Free The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories by Jeff VanderMeer

MacDiarmid's skin and he fought an urge to sneeze. The antiseptic coolness took away the itchy, hot irritation. It made him sleepy.
    Their flashlights revealed a long hallway with doors on either side. White stucco over wood. MacDiarmid turned off his flashlight as he pushed against the first door on the right. It opened.
    "Perfect," MacDiarmid whispered to Conrad. A double-paned window at the room's far end reflected uneven yellow light. As they moved toward it, MacDiarmid stumbled over what appeared to be sacks. MacDiarmid edged up to the window and peered out onto the street.
    The seven soldiers were disciplined types, no doubt taught in the U.S. when the President and Zapata were cock-to-balls close. Each soldier had a poultice tied around his neck, edged with feathers and pig's teeth, and they secured each foot of ground before advancing. MacDiarmid, palms sweating, found he feared their thoroughness. Their faces were blank and grim, set without compromise. The night became blacker in their wake and MacDiarmid let out his breath when they moved on, out of sight. Conrad even cracked a smile.
    MacDiarmid never understood what happened next. Like his dream of wheat fields, it was something dimly luminous, diaphanous as the flickering lamps or the light in Conrad's eyes.
    As he stepped away from the window, meaning to walk through the door, the room felt stuffier, rank, lived-in .
    A voice said, "Feliz Navidad, Santa Claus."
    MacDiarmid flicked on his flashlight. He shone it toward the voice. He saw disheveled black hair framing a pale, boyish face.
    "Mark!"
    It couldn't be Mark.
    Someone—Conrad?—laughed and the boy's face fell away from the circle of light and MacDiarmid emptied his magazine, as though Conrad's laughter had decided everything for him, and when he finished with the first magazine, he clicked in another and kept firing until the second magazine was spent and his finger jammed on the trigger.
    His hands shook. He heard the woman's voice saying, "In the red lights, in the red lights," Mark asking, "What's the army?," Julie saying nothing at all, staring out a window and smoking a cigarette as they finalized the divorce papers.
    The flashlight hit the floor as MacDiarmid loaded a third magazine. At the sound, he seized up, his finger reflexively twitching like a lizard tail.
    Conrad panned his flashlight across the room. Blood sprayed the walls in violet streaks. Viscera glistened from bellies. Arms had been torn off. Legs were a welter of bullet holes. The child who had spoken appeared to be asleep against a side wall, his brains spackled across his forehead. A mass sobbing rose from the wounded. In the murky light, they resembled ghosts or ghouls more than children. Bile scorched MacDiarmid's throat. The fields, the empty spaces, rushed away from him. For a long moment, he believed he might faint or die. But he did not.
    Only when Conrad started to take trophies did MacDiarmid return, from a place so anonymous and frozen and unalive, that he could only vaguely remember the experience, or that such a place might exist within him.
    "The soldiers!" MacDiarmid hissed in Conrad's ear. He shook Conrad as best he could shake a dead person. "They aren't fools! You stupid fuck! If they heard the..."
    The moans. The crying.
    They ran, Conrad reluctantly following MacDiarmid's lead. They doubled back, waded through streets where the plumbing had failed and rats swam through sewage. They scrambled over rooftops, jumped into backyards strewn with laundry lines. Mortar fire rocked the ground. The swish of helicopter blades cut up the sky. The blaze of neon signs from abandoned shops reminded MacDiarmid of Saigon. It was too dark, the night so thick with humidity that he was choking on it.
    As they ran, Conrad listened to his shortwave. MacDiarmid heard " Love ," " ...soldiers ," " we want you... ," the silken thread of her voice, moist and quick.  
    Sanctuary took the form of a partly-looted appliance shop. MacDiarmid