The Impaler (33 page)

But now that his grandfather was gone that could never happen; now that Rally had told him the truth about what was going on in the cellar, Edmund didn’t know quite how to feel about the whole thing.

Only that the searching was still there.

“I’ve arranged for you to fly home, Lambert,” said Edmund’s commanding officer. “We can have you manifested on the next bird to Kuwait.”

“No thank you, sir,” said Edmund. “I’d like to finish up my time here. I’ve squared it so we can delay the funeral. It’s only a week, and my men need me.”

This was true. The 187th was scheduled for a raid on an insurgent stronghold that evening in the southern part of Tal Afar. The intel had come in that morning, and Edmund had organized the mission himself—needed to move fast before the enemy changed position again.

But his men were angry with him; thought the whole thing poorly timed. Edmund couldn’t blame them. With less than a week of their tour remaining, no one from the 187th wanted to be the last to bite it. There was no question as far as Edmund Lambert was concerned. He knew what he had to do.

“Are you sure your head’s on straight for this?” asked his commanding officer. “You’ve got a lot of men depending on you tonight, Lambert.”

“Yes, sir,” Edmund replied. “My grandfather and I weren’t very close.”

Later that night, Edmund and his unit set out in a convoy of unarmored Humvees that were to bring him and his men along a main road to the outskirts of the city, about a quarter mile from their target. The remainder of the distance would be covered on foot.

Everything had been going according to plan until the convoy passed through an intersection about a hundred yards from the drop-off point.

Edmund watched in horror as the Humvee at the head of the convoy was hit dead-on in a hissing streak of white. Then came the explosion, and Edmund knew the gunner was dead. Two men scrambled from the disabled vehicle. One of them was on fire.

Another explosion—screams of
“RPG!”
and
“Medic!”—
and all at once Edmund and his men were under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Time seemed to rush forward in leaps—the
poppity-pop-pop
of returning fire; the metallic thunder of Edmund’s gunner above his head shooting wildly. Then the pump of boots on the hard-pack street—screams of
“Down there, down there!”
and Edmund found himself crouched behind the corner of a building, the green of his night-vision goggles illuminating his surroundings.

More gunfire, and Edmund peered down the side street as a Humvee rolled past him, the gunner firing at the fleeing insurgents. It was a trap. Edmund and his men had seen this before. Edmund radioed for the Humvee to hold its position. It did, and kept firing down the street as an IED exploded up ahead.

Then they were running—Edmund and three of his men on the main road—rounding the corner of the next block; the
back and forth of orders, the salute report, the request for rerouting and reinforcements on the radio.

They were in the southern neighborhoods—close to the city’s small wooded park, beyond which were pockets of farmland and then the desert. Intercept them before they get to the park, Edmund thought; take up position and mow them down before they lose them in the trees and then on to who knows where.

Edmund waved his men ahead in three-to-five-second rushes, covering each other as they cleared and passed the narrow alleyways between the houses. Edmund was at the end of the line, was about to take up his next position when his NVGs picked up something strange approaching in the alleyway. Instinctively, he stepped forward and raised his weapon—but when his mind finally registered what he was seeing, Sergeant Edmund Lambert froze.

It was a large male lion.

Edmund had heard the stories at the start of the war; knew that in the days leading up to and immediately following the U.S.-led invasion, the sight of animals wandering the streets of Baghdad was quite common. Most had either escaped or were freed by looters from the Baghdad Zoo, which had been home to a large number of lions. Many of the big cats had been rounded up by American soldiers in armored vehicles; others were rescued from the Hussein family’s personal menageries, as well as from the appalling conditions of many private zoos.

Yet the rumors among the locals had persisted; sightings of man-eaters believed to have once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, who was notorious for feeding his lions with the flesh of his enemies.

Rumors. Just rumors.

But here, north of Mosul, so far away—this couldn’t be happening.

The lion was closer now.

It stopped about ten feet away and looked back over its shoulder down the alleyway. Edmund registered in the back of his mind that the lion looked well fed. And at the same time he realized he was not afraid, he felt a crack inside his head—the lion, the alley shifting crooked across his eyes, along with a high ringing in his ears. He was vaguely aware of the sound of gunfire and shouting behind him, but felt himself being pulled forward, as if a hand had been placed on the barrel of his rifle, gently pushing it down. He let it fall but didn’t hear it hit the ground as the ringing in his ears grew louder.

The lion turned back, lowered its head, and stepped closer—looked meekly up at him with eyes both sad and full of greenish white fire. Edmund felt as if the air around him had turned to lime Jell-O, his movements heavy and not his own. A dream, a swirly dream of shadows, of bright green crumbling brick and a presence—no,
two
presences—whispering somewhere behind him.

“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”

“C’est mieux d’oublier.”

Then Edmund saw the word G-E-N-E-R-A-L—a flash of silvery letters, stitched in cursive across a dark blue background. It was as if the word was sneaking up on him from behind; as if he was catching only a glimpse of it before it faded back into the black.

“C’est mieux d’oublier.”

Then another crack.

Now, there was only the lion again, staring up at him from the green. Edmund stroked its mane, his hand tracing slowly down to caress its face. Another flash of memory, and Edmund’s fingers were inside the lion’s mouth. He registered somewhere the feel of its teeth, but at the same time saw his fingers as his grandfather’s, the lion’s mouth his own.

The lion licked Edmund’s hand—not his hand, but his
good luck charm; the ancient Babylonian seal between his thumb and forefinger.

“C’est mieux d’oublier,”
Edmund whispered, and suddenly felt a hot wetness in his groin—felt it running down his legs—and realized his face was cold and moist, his breathing labored as if he was sobbing.

Sobbing?

Edmund could not remember crying since his mother died, since that TV show with the happy little boy who looked just like him got canceled.

“Be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”

“It’s not my fault,” Edmund said—and all at once the alley shifted again, this time with a whoosh, and the green of his NVGs grew brighter. The lime Jell-O dissolved, the air grew thinner, and now there was only the sound of someone calling his name.

Edmund looked down at his hands. The Babylonian seal was gone, and the lion was moving away—did not look back as its heavy paws carried it quickly around the curve of the alleyway and out of sight.

“Come back,” Edmund heard himself whisper. “Come back.”

He felt someone touch his shoulder—heard his name, closer now—but the world had already begun to iris into black.

Edmund awoke in the infirmary, groggy, but clean and dry and stripped down to his underwear. The lights, the col-ors—especially the whites—seemed brighter, and Edmund could hear the tapping of fingers on a keyboard.

“He’s awake, Doctor,” said a female voice to his left.

Edmund turned toward it, but a bright light met his eyes—a man’s voice now, soothing, and a gentle hand on his
eyelids propping them open. Then the light was gone, and in its place, big orange dots and lots of questions. Lots of answers, too—most of them “I don’t know” in a scratchy voice that sounded nothing like his own. Words from the doctor like dehydration, heat exhaustion, fainting, and semi-comatose—questions about what he ate, “I’m going to give you so many ccs of this and so many ccs of that,” and more words that Edmund didn’t understand.

And then he remembered—asked suddenly, “Where’s the lion?”

“The lion?”

“Yes,” said Edmund. “The lion who killed my mother.”

“You’re hallucinating, soldier,” the doctor said.

Silence. A dull prick on his forearm.

“Carry that rope for me, Doc
,
” Edmund whispered, fading. “It’s better to forget.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. “It’s better to forget.”

Two soldiers were killed in the ambush, two were wounded, but Edmund’s team got eight insurgents thanks in part to Edmund’s intimate knowledge of the area and his quick rerouting of his troops toward the park. And even though Edmund didn’t participate in the gun battle, even though no one ever knew what happened to him in the alleyway, his men didn’t blame him for the loss of their comrades.

But Edmund couldn’t have cared less if they had. All that, his former life, was over. All that—the Army, Iraq, war, insurgents, death—all nonsense, all meaningless to him now in comparison to his anointing.

Sergeant Edmund Lambert was given a clean bill of health but declined to speak with an Army counselor. He made two more patrols and killed one Iraqi before flying back to Fort Campbell. He never mentioned the lion or the General ever again, and never once mourned the loss of his good luck charm. The lion wanted it. The lion wanted everything. But most of all, the lion wanted him, too.

It was all so clear to him now. Indeed, the answer had
been there ever since he was a child, but Edmund had simply been too stupid to see it. The General.

G-E-N-E-R-A-L

Yes, Edmund thought, if he broke apart the word General (or, wrote it on a piece of paper like his grandfather had taught him,
dash-dash-dash
and whatnot) and rearranged the letters, one would get Nergal with a leftover E, as in:

G-E-N-E-R-A-L = E + N-E-R-G-A-L

Or, if one preferred, on could write the equation this way:

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L

Either way it was the same. The leftover
e
, of course, stood for Edmund. There could be no doubting that now. The evidence was clear, irrefutable, beyond coincidental. Edmund knew this with every fiber of his being; knew it in a way that made him feel as if he had never known anything before.

The god Nergal had visited him in his dreams all those years ago—had bestowed upon him the code, the equation, the
formula
—and had since waited patiently for Edmund to understand. And how many times had he heard those words from Rally and his grandfather? Equation and formula? Ner-gal had been speaking to him all that time through the old men, too!

And now, finally, Edmund understood what the god was saying: Edmund and Nergal on one side of the equal sign, the General on the other. Yes, only with Nergal could Edmund become the General.

The totality of the equation said so: E + N-E-R-G-A-L =

G-E-N-E-R-A-L

But N-E-R-G-A-L needed E(dmund) to become the G-E-N-E-R-A-L, too. But Nergal was already a general—the supreme general; the most fearful of them all, in fact. So what was Nergal getting at? Perhaps the formula meant Ner-gal needed Edmund to become a real, living breathing gen-
eral again. Yes, perhaps Nergal needed Edmund to help him return to the land of the living. But how?

The images on the seal! It was all there! How else could one balance the equation? Nergal wished to return, to become flesh again, and he had chosen Edmund as his vehicle—had actually given him instructions on how to do it! That was why he sent the lion to take back the seal. The lion was Nergal’s emissary, and by returning the seal—that very thing that in ancient times was used in secret correspondence—Edmund had accepted the god’s offer. Worship and sacrifice were the keys to bringing him back!

He had not been hallucinating. The lion was real, and everything happened there in the alleyway just as Edmund remembered it. Edmund was sure of that. The proof was there in the formula.

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L

And what was it that Rally had said on the telephone? Something again about getting the “formula” right? Well, that had to be another message from Nergal, too; and now that Edmund had finally gotten
his
formula right, he would never be so stupid as to ignore or misinterpret his messages ever again.

The messages were everywhere and in everything. Edmund understood this now. He just had to look more closely to be able to read them.

And Edmund knew he needed to look more closely at Rally, too. There was a message there, an answer that needed to be extracted from all his doublespeak about formulas and whatnot; an answer that had been there all along, but again Edmund had simply been too stupid to see it.

Edmund understood this in his gut, although he could not articulate it in his mind; could not reach out and touch that flash of silver stitching against that dark blue background no matter how hard he tried.

G-E-N-E-R-A-L

To see the word written that way—
A memory? A dream? Something real or imagined? Something he was projecting now that he knew the formula?

But along with the silver stitching of
G-E-N-E-R-A-L
came other flashes—distant shadows and voices that brought with them a thick gooiness that reminded Edmund of the medicine. He could not see to whom the voices belonged, but understood there were only two of them—understood this in the same way he had understood the General’s name all those years ago as a child. But the voices were speaking in French; whispers and mumblings and back-and-forth echoes that Edmund didn’t understand.

Edmund knew his ancestors had moved from New Orleans to North Carolina after the Civil War. Was it his family he was hearing? Was it Nergal speaking through his ancestors of his destiny?