AN AMERICAN RHAPSODY

A Moment of Other...

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:39:00 +0000

It's still going to be a while before the next chapter of this ongoing series is ready to be posted for viewing. In the meantime, I'd like to take this opportunity to show you another project I was working on and is now available to buy. It's a story much different from this one, American Rhapsody. But I am very proud of it all the same. If you feel like supporting my efforts, buy a copy for yourself or someone you think might enjoy it. It's called THE ASSASSIN IN ARMANI. It's only available in the Kindle store, but that doesn't mean you have to have a Kindle to read it. Amazon makes Kindle Apps for just about everything now, including your web browser. So if you don't have a Kindle, download a Kindle app for your favorite device (or devices) and enjoy my short novel as well as the many, many others in the Kindle store.

Thank you for your readership and awesome support.

-J. A. Adkins (the author)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005J4YK8U
(US site)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005J4YK8U
(for my UK friends)

http://www.amazon.de/dp/B005J4YK8U
(for those in Germany)

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:55:00 +0000

PART FOURTEEN

    Gabriel Audaz reveled in the deep and satisfying peace filling his heart. He felt Isabella’s forehead pressed against his own. The cool, salty air whipping off the waves softly crashing onto shore billowed and tousled their hair. He smiled, listening to the sweetness of her voice as she prayed. There was no sense of fear in that moment. There was no pain or overwhelming chaos. There was just two friends on a beach, embraced in the love that only friends can have for each other, and comforted by the presence of God surrounding them, protecting them from any harm that could deter them from saying goodbye.

    Gabriel lifted his eyes from the sand at his feet to see Isabella smiling at him. “Feel better,” she asked.

    Gabriel smiled. “Yes.”

    “Good. Now, wake up.”

    Gabriel looked at her with a start, her words confusing. “Huh?”

    A loud, sudden crash of tin pans and equipment spilling across the floor made Gabriel jump, startling him awake in an instant. An attendant, even younger looking than himself, crouched nervously nearby to pick up the mess he had made. Gabriel watched him for a moment, his mind catching up to the present and his surroundings. He quickly realized he was in a field hospital somewhere. Other soldiers, with injuries of varying degrees of seriousness in varying stages of treatment and healing, laid in beds to his left and right.

    “Corporal Audaz,” said a nurse walking closer to the firm, narrow bed he had been placed in. “It’s good to see you awake.”

    “I guess it’s good to be awake,” Gabriel said groggily. “How long was I-”

    “Three days,” she answered before Gabriel could finish asking. “And considering your heroics and how hard you pushed yourself, I’m surprised it wasn’t a week or more.”

    Gabriel blinked, trying to put all of his thoughts back together. All at once, the events in the valley began to come forward out of the sleepy fog in his mind. He looked up at the nurse as he tried to sit up. His chest felt like it was weighed down with lead. Gabriel winced as he tried to breath deeper, every muscle and nerve in his chest stinging like mad.

    “Easy, Corporal,” the nurse said, trying to help him. “Your broken ribs are not going to heal that fast. Not after the way you pushed yourself.”

    “The sergeant,” Gabriel started to ask. “The sergeant I helped. I...I can’t remember his name.” Suddenly, Gabriel realized he had never learned what it was.

    “Ives,” said a voice from behind the nurse. She shifted out of the way enough to reveal the private Gabriel had rescued in the village. His name was Austin Harley. He had insisted on being placed next to the crazy soldier that had saved his life. Private Harley smiled warmly at Gabriel. “His name is Sergeant Ives, sir.”

    Gabriel stared thankfully at his peer for a long moment, returning the smile the bandaged soldier had plastered to his lightly stubbled cheeks. Gabriel looked up at the nurse expectantly a moment later. “Is he all right? Is he alive?”

    “I believe so,” the nurse answered uncertainly. “I know he was in rough shape. The doctors managed to get him stable, but, I believe they had to airlift him to one of the main hospitals.”

    Gabriel nodded slowly, comfortable with that little bit of news.

    “You two rest. You’ve had quite the ordeals. I’ll be back to check on you soon,” the nurse said with a pleasant smile, patting both men lightly on the arm.

    Gabriel watched her walk past their cots for only a moment, letting his attention wander around the awkward scene he found himself within. The walls were plain, the dirt and grime of the dry climate washed away. There was the smell of bleach and dust hanging in the air. It was pleasant and welcomed by Gabriel’s nostrils. He thought he would forever have the iron-rich scent of blood burned on the inside of his nose.

    Gabriel’s thoughts drifted back to the quiet sergeant he had carried over the rocky, unforgiving terrain. The dry, packed dirt still thawing from long, harsh winter freezes could have been the thickest, boggiest mud in the world. Gabriel would not have changed his mind. Help could not get to them so Gabriel knew he had to get the wounded man to safety. The sergeant had saved Gabriel’s life. Gunmen stalking through the sparse brush, steep valleys, and devastating pain rolling inside his own body were no deterrents. Gabriel did what had to be done. He had to do what he could.

    His thoughts shifted to the man he caught staring at him expectantly. Gabriel wondered if he was suddenly being hero worshipped. He hoped this wasn’t the case. Gabriel glanced up and down the length of the prone soldier smiling,with patient thankfulness, across the narrow gap between their thin beds. Gabriel’s brief mental recounting of the wounded sergeant had reminded him of the wounded private laying in the bed to his left. “You all right,” Gabriel asked him. He quietly marveled at how suddenly grown-up he sounded in his own ears. He wondered if anyone else listening had noticed.

    Private Harley nodded his head. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

    Gabriel smiled encouragingly. “Good.” He noticed something protruding from under the soldier’s side. It was thin and metallic-looking. The sunlight bouncing off the white, sandstone walls from the square windows behind them made the smudged trim of the object gleam ever-so-slightly.

    Gabriel gestured toward it with a nod of his head. “What’s that?”

    Private Harley looked down at his side. “Oh! It’s my tablet,” he said, tugging the skinny, portable computer out from under himself. “I keep it in my bag so it’s a little roughed up.”

    He touched the power button at the bottom corner of the streaked, scored black plastic frame. The rectangular touch screen flickered to life. “But, it still works.”

    “Cool,” Gabriel said.

    “Do you want to use it?”

    Gabriel looked up at Private Harley. “You don’t mind?”

    Austin Harley smiled. “Not at all. Go ahead!”

    “Thanks,” Gabriel said, taking the computer roughly the size of his two hands put together as Private Harley offered it across the shallow gap separating them.

    “No, sir,” Harley said. “Thank you.”

    Gabriel took his eyes away from the borrowed device in his hands to look left at his new friend. “For what?”

    “For saving my life, sir.”

    Gabriel only watched him for a moment. Finally, he shook his head, saying quietly, “You don’t have to thank me. And you don’t have to call me ‘sir’.”

    Private Harley grinned. It was a small gesture of how humbled he felt right at that moment. “Nevertheless, you still have it.”

    Gabriel smiled and nodded his head.

    Private Harley leaned back on his pillows. “Oh,” he suddenly remembered. “There’s probably not too much time left on the battery...five or ten minutes maybe. And, the network is awful here so the connection might be really slow.”

    Gabriel nodded his head again. “Okay,” he said, already exploring the functions on the device.

    It only took him a moment to find and open Private Harley’s web browser. But the soldier had been right about the near abysmal speed of the connection. Gabriel’s eyes kept peering wearily up the screen to the upper-most tool bar. There, the small battery icon was a solid red. He didn’t let it upset him. Gabriel took a slow, pained deep breath, aware of the need to be grateful for the means given.

    It took a few minutes more to finally get logged all the way into his personal email box. There were a few random messages that didn’t demand immediate attention. Instead, Gabriel’s eyes widened with excitement when he saw an i.d. with a very familiar last name. It took Gabriel just another second to recognize the user tag as the name of Isabella’s mother. Gabriel thought it strange, but on the whole not completely unusual. Isabella’s mother had always seemed to like him and never hesitated to welcome him into their home.

    The subject of the email gave no hit to whether the message awaiting him was good or bad. It simply said Hello Gabriel. Gabriel tapped the screen, opening the email already several days old. It had been sent the night of the brigade’s drop into the valley.

Dear Gabriel, I hope you are doing well and surviving. I know how strong and determined you are. I wish I could have you here instead of there. I, and everyone else here, could really use your strength and heart right now. I don’t have it in me to make this very long. I’m sorry. I wish I was writing you with better news. Please forgive me. Early this afternoon, there was an accident on the highway. It’s been raining really bad here the last two days. A car lost control and slammed head on into another. It slammed into Izzy’s car. As far as we can tell, she went peacefully. I’m sorry Gabriel. Izzy is dead. Please be safe and come home.

    Gabriel stared at the end of the message for a long time. He was startled when the tablet hummed noticeably for a long second before the bright screen went suddenly dark. He could still see the email in his eyes though. It was all he could see as he stared down at the lifeless device. His heart felt like a lead weight plunging down through his chest. He started to feel sick. He closed his eyes, trying to calm himself down.

    Gabriel was surprised again. He found himself back on the beach. He was standing at the water’s edge instead of sitting in the sand. Gabriel turned with a start, looking up and down the deserted shore. Their friends were all gone. The glow of the small campfire was strangely absent from the nearby dunes. He spotted the place on the beach where he and Isabella had sat. The marks of their presence were still there. He saw the random shapes he had carved into the loose surface. His side of the sandy scene was messy compared to hers.

    Gabriel crouched lower where Isabella had been sitting. A warm breeze brushed against his face and arms as he traced the outline of the shapes she had drawn into the damp grains of soil. It was a heart, only slightly smudged out when she had scooted closer to him to pray. Gabriel looked at the etching carefully, noticing letters in and around the heart: G & I FRIENDS FOREVER.

    Gabriel smiled. He lifted his head to look at the sun hovering close above the ocean’s horizon. “Thank you, Izzy,” he said softly. “Thank you for being my friend.”

* * * *

    It seemed to take a long time for the sounds echoing through the still darkness to become clear and make the slightest sense. But finally, Lucia Audaz recognized the monotone beeps of what could only be a hospital heart monitor. It meant she was still alive. Somehow she had survived what she had been certain was the closing hour of her life. She had been ready. There were no lingering doubts, no feeling like she had failed to complete some objective in her life. Lucia Audaz had made a life for herself she had been proud of, raising a family and serving the country she loved as the best citizen she could possibly be.

    She took a deep breath of the chilly air being pushed through a narrow, plastic tube and into her nostril. As she opened her eyes, the rest of her body began to wake up with her. She could feel the small hose helping her breath laying on her cheek as it draped down onto the bed and away out of sight. She could feel the dry cloth of the thin gown clothing her pressed against her skin under the stiff sheets and blanket pulled up to just below her chest. Lucia took another breath, feeling a tautness on her scalp and across her torso that was unusual.

    His mother’s shifting drew Carlos out of the bleary collage of thoughts circling in his mind. He turned away from the window. The view was simple and unimpressive. There were the concrete walls of the hospital’s opposing wing. A few windows dotted the otherwise featureless, off-white surfaces. A few floors below them, a small courtyard could be seen between the thin branches of young trees, their dry foliage rustling in the wind bowing the weak limbs. Each brittle leaf was almost perfectly silhouetted in the amber-yellow glow of a tall lamp hidden from the window.

    “Mamma,” Carlos said quietly, approaching her bedside.

    “What happened,” Lucia asked groggily. Her voice was dry and cracked.

    Carlos helped her sip a small gulp of water from a little cup left beside her bed. “You’re alive. They saved you. The doctors saved you.”

    Lucia Audaz stared at her son. For a moment that stretched longer and longer, she couldn’t understand what he had just said. Finally, she realized the confusion was not on her part. It was on his. “No,” she said, her voice still cracking. “Why?”

    Carlos sat up straight. He was on the edge of her bed. He wanted to be close to his mother, now more than ever before. The doctors had told him the worst was over for now. They had won a severe and critical battle. They warned the war was far from settled, however. Carlos wanted to start things right when she woke up, to make up for the years he was absent from her world, where he was nothing but a name and old pictures in photo albums growing dusty. He wanted things to be right between them, for all the tension to finally be gone.

    A dark and twisted sense of regret suddenly sank in his heart as he watched the look on his mother’s face. There was something unmistakable in her eyes. She could be so easy to read. Instead of the relief he had hoped she would awaken with, Carlos could only see a frustrated disappointment in the rich, brown eyes of Lucia Audaz.

    “What...what do you mean, ‘why’?”

    Lucia cleared her throat. “Why did they save me?”

    Carlos stood up in shock. “Because they’re doctors, momma. That’s what they do.”

    “Not this. Not like this. Carlos, please. I know what I’m saying.”

    “Good! Because I don’t.”

    Lucia sighed, turning her head away from Carlos to stare ahead past the foot of the bed. “Carlos, son, I knew. I have known, for a long time, what this was. I have known for a long time what it meant. And, I have known for a long time that there was nothing the doctors could do...”

    Carlos was looking at her when she finally peered at once more. “...Or, would do,” she continued. “There are rules now, laws and procedures that force doctors’ hands. Patients have to jump through hoops and I didn’t have the resources to do that. And, I’m not a trained dog about to do tricks for a treat...even if that means my life.”

    Carlos’ gaze shifted. His mother, even after being unconscious for three days, noticed immediately. “What did you do,” Lucia asked, her eyes narrowing to a cold, piercing intensity.

    Carlos looked at her uncertainly. He hated when when she did that, when her gaze seemed to be probing into his mind and soul. “What? I...I got them to save your life.”

    “How?”

    “Momma, you’re alive-”

    “How, mijo,” she asked, her rasping voice easily overtaking his. “I wasn’t on pain pills and muscle relaxants instead of an actual treatment because I thought it would be better for my health. I’m over 50 years old. That alone makes me a low priority for procedures, medicines, even hospital stays. Add in the fact I sit close to the bottom of the income scale, now I’m even less desirable in this time of medicinal rationing.”

    Carlos turned away from her. He bit the inside of his lip. It was nervousness and frustration. He was already uneasy about the decisions he had made, the new alliances he had seemed to set in stone. There was no denying it had begun to feel, almost immediately, like Carlos had sold his soul to the devil. Now, the situation seemed even worse. Now, his mother seemed to sense exactly what transpired. He stared down into the lamp-lit courtyard below the window. The sunlight in the sky had almost completely faded into the growing night.

    “So the question is how? How did you manage to get this done for me? You are an incredibly talented artist and storyteller...but you haven’t done anything to make any serious money.” Lucia Audaz took a deep breath, the slightly chilled air channeled through the tube making her head spin a little.

    She waited just another moment before continuing. “You haven’t made enough money for this.” Lucia looked at the back of her son. He had never been good at hiding things from her. “So how did you do it? Who are you doing tricks for, son?”

    Carlos turned sharply, starting for the door. He stopped with several steps left to go. He stood hesitating, uncertain of what he should do. He pivoted around again, taking a few steps further into the room. It became a kind of pacing. Lucia watched him quietly. He stopped at the foot of her bed to address her.

    “You know, instead of laying there and being judgmental and...and unappreciative, you might try seeing it from my perspective, Mom. You were dying. The woman I love most in the world was dying. Excuse me for trying to delay that for a little longer. Excuse me for finally trying to do something right in your eyes for a change!”

    Lucia took another long, slow breath. She shook her head, “Oh, mijo...”

    Carlos tensed. The cold, dark anger he had managed to store away inside of him exploded through his body. There were so many things he wanted to say, to shout and scream across the small room. How dare she, he thought bitterly. How dare she make me feel this way. She stared at him patiently, waiting for his internal tantrum to become external or fade away.

    He took a deep breath, his back straightening with new confidence in the range of his mother’s scrutiny. “I’m a man, Mom. A man who did what he had to do, what he felt needed to be done. But you don’t have to like it. You can just lay there and accept it.”

    Carlos didn’t say anything more after that. He didn’t stay in the room, either. Lucia turned her gaze toward the window. She didn’t watch her son leave. Neither looked back at each other before the heavy door clicked loudly closed. The metallic sound echoed around the quiet room, muting for a moment the electronic been of the bedside monitor. For the two of them, it wasn’t just the sound of a hospital room door closing tightly. For this mother and son, it was the door of their old world, the world they had always known and understood, closing for good.

    Lucia knew, as Carlos did, there was no going back. One had made a decision for two, so they were trapped together. Lucia leaned back against the cool pillows behind her head. She closed her eyes, thinking of her husband and son in a time long ago, in a place that existed only in her memories.

    Carlos stepped out of the hospital, thinking of the moment he wanted to get away from, and then, the world he was going to help remake.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:25:00 +0000

PART THIRTEEN

    There were so many lights. They flickered and flashed past her eyes in dazzling displays. The world seemed to be in a racing spin. Lucia Audaz tried to blink away the dizziness, but that only made things worse. The skin on her face felt electrified. The sweat on her brow was so cold. She wanted to wipe it away. Her hands felt like rocks at the end of her arms. She couldn’t tell if they were even her arms at all. Are my arms still there? Are any of my limbs still attached? Nothing was right. The world wasn’t as it should have been. It was rejecting her. Lucia Audaz’s head swam, making her stomach turn somewhere in her disconnected body. A man leaned into her field of vision. At least she wasn’t on the kitchen floor anymore. The smell of coffee burned in her nose.

    “Can you hear me?”

    The voice was a muffled echo. It sounded like her husband’s. But he was dead. Lucia Audaz peered up with wide eyes at the figure hovering over her. Is this what this is, she thought. I’m dying? That’s why it all feels so strange. And that’s why I can see my beloved.

    “Mrs. Audaz, can you hear me,” the paramedic asked again. Her dilated eyes were swimming in a barely conscious state. “She’s right on the edge,” he said over his shoulder to the driver of the ambulance.

    The siren wailed beyond the brightly lit interior of the ambulance. Lucia could clearly see the sterile environment of the mobile doctor’s office. She could easily discern the young, sandy-blonde haired man trying to keep her alive. Silly boy, she thought. You shouldn’t waste your time. That’s when the pain returned. It pressed on her whole body at once, like all the gravity of the world had forgotten about her and then found her again, over compensating for its mistake. Her nerves fired, sending numbing shocks through her muscles.

    The young man above her slipped back into shadow. It wasn’t the paramedic anymore. Her husband had returned, watching down over her, his life-long love. They would be united at last. The world was rejecting her, it was changing and didn’t want her in it. Lucia Audaz’s lips curled as if to smile. She had been waiting to smile at her husband. At last, she was ready to be with him. The dazzling lights in her eyes faded slowly to black. The last thing she remembered thinking was a hope her son would forgive her.

* * * *

    The wind that blew against his skin felt so odd in the early morning air. Carlos Columbus Audaz stood under the flickering, mustard-yellow glow of a buzzing street lamp. The cool, bitter breeze whipped at the small, wrinkled piece of paper clutched in his fingers. He looked down at it strangely, perplexed as to why he was still holding onto it.

    The sleek, unblemished sedan he had quickly come to know so well Carlos caught himself thinking of it as his own, was sitting along the curb in front of his home when he emerged from Alex’s backyard. The sun had sunk below the roof lines of the neighborhood. It was way past the regular time for the driver to be in the area.

    “I’m sorry, sir. I was told to return immediately,” the driver said as Carlos had approached from across the street. “We have to go right now, sir.”

    Carlos looked at him strangely. The driver seemed to read the question in Carlos’ eyes. “It’s your mother, sir. She’s in the-”

    Carlos wasn’t listening. He had bolted into the house, his voice echoing through each room and down the short hallways. No one answered back. His uncle, his sister, his mother and aunt were all missing from the aging abode that never seemed totally quiet or empty. That evening, it didn’t even feel quite like the home he had grown up in. There was a cold and ghostly feeling penetrating the richly painted walls lined with hundreds of framed family photographs.

    Carlos saw the note taped to his bedroom door. It was scribbled by his uncle. His mother had collapsed on the kitchen floor earlier that day. Carlos clutched the vanilla-colored scrap of paper tightly in his hand as he turned and hurried back outside to the waiting car, the driver already seated behind the wheel. Carlos couldn’t remember if he had closed the front door, let alone locked it.

    The ride to the hospital had been a nervous blur. Staring out over the cracked and empty sidewalk of the abandoned neighborhood in the early morning light, Carlos still couldn’t really remember it. He had just walked from there, yet, still could hardly recall the way. The cold air rolled past him again, sending chills up his arms. It rattled and shuffled bits of trash hugging the curb and the walls of nearby buildings. Carlos blinked, trying to remember why, exactly, he had wandered into that specific part of the city.

    There was no confusion about where he was. The glow of the street lamps bounced off the wall of the studio to his right. Halfway down the abandoned street and halfway parked on the sidewalk was the burned and hollowed shell of a small car. Storefront windows were smashed in. The exposed interiors were deathly quiet. The charred marks of searing flames long extinguished stained the walls around window frames on the buildings stretching stoutly upward. There was a strong, bitter scent in the air. It was a rich, burning smell that lingered in Carlos’ nostrils. Blood, he wondered. He walked a little ways more onto the deserted battle field, stopping a dozen steps from the tortured skeleton of the burned vehicle.

    For a moment, Carlos’ mind drifted back to the broken swing in Alex’s backyard. The image inspiring fragmented emotions lasted hardly a second before his mind leapt forward to the hospital. Carlos quickly recalled bursting through a pair of heavy double doors that were loud enough when they moved to alert the whole hospital.

    “What happened? How is she? Where is she,” he had asked in rapid succession as soon as he spotted his family.

    His uncle and sister took turns trying to explain what had happened, how they had found Carlos’ mother collapsed on the kitchen floor. Carlos kept glancing at his aunt. She sat silently in one of the thinly upholstered chairs of the waiting area. Her brown eyes were staring blankly at the floor, her thoughts a long way from the soda-stained carpet and aging magazines.

    Carlos had felt himself being subtly backed toward one of the over-used chairs of the waiting area. He lifted his eyes past his family at the sound of heavy double doors opening nearby. A doctor with thinning, sandy blonde hair and dry, sagging green eyes approached the family. The look on his face, the way he tried to avoid making any direct eye contact with them, revealed the seriousness he had yet to convey as he walked closer.

    Lucia Audaz was stable but in serious condition. Her outlook, however, was grave. It was news that sent Carlos’ sister to her knees on the rough carpet. She wasn’t sobbing or crying as she sat helpless on the floor. Instead, her body shook with the emotional shock of the doctor’s prognosis. Carlos was listening to the doctor but he was also staring at his sister. He wanted to sink to his own knees beside her, to share in the tidal wave of grief overflowing in her heart. He wanted to share the burden of that pain, of the growing sense of loss. It would have been the most brotherly thing he could think of to do.

    But, in that moment, at the cusp of the world that had seemed so familiar suddenly coming apart and radically changing into something new, unexpected, and unrecognizable, Carlos felt no pain or grief. As he had stood in that small waiting area with his family and the doctor barely speaking above a tired mumble, Carlos couldn’t find it in himself to surrender the emotions he was feeling to be the comfort and rock he knew was probably most needed by those around him. Where there should have been grief, there was empty anger. A bitter, putrid anger that consumed him so easily. It was fueled by the mounting stresses that seemed to be bombarding him without mercy, like the universe was punishing him and only him. Carlos’ unstoppable, boiling anger was also being fed by an undeniable guilt.

    What do I have to feel guilty over, he asked himself, standing on the edge of the cracked, grease, and city-stained sidewalk. Carlos lifted his eyes from the cool, underused asphalt to the scene around him. He thought of everything that had been happening in his life, the decisions made, words said, desires and passions given in to. They seemed to have all culminated to put him right there in that spot, as if he had been destined to be there all along. The violence-scarred, terrorized, abandoned neighborhood was a symbol of Carlos’ tortured soul and he knew it.

    Everything, he thought, answering his own question. I have everything to feel guilty over.

    Carlos stepped off the curb, officially entering the place of unsettling chaos he had tried so desperately to run from. He considered how silly that notion was and how close to it he had always been. The chilled wind picked up again, stirring the smells flooding the quiet street. It shook the broken fragments of glass still clinging to the splintered windowsills. It lifted the scent of singed iron from the stains of dried blood marking the path and course of the sweeping, savage violence. Carlos tried not to look at them. He tried not to follow the browning streaks, unwashed by rain or city worker, into the dark, open cavities of storefronts and homes. The darkness swollen within each wounded edifice of former prosperity and worthwhile endeavors was as thick and cold as the darkness within himself.

    Carlos realized that was what he was trying not to see. It had nothing to do with the blood on the ground, as disgusting as it was. He stopped near the burned, hollowed vehicle left to rot on the curb. Even as he stared at the partially melted and twisted steel skeleton, as he tried to keep his thoughts focused, he couldn’t stop the feeling of his skin crawling. The sun was beginning to rise, its sharp bands of orange and yellow light reaching above the cityscape. Yet, none of it seemed to be piercing the shadows hovering in the street. What light there was seemed gray and muted. The darkness stalking within the silent buildings appeared undeterred by the waxing light of day. He felt eyes on him, watching the subtle movement of his arms and shoulders, the loose hairs on his head bustling softly in the wind.

    Carlos turned swiftly and suddenly on his heels. The feeling had quickly become too much. He didn’t like it. It was scaring him which was making him angry, reigniting the rage that had been cooling since he left the hospital. He wanted to turn and face down the sense of evil permeating from the cavernous buildings and narrow, sinewy alleyways. He wanted to see the eyes, the faces of malice peering omnisciently out at him.

    Carlos had turned to face the slender, well-groomed form of Mr. Simon.

    “Hello C.C.,” Mr. Simon said quietly with a strange politeness. “What are you doing out here this early in the morning?”

    Carlos watched the thinly framed man with the smooth, flawless face. His cheeks were slightly pale from the long winter and days of travel. He kept his hands in the pockets of his long, expensive coat. The material was of the finest quality, just like the obvious, precise, and skilled tailoring evident from even a dozen steps away. Mr. Simon was either very wealthy or very, very well connected. No average citizen would be able to hold onto something so extravagant without finding themselves being labled a hoarder.

    “I needed some air,” Carlos finally responded. It wasn’t a lie.

    “So you went for a walk at the crack of dawn?”

    “Yes.”

    Mr. Simon stared at Carlos. The expression on his face took on a calculated smugness as he added, “All the way from the hospital, I gather?”

    Carlos stiffened. He couldn’t hide the surprise riddled in his wide eyes. “Yes. My mother-”

    “Your mother. Yes, I know,” Mr. Simon interrupted. He took a step off the curb, walking slowly, casually into the empty street. Spent bullet shells were visible on top of the solid, slightly faded lines long ago painted down the center of the blacktop. “And yet, you felt compelled to leave and...walk all the way down here.”

    Carlos watched Mr. Simon walk in a slow arch from the sidewalk into the street. He furrowed his brow, conquering the surprise and intimidation he had been feeling since first catching sight of the bureaucrat standing at the edge of the shadows. “I wouldn’t say compelled is an accurate description. I needed some time to think and went for a walk. I didn’t really feel compelled to end up anywhere.”

    “Nonetheless, here you are.”

    “Why does it bother you so much that I’m on this street?”

    Mr. Simon looked up at Carlos. He grinned pleasantly. His voice was polite, even slightly upbeat. He never seemed directly hostile or aggressive. Compared to Carlos, he was a master at hiding his emotions. It made Carlos wonder if he had any at all. “It doesn’t bother me at all, C.C.. I’m simply curious.”

    “Why?”

    Mr. Simon pursed his soft lips slightly. There was the subtlest sheen on the tender, lightly red flesh. “Obviously, this is not the sort of area a person like you would venture voluntarily. Not unless you knew someone here, which you don’t. Not unless you had business here, which you don’t.” Mr. Simon started walking again as he was speaking. It was just a few steps to the burned-out chunk of blackened steel that had been a car only days before. “You’ve never been very wealthy, though, your income now is far better than most around you,” Mr. Simon continued.

    Carlos watched the strange man silently. He was unsettled by what Mr. Simon said, but didn’t know what to say himself in response.

    “That wall that separates the studio from this street may just be thick concrete to most, but for you it’s something more. It’s like the space between two planets, two entirely different worlds. You always knew this world was here. And, you probably even believed you understood it, at a basic, maybe scientific and clinical level. But then...something happened and you were faced with the realization that you have absolutely no idea what happens here, beyond the wall-beyond the space between your world and this one.”

    Carlos watch him incredulously. “What’s your point, Mr. Simon?”

    Mr. Simon looked up from the flakes of carbon he had been chipping at with his fingernail on a piece of the car’s skeleton. “My point?” He chuckled once, then answered, “Welcome to the Moon, C.C..”

    Carlos stood uncomfortably on the sidewalk. He realized he was leaning back in just the slightest way. He didn’t move yet. Instead, he simply stared at Mr. Simon as the mysterious, government avatar continued to speak.

    “You’ve been wanting to see this place since the day I arrived. You and young Mr. Vale heard the scene unfolding from right...” Mr. Simon turned and pointed toward the wall on the opposite side of the street. “...over there.”

    He turned back to face Carlos once more. “So, C.C., what do you see? Is this place what you thought it would be?”

    Carlos swallowed. “I...I didn’t know what it would be. I didn’t really know what I was expecting.” Reason, he told himself. But now you see yourself. Now, you see the chaos within and not just without. “I think I wanted to know why more than anything else.”

    “Why, what,” Mr. Simon asked.

    “Why a place like this, that seemed to be functioning well and normal enough could break down so suddenly and violently like this. Why a place so close...” Carlos took a breath, surprised by the thought about to be given voice. He could have used this second stretching into many to change the wording. He decided to go with it, letting the new reality of his changed world sink in. “...So close to me could come apart and collapse like this.”

    Carlos blinked and Mr. Simon seemed to suddenly be in his face. The man was standing less than an arm’s length away, barely a step onto the sidewalk. His elbows stayed bent as he gripped both of Carlos’ shoulders. “It’s simple, C.C.,” Mr. Simon said with a beaming smile.

    “It happened because these people were abandoned, forgotten about, and lied to. The beloved free market didn’t deem them worthy and so it left them behind to their own devices. That’s why we exist, C.C.. That’s what makes our jobs so important!”

    Carlos took a quiet breath. “It is?”

    “Yes! It’s so beautiful, C.C.. We will tear down the lies and replace them with the sights and sounds that will illuminate everyone! It will feel so good it will become truth! Our truth will save everyone and that will save the world! But we can’t do it alone. We need visionaries like you C.C. We need you to stand with us. We can save neighborhoods like this one from this kind of despair.” Mr. Simon made sure he had Carlos’ gaze before he added, “With us, you can save your mother.”

    Carlos gasped audibly.

    Mr. Simon’s face saddened. Carlos couldn’t tell if the pity in his beedy eyes was genuine. “The doctors...they told you there was nothing they could do, right?”

    Carlos looked away from Mr. Simon for a moment. “More or less,” he said, the pain from the long night behind him coming through, unstoppably, in his voice. “Some of your friends were there, too.” Carlos returned his gaze toward Mr. Simon. “I guess to help remind the people doing their jobs what that actually meant.”

    Mr. Simon shook his head. “Now that was unfair, C.C.. While they are certainly not my friends, like me they also have jobs to do. It is nothing personal. Times are tough and resources are getting tight. Sometimes that means rationing.”

    Carlos’ skin suddenly began to crawl. A chill ran up and down his spine. Mr. Simon’s hand was on his shoulder. He spoke softly, tenderly like a man who understood the pain of another, but has never actually endured the strife he extended his sympathies toward. “Sometimes that means making the tough choice.”

    Carlos narrowed his eyes. “What choice?”

    Mr. Simon didn’t hesitate to answer. “To sacrifice, even the ones we love, for the greater good. Our salvation depends on it. Neighborhoods and streets like this one depend on our ability to do the hard things...the hardest of hard.”

    Carlos didn’t respond. He merely looked away.

    “But,” Mr. Simon said, “there are those too important to simply let go and allow to wither away in pain and suffering.”

    Carlos took a deep breath. The ground under his feet felt unsteady. The air had a strangeness to it he couldn’t identify. “Why,” he asked.

    “Because I believe your mother is a powerful source of influence and strength for you. We need you to be strong, C.C.. So, I believe your mother should receive all the care she possibly can.”

    Carlos looked up at Mr. Simon again. “And in exchange?”

    Mr. Simon’s face had not changed. He still had a hand on one of Carlos’ shoulders. “Join us. Dedicate your skills, strength, and talent to benefiting the greater good. It’s all any of us can do. But, if you do this, if you agree to continue working for us, your mother will be taken care of. I promise you that.”

    Carlos stared at Mr. Simon for a long moment. He turned his head, sensing the brightening sunlight piercing the cold, gray mist permeating the long street. If he wasn’t so consumed by Mr. Simon’s proposition and the answer he felt rising out of his throat, Carlos might have paused a moment more to actually wonder why the warmth of the sun felt so faded and far away. Instead, he faced Mr. Simon and took a deep breath.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:59:00 +0000

PART TWELVE

    Gabriel wheezed as his body slid to a stop against a half-broken wall. He couldn’t tell what the building was or had once been. There was so much smoke. It obscured everything and choked the air. It had been hard enough for Gabriel to breathe that day. With the sultry, gray smoke everywhere, his lungs felt like lead weights and his chest burned like a forest fire.

    Gabriel blinked slowly, his eyelids feeling heavy. It was suddenly difficult to resist the urge to keep them closed. A tired and weary part of him was ready to call it in, to lay down and sleep, even if it meant forever. Maybe it would be easier that way. He didn’t know. Gabriel knew if he sat in that position much longer he would surely find out. But he was so tired.

    “Gabriel!”

    His eyes shot open with a frightened start. The voice that had shouted his name belonged to Isabella. There was no mistaking it. His heart skipped a beat. He had raised the rifle in his hands on pure instinct. For a fraction of a second, Gabriel swore he beheld a vision of his best friend before him. But he blinked again, seeing only the drifting, churning, gray smoke.

    And then, he saw a shadow on the curling, ashy mist. Someone was running toward him. He could hear their feet in the sand and gravel. Gabriel’s heart raced. Was it friend or foe? He couldn’t tell. They were almost on him. A dozen paces and a wall of smoke were all that separated the two figures. Suddenly, gun shots sprayed through the brume. A few bullets struck the dusty bricks near Gabriel’s head. The rest pierced and punched through the collapsing man’s body. The smoke cleared around the enemy as he slumped against the remains of the blown-out wall opposite Gabriel.

    The trembling, young soldier realized then he wasn’t standing outside of a building, but, instead, within. A weak, bitter cold breeze drifted into the valley moving the cloud of hovering smoke. Gabriel could see the wooden floor under his feet, the tossed and tattered remains of furniture here and there nearby. A flight of stairs led upward to a second floor that was completely.

    Gabriel’s eyes lingered on the stairs, on a small family cowering less than halfway up the steps. It was three, fearfully quivering people: a father, whose thick arms were wrapped around the shoulders of his wife and very young son, keeping them close to him. Gabriel watched the father lift his head, his eyes looking worriedly toward the uneasy American. Gabriel wasn’t certain what to do. There was a noise nearby, just beyond the brick wall he was still braced against. Gabriel’s eyes focused on the father in the narrow stairwell. He wasn’t looking at Gabriel.

    The gravel and debris crunched loudly under a heavy foot step immediately outside a gap in the sooty brickwork. The din of the motion was nearly muted by the disheartening sound of an automatic rifle being cocked. Gabriel saw the barrel a second later. It was one of the American rifles and it was pointed straight toward the helpless family. Gabriel blinked, his mind in chaos. Is that friend or foe, he asked himself hurriedly. His heart felt like it was about to leap out of his chest. He looked at the scratched, black rifle, then at the family. Foe, Gabriel decided.

    With that, his body sprung into action like a race horse launched from the starting gate; or an attack dog let loose off its leash. The Audaz boys have strong grips, especially Gabriel Audaz, thanks to his military training. His strong hand grabbed the warm rifle, his clammy fingers wrapping around the center of the barrel as he pushed the smooth assault weapon swiftly upward. In the same motion, Gabriel pivoted his foot and shoved his weight in a furious blur against the assailant in the alley. The man shouted something arabic in surprised confusion before the wind was knocked out of him. He stumbled then crashed, with a painful crack, backwards onto the ground. A single shot leapt into the air out of the sleek barrel, squeezed by the finger of the militant man on the ground. Then the gun was on the ground, his wrist under Gabriel’s boot and the bones in his face snapping loudly under the unstoppable force of Gabriel’s fist.

    A quick search of the enemy revealed little useful intelligence, other than he had raided the body of another American soldier very recently. Gabriel discovered a silenced pistol tucked into the folds of the unconscious man’s tunic. It was an officer’s weapon. The battalion c/o, thought Gabriel. He grabbed the rifle out of the man’s limp fingers. It matched the gun slung around Gabriel’s shoulder exactly. Gabriel pulled the nearly full clip free from the gun, adding it to his own supplies before tossing the empty rifle into the smoke. He stood up, turning back toward the blasted house. The father on the steps inside nodded thankfully to him. Gabriel smiled, nodding back.

    He moved with quick, anxious haste toward the mouth of the alley. Pale sunlight dappled across the torn central avenue of the small village. Bodies were strewn amongst the debris, soldiers and civilians indiscriminately mixed together in the savage scene stretching away before him. There were voices up the street, words spoken proudly, but not in English. A group of al-Qaeda stood over a wounded American. He was sitting upright on his knees but slumped slightly forward. They were laughing at and taunting him. They waved their weapons around in front of him, tapping his cheeks with the barrels of their rifles. Gabriel wanted to save his peer right there, but he had no clear or viable shot. He could have used his rifle, but he wasn’t ready to alert every radical fighter in the village of his presence. Gabriel would use the silenced pistol for as long as possible, but he first needed a better line of sight.

    He doubled back up the alley, rounding a corner into another. He crept hurriedly under broken windows of dark, eerily quiet buildings. The echo of the taunting men bounced between the war-riddled structures. Gabriel scaled a ladder propped against a mostly intact house. He climbed to the roof as quickly as possible, worried the rickety rungs would not support him. Wafts of smoke rolled past in the cold wind. Gabriel kept low as he moved with haste toward the front of the building. The roof under his feet creaked softly with each step. He didn’t have time to worry about it then. He had to save his fellow soldier.

    Gabriel reached the edge of the roof, peering carefully down toward the street. The smoke was thinner in this part of the village, barely cloaking the scene below. His eyes glanced past the group to the blasted windows and walls across the roadway. Gabriel thought he could see his objective: the radio and its operator sitting against a wall in a partially gutted market.

    The wind howled and then faded. Gabriel felt the first shot rattle through the chamber of the silenced pistol. He shifted his aim quickly then fired, the second bullet launching through the hazy air right behind the first. The third was only a heartbeat later. The fourth took an extra second, the gunman closer to the building Gabriel was standing on. Three of the four men were collapsing as Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, the slender bullet rocketing downward as the enemy soldier was trying to react.

    The shot had just hit its target when the sound of rotting hinges cried out over the rooftop. Gabriel turned around, spotting a bearded man with an old Russian rifle standing in a small hatchway. He shouted something in Arabic as he raised his weapon. The silenced pistol was still raised at the end of Gabriel’s arms, the man halfway across the rooftop in the sight. Fingers on opposing guns began to move in tandem.

    Gabriel inhaled sharply, but not because of a stray shot that took him by surprise. The wooden planks under his feet groaned and cracked. He felt the burn of new, bleeding cuts and scrapes on his arms and face as he sank past jagged ends of freshly broken boards. The interior of the building rushed by, remaining a dizzy blur for a few moments, even after he had landed. The cloud of serrated, shattered roof surrounding him sank like a lead mist when Gabriel’s body hit the floor. It was a painful, graceless landing against cold, dirty concrete.

    Gabriel barely had time to push the debris off his back and shoulders, or collect his wits as he sat up straighter against a hard, plaster wall. The Arabic man from the roof shouted again, closer this time. A shadow raced across a milky band of sunlight above Gabriel’s head. Gabriel’s right hand was empty. The butt of the silenced pistol lay amongst the debris, centimeters from his fingertips. He sensed it and grabbed it as the man from the hatch appeared from around a corner across the room.

    Gabriel fired once, the furiously shouting man with spit in his beard, letting loose a storm of noisy gunfire. Gabriel ducked, pushing himself off and away from the wall. Bullets peppered the crumbling plaster, tracing an uneven line up the ceiling until the enemy sank lifelessly backwards. Gabriel breathed quickly, his chest and side burning madly. There was no rest for the weary soldier laying on the floor. Somewhere out of sight, a door was kicked open. More shouts rang through the dim interior of the building. Gabriel knew that was his cue to move. He did not hesitate. He was up with a pained gasp and hurrying unsteadily over the littered floor. He was steps away from the front door when his ears retched under the bloodthirsty hail of gunfire that suddenly tore into the walls and floor around him.

    Gabriel leaned forward, his weight bombarding the locked door in front of him. He crashed through to stumble down the sandy steps instantly beyond the threshold. Despite the pain that shot outward from his ribs, Gabriel never lost his balance. He pivoted slightly to release another shot from the silenced pistol. The spring in the empty chamber clicked. Damn, thought Gabriel quickly, tossing the spent weapon into the dirt. There was no sense in holding onto what he didn’t need to carry.

    It was a dozen paces from the base of the steps to the beaten soldier swaying on his knees in the wide street. Gabriel slid to a stop, this time unable to stay on his feet. Bullets zinged over his head and bit at the ground as he fell and then quickly sat upright. In the same motion, he swung his own rifle off his shoulder, cocking it quickly. With hands almost perfectly steady, his nerves tingling with surging adrenaline, Gabriel raised the sleek, American assault rifle and returned fire. He wasn’t aiming to kill, just to send the enemy hiding long enough to get out of the street. Gabriel was surprised when one of the combatants fell backwards with a gurgled cry.

    “Can you move,” Gabriel shouted, looking sidelong at the bruised soldier.

    “I...I think so. I don’t know!”

    Gabriel squeezed the trigger again, the rifle kicking back as he painted the entryway of the building with another round of steady violence. “We’re going to have to find out,” Gabriel shouted, shouldering his weapon again, the barrel still smoking.

    He hoisted the soldier up off his knees. Gabriel gritted his teeth, trying not to cry out from the near-blinding pain that clawed out of his chest as he helped the soldier stand up. He felt wet blood on the man’s uniform. There was a small tear in the side, near his back. It was a stab wound, but Gabriel couldn’t tell how deep it went. He leaned his woozy peer against him, wincing from the added weight on his tender torso. A matter of seconds had gone by since Gabriel had ceased fire. It may have been several seconds too many.

    The clattering rattle of the older Russian assault weapons filled the air. Bullets struck the dirt at the their heels or zipped past at breathtakingly close range. Gabriel moved, undeterred, with as much speed as he could muster, ever forward. A shadow appeared in the corner of his vision. The soldier limping along with him saw it too.

    “Grenade!”

    Gabriel saw it bounce against the remaining section of the storefront. “Go! Jump,” he yelled at the soldier before flinging him through the blown out window. Gabriel dove to the side in the racing second before the palm-sized bomb detonated. A cloud of hot dust and shrapnel exploded outward against the scarred building. Gabriel held his breath, trying to feel any new points of pain in and around the length of his body. He had dove through a narrow gap in the brick wall blackened by a previous explosion.

    He stood up, the echo of probing gun fire still resonating from outside. The brief ringing in his ears was quickly subsiding. He braced his hand against the wall on his right. The faded plaster drew his eyes and then his weariness. The radio, operator, and wounded soldier were just on the other side. Gabriel glanced over his shoulder toward the fractured brickwork. No going that way, he thought with a painful sigh.

    Hazy sunlight poured suddenly inward around a silhouetted figure charging toward Gabriel. Gabriel had been a few steps away from a door unexpectedly kicked in. He braced himself against the impact of the sweat-smelling man, painfully catching his momentum. Gabriel pivoted their tangled mass, then shifted hard to the left. The combined and radical velocity was no match for the weakened wall they went crashing through. The wounded soldier in the store jumped backward with a start at the sight and sound of the exploding bricks and plaster. He recognized Gabriel as the dust began to settle. The musty attacker was already unconscious. Gabriel let go of his wiry, greasy hair before standing up.

    “We’ve got to call in air support,” Gabriel said over the battle noise from outside.

    “We won’t make it,” the soldier said fearfully.

    Gabriel shook his head. “We have to try. Do you know where we are?”

    “Vaguely.”

    Gabriel moved painfully past the blown-out window of the store, keeping his body low enough to avoid getting shot. He crouched beside the other American in the room. He stared out at Gabriel without meeting his gaze. There was no life in his eyes. Gabriel exhaled loudly, graciously closing the dead soldier’s eyes. A few bullets found their way inside the broken store, ending the moment of respectful silence.

    The drifting smoke had thickened for a time while the two living Americans were talking. Gabriel had noticed before he had approached the body of the operator. He peered over his shoulder at the gaping storefront, praying the bitter fog held long enough for him to call for help. A chance shot continued to strike against the walls and floor. A passing glance at the other soldier told Gabriel he wasn’t alone in that feeling.

    “We won’t make it here,” Gabriel said. “They’ll find us and kill us.”

    There were no first responders to call for, no police or emergency workers to request an immediate arrival. With the spray of bullets quickly and desperately intensifying, the idea of law enforcement suddenly seemed laughable. Gabriel focused on the lights and sounds of the active radio he held against him. He wished it was as easy as dialing a phone number, a special hotline to ask for warplanes to blast the enemy into the twilight. In a way, there may have been the ability to do that: a specific frequency nearby pilots were tuned into for just this kind of situation. However, Gabriel didn’t know what it was. All he could do was to scan the band, broadcasting his voice over a handful of frequencies at a time.

    “What’s your name,” Gabriel asked the wheezing young man slumped low against a nearby wall.

    The soldier took a pained breath before he answered. He was holding the shallow knife wound, his fingers wet and bloodstained. The man who had been beating him hadn’t stabbed him to kill, not immediately. They had just wanted to hurt the American. “Harley, sir,” he answered, his voice strained as he held his bleeding side. “Austin Harley...Private, sir.”

    Gabriel nodded. “I’m Gabe-”

    There was a noise in the static on the radio. A voice squawked with an American dialect. Gabriel quickly confirmed who he was, explaining the situation and the request for air support. The pilot replied with his call sign once more.

    “Warthogs,” Private Harley mumbled, staring at the radio.

    Gabriel glanced up at him curiously as he dug for a map in his pockets. With the torn, creased paper unfolded a moment later in his fingers, the anxious corporal did his best to pinpoint their location and the positions that needed to be hit. “Be aware,” Gabriel added after the pilot confirmed the information, “fire will be danger-close. I repeat, danger-close. Unavoidable! Friendlies are dug in and surrounded.”

    There was a pause that made Gabriel’s heart skip a beat and start to sink simultaneously. Finally, the pilot’s voice returned over the near-deafening hailstorm of bullets bombarding the building. “We copy danger-close. En-route now. ETA...two minutes.”

    “Roger. We’re moving to a nearby corner of the village to get clear. Good-”

    Gabriel’s words were silenced by the sound of something heavy ricochetting off the outside facade of the building. Whatever it was sounded bigger than a grenade and had landed close in the upturned soil. Gabriel’s eyes looked to Private Harley and then the wall under the wrecked windows. Both men held the same fearful expression. Both men had the same instinct telling them what the noise belonged to. “Move,” Gabriel said, pushing himself off the floor where he had been sitting. Private Harley was a slow step behind. Gabriel noticed, reaching behind himself to pull the wounded, woozy soldier forward.

    Something went pop. That was all Gabriel remembered hearing before finding himself on the floor in the narrow hallway of the small market. The hole he had made with the enemy soldier had expanded in the lost seconds of the immediate past. Gabriel’s chest and side throbbed like never before as he slowly picked himself up. His neck and arms stung with fresh cuts. The bricks of the storefront behind him were reduced to blackened gravel. The body of the radio operator was nowhere to be seen.

    Gabriel tried to see through the hot mist of dust and sand burning his eyes. He saw movement at his feet, then movement outside. Austin Harley was trying to stand up. The echo of the explosion was still ringing in both of their ears. Gabriel reached down, wincing as he pulled the shell-shocked private out of the debris. He was already leading the bleeding soldier toward the kicked-open door when Gabriel glimpsed the shadows of a handful of figures stretch across the ruined storefront.

    The ground outside tilted left, then right unnaturally in Gabriel’s eyes. He knew it was all in his head. He wondered if he had a concussion. It didn’t matter. The planes were coming. They had to get out of the fire line. Both soldiers weaved dizzily up the narrow path between buildings. Gunfire rattled behind them and from the buildings beyond the main avenue. The fog of muffled silence was fading from their blasted ears.

    They were a dozen steps away from a small building at the end of the narrow lane. A wide shadow swept across the ground as something blocked the sunlight sinking slowly into the western sky for a split second. Gabriel squinted into the smoky air. He instantly saw the gleam on the long wings. His ears could barely make out the long snarl of its jet engines. The planes had arrived.

    Bullets bit at the sand around their feet, then didn’t. All at once, the endless barrage ceased. Evermore through the thinning, audible haze congesting his hammered eardrums, Gabriel could discern the world around them again. He turned his head at the panicked shouts echoing down the street. But his attention was lost on a sight that gave him goosebumps. Thick plumes of smoldering building fragments, dust, and dirt reached into the air above the rooftops on the far end of the village. The roaring bellow of powerful, twin jet engines lifted his gaze a little higher to behold the A10-Thunderbolt banking lower toward the outcropping of buildings.

    Gabriel watched the scene in awe. The ravaging, unstoppable 30mm gatling gun under its heavy, blunt-tipped nose tore across the rooftop armories and improvised turret nests. Sunlight danced across the small explosive that dropped from its left wing. The merciless bubble of earth-breaking noise and fire that followed shook the ground and sprayed the air with fresh flames, smoke, and debris. But Gabriel ignored all of that, watching the Warthog bring the hellish rain that sent the enemy running.

    “Wow,” Private Harley said as the strafing airplane veered away to their left, over the crippled wall of the village.

    Gabriel blinked in surprise as another Thunderbolt soared swiftly from right to left over the war-infested terrain beyond the buildings and wall. Scattered gunfire from the ground tried to scratch at the armored surfaces of the mighty plane. The brilliant flare from the mouth of its unstoppable cannon was a harbinger of the hell unleashed upon those on the ground.

    The unpaved street under their feet rattled again. The heat from a closer explosion swam over the soldiers’ backs. Gabriel glanced behind them to see a third Thunderbolt sweeping low over the village, cutting a diagonal path across the infested village and coming much closer than the first two planes. Gabriel urged himself and the soldier leaning against him forward once more. Airplane shadows crisscrossed the ground as the full squadron arrived over the village. White and black smoke thickened the air again. The heat from more fires stretched up the alleys and streets from the newly bombarded buildings.

    New shots rang from behind them, guns hungry for kills sending fresh bullets scuttling through the begrimed air. The two Americans were at the doorway of the lone building tucked against the village wall. Gabriel pushed Private Harley up the short, rickety stairs and into the partially open door hanging loosely on its creaking hinges. Gabriel pivoted quickly around as soon at the private’s weight was off his side. His rifle was already off his shoulder, his finger approaching the trigger. Gabriel found the gunman charing up the street through the smoke. He was a few dozen yards away. And then, he wasn’t. There was only the sound of a body crashing through wood and crippled mortar, though even that was muted by the boar-like call of the passing Thunderbolt.

    Gabriel watched the stout fighter with its long, fixed wings move smoothly through the thick trails of smoke and dust. He stood motionless, staring at the tracers that leapt from the end of the cylindrical cannon at the forward point of the plane. Gabriel could not shake his focus from the modern warbird laying waste to those that had so ruthlessly shed so much blood. The planes brought a sense of relief and hope. They encouraged a feeling that his day was done, that the time to rest was at hand. Gabriel’s body had just begun to agree with that thought when something in the corner of his vision tore his attention away from the sky.

    He saw the woman in the doorway first, her body shaking, making her quiver as she called out into the firestorm. Through the chaos of blazing weapons and blaring engines, Gabriel could make out the absolute terror emanating in her cries. Suddenly, Gabriel recognized the doorway she was standing in and the ruined building to which it was attached. He suddenly realized it wasn’t the orbiting planes she was frightened of, it wasn’t cries of alarm for her own life the mother Gabriel had seen cowering on a dilapidated staircase was tearfully and frantically extolling out into the world.

    Gabriel stepped off the stoop in a daze, aware that something terrible was on the verge of occurring. The woman gripped the doorframe tightly, easing herself inch by petrified inch out of the barely-standing structure. She was trying to get to something. Gabriel’s instincts guessed at what it was. He remembered the father and young son. Then the curling streams of vapor flooding the main avenue cleared just enough to confirm what Gabriel already knew would be there.

    The young boy that had been hiding with his family stumbled over the small craters and through the sea of burned and broken debris. Gabriel took a breathless step forward. Where’s the father, Gabriel asked himself. A desperate cascade of rapid rifle blasts from somewhere out of view picked at the steps and stones around the screaming woman. The loathsome gunmen were just shooting at anything they could now, anxious for some kind of victory to claim. It didn’t seem like they had noticed the three-year-old in the smoke yet. Gabriel’s ears perked. Those with the rusty, rattling rifles were no longer the real danger.

    A Thunderbolt was making one last attack run. Its engines snarled as the pilot lined his metal bird of war up over the village, guiding it along the main avenue. Gabriel looked back and forth between the boy and the plane soaring just above the rooftops. The smoke choking the street was too thick for the pilot to see him. The dangerous gatling gun was already alive again.

    Gabriel didn’t hesitate another heartbeat. He didn’t think or hold back because of the pain and weariness rolling through his body. With only a quick glance over his shoulder, Gabriel tossed his rifle to Private Harley through the gaping doorway before launching into a full sprint. It was a race against an airplane. As he came out of the side street, the noise of the Warthog was almost deafening. He glimpsed bad guys trying to run from the bullets that seemed to seek them out. Their anxious retreat was leading them directly toward the same spot Gabriel was sprinting for.

    From the bullet-riddled stoop, the panic-stricken mother watched with despair. An American soldier was rushing out of an alley and into the smoke. Three of the belligerent attackers that had terrorized her village were hurrying up the pulverized avenue. Behind them, an American plane was firing unstoppably into the waves of smoke. All were heading right for her son who stood amidst the chaos pointing with youthful naivety toward the sights in the sky. Tears streamed from her eyes as she pushed herself away from the doorframe, a simple act that took all of her strength. She barely managed a step before she was stopped. A warm, heavy hand gripped her arm. Her husband, bleeding and weak, held his trembling wife tightly. He pulled her back across the the threshold of their home and out of the hellish storm that was unfolding in front of them. The A10 flew past overhead, its engines shaking the walls and floor still intact. A stinging wall of smoke and dirt exploded outward from under the swiftly attacking plane.

    The battle-shaken couple sat up off the littered floor of their home, knocked down by the force of the jet’s flight path. All they could see was an ocean of thick, gray and black smoke past their doorway. The sound of mighty, air-smashing engines muted every other noise of the world, from the racing beats of their heavy hearts to the sounds of their despairing sobs. For the mother who had already seen and lost so much, all hope seemed completely taken from her.

    The father blinked and gripped his wife tighter. A shadow moved in the smog. Through burning tears the mother watched with held breath a vision she would come to call a miracle. Amidst the fire and death, the smoke and bullets, the American soldier appeared with swift, heavy steps up to their stoop. Gabriel Audaz, out of breath and energy, held the little boy tightly in his arms. Little tears dampened his dusty uniform.

    Gabriel jumped out of the firestorm that seemed to be on his heels and through the crippled doorway of the crumbling house. His chest screamed in pain. He wheezed a breath of relief when his body finally came to rest. He had hit the floor, sliding partway across the shallow layer of soot and debris. Gabriel kept the boy he was protecting out of the mess that tore into the cloth around his own skin.

    The mother and father appeared above him, smiles as bright and warm as the sun filling his dizzy vision. He smiled back at them, letting the couple take their son back into their own embrace. They spoke words of thanks Gabriel didn’t really understand or hear. His day was done at last. There was nothing else he could manage, including lifting his body off the wrecked floor. Gabriel let his eyelids sink slowly closed, the song of fading airplane engines and tearful joy lulling him to a state of welcomed peace.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 10:11:00 +0000

PART ELEVEN

   The sun was already low in the sky by the time the luxury sedan came to a gentle stop at the foot of an empty, familiar driveway. Carlos Columbus Audaz gave a half-enthused thanks to the driver before opening the rear passenger door. The mild February air of the Southern California evening washed over his face and arms below his rolled-up sleeves. Pink-orange sunlight stretched over the roof of his house as the sun slowly sank away behind it. The warm band of light reached past him, over the car and quiet street to the house facing his. Carlos turned around and found himself staring at that home.

   His eyes were locked onto its brown, stucco facade made almost fuchsia in the waning daylight striking it head-on. Carlos felt something dark inside of him crawling out of deep and hidden recesses. It was bitter and hot, yet his skin seemed to suddenly feel cold. There was a tingling in his nerves and muscles, it was electric like only anger could be. He felt his blood boiling with a strange, irrepressible rage.

   “Sir?”

   Carlos blinked, dropping his gaze away from the house across the street to look at the driver in the front seat of the car. Carlos was still holding the door open. He was just standing on the curb, lost in a growing storm.

   “If you don’t mind, sir,” the driver said, gesturing subtly with a nod of his head toward the door in Carlos’ white-knuckled grip. “It’s nearly dark and all the gas stations outside of the Central District will be closing. Rations and riots, you know?”

   Carlos stared at the driver absently, hearing the man’s words but not really listening. “Umm...yeah. Right. Sorry,” Carlos said, closing the door with a firm push. He didn’t watch the sedan pull away. He didn’t even move from the spot on the edge of the curb he’d been standing. His attention snapped immediately back to the building across the street. It was the home of Alex Vale.

   Like at his own house, the driveway was empty. Carlos eyed the Vale’s garage as he walked closer, trying to remember how many cars the family had. As far as he could recall, only one. Like most families, the Vales could not afford the multi-vehicle tax levied against the California populace a year or so earlier. Many sold their extra cars, making parents and eager teenagers vie for the valuable time behind a single steering wheel.

   Carlos opened the glass front door when there was no response to his ringing of the doorbell. Where is Alex, Carlos asked into the ether as he knocked forcefully on the heavy, cherry-red inner door. He rapped his fist against the thick wood once and then twice more. There was no answer, no sound of muffled movement on the other side of the locked barrier.

   Carlos stepped back, glancing up at the second story. Alex has to be here, he thought to himself. There’s no place else for him to go. Carlos bit the inside of his lip as he thought for a long moment. He watched the sunlight dropping slowly off the walls and darkened windows. The curtains were drawn together, obscuring the interior beyond the stained glass. Carlos shuffled his feet off the stoop, moving with a frustrated huff around the side of the house.

   He felt a burning scrape on his knee as he scaled the rock wall isolating the Vale’s backyard. He ignored it, not caring about the small tear in his designer pants. At least, not right then. Carlos stumbled through the thick grass of the backyard, trying to stay upright after springing off the wall. Instantly he spotted familiar landmarks from a time that suddenly seemed so far away, a childhood that was more like a dream than an actual period of his life. Carlos’ eyes lifted upward to a window on the second story of the house. Our lives, he corrected himself.

   The two men, once boys and friends, had a system for getting in and out of the house in a more non-traditional way. It was discovered accidentally. They were filming a scene for one of countless games and adventures shared during those years. As Carlos gripped the warped, cracked wood of a thick swing seat suspended from a long limb of an ancient tree, he couldn’t stop himself from grinning. He felt like a geek, at least thinking back on his life life from two decades before. There was a rolled-up rope ladder just out of reach on top of the chest-thick branch. Carlos tried to remember what their imaginations had transformed the backyard, tree, and house into as he shook the stored ladder loose.

   Was it a temple in Sri Lanka? A booby-trapped tomb in an ancient Amazon shrine? A space station? Carlos actually chuckled, quickly climbing the dried out rope. The coarse fibers seemed to be quietly breathing as his weight moved upward. The small setting surrounded by the unfriendly rock wall had served as the location for many far away, adventurous locales the two boys could never travel to at the time. Carlos took a deep breath once he was atop the thick limb that stretched out toward the weather-stained roof. His mood nearly began to change. He might have found the ability to actually calm himself down. He wiped the thin layer of sweat beading on his brow off with his shirt sleeve. His eyes fixed in on the open window of Alex’s room. The childhood memories making his heart feel lighter were suddenly crushed, snuffed out of existence by that dark feeling crawling out of his soul.

   The grin on Carlos’ face was gone by the time his feet touched the cracked shingles layering the rooftop. His knee was bleeding underneath his torn pants, stained, along with his shirt, by the mud and moss spread over the old tree. He was tired and, now, sweaty, adding to his misery and anger. Carlos didn’t look back as one of the old knots holding up the ladder snapped free, too weak from years of wind, weather, and sun to stay intact any longer. The stress of the times had won out.

   Alex was home, but he wasn’t in his room. Not at the moment Carlos climbed over the windowsill. It took Carlos a moment to recognize the music circling the cyan-painted walls. It was a soundtrack to a movie Alex had seen a hundred times, maybe more. The instrumental score had always been striking to Carlos and emotionally powerful to Alex, though he never described how or why. Carlos was so focused on the music and taking in the details of the bedroom that had become foreign to him, he nearly missed the sound of water running from a nearby bathroom.

   The faucet shut off, leaving only the sound of the music resonating from small speakers placed inconspicuously around the small bedroom. Carlos’ eyes shifted suddenly from a framed, faded and frayed American flag mounted to the wall above Alex’s bed to the doorway. Alex had stopped in mid-stride, surprised by the presence of the man he used to call his best friend.

   “You should have knocked,” Alex said, walking across his doorway into his room.

   “I did,” said Carlos, tensely.

   Alex rubbed his wet hair with the soft, white towel in his hand. “Oh, sorry.”

   “You never came back to the office.”

   “How long did it take you to notice?”

   “You embarrassed me at lunch.”

   Alex furrowed his brow. “Really? How horribly tragic for you.”

   “Why are you acting like this,” Carlos asked loudly. He could feel the anger boiling inside of himself again. It was coming from pain, an awful sensation of feeling something so solid and stable in his life suddenly changing and tearing apart.

   “Carlos, listen to yourself! Do you hear your words at all?” Alex tossed the damp towel onto the footboard of his neatly made bed. “I was told today that everything I’ve done is wrong. The work I have struggled to perfect and make as accurate as possible is worthless because the people in charge-your new friends-want us to tell lies. Lies, Carlos! The Glorious Cause is a sham! It’s become their cause and it’s a trick!”

   “Stop it, Alex.”

   “Stop what, Carlos?”

   “Stop talking like that. Stop talking like one script change is the end of the whole freaking world.” Carlos sighed, turning away from Alex to lean against his friend’s old desk. The thin wood creaked softly under the pressure of his weight. “And why shouldn’t they make changes, you know? It’s their money. They’re in charge. We work for them.”

   Alex shook his head. “That’s the thing, Carlos. We don’t. That studio is subsidized. The taxpayers own it. We own it.”

   It was Carlos’ turn to shake his head. “That’s funny. Go ahead and tell them that.” Carlos looked up at Alex. “Look, I don’t like this either. But this is my job. And like it or not I’m going to do it. I’ve wanted to make movies my whole life. I’m getting to do that now and I’m not going to stop.”

   “At what cost though, Carlos? Look at what you’re giving up.”

   Carlos blinked, surprised by Alex’s statement. “What? Poverty? Living from project to project like we used to? No thanks. I’d rather not go back to that. I’ll stick with being fed and provided. I’ll hold onto making the money I earn.”

   It took Alex a moment to say anything. His whole body felt numb from Carlos’ words and conflicted logic. His heart sank, frozen in shock. Suddenly, Alex could no longer recognize the man in front of him. Gone was the face of his best friend, the glow of a creative spirit pure and free. That person had been conquered, replaced by a sacked soul wrapped in chains. The figure before him, invading his space, was a hollow shell to be filled by the whim and will of the those more powerful than himself.

   Finally, Alex found his voice again, though only to say, “I don’t know what to say.”

   “Say you’ll come back. Say you’ll help me finish this movie. Say you’ll help me make the best of it. Let’s do this. Then...then we’ll change the world.”

   Alex’s eyes dropped, saddened. “If we haven’t completely changed before then.”

   “We won’t. Come back and you’ll see we won’t.”

   “I can’t,” Alex said, still looking down at the carpet. His voice was soft and unsteady. It was hard to feel the floor under his feet. The whole world felt like it was turning upside down.

   “What?”

   Alex closed his eyes. “I can’t,” he said again, louder this time. “I can’t follow you this time.”

   Carlos slammed his fist against the top of the desk. Everything on the smooth, dusty surface jumped and rattled. He couldn’t explain why he did it, only that he had. He saw his fist more after the fact, as if it had been an instinctive impulse. He saw his knuckles change from white to red and back again as the impact traveled through his hand and up his arm, as his muscles tensed tighter. It caught Alex’s attention as well. Carlos looked over, their gazes locking instantly. Both were a mess of anger and sadness.

   “Why, Alex? You’re being selfish!”

   Alex narrowed his eyes. He exhaled slowly, letting his shoulders sag as he dropped his defensive posture. “I guess so,” he said, almost at a mumble, taking his eyes away from Carlos’ gaze.

   “You aren’t thinking about what you’re doing. You aren’t thinking about me...or the story. You aren’t thinking about you...” Carlos glanced around the room, his eyes rolling to take in everything from the floor to the ceiling. “...your family,” he continued.

   Alex looked up at Carlos sharply. “My family?” Alex shook his head. “You truly are lost, aren’t you? I’m an only child. Both my parents grew up in foster homes. They built their life together from scratch all by themselves. And, they died in a car crash a month before we came back.”

   Carlos stood stunned, suddenly remembering. He felt the air rush out of his lungs, Alex’s words striking him like a steel bar.

   “You stayed in Toronto to finish things up when I left. Your family, the neighbors, old friends and some of their families all came to the funeral. It was a tremendous feeling of support. Only...you weren’t there.”

   Carlos finally looked away from Alex. “I’m sorry,” he said glumly.

   “It doesn’t matter anymore. And no apology is going to make me change my mind. You have already made up yours,” Alex said sternly. He turned away from Carlos, walking the few steps separating the corner of his bed and his open closet.

   There was a duffle bag on the floor, it’s zip-top still open, revealing the clothes folded and tightly tucked within the thick, mesh fabric of the heavy luggage. Alex bent over to reach for the soft straps. Carlos grabbed his left wrist, holding it firmly but non-threateningly. “Alex, no. Stop.”

   Alex turned, his arm still held by Carlos. Alex looked, first down at his trapped wrist, then up at the face of his oldest friend. There was desperation there, mixed in the storm of defiant anger. “No, Carlos. I have to go.”

   “Alex, stop,” Carlos said, tightening his grip on Alex.

   Alex could feel the pressure building at the bottom of his arm. “Carlos, let go. I’m leaving and-”

   “Alex, stop!” Carlos stared undeterred at Alex, his fingers strangling Alex’s wrist. The skin was starting to tingle and burn under Carlos’ steely and sweaty grip.

   “Carlos, let go.”

   “No, Alex.”

   “Carlos, let go!”

   “No!”

   Alex pulled at his arm, trying to free himself. “Carlos, this isn’t funny! Let go, now!” He yanked at his arm again. “That hurts! Let go!”

   “No!”

   “Carlos,” Alex protested, pushing his friend’s shoulder in another attempt to get his arm loose from the threatening hold.

   The forceful nudge against his shoulder was the final snap. Already on the edge of the darkness that had been swelling inside of himself, Carlos became completely lost within it. He felt his body, every muscle and nerve to every artery and vein, become consumed in a flash-boil of dark and selfish rage. It was an instinct of hate that Carlos finally surrendered to which propelled his unoccupied hand, now balled into a mallet-like fist, through the dim light of the bedroom.

   Alex didn’t see it coming. In all the world and space he never suspected his best friend would become violent with him. Alex’s vision flashed white then swam in a blurred and jarring dizziness. A rush of maddening pain exploded outward through his body from the surprise impact on the side of his face. Alex blinked, trying to steady his balance and spinning vision. He was looking down at his bed, past his outstretched arm still locked in Carlos’ grip. A drop of blood from the swollen corner of his mouth landed lightly near his elbow.

   Alex watched the tiny, crimson rivulet staining the pale skin of his arm. It had only been a few seconds since Carlos had punched him. Alex didn’t look up at the man holding him hostage. He took a deep breath, pulling in and focusing the feeling of the pain surging up and down his body. He used it as strength, understanding now that everything that once was sacred was now destroyed.

   With a surge of raw energy, Alex shoved instead of pulled. He used Carlos’ weight and stance against him, launching the two of them unsteadily backwards until they crashed ferociously into Alex’s desk. Carlos shouted in pain, landing another punch into Alex, this time in his side. Alex groaned but fought back, pulling back and then shoving them both against the wall. The plaster cracked, caving slightly inward in a shallow, Carlos-shaped crater. The two friends had rapidly dissolved into adversaries. They struggled and fought with bitter passion around the room, destroying the things that filled it as they went. It was the undoing of the familiar, the tearing down of a world once shared.

   The battle reached its climax. Bruised and bleeding, but each holding firm, Carlos and Alex spun around in a tight circle on the littered floor desperately searching for the single advantage each of them needed. The two opposing forces met again in a combustible impact that drove them sideways through the room. Glass and wood exploded under their unstoppable momentum as the two young men burst through Alex’s bedroom window. The two tattered bodies rolled painfully and uncontrollably onto the coarse, abrasive shingles. They finally separated as they each tumbled down the slop of the roof, each trying to find something to grip in a blind panic of motion.

   Carlos barely found the tree limb. Alex managed a brief hold on the rusted gutter. It didn’t last. The weathered and weakened metal almost instantly gave way under his weight, sending him falling to the dried grass below. Carlos wasn’t far behind. He had barely heard Alex land with a winded grunt against the ground before the bobbing tree branch snapped near his fingers. The old wood had no strength at its end, the bark shearing loudly free from the rest of the stout tree. It sent Carlos to the grass two dozen feet below in a shower of dry splinters.

   For a long time the two young men just laid there in the cool, dry lawn under the tree. Their chests heaved with each quick, pained and shallow breath they took. Leaves rained down from the disturbed solitude of the thick, spidery branches. Carlos blinked, brushing one of the crisp, yellowed leaves aside when it hit his face. Mastering his strength, Carlos rolled over and upright onto his knees. His vision spun for a moment as he scanned the yard around him. Alex was still laying on the ground a few feet away. The nightmarish anger had not gone. Carlos could still feel it under his skin, pushing him through the grass on his hands and knees.

   Alex could hear Carlos moving. He sensed him coming closer. Still, he only laid there, feeling the evening wind blow over his hot, bruised face. He felt it cooling the thin stream of blood slowly sliding down from his mouth. He was done fighting. Even when Carlos came into view, the angry grimace on his face washing away any of the old light and idealism his friend once eschewed, Alex didn’t move. His eyes considered the other man’s presence before returning to stare at the darkening sky. A few stars had begun to appear out of the deepening violet.

   Carlos noticed the lack of response from Alex. He glared hatefully, climbing on top of Alex’s torso. With one hand he gripped Alex’s already torn shirt, pulling him upward. His other hand was already in a fist, his swollen knuckles white and ready to strike.

   “Go ahead,” Alex said, his voice a tired, coarse whisper. “If you think you have to, go ahead. Do it.”

   Carlos stayed frozen, staring at Alex through eyes that did not feel like his own.

   “What are you doing, Carlos,” Alex asked. He managed a chuckle, suddenly aware of the gravity of their situation. He suddenly understood his place. Alex was awake in a world half-asleep. He realized then, for the first time, he wasn’t just seeing the stars appear through the haze in the sky. “What are you so afraid of that you have to destroy me?”

   Carlos reared his fist back, ready to bash his tingling hand into the younger man’s face. But he stopped. His nostrils flared. His lungs burned with the rapid breaths he couldn’t stop taking. Yet, even with all the anger and hate churning away inside him, Carlos could not move his arm any more. He wanted to, a part of himself even felt he had to. Carlos turned his head slightly, his eyes peering back to look at his fist hovering in the air.

   Alex watched wordlessly in the seconds that passed until Carlos finally dropped his tensed arm, his swollen fingers opening. He loosened and then let go of the hold on Alex’s shirt, dropping his back into the dry, sandy-green turf. Carlos stood up, looming over his old friend. “I’m not afraid. I’m not the one running away.”

   Carlos swallowed his anger and stepped over Alex without another look back. His thoughts and feelings where in a whirlwind he couldn’t figure out how to escape. His only clear notion was to get out of that yard and away from Alex. He had managed only a few steps when the voice he had always known to belong to his best friend called out to him for the last time.

   “Are you sure, Carlos? Aren’t we both running away from something?”

   Carlos didn’t answer. He rounded the corner of the house hurriedly, making his way back toward the rock wall. Alex didn’t watch him leave. He kept his eyes on the sky, watching as more stars appeared out of the city haze. He wasn’t that startled when the ropes holding up the old swing to the tree finally gave way. The small, wooden bench split in two when it hit the ground and settled into the grass and dust.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:17:00 +0000

PART TEN

    There was smoke and the sound of the ocean. The choking gray veil consumed the landscape in all directions. He could barely see the dirt and the trampled brush beyond the tops of his boots, never mind the ghostly appearances of the soldiers nearby, an arm’s reach away at most. At the same time, the disconnected wash of a swiftly flowing tide over sand and crushed bits of coral echoed strangely in his ears. Gabriel Audaz blinked, a small, subtle effort to figure out if he was alive or dead.

    He turned his head, letting it list slightly, wearily to his right. He breathed a startled gasp of the sultry smoke. There should have been a soldier there, an American peer in dirt-stained fatigues braced against the scorched and scarred remains of an old car. Instead, for the span of a haunting and heart-stopping second, Gabriel beheld the glowing, smiling face of his best friend Isabella.

    Gabriel shifted backward with a start, trying to catch his breath. He was trying to keep himself from calling out her name. In the blink of an eye, she was gone. And then, Gabriel was reminded he was not dead, not yet. If he had been asleep, he wasn’t anymore. The ear-splitting crack of a bullet against the blackened metal skin of the useless automobile made Gabriel’s heart skip a beat. The lightning fast shell had struck the lifeless car, pummeling through the thick door where his chest had been less than a moment before.

    The soldier closest to him turned around, feeling the vibrations traveling through the frame of the car. Another shot grazed past the back of his helmet, missing his head by a hair. There was a wordless exchange between the two young men. It was a look lasting only a second, a silent expression only soldiers can understand.

    “They’re trying to outflank us,” the soldier yelled, overcoming the moment of terror that had brought his life within millimeters of its end. Without another word, the soldier raised his rifle, pumping the wind-stirred streams of thick smoke with a fresh round of quick, deafening bursts of white-hot gunfire. His shots were joined by a few others who pivoted around against their cover.

    Gabriel watched motionlessly as a fierce, semi-blind storm of bullets was unleashed into the choking, gray curtain. He suddenly felt the warm metal of a rifle barrel under his sweaty, dirty fingertips. Gabriel turned his head sharply, looking down between himself and the slouched, barely-conscious form of the sergeant he had carried through the valley. He saw the older man’s hand subtly nudging the dust-covered weapon closer and away from himself. His tired eyes, unable to stay locked on Gabriel’s for more than a dizzy moment, told the young corporal to pick it up.

    Gabriel nodded. The harsh, nerve-splitting rattle of the powerful rifle filled Gabriel’s senses before he even realized the gun was firmly in his hands and his finger was on the trigger. He was sitting upright, focusing past the sensation of the rifle’s butt recoiling mercilessly against his shoulder. His eyes stared down the scratched and scathed barrel, past the instant flashes of the muzzle flare. His aim was accurate but hardly precise. It was too difficult to pick a specific target. They were laying down a blanket, deterring the opportunity for their lives to be taken by those scurrying along the rising bluffs of the valley wall.

    Gabriel could see, first, one and the another figure stagger and collapse beyond the distance and smoke. But where one fell or had turned and started retreating out of range, the corporal spotted another head pop up out of the sandy, bullet-riddled cover. One blurry, distant face stayed visible too long, their moment of reconnaissance costing their life. It was a long moment before Gabriel realized it was from his gun that fatal shot had sprung.

    The next squeeze of the trigger brought nothing. The empty chamber clicked loudly. Only a thin, silver trail of smoke emerged from the searing mouth of the rifle. Out of instinct, Gabriel patted the pockets on the front of his uniform, searching for a fresh clip of ammunition. It only tool a second for him to remember he had none. His own spare magazines had been lost somewhere in the sandy brush and blood the previous night. Gabriel looked down at the semi-conscious sergeant. It took all of the wounded man’s strength to rotate his cold, heavy hand.

    A new bevy of bullets sprayed through the air from behind the scorched car. The tortured metal rang out fiercely under the bloodthirsty maelstrom. Gabriel ducked down closer to the sergeant while he felt the soldier to his right drop fearfully back against the car door. A few of their peers grunted in pain, nearly not making it out of the changing fire line in time.

    “This is crazy,” the soldier braced against the car and Gabriel’s shoulder shouted. “We’re not going to make it here! There’s just too many of them! We don’t have the ammo!”

    A young private stumbled out of the smoke, only to fall face first into the dirt a few dozen yards away. Blood stains swelled on his flattened back. Gabriel and the other soldier stared in numbed shock. “Or the manpower,” the solider said gravely.

    Gabriel felt a small tug on the cuff of his dirty sleeve. He turned his head, looking down toward the bloodstained fingers trying to tighten their grip about the dry and dusty hem of cloth. The sergeant was trying to pull his arm, trying to bring Gabriel closer. Gabriel leaned down. He felt the hot air of the older man’s strained and raspy voice against his ear. Gabriel couldn’t help that his skin felt like it was crawling around the sound of his scratchy, gravel-like words. It wasn’t the sergeant’s fault. He wasn’t trying to die. It was just happening.

    Gabriel nodded his head when it seemed the words had stopped coming. He straightened his torso upright again before leaning toward his right and the soldier at his side. “Where’s the air support? Has anyone called it in?”

    The soldier shook his head, “We cant’! The com links are down! Been that way since we jumped, I think! There was a guy with a radio...a corporal, I think. But, he went in with the first two squads!”
    “Went in where?”

    The soldier pointed to the left past Gabriel and the sergeant. “Into the village, before the bombers showed up and cut our lines!”

    Gabriel’s eyes stared past the soldier’s stiff and outstretched arm. He gazed uneasily at the evidence of the earlier fighting, the source of the noise and echoes that had rolled down the valley. He imagined the scene of the brutal skirmish, spotting the bullet-dug holes in the village wall, sections of which were blackened or blown out altogether. “Any chance he’s still in there?”

    The soldier shifted his gaze, peering at Gabriel for a moment as he considered the question. “There’s always a chance for anything! There’s a chance Santa Clause is in there, too! But, that doesn’t mean he is, or that he’s alive even if he were!”

    Gabriel felt the sergeant tugging at his sleeve again. Gabriel leaned down and listened carefully, patiently, to the slow and whispered voice that dragged itself out of the wounded man’s parched throat. When the words stopped coming, Gabriel waited a moment to respond. He understood what the older man was saying, not just the words used but the context, the meaning suggested and implied.

    Gabriel took a deep breath, finally nodding his head. “Even if the operator is alive or dead, the radio is still in there!”

    “If it hasn’t been blasted into wall fragments or new bomb parts!” The soldier at Gabriel’s side shook his head. “That’s a big gamble, man!”

    “The biggest,” Gabriel said flatly, looking only at the ground in front of him.

    “Exactly! And one I haven’t been willing to roll the dice on. Not to risk what’s left of us out here making a mad dash for that gate!”

    “I’ll do it.” The words were out of his mouth before he had fully thought it through, before Gabriel was even aware that he wanted to say it at all. Not that it mattered. What he wanted was of no consequence to what needed to be done.

    “What,” the soldier asked, surprised. “You?”

    “Yeah,” Gabriel said, looking up at the young man for the first time in several minutes. “Someone has to. So I’ll do it. I’ll go. I’ll find the operator...or his radio. And if our side’s is busted...well...they must have a way to communicate,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward the distant figures in the smoke and on the cliffs surrounding them beyond the car.

    “Do you even know how to work a radio?”

    Gabriel swallowed, staring into the dry and reddened eyes of the soldier next to him. “Vaguely,” Gabriel answered. “Enough to call for help, I think.”

    The soldier shook his head in disbelief. “You’re crazy, man. Bat-snot crazy!”

    Gabriel glanced down to his left. The sergeant nodded his head once, subtly. There was an air of approval, of respect about the dying man. It was like that of a father, quietly proud of his son. Gabriel smiled slightly, nodding his head in acknowledgement.

    “I may be crazy, but it’s time to try something other than sit here and wait to die!”

    Gabriel collected the last few clips of ammunition for the sergeant’s rifle out of the older man’s gear. The soldier watched, realizing there was no changing Gabriel’s mind. Suddenly, he didn’t want to change the corporal’s mind. The young soldier was feeling something wash through him as he gazed at Gabriel, preparing to march off into the face of death. It was a feeling that had been absent too long, missing for such a time he couldn’t know if he had ever truly felt it. It was such a simple and pure sensation. The soldier felt awake and alive again, rather than condemned to waiting for his turn to die. The soldier was feeling hope. He smiled, just a little and just for an instant.

    “We’ll provide covering fire while you make your sprint to the wall,” the soldier said to Gabriel.

    Gabriel nodded. “Don’t waste too much ammo. I can’t promise this will work. I can only promise I will try.”

    The soldier nodded. “I know.”

    Gabriel smiled warmly at him. He glanced down at the sergeant while the soldier began to spread the word to their peers taking cover nearby. The older man was nearly lost, his eyes no longer able to open past a thin sliver. His breathing was quick and pained, each breath more shallow than the last. Still, he was able to smile proudly, thankfully, at the corporal who had carried him over the rough terrain, who had never once given up on him.

    “Okay, friend,” the soldier said, tapping on Gabriel’s shoulder. “We’ll fire when you’re ready.”

    Gabriel took a deep breath, his eyes lifting from the sergeant to fix in on the blasted wall. He waited for only a moment. Then, without any more hesitation, he said, “Ready.”

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:44:00 +0000

PART NINE

    Carlos Columbus Audaz sighed into the thick glass of the passenger window. He was absently watching the cityscape of Los Angeles stretch past the luxury sedan as it made its way through the half-crowded streets. The endless rows of parked cars lining the curbsides of the cracked, neglected sidewalks were painted in the same unique colors of twilight as the concrete and glass buildings looming over the the wandering pedestrians. Carlos wasn’t that interested in the pastel bands of fading sunlight bouncing off the thin clouds and faint layer of haze casting subtle pink and mauve shadows up and down the city streets.

   His mind was lost in the chaos of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The day had become far longer and frustrating than he had first realized. His body was drained of any real emotional energy. Now, Carlos just wanted to go home and sleep. Tomorrow would be a new day and this one would finally be over.

   The din of the helicopter still rang in Carlos’ ears almost as loudly as anything else. The gusts of hot wind spraying the stinging dust stirred by the rotors spinning in a blur above the black and blue-painted aircraft had hit Carlos like an invisible wall. He had squinted into the mild, bitter smelling air. There were others gathered at a decidedly safe distance form the vehicle, forming a crescent of curious onlookers. They all stood stiffly, bracing against the torrent of air expelled away from the helicopter coming to rest in the freshly manicured grass. Mr. Simon was already there. Douglass Stoll stood closely in tow, never far from the face of his political bosses.

   The rotors slowed closer to a stop, each blade becoming perceptible, when the passenger doors swung swiftly open. A man inside, tall and lean like a spry athlete in his prime was smiling jovially at another man sitting opposite him. The star of the film patted his smaller, stockier traveling companion merrily on the shoulder. Carlos watched every movement without breaking his gaze. He took a sharp breath, inaudible under the gradually quieting whine of the idling engine. He was hardly alone in the gesture.

   It was the way the leading man carried himself, his poise and effortless grace when he stepped out of the helicopter’s cabin. It was the sharp lines of his broad shoulders and trim torso. It was the way he wore his clothes, as if every stitch was naturally made to compliment his frame and the motion carrying him forward. Most of all, it was his remarkable likeness to the President of the United States.

   “I’m only here for a few days,” Markus L. Tay said a short time later. His eyes took in the other men at the wide, circular table at the back of the overpriced cafe. “There are some things we’re finishing up. And then, I’ll be back and we can really get this movie going!”

   Carlos would swear he felt his jaw crack against the table. He blinked, trying to hide the gawking stare of shocked awe he knew riddled his face. He quickly peered sidelong at Alex who only rolled his eyes.

   Doulgass Stoll cleared his throat, simultaneously trying to sit up on his side of the semi-circular, crimson, leather booth. He, too, was trying to hide the surprise and flicker of frustration that appeared in his own features. The studio chief was not being as subtle as he assumed he was. “Umm...well...”

   “This is Presidential business, I’m guessing,” asked Mr. Simon before Douglass Stoll could finish his stuttering thought.

   Marcus L. Tay nodded his head and smiled brightly. “Yes, it is. He invited me back personally.”
   “Of course he did,” Mr. Simon said with a pleased and knowing smile.

   The whole exchange was making no sense to Carlos. He felt far on the outside of a play he’d just sat down to watch but was already halfway through.

   “It shouldn’t be a problem. Right, Mr. Stoll,” Mr. Simon asked, his calm voice rising above the table. There was a relaxed brightness in his voice, a kind of polite merriment. At the same time, there was no denying the subtly of the threatening undertone that rang faintly but clearly in his words.

   Douglass Stoll barely regarded Carlos before he spoke. He mostly looked down at the table and his nearly empty glass on the polished surface. “No! It, umm....shouldn’t be a problem at all. I think it will work out.” Douglass Stoll lifted his gaze toward the others at the table. He was a little taken aback by the way Mr. Simon was quietly staring at him, the man’s eery grin unflinching between his smooth cheeks.

   “In fact,” Douglass continued, “I’m absolutely sure it will.”

   Mr. Simon nodded his head excitedly. “Excellent!”

   “The President knows there’s work to be done here,” Markus said, jumping back into the conversation.

   “The President doesn’t know the meaning of the word work,” mumbled Alex, staring off into space. His eyes were locked on the table, yet he could still sense the hot glares now focused on him like police searchlights.

   Mr. Simon waited to speak until Alex had lifted his gaze away from the varnished grains of the rich wood of the table. “I’m sorry, my friend. I don’t think I heard you quite right. What was it you just said about our President?”

   Douglass Stoll was still glaring at him. Alex spotted the beads of sweat on his expansive forehead glistening like grains of find sand on a deserted beach somewhere. “Mr. Vale is obviously frustrated and just in the wrong frame of mind today. I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” said Mr. Stoll encouragingly.

   Alex furrowed his brow. He was hoping Carlos might jump to his defense by proffering his own frustrations at the announced delay, this one coming on the heels of so many before it. The entire movie was now a full month behind schedule because of one man. Alex’s eyes shifted for a moment to peer at Markus L. Tay. Well, Alex thought to himself, two men really.

   “Mr. Vale’s frame of mind is just fine,” Alex said evenly, though his words were sharp. “I am simply finding this entire discourse, not only confusing, but alarming. And I think it sucks that between the studio chief overseeing this project and the director in charge of it, I’m the only one raising the obvious concern!”

   Markus shifted in his seat, trying to sit up straighter. He turned his body slightly in an effort to address Alex directly. Alex noticed how the actor was trying to wear the look of a role and a figure he had no real grasp on. The charm in his college-boy face and eyes that couldn’t seem to stay centered on one thing for more than an instant was lost on the dispirited writer. Here was the professor’s pet repeating the words and phrases read to him like a parent reading slowly to a young child.

   “The President cares very much for this project. He understands your concerns. That’s part of the reason I’m here,” said the Presidential performer, smiling warmly. To him, Alex knew, this was all true. This script was holy. Whatever honesty in the President’s words may or may not exist, Alex could see the glimmer of genuine earnestness shining from Markus’ heart through his eyes.

   “I have to go back and tell him what everyone is thinking. He wants to know how he can better help the project,” Marcus continued. “Everyone there does.”

   Mr. Simon sipped casually on his cold iced-tea. He was savoring the taste, the flavor of each drop rolling over his tongue and smoothly down his wet throat. Good tea, real tea, was already so expensive. The rich smell of the leaves that had been soaking someplace out of sight was worth hesitating to admire and remember. Mr. Simon liked the restaurant they had chosen to dine in. He was going to have to remember it. He swallowed another sip, then quickly added, “Not to mention your research.”

   “Oh, yes. Of course. That’s taking up a lot of time as well. And the President knows the production is taking a bit of a shellacking because of my being in Washington.

   Alex narrowed his eyes. “A shellacking?”

   Markus looked at Alex again, confused. The term seemed so natural to his ears and mind. Everyone at the White House seemed so used to the word, Markus assumed everyone else was using it as well. “Yeah. Look, Mr. Vale, the majority of the movie’s budget is coming from the government. Everyone involved-the crew, the other actors, even yourself-is getting paid no matter what.”

   “How is that a valid argument?” Alex turned his head suddenly to his right. His look was piercing and fiery as it took in the silent form of his friend and boss. “And why aren’t you saying anything?”

   Carlos gestured dumbfoundedly. He had no idea what to say or what to do. Internally, he was lost in the mire of a fierce war of conscience. There was no denying the logic, artistic passion, and integrity of Alex Vale. Simultaneously, Carlos knew what they were facing. He understood the power staring them down from across the appetizer-laden table.

   “Alex, maybe we could enjoy the rest of our lunch and finish this discussion back at the office,” Douglass Stoll said calmly, though it wasn’t as much of a request as it was a superior giving an employee an order.

   “No, Mr. Stoll. That won’t be necessary. I’ll excuse myself now so you gentlemen can continue having your pleasant lunch and bilking of the American public.” Alex stood up with anger in each motion of his body. “Besides, there is nothing different I would say or feel later that is different from this moment.”

   Markus looked hurt the most out of the four men still seated in the crescent-shaped booth. “No, hey...”

   Alex held up his hand. “Sorry, man. I’ve lost my stomach for any more of this.”

   Carlos watched his best friend walk with fiery haste toward the front of the quiet restaurant. When he was out of sight, his eyes drifted back to the table to meet the varying gazes waiting for him. Markus L. Tay seemed concerned. His light, hazel eyes angled slightly down as he sat disappointed at the turn of events. Douglass Stoll was slightly slouched, a figure of conflicting fear and embarrassed frustration whose chest was rising and sinking with quickened, shallowing breaths. Mr. Simon seemed unmoved. Perhaps he had been waiting for one of them to break all along.

   Carlos remained silent. His thoughts were tangled and spinning madly. He had no idea what to say. He feared he would only make things worse. A part of him wanted to do just that. A part of him wanted to join Alex, to completely disrupt the growing travesty before the wretched tentacles of faraway bureaucrats completely strangled the life out of the film. Yet, he hadn’t moved. Carlos was still sitting in the posh, maroon, leather booth.

   Mr. Simon had noticed this very fact. “Is this going to be a problem?”

   Douglass Stoll and Carlos Columbus Audaz exchanged uneasy stares. They were both conflicted, but one had already long ago sold out his soul. His principles were hollow words he kept in a frame in a room somewhere in his house. The other felt the slope getting slick under his feet. He could feel the gravity at the table and considered how long it would take before he could no longer pull himself free.

   Douglass Stoll answered Mr. Simon’s question. “No. It won’t be a problem. Everything is good.”

   Mr. Simon smiled. “Excellent,” he said then took another small, savoring sip of his iced tea. He absolutely loved the flavor of it. Life was so good right then, he couldn’t help but smile a little more.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:14:00 +0000

PART EIGHT

Gabriel Audaz winced as more sweat fell into his eyes. It was a fierce and bitter sensation he could not stop. The salty perspiration dripped off the loose strands of his black hair and down his face in endless rivulets. He couldn’t wipe it away. The half-limp body of the wounded sergeant was tightly encircled by Gabriel’s left arm, urging him along the uneven terrain. Gabriel’s right arm was trying to keep the man from slouching forward, his had pressed tightly against the older man’s wounded side.

   The morning was already warming up, hinting without subtlety at the blistering day that was making its arrival. The valley walls bounced with the echoes of a battle somewhere ahead. They could hear the rattle of machine guns, muffled by the rocks and dirt consuming the distance between themselves and the source of the violence. There wasn’t much of that distance left. The stench of smoke was drifting down the valley. It was all Gabriel could smell.

   He brought their lumbering pace to a stop. The bedrock under his tired feet trembled with the boom of a heavy blast that was more like fading thunder by the time he could hear it. His ears perked at the sound of shifting pebbles, dislodged by the traveling vibrations. Gabriel’s eyes shifted and scanned in every direction he could turn his head. He spotted the smoke, thick and gray, as it climbed over a rise less than a mile away.

   “Tread carefully, Corporal,” mumbled the sergeant in Gabriel’s arms.

   Gabriel regarded him briefly. He nodded once, “Yes, sir.”

   They didn’t speak anymore as Gabriel carried them up the valley. Gabriel blinked away more sweat as his eyes searched left and right, watching for anything out of the ordinary. He had to smirk at that thought. I should be looking for anything, he told himself. We’re the one’s out of the ordinary. What really is ordinary in this place, anyway?

   Gabriel suddenly stopped. Gray tendrils of hazy smoke curling and snaking in faint breezes began to lazily stretch around them. His gaze was transfixed on a sight beyond the bitter fog. It took a long moment for the sergeant to realize they had stopped. He shifted, dragging his mind out of the semi-conscious state he kept falling into. “What is it?”

   Gabriel gestured with his chin in the direction of a nearby slope. Several tattered parachutes were strewn across the dry mountainside, their fabric frayed by the nighttime gunfire and stained red by the blood of their owners. A few bodies remained amongst tangled canopies and the brush. Gabriel looked away, breathing heavier.

   “Oh,” the sergeant said, wearily taking in the scene. “Pray for them if you like, Corporal. But do it in your head and let’s keep moving. If we stand here too long, we’ll end up next to them.”

   Gabriel blinked. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said distantly.

   Gabriel quickly readjusted the sergeant’s weight against his body, then started forward on the littered trail. The tide of of battle had violently swept through the area. Bullet shells glistened in the sunlight between the sinewy shadows cast by the thickening haze. Blood, still damp in places, dotted the dirt under their feet. The small trees and spiny bushes bore the brunt of the upheaval. Snapped twigs and fiercely broken branches with ends in jagged splinters stretched across the valley. The light of a fire caught Gabriel’s attention, visible at first in the corner of his eye. Within a few paces, he was able to look down a shallow gulch leading off to the left from the rough trail they journied along. One of the Ospreys lay in a smoldering heap of charred, smoldering wreckage, its parts strewn along the blackened, scarred walls.

   A torrent of gun fire echoed down the valley. Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat. He had glanced away from the sight of the crashed plane for just an instant, distracted by the crack and rattle of dueling rifles. When he finally looked back toward the wreckage, Gabriel’s eyes locked onto the silhouetted figures scurrying past the glowing debris. He squinted, spying signs of weapons in their hands. He noted their direction, aware it was the same as his. Gabriel stared ahead at the column of smoke climbing into the sunlit sky. With each lumbering step, the choking mass crew thicker and disconcertingly closer.

   “Do you want to pray with me,” a distant voice asked, echoing in Gabriel’s mind.

   With few exceptions, everything seemed to happen all at once in Gabriel’s life. He understood that his sexuality was something that had always existed within him, and its development was something naturally incremental. But his realization of it seemed to have come on suddenly in his memory. The ongoing conflict that ensued within himself he remembered being just as sudden and dramatic in its appearance. His fixation on becoming a soldier and a leader seemed to happen in the blink of an eye.   He had found a picture of his grandfather one day. At the same time, he had begun reading about George Washington. Gabriel recalled an instant desire to follow in the footsteps of the two inspiring men. His mother had not spoken of the near-stranger in the wrinkled, faded photograph. It wasn’t until she realized her son would not be shaken from his decision that she opened up about the army captain his father had named him after.

   And now, all at once, those skills he had read about and imagined emulating, then began to learn and comprehend as something tangible in basic training, were being put to the test. Gabriel, with the wounded sergeant on his arms, had just rounded another bend in the cold, dry valley where more burned and broken plane parts littered the dusty landscape when the hell he knew was coming opened up. The hazy streamers of smoke had begun to swell into lung-rasping patches that rolled above the ground. It partially obscured the dispiriting field of lifeless bodies sparsely strewn over the blood and bullet-riddled sand.

   Gabriel was trying not to focus on them. He was trying not to spot the American flag patches on the shoulders, or the haunting gazes of their open eyes. He had to lead himself and the sergeant around more than a few laying in their path. Gabriel knew his mind had to stay sharp. He had to keep himself aware, his senses up and alert in the bitter smoke polluting his field of vision.

   “I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life,” Gabriel heard his own voice echoing back to him from the recent past. “...with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die-”

   NO, Gabriel shouted to himself. He was losing his focus, his grip on the present slipping again. He felt his heart racing in his chest. A shot rang out somewhere. It was close, the quick blast of firepower a single, deafening pop in the smokey air. Gabriel stumbled over something. He wanted it to be a rock, but he knew that it wasn’t. He couldn’t stop himself from yelping in surprise and fear.

   “I’m so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.”

   At the same moment his thoughts began slinking back into that memory on the beach, another shot tore through the gray veil of smoke. Dirt was erupting into the air before the crack of hot noise had filled the valley. The bullet had missed the two soldiers struggling across the terrain by less than half a dozen feet.

   Gabriel turned his head in the direction he thought the shell had been fired from. Through the thinning curtain of smoke, he spotted the handful of figures gathering hurriedly together. One already had his rifle raised and sighted. The others flanking him were following suit. Dark muzzles at the end of paint-chipped barrels exploded with light and noise. Bullets buzzed with white-hot speed as they hit the dirt at Gabriel’s heels. There was nothing he could do but run. With the sergeant braced against him, there was no way Gabriel could return fire, even blindly. He tried to zigzag unpredictably, sidestepping the close shots getting closer and simultaneously avoiding tripping over the mounds under the smoke, the bodies of his fellow soldiers already fallen.

   More shots broke through the wafting pockets of smoke, tearing through the air across the valley. The noisy barrage of deadly shells angrily peppered the sandy floor in every direction around the fleeing, breathless corporal carrying the half-awake sergeant. Gabriel didn’t know how long he could last. The rifle fire was coming on without stop, a rapid hail storm of lethal and furious tenacity. Words he didn’t understand were shouted somewhere close through the smoke and over the gun fire. Gabriel’s ears perked at the sound of the wind changing slightly for just an instant. It was like the smokey air was wrapping around and then bouncing off of something in the same instant. He caught a glimpse of what was unmistakably a grenade. It spit out of a rolling waft of smoke, sailing over his head but not far enough to make him feel better.

   The palm-sized bomb shaped slightly like an egg exploded in the dirt behind and to Gabriel’s right. Tiny pebbles became molten shards that sprayed across his back and neck. Gabriel gritted his teeth. He felt the bloody sting of the shrapnel digging into his calves. He was luck and knew it. With a deep breath of the choking air, Gabriel pushed himself, with the weight of the sergeant against him, forward. The wind shifted once again. It was the sound of more grenades tossed without aim into the sultry mist. A deafening fissure of smoke, dirt and debris exploded loudly to Gabriel’s left and then ahead and to his right. One more grenade detonated behind him, the valley floor tearing open in Gabriel’s wake by mere seconds.

   His ears were ringing like mad, the earth-shuddering thuds of each little bomb burst causing his ear drums to send a shrill cry reverberating deep into his skull. Gabriel wanted to scream but didn’t want to waste the breath. He could barely hear the heavy pounding of his racing heart. There should have been no way he heard the figure suddenly come forward out of the smoke, closing the distance that had separated them in the valley. Even with his heart furiously pumping fresh blood into his straining, bleeding legs, there should have been no way Gabriel had the strength or agility left to get away. The odds were stacked against him. And yet, Gabriel’s path through the valley stayed true.

   In the thickening, burning haze he saw the shadow move across the drifting veil a mere second before the figure appeared. He had seen the old Russian assault rifle raise in a hurried instant before the nameless shape of the enemy squeezed the the dinged and paintless trigger. The warm, late morning air brushed against Gabriel’s face as he surged forward a single, panicked step. It wasn’t much. But, it was just enough. The bullet already leaping out of the aged barrel skimmed the smokey air where Gabriel and the sergeant should have been. Instead, it sliced like a razor through fabric alone instead of flesh. Gabriel still felt the blistering heat radiating off the slender, little body as it sailed millimeters above his skin.

   His hurried push out of the bullet’s path made his next step unbalanced. Gabriel stumbled unstoppably, his body, along with the sergeant’s, falling forward into the sloping landscape. A fireworks display of gunfire illuminated the gray vapor around them. Gabriel squinted at the maddening din consuming the mountain air. The enemy soldier behind them stiffened, his heart stopping as a steady shot ripped into his chest and then through his back.

   Gabriel didn’t watch the bearded man fall backwards into the dirt. There was no time to lay low and watch the scene play out around them. Gabriel peered ahead, spotting a handful of soldiers in uniforms matching his own. He spotted the raging fires of exploded vehicles expelling the thick columns of smoke into the hauntingly colored sky, partially lost somewhere above him. They had finally arrived at the heart of the bloody battle that had developed across the length of the valley.

   “...I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am...” Gabriel heard his memory echoing in his mind once more as he rose carefully to his knees. The flesh on the backs of his legs burned in that simple movement. He wanted to cry out from the pain that doubled in intensity as he began to drag the sergeant closer to their fellow infantry men. “...Before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

   As Gabriel used all of his strength to pull the wounded sergeant across the stirred sands coated with a mire of muddy crimson and ash and pitted by the rock-jarring explosions, he couldn’t help but recall Isabella that night on the beach. Even as violent gun fire was exchanged in noisy streams racing past him, Gabriel remembered the feeling of being in the warm embrace of his best friend on that late, windy evening. It gave him something else to focus on as he closed the painful distance toward the infantry. The bursts of their rifles were like beacons home in the raging storm of death in the darkening valley.

   “Do you want to pray with me,” Isabella had asked.

   Gabriel nodded, “Yes.”

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 06:28:00 +0000

PART SEVEN

    Fifteen minutes after Carlos had left his mother alone in the kitchen, he was closing the front door of his childhood home. A black car, exactly like the one that had dropped him off the previous afternoon, was idling quietly beside the curb. He spotted his best friend and long time assistant, Alex Vale, in the predawn light. Alex was already at the car, standing in front of the passenger-side doors. Carlos was halfway down the front walk when he noticed the expression on the younger man’s face.

   Neither spoke as Carlos closed the distance between them. Carlos stopped at the curb, glancing back and forth at the doors on the car and the look on Alex’s face. It was a look that didn’t take Carlos long to decipher. There was annoyance, painted with unease and even a little fear. For Carlos, it was turning his awkward moment into a frustrating one. As he mouthed the name “Simon”, and as Alex nodded in the affirmative, the passenger door near Alex’s right hip popped open. A tanned, moisturized hand pushed the door open enough for Carlos to reach for it.

   “Good morning, Carlos,” smiled the bright-eyed, young bureaucrat when Carlos peered slowly down into the backseat of the car. “Come on! We’d better hurry if you’re going to get to the set on time.”

   Carlos stood up straight. He rolled his eyes in front of Alex who shrugged his shoulders. Both knew they had no choice. Alex opened the front passenger door as Carlos sat down in the back. The driver was accelerating away from the curb before the two doors were pulled closed.

   “How are you this morning,” Mr. Simon asked Carlos with enough enthusiasm and friendliness to white-wash a bloodstain.

   Carlos watched him out of the corner of his eye for a moment before directing his gaze out the window beside him. “I’m fine, Mr. Simon. How are you?”

   “Me, CC? I’m great. I hope you don’t mind me tagging along for the drive this morning?”

   Carlos swallowed most of his anger and disgust for the blonde-headed stranger sitting beside him, invading what little space he could call his own. Still, his displeasure at the situation and the presence of Mr. Simon shone through his expression as Carlos turned in his seat to finally regard him. His anger emerged as a sharp annoyance in his words as Carlos replied, “Well, it is unexpected, Mr. Simon. I would have preferred you waiting until I arrived at the set. And please...don’t call me that. Only those I deem to be close friends call me CC.”

   Mr. Simon blinked, looking disappointed for a moment. That moment passed quickly, however, and seemed as forgotten as if it had never occurred. “My sincerest apologies, Carlos. But, you did say you might be able to spare a few minutes this morning. I just wanted to keep you honest, eh!” The man laughed loudly at his own humor.

   Carlos rolled his eyes again. “What was it you wanted to discuss, Mr. Simon?”

   “Oh! Umm, the script.”

   “What about the script? Mr. Vale and myself have worked very diligently on all the material in the story.” Carlos glanced up at Alex who nodded his head from the front seat.

   “Oh, yes. I can tell. It’s very good. Very good. I truly enjoyed it.” Mr. Simon smiled at Carlos and Alex, who had turned in his seat. “However, there are a few points...some things here and there that...well...need to be addressed.”

   “Sorry,” Alex questioned sharply. It was the first time he had spoken all morning.

   Mr. Simon smiled. It was hard to read that smile. His thin, red lips were pointed in the corners. His smooth, pale cheeks barely seemed to wrinkle. His eyes twinkled, maybe with a maddening glee. Either way, the joviality on his narrow, unblemished face was off-putting to the two men watching him.

   “I’m not trying to say you’ve gotten in wrong, per se,” continued Mr. Simon. He used his fingers to make air quotes as he spoke. “I’m just saying that the sources you used are not necessarily the correct ones. They are not the ones we would have preferred.”

   “I don’t understand,” Alex said, his voice almost at a whisper. He had spent months doing research, checking and then double checking his facts.

   “We love the effort put in so far,” Mr. Simon added. “That’s part of why I’m here, to keep you guys pumped and excited.”

   “Fired up,” Alex asked, sinking with a defeated feeling into the front seat. His question had been mocking in nature.

   Mr. Simon didn’t seem to notice. To him, it was a genuine statement. “Exactly!”

   Carlos narrowed his eyes, his brow furrowed again. “Why else are you here?”

   “Hmm? Oh,” said Mr. Simon, turning his head to stare at Carlos. “Well, to make sure the story stays true to history.”

   “But it does,” Carlos said sternly.

   “Well, a perspective of history, yes. But not the correct one. Not the history the people need to have.” Mr. Simon reached down into a black, leather satchel between his feet. Carlos spotted a copy of their script appear from the bag’s interior. There were other things in there as well, a plethora of files for which Carlos was trying not to imagine the contents.

   “History, Carlos,” Mr. Simon said brightly as he sat upright again, “is always determined by the winners; by the victors of a struggle; by the strong emerging over the weak. The progressive cause has come out as the victor over those more conservative, less civilized and intellectual that for so long strangled the evolution of a just and equal society.

   “The dream is being achieved boys! It’s here and we’re a part of it! This...your scipt, The Glorious Cause...” Mr. Simon tapped the bundle of pages he held like holy scripture as he spoke with honest passion in his voice pouring out from his soul. “This is the story of how it has all come to be. You have been asked-chosen-to tell it! But you have to have the correct history. We must show the people what they need to see.”

   Carlos and Alex exchanged uneasy glances. There was more trepidation in Alex’s gaze than in Carlos’. Carlos simply felt...curious. “We must,” he asked.

   “Yes! The Glorious Cause must be the final nudge to forever closing the door on our dark and narrow past.” Mr. Simon held the script in front of Carlos. “The right history must be used, my friends. This is too important.”

   Mr. Simon smiled again as he watched Carlos take the edited draft from his own manicured hands. Alex was watching as well, unnerved by the cold shiver that traveled down his back.

* * * *

   Carlos Columbus Audaz sat silently under the wide bank of windows in is quiet, spacious office. His gaze was fixed on the bands of unfiltered sunlight pouring into the room, stretching over the hardwood floor and across his desk to the other side of the room. Somewhere beyond his barren, mono-colored walls a door was suddenly and loudly slammed shut. Carlos looked up from the patterns of light and shadow keeping him transfixed. He should have been better occupied. There were schedules and designs to approve. There were meetings to be preparing for. There were script notes to be going over. Carlos rolled his eyes. The script, he thought with a level of disdain he had been struggling with all that morning.

   Whomever had slammed the door was marching fiercely and urgently toward his office. Carlos had a hunch who it would be. He made no effort to sit up in the black, polished leather executive chair. The head of the studio, Douglass Stoll, had proffered it to Carlos-along with the swanky, spacious office-as a gift for signing onto the studio’s monumental project.

   The office door opened with a frenzied whoosh. His long time friend and lieutenant, Alex Vale, stomped over the threshold in the wake of air thrust through the mostly empty room. Alex slammed the door behind him in the same motion, approaching Carlos’ desk before the clattering impact had reverberated all the way around the cavernous office space.

   Carlos didn’t flinch, even when the copy of the script he had spotted in Alex’s white-knuckled had was suddenly thrown down onto the cluttered surface of his desk. Pens rolled onto the floor. Cold, stale coffee swished over the stained rim of a nearby mug. He lifted his green eyes slowly toward Alex’s face. Carlos didn’t seem impressed by the passionate display being put on before him.

   Alex didn’t wait for Carlos to regard him. He was already yelling by the time their eyes locked. “This is outrageous! Absolutely and unequivocally infuriating and insulting!”

   Carlos furrowed his brow. “What?”

   Alex staggered backward half a step. “What do you mean, ‘what’? The script! That’s what!”

   “Oh.”

   Alex’s jaw dropped, stunned by the lack of anything reciprocated from the person he had for so long found himself admiring the most. “What do you mean, ‘oh’? You’ve got to give me more than ‘oh’. Have you read what they...what he has done to our script?!”

   Carlos closed his eyes as he nodded his head.

   “And all you can say is, ‘oh’?!”

   “What would you like me to say?”

   “Something! Anything!” Alex leaned closer toward Carlos, bracing his hands flat on the thinnest layer of papers strewn over the top of the desk. “Seven months, CC. Seven months of hard work, of traveling around the country doing more research than I know I’ve ever done before. We watched...didn’t we watch resources-museums and libraries being closed around us?”

   Alex paused for a only a moment, waiting for Carlos to answer him, wanting Carlos to answer. “Didn’t we?!”
   “Yes! I know. I remember,” Carlos replied defensively.

   “And you can sit there so calmly? So quiet and passive? They have closed the door on everything we did! The script is completely gutted. It’s soul has been torn out and replaced with...with...” Alex gestured angrily toward the mound of bound papers that was their edited screenplay, “...this garbage!”

   Carlos finally sat up. “Do you think I’m happy about this? That little weasel persuaded Mr. Stoll to cancel the shoot this morning. All for the sake of the actors and crew to become acquainted with the changes to the script!”

   Alex shook his head. “This is about more than just the script, CC. Look at what they’ve done...at what they’re doing.”

   Carlos nodded emphatically. “I know, I know. They are turning an already frustrating and complicated project into a structural and creative nightmare.”

   Alex slammed both of his fists against the top of the desk. “NO!” A blob of the cold, stale coffee bounced over the lip of the nearby mug under the force of Alex’s outburst. “Damn it, Carlos! It’s about more than the stupid movie! They are changing history. You sat in those libraries, in those archives with me. You saw the documents, the books, the memos that I saw. We were learning the facts.”

   Alex picked up the script again. “What this man, this Mr. Simon-and whoever he works for or with-has done is make irrelevant, just with the stroke of a pen and the seal of the government, everything we found. Everything we know to be true!”

   Carlos stood up angrily, his chair rolling backwards into the wall behind him. “What are you suggesting, Alex? What would you have me do?”

   Alex’s face twisted with confusion. A flicker of sadness passed over his eyes. He stared at his best friend for a long moment. “It’s not just about you, Carlos. We made this project into something real. Now, it’s being turned into...into propaganda by nameless and faceless bureaucrats.”

   Carlos took a slow, deep breath. “Fine. What would you have us do?”

   “Let’s confront him,” Alex said quickly. “Let’s find out where Mr. Simon found his ‘facts’ and check them against our sources.”

   “Alex-”

   “We can go to Mr. Stoll, argue our case. He’ll have to see our side of things! Right now we’re the only ones who can show our sources. We can hold up what is being denied to exist!”

   “Alex, he won’t listen,” Carlos shouted, his voice booming off the empty walls of the office. “Look around you. Where do you think we are? What do you think this place is?”

   Alex narrowed his eyes. “So what do you suggest?”

   Carlos didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t sure how to answer. Alex didn’t wait very long for a response. “Carlos, what are you going to do?”

   Carlos’ shoulders sagged. “I don’t know,” he finally answered. He lifted his head to meet Alex’s intense gaze. “I don’t know what to do.”

   There was a small noise behind him. Carlos heard it, but only just barely. It was the sound of the glass in the window bouncing minutely under a change in the air. Carlos’ mind was aware of it yet gave the sound no immediate priority. It was simply a noise behind him, nothing more.

   Alex’s voice dropped to a somber, uneasy tone. “We’re being used, CC. We are being put as pawns on a board to be in a game being played by much more powerful people. I’m scared, CC.” Alex didn’t look away from his older friend as he spoke. His dark blue eyes bore holes through Carlos, as he if he were no longer simply looking at a man, but instead were looking past the flesh and bone to the part that mattered most. “I’m scared we’re being used for something very dark.”

   Carlos blinked uncomfortably. He considered the younger man’s words for a moment. “Alex...I can’t fathom the thought that-”

   Carlos suddenly paused. The noise from behind him had returned. The vibration in the window was louder and more sustained. Beyond the trembling glass, the air outside was becoming alive with the whirring din of rotor blades buffeting against the wind. Carlos turned around. His eyes scanned the crystal blue sky, spotting the point in the cloudless view were the dynamic sounds were emanating. A helicopter was descending toward the studio.

   “Why do I have a feeling...” Carlos muttered, mostly to himself. It was the size of the helicopter, becoming more discernible with each new second he watched it, that gave Carlos reason to suspect the primary occupant of the aircraft.

   “What is it,” Alex asked from behind Carlos. He was still standing on the other side of the desk.
   Carlos turned around. “I think the star of our movie is finally showing up for work.”

   Alex watched without an utterance as his older friend and boss quickly shuffled and scattered the clutter on his desk in a desperate search for something. A small, black notebook revealed itself in the scurrying movement. Carlos smiled excitedly at the find. He picked it up, circling around the desk in excited haste. “Now we finally might be able to do something significant.”

   Carlos was at the doorway, a step into the corridor beyond his office before he stopped to look back at Alex. The younger man was still standing in the same spot in front of his desk. Carlos looked at his friend for a long moment. Above them, the helicopter soared low over the rooftop, the whine of its engine loud under the drumming whir of the long, sleek rotors chopping through the California air.

   Alex didn’t look up at the reverberations in the ceiling. He still hadn’t even turned around. Carlos knew he needed to say something. He knew he needed to encourage his friend, to reassure him that he wasn’t going to let their project be pulled out from under them. Maybe he could say those things later. He wanted more time to make the message count. Tonight, Carlos thought to himself. Once everything else is arranged and we’re back on track. Alex has to understand that, at least. He knows we’ll talk.

   “Alex...” Carlos started to speak.

   “I’ll be along in a second.” Alex turned around. There was less than a dozen paces between them. Yet, for the first time the two friends felt like they were seeing each other across a wide and bottomless chasm. Alex nodded his head once, gesturing toward the corridor beyond Carlos. “Go ahead.”

   “You have to come too,” Carlos said, watching his friend strangely. He didn’t like the tone in Alex’s voice or the feeling in the air between them. It was dark and awkward.

   “I am,” Alex said simply.

   Carlos stood in place for only another moment. He nodded in acknowledgement, then started up the quiet hallway. Alex watched him then turned his head slowly back toward the desk and the altered screenplay. Alex had known Carlos Columbus Audaz for a long, long time. Longer, in fact, than anyone other than his family. The other kids in the neighborhood had each made their way through the rotation of friendships, to acquaintances, then peers, and finally strangers to Carlos. Somehow, Alex Vale had persevered through the social gauntlet of the reserved man who had grown up across the street. Their bond had become something that seemed wholly unbreakable.

   Alex hesitantly picked up the accursed script. He sighed, the paper feeling like an anchor in his grip. The type set seemed more like unholy branding in the recycled, egg-white, rectangular space. Unbreakable, Alex said in his mind, continuing his brief reflection on his friendship with Carlos, until now.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:50:00 +0000

PART SIX

    Gabriel Audaz blinked away the sting in his eyes. The harsh sand was making them tear up, obscuring his vision even more. He was back on the beach again. Isabella, his best friend in the world, was talking to him. She had asked him a question, the same question she always asked in this memory. He hadn’t answered her yet.

   “Gabriel...”

   He turned his head to look at her, studying the way her blonde hair stayed on her face no matter how much she pushed it off to the sides. A few of the sun-kissed, golden strands hung down almost to her nose. Gabriel looked past the wind-teased locks of her hair to her pale, piercing cobalt eyes. Looking into her eyes was like looking into lakes of solid, crystal blue. The kind of lakes found high in snow-capped mountain ranges. The kind of lakes full of enchantment and mystery.

   “You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.

   Gabriel had lowered his gaze to her lips as she spoke. He brushed the loose strands of his own soft, black hair off his brow. He remembered kissing those lips once, the way they felt like a rosy satin against his own. He thought of a flower petal in comparison, the way they are so smooth and delicate at the same time. And, in the next instant he also thought of how they are often better admired from even the smallest distance.

   “I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said. “I’m just thinking...”

   “About the answer?”

   “I guess,” he said distantly. He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him. “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued, hesitantly.

   “I’m not sure I understand.” Isabella had been leaning back, her hands buried in the sand behind her, bracing her slim body. She pushed herself upright, straightening her back. “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question.”

   Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. He could see the disappointed look on her face.

   “Do you have an answer,” she had asked after a moment.

   Gabriel could hear the concern in her voice and knew that was the reason for the expression on her glowing face. Her features were beautiful, the skin of her cheeks and brow unmarked by the slightest blemish. She was worried she wasn’t getting through to him, that she was failing in some way. She feared what it could mean. Their friendship had long-since healed from a single, previous fallout, but remained scarred.

   Gabriel finally looked at her. “I do.”

   She smiled warmly, laughing away her moment of frustration. “Then tell me.”

   Gabriel bit his lip. He hesitated for a long moment, listening to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore line. “I’m...I’m afraid,” he began to say. “...I mean really afraid...of...failing to act.”
   Isabella frowned. “Huh?”

   Gabriel leaned forward, the sand spilling off of his hands as he brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he held pressed against his chest. “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”

   “Sweety, it’s okay,” Isabella said reassuringly. “They’re natural. It is just who you are-or will be-starting to come out.”

   “That’s the thing. I don’t know who or what that is. I want to know but I also want to do the right thing. I’m joining the army, Izzy. And, I know this...stuff...doesn’t matter anymore. Not officially.”

   Isabella watched her best friend carefully. “But?”

   “But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or a name yet. I’m in complete conflict. I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life-with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am. Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

   Isabella seemed to think for a long moment, considering everything Gabriel had just confessed to feeling. Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches, closing the arm’s length between them. She hugged her best friend tightly. “Do you want to pray with me?”

   Gabriel nodded.

   A noise pierced the fog of his mind. Gabriel was awake in a flash, lost in the space of the world he was occupying for a hazy instant. Sand and gravel shifted around him in the subtle vibration surging through the bedrock. The wind making the limbs of the dry trees and brush all around sway and hiss carried in it the smell of smoke and bitter sulfur. A mortar, Gabriel thought. He blinked away more of the sleep still mired in his eyes. Against the horizon, a thin column of smoke had begun to reach above the cliffs.

   Gabriel wiped down his face with both hands, trying to awaken fully. It worked, but not the way he had intended. The deep breath he took in as he dragged his palms down his brow and cheeks drew the strong stench of iron and dirt deep into his nostrils. Gabriel quickly pulled his hands away from his face only to stare at the dried blood stained across the skin of each. It went up and down all ten fingers to each wrist, spiraling unevenly across the backs of each hand and over his shoulders.

   He knew it wasn’t his blood. Gabriel remembered the bearded stranger who had tried to take his boots and their struggle that followed. Gabriel felt the weight of the rust and crimson-stained knife tucked into his belt and remembered the other figure in the night. His brain recalled the sound of the gunman’s flesh tearing open as Gabriel drove the serrated blade deep into his body. Then, with a start, Gabriel suddenly remembered the sergeant who had saved him.

   “Sergeant,” he called out, his voice low and hoarse. There was only the sound of the wind rolling over the landscape that answered him. Gunfire echoed faintly down the wide valley, its source the same location as the smoke. “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, trying to keep his voice low. He didn’t know who else could be listening, waiting unseen in nearby places.

   Gabriel tried to stand only to collapse onto his hands and knees. A muscle-wrenching pain, tremendous and unforgiving, seized his left side. Gabriel cursed his cracked ribs. Then, he cursed himself for having forgotten them in that moment, for trying to get up too quickly. He lightly pressed his hand over his fatigues above the epicenter of the pain. He could practically feel the bruise through the dirtied cloth.

   Gabriel could have given up right there. A part of him wanted to. The left side of his torso definitely wanted him to throw in the towel, to lay back down and let time and fate roll over him. He was stuck on his hands and knees, fighting back tidal waves of pain barely starting to ebb. He was lost somewhere in a dry, cold corner of a small, war-torn country on the far side of the world.

   A rattle of gun fire reverberated down the steep walls of the frozen valley. Gabriel opened his eyes when the diluted sound reached his ears. The first thing he saw was the dried blood on his hands. Gabriel stared at it. People are dying, a voice inside of him whispered. People are dead. Gabriel lifted his head. He spotted the droplets of blood clinging to the dried leaves of nearby brush. He saw how others had become red-brown blotches caked into a discernible train in the dirt. But maybe there’s still time.

   “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, risking an uptick in the volume of his voice.

   With a slow, precise deep breath that brought with it a predicted-but far less intense-wave of pain, Gabriel grit his teeth. His even breath became a gasp as he pushed himself upright. He wanted to scream. He desperately wanted to scream. Somehow, he managed not to do so. His strength, like his courage, was holding. Breathing quick and shallow, Gabriel slowly managed to stand all the way up on his feet. He realized, as the pounding pulse of his heart stopped drumming against his eardrums, that he was humming. Gabriel chuckled at himself.

   “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, walking quietly through the brush. He was following the crimson trail laced across the brittle plant life and dusty floor. “Sergeant, this is Corporal Audaz. Can you hear me?”

   There was a low groan from somewhere nearby. Gabriel listened, adjusting his course toward the sound. “Sergeant, can you hear me?”

   A man on the ground stirred amongst the trampled brush a half dozen more paces away. Gabriel smiled with relief. There is still time, he thought. He quickened his pace, despite the pain that throbbed powerfully from his side at every other step. “Sergeant, just hang on.”

   The older man groaned, “Hold onto what? I’m already on the ground.”

   Gabriel’s smile broadened. “Yes sir, you are.”

   “Corporal,” the man said unenthusiastically, trying to roll over onto his back. He was laying on his stomach where he had collapsed in the hours Gabriel had fallen asleep. “...You’re going to get us shot if you...keep...talking so loud like that.”

   “Sorry, Sergeant,” Gabriel said, softening his voice. He stood over the wounded man, watching him trying to painfully reorient himself. The older man’s dark stubble peppered his sun-reddened, coarse cheeks. His fatigues were covered in dried dirt and blood. Gabriel blinked before saying, “But you’re already shot, sir.”

   The half-dead man opened one eye. “Yeah, well...I don’t want to get shot again. I’m...I’m not trying to to start a collection, Corporal.”

   Gabriel tried crouching. He winced as the pain in his side suddenly ratcheted sharply upward. It felt as if the blood and muscle around his left ribs were suddenly coming to a boil. The sensation was too much, forcing Gabriel to stand fully upright again. “You need some water, sir,” Gabriel said, nearly out of breath.

   “I know. But you gave me almost all of your water a little while ago.” The sergeant exhaled sharply, groaning in pain as he finally rolled all the way over onto his back. He sighed and said with his dry voice getting raspy, “Getting shot sucks.”

   Gabriel smiled. “Yes, sir.”

   The man on the ground at Gabriel’s feet, struggling just to stay conscious, dizzily pointed a blood-stained finger up at him. “You should avoid it.”

   “Yes, Sergeant.” Gabriel held his smile. He watched the sergeant drop his arm against the dirt. “Still, you need water.”

   “I’m not taking the last of your water, Corporal!”

   The echoing din of the distant battle swept slowly down the valley. Gabriel lifted his gaze to the smoke climbing into the dawn-lit sky. The few clouds there were stretched at canted angles from east to west. The rising sun was bathing them in brilliant light, coating their windswept, downy bodies in a breathtaking gold hue. The heavens beyond were changing from the velvet darkness of the early morning to the pink and blue of the approaching day.

   Gabriel hadn’t realized until that moment how captivating the landscape in that corner of the world could be. He found himself distracted by the view provided by the low cliffside they had stumbled up during the late hours of the night. He smiled, despite himself. He was thankful for the opportunity he felt he had been blessed with. He had been given the chance to live to witness the birth of a new day and a new lease on life.

   Gabriel thanked God for the opportunity received, then cast his eyes back down from the illuminated clouds to the column of smoke. “There might be some water that way, sir. Up the valley in that direction,” Gabriel said, pointing toward the cliffs and the smoke beyond them. “There could be more of our guys there, sir. Medics and the like.”

   The sergeant did his best to nod. He hardly moved at all, but it was still a noticeable gesture. “Good, Corporal. Go. Get water and get your side looked at. Help the boys there win the day.”

   “I’m not leaving you here.”

   The sergeant coughed a chuckle. “I’m already dead, Corporal.”

   Gabriel shook his head. There was an unshakable determination in his eyes. The sergeant could see it clearly, even in the haze of his semi-consciousness. “Not dead enough to stay here, sir.”

   “Corporal-”

   Gabriel took a deep breath. He knew what he was about to do was going to create a tremendous, body-shocking amount of pain for both of them. Action had to be taken. They may suffer the effects of their injuries and live, but Gabriel knew without doubt they would surely die if they remained in place, avoiding the challenges of their circumstances.

   “Sorry, sir,” Gabriel interrupted, preparing to lift the wounded man off the ground. “It’s time to live. You’ll just have to die some other day.”

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:38:00 +0000

PART FIVE

     For a long time there was only the night and the myriad of cricket songs. Then, all at once, power found its way into the silent house. Electricity was pushed down the idle lines swaying in the occasional breeze. After ten hours without any energy, the cold gadgets and essential appliances plugged into wall outlets throughout the quiet rooms came back to life. Digital clocks beeped and ignorantly flashed the wrong hour on their illuminated faces. The refrigerator rattled and popped as it reactivated. A small telephone chirped once then returned to silence.

   Carlos Columbus Audaz was only half asleep when the air conditioner outside of his window suddenly snapped on, its heavy fan loudly whirring just beyond the thin pane of glass. It made enough noise, along with the vibration of the vents in the walls, to startle Carlos fully awake. Groggily, he yawned and stretched over his wrinkled quilt and sheets. The smell of paper was strong in his nose He’d fallen asleep with his cousin’s latest letter over his face. Gently pushing the wrinkled, college-ruled sheet of notebook paper aside, Carlos looked at the glowing face of his old watch. The lens was scratched. The wristband was stiff with years of dried sweat. Carlos sighed and shook his head. Barely an hour had gone by since he had last looked at the time.

   He pushed himself upright onto his elbows. One leg was already hanging off the side of the bed, his foot almost touching the soft, thick carpet. Carlos shifted, putting both feet flat on the floor. He stood up slowly, the groggy sensation persisting mercilessly. He tried to remember the last time he had gotten any real sleep. After a minute, and then two, Carlos gave up. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever had a real, decent night’s sleep. It didn’t matter. He certainly wasn’t getting any sleep these days. Stepping into the bathroom, Carlos figured that over the last four nights he had managed to acquire only about a total of six or seven hours of sleep. Reading helped, but it was not a lasting antidote. That was one reason Carlos had dug the letter from Gabriel Audaz out of his cluttered belongings. The other reason had been the dinner with his family. Sitting so close to his uncle had been a grating test of Carlos’ patience and will.

   Dinner was served and eaten on an old, round, glass table that had been on the cracked concrete porch since Carlos was twelve. It had been their first summer in California since his father had moved them to Los Angeles from St. Augustine, Florida. The table was bought used, the umbrella that would have gone at the table’s center declared missing long before Carlos’s father had purchased the aluminum-framed furniture piece at a flea market. Carlos remembered that besides birthday parties and the rare winter mornings when his parents felt it was cool enough to enjoy a cup of coffee on the patio, the table was hardly ever used.

   “You know your father started spending more time out here,” his mother had said a few minutes into dinner. The conversation had been lagging. The older adults surrounding Carlos seemed so unsure of what to discuss; and, Carlos had nothing he felt like contributing.

   He looked up from his food. “Really,” Carlos asked with little enthusiasm.

   His mother nodded, “Oh, yes. He said he finally wanted to get some genuine use out of this thing before...” Her words trailed off.

   Carlos looked up from his food to his mother again. He couldn’t explain why, but he suddenly felt confused by the heavy appearance of mourning in her eyes. His mother was supposed to be a firebrand, a tenacious and passionate woman quick with her wit and intelligence. She was supposed to be brave, a figure who couldn’t help but naturally demand your attention and respect just by walking into the room. Yet, there at the half-heartedly decorated table covered with plates and serving dishes that were old and discolored, Lucia Audaz appeared weak. The inability to say something so simple as the concept of death, to have lost her frankness and talent to be direct and out with it...Carlos found it tragic.

   He quickly decided to finish her sentence. “Since he died?”

   Carlos felt and then saw the sharp, pointed glares his older sister, aunt and uncle were shooting at him from their places across the table. He shrugged his shoulders, feigning ignorance.

   “Yes,” his mother whispered. Lucia Audaz’s eyes were gazing in the direction of her son but she wasn’t looking at him. It was more like she was looking past Carlos, to another person, another time. “Since he died.”

   It wasn’t long after the awkward silence that followed that Carlos’ uncle took the reigns of topics to discuss. Carlos quickly began to feel nagged by his uncle. It started off subtly. Broad questions about studio life and living and breathing a movie rolled without much pause over the glass table top. Maybe it was because Carlos felt defensive since the fiery looks his extended family members had given him. Maybe it was because he simply didn’t like the undertone in his uncle inquiries. It didn’t matter. The conversation was irrevocably heading in one direction. To Carlos’ surprise, his mother did not intervene until it seemed like both men were about to jump across the table at each other.

   It had been when his pride was insulted, and then his work ethics and patriotism were questioned and mocked that Carlos could not take sitting at that table any longer. He stood up suddenly as voices had been steadily rising. His stance was aggresive, his chest heaving with hot anger. His shoulders were locked as his hands tightly pressed down on the wavy texture of the glass table top. His uncle took the posture as a signal of escalation. The older man was half way out of his chair when Lucia Audaz’s voice cut through the mild night. The heated argument was over, the noise echoing quickly away. Lucia, with a course and low, even voice, commanded her brother-in-law to sit down.

   Mother and son stared at each other. Neither spoke for a second’s-long eternity. Finally, Carlos blinked. “Thank you, mother. Dinner tasted very good. If you’ll excuse me...” There had been the heavy sound of stunned silence behind him as Carlos walked back into the house. He could feel their eyes staring him down, watching him until he disappeared into the darker recesses through the open doorway.

   In his room, Carlos stood with his back against the door. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. A shiver of panic lapped up and down his body. He had shouted his uncle down over insensitive, but meaningless comments. He’d stared his mother down then turned his back to her. He was feeling like the defiant child suddenly and fearfully barricaded in his own room.

   A noise in the kitchen shook Carlos back from his drowsy thoughts of the previous evening.

* * * *

   Lucia Audaz steadied herself against the cool granite counter. In her mind she was trying to stay focused, to keep her frustration down and away. It was nearly an overwhelming enough challenge to keep herself steady. It was taking her longer each day to get out of bed. The dizzy spells and pulsing, crippling ache that would twist its way around her head and then down her spine once went away as quickly as they had appeared. Now, it took minutes.

   Lucia opened the cupboard above her head. Reaching for a can of coffee on the second shelf, she spied her fingers strangely quivering. No, she commanded herself, willing her nerves to stay steady. It wasn’t working as well as it once did. The coffee can felt heavy in her grip. It took two hands to lift and bring it down from the raised shelf. She still almost dropped it. The wide, aluminum can landed hard against the granite countertop, Lucia’s wrinkled fingers still clutching it. She knew the sound had shot through the house. She didn’t want everyone awake, not yet.

   The scoop of aromatic grounds trembled disconcertingly in Lucia’s grip. Her weary eyes, holding back stinging tears, watched her whole hand bounce and twitch without control. Her will was strong, it had always been. But now, in the dim light of her kitchen in the waning years of her home and family, Lucia Audaz felt she had no power to stop the painful dissolve of her entire world.

   “Mom?”

   Lucia nearly dropped the entire scoop into the waiting filter. She took a deep, startled breath, gathering every ounce of strength to steady herself. “Yes, son?”

   Carlos waited for her to turn around. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the trim that was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Lucia didn’t turn to face her son. She kept her back to him, adding another scoop of coffee grounds into the bleached-white filter. “Why are you up so early,” Carlos finally asked. “It’s only 4:30.”

   “I coulnd’t sleep. And, I thought you might be getting up. You never liked to sleep in.”

   Carlos let himself smirk. It was true. He liked getting up with sun. Though, while he reveled in it in his youth, at thirty he no longer could muster the enthusiasm. Maybe it was the growing lack of sleep. Maybe it was just life in general.

   “I’m making coffee,” Lucia said, a positive inflection revealing itself in her otherwise even tone. “Would you like to have a cup?”

   “I can’t,” Carlos said. “Thank you, though. I have to get ready. I have to be on set soon.”

   Lucia nodded. “Of course.”

   Carlos’ brow furrowed. “It’s work, Mom. I have to go.”

   Lucia finally turned around, facing her son for the first time that morning. She once thought he was going to grow up to look just like his father. More than that, there was a time when Lucia was convinced that her son would mature into the man that his father had been, that the character of Adrian Audaz would become the mold Carlos Columbus Audaz would not only shape his life around, but reshape and make better.

   It was a different time and a different world when Lucia considered such things, when thoughts like those made her smile. Instead, the young man standing in the doorway of her kitchen had the physical features similar to her beloved and deceased husband. But the shadow of that man had faded over her son. This man was family but he was also a stranger to her. She looked at him as such. Who he was, Lucia did not know. Who he was becoming was a question she feared the answer to, the evidence of his path disparaging to her once bountiful hopes.

   Lucia blinked once then nodded her head, almost diplomatically. “Yes, Carlos. I know.”

   Carlos stopped leaning against the slightly warped doorframe, standing straighter as he put his hands on his waist. “Are you all right?”

   Lucia took a deep, quiet breath as she turned her back to him, returning to her first morning task. “Yes, son. Don’t be late for work.”

   Carlos’ hands dropped to his sides. His mother’s distant words struck him like a cannon shot. He blinked, stunned by her cold frankness. He opened his mouth, his lips beginning to form words that never came. There was nothing he could say. So he turned around, walking away to his room while his mother quietly finished making coffee. He never noticed the way the muscles in her arms were as tense as tree limbs. He didn’t seem to be aware of the fact she was struggling to keep her body still, to fend off the queasiness bubbling in her system, to simply keep from collapsing on the floor in front of him.

   When the moment’s new dizziness had passed and she had finally swallowed back her nausea, Lucia Audaz filled a pitcher with water, pouring it with well rehearsed, calculated and precise movements into the reservoir of the coffee pot. She never wondered or feared if that would be the last time she would be able to do such a simple task herself. Lucia simply closed the lid over the filled container, making sure the plastic cover snapped into place. She pressed the ON button which glowed red under the pressure of her fingertip. Then, she turned around and walked casually out of the kitchen, remembering to lightly tap the light switch on the wall.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:00:00 +0000

PART FOUR

    A twig from the dried brush snapped loudly in the still, late hour. Gabriel Audaz opened his eyes in a startled instant. He didn’t breathe. That was probably for the best. The first breath he had taken had been more painful than he was ready for. A sharp, stinging ache clawed at his lungs and chest, making his breathing shallow and staggered.

    A silver coil of rancid smoke from a thin cigarette snaked its way through the desert air near Gabriel. He tried to ignore it to not stare at the smoldering butt of paper and foul tobacco held between the dry lips of a man Gabriel could barely discern in the late night darkness. The battle in the air had ceased some time ago. The curtains and trails of smoke had faded to nearly transparent traces, leaving the twinkling stars in the freezing, pre-dawn sky.

    Gabriel’s ears burned in the awful silence of the war weary landscape. Even the dying fires in the distance seemed to exist without any kind of noise. There was only the sound of the strange man breathing as he walked slowly through the dry brush. Gabriel’s heart pounded with a racing drumbeat in his chest. The man’s slow march was leading him away one gradual step at a time. He was scanning the dark around him, leery of any movement.

    Where are the others, Gabriel thought, struggling not to panic. He didn’t want to tremble or flinch any more than he wanted to feel the reeling ache in his chest and side. Why is there no gun fire? Am I the only one left? Gabriel inhaled as slowly and gently as he could manage. The smell of the man’s cigarette was finally fading.

    Wait, Gabriel thought as he quietly exhaled, wincing in the pain of what he was certain were broken ribs. He remembered the soldier from the sky. Suddenly, Gabriel realized he couldn’t completely feel the ground. His head, neck, and the top of his back were in the dirt. Cold sand had turned to matted mud in the sweat-damp hair extending past the rim of his helmet and down to his neck. The rest of Gabriel’s body was splayed across the unmoving torso and legs of someone else-the paratrooper who had fallen into Gabriel’s parachute.

    Gabriel managed to move his hand, just slightly, before he froze once more. A near-silent gasp escaped his lips. A spray of dust brushed against his face. More twigs snapped in the dark. The loud movement was much closer than before. Gabriel’s heart beat was fast it was more like the vibrations of a jack hammer than a rhythmic pulse in his body. He thought at first the man from before had quickly circled back around. The figure that appeared out of the dense, cold night didn’t quite look the same. Gabriel could barely see him and he wasn’t about to strain himself to gain a better look. The stench of sweat unwashed for weeks or longer reached out like a malicious entity from the heavily garbed man. Gabriel could still hear the frozen plants breaking under the man’s feet. His gait was uneven, one leg limping behind the other.

    The man stopped a step away from the spot where Gabriel was laying as still as the paratrooper half underneath him. Gabriel kept his eyes away from the hints of firelight stretching through the night from unknown places. He tried to hold his breath, inhaling and exhaling quickly when he thought the man had turned away. Over the raging stampede of his frightened heart, Gabriel thought he could hear the man mumbling. He felt the man brush against his boots as he took a few cautious steps into Gabriel’s field of view. With his eyes almost completely closed, Gabriel still saw the man’s lips moving hurriedly. They were barely visible within the wiry, greasy nest of facial hair twice as long as the hair on Gabriel’s head.

    Is he praying or simply talking to himself? Gabriel couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sure if it mattered. Is he an enemy soldier or just some wandering tribesman? In the fleeting glimpses Gabriel managed, he could see no rifle or pistol in view on the man. His thick robe of hastily and inexpertly sewn fuzzy, matted patches or dirty, sweat-stiffened tunic showed no evidence of any kind of hidden firearm. So is this man checking closely for signs of life or is he looking for someone or something specific? Gabriel couldn’t answer these questions. All he could do was lay there, atop the corpse of his fellow soldier he wasn’t sure he even knew. All Gabriel could do was pray he would survive.

    Still mumbling in a language far from English, the wandering stranger crouched down near Gabriel’s feet. He was out of Gabriel’s limited range of vision. Gabriel would have to move in order to see him. Moment’s later, Gabriel realized he didn’t have to move to know what was happening.

    A calloused hand of thick, red fingers slapped against Gabriel’s left foot. It was a probing glance of skin against boot. Gabriel tried not to flinch. He felt his toes curl which made his heart leap into his throat. The man’s slurred mumbling continued unabated, Gabriel’s lack of lifelessness still apparently unnoticed. Gabriel wanted to swallow. He needed to swallow. His throat was on fire. Saliva was pooling in his mouth. He didn’t dare risk the movement of muscles he feared were too easily visible.

    The thick fingers tapped along the top of his boot, searching for signs of life and the knotted laces keeping the heavy shoe on Gabriel’s foot. Gabriel could feel the dry, icy breezy teasing the beads of sweat collecting on his skin. How much longer, he wondered to himself. How much longer before he realizes I’m not dead?

    The bearded stranger found what he was looking for. Gabriel could feel the fingers going to work undoing the loops and knots on the top of his left boot. Every nerve and muscle in Gabriel’s body was as tense and tight as a board. He knew things could get out of hand at any moment. He was going to need to be ready. Gabriel managed the will to move his fingers, bending and flexing them as subtly as he could. He felt the dead soldier’s belt under the cold tips of his fingers. Gabriel was looking for a weapon or anything he could quickly use as one.

    The laces on his left boot were nearly untied. At the same time, Gabriel stretched his fingers out a few more centimeters. His eyes were looking around, scanning the edges of the cold, hellish landing spot. He spotted his dusty rucksack and rifle tangled in the nearby brush. The mumbling stranger tugged on Gabriel’s boot. On pure instinct, Gabriel tried to counter the motion, jerking his foot back toward himself.

    In that same moment, the man stopped mumbling. Gabriel knew the game was up. He lifted his head, his eyes instantly drawn to the distant firelight glinting off a small, sharp knife the man had snatched with a hunter’s speed from his belt. Gabriel looked at the knife intensely, then up at the eyes of the man holding it. Their gaze was locked for only a moment, each of their hearts beating like mad. The stranger shouted something, a garbled warning perhaps. Gabriel could barely hear it through the thunderous thudding of his pulse against his eardrums.

    The man raised his arm, the knife hanging for less than a second above Gabriel’s foot before the it was brought back down, the wool-covered arm moving in a blur. But Gabriel was already in motion. The padded tip of his boot connected with the man’s bearded chin with enough force to send him sprawling backwards. Gabriel felt the stained blade graze his leg, the fabric of his pants sheering under the razor edge. It missed carving into his flesh by the width of a hair.

    The momentum of his defense had sent Gabriel rolling to one side and off his fallen peer. The old stranger was trying to recover in the dirt nearby. He was moaning loudly, crying out for help. Gabriel sat upright on his knees. He glanced at the man and then at the ground. He saw the knife at the same time as it’s owner, listing sideways where it had landed, tip-down, in the sand.

    Together, the two men lunged at the same spot. Adrenaline was boiling in Gabriel’s veins as he collided with the older man. Neither reached the knife. They wrestled and fought feverishly, trying to pin or strangle the other before getting overpowered. The old man kept up his shouting, his groaning, rasping voice breaking through the silence around them.

    Gabriel managed an advantage he thought he could hold. But a cloud of sand and pebbles peppered his eyes as he swung down with his fist. He slumped backward and off the flailing man, trying to wipe the stinging debris from his eyes. A rock cracked against his helmet with surprising force, sending Gabriel crashing to the ground. He tried to recover as quickly as he could, rolling onto his back before the man could attack again. It was too late. He was on his side when the bearded man leapt. The dirty blade glinted in his hand once more. His rasping voice bellowed noisily above him as he moved his arms in a swift, tight arch.

    Suddenly, a sharp crack pierced the night. The older man straddling Gabriel’s body stiffened, his voice dropping off as he choked on a desperate breath he could not take. Gabriel felt a strange warmth on his face and neck. In the dark, he hadn’t been able to see the fine mist of blood that had erupted from the man’s chest. He had been shot, the bullet traveling fast and hot in the late night.

    The dirty knife plopped against the dirt, the strength in the man’s fingers going slack. He was dead before he toppled over into the sand. Gabriel was stunned. He lay propped on one elbow in complete surprise and confusion. The sound of the brush beyond his small landing site grabbed Gabriel’s attention away from the dead stranger. Gabriel moved urgently, the hilt of the knife tucked tightly into his sweaty grip as he tried to sink into the shadows around the scene.

    The man who had been smoking the cigarette appeared out of the darkness as if the night itself had given him shape. He stopped in the stirred sand between the two bodies, the dead paratrooper and the freshly shot stranger. Gabriel watched him carefully, trying to know when to move. Gabriel knew he would only have one opportunity to strike. The man had a rifle. Gabriel had a knife. He had to make his effort count.

    The hunter crouched down, examining with surprise the body of the man in the long, wool tunics. Gabriel knew this was it. The rifleman’s back was turned, not all the way but maybe just enough. There was no counting to three like in the movies or books. Gathering his strength and courage, trying to ignore the racing, reverberating beat of his heart pounding in his chest and feeling another hot surge of adrenaline rush through his body like a tsunami, Gabriel leapt to his feet.

    But he did not go farther than a step and half. He stopped and turned his head sharply. The fevered, mad cry of another man barreling out of the shadows made Gabriel nearly jump out of his skin. It was another soldier. Gabriel watched him with baffled amazement. The charging American had startled the rifleman who stumbled back to his feet while trying to turn around at the same time. Gabriel had managed a glimpse of the gun in the soldier’s hand. He had a shot and the time to take it had arrived.

    The American’s rifle jammed. Where there should have been another deafening pop under a blinding, white-hot muzzle flare aimed in the direction of the tobacco-scented warrior, there was a much more disheartening noise. A ringing, hollow click and retching of small gears that was as unexpected as it was disconcerting.

    The enemy’s gun worked with little effort. The older rifle was off his shoulder and loosely in his trembling grip in an instant. His own shot rang loudly, the muzzle flare as brilliant as the American’s gun would have been. The bullet that leapt like a rocket from the recesses of the dark, scathed barrel did its job as precisely as any other might.

    Gabriel knew his countryman would be hit even before he was. The whole attempt seemed like suicide the moment it had started. When the newer, more advanced weapon made its fatal failure, Gabriel started on the step he had stopped. He stayed behind but to the side of his fellow paratrooper, fearing the bullet’s path would find him after exiting the back of his peer a few steps ahead. The soldier slumped to his knees, revealing the breathless corporal racing out of the darkness.

    The rifleman saw Gabriel too late. The teenaged soldier pounced at the bearded man, knocking the arm with the rifle in it aside just as his trigger finger squeezed firmly. The shot was a powerful, heart-stopping clap of noise. It muted the hiss of the hot bullet traveling into the snow-dusted brush and frozen darkness. The eye-opening noise did nothing to cover the deafening gasp of the enemy who sank under the weight crashing down on top of him. Gabriel watched his eyes, studying without word or thought in that incredible moment how wide and fearful they became as the dirty blade silently dug into the rifleman’s torso.

    By the third, heaving breath the enemy was dead. His blood was hot on Gabriel’s trembling hand. The dust hadn’t settled around the new corpse before Gabriel was on his feet again, backing away from the life he had just taken.

    “Good work, Corporal...” said a tired, hoarse voice near his feet.

    Gabriel turned around swiftly to look at the fellow American laying in the dirt. He thought he could make out stripes on the man’s shoulder, but he wasn’t sure how many there were. Gabriel guessed he was a sergeant. He didn’t know his name or what company he was with. Right at that moment, it didn’t matter. Gabriel peered at the sergeant’s rifle then over at the old stranger who had owned the deadly knife. “You took that shot?”

    “That’s right. And you...you’re welcome, Corporal.”

    “Thank you, Sergeant. But then why-”

    A bullet slapped against the sand a few feet from the lifeless paratrooper. Another round whistled hauntingly as it zipped past Gabriel.

    “Another time, Corporal! The enemy’s comin’! We’ve got to move!”

    Gabriel began to panic. A moment ago, his movements and decisions seemed so clear and easy to act on. Now, suddenly, Gabriel felt lost. His thoughts were jumbled up, his mind distracted by the wounded sergeant, his lack of any real weaponry, and the sharp, knuckle-digging ache that would not show him mercy emanating from the side of his chest. From the darkness surrounding them, bullets moving too fast to see crisscrossed the small arena of dirt and blood.

    “Can you walk,” Gabriel asked the bleeding officer.

    The sergeant tried to sit up but quickly gave up. “Ha, ha...no!”

    Shouting voices echoed over the fading gun shots. The enemy soldiers were drawing closer. He could hear the brush crunching as their hurried feet crashed through it.

    Gabriel nodded his head. “Okay. Okay,” he said, trying to think. He was scanning the scene, trying to see into the dark. Never more than this would Gabriel have been more than thankful for just a little bit of sunlight. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes. In a passing glance, he spotted his own rifle, abandoned with his rucksack a short walk away.

    His heaving chest made him wince as he looked back down at the sergeant. “Okay,” Gabriel said again, fighting back the pain that made him want to wheeze. “i’m going to have to carry you, sir.”

    “What? No.”

    Gabriel nodded his head. “Yes, sir. I can’t leave you here.”

    “They’ll kill us both.”

    “Then we’ll die as soldiers together, sir.” There was an unmistakable honesty in Gabriel’s trembling voice. “That’s better than dying out here alone.”

    The sergeant stared up at the young paratrooper. Another shot cracked in the dark distance quickly being closed. Finally, the sergeant nodded his head to Gabriel who hurried to grab his near-forgotten gear. The enemy was within sight, the shadows of the early hour bending around them then retreating away completely as their guns came alive.

    The fiery rattle of deadly bullets sprayed through the air and through the brush. Gabriel narrowly avoided his life coming to an end. With his rifle and rucksack slung over one shoulder, the frightened corporal returned to his wounded officer. With gritted teeth, he hoisted the sergeant he didn’t know onto the other shoulder.

    “Let’s go, corporal!”

    Practically dragging the wounded man, Gabriel led them away from the blood-stained landing site. Machine guns ratcheted a barrage of bullets toward them that whistled and hissed as they sailed through the air. Thin fountains of dirt sprang up at their feet where shots fell short. Twigs snapped loudly under their hasty, stumbling gait as they ducked the searing shells passing all too closely.

    Gabriel felt a shot near his leg. It singed the thin hairs on his skin as it tore through the already gashed fabric. He took a deep, crippling breath. Tears welled up in his dirt-clotted eyes. The pain only pushed Gabriel harder. He tried to run even faster, carrying himself and the sergeant as swiftly as he could into the predawn darkness.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:41:00 +0000

PART THREE

    Carlos Columbus Audaz breathed in slowly. How old was he? How old did he feel right at that moment? Still in that disorienting, hazy space between asleep and awake, Carlos Columbus Audaz could have been eight years old all over again. He was in his childhood bedroom, a medium-sized square space in the back corner of a faded peach-colored stucco ranch house. The sound of his phone buzzing across the warped, wooden end-table beside his bed woke Carlos up further. Ignoring the vibrating device an arm’s reach away, Carlos glanced around his room. He scanned the old posters still tacked to the walls, the colors yellowed and opaque, the edges worn down and curling at the corners. He looked at his open closet, at the pile of clothes falling out of it. The door itself was partially and permanently ajar as it hung onto a single remaining hinge.

   The top of the end table shook again as his phone gave a few more short, quick bursts of noise. Whomever had called had just left a voicemail. Carlos climbed out of bed, straightening his wrinkled clothes as best he could. He had fallen asleep almost as soon as he had arrived. A nearby comic book-themed clock told him his nap had only lasted about an hour.

   It was the smell of his mother’s cooking and not the hum of his mobile phone dancing across the bedside table that had awoken him. He stared past his reflection in the full length mirror mounted to the back of his bedroom door. The dusty glass rattled as another door in the house was opened and then quickly, forcefully shut again. The din of his family was growing in intensity as dinner time approached. Carlos wasn’t paying them much attention yet. His thoughts were focused on himself. He knew where he was in time. His reflection told him how old he was. His soft, jet-black hair he tried to maintain at a stylishly unkempt short to medium length was subtly showing signs of thinning at his widow’s peak. The skin around his tired, reddened green eyes was a little more baggy than it used to be. The lines of his jaw seemed harder and more defined. His chest looked broader, along with his waist, but without any real improvement or difference in his muscle definition.

   Maybe it was because he was turning thirty in a few days. That might explain the strange feeling wrapped tightly inside of himself. He felt it like an anchor on his shoulders and in his soul. Yet, he could not define it or explain it. He wasn’t even sure when he had started to feel this way. Surely not forever, Carlos thought to himself.

   Suddenly, the sound of his mother’s voice, rolling unstoppably like an avalanche down the hallway to his room, shook Carlos out of his stupor. He heard her rapid footsteps across the carpet an instant before he heard her call to him through the door. While often loud and direct, his mother’s voice still had a tenderness about it. Her spanish rolled off her tongue like a song. She often spoke it around the house but always preferred english when out in public. His mother had worked hard to become an American citizen long before his birth and so chose to speak the language of the country she loved over her own native speech.

   She had called him to dinner and there was no keeping Luisa Audaz waiting.

   “Look everyone,” his sister announced as Carlos entered the kitchen. “The great filmmaker is awake. Shh, he may be creating in his mind right now,” she added, chuckling deviously.

   Carlos screwed up his face at her, his only reply to his always sarcastic sibling. Debbie Audaz was two years older than Carlos, a fact she often made sure to needlessly point out to him or anyone she felt might be curious to know. She was standing against the counter, sweat beading on her brow. She was either waiting to be helpful or just trying to secure attention for herself while other people stayed busy around her. She was absently fingering the slightly tarnished engagement ring on her left hand. It had been over two years since her fiance had proposed. It wasn’t a case of cold feet or procrastination on the couples’ part. They were in the waiting period to get all three marriage licenses needed in order to make it official.

   Carlos felt a tender, wrinkled hand on his shoulder. He caught a whiff of familiar perfume before turning around to be greeted by the smiling face of his sixty year-old aunt, Victoria. “Ahh, mijo,” she said radiantly. He had always felt as if he were her favorite. Carlos made a show of hugging her tight in front of his sister. “How are you feeling,” his aunt asked.

   Carlos smiled down at the shorter woman. She was watching his face carefully. “I’m fine, Aunt Victoria. I promise.”

   Aunt Victoria blinked but kept her gaze locked onto Carlos, peering without a sense of end into his own eyes. Carlos quickly went from feeling awkward to uncomfortable. What is she looking for, he thought, practically in a panic.

   Just then, his mother’s voice cut through the steamy silence of the kitchen. Carlos jumped in surprise. His aunt smiled up at him, letting go of his shoulders she had been gripping tightly under her wrinkled fingers. “You’re going to burn a hole in my son like that,” Luisa had said curtly when she entered the kitchen and pushed past her sister in-law. “Now come stir your sauce. I’d like to serve dinner now.”

   Carlos stared at his mother. Even sweating in the sultry kitchen that felt as if it had never been touched by an air conditioner, even moving in a busied fluster of motion, Luisa Audaz was radiant. Her strength was like Atlas, her shoulders strong and square as she carried the weight of her family across the top of her back and through space and time.

   “Carlos, go sit down at the table,” she said, turning away from the overcrowded stove. “I’ll bring you a plate.”

   Carlos didn’t argue. He simply nodded, walking quietly into the dining room. A spicy-sweet scent flooded his nostrils as he crossed the threshold into the softly lit room. It was a wide rectangle with a pair of narrow, curtained windows on the far wall past the foot of the dining table. His mother had repainted in there since he had last been at home. Two years, he realized. At least that. The thick, dark brown, wooden table was the same. All the chairs appeared to be the originals, a fact confirmed when Carlos applied some pressure with his index finger to the top of the one nearest to him. The ornate carvings along the sides and head of each chair were crowned by an evenly finished cross. In his youth, Carlos had been roughhousing during a random adventure. His game ended when the chair rocketing him into space sank backwards against the wall and then to the floor. The jarring impact had made him dizzy and nearly snapped the hand carved cross clean off the top of the chair.

   “Not in there,” his mother said, leaning her head through the doorway.

   Carlos turned around. “Why?”

   Suddenly, the hazy bulbs on the low-hanging chandelier went dark. The mustard-orange glow from above the stove vanished. Everything in the house went quiet and still. Carlos glanced around curiously. He looked at his mother again with confusion.

   “It happens everyday, mijo.”

   “Everyday?”

   “Yes. Sometimes later. But, sometimes not. Today is not.” Luisa shrugged her shoulders. “We’ve learned to start doing without during the time.”

   Carlos began to speak, “But...” His mother waved her hand, brushing his thought away.

   “We’ll eat outside. The table is already set. Your sister and Uncle Ramòn are outside already.”

   Carlos looked toward the windows at the far side of the room. His eyes lingered on the lifeless and lightless chandelier hanging over the center of the table. He turned to his mother once more. “But-”

   “Go, Carlos! Dinner is ready.”

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:38:00 +0000

PART TWO

   Gabriel Audaz awoke with a start. He blinked away the moment’s disorientation. He didn’t even remember falling asleep. It was a symptom of his body he didn’t understand. Despite a decent amount of rest, energy from a good meal, and a self-conscious effort to stay positive and awake, Gabriel had succumb. School plays, big exams with the weight of his future riding on a dozen or more rows of scantron bubbles, even dates he’d let himself get talked or dragged into would result in the same phenomena: nearly insurmountable, embarrassing drowsiness. If he became nervous enough, Gabriel would find himself sliding down a yawn-filled tunnel toward dreamland.

   For a long minute after being stirred by a sudden shudder of turbulence, Gabriel felt extremely awkward. That gnawing embarrassment from his recent youth persisted until a new noise reached his ears. He glanced down the length of the noisy Osprey until his halo-green eyes found a soldier heaving into a soggy paper bag. Just like that, Gabriel’s unease about his nervous narcolepsy diminished far from the front of his mind. He wondered briefly in the impending action his company was about to face would shock his system, finally waking him up in the mad waves of his anxiety.

   “Thirty seconds!”

   Gabriel Audaz, a newly promoted corporal in the United States Army Airborne, looked up at his commanding officer. He took a deep breath, trying to ignore the sound and smell of the soldier upchucking everything he’d ever eaten into the small, white bag gripped like a life line in his white-knuckled fingers. A second later the signal was given and Gabriel rose uneasily to his feet. He had been training for this moment for the last six months. The fact that it had arrived was not easing the terrible fear crawling through every trembling muscle in Gabriel’s body.

   The already dim, mustard yellow and dingy orange lights of the grease, kerosene, and vomit-smelling steel world around the standing soldiers suddenly went dark. A piercing red glow instantly replaced the fleeting darkness. Outside the bulkhead, Gabriel could hear the deep, droning, steady whirr of the powerful propellor engines. He was trying to listen beyond the awesome horsepower driving each rotor blade around in racing, blurred circles through the chilly, dark sky.

   “What are you most afraid of?”

   Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the paratrooper behind him. “Huh,” he asked over the din of the plane. The soldier peered at him strangely, annoyed to be dragged out of his own thoughts by the surprise query.

   “Gabriel...”

   Gabriel turned his head and blinked in surprise. Where in one moment he had been on a V-22 Osprey flying into enemy territory in southern Afghanistan, Gabriel Audaz suddenly found himself staring into the face of his best friend. He recognized the scene from over a year before the present late night in the armored plane.

   “You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.

   Gabriel brushed loose strands of his soft, black hair off his brow. It was another nervous tick, though that one easier to control. It was also breezy. They were sitting in the sand, the waves crashing nearby against the beach. A blanket of stars twinkled above them before being erased in a pocket of clouds hanging in the western sky above the ocean. Lightning lit the rolling, gray masses whose tops were climbing high into the distant sky. An occasional rumble of thunder found its way to the sandy shore line.

   “I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said. “I’m just thinking...”

   “About the answer?”

   Gabriel glanced at his best friend, then away from her. He looked briefly over the sand to the wind-whipped flames of a small camp fire dancing in the frequent gusts pushed off the churning waters. Their friends were laughing and playing around the amber and yellow light. “I guess,” he had said distantly. He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him. “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued hesitantly.

   “I’m not sure I understand.”

   The environment suddenly changed. Gabriel blinked, his mind back to the present, to the line of soldiers standing in the aircraft. The ramp at the tail of the plane was opening. Eddies of cold, dirt-scented air mixed with the engine exhaust shoved and wound their way up the length of the flying vehicle. The red lights on the bulkheads shifted to green. They were jumping. The time to fight or die had come.

   “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question,” Gabriel’s best friend had said. The two of them had decided to play truth or dare, only without the dares. They were graduating high school in a matter of weeks and they didn’t want to part ways without knowing everything they didn’t already about one another.

   Gabriel knew she had suspected a secret he had been keeping inside of himself. The question about his fear had been another way to get through the locked door around his heart. He wanted to tell someone, but then, simultaneously, he absolutely did not. Giving it a voice, a description with clearly defined words would make it real. He was afraid of what his world would become after that. And yet, that fear was still less than another.

   A strong tap on his shoulder brought Gabriel’s mind forward again. He nodded his head and tapped the shoulder in front of him. The status check went up the line of soldiers to the commanding officer waiting near the door. Behind that man, the dark sky suddenly became bright and alive. A fiery burst consumed the view beyond the ramp. The concussion slammed against the ear drums of the soldiers almost as hard as it hit the plane. Everyone in line braced themselves as the Osprey jumped and rocked from side to side. Gabriel watched the view past the open ramp. He saw the other planes in the convoy dive and pitch away from the exploding rounds beginning to pepper the air.

   “Do you have an answer,” she had asked. Her name was Isabella Faroe. She had been in love with Gabriel since the seventh grade. They had tried to date once. The failed attempt had led to a short-lived division in their friendship.

   Gabriel remembered looking up at her.. “I do.”

   She had smiled warmly, laughing away her frustration. “Then tell me.”

   The line on the plane was moving. They were jumping. Gabriel followed close behind the soldier in front of him. Their aircraft rocked once more. Gabriel, along with those around him, struggled to stay standing upright. The bulkheads shuddered noisily. The blistering hot hiss of pulverized shrapnel and debris brushing against the fuselage was disconcerting as Gabriel and the remaining soldiers approached the open ramp.

   A sound like air suddenly and loudly being sucked through a straw made every heart skip a beat. It was a noise that was so fast it didn’t seem real. It was replaced, only a second after it was first heard, by a the deafening pop of a devastating explosion. All eyes were on the Osprey behind their own. Each soldier still in the jump line watched with unblinking focus as the swollen, steel bird rolled uncontrollably onto its side. Fire and smoke stretched out of the molten, shattered interior of the crashing plane.

   Gabriel thought of the sound before the explosion. He knew it had been a missile. He had been scared to death of jumping out of the aircraft and into the open battle below. But after watching the other plane be destroyed so fast, so mercilessly, Gabriel was now even more afraid to stay on board any longer. The sentiment seemed to be shared by everyone still on board. The remaining soldiers moved hurriedly toward the ramp, leaping into the open night sky with racing pulses and their hearts in their throats.

   It was finally Gabriel’s turn. It happened so fast and seamlessly he barely had time to realize or think about it. One moment he was a few steps away from the ramp’s edge. The next moment there was nothing under his feet. The icy-cold air was howling past his ears, the wind buffeting against the gear strapped tightly to his body. Compared to the din of the plane soaring away above his opening parachute canopy, the world around Gabriel suddenly seemed so quiet.

   His mind drifted back to that night on the beach. “I’m afraid...” Gabriel had begun to say. “...I mean, really afraid...of...failing to act.”

   Isabella frowned. “Huh? I don’t understand.”

   Gabriel leaned forward, the soft sand spilling off of his hands as he had brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he had braced against his chest. “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”

   “Sweetie, it’s okay,” Isabella had said reassuringly. “They’re natural. It is just who you are...or will be, starting to come out.”

   “That’s the thing. I don’t know who or what that is. I want to know but I also want to do the right thing. I’m joining the army, Izzy. And, I know...this stuff...doesn’t matter anymore. Not officially.”

   Isabella watched her best friend carefully. “But?”

   “But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or name yet. I’m in complete conflict. I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life; with you...with everyone. With God, especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am. Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

   Gabriel remembered Isabella appearing to think for a long moment. Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches. She hugged her best friend tightly. “Do you want to pray with me?”

   Gabriel remembered nodding. A sharp, swift noise that became a deafening crackle interrupted his thoughts. He looked up past the canopy of his parachute. A few seconds had gone by since he’d leapt out of the advancing Osprey. Another transport had been hit. It’s frame was lost to sight behind a white-hot plume spraying molten steel airplane parts over the frost-covered terrain. All at once, the late-night sky seemed to come alive again. The sea of descending paratroopers were dark silhouettes against a breathtaking backdrop of exploding mortars, anti-aircraft fire, and the ever more frequent vapor trails of ground-launched rockets.

   The ground wasn’t getting closer fast enough. The engines of one of the Osprey’s revved up loudly, the sound climbing over the mire of chaos blending together into one awful, nightmarish noise. Gabriel looked up again into the swaths of blistering fire and choking smoke. Paratroopers were leaping madly out of the dying plane rolling onto is mangled side, fire consuming its blown-open cockpit to the passenger compartment. Gabriel watched the horror of the hell-spawned scene. Wrapped in searing flames glowing brightly, his peers fell out of the deadly storm. From a distance they looked just like any other pieces of debris. But Gabriel knew those were people he had seen and spoken to, people he had eaten beside, people he had trained with.

   Suddenly, there were more screams, cries of bloody agony echoing throughout the crowded sky. Between each heart-wrenching bellow, Gabriel was beginning to detect the source of the pain. It became very clear when a bullet meant for his life zipped hotly by his ear. A tracer round rocketed away into the sky to his right. Gabriel watched it appear then vanish in an instant. Just beyond its path, something changed in the dark. It took a moment for Gabriel to realize it was another paratrooper. The soldier’s parachute had been hit by the spray of bullets from the ground.

   Gabriel looked down, trying to fend off the panic beginning to set in. He was almost there, the small, dry patches of brush throwing web-like and sinewy shadows across the dirt in the sky-consuming explosions high above his canopy. Another few seconds and he would be on the ground.

   Then, something went wrong. Gabriel heard the clinking of metal above him. There was the way the wind shifted and sounded as if bouncing and rolling off of an object free falling through the sky. Gabriel looked up. He managed only a fleeting second to catch a terrifying glimpse of the flailing body before it hit the top of his parachute. The swift, smooth descent to the dusty floor under his boots became a breathless drop.

   First, the parachute-wrapped soldier, barely alive, collided with Gabriel. The unstoppable force knocked him onto his back. In a panic, Gabriel and the unknown compatriot rolled over each other as the ground spread out on all sides around them. Gabriel felt the air rush from his lungs at the moment of impact. An overwhelming wave of pain barreled unstoppably through his body. Gabriel remembered smelling sand and burning airplane fuel raining out of the sky. He remembered the feeling of the darkness closing in, blocking out the glow of the fires above him and the sounds of bullets erupting from smoking rifles all around. As he blacked out, Gabriel wondered, for an instant, if we would be waking up again.

II. "The Glorious Cause"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:55:00 +0000

PART ONE

    Things could go either way. And, everyone watching the silver-hued screen knew it.

   A boy stands in a room that is hot and cramped. A ceiling fan turns slowly, lazily moving the warm air around between the boy, walls of overcrowded bookshelves, and the other occupants in the old church office. The boy can hear a conversation between the two older men behind him, yet he isn’t really listening. As his eyes explore the titles on a nearby bookshelf, each tome a trophy of socialist and communist ideas and achievements, the boy hears the name of his father. It’s breathed out naturally by one of the men: the boy’s grandfather.

   Suddenly the boy is much younger, a wide-eyed three year old standing on a gravel driveway. A tall black man in a slim, dark suit and tie stands over him. The engine of a taxicab idles noisily a few steps away. “You won’t understand this now,” speaks the senior to his junior. “But one day, I am confident you will. You will always know what it is to know a dream and stop at nothing to chase it down...to make it real and share its glory with the rest of the world.”

   The father crouches down, putting his face closer to his son’s. The boy can almost see his reflection in his father’s glasses. “The world is sick, my boy. Do you understand that?”

   The little boy nods sheepishly, not really sure if he understands or not. He’s too young, maybe. But then again, maybe he has an instinct for the things his father is telling him. Perhaps the passion of one already exists in the other, waiting for its time to mature and evolve.

   “I have to go now,” says the father stiffly, his voice almost flat and emotionless. “It’s my turn to take up the glorious cause. I have to fulfill the dream of my father. One day, I know it will be your turn and I know you won’t fail in helping to fulfill mine.”

   Suddenly, the boy is back in the office. Sunlight dapples across the floor from behind the loosely hanging blinds in front of the open window. The boy hears his grandfather speak again. “I have no doubt, Mr. Davis, that you are the man to trust in these matters. I can’t think of anyone to help guide my grandson on his journey better than yourself.”

   All at once, the sound in the room is gone. The lighting was changing, growing rapidly brighter. Then, the image of the two men, the boy, and the office were gone. A blank, white screen reflecting the piercing light of the projector illuminated the small seating gallery of the narrow theater.

   “That’s the end of the reel, Mr. Audaz,” shouted a muffled voice, disconnected from the rest of the screening room.

   Carlos Columbus Audaz sat up in his seat, stretching his back. He turned his head and nodded once to the scruffy face barely visible in the open window of the projection booth. Carlos also took the moment to glance at the other occupants of the small, private theater. He counted a half dozen men in sharply tailored suits and even more people in the seats behind them, their small notepads and ledgers open and being updated. Carlos figured them for assistants or aids or even assistants of the assistants. Their clothes were far less elaborate in style or brand than most of the executives.

   Carlos sat back into his seat, staring for a quiet moment at the empty screen. What am I doing, he asked himself. Is this really it? Is this what I wanted?

   Carlos felt a patient gaze centered on himself. He turned his head in time to see his own assistant shift his gaze back to the blank screen still bathed in the bright, white light of the projector. The projectionist had been running dailies in the industry for years. He knew to keep the machines running until the meeting in the theater was over and the executives were walking and talking their way to the exits.

   “What is it,” Carlos asked, turning his head to stare at the screen and seats in front of him. There were only two rows left.

   “I was going to ask you that,” whispered his assistant. Alex Vale had been working with Carlos Columbus Audaz since Carlos’ very first movie. Carlos had just turned fourteen and was crafting his amateur indulgence in and around his sleepy Los Angeles neighborhood. Alex was eight at the time. He lived across the street from the auspicious young filmmaker. Alex hadn’t know anything about movie making and, at first, didn’t really care. He looked up to the big kid in the house across the street and would do whatever had been necessary to have the privilege of being involved in his games and goings-on.

   “You don’t seem quite yourself,” Alex continued, still whispering.

   Carlos shrugged his shoulders. “I just...I don’t know, ya’ know? I can’t get comfortable with this one.”

   It was Alex’s turn to shrug his shoulders. “Maybe it’s just that this is your first big budget? Like, full-scale instead of our normal, miniscule budget.”

   “I don’t think it’s the budget,” whispered Carlos. “At least, that’s not the major part.”

   Alex wrinkled his face. “Is it the acting?”

   Carlos snorted a laugh. “Ohh,” he moaned softly, “don’t say that.” He glanced over his shoulder. The men in the expensive suits cloaked in the soft shadows almost completely enveloping the rear of the theater were still talking amongst themselves. “But yes, the acting is terrible.”

   Alex chuckled quietly.

   “They are so stiff,” whispered Carlos. He was directing his voice and frustration at the glowing screen. “There is not creativity. The little boy and the damn ceiling fan were the best performers in those shots!”

   “Don’t forget about the schedule,” said Alex.

   “Ohh,” Carlos quietly moaned again. “Don’t even get me started on that! Where is the star of this movie? Why is he never on set? I wasn’t ready to shoot these scenes. That set wasn’t even finished yet! I could see the lights out the window!”

   “Carl!”

   Carlos lifted his head with a start. He spotted the head of the studio turning off the aisle and onto the row in front of he and Alex. Another man in an expensive suit was a few steps behind. The studio chief was known as Douglass Stoll. He was in his late forties and a weathered veteran of Hollywood and the media industry at large. His teen-model good looks had become weighed down and faded by time and choices that weren’t always the best.

   “Mr. Stoll,” Carlos said with polite enthusiasm. He stood up as his boss approached, Alex following suit a heartbeat behind.

   “It’s looking good, son! It’s looking good,” Douglass Stoll said earnestly, shaking Carlos’, and then Alex’s, hand. “Carl, I’d like to introduce you to someone. This is Mr. Simon. He’s the new liaison from the Administration. He’s here to help with the film.”

   The slender man with a tight fitting dark suit, flat chest, and olive skin stepped foward when Douglass Stoll gestured to him. He nodded toward Carlos and Alex warmly. Instantly, Carlos was hesitant about the man standing in the next row. Who was this person? What was he here to do? And why did there seem to be an air of superiority radiating off of him? These were all questions flowing through Carlos’ mind.

   The man’s smile broadened as Douglass neared the end of his introduction. “This is my first time in Hollywood. It’s very exciting. So I just want to help in any way that I can. If you need something from Washington and the Administration, just let me know!”

   Carlos let himself smile, though it wasn’t one of joy or amusement. “How about the star of the movie? Our lead actor was supposed to be here four days ago but apparently he’s in Washington doing God knows what!” Carlos’ pitch climbed strangely as he was speaking, the words beginning to come out in one rushed breath. His tone went from honest curiosity wrapped in sarcastic-borderline condescending-politeness to curt, bitter, and mockingly pleasant. There was no hiding the hostility he felt and exuded.

   Douglass Stoll took a deep breath, his eyes wide with worry. He peered at the man standing near his left side. Mr. Simon was still smiling broadly, his grin now somewhat menacing. He laughed, a nasally rapid guffaw. Douglass Stoll breathed with relief, even joining in on the laugh a little bit. Carlos and Alex eyed each other then looked toward Mr. Simon. Neither could figure out what he was so amused by. Carlos had told no joke nor had he made any attempt at all to be funny. The scene was becoming suspicious and unsettling. Carlos began to wonder if the government stranger before him was advertising signs of mental instability.

   Mr. Simon’s laughter settled to a chuckle. He took a slow, deep breath. Then, still smiling with amusement said, “He’s with the President of the United States. You can’t rush those visits.”

   “Besides, he’s learning about his character,” Douglass Stoll quickly added. “It’s all for the movie. And that’s important to us, right?” He tried to glare at Carlos without Mr. Simon noticing.

   Mr. Simon didn’t seem to care about the look on the older man’s face, even if he had noticed. “I’ll see what I can do. But the President makes these decisions,” Mr. Simon said, shrugging his shoulders passively.

   Carlos suspected he was just being told what he wanted to hear. It was in the stranger’s eyes. The words slipping off his tongue might have simply been disingenuous, but his small, crystal brown eyes were screaming his true, concealed insincerity. Carlos had had enough for one day. He broke the probing stare he had been locked into with Mr. Simon. His gaze shifted to Alex instead. Alex instantly understood. He seemed to have been waiting for that look from his boss. With a prompt and courteous nod to the two older men facing them, Alex turned to his right, starting hastily for the aisle.

   “We’ve got an early start tomorrow. We’ll be on location outside of the city. If you’ll excuse me...” Carlos was only looking at his boss as he spoke. He didn’t feel a reason to acknowledge a man who had nothing to do with himself or nothing genuine to add to the production.

   Carlos didn’t wait for any farewell words or gestures. He turned away from the two men almost as soon as he was done speaking. He felt their gaze on his back as he turned onto the aisle at the end of the row of seats.

   “Oh, Carlos,” Mr. Simon called after him.

   Carlos stopped in mid-stride. He shifted his eyes to the right, taking notice of the way the other men in suits were watching him. He noticed the way the assistants were trying to watch without looking up from their notes. There was an element of relief Carlos detected from all of them. They were thankful it was not one of their names that had been called, that it was now him stuck in the long stare of Mr. Simon’s sharp, brown eyes. Carlos didn’t say anything when he turned himself around just enough to regard the government avatar. He didn’t need to speak. Mr. Simon was already waiting.

   “I’d like to talk with you. Perhaps, tomorrow morning? Before you...umm...have to be on set?”

   Carlos lightly bit the inside of his lip before he answered. “I might have five minutes.”

   Mr. Simon continued to smile pleasantly. If it was an attempt to be disarming, it wasn’t working at all. “Sounds good,” he said enthusiastically.

   Carlos turned and continued up the aisle without another word. The sunlight beyond the lobby windows struck harshly against his eyes. Carlos winced as he walked the last few steps to the glass door. He suddenly drew a sharp breath, pausing for a heartbeat over the padded threshold. Sensors were hidden in the matt-black paneling encasing the near-spotless doorway. They triggered a feature of the building that had been making Carlos cringe.

   “Have a pleasant day, Mr. Audaz,” rang a digital, female voice.

   Carlos had known it was coming. He’d been through the doors a half dozen times by that point. He also knew that if he continued to stand in the doorway, the sensors under his feet and mounted within the sides of the doorframe would detect him, triggering the the computer to speak again. It was just one of the many, many wonders of the ever-growing Forefront Studios.

   Carlos didn’t wait for the ghostly, unsettlingly friendly voice to courteously ask him if everything was all right. He was a few steps from the curb on the wide sidewalk before he heard the door tap lightly against its frame having shut automatically. Alex was already standing there, his sky-blue cell phone pressed tightly to his left ear. There wasn’t much conversation to hear. Unless he really had something to say, Alex Vale tended to be the attentive listener in a conversation.

   Carlos wiped a layer of sweat beading on his forehead with the back of his hand. His soft, black hair was already damp and greasy-looking in the warm afternoon. The temperature didn’t tend to bother him. He had lived in Southern California nearly his entire life. Broiling asphalt and sultry breezes winding down the bustling streets and avenues of Los Angeles to only brush the sweat more evenly across his light-brown skin was a part of life. In a way, he kind of liked it. For Carlos, it was home.

   A wet, salty droplet slipped off his short, ebony bangs. It stung against his eye, interrupting his thoughts. Where is that driver, Carlos asked in his mind. Alex seemed to sense Carlos’ unvoiced query echoing through the ether of the universe. He turned to face his boss, shrugging his shoulders in reply. Carlos inhaled sharply, then suddenly felt his heart skip a beat.

   From beyond the concrete wall behind the theater, the devastating pop of a gunshot coursed through the air. Both Carlos and Alex flinched instinctively, ducking into an automatic half crouch. Screams erupted beyond the the white-painted slab that ran the length of the studio’s perimeter. Glass exploded, the sharp hiss echoing up and down the street beyond the solid partition. Carlos and Alex looked behind them at the theater’s side and the wall behind it. They tried to stare past the unblemished concrete to the barbarous world that had suddenly seemed to take shape where moments before there was the illusion of peace and order.

   More shots rang out, the deadly rounds tearing, unseen, through the heat of the day. Both young men stumbled backwards off the sidewalk into the studio street. A terrifying storm of frightened screams and vengeful voices cursing and shouting each other down was making Carlos’ pulse race. Car horns blared, adding to the unseen chaos before suddenly being silenced by a third round of crackling, deafening gunfire.

   Carlos glanced at Alex as if to ask what they should do. But the pale, wide-eyed expression on Alex’s face revealed the same question awaiting an answer. Another car horn bleeped loudly. Both boys jumped with a shout then looked at the black, armored sedan idling in the street nearby. The driver’s door opened hurriedly. A man in a black suit and tie stood up, rising part way out of the vehicle. He looked at both young men at once. “Mr. Audaz, this way please!” He had to yell over the soundtrack of battle beyond the wall.

   Carlos peered quickly at Alex who finally ended his phone call. The two friends ran the dozen steps to either side of the car, practically leaping into the rear passenger seats before the driver accelerated up the subtly curving road.

   “To the office, sir?”

   Carlos blinked, trying to get his senses back in order. He wiped more sweat from his face. It felt like it was just trickling from every matted strand of his black hair on his head. “No,” he answered, directing his voice toward the front of the car. “Home. I think we’ve had enough of this place today.”

   “A government agent and a gun fight. Are we in somebody else’s production,” asked Alex. His chest heaved. He was trying to steady his breathing.

   “It would be nice to know if we were,” Carlos responded. “But I don’t think so.”

   The incident had caught him off guard. The whole afternoon had turned out that way. Despite the reference to Mr. Simon by Alex, Carlos found himself disinterested in the mysterious bureaucrat. He couldn’t stop his mind from focusing on the sounds from outside the studio. They had been far away but not far enough. He had been close enough to hear the shot crack open the hot air of the late summer day. He had been near enough to feel the fear in the those curdling screams. They had rippled through the air, through his skin and veins like overwhelming waves.

   Suddenly, absently watching the studio gates pass by the passenger window of the armored luxury sedan, Carlos began to think of how he truly felt: the hot, dark fear retching out of the recesses of his soul. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking about his severe vulnerability, how a few different choices might have put him on the other side of that wall behind the theater.

   As much as he was thinking about himself, Carlos realized something else. He couldn’t stop thinking about his younger cousin. Carlos knew, as stunning and forever impressing onto his memory the events of the day were for him in the world, they might not have been anything in contrast to the life unfolding for eighteen year old Gabriel Audaz.

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:01:00 +0000

Principles and values. Almost everyone knows how to define them. The question is, do you know how to hold onto them?

AN AMERICAN RHAPSODY

Chapter 2: "The Glorious Cause"

Coming Soon...

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:04:00 +0000

COMING SOON

Chapter 2:

"The Glorious Cause"

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:20:00 +0000

The Parrish Farm Burning.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:37:00 +0000

Part Nine

The light of dawn, made gray by the lingering winter storm, began to creep over the Mall and monuments of Washington D.C.. From the padded box he called an office, Wyatt Douglass stared sleepily out the lone, wide square window behind his desk. He was watching the morning in a daze, the concrete and granite buildings beyond the thick, unpolished glass obscured by a thick layer of frost. He mostly could see only himself reflected in the light of his brightly glowing computer screen. The old monitor hummed loudly, limping through its long days and fast approaching a state of desperation in terms of needing repairs. Wyatt never held his breath when he went to push the ON button. He just assumed it wouldn’t respond and so was pleasantly surprised each morning to be wrong about that. Once, he actually let himself wonder where he was on the waiting list. That, however, was months ago.

Wyatt should have been at home. But, there had been work to do before he could rest. He was nearly finished now. All that remained was filing his report, officially closing the case of the events at the Parrish farm. Wyatt turned his head enough to look at the buzzing monitor. The whole process was taking much longer than normal.

Two files at idle on the screen. Words were organized into sentences and those sentences assumed the structures of basic paragraphs spanning multiple pages. The letterhead of his agency and office were affixed to the top of each document. The similarities between the two files ended there, leaving the bulk of the contents in stark contrast to each other. The shorter of the two was a report he could have written blindfolded from his office without ever actually having traveled into the field. It was exactly what had been called, exactly what was expected from him. It was an inside the box write-up that patted the backs of the agents and agencies involved. It described the scene and characters precisely as it had been predicted Wyatt would find it in. It was a reassurance the bubble housing the world those in the know lived uneasily under had not begun to weaken or come apart.

Wyatt blinked, shifted his eyes over barely a degree to stare at the second file. There were more pages in this document. There was more to be described, more to take into account. He had done his best to piece the bloody puzzle together in his head from all the information he had collected. This report no longer assumed the innocence of those agents or authorities that had fallen at the scene. Wyatt shifted in his chair as he considered exactly what he had written.

Staring again at the frost on his office window, Wyatt imagined the Parrish house the morning of the raid. That’s exactly was it had always meant to be. He’d discovered the paper trail upon his return to the Capital. Wyatt saw the orders to seize the property. The use of any force or means necessary was clearly printed more than once throughout the chain of command, from the building he sat in to the local sheriff’s office that would be providing an escort. A raid is exactly what Old Man Parrish knew was coming.

The wise, old farmer had seen the signs like a wide-eyed sage. He had readied his family as best he could. He had hopes of standing their ground like any injured citizen would. There was a machine much larger than themselves about to roll over them. One family, a few tight-knit individuals were standing alone against the cold, oppressive powers which had swollen to extremes without check. Old Man Parrish knew what he was facing and knew what he had to do.

One of them had to get away, they had to be elsewhere and cease to exist in that house. His daughter, young but able, might have a chance. She could live and find a way to tell their story, to confess the truth about what happened. During the tearful goodbye’s, Wyatt imagined the purging of her life amongst them had earnestly begun. Any picture of her was removed and thrown, with school papers and diaries, into a hot and hungry fire in the gaping, brick hearth.

Madeline had told him it was her brother that had led her into the barn. Wyatt calculated it was at this point the sedan with his peers, along with their escorts in dusty patrol cars from the local sheriff’s office, were cruising up the length of the driveway. Here, a detail Madeline may have never been aware of existed in a veil of lies and deceit. It had taken a return to the scene after the snowy morning with her. Wyatt discovered tire tracks he hadn’t noticed before. The mud and snow made them seem to glow with a harsh and violent clarity. The truth will not be hidden, Wyatt had thought. It was the tread of tires fixed to a vehicle too big to be an ambulance. A haunting thought hung in his mind. He dared not shudder but a cold no chill in the winter air could compare with surged within him. A black-boot squad, Wyatt had guessed without doubt.

Near the blackened, crumbled remains of the barn, Wyatt had stood utterly bewildered. In the first visit, he could not fathom the need for the old building to be razed like that. “He burned it down,” said one of the wounded deputies. Wyatt had broken into his hospital room in Ardmore before his flight. It didn’t take long for the government wet nurse, Gordon Parks, to track him down. But Wyatt still managed to gain a few minutes of free interrogation time.

“Who?”

“The kid.”

“Who,” Wyatt had asked again, his voice sharp and direct. They were knocking on the door of the hospital room by that point. Wyatt had jammed it, trying to give himself more time. “What kid? The farmer’s kid?”

“Yeah! The so...son.”

“Why did he set it on fire?”

“I don’t know. He was a stupid farm boy.”

As calmly as if he were going to fluff the young deputy’s pillows, Wyatt reached down and firmly placed his hand upon the bloodstained bandage taped below the man’s right shoulder blade. The pain he felt must have been instantly tremendous by the watery, wide-eyed glare he shot at Wyatt. “Try again,” Wyatt said.

“Ahghh! I don’t know! I was near the back door of the house.”

“What happened to the boy?!”

“He had something in his hand! Aghh! He was coming out of the barn! He surprised them!”

“Them? Them who?”

“The...ahghh! Please....aahghh! The black-boot guys!”

Wyatt’s stomach had dropped. He knew it. He stepped back from the deputy. The knocking on the door had turned to heavy pounding by that point. With racing breaths, the deputy said, “That’s when all hell broke loose.”

Wyatt didn’t get to speak with the other deputy. He didn’t need to. He had the scene in his head. Having smuggled his sister to the cellar in the barn, the Parrish boy emerged from the barn, startling the black-boot taking a flanking position around the farm house. He must have had a gun or shovel or ax in his hand. But, he also may have only had the padlock for the barn door. The black-boot fired his weapon, killing the younger of the old farmer’s two sons. Parrish must have been watching at the window. He smashed the glass and fired his rifle, a deadly spray of shotgun shell striking the anonymous soldier in the back of the neck.

The next shots came from the back door, bullets piercing blindly through the wood. It was one of his fellow agents. Old Man Parrish simply must have pivoted to the corner of the wall near the window, aimed at the wooden door he knew would not stop the blast of his gun and fired. By now the house was being stormed. The second agent must have stepped over the fallen body of the first, kicking open the door and firing. They would miss, leaving the spray of small craters in the wall near the spot Parrish was using for cover. Parrish would discharge another rough, blood from the agent stumbling backwards splattering the foyer.

The family wouldn’t last long against the force sieging their home, but they lasted long enough. The other two agents would be felled before it was all over. The blood in an upstairs bedroom amongst constellations of bullet holes had told Wyatt one of the family members had been acting as a sniper. An agent was trying to get away, making them the last of the opposing force to die, not the first.

Wyatt sighed with ill despair. The burning of the bard hand been nothing but after-the-fact theater, smoke without the mirrors. He turned his chair away from the window to face his desk. He looked at the computer screen, taking another deep breath. Of all the elements he had included in the longer file, there was one detail left out. He smiled, thinking of her as he submitted the long document into the system for review. He deleted the first one, the shorter version, wondering how much he had just made the bubble shake.

Wyatt turned the noisy monitor off and reached for his coat. The hazy, gray light of the morning poured into his office from the lone window. He looked out to the nation’s capital once more. He thought of Madeline out on the plains. He hoped with all of his heart she would make it to where she was going. Even if she didn’t, he wondered if she felt like she already had. Despite her sadness, Wyatt wondered if a part of her was smiling. She had survived and told her story. Somehow, she had known-or, at least had enough faith-that Wyatt would find the strength to deliver her story, her family’s story, to the world.

As he closed the door to his office, Wyatt knew everything would be different now. Maybe no one would read his report. That didn’t matter. He knew. Wyatt walked out of his office into a different world. There was no grass to be greener. He was in a hallway. And, it was winter. So he thought of another saying as he waited for an elevator, feeling a sense of insufferable gloom shrugged off his shoulders.

The truth shall set you free.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 20:50:00 +0000

Part Eight

Mark LeVine slowly opened his eyes. He stretched, feeling the muscles in his arms and legs tense. He yawned unstoppably then sat up, resting some of his weight on his elbows. He felt like he’d been asleep for hours. Glancing at the clock, he realized it had only been minutes, a dozen at best.

The bathroom door was closed. Yellow-white light ringed the caramel-colored partition. Mark rose out of bed and stood at the door. He touched the handle. He knew it wouldn’t be locked. Zach never locked it. He started to turn the handle, but stopped. His weight was already pushing against the smooth surface of the wooden door. Above the sound of the shower spray on the other side, Mark could hear Zach’s voice ringing sweetly off the walls. He was singing. Mark was smiling as soon as heard him and then felt his smile broaden when he recognized the lyrics. It was their song.

Mark stood against the bathroom door, letting the minutes fade away into the background of his life. All that mattered for the moment was the sound of Zach’s voice, the words he was singing into the shower walls caressing Mark’s heart and putting to rest any remaining anxieties he felt.

Mark walked about the house as if he were floating. A sense of serenity, unlike any other he had ever known, had washed over him. Each step across the soft, sky-blue carpet felt more like a bound from cloud top to cloud top. He was floating on an air of self assurance. He had stared down the mouth of lions and walked away alive. For the moment, nothing else in the world existed beyond their walls, their furniture, their yard, or each other. Mark felt himself suddenly thinking of the bakery and, for the first time in two days, let himself smile about it. Standing on the edge of the cold, kitchen tile, Mark breathed easy. Everything’s going to be okay, he thought then stepped into the darkened room. He tapped a nearby light switch. Even if it isn’t, it still will be.

He was laughing at his thoughts as he quickly began to busy himself. Soon, the whole kitchen was alive. The smell of eggs and batter slowly firming on old, grease-scorched pans circled about him and gradually the rest of the house. Zach took a deep breath when he emerged from the bathroom. He followed his sense of smell, attracted by the hints of his favorite breakfast, and his sense of sound, perked by the hiss and buzz of things cooking, down the narrow hallway.

“What are you doing,” Zach asked. He had been standing against the corner of the wall at the edge of the kitchen. His bright smile grew even brighter when Mark looked up at him.

“Cooking,” he answered smugly, smiling. He had been about to flip another pancake when Zach spoke. Without looking down, he playfully tossed the golden-brown flapjack into the air. It did not end gracefully. Zach laughed. Next to his singing, it was the sweetest sound Mark had ever heard.

They ate standing up, never leaving the kitchen. They laughed like friends on a first date, comparing stories of childhood embarrassments and memories of moments unique to each other. They talked like they hadn’t in years, seeing each other anew, remembering themselves and the things they had once shared. At the sink, with their late dinner of breakfast now only cooling pans stained with batter and egg whites, Zach stacked their plates freckled with pancake crumbs standing like small atolls amongst seas of maple syrup. His attention was directed at the dishes he was rinsing. He didn’t notice Mark stealthily approaching. He wasn’t paying attention to the plate in Mark’s hand or the way he was dipping his fingers into the leftover pool of syrup.

“Guess what,” Mark said, inches from Zach.

“What’s that,” Zach said, barely glancing over his shoulder.

Mark leaned in close to Zach’s ear. “You’re it,” he whispered, trying not to giggle. Mark didn’t have to do anything else. Zach did it for him. Acting in a surprised reflex, he turned his head with a start, causing his ear to drag across Mark’s syrup-laden fingertips.

Mark laughed as Zach recoiled. Zach laughed back, grabbing the small spray nozzle with one hand as he tried to clean his sticky ear lobe with the other. Zach gave no warning to Mark. He squeezed the trigger on the sprayer, sending a rapid burst of warm water splashing against his partner. Mark shouted, still laughing, as he tried to duck out of the way. He scooped more of the maple mess onto his fingers then lunged toward Zach who shifted with a giddy shriek. More water erupted from the small nozzle in Zach’s grip, spraying Mark on the face and neck.

Mark was undeterred. It led to a chase out of the kitchen when Zach ran out of hose for the sprayer. They laughed as they teased each other around the house, jumping over furniture and scurrying around corners. The youthful energy suddenly pumping through their veins seemed unending. Hours seemed to pass before they finally tackled each other breathlessly on the couch.

“That was too much fun,” Zach said, still giggling.

Mark only nodded.

“What time is it?”

Mark glanced around the living room for a clock. “Late,” he finally said with a chuckle.

“Should we finish cleaning up and go to bed?”

Mark took a slow, deep breath. “Probably.”

Zach blinked sleepily for a moment, feeling the giddy adrenaline drain away. “Okay,” he finally said. “You handle the garbage and I’ll finish the dishes.”

Mark smiled and nodded. He realized how tired he actually felt when he stood up then turned and helped pull Zach off the disheveled cushions of the couch. At the same time though, Mark also never felt more alive. Every heartbeat, every breath seemed to register in his mind with radiant, almost overwhelming clarity. The way the lamp light around the living room splayed across the painted walls seemed strangely new to him. He listened to the low rumble and rattle of the heating vents in the floors as the warmed air was pushed through the house.

In the kitchen, there was the sensation of the cold tile under his feet again, the feel of the old ceramic tiles and the narrow valleys of dirt and water-stained grout that led him toward the back door. Zach was back at the sink, the water running out of the faucet softly distorting another noise. Mark looked up from the garbage bag he was tying closed. Zach was humming again. It was the same song he had been singing in the shower. Mark smiled, happier in that moment, in that night, than he had ever been. Let them come get us, he thought boastfully. Let them come in and smash all our things and take our store away. Zach noticed Mark staring at him with that warm smile that had become such a rare sight the last many months. He smiled back at him, blinking like a silly flirt.

Mark chuckled. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be done here in a minute,” Zach replied, placing the dripping pan clutched in one soaked hand amongst the other dishes already in the dishwasher. “I’ll meet you in the room.”

“I look forward to it,” Mark said with a coy smile, his eyebrows bouncing playfully. He slipped his bare feet into an old pair of sneakers as he unlocked the back door. A fist of cold air was the first thing to greet him when the door creaked open. “It’s still snowing,” Mark said.

Zach leaned forward over the sink, pushing the thin curtain hanging loosely in front of the small, square window overlooking the backyard. Mark turned on the outside light fixed to the wall above the concrete stoop. “Wow,” Zach said. “It’s so beautiful.”

Several inches of snow had already coated everything in sight. Mark closed the door behind him and stepped off the stoop into the freezing powder. He stopped, gazing around the serene winter wonderland that had once been their unimpressive backyard. The dried patches of grass and warped, plastic lawn furniture they never sat in were all covered in snow. Only frosty mounds marked the spot the old chairs stood. Maybe this year he would get rid of those plastic pieces of junk. Maybe he could build them new furniture. Mark didn’t know how to build furniture. He could try, though. He could do that, and maybe-just maybe-he might actually learn a new skill he wouldn’t otherwise have. Mark smiled at himself.

He tilted his head back and looked up into the dark, swollen clouds hovering in the sky. He couldn’t really see them, only the heavy flakes of snow that fell angelically out of the silent shadows of the late night. Mark always loved the snow as a boy. What child doesn’t, really? Even as he got older, Mark always managed to hold a ten year-old’s enthusiasm for the frozen moisture. To him, as with many-including scores of youth-the snow simultaneously meant fun and peace.

This year though, for so many it just added to the heartache and strife so many were already enduring. The winter storms and unpredictable cold snaps had compounded the already troubled movement of essential goods and services. Farmers struggling to keep their crops healthy had their problems exacerbated by the unforgiving winter. Mark took a deep breath. God’s punishment, he thought, still looking up through the falling snow. You aren’t mad at me, are you? Mark blinked into the dark, wintery silence of the sky. The snow fell and fell without end, cold flakes kissing his tingling cheeks and nose.

The dinted, unremarkable, pale metal cans Mark would have to drag to the curb at the end of the week-if the service was running again-were around the side of the house. A layer of snow had collected on the flat lid of the closest barrel-shaped container. Mark brushed it off quickly, the harsh cold of the snow lightly burning his hand. He shivered slightly as he picked up the lid and dropped the sealed bag into the rank confines of the trash can.

Replacing the lid, Mark began to turn back the way he had come. His ears perked and he stopped before really having started. A noise beyond the falling snow landing quietly against the settling layers already enveloping the ground suddenly seemed to consume the peaceful night. It didn’t take Mark more than a second to recognize the din of an idling truck. With a single step toward the tall, dense hedges running a straight line between their yard and the next one, Mark peered through the silent storm. He gazed past the side of their house and toward the street beyond their front yard. He couldn’t see anything. There was only the snow and the darkened shape of the house across the street. Mark listened for another moment then shrugged his shoulders. Must be the neighbors, he thought, turning around.

He had rounded the corner into the backyard when a twig snapped somewhere in the snow-draped hedges. Mark stopped in mid-step. His breath caught in a quiet gasp. He watched the leafy, dark masses partitioning the two yards for a long moment. He let his eyes shift and glance up at the darkened windows of the house beyond the bushes. It belonged to an old woman. Mark couldn’t remember her name. He completed his step, walking slowly sideways toward the back door. It’s an animal, Mark figured.

The night had become still once more, save the falling snow covering the ground under another layer of cold, wet flakes. Mark glanced at the back door, still closed and only a half dozen steps away. He turned his head back toward the yard. The darkness beyond the snow shifted suddenly. Movement in the hedges seemed to echo with frightening ferocity though the silent winter storm. Mark’s breath caught again. He watched the shadows take shape as black-dressed figures advancing swiftly out of the fringes of the yard. Mark’s heart began to race. Closer they drew and suddenly he understood, suddenly he knew instantly who these midnight-cloaked soldiers were.

“No,” he shouted into the thinning space of snow and night that separated him from them. The incandescent, yellow-white glow of the porch light ringed the polished barrels of their guns, drawn and ready to fire and the end of their thick, outstretched arms.

“No!” Mark turned with urgency and bolted the remaining steps toward the door. He heard the movement in the snow behind him, the violent kick in the powder that told him they weren’t about to let him get away.

Mark only turned around again when he was in the house and closing the door. One of them was already on the stoop. He lunged forward as Mark swung the door toward the frame. Wood and padded armor collided loudly. A thrust of weight Mark wasn’t ready for knocked him slightly off balance. He quickly found his footing again, bracing against the force opposing him. He shoved the door back against his foe who slipped backward. There was a moment of surprised hesitation Mark instantly regretted. He rebalanced again and tried to slam the door the rest of the way shut. A gloved hand appeared in the last second before the door was in place. A muffled shout of hot pain coursed through the wood and glass to Mark’s ears. Mark would have smiled in victory then. But there was no victory to be had.

A sharp pop exploded through the cold beyond the back door. Mark felt it before he heard it. More precisely. He felt the searing shell of the racing bullet that punched a scorched hole through the wooden door graze painfully off his side. He felt his flesh tear open in the moment after the bullet had already past. It cracked against a wall somewhere behind him. Mark’s strength suddenly lagged and he backed off the door a half step.

The piercing scream of glass violently shattering filled their little house. Wood splintered as both the front and back doors were suddenly kicked open. Mark wasn’t done fighting though. He moved with anger beyond any rational thought he could recognize. He wasn’t trying to protect the house, only himself and then Zach. The nearest object he could grab was a broom. One of the faceless figures stormed past the wrecked doorframe nearby. Mark charged forward, swinging the yellow handle in a wide arch that caught the black-clad foe off guard. The figure adapted swiftly, catching hold of the thin, fiberglass pole that had slapped his cloaked face and padded helmet.

The situation was spiraling rapidly out of control for Mark and he knew it. In the rest of the house, more of the faceless soldiers tore through the last shreds of their personal space, invading their lives like tendrils of a cancer that cannot be stopped. Mark could hear Zach shouting. He could hear the heartbreaking thuds of furniture, or a body, being thrown and broken. Still, he wrestled with the foe before him, staring into the black, soulless goggles obscuring the eyes he knew were glaring back at him. Mark wasn’t going to win. He knew he wasn’t going to win. He had to try. He could, at least, do that much.

The broom handle, gripped by both men, swung wildly left and right then up and down as they danced a warriors dance of strength and death around the kitchen. There was a swift crack against one end of the broom that sent shudders down the length of the long handle. Razor sharp glass rained down from the broken light fixture attached to the ceiling. In the sudden darkness that wrapped tightly around them, Mark felt the splintered shards glance off his neck and arms, the small rivulets of blood hot on his skin. He felt the sting of sweat in the new wounds for only an instant. Then, there was only a blinding pain that erupted from the back of his skull.

“Enough!”

Mark blinked. He was on the kitchen floor. He felt the cold tile and grout under the glass pieces pinching his cheek. Black boots caked with snow filled his spinning line of sight. “Get him up,” a muffled voice shouted from above him. “Let’s stop wasting time!”

Unforgiving hands hoisted Mark off the darkened kitchen floor. “You boys are in so much trouble,” another muffled voice said. Mark couldn’t tell who was talking. He couldn’t tell how many of them there were. His vision was swimming in a hazy fog. He was certain he had a concussion. “Look at all the pretty things,” came another voice. “Look at all the pretty, illegal things.”

“Wha...What do you want,” Mark tried to ask. He was out of breath and out of strength.

His answer came in the form of a fist across his face. Through the overwhelming fire of pain, he hears one of the figures shout, “Shut your mouth! You’re under arrest!” A figure walked into view in front of him. “Get them outside,” he barked from behind is mask and goggles.

Mark was dragged outside into the cold and snow. Behind him he heard Zach’s soft moans. They were dropped like sacks into the freezing powder beside one another in the middle of the yard. It felt good to lay down, even if the cold burned as much as fire. The feeling of respite was not to last. Gloved fingers gripped Mark’s blood-matted hair, yanking him backwards and up onto his knees.

“Get up!”

Zach yelped, pulled upright the same way. His frightened moans became panicked, racing sobs as the sound of a dozen heavy boots shuffling into the snow was suddenly muted by the cocking of pistols. Bullets were being readied to fire. A strange feeling suddenly washed over Mark. Somewhere beyond him, Zach was trying to say something. But Mark couldn’t hear him. He felt his mind drifting, floating between this world and something far more dream like. Through the haze he was the faces of his mother and father. He hadn’t thought about them in years.

“Mark!”

A gloved hand slapped the backs of both their heads. Mark hissed in pain, feeling his scalp and skull throb together in overwhelming waves. “Shut up,” a voice commanded sternly.

“Mark LeVine and Zach Goyer...” another voice rattled off behind them. At least he got my name right, Mark thought. “You both are under arrest for crimes against the country. And, my goodness, are you two ever-so-guilty.”

The faceless figure Mark began to assume was the leader continued speaking as he paced somewhere behind them. He called them names and laced their supposed charges with as many foul remarks and curses as possible. Mark could barely listen to him. His mind was still turning, still floating in and out of consciousness. In the haze of his mind’s eye, he saw his parents again. They seemed to be waiting for him. He felt ten years-old again, stepping off the school bus and seeing them smiling at him. They were waiting for him to come home.

“I’m scared,” Mark suddenly heard Zach whisper between the racing sobs. He was trembling from head to toe.

“Pray,” Mark whispered back. He didn’t know where word had come from. He didn’t remember it forming in his throat or slipping past his lips. But, he had said it. He said it again. “Pray, baby.”

“I’m scared,” Zach said again.

“Shut up,” the soldiers directly behind them barked as the leader continued to speak.

“Don’t be scared. It’s all okay.” Mark didn’t know how or why, he just absolutely felt he was speaking the truth. “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s all okay.”

“Shut up!”

“Just pray, Zach. Don’t be frightened any more.”

“What?!” The leader was at Mark’s right ear. Mark felt his ear drum try to explode when the figure, a man, screamed his question through his mask. “Don’t be frightened?! You should be! You should be! Look at you! You’re worthless!”

“Pray, Zach,” Mark said again. His voice was even. He kept his eyes closed. He could still feel snow on his cheeks even as the vision inside his mind was a different place and a different time. His parents nodded to him.

“Don’t pray! Who are you going to pray to?! Look at what you’ve done! Look at the damage and destruction you’ve caused! Do you think we want to be here?” The leader’s gloved hand pressed hard against the back of Mark’s head, forcing his eye line toward snow. “LOOK AT IT!”

“Pray,” Mark whispered. “Don’t be scared.”

“The Earth isn’t going to listen,” the figure screamed. “No one is going to listen to you. You’re so stupid!” But under his voice, his squealing tones, Zach had begun to pray. He didn’t pray to the Earth. He prayed to God. He didn’t even consider the alternative. Why would he?

“He’s praying to God,” one of the figures standing directly behind them said.

“God? God?! You are going to ask forgiveness from some ancient form in the sky? It’s the Earth you live on, stupid! The Earth!” He slapped Zach again and again across his scalp as he spoke.

Zach cried out but did not cease. His prayer continued as if all existence beyond his own depended on it. Mark kept his eyes shut. He clamped them tighter, not wanting to see any of this. A sudden vision flashed before him, replacing the sight of his parents for only a moment. Maybe it was all his imagination, his mind hiding from the terror and violence. But, maybe it wasn’t. Mark didn’t know. He didn’t fight against it. He saw people, crowds thousands and thousands thick. He saw friends and strangers alike. He sensed something about them. It was a feeling of resistance.

“...And you have damaged the Earth,” the figure was saying. “You and people like you. Filthy dregs. I hate you! We all hate you. And you will pay for your crimes.”

“We’re not frightened,” Mark said.

“One-Zero-Seven,” the leader shouted, ignoring Mark. Another of the black-clad soldiers snapped to attention. He was standing under the porch light. The soft yellow radiance was the only light in the yard. “Is that an incandescent bulb in that light,” the leader asked.

The one he had called One-Zero-Seven looked up at the warm light emanating from a dusty bulb. “Yes.”

“I don’t understand it,” the leader sighed, shaking his downturned head. “Something so simple. Maybe you could have saved yourselves. But so much contraband...including that little bulb. The feather on the stack crumbling now.” He turned his head toward the soldier under the light. “Destroy it.”

The one called One-Zero-Seven stared into the light for a long moment before reaching upward. His thick glove embraced the hot glass of the bulb as he carefully unscrewed it from the dirty socket. At the same time, the leader of the dark-armored band turned back toward Mark and Zach. “By the powers fully vested in me as a protector of our Earth and nation, I find you both guilty of all charges.”

“We are not afraid,” Mark whispered. Beside him, Zach’s praying grew just a little louder.

“The punishment is death...”

“We are not afraid.”

“To be carried out with even swiftness in order to preserve the system of justice.”

“We are not afraid.”

“Well, you should be!” There was a snarl in his voice that surprised everyone. Hidden eyes all turned to him at once. “There’s only two of you.”

“There will be more.”

A thousand racing heartbeats seemed to span the sudden silence that followed Mark’s quiet challenge. The leader stood in the snow, staring at the back of Mark’s head. There was something definite in Mark’s voice that he could not explain which rattled his core. And, the long pause was becoming evidence of the event. So he took a long, loud, deep breath. “One-One-Zero...One-One-Two, I hereby authorize you to carry out the sentence on my command.”

The two figures behind Mark and Zach readied themselves. Zach’s voice, trembling almost hysterically, was still softly echoing his prayer into the falling snow. Mark let himself smile. He saw his parents. He saw old friends and strangers. He felt the confidence they all shared. “There will be more.”

“Ready!"

The hand on the bulb still turned. The connection to the socket was beginning to break. The yellow light flickered.

“Aim!”

Mark watched his parents nod to him once more. He was going home again. The hand on the bulb felt the connection break, the light within the fragile, dusty glass disappearing. Darkness swept across the yard. In the frozen shadows of the late night, Mark finally opened his eyes. He still felt the snow on his face as he turned to look at Zach.

“I love you,” he said.

Zach turned his head sharply. He felt Mark’s fingers take his trembling hand and smiled.

“Fire!”

For a moment there was only darkness. Even the snow seemed to vanish in the cloak of the night. Then, the darkness shrank away once, then twice. It happened as quick as lightning. Air blistering cracks from the emptying pistol chambers echoed long after the brilliant, twin muzzle flares that made the white snow sparkle like a field of diamonds for an instant. Then, there was only silence. Two nameless bodies lay lifeless in the snow turning from white, to pink, to red. The black-clad soldiers turned and began to disperse without a word whispered or gestured. The job was done, though one lingered for just a moment.

He stood staring beside the stood at the light bulb in his hand. A snowflake landed without any noise on its warm surface. He looked up into the night, at the house next door beyond the shrubs. He almost didn’t see the old woman moved suddenly deeper into the darkness of her bedroom. With a soft, longing sigh, the one called One-Zero-Seven joined the others as they returned to their idling black truck. The job was done.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 10:38:00 +0000

Part Seven

The bitter sleet had turned to snow by the time they reached the edge of the farm. Several inches were already blanketing the ground with more continuing to fall. It crunched with the frozen grasses under their feet. The dense flakes fell with hardly any noise, only the occasional whisper of a shivering breeze brushing the wet powder against their clothes, their faces, and the sulking blades of grass persisted in the air around them.

Wyatt’s eyes strained in the predawn darkness. It should have been getting thinner, the blackness of the night retreating from the oncoming violet and pink of dawn’s first hours. Instead, it seemed as dark and infinite under the heavy, gray clouds hanging low in the winter sky as it would be at midnight. “Are you sure you want to do this,” he asked softly to the girl he didn’t know walking ahead of him. “We could go somewhere else.”

“No,” she said without looking over her shoulder. Her dry eyes burned as the occasional snowflake would drift between her matted eyelashes. They had been in such a rush to leave the house in town. She didn’t get to straighten up, to look more presentable. What did it matter, really? Her family was dead and she was mourning. She was allowed to look a little horrid. She certainly felt like it.

“I want to be here,” she said. “I need to stand amongst the ruins for a little while.” She stopped near a snow-covered tractor and glanced over her shoulder at Wyatt. “Are you afraid your partner is following us?”

Wyatt shook his head, stopping beside her. “No. He’s probably watching the house, trying to spy what we’re doing there.” Wyatt had told Eleanor, the cashier, and her boyfriend, Jonah, to create an atmosphere of intimate debauchery. Gordon Parks apparently had a dirty mind. Wyatt was willing to humor the younger fool at the fool’s expense.

“Are my friends going to be okay?”

“Yes. He won’t do anything to them. He’s only doing his job.”

The girl looked at Wyatt. “Oh? What is that?”

Wyatt held her gaze. Snow descended swiftly to the ground between them. “To spy on me.” Wyatt turned his head, his tired eyes peering past the abandoned tractor to the distant outcropping of buildings. They seemed farther away in the frozen dark. A subtle orange glow persisted where the charred remains of the barn lay crumbled upon the earth.

Wyatt waited for her to ask another question, to enquire why he would need looking after. She said nothing else. Either she didn’t care or assumed the very fact Wyatt was with her now was enough evidence to warrant his being spied on. “We better keep going,” Wyatt finally said.

She nodded her head and walked around the sleeping, snowy tractor. She continued to lead the rest of the way to the place she had once, even so recently, called home. At two hundred yards from the house, she stopped again. Wyatt stepped beside her once more. They were still in the empty field, the livestock absent from sight or smell. A thin, loose cord of barbed wire bowed between two rotted, wooden posts a few feet apart from one another. A thin layer of snow traced the length of the rusty, steel string. Wyatt was going to put his hands on it. He kept them in his coat pockets instead.

“This is close enough,” she said softly, taking hold of the fence with a delicate motion.

For a long time neither spoke. Wyatt let his gaze shift back and forth from the ruins of the girl’s home, to the falling snow collecting on their coats, their hands, and down their bodies. But, he also found himself watching her, trying to figure out who she was-who her family was. What did they mean to anyone but each other? Why are we really here, he asked himself.

“Why are you here, Agent Douglass?”

Wyatt blinked. Her question caught him off guard and he wondered whether he had voiced his thought out loud. He took a small and quiet breath. “I want to know what happened here yesterday morning. I want to know why six people are dead because of an obscure environmental infraction.”

“I wonder if six people are dead because of that,” she said into the pale darkness. Her voice was flat and raw. “I wonder if six people died because someone decided to stand up for themselves.”

Wyatt blinked again, startled when she turned to look at him sharply. There was blame in her eyes and as she spoke, Wyatt found himself willing to accept it on behalf of the heavy hand he knew he was a face for. “Because,” she said, “someone...my father and my family together...said no. Not here. Not us. Not anymore.”

Wyatt waited until she turned her head before he allowed himself to look away from her. “Tell me what happened here,” he said.

“Don’t you have reports? Didn’t your people already give you that information?”

“They gave me a perspective...one side of a story I can’t help but believe I haven’t come to fully comprehend.” Wyatt lifted his eyes from the snow obscuring her shoes to find her watching him. “I want to know. I need to know.”

She stared at him for another long moment, then turned her head once more to watch the dying embers of the crumbled barn being slowly smothered by the wintery powder enveloping the charred remains. She realized, then, she was trembling. Small bits of snow slipped free from the barbed wire under her quivering grip. She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly in an attempt to steady herself before she began to speak.

The daughter of the farmer named Parrish told of the first time she had seen the men from the government at their home. It was a year before and a late afternoon in the spring time. Her older brother had picked her up from school. She had been helping out with one of the clubs. Her mother and father were standing firmly but politely in the way of a man who seemed eager to learn all about their land and the methods of her father.

“He never asked about us,” she said. “It’s like we were just flies on a plate to him. We existed as something not needing to be considered.”

She told Wyatt of the fliers and notices that began to cover the breakfast table. She described the strangers that walked up their driveway claiming to be our neighbors. She pointed toward the tractor behind them. Six months before that freezing early morning it now stood quietly in, its engine was gutted and some of its parts stolen. She managed a smirk, though there was no joy or illusion of happiness on her face. “Is it ironic that the tractor actually belonged to our neighbors?”

Wyatt listened as she explained the fines that began to get levied against them. Her father saw their taxes rise unexpectedly and in stark contrast to the others who lived around them. But that was when her family really took notice of the number of farmers that had given up, their land surrendered to the government. “New people showed up. On the Montright farm...some people who had never even seen a combine or a harvester before.”

Crops didn’t grow. The fields were cleared of the stain of Man and his efforts, “the acres preserved” the main phrase spoken with a smile by men and women with faces like snakes. She told him of the announcement that new solar farms and wind farms were going to be built-the orchards and pastures of a new and greener century. Wyatt nodded his head as he listened. He knew those projects had yet to be completed or even begun.

“They wanted our farm. They wanted our livelihood,” she said. “‘It was our turn to let someone else have theirs’ they told us. Apparently, my father was too successful in his career.”

The girl took another breath. “My father was not afraid. Not for himself, anyway. He would not budge but he knew they weren’t going to stop. He had watched the way the country went. It was like standing in the way of a train that doesn’t know where it’s going but too many others are afraid to stop. That’s what he said, anyway.”

She paused for a long moment. The soft breeze had picked up into a steady wind. It howled through the snow banks of the open field. “And sure enough,” she said at length, “...they came.”

Wyatt stood beside her, his back against the wind. He felt the sting of it, of the snow that bit at the exposed skin of his neck. He ignored it as best he could, sheltering her from the passing gust. “What really happened yesterday morning?”

She told of the final warning they had received days before. Then, their water was cut off. Then, because they still would not comply, the power was shut down. Still, the family stayed. In a way, the description of her father the girl provided matched the profile documented by Wyatt’s peers, but only to a point. While he did seem stubborn, he also seemed noble. He wasn’t just trying to protect his home. He was trying to stand and defend against the blatant attack on his family, on his children. Their future was being robbed from them by the nullification of their present.

She didn’t watch all of the events. She saw the cars coming up the driveway. She was told she could not stay. With unstoppable tears her parents hugged and kissed her. They told her to run and not look back. She had to live. She had to survive to tell the world what happened to their family. As the cars came to rest a short distance in front of the house, her brother was dragging her into the barn. “He hugged me tighter than I’ve ever been hugged,” she said into the snow and wind. Her eyes were locked onto the blackened remnants of the fallen structure. “He kissed me on the forehead and told me he loved me...that he believed in me.”

At the back of the barn, she pointed out, was a small cellar accessible by a heavy, wooden hatch. In the cellar was a wall that could be pushed aside, revealing a third rate tunnel that led all the way to the highway. It was meant to be used to install a new type of irrigation system her father had been developing. If it worked, it would have actually saved water.

“My brother smiled at me before he closed and locked that hatch,” she said distantly. “It was the last time I saw him. It was the last time I knew he was alive.”

She didn’t say anything else, not for a long time. Minutes felt like hours in the howling wind that kicked the wet snow across the frozen plains. Wyatt stood as silent as she was. He didn’t urge her to say anything or do anything. He felt no need, that is, until something in the distance caught his attention. He stared past the bared-wire fence to the darkened farm house, watching the slowly fading shadows. It was movement, a guard on patrol steady and oblivious.

Wyatt heard the girl beside him shift in the snow. “I’m ready to go now,” she said.

He wasn’t watching her. His eyes stared at the dim beam of a flashlight scanning the snow around the house. “It’s probably the best time, anyway,” Wyatt said, gesturing to the lonely guard with his chin.

“It’s getting brighter here,” she said, taking a step back from the fence. “He might be able to see us.”

Wyatt didn’t move.

“Agent Douglass, please...” Wyatt felt her hand on his arm. He looked at her fingers, then into her eyes. “I need to leave this place now. With or without you.”

Wyatt watched her eyes for a long moment before turning his head to look out toward the farm house. The single guard had stopped to talk to another that had emerged on the stoop of the side door. Neither seemed to be aware of them on the other side of fence. Wyatt nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The first light of the morning cast the rural Oklahoma countryside in a hazy, gray luminance. The snow had tapered to an occasional, wispy flake by the time they approached the beat-up pickup truck they had borrowed from a neighbor of the cashier, Eleanor. The rusted metal had more dents than paint coating its weathered skin. The windshield was cracked and the one remaining windshield wiper was stuck pointing upward at a sixty degree angle.

The hinges of the driver’s side door wretched as if in pain when Wyatt pulled it open. He wondered if it was just going to come off in his hand. She hadn’t opened the passenger door yet. She hadn’t even walked around to that side of the truck. Wyatt turned around. She was standing near the warped and mangled tail of the pickup. He looked at her, watching her tug on the black, padded straps of the book bag she had been wearing the whole time. Snow fell from the wrinkles and folds it had settled into during their trek back through the white, frozen and deserted fields.

“You aren’t going to get in,” Wyatt asked her. He already knew the answer. He had probably known before they ever arrived.

“I want to thank you,” she said instead of answering his question directly. “...For bringing me out here. I think I needed this more than you said you did.”

“I just wanted to try to understand what happened.”

“I know. And I needed to say goodbye...to mourn.” She forced herself to smile. “Or, at least start mourning. Because, that means I can start moving on, right?”

Wyatt tried to match her smile. He watched the single tear roll swiftly down her cheek. He nodded. “So you’re moving on?”

“Yes,” she said, wiping her face of the tears that were following the first. They were warm on the cold skin of her cheeks and shimmered briefly in the hazy morning light. “Tell my friends I said thank you. They knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I already gave them my goodbyes.”

“Where will you go?”

She chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not really sure. The Red River is not far that way.” She pointed south to her right.

Wyatt let his eyes peer past her delicate hand to the gray, fog enshrouded horizon beyond. He looked back her and asked, “Will you be able to make it?”

She shrugged her shoulders again. “I don’t know. I know I never will if I stay. There is nothing for me here, not even hope. But out there...maybe I can start over. Maybe I can have the chance to live the life my family gave theirs up for. Whatever the chances or risks or whatever...I have to try.”

Wyatt nodded. “Good luck-” He stopped and smiled suddenly. It was a genuine smile. “I don’t know you’re name.”

Her face brightened in the cold, gray light of the morning. She smiled warmly, as if she were smiling at a joke shared by an old friend or some long lost relative. It was almost like a joke, as she thought about it, albeit a tragic one. She knew in that instant the feeling of trust she had felt upon seeing him for the first time at the bottom of the stairs only hours before was one of the most well-founded intuitions she had ever known. “Madeline,” she replied simply.

Wyatt nodded. “Good luck, Madeline.”

“Thank you, Agent Douglass.”

With that, the girl he now knew as Madeline Parrish turned to face the snow fields leading away to the south. Wyatt watched her intently, studying and storing the sight of the miracle he was witnessing. Wyatt thought of something his grandfather had told him once: that the greatest moments in life always start with a single breath. Madeline took her breath and then her first step into a new life. The old one slowly faded into the snow and haze behind her as she treaded bravely into the cold and snowy wilds. Wyatt watch her until she was out of sight in the field. He let himself smile again, proud of the young stranger he felt so close to. He knew in his gut she would make it. It gave him hope. If she could do it, maybe Wyatt Douglass could find the strength to walk toward his own freedom beyond the wind and snow. He was still smiling as he cranked the chugging engine of the old truck to life. He would follow her tracks one day soon, just not today.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:25:00 +0000

Part Six

Mark LeVine blinked the water out of his eyes. It was raining. He didn’t remember when it had started. It might have been raining when he left the union offices. He hadn’t been paying attention. People on the sidewalk hurried around him, their jackets closed tightly to keep out the dropping temperature and stinging, cold rain. But Mark himself stepped idly along the slippery concrete. It was time to go home yet he wasn’t walking that way. Mark wasn’t walking to anywhere specific. For the time being, he just felt like walking.

Mark had almost jumped out of his skin at the contact of thick, olive-colored fingers on his shoulder. The receptionist hadn’t batted an eye. She never flinched or took her focus off of Mark. It was like the man that was suddenly standing behind him was a ghost only Mark was aware of.

The man spoke as Mark turned swiftly to face him, drawing his shoulder away like the man’s touch was acid burning through his jacket and shirt. “Is there a problem here?” He was shorter than Mark and much older. His slightly squared head was topped with a thin, evenly combed layer of silver hair. He wore a plain black suit and tie that made the white of his shirt stand out like sunlit snow. His faded-blue eyes were disarming and locked solidly on Mark’s. “What’s going,” he asked, his voice not direct at any one person.

The receptionist answered before Mark. “This man stormed up here a few minutes ago.”

“Stormed,” Mark shouted over her. “How could I storm? I’ve been sitting here waiting for over an hour!”

“-He refuses to fill out his paperwork! He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to be! And, he’s trying to cause a scene! He’s blaming us for some vandalism!”

“Because UNION was spray-painted all over my shop!”

The man held out his hands with such suddenness it caught the attention of both of them. “Okay, okay. Let’s just settle down a moment.” He didn’t yell. His raised voice was only loud enough to be heard over them. When the echo of their bickering had begun to fade into the recesses of the office suite, the man spoke again. “May I see his forms, please?”

The receptionist stood up for the first time since Mark had been there. The official looking man took the papers from her outstretched hand. “Thank you, Ms. Kory,” he said.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Bloom,” the receptionist, Ms. Kory, said pleasantly to the man who was obviously her boss, or at least one of them.

Mark watched them, mostly Ms. Kory. He eyed her hatefully, wondering how such a spiteful woman could exist. He almost didn’t notice Mr. Bloom walking past him until he heard the older man politely call his name. Mark turned around, missing the narrow-eyed glare from Ms. Kory’s tightly scrunched face.

“Let’s talk this way, Mr. LeVine,” Mr. Bloom said, gesturing over his left shoulder with a sideways nod.

What could have been seconds or minutes later, Mark wasn’t sure which, Mr. Bloom was opening a door into a small conference room. He had been led around a series of corners and down an uncertain number of hallways. Mark felt uncomfortably turned around. Still, he followed the silver-haired Mr. Bloom a few steps further into the conference room. The man had been talking about various random things around the office suite he, at least, found interesting. Mark had only been half listening, trying more to pay attention to his surroundings than find a fascination in labor statistics, color schemes, and the history of a wall. Somehow, Mark realized, he had failed on both counts.

The conference room was a basic, oblong, rectangular space illuminated by a panel of tall windows reaching from the linoleum floor to the soft-tiled ceiling. Most of the floor space in the isolated room was taken up by a long, wide table Mark guessed was about ten or twelve feet long. A dozen black, leather chairs surrounded the polished, wooden edges of the table. Mr. Bloom gestured to one of them as he walked to one end of the table, becoming silhouetted by the late afternoon light pouring in between the narrow slats of the thick blinds draped down the length of each window. “Have a seat, Mr. LeVine,” he said pleasantly.

Mark bit the inside of his lip and straightened his back. “No, thank you.”

Mr. Bloom pursed his lips slightly. “Oh,” he said. He might have been genuinely disappointed. “Well, suit yourself. But, I’m going to sit down.”

Mark watched the older man sit down at the end of the table. For reasons Mark could not explain, he found himself pulling out the closest leather chair and seating himself in it. He sighed, disappointed with himself.

“So, Mark...” Mr. Bloom looked down the table to the young man. “May I call you Mark?” He didn’t really wait for Mark to answer either way. “Mark-”

“I don’t want to join a union!” Mark blinked suddenly. He couldn’t believe he had said that out loud and so boldly. He took a quick breath, drawing the small surge of strength he felt at the surprised look on Mr. Bloom’s face. “That not why I’m here. I came here for answers. My business was smashed and I want to know why...I want to know by whom. I didn’t come here for membership. Just answers.”

Mr. Bloom blinked slowly, thoughtfully. His lips were drawn tightly together, the lines of his soft face suddenly appearing more defined. He didn’t say anything, not for a long moment. He didn’t seem to be waiting for Mark to say anything more. Mark wasn’t sure what more he needed to say. If he had begun to put his thoughts together, they were broken by the sudden sound of a door handle turning loudly and a door swiftly being opened and then closed.

Mark turned in his chair enough to peer over the back of the supple, black leather. A man much younger than Mr. Bloom walked casually past Mark, his eyes fixed on the silhouetted figure of Mr. Bloom perched observantly with his back as straight as an evergreen tree in the chair at the end of the table. Mark felt strangely uneasy about the way the man had seemed to ignore him. Suddenly, like never before in his life, Mark felt lower than any other human being.

He watched the tall man with a slender, muscled frame walk with even, calculated steps toward the end of the table. Mark noticed the paper-stuffed folder he placed on the table in front of Mr. Bloom before walking around the older man’s chair to take a seat on the opposite side of the table from Mark. His eyes were a dull blue Mark could barely make out in the grim shadows hovering against the opaque bands of pale sunlight stretching through the room. His sandy blonde hair was like the world’s perfect wheat field, each stalk trimmed short and even. The skin on his thick hands looked smooth and well manicured. The silver of his watch gleamed for a moment as he sat down. If it hadn’t been for the dull, golden hue of his hair and the softly tanned complexion of his face and neck, Mark would have lost sight of him in the black leather chair.

He wore a black suit and black, silk shirt. Mark suddenly wondered if the man smelled like money. His tie was the oddest part of him, the pattern consisting of narrow stripes purple and red in color. When he looked at Mark, Mark inhaled sharply, maybe too loudly. Mark looked away quickly, spotting Mr. Bloom flipping through the contents of the folder.

Mr. Bloom took a deep breath, laying his hands on either side of the open folder and the documents spread over each flap. “Mark,” he said with a clarity that reminded Mark of his grandfather. It was the way that even when he was wrong, his grandfather could have little doubt he, himself, was absolutely right. It was his grandfather that had tried to exile him from the family. Mark never cared much for his mother’s father.

“Mark, you know that this is simply a misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding ...a forgivable ignorance that is, unfortunately, leading to unnecessary hostilities.”

“No one wants a war, Mark,” said the man seated across the table. “What happened was unfortunate.”

“Yes,” added Mr. Bloom. “I completely agree. As much as we would like to, we simply can’t control what all of our membership-even the truly advantageous and dedicated members-do all of the time.”

Mark realized, horrorstricken, what this was. It was a close to something like an apology that he was going to receive. But it wasn’t even really that. It was a bold face admittance. It was the truth about so many things said with the smile of a wold as he talks a sheep into letting him through the door.

“Even the best parents can’t control their children all of the time,” Mr. Bloom continued.

“Something you’ll have to learn if you still want a child of your own,” said the blonde-haired man.

Mark’s eyes shot from Mr. Bloom to the blonde-haired man to the open folder on the table in a matter of heartbeats. He recognized his name on several forms. He saw Zach’s name as well. Those were their records. His gaze lifted with awe-fired fear to the two men watching him.

“You can’t adopt without joining a union,” the blonde-haired man said as soon as his eyes met Mark’s.

Just then, the door behind Mark opened again. Two men walked in, one after the other. The door closed loudly behind them. Their footsteps seemed to clamor loudly off the walls around the table. Mark was watching them. He wondered if they were being deliberate in their actions, each one taking a separate route to the opposite side of the room. They placed themselves in the long-backed chairs beside the blonde-haired man.

“You’re under no pressure to join a specific charter,” said Mr. Bloom.

“Your field of employment allows you several key opportunities,” said one of the two men that had just entered the conference room. They were slightly older than the blonde-haired man. The one on Mark’s left had brown hair, the one to Mark’s right had salt and pepper colored hair. Their eyes were similar in color, so were their slightly sunken cheek bones and narrow, pale noses. Mark wondered if they brothers, or cousins. He didn’t have too much of a chance to ponder.

“As a gay man myself, I’d be happy to counsel you on some of the options that, itself, provides,” Mr. Bloom said.

“Huh,” Mark questioned, his brain catching up with what was quickly being said. “Why-”

“You’re a business leader with a unique perspective,” said the man with salt and pepper hair. “We look for that. It’s good for diversity. You could, maybe, make a good leader. Maybe anywhere you like.”

“It’s important to have diverse leaders, especially when and where there might be none.”

Their words and voices were beginning to flow together. Mark was having trouble keeping up with who was saying what. “No,” he said meekly. “I...I don’t want to be a leader anywhere.”

As he was speaking, the door behind him opened once more. The sound of high heels tapping with precision under a steady, intimidating gait muted his words even more. Mark looked at her as she walked around the table to his right. She was an older woman, well past her forties. She wore a close-knit purple blouse with an obscene red pendant near the v-cut neck line that extended a few inches below her collar bone. Her black skirt stretched down to her calves was almost as tight as the skin on her face. She sat down next to the man with salt and pepper hair, quickly acknowledging Mark’s last statement.

“It is truly disheartening to hear such a thing,” she said intensely. Mark couldn’t help but think of his high school principle.

“I don’t want to join a union...any of them,” Mark said, looking at the faces surrounding him, watching him.

“Aren’t you being selfish,” the woman said.

“You’re not thinking of others, your neighbors and friends,” said the younger of the two brothers.

“Don’t you realize how unfair you’re being?”

“Is it right to horde resources, Mark,” asked Mr. Bloom. “Think about that. Think about the country and how fragile it is.”

“Everyone has a part to play. Are you going to play yours fairly, Mark,” asked the woman.

“How can anyone know if you are taking only your fair share? What will society think? What will your friends say?”

Suddenly, the blonde haired man leaned over the edge of the table. “Have you thought about your partner, Mark?

“Or, your employees, Mark,” asked the older brother. “Have you thought about them?”

“What about your business in general? It is such an unstable and difficult time we live in, Mark,” the woman said. “Don’t you want to protect your business?”

The younger brother spoke up again. “Don’t you want to protect what’s yours?”

“Wait, wait! Please,” Mark protested, his voice rising above the rattling, attacking din of their voices. “You can’t just sit there and do that. I’m not an idiot you can just talk down to. I have...I have my questions too,” he said, stamping the polished tabletop with his finger tip.

“Who are you people? Why are you treating me like a...a petulant child who doesn’t understand the rules of the classroom?” Mark sat up in his chair. “Well, I don’t care about your rules. I don’t want to be a part of your classroom. I don’t want to be in a union!

“I’m a baker. All my life I’ve wanted to make cookies and be my own boss. I will never be in a union. Or, be some kind of managerial figurehead. I have the freedom to work as long and as hard as I choose. I have the spirit of ingenuity unfettered and I will not submit to change that. I don’t have to wait on my turn or a boss to let me go toward something great or hold me down and keep me in my place.

“So what do you want? My soul? My ethics and my values? Why do you have to tear us down? Do you want to hurt us or our store? Fine! Go ahead! Kick down the doors! Throw rocks through our windows! We’ll fix them! We will do it. Us...ourselves, without your bureaus or your bosses. Do you want to burn it to the ground? Go ahead! We’ll build it again!”

Mark was suddenly on his feet. He was propelled by an anger raging beyond his control, a fear he could feel like a nameless, black weight on his soul and deep in his heart, and a sense of pride he had only felt in the shop of his dreams, standing beside the love of his life.

“So what the hell do you want?!” He was pounding his fist into the table now. “Who the hell are you people?!”

The conference room became deathly silent. Mark’s voice quickly faded between the vacuum of space between the bands of light and shadow stretching from the windows. Mr. Bloom was the first person to speak. He held his hands flatly together in front of his face, though he wasn’t praying. “America is a...delicate place, Mark. It’s sort of like...a wheel. One bad spoke and the whole wheel of America can just come apart.”

The woman across the table spoke next. The tone in her words was beyond impersonal. She could not hide the threat laced within the context of her nouns, pronouns, and prepositions. “America is delicate, indeed. More than that, it is sensitive. The American people are sensitive. They depend on people like us, people who help establish the system that protects them. You can’t just go around disrupting the system.”

Mark shook his head in disgust. “‘People like us’? People like you are part of the problem. Have you looked out those windows?” He pointed past Mr. Bloom to the panels of glass and blinds. “Have you? You aren’t protecting anything. You’re destroyers, all of you.

“Me? And people like me? We run good businesses, honest businesses with decent prices because we don’t have armies of faceless workers promised and then anchored to unfunded and unrealistic liabilities. There are no shadowy puppeteers with one hand pulling the strings and the other taking their share. What we do and what we produce are not natural resources. We have to work for them. And you can’t take them.”

The woman shook her head. “Mark, you-”

“I want to leave now!”

The blonde-haired man leaned forward slightly in his chair. “Are you sure Zach feels the same way as you?”

Mark glared through the shadows into the eyes of the blonde-haired man. “I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.” He looked at the rest of the obscured faces. “We will never give in. Neither one of us.”

Mr. Bloom took a deep breath. “If that’s how you fell, Mark, the door is right there.” He gestured with a subtle nod toward a door on the right-hand side of the room from where Mark was sitting.

Mark hadn’t noticed it before. He didn’t wait for any more prompting, or for any of them to say anything else. The door locked with a loud click behind him and Mark found himself in the lobby outside the office suit. He didn’t keep track of how long it took him to get back outside and onto the sidewalk.

Mark blinked more of the cold, stinging rain out of his eyes. He was standing on a street corner. The green of a traffic light blended strangely with the flashing orange of the DO NOT WALK sign above his head. He felt people pushing past him, trying to cross the street. He had no idea how long he had been standing there. The National Mall stretched from left to right across the noisy avenue. Towering above it in a holy, ivory-white majesty was the Washington Monument. Mark realized he had been staring at it.

He would never know exactly why, nor was there just any one reason, but Mark suddenly had the inescapable urge to touch it. He had not been inside since he was a child. It had been years and years since he felt the smooth stone of its facade under his fingers. He was sure he hadn’t even looked at it since it became closed to the public two years earlier. They never did give a real reason as to why.

The rain seemed heavier, colder as Mark approached the barriers. A few guards patrolled the low-gated perimeter. He thought there might have been more. He wasn’t watching for them. He felt the cold, slick metal under his hands. This could get him into serious trouble. He could be thrown in jail. He could be forced to pay some tremendous and devastating fine. They would make an example out of him. I don’t care, Mark thought. This is supposed to stand for something. It isn’t supposed to be locked behind gates. I have to know. I have to remember.

Mark kept repeating that over and over in his head as propelled himself over the wet barricade. It rattled noisily. He nearly lost his balance, half stumbling as he rushed onto the forbidden hilltop. A guard shouted from somewhere behind him. Then, two more were yelling. He heard them at the barricade, the aluminum ringing under the hiss of the rain and sleet as they scurried after him. Mark turned his bumbling gait into a panicked dash toward the monument. The heavy stones gleamed with a white like angelic snow. He could smell it he was so close. He could feel the bitter wind rushing off its smooth sides. He looked up toward the point of its spire. The obelisk commanded the landscape around it and the sky above it, piercing the sagging clouds.

The guards were nearly on top of him. Mark reached out, his fingers splayed wide, ready to touch the monument. That was all he needed, just to feel it again, just once. He needed it to remind him, to encourage him. They were shouting in his ears. Mark was only a few feet away when one of the guards tackled him. The others were on the scene a heartbeat later. Their hands fought for a grip on his limbs flailing for freedom. They wouldn’t let him get up to walk so Mark crawled. He was less than a foot away when he felt a wet boot connect with his gut, lifting fiercely against his diaphragm for an excruciating instant.

Mark heaved, trying to breathe. He was trying to shout, pleading with the guards who pulled him off the rain-soaked ground with strangling hands on his arms and even his hair. His ears were flooded with demeaning curses slithering off their tongues and past their lips. Yet, still Mark struggled. He reached out again, shoving off one of their hands as pleaded even louder. He just needed to touch the stone once. The wind howled against the writhing mass. Mark managed to gain a few inches of ground. It was just enough. His fingers brushed the cold marble. It was a moment that lasted a heartbeat yet stretched in Mark’s mind for infinity. It was everything he remembered and more. The sensation of the hard, smooth stone against his skin took its time to travel up the length of his arm straining against the pull of the guards.

Mark knew he would never feel the monument dedicated to the first leader of the free world again. He didn’t fight anymore as he was dragged down the shallow slope of the hill. He didn’t resist when the guards shoved him back over the barricade. They spit in his face for the trouble he caused before turning to go back to the easy monotony of their day.

There would be no jail, no fine, no severe public embarrassment. Mark smiled but felt himself sob. In a way, it was like he was granted the gift to feel freedom just one more time. He stared in tearful awe at the monument rising into the clouds and thanked God for that cherished gift. He would never forget it.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 12:20:00 +0000

Part Five

With clenched teeth, he inhaled against the fierce pain coursing through his nerves. It was the searing burn of his muscles pulled tautly around his abdomen, like harp strings tuned so tightly one pluck and they were sure to snap apart. Wyatt endured it though. He did this every night he could, pushing his body to its breaking point. He did this more than he slept. It wasn’t that he was obsessed with exercising or staying in shape. Wyatt cared little for the shape of his body. No, he worked his crying muscles, his tingling nerves, his boiling veins for a much deeper reason. In a world where so many around him seemed numb, Wyatt Douglass sought to feel alive.

Halfway through another sit up, a knock at the door made him jump. It broke his concentration, though he wasn’t keeping a count. Wyatt sat all the way up, his knees pressing against his bare chest. Beads of sweat glistened slightly across his neck and shoulders in the glow of the nearby television. A salesman in a blue T-shirt was pitching some useless product to the sleepless masses. Another man in a purple T-shirt nodded with rehearsed movement beside the first. Wyatt wasn’t listening, the volume was almost all the way down. It was just loud enough to make noise. That was all he had intended.

The door rattled again, a little louder this time and a little more urgently. Wyatt watched it for another moment before finally getting to his feet. He grabbed a shirt balled up on the corner of the bed as he padded calmly across the soft carpet. The dry threads of the thin shirt clung to the sparse layer of sweat on his torso as he slipped it on. With a casual, unassuming rhythm, Wyatt unlocked and pulled open the thick, hotel room door.

A fist of bitter cold air was the first thing to greet him. This hiss of heavy sleet cascading in dense sheets against everything beyond the balcony outside his door reminded Wyatt for the first time in hours a storm had moved into the area. He figured it’d probably start snowing soon, too. While the sound of the winter storm filled his ears, it was the wet, shivering figure in front of him that consumed his vision. It was the cashier from the restaurant. He wasn’t surprised to see her.

He started to open his mouth, to ask a question. But she was already answering. It was probably an obvious question anyway. She had known he would ask and she had known it would be the first question. “I have a friend that works here. He told me you were here. He gave me your room number.”

She stood there waiting for Wyatt to say something. He didn’t. He just stood there, one hand holding the door and the other hanging loosely at his side. His eyes even seemed frozen, a nearby light glowing dimly sparkled like a pair of faint, distant starts in the black voids of his pupils. He was watching her, trying to study her. Mostly frozen drops of water clung to the brim of a loose, nylon hood she clasped tightly with both hands. Her brown eyes were partly hidden under the shadow of her hood. Her hair seemed darker, especially the wet strands plastered to her clammy, white brow. She was still trembling, partly from the wicked cold and partly from his looming presence.

She swallowed nervously. The silence stretched between them until she broke it uncertainly. Despite her best effort, she could not keep her voice steady. “Sh...She wants to meet you. I...told her what you said. I told her about you and...and she...ww...wants to meet you.”

“Where?”

The cashier seemed startled at the sound of his voice. She straightened noticeably, taken aback by the mysterious man in the doorway. “Ss...Someplace else. Away ffr...from here.”

Wyatt blinked, then said evenly, “Okay.”

She didn’t move or step closer to the open doorway when Wyatt retreated into the shadows of the room beyond the bright ambiance of the dresser-mounted television. She waited patiently, still shivering against the cold while Wyatt quickly gathered his keys and wallet before pulling on his socks and shoes. The TV suddenly winked out, the heavy darkness leaping from the fringes of the hotel room to envelop the quiet space. Wyatt emerged a moment later, adjusting the collar of his jacket.

As the door she had struggled to convince herself to knock upon clicked loudly shut, the trembling young woman felt the agent’s arm lightly encircle her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he whispered against her ear. Wyatt glanced over their shoulders to catch sight of Gordon Parks watching them through a thin gap in the curtains of his own room. Wyatt knew he would be there, that he had probably been watching since she first came to Wyatt’s door.

Gordon’s eyebrows bounced playfully and he smiled with a devious, almost congratulatory look upon his youthful face. Wyatt only responded by turning his head forward, already guiding the young woman toward a nearby flight of stairs.

Her name was Eleanor and she only stopped shaking when she had taken a second, long drag off the cigarette held tightly between her pale lips. She didn’t speak except to laugh at herself. “It’s sad, I think. Ya’ know? I spend more money on these things...” She held up her cigarette, the smoldering butt glowing brightly in the darkness between them in the front of her car. She let it touch her lips again and drew another stream of the hot smoke into her mouth. Then she chuckled. “...I spend more money on them than I do for food. It’s the taxes, though. Everything’s expensive. You have to make your choices.”

Eleanor just drove after that. Wyatt just sat and watched the sleet fall through the beam of the headlights. He didn’t know where they were going. It didn’t matter. A few minutes later she parked the car against a curb in a neighborhood that looked like almost any other random neighborhood in the country. “We’re here,” she said, opening her door.

Wyatt followed her up a narrow, concrete walkway to a warped, wooden door. Most of the paint was missing and what was left looked like the cracked, parched floor of some Godforsaken desert. She opened the door quickly, the hinges creaking wildly, alerting anyone inside the small, two-story house. Eleanor crossed the threshold and stepped hurriedly aside, letting Wyatt walk calmly in behind her.

The agent quickly scanned the unfamiliar setting. A man with tangled, greasy black hair pushed up on one side, stumbled sleepily off a worn down sofa and onto his feet. He stood defensively, a weary animal ready to pounce at the slightest hint of a threat. “Is this him,” the stranger asked Eleanor. He looked to be in his early twenties. His voice was ragged, like the day’s worth of stubble on his face. He might have been fighting a cold on top of trying to keep watch with hardly any sleep. He blinked frantically, his body still orienting itself. He’d been caught off guard, dozing on the only job he had right now.

“Yeah,” Eleanor said, walking around Wyatt who was still in the entryway.

“Do you have a gun?”

Wyatt shifted his eyes from Eleanor to the younger stranger. He shook his head, saying evenly, “No.”

“Aren’t you some kind of government agent?” He clenched his fists, tensing the muscles in his arms to make them bulge.

Wyatt nodded, looking at him unimpressed. “Yes. But I still don’t have a gun.” Wyatt looked the stranger dead in the eyes, his gaze seemingly unchanged but for a fierceness the stranger obviously felt as he straightened his back. “Do I need one,” Wyatt asked.

Someone else answered the question. “No, you don’t.”

Wyatt looked up the narrow steps to a dark haired girl with cold, distant eyes. She was staring at him but spoke to the stranger at the couch. “You can stand down now, Jonah. He’s not going to hurt us.”

“What about his friends?” The boyish looking Jonah turned his beady eyes toward Eleanor. She had plopped down in a torn, leather easy chair. Her wet jacket was hanging off the soft back, icy droplets tapping against the thick, tan carpeting. “Were you followed?”

Eleanor shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t think to look out of people following them.

“I have no control over anyone else,” Wyatt said with little emotion in his voice. He was simply stating a fact.

The girl at the top of the steps had begun to descend the rickety planks one at a time. “I’m going to get some water. Would you like some water, Agent Douglass?”

She walked past him as she said his name. It surprised Wyatt but he didn’t let it show. Of course she knows my name, he thought to himself. She probably saw my business card.

“The kitchen is this way,” the girl said, already halfway across the living room. Wyatt proceeded to follow her, watching Jonah watch him with every step he took. “Don’t let Jonah get to you. He’s more scared than he looks,” the girl said with a slow sigh when Wyatt had rounded the corner leading into the kitchen.

Wyatt let himself smirk at her comment. “If you say so.”

“What did you want to talk to me about, Agent Douglass?” She didn’t face him as she spoke. The hinges on a cabinet door above a lemon yellow, linoleum counter top squeaked softly. She pulled two stout glasses from the front of an assortment. “You wanted to see me. Well, here I am.”

“I wanted to ask you about your parents,” Wyatt said. He took another step into the kitchen. “I wanted to ask you about what happened on that farm...your farm.”

Wyatt watched her fill the glasses with tap water. He saw her shoulders rise and sag with the heavy, pained breath she took at the mention of the farm. Finally, the girl turned to face the strange man who had once been only two things: first, an idea of something terrible, an avatar of an evil arm soaked in the blood of her family; and second, a name on a business card her best friend had put in her hand just a few hours earlier.

Wyatt took in the sight of the sun-kissed emerald of her eyes, the way they were almost like summer sunlight on a blade of grass. She had been crying, but that had been hours ago. Her eyelids were puffy and sagging. The whites of her eyes were hidden under the swollen and dry red veins. Yet, he still could take his gaze away from the color of her eyes. He thought of a blade of grass again.

“Here, unless you’re not going to drink it.”

Wyatt looked down at the proffered glass. He felt himself smirking again. A Texas flag was painted around the center. He looked at the glass in her other had, recognizing the Oklahoma colors between her fingers. He nodded appreciatively, taking the Texas glass into his fingers.

“Since I’ve got a man from the EPA here, is there anything I should know about this water?”

Wyatt lightly rubbed the painted lone star under his thumb. He lifted his eyes to hers. He shrugged his shoulders before touching the rim of the glass to his lips. Lukewarm water traced its way over his tongue and down his throat. He swallowed the small sip then answered, “I don’t know.”

The girl snickered once, shaking her head. “Funny.”

“I’m not what you think I am. I’m not a scientist. I don’t investigate pollutants...just polluters.”

The brief glimpse of something barely resembling a smile had completely vanished from her face. “Is that what your friends were doing at my father’s farm? Investigating?”

Wyatt looked down at the glass in his hands again. He was cradling it like some kind of precious element, like it were a lifeline or an anchor he absolutely could no longer let go. The thumb of his right hand was still caressing the roughly painted surface of the Texas banner. “I don’t know what happened,” Wyatt said. “That’s why I’m here. I want to know what you know.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the wall behind Wyatt. He turned, his back straightening. Every muscle in his body tightened at once. Suddenly, he was sympathizing with Jonah at his entrance into the house. It was Jonah’s head that poked around the corner. He glanced at Wyatt then quickly looked past him. “Somebody’s here. Well, they’re across the street.”

“What? Who,” the girl asked. “Do you know who it is?

“No. It’s a nice car though. They came up the street, did a U-turn, and then parked up near old Mrs. Handers’ house.” Jonah stepped further into view. “They’ve been there for like...a few minutes.”

“Don’t be too detailed,” Eleanor shouted from the living room.

“I’m doing my best!” Jonah looked at the pair in front of him. “I couldn’t think of a number.”

“I think I know who it is,” Wyatt said. “Idiot,” he mumbled under his breath, turning around to gently place the Texas glass on the linoleum counter top. He was thinking of the idiot in the car. It could only be the young, brown-nosing Gordon Parks.

Wyatt turned to look at the girl. “We need to go. We still need to talk. Is there a back door we can use?”

Jonah and the girl tilted their heads slightly, directing attention toward the locked door just a few feet to their right.

“Ahh,” Wyatt said. “Good.”

Jonah leaned close to the girl. “He’s not supposed to be some kind of detective, is he?”

She shrugged her shoulders. It was the best sign of hope she had received from the stranger so far.

“Get your stuff,” Wyatt said. There was authority in his voice. He was quickly trying to move past an obviously embarrassing moment. “We need to go before he gets impatient.”

“Who,” Jonah asked as the girl began to turn and walk out of the kitchen. Wyatt stayed a few steps behind her. Jonah grabbed his arm. “Is he going to kills us?”

Wyatt looked at the soft fingers gripping his biceps. “Worse.” He looked up into the puppy-dog eyes of the younger man. “He’s going to tattle on us.”

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:18:00 +0000

Part Four

Wyatt Douglass had never really experienced life with a pet, at least of the dog or cat variety. He’d taken care of a series of goldfish that passed, over a period of months, between a small, clear, glass bowl which sat upon a shelf in his room, to a much larger porcelain bowl in a small, white and blue-tiled room down the upstairs hallway of his childhood home. He could easily recall friends who traipsed around on Sunday afternoons, a panting K-9 steadily in tow. Then there were peers at school who walked with squared shoulders and egos floating like loosely anchored hot-air balloons above their heads overshadowing potentially interesting personalities. Behind them would always be a wake of other members of Wyatt’s generation, the starry eyed youth whose gazes were unexplainably fixated on the popular human lumps trolling up and down the hallways. Wyatt imagined those numbed, drooling masses to be like pets. He couldn’t remember being one of those panting fools salivating for any opportunity to please the “cool kid” at the head of the rabble.

Wyatt could never recall truly experiencing that feeling of being followed and admired by someone or something that unabashedly displayed its self worth as somehow being lower. He could not wrap his mind around how they seemed to believe they didn’t deserve to be at the front of the line. He had observed that their scattered internal workings appeared to indefinitely prescribe them to be lead, blindly if necessary. Suddenly, however, Wyatt Douglass found himself strangely elevated to the position of “cool kid” and his shadow enveloping the talkative Gordon Parks.

The din of the restaurant Gordon had followed Wyatt into from their hotel a block up the road barely muted the words jumping off the younger man’s tongue. Wyatt had hoped to spend the rest of the evening alone. He had tried to sneak out of his hotel room. Gordon Parks was staying in a room one door down but was already standing attentively outside Wyatt’s door when he stepped out.

“So what do you think?”

Wyatt blinked, the silence at their table suddenly louder than the chatter reverberating off the walls under the mellow music flowing between the waves of words and phrases all around him. He had heard Gordon’s voice, knew he had been discussing something relative to the two of them. But, his lack of any real care for what the younger man had to say had caused Wyatt to ignore Gordon’s words completely.

“I think,” Wyatt said with a mild stretch of his back, “...that it’s time to call it a night.”

“So soon? Well, I guess it has been a long day,” said Gordon Parks. Wyatt couldn’t tell if he was talking to him or announcing it to himself. Gordon stood up a second behind Wyatt. He was reaching for his wallet when he asked, “Do you want me to pay?”

Wyatt put his hand out to stop him, shaking his head at Gordon before turning away from the table.

“I’m just going to use the restroom,” Gordon said. It sounded more like he was asking for Wyatt’s permission. Wyatt shrugged his shoulders and waved him away.

At the front of the restaurant, the mustard yellow of street lights outside reached through the dirt and rain-stained windows, throwing off-color bands unevenly across the flat, sky-blue walls. The hostess smiled pleasantly at Wyatt as he approached her counter. He placed the meal ticket on the laminated wood surface between them. Her hair was a rich brunette color. Her face was narrow and tan. Her brown eyes were soft, unable to hid her weariness. Foodservice, like government work, Wyatt figured, would do that to a person.

“Did you enjoy your meal?” Her voice was warm. She sounded sincerely concerned, his satisfaction either about to be the high or low point of her evening.

Wyatt nodded, barely glancing at her as she spoke. “Yes. It was very nice.” He didn’t say it coldly or impatiently. He sounded tired.

He kept his eyes moving as she busied herself at the cash register, only to find himself staring past the girl with long, flat hair in front of him. There was a plaque on the wall. Wyatt couldn’t take his eyes off of it. It sent his brain into a spin. He had seen it before, or one exactly like it. Except, here there was one small difference. The engraved plate near its base was still intact, displaying the trophy’s purpose and year of award. The copy he had seen on a bedroom wall in the Parrish farm house hours before was absent of that very feature.

“Sir,” the cashier said, his change in her hand.

He looked down at her for a moment then back up at the wall behind her. There were several of the plaques, each branded with a different year. There were framed pictures surrounding the mounted awards. In each one were the proud and smiling faces of each year’s winners. There were fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and whole families beaming with a wholesome pride into a camera flash. Wyatt’s gaze focused onto one family in particular.

The cashier noticed the look on Wyatt’s tired face. She turned slightly to follow his gaze. He heard her inhale sharply yet still softly. He was looking directly at her, waiting for her brown eyes-now wider and more alert above her defined cheek bones-when she turned back to face him.

“You know who she is,” Wyatt asked, his words direct. He could tell by the look in her eyes there was no need to delay the point he was after. He waited for her to answer. He watched her try to form the words of a reply. He didn’t wait very long. “Where is she?”

Again, the cashier started to speak then stopped abruptly. Her eyes shifted, her attention caught by someone else quickly approaching. “Ready to go?” The voice of Gordon Parks seemed to boom over Wyatt’s left shoulder. His jovial trek to Wyatt’s side came to a quick halt when Wyatt looked sharply at him. Gordon watched the twenty-nine year-old for a moment, then noticed the cashier for the first time. Her appearance was striking in a small town sort of way. To Gordon, who looked her torso up and down without any subtlety, the girl would have been worth spending the night with. But there was the intent way Wyatt was peering at him, and the other man’s near proximity to the counter.

Gordon’s eyebrows arched knowingly. “Oh,” he said and began to smile. “I see, Agent Douglass. Good call, man. Good call. I’ll uhh...let you finish making your plans and meet you outside.”

It took Wyatt a moment to understand what the young fool was trying to say. He glanced sidelong at the cashier. Suddenly, it dawned on him. “Umm...right.”

Gordon Parks nodded, his smile beaming and sickening to Wyatt who waited until his counterpart was out the front door before turning back to the woman behind the counter. “I need to speak with her. Please, it’s important.”

“I...I don’t know where she is. Maybe...maybe she’s dead.” Her voice was shaking, ruining her attempt to sound confident.

Wyatt shook his head, pulling a business card out of a pocket in his wallet. Using a pen sitting on the laminated countertop, he quickly jotted his hotel information on the empty back of the card. “Please, give this to her,” he said, ignoring her last remark. “It’s only a matter of time before the others figure this place out, too. I can’t make her, or you, trust me. That’s okay. Just give that card to her. Tell her I only want to know what really happened out there.”

The cashier barely nodded, staring at the card on the countertop in front of her. She didn’t watch him leave. She stared at the card and the thin, black ink drying on its surface, uncertain of what to do next.

* * * * * * *
A chorus of telephones rang incessantly somewhere down the long, arched hallway to Mark’s left. He sat nervously in a small, stale-smelling lobby on the third floor of a run down office building in the heart of downtown D.C.. Mark glanced quickly toward the distant end of the noisy, but empty, corridor. He spotted shadows stretched across the thresholds of glass offices, each moving swiftly across the dirt-stained linoleum. His eyes followed the long, web-like cracks in the thin, grime encrusted tiles back to the lip of the carpet a few feet away. The short, dusty threads covered almost the entire floor of the waiting area and almost muted the uneven tapping of his foot against the small, stiff fibers under his chair.

“Mr. Levine?”

Mark looked up sharply when the squeaky, nasal voice of one of the seven receptionists on the other side of a tall, cherry-stained plywood partition called his name. He craned his neck to see her peering over the flat surface of the chest-high wall. “Ye-”

“You forgot to fill out a section of the form you were given downstairs,” she said, rolling over his response as if had said nothing at all.

Mark approached the square space carved out of the thin, wooden barrier. His tired eyes glanced quickly down the half empty form. “Umm, no...I didn’t.”

The receptionist leered at the man in front of her. She was mentally preparing herself to deal with yet another simpleton who lacked the ability, it would appear, to follow even the most simple of instructions. “Well, Mr. Levine, how can we know what union to try to place you in if you don’t state your preference.” It wasn’t a question, more like a warning to make a decision.

“But I don’t have a preference. I don’t want to join a union.”

Mark watched the woman with murky, hazel eyes unnaturally enlarged by the thick lenses of her circular-framed glasses. The black plastic clung to the bridge of her thin, pale nose. Her black hair was pulled tightly back into a short, knotted bun. The softly humming fluorescent lights made the greased-down ebony strands shimmer as she shifted in her chair. Her annoyance was growing and her wiry face did not hide this.

“Then why are you here,” she asked. “Why are you wasting everyone’s time?”

Mark blinked. He turned his head, first to the left and then to the right, taking in the full scene of the empty lobby behind him.

“Us! Back here, Mr. Levine,” the receptionist gestured to the women behind her. A few looked up in their direction, but only for a moment before returning to whatever it was they were sleepily busying themselves with. “We all have work to do, too.”

“As do I,” Mark said bitterly. He hadn’t raised his voice yet. He wanted to. His nerves were still shaky. He took a deep breath, steadying himself. “But it’s hard to do that when your business has been smashed up by union thugs.”

The receptionist sat up straighter in her chair. “That is a very strong accusation, Mr. Levine.”

“And one I can back up,” Mark said with a sneer, leaning closer into the narrow opening. “Come down to my bakery. My partner and I will be happy to point out the evidence.”

A quiver in her flat, painted lips betrayed the snarl the receptionist was trying to hide. “It’s too outrageous to believe. Are you here to file a grievance, then?”

“No, I’m admiring the curtains and the furniture arrangement,” Mark snapped sarcastically. The volume of his voice was edging toward yelling. “Of course I’m here to file a grievance.”

The receptionist stared wordlessly at Mark across the smooth, stained partition. He was an alien from another world to her, visible through the small, square space of open air. He suddenly seemed more tolerable to her now that she felt a sense of superiority over the lost little lamb fully return. She leaned back confidently in her chair. The aged springs under the seat, desperate for repair, wretched noisily. She crossed her arms, never breaking eye contact with him.

At last, with a cold smile, the receptionist said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Levine. There’s nothing I can do here. You’re on the wrong floor.”

“What?”

“Exactly as I said. The offices here are for applying and processing only, not the filing of grievances or petitions.” Her words were punctual and matter-of-fact without losing the razor-sharp condescension she had obviously intended on sending across the partition.

“First of all, it’s LeVine...not Levine. Annunciate the syllables in my name!” Mark stood back, composing himself for the briefest of moments. He didn’t dare take too deep a breath. He hardly wanted to breathe in the stale dust permeating the air. “And secondly, I was told yesterday that the heads of each chapter for each union had offices here! And, this was the place to go! This building and this floor!”

The receptionist blinked once. She leaned forward just slightly, as if just enough to straighten a muscle cramping in her back. “Who, Mr. Le...Vine? Who told you that?”

The name of the store had been Handy Crafts. It was a mom and pop store, or at least it had been once. It sat quietly at the far end of the dilapidated shopping center. It had been there when Mark and Zach signed the lease on the space that would become their bakery. They went in once, just before the grand opening of Heart and Soul. Mom and Pop were a week away from retiring. The keys of their small trinket and repair store were being handed to their nephew in exchange for those of a comfortable condo in Florida.

The first time Mark even stood at the door of the old store since that first meeting years before was the afternoon of the bakery’s ransacking. He wasn’t sure what to expect. There were two visions in Mark’s mind. One, that it would look almost identical to his memory of that first visit; or two, it would be in shambles, forgotten by time and the nephew left to run it. Mark stared at the faded lettering remaining on the smudged glass door.

Beyond the warped threshold, Mark beheld a stuffy, dingy gallery of junk cluttered shelves and fraying rugs on the floor. The yellowing plaster, once white, reeked of mold and tobacco and resembled the type of dry, doughy maps of the United States he and his friends once made in grade school. Mark had been hoping for his former vision, but was less than surprised to discover the latter. He felt sick at the sight of the two men running the place. A pair of slobs like Mark had never seen before. They were archetypes of so many things gone wrong and stereotypes for the kind of people that had walked the insufferable sense of gloom, hand in hand, into the rest of society. Bits of food clung to the sandpaper stubble coating the bloated cheeks of one standing behind a smoke-tinged glass counter. Dull eyes peered at Mark from the thinner, balding patron at the back of the store. Mark couldn’t shake the feeling he was the only one amongst them that hadn’t sold his soul.

“Do much business,” he had asked, trying to sound casual.

The two human sloths smiled at each other. If this was middle America, what were Mark and Zach? “Not really,” the skinny one at the back of the store answered.

“But business got to stay open. Wouldn’t be right just to close this place down,” added the chubbier man. Greasy curls of chest hair poked above a loose, egg-white shirt.

“What happened to the owner...the original owner?”

“Sold it to the union,” said the chubby one.

“For the good of the Nation,” said the second one.

The chubby man behind the counter let his smile widen. “A fine patriot. Felt the union could run the store best. Help keep everything fair and just. The way it all should be.”

Mark let his gaze shift between the two figures. He suddenly felt as if he were standing at the steps of an entrance into hell. Before him were the gatekeepers, flag bearers of a banner Mark could not recognize. “I want to talk about the unions,” he said after a long, hesitant moment.

I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

noreply@blogger.com (wanderingscribe) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Part Three

Agent Wyatt Douglass of the Environmental Protection Authority sighed as he listened to the voice coming through the receiver of his cellular phone. It was his most immediate superior. The man had long earned Wyatt’s respect. But at the moment, he was grating on Wyatt’s last nerve. A moment to speak at last presented itself. “Too many questions? What was the point in me coming here if I can’t ask questions?”

Wyatt paced in front of the farm house. He was mostly alone here, the majority of the other agents and investigators were either still inside or gathered near the back door. Wyatt squinted into the late afternoon sunlight angrily. “The right questions? How do I know which ones are the right questions without asking as many questions as I can?...Well, who are these guys?...Why do they have the...Oh. Well, that’s a bunch of crap, isn’t it? So why am I here?...Public relations, basically, right? Wow. How embarrassing for me...Huh? No, I haven’t found anything yet.”

That was a lie. While the man on the other end of the call had Wyatt’s respect, he did not have his trust. No one had that. There didn’t seem to be anyone truly left in the world to give that away to or allow to have. Wyatt ended the call, thinking of things he had found today. A picture of what had taken place on the old farm was forming in his mind. Wyatt had read the report taken by the first responders who had arrived on the scene apparently minutes after shooting erupted in the farm house centered in Wyatt’s gaze.

According to those initial statements, now being treated as holy writ to avoid any kind of real investigating, the agents representing the Environmental Protection Authority-along with their two escorts from the local sheriff’s office-fell under attack almost as soon as they arrived on the property. The surviving deputy moaned and groaned his emotional trauma as he had been carried by stretcher into an awaiting ambulance. “They led us...into...a trap...They...had it all set up...Oh, God! Why were they so...crazy?!”

Wyatt stared at the vehicle driven by his fallen peers. It sat silent and useless at one corner of the long gravel driveway. Twenty yards ahead of the bullet-scarred hood was the side of the farm house. The back door Wyatt had first entered was at too awkward an angle to cause the damage tattooed over the grill and fiberglass. Wyatt’s foot glanced off the deflated rubber of the left front tire.

Wyatt shook his head. It was not sitting right with him.

Inside the farm house, it was the small things that caught his attention. It was the things in his mind he imagined should have been one way in a place like the old house on the flat plains of the geographically centered state. Where were the family pictures? They seemed to be missing or scarce in number while antique store and flea market prints of various paintings and wall hangings still held to their nails in an unassuming decorative style. In the bedrooms, name plates were missing from trophies. Book bags were light and empty except for the forgotten loose change, the small bits of lunch money never to be used or taken again. The homework and school papers, report cards and permission slips to be signed by mom and dad were all missing.

Wyatt considered the crumbling barn outside, still smoldering and breathing out a gradually thinning column of charcoal gray smoke. He was staring at the red embers, feeling the sharp waves of heat radiating upward into the cold, winter air when he heard the anxious steps of Gordon Parks approach behind him.

“They’re just about ready to close up the scene, sir,” the bureaucratic wet-nurse said after clearing his throat.

“What about this barn?”

Gordon blinked as if noticing the collapsed remains of the charred structure for the first time. “Someone will be posted here...from the sheriff’s office, that is, all night. I’m sure it will be fine.”

Wyatt didn’t say anything. He didn’t turn around or make any motion to leave the spot he was standing on. Gordon Parks either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“Ardmore,” Wyatt said simply, staring into a red hot coal that had once been a support beam.

“Oh. Good.”

A long, awkward moment persisted when Wyatt made no sign of movement. He could feel Gordon Parks’ eyes staring at him, into him, trying to figure Wyatt out. “Umm...Agent Douglass?”

Wyatt noticed the sky, slowly beginning to darken above the crisp orange and crimson bands surrounding the setting sun. “All right, Mr. Parks. Lead the way,” he said with a sigh, stepping in hesitant time behind the younger man already walking with relieved glee toward their cars.

* * * * * * * * *

Mark LeVine stared at the empty blue sky hanging above him and the mostly empty parking lot surrounding him, spread out as if it were nothing more than a gray, lifeless plain. The afternoon sun had already begun to warn the hood of their beat-up sedan, warn down by the merciless miles of neglected road ways. The red paint was once glossy but now could barely hold a sheen on the best of days. It was dirt stained with random patterns of grease that had long ago bonded under many passing seasons to the faded detailing. The headlights were cracked and the tires were out of alignment. Mark took a deep breath, feeling the rough layer of dried-out paint underneath his fingertips. He did love that car, though. All things considered, Mark had little doubt it would be the last car he ever owned.

“Are you just going to lay there the rest of the day?”

Mark shifted his eyes, startled by the surprising sound of Zach’s sweet voice. It was even and casual, off-putting and disarming all at once. There was no hint of the stress simmering just under the calm demeanor of the twenty-nine year old blonde-haired man from rural Virginia. He was smiling at Mark, the subtle dimples on his cheeks more prominent in the cold sunlight. His green eyes stared up toward Mark’s, mercilessly locking onto his gaze. Zach was waiting for an answer.

Mark grinned. It was the only thing he could do under the weight of his boyfriend’s eyes, the glow of the lightly freckled face, and the embrace his presence alone provided. “No.”

Zach leaned forward against the car. He was tying to look extra cute. He had no doubt just by watching Mark he was succeeding. “Is there room for one more up there?”

Mark glanced down the length of the hood and pretended to sigh. “Oh, I think we could squeeze you in.”

Zach waited until he was laying comfortably beside Mark to ask, “What are you thinking about?”

Mark looked over at Zach. He felt his grin become a smile when Zach laid his head against Mark’s outstretched arm, the back of his neck snuggling Mark’s right biceps. “I’m just...trying to figure all of this out, I guess. I want to know why it happened. I want to know what we did.”

Zach shrugged his shoulders. “We’re not part of a union.”

“But we’ve never been part of one. The bakery’s been open for almost six years. Why, now, do we suddenly get...ransacked?”

Zach had no answer, no words he could think of to calm Mark’s racing thoughts. He squinted through the sunlight radiating down onto them. A woman was pushing a covered stroller up the cracked, barren sidewalk hugging the outside walls of the quiet shopping center. He watched her, suddenly thinking back to a recent event in the boys’ lives. “What about the adoption application?”

“What about it? And which one?”

A month before, Mark and Zach took the first bold step on a journey they had hoped would eventually lead them toward starting a family. There were at least two primary sets of forms they had to submit in order to just determine their eligibility to adopt a child and expand their household. New local equality directives required a couple to first report to the office of their local district Housing and Community Bureau. There, they would learn if there was room in their residential district for their family to expand. The availability of resources had to be accounted for and confirmed. The livelihood of everyone around them was at stake, after-all. At least, that was what had been taught to the public over the last two years. The first application was four pages and was to be followed by no less than a six week waiting period. The boys had gotten lucky. An elderly couple two blocks from their house had died the week their application came up for review.

“Either one,” Zach replied. “Both.” He turned his head, his eyes finding Mark’s. “Was there a question about union affiliation on either one?”

Mark quickly searched back into his mind, recalling the endless lines of questions. He sat up as he remembered, barely feeling Zach’s head lift away to free his arm. He answered, softly, his voice a coarse inflection of the sudden wave of fear and anger rolling through him. “Yes.”

Mark could see the question, the wording almost identical on the two different documents. He remembered his answer on both, his wording a perfect match. NO.

Zach turned his head away again, staring across the deserted parking lot. At the far end of the asphalt field, past the uneven and faded lines of parking spaces, two vehicles sat alone amongst the emptiness. He shifted his gaze for a moment, taking in the scene in front of their bakery. Even with the glass of the window and door smashed in, the interior of their store wrecked and marred by the spiteful, juvenile bitterness, a line of five vehicles were parked closely together. He could just barely make out the forms of the drivers standing in line for the few items available to buy.

“I wonder how they stay in business,” Zach asked, turning his attention back toward the far side of the plaza. “Are they in a union?”

Mark didn’t answer him, not at first. When he did, it was without words. Zach felt Mark’s weight shift and then heard his feet on the pavement. Zach looked at him cross his field of vision and asked, “Where are you going?”

Mark was already several steps away when he replied over his shoulder, “To find out.”