Adrift
Copyright© 2025 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 8
Bess looked around, wiping a hank of hair from her eyes. Lots of people at work! Griff came up and plopped down next to her. “Whoosh!” he said fervently, “I can’t believe how out of shape I’ve gotten in the last year!”
Bess smiled, then remembered something the woman Marine had told her. “Griff, you never really talked about the Marines. Oh, little stories, but nothing big.” She waved towards the mass of people. “How come some of them know you? Personally?”
He reached out and hugged her, and then kissed her lightly. It was a chaste, relatively emotionless kiss; a kiss that surprised her. Usually, Griff was a tiger.
“Bess, when I joined the Marines, I was a sad sack, useless. They made me over in the Corps image.” He laughed and shook his head. “They’re as good at that as ever!”
He settled himself down on the ground and looked around. No one else was particularly close. “When you get out of boot camp, well, you feel like you’re the cock of the walk. The Big Guy on the block. Of course, everyone else knows you’re full of shit, but you don’t.”
“They came through, asking for volunteers for Afghanistan. Everyone -- everyone and his brother volunteered. There was an officer who looked at me and said I was a little shrimp. That’s what he called me to my face -- a little shrimp. I thought he was a moron. I wanted to bust his chops, but he had this gold maple leaf on his collar. He asked me if I was afraid of the dark.” Griff laughed bitterly. “I told him to go fuck himself, go fuck his momma too while he was at it. I wasn’t afraid of anything; that I’d stopped being afraid of the dark when I was four years old.” Griff drew a line in the leafy debris of the forest floor with his finger.
“They sent me off to a special school. Sixteen weeks.” He shook his head. “Bombs, booby traps, intelligence collecting. Then off to The ‘Stan.” He paused, looking serious. “You didn’t read about it much in the papers. The buggers have miles and miles of tunnels and caves. Jesus! Some of the places I was in had been dug before Christ! No shit!” Griff shook his head in wonder.
“They were dirty fighters; there was nothing good about them. They got hard ons trying to kill even one GI.” He laughed. “In one cave, we found this big ol’ Turkish rug, maybe twenty feet on a side. It took six of us a day and a half to check it for traps. Then some goom-ball REMF told us to roll it up and ship it back to the rear.”
Griff laughed again, not at all pleasantly. “They’d dipped it in something -- it was fine, spread out. Roll it up ... twenty-some odd hours later, it spontaneously combusted. It burned down a cargo transfer area at Kandahar; if it had taken another two hours, it would have started burning on a C-130 en route to the USA.”
Griff stopped talking, staring into space.
Bess touched his arm. “But really, what did you do?”
Griff laughed then. He reached out his arm, took her, and kissed her so hard that her toes curled, and she wanted to be alone with him. When he let go, he gently stroked her cheek. “I stayed alive, Bess. Just that.”
“I thought we had hardly any casualties at first.”
He shook his head. “They had funny rules about that, not wanting to disturb you folks back home. There were ten guys in my caving class. One guy did so well that they kept him back as an instructor. Of the nine of us who deployed, two of us came back with all of our parts.” He paused, then said softly, “They really, really, really wanted us dead. Whatever it took. Tricks as diabolical as they come.”
For a second, he was silent, and then he laughed. “Hey! Enough about sheethead screw-ups! They didn’t kill anyone in my unit! Zero, zip, nada!”
Bess tried to fit that with what he’d said a moment before, and then she realized what the missing component was. Bits and pieces. No one had been killed, but just about everyone had lost ... something.
The gunny came by. “Griff!”
Her husband turned to the man.
“We found something just up your alley! There are some limestone hills, about a kilometer that way.” He waved towards the north. “Seamed with caves.”
Bess felt a stab of fear that twisted in her guts.
Instead, Griff laughed. “No sheethead booby traps! Cool! Point me the way!” He stood, and Bess found herself standing with him.
“I’m coming too,” Bess said simply.
She was surprised when Griff stared at her for a second and then said, “Mind if I give my wife a little OJT, Gunny?”
Griff’s easy agreement had been a surprise, but the gunny’s reaction knocked her wind away and made her blush from her hair roots to her toenails.
“Your wife needs a little OJT, Corporal? Geez, I can get the entire squad to volunteer for that duty! Even the gals!”
It was, Bess thought, another of the things the Marines did differently than other people. Because all Griff had done was laugh.
The party consisted of a dozen people, most of them Marines. Two were in front, spread about ten feet apart, on either side of their path. Two more came up the rear. Bess was part of a group of four in the middle. One of the most surprising things was that Griff was in charge.
It took a half hour to cover the distance to the hills. Griff walked up to the biggest, blackest hole and looked around. “Animal tracks,” he said softly. His eyes rested on Bess for a few seconds. Suddenly she was aware that he was thinking of leaving her behind. She lifted her chin. Not!
He eyed her and grinned. Then he turned to the woman marine with them. “You’ve got the detail, PFC.” The woman nodded. “What I’m going to do is penetrate about two meters, first. Eyeballing the environment. For God’s sake, don’t whig out if something comes at me!”
“You got it, Corp,” the woman said firmly.
“If it’s clear, I’ll call for Bess.” He nodded at her. “You will have your combat knife in hand, right?”
For the life of her, Bess couldn’t imagine herself walking anywhere with a combat knife at the ready. “Yes, Griff.”
“Yes, Corporal,” he corrected her instantly.
Bess knew it was important, for Griff, for the others. “I’m ready, Corp.”
He laughed, shaking his finger in her face. “Do not go spoiling my image! It’s tough enough being a Marine!” He turned, and without hesitation, stepped inside the darkness.
For a minute nothing happened. Then another. Then Griff said quietly, “Bess, come along. There’s something in here, but it sounds small. Watch yourself!”
Bess took a deep breath, held the knife in her right hand, held low like Griff had, and walked inside.
The first room of the cave was about five feet around, about ten feet high. There was a black space to her left, another to her right front. “The noise,” Griff said softly, “is coming from the left. Very carefully, I’m going that way. Just keep your head! Think, girl! You can do this!”
For an instant the dark, the weight of the rocks overhead, and darkness around her threatened to overwhelm Bess. Then she lifted her chin. Hey! I stopped being afraid of the dark when I was five! Maybe not as young as Griff, but it’s been a while since she was afraid of the dark!
From in front of her, she heard Griff speak softly.
“Well, I can see it. It’s house cat-sized, but looks more like a frog. Hopping mad, I’m thinking. Bess, tell Rita to move the squad to the west, but they aren’t to shoot. Then you do the same, right?”
“Yes, Griff ... Corporal.” Bess passed the message back and moved herself.
“Ready!” came the word from outside, and Bess relayed that to Griff, then added that she was ready as well.
There was an indistinct sound, then another. Oh! Griff was throwing small rocks at it! There was a sound like a cow farting, then a streak that shot out of the entrance Griff had gone through, a streak that braked sharply when it realized Bess was where she was. It turned and raced towards the light.
After a short second, there was a single shot from outside. Bess stood still, hoping no one had been hurt. Griff stalked out of the dark hole he’d been in, ignoring her, going straight outside. Bess followed him.
The woman PFC looked nervously at Griff. “Missed, Corporal.”
“You missed?” Griff asked mildly.
The woman shook her head. “My squad missed, Corporal.”
Griff walked over to her, standing directly in front of her.
The woman was chunky, easily six inches taller than Griff and was maybe sixty pounds heavier. Bess doubted if the woman had an ounce of fat on her body.
“I admire loyalty, I do,” Griff said calmly. “Loyalty kept me alive more times than I care to think about.” He continued, his voice soft, “But you have a fuck-up in your squad. I want to know who.”
The woman Marine lifted her chin and shook her head, without speaking.
Griff looked down the line of five Marines. He walked down the line, turned and retraced his path back to the woman. “At some point in time, we’re going to be down to our last cartridge. One of your fuck-ups made it just that much sooner. And didn’t even score.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the woman Marine told Griff, her voice firm.
“You will. Or you’re going to not amount to piss in the Corps.” Griff walked the line again, returning to stand in front of the woman, who stood rigid.
Bess had no idea, none, of what this was about. Oh, yeah, the guy shouldn’t have fired, but Bess could understand being frightened. She’d been frightened!
“The problem I have, PFC, is just where that round went,” Griff said quietly. “I stand here and I see the cave where Bess and I were. Then I see you all standing here, with your fingers up your assholes, being useless. Tell me where the round went.”
Bess saw the woman’s eyes flick towards the camp.
Griff turned red, beet-red.
He walked along the line of men, then back, then again. “I never was much in the Corps, just a jumped-up corporal,” Griff was speaking as if to himself. “But I knew my job. I knew what I had to do. Little things. Big things.”
His fist was like the hammer of Thor! A smashing strike! One of the men doubled over, retching in the grass.
Griff looked at the woman. “They called this decimation in the Roman Legions; one in ten were singled out for punishment.”
Griff waved back towards the cave. “There’s another of those things in there. I hate being sexist, but I think it was the guy that just scampered to safety. Momma will probably be a little less eager to run, a little more willing to fight.”
He leaned close to the woman, his voice a scream. “Am I going to have Marines behind me? Or worthless pukes?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just turned and headed back towards the cave. “With me!” he told Bess as he passed her. She followed Griff inside the cave.
Again, for a long minute they stood still in the outer chamber. Bess listened as hard as she could, but couldn’t hear a thing.
Griff’s voice was low, pitched so only she could hear it. “On the bird home, my gunny took me aside. I had, he said, a career in the Corps, if I wanted it. I looked at my hole card and decided that just about anything was better. I wanted a regular life: a wife, a family, and a home in the suburbs. Leaves falling in the autumn, some snow, maybe, in the winter, trees and flowers blooming in the spring and hot, lazy days in the summer. A white picket fence and kids running screaming in and out of the house.”
“I told him no, thanks. The gunny told me that I could have made gunny myself and that I had a talent for command. I thought it was re-up bullshit, so I blew him off.”
Griff waved at the darkness in front of them. “Momma’s in there. I think she’s like mommas everywhere -- she wants the kids safe -- that’s the bottom line. So you go there.” He waved to the room that he’d headed for first. “I want her to have a clear shot at the door.”
Bess nodded. She moved off to the side, where she was supposed to go. The second chamber was about ten feet on a side and significantly darker than the entrance chamber. She tried to use her ears to hear anything, anything at all. She heard nothing, she saw nothing.
“Here goes,” Griff told her. Bess gripped the knife firmly in her hand. There was a sudden surge from where Griff was, and then a moment later Griff said softly, “Jesus!”
He didn’t seem distressed, so Bess moved towards him. She went through the door, and saw Griff standing a few feet away. “What?” Bess asked.
Silently, he flipped on the flashlight he’d eschewed up until then.
The room they were in was perhaps a hundred feet wide, three times that wide. The ceiling was perhaps twenty feet overhead. A small stream bubbled through the middle of the room. The water moved swiftly, but most places you could step over it easily.
“Welcome to my cave, woman,” Griff said, his voice brusque.
“We’ll be safe here,” Bess said softly.
“Oh, yes, sure. Nice and safe.” He pointed the light at a rock in the middle of the room, a rock that had obviously fallen from the ceiling. “Unless the roof comes down.”
“It was a long time ago,” Bess said defensively.
“Probably,” Griff replied. “Now we need to tell a lot of people it’s time to move again.”
Harry had spent most of the long, long afternoon at Becky Thatcher’s side, taking notes. Becky would tell her something, and Harry would write it down. Late in the afternoon, there was a single shot from several hundred yards away. Harry wasn’t at all sure why Becky was concerned, but Becky ordered an immediate head count.
That was something, Harry thought, that they were going to have to get used to. Still, there was no one known to be missing, except a Marine party off exploring.
Harry was mildly surprised to hear her sister’s name mentioned favorably by Doctor Sanger. The reed mats were going to be important, at least in the short term. Harry remembered with barely concealed loathing making mats at summer camp. Who would have thought, Harry asked herself, that it would be important?
The Marine scouting party returned. Harry got to stand at Becky Thatcher’s elbow as Griff delivered the report on the caves.
“And the shot?” the gunny asked, his voice mild.
“That’s been taken care of.”
“It hit the aircraft,” the gunny told Griff, his voice dry and a little bitter.
Griff laughed, nastily, Harry thought. “I bet you could fire off a thousand rounds from the caves and still not hit it.”
“And you’re sure it has been taken care of?” the gunny demanded, looking at Griff.
“Aye, aye, Gunny. It’s history,” Griff said with finality.
Harry looked at the people who’d been on the expedition. Only five uniformed Marines had carried guns. The woman Marine in uniform looked bleak, and the rest of them were looking down at the ground. One of the men looked like he’d been sick to his stomach.
Harry nodded to herself. He was the man who had fired without permission, without thinking. And Griff had hit him. Harry thought a bit more and then grinned to herself. And no marks! Every time Harry and Sandy had a fight, there were marks -- usually a lot of them. She needed to take a few lessons here!
“The animals were about this size.” Griff held his hands about two feet apart. “One was a mom, with a litter of a half dozen pups. Smart mom -- she decided to live to breed again another day.”
Griff didn’t say anything more about the baby critters. They were dead, Harry was sure.
“They look like frogs, but run like greased lightning and not at all like a frog. The head goes down, the back end comes up, and zip!” He shook his head. “I’m certain that they are carnivores. They probably aren’t a threat to an adult, but we will have to be careful with small children and babies.” He paused.
“I think, for a while, we should all be careful. I have no idea about how they hunt. The fact that they ran ... that’s not good.”
“Affirm,” Jack Pierson confirmed. “It was smart. We don’t need any smart animals. Particularly hunters.”
“Speaking of that,” Tim Riley, the Coast Guard officer, interjected, “Mei Lei, do you remember if the passenger manifest listed any vegetarians?”
Harry spoke up after a second, while the other was thinking. It was something she knew. “Two.”
Becky met Tim’s eye, and then she nodded. “Mei Lei, make a note of their names. Get with Dr. Sanger, have her talk to them about the risks, in the short term, about their lifestyle choice.”
“Are we going to have a problem with environmental whackos?” Jack asked.
Becky Thatcher shrugged, but the Chinese woman shook her head. “They and the vegans -- miss a few meals, and they will fall into line. If not, the gene pool is well rid of them.”
“Mei Lei!” Becky’s voice was sharp, but quiet.
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