The War

  Whisperer

  The War Whisperer

  __________________________

  Book 5:

  The Hook

  Barry B. Longyear

  Enchanteds Publishing

  New Sharon, Maine

  The War Whisperer, Book 5: The Hook is a work of fiction. The contents of this work are either products of the author’s invention or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events are coincidental.

  Enchanteds edition, The War Whisperer, Book 5: The Hook copyright © 2020 by Barry B. Longyear, all rights reserved including the right to reproduce this work or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information write: Barry B. Longyear, PO Box 100, New Sharon ME 04955.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Not so very far into the future

  Stare Down

  Illusion, hallucination, fantasy, dream— I was held above the universe of myself paging through events of my life, but as the memories drew together they were devoid of either sense, quality, interest, comprehensible content, or order. There was a storm with no wind, a baby suffocating in an oven of a garbage bin, two hundred burning boys, dozens shot down in a video game brought to life, the score kept in blood and secrets. There was a whisper, as well, seeking a new kind of soldier to fight a new kind of war. I could neither see the kind of soldier nor the kind of war, but I could see conscription papers held in that skeletal hand once again reaching out to me across Hell’s enlistment table. Changing the world, but in the end the same old kinds of soldiers dying in the same old kinds of ways in the same old kinds of wars.

  Why does Death never tire of the same old joke? Or is it that Uncle Reaper keeps pulling that tired old gag on the human race over and over again until we finally get it?

  Two soldiers walk onto a battlefield and aim at each other. Bang!

  Get it? No.

  Well, maybe next time—

  —A flash of light, a shock wave picking me up and throwing me into the dark: that was in some village in Iran or perhaps an operating table defibrillator moment.

  —Dragging someone out of the line of fire one second then a fist driving me into the dirt—

  —Someone else dragging me out of the line of fire.

  —Friends, family dropping, their bodies torn by grotesque wounds. For each casualty suffered by the Six double-eight we took slightly more than two hundred and fifty-seven enemy lives. Triple that in wounded and missing.

  —Two thousand soldiers walk onto a battlefield—

  —You don’t get it yet?

  As has been noted: Sometimes material needs more work; Sometimes one needs a more sophisticated audience.

  Is that it? We get sucked into the same old hopeless conflicts time after time because the Human race is dim? Can’t learn from the past? Refuses to acknowledge the obvious?

  —Two million soldiers walk onto a battlefield—

  —and Uncle Reaper’s grin grows wider.

  In that squalid trailer, sitting in that chair, eating strawberry ice cream and watching my father, my grandfather, hopelessly entangled in the consequences of his own design. I could taste that ice cream—the best strawberry ice cream I had ever tasted and I didn’t even note the brand.

  I felt nothing for the tortured man in the bolted down chair. What goes around comes around, Perky. Texas law wouldn’t have allowed Perkins Eddy to suffer that kind of punishment. After all, that’s not who we are, at least not in public. We’ll shoot Osama in the eye, but we won’t show the picture of that to the hundreds of millions who spent billions to see that picture because, “that’s not who we are.”

  The one who said that had no clue who we were then nor what we were becoming.

  The worst Perky could have gotten, after years of appeals and stays, would have been a feel-good lethal injection at the hands of the Texas judicial system. That elusive thing called “justice” would seem to require more of a consequence than a drug trip. Perhaps spending one’s remaining months or years undergoing one of Jaz’s computer induced nightmares would suffice. It has been said before: The law is blind; Justice has to peek.

  —Things changing—

  In that jumble of moments I felt conscious, cold, a plastic taste in my mouth, a chemical smell in my nostrils. I reached out to feel, to find, to see, to learn what I was supposed to do next. But there was nothing to touch—nothing to see. My fate was in other hands.

  Alcohol, plastic, laundry detergent, disinfectant —that unmistakable hospital odor. I was being operated on by something or someone. I could deduce that much. I was in a strange kind of other-consciousness that wanted to take me on inter and outer dimensional trips. I was feeling around, poking for a way out, reaching up from the depths, above dark waters, into the light—

  –I felt myself move–

  “Aumento la anestesia, por favor,” said a very deep voice. There was a hiss, and my choice of paths dwindled exponentially until I again saw a weary Uncle Reaper in profile sitting slumped in a chair, his scythe leaning against a mossy garden wall, the space illuminated by a single circular open patch in the trees above: a window through the leaves from which came a dim blue light.

  “Uncle, you look tired,” I said to him.

  At first I didn’t think he heard me. But he simply nodded once. A new plague, a new flood or earthquake. Perhaps a super volcano, another category five hurricane. Another rerun of that old joke?

  The sound came from that darkness inside Uncle’s black cowl. “Two billion soldiers crawl out on a battlefield and aim their weapons at each other, and they die, die, die. They will never get it.”

  He turned his head and faced me, a tear streaking down a bony cheek.

  “They will never get it.”

  —The look on the face of Alonso Cruz’s mother, the torture of being pulled between motherhood and being in a military family. And she had cried for me as I had cried for more things than I could number.

  —She had cried for me . . .

  For a moment Jazmín’s face floated above me against a sea of diamonds, her expression a mix of impatience, love, and fear. I could see her lips moving but couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  . . . Ojos . . . abiertos . . .

  —My eyes. She was talking about my eyes. My eyes were open.

  Of course they were. I couldn’t have seen her otherwise. But the light was too bright, I closed my eyelids against the glare, and followed the bright spots down a labyrinth of dim tunnels to where Uncle Reaper was again telling the same old joke to a universe of new bloody listeners.

  “Twenty billion soldiers transport onto a battlefield— Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—”

  In one of the tunnels was a previous reality— The man, Juan-Diego, speaking in Spanish using the voice of the War Whisperer: “. . . have had the Devil’s own time trying to get in touch with you.”

  Question: Does the marionette look upon the master’s strings as movement, energy, a benign slavery, or a very resented limitation on freedom? Of course, a part of myself chided, hunks of seasoned wood do not look upon anything as anything.

  And so what is the point of searching for the perfect phrase with which to describe a feeling or a dream? No one with ears or eyes sufficiently open and neutral could receive and understand the map of words.

  —Am I dying? I wondered.

  So what if I am? I answered myself. I’ve served friends, school, parent, and country. Not so well, perhaps, but I had given it my best.

  Would Aguilar need a killer he would first have to spend a fortune to heal? Old bullets splattering old brains? Was that it? A new kind of soldier for a new kind of war? War—any kind of armed conflict with Mexico— would be a preposterous undertaking for an entity as small as Tamaulipas.

  “See,” said Uncle Reaper as he grabbed the mike and addressed the audience, “Goliath and David walked out onto a battlefield, and David put his hand into his scrip and took out a stone, and cast it with a sling, and fetching it about struck the Philistine in the forehead—”

  Laughter.

  “—Where it stuck!”

  Uproarious laughter.

  “—And Goliath fell flat on his face!”

  Screams.

  Yeah. Billions of bloody heads laughing.

  Uncle Reaper was killing them.

  —So distant from my ICI signals, the sounds became faint, my perception of my communication interface intermittent and garbled, then darkness again. Perhaps I never had heard them, the noise—the whispers. Perhaps I perceived nothing more than echoes from inside my own mind.

  —Place where the Lipan prey—that is what “tamaulipas” means in Huastec, a Mayan related language. I am a Lipan in Tamaulipas, I thought. So, pray tell, for what does this Lipan prey?

  “Prey” in that context means “hunt.” Do I hunt a purpose? a mission? A family? to go back in time and rearrange everything? To find more lives to end?

  I listen, I look, I seek, and it is none of those.

  Emptiness. Nothingness. Answerless, gray nothing. What do I hunt? What do I seek? What is Jerry Track’s cause now? Instead of having another mission, another goal, thrust upon me, this time I would like to choose.

  —Someone interrupting . . . talking about blood pressure dropping. None of my affair.

  Trying to locate my train of thought through a soup of molasses . . .

  Causes.

  That was it. Choosing
a cause without knowing what the choices are.

  I am here because this is where my mother might find life. And I owe someone for that life: Juan-Diego Aguilar. What is the old man’s price for his miracles? Are there any causes left that I could bring myself to serve to pay him back only to find the masters of those causes serve only themselves, fantasies, ignorance, or worse: that old joke?

  The galactic manifestation of Uncle Reaper, “Two trillion beings walk, crawl, slither, and transport to a battlefield. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

  Presumptuous, a search for things worth doing when the continued existence of the proposed doer is in such doubt. Still, there was always the possibility, however slight, I might live. Should I live, the question is what to do.

  How many causes had there been? How many fights, battles, wars? In the four billion year struggle of this thing called life what was the total body count?

  —And now what? Another war with Mexico? Another revolution? How? With what? I could feel myself dressed as David in his skimpy little shepherd’s skirt carrying a sling and five little stones as five hundred armored and spear-toting Goliaths walked onto the field before me.

  Yeah.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one—

  —My ICI came on tuned into some podcast. Pancho Villa’s real name was José Doroteo Arango Arámbula Francisco Villa. A part of my brain wants to laugh but the nerve that carries the electrochemical impulse from the brain to the rest of the body is somehow blocked.

  I could hear someone—several unknowns—singing “La Cucaracha.”

  The cockroach, the cockroach,

  cannot walk anymore

  because it doesn’t have, because it’s lacking

  marijuana to smoke.

  Ya no puede caminar . . . This dream state, this supposed period of unconsciousness was wearing me out. An eternity of battles, a Germanic Valhalla, the dead rising to fight again and again, and stoner cockroaches. No wonder Uncle Reaper was tired.

  Where was the shade beneath Stonewall Jackson’s trees? Where is the approaching light? Those pearly gates? The curtains hiding that mysterious God thing at last swept aside to reveal simply another flawed creature with a knack for drama —

  Porque no tiene, porque le falta

  Marijuana que fumar.

  A fuzzy image hovered above me joined by a second and a third. I heard words I couldn’t understand against a hollow hissing in my ears. One of the images drifted very close, dark brown eyes above a turquoise mask.

  “So doctor of the dark eyes,” I slurred to the image, “when you drop a scalpel on the operating room floor, does your protocol require spitting on it before or after you wipe it on your ass?”

  The dark eyes squinted and the image laughed.

  Another fuzzy image said something. It repeated what I had said, but in Spanish. More laughter as someone increased the anesthesia.

  What I could see faded until the universe was again consumed by blackness. I was out but not unconscious is how it seemed. I was lost in blackness and trying to feel about with hands and feet I was uncertain existed. I wondered how my mother was doing, how I was doing, and again why this Aguilar fellow was going to such an expense. I waited then got terribly bored standing in eternity’s queue for answers no one had. I demanded either death or to wake up, and wondered if any of my ICI game apps were accessible in my present state.

  They were not.

  Debts. I owed the Aguilar fellow several fortunes. Beyond that? There once was trying to find love, a family, a brother, a woman, all once upon a time. There was trying to learn everything that interested me and helping everyone in my ten. There was seeking an answer to my brother’s blood.

  —Those were good and righteous times, and in the case of Bingwen Lee, exciting and fun. However, those were old numbers; those accounts were closed.

  —Weariness suddenly consumed me, filled me, drove me to my knees leaving me weak and helpless before some gigantic approaching menace; its appearance, its nature, absolute mysteries. My ignorance left me at a loss as to which of my weapons to bring to bear. I was kneeling beside weary Uncle Reaper, my hand holding onto his bony thigh through his stringy black robe.

  The Reaper turned his head, looked at me, and asked me what I was feeling.

  “Feeling,” I slurred. “It . . . My life unfolding before my mind’s eye. Thought it would be a rerun, not a remix with critical viewer commentary.”

  And Uncle Reaper opened his grinning jaws and laughed. So much better facing death with a joke rather than with screams or tears.

  What was I feeling? I felt . . . directionless, numb, guilty, dumb, at a loss as to what to want, as to what to do.

  “It is coming for me, though,” I said. “This weight, this machine, this destiny.” What was coming would do what it would, my inability to do anything about it a crushing mass upon me. This was going to be it: the end of the confusion, the life, the pain of that Lipan Apache baby who never was meant to live.

  —Back among the broken taco shells,

  Spoiled mayo, flour dust, and moldy guacamole for a bed, a Dumpster for his crib, Satan’s unwanted child . . .

  I felt myself laugh. The jokes were getting a little better. More drugs to drive me deeper into darkness . . .

  Calling Perkins Eddy “Satan” was a bit of wordplay arrogance, however. It elevated me to a dark princely office that sounded very sinister and powerful—possibly even cool: Satan’s child, Hell’s heir apparent.

  No pretenses in this dream, however. Perkins Eddy had not been Satan; He had been an asshole, and I was Asshole’s Child. Not much meaning to my existence, and the only accomplishments I had were a few songs, a smallish pile of money, and a very long string of corpses whose deaths may have served some purpose or other at various points in time.

  “Well,” pointed out that dark figure holding out a skeletal hand, the palm upraised, “there was glory, wasn’t there? There were all your medals.”

  “Tin and ribbons,” I retorted. “Billy Kilroy used to mutter scornfully, ‘ribbons and tin’. There is no glory in death, Uncle. Dead is just dead.”

  I reached over to pin my Distinguished Service Cross on Reaper’s robe, and as I did do both medal and specter faded into nothing.

  Tin and ribbons, ribbons and tin;

  We all see the death. When’s the glory begin?

  The recognition we valued came from words, touches, looks from brothers and sisters, loved ones, not from ribbons and tin presented by some general or politician who hadn’t been close enough to the action to smell the blood or wipe the brain spatter and shit from their faces.

  Yeah. Snobbery. There’s no bigger snob than an infantry grunt. “If you’d been through what I been—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Have another beer and shut up.”

  —A bright blue light came at me, as if my body took a deep breath for the first time in a decade, the oxygen-rich blood filling me with a new and dizzying energy. I had been so prepared to die. But now life—

  —or was this the real reaper: Death. In those near-death experiences people always talked about a light, and there it was. I saw the light, felt it filling me with afterlife—

  A hiss, a metallic instrument dropped into a metal tray, voices low and serious, I was under anesthetic. I knew that. I shouted to myself and to the universe claiming my part in existence, but standing there before me was that tall black-shrouded figure, my true father, an all too familiar skeletal hand with an upraised bony index finger wagging back and forth at me in contradiction. Tch, tch, tch.

  Uncle Reaper.

  He stood there, this irreverent joke of generations of orphan assassins, this death’s-head uniform patch, this motorcycle gang tattoo, this spirit to whom I had half-prayed more times than I could admit.

  —The bony dude in the black hoody.

  “Hi, Reap,” I said. “Business been good?”

  He stood there silently, patiently grinning, watching me, undecided still whether I was one of his children, one of his agents, his replacement, or his very next client. “Good enough,” he said.