The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden, Part 3 of 12

This week we are brought into the fold of Lucky Ford’s strange rescuers, the Office. What goals does this secret group pursue, and how does one paratrooper fit into their plans?

The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, or as a DRM-free ePub!

This is Part 3 of The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden. Pop on back to Part 1 or Part 2 if you’d like to avoid any spoilers.

Content Warnings: Mild Swearing, Tobacco Use

SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 10, 1943
AN UNIDENTIFIED VALLEY
THE ISLAND OF SICILY

“This young man is quite fortunate we happened along, wouldn’t you say?”

Lucky groaned and opened his eyes a millimeter at a time but the rising sun was as bright as a flare, blinding him. He squeezed them back shut. The absurdly British man continued:

“A man of your talent isn’t around often enough, Edgard. That is, unless he’s working for the jerries. In which case, one finds oneself on the receiving end of that talent far too frequently.”

He was British, but he didn’t talk the same way as the tommies Lucky'd met in North Africa. This man sounded lofty and aristocratic, lacking any of the street-wise swagger or country flip of an enlisted Englishman.

“He is awake, Colonel,” a gruff Frenchman grunted.

Someone kicked the corner of Lucky’s stretcher. They must have taken him off the roof after he'd passed out. That roof where those Nazis, those things…

“Holy mackerel, that was real!” Lucky yelped. He sat up with a jolt. The last night's events howled through his head.

Two men stood over him, each with a drawn pistol aimed at his chest. Soldiers in gas masks surrounded them, paused in mid-step to stare. That waited, grim and silent, to see what Lucky was going to do next.

“Did I say that out loud?” he gasped, trying to calm his thundering heart. It felt like it was going to punch its way out of his chest.

“You certainly did, old boy, but you have nothing to worry about now,” the old Brit said. He took a knee next to Lucky's stretcher and holstered his revolver. He smiled in a friendly way that made all his deep wrinkles smile with him. He waved at the lingering men around him, saying: “All of you back to it, back to it, the war's still going.”

The men followed their orders and went back to their tasks, swarming over the wrecked emplacement like hungry ants. Satisfied that all was in progressing, the Englishman turned his attention back to Lucky.

“Calm down lad, you’ve had a lot to take in, let's have a word about it.”

Lucky studied the old soldier and realized he hadn’t been hallucinating. This is the man who, sword drawn, had ridden the hood of the parachuting Jeep while his friend sniped those monstrous krauts from the passenger seat. Now he knelt next to Lucky, powerful yet refined all at once, one hand on a jeweled sword pommel and the other on the grip of one of his revolvers.

He was wearing a dust-colored safari suit, with a pith helmet resting comfortably on his head like he was getting ready for an expedition into the thickest uncharted jungles. The monocle on his left eye caught the scarlet light of the rising Sicilian sun, and a thick, brown, and expertly manicured mustache clung to his upper lip as he spoke, riding along like a ship in a storm.

Lucky couldn’t quite find the words he needed. This man, in this outfit, was decked out with a curved cavalry sword on one hip, its golden handle polished almost to glowing, and a trio of engraved and inlaid revolvers strapped to his other. He’d been living olive drab for so long that he could barely comprehend what he was seeing.

“I’d imagine you have quite a bit on your mind, my American friend,” the Englishman said. Lucky nodded. Every detail of the man was odd.

Each of his pistols was more elegant than the last, one inlaid with gold, another filigreed in silver foil, the last encrusted with brilliant rubies. He was in his mid-fifties but strongly built, and his posture made him look a head taller than he actually was. He glowed with an aura of both earned and hereditary authority. The old Brit smiled, and as he spoke he knocked a wooden tobacco pipe against the sole of his brilliantly shined boot:

“Well, out with it.”

“Who the hell are you people?” Lucky managed to stammer.

The second man, muscular and wide but short and hairy, stepped forward up like a scrappy yard dog. Lucky had a good six inches on the man, and he wasn't even that tall at five-ten.

“You will know if we decide to tell you, enfant.” the Frenchman's thick accent grated harshly against his English words, like he was spitting each syllable out. As opposed to the Englishman’s anachronistically formal gear, this man looked far too casual for the field. He wore a tight formerly-white undershirt that let his thick chest curls spill over the top while with his massive biceps damn-near tore free from the grayed sleeves. Reflective aviator-style sunglasses concealed his eyes under thick black eyebrows. His thin mustache twisted above a snarl, and he held a hand-rolled cigarette delicately in his bared teeth. He’d shaved his head recently, but the stubble poking through gave away that his hairline had receded past his ears.

The Englishman stood patted the Frenchman’s hairy shoulder, saying:

“Now Edgard, it would be a shame to run off this young man after you went through all the trouble of saving his life, don’t you think?”

Edgard huffed, glared at Lucky again, then stalked over to a crate nearby and sat.

“It is Private Ford, isn’t it? We took the liberty of checking your identification tags when we examined you for injury.”

Lucky just nodded, dumb. The Brit continued:

“Well private, you’ll be happy to learn Operation Husky is back on track and proceeding as smoothly as can be expected. Of course, other than the small hiccup your squad encountered.”

“Hiccup?” Lucky snapped, suddenly furious. His who squad was gone, in a night. He glared at the strange men surrounding him, who could be so casual about this massacre. He demanded again: “Who are you?”

Edgard took a long drag on his cigarette then began disassembling his had begun cleaning his weapon, a massive rifle, almost five-and-a-half feet long and big enough to stop a tank. The Englishman smiled broadly.

“My boy, our surly friend over there is your savior, Lieutenant Edgard Neff of the Free French Army. All your thanks may go to his steady hand and that gorgeous monster in his lap. I dare say the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, Mark II was never designed to pick off hairy krauts from a good three-quarters mile out on a dark and windy morning, but it seems you and I have no room to object to that point.”

Lucky tried to respond, but the Englishman would have none of it, like he never stopped to take a breath.

“I say, I’ve seen Edgard shoot the eye out of a panzer gunner from as far as a mile out. He’s a magnificent shot.”

“Yeah, amazing, thank you, sincerely, but - !” Lucky attempted, to no avail.

“And I myself am Colonel Sir Doctor Alistair Halistone the Third, Baron of Westover and Field Operations Commander for the Bureau of Mediterranean and African Affairs of the OCUO. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Private Ford. Or may I can you Lloyd, now that we’re introduced? I know that you Yanks sometimes prefer a degree less pomp. My men call me the Colonel.”

Lucky waited before he spoke, just to make sure the Colonel was actually going to let him get a word.

“They call…” Lucky's throat seized up when he saw two of the Colonel's gas-masked men carrying a pine box stamped with an American flag. “They called me ‘Lucky’, sir.”

“'Lucky' indeed. I shan’t even attempt to calculate the odds that we’d intercept the Vargulf transmission and arrive when we did. Those hairy curs are notorious for taking apart units of men, piece by piece. I wouldn’t say I have ever seen them riding in a rammpanzer, however. Edgard and I didn’t think those would be fielded until September at earliest.”

The Colonel waited for Neff to give him confirmation, but the Frenchman was busy cleaning the yard-long barrel of his rifle. Lucky seized the moment to squeeze his questions in.

“What is all this stuff you’re talking about, sir? The vargulf, the rammpanzer? I've never even heard of your outfit. What's the OCUO?”

The Colonel studied Lucky for a moment. His bushy mustache twitched, and then spread wide as his mouth cracked into a beaming smile.

“Genuine curiosity and the desire to learn, traits I shan’t say I see enough of these days. My boy, you find yourself in the company of a group comprised of specialists from all of the allied nations whose sole duty is to monitor and respond to situations like that which you encountered this morning. Abuses of science and morality that might allow the fascists to tip the war in their favor. That, we cannot allow.”

Lucky thought that unkillable monsters in an invulnerable tank sounded right up the Colonel's alley.

The Colonel continued:

“Lad, we are the Office for the Cataloging of Unusual Occurrences. A rather bland designation, I know. We excel at keeping a low profile, which is why you should be unfamiliar with our work.”

The Colonel twirled his mustache and puffed out his chest, proud of his organization. He sounded like a loon. Lucky figured he himself had to be crazy too, because he'd seen the proof with his own eyes.

“Unfortunately, when our services are needed, it is often too late. Scenes like this are all too familiar. But we strive to make things right. We never leave a fallen comrade on enemy soil,” he said. Lucky looked past him. There were seven pine coffins, lined up and ready for transport. Beyond that, the soldiers had laid out all of the Italian dead and were transcribing their names and ranks along with photographing their faces.

“Lucky, does this account for all of your men?” the Colonel asked.

“There’s ten men still in the plane. And there’s two more, Sergeant Burke and Parker, they’re in there,” Lucky said. He nodded to the burnt-out, collapsed command center. He trembled and fumbled through his pockets, finally locating his comrades’ fused dog tags. The Colonel stared at them in Lucky’s palm for a moment, and then called to a masked soldier who had been standing at-ease near the growing stack of coffins:

“Miller, would you please catalog these? There are two friendly I-A casualties.”

“Yes, Colonel,” Miller said, another Englishman. He reached out with a pair of metal tongs and plucked the tags from Lucky's hand, placing them in a neatly labeled brown paper bag. Miller walk away, holding the bag out at arm's length.

“Thank you, Miller,” the Colonel said. “Lucky, do you think you could pinpoint your crash site?”

The Colonel handed him a detailed map of the region. The emplacement was marked with a small red ‘X.’ Lucky traced back down the path they’d taken through the forest to show where he thought their plane had gone down. Lucky could only give his best guess. The Colonel immediately dispatched a squad to inspect the crash site and collect his squadmates.

“Do you mind going over the rest of your evening?” the Colonel asked him. “No detail is too small.”

Lucky sighed and told him about the launch, how everything had been going as planned until the instruments went haywire. The Colonel nodded, like he’d expected that part. When AA took out there engine, the Colonel had questions.

“There was no other incoming fire? A direct hit, you say?”

Lucky confirmed this, and Colonel nodded sagely again, considered things he didn’t deem necessary to share. Lucky told him about the crash, how the pilots had saved as many people as they could with their landing but lost their own lives in the process. He told him about told him about their successful assault on the emplacement and their storming of the enemy command post.

When he brought up the SS officer, the Colonel interrupted again:

“Did this man have any distinguishing marks? Scars, tattoos, perhaps even an eye patch? If he had clearance to access an I-A device and the Vargulf Korps, it would be very beneficial to know who he was.”

“He was gray, his skin, his eyes, they had no color at all, like a dead body, or even just a picture of one. And hairless. He didn’t even look alive.” Lucky remembered the dead man's intensity, his hatred, his last threat gurgled through Thompson-pierced lungs. “He shot Parker in the neck and laughed as he died. He’s buried somewhere in there, too.”

Lucky pointed at the crumbled command post. Several masked soldiers scurried around in the dead circle surrounding the collapsed building, examining it from afar with chattering chrome instruments.

“Who was he? What could do that?” Lucky asked the Colonel.

“He must have been someone of note to our enemy. The Nazis have developed a device designated the Ionen-Aktivierung Granate. They are only distributed to key SS officers as a means to destroy sensitive items as a last resort. You and your sergeant stumbled upon something quite important and unexpected.” He motioned to the devastated area around the crumbled command post. “I expect you’ll learn more about I-A devices in training.”

“Training?” Lucky asked, dumbfounded. “I just want to know what the hell did this to my friends. What were those… things?”

Even the thought of the warped, blood-stained Nazi with the steaming, cross-shaped wound made Lucky shudder.

“You are one of very few to survive an attack by the Vargulf Korps. They are a band of Nazi zealots who consider themselves something akin to mythical warriors. Nothing more than drooling abominations and perversions of science, if you ask me. Quite invulnerable to conventional weaponry, which beggars the question: how did you manage to withstand them during your very long evening?”

Neff had paused cleaning his rifle and was waiting for Lucky’s answer.

“I don’t know what I did,” Lucky said. “If you guys hadn’t showed up when you did, I’d be a goner for sure. They'd just stormed us in that tank and tore apart anyone they didn’t run over. I got a right hook in on their leader. But I think my cross burned him, that’s what made them hesitate.”

Lucky held up the sheriff's cross and the Colonel examined it through his monocle.

“You are indeed a fortunate young man. Pure silver, correct?” Lucky nodded, and the Colonel continued: “Silver is known to cause an instantaneous and severe chemical reaction in those brutes. The chemical concoctions that pump through their veins becomes quite spectacularly combustible when exposed to any amount of silver. Fortunately for you, Edgard and I never find ourselves far from silver bullets.”

Edgard looked up and grinned, the first smile Lucky’d seen from him. He held a massive bullet, as long as his entire hand. The tip gleamed.

“The silver? I thought it was…” Lucky trailed off, and the Colonel cut him off again.

“Your cross? Heavens no, private. Just a symbol, only as powerful as you make it. That was the very first lesson I had to learn in this new war, as well. We live in a world of men and science; anything that seems to exist beyond that simply requires a second look. I might consider myself one of the most open-minded of men, considering my family history, but the magic and mythology of stories are just those, stories.”

Lucky watched the sheriff's cross swing on its thin chain, catching glints of sunlight. He understood what the Colonel was saying, but anyone who'd lived through a night like his might not be so quick to dismiss the possibility of more than just what they could see. The old soldier placed his hand on Lucky's shoulder and smiled again.

“We will handle the rest here, Lucky, there is still much analysis and cataloging to do before I can get some rest, but, I say, you have earned yourself some rack time. Please, go along with Miller, he’ll escort you to our transport.” With that, the Colonel turned and walked away to oversee the excavation of the demolished command post. Miller, the gas masked soldier, came to Lucky's side.

“Right this way, Private Ford.” Lucky started to follow him, and then stopped dead. He had nearly forgotten: the Vargulf had Grease.

“Colonel! Colonel!” he yelled. The Colonel stopped, plucked his pipe out of his mouth, then asked:

“What's all this, then?”

“They took one of our guys alive,” Lucky said. “How can we track them? What will they do to him?”

The Colonel's shoulders slumped. He put the pipe back between his lips a drew on it for a long moment before he said anything.

“We will do what we can. If they have him, he will be with the Crying Maiden. That is, unless he found some of your luck,” He stared at the eastern horizon for a second, then paced away, leaving it at that. Lucky looked to Miller for an explanation, but his expression was unreadable behind his gas mask. It was instead Neff who spoke up, smoke leaking out of his nose.

“I would pray your friend has died already,” he said. He slammed his reassembled rifle's bolt closed and slung it across his back with a thick leather strap. “The Vargulf are animals: that would play with him until they bored of him.”

Neff spit the stub of cigarette into the dirt and ground it out with the toe of his well-worn boot, saying over his shoulder:

“They are men no longer. They are devils.”

Lucky tried to object, but a gloved hand clamped down on his shoulder, drawing him away.

“Come now, Private Ford.” Miller’s voice was unsettlingly calm behind the muffling layers of his mask. His clear blue eyes looked out at Lucky. “The truck is waiting to take us to the airstrip. The plane won’t wait forever, and Flight Lieutenant Seacombe is notoriously impatient.”

For Lucky, the ride to the airstrip was irritatingly quiet; he had so many questions but there was no one to ask. Miller had taken shotgun in the liberated Italian truck, leaving Lucky to ride in the uncovered bed. Between the sputtering engine and the rushing wind, any conversation would have been washed out anyway.

Sicilian farmland blurred by. Lucky had already seen enough of this island for a lifetime, but the only sights available to him inside the truck were the four stacked coffins containing men he’d known.

Lucky saw a few planes zip past in the distance. and had seen one column of smoke. Beyond that, the island was quiet. He was afraid that meant the landing had been pushed off the beach, but the Colonel had told him the operation was going well. He needed more information, and no one was giving him any.

Four other trucks followed closely, bouncing along the dirt road. Each contained remains, Lucky's squad and the Italian dead. The OCUO soldiers escorting them were still wearing their gas masks, just like Miller. These other trucks had already to Lucky’s plane and recovered the rest of his squad.

Lucky could remember all twenty of them,. He remembered some crack Grease had made about those Tunisian girls they'd met a couple nights before they left for the jump and he tried to crack a smile. He sat down, set his helmet on the bench next to him and closed his eyes, the rumble of the truck somehow peaceful after everything.

It couldn't have been more than ten minutes after Lucky's eyes shut that the truck ground to a halt There was a familiar C-47 parked down at the end of a gravel road just long and straight enough to land a plane on.

Lucky jumped off the tailgate and stretched, his muscles groaning awake, sore from battles and plane crashes, and then turned around to eyeball the plane. It was definitely the same plane he’d seen dropping the OCUO troops earlier, but something about it was off. The closer he got, the less it looked like any C-47 Skytrain he'd seen before.

The twin engines were bigger than they were supposed to be, and their propellers were some kind of white metal, and dual-bladed, one set spinning ahead of another. Metallic armor was bolted all over the wings and fuselage, and the air shimmered around it. He walked closer, and reached up to touch the wingtip. When he got close, a static shock arced from the plane to his finger, giving him a sharp zap that made him jump.

“Crap,” he muttered as he stuck his reddened fingertip in his mouth.

“Careful there, hayseed, can’t going around playing with everyone else’s toys.”

Lucky looked up to find a short and skinny young Black man standing on the wing. He held an unlit cigarette in his lips and grinned down at Lucky. The man's Coke-bottle glasses caught some of the Mediterranean glare. His uniform was too big for his wiry frame, his sleeves and pant legs so loose that he had to roll them up three or four times at the cuffs. His sergeant stripes hung so low that the chevrons were at the top of his elbows. He barely looked twenty, very young for a sergeant.

“Shoot, kid, don’t let the Angel seeing you messing with her wings anyway; she’ll realign your teeth for you, no question.”

He clambered down the wing and lowered himself down until he was hanging off it by his fingertips. He let go and landed in a cloud of dust next to Lucky. His helmet, way too big for his head, almost bounced off with his landing, and for a second he scrambled to keep it on his head. He quickly regained his composure to give Lucky a wary once-over. He was even shorter on the ground.

“What kind of plane is this?” Lucky asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You’re damn right, 'cause this here’s the only one.” His wariness from just a second before instantly evaporated so he could show off the plane. “Took me one of them C-47’s and slapped all the bells and whistles on her. I call her The Express. Higher-ups got some kind of designation for her, but they ain’t her daddy, so they ain’t naming her.”

“Makes sense,” Lucky said. He heard boots crunching gravel and found Miller approaching from the parked trucks, clipboard in hand.

“What do you got for me?” the sergeant asked him, forgetting all about Lucky. He took the clipboard and began flipping pages. His grin disappeared as he read the list.

“This is a lot of stiffs,” he muttered, staring at Miller over his thick glasses.

“Ahem,” Miller said, nodding at Lucky.

“Right, right, well let’s get ‘em aboard so we can get ‘em home,” Bucket said.

Lucky distracted himself from the dead by continuing to examine the plane. He was close enough to check out that weird emblem he had noticed when the plane flew over earlier, the same the milling soldiers wore on their uniforms.

The emblem looked like a medieval crest and it showed a majestic golden eagle clutching a silver sword in its hooked talons with its powerful wings framing a staring hieroglyphic eye. The bird was encircled by laurels and banners that read ‘Semper Vigilo,' ‘O.C.U.O.,’ and ‘MCMXVI’. Lucky reached up to touch the seal, wary for another shock, but was interrupted when a shadow passed him from behind.

“It’s Latin, it means ‘Always Watching.’ That’s how I knew some yokel was about to paw my wing,” a woman snapped through a thick Australian twang. Lucky turned around to look at her, but she stood with the morning sun to her back, making him squint and shade his eyes. “What are you giving me that stink-eye for, yank? You aren’t Office, so who in the blazes are you?”

The gruff Australian shoved Lucky, sending him backpedaling away from the plane. His heel caught a rut, landing him flat on his can in the dust. Miller appeared by his side and grabbed his arm to haul him back to his feet.

“Flight Lieutenant, this is our newest guest, Private Ford. I’d suggest you not rough him up too severely, as the Colonel would like him to last long enough for a proper debrief,” Miller said, his voice muffled by the charcoal filter on the side of his mask. He brushed the dust off Lucky's back, adding: “Private Ford, I’d like to introduce you to Flight Lieutenant Seacombe. She shall be handling our exfiltration today.”

Lucky could see Seacombe clearly now. She was stunning. She kept her blond hair tied back with a twist of copper wire, out of her face. Hydraulic fluid and smears of engine grease striped her skin. She wore flight goggles loose around her neck, and her flight suit was unbuttoned at the top, revealing a dingy white undershirt beneath. Her rolled up sleeves showed off tight muscles coiled below oily smudges and fresh scrapes. Her leather gloves creaked when she clenched her fists. The rusty monkey wrench sticking out of her back pocket and banged-up revolver strapped to her thigh were distracting, but not enough to keep Lucky from noticing that her narrowed eyes were as blue as the Mediterranean.

“Are you the angel the sergeant was talking about?” Lucky asked, the afterimage of the sun burned into his corneas forming a halo around her head. She looked at him long and hard, seething, before speaking to Miller alone.

“You should be glad I like the Colonel; otherwise I’d kick the both of you in the teeth. Not that it’d make any difference for you, Frosty. Just keep this greenie away from my bird until we’re loaded, I don’t need some Yank kicking the tires while I run through pre-flight.”

She spat into the brown dirt between Lucky's boots, then turned around and marched back to her plane, snarling over her shoulder:

“And if you expect his boney rear to get on my plane, tell him to change his clothes. I don’t want that mess all over my bird.”

Lucky looked down, embarrassed that he'd forgotten about all the blood and dirt ground into his uniform, into his skin. Miller waited until she was out of hearing distance before he spoke:

“You might well be the first sap foolish enough to call her ‘Angel’ to her face, private. Did Sergeant Hall put you up to that?” he asked, motioning to the young sergeant he had spoken to earlier.

“Doesn’t seem like the name fits anyway,” Lucky said grumpily. He kicked road dirt over her still-wet saliva and watched it soak through.

“She does fly like she was born with wings, and many officials owe her their lives. You may yet.”

Lucky watched her examine the engine on the other wing. She noticed him staring, forcing him to look away. Miller continued:

“Despite her bellicose phrasing, Flight Lieutenant Seacombe was absolutely correct: we must get you a change of uniform. Are you comfortable helping to load the plane?” Miller asked.

Lucky watched the coffins coming off the trucks warily. The least he could do was be the pallbearer for the men he’d let die, and for the men he’d killed. He nodded.

“Thank you, Private Ford. I shall see what I can do about finding you fresh garments, and perhaps some clean water with which to wash your face.” Miller sounded to Lucky a lot like he was giving him a cool smile behind his gas mask, not that Lucky could tell.

“What are officials?” Lucky asked him as he walked away.

“Individuals who work for the Office, of course. They, me, you, we.” Another borrowed Italian truck full of OCUO soldiers, officials, pulled up to the runway. “Excuse me, Private Ford.”

Miller gave Lucky a friendly wave then trotted away to help the newly arrived officials unload a stack of crates near the improvised runway.

It took and Lucky and the officials a little more than an hour to load all the coffins and the crates they'd collected from the emplacement into The Express’ hold, but by the time they were rigged and secured, there only remained room aboard for ten men. Most of the officials, except Miller, Hall, and five other men, piled back into the trucks and drove back the direction they'd had come from.

The remaining five officials and Sergeant Hall hauled themselves into the airplane as the twin double-propellers began to turn. When Lucky reached for the handhold to pull himself up into the door, a boot pushed down on his shoulder, sending him stumbling away from the plane.

“What the hell did I tell you, greenie? Find some clean threads or start walking.”

Lucky stared up at Seacombe dumbfounded. Was she not going to let him on the plane? What the hell was wrong with her? He opened his mouth to ask that very question, but Miller grabbed his shoulder and shut him up. He looked at Lucky through the scratched lenses of his gas mask and shook his head, one finger over the ventilator of the mask, shushing him. He pushed a bundle of clothes into Lucky's arms.

“Try these out, private,” he said, then pulled himself up into the plane.

“Where am I supposed to change?” Lucky asked, looking around at the featureless road and field around him. Nothing to duck behind in sight.

“I don’t give a damn where you do it, just do it fast!” Seacombe yelled. She left the hatch to make her way to the cockpit. Lucky stood bewildered, staring into the empty doorway, expecting her to come back. Instead, the engines coughed to life and the props began turning slowly, wind kicking up around his feet as they spun faster and faster. Gravel crunched as the huge tires began to roll, ever so slowly.

Fast as he could, Lucky tugged both boots off his feet and slung them over his shoulder by their laces. The plane had started to speed up, and he undid his belt as he chased the door, running clear out of his pants in an attempt to step into the leg of the fresh pair while at full sprint. He barely had time to grab the sheriff's broken watch from his pocket as his blood-stained trousers fell into a crusty pile behind him.

Lucky tossed both boots into the door of the rolling plane, followed by his helmet and the new shirt he'd been given. As he ran he ripped away the rest of his old uniform, half-a-dozen gore-caked buttons popping off at once. He threw his shirt into the dust and sprinted, barefoot and bare-chested, to the accelerating aircraft and threw himself up and into the door. Miller and another official caught him by his arms and dragged him the rest of the way in, slamming the hatch behind him and leaving him in a panting heap on the floor.

Lucky looked at the seven men seated around him and they all looked at him, then to Sergeant Hall, who burst into raucous laughter followed quickly by the rest of them, pointing at Lucky and laughing so hard tears welled up in their eyes.

Lucky finally caught his breath and pushed himself up to his knees. They all stopped laughing, waiting for him to speak. He was a half-naked, sweat-stained Vargulf-attack-survivor going who-knows-where with who-knows-who, and he only had one question on his mind:

“What the hell is wrong with her?”

The laughter erupted all over again as the plane bounced off the dirt road once, twice, and was in the air.

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Copyright © 2022 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.