beat my arms again and again, shrinking the scene below, raising me higher into the sky. There was-I felt full-more than full, gorged, but thirsty, still thirsty, that same, overpowering dryness I’d experienced the previous…time. The thirst was so strong, so compelling, I was a little surprised when I kept climbing. My flight was connected to the sun balanced on that hill, a kind of-not panic, exactly: it was more like urgency. I was moving, now. The air was thinning; my arms stretched even larger to scoop enough of it to keep me moving. The temperature had dropped-was dropping, plunging down. Something happened-my mouth was already closed, but it was as if it sealed somehow. Same thing with my nostrils; I mean, they closed themselves off. My eyes misted, then cleared. I pumped my arms harder than I had before. This time, I didn’t lose speed; I kept moving forward.

“Ahead, I saw the thing I’d seen in the courtyard-a huge shape, big as a house. Pointed at the ends, fat in the middle. Dark-maybe dark purple, maybe not-and shiny. The moment it came into view, this surge of…I don’t know what to call it. Honestly, I want to say it was a cross between the way you feel when you put your bag down on your old bed and, ‘Mommy,’ that little kid feeling, except that neither of those is completely right. My arms were condensing, growing substantial. I was heading towards the middle. As I drew closer, its surface rippled, like water moving out from where a stone strikes it. At the center of the ripple, a kind of pucker opened into the thing. That was my destination.”

“And?” Lee said.

“Lucy emptied her Gatorade on me and brought me out of it.”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Lee said.

“Afraid not,” Davis said.

“How long was this one?” the lieutenant asked.

“Almost five minutes.”

“It took her that long to toss her Gatorade on you?” Lee said.

“There was some kind of commotion at the same time, a couple of guys got into a fight. She tried to find help; when she couldn’t, she doused me.”

Lee shook his head.

“And you have since confirmed the existence of this object,” the lieutenant said.

“Yes, sir,” Davis said. "It took some doing. The thing’s damned near impossible to see, and while no one would come out and say so to me, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t show up on radar, either. The couple of pictures we got were more dumb luck than anything.”

“’We’?” Lee said.

“I-”

The lieutenant said, "I put Mr. Davis in touch with a friend of mine in Intelligence.”

“Oh,” Lee said. "Wait-shit: you mean the CIA’s involved?”

“Relax,” Davis said.

“Because I swear to God,” Lee said, "those stupid motherfuckers would fuck up getting toast out of the toaster and blame us for their burned fingers.”

“It’s under control,” the lieutenant said. "This is our party. No one else has been invited.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t show up,” Lee said. "Stupid assholes with their fucking sunglasses and their, ‘We’re so scary.’ Oooh.” He turned his head and spat.

Davis stole a look at the sky. Stars were winking out and in as something passed in front of them. His heart jumped, his hand was on his stake before he identified the shape as some kind of bird. The lieutenant had noticed his movement; his hand over his stake, he said, "Everything all right, Davis?”

“Fine,” Davis said. "Bird.”

“What?” Lee said.

“Bird,” Han said.

“Oh,” Lee said. "So. I have a question.”

“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said.

“The whole daylight thing,” Lee said, "the having to be back in its coffin before sunset-what’s up with that?”

“It does seem…atypical, doesn’t it?” the lieutenant said. "Vampires are traditionally creatures of the night.”

“Actually, sir,” Lee said, "that’s not exactly true. The original Dracula-you know, in the book-he could go out in daylight; he just lost his powers.”

“Lee,” the lieutenant said, "you are a font of information. Is this what our monster is trying to avoid?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. "Could be.”

“I don’t think so,” Davis said. "It’s not as if daylight makes its teeth any sharper.”

“Then what is it?” Lee said.

“Beats me,” Davis said. "Don’t we need daylight to make Vitamin D? Maybe it’s the same, uses the sun to manufacture some kind of vital substance.”

“Not bad,” the lieutenant said.

“For something you pulled out of your ass,” Lee said.

“Hey-you asked,” Davis said.

“Perhaps it’s time for some review,” the lieutenant said. "Can we agree on that? Good.

“We have this thing-this vampire,” holding up a hand to Davis, "that spends its nights in an orbiting coffin. At dawn or thereabouts, it departs said refuge in search of blood, which it apparently obtains from a single source.”

“Us,” Han said.

“Us,” the lieutenant said. "It glides down into the atmosphere on the lookout for likely victims-of likely groups of victims, since it prefers to feed on large numbers of people at the same time. Possibly, it burns through its food quickly.”

“It’s always thirsty,” Davis said. "No matter how much it drinks, it’s never enough.”

“Yeah,” Lee said, "I felt it, too.”

“So did we all,” the lieutenant said. "It looks to satisfy its thirst at locations where its actions will draw little to no attention. These include remote areas such as the U.S.-Mexico border, the Sahara and Gobi, and the Andes. It also likes conflict zones, whether Iraq, Darfur, or the Congo. How it locates these sites is unknown. We estimate that it visits between four and seven of them per day. That we have been able to determine, there does not appear to be an underlying pattern to its selection of either target areas or individuals within those areas. The vampire’s exact level of intelligence is another unknown. It possesses considerable abilities as a predator, not least of them its speed, reaction time, and strength. Nor should we forget its teeth and,” a rap of the artificial leg, "claws.”

“Not to mention that mind thing,” Lee said.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. "Whether by accident or design, the vampire’s appearance is accompanied by a telepathic jolt that momentarily disorients its intended victims, rendering them easier prey. For those who survive the meeting,” a nod at them, "a link remains that may be activated by persistent, pronounced stress, whether physical or mental. The result of this activation is a period of clairvoyance, during which the lucky individual rides along for the vampire’s current activities. Whether the vampire usually has equal access to our perceptions during this time is unclear; our combined accounts suggest it does not.

“However, there are exceptions.”

IX

2005

“I know how we can kill it,” Davis said. "At least, I think I do-how we can get it to come to a place where we can kill it.”

Lee put his Big Mac on his tray and looked out the restaurant window. The lieutenant paused in the act of dipping his fries into a tub of barbecue sauce. Han continued chewing his McNugget but nodded twice.

“The other day-two days ago, Wednesday-I got to it.”

“What do you mean?” the lieutenant said.

“It was coming in for a landing, and I made it mess up.”

“Bullshit,” Lee said. He did not shift his gaze from the window. His face was flushed.

“How?” the lieutenant said.

“I was having a bad day, worse than the usual bad day. Things at Home Depot-the manager’s okay, but the assistant manager’s a raging asshole. Anyway, I decided a workout might help. I’d bought these Kung Fu DVDs-”

“Kung Fu,” the lieutenant said.

Davis shrugged. "Seemed more interesting than running a treadmill.”

Through a mouthful of McNugget, Han said, "Bruce Lee.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. "I put the first disc on. To start with, everything’s fine. I’m taking it easy, staying well below the danger level. My back’s starting to ache, the way it always does, but that’s okay, I can live with it. As long as I keep the situation in low gear, I can continue with my tiger style.”

“Did it help?” the lieutenant asked.

“My worse-than-bad day? Not really. But it was something to do, you know?”

The lieutenant nodded. Lee stared at the traffic edging up the road in front of the McDonald’s. Han bit another McNugget.

“This time, there was no warning. My back’s feeling like someone’s stitching it with a hot needle, then I’m dropping out of heavy cloud cover. Below, a squat hill pushes up from dense jungle. A group of men are sitting around the top of the hill. They’re wearing fatigues, carrying Kalashnikovs. I think I’m somewhere in South America: maybe these guys are FARQ; maybe they’re some of Chavez’s boys.

“I’ve been through the drill enough to know what’s on the way: a ringside seat for blood and carnage. It’s reached the point, when one of these incidents overtakes me, I don’t freak out. The emotion that grips me is dread, sickness at what’s coming. But this happens so fast, there isn’t time for any of that. Instead, anger-the anger that usually shows up a couple of hours later, when I’m still trying to get the taste of blood out of my mouth, still trying to convince myself that I’m not the one who’s so thirsty-for once, that anger arrives on time and loaded for bear. It’s like the fire that’s crackling on my back finds its way into my veins and ignites me.

“What’s funny is, the anger makes my connection to the thing even more intense. The wind is pressing my face, rushing over my arms-my wings-I’m aware of currents in the air, places where it’s thicker, thinner, and I twitch my nerves to adjust for it. There’s one guy standing off from the rest, closer to the treeline, though not so much I-the thing won’t be able to take him. I can practically see the route to him, a steep dive with a sharp turn at the very end that’ll let the thing knife through him. He’s sporting a bush hat, which he’s pushed back on his head. His shirt’s open, t-shirt dark with sweat. He’s holding his weapon self-consciously, trying to look like a badass, and it’s this, more than the smoothness of his skin, the couple of whiskers on his chin, that makes it clear he isn’t even eighteen. It-I-we jackknife into the dive, and thirsty, Christ, thirsty isn’t the word: this is dryness that reaches right through to your fucking soul. I’ve never understood what makes the thing tick-what

drives it-so well.

“At the same time, the anger’s still there. The closer we draw to the kid, the hotter it burns. We’ve reached the bottom of the dive and pulled up; we’re streaking over the underbrush. The kid’s completely oblivious to the fact that his bloody dismemberment is fifty feet away and closing fast. I’m so close to the thing, I can feel the way its fangs push against one another as they jut from its mouth. We’re on top of the kid; the thing’s preparing to retract its wings, slice him open, and drive its face into him. The kid is dead; he’s dead and he just doesn’t know it, yet.

“Only, it’s like-I’m like-I don’t even think,

No, or, Stop, or Pull up. It’s more…I push; I shove against the thing I’m inside and its arms move. Its fucking arms jerk up as if someone’s passed a current through them. Someone has-I have. I’m the current. The motion throws off the thing’s strike, sends it wide. It flails at the kid as it flies past him, but he’s out of reach. I can sense-the thing’s completely confused. There’s a clump of bushes straight ahead-wham.”

The lieutenant had adopted his best you’d-better-not-be-bullshitting-me stare. He said, "I take it that severed the connection.”

Davis shook his head. "No, sir. You would expect that-it’s what would have happened in the past-but this time, it was like, I was so close to the thing, it was going to take something more to shake me loose.”

“And?” the lieutenant said.

Lee shoved his tray back, toppling his super-sized Dr. Pepper, whose lid popped off, splashing a wave of soda and ice cubes across the table. While Davis and the lieutenant grabbed napkins, Lee stood and said, "What the fuck, Davis?”

“What?” Davis said.

“I said, ‘What the fuck, asshole,’" Lee said. Several diners at nearby tables turned their heads toward him.

“Inside voices,” the lieutenant said. "Sit down.”

“I don’t think so,” Lee said. "I don’t have to listen to this shit.” With that, he stalked away from the table, through the men and women swiftly returning their attentions to the meals in front of them, and out the side door.

“What the fuck?” Davis said, dropping his wad of soggy napkins on Lee’s tray.

“That seems to be the question of the moment,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir-”

“Our friend and fellow is not having the best of months,” the lieutenant said. "In fact, he is not having the best of years. You remember the snafus with his disability checks.”

“I thought that was taken care of.”

“It was, but it was accompanied by the departure of Lee’s wife and their two-year-old. Compared to what he was, Lee is vastly improved. In terms of the nuances of his emotional health, however, he has miles to go. The shit with his disability did not help; nor did spending all day home with a toddler who didn’t recognize his father.”

“He didn’t-”

“No, but I gather it was a close thing. A generous percentage of the wedding flatware paid the price for Lee’s inability to manage himself. In short order, the situation became too much for Shari, who called her father to come for her and Douglas.”

“Bitch,” Han said.

“Since then,” the lieutenant said, "Lee’s situation has not improved. A visit to the local bar for a night of drinking alone ended with him in the drunk tank. Shari ‘s been talking separation, possibly divorce, and while Lee tends to be a bit paranoid about the matter, there may be someone else involved, an old boyfriend. Those members of Lee’s family who’ve visited him, called him, he has rebuffed in a fairly direct way. To top it all off, he’s been subject to the same, intermittent feast of blood as the rest of us.”

“Oh,” Davis said. "I had no-Lee doesn’t talk to me-”

“Never mind. Finish your story.”

“It’s not a story.”

“Sorry. Poor choice of words. Go on, please.”

“All right,” Davis said. "Okay. You have to understand, I was as surprised by all of this as-well, as anyone. I couldn’t believe I’d affected the thing. If it hadn’t been so real, so like all the other times, I would have thought I was hallucinating, on some kind of wish-fulfillment trip. As it was, there I was as the thing picked itself up from the jungle floor. The anger-my anger-I guess it was still there, but…on hold.

“The second the thing was upright, someone shouted and the air was hot with bullets. Most of them shredded leaves, chipped bark, but a few of them tagged the thing’s arm, its shoulder. Something was wrong-mixing in with its confusion, there was another emotion, something down the block from fear. I wasn’t doing anything: I was still stunned by what I’d made happen. The thing jumped, and someone-maybe a couple of guys-tracked it, headed it off, hit it in I can’t tell you how many places-it felt as if the thing had been punched a dozen times at once. It spun off course, slapped a tree, and went down, snapping branches on its way.

“Now it was pissed. Even before it picked itself up, the place it landed was being subject to intensive defoliation. A shot tore its ear. Its anger-if what I felt was fire, this was lava, thicker, slower-moving, hotter. It retreated, scuttled half a dozen trees deeper into the jungle. Whoever those guys were, they were professionals. They advanced on the spot where the thing fell and, when they saw it wasn’t there anymore, they didn’t rush in after it. Instead, they fell back to a defensive posture while one of them put in a call-for air support, I’m guessing.

“The thing was angry and hurt and the thirst-" Davis shook his head. He sipped his Coke. "What came next-I’m not sure I can describe it. There was this surge in my head-not the thing’s head, this was my brain I’m talking about-and the thing was looking out of my eyes.”

“It turned the tables on you,” the lieutenant said.

“Not exactly,” Davis said. "I continued watching the soldiers maybe seventy-five feet in front of me, but I was…aware of the thing staring at the DVD still playing on the TV. It was as if the scene was on a screen just out of view.” He shook his head. "I’m not describing it right.

“Anyway, that was when the connection broke.”

Davis watched the lieutenant evade an immediate response by taking a generous bite of his Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese and chewing it with great care. Han swallowed and said, "Soldiers.”

“What?”

“Soldiers,” Han said.

Through his mouthful of burger, the lieutenant said, "He wants to know what happened to the soldiers. Right?”

Han nodded.

“Beats the shit out of me,” Davis said. "Maybe their air support showed up and bombed the fucker to hell. Maybe they evac’d out of there.”

“But that isn’t what you think,” the lieutenant said. "You think it got them.”

“Yes sir,” Davis said. "The minute it was free of me, I think it had those poor bastards for lunch.”

“It seems a bit much to hope otherwise, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir, it does.”

When the lieutenant opted for another bite of his sandwich, Davis said, "Well?”

The lieutenant answered by lifting his eyebrows. Han switched from McNuggets to fries.

“As I see it,” Davis began. He stopped, paused, started again. "We know that the thing fucked with us in Fallujah, linked up with us. So far, this situation has only worked to our disadvantage: whenever one of us is in sufficient discomfort, the connection activates and dumps us behind the thing’s eyes for somewhere in the vicinity of three to five minutes. With all due respect to Lee, this has not been beneficial to anyone’s mental health.

“But what if-suppose we could duplicate what happened to me? Not just once, but over and over-even if only for ten or fifteen seconds at a time-interfere with whatever it’s doing, seriously fuck with it.”

“Then what?” the lieutenant said. "We’re a thorn in its side. So?”

“Sir,” Davis said, "those soldiers hit it. Okay, yes, their fire wasn’t any more effective than ours was, but I’m willing to bet their percentages were significantly higher. That’s what me being on board in an-enhanced way did to the thing. We wouldn’t be a thorn-we’d be the Goddamned bayonet Han jammed in its ribs.

“Not that we should wait for someone else to take it down. I’m proposing something more ambitious.”

“All right.”

“If we can disrupt the thing’s routine-especially if we cut into its feeding-it won’t take very long for it to want to find us. Assuming the second part of my experience-the thing has a look through our eyes-if that happens again, we can arrange it so that we let it know where we’re going to be. We pick a location with a clearing where the thing can land and surrounding tree cover where we can wait to ambush it. Before any of us goes to ruin the thing’s day, he puts pictures, maps, satellite photos of the spot on display, so that when the thing’s staring out of his eyes, that’s what it sees. If the same images keep showing up in front of it, it should get the point.”

The lieutenant took the rest of his meal to reply. Han offered no comment. When the lieutenant had settled into his chair after tilting his tray into the garbage and stacking it on top of the can, he said, "I don’t know, Davis. There are an awful lot more ifs than I prefer to hear in a plan.

If we can access the thing the same way you did; if that wasn’t a fluke. If the thing does the reverse-vision stuff; if it understands what we’re showing it. If we can find a way to kill it.” He shook his head.

“Granted,” Davis said, "there’s a lot we’d have to figure out, not least how to put it down and keep it down. I have some ideas about that, but nothing developed. It would be nice if we could control our connection to the thing, too. I’m wondering if what activates the jump is some chemical our bodies are releasing when we’re under stress-maybe adrenaline. If we had access to a supply of adrenaline, we could experiment with doses-”

“You’re really serious about this.”

“What’s the alternative?” Davis said. "Lee isn’t the only one whose life is fucked, is he? How many more operations are you scheduled for, Han? Four? Five?”

“Four,” Han said.

“And how’re things in the meantime?”

Han did not answer.

“What about you, sir?” Davis said. "Oh sure, your wife and kids stuck around, but how do they act after you’ve had one of your fits, or spells, or whatever the fuck you call them? Do they rush right up to give Daddy a hug, or do they keep away from you, in case you might do something even worse? Weren’t you coaching your son’s soccer team? How’s that working out for you? I bet it’s a lot of fun every time the ref makes a lousy call.”

“Enough, Davis.”

“It isn’t as if I’m in any better shape. I have to make sure I remember to swallow a couple of tranquilizers before I go to work so I don’t collapse in the middle of trying to help some customer load his fertilizer into his car. Okay, Rochelle had dumped me while I was away, but let me tell you how the dating scene is for a vet who’s prone to seizures should things get a little too exciting. As for returning to college, earning my BS-maybe if I could have stopped worrying about how Goddamned exposed I was walking from building to building, I could’ve focused on some of what the professors were saying and not fucking had to withdraw.

“This isn’t the magic bullet,” Davis said. "It isn’t going to make all the bad things go away. It’s…it is what it fucking is.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said. "I’m listening. Han-you listening?”

“Listening,” Han said.

X

4:11am

“So where do you think it came from?” Lee said.

“What do you mean?” Davis said. "We know where it comes from.”

“No,” Lee said, "I mean, before.”

“Its secret origin,” the lieutenant said.

“Yeah,” Lee said.

“How should I know?” Davis said.

“You’re the man with the plan,” Lee said. "Mr. Idea.”

The lieutenant said, "I take it you have a theory, Lee.”

Lee glanced at the heap of coals that had been the fire. "Nah, not really.”

“That sounds like a yes to me,” the lieutenant said.

“Yeah,” Han said.

“Come on,” Davis said. "What do you think?”

“Well,” Lee said, then broke off, laughing. "No, no.”

“Talk!” Davis said.

“You tell us your theory,” the lieutenant said, "I’ll tell you mine.”

“Okay, okay,” Lee said, laughing. "All right. The way I see it, this vampire is like, the advance for an invasion. It flies around in its pod, looking for suitable planets, and when it finds one, it parks itself above the surface, calls its buddies, and waits for them to arrive.”

“Not bad,” the lieutenant said.

“Hang on,” Davis said. "What does it do for blood while it’s Boldly Going Where No Vampire Has Gone Before?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. "Maybe it has some stored in its coffin.”

“That’s an awful lot of blood,” Davis said.

“Even in MRE form,” the lieutenant said.

“Maybe it has something in the coffin that makes blood for it.”

“Then why would it leave to go hunting?” Davis said.

“It’s in suspended animation,” Lee said. "That’s it. It doesn’t wake up till it’s arrived at a habitable planet.”

“How does it know it’s located one?” Davis said.

“Obviously,” the lieutenant said, "the coffin’s equipped with some sophisticated tech.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lee said.

“Not at all,” the lieutenant said.

“I don’t know,” Davis said.

“What do you know?” Lee said.

“I told you-”

“Be real,” Lee said. "You’re telling me you haven’t given five minutes to wondering how the vampire got to where it is?”

“I-”

“Yeah,” Han said.

“I’m more concerned with the thing’s future than I am with its past,” Davis said, "but yes, I have wondered about where it came from. There’s a lot of science I don’t know, but I’m not sure about an alien being able to survive on human blood-about an alien needing human blood. It could be, I guess; it just seems a bit of a stretch.”

“You’re saying it came from here,” the lieutenant said.

“That’s bullshit,” Lee said.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Davis said. "There’s been life on Earth for something like three point seven

billion years. Are you telling me this couldn’t have developed?”

“Your logic’s shaky,” the lieutenant said. "Just because something hasn’t been disproved doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“All I’m saying is, we don’t know everything that’s ever been alive on the planet.”

“Point taken,” the lieutenant said, "but this thing lives above-well above the surface of the planet. How do you explain that?”

“Some kind of escape pod,” Davis said. "I mean, you guys know about the asteroid, right? The one that’s supposed to have wiped out the dinosaurs? Suppose this guy and his friends-suppose their city was directly in this asteroid’s path? Maybe our thing was the only one who made it to the rockets on time? Or maybe it built this itself.”

“Like Superman,” Lee said, "only, he’s a vampire, and he doesn’t leave Krypton, he just floats around it so he can snack on the other survivors.”

“Sun,” Han said.

“What?” Lee said.

“Yellow sun,” Han said.

Davis said, "He means Superman needs a yellow sun for his powers. Krypton had a red sun, so he wouldn’t have been able to do much snacking.”

“Yeah, well, we have a yellow sun,” Lee said, "so what’s the problem?”

“Never mind.”

“Or maybe you’ve figured out the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct,” Lee said. "Vampires got them all.”

“That’s clever,” Davis said. "You’re very clever, Lee.”

“What about you, sir?” Lee said.

“Me?” the lieutenant said. "I’m afraid the scenario I’ve invented is much more lurid than either of yours. I incline to the view that the vampire is here as a punishment.”

“For what?” Davis said.

“I haven’t the faintest clue,” the lieutenant said. "What kind of crime does a monster commit? Maybe it stole someone else’s victims. Maybe it killed another vampire. Whatever it did, it was placed in that coffin and sent out into space. Whether its fellows intended us as its final destination, or planned for it to drift endlessly, I can’t say. But I wonder if its blood-drinking-that craving-might not be part of its punishment.”

“How?” Lee said.

“Say the vampire’s used to feeding on a substance like blood, only better, more nutritious, more satisfying. Part of the reason for sending it here is that all that will be available to it is this poor substitute that leaves it perpetually thirsty. Not only does it have to cross significant distances, expose itself to potential harm to feed, the best it can do will never be good enough.”

“That,” Lee said, "is fucked up.”

“There’s a reason they made me an officer,” the lieutenant said. He turned to Han. "What about you, Han? Any thoughts concerning the nature of our imminent guest?”

“Devil,” Han said.

“Ah,” the lieutenant said.

“Which?” Lee asked. "A devil, or the Devil?”

Han shrugged.

XI

2005-2006

To start with, the lieutenant called once a week, on a Saturday night. Davis could not help reflecting on what this said about the state of the man’s life, his marriage, that he spent the peak hours of his weekend in a long-distance conversation with a former subordinate-as well as the commentary their calls offered on his own state of affairs, that not only was he always in his apartment for the lieutenant’s call, but that starting late Thursday, up to a day earlier if his week was especially shitty, he looked forward to it.

There was a rhythm, almost a ritual, to each call. The lieutenant asked Davis how he’d been; he answered, "Fine, sir,” and offered a précis of the last seven days at Home Depot, which tended to consist of a summary of his assistant manager’s most egregious offences. If he’d steered clear of Adams, he might list the titles of whatever movies he’d rented, along with one- or two-sentence reviews of each. Occasionally, he would narrate his latest failed date, recasting stilted frustration as comic misadventure. At the conclusion of his recitation, Davis would swat the lieutenant’s question back to him. The lieutenant would answer, "Can’t complain,” and follow with a distillation of his week that focused on his dissatisfaction with his position at Stillwater, a defense contractor who had promised him a career as exciting as the one he’d left but delivered little more than lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties at which the lieutenant was trotted out, he said, so everyone could admire his Goddamned plastic leg and congratulate his employers on hiring him. At least the money was decent, and Barbara enjoyed the opportunity to dress up and go out to nicer places than he’d ever been able to afford. The lieutenant did not speak about his children; although if asked, he would say that they were hanging in there. From time to time, he shared news of Lee, whom he called on Sunday and whose situation never seemed to improve that much, and Han, whose sister he e-mailed every Monday and who reported that her brother was making progress with his injuries; in fact, Han was starting to e-mail the lieutenant, himself.

This portion of their conversation, which Davis thought of as the Prelude, over, the real reason for the call-what Davis thought of as the SITREP-ensued. The lieutenant, whose sentences hitherto had been loose, lazy, tightened his syntax as he quizzed Davis about the status of the Plan. In response, Davis kept his replies short, to the point. Have we settled on a location? the lieutenant would ask. Yes sir, Davis would say, Thompson’s Grove. That was the spot in the Catskills, the lieutenant would say, south slope of Winger Mountain, about a half mile east of the principle trail to the summit. Exactly, sir, Davis would say. Research indicates the mountain itself is among the least visited in the Catskill Preserve, and Thompson’s Grove about the most obscure spot on it. The location is sufficiently removed from civilian populations not to place them in immediate jeopardy, yet still readily accessible by us. Good, good, the lieutenant would say. I’ll notify Lee and Han.

The SITREP finished, Davis and the lieutenant would move to Coming Attractions: review their priorities for the week ahead, wish one another well, and hang up. As the months slid by and the Plan’s more elaborate elements came into play-especially once Davis commenced his experiments dosing himself with adrenaline-the lieutenant began adding the odd Wednesday night to his call schedule. After Davis had determined the proper amount for inducing a look through the Shadow’s eyes-and after he’d succeeded in affecting the thing a second time, causing it to release its hold on a man Davis was reasonably sure was a Somali pirate-the Wednesday exchanges became part of their routine. Certainly, they helped Davis and the lieutenant to coordinate their experiences interrupting the Shadow’s routine with the reports coming in from Lee and Han, which arrived with increasing frequency once Lee and Han had found their adrenaline doses and were mastering the trick of interfering with the Shadow. However, in the moment immediately preceding their setting their respective phones down, Davis would be struck by the impression that the lieutenant and he were on the verge of saying something else, something more-he couldn’t say what, exactly, only that it would be significant in a way-in a different way from their usual conversation. It was how he’d felt in the days leading up to Fallujah, as if, with such momentous events roiling on the horizon, he should be speaking about important matters, meaningful things.

Twice, they came close to such an exchange. The first time followed a discussion of the armaments the lieutenant had purchased at a recent gun show across the border in Pennsylvania. "God love the NRA,” he’d said and listed the four Glock 21SF’s, sixteen extra clips, ten boxes of.45 ammunition, four AR-15’s, sixteen extra high-capacity magazines for them, thirty boxes of 223 Remington ammo, and four USGI M7 bayonets.

“Jesus, sir,” Davis had said when the lieutenant was done. "That’s a shitload of ordnance.”

“I stopped at the grenade launcher,” the lieutenant said. "It seemed excessive.”

“You do remember how much effect our guns had on the thing the last time…”

“Think of this as a supplement to the Plan. Even with one of us on board, once the thing shows up, it’s going to be a threat. We know it’s easier to hit when someone’s messing with its controls, so let’s exploit that. The more we can tag it, the more we can slow it down, improve our chances of using your secret weapon on it.”

“Fair enough.”

“Good. I’m glad you agree.”

Davis was opening his mouth to suggest possible positions the four of them might take around the clearing when the lieutenant said, " Davis.”

“Sir?”

“Would you say you’ve had a good life? Scratch that-would you say you’ve had a satisfactory life?”

“I…I don’t know. I guess so.”

“I’ve been thinking about my father these past few days. It’s the anniversary of his death, twenty-one years ago this Monday. He came here from Mexico City when he was sixteen, worked as a fruit picker for a couple of years, then fell into a job at a diner. He started busing tables, talked his way into the kitchen, and became the principle cook for the night shift. That was how he met my mother: she was a waitress there. She was from Mexico, too, although the country-apparently, she thought my old man was some kind of city-slicker, not to be trusted by a virtuous girl. I guess she was right, because my older brother was born seven months after their wedding. But I came along two years after that, so I don’t think that was the only reason for them tying the knot.

“He died when I was five, my father. An embolism burst in his brain. He was at work, just getting into the swing of things. The coroner said he was dead before he reached the floor. He was twenty-seven. What I wonder is, when he looked at his life, at everything he’d done, was it what he wanted? Even if it was different, was it enough?

“How many people do you suppose exit this world satisfied with what they’ve managed to accomplish in it, Davis? How many of our fellows slipped their mortal coils content with what their eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-seven years had meant?”

“There was the Mission,” Davis said. "Ask them in public, and they’d laugh, offer some smartass remark, but talk to them one-on-one, and they’d tell you they believed in what we were doing, even if things could get pretty fucked-up. I’m not sure if that would’ve been enough for Lugo, or Manfred-for anyone-but it would’ve counted for something.”

“True,” the lieutenant said. "The question is, will something do?”

“I guess it has to.”

Their second such conversation came two weeks before the weekend the four of them were scheduled to travel to Upstate New York. They were reviewing the final draft of the Plan, which Davis thought must be something like the Plan version 22.0-although little had changed in the way of the principles since they’d finalized them a month earlier. Ten minutes before dawn, they would take up their positions in the trees around the clearing. If north was twelve o’clock, then Lee and Han would be at twelve-necessary because Han would be injecting himself at t-minus one minute and would require protection-the lieutenant would take two, and Davis three. The woods were reasonably thick: if they positioned themselves about ten feet in, then the Shadow would be unable to come in on top of them. If it wanted them, it would have to land, shift to foot, and that would be the cue for the three of them aiming their AR-15’s to fire. In the meantime, Han would have snuck on board the Shadow and be preparing to jam it. As soon as he saw the opportunity, he would do his utmost to take the thing’s legs out from under it, a maneuver he had been rehearsing for several weeks and become reasonably proficient at. The average time Han guesstimated he’d been able to knock the Shadow’s legs out was fifteen seconds, though he had reached the vicinity of thirty once. This would be their window: the instant the thing’s legs crumpled, two of them had to be up and on it, probably Davis and Lee since the lieutenant wasn’t placing any bets on his sprinter’s start. One of them would draw the Shadow’s notice, the other hit it with the secret weapon. If for any reason the first attacker failed, the second could engage if he saw the opportunity; otherwise, he would have to return to the woods, because Han’s hold on the thing would be wearing off. Once the lieutenant observed this, he would inject himself and they would begin round two. Round two was the same as round one except for the presumed lack of one man, just as round three counted on two of them being gone. Round four, the lieutenant said, was him eating a bullet. By that point, there might not be anything he could do to stop the ugly son of a bitch drinking his blood, but that didn’t mean he had to stay around for the event.

Davis knew they would recite the Plan again on Saturday, and then next Wednesday, and then the Saturday after that, and then the Wednesday two weeks from now. At the Quality Inn in Kingston, they would recite the Plan, and again as they drove into the Catskills, and yet again as they hiked up Winger Mountain. "Preparation" the lieutenant had said in Iraq, "is what ensures you will fuck up only eighty percent of what you are trying to do.” If the exact numbers sounded overly optimistic to Davis, he agreed with the general sentiment.

Without preamble, the lieutenant said, "You know, Davis, when my older brother was twenty-four, he left his girlfriend for a married Russian émigré six years his senior-whom he had met, ironically enough, through his ex, who had been tutoring Margarita, her husband, Sergei, and their four-year-old, Stasu, in English.”

“No sir,” Davis said, "I’m pretty sure you never told me this.”

“You have to understand,” the lieutenant went on, "until this point, my brother, Alberto, had led a reasonably sedate and unimpressive life. Prior to this, the most daring thing he’d done was go out with Alexandra, the tutor, who was Jewish, which made our very Catholic mother very nervous. Yet here he was, packing his clothes and his books, emptying his meager bank account, and driving out of town with Margarita in the passenger’s seat and Stasu in the back with all the stuff they couldn’t squeeze in the trunk. They headed west, first to St. Louis for a couple of months, next to New Mexico for three years, and finally to Portland-actually, it’s just outside Portland, but I can never remember the name of the town.

“She was a veterinarian, Margarita. With Alberto’s help, she succeeded in having her credentials transferred over here. Has her own practice, these days, treats horses, cows, farm animals. Alberto helps her; he’s her assistant and office manager. Sergei gave them custody of Stasu; they have two more kids, girls, Helena and Catherine. Beautiful kids, my nieces.

“You have any brothers or sisters, Davis?”

“A younger brother, sir. He wants to be a priest.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Isn’t that funny.”

XII

5:53am

Lying on the ground he’d swept clear of rocks and branches, his rifle propped on a small log, the sky a red bowl overhead, Davis experienced a moment of complete and utter doubt. Not only did the course of action on which they had set out appear wildly implausible, but everything from the courtyard in Fallujah on acquired the sheen of the unreal, the delusional. An eight-foot-tall space vampire? Visions of soaring through the sky, of savaging scores of men, women, and children around the globe? Injecting himself with adrenaline, for Christ’s sake? What was any of this but the world’s biggest symptom, a massive phantasy his mind had conjured to escape a reality it couldn’t bear? What had happened-what scene was the Shadow substituting for? Had they in fact found a trap in the courtyard, an IED that had shredded them in its fiery teeth? Was he lying in a hospital bed somewhere, his body ruined, his mind hopelessly crippled?

When the Shadow was standing in the clearing, swinging its narrow head from side to side, Davis felt something like relief. If this dark thing and its depravities were a hallucination, he could be true to it. The Shadow parted its fangs as if tasting the dawn. Davis tensed, prepared to find himself someplace else, subject to a clip from the thing’s history, but the worst he felt was a sudden buzzing in his skull that reminded him of nothing so much as the old fuse box in his parents’ basement. He adjusted his rifle and squeezed the trigger.

The air rang with gunfire. Davis thought his first burst caught the thing in the belly: he saw it step back, though that might have been due to either Lee or the lieutenant, who had fired along with him. Almost too fast to follow, the Shadow jumped, a black scribble against the sky, but someone anticipated its leap and aimed ahead of it. At least one of the bullets connected; Davis saw the Shadow’s right eye pucker. Stick-arms jerking, it fell at the edge of the treeline, ten feet in front of him. He shot at its head, its shoulders. Geysers of dirt marked his misses. The Shadow threw itself backwards, but collapsed where it landed.

“NOW!” the lieutenant screamed.

Davis grabbed for his stake with his left hand as he dropped the rifle from his right. Almost before his fingers had closed on the weapon, he was on his feet and rushing into the clearing. To the right, Lee burst out of the trees, his stake held overhead in both hands, his mouth open in a bellow. In front of them, the Shadow was thrashing from side to side like the world’s largest insect pinned through the middle. Its claws scythed grass, bushes. Davis saw that its right eye had indeed been hit, and partially collapsed. Lee was not slowing his charge. Davis sprinted to reach the Shadow at the same time.

Although the thing’s legs were motionless, its claws were fast as ever. As Davis came abreast of it, jabbing at its head, its arm snapped in his direction. Pain razored up his left arm. Blood spattered the grass, the Shadow’s head jerked towards him, and the momentary distraction this offered was, perhaps, what allowed Lee to tumble into a forward roll that dropped him under the Shadow’s other claw and up again to drive his stake down into the base of its throat. Reaching for the cell phone in his shirt pocket, Davis backpedaled. The thing’s maw gaped as Lee held on to shove the weapon as far as it would go. The Shadow twisted and thrust its claws into Lee’s collarbone and ribs. His eyes bulged and he released the stake. Davis had the cell phone in his hand. The Shadow tore its claw from Lee’s chest and ripped him open. Davis pressed the three and hit SEND.

In the woods, there was a white flash and the CRUMP of explosives detonating. A cloud of debris rushed between the trunks. The Shadow jolted as if a bolt of lightning had speared it.

“SHIT!” the lieutenant was screaming. "SHIT!”

The Shadow was on its feet, Lee dangling from its left claw like a child’s bedraggled plaything. Davis backpedaled. With its right claw, the Shadow reached for the stake jutting from its throat. Davis pressed the two and SEND.

He was knocked from his feet by the force of the blast, which shoved the air from his lungs and pushed sight and sound away from him. He was aware of the ground pressing against his back, a fine rain of particles pattering his skin, but his body was contracted around his chest, which could not bring in any air. Suffocating, he was suffocating. He tried to move his hands, his feet, but his extremities did not appear to be receiving his brain’s instructions. Perhaps his hand-crafted bomb had accomplished what the Shadow could not.

What he could feel of the world was bleeding away.

XIII

2006

Although Lee wanted to wait for sunset, if not total darkness, a preference Davis shared, the lieutenant insisted they shoulder their packs and start the trail up Winger Mountain while the sun would be broadcasting its light for another couple of hours. At the expressions on Lee and Davis ‘s faces, he said, "Relax. The thing sweeps the Grove first thing in the morning. It’s long gone, off feeding someplace.”

The trail was not unpleasant. Had they been so inclined, its lower reaches were wide enough that they could have walked them two abreast. (They opted for single file, Lee taking point, Han next, the lieutenant third, and Davis bringing up the rear. It spread the targets out.) The ground was matted with the leaves of the trees that flanked the trail and stationed the gradual slopes to either side. (While he had never been any good at keeping the names of such things straight, Davis had an idea the trees were a mix of maple and oak, the occasional white one a birch.) With their crowns full of leaves, the trees almost obscured the sky’s blue emptiness. (All the same, Davis didn’t look up any more than he could help.)

They reached the path to Thompson’s Grove sooner than Davis had anticipated. A piece of wood weathered gray and nailed to a tree chest-high pointed right, to a narrower route that appeared overgrown a hundred yards or so in the distance. Lee withdrew the machete he had sheathed on his belt and struck the sign once, twice, until it flew off the tree into the forest.

“Hey,” Davis said, "that’s vandalism.”

“Sue me,” Lee said.

Once they were well into the greenery, the mosquitoes, which had ventured only the occasional scout so long as they kept to the trail, descended in clouds. "Damnit!” the lieutenant said, slapping his cheek. "I used bug spray.”

“Probably tastes like dessert topping to them, sir,” Lee called. "Although, damn! at this rate, there won’t be any blood left in us for Count Dracula.”

Thompson’s Grove was an irregular circle, forty feet across. Grass stood thigh-high. A few bushes punctuated the terrain. Davis could feel the sky hungry above them. Lee and Han walked the perimeter while he and the lieutenant stayed near the trees. All of their rifles were out. Lee and Han declared the area secure, but the four of them waited until the sun was finally down to clear the center of the Grove and build their fire.

Lee had been, Davis supposed the word was

off, since they’d met in Kingston that morning. His eyes shone in his face, whose flesh seemed drawn around the bones. When Davis embraced him in the lobby of the Quality Inn, it had been like putting his arms around one of the support cables on a suspension bridge, something bracing an enormous weight. It might be the prospect of their upcoming encounter, although Davis suspected there was more to it. The lieutenant’s most recent report had been that Lee was continuing to struggle: Shari had won custody of Douglas, with whom Lee was permitted supervised visits every other Saturday. He’d enrolled at his local community college, but stopped attending classes after the first week. The lieutenant wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to call Lee an alcoholic, but there was no doubt the man liked his beer a good deal more than was healthy. After the wood was gathered and stacked, the fire kindled, the sandwiches Davis had prepared distributed, Lee cleared his throat and said, "I know the lieutenant has an order he wants us to follow, but there’s something I need to know about.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said through a mouthful of turkey on rye, "ask away.”

“It’s the connection we have to the thing,” Lee said. "Okay, so: we’ve got a direct line into its central nervous system. The right amount of adrenaline, and we can hijack it. Problem is, the link works both ways. At least, we know that, when the thing’s angry, it can look out of our eyes. What if it can do more? What if it can do to us what we’ve done to it, take us over?”

“There’s been no evidence of that,” Davis said. "Don’t you think, if it could do that, it would have by now?”

“Not necessarily,” Lee said.

“Oh? Why not?”

“Why would it need to? We’re trying to get its attention; it doesn’t need to do anything to get ours.”

“It’s an unknown,” the lieutenant said. "It’s conceivable the thing could assume control of whoever’s hooked up to it and try to use him for support. I have to say, though, that even if it could possess one of us, I have a hard time imagining it doing so while the rest of us are trying to shorten its lifespan. To tell you the truth, should we succeed in killing it, I’d be more worried about it using the connection as a means of escape.”

“Escape?” Davis said.

Lee said, "The lieutenant means it leaves its body behind for one of ours.”

“Could it do that?”

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said, "I only mention it as a worst-case scenario. Our ability to share its perceptions, to affect its actions, seems to suggest some degree of congruity between the thing and us. On the other hand, it is a considerable leap from there to its being able to inhabit us.”

“Maybe that’s how it makes more of itself,” Lee said. "One dies, one’s born.”

“ Phoenix,” Han said.

“This is all pretty speculative,” Davis said.

“Yes it is,” the lieutenant said. "Should the thing seize any of us, however, it will have been speculation well-spent.”

“What do you propose, then, sir?” Davis said.

“Assuming any of us survives the morning,” the lieutenant said, "we will have to proceed with great caution.” He held up his pistol.

XIV

6:42am

Davis opened his eyes to a hole in the sky. Round, black-for a moment, he had the impression the Earth had gained a strange new satellite, or that some unimaginable catastrophe had blown an opening in the atmosphere, and then his vision adjusted and he realized that he was looking up into the barrel of the lieutenant’s Glock. The man himself half-crouched beside Davis, his eyes narrowed. His lips moved, and Davis struggled to pick his words out of the white noise ringing in his ears.

“ Davis,” he said. "You there?”

“Yeah,” Davis said. Something was burning; a charcoal reek stung his nostrils. His mouth tasted like ashes. He pushed himself up on his elbows. "Is it-”

“Whoa,” the lieutenant said, holding his free hand up like a traffic cop. "Take it easy, soldier. That was some blast.”

“Did we-”

“We did.”

“Yeah?”

“We blew it to Kingdom Come,” the lieutenant said. "No doubt, there are pieces of it scattered here and there, but the majority of it is so much dust.”

“Lee-”

“You saw what the thing did to him-although, stupid motherfucker, it serves him right, grabbing the wrong Goddamned stake. Of all the stupid fucking…”

Davis swallowed. "Han?”

The lieutenant shook his head.

Davis lay back. "Fuck.”

“Never mind,” the lieutenant said. His pistol had not moved. "Shit happens. The question before us now is, did it work? Are we well and truly rid of that thing, that fucking blood-drinking monster, or are we fooling ourselves? What do you say, Davis?”

“I…” His throat was dry. "Lee grabbed the wrong one?”

“He did.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” the lieutenant said. "I do not fucking know.”

“I specifically gave each of us-”

“I know; I watched you. In the excitement of the moment, Lee and Han must have mixed them up.”

“Mixed…” Davis raised his hands to his forehead. Behind the lieutenant, the sky was a blue chasm.

“Or could be, the confusion was deliberate.”

“What?”

“Maybe they switched stakes on purpose.”

“No.”

“I don’t think so, either, but we all know it wasn’t much of a life for Han.”

“That doesn’t mean-”

“It doesn’t.”

“Jesus.” Davis sat up.

The lieutenant steadied his gun. "So?”

“I take it you’re fine.”

“As far as I’ve been able to determine, yes.”

“Could the thing have had something to do with it?”

“The mix-up?”

“Made Han switch the stakes or something?”

“That presumes it knew what they were, which supposes it had been spying on us through Han’s eyes for not a few hours, which assumes it comprehended us-our language, our technology-in excess of prior evidence.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. "Still.”

“It was an accident,” the lieutenant said. "Let it go.”

“What makes you so sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve had no indications to the contrary. I appear in control of my own thoughts and actions. I’m aware of no alien presence crowding my mind. While I am thirsty, I have to desire to quench that thirst from one of your arteries.”

“Would you be, though? Aware of the thing hiding in you?”

The lieutenant shrugged. "Possibly not. You’re taking a long time to answer my question; you know that.”

“I don’t know how I am,” Davis said. "No, I can’t feel the thing either, and no, I don’t want to drink your blood. Is that enough?”

“ Davis,” the lieutenant said, "I will do this. You need to understand that. You are as close to me as anyone, these days, and I will shoot you in the head if I deem it necessary. If I believed the thing were in me, I would turn this gun on myself without a second thought. Am I making myself clear? Let me know it’s over, or let me finish it.”

The lieutenant’s face was flushed. "All right,” Davis said. He closed his eyes. "All right.” He took a deep breath. Another.

When he opened his eyes, he said, "It’s gone.”

“You’re positive.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You cannot be lying to me.”

“I know. I’m not.”

The end of the pistol wavered, and for a moment, Davis was certain that the lieutenant was unconvinced, that he was going to squeeze the trigger, anyway. He wondered if he’d see the muzzle flash.

Then the pistol lowered and the lieutenant said, "Good man.” He holstered the gun and extended his hand. "Come on. There’s a lot we have to do.”

Davis caught the lieutenant’s hand and hauled himself to his feet. Behind the lieutenant, he saw the charred place that had been the Shadow, Lee’s torn and blackened form to one side of it. Further back, smoke continued to drift out of the spot in the trees where Han had lain. The lieutenant turned and started walking towards the trees. He did not ask, and Davis did not tell him, what he had seen with his eyes closed. He wasn’t sure how he could have said that the image behind his eyelids was the same as the image in front of them: the unending sky, blue, ravenous.

For Fiona, and with thanks to John Joseph Adams