Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 23

Back at the Winslows’, everyone was shedding their vests, armor, and outer clothes, which were saturated with a mixture of water and soot from flamed wet tampons and diapers. Roland had gone through fourteen flamers, another record in the secret history of the Nightstalkers. They’d dashed to the pool in relays, tossing in cases of diapers and tampons, while Roland flamed the surface.

The Firefly had fought back. Kelsey, cowering behind a lawn chair, had suffered a broken arm, and Support had taken him away afterward for medical treatment. Kirk, keeping his record intact, had suffered a dislocated shoulder when a tentacle grabbed his hand and tried to drag him into the flaming pool. He’d simply walked over to the wall of the house and slammed it back into the socket.

The Firefly had dissipated when they were down to three feet of water left and their copious supply of diapers, tampons, and napalm was running dangerously low.

“Maybe you need to go home, Scout?” Moms said as she noted the team in a state of half-undress.

“You know how to use the washers and dryers?” Scout asked. “They have one on every floor.”

“Why?” Nada asked.

“You think anyone around here carries laundry up the stairs?” Scout said.

“I doubt anyone who lives here carries their laundry anywhere,” Moms said.

From the room off the hallway from the garage they heard Roland cursing. “Anyone know how to turn this thing on?”

“See?” Scout said.

“Everyone get some pants on,” Moms ordered, “while the kid dries our cammies.”

The guys trooped upstairs while Moms and Scout gathered clothes off the floor.

“Thanks,” Moms said as she removed magazines from a sopping combat vest, along with a radio, grenades, and other assorted goodies.

Scout looked over at her in surprise. “For what?”

“That was a good idea. More importantly, it worked and no one got killed.”

Scout shrugged. “I just put what the guy was saying together.”

“I know,” Moms said, “but you did it quick. That’s important. That’s a talent.”

Scout flushed. “You should see me ride. Now that, I’m talented at.”

“I’d like to someday,” Moms said.

The conversation was over as the team came back down dressed in their civvies, with bundles of sopping camouflage fatigues in their hands. Scout dispatched them to all three floors with orders to put them in the washers. Then she went from floor to floor, loading each machine with detergent and softener and setting them correctly.

The team sat around on leather sofas while their clothes began to whirl. A loud clanking sound came from the upstairs laundry.

“Eagle,” Moms said. “Where’s your Mark-23?”

“Just great,” Roland muttered and he went upstairs with Scout and retrieved the wet gun from the washer. He sat down with it and ejected the magazine.

“Can you show me how to take it apart?” Scout asked, startling Roland.

“Sure.”

So while the big guy and the little girl took a large-caliber pistol apart, the rest of the team decompressed. Roland didn’t even realize he was rubbing his fungus-covered feet along a carpet that cost more than the house he grew up in. Doc was eyeing the bourbon in the crystal decanter, but decided he’d had enough of liquids that could kill him for the day. Kirk was looking at a photo that had been in his pocket and gotten soaked, setting it so it would dry but not be seen by the rest of the team. Eagle was upstairs on over-watch. Nada had taken out his machete to sharpen it, but realized he hadn’t used it in the Great Water Battle, as they had decided to name it on the way back, so he put it on the coffee table that cost as much as his MK-23 pistol. Moms was typing up her after-action report.

Roland had finished taking apart Eagle’s gun and then he walked Scout through the steps. Moms watched them, torn between pride and disapproval. When Scout did it correctly, on the first try, the girl did a flip, then went to a handstand in the center of the room on top of the coffee table next to Nada’s machete.

“I’ll give you a dollar to stop doing that,” Moms said, feeling bad because she knew the real reason it bothered her was Scout’s exuberance and energy. Moms couldn’t remember ever feeling that way.

Scout was still on her hands and looked at Moms. “Do you mean four quarters or a hundred bucks?”

Roland looked up from the gun, stunned. “She’s a gambler. That’s what they call a hundred bucks.”

Scout flipped and stood upright. “No. I don’t gamble, but Doctor Carruthers, two blocks over, is a bookie. And his son, Tad, was my BF, for a while. And I think he was my BF because his dad was so interesting and he let me listen as he took bets. I like to listen.”

“Of course you do,” Moms said, running a hand through Scout’s damp hair, avoiding her burn from the killer curler. “Four quarters. On my tab.”

Scout sat down, yoga style, on the plush rug being invaded by Roland’s fungus ten feet away. “Sure, but there’s a vig on the tab.” Then to no one and everyone she began speaking, the words rushing forth. “Did you know the term vig comes from vigorish, which is how they supposedly treated you when you owed money? Broke your knees with vigor?”

“No, I didn’t,” Nada said, with a warning look at the others, and they all realized what he meant. Scout was finally coming down off the action by talking and everyone had a different way of doing it.

“But Doctor Carruthers said that was mostly movie BS, because how’s someone going to pay you if they got broken knees? He said the worst thing you can do to a degenerate gambler is cut them off from gambling. Which makes sense, right?”

“Right,” Nada said.

Scout looked at Kirk, who was looking at the drying picture. “How’s your shoulder?”

Kirk looked up, startled, his mind 990 miles away in Parthenon, Arkansas. “Huh?”

“Your shoulder?” Scout repeated.

“Oh.” Kirk rotated it with a wince. “It works.”

Scout nodded toward the picture. “Girlfriend?”

Everyone on the team went still, because no one ever asked personal questions.

“My kin,” Kirk said.

“You guys don’t seem like you have families,” Scout said. “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

Kirk didn’t seem to notice the rest of the team, only Scout. “My older sister, Dee. Two younger brothers and little Becca. She’s the baby of the family. Just turned six.”

“I wish I had a brother,” Scout said. “A sister, maybe not. We’d probably fight.”

“Right,” Roland said. “You not getting along with someone.”

A bunch of dings started going off and Scout jumped up. “Washer to dryer. I’ll take care of it.” She ran up the closest set of stairs, not the ones Roland had taken.

Moms looked at her exhausted team. “We’ve got two Fireflies left. We were lucky we had Scout on this one. That stupid Acme would have blown us all up.”

Doc made no protest, which meant assent, which was just piling on top of all the strange things the Nightstalkers were going through.

Moms pointed in the direction that Scout had gone. “We cover her ass. I want over-watch on her twenty-four/seven. Got it?”

“Got it,” Nada and Doc and Kirk said.

Moms looked at Roland. “Got it?”

“Got it.”

“You look funny,” Roland said when Scout came in the door.

They’d sent her home, Kirk providing security, and now she was back. The team was geared back up, everyone much more comfortable in their cammies and body armor and combat vests.

Scout was geared up in her own way. Wearing boots and a little helmet and white pants and was so unlike the girl who’d rang their doorbell not long ago. But she still had blue hair.

She jerked a thumb at Kirk, who was hovering over her shoulder. “He says I can’t go.”

“Go where?” Nada asked.

“Duuuhhh,” Scout said, twirling about. “I need to exercise Comanche. I haven’t seen him since you guys dropped in. He’s probably going nuts.”

“Comanche?” Roland looked up from adjusting the trigger pressure on his MK-23 for the umpteenth time. “Why’d you name him that? Did you know that’s the name of the horse that survived Custer’s Last Stand? Captain Myles Keogh’s horse?”

“Duh.” Scout started humming “Gary Owen.”

Roland shook his head. “You are one weird little girl.”

“How do you know about Comanche?” Scout asked.

Once more the room fell silent, because Roland was exhibiting intellectual prowess, which was like Eagle throwing the hatchet. Dangerous.

“Myles Keogh was a distant relative on my mother’s side of the family, the wild Irish side,” Roland said.

“You have a not-wild side?” Scout asked, and Roland gave a hint of a smile, which was like a slab breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf.

Roland continued. “We didn’t have much in my family, but we had this big Bible and in it were all these names and Keogh was there. From fighting in Ireland to Italy to the Civil War to dying with Custer. He was a warrior.”

“His horse was the only survivor,” Scout said. “I thought that was pretty cool. He was wounded and all, but they took care of him.”

“Well,” Roland said, military tactics and history being an area he actually spent brainpower on, “technically people have the whole Little Bighorn thing kind of wrong. The Seventh Cavalry was not entirely wiped out. Just half. Just the guys in the companies following Custer. Reno and Benteen held their ground.”

“Most Medals of Honor ever given out for a single battle went to the men who crawled down to get water for the wounded,” Moms said without looking up from the laptop, earning her a look from Roland that no one else could interpret. She went back to typing in the report for the Great Water Battle.

“How the hell do you know this stuff?” Nada asked Scout. “Most people don’t even know where Little Bighorn is.”

Roland thumped the table. “Bet she got a hippo — hippo-whatever as big as Eagle’s.”

“Hippocampus,” Kirk said.

“I have all the books,” Scout said. “And my dad took me there when I was twelve. My mom was, well, she was off at the time. It was soooo not what I thought, but it soooo made sense when I got out of the car and saw it.”

“How do you mean?” Nada asked.

“Well,” Scout said, “all the pictures and paintings are so wrong. It looks flat. The battlefield. Two-D. But when you get there you see it’s all valleys and hills and rolling land. Three-D. You could hide Lady Gaga and her entire crew out there.”

“Yeah,” Nada said. “Cover and concealment. Critical to any battle. We had some shitholes in the ’Stan that—”

“No cursing,” Moms said, still typing, and Nada’s jaw flapped down.

“Why did Custer fascinate you?” Kirk asked.

Scout twirled her crop. “I guess I wonder what it would be like to have to follow him, follow his orders with no choice. Be one of his soldiers and they knew it was going to be bad and that he didn’t care about them because he had his own agenda. I don’t like the idea of not having a choice, of having no control over your own life. I just don’t understand how those guys did that — follow orders and just go and die?”

Moms stopped typing and everyone got quiet.

“Oh! Sorry.” Scout stopped twirling her crop and for once was still.

“I don’t think they thought they were going to die,” Kirk said. “Soldiers have hope. You gotta have hope or you can’t do the mission.”

“Sometimes they don’t,” Moms said, surprising everyone. “At Cold Harbor, the only battle Grant ever admitted he screwed up, there was a soldier who wrote in his diary: June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed. Not much hope there.”

Roland stood abruptly, dropping the gun to the table, parts spewing everywhere. “It might not be the Medal of Honor, but Moms was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. I’d follow her anywhere, hope or no hope. She saved my life.”

Moms shook her head, ignoring the looks everyone was giving her, and knew Roland had said it as much for Scout’s benefit as anything else. “No personal stuff, guys. Roland, you drive Scout to the stables and watch over her. Like you’d watch over me.”

Roland picked up the MK-23 parts and had it reassembled in fourteen seconds. “Yes, ma’am.”

Roland and Scout came back twenty minutes later. Scout was pale and her lips were as blue as her hair. Her face was streaked with tears. Roland was literally twitching, gun in hand but shaking his head over and over.

“I didn’t kill him,” Roland said. “I didn’t kill him.”

Nada ran across the room and grabbed Scout, pulling her in tight to his chest, up against his body armor, his magazines and his grenades. Scout melted in his arms and he held her from collapsing on the floor. “What happened?” he asked, looking at Roland, who had the crazed look in his eyes of combat.

“I didn’t kill him,” Roland repeated.

“Good,” Moms said, walking over. She put a comforting hand on Roland’s shoulder. “Who didn’t you kill?”

Nada realized it. “There’s a Firefly in Comanche?”

Roland nodded, getting control. “The guy who runs the stables was hurt bad. I got him out. The horse damn near got us. Took out doors. Just kept kicking at us. I pulled the guy out. He got broke ribs, smashed jaw, but he’s alive. Said the horse just went nuts. He was lying there dying for a day after he got hurt. Support got him now. He’ll be okay. I didn’t kill the horse. I didn’t. I shoulda. I screwed up Protocol.”

“Please, please,” Scout said between sobs into Nada’s body armor. “You can’t kill him. I’d die if you killed him.”

Nada looked down at the rag of a girl in his arms, her sobs wracking through both of them. “We won’t.” He easily lifted Scout up and her head rested on his shoulder.

“Swear?” Scout said.

“Protocol,” Moms said. “We have Protocol. Containment. We have—” Then she stopped speaking, seeing the look in Nada’s eyes.

Nada held Scout with one arm and patted her on the head with the other.

“Ouch!” Scout said in her misery. “Curling iron.”

“Sorry.” Nada gently lowered her and she looked up with tear-filled eyes.

“We might have to hurt him,” Nada said, “but we won’t kill him.” Nada had snot on his combat vest from Scout. “It’s going to be okay.”

“The government will buy you a new horse,” Doc said. “Support is already rebuilding the Lindsays’ pool.”

Scout got even more upset. “Comanche isn’t a pool! I don’t want a new horse. I want Comanche!”

Roland spoke up. “Well, he did survive Little Bighorn. He could survive this. Maybe we can, like, you know, evacuate him, quarantine him.”

“Right,” Moms said. “Get a chopper and sling-load a horse inhabited by a Firefly over the neighborhood to where? The goat lab at Bragg?”

They all, except Scout, knew what went on at the goat lab at Bragg. It was necessary to train Special Ops medics, but it was brutal. Each medic at the beginning of the lab phase was assigned a goat that they had to shoot. Wound only. And then nurse back to health. But they said goats don’t have a nervous system that registered pain anyway; so they said. No one ever asked the goats.

“We’ll just have to make the Firefly leave him,” Roland said.

“You said you have to kill him and flame him for that,” Scout whined.

“Well,” Doc said. “Maybe not.”

They all turned to him.

“We’ve never done a controlled kill,” Doc said. “It’s always been a—”

“Clusterfuck of a firefight,” Nada said.

“Exactly,” Doc said. “We do not know what Fireflies are, and we have only a limited knowledge of their parameters, and lately they have been pushing that. Whatever was going on inside the Rift in the Fun Outside Tucson was new. The backhoe trying to take out the Wall around here was different. Maybe we need to be different. Approach things in a new way.”

“You still said kill,” Scout said.

Doc knelt in front of her. “You say you’ve seen a lot of movies?”

Scout nodded.

“Seen The Abyss?”

Scout nodded.

“Remember where the woman drowns and they revive her?”

Scout’s eyes grew wide.

“Do you trust us?” Doc asked.

Scout looked him in the eyes, and then at the other team members. “No.”

“’Cause you think we’re Custer,” Roland said. “But we aren’t Custer.”

Nada nodded. “That can be our new Nightstalkers motto: ‘We aren’t Custer.’”

Scout wiped snot off her face. “But that’s like saying we aren’t Fetterman. Custer knew about Fetterman, they all did, from ten years before Little Bighorn, but nothing different happened.”

“Who’s Fetterman?” Kirk asked.

“Don’t you guys read anything?” Scout asked. “Or watch the History Channel?”

Roland nodded. “She got us there. Fetterman was a lieutenant at Fort Kearny who went out to relieve a wood-cutting party that was attacked and disobeyed orders. Went beyond Lodge Pole Ridge because Crazy Horse sucked them into an ambush with a diversion. Ten years before Crazy Horse sucked Custer into the Little Bighorn.”

“We ain’t him either,” Nada said.

Moms sat down with a deep sigh into a chair. “Do you see the irony of that statement, considering we’re going to try to kill a crazy horse, dissipate a Firefly, and bring the horse back to life? Ms. Jones is going to kill me.” She looked up. “And I am not speaking metaphorically.”

Scout started crying again and Nada started to say something, but he knew his limitations. He was a soldier and he knew when to keep his mouth shut while his commander made a decision.