Monsters in the Bush: Lovecraftian Military Tales by David Rose

Author:David Rose [Rose, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Screaming Banshee Press
Published: 2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Lovecraft in Lockup

04 0855C OCT 05

In a trailer, all by himself, Private First Class Pete Peabody is doing the same thing he’s been doing for the past three days. Bandage still wrapped around his head, PFC Peabody tapes another image to the wall—another page out of that dead crypto-linguist’s book.

The Complete Illustrated Guide to H.P. Lovecraft has yet a few pages left. Once they are ripped out and taped up, the book will be entirely disemboweled. Good. Peabody had snuck in and stolen all of Sgt. Greene’s books—quite an un-military-police thing to do—but the bastard had clocked him in the grape with his rifle. Besides, a quick dive into what was technically thievery had delivered the exact clue he’d hoped so desperately to find. And now that vital clue, taped proudly to his wall, made for the centerpiece in a bewilderment of text and related images the young MP obsessed over day and night. For centering the mosaic was the torn-out page displaying the glorious Shantak.

He’d likened what had prompted him to snoop as nothing more than an itchy hunch, but when his eyes beheld that page, the beast, the monster with the horseish head and the dragon’s wings, he knew his investigative instinct had become as potent as the magic he now had to know.

“Peabody.” His door swings open. In walks Staff Sergeant Bonney. “Someone…” The enlisted leader bounces his eyes from one monster to the next, resting them on the nutcase he’s still technically in charge of. “Someone over at recon wants to see you. Put away…whatever you’re doing. Let’s go.”

Staff Sergeant Bonney is all right. He’d been a recruiter they’d said, and he had that way about him where he could stick to the plan of the day even if a meteor had fallen on battalion headquarters. As they walk together through the MEK, Peabody wonders if Bonney could be as silver-tongued as his own recruiter had been. The staff sergeant is so tight-lipped and head down Peabody can’t imagine the guy selling anyone a solid four years in the Corps.

It is only when he picks up on the third or fourth snicker about them that Peabody realizes his escort is escorting “a freak.” The way a puppy who yelps can be torn to shreds by the rest of the litter, Peabody, in a unit full of tight asses and furthered by being on a compound where rumors spread like fire, his bandaged head and refusal to lie have linked him to that ill-fated recon team, and the scuttlebutt now is that on him was rubbed their collective lunacy.

It becomes easier to forget about the stares and whispers when they dissolve themselves into the row of trailers; the ones separating his unit’s berthing from the main office buildings of the MEK. Before long he is thrust into an office and Staff Sergeant Bonney shuts the door.

If he had been toppled into a horror movie, it would have been little different. Before him, behind a table, tacked to a corkboard are two photos.

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