White Space

She did, and her stomach bottomed out.

They lay together on the snow, staring into the black night above and at something new: very dense, milky, and shimmering as if studded with silver glitter—or stars. It boiled out of the darkness in a great pillowing mass, gathering and gobbling the night.

“Oh my God.” She couldn’t seem to get enough air. “Is that … is that a cloud?”

“That’s no cloud,” he said.

BODE A Real Long Way from Jasper

1

“WHAT IS THAT?” Chad peered through the Dodge’s windscreen. “Is that smoke? Like, from the explosions?”

“It wouldn’t be white, unless they were using phosphorus,” Eric said. He was in the backseat but leaned forward now, draping his hands over the front, his walkie-talkie dangling by its wrist strap. “That’s more like fog.”

“Or just real thick clouds,” Bode said. Fog or clouds, he didn’t like the look of all that open sky. Drop him into a tunnel—what he and his fellow rats called a black echo—any day. Not that a tunnel was a cakewalk. There was the enemy hunkering down there, waiting for a quiet kill, and booby traps: snakes, wicked-sharp punji stakes smeared with God knows what kind of poison or human shit. But scorpions were the worst. Those suckers nested everywhere: on the walls, the ceiling. Get stung, and you were gone.

Other guys called him lucky. Maybe he was. If he’d popped out of that tunnel ten seconds earlier, that mortar would’ve taken his head off. Instead, Sergeant Battle took the hit: one minute there, his hand reaching for Bode’s, and the next—

Which is why you need to think, be careful, watch your step. The voice in Bode’s mind was more hiss than whisper. Not like I can take one for you this time around, son.

Bode’s eyes flicked to the rearview. Battle’s head floated next to Eric, who was back to fiddling with his walkie-talkie. Eric wouldn’t have seen Battle anyway, probably a good thing. Battle’s head was a ruin. Most of the meat on the sergeant’s face had flash-fried, leaving blackened bone and shriveled tendon. Battle’s right eye was a crater, no white at all. His left hung on his cheek, tethered to its socket by a leathery stalk of cooked nerve. A fist-sized chunk of Battle’s skull was gone, leaving behind daylight and a charred curl that had been his left ear. A goopy pink sludge of Battle’s brains slopped over his neck.

“I know that, Sarge,” Bode said, thinking it was lucky no one could hear him talking to the ghost of a dead guy no one else could see. “But you know we had to help. I couldn’t send the devil dog off on his own, no backup. Wouldn’t be right.”

Right’s got nothing to do with it. Battle’s mouth was a tight rictus grin of fat maggots squirming over shattered teeth. After all, it isn’t like you don’t already got enough problems.

2

CHAD HAD NOT wanted to go.

“Man, this is a really bad idea,” Chad said. They’d retreated to the kitchen to retrieve their weapons: a Remington pump, which was already minus two shells, and a four-shot bolt-action Winchester .270, as well as Chad’s Colt. Bode’s own service weapon was lying in scrub somewhere way back in Jasper. The desert was good for swallowing all kinds of stuff a guy didn’t want found. Guns. Money. Drugs.

Bodies.

“I mean it.” Chad gnawed at his sore. “Don’t we got enough problems?”

“You’re gonna give yourself a scar, man.” Bode hip-butted a drawer of silverware shut. The cupboards above the sink weren’t exactly bare, but whoever lived here had a thing for Kraft macaroni and cheese; the cupboards next to the fridge were stacked full, top to bottom. Man, they must have a lot of little kids. Who else plowed through that many Blue Boxes? Not that he minded: he’d choked down so many beans and franks in the bush, he hoped he never saw another hot dog.

Bode squatted, opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and pawed past cleaning supplies, lighter fluid, trash bags. No real weapons, though, not even a butcher knife. He felt under the sink to be sure—maybe something taped there—but there was nothing.

Weird. Farmers were always shooting shit: groundhogs, sick horses, crap like that. He stood, thought about that, staring at the black rectangle of window over the sink. So where would they stash a weapon? The barn? Maybe down cellar?

Framed in the window, Battle peered back. There aren’t going to be any other weapons here, son. This isn’t any kind of here you’ve ever been.

“A scar.” Chad let out a giddy bray. “Like that’s the worst thing I got to worry about.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” Bode said, flatly. To Battle: “What do you mean, this isn’t a here? I’m standing here.”