The place he was in chilled his soul. Cold, dark, damp. A hole in the ground, literally. It was to be his home for the rest of his life, unless a miracle occurred. In this harsh reality, he knew there was no such thing.
Jonathan Brinkman sat huddled in the corner of his tiny “cell,” like an animal waiting for slaughter. Above him, the sounds of war permeated the thick, humid forest. Gunfire raged around him, swirling like a funnel cloud down to his auditory range. He clasped his hands over his ears, wanting to shut out all sounds of this thing called Nam.
Soon, Brinkman was asleep, pitched against the cold dirt wall of the makeshift cell. In his sleep, he was able to forget just for a little while. Able to forget he was a POW, soon to be MIA, never to see his wife and children back home again. Never to be able to go to sleep at night, and wake up in the morning, without the accompanying sound of warfare.
Above him on the ground, war raged. He wondered about his buddies out there, exposed. He wondered who had it worse off, them dodging gunfire and ambushes around every corner, or him stuck in this hole waiting to be tortured, maybe killed.
When Brinkman woke up, it was to the disturbing sound of silence. The air was still and unnerving. All gunfire had ceased. Brinkman sat up, his body sore from the beatings of days past, and the way he had to curve his body in on itself to stay warm. He strained forward, wanting now to hear something, anything. But there was no sound. Not even the typical hum of jungle insects or the monotone cry of the wiry tree-borne monkeys that draped the ceiling of the deep forest like a moving blanket.
By the way the shadows fell, he could tell it was evening. Twilight Time. Magic hour. Perhaps they had called a cease-fire. Brinkman laughed at this. He knew the States would never give this one up so easily.
He stretched his long limbs out the fullest extent he could. The hole he was in was a little over seven feet across, enough for him to lie flat without disturbing the little metal pot they had so generously thrown him for his waste. He forced himself to work what was left of his deteriorating muscles by doing a few sit-ups, a few leg extensions. He wasn’t able to do much, but he had to keep his body in working order… just in case…
All around him, the uncanny silence filled his ears with a roar akin to a thousand screams. Something was terribly wrong, he thought, and then he laughed. The whole Goddamned war was terribly wrong. But the hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and his skin went hot and dry as the air seemed to close in on his hole in the earth like a sucking vortex.
Suddenly, a bright light filled the hole, a white light so intense Brinkman had to shield his eyes with his arm and turn away. He could not look up into the open craw of the hole, to the source of the light. But he imagined it was some new torture device of the enemy, and he pushed himself hard into the side of the cold wall of earth, as if hoping to blend in with the dirt and go invisible.
“Jonathan.”
His name was called. Not a command, and not a trace of a Vietnamese accent. No, Brinkman could have sworn it was almost… whispered.
“Jonathan.”
Brinkman slowly dropped his protective arm from his face and peered through his eyelids at the source of the voice emanating from within the core of the white light. In the brilliance he could see a faint form, sense it more than see it.
“Who are you?” He had to struggle to get the words out of his dry throat.
He waited for a response, his body tense and ready for whatever new abuse lay in store.
“Jonathan. Do not be afraid.”
He could see them now. Three of them, descending down the hole. His heart almost ceased to beat in the grip of pure terror, and now what he saw made him more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Even more afraid than what he’d seen on the ground.
“My God…my God…” His voice was barely a whisper. “What are you?”
The three beings floated down the hole without touching dirt. They moved around Brinkman in a circle. He clutched at his chest as they hovered in full view, so he could see them, his newest enemy.
They were small, about three feet tall, and their thin bodies supported large and rounded heads that seemed to loll from side to side. But what made the air sit thick in back of Brinkman’s throat were the eyes. Their eyes. Big, black, almond-shaped pools of liquid ink that wrapped around the sides of their heads. And when he looked into those eyes, Brinkman could swear he saw his soul.
“Jonathan.”
It was not a question, not a demand. They just said his name, over and over again in a kind of mechanical harmony that reminded Brinkman of a sci-fi flick he’d once seen back in the States, when he was still a free man. This put a new terror into his heavily taxed heart. These things were robots, sent and controlled by the enemy camp. Brinkman stood slowly, hoping his six-foot frame would imply superiority, and faced the beings.
“What do you want? Who sent you here?” He tried to control the fear boiling just below surface. He knew, perhaps by sheer instinct, that he must not let these things see his fear. He felt like a lamb standing naked and unguarded before a starved pack of wolves. But even lambs had free will, and Brinkman swore no robot would take him down. He had fought of their crazy-eyed young men, boys who had bloodlust written all over their faces. No way would he go down in defeat to some technical assassin the Vietnamese soldiers had cooked up.
Like a well-trained soldier, he would fight the good fight like he’d done every day of his life for the past six months…
---
They had taken him during a night raid. Two young soldiers, dirty-faced kids with sick yellow skin and eyes sharp as broken glass. Jonathan Brinkman had just turned 23. But there was no party, no cake, and his only gift had been the shell exchange above his foxhole. He had spent his birthday watching his best buddy, Ross Capier, lose his right arm, then his life, to enemy fire.
Then the real birthday surprise jumped out before him, wrapped in fatigues and armed to the teeth. Before he could make a wish, the candles were blown out for Jonathan Brinkman. They came out from behind a low sling of brush, like jungle cats hiding in waiting. Brinkman had strayed into unknown territory without backup. Capier had been his backup, the eyes behind his head. But Capier had his own surprise waiting in store, a surprise that ripped the life from his young body, while a million miles away his mother and father sat over dinner, praying for their son.
Brinkman hadn’t realized how far he’d wandered until the butt of foreign firepower jabbed at his temple and the slit-eyed boy-cats dragged him to the ground. Brinkman could have screamed, but above the gunfire, who would have heard him?
He was taken into enemy camp hidden deep within the tangled jungle. There they questioned him, and beat him over and over again. And when he would not answer their questions, they beat him some more. But it had nothing to do with heroics. Jonathan Brinkman didn’t hold out on information because he was a brave, patriotic American. He held out because he didn’t know a thing. Nothing. He was just a Goddamned grunt who did what he was told in a war he neither cared for, believed in, nor understood.
He longed to die. Even with a young wife and two twin newborns waiting for him at home in sweet, sweet Sweetwater, West Virginia. The pain was so great, the fear even greater, that for a while, even death seemed a respite.
But death was not in the cards, and Brinkman was given a new home, this seven-foot wide hole some twenty feet deep in the suffocating jungle earth. Their routine was simple, they visited him at first three times a day, then two, beating him, often burning holes in his skin with strange-smelling cigarettes, electric prods or whatever tool or device they chose to bring. Still, Brinkman refused to speak. He didn’t have anything to say, really. He just took what came his way with all the will he could muster, screaming out in his mind the three words that had gotten through this far… “ I will survive.”
After a while, he could tell they were getting bored with their abuse, their beatings getting shorter and far less severe. They brought him food, a musty gruel, and adequate water, once at dawn and again at twilight. Sometimes, one of the real young ones, not more than a boy, would throw him down a food ration bar. They even had the decency to supply him with a few plastic bags and the metal pot for his waste.
The Hilton it was not, but it was bearable as long as he could stay alive, and sane.
It was that hope that got him through.
Until three days ago. Or at least it felt like three days’ time. That’s when the war seemed to shift locale. Since then, no one had come to beat him, or feed him, or even to see if he was still alive. He had seen neither hide nor hair of his captors. Brinkman stayed silent at first, but when the sound of gunfire had completely surrendered to the low roar of jungle creatures, that had disturbed him into a near panic.
Brinkman spent most of his waking hours screaming at the top of his lungs until his voice box croaked and his throat bled raw. His fingers bled as well from groping and clutching at the solid walls around him, trying desperately to find a ridge or crack in the side of the earth so he could climb out. But the walls were smooth and even in his stronger moments he couldn’t jump that high.
And so he screamed and hollered, eventually wailing like an injured animal, hoping someone would come. He didn’t care whom. God, he would have even welcomed the enemy soldiers with their coldness, their beatings. He would have welcomed the most brutal torture. He just wanted someone to come.
---
“Jonathan.”
Now he had gotten his wish and these things were floating before his eyes. The hair on his arms prickled with electricity. He tried to take in air through parched lips but the air had become heavy and unbreathable and as he watched these three things move closer to him, their skin emanating a milky aura that seemed to wax and wane, Brinkman felt his limbs go weak and he blacked out.
When Brinkman awoke, the light was gone. Above him, the jungle now lit up with the soft glow of the full moon peering through the treetops. Occasionally, a shell fired off in the distance and Brinkman would instinctively duck low, even though he was about as low as he could get. He leaned against the cold earth wall and thought of his wife, Ginny, and his twin boy and girl back in Sweetwater. But that thought was too painful, and he quickly turned his attention to some fresh food and water sitting beside him. The Enemy must have come back, he ventured. Sometime in the night, perhaps to check on how effective their robots were.
Brinkman cringed as he tried to move. His head throbbed and his back ached from the curled position he had been in. He put his hand to his temple to try and rub the pain away, and his hand touched something wet and thick. Brinkman recoiled as he looked at his hand and saw blood. He touched his ear and there was more, fairly fresh. What had they done to him, the robots?
They had put him under. In a trance. Perhaps they had induced it with a drug; something sprayed into the air. Or maybe they had used mind control. He remembered their eyes, those massive inky wells, and how he had felt his consciousness slipping away under their hypnotic power. But he did not know what they did to him once he was under their spell, although the blood from his ears sent chills up his spine.
In the meager moonlight, Brinkman pulled up his filthy shirt and examined his chest. There were cuts all over, and bruises, but those had simple explanations. Beatings will do that to you. But even the beatings of the Enemy could not explain the drops of blood gathered around his navel. Terrified, Brinkman unzipped his pants and lowered them, holding his breath, then letting it explode in gasps, when he saw fresh blood clinging to the tip of his penis.
Brinkman went numb. They had done things to him, things to his body while he lay helpless out cold. But they had left him food and water. Brinkman didn’t allow the thought to enter his mind, but it did, nonetheless, creeping in through an opening deep in the back of his subconscious…
Perhaps the soldiers were long gone, and these things, these robots or creatures or whatever they were, were his new caretakers. He was dealing now with a whole new enemy. One he had no idea how to fight.
The deeper night fell, the more confused Brinkman became. His head was a jumble of thoughts of fear, of survival; worry for himself and for his fellow grunts that might be out there waiting in holes like this one, hoping to be discovered. Brinkman felt like a victim of something he couldn’t understand. Something that had the power to float down twenty-foot holes and light up the entire sky, and make him go blank against his will.
He had long ago begun questioning his sanity. But occasionally he would get those incredible moments of clarity, where he knew everything that had happened was real.
And then they came back.
“Jonathan.”
He had not been sleeping this time. He was waiting for them. Four nights he waited, sleeping intermittently, not wanting to be taken by surprise. No, never by surprise. That’s what had gotten him into this damned hole.
“What do you want with me?” Brinkman forced back the tension and fear in his voice.
There was a brilliant blue beam, shining down into the hole, and Brinkman looked up at a round hovering metal object holding court just above treetop level. The three things floated out of a hatch on the bottom of the object and gently drifted downward on the beam, into the hole.
Brinkman stood up and moved into the center of the hole, determined to stand his ground. His body shook with fear, but he would not let them see it. He tightened himself up, mentally pushing waves of terror downward, centering his energy. It was something he had learned in college, some martial arts stuff his roommate had shown him.
Right now, it seemed to be working.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t come any closer.”
The three creatures surrounded him, but they did not touch him, just stared at him with those eyes, swaying as they floated only inches from the dirt. They were so thin and so much smaller than he was, and now Brinkman could really focus on their bodies. They had arms and hands, but their fingers were more like webbed stumps. Other than the huge eyes, their nose and mouth were nothing but small slits and he could not make out any ear openings.
Brinkman forced himself to keep his focus off their eyes, but they were like magnets, drawing him in and making him go weak. He fought with every inch of his will to turn away, but he was losing ground. They were in his head now, talking in calm deep voices, asking him to look. They just wanted him to look. Just don’t be afraid and… look.
And he looked.
A white fog lifted and Brinkman opened his eyes but the lids felt heavy. He sat up and realized he was not in his hole. He was in a strange place, a place far from the dense, wet, war-torn jungle he had come to call home. He was on a long, steel table in the center of a large, blindingly white room. The walls of the room were blank and windowless and other than the table he lay on, there was no other furniture around.
Above him, Brinkman saw a big machine with long robotic arms. At the end of one arm was a hypodermic. Another ended in what appeared to be a tiny probing camera lens. Brinkman tried to move his arms and legs but his body felt like a block of lead. He finally forced his feet to the edge of the table and held onto the side as he used his arms to spring his body off the table. He had to struggle to stay balanced as his feet hit the ground. It was as if he hadn’t walked in years and his legs responded with stabs of pain as he stepped away from the table.
Brinkman made his way down a long hallway. The ceiling was low and he had to stoop to accommodate his large frame. He had seen no forms of life since he came to, but was certain he was not alone. His hunch proved correct as he leaned up against an open doorway and peered into an adjoining room.
It looked like a surgery room. Several of the creatures hovered around a low steel table as if working on something… or someone. Brinkman moved into the room, not really caring if they saw him. He wanted to see what was on the table, and he got close before one of the milky floating things turned and saw him, its huge eyes going even wider in surprise. The thing came at Brinkman, its tiny mouth stretched back in a silent sneer. Brinkman backed up a few steps, and then pushed at the thing as it came towards him, sending its frail body floating to the far wall.
Brinkman moved towards the table and leaned over the tiny surgeons, busily working.
“Oh my God, Capier!”
Brinkman watched in a blend of horror and awe as the creatures reattached his dead buddy’s right arm to his gaping shoulder. Then Brinkman shielded his eyes as a mechanical dome over the table began to glow with an intensifying white light and a low, electronic hum permeated the room. Something stirred on the table, as if the dome’s light was manipulating Capier’s dead corpse. Brinkman squinted and could see movement and the floating beings were moving away from the table as Capier’s body literally “sat up” on the table… alive.
The creature Brinkman had pushed away now grabbed his hand and led him out of the surgery room, and this time, Brinkman didn’t struggle. He had no struggle left in him. He had just witnessed these strange beings bring his dead buddy back to life. He would let them do whatever they wanted from now on. He had no choice.
The creature stopped with Brinkman just outside the surgery room. It turned to face Brinkman and stared deeply into his eyes.
“Jonathan.”
It wasn’t spoken out loud so much as heard in Brinkman’s head.
“Is that all you know how to say? My name?” Brinkman felt a swell of anger build up inside of him, and he welcomed its promise of release.
“Why don’t you tell me what the fuck is going on here? What did you do to Capier? What are you going to do to me?”
The thing just continued to stare, its black eyes swallowing Brinkman in until he began to feel dizzy.
“No, I’m not giving in to you again. I want some fucking answers!” He stepped back a few paces, but his eyes never left the creature’s own. “I want you to stop treating me like a Goddamned animal and give me some answers!”
In a flash, Brinkman was back in the hole, being questioned by enemy soldiers. The irony made him smile weakly. Then he was back in the room. The creature seemed to shift position, just a little. It turned and floated away down the hall.
“God damn it! Don’t leave. Don’t leave!” But Brinkman was alone in the hall. He moved towards the open door to the surgery room but it slid closed before he could get in, leaving him standing alone in a cell of white walls. Always a cell, Brinkman thought. Suddenly, he felt very tired. Tired of being a victim. Tired of always being at war with something. Tired of fighting. He found his way back to the room with the table and lay down. Within minutes, he was asleep.
Something shook him awake, but before Brinkman opened his eyes, he had to know where he was. In that dark place between sleep and wakefulness, he made his fingers move over the surface his body rested upon. Feeling the smooth solidity of the steel table beneath him, he signed resignedly and allowed himself to be shaken into consciousness. His eyes struggled to open, as if he had been drugged. The voice of whatever shook him awake remained persistent.
“Hey, Brinkman! Looks like we fuckin’ outfoxed the bastards!”
Brinkman opened his eyes to the smooth, rounded baby face of Ross Capier. The dead soldier was now very much alive and animated, smiling like some kid in a malt shop.
“Can you believe this place?” Capier motioned around the white room, dimmer now, perhaps in respect for Brinkman’s need for sleep. As he rose, Brinkman leaned onto a soft fluffy mound where his head had been. A pillow. He smiled and grasped it, amused be the personal touch.
“What happened, Cap? You were toast. I mean, you’re supposed to be dead…” Brinkman’s head felt fuzzy and thick, but yes, indeed, Capier was alive in front of him.
“Didn’t they tell you?” Cap’s voice was matter-of-fact.
“They don’t tell me anything. I don’t believe they know how to say anything other than my damned name. Jonathan.”
Cap looked surprised. “Oh, hell, they do! They talk up a damned storm with me. You should try –“
Brinkman grabbed Capier and shook him, as if to see if the man’s body would fall apart. But Cap was solid.
“Listen, Cap. Cut the praise shit. What are these things going to do to us? And where the hell are we?” Brinkman was not ashamed of the edge of panic in his voice. This was neither the time nor place for dignity.
“Nothing bad, I mean it ain’t anything to be afraid of, Brink. Just lie still and let them do what they need to do. Then they’ll take you home.”
Brinkman felt the blood drain from his face and neck. He looked at Capier, saw the way the former dead man looked all around him like a child in awe on Christmas morning. They got his mind, Brinkman surmised. Gave Cap back his body in exchange for his mind.
“Cap, you really think they’re going to take us HOME?”
Capier seemed confused that Brinkman would ever question their intention. “Why shouldn’t they? They said they would. They take their samples and take us home.” Capier said it with such certainty, he almost had Brinkman convinced. ”We’re just guinea pigs. That’s all. Once they have what they need, they’ll set us free.”
Brinkman gripped Cap’s arm, the once that had just been reattached hours ago. “Jesus, Cap, you fucking idiot! Look at what we in our own labs, to our own guinea pigs! We don’t set them free, you fucking asshole! We use them, and then WE KILL THEM!” Brinkman’s face was fire engine red with anger and fear. The vein in his neck bulged, ready to burst. Capier just stared at him, mouth open.
The door to the white room slid open and one of the creatures floated in, moving towards them quickly. It motioned with an upraised arm to Capier, who followed it out of the room without a word. Just before the door closed behind him, Capier turned and smiled at Brinkman.
He thinks he’s going home, Brinkman thought, watching his buddy go.
The door opened again and another creature entered, maybe the same one, they all looked alike to Brinkman. The creature stood before him, staring with those unrelenting eyes. Brinkman didn’t bother to put up a fight. He felt his eyelids go heavy as bricks as the creature helped him lie down on the table. The last thing Brinkman saw before darkness enveloped him was a long, sharp needle moving down towards his face.
And then the pain came, followed only by deep black.
He sat up, stretching his legs, and sat there for a long while. He was back in his hole, his home away from home. Above him, the jungle treetops hid the deep blue sky from his view. He ventured it was evening, but it could have been dawn.
His next thought was of Capier. Hopeful, naïve Cap. Brinkman wondered what they did to dispose of him. Or could they have possibly taken him home? Like they took him home, back to this hellhole. And then Brinkman felt betrayal, as if the creatures somehow broke an unspoken promise. But they had never told him they were going to rescue him. Never told him they were going to take him “home.”
Brinkman felt himself come, for the first time in months, within moments of full and complete defeat. Within moments of believing that he would never be found, would never see his young, pretty wife and two babies again. Would never walk the quiet, boring small-town streets of Sweetwater, West Virginia. Would never see the American sky…
He wondered what had come of the war, and his captors, and if they knew about the weird floating things. Or had it all just been a horrendous nightmare – a stretched out hallucination brought about by the terrors of war. He closed his eyes, letting his body sink down into the hard dirt, letting his mind cut loose, completely loose. And he began to laugh, loud and hearty and with everything he had left to give. And that laugh became a howl, almost manic, that worked its way out of the deep hole in the earth and through the tangled jungle growth and found its way to the ears of a man. A grunt.
An American soldier.
Brinkman lay deep asleep in the Veteran’s receiving center outside of Norfolk, Virginia. His cot was small and creaky, but who gave a damn? It was on American soil. Something made him jolt awake and his eyes flew open with a start, fully expecting to see walls of dirt. Instead, he froze, totally unfamiliar with these walls. He felt his throat close up, sure they had him again, on their ship.
Something stirred beside him and he turned to face a man asleep on a cot, and another man opposite him. As Brinkman’s eyes regained focus, he realized he was in a room full of men on cots, rows and rows of cots.
“Jesus Christ. What have they done?” He arose from his makeshift bed and walked through the rows of sleeping bodies to the thick double-doors at the end of the large room. He opened them and entered a long grey hallway riddled with doors and offices. As his mind cleared, Brinkman calmed. He couldn't be sure, but either the creatures had changed their ship, or he was in a real live military hospital.
A young male orderly came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder. Brinkman jumped, then turned to face a human, and sighed deeply.
“Where am I? Is this place for real?”
The orderly smiled. “Bryce Receiving Center. You’re OK, Mister. You’re doing just fine!” The orderly took Brinkman’s hand and read his wristband.
“Jonathan Brinkman, United States Army. Welcome home, soldier! Now get some rest. You have some early morning tests before you leave for home base.” The orderly smiled at Brinkman, gently motioning him back down the hall towards the sleeping quarters.
“The war…” Brinkman’s tongue felt dead and thick in his mouth.
“It’s over, thank the Lord. You’re going home!” The orderly held the door open as Brinkman passed through into the darkness.
He found his cot and sat on the edge for a long, long time, drinking in the reality around him, peering into the shadows at the ones who got out alive. He suddenly wondered if Capier was here, if he made it home. A hot rush of blood surged from his heart to his head, making him dizzy, and the hair on his arms stood at attention. The air became thick and wet with something, and Brinkman felt it right there behind his cot before he even saw the light.
He turned slowly and faced it. The creature stood at the head of the cot, giving off a warm glow. It just stared at Brinkman. But this time, Brinkman felt no pull, no persuasion in those incredible eyes. He felt nothing really. He stared back at the thing and felt his lips curl into a slight smile.
“Jonathan.”
“Yes?”
“Welcome home.”
The End.
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