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trying to find out who the Skunk Man had been.  But the two chopper crews didn’t know each other: both teams had been recruited from different units.
    He asked the base officers about the Black Hawk crew.  Classified, they said.  Per military protocol, they reminded him, Black Ops operatives were not known to anyone outside their unit.  They smiled and shook his hand and told him to forget about them; they had never officially existed, anyway.
    John received an award.  A bronze star.  Vogel got a silver one, posthumously, as did the other fallen men.  John almost expected them to give one to the Black Hawk.  But no, not to a machine.  Only to the dead and those who had seen death.
    John had seen death twice now. 
    And both times came with the strange man.  The man who was now gone, a corpse that would smolder forever under the hot sun of Iraq.
    The Skunk Man.
     

DOM#67B
    LOSTON, COLORADO
    AD 1999
    3:30 AM FRIDAY MORNING
     
    John woke up from the dream, and could not move. 
    In the movies, when people had nightmares, they always sat bolt upright, drenched in sweat and panting like a beaten dog.  John never did that, though nightmares were his constant companion.  When they came, the personal, unremembered demons of the night, he woke feeling heavy.  His eyes would snap open, but he couldn’t sit up if he wanted to.  Two-ton weights seemed to press each limb to the rumpled sheets of his bed, and movement was impossible for a time after waking.  All he could do was lay there, every muscle quivering from unremembered exertion, every joint sore from unknown strains, and feel the bed beneath him. 
    The bed was too large.  It had been ever since Annie died.
    He looked into the darkness, past the fuzzy outline of the pillow that half-poked him in the eye.  A digital clock on his nightstand glowed like an iridescent monster of the night, deep laser-red eyes staring out with anger and bloodlust.  Unblinking.  Unmoving.
    Gradually the monster’s eyes resolved themselves into readable numbers as John’s eyes cast off the lingering effects of sleep and his brain cast off the lingering effects of his past.
    3:30 a.m.
    He woke every night, and though the times varied, they were always at the half hour.  Never 4:31 or 2:16.  Always 2:30 or 4:30 or sometimes even 5:30 if he was lucky.  Sometimes, when he cared to think about it, it frightened him that he woke with such precision; such exact timing.  Biological clocks were generally well-tuned instruments, he knew...but that tuned? 
    The digital eye blinked.  3:31.
    He still couldn’t move.
    Sleep had fled, and he knew that it would not return.  He never slept again after waking in the night.  When his eyes closed, the demons were real, and though he braved them every night, twice in one night would be too much to face.
    Strength gradually returned as his heart ceased to pound against his ribcage.  He sat up.
    The covers fell away from his naked torso.  Though nearing forty, John’s body closely resembled that of an active twenty-five year old.  His chest was still firm and muscular, athletic without being bulky.  His stomach was flat, with traces of a washboard musculature showing through from time to time.  Annie used to tease him about that, telling him he was vain for keeping up so.  But he never worked out.  He was just born with it.
    Annie.
    He felt the scar, as he did every night, and as he did every night he allowed himself to think about the dark flesh and the darker past it signified.  The gnarled skin curled around his shoulder like a monkey tail wrapped around a tree.  The scar tissue on his chest was smaller.  The entry of the shot when he was young had left a mark, but it was barely the size of a silver dollar above his right pectoral. 
    On his back, though, the wound and scarring were greater.  There the scar was a large fist of curled matter, darker than his olive skin.  It seemed to swallow light, hunching like a malignant