He stared at me for a long moment. “Listen,” he said, “I know I haven’t been the best dad. I know I can be better. You have a few more months before you can leave on your own. Let’s make those months good ones. If not for our sake, for your mother’s. Okay?”
I felt a powerful emotion grow in my chest. For the first time in forever, he was acting like a father. He was doing everything I’d wanted him to do. I opened my mouth to speak, but found I couldn’t.
“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.
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.