MEMORANDUM FOR:  Department of Military Psychiatry

                                          Attn: Colonel Cary Maguire

                                          Richard Benjamin Armed Forces Institute of Research                          

FROM:  Zack G. David, M.D.

              Department of Veterans Affairs (Seattle, WA)

SUBJECT:  Transcription of Case #WS6033--Ref. Redmark/“Crimson Web”)

            Per request:  A transcript of the last personal recorded narrative by Buck Sergeant Preston Redmark (Medically Retired).  As you know, Redmark was a former patient of my uncle, Martin David, in the mid-Thirties.  Dr. David is not shown in the brightest light during his cameo here, but I’ve been faithful and edited nothing out.  To do so would rob you of a crucial understanding of Redmark’s reluctance to accept even conventional forms of psychiatric treatment. 

            Interesting note:  Though it cannot be captured in print, Redmark’s voice changes quite drastically when speaking the dialogue parts of ‘Fast Eddie,’ his own perceived doppelganger. 

            This narrative was originally recorded on Redmark’s Personal Robot (‘Sly’) and was discovered after Redmark’s death by DHS officials, who quickly classified it.  The bootleg copy from which I made this transcript was turned in to a Veterans Affairs clerk by an anonymous woman on 17 March.  That copy has been erased, per direction.

            For ease of understanding, I have broken the account into rough hewn “chapters.”  I’ve also made periodic footnotes to act, hopefully, as a useful historical supplement for any other persons allowed to read this account. 

                                                                                                            //Signed//

                                                                                                            Zack G. David, M.D.

                                                                                                            22 March 2066

 

THE DREAM

 

            Pavor nocturnus--the night terror.  It happened again, always the bloody same…   

Dust finally settled where I’d fallen halfway from heaven, a camouflaged pancake at the gritty base of the Hindu Kush range.  Ultra fine plumes of soil had flew high in the atmosphere from my point of impact, easily spotted by the Man on the Moon if he happened to be looking.  Gingerly I removed the pair of red silk panties from my mouth, spat a mixed glob of dirt and flecks of blood, and stood painfully.  All alone again, under that damned sky of hellish crimson ash, in that lethal valley circled by row after row of ice-tipped, shark-teeth mountains. 

            Squinting through the haze at the inhospitable landscape, I thought, “Jesus Christ, not again.”  Almost as if I was lucid.  Yet despite my past visits, I was caught off guard to see that I was wrong about the being “alone” part.  Also on that sublime floor, just half a klick away, was a ragged legion of red-caped Afghan Jihadists, each waving a ratty AK-47 and wailing for my head on a pike, or so I presumed. 

My instinct was to run, but where? 

Sweat began to seep from all the predicable places as combat skills training kicked in.  I snatched up my black weapon lying half buried at my feet.  On my left something in me cracked like a branch--but all pain was gone, supplanted by adrenaline and a mind-freezing dread of capture, of days of torture ending with my head being hacked off on YouTube. 

The wind kicked up a dozen columns of dust devils.  Impossibly, they rose hundreds of meters high, twirling, ferocious and intense, unpredictable fingers of a mad God.  They hunted with random indifference, the cyclones, and I smiled each time they snagged a foot soldier of terror.  Bit by bit, my odds of survival increased.

But not enough.  Not even close. 

            They raged, those pious fanatics, and they praised the justice of their version of Allah as they rode clockwise up and up into the erosive windmills, their soft tissues effortlessly wiped clean from their bones to scatter on the range.  How sad for them.  Bastards.  

The soldiers remaining on the ground snarled gibberish and let loose their dogs of war.  Advancing, they closed on my unarmored self and like a turtle wanting of its shell, my body tensed, trying to make a smaller target of itself.  Through bloody teeth, I hissed.  Gripped my XM8 carbine tighter, fumbled for an ammo clip.[1]  Pressed the bolt catch and slapped the magazine snug into its hole. 

            Scanning the playing field, I was briefly startled to see in the crushing crowd a grotesque oddity toward the rear--some shimmering green-hooded figure, beardless and lipless, a jawbone jutting from an otherwise normal--familiar--face.  No time to make out precise features, but of course I know it’s just Fast Eddie, taunting me. 

The circle of death constricted, so I planted my boot heels in the foreign land and readied for a grand finale.  Charging the rifle’s cocking handle and flipping the safety off, I passed up semi for automatic; always a crowd pleaser.  Drew to bear center mass on the closest of the encroaching shitheads, my gloved finger begging to pull the trigger, to end many of their lives before they ended mine.  The textbook solution was two to the chest, one to the head, but there was no time for such idyllic shot patterns.  I'd fire wild and take what I could get.                       

Dropped to one knee, brought the rifle up.  Elbow on thigh to steady the weapon, the butt braced against my bruised shoulder.  Pulled the trigger back... and nothing happened.  Frantic, I squeezed again.  Impotent fucker was jammed!   

At my back an abrupt rush of wind slammed me like a wall of water--the part I hated most.  A sucking dust devil had bore down, locked on before I could squeeze off a single round.  I was extricated from one decidedly doomed predicament to another, and up I raced, spinning and nauseous.  Yet in this brief unpleasantness I had time to wonder if I, too, should thank God. 

I chose to wait. 

            Soaring from the funnel’s end, I screamed as my feet kicked frenetically at the open air.  That motion was impossible, I caught myself thinking… not that much of the preceding had been possible, but who can make sense of the mind? 

I opened my eyes slowly, peered down the length of my goose down blanket at my covered and useless legs.  Petrified sticks!  Of course they hadn't moved.  I looked up at the motionless ceiling fan.  The bedroom was dark and perfectly still… yet something had set off Sly's finely calibrated detectors, for it too had woken and wheeled over from its charging station to check on me.  I was chilled but rather than telling it to turn up the heat, I pretended to go back to sleep, letting the damned thing stare at me with its creepy human-like eyes. 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

            "I was born in a rusted bathtub in a ditch by the side of the road in Coober Pedy.  Not a big place, just a small mining town where my parents got stranded in the fall of 2010, hitchhiking across the Outback.  They were making south to Adelaide, but never made it."

            That's a story I used to tell when I was really alive.  Harmless.  Not even a lie, per se.  I’m a whole-heartedly honest person who happens to be a consummate bullshitter. 

“When talking about the duller aspects of life, feel free to exaggerate,” Father once said. 

            So if I say "back when I was really alive," I mean before the accident that paralyzed me.  It's an exaggeration, really alive, because technically I'm still alive.  Just never feels that way. 

I'll only exaggerate so wildly as to be obvious to anyone with the IQ of a finch.  If you’re naive enough to believe me, you’re not worth the trouble to straighten out, I say. 

“Truth makes no difference to pinheads and we all know plenty of those.”  Another Father-ism.

But the truth is my parents--rest in peace--never went to Australia or anywhere else.  I was born in Rapid City, the only sputtering spawn of Fred and Lorrie Redmark.  It's true I was born in a sort of tub, though.  Mom felt the process would be easier underwater, and she always said it was. 

            They incubated me like an egg.  Three days before I maintained a fair body temperature.  Wanted attention from the get-go, it seems.  The nurses set me free and the folks took me home and kept me tightly swaddled near the baseboard heaters, but not too often because the dogs had a tendency to lick me.  Salty skin.  Mom breastfed me and she ate a lot of pretzels. 

            Halloween night, when the kids came for candy, the Redmark home had none.  Mom had been preoccupied with the task of birthing a new life, Father was just busy reading lots of car magazines.  Mom’s excuse was better. 

Father’s big idea:  “Hey, let’s wrap Preston in plastic and drop him in a trick-or-treat bag.  That would be some trick.”

Surging as she was with that wolven maternal instinct, Mom didn't think the line was too funny.  The kiddies were given unpopped bags of popcorn… and our house was toilet-papered in the wee hours. 

Tricks.  My daring life started and ended with tricks. 

The end was several years later--not several enough, though, if you think twenty-four is a small number of years to spend here.  It’s small on average and assuming you’re lucky enough to be born American.  God bless America, by the way, because life expectancy in thirty percent of this hollow world can be measured in single digits. 

My life ended for one minute only.  After, I woke up like this, lying prone in the steet, staring up into the green eyes of an angelic EMT… and unable to move from the neck down except for three fingers on my left hand. [2]  Not enough to masturbate with now, even if I could reach it.  Of course, nothing going on down there anyway.  Hasn't been for three decades. 

            “I am a man whom Fortune hath cruelly scratch'd," as Fast Eddie might say.  I died, young and of unnatural and ruthless causes.  I'll tell you all about it.  Let me just say this for now--a friend once told me there's no such thing as coincidence.  For a long time, I didn't believe him. 

I should have. 

#

            Thirty years of paralysis has not done much to improve my outlook on life.  Don’t say you understand.  You don’t.  But the year before was even worse.  I’ve banged my head trying to find the perfect starting point, but I’m not a perfectionist so let's begin right after the suicide bombing. 

January 2034, Kabul, Afghanistan.  The year before I died.  I was twenty-three.

“This guy finished his deployment the hard way,” the nurse said as they wheeled me into surgery.  I’d finished by almost getting blown up in a vehicle-based IED attack, but unfortunately I escaped the Reaper that time.  Four days after the operations that saved me I was sent to convalesce in a G.I. hospital in Germany.  I didn't recall the details of the attack at the time, due to the brain trauma.  Didn't recall much of anything then.  An obstacle then, but I remember it all now.

            "As your new eyes heal," the kind doctors told me, "we're going to run you, like a rat, through an array of exotic and humiliating tests.  Brain scans.  The usual, to evaluate your behavior for signs of cognitive impairment.  It’s cool.  Hang in there, killer, you'll be back home watching the VIED before you know it!" 

            The bombing on the Dead Road to Kabul, they said, left me with no broken bones or other physical injuries besides the shrapnel in my old eyes and a touch of mild Traumatic Brain Injury.  I told them there was no such a thing; Traumatic Brain Injury isn’t a picante sauce.  I could sense them shrugging.  Doctors have no sense of humor.[3]                 

            The testing lasted less than a week then came to an abrupt stop. 

"You were in an accident before this,” they said.  “A car wreck?  It’s here in your records.”

It was my turn to shrug at them.  My new eyes were working, and I could see the acne on their childish, ignorant faces. 

“And?”

“Could be nothing.  But compounded brain trauma… you've been displaying the typical symptoms of post traumatic stress.  You understand?”

“Yes, I speak English,” I said.  “Continue.”

“It's normal.  What you've been through.  We're going to put you on a few extra meds for a while.  For headaches.  Mm, possible hallucinations.  So you don't go hurt anyone--especially yourself.”  They smiled as if someone had told a joke.  Had they?

“When can I get out of here?”

“Today.  Do you have someone to go home to?  Someone who loves you and would never cheat on you during your deployment?  Oh.  Well, that's fine.  We'll get in touch with your base and someone will pick you up at the airport.  Congratulations!  We’re releasing you back into the great wide open!" 

And so they did.  I always wondered if they tagged me before letting me out, but after thirty years of looking, I've never found an implant. 

#

            I returned to Washington State.  Home, if there was such a thing. 

Not anymore. 

A sponsor from Holcomb picked me up and handled me while I underwent the med board and subsequent discharge from service.[4]  I'd joined the C-Corps, in 2030, after being a Longarm contractor for two years.[5]  Out of the five services to join, the C-Corps was the best in terms of "quality of life," which is another way of saying less bullshit, less getting shot at, and better base swimming pools.  But they gave me the boot and I couldn't blame them.  The war made me quite unsalvageable.

            My house in Pondweed was still there, of course, but the pad was barren and smelled like the bottom of a tombstone.  The reminder of my life before the deployment to Camp Skylark no longer existed.  My darling English wife, Wendy, and the lion's share of our belongings were gone.  She'd held a yard sale of our stuff, leaving me one spoon, a recliner, a homemade plywood desk, and my cherished Isaac Maimon painting of French women having coffee.  This, she had scoured with a steel wool pad. 

            I endured all that--the TBI, PTSD, the divorce, the end of my career, the gross sale of our furnishings and wanton destruction of fine art.  But I'd also acquired bad breath from stress-related gastrointestinal problems, and I admit, I was pretty touchy about it. 

#

"Don't you think you're taking a lot of pills?" Mom asked.    

"I don't like to," I said, not telling her that I was also consuming a lot of medical marijuana, which I didn't mind so much.  No one minds being high; that's why they call it high. 

“I was reading Natural Cures…,” she started.

I scratched my eyelids.  “Mom, please change the subject.”

"Did you hear about the King of England?"

Damn, not the news.  I'd heard he was knifed in the back.  But I didn’t care. 

With the pills, dope, and high alcohol content of my blood most of the day, I kept up a steady stupor while watching the news on the tiny VIED-sphere I'd bought.  It was always the same anyhow:

"--King of England stabbed in the back as he..." 

"--wailed as this Tel Aviv religious school was destroyed by..."  

"--bodies of earthquake victims washed ashore all night..." 

"--as the disease ravages Louisiana and parts of Mississippi..." 

"--who was raped by all three priests before being..."

Zap. 

"Yes, Mom, I hear it all.”  And dissociated, I shrugged it all off. 

#

By the end of that first week home, I felt no need to call Mom anymore to let her "know how I was doing."  If she cared, she would've come there.  Father had an excuse, at least; he’d died five years earlier from Gulf War Illness.[6]

After six weeks home, I'd neglected to pay my bills.  I was already behind since Wendy could never be bothered with such trivialities when I'd been in Afghanistan.  She'd refused to do a lot of things--pay bills on time, be faithful, bring our unborn baby to term.  I'm not bitter.  She's probably an ugly old bag of lizard skin by now and she'll get what's coming to her, if she hasn't already.  Fast Eddie promised that much and I grew long ago to trust him.[7]  More or less. 

I got a warning in the mail saying my power would be shut off, but that didn't sink in; I had other problems.  For starters, my memory imploded, for lack of a better word, and I forgot my damn first name for three days.  But how do you explain that one to the power man? 

   #

It’s not a free country when you can’t sit around in public like an old whino.  I began dressing like one, too, since the power was out and I couldn't do a wash.  Saturday morning--two minutes 'til noon--I got up, put on a Mind the Gap shirt and my old camouflage C-Corps jacket.  Opened my front door to go out and stopped to read the note tacked beside it: 7 KNIVES.  The note had a down-pointing arrow, so I looked. 

There on the floor was a wooden beer crate.  Sure enough, it was full of knives and many more than seven.  Ka-Bar, tanto, S-guard Bowie.  Switchblade, dagger, spear point pigsticker.  Various others.  I put a switchblade in my jacket, a pocket knife in my jeans, grabbed my skateboard and left. 

Riding down to the business part of town, I enjoyed the exercise and crisp weather, but was overcome by exhaust dioxides.  Hell, the air in Kabul was cleaner.  Forget Tacoma Aroma--air in Pondweed is like sucking a tailpipe.  Whole place is a toxic dump shunned by pols who’d never make a name here, abandoned by the enterprise of commerce, given a wide berth by the cops who ruin their tire alignment patrolling pot-holed roads.  Even the hapless teachers had made their exodus.  Pondweed is another roadside victim of the American Dream getting splattered by the hot wheel of Entropy, but it's my home, God damn it, and if the Dream's going to die here, I figure I will with it.[8] 

Why not?  I did once already. 

So I skated the half klick past polluted Latchky Pond, passing boarded up stores and transmission shops until I approached a strip mall which grew like a goiter from that neck of town.  If it had seen better days, it was only a couple.  Skidding to a stop, I entered the Sup-R Smoke and Liquor Shop, aka the Stop n' Rob, and greeted Willy, the skinny Vietnamese who was restocking the porno mags and who always looked like he didn't like anyone and especially not me. 

"Just this," I said, putting a liter of beer by the register. 

"$11.30."

I reached in my back pocket and felt my own ass.  No wallet.  Damn!  There was some cash in my front pocket, though. 

"You're paying cash?  You don't have Skinbee?" he asked, sneering-like. 

"No.  I've got a ten and an Injun."  I took a quarter from the loose change tray on the counter.  "And a quarter.  Actually…,” I realized I also my credit card in my other pocket and put that on the counter.  “What do know?  Throw in that Hustler, too.  The one with the hot blond.  I'm feelin' lucky." 

"Go get her." 

I stepped out and sat on the curb, cracked open my beer and drank from the bag.  No other persons around the strip; business was dead, which was good for me.  I hoped no further interaction with humans would be necessary for the rest of the day.