Jabberwock, p.1
Jabberwock, page 1
JABBERWOCK
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2010 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover art by James at GoOnWrite.com
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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Also by this Author:
Rook: Allie's War, Book One
Shield: Allie's War, Book Two
Sword: Allie's War, Book Three
Shadow: Allie's War, Book Four
Knight: Allie’s War, Book Five
War: Allie’s War, Book Six
Bridge: Allie’s War, Book Seven
New York: Allie's War, Early Years
Revik: Allie’s War, Early Years
The Alien Club
The Culling (The Slave Girl Chronicles: Book 1)
The Royals (The Slave Girl Chronicles: Book 2)
The New Order (The Slave Girl Chronicles: Book 3)
The Morph
Never More
Also by White Sun Press:
Jack Dervish, Super Spy
Maya Papaya
The Kung Fu Instructor
Synopsis
A squad of soldiers takes a ride out to the middle of nowhere, thinking the Lieutenant sent them there as just punishment for posting pictures of his old lady. But in an empty stretch of desert lives a cave inhabited by a man whose presence they can’t explain...who speaks in riddles and seems to know them.
Before they can figure out what he wants, an ancient evil marks them in the beginning of an age-old battle of good and evil.
JABBERWOCK
“Get down! On the ground! Right now!”
I looked at Billy when I heard the shout. His eyebrows went up as high as mine probably, stuck somewhere under the edge of a dust-covered helmet. Unbelievable. Who the hell would’ve thought that piss-ant back at base would end up being right? We’d all figured it was punishment, being sent out here, to get back at us for those pictures we posted of his old lady.
“You hear me, dirt bag? Get down!”
Hesh had a live one, all right. He had to be talking to an actual person when he pulled out the Dirty Harry dialogue like he’d suddenly switched from an automatic rifle and fatigues to a leather jacket and a Colt .45 with a pearl-grip handle. Hesh wasn’t the brightest cat in the unit, but he took his job seriously. Hell, he took everything seriously.
Me and Billy exchanged another look, then we ran the rest of the way down the rock and dirt tunnel, the same direction as Hesh’s high-pitched voice. We didn’t look to see if the others were following, but we could hear them. Their boots echoed against the walls, dropping silt and loud the deeper we went, so we sounded like a full-bore army instead of a handful of guys with way too much equipment for this crippling heat.
I couldn’t believe someone was here at all. We’d pulled up to this snake hole for the shade, an excuse to eat something, pour water on our heads and watch it evaporate. The reality was, we were sitting in the middle of the shit end of a bleach-bone white and sand stretch of nothing, and no known tactical targets but some b.s. “rumor” the Lieutenant cooked up to make us think twice about screwing with him in future. The air was so dry and hot out here, it sucked the breath out of our lungs every time we inhaled, leaving nothing but a coat of dust.
The darker rocks of the caves were the closest we’d found to a break in the endless monotony of the landscape since we left around five that morning. Trees, mountains, water…even those broken, dry, scrub-like bushes I’d grown to hate in the past nine months…those were just a distant memory out here. I’d never seen a place so completely dead in my entire life. It was like the earth had been scorched by the breath of God after he’d eaten the worst kind of Texas chili.
And yeah, I had to keep it funny in my head, because otherwise it was too damned depressing. Everyone’s sense of humor got pretty sick out here.
Just the night before, we’d been pumping rats full of gasoline for fun, lighting matches and laughing like hyenas when the little bastards exploded. I would’ve been comforted by the sight of a few of those little rangy fuckers scuttling across the dust-covered rocks out here. Nothing, not even cockroaches, seemed to survive this place.
Glare rippled and whispered out over miles of white chalk cliffs. We’d only seen a few of those wandering gypsy types. Hunched over on camels, with tablecloth headdresses and burnt leather skin that made their eyes stand out like marbles with a hundred miles’ distance burned into their retinas…they looked more like props in some bad mummy movie than actual people.
Still, Hesh was screaming up ahead, yelling his fool head off like he’d stumbled across the terrorist boot camp for all of the sandpits of the universe. We tumbled into the room after him, only five of us now plus Hesh because the squad lost a few to leave and transfers. Guns gripped in sweat-grimed hands, we all squinted in the dim light. When we got to that dusty corner of the cave, I was a little stunned to see it was just one guy.
One small guy, and he looked about as dangerous as those rats had the night before. Less so, really…I didn’t figure he’d bite us and leave us with some kind of desert rat version of syphilis, although maybe I was being optimistic.
He held his hands up, bowing down so low I couldn’t see his face. He wore one of those wraps, what looked like a cheap hotel towel sweated to the color of urine. Shapeless cotton covered his narrow, child-sized shoulders and stuck to a concave back. His hair, which could have been almost any color really, sweated to his neck, thick with grease.
It wasn’t until he looked up that I realized he was white.
Well, white in the sense of being one of us…a godless infidel in the middle of Allah’s country, and a scrawny, squinting mother at that. His skin was so covered in dust I wouldn’t have looked twice at him but for his eerie, pale-blue eyes. They were the eyes of a blind person, but he looked straight at Hesh’s face, then over at the rest of us, and the look in them let me know he could see just fine.
“What are you doing here?” Hesh yelled.
Always with the yelling, that guy.
I wondered if he was deaf, yelling like that in here.
His gun was still in the guy’s face.
I thought that was overkill probably, but Hesh was pretty high strung, and it was hot as a fucking compost heap inside that cave, the only light coming in through what looked like shooting slats in the dirt wall. Given that we were in the middle of nowhere, like I said, and I hadn’t seen any jeeps besides ours or anything approximating a camel within a donkey ride’s distance after a few hours of hard driving, I guessed maybe Hesh had a point. The guy was skin and bones, and smelled like he’d been wearing those clothes for a month. No way was he one of those civilian contractors in their prissy tan slacks and mirrored four-hundred-dollar shades.
“What are you doing here, shithead?” Hesh’s thick jaw clenched. He was aware of the rest of us now, so Dirty Harry was back.
The man held up a hand. It reminded me of the wagging tail of a dog that doesn’t want to be kicked. He smiled, but I have to say, I didn’t like the smile much…and it didn’t look to me like it matched his supposed fear of us. He looked annoyed, actually, like we’d interrupted his favorite t.v. show and he just wanted to get back to it.
Owl, named mostly for his coke-bottle glasses and his annoying habit of telling us pointless facts he got off the internet, squinted at rat man, his lips a flat line.
“Chill out, H,” Owl said. “Poor fucker’s going to piss his pants.”
“What are you doing here?” Trip said, louder than Owl.
The little guy looked at him, and I kid you not, he squealed. He held his hands in front of himself and squealed. I looked at Billy in disbelief and saw him suppress a laugh.
Hesh kept right on yelling. “What’s your name? Who’re you with?”
I watched the little squealer. I saw his lips moving after he’d looked at Trip. He seemed to have recovered himself, but he was staring from one of our faces to the other, almost like he knew us. Like he might have gone to high school with me or Malcolm or Billy or Owl, and he was trying to recognize us through the grime and being bulked up in the years since. I heard a weird sound, almost a humming, buzzing sound, like saliva stumbling over lips and teeth and I realized the man was talking, muttering.
Hesh poked him with the stock of his rifle. “You speak English?”
I rolled my eyes at Billy.
“Hey.” Malcolm stepped forward. His voice held no humor, not a trace of anger or impatience. “He’s trying to talk…let him talk.”
Everyone fell silent.
Malcolm’s clear brown eyes studied the rapidly moving lips with an almost scientific-like interest. He didn’t look afraid in the slightest, or even curious really. Malcolm was a giant over the rest of us, a good couple of inches taller than even me, and I’m a smidge over 6’3” in my socks, so nothing to sneeze at. Even Hesh didn’t want to fight with Malcolm.
It was more than his size, too. Malcolm was the only guy in the squad who didn’t even watch while we were blowing up the rats…or hanging up altered pictures of Mrs. Lieutenant Dvorsky with her face in the lap o
And no one argued with Malcolm to his face. It was just one of those things.
So now everyone waited for our human rat to speak.
He looked around at all of us, those staring blue eyes holding some kind of intensity. Then he cackled, and began saying a bunch of words that didn’t make sense to me, but that somehow sounded familiar, like I’d heard them before.
“’Twas Brillig, and the slithy toves…did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe…”
“What?” Trip stepped forward.
His narrow face looked tense. He didn’t look happy at all, and normally Trip was a pretty even-keel kind of guy. His eyes were like steel balls, boring into the guy, and he brought up his M16 and put it pretty far in the guy’s face.
“What the fuck does that mean?” He looked at Owl. “Was that even English?”
But the rat-faced man with the pale blue eyes looked only at Malcolm.
“Not right,” he muttered, clutching his hands together in front of his chest. “You’re not quite right…not quite…but you’ll have to do…”
Malcolm didn’t move, didn’t seem to change expression, but all of us looked at him. Hesh just stared, jaw hanging like we’d switched channels on him and he couldn’t figure out where the regular programming had disappeared to. Trip looked well and truly pissed off. Billy had that look on his face like he couldn’t quite get the punch line. Owl looked like I felt, like he was trying to remember something right at the tip of his tongue and couldn’t grasp it. He rubbed the edge of his face under his helmet with one grimy finger and glanced at me.
“I guess we take him up top,” he said. “Right?”
“He’s crazy, man,” Billy said. “Brains fried in the sun.”
“But we gotta take him back, right?” said Owl.
Trip continued to stare at the rat. He stepped closer, putting his gun in the guy’s face.
“What’s he ‘not right’ for, exactly?” Trip said.
The man continued to stare Malcolm up and down, as if measuring the length of him. Malcolm looked unperturbed, but Trip’s face seemed even more pinched than before. Out of the bunch, I probably knew him least, but he and Owl were tight so I always figured he was okay. Not dumb like Hesh, or dangerous or anything.
“What are you doing way out here?” he asked the guy.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son,” the little man breathed.
“What?” Trip said. He shoved at the guy with the barrel of his gun. “You threatening me, you piece of shit? Is that what you’re doing?”
“Chill out, T,” Billy said. “He’s harmless.”
“I want to know what this motherfucker’s doing out here!”
“He’s mumbling to himself in a cave, Trip…let it go.” Billy took charge. “Owl’s right. We pat him down, bring him in. We can’t leave him out here, anyway. Dude’s obviously crazy, and there’s no water for like sixty miles.”
Owl pulled his friend back, patting him on the shoulder when he got him out of range of the man in the limp towel. “Leave it, Trip.” He grinned, trying to get the other to look over. “…That’ll give Dvorsky something to chew on…if we bring him back a live one.”
Stepping forward, I figured I’d grab the guy’s arm, maybe ask Billy to take the other one. Since I wasn’t feeling an overwhelming desire to shoot the crazy fucker, or even scream at him, I figured me and Billy were the best bet for escorting him out of the hole.
While I would have killed for shade an hour ago, now I couldn’t get out of that no-air furnace fast enough. Thinking about that, I paused long enough to look around. These caves were essentially sand packed so tight it was like rock. It should be cooler in here. In fact, it should be a lot cooler. Every time we’d crouched in places like this in the past, it was like 10 degrees less than just shade. Owl seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
“Why is it so fucking hot in here?” he complained. “Feels like we’re sitting on a damned furnace…”
“Maybe it’s a bunch of WMD’s,” Billy joked.
The little man started laughing. His laugh was high-pitched, hysterical, like someone had hit him with electrical current at the exact instant he lost control of his mind.
“No…no…no…” He pointed at Malcolm. “He knows, don’t you, boy? He knows why it’s hot in here! He came for it!”
We all looked at Malcolm.
None of us would have called him ‘boy.’ Not even on a bet.
But it didn’t seem to bother him. He blinked over clear, light-brown eyes, then looked around the cave walls. Our eyes followed his. I didn’t see anything. Just packed sand and rock, and those narrow slits that looked down a gradual slope to the shimmering bleached rocks of the valley. The light outside was so bright that the holes appeared white until you got close.
“What up, Mal?” Billy said. “What’s he talking about?”
Malcolm looked at Trip, then directly at me.
“I think something’s born here,” he said cryptically.
“They told me to wait,” the guy in the hotel towel was babbling. “They told me to wait right here, until he came. They told me to wait…so I waited! I waited and waited and waited, and no one came. No one…” He looked at Trip, and his muttering grew louder again, until he was nearly shouting. “He took his vorpal sword in hand…long time the manxome foe he sought…” He let out a choked laugh. “…The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Come whiffling through the tulgey wood, and burbled as it came. One! Two! One, Two! And through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head, he went galumphing back!”
Trip shot him. Right in the chest.
I stood there, my jaw hanging. Our human rat slammed into the cave wall, and the rest of the guys scattered back. Hesh yelled. Owl yelled too. I cursed and stumbled backwards, instinctively away from the gun. Everyone gave Trip a wide berth…all but Owl, who grabbed his arm, trying to pull him back with us. I looked at Billy, and his face had gone a funny color; he didn’t look like he wanted to make a joke now.
“What the fuck, Trip?” Hesh sounded almost excited. “Jesus H. Christ! You blew the guy away! You totally blew him away!”
“Calm down!” Billy yelled. “Everybody just chill for a minute!”
“What the hell is the matter with you?” I asked Trip.
Owl gave me a warning look, like don’t push him right now, and seeing that he had a good point, what with the murder and the confined space, I backed off.
Billy looked at me. “Doc, see what you can do for him.”
I wasn’t a medic. They called me Doc because I liked Bugs Bunny. I’m serious.
Still, no one else there was a doctor either. I knelt by the guy, putting down my gun. Wiping sweat off my face, I looked him over, focusing on the blood seeping through the rough cotton robe. I put a hand over the spreading stain, trying to get pressure on it, and checked his pulse with my other hand. It was already weak.
“Hey,” I said to the guy. “Can you hear me?”
His mouth was moving again, but off-time, jittery. Saliva coated his lips, and it didn’t look right. I’d never actually seen someone foam at the mouth before, but he was, and now, with the hole in his chest, the foam was turning pink.
Yanking off my helmet, I leaned my ear down by his lips.
“Too late now,” he mumbled. “Too late…” He grabbed my arm. “This used to be a nice place. Not like this at all…trees. Beautiful trees and rivers. It was lovely…”
“Too late for what?” I said.
“I would’ve been ready in another minute…” The rat-faced man smiled, and it was that smile I didn’t much like. “Someone’s got to play it. Buy the ticket, take the ride…”
