You go left, my eyes ordered Eddie. We’ve communicated in battle situations without talking since we were young lieutenants, in Iraq War One. And even before that, at ROTC, in Massachusetts, where we met.
Eddie’s quick glance said, If he’s in there, he left that front door open. Step in, Marines, and BOOM!
My hand signals told Eddie, Ready? One… two…
We burst in, me in the lead, Eddie taking the corners. Me processing the scene, thinking, Nothing moving yet… two rooms: the bunk room and the kitchen area. Corners clear. Body one in the lower bunk. Body two on the floor. Flies. Lots of flies. Clouds of flies. That was what I saw move by the window.
Eddie came out of the closet-sized, honey-bucket bathroom, and I smelled urine and shit from in there, unemptied buckets.
“All clear, Uno,” he said, lowering his Mossberg, leaning against the wall in momentary relief.
But then the flies moved again as a mass, rising off the form on the bunk, to cross the window, a fast-moving shadow, a hungry buzz, and the relief was over.
Oh man…
Eddie knelt at the lower bunk. A poster above the upper one pictured a smiling female researcher in a Woods Hole Institute sweatshirt, holding up tweezers and a Ziploc bag: REMEMBER TO FREEZE YOUR SAMPLES!!! A second poster showed a big polar bear, teeth bared, and the caption: LOOK BEFORE YOU STEP OUTSIDE!
“Oh, Christ, One. It’s Kelley.”
She lay — what remained of her — in a torn heap of bedding, and I had to force myself to look at the mass of muscle, liquid, and ligature where her head had been. A bare foot protruded from the shredded North Face sleeping bag. The flies were a tropism drawn to the worst kind of luck. The stuffing poked out, soaked with black blood. She’d been thrown into the wall by the blast, smearing the planking with grayish brain matter, a raisin-sized bit of discolored bone wedged between planks, and then she’d bounced off and settled. The limbs showed all the animation of a straw doll’s. A mass of strawberry-blond hair was pasted by blood to the wall. A single yellow strand glowed abruptly in a beam of sunlight coming through the window, flaring and dying as quickly as a soul departs a body.
That lone hair got to me more than the rest of the carnage. One hair. The strand you find in a teenage girl’s brush, and it went along with the innocent items on the milk crate night table, sitting an arm’s reach from the body; a Head & Shoulders shampoo bottle, a red-banded Mickey Mouse watch, a silvery palm-sized miniature digital recorder, a half-empty pack of Juicy Fruit gum.
“That mirror is busted over there,” I said, jerking my head toward a part of the cabin otherwise untouched by violence. Something about it stood out… a mirror… shattered… a mirror…
“Shot up?” Eddie said.
“No. No pellet marks. Someone must have just smashed it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“How the hell do I know?” I snapped.
I fought off a wave of sickness.
The upper bunk was untouched, a sleeping bag unrolled and zipped, just lying there. Mom’s probably. The women slept on one side of this cabin, guys on the other.
Eddie knelt in the center of the room, by the second body. The shooter, from the look of things. Merlin’s cousin Clay Qaqulik. Eddie going through the pockets. It’s funny how, even in the wild, some people carry a wallet.
“It’s Clay, all right.”
He lay by his shotgun, but only half of his face looked back, one pale brown eye gaping, slick cheekbones visible on the left side, as in a medical school display. The human male skull. The rest of what had once constituted a face was splattered across the thick planking, with more gray matter glommed onto the legs of a small splintery wooden table, below a tin of canned milk, a box of Trader Joe’s wheat bran flakes, a box of cracker-like Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a half-played Monopoly game, with a plastic hotel sitting on Park Place, and a bagged half-loaf of Wonder bread — with a lone fly trapped inside, stuck to the condensation in the bag.
I also saw a pack of Zithromax, a five-day antibiotic, with three of the five pills missing. And an open bottle of Tylenol.
They were sick, sure, but with what?
The shooter’s trigger finger — left hand — was still snagged in the guard of the Remington pump action and the left arm was twisted, dislocated. When he’d blown off half his face, the recoil had snagged the finger, torn wrist tendons as the blast pulled the shotgun one way, the man the other.
Eddie flicked his head toward the door, referring to the bodies outside. “Mom and Dad were on their backs, so—”
“So Kelley’s still in her sleeping bag, which she would have tried to get out of if she heard shots. You think the first killing was here?”
“The shooting on the phone call was in here.”
“So Clay comes in here first, and the parents hear it and run toward the house to help. He steps out and shoots them, too. He comes back in. He shoots himself.”
In my head, I heard it: BOOM… BOOM…
Eddie said, “Or he shoots the parents first, Kelley’s too scared to move. Then he does her. But why?” Eddie said, pulling on rubber gloves.
I tried to remember the phone message. “Kelley said something about Clay seeing things. Hallucinating.”
Outside, Merlin and his deputies walked the perimeter of the camp, checking for people or evidence.
“I’m thinking Fort Hood,” Eddie mused as we got out the Ziploc bags and tie-on masks, forcing ourselves to start the awful collecting: fingernail clippings, blood samples, hair bits for a toxics test.
Eddie said, “He wouldn’t be the first vet who went around the bend. Kills three. Turns on himself. Alcohol… drugs… plenty of that up here… Or maybe being sick made everything worse.”
I thought about it. I shook my head. “It doesn’t explain the call. She said they were all sick. She was terrified because they were all sick. She didn’t even mention a shotgun. Don’t you think, if it was just about Clay, that the whole call would have been about him?”
Eddie sat back on his heels. He showed a lot of white in his eyes when he was concentrating. He shook his head. “This won’t have anything to do with us, or our mission. Don’t look at me like that! I’m just saying.”
“She called us, Eddie. She needed help. The mission? Who cares about the goddamn mission! What the hell happened here?”
“She’s scared. Disoriented. Babbling. I can think of drugs or chemicals that would make you paranoid as hell.”
“I want to test these bodies,” I said.
Despite the cold, I felt sweat in my eyes. There was a quick, small movement to my left, and I instinctively moved sideways, grabbed for my Mossberg, only to see a miniature mammal, a rodent-like vole, scamper from under the bunk and out the open doorway.
I said, rapid breathing subsiding, “She said she kept a diary of symptoms. Book diary? Or computer?”
“Laptop’s my guess. Or some new super mobile device that only kids and tech geniuses know about.”
“Take the laptop. And,” I said, eyeing two items on the night table, “that little voice recorder of hers.”
We forced ourselves to start looking for a diary, whatever form it took.
I knew that shock and grief would come later, when we got home — and later still, would be added to the roll call of Marine bad dreams.
Eddie found another busted mirror in the honey-bucket room. Just a little six by six thing that had been hanging on the wall, and was now shattered, its glazed pieces lying on the floor.