Shifting Again Read online

  As he drifted into dreams he had a thought he had too often: if it only was a different time, a different place... and then he was swept away from the forest and the war by the merciful arms of sleep.

  ***

  "Vonne, wake up, come on..."

  The butt of Hewitt's rifle prodded Vonne awake. Hewitt's soft, insistent words filtered into his awareness just before the other sounds: the silence of the forest, and then, the rapid staccato of gunfire somewhere in the distance. He jerked himself into a sitting position, fully awake now. His gun was in his hand quick as thought and he tilted his head to listen for the direction of the live fire. His stomach rumbled dimly; he willed it to stop and focused harder.

  "That way," Hewitt hissed. He lunged to his feet and into motion, cutting his way through the undergrowth without hesitation. Vonne scowled at his buddy's recklessness but he followed. The sun was still high overhead, baking the air into a hot, humid mass. Vonne felt moisture running off of him like he'd taken a shower. He scraped his sweaty hair back from his forehead and mopped his face with one arm.

  The gunfire was close now, so close Vonne was surprised no one had noticed them crashing through the underbrush like elephants. He swiveled to his right when he heard shouting coming from a dense cluster of trees; but straining to see, he saw nothing, found nothing. When he turned back Hewitt was already gone ahead of him. "Fuck!" he said hard under his breath. He stilled and tried to hear Hewitt's progress, or more fighting, but the forest seemed to have quieted to mock him. Frowning, he tried to pick up the direction he'd been headed.

  "Hewitt," he chanced a loud whisper. He figured their careless progress would have given his position away already. "Hewitt!"

  He worked his way around a tangle of low, thorny bushes and emerged to see Hewitt standing, motionless, at the edge of a clearing in the woods. Tall grasses grew waist high in the clearing, lit a brilliant gold by the noonday sun. Vonne started to say Hewitt's name again, and then stopped, finally seeing what had frozen his friend in place.

  Lost over three weeks ago, Curtis Dremel had disappeared during a raid on a Primitive supply center. His loss had been hard for Vonne, but Hewitt had been crushed. Hewitt and Curtis had been like brothers, grown up together, an inseparable duo before Vonne's arrival made them a trio. Sometime during the war the two of them became more than just friends--they never talked about it, but Vonne knew, heard them sometimes in the closeness of the tent. If he was ever envious he never said anything; and if he was ever a little glad for Curtis's disappearance, he would never have admitted it even to himself.

  Vonne shook off his shock first. "Jesus, Curtis, you're alive!"

  Dirt and blood smeared the dark soldier's face, but he seemed whole enough. His expression was more than a little bewildered as he stumbled toward them. His mouth worked as if he was trying to find words.

  Hewitt shook off his paralysis at last, breaking into motion, shoving his gun behind him and cutting toward the standing figure in the midst of the tall grass. His words drifted back to Vonne across the clearing. "Curtis--Christ--Curtis..."

  Curtis smiled and spread his arms, almost as if presenting himself, or beckoning Hewitt. Vonne felt a momentary pang of emotion he'd long thought dead. He thrust it away: he was glad Curtis was alive, glad as fuck, thankful. He followed after Hewitt, plunging forward.

  "Hewitt...?"

  Curtis's voice rang out in the stillness, strange and harsh and somehow unlike himself.

  "Curt, oh Jesus, it's me, Curt, it's me--" Hewitt was almost to Curtis now, stretching out one hand toward his friend, as if he could save him from whatever horrors were marked so obviously on his face. Curtis reached out as well, stumbling forward to meet him, fingers curling for a handshake.

  Vonne fell back, stopped moving entirely. He wiped sweat out of his eyes. The heat was really fucking bad. He could see it distorting the air, bending Curtis's shape, making him look sort of blurred and wavy--slurring into something less human....

  "FUCK!" Vonne burst forward into motion. "Hewitt, get back! Oh, fuck!"

  A new trick, an old one they'd never seen, Vonne didn't know, but Curtis wasn't Curtis any more. Before Vonne's eyes Curtis shed his humanity, erupted fur and fangs and claws, muzzle like a stunted dog's and yellow eyed like a wolf. The inhuman reek of him hit Vonne like a wall of stench, that weird smell that wasn't revolting like garbage but almost pleasant, almost stirring, musky and strange and thick.

  The forward motion of Hewitt and the thing that had been Curtis--or had taken on his face--brought their bodies together before Hewitt could react; they crashed to the ground in a grotesque parody of an embrace and even from the distance Vonne was from them he could hear the sick crunch of bone and flesh under teeth. Vonne heard screaming and he yanked his gun up to save Hewitt before he realized it was his own voice he was hearing. Hewitt was silent; from the twisted merging of man and beast there was only sickening sound of teeth on bone.

  As soon as Vonne got a clear shot he took it, still shouting bloody murder. The sound of his gun was like thunder in his ears. His screams coalesced into words: "Get off him you fucking ape! You fucking throwback!"

  At last he got the thing's attention enough to pull it off of Hewitt and toward him. When their eyes met he couldn't help but wonder how much--if any--of Curtis was in there, or if they had only taken on the ability to mimic men they had seen or killed. It made him hesitate just long enough for the beast to close the distance between them. But as it filled his personal space, plugged his nostrils with its primal reek and his vision with its inhuman shape, he knew Curtis was no part of this thing and he moved just in time.

  In most speed contests between Primitive and man the Primitive won, but this time Vonne was lucky. He pulled the pin out of a grenade and dropped it at the ape's feet, rolling away before it even registered what had happened. He covered his head against the resultant rain of dirt and pelt and blood and fur. The wave of the explosion hammered into him; he tried to roll even further out of the way, but he'd come to the edge of the clearing, and the blast hurled him into a tree. His breath was slammed out of him, and his consciousness followed.

  ***

  Vonne opened his eyes. He wondered if he'd gone blind at first, it was so dark, but then he saw a few dim, pale shapes in the space around him.

  "You're alive." Hewitt sounded so desperately relieved that Vonne reached out a hand and groped for him. He gasped when he laid his hand in something wet, and ragged-edged.

  "Can't believe you're alive," Hewitt said, and Vonne felt a rough glove pat the back of his hand reassuringly. But Vonne heard something catch in Hewitt's breath.

  "Thought it chewed your head off."

  "Sure tried to," Hewitt agreed. "Got my arm, mostly." Vonne made out the bare shape of Hewitt's face, sweaty curls plastered to the high pale dome of his forehead.

  It took him a moment to notice the obvious: "Where's your hat?"

  Hewitt without his cowboy hat was as alarming as the blood Vonne had put his hand in. The other man shrugged. "Got stomped on, I guess."

  Vonne gritted his teeth and scooted his ass until the wall helped him sit up. "Hewitt?"

  Another shrug. There was more light now. It must be turning dawn, Vonne thought, but Hewitt had somehow wrangled his mass to shelter. The pain in his head was beginning to dim, at least. In the growing light he could see that Hewitt was torn up badly. He'd carefully attended to himself, of course, but even the dirty bandages they all carried as field dressing hadn't been enough to cover all the scrapes and gashes. His well-loved jeans were purple and black with blood, his long legs a ruin.

  Vonne scuttled toward him, hands hovering, unable to think of anything that might help but desperately wanting to.

  "You think..." Hewitt whispered, "You think that was Curtis in there?"

  Vonne let out a long breath between his teeth. "No," he said at last. "Don't think it was. Why would Curtis try and kill you?"

  "Why didn't that thing kill me?" Hewitt's righ
t hand drifted to the wad of bandages wrapped around his left forearm. Blood glistened thickly through the layers of white. "Could have bit clean through my bones, if it wanted."

  "I was shooting at the fucker, Hewitt. Don't you go reading shit into shit that don't got any meaning." He fumbled among the items strapped to his back, his belt, his waist. At last he found where he'd tied his canteen on last time. He pressed it into Hewitt's hands. "You better drink something." An odd smell clinging to Hewitt drifted up to Vonne--somehow cinnamon and musky and salty-sweet. Probably left from his grapple with the Primitive. Weirdly, Vonne felt himself go half-hard.

  "Wish Curt was really back." Hewitt shook his head at the canteen. He opened his eyes, meeting Vonne's. "Better not. Got bit, right?"

  Cold slammed into Vonne's belly, his odd dim arousal fled as quickly as it had come. How could he have forgotten that wretched scrape of teeth, wet sound of skin breaking? Hewitt noticed his expression with a quirk of his mouth. He reached out and touched Vonne's gun.

  "You got a round for me?" Hewitt asked.

  "Jesus, no!" Vonne shouted, jerking back. "No, I don't got a round for you, you son of a bitch!"

  "You know you gotta."

  "Fuck what I gotta!" Vonne yelled. But Hewitt was right. Any soldier bitten and not in immediate range of a med team was to be put out of his misery. Anything that got Primitive blood into a Human's meant threat of hostile takeover. The war on a microscopic level: Primitives winning there, too. Vonne crashed his fist into one side of the cave, swearing. "Goddamnit! I don't give a goddamn shit if they are better, I just want my goddamn normal life back! I want you, and I want Curtis, and I want being out in the forest and not freaking out in some goddamn hole with my goddamn best friend asking to have a bullet in his goddamn head!"

  "You tell 'em," Hewitt laughed weakly. His eyes were shut, his breathing shallower. His hand slipped off the muzzle of Vonne's gun.

  He panicked, lunging forward to grab Hewitt's shoulders and shake him. "Jesus, no, Hewitt! I'll find the corps, get you a medic...." Medic teams had anti-change agents, stuff culled from the Primitives' own research, retrovirals and anti-mutagens and that sort of thing--though Vonne knew sometimes even that stuff wasn't strong enough to stop a man going ape if that was what his heart really wanted.

  That was the biggest difference between Men and the Primitives, after all. Primitives had been men once, who saw back to the old ways, blended them with the new--science and more arcane, inexplicable things come together. Viral agents and ritual, recombinant DNA and incense.

  Hewitt didn't open his eyes, but his gloved hand slid up to squeeze Vonne's wrist. He mumbled something.

  "What?" Vonne demanded, shaking him again.

  "Said... stop it... you're giving me a boner and I need that blood elsewhere."

  Impulsively, Vonne seized Hewitt's hand and squeezed and released it just as quickly. The heavy scent of him was stronger. Vonne tried to tell himself was just the smell of a man dying. But the evidence seemed against him. Hewitt seemed to be breathing more deeply again; he seemed more resting than dying. Vonne steadfastly ignored the part of him that suggested Hewitt's recovery wasn't necessarily a good thing. He stripped off his beaten up camouflage hunting jacket, loved and trusted since before the wartimes, and draped it over the other man, then handed him his best knife and his canteen and the little bottle of barracks' moonshine he kept for both antiseptic and alcoholic purposes. "Now, I don't give anyone that bottle, and I expect you to be returning it ape-cootie free," he schooled Hewitt with a serious face.

  Hewitt nodded and then coughed. Vonne didn't like his ashen complexion, but he didn't say so. "I'll be back any minute with the corps medic, so you just sit tight, keep quiet. Jesus, you're gonna shiver yourself apart." Vonne wished he had another sweater like he'd had when this all started, but it had ripped full of holes fast. He just had to hurry, that was all. If he was back soon, Hewitt's teeth wouldn't chatter through his tongue. The other man seemed close to losing consciousness again; his eyes were slits, the glimpse of hazel just enough to tell he was still watching Vonne. "Sit tight," Vonne repeated, feeling worse than ever about leaving. He patted Hewitt's shoulder and then moved toward the entrance of the small cave.

  The low moan stopped him. He turned, but he was too far to see Hewitt's face. The weird smell had filled the whole space, thick and exotic and somehow animal.

  "Don't you worry," he whispered back even as his sense of panic deepened. "Don't you worry, I'll be back soon."

  When he got no reply from Hewitt, he hoped his friend was reassured, and plunged back into the forest.

  ***

  "Vonne! Jesus, man, how are you alive?"

  Vonne pushed past the startled team leader sitting outside the command tent and went inside. It had been a full day of pointless wandering before he found the relocated base camp for Unit GJ, and he wasn't in any mood to be friendly. He ignored the perimeter guard completely, some greenie that didn't shoot him down as soon as he broke the camp line, and made a beeline for command.

  "Throwbacks are getting too close," Captain Holdren was saying, indicating a diagram on a portable screen. "Cho's faction has been hoping to pre-emptive strike, take over this area before the Primitives and turn it to human causes but--" the captain frowned. He stopped abruptly as he noticed his men staring toward the tent entrance, following their gaze to Vonne. "Excuse me, son, but you can't be here."

  "Sir, I need--" Vonne began. A medic, barely distinguishable from the grungy, civilian-clothed ranks, rushed in behind him with a scanner to read him.

  "Scan's clean; he's not throwback," the medic announced, and then colored when he noticed what he had intruded upon.

  "'Course I'm not a throwback! Stop that," Vonne said gruffly, batting the medic's intrusive instrument away. "Hewitt's back there--between here and Outpost 54. We need help."

  "'Captain Cowboy' Hewitt?" the medic said with some dismay. Vonne winced. It was a stupid nickname that Hewitt had loathed, but it stuck within the ranks.

  The captain stared at Vonne, his effort to scrape up some recognition obvious. "You were with Sixth Corps, weren't you?" The captain's face went that automatic blank of a man who'd had to deliver bad news too many times. "Doubt your friend's alive by now, apes brought down the old Forestry offices--Outpost 54. We got reports."

  "No, we got out," Vonne protested. "He's bit, we gotta get a medic--"

  "Bitten?" The captain's face turned serious. "How far?"

  "'Bout a day's walk southeast--"

  The captain's face darkened. "And you didn't do your duty to see him off intact?"

  "You were supposed to be three hours away, not a whole fucking day!" Vonne shouted. "So no, I didn't 'see him off intact’, you heartless piece of shit!"

  "You are out of line--!" One of the other officers stood, but the captain raised a hand and gestured him down. The expression on his face warred between annoyance and pity.

  "We were forced to move base when Outpost 54 failed to hold off a Primitive aggression. If you're lucky, your friend's dead, son. So let him go."

  Vonne opened his mouth to protest, but the captain shook his head warningly. His hand landed on Vonne's shoulder, squeezed it hard before he turned away.

  "Medic, would you mind escorting this soldier out of command? Why don't you take him to the mess? Food does a man favors."

  "Yessir!"

  The medic obediently took Vonne's elbow and gently steered him to the tent's exit.

  "I'm real sorry to hear about Cap'n Cowboy. He was real good to everyone here at base. Always had a joke when you didn't expect it. I liked that." The medic hovered at Vonne's elbow while they walked. "I liked his hat. Bet he's still wearing it, wherever he's gone now."

  Vonne said nothing. He had meant, upon being so completely dismissed by the captain, to go back and look for Hewitt himself, but the mention of Hewitt's missing hat made his gut clench and his eyes prickle. He cleared his threatening sinuses with a great, noisy inhale, change
d it into a hawk and spit. But he couldn't expel the wet, heavy certainty that the captain was right. Hewitt was lost to him now.

  "Fuck, man, if things had been different," he muttered, scowling harder at the ground as if it were responsible for his pain. He pinched the bridge of his nose, clenched his eyes, then caught the medic staring at him with a concern and a pity that turned his stomach. "Can't a man sneeze in some fucking peace and quiet?" he growled, glowering.