Free Backwoods by sara12356 Page B

that.”
    The two privates laughed.
    “You mean, the two of them…they’re together?”
Andrew asked.
    LaFollette laughed again. “Yeah. In
O’Malley’s wet dreams.”
    “He just wants to,” Turner said.
    “He’s been trying to get in her pants since
the day he got here,” said LaFollette. “Langley said he was the
only guy he’d ever seen who was pussy-whipped without getting any
pussy.”
    The two soldiers laughed again.
    “Langley?” Andrew said. “The guy who came up
with ‘put it up the little tramp’s ass?’” Apparently Langley was a
veritable fount of such colorful phrases.
    “Yeah. Grant Langley. He was A squadron’s
leader. Hand-picked by Prendick. They all were.”
    “Santoro’s always been pissed off about
that,” Turner told Andrew, leaning forward and speaking in a low,
conspiratorial tone. “Said he didn’t deserve it. She was just
jealous, if you ask me.”
    “He got sent home a month or so ago along
with the rest of his squad. Captain Peterson, too. They all came
down with Rocky Mountain spotted fever.” LaFollette shook his head,
looking somber. “That’s some nasty ass shit.”
    Rocky Mountain spotted fever? Andrew
thought in surprise. That’s the big secret about what happened
to Lieutenant Carter, the guy who had my room before me? Everyone else had, to that point, seemed so tight-lipped about
Carter and his whereabouts, that he found himself nearly
disappointed with the banality of the truth. The forests all around
them were teeming with deer ticks. Rocky Mountain spotted fever,
Lyme disease and other ailments transmitted through their bites
should have been considered both a common enough concern and
unextraordinary risk.
    “Hey, man.” Turner walked around the table
toward Andrew, slipping an iPhone off a carrying clip on his
waistband. “You ever here of a camel spider?”
    “Oh, yeah, show him,” LaFollette said,
grinning.
    “Camel spider?” Andrew shook his head.
    “They’re all over the place in Iraq,” Turner
said.
    “Nasty fuckers,” LaFollette added. “Bigger
than your hand. Seriously. And they can run up to like thirty miles
an hour. When they bite you, it can rot the skin and shit, clear
down to the bone.”
    “Jesus,” Andrew remarked, brows raised.
    “Here, look. I’ve got a video saved of one.”
Turner pivoted so Andrew could see his iPhone screen. “Langley sent
it to me back when the internet was working. Said he’d shot it over
in Baghdad, about six weeks before he left. That’s him right
there.”
    In the video, a young man stood in extreme
close-up, grinning broadly as he addressed the camera. His hair was
shorn in the close-cropped style of an active-duty soldier, and he
wore desert-grade military fatigues.
    “I’m sending a little care package home,” he
said. He had heavy brows that hung low over his eyes, lending them
a slitted, nearly predatory appearance. “Check it out.”
    The camera panned down as he flapped his hand
in directive, showing a large box on a table top. Wrapped in brown
paper, it looked indeed like something that might be shipped.
Except for the enormous, wriggling creature pinned beneath the
intersecting lines of tautly bound packing rope wrapped around the
box.
    “Holy shit,” Andrew whispered, leaning
closer.
    “It’s something else, huh?” Turner
grinned.
    “What is it?” Andrew asked.
    “We told you, man, it’s a camel spider,”
LaFollette said with a laugh.
    The thing sort of looked like a spider. But
it appeared to have five pairs of legs, not four, all of which
flapped and flailed as it struggled to escape the ropes. It took
Andrew a moment to realize these weren’t an extra set of legs, but
the creature’s palpi, which were sort of like antennae or
mandibles in other similar arachnid species.
    “They say these fuckers can scream like a
bitch,” Langley said, off-camera. “Well, boys and girls, we’re
going to find out if that’s true.”
    “Here it comes.” LaFollette sounded