Luther bolted for the camp. As he neared, he could hear the men’s laughter. They were at ease. Bored. Passing the time. He had the feeling he had seen this all before: The quartet playing cards. The sergeant shaving. The dancing soldier beside the turning Victrola. Smile, smile, smile. His mouth in a half grin, James watched a hawk circling overhead. The air was crisp, the sky gray and calm. Light snow fell. Luther had never been more afraid.
We must stop this. The words wouldn’t come. What if he was wrong? What if he screamed the warnings—the warnings of the dead—and looked the fool?
“Don’t pick up the phone!” Luther said, breathless with fear.
The others regarded him curiously. Three seconds later, the field telephone rang. The sergeant wiped his jaw, pocketed his razor. “Spooky,” he said, shaking his head. The sergeant listened, nodding. “Yes. Yes. Ready, sir. Over and out.”
Luther took a step backward. Say something. Say something.
The sergeant yanked up his suspenders and grabbed his helmet. “Soldiers, this is not a drill. The time is now!”
“The time is now!” the men echoed, abandoning their card game mid-play and running for position. “Luther! I said, positions! That’s an order!”
Luther turned toward the forest. He would not die for a bad cause.
“Luther!” James called from the circle.
Luther saw his brothers-in-arms holding hands, ready. And then he had a sense of them, skeletal and screaming.
“Soldier! Take your position!” the sergeant ordered.
“James,” Luther whispered, but James was no longer looking at him.
Above the Marlowe estate, two streams of blue lightning shot up, piercing the cloudy sky, filling it with tentacles of blue light. The sky moved and groaned like a giant sea beast in pain, and in the next second, the electricity reached down like a staticky blue hand, surrounding the men of the one forty-four. Luther broke into a run, dropping his gun. He was numb with fear. Don’t look back. Just go. Keep running. But at the top of the hill, his heart reneged. Deserter. Luther turned. Down below in the clearing, the men of the one forty-four still held hands. Swirling mist wrapped itself in a deadly caress around their shaking bodies. The men stood fast, but their expressions—wide eyes, open mouths—betrayed their fear.
“Do… you see… that?” the soft-shoe dancer said in a strangled voice. “Dear god!”
“Hold!” the sergeant ordered through his own pain.
A slap of thunder echoed in the woods. The sky ripped open, a terrible birth. Fractured light pierced the men, pouring through their flesh. Luther could see their whole skeletons as if they were X-rays of themselves. And now they were screaming as they floated up toward the mangled sky and whatever lay inside its dark wound.
Luther’s horror was deep water; he was drowning in it. He could not move, could scarcely breathe. A pinpoint of silence held the moment in place, and then a blast of white raced across the ground with such force it destroyed the trees and knocked Luther through the air. He smelled burning flesh, felt a pain greater than anything he had ever known, hot as a branding iron.
And then he was unconscious.
For days, Luther dreamed. In his dreams, he saw the funny gray man with the stovepipe hat. “Greetings, Luther Clayton. Deserter. Do you hear your brethren crying?”
Luther did. He heard them screaming: Help us. Help us. Help us.
When Luther came to, his head pounded. And his legs were gone below the knees. There were voices in the room. Real voices. Jake Marlowe and a pompous general and a sergeant at arms. Luther saw them through the slits of his heavy eyes.
“Margaret Walker tried to smuggle out documents and expose the operation. We’ve jailed her for sedition.” The general.
“And Miriam?” Marlowe.
“An enemy of the state. We can’t allow such power to go loose. We’ll be keeping her under lock and key.”
“What about Will?”
“He’s a broken man. No threat that we can see,” the general said. “Mr. Marlowe, what happened to my soldiers? Where is the one forty-four?”
“I don’t know. But if I could just re-create the experiment with adjustments—think of the enormous good it could do, all that energy—”
“We’ll be shutting down the division, effective immediately.”
“No! General, just give me a chance to perfect it—”
“That machine is far too dangerous. We’ve already lost Rotke Wasserman and the entire regiment to this disaster. We’ll send the telegrams to the families with our sympathies. We’ll take it from here, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Sir, I think he’s awake.” The sergeant at arms.
They all turned to Luther now.
“Luther? Can you hear me?” Marlowe. He looked a wreck.
Luther nodded. Pain shot through him from his forehead down his spine, but he felt nothing below his waist.
“Did you see what happened to the one forty-four? Do you know where they are?”
“They’re with him,” Luther croaked.
“Who?”
“The land is old, the land is vast, he has no future, he has no past, his coat is sewn with many woes, he’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows.”
The general’s upper lip curled. “What the devil does that mean?”
“He’s gravely injured, General, and shell-shocked. There’s no telling.”
The general stood at Luther’s bedside and patted his arm with confidence. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough, soldier. A grateful nation thanks you for your service.”
But the screaming did not stop. Luther saw his ghostly friends in every corner of his mind. Help us! they begged. Oh, he would go mad!
The Shadow Men came to see him in the dark of night.
“Are we taking him out?” the one asked the other. He straightened a loop of piano wire between his gloved hands.
The other Shadow Man snapped his fingers in front of Luther’s face. “He can’t say anything. His mind’s gone.”
“Still.”
“We wait for orders,” the Shadow Man said. “Needs to look like he died in his sleep.”
Reluctantly, the other Shadow Man pocketed his wire. “See you tomorrow, deserter. Sweet dreams.”
Just before dawn, Will Fitzgerald stole into the ward and crouched beside Luther’s bed. “Luther, can you hear me? It’s Will Fitzgerald.”
Luther turned his face to Will’s. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his eyes were swollen and red. Will whispered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
In the dark of night, Will helped Luther to a waiting car. “Ben Arnold?” Will asked the driver.
The driver nodded, and Will deposited Luther and his crutches into the backseat.
“Where’m I taking him, Mr. Fitzgerald?”
“Somewhere he can’t be found.” Will handed Ben all the money he had.
“Sorry to hear about your fiancée,” Ben said. “The machine really do that to her?”
Will’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Just make sure you help him disappear.”