The engines still ground out their intentions to advance and Alan thought they sounded closer now that he was down at the valley floor. He rolled to begin searching for the wires, and he felt the stars come on; that bleeding in of white noise buzz. His vision washed out to a true absence of sight, somehow discernable from the overpowering darkness; the loss of a sense as compared to the vacancy of detectable light. He lay frozen as a wave of nausea rolled up through his torso, and when his vision began slowly to clear, he realized he was gasping for air.
And the engines came on.
He cast about in the dirt with his hands, patting frantically and praying he would not have to move again to a new spot. He wasn’t even sure if he was in the right area; if he’d rolled off course in some way and come down a few feet removed in either direction. And a few feet was really all it would take to confound his efforts. He didn’t know where he was in relation to the first pit, either. He recalled dimly through the throbbing horror of his skull that they’d staggered the position of the battery from the location of the fougasse so that it was several meters away up the trail.
It all came down to position, didn’t it? The wire had been cut somewhere, and he had to find it; find it or watch his family die. He raked long, sweeping furrows with his fingers, jamming dirt, twigs, and other debris up under the nails, and found nothing. Alan whimpered and made ready to move.
And then he could see the glow of the first headlights beyond the bend, giving form to the surrounding trees and mountainside, showing the shape of the earth’s body in dull washout. The shadows of the terrain swayed and shortened as the light source neared the turn.
Alan drug himself further toward the trail, gritting teeth through vision flickering in and out, gritting them against his rising gorge, and then soon found himself crawling through blackness. He kicked with his legs and hauled with a single hand, clutching the battery to his chest. Through his flailing, Alan caught a mouthful of vomit between his teeth, spat out a portion of it, and choked down the rest. He dragged and hauled, and looking again saw the first truck coming in his direction.
His growling moan morphed sluggishly into a long, trailing “fuck”, and on the final extension of his arm—his last before he gave up on the mortar and would instead make a best-effort attempt to just lay his body across the trail and pray the driver might swerve and wreck—the tips of his fingers brushed wire. Sobbing, he pulled his body forward a final few inches, found the ends, and discovered them to be every bit as jagged as the severed length he’d previously exposed. He took a split second to roll each between his fingers, heaved over onto his left side, and saw the hellish gleam of headlights bearing toward him.
Now totally blind, he touched the ends to the battery terminals by feel alone. Alan had enough time, less than half a heartbeat in the long march of the sentinel ponderosas, to wonder if he would be consumed, but then the entire world was replaced instantaneously with concussion and violence, rubbled dust of concrete, scrap metal, and doom.
51
PALLIATION
The fire team fell into a natural order, and it did not matter terribly if a hypothetical observer wished to ascribe that order to a general understanding of experience or competence (sought consciously or otherwise), random accident, or basic circumstance. The members had not given time to such thinking, shifting easily into place as though being sucked into a vacuum.
This was their order: Gibs on point, then Tom, then Greg, and Rebecca at the rear. They hunkered through the field like bandits, moving silently, taking orders through hand gestures. They’d all fielded with each other previously in various combinations, and they could see from the set of Gibs’s shoulders and the aggression of his movements that there was murder in his heart. He didn’t move with the caution to which they’d become accustomed; absent was the familiar consideration given to each subsequent waypoint. He plunged ahead like a marauder, and it was everything the others could do to match his pace and maintain silence.
They crossed the gap between the greenhouses and the home Andrew had shared with Victor—their target—passing by the line of now deserted tents on their right. Tom eyed these suspiciously as they passed, as if an attacker might jump out from behind a canvas flap, and angled his barrel in their direction. He thought of when Warren’s people had stayed with them, occupying the very same area, and how George had started referring to the grounds as “The Guest Houses.” Tom’s hand creaked over the grip of his rifle. He couldn’t recall exactly when it happened, but at some point, he’d started looking at George like a father; a father he sorely missed. He tried not to think about such things for very long.
Gibs stopped by the wall of Andrew’s place, positioned just outside the front door, and thought about the previous occupants. Then he thought about the other families that had been destroyed; Samantha’s loss of Jeffries after she’d already lost so much; Ben’s loss of his father. The near-murder of Alish, and Greg’s budding family right along with her. He wondered about whatever the hell it was between Jake and Amanda, if that had been killed too, and if it had been killed from the outside, or from within.
And before he could stop himself, he considered his own slowly dying belief. Gibs was an instinctive creature, half the time not understanding his own decisions even after they’d been made; knowing only that they were right when he made them. For all his knowledge of group behavior, morale, tactics, and logistics, these were still things in which he’d been drilled. Instructed. The deeper core beneath these concepts operated according to its own principle. The things he understood to be right or wrong, anchored at first by a floundering mother and later reinforced through a life spent in pursuit of strength; of moving from vulnerability to invulnerability. And in such pursuit, he’d learned to hate the sign of weakness in himself and pity its display in others. The core values of the Marines (the true values shared by the grunts who understood, and fuck those clueless twats in the higher echelon) had thankfully coincided with his own. If they hadn’t, he likely would have finished off his four and moved on. As it happened, it had taken longer than four years for his belief to wane.
He wondered now if belief’s lifespan shortened as a man advanced in years. He thought of his younger days. Thought of the certain knowledge that he’d have put a bullet through any man guilty of torture, his side or theirs. How in the fuck was it possible that the actual War on Terror might seem like “the good old days”? As if those were simpler times?
He turned his head and nodded curtly to the team stacked up behind him, and then looked at the doorknob a few inches away from his nose. It was affixed to the door leading into Drew’s place, inside of which were a group of people he very much wanted dead. He gently took the knob in his hand, moving slow to keep it from jiggling in its housing (and so give away their presence), squeezed, and then waited in annoyance through a wave of déjà vu. He’d been here before. The knob wasn’t supposed to turn, he thought; it was supposed to resist him.
It occurred to Gibs, leaning against Andrew and Victor’s home, that the act of murder wasn’t a crime perpetrated upon the victim alone. It spread virally, infecting those in the victim’s life; those who loved him… or her. So infecting them, love and love’s capacity were likewise murdered, compounding murder’s sin.
He thought of Otis and Ben; of George, who’d been with him from the very beginning, who’d been the father figure to them all; of Jeffries and his young wife, Samantha; Isaiah the solitary man; Patricia’s orphans; of Andrew and Victor.