A Day in the Life of Forrester - Pt. 5
Echoes
By: Karen Walker (Serris)
Co-Author: Stephanie Watson (SLWatson)

Disclaimer: Clay belongs to BBI, though I wish he was mine.
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It was a stunningly beautiful day on the outskirts of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, as the sun radiated through the big, billowed clouds.  In the trees, birds whistled happily, singing their duets in glorious rapture of the arrival of summer.  Opposite of the tree whither the birds sang their melodies stood the Gizmonic's Institute, a rather rigid building, and certainly out of place in the calm serenity of the afternoon.

Against the enormous building, a puny door opened and a Clayton Forrester made his way out into the sunlight, grumbling to himself.  He despised going outside and exposing himself to the rays of the sun, however, with his assistant being entranced in a book, there was no hope for the scientist's mail to be delivered to him.

As he crossed the road, a near miss with a passing car alerted him that caution would be needed, even if he was only going across the street.  Nodding to the enraged driver, he waved the man on with a smile before glaring after the license plate of the car that screeched away.  No one crossed Dr. Clayton Forrester, especially when he was crossing the road.  Smirking slightly, he repeated the numbers and letters over and over in his mind as he stepped up to the mailbox: Yes, that man would pay for his crudely spoken insults.

Taking out a bulky set of keys, he spent a good five minutes searching for the right one to open the mailbox allotted to him when he was hired.  Mentally making a note that he had to create a universal skeleton key for any locked mailbox, he put the proverbial ticket-to-open into the lock and turned it.  As he unveiled the contents of the box, he shook his head in disgust.  Of course, with junk mail and bills coming in so quickly the mailman had stuffed every possible piece of mail into the little square, and then added about three more pieces.

Replacing the keys in the pocket of his labcoat, he began pulling the cramped letters, bills, and special once-in-a-lifetime offers from their confines.  It took quite a bit of exertion to  remove the first few pieces, but after getting those out, he had no trouble with the rest, save the curled parcels that were always plaguing and looming over the rest of the mail.  Putting them all into a nice pile, he then nudged the door of the mailbox closed, which locked itself automatically.

Starting his way back towards the Institute, he began filing through the mail.  Most of it was junk mail intended for his assistant.  Separating those pieces, he slipped them in one pocket, along with a letter that had arrived for his own right hand man.  Continuing his stroll, he then separated the bills, slipping them into the other pocket and leaving himself with a letter, stamped with the seal of the Navy.

Raising an eyebrow, Clayton focused on the four letters that signified the aquatic section of the Armed Forces.  Letting his eye trail down the page, the young scientist read over his own address, then looked at the return address, printed neatly by the schooled hand of Zeak Matthews.  Only his name sat idly on the paper, leaving no return address or even an idea where he might be.

The man looked around as if it were a secret that he had gotten such a thing, before turning it over and looking at the seal on the somewhat ragged envelope.  Opening the flap with careful precision, he then opened the door to the building and sat himself in the stairwell, third step from the bottom.  Stretching his legs out in front of him, he pulled the letter from inside it's gentle confines.

As he set the envelope aside, he looked at the inaccurate folding of the handwritten pages and leaned back a bit.  Taking a long moment to try and guess what his old friend might have said, he smiled at the lighthearted memories of the football player who hardly ever got to play football. 

Laughing at his own foolish thoughts, he once again looked around to make sure no one was watching before unfolding the letter.  The insides, however, did not reflect the same disciplined hand as on the addressed side of the envelope.  Beginning to read, he settled into the words on the paper:

Dear Clay,

Hey, pal, I suppose you're some kind of big shot science guy back there in the good old US by now, huh?  Yea, sure, and I'm a Navy Seal.  Actually, come to think of it, I could have been, but who's counting anyway?  I'm sure you're probably wondering where I'm at right now, but quite honestly I couldn't tell you the exact place.  Somewhere in Puerto Rico, though, if that gives you any more of an idea.

Things are awfully hot down here, believe it or not.  Like the desert in Arizona at high noon, only it's not a blistering heat, but a suffocating heat: The kind of heat that warms the air and fills your lungs to the point where you wake up with a hacking cough.  I guess you'd really have to be down here to fully understand.  Be glad you're not.

We went out on patrol yesterday and ended up in a small city.  Five miles of walking through soggy land, and another ten in straight rain.  Fifteen horrible, soggy hours, Clay, and we're rewarded with a city in ashes and only one refill for our canteens.  Ironic, isn't it?  One refill of water after trudging through it for hours.  I can see why father wanted me to join so much.

I guess I shouldn't be upset, really... afterall, it wasn't my family.  But you know what?  It doesn't make me feel any better to know that my mother and father are sleeping in their beds back home while someone here is mourning the loss of their entire family.  Should it honestly?  Is that really what I'm here to do? 

Yea, I know that your probably rolling your eyes by now, but Clay, if you were here I know you'd be feeling the same way I am right now.  If you had to see the things I've seen you'd know where I was coming from.  Even today... today we saw a little boy.  He couldn't have been more than seven years old, and he was using every little muscle he had to pull at some rubble from one of the buildings that had been hit.  We all watched as if our strength was less than that little boy's, and when giant crocodile tears came streaming down his face, he took a woman's hand that was lying limp under some stone.  I'm so ashamed of myself... of my country, even.  I could have done something!

It made me think as I sat there, watching.  Just think about it... Somewhere in that city a man was working the midnight shift, cleaning up the hallways of a makeshift hospital.  All he could think about was going home to his little girl and his loving wife and getting a good night of sleep.  All he wanted was to sleep away the nightmares of all of the wounded soldiers, and dream of the days when peace was just as common of a word as day and night.  And while he thought such things, our bomber pilots were overhead, dropping their bombs down with neither warning nor a care about the man or his family!  What has this world come to, Clay?

I can't take this kind of thing anymore... I think I'll go insane if I have to put up with it for another year.  The next chance I get, I'm coming home and the I'll be damned if I reenlist.  Pray for me, please; I need all the help I can get.  And when I do make it home, we'll meet up again, even if it's just for the sake of a class reunion.  Until then...

Your friend,
Zeak


It took a horribly long moment for the whole situation to sink in, while Clayton folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope.  Rubbing his eyes, he managed to hold back the emotions he acquired from the letter, and from his own thoughts.  He hadn't expected such a powerful letter, but then again, he had never expected Zeak to write, or even become a friend.

Standing, he slipped the letter into the pocket with his bills, a shaking hand the only betrayal of his feelings after he had set his jaw.  Clay knew that things would turn out okay for the enlistedman as long as faith and hope remained, but in such a dark world, both were things one had to grab hold of tightly, or they would slip away without a trace.

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The year was 1979, and the place was Puerto Rico. On that fateful year, there was an underground fight among the Puerto Ricans for independence from the United States, and a bus of Navy boys who had headed back for their ship were ambushed. That had been on December 3, but now it was December 24th, the day before Christmas.


Clay appeared in that dense jungle, not sure how he had even got there. Things had been going just fine in his lab, and now he was in some humid place in a country only God knows the location of. Turning around, he looked at the dense foliage and could hear sharp sounds off in the distance. He wasn't quite able pick them out though: Everything was a blur of confusion to him.

In the distance and before a moment passed, a shout rang through the foliage, following the sound of a single shot being fired, putting the jungle birds into a screeching uproar. The agonized cry echoed across the forest, bounding around the trees like a sickening pinball game.

Clayton looked up from the marshy ground as the cry hit his ears, not quite sure what to do or even what to expect. Looking down at his chemical stained hands, he dropped them to his sides and started running towards the screams; perhaps he could help.

It wasn't long until he burst into the scene. Tied to a stake was a uniformed man, slumped over as another rattled at the grate over his makeshift cage, half-shouting and half-sobbing at the loss of one of his own. The other men, presumably guards, paid Clay no mind... it's almost as though they didn't see him.

Clay looked around in horror, stopped in his steps. Glancing at the guards for a moment, he then looked to the man on the stake. Stepping over, he lifted the head of the man to check him over. The man's face wasn't known to him, but he wasn't much more than a boy. He wore scratches and scars about his face, and although he couldn't have been much older than 18 or 19, it looks as though he had lived in Hell for the past few weeks, and perhaps he had. However, he's beyond that Hell, and anything else.

Letting the boy's head go, he crossed himself slightly before looking to the man in the cage. Crying shamelessly, the man who had his fingers entwined in the grate of the cage is older, perhaps in his mid twenties. He's build heavy, but his body trembled from the nightmare he was faced with. Dark hair plastered to his forehead from rain and blood, he stared at the boy on the stake, almost as though somehow, by force of will, he could have brought him back from the dead.

Clayton looked at the man in the cage, then the other man before running and trying to get the cage open. The lock held with amazingly good strength, and the man beneath the caged grate took no notice of Clay's helpless attempts to get the gate open. One of the guards walked over, a machine gun in hand, and totally bypassing Clay he threw some bones down through the grate, as he would a dog. Flinching away, the enlistedman below turned long enough to save getting hit in the face, but turned back fairly quickly, the low light catching the name stitched in black on his fatigues: Matthews.

Clay blinked, the name clicking in his mind, but then again, not. Could it be? No... it wasn't possible. Kneeling down in the mud, he tried to reach a hand out, to help, to let him know a friend was there, to do something. "Zeak...? Is that you?"  He asked, his voice weak from the smell of blood and the thought running through his mind.  Zeak Matthews almost looked through his old friend, imagining he must have heard something, but finding it more likely to be the imagination of a forgotten man, he sunk down into the mud, curling up once again.

Pulling at the bars futilely, with tears in his eyes, Clayton yelled, "Listen to me! Listen..."  However, the soldier just closed his eyes, leaning against the slick muddy wall with a half-choked sob of desolation and hopelessness.

The scientist looked down for a moment longer before laying back in the mud. "You can't hear me, can you? Or see me... you're just a dream; a phantom..."


With those simple words, the fragile frame of Dr. Clayton Forrester bolted upright in his bed.  It had only been a dream, or at least more of a nightmare in such a case, but tears rolled down his cheeks at the horrible images planted in his head.  He had been told that war was only what the soldier made of it, but he was not soldier, and it seemed pretty awful to him.

Clayton Forrester had shot a man into space.  He had plans of world domination, but late in the night, when he was vulnerable with fatigue and nightmares, he temporarily forgot all of that.  He was a college student once again, one of his only true friends sitting up with him and chatting away.  He held onto those times, then shoved them away again... they hurt too badly, particularly now.  Memories of a lighter time in his life, before the insanity had taken hold and left him struggling to achieve something he would probably never achieve, were things he tried hard not to remember.  They made men weak, those warm memories.  They made them trust and care, and those were things Clay couldn't afford to do.

Now Zeak was out there, suffering.  His letter had spoken as much, showing Clay that the once light-hearted Boston fellow had been destroyed, and that even when he came home, he wouldn't be the same.  What kind of world did they live in anyway?  One that didn't deserve to be left unconquered.

But there would be time enough to worry about world domination tomorrow.  For now, there was nothing to do... nothing to say.  So, quietly and painfully, Clayton mourned for his friend, and even more softly, with no one to hear, he prayed for him as well.