The Killing Flower
The
Killing Flower W.K. Dwyer
Published by Jannicke Blomst P.O. Box 2044, Springfield, VA 22152 © 2016 W.K. Dwyer All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. ISBN 978-0-9977383-0-8 Th is is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental. Editing: Katherine Pickett, Christina M. Frey Proofreading: Lori Paximadis Cover art: Carlton Tomlin Book design: Amber Morena http://www.killingflower.com/ Th is book contains quotations of song lyrics reprinted with permission: “Maps” Words and music by Karen Orzolek, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase Copyright © 2003 Chrysalis Music Ltd. All rights administered by Chrysalis Music Group, Inc., a BMG Chrysalis company All rights reserved Used by permission Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC “Bodies” Music and words by Dave Williams, Mike Luce, C. J. Pierce and Stevie Benton © 2001 Reservoir Media Management, Inc. and Pounding Drool Music All rights for Reservoir Media Music and Pounding Drool Music Administered by Reservoir Media Management, Inc. Reservoir Media Music Administered by Alfred Music All rights administered by Reservoir Media Management, Inc. Reservoir Media Music administered by Alfred Music All rights reserved Used by permission of Alfred Music “Airbag” Words and music by Thomas Yorke, Jonathan Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Edward O’Brien and Philip Selway © 1997 Warner/Chappell Music Ltd. All rights in the U.S. and Canada administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved Used by permission of Alfred Music Every effort was made to obtain reprint permissions for one line of lyrics from “Bulls on Parade” from Evil Empire by Rage Against the Machine; however, there was no response from original/residual copyright holders at the time of publication.
To the John Humes of this world, who get it: listen to the Bloody Sundays and respond only with Good Fridays
The Killing Flower
Prologue
F
unny. Of all the times in my life I’d asked God to turn back the clock, the one time I didn’t was right after 9/11, and that was what put it all in motion. That’s what led me to the little girl, and she set the stage for it to happen. Of course I could have asked him, easily. Sitting in the horror and desperation, I could have cried out as I had so many times, praying and pleading: Please, make it all go away, go back and erase the past. And not just for me this time, for all of us. But he wouldn’t have listened. He never had. All my life I’d lived that delusion: I was special. Precious in his sight. Precious enough to be saved, rescued, even raised from the dead if needed. We were all special, entitled, exceptional. In our darkest hours, we could use our own personal God hotline, and he would actually answer the phone and get on it, take care of things. But it didn’t happen. He never protected me. And he didn’t protect us that day. So that September morning, something finally snapped inside me. I stopped asking him for anything and just started doing it myself. I threw away my plans for college. I set my sights on joining up. I was going to change the world. I was going to fi x things he obviously didn’t care about; I was going to prevent the next one. And that is just what happened. I don’t know exactly how, because it involved some bizarre relativity shit I will never understand, but it happened, believe me. My friend and I saw proof.
T
he first time I asked God to erase the past, I was thirteen. My best friend, Joshua, had talked me into joining his church missions group, and we spent a summer in Brazil, trying to sell Jesus to some of the poorest people in the Amazon region. “You’re Episcopalian,” he 3
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said, smiling, “but that’s okay, we won’t tell anyone,” and he gave me a wink. The only reason I had even been interested was that I thought the word missionary meant something like Indiana Jones—exploring, hacking through jungles with a machete, stumbling upon ancient ruins, discovering the Ark of the Covenant. Instead, all we did was lay bricks in unbearable heat and humidity, go to prayer rallies, and pile into buses, clapping and singing songs on our way to tiny villages so we could “witness,” which made me feel weird and uncomfortable. It was my third week there. The airline had lost my duffel bag with all my clothes and supplies, so I had spent most of my money replacing them. One of the counselors had put me on toilet detail for sleeping during devotionals (I swear I was praying). Then I’d caught a horrible stomach virus. Plus, I’d just gotten into a huge fight with Joshua after he warned me to stay clear of my uncle because it was scientifically proven that all gays were pedophiles. That was the day I decided I wanted to leave, the same day my mom dropped the nuke on me in the form of a letter. I lay in my hammock, opening the handmade paper envelope, and began to read. I could practically hear her sweet, lilting voice as she told me how proud she was of me for going to Brazil to help others, how she admired my courage, how amazed she was I was “so grown-up already,” reminding me for the millionth time I was the best Mother’s Day gift she could have ever, ever, ever asked for. But as I read on, I realized she had begun to talk about something else, something about our family, about me not worrying, keeping my chin up, even remembering that “God will take care of you no matter what happens, isn’t that right, son?” She talked about how my sisters and I would all be okay, and “Aren’t we such survivors, son?” I knew at once things must have gotten even worse at home. Whenever she talked to us about how firm and imperishable our family was, all I heard was a low, disquieting rumble. I knew what was coming, but at the same time, I didn’t. There was no way to imagine it, no way to prepare myself. When I got to the word divorce, something collapsed inside of me. I went numb, motionless, staring at the paper and Mom’s cursive handwriting, noticing
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where she’d traced over certain words, made black smudges with the felt tip. My eyes skipped down toward the bottom of the page. The phrase “your father and I”—I sat and stared at that phrase. It was the end of God caring about me. It was the end of the blessing of our wonderfully perfect, loving family. Gone was the last bit of security my parents could offer me. Gone was the sweet, lilting voice, buried beneath the roar of things crashing. I took her letter and ran out toward the revival center, knelt, and prayed: Dear God, make it not true. Reverse everything; let me go back and do this over. I won’t go to Brazil. I’ll say no to Joshua. I’ll tell him it’s wrong to go to poor countries and preach to them like they are bad people, try to save them when they didn’t ask to be rescued. I’ll tell him it’s wrong for us to think we are better, more Christian, the superior, enlightened ones who can force our beliefs on others. I won’t go, I promise. Please, please, God, send me back. And I prayed like that. Every day. For weeks. I even went to Joshua in desperation, and he reassured me, said the Lord was omnipotent. So I kept praying, kept praying: God, dear God, all-powerful God, turn back the clock. Well, of course I got no response, and the worst thing that could happen actually went on happening, tra-la-la. God’s in his heaven, as they say. And it was no different from the other times in my life I asked him to make it all go away. But 9/11, that’s when everything changed. That’s when I finally said no, I’m done with this shit. To hell with praying, to hell with begging, asking for mercy. In fact, fuck that nonsense—believing someone’s out there listening, requesting shit and getting no answer whatsoever. I’m done knocking on doors when the house is empty. I’m not a kid anymore, I don’t need Mommy or Daddy or anyone. I can do this myself. And that’s what happened. Well, kind of. See, it’s not that this story is about how things were so different. It’s about how they were so very much the same. In fact, the following story is a reprise.
Iraq, 2006
W
hen we were in Anbar we used to call it “doing crack”—going on patrols into the city to draw out insurgent attacks, roaring down streets in our Humvees, laying down some serious fire on bad guys lurking in buildings or crouched behind walls, wielding RPGs. It was an incredible rush just knowing a firefight could happen at any moment. And when it did happen, fuck. It was like the coolest video game you could imagine—looking down the thumping barrel of a .50-caliber M2 machine gun, red and black smoke, dust and shit flying everywhere. Calling in for fire support and watching one of those A-10 Warthogs whoosh across forty feet off the deck and blow the ever-loving shit out of a building. Oh my God, it was just fucking bizarre how cool it made you feel. When I was five I loved to play Transformers: Autobots battling the evil, weaker, kinda stupid Decepticons. I’d spend hours building up some ridiculously humongous base of operations for the bad guys, using all my old crap left over from Microman, and then assemble the Autobots’ forces about ten times as big, with all the cool vehicles with laser cannons, ion shields, nuclear warheads. And after all that elaborate setup, I’d have this mondo epic battle scene, and it took about two minutes to completely obliterate the Decepticons and their whole operation. Yeah, Iraq was pretty much like that. We had all the cool toys. Bad guys had nothing. They drove around in their busted-out Toyotas— “jingle trucks,” we called ’em—scurried around in bathrobes, holding antique AK-47s. Behind walls, on rooftops, crouched in some shop doorway, who knows. You couldn’t see ’em half the time. They were just some amorphous, undefined . . . thing. And as long as you couldn’t actually see anyone get waxed, and of course as long as none of them 9
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actually took out any of us, blowing the shit out of cars and buildings where the little fuckers were hiding made you feel giddy as hell. Giggle factor was way off the charts. That’s how it began, the first real day of the war for me. Tearing through city streets in a Humvee, everybody in the squad all pumped up, me sitting up in the turret, firing off rounds like I had lost my fucking mind. Radio chatter, the constant clamor of orders being yelled, external loudspeakers blaring that song by Drowning Pool: “Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor . . .” It was three weeks into my first tour; we were finally, actually doing something. My main man was Ethan, my best friend from high school, who’d joined up with me. Smart as hell, read quantum physics in his spare time, eidetic memory—one of those guys who are not so much nerdy as just unassumingly brilliant. But he was a total anomaly: grew up in the sticks of southeast Tennessee, home of the quintessential hayseed, yet he went to an all-boys private prep school, where we met in eighth grade, and scored a fuckin’ genius on the Mensa test. Then again, you would have no idea by looking at him. He wasn’t exactly Ed Grimley, with the greasy hair and pants up to his chest. He actually looked remarkably like Nicolas Cage: rugged features, solid jawline, lean, muscular frame. Did free-climbing and parkour for the hell of it and was pretty damn good. He could also rattle off NASCAR stats and knew all about deep-frying candy bars. So the idiots in the platoon, the guys with barely two rocks in their fuckin’ skulls, might normally try to say, “All you gots is book learnin’,” but not to Ethan. They couldn’t touch Ethan. Our rifle squad was kind of small. Two fire teams plus Staff Sergeant Huey, our squad leader. He was awesome. An older guy on his third tour in OIF/OEF, he knew what made a good soldier, and he totally believed in us. He set a great example, pushed us to excel, and spent a lot of time with us individually, honing our skills. He was also extremely funny, pulling pranks and shit, which kind of threw me at first, but I soon realized it was intentional. He did it for morale, to keep our sanity. I didn’t know the other guys in the unit, really. Except PFC Ma-
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seth. He was by far the craziest motherfucker we had. He had this total country-boy southern drawl, talked slowly, with sarcasm in every word. He clowned around constantly. From the very first mission I was on with him, he’d do this stand-up thing, trying to crack everybody up. He had gotten the dead lowest score on the marksman test, didn’t give a shit, and was also known for sleeping when he should have been out on missions. We met him on our first bivouac in basic training, where we were supposed to be all roughing it, surviving off dirt and rainwater for days on end. The first morning, we look over, and there is Bryan Maseth in his tent with a frickin’ box of Cookie Crisp cereal. From then on we painted this caricature of him in this plush family-sized tent with a sixties-style waterbed and a beer cooler, watching HDTV. It was funny as hell. We were so brutal, even with the commanding officers. There was Specialist Christopher Th iessen, a tall second-generation Greek guy who seemed to talk about money a lot, and there was a Hispanic dude, Barco, who was in the same team as Christopher. Then there was Terrell Walker. He was the grunt Maseth seemed to hang out with most. Short, stocky, jet-black skin, a big, wide nose and “what the fuck you lookin’ at” eyes. Reminded me of that actor Ving Rhames from Pulp Fiction. He listened to a lot of Public Enemy and rap metal. My first impression: thug. Seemed like he was just itching for a reason to start some shit with other soldiers, especially if you was whitey. Then there was me, Mr. Higher Purpose. They’d already started tagging me as the spoiled rich kid just ’cause I had a few T-shirts from Diesel and an Alessi espresso maker. I was hoping that didn’t stick. I needed to blend in, to go kind of unnoticed for now. I had reasons to be there others didn’t, ideas I had to keep to myself. They wouldn’t get it. Not like some secret plot or anything; I just knew I’d be playing a lead role. Which part exactly, what lines, I wasn’t sure. But I had the big poster taped up over my bunk, the one with the graphic of 9/11, The Falling Man. The one Sergeant Huey said was a little disturbing. “Yeah . . . ,” I said, wanting to explain. But it would have been too soon. First I had to show them I wasn’t just some sheltered, oversensitive, fragile motherfucker who couldn’t handle war. Fuck that. I got
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through my nightmare childhood; I doubt any of these punks could survive the shit I’ve seen. But that was actually a good thing; it was exactly what made me stronger. Because when things got bad, the guys would need someone to bolster them, to show them how to deal with emotional trauma, to survive mentally, not just physically. No one ever protected me—not God, and definitely not my parents . . . hell, if anything, they were the ones bleeding out. Well, I wasn’t my dad and I wasn’t my mom. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to repeat their mistakes. I was better than that.
M
ost times Ethan and I would be in the same Humvee, bumping down back alleyways on some routine daytime mission, in full battle gear and sweating our asses off. It was so hot, so incredibly hot. Together with all the palm trees and sand, it reminded me of days at the beach in midsummer, when the air just sat and stuck to you, the blistering sun made it impossible to see, and you couldn’t walk five steps without burning the shit out of your bare feet. Every day in Iraq was like that, as far as I could tell—the beach, plus mortar rounds and IEDs. But a lot of times Ethan seemed to be the guru. Like the cool older brother—reserved, yet comfortable sharing his knowledge. Guys in the squad were always asking him about shit they should have known from their OPSEC training, or daring him to do some jackass stunt. He’d usually do it, too. It seemed like he obliged them more for the sake of their education than anything else. One time we were stopped on the road, getting some chow, and one of the guys found this viciouslooking scorpion crawling next to the Humvee. Ethan went over and started messing with it. Whoever was on security detail yelled down from the top, “Coffelt, that’s a fucking scorpion. Cease and desist the hell away from that fucker!” Ethan bent down to look closer. We started to gather around, getting all excited and goofy. Walker peered in to see, lifting his shades. “Oh snap, you mean dass the kind o’ shit crawling around this muhfucker?”
Acknowledgments Novels tend to be associated solely with authors, their creation attributed to whoever’s name is on the cover. Having gone through the process, I realize what mythology this is. This book is the product of an entire team—those on the payroll and off, consultants, beta readers, coworkers, friends, and family. Without this awesome team The Killing Flower simply could not have been created. First there was my girlfriend, Bonnie, who provided the safe environment to create in, but also knew not to let me escape: “Oh, no. This one you’re going to finish.” There was my buddy Greg, who marked up the first drafts—dude, you are such a natural at this stuff it’s annoying! Steve, Sharon, and Derek, your consulting on all things military saved me from total embarrassment. Kay, my translator, you encouraged me to publish and shared your journey in creating The Iraqi Cookbook. In no way can I take credit for the transformation of my story into an actual novel. Katherine and Christina, you have got to be the best editors any author would ever need. You adopted this story as you would your own, totally got what I was going for, coached and guided me, corrected me, and held my hand the entire way. I could write a book on just how invaluable this process and interaction has been. Amber, your interior design was spot on from the beginning. Lori, you were a stickler and it paid off. And finally, Carl, what a brilliant piece of artwork you came up with for the cover—a simply awesome interpretation of this story. I am forever indebted to you. I want to also thank my parents. Dad, your objective analysis just days after 9/11 was what got me thinking about the root causes of terrorism. Mom, you left this world a little better than when you got here; this was my inspiration. 393
W.K. Dwyer has written short stories and poetry for decades and was trained as a musician under J. D. Blair. Following the events of September 11, he stopped creating music to focus on writing and podcasting about the root causes of terrorism. W.K. holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering and has done post-graduate work in AI and cognitive science. He works as a government contractor, developing targeting systems for counterterrorism. This is his ďŹ rst novel. Twitter: wkdwyer Email: dwyerwk@gmx.com