“Let me sign some paperwork, then you and I can be on our way,” he said as he turned.
“Hey, Dad?”
He turned back.
“Can you get Wheatie out of here, too?”
My father’s smile fell and his face contorted into a mask of tortured anger.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Wheatie.”
“What about him?”
“You keep talking about him as if he’s still alive.”
“What are you talking about?” I turned to where Wheatie sat. Gone was his usual smile. He frowned and his face looked different.
“Wheatie drowned in that pond the same day you and Helen were attacked.”
I watched as Wheatie’s skin began to flake away and his hair began to fall out. A spider crawled out of his mouth and found a home in his now empty eye socket.
“The doctors said that I shouldn’t press it, that I should let you realize his death on your own.”
“Wheatie’s dead?” I asked, the words whining from my mouth. I went to repeat it, but only my mouth moved. No sound came out.
“Yes, son.”
Where Wheatie had been, there was nothing but a pile of dust and bone. Wheatie had disappeared into that black water the same night four strangers had left permanent bruises on our souls.
I remembered.
I remembered it all.
“They pulled him from the water the next morning,” I said.
My father nodded.
“No one knows why he was in the pond. He didn’t even know how to swim.”
He nodded again.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why’d you let me go on like that?”
“I have told you. I tell you every year and then you just sort of forget. The worse things get, the more you seem to need Wheatie.”
I felt a pressurized balloon blow inside me and emotion rushed to my face. I couldn’t help it as I cried over the loss of a friend who’d died a few moments ago and four years ago.
Wheatie.
Helen.
The Black Water.
“Oh, Dad, it’s just too much,” I managed to say between sobs.
Then the ghost of Wheatie whispered into my ear, “Joe Ledger. Teen heartthrob.”
And I completely lost it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and Special Operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and nonfiction have been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, the New York Post, the Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the Twenty-first Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. He has written more than twenty-six books in multiple genres, and his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci-fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war.
INSTINCT (A GHOST STORY)
BY BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT AND G. P. CHARLES
A nuclear bomb.
My master and I had just fought our way past armed thugs into the bowels of the Aghajari Oil Refinery near Tehran, Iran, and now this. Hidden in a cavern carved out deep underground. Walls chiseled out of stone, lined with stacked wooden crates, surrounded us on all sides. The chamber itself was massive. Water dripped from the ceiling high above and pooled around broken rock and clay, and at least two dozen human corpses. The air smelled of mold, moss, sweat, dust, oil … and death. So much death. I shivered involuntarily, unnerved. And my master gave me a concerned look.
I was trained for all kinds of situations. Especially dead bodies. I should not have been afraid. But I was. I couldn’t help it. The fear in the air crushed around me like a human embrace.
“Easy, boy,” he said. “It’s okay, Ghost … it’ll all be okay.”
My master shone his light around the cavern, turning back, and found a dozen sets of clothes, folded neatly atop a nearby crate. “Oh shit,” he muttered. He dropped his balaclava and began winding through the stacks, examining the crates, illuminating them with his flashlight as he went. Then he froze. And I sensed his tension rising. Heard his heart pound faster.
I moved cautiously up beside him to peer at what he was seeing: a real, live nuclear bomb.
As my master would say: What the fuck were we doing here?
Even in danger, my master’s a smart-ass.
With one sniff, I could tell my master found it just as unsettling as I did, despite our expectations. I sensed he wanted to run, but instead we both just stared at it.
Joe Ledger, that’s my master. Kind of a badass to most people. Of course, I can hold my own, too. In fact, he may get most of the credit, but I like to think he couldn’t do it without me. Ghost, that’s my name, and with a name like that, I suppose a lower profile is only natural. That, plus the fact I walk on four legs and am a lot shorter.
We’d come here for this. That had been the assignment. Terrorists threatening to set off multiple nukes—our job was to find them. That didn’t make it any more pleasant realizing you actually had and were standing right next to it, a few feet away. It lay in the center of the cavern floor with thick, snakelike power cords coiling off from it toward a nearby wall.
It didn’t help that the whole place had the overwhelming odor of rot and death, either. Rotting meat was just part of it. My nose crinkled as I digested this. There was one more smell, too—adrenaline, hot breaths, warm blood—fear.
My master tapped his ear—no doubt hoping for the signal he needed to communicate with the team. His shoulders sank again, and I knew it wasn’t working. He stood there for the longest time, examining the bomb. It was at least twice my height and several times longer and wider than me. There was no ticking sound, but I didn’t know if that was good or bad, and from the way my master looked at it, I could tell he wasn’t quite sure, either.
“Okay,” he said, and moved around it, going for a closer look, his flashlight’s beam leading the way.
With a clink, he removed his tool kit from his pack, unrolled it, then took a screwdriver in one hand and the flashlight in the other and went to work. My master is smart and he knows lots of stuff, but I had to fight the urge to shrink back as I thought, I hope he knows what he’s doing.
I sniffed again, listening to the air around us as my master removed a metal shield. Sweat poured down his face to sting his eyes and he winced before taking a metal plate and several screws and setting them gently aside. I locked my eyes on his face, watching for any signs as he examined the interior of the bomb. What was it? I wished he’d tell me, but instead he took the screwdriver and began unfastening something else I couldn’t see.
As his hand came away again, the plate he pulled back was the same metal but smaller. He was seeing something. And I sensed him relax, even as tension left his body and his eyebrows raised in question. “What the fuck?” he muttered.
Still no ticking. Even the scent of his adrenaline faded a bit. Was that good or bad? I wagged my tail, hoping he’d tell me.
“Ghost, old buddy,” he said as he continued staring at the bomb, “I think we got lucky.”
Then my ears popped up at a soft scuffing behind me and we both spun around. A growl rose in my throat as the smells of fear and death grew stronger again.
There were two of them. One a major my master had fought earlier, who’d lost his teeth. The other in orange coveralls of refinery staff. The major smiled, showing fangs, his real teeth. Long fangs. Red Knights!
Though both were armed, neither they nor my master had drawn their weapons. But their eyes glowed at us: red, haunti
ng.
My body started shaking and I let out a whimper as my bladder let go. I had no control. Now the urge to run was almost overwhelming, but I couldn’t move.
The two men’s smiles widened.
And I was torn between the shame at my own fear and immobility, sensing the disappointment of my master. He was counting on me and yet I couldn’t do a thing. A thousand blips of memories, of things Joe and I had been through, flooded my mind, taking over all my thoughts. Desperate for something to ground the world around me, I focused on one, the earliest. The day I met my master.
He was broken, I could sense it. Not physically—though he bore the evidence of that as well. Damaged in a way I couldn’t see. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like him. He reminded me of the Man, the ex-Marine who caged my mum and me and my siblings in filth. Whose voice was as harsh and cruel as the wire we slept on each night. The Man and this Joe Ledger had the same hair color, the same … hardness … to their eyes. From experience, I knew that hardness changed only when it came with pain. My pain. My mum’s pain. The pups around us who I could smell and hear but never saw. If I was too eager for my food, a steel-toed boot would thump into my ribs. And those eyes glinted like glass.
I couldn’t possibly be safe here.
I narrowed my gaze on Joe and lowered my ears.
My trainer, Zan Rosin, smiled at Joe. “He’s a very nice dog,” she said. “He’s exceptionally smart and has already passed through standard and advanced training in search and rescue, bomb detection, bark and hold, high-speed disarm, cover and concealment…” Her words trickled down and stopped.
Joe scowled at me. He didn’t like me much, either. Fine. I’d put an end to this and go back with the woman who’d spent so much time teaching me. The woman who’d rescued me and taught me kindness. I curled my lip and bared my teeth.
I tried to pull myself out of the cycling memories, back into the cavern of rot and death. But the fear … I was back in that horrible puppy mill again, terrified to poke even my nose out of my cage when Zan rescued me, certain the pain would come again. That maybe this time, like my youngest littermate, I wouldn’t survive it.
Memories cycled again. Another took over, an echoing laugh that was warm, friendly, and accompanied belly rubs. Rudy. Rudy was always safe.
“How long’s it going to be, Joe, before you acknowledge the pain instead of trying to drown it? Grace is gone, and I miss her, too, but she’d roll over in her grave if she could see you right now,” Rudy said, his usually kind voice harsher than what I’d become accustomed to.
Joe instantly turned cold, his words sharp and intense, though not a shout. “Fuck you.”
“Nothing changes no matter how often you say that. I get the message—I’ll let you wallow. You do that damn well.” He snatched his keys off the table and stalked to the door.
Joe made no move to get up. Confused, I glanced between the closed front door and my master. I’d only known him a couple of weeks, but I’d not seen him this way. As if Rudy’s words stole something from him.
Joe lifted his beer bottle at me and cracked a sardonic smile. “Cold, hard honesty.” He took a long slug, frowned at the bottle, then set it aside and stared out the window.
Something was different. I didn’t know what, but I sensed it in my bones. And I was Joe’s companion now, so I did what seemed right. I rested my nose on his thigh. His hand fell on my head, fingers barely shifting through my hair.
“He’s right, you know,” he murmured quietly. “I am wallowing. Because nothing’s the same without her. You’d have liked her, Ghost.” He shook his head. “You’d have loved her.” His fingers gripped tighter—not painfully—and then relaxed completely.
“I’m going to bed. You coming?” He pushed out of the chair.
I wagged my tail hesitantly. My dog bed was evidence of my new freedom—no kennel at night. Run of the house. Soft bed to curl up on while I guarded him and the house. Only Joe had never invited me. I followed as I ought to. Something had definitely changed.
The following morning Rudy interrupted our training session—something completely out of the ordinary. “Joe, they found him,” he said urgently.
Joe froze in place. He radiated an intensity I only ever felt when Rudy brought up his lost mate. In moments, we were running, meeting with the man Joe called Church, and what seemed even seconds later, boarding a giant winged bird, heading someplace called Amsterdam. I asked no questions. It was my duty. I was working … and I sensed Joe was, too.
We met another man—one I’d end up never forgetting—after the long air ride. Spurlock, Joe called him. During the taxi ride to what would be our destination, they talked about Joe’s mate, Grace. Joe didn’t like what Spurlock said. And strangely, I found myself not liking him for upsetting Joe. We hadn’t been together long, but I liked him. He treated me like a friend. A partner in all he did.
“Well,” Spurlock said, “at least we have the bastard cornered. Time for a little bit of payback.”
Silence filled the car. Outside the windows, the island rolled by, green and pretty. I watched Joe, though. His energy was all over the place. I didn’t know how to communicate with him, not in the way he talked with me, at least. I didn’t have words. But I did have a voice.
I whined, telling him I understood.
Joe reached back and ran a hand over my head.
I’ve got this. I’m right here, I wanted to say. But he’d never understand my limited language. I couldn’t rumple his fur, but I could lick his fingers. And so I did.
* * *
“Fetch dog,” someone said as my eyes focused again. The two knights kept staring at me. The major laughed and sneered as he touched his chest and drew a line with his fingers above his eyes. What did that mean? Some sort of crazy human ritual?
“If you kill that piece-of-shit dog, we will make it easy for you,” said the other knight, the one in the maintenance uniform, smiling.
And I shrank back involuntarily, afraid, even as my master’s eyes went from fear to fury.
“Here’s an idea,” my master said, and instantly threw a screwdriver at the maintenance knight with his left hand while drawing his pistol with his right. The shiny, well-oiled black metal glinted in the low light.
The knight in overalls caught the screwdriver.
Then a red dot opened in his forehead as my master fired the pistol right at the knight’s nose and he flew back. Blood and brains splattered out the back of his head as his neck snapped with a crack and he landed hard against a stony wall, sinking into a heap on the floor.
The major didn’t even react. Instead, like a blur he rushed my master and me. I barked and lunged as my master fired again, but then stopped myself. I was trained not to jump in when my master was shooting.
The bullet hit the major sideways, passing through his elbow and sinking into his hip. He seemed to lose footing then, falling to the side and screaming.
“Hit!” my master ordered.
I was on the major like lightning, as fast as I could, tearing at his flesh, as the Red Knight’s screams rose in pitch and desperation. I smelled garlic and gunpowder mixed with his warm, dead blood as it soaked into my fur, and I tore out his throat, then ripped his arm to shreds as he tried to deflect me. Nothing entered my mind but kill. End him as fast as I could.
And it was over quickly.
As my master turned, contemplating his next move, I caught the scent of more death, more Red Knights—they were coming closer. I growled and barked in warning, staring down the hallway in the direction of the scent.
My master turned and spun his gun up as we saw movement in the shadows. Thirty or forty this time—indistinct forms in the darkness, so many forms.
One of them stepped forward as the others parted. His skin was white as snow, his eyes redder than blood, and he seemed taller and more muscular than the rest. Over his black clothes, a necklace with a silver teardrop glinted through the shadows.
My master aimed his gun at him, but
then there were footsteps behind and around us. I turned quickly, taking in the targets. More knights. We were surrounded.
“White dog…,” they whispered, and it spread through their numbers. “White dog!” Then they all touched their chests and drew lines over their eyes. Were they afraid of me? It was hard to sense it over my own terror.
The leader half turned and growled, silencing them, then turned back to my master. “I know who you are. You are Captain Ledger.” His voice was icy as winter wind, and I shivered hearing it.
“Oh shit,” my master mumbled beside me, shifting with uncertainty.
“You are a traitor to your own people,” the lead knight continued, “and an enemy of mine.”
Damn right. Kill you all.
But instead my master said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
The lead knight smiled. “Our friend told us.” His teeth shone. They were sharp, sharper than mine, menacing. My heart thumped harder as I felt the fear again.
“He said that you conspired with Rasouli and the Red Order to keep us in chains,” the leader continued.
My master’s face didn’t change as he replied, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, pal. I’m here to keep this bomb from going boom. When I’m done with that, we can sit down with a latte and talk about it.”
I sniffed the air, listening for Echo Team, but got no hint of them. We were still alone. Trapped.
“Do you know who we are?” the lead knight taunted as the others moved in, surrounding us.
I whimpered beside my master, shivering. We were in trouble. I trusted my master, but what could he possibly do? We’d waited too long. We should have run at the first sign of them.
“At a guess?” my master replied. “Grigor, chief bloodsucker of the Upierczi.”
The leader only nodded with approval, his face frozen in that terrifying smile. He told my master it would be an honor to die by his hand, as if the Red Knight knew it with certainty. I didn’t doubt him at the moment, but my master just stared.
“That’s actually not on my day planner,” he said.
The lead knight’s eyes cut left and right as the others moved closer. “Bring him to me!” he ordered.