The story continues in The Last Conquistador
An ancient demon hatches a plan to gain human form.
A Spanish conquistador, hungry for wealth and status, sets sail for the New World.
An American soldier in modern-day Germany desperately searches for his runaway girlfriend.
All three stories combine and collide in The Last Conquistador.
She walks across the dance floor, coming back to me, swinging her hips as though it’s her world, even though it’s not. I wink. She arches an eyebrow, pretending to be separate from it all, like so many of the Germans here.
That’s my Lise: too hot in the blue dress that clings to her curves, too cold in her recessed gaze. Dry Ice, a guy in my unit called her. But I know better.
She walks past the PX cowboys and their German groupies twirling on the dance floor. She swings straight through the thick of it with a haughtiness that makes me want to grin.
And then it happens—slow enough for me to catch every moment but too fast to stop it.
Two broncos are about to buck each other up. A scarecrow with a flat-top whirls his arms at a tubby blond GI, his face twisted with curses. Lise doesn’t see them, but she heads right for them.
I’m out of my chair and I shout her name, but Rascal Flatts drowns me out. My heart rumbles in the molasses air. Lise sees me bolt toward her. She turns her head just as the scarecrow lands a blow on his enemy’s cheekbone. Tubby stumbles smack into Lise. She falls to the floor. I shove a couple out of my way and scoop my arm under hers. I haul her to her feet, then I lurch over to the scarecrow and give him a quick jab in the ribs. He crumples in half and we vanish to the sidelines.
I press myself against the farthest wall. Lise trembles. I wrap my arms around her and pull her close and kiss her face but it doesn’t help.
“It’s too much,” she whispers in my ear.
“Tell me they hurt you and I’ll go back there and kick both their asses.”
She says no but she won’t stop shaking. Her heart thuds against my chest, faster and faster. This isn’t her. I’ve seen her thunder. I’ve seen her roll over a skinhead MP at the Mannheim Fest who dared to accidentally spill pilsner on her friend and not apologize. The music ratchets unbearably loud and strobe lights sting my eyes. In the corner of my eye I see a rat run across the floor. I turn but nothing’s there.
I pull Lise outside, into the dry September night. We sit on the steps far away from the German chicks sucking on their Newports, tourists in their own country, souvenir shopping for a GI Joe of their own. I don’t want Lise anywhere near them. Not now, not ever. I run my fingers through her bottle auburn hair, then I take her hand in mine, soft but not delicate. It still shakes.
“Something’s wrong,” I say. “I know it.”
“Yes,” she says, sucking in a breath and turning her face to mine. “I’m pregnant.”
I’m pregnant. The words get stuck right on the outside border of my brain, bank robbers trying to crack a safe that won’t open. Off in the parking lot some guy laughs, a cackling crow. I look up, searching for stars in the clouded sky. Nothing’s there.
“Randy...”
I nod. I just nod.
Three months. That’s how long I’ve known Lise. I only met her because my buddy Thor is seeing her sister Monika. I had extra duty—mopping the HQ building floors because I told some two-bit sergeant where to go. When I got back she was in the hallway, solid and shapely, like the kid sister of a truck stop waitress, chewing gum and flipping through some magazine as if the rest of the world didn’t matter. She glanced at me, then back at her magazine, then at me again. I didn’t care for her attitude.
You think you own this place?” I said with a sneer.
She kept her trap shut and held her Mona Lisa pose. It pissed me off and turned me on. Then Monika poked her head out of Thor’s door. She eyed me as though I was nothing but a dirty spic, and then she machine-gunned Deutsch at Lise. Lise shoved Monika back into Thor’s room. Then she gave me a smile that dripped with sugar.
That was it. I was hooked.
And now this.
“How far along?”
“Eight weeks.”
That would make it about the first time. I laugh. Not as loud as that loon in the lot, but pretty damn close.
Lise punches my arm. “I did not plan for it to happen this way,” she says coldly.
“I didn’t think you did.”
She leans her head against my shoulder. “What do you think?”
I can’t tell her what I think. She’d never understand. Hell, I can’t even understand.
“I can take care of it,” she says.
Three years ago I was speeding down 225 back to Aurora, my third-hand Honda vibrating and rattling, empty Coors cans clinking on the floor, textbooks for the class I was about to flunk sliding away, wasting away in community college, caught in that country with mountains like fences and canyons like dungeons, all the while this damn pounding in my brain that carried a message I never could decipher. Then the billboard appeared: a call to arms in camouflage.
The next day I enlisted to save myself. And now, here I am, thousands of miles away from those days, with a woman who looks at me like no one ever has, who sees me as Randy and not some undersized buzzcut pseudo thug. And she doesn’t flinch.
And now a kid! How can I handle a kid?
I could walk away from this love. Most guys would. They’d turn and run and never look back. Tell her to get rid of it. Or just say nothing, just bail.
But I’m not most guys.
It’s like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff looking down at endless dark water. So damn high, and no telling what’s beneath those waves. It doesn’t matter anymore. I jump. The world falls away as I tumble through the air and it scares the shit out of me.
“No.” My hand shakes now, probably about as badly as Lise’s was earlier. I cup it on her stomach. “It’s you and me, and this baby. Together.”
It’s too early to be awake, and it’s not the sun bleeding through my curtains that wakes me. It’s the scratching. At first I think it’s the dream, the one where I’m swimming in the clear Caribbean waters when a hand pulls me under, but it’s not. Scratching, slicing, screeching. It’s not a dream. It’s coming from my window.
I climb out of my bed so as not to wake Lise. The linoleum is cool on my feet as I tiptoe across, past my scuffed boots, past the chair with my crumpled BDUs. My head hammers that something’s wrong, really wrong. I tell myself it’s probably just some dickweed private with too much spare time and too few brain cells. I pull back the curtain, first an inch, then all the way. Nothing but a thin strip of brown crud on the glass.
Back in bed I try hard as hell not to think. Beside me Lise’s hair is rippled over her face, a mermaid safe on dry land. She stirs and brushes her hand through her hair, then she lies still. Any other Friday morning she’d be gone and I’d be doing PT right about now, but it’s Labor Day weekend—four days of freedom—so the time’s all mine.
She wraps me in her arms, as if she’s afraid I’ll bail on her after all. I snuggle against her, close in this twin bed, thankful for the privacy. Fort Campbell was my first duty station, and only sergeants got their own quarters. The rest of us junior enlisteds had to bunk with a stranger and share a bathroom with a dozen other clowns. But here in Germany it’s like living in a hotel. Single rooms and one bathroom for two men, which is lucky, because I’ll never make sergeant; I’ll be a specialist until they drive me out.
Lise shifts apart from me and the mattress gives a creak. She opens her eyes and searches into mine. “Tell me this, Randy. Do you believe this was all meant to be?”
I don’t trust fate. If I did, I’d be a goner. “Yes,” I say, not thinking of fate but of her, in the flesh, here with me. And the kid. I get walloped with panic. I shove the panic away and picture something better: the gorgeous clump of cells inside her, my DNA mixing with hers, our histories becoming one. Like a sap I say, “You’re
the one I never knew I was looking for.”
Her arms relax. A glint of sun hits my eye. I glance over to the window, expecting to hear that scratching return. It doesn’t. She pulls away, as much as she can in this bed not meant for two. The mattress shivers and the sheet slides down her hip.
“We haven’t known each other very long,” she says.
“A lifetime to me.”
“This is important to you.”
“More than you can understand.”
“Why?”
I want to tell her about the pounding and the echo left behind. Desolation. No future. But I don’t. She’ll think I’m nuts. So I tell her another truth, one almost as important. I close my eyes. “Because before you, and this,” I caress her stomach, “I wasn’t really alive, and I never knew it.”
She places her hand on the nape of my neck and strokes it, soft, delicate. This is the Lise no one else sees. “You are a beautiful man, Randy.” Her voice drifts low. “That is not a lie.”
The pendant hangs around her neck, the cloudy gray stone embedded in the silver star, the one I gave her just last Sunday. When she first put it on it was spectacular but now it gives me a jolt of fear, a bad luck charm. I was twelve when I swiped it. My worst year. I stood in the open doorway of my Aunt Vickie’s cabin shielding my eyes from the brutal New Mexico sun, looking at nothing but red dirt and bleached green scrub. Nothing else. Nothing. The necklace hung on the hook where Vickie kept her keys. It was her talisman. She never took it off, but there it waited. I slipped it into the pocket of my jeans. I never understood why I did that; I just assumed I was a dumb punk kid, a klepto. When I gave it to Lise I knew it was meant for her. She shook her head and protested as she first put it on, as if she didn’t deserve it. The necklace looked perfect then. Now the stone is too clouded.
Lise rises and sits on the edge of the bed, her back to me, her hair falling in tendrils past her pale shoulder blades. She stares out the window at the compound’s fence as the seconds tick on by. The world is silent. I wish it could stay like this. Finally she leaves the bed and walks to my mini-fridge.
“You have no milk?”
I laugh. Unless she wants beer or Coke she’s out of luck.
“I need milk.”
“Cravings so soon?”
“I just want milk,” she says, her voice tinny and tired. She presses her hand into her stomach. “Why does this have to matter for what I want?”
I climb off the bed and kiss her. My sisters told me stories of how my mom went nuts when she was pregnant with me. Hormones and all.
“Okay. I’ll get you whatever it is you want, okay?”
She nods, her hazel eyes downcast, and for a moment I think she might start to cry but that isn’t her. I have this urge to tell her I love her but I don’t. When I leave I glance back and smile but she’s looking toward the window and doesn’t catch it. Tonight I’ll treat her like a queen. I’ll take her to the fanciest restaurant downtown and we’ll feast on lobster and steak. She deserves it. I close the door.
The trip there and back takes ten minutes, max. I grab the milk—not skim, she’ll need the fat—and I pass a shelf of baby food. Why the hell would they keep baby food in this place? No families live here. I smile, though, and the whole walk back I think about toys and formula, diapers, tiny clothes, burping, cooing. It all seems so right.
Thor sits outside on the barracks steps, wearing gym shorts and a Packers t-shirt. He’s the picture of corn-fed midwestness. He waves me over.
“You hear about what happened to Ollie last night? Went downtown and got jumped by a couple of Turks. Got his head busted open.”
Ollie: skinny kid with a big mouth. “I’m not surprised.”
“Dangerous world out there. Lots of crazies. My parents warned me to watch myself. They were right.”
I picture Ma and Pa Gundersen on the farm or wherever the hell Thor grew up, all white and wide-eyed at the thought of him crossing the county line.
“Maybe they were wrong,” I say. “Maybe it’s a goddamned beautiful world, once you break out of your bubble and step into it.”
He spits tobacco juice in the dirt beside the steps. “That doesn’t sound like you. You’re supposed to say something smart-alecky about how we’re all just moving toward death.”
I smile and shake my head. Suddenly I love this place, this life, this world. All of us, kings here. All of us freed from our past. “That was yesterday. Today everything’s different.”
He gives me this look as if I’ve been smoking something. So I tell him about Lise and the kid. I wait for a congrats, a slap on the back. I’d settle for a smile. Nothing. He just pulls at his chin and stares at the gravel lot. He ejects a gob of tobacco spit and wipes stray flecks from his lower lip. Seconds slip by. I might as well not even be here; he’s lost in a different universe. So much for joy.
Finally, he says, “You sure about this?”
I miss a beat. “Of course.”
“But you’re so young.”
“Twenty-two’s not young.”
He snorts laughter, and I want to punch him. I know what he thinks of her: foul-mouthed and stiletto sharp. He doesn’t know the real her, not the way I do. And now she’s giving me a future, a family—hope, for the first time in a long time. And all he does is laugh.
“We’ll be fine, the three of us,” I tell Thor.
Thor’s blond hair blazes in the sunlight. He’s trained straight ahead, back in his own universe. I look away, down the green lawn to the grove of trees and the gazebo fifty yards away. Standing like a statue under its white arches is a dark-skinned chick, maybe eighteen. She’s tall—taller than me, as tall as Thor. Her hair is long and shiny black. Her clothes are linen pulled and stretched. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink. She stares right at me, in my eyes, accusing me.
I elbow Thor. “What do you make of that?”
“Make of what?”
“That, you dumb ox.” I frown at him. He must be half blind. I glance back. The girl is gone. Coldness hits my skin, even though it’s already hot. I begin to wonder if I’m losing it. “Never mind.”
“Hey, sorry for being a jerk. Congrats, brother,” he says, and I think he means it. I look at him and his big blue Anglo eyes. I never considered anyone Anglo until I enlisted. I never thought of myself as Hispanic until I left Colorado. Four hundred years in America for my family—I never thought of myself as anything but American. But dumbasses like Thor, fifty years removed from Sweden, are somehow more American than I am.
“Thanks,” I mumble. The milk carton is warm now.
My door is shut. I slide in the key card, half expecting Lise to jump out and throw her arms around me. Only she doesn’t. My room is silent as a tomb. Out in the hallway someone slams their door and I jump. I call her name but no one answers. Her clothes and shoes and purse are gone. Maybe she got tired of waiting for the milk and went to get some herself. Typical Lise. But then I see a slip of yellow paper lying on my blue sheets. I pick it up.
I must leave you. Don’t try to find me. This way is best.
I drop the milk to the ground. The carton splits, and milk seeps onto the linoleum. I run to the bathroom, but it’s empty. Back in the room I read the note again, with its blunt English and well-formed script. I want to believe it’s a joke, with all my
soul. But I know better. I think back to that open door in New Mexico, me at twelve staring out at nothing. This is no joke. People don’t vanish unless they want to stay vanished.
This can’t be happening. She can’t do this to me, not now. My legs get weak. A fiery knot of panic in my chest spreads into my arms and legs. The corners of my vision turn black. The pounding in my head, the one that was weak back home, is now strong, and its message clear: it was never meant to be.
No, I refuse to believe that.
I go to the window, lean my head against the cool pane and gaze at the grassy yard. I fight to keep the bricks in my mind from crumbling. Then I hear a ta
pping at the bottom of the window. A nail, a fingernail, jagged and brown. It claws against the glass. The nail bends and then it cracks. Blackened blood drips from splintered skin. The oozing finger scrapes higher, leaving a thick trail. I see the hand attached: darkened skin flaking off bone.
Run!
I can’t run.
Move!
I can’t even move.
The nail and hand rise, then the whole arm, as if floating up from the earth. Then a face appears. I recognize it—the girl from the gazebo. But she’s wrong. Hair twisted and wild, clumps ripped from the scalp. Eyes gone, black sockets oozing slime. Mouth a gash of mud and blood. She stretches her mouth open. Her lips crack and split. An eel slithers out. She snaps her jaw and chops the eel in two, grinning sick.
She rises and beckons me with her bloody finger. Inviting. Calling. Pounding in my head hard enough to blow my skull apart.
I slam the drapes and shut her out. No more sun. No more monster. I stumble back and fall to the floor. I scramble from the window and ram against the far wall. I can’t scream. I can’t even speak.
I cower against the wall as minutes turn to hours. My mind is frozen, caught between a girl who’s fled my world and a monster trying to get in. Finally a thought spins to life. Not a thought but an order, one that burrows deep and beats a message I can’t ignore: Find Lise, before it’s too late.
Follow the story as it continues in The Last Conquistador. Available now.
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