“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 alclass="underline" 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.