Fortunate Sons

Chapter 33: Nightscouts

Three days.

Three days that Taylor, Dix, Mitch, Ma Ahn and Thom had spent watching the horizon for trouble. Three days of straining their eyes, three days of being on edge and three days of turning stiff as a board. Outside in the black of night the crickets chirped and the frogs sang noisily from the ponds and swamps that lay outside the village. The three of them remained at their post, in front of the window in the main house on their aching, bruised knees with their elbows propped against the bamboo sill.

"Man this sucks!!" Thom groaned. "What is even the point of this? I mean it's not like we're even going to find anything."

"Tough luck," Mitch retorted. "We're stuck here until sunrise."

Taylor didn't pay any attention to the bickering. He had stayed still with his gaze focused on the horizon, occasionally shooting them a sideways glance while he munched his way through a bag of goldfish crackers.

The whole of the main house was as quiet as a tomb with only the radio quietly playing "For what it's worth" in the kitchen. Everyone else had gone to sleep, leaving the five of them to keep watch for most of the night. Never in their lives had they been so bored. Usually at the base or in town there was always something to do, but here was a completely different story.

"What've we got for chow?" Ma Ahn asked.

Taylor didn't even look at him. He handed him the bag of goldfish without a word and kept his gaze fixed on the horizon outside the window.

"We've been eating this shit for three bloody days!" Ma Ahn complained.

"Would you rather I opened up a can of ham and lima beans?" Taylor retorted, his mouth half full of the crunchy orange crackers.

Ma Ahn made a disgusted gagging noise at the mere mention of the awful ham and lima bean rations that GIs carried in their packs. He had tried it once and only once. Needless to say it hadn't ended well......at all.

Heavy footsteps indicated the arrival of Ogun who had come back carrying the book and the charred remains of the hand. "You won't like this," he informed them.

"How bad?" Taylor asked.

"It's definitely a Jiang Xi brother," Ogun sighed. "Not good by any stretch of the tripwire."

The charred hand was placed in the center of the table with the others gathering around to get a good look. "Man, Wild Bill would be after this thing as if it were Billy the Kid," Dix remarked.

"Where the hell did they even come from?" Thom questioned. "I mean it's not like.......wait.......I think I know what could have happened. Taylor, you guys studied this back home in Louisiana right?"

"Yeah?"

"What are some of the ways that this creature can be summoned?"

"Could be a number of things," Taylor replied. "The creature could've been buried improperly, a bolt of lightning could've struck the cemetery, sometimes a pregnant cat leaps across the coffin. The most likely case here seems to be some kind of necromancy."

"Necromancy......" Thom mused. "What about the black dog we've seen? You think there's some kind of connection between the Cuong Thi and the black dog?"

"You know," Ogun pointed out. "There very well may be."

"Any idea how?"

"A shapeshifter."

"Shapeshifter?"

"Yes," Ogun replied. "They are often called skin changers, shifters, what have you. They change their forms to do whatever it is they have been bidden to do. Some can be good.....but many seek solely to do evil."

"What kind of skin changer are we dealing with here?" Thom asked.

Ogun opened a scroll that Ho Than had lent him and handed it to Thom. Thom was horrified at the illustrations that were displayed on the yellow, stained pages of a human halfway through a terrible transformation into a wolflike creature with sharp yellow teeth and glowing red eyes. "The Ma chó sói......a werewolf." He said.

"Aye brother, ugly as sin and just as deadly," Ogun replied.

"So you think that whatever summoned the Cuong Thi is also some kind of a skin changer?"

"Aye," Ogun replied.

The more Thom and the others thought about it, the more concerned they grew, especially Taylor, Dix and Mitch who had grown their entire lives learning about the supernatural and its dangers. Even though they had grown up under the safe and watchful protection of Bill and Miss Etta, it still unnerved them that these creatures were in a war torn country where there was already enough fighting. To think of the devastation these creatures could cause was unimaginable.

"So herein lies the question," Ogun enquired. "What course of action do we take to stop them?"

"Leave it to us," Taylor piped in. "Our guardian once taught us how to stop these critters and we haven't forgotten what he taught us. Give us some time and the right supplies and we'll be able to do it."

"You sure?"

"We're absolutely positive," the trio said in one collective voice.