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The air's all atmosphere at the summit, water vapour heavy. Dismal clouds pull down like a shroud so close against the hills he can't breathe through his dark cowl, has to draw the damp fabric up to wrinkle over the ridge of his nose or else he's sure he'll suffocate.
It's the sort of rain that doesn't fall so much as seep, and his tread skids out on the windswept slope. Ordinarily, he's not one to let the terrain catch him off-guard. Slip once, step wrong, and you're dead.
Never shoved the mask up just to catch his breath either. He's breathed through worse. Suffocated through worse.
The fog obscures the coastline and the cliff's edge. He's gripped by the wild, clenching feeling that his limbs will keep pumping along at their steady run and carry him right over. That he'll have no choice but to plunge down and stiffen his legs for a water landing.
That's familiar at least. Feeling outside of himself. Existing as something Other. He lets that thought sink through him, that he’s someone else, something else, pulls it as tight around his skin as the clouds around the highlands.
His body isn't his and hasn't been in a long damn time.
Viewed from above he watches himself slip down wraith-like into the swale of a valley, a dip in elevation carved by the meander of a spring. His body trips and his knees give, palms sinking in mud.
That's when he finds the bones.
They're pearly-white and near-articulated, cartilage shrinking as it dried to hold the skeleton together just so. The shape of a man, stripped back to its framework.
He's planted a hand in the mud down low near the exposed frets of the spine. He'd be elbow deep in guts if this were a recent corpse. His fingers would splay across the stiffness of abdominal muscles if this were a man, still breathing or fresh dead.
It’s instinct that has him recognizing the bones. He presses the purple half-moon of a bruised fingernail against the familiar crooked lower teeth in that squared off jaw. When he shifts to clack the jawbone up in a grin, he remembers the dimples, the shape of a mouth curled around some drawled quip. Voice vowel-heavy and round. Lost in the crackle of headset static.
Smile, Johnny, he thinks and bares his own teeth. Then releases pressure to let the jaw gape.
The smooth dome of the skull is interrupted by a tidy bullet hole at the temple, fissured lines cracking away from it across the thick ridge of browbone, the eye socket, up into what would have been buzzed hairline.
There's no hair, no skin, not a scrap of flesh left on the exposed bone.
Squeaky-clean, he thinks. Haha.
And then, that's odd. Only been a week.
He runs a hand up the rain-slick slide of what was once an arm, feels sure with too much pressure the bones will crack or at least lose their hold on each other. Leg bone connected to the whatever bone and all that. He’s sure they’ll sink into the suck of mud along the creekbed and be washed over by silt and someday tumble out into the sea when the whole cliff erodes.
It’s said these hills are so old they formed before bone itself evolved, before life left behind clear impressions of itself.
Funny, he can remember that tidy little factoid but not what the arm bones are called as he fingers out the neat fit of them together.
Something’s not right, the way the skeleton holds its shape. It should be scattered. The foxes should have taken the corpse piece by piece to their kits, bits of flesh swelling their bellies round. The ravens and seabirds should have tugged it to nothing, strewn it across half the mountain. Even ordinary decomp should have left the body in the clutter of a loose pile.
Fuckin’ odd.
We cremated him.
With a sick lurch, the atmosphere condenses all at once and the skull grinds on dry vertebrae and the skeletal fingers claw to grip his face and–-
Price scrutinizes him, flinty-eyed, and grunts in disapproval.
“You look like steamed fuckin’ shit, son,” he says.
He grimaces and coughs over a bummed cigarette. It’s not Ghost’s first choice of nicotine either, but he’s not about to go off base for better selection than the commissary. He quit smoking years back.
Ghost cocks a brow that the Captain can’t see.
“How you figure that?” he asks. “Could look like anythin’.”
Price looks unimpressed.
Can’t see any of him at all really, wholly masked up and swaddled tight. Sunglasses indoors and out. Full-fingered gloves. He turns his head away to take each long drag from a cigarette, mask twitched up and down with such practiced swiftness that he blows the smoke out through the fabric’s skeletal grin.
They lean together against a brick half wall in the alley just outside a service door to the mess. The dumpsters reek, but he’s chosen this spot hoping nobody got the itch to follow him. Price is stubborn.
“Steamed shit,” the Captain repeats. “Go take a long nap, mate.”
“Roger. Get right on that, sir.”
“I’m dead serious.”
“Funny choice of words,” says Ghost. It is funny. Neither of them laughs.
Price has put in for leave. Medical recoup, he says, even though he’s hardly banged up. Maybe his head’s not on straight.
He'd been stoic just after, voice flat and hard and professional, announcing bluntly one KIA but then after someone confirmed visuals on Makarov’s escape and the chatter of comms took over responsibility, he'd clenched down and gripped his knees like he'd taken a gutshot. Wheezed with choked off breaths until Garrick gripped him by the shoulders and clapped his arms with both open palms.
He remembers what that kind of grief's like. A shock wave. An exorcism.
Ghost still down on one knee and empty as anything, feeling nothing.
Price had started shouting with it, pissed off and voice wavering, and then the medic van had screeched up and there’d been too much commotion to keep track of much of anything at all.
In theory, the higher-ups like the thought of every soldier being a tireless, unflappable machine, but it's unspoken that nobody expects it to pan out in practice. Even the most hardened bastard is only human and working so closely with a task force means the inevitable casualty hits even harder. Everyone who knew Soap’s got protocols lined up for the next few weeks. Mandatory therapy. Screenings before they can return to full duty.
Can’t seem to get it through their heads that Ghost's just fine. Right as rain. In this line of work, men die, and he knows that. He’s always known that.
Price is off to the beach of all places. Somewhere in the States. Maybe he’s got family, after all. A girl somewhere or a kid, but Ghost doubts it. It amuses him, the image he’s got in his head of the Captain in a beach chair plowing through margaritas.
“You could do with a holiday too, Simon,” says Price.
“Think I should work on my tan?”
“Somethin' like that.” Price laughs. It's hollow. He flicks the butt of the cigarette down with a grimace and scuffs it with his boot. “You sure you don't want the time off? Not often in your career they hand out leave like this.”
He's clever. Doesn't say need the time off but Ghost hears it.
“Might sit out and watch some recruits trip over themselves. Closest thing to time off I'm interested in.”
“Don't forget sunblock.”
Price waves with an informal salute, and Ghost echoes him. Doesn't move from his lean against the brick wall until the pack of cigarettes clatters empty into the void of the dumpster.
Later, he'll learn Price went state-side to take Shepherd down, and he'll burn incandescent with an angry sort of bereavement.
In another month, they'll catch up to Makarov.
When Ghost puts a bullet square between the bastard's eyes, it won't feel much like a reckoning. It's just brain matter. The man crumpling down into any old corpse.
Thunder growls over the ridge, and the rain touches the round of the hills in a sleek plume that trails like smoke. He’s picking his way through the heath-swathed foothills, moving at an easy jog, the static pressure laying over him in warning. Cradling the weight of his rifle, trigger finger cold and stiff, he keeps an eye on the rippled folds that wrinkle their way up the highlands.
He knows there’s no enemy waiting for him besides the quicksilver slither of lightning across the open moor, but it’s good ground for an ambush. Can’t help but check. He scans quick with the scope and thumbs on the semi-auto, not wanting to waste ammo out here alone. His comms are quiet, not even a crackle.
There’s something there. A dark shape just over the line of the first ridge, unmoving.
He stops in a seep of wet ground and wipes condensation from the scope with his fingers. He peers through with the bite of metal against his eye socket and sees the prone shape of the corpse.
The slope burns through his calves, and a wet wind picks up while the storm churns along the peaks. He’ll have to find shelter soon.
He estimates the body on the ridge has been dead a few weeks.
It’s bloated and white through the gaps in its clutter of tactical gear, and lying on its back, the carrion birds have made a mess of the face, stripped back to ghoulish scraps of gore. The smell is sour and rotten, not the fresh copper of raw meat. He goes hard down on one knee to lean over the body and feels a dizzy sort of vertigo.
On the wings of a black bird, he looks down at himself as he crouches. The hard carapace of his white mask mirrors the exposed bone of the corpse, and a bottle-green beetle climbs its way out of an empty eye socket. He tugs his glove off with his teeth and sticks his fingers in to probe the slick hollow.
The bullet to the temple didn’t crack the sphenoid bone at the back of the socket, its trajectory straight through the meat of the brain. It was probably lights out right away. Everything that made flesh into man snuffing to nothing before the blood even started to pool.
With his fingers curled deep into the socket, his thumb skims the raw bullet hole.
Thunder erupts like artillery fire.
He feels it in his chest.
When he tucks the tip of his thumb into the divot of the wound, it’s wet, cold, and unpleasant. Not unlike the mountains themselves. There’s no neat channel of ruined tissue carved out by the trajectory of the bullet. The meat’s gone liquid inside. Brain matter’s quick to dissolve into slop. If he lifted the head by the scruff of hair at the scalp, he thinks it would slosh.
The rain comes in a wall of water, and he bows over the body, droplets falling from the dome of his helmet to freshly redden the rust stains of dried blood. He wishes he could hide from the storm like a beetle in one of the shattered sockets, tucked up fetal into the cavern of bone. He keeps his fingers in there like that’s enough, the dry prod of his fingertips against the thin cracks of the orbital ridge.
You used to watch me, he thinks. Knew what I was up to at a glance.
There'd been something there, maybe. Some tension unrecognized, taut like a tensed muscle. Johnny'd grin wide and stupid, and he'd grin back without a thought, hidden. He'd feel a little bit like a living man for a breath, like somebody who could desire something beyond all this, like he was more than just meat and bone.
Ghost holds his fingers stuffed full inside the cup of Soap's eye sockets and lets a shudder go down his spine.
It’s intimate. He never touched him alive, not really. Didn’t touch him fresh-dead either. No use prodding with two stiff fingers at the carotid to check. Not with that much blood on the concrete, the point-blank, cracked open temple. No use at all. Maybe the last heartbeats would have fluttered beneath fingers knuckled under his jaw. Maybe he’d have felt it when it stopped.
Brain-dead already. Vacant.
He strokes the tacky orbital with a slow pressure. His eyes were storm-blue. Nobody’s ever touched him right here, behind the eye, beneath the skin.
It’s sick. He knows even in the blur of what must be a dream that it’s not right. What he’s thinking about doing.
The roar of a thunderclap knocks his own brain against his ears.
In the darkness as the clouds break overhead, he sees himself through the grey-green of infrared imaging as he straddles the corpse up near its shoulders. His body is white-hot, and the dead man is a lukewarm grey, burning with the scant heat of decomp.
He gets his fly down, fingers clammy with rain, and from a great distance, from the bare peaks of the mountains opposite, he watches himself fold to brace his palms against wet moss on stone.
You’re sick, he thinks.
He’s watched a target have sex through his NVGs before, waiting through the blurred rut of glowing white bodies together for the bastard to lean back through his finishing thrusts, and that’s when he sank the bullet home. He likes the thought of his shot blowing the target’s skull to smithereens a single moment before the crest of his orgasm.
Stealing an undeserving man’s last gasp of pleasure just before it can sink its claws into his gut.
Fatal blue balling. It’s funny. Makes him laugh. How maybe a target knocked off mid-coitus will take longer to die because all his blood’s pooled too far south to pump out quick through the new hole in his head.
He leans to tease his soft cock against the rain-wet rim of the eye socket of a dead man.
When he looks down to watch himself do it, one living, blue eye peers up at him, looks through him, sees exactly what he doesn’t want it to see.
When he wakes, he vomits off the side of his bunk and lies there sweat-damp and achey with the sour stink of it overwhelming his senses. A little like the rot of decomposition. Heavy and wrong.
Maybe he'll finally take leave after all. Drive out into the mountains.
When he sleeps again, days later, strung-out and desperate and barely alive, Ghost lets the corpse look its fill.