In the Beginning
I am a sniper. I was trained to be one of the best snipers in the Corps. As it turned out I was one of the best while I served. I was one of the best while I was a sniper after I joined the Dallas police force. I had the scores to prove it. The fact that I am no longer explains why I volunteered for a suicide mission. Why didn’t I care about my life? It was simple. The monsters had already taken everything else.
You might get the impression that I didn’t like them very much. You would be right. Want to know why? They killed my parents when they hit Galveston with that tidal wave. Dad and Mom had only gone there to get my sister and her kids out. Failed. Got my brother in Washington. The Capitol, not the state. He was army. Sadly, he didn’t die. He got turned into one of them. Fortunately, it was still dazed after leaving its cocoon when the refugees found it. They sent me his wallet.
I don’t know what type it was, the attack was too swift. We’d been stationed out in buildings in teams of two. Any more was a waste. The bastards tended to level any buildings that fire came from. We were set up with only two per building. Spotter and shooter. Me and Donovan Gerrold. We switched out every fifteen minutes or so to stay sharp.
We’d picked a nice apartment building on the corner of two major thoroughfares. Lots of kill zones. The battle types had pretty thoroughly chewed up the army units that were protecting the city. The front lines had passed by half an hour ago and the leader types were beginning to show up.
One second I was waiting for Donny to verify my latest officer kill. It was a general, I think. One of those Angel types. At least it had wings. Exactly what type? Who gives a shit? It was one of the pretty ones. We couldn’t tell them apart then. At least it was one of the ones that bullets could kill. The red mist Donny glimpsed while my rifle recoiled said that much. You can kill them if you just catch them unaware.
The next instant, my world exploded in pain. Darkness swallowed me up. When it finally spat me out, my world had changed forever. Snipers need two arms. Two whole arms. Partials won’t do. I asked.
Once I recovered enough that everyone knew I wasn’t going to die, the hospital cut me loose. Since they’d shipped me to Wyoming to find me a bed, I went up to the Canadian front to die. It was the closest.
The Canadians didn’t need any snipers with just one arm either. However there was a booming cottage industry in suicide bombers. In that job, I figured that one arm will work just fine. I mean, I knew that these things were going to kill me. The fact that I got to pick the time was unexpected, but welcome. And the fact that I wasn’t going alone was just the cherry on the ice cream.
One of the few things we had going for us was the fact that Sukebe apparently had no military background. Another was the fact that for the most part, he didn’t think his servants should show too much independent thought. Otherwise we’d have gone down in no time.
He’d made up a playbook for his army, which they were expected to follow almost slavishly. Which they did, especially in the beginning stages of the conflict. It made them predictable. And in war, being predictable was just one step from being dead.
For example: their military doctrine indicated that a headquarters building had to have certain things. What they were, no one on our side was completely sure. He was a madman, after all. And lunatics are supposed to be unfathomable. However, it meant that only certain types of buildings were just right for HQs. The REMFs1 in the Pentagon called it the Goldilocks mentality. I wonder what they called it when the diggers hit the Pentagon, and the fliers killed the ones that made it out of the building. The brains had fancy names for them. We didn’t. They were diggers and fliers and swimmers and fighters and ghosts. Everyone was afraid of the ghosts. To call them anything else was to humanize them. That made the pretty ones harder to kill.
And no matter whether or not it was hard for us to kill them, it was always easy for them to kill us. At least until we found out about their little psychological quirk.
Anyways, HQ’s had to be so far away from the front, and have certain amenities in case Sukebe or another of the top brass dropped in. Fancy hotels were usually off limits. But a middle of the road motel was a good bet.
The doctors say I can’t help but ramble when I talk. Brain damage, they call it. I call it filling in the details. Fuck 'em.
So that explains how I came to be hidden in the interior walls of the hotel we thought they would use with a whole bunch of plastique strapped to my body. Normally they would have just placed the explosives and used a radio detonator. Sadly, there was the fact that explosives were getting pretty hard to come by at that point, so if I didn’t have to blow up, they wanted the bombs back. Also radio detonators were unavailable. At that point, I was cheap and the plastique was expensive. So if it didn’t have to be used, it had to be returned. With a vest I could just walk it back to the armory.
***
His missing arm hurt. It always hurt. Sweat ran down his face, carving runnels in the dust. He swiped at it with a sodden rag. His aluminum foil helmet rattled at the contact. Rumor had it that it could block a ghost from hearing his mind, so he’d been told to make one. Just in case it didn’t work, he concentrated on the still river as he’d been taught.
He was nothing. No one. If his mind was empty, then they couldn’t find him. And if they couldn’t find him, he could kill them.
The man next to him leaned over. An urgent whisper floated through the air. “Jamie?”
Identity flooded back. Jamie Harris glared at the whisperer. “Shut up Lee. They can hear a gnat fart through these walls.”
Liam O’Conner grinned and wiped sweat off his eyes. “Good thing there aren’t any gnats here. Hell, Jamie, the other guy is always ten feet tall. Of course, some of them are ten feet tall.” He wiped the sweat on the building support next to him, and then grimaced at the filth he’d just scraped onto his hand. “Shit.”
His eyes widened as voices sounded from the baby monitor they’d hidden in the lobby.
The two men crouched silently as they listened to the security team sweep the building. They waited.
Two hours later, the baby monitor picked up other sounds. People talking about where troops were located, how the advance was going. In other words, leader types chatting about the war. Jamie worked hard to pretend the voices weren’t female. That was one of their weapons.
Jamie slowly levered himself to his feet and glanced at the duct tape holding the access plate in place. They’d cut the screws on the outside and glued them onto the plate so that it looked like nothing was wrong.
Jamie had the vest bomb, so it was his duty to verify that room held invaders before Lee would detonate the bombs on the building supports. After all, it wouldn’t do to blow up humans.
Having only one arm, he couldn’t swing the heavy plate quickly and hold the detonator at the same time, so he kicked it open and jumped through.
Enemy officer uniforms gleamed in the dimly lit foyer. Peripheral vision showed the guards, with inhuman quickness, already surging forward to contain the intrusion. Jamie screamed “Go,” as the plate bounced back from the wall, smashing him sideways across the room. He still had the detonator, and smashed the button with his thumb. Something jerked his arm and the world exploded.
***
Jamie groaned and slowly turned his head. He opened his eyes then squeezed them shut as the room spun. His head felt like there were dwarves trapped in his skull, hammering their way to freedom. He lay there until finally the dwarves took a break
Slowly he opened his eyes again, carefully blinking the dirt out of them. Bodies and bits of bodies littered the floor. From what he could see, the blast from the support columns had been channeled out through the access hatch like a shaped charge. The wall reflected the blast through the rest of the room. The destruction was almost complete, and part of the room had collapsed, blocking the door and windows. Dim light flickered in through cracks in the walls. The floor was covered in rubble, but obviously the supports hadn’t completely given way. The building was still standing.
It had just been luck that he hadn’t been killed. Jamie froze. Something was wrong. “I’m still alive.” He coughed dust and spat on the floor.
“What the hell?” Slowly he propped himself up on his arm and looked down at his vest. The detonator switch was gone. Only an inch or two of wire still showed where the detonator cable had ran to the detonators on his vest. Slowly he looked around. The detonator cable and switch were in the hands of a creature with vaguely doglike features that lay only a few feet from him.
Its height was close to his six feet, and it was covered in red fur with black stripes. Strangely enough, it had blonde hair. Its breasts... He blinked. Breasts. That made it so difficult. He’d been raised to never hurt women. He’d been taught almost from birth to never even consider violence against the fairer sex.
He peered at the Growlie more closely. Those breasts were moving. Slowly Jamie pulled himself over to the beast. The creature was unconscious. Jamie pulled his knife from his belt and, lying next to the creature, pulled his knife across its throat.
It took more than one slash to kill it, and by the time the job was done, Jamie was covered in blood. He left the knife in the Growlie’s throat and wiped vainly at his face, smearing the blood around.
“Apparently assassins need two arms too.” Jamie shook his head at his little joke, wincing when the movement reminded the dwarves in his head to go back to hammering.
Slowly, Jamie pushed himself into a sitting position and surveyed the room. None of the other forms he could see appeared to be breathing. As he twisted, pain lanced through his leg. Jamie looked down at his left leg. “I do believe my foot is supposed to point to the front, not to the right.” His leg was broken below the knee.
Jamie realized that his voice was slow and slurred. He blinked owlishly. “Classic signs of shock, showing am I.” He smiled lazily. “Not good this is.”
Jamie frowned. Slowly he turned himself and pointed his stump at the floor. Suddenly he let go and fell. The pain from his stump was sharp and familiar, and helped to drive the cobwebs from his mind as well as distance him from the new pains in his leg.
“Well, I don’t appear to be channeling Yoda anymore.” He grimaced. “I need to stabilize that leg.”
Jamie looked around, fruitlessly searching around for something a one armed man could use as a splint. “Humph. It appears that to be doctor you will need two arms as well. And since I couldn’t even blow myself up right, I wonder what I will do for a living? Oh, wait. I still have to survive.” He frowned. “And I think that perhaps God wasn’t ready for me to see him yet.” The frown deepened. He’d written off God with his family.
“Right. Just lucky, I guess.”
Jamie jerked when the soft soprano echoed around the room. “Human, either kill me or quit babbling.”
He lunged for the knife still in the Growlie’s throat and slipped in the pool of blood, slamming face first into the floor. Darkness pulled at him. Jamie fought to stay conscious. Slowly, he won the fight.
Propping on his arm, Jamie pushed himself back upright. After carefully recovering the knife, Jamie looked cautiously in the direction of the voice, but he couldn’t see anything. So, knife clenched in his teeth, Jamie crawled towards where the voice had come from, thinking to himself; one more to kill before I die.
Nearing where the voice had come from, Jamie slowed. The wall here had partially collapsed and a large pile of rubble had piled up here. There was no easy way around it. Jamie was going to have to crawl over it to get to his foe.
As he reached for the first rock to lever himself up, it quivered. Jamie froze. The rock moved again. Jamie slowly pushed himself up, carefully not touching the rock, to peer over it, every nerve in his body taut with the readiness that he would only have an instant to snatch the knife from his teeth and stab as he fell.
The rubble had mounded up here and extended to the wall. Jamie pushed himself backwards as he realized that the rock had moved from below.
Slowly, Jamie pushed at the rock. As it overbalanced and rolled away, he ripped the knife from his mouth and threw himself forward, bringing the knife down. In mid swing Jamie attempted to stop the knife and fell. A rock intercepted his forehead on the way down. He bounced off of it and landed on something warm. Soft fur pressed against his face and a warm, familiar scent filled his nostrils.
“Get off me.” The soprano voice was cold. “You’re bleeding on me.”
Jamie lifted his head. “Sorry.” He slowly pushed himself up. “I can’t do it.”
“What can’t you do?”
Jamie grimaced. “I can’t kill you.” He slowly put the knife away. “I can’t kill a horse.”
“I am not a horse.” The voice was grim. “I am a unicorn.” The unicorn lifted her head to glare at him. “And if I could reach you, you would be dead.”
Jamie could see that the unicorn was trapped beneath a large slab of concrete that had broken from the wall. Only her head was free, and that had been underneath the rock he’d rolled away.
He shrugged, then winced as the dwarves, sensing freedom close at hand, redoubled their efforts. “You’re a horse with a horn. My family has raised horses in Kentucky for generations. And, I made a promise never to hurt another horse.”
She cocked her head sideways. “Who is Poppet?”
Jamie recoiled. “Stay out of my head!” He slapped at the mare’s head angrily.
She jerked away, and then lunged. Her teeth clocked together as she snapped at his hand. “So much for your promise.”
Jamie was about to retort when, with a grumbling sound, the slab of concrete settled down on the mare. She wheezed and began fighting for each breath.
Jamie peered down next to the mare. He could see space behind the mare’s back, and it looked like there was enough room to get some rubble in there to help shore up the slab. He quickly got to work.
Although quick to begin work, the job went slowly. Jamie had to crawl to each likely piece of rubble and push it to the side of the mare and then, if it fit, ease it down the mare’s back as far as it would go. He found a reasonably straight piece of rebar that had come off of the wall and used it to push the rubble farther down. Soon he had the space full.
Jamie looked the situation over carefully. It looked hopeless. “Without a bunch of heavy lifting equipment, I don’t see how I’m going to get you out of there.”
“You aren’t. Just kill me and be done with it.” The unicorn’s voice was labored.
Jamie ignored her. “Just how did you get in the building?” Jamie looked puzzled. “This wasn’t a fancy hotel, and it just had the one door.”
“I can take a human shape.” The unicorn struggled to take a breath. “When you came lunging out of that damned door, I changed shape to protect myself. Then that wall fell on me, burying me. If I change back, the wall will finish crushing me. Normally I could teleport out, but before we set up a command post, we protect it against teleportation. So, here I am going to die.”
“Now wait just a minute.” Jamie sounded like he was getting excited. “We just might have a chance. You being able to become a girl just might help us out. If you curl your legs up, I can fill the space with more bits of the wall. When you change, we should have a couple of seconds to pull you out. At least it’s better than no chance at all.”
The unicorn looked at him levelly for a moment, and then pulled her legs up as close to her body as she could. Jamie got to work.
He worked until he couldn’t move any more, then took a five minute break, and got back to work. Eventually he couldn’t force any more rubble into the gap. The unicorn was silent, fighting for each breath.
Jamie mopped his face with his already sodden shirt. “Let me get my breath, and then we’ll get you out of there.”
“I don’t think this is going to work.” The unicorn sounded like she was already dead.
Jamie exploded. “I don’t give a fuck what you think. If you want to die, then you can do it by your own hand, once I get your sorry ass out of there, but until then you are going to help me, or by God I’ll…” He trailed off, a look of chagrin crossing his face.
“Or what, you’ll kill me?” The unicorn sounded amused. “Fine, we’ll try it your way.”
Jamie crawled in front of the unicorn’s nose and braced his good foot against the block of rubble underneath her head. He carefully sat up. “Now when you change, grab my hand just as quick as you can. With you pushing and me pulling, we should have you out of there long before that slab can get you.” He reached up, placing his hand on her head. “Now!”
A glow enveloped the mare as she changed, and both of her hands shot up to grab his one. The slab slid down quickly as Jamie pulled with all of his strength. It wasn’t working. The girl was stuck. She screamed.
Jamie screamed back. Rage and fear shot through him. In desperation, he placed his broken leg next to his good one and again pulled with all his might. He screamed again as bone audibly ground against bone.
The girl slid free just as the slab settled down. Jamie spun into darkness.
***
Jamie slowly opened his eyes. Apparently, the dwarves had asked some family to join them in their break for freedom. He sincerely hoped they got out soon as he didn’t think any more of them would fit.
“You’re awake.”
A beautiful girl moved into his line of sight. She was tall and shapely, with long blonde hair and pure white skin. A few red lines traced down her body to mark where she’d been dragged out from under the slab. Jamie blinked when he realized that she was naked and that he was staring at a perky breast. He flushed as he realized what his body was doing. His voice was filled with disbelief. “I’m dying, and I got a boner. Maybe I ain’t quite ready to die.”
The girl gave him a bright smile. “Of course not. I’ve splinted your leg.” She frowned. “There is a lot of swelling however, and I think you are bleeding into the break. You need healing right away to keep the leg.” The smile came back. “I can feel the barrier weakening. In an hour I should be able to teleport us out.”
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Jamie’s voice was slurred again.
“You saved my life.” The girl sounded surprised. “Even though I was ready to die you refused to give up. You don’t kill someone after that.” She frowned again. “And don’t even try to send me away. I’m going to make sure that you are taken care of.”
“Fine.” Jamie was so tired. “Just let me sleep.”
“Wrong answer.” She propped him up, putting his head in her lap. Jamie had apparently been wrong when he thought his head couldn’t hurt any more. He gasped.
“You have a concussion and need to remain conscious.”
Jamie just wanted to sleep. For sleep he was willing to argue. “And just how do you know?”
“I worked for a while in Sukebe’s medical centers.” She began peeling dried blood from his face. He winced as she pulled up a flap of skin. “Oops.” She gently pushed it back into place. “So, in order to keep you awake, we are going to have a long conversation.”
“Whatever.” Jamie closed his eyes. “What do you want to talk about?”
She took a deep breath. “When you were pulling me out from under that slab, you were yelling a name in your head. ‘Poppet’. And you were yelling ‘not this time.’” She stroked his cheek. “Obviously it was important to you. Who is Poppet?”
Jamie sighed and opened his eyes. “When I was ten years old, one of our mares had twin foals. As is often the case, the mare rejected one of the foals. My father thought it would be a good character building exercise for me to raise the foal. So I bottle fed this filly day and night until she was weaned, and I hand raised her as I grew up. We’d been watching some Britcoms around the time I raised her, and I named her Poppet, because she was such a tiny little thing.”
The girl frowned. “So why were you thinking of her when you were pulling me out from under the slab?”
Jamie closed his eyes again. This time the pain was internal. “When I was sixteen, Poppet fell into an abandoned well. My parents were out of town with my brother at a 4-H meet, and I was alone. I tried everything to get her out, but I just couldn’t do it.
“I couldn’t leave her alone down there to die and I couldn’t get her out. So, I shot her. Then I filled in the well.” He grimaced. “I had to tell my dad when they got back, and he told me that the Pattersons down the road had rented a crane the week before to stand up a windmill that had fallen over. If I’d called them, I could have saved her.”
He looked up at her. “I gave up and I failed Poppet. But I was not going to fail you.”
The girl bent down and kissed his forehead. “I don’t have a name, you know.” Jamie blinked at the change of topic. She continued. “All I’ve ever had for a name was just a rank and number.”
She gave him a hesitant look. “Do you think you would like to call me Poppet?”
***
Now I’m old. I’m going to die soon. Poppet still looks like she did when we met. Longevity. We had no idea that she had it. After all, Sukebe didn’t tell his troops anything other than go here and do this. He certainly didn’t have long dissertations with the troops about their non-combat powers.
Hell, we wouldn’t even have a name for it if it wasn’t for those hackers in Seattle who blitzed Sukebe’s computers.
Poor bastards lasted just long enough to bounce what they got to a robot server which spammed it all over the planet. Hey, it worked. Saved by e-marketing spamware.
Then the building exploded. Rumor has it that one of them teleported in and detonated the building. Poppet says that most likely it was a psychic type that piggybacked in some poison type with an explosion attack. I guess I’m supposed to know what that means, but I don’t.
We still don’t really talk about the war. Or about Sukebe’s pokegirls. They’re not people to me. Except for Poppet.
I’ve given Poppet to my eldest son to take care of. She has needs that I can’t meet anymore. These days they call it Taming. Bullshit. She was and is the love of my life. I’m just sorry that we couldn’t have kids. Longevity again. She won’t be fully mature for over a century. No healthy human woman wants a scarred up one-armed man. Hell, even the infertile ones got their pick of the human race. Why would they want me?
So Poppet picked out one of them for me to have sons by. An Alaka-Wham. So I Tamed it until Poppet and I had a family. Poppet says she will take care of them.
I try to love my daughters as much as my sons, but they aren’t people to me. Maybe someday humans will be able to look past that. With the number of fertile women what it is, if we want to continue, I guess we got no choice.
Poppet says she will help.
From the Journal of Jamie Harris
1. REMF – Military slang for Rear Echelon Mother Fucker. It is considered a nice way (at least amongst the men at the front line) to refer to the fellows who have never been at the sharp end.