"Colts noticed his feet looked of rubber," the soldier replied.
"Looked of rubber?" I asked.
"Yeah... its one of the warning signs..." he continued, "according the the investigators limbs looking of rubber are a common symptom: it means that their skin is hanging off of them and being changed from the new guts inside of them." He then looked into his mug and went quiet.
Rubber feet. I couldn't help but think that if it manifested into a physical ailment that was visible on the body as to bizarre or abnormal behaviour, I had to ask how would Nana miss that? After all, as she was the wife, she's had to see her husband's feet at some point. This was good, or so I thought, for it meant that I had pinpointed when the soal took Darmon's body: it was during his more recent staying at the barracks.
I asked the soldier if there was any sign of personality change. He shook his head. "it surprised all of us... if it wasn't for Lieutenant Colts it would have gone unnoticed."
I assumed that it was missed because soldiers wear boots: you wouldn't be looking at feet. Still, no personality change... at all?
"Not even something that could be shell shock or home-sickness?" I asked the soldier.
"Nothing..." he's voice whimpered off. I was getting a little scared at this point. "So, how did Lieutenant Colts find out?" I asked.
"In the barracks," he replied, "the two were talking by the stairwell that lead from the mess to the bedrooms. Then Colts called out 'Soal! Soal! DelVora is a soal!' Everyone looked, and we saw DelVora there with his left boot off, revealing a rubber foot."
"Did you take it to an investigator?" I asked. He told me they didn't. "Colts told us that in the time it took to investigate the sergeant would be killing us and sending his soal buddies after us," was the justification.
I had later looked up the soal in relation to other crimes. There was no coloration.
So I asked him, "So then what?"
Ladies, gentleman, would you like to know exactly what 'extraction' means? I warn you, its pretty graphic. The account, to the best of my memory.
"We bullrushed him. Two other soldiers carried him into the infirmary, kicking and screaming, and they held him against the wall while Colts, with a mallet and some nails, nailed him by the wrists to the wall... to steady him. He armor was undone down to his underwear. Then Colts grabbed a scalpel. He took it and, in mail gloves, shoved this into DelVora's mouth.
"We could see DelVora try to bite down and his muffled screams could be heard from the hall as Colts just started to pull DelVora's throat out through his mouth. Then the screams stop when we started to see his lungs come out. Next was the esophagus. We could see him twitching as his innerds were being pulled through his mouth. The terror that those guts were his could be seen in DelVora's eyes.
"He stopped moving at some point, about halfway through extracting his intestines. I'm not sure when he died. When Colts was done, with the heart being along the last of the organs ripped out through the mouth orifice, the guts where put in a bag and his skin and bones were placed in a body-bag and the guts bag was taken to be burned in the furnace."
I thought what some of you are thinking now: How barbaric. I mean, soal or not, some humanity would be nice. Nevertheless, the line that stop me believing that Sergeant Darmon DelVora was one, was when the soldier said to me that he noticed that the feet were no longer rubber. Neither foot.
"I made a point of it to several of my mates, but they completely believed the Lieutenant," he went one, "I feared pushing the subject would have me share DelVore's fate.
So there was a strong possiblity that Darmon was not a soal at all, however I was getting a suspesious feeling that Lieutenant Colts was a grudge informer, who insited a lynch mob to kill Darmon. But why?
I continued to entertain the idea that Colts might have been mistaken, that is until I got home and spoke to Nana.
When asked she told me she didn't see any of the signs of soal on her husband. She knew them better than I did. However, when I asked her if she knew any of his squad mates?
"Oh, I've met some of them a few times," she tells me, "though recently I've been getting letters from his commanding officer, Seymore Colts. Their mostly condolences, but the last couple... I think he wants to date me."
<Continued on The Fallacy>
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