SEAL Team 666: A Novel

The first time his father knew something was wrong was when he found Jackie in the closet covered in the entrails of a roadkill pig. Walker had only remembered the scene recently. It played across his mind like something he’d seen, not something he’d done. But the memory of the smell of the rotting entrails, blood, and offal, the stench of the puddle of vomit and urine that little Jackie lay within—it was so powerful it had to come from his own memories, however imperfectly they were set within his mind.

At first his father had stood there, one hand on the door, the other at his mouth. What he was seeing wasn’t understandable, it wasn’t explainable. There were no words that could have been used to describe the feelings of helplessness, outrage, and fear that played a devil’s jig on his psyche as his youngest boy giggled with the voice of an old man.

“Halikan mo nga ako, Tay,” it said. Give us a kiss, Daddy.

His father had slammed the door shut immediately, leaving him in the darkness with his own insane giggles as he let the voices in his head take turns using his mouth.

“Why’d he do that?”

“You’re an ass licker.”

“Tatay?” Daddy.

“Fuck a duck.”

“Ibalik mo sya.” Make him come back.

“Suckie suckie on the rubber dubber duckie.”

“Tay, parang awa mo na.” Daddy please.

The door opened slowly, almost of its own will. Jackie’s father was already backing away from the sight of his child, the lascivious look of hunger curving his little lips into something inhuman.

“Fuck a duck, Daddy. Fuck a duck.”

It would take three months for the father to find a way to get his son back, and in saving him, he’d find his own demise.

31

KADWAN. TWO MONTHS EARLIER.

The shipment from Temple of Heaven Importers had arrived. He’d had a dozen men bring the thin, man-sized box into the room he’d spent the last six months preparing. The walls, ceiling, and floor bore the results of his creation. A single brazier mounted in each corner of the room provided a dull glow.

While he sat languidly in lotus position, becoming one with the room, the men placed the box in front of him and hurried out, their eyes flashing their naive fear. He waited for the scurry of their steps to diminish, then resumed listening to the screams that were just on the edge of hearing. The power and energy of the women’s pain mixed inextricably with the swaths of their blood that he’d finger-painted upon the cold stone walls. He’d added the crushed petals of flowers to the mix, creating alternate pigments that breathed life into his work. So instead of a mere abattoir, he now had six planes of hand-painted hell, created through the agony of one hundred and fourteen women, three boys, seventeen men, and an elephant. What had once been a universal red had been transformed into an elegant multicolored creation of geometric slashes and curls, as if his artistic command of their lives had caused the blood to reshape into its own outraged intelligent designs.

With the mad screams of the dead loud in his ears, he opened the box before him. It took a while. The Chinese loved their knots and used them to keep both good and evil at bay. Finally he lifted the lid and stared at the thing that lay within the luxurious gold satin interior.

It glistened below him, telling the story of so many people who’d allowed their bodies to be colored. A tattoo of a snake here, a dragon there, a garish anchor with a naked Western woman next to the letters of someone’s long-forgotten lover, and a hundred more, all stitched together with thread stolen from the mandala rugs of Tibetan monasteries.

Touching it with a trembling finger, he felt its paper-thin fragility. Yet no matter how fragile it seemed to him, to the other it would be like a suit of titanium Kevlar. The men and women who’d gone into the creation of this wonder would keep the creature from latching onto his soul. It would allow him to survive the channeling and give him power over the one who’d been speaking with him all these months.

Trust me

, it had said.

But he knew better. The suit of tattooed skin would be his commentary on the being’s desire to be trusted.

He unfolded his legs and stood tall. His angular shoulders and hips pressed against his rib-thin, naked brown body. His skin was a road map of self-discovery, crisscrossed with charts from thirty years of self-mutilation.

As he stepped into the suit of other people’s skin, he was delighted to hear the screams grow louder.

32

GOLDEN BUDDHA. IMPERIAL BEACH. LUNCH.