Good Luck, Yukikaze

malice we bear toward them.”

Every man in the room nodded at his words. Lieutenant Mayle was getting a very bad feeling about this, increasingly convinced that he’d come to someplace he definitely didn’t belong. He felt like he’d missed something important somewhere. These men here had come without any doubts about why they were there or what they had to do. He was the only one who didn’t know why. But how could that be? And what was all this talk about malice and revenge? These people were nuts, and more than that, they weren’t aware of it.

Lieutenant Mayle went back to his desk and drew a bottle of whiskey out of his bag. It was a going-away present from his old squadron. He used the cap in place of a glass and drank a shot. The other men in the room glanced at him but said nothing.

I’ve just come to a place I’m not used to yet and I’m getting an attack of homesickness, Lieutenant Mayle thought. Why had these other guys in the room so quickly and wholeheartedly devoted themselves to their task? He just couldn’t get himself to feel that way.

I’m the normal one here, he thought. It’s everyone else that’s weird. They must have been brought here due to psychological problems. That had to be it. He must have been transferred here by mistake. There was no other explanation. Tomorrow, he’d see the commander and lodge a protest. There was no way he could accept this situation like the others here were. That was just normal... wasn’t it?

The whiskey began to work its intoxicating therapy and gently calmed Mayle’s nerves. Right, there was nothing for him to worry about. He’d straighten out whatever screwup had been made. Tomorrow, he’d be heading back to his unit. That was just common sense. As he drank shot after shot, he felt better and better. Lieutenant Mayle forgot all about tomorrow, and he stopped caring about the present as well.

He remembered finishing the bottle off and then crawling into bed to sleep. When he next opened his eyes, his surroundings were dark. Not totally dark, though. A night light cast a dim glow. For a moment, Lieutenant Mayle didn’t know what the light was. It seemed to move as he followed it with his eyes, like the running lights on consort planes flying with him in a night formation. But as he focused, he realized that it was just a night light on the ceiling, and he had gotten very drunk. His breath stank of alcohol. He was thirsty and needed to take a piss badly.

Lieutenant Mayle sat up in bed and shook his light head to clear it. The world wobbled unsteadily. He was still drunk. His head ached a bit, but it wasn’t too bad of a hangover. He had a tough liver, and Lieutenant Mayle was confident that he’d be able to hide that he’d been drinking.

Still, there was the smell of booze on him. Mayle took a deep breath and held it. What was this smell? He must have vomited while he was passed out drunk. But the empty bottle had been placed neatly on his desk. The desktop was clear, the chair upright and clean. There wasn’t a sign of any filth on his bed or sheets either.

Lieutenant Mayle inhaled again and then felt like vomiting. It was a smell like rotting kitchen garbage. It was this smell that had awakened him, he realized, not the urge to urinate. This wasn’t the smell of his own vomit. Something in the room was rotten.

He climbed out of bed a little unsteadily, keeping a hand on it to support himself. How the hell could his roommates sleep with this stench? The man in bed next to him was sound asleep, not moving an inch.

What was making this smell? Finally getting up from the bed, Lieutenant Mayle looked around. Nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary, but this smell wasn’t ordinary. He looked over at the man in the bed next to his, thinking of waking him up. His face looked black in the weak glow of the night light. Lieutenant Mayle walked around his own bed to get a closer look. He didn’t recall that this guy was a black man. His face looked bluish-black, and his hair was standing up straight in a wild tangle. Mayle suddenly realized that his own hair was doing the same thing. Every hair on his body was standing on end.

The man in the bed next to him had no eyes in his head, just two black, gaping sockets. He wasn’t alive. It was a rotting corpse. Moving aside the blanket that covered him, Lieutenant Mayle suddenly clapped his hand over his own mouth. The stench from the half-burned corpse was overwhelming. It seemed to be clad in a charred flight suit, and its belly was swollen.

He didn’t know what had happened. He had to tell someone about this, but his rapidly sobering brain knew that was impossible. Everyone in this room with him was dead.

The man in the next bed was a dessicated, mummified corpse. The one in the bed after that was as white as soap. The one next to that was covered in blood. And in the bed of Lieutenant Burgadish next to the door, there was no body, just a head. Just a severed head. The eyes on Burgadish’s head suddenly opened and looked up at Lieutenant Mayle.

Mayle stumbled out of the room into the brightly lit hallway. He looked up at the dazzling lights overhead and sneezed. Any minute now, he’d wake up from this nightmare, he thought. But his nausea wouldn’t go away. No doubt he’d drunk too much and his body had whipped up this whiskey-fueled nightmare in protest. Thinking that, he headed for the restroom at the bend in the hallway. It felt so far away, probably because this place used to be used as a warehouse. Elite, my ass, Mayle thought as he regained his sense of reality.

The lights were bright in the restroom too. There was another man inside, standing at a urinal. He turned to look at Mayle, then smiled.

“Lieutenant Mayle! Long time no see.”

Mayle backed away, unable to answer.

“Lieutenant?” asked Jonathan Lancome, tilting his head inquisitively. “What’s wrong, Lieutanant? You look terrible.”

Zipping up his pants, Lieutenant Lancome walked slowly toward him. Suddenly, a hole appeared in his belly, blood and flesh flying everywhere. Lancome’s body, now blasted in half, fell to the floor. The entire restroom was stained red. Mayle thought he heard a howl like a wild animal, and then he ran from the room, suddenly aware that the cry he’d heard was his own scream. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t stand straight. He hit the wall immediately outside the restroom door, cushioning the blow with both hands, then bent over and vomited. The bile poured from his mouth like someone had opened a tap. Mayle puked two, then three times. By then there was nothing left in him to come out, but he still stood there, dry heaving. The effort brought tears to his eyes. It had to have been the guys in the 505th, Lieutenant Mayle thought. They must have spiked that going-away present of theirs with some kind of powerful hallucinogen, no doubt so that they could calm the rage they must have felt for him. He’d loved those guys, and this was how they’d repaid him. Fuck them all.

“Are you all right, Lieutenant Mayle?”

He heard a voice. He turned his tear-blurred eyes to see who it was. It was no corpse. It was a live, healthy human being. But there was nothing normal about this, because the owner of the voice was the supposedly dead Lieutenant Lancome.

“Who... who are you?”

“Have you forgotten me, Lieutenant?”

“The Lieutenant Lancome I knew is dead. You can’t be him.”

“I am Jonathan Lancome, Lieutenant.”

“But you’re dead.”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

Mayle took a moment to process that.

“What?”

“I haven’t forgotten how good you were to me when I was alive, Lieutenant.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying?”

There must have been something wrong with his ability to understand speech now. What the hell did he mean by when he was alive?

“Look, I don’t care if you’re dead,” Lieutenant Mayle said, carrying on even though he knew it sounded ridiculous. “Stay dead for all I care. But I’m alive, so don’t kill me.”

At that, Lancome responded with a bright smile that sent shivers down Mayle’s spine.

“You haven’t changed a bit, Lieutenant. I feel relieved now.”

“What do you mean, I haven’t changed?”

“Right. No matter what happens, you keep your head. Please, Lieutenant. Give me orders. I’ll do anything for you, because I can’t die now.” Lieutenant Lancome then said that he knew what to do, then went back into the