LITMIR.BIZ

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time I could check, less than fifty. Sergeant major shot to hell. Lieutenant colonel just blew up in your face.”

      Key gritted his teeth, then hazarded a quick look around. He returned to his prone position with his cracked skull thankfully still just cracked. But he could still not distinguish enemy from friendly fire. Worse, he couldn’t find any human source of the shit-storm. “Where is everybody?”

      “Damned if I know,” Daniels said.

      “Where’s comm?”

      “No live communication for a coupla minutes now.”

      “What? So who’s commander now?

      “Near as I can tell, you,” Daniels said. Then he added sarcastically, “God help us.”

      Key ignored the comment, but couldn’t disagree. Finally made it to chief with a nice new concussion as a reward. Even so, he still could remember that his rep was “Joe Cool.” According to Daniels, he never lost it. No time to start now.

      First things first, he heard the father inside him instruct.

      “Where are we?” he yelled at Daniels in a tone that broached no sarcasm.

      “Outside of Shabhut,” Daniels spat back, then couldn’t help elaborating. “Well-fucking named. A more miserably shabby mound of huts I’ve never seen.” Then, when Key didn’t answer, he felt compelled to add, “Outside of Aden, inside of Yemen!”

      Joe remembered where that was. Good sign. “What are we doing here?”

      “Orders. Code C3,” Daniels reported, then added with just a tinge of doubt, “Do you at least know what that is?”

      Clean the town.

      “Yeah, I know what that is,” Joe answered, struggling to keep misery out of his voice. “But the town seems to be cleaning us.”

      Key twisted in place, looking in every direction for a sign of anything or anyone who could help. He saw nothing but smoke, dust, and strafing. But, above the wining, sizzling bullet noises, he heard a growing, grinding, thundering sound just as the ground beneath him began to shake.

      The tank? He both wondered and hoped. Had to be a tank. If so, had to be our side. Enemy didn’t have…!

      “Fuckaduck!” Daniels bellowed at the same moment the sarge’s huge paw dragged Key up. “ASS!”

      Within seconds of reaching his feet, Key knew Daniels wasn’t referring to their butts, or even suggesting in his usual subtle way that they move theirs. He was using the age-old term for “asset”—one with a lot of firepower.

      Sure enough, rumbling and roaring down the tank track was a Marine HMMWV—High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee—that seemed intent on leaving sergeant and corporal jelly beneath their ten-foot-ten-inch wheelbase.

      Even though his mental fog, Key could tell that whoever was driving was fully committed to get the hell out of there. The now opaque windshield looked like crimson stained glass, and the doors looked as if they had been pounded by Satan’s fists. The big tan Humvee roared by them as Daniels’ eyes bulged—first at the retreating vehicle, then at his strangely apathetic friend.

      “Fuck,” Daniels started as he let his M240 drop, it’s strap making it swing behind him. “A,” he continued as he grabbed the M32 Multi-shot Grenade Launcher that hung from his other shoulder. “Duck!” he boomed as he aimed it at the back of the diminishing lorry.

      Key just stood there, feeling strangely calm amidst the storm. Then, as if his eyes were cameras, they suddenly zoomed in for a close-up on the rear of the Humvee. Strapped to the back of the payload bed was a large rectangular box he didn’t recognize.

      That’s weird, he thought. We didn’t leave base with that.

      “Daniels,” he suddenly yelled. “No!”

      But it was too late. The sarge had decided that either the enemy had captured the vehicle or some chicken-shit coward was running. Either way they deserved a forty by fifty-one millimeter extended range low pressure high explosive.

      Key was jumping onto Daniels as the shell made a grey line toward the back of the barreling Humvee. It hit its target just as Key hit Daniels. The reaction between the two, however, could not have been more different.

      The corporal bounced off the sergeant, who had been described more than once, by more than one person—including soldiers too young to know what the expression even meant—as a brick shithouse. The fact that he could carry both a M240 and a M32 at the same time as if they were a messenger bag and a purse gave testament to his size and strength.

      The grenade, however, did not bounce. It detonated with a cracking bang, followed, as Key feared, with a ground-shaking, Humvee-bouncing, air-quaking ba-boom. The back of the HMMWV was filled with boxed enemy ammo.

      Key slammed to the ground just as a sizzling shockwave of heat, dust, sand, and shrapnel swept over him like a scythe. The force was so strong, he didn’t even bounce. Instead he was buffeted, shook, and even skidded a little. But this time he was sure he didn’t lose consciousness. Which was strange, because a cloud the color of bones settled over him, along with a perplexing sensation of peace.

      That’s it, he managed to think. I’m dead.

      The certainty of his demise made it easy for him. If he was dead, the concussion wouldn’t matter, nor would anything else. So, he just sat up, rolled to his side, and rose to his feet. He stood there for a few seconds, trying to see or hear anything. Anything: screams, gunfire, Daniels’s profanity. But there was nothing. Nothing but the uncanny off-white cloud that seemed to envelope him.

      So Key started walking. He thought the mist would soon dissipate, but it didn’t. So he just kept moving. He didn’t know for how long or in what direction. As long as he was covered in fog he kept moving.

      Come on, come on, he thought. Heaven or hell, make a decision.

      He only paused for a second when he realized that maybe they already had. Maybe this was purgatory. Maybe he was doomed to walk in this for God-knows-how-long.

      Key chuckled at the truth of that. Yeah, only God knew how long. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken Your name in vain so often….

      As if in response, the mist finally began to clear. Key stopped dead in his tracks as the smoke retreated—like he was a circular fan. All around him a devastated village began to appear. The whole place looked like a giant lawn mover had been dropped on it. The dwellings didn’t look so much detonated as shredded. The foliage didn’t look so much cracked or broken as frayed.

      Then something else started coming into view. At first Key didn’t even recognize them as corpses. The pungent smell—it could’ve been anything dead. He’d smelled carcasses before, in the mountains of Southern California where he grew up. It wasn’t until he realized that the hair, fingernails, and toenails were human in origin that he acknowledged them as more than elaborately slaughtered animals.

      The hands and feet of the corpses weren’t just sliced open, they seemed inflated until they burst. In fact, all the limbs of the corpses were like that—even the heads. Popped balloons. Balloons popped from the inside, by shattering nails. What sort of weapon did this? What sort of weapon could do this?

      Key walked slowly around, forcing himself to stare at the devastated bodies—trying to recognize something, anything, about them. Their hair was colored the same dark black by their staggeringly violent deaths, so that was little help. Only the length gave hint of male or female—but not in any convincingly effective manner.

      But their remaining, tattered, blood-and-gut-stained clothing held the only real clues. Key could distinguish villager from soldier, but just barely. He dreaded seeing insignia or ID patches, but he looked intently for them just the same.

      A young woman’s face flashed in his mind’s eye. He wasn’t proud that he put his hope that Terri Nichols was alive above the rest, but he had felt protective

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