The Wrecking-crew

Everybody was off doing their own thing. I sat on the couch, alone, in my usual place, feeling sorry for useless ass, a drink in one hand and my revolver in the other.

As I slowly got drunk, I began hearing voices. These were voices I had know a long time ago and they belonged to people I knew were dead.

One in particular belonged to a guy named Carlos. We’d been tight in the Suck and I was there the day half of his head exploded from the bullet of a Kalashnikov.

“Come on, Tom,” he gently said, “Then we’ll all be together again.”

Slowly, his form moved from the shadows and into the light that slipped through the blinds from the streetlamps outside. In quick succession there was Johnny, Ray-Ray, Olsen, Gonzales, Jonesy-boy, Smitty, Garrison, Ames, Manetti and Metcalf.

They were all there. The old Wrecking-crew as we were known, the one’s given the shit-ass jobs that no one else wanted to do.

“Come on, Doc, don’t be a coward,” Carlos said.

I fingered the revolver that I had resting on the arm of the sofa and took another slug of my drink.

“You ain’t Carlos,” I stated. “Carlos would never called me coward, pussy, maybe but not coward.”

I gulp another mouthful of my liquid courage and closed my eyes.

“You can’t fool a fool,” I chuckled to myself.

Then came the figures from the darkness no man wants to see. The death and the possible dead, that he helped create.

They were there for me. And though I had no idea what these being were saying as they spoke their own tongue and not my native American English, I knew they were urging me to commit the final act.

One figure moved closer than the others. I recognized his face, though it was half-rotted.

He was a Soviet Army officer and he still bore the wound I inflicted on him jus’ to the left of his sternum. His uniform was matted with mud and debris, the wound entrance, though tiny, was stained a greasy, black and the hole in his tunic was rough edged.

“Yбей себя,” he repeated over and over.

Though I speak not Russian, I was certain he was also urging me to kill myself. I picked the revolver up again, followed by more drink.

“да!” he hissed at me.

It was one of two or three word I understood and it startled me. So, I took another long swallow of booze before answering, “Hет!”

With that I popped open the cylinder of the gun and slowly began unloading the cartridges, standing them up, single file a pointer finger width apart on the glass coffee table before me. As I did this the atmosphere in the half-lighted room changed and became chilled.

I picked my glass up and tossed off the last of the liquor.

The many figures, those that appeared as my buddies, those whose memories still torment my sleep and sometimes my waking hours, were gone. In the corner though, half-crouching was a hideous creature, red skin that remained taut across it’s sharp bony features, yellow-green eyes, that did not blink and elongated hands with fingers that bore dull-black dagger like nails.

“You,” I said, as a challenge. “Probably not what you really look like either, you old bastard, trickster!”

He words came to me as a growl, but I could not understand them either. Again, I was certain he was trying to get me to end my life so he could have my soul.

Staring at him, I reached for the bottle at the edge of the table and pour myself another snoot full of alcohol. I downed it and leaned back in the couch.

The thing in the corner growled and hissed some more instructions. Then it fell silent.

Still staring into the malignant eyes of that other-worldly grotesque, I began, “The Lord is my shepherd…”

The table began to shake violently and suddenly shattered as if struck my a baseball bat. My eye’s left the monster to see the table divide into a thousand shards, and when I looked back, the malevolent creature had vanished.

I continued, “I shall not want.”