He never refused an order after that.
He was tied with a wire looped around his waist that linked him to every other child in his village. They were told to march. Anyone who fell from exhaustion or hunger was killed. By the time they reached other villages, they were half mad and starving, and they descended on the homes like plagues of locusts.
Many died. But it didn’t matter to the men from God’s Army. There were always more children to add to the line.
Today, God’s Army was on the move toward the edge of the bush, where a unit of the government’s soldiers camped. Many times, the God’s Army soldiers told Joseph and the other children how the government soldiers were evil, how they were the minions of the Devil, and how they had to be stopped.
Joseph supposed some of the other children believed it, but he doubted anyone cared. They were barely alive. They would do what they were told. Believing took more resources than they had.
Not that Joseph particularly cared what happened to the government’s soldiers, either. They were the ones who told him it was safe.
He’d been looking forward to his holiday trip home from the boarding school in Butembo. While he was away, he worried for his family. He remembered the sounds of gunfire, the times his mother would scoop him up and run with him into the bush to hide whenever the men came. But the government said the problems had been resolved. The rebels, like God’s Army, had been sent back over the border to Uganda and Sudan. There would be no more raids or attacks.
He came home in December. Everyone was proud of him.
Then God’s Army killed everyone he loved.
Since that day, Joseph had learned more than he ever wanted to know about the world.
The government troops were useless at best. The war was not over, as the government people had said. It had simply become quieter and more convenient. Refugees driven out of Sudan and Uganda had their own militias. Competing groups were hungry for fresh recruits. Even the government’s soldiers were not above taking boys and girls and putting guns in their hands. All the armies needed bodies. Joseph and the other children were both soldiers and the spoils of war.
Joseph was a bright student. He’d absorbed knowledge like a sponge, picking up languages as if he’d been born to them. But his mind had shut down. Every one of his days had a distant, dreamlike quality. Too little food and too much horror. He barely knew his own name anymore.
So he was surprised when the talk of the soldiers at the head of the line shifted into something unfamiliar and yet recognizable. In a moment, long-ignored parts of Joseph’s brain began to work.
English. The soldiers were speaking English.
They were talking to a man wearing all black. His clothes were neat and clean. He handed the men from God’s Army a large bag of powder. It wasn’t like the drugs that were usually mixed together before a battle. It seemed to have a bright green tinge to Joseph, even against the plants around them.
They were all given the powder and told to swallow it. Joseph and the other children complied. They were released from the long wire that held them together.
In a moment, Joseph knew, they would be told to run, screaming, out of the bush and into the clearing below. They would draw the fire of the government men, while God’s Army would wait in the trees and watch to discover the enemy’s positions.
But something was different this time. Somehow, Joseph found himself anxious to run. He felt stronger. Angrier. He was ready to tear the government’s soldiers apart with his bare hands. He didn’t care who they were or what they’d done. He just wanted them dead.
He noticed the other children on the line stamping with the same kind of impatience. Their mouths opened in wide grins.
“Go,” one of the soldiers shouted, and they were off.
Joseph found himself running faster than he ever had before. Bullets sang into the air all around him, but for once, he was not scared. He simply wanted to rend, to tear, to bite, to kill.
He hit the first government man in the chest. The man’s eyes were wide with terror. He was frightened—frightened of Joseph. It felt wonderful. To finally be able to strike back, to take revenge, to have someone scared of him for a change.
Joseph realized the man was screaming at the top of his lungs. He had not heard it until then. The pounding of his heartbeat in his ears had drowned it out.
He found he was up to his elbows in the man’s viscera, pulling things from his chest one after another. Blood and gore slicked his hands and his face. He finally found something that made the screaming stop as he crushed it between his fingers.
The government man wore a look of pure terror on his dead face. Joseph looked at the thing he’d torn from the man’s body. A wet, black and red lump of meat.
His heart.
It was almost up to his mouth when he realized what he was doing.
He dropped it, recoiling from the body. He almost shrieked, but nothing came out of his throat.
It was only when Joseph brought his hands to his face did he learn how he was able to reduce the man to bloody ribbons.
His hands were no longer his own. Instead, he looked at the talons of some kind of lizard. Sharp, yellow claws protruded from dark-green scales.
Joseph heard a hissing noise, and for an instant, he was back on his family’s bicycle, the one with the constantly leaking inner tube.
The hissing came from his own throat. It was the only sound he could make now.
He turned and saw another soldier—this one wearing sunglasses that reflected the daylight back at Joseph.
In the tiny mirrors on the man’s face, he saw a horrible creature: a fishlike head on a man’s body, lizard skin and needle-sharp teeth and claws.
The fish-mouth gaped back at him, and he realized that when it moved, so did he.
He saw himself.
Joseph couldn’t move. The soldier was equally horrified, but he had a gun. And with a simple pull of the trigger, he stitched a line of bullets across Joseph’s chest.
They thudded heavily into him. He felt blood pour out of himself. He sat down on the grass.
But he didn’t die.
The soldier ran away before finishing the job. The bullets alone were not enough, but Joseph knew he wouldn’t be able to stand again. Cramps bent his legs. He felt bones cracking. Whatever had changed him wasn’t done yet, but his body couldn’t take any more.
All around, he saw the other children from the line. They were twisted and changed as well, but some had not transformed as fully as Joseph. Some were like large tadpoles, their bodies fusing at the legs and waist. Others collapsed into a heap, unable to take the strain. He saw scales and fangs like his own, claws and ridged backs, gill-like protrusions under snapping jaws. But he saw nothing remotely human. One by one, they all dropped. Even the ones still breathing, like Joseph, could not move.
The government men were long gone. They left their jeeps, their equipment, even their guns. Men from God’s Army came down from the bush and began scavenging whatever they could find. They were careful to walk around Joseph and the rest of the lizardlike bodies.
Joseph heard the familiar and unfamiliar strains of English from behind him. His heart was beating slower now. There didn’t seem to be enough blood to go through him anymore.
He recognized some of the words. It was almost a pleasure to recall learning the language.
“—how you have any right to complain,” the first voice said.
“Every one of them died,” the other responded. “Now we’ll have to find more.”
Joseph twisted his head around, despite the pain. He couldn’t turn his neck as far as he did before.
But he saw the men who were talking. One was a commander in God’s Army. He was speaking to the man in black, the one who brought them the powder.
“I’m sure you’ll have no trouble filling the ranks,” the man in black said. He kicked one of the bodies nearby. It squealed. He aimed a gun at the body and fired. It let out a hiss that trailed into nothing. He moved on.
“You didn’t say it would kill all of them.”
“That’s the nature of science,” he said, stepping closer to Joseph. “You keep on trying until you eliminate all the mistakes. That’s how you learn.”
Joseph wasn’t scared. He realized how futile it was, waiting for salvation all this time. He understood now: he was dead. He must have died and gone to Hell a long time ago. He wondered how this could happen to him. What could he have done to deserve this? And now he knew: God had abandoned him. With that knowledge, a kind of peace settled over him. At the very least, he no longer hoped for anything better.
The commander scowled. “And what did you learn here?”
The man in black looked down at Joseph. For a moment, there seemed to be a dark mix of pity and amusement in his eyes.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough for now.”
He pointed the gun at the space between Joseph’s eyes and fired.
TWO
If eyewitnesses and conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the Lizard People are still among us. Reports of reptilian humanoids range from Florida to as far north as Canada. There’s the Gatorman of New Jersey, the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp, the Loveland Frogman, and the Thetis Monster, to name a few. But these Bigfoot- like monsters are nowhere near as frightening as the alien-human Reptilians (or Reptoids) who allegedly control the world through a global secret society.
—Cole Daniels,
Monsterpaedia
A
lex Howard sat in the bridge of the luxury yacht and listened to the sounds from the party below. It was past midnight and they were just getting started.
Howard drank coffee. The first part of the trip, from Miami to the Riviera, was pretty dull. His boss wasn’t on board for the long haul across the Atlantic; he couldn’t be away from his investments that long. He joined them when they reached the Riviera, bringing his entourage and a half dozen women who looked like strippers along.
At first, Howard joined the party at night. It was a huge mistake. Piles of cocaine and meth, bathtubs of liquor, a rainbow of pills, all from the boss’s seemingly endless supply. Around day five, it began to seem like a grim endurance match. Even the women, longtime experts at faking delight, were strung out and snappish. He’d started to make mistakes. Piloting a 140-foot craft wasn’t something you wanted to do hungover, even with the help of GPS and electronics.
But the real reason he was drinking coffee and not champagne was he nearly referred to his boss by his nickname, Moco.
Fortunately he caught himself in time. The last guy who’d called Jaime Carrillo by that name got a new nostril sliced into his face with a Tekna knife.
Howard didn’t fool himself; he knew what he’d signed on for when he took the job. Carrillo loved to tell people he’d had the yacht custom-built, from its bronze sculpture in the main salon to the air-conditioned doghouse with marble flooring.
The truth was Carrillo had taken it for a fifth of its value when its previous owner, a real estate mogul, needed to liquidate his assets while facing the twin threats of a financial meltdown and a nasty divorce. The crew was given the choice of working for the new owner. Most of them left, but a few—including Howard—decided to stay.
Howard, who was first officer under the previous captain, wasn’t entirely stupid. He would have known Carrillo was dirty even if his name didn’t pop up on CNN every few months. The guy paid cash for everything, wore insanely expensive clothes and was guarded by enormous men with H&K MP5 machine guns slung under their arms.
But he wasn’t currently under indictment for anything—rumor had it he owned several prominent Mexican politicians.
Carrillo was still living in the shadow of his father, a drug lord who belittled his son his entire life before dying, a casualty of cocaine and Viagra, in the arms of his nineteen-year-old girlfriend. He was the one who came up with the nickname “Moco” for his son’s habit of picking his nose as a boy. End result: Carrillo had daddy issues, high-powered weaponry and limitless funds. Never a good combination.
Howard figured he could handle it. A job’s a job, right?
He hadn’t thought it through. Howard made it a point never to look in the hold, but he knew he was basically a smuggler now. As a fringe benefit, he spent long stretches of time in the middle of the ocean with a man who killed people for fun and profit.
But it wasn’t like there were a lot of openings for yacht captains, and there were even fewer job opportunities for former Coast Guard officers in his landlocked Texas hometown.
Howard also had to admit Carrillo was pretty good at his job. As pressure had increased on the Mexican cartels over the past few years, he diversified. He reached out to the players who preferred their cargo not be examined by Homeland Security. He bought real estate. He recruited girls and women from the dirt-poor areas of Mexico and turned them into slaves in factories and brothels overseas. And he began smuggling guns—which were never in short supply in Mexico—to places that needed firepower.