Bang. She shoots this brute as Aymen gets up to come back at her. The man holding Peter drops what he thinks is now a corpse to run and help Aymen.
For the first time in his life, Peter has kept his head under fire as he faked his dying moments receiving Aymen’s bullet. The object has saved him, or at least the fragment did. As his captor tries to help Aymen, Peter trips him up like he did Zara when they wrestled. To the ground he goes with a thud as Peter rushes Aymen from the back with the object fragment.
Just as Aymen has his arms around Zara’s neck, ready to snap it, Peter slams the fragment into the side of his head. Aymen is stunned for but another microsecond, long enough for Zara to aim at his thigh and shoot. Thud, down goes her tormentor. And she does the same to Peter’s captor. All three taken care of.
Zara is in the zone. High respiration rate. High heart rate. High cognition rate. She turns in a circle and scans around herself with the gun out in a combat position. There is no one left. She sighs and nearly collapses as Peter catches her. She cries into his shirt.
Uncannily calm and composed, he kisses the top of her head as she lets loose a decade of the deepest, darkest emotions. Images of helplessness as they forced her to watch the violation, torture, and mutilation of Rona. As they did the same to her in front of Diyar. She searches within her soul for redemption now that she has shot the last of their tormentors. And all she encounters is blackness, loneliness, and icy coldness. She shivers, with her arms around Peter and the gun dangling from her hand.
As her tears subside, she looks at his hands and whispers, “Ahem. Peter. Your hands.”
Incredibly embarrassed, Peter takes his hands away from her chest as he realizes she is almost as undressed as the statues he showed her. He strips his tunic shirt off and gives it to her, putting his hands over his eyes to show his respect for her modesty.
Peter peeks through his fingers to see if she is modest again. She is his Zara once again except for one detail. As she checks the downed assailants, he searches around and finds it. Her headscarf. The sign of her protective outer persona. He gets it and places the final mark of modesty around her head as she pauses in collecting the assassins’ weapons. She smiles, in a more special way than she ever has before with him, which makes him feel the warm fuzzies he so desires, and she kisses his cheek affectionately.
She stands over Aymen, whose wound does not allow him to get up. She points one of their rifles at his crotch. “Why should I not rid you of this as I did to your brother, who begged me like a child before I exterminated him from this Earth?”
Aymen looks at her with the same dark piercing eyes and spits at her. “You donkey slut whore. You deserved everything we did to you, and so did your pathetic ugly Ezidi friends.”
Zara shakes her head. And to Aymen’s surprise, she shoots on both sides of his crotch, leaving his organ intact but disabling his adductor tendons, then knocks him unconscious with the rifle butt.
Peter watches this. He has only imagined until now how fierce a warrior she must have been. And from what little he has heard in their exchanges, this monster deserved to be ripped apart for what he did. Why didn’t she take her rightful revenge?
He puts a comforting arm around this complicated person he is halved with, and she takes his other arm around her to get his bear hug. And she cries again, but with tiny tears. The grief of saying goodbye to something that has been with her for too long. Something that is now gone. Something she needs to let go of.
The other two assailants start to move around. Zara breaks from their embrace and shoots both of them in the legs again. They will not be chasing after anyone anytime soon.
Peter stares at her, wondering how she could go from tears to cold killer in a nanosecond. He is compelled to ask her, “Zara, after what they did to you, your friends, why do you leave them alive? They will just do their horrible things again to someone else.”
The cold, efficient Zara melts a little as she answers, “Peter, you simply do not know what I have done in my life. I stopped killing people three years ago. Killing does not right the wrong. Only leads to more killing.”
She gives him a pistol. “You kill them.”
Peter looks at the gun. He thinks about what they were about to do to Zara. He thinks about what they must have done to her. They must have been the ones to have inflicted those scars, those deep wounds on her breast, on her upper and lower inner thighs, which he tried not to stare at. He points the gun at Aymen’s head. Now is his moment to be Sam with this gun. Staring down the barrel, he begins to shake. And he cannot pull the trigger. He does not need to be Sam to be a man.
With the tiniest of smiles through her tough façade, she takes the gun from him. “You are not a killer, Peter. Maybe that is why you are my other half.”
As they leave the wounded to fend for themselves, Peter watches the large dark birds circling, ones resembling the big birds carved on the pillars at Göbekli Tepe, now a pile of dust thanks to them. With object gone, at the truck, Zara says, “Gloves off. No more nice girl,” as she ducks under her wounded vehicle to access a secret compartment. Out comes a Russian AK-9. Then comes a box with a Russian VSS Vintorez. “My old friends,” she says as she checks them.
Peter knows these weapons as well. “Zara, what are you doing with Spetsnav special operative weapons?” He points to the AK-9. “Old-tech assault rifle. Shoots without a sound but can pierce bulletproof vests.” He points to the VSS. “Old-tech sniper rifle. Sound suppressor and the same subsonic bulletproof-vest-piercing rounds.”
She grins like a kid after Halloween. “Old tech. But highly effective.”
“And why do you have Spetsnav special operations weapons?”
She flashes a mischievous smile at him and replies, “Mei is not the only one who can get what she wants out of men. Back in the day, I did too.”
Even having the advantage of having been inside her soul for a moment, Peter still does not fully understand this woman. In his confusion, he has to ask, “But I thought you didn’t kill anymore?”
“I am going to make an exception for killing a priest. A two-faced, lying man of the cloth who sold us out to the AC, who stole the object for his buddies in Rome,” Zara vents as she gives Peter the VSS to carry.
Looking puzzled, a common face he has around her, Peter asks, “Are we going to chase Jean-Paul on foot?” He points to her truck.
Shaking her head, Zara surveys the front tires of her poor truck. The assassins have flattened them.
Peter looks at the punctures, then the writing on the side walls, and says, “You have the top of the top here. The first year of the self-inflating, self-sealing run-flat tires. These babies run over a thousand a tire.” Seeing her surprised face, he says, “You must not be a car person either.”
After reading the truck manual in the glove compartment, Peter, sitting next to Zara in the front seat, punches the needed sequence on the MoxWorld center control console and the tires are fixed. Just in time, as Zara’s MoxWrap lets loose an ear-bursting shrill. She yells, “Hang on,” as she punches the accelerator and the first bomb obliterates the area where the object was. The second one craters where their truck was parked as Zara pushes these tires as fast as they can stand.
And the bombs keep falling on Karahan Tepe, cratering even all the unexcavated areas. Someone seriously wants no trace of any leads to the object ever to see the light of day. As they descend the ridge that was once home to the object, Peter is particularly proud he did not panic and cower in the fetal position. Was it the object, or was it Zara who did this to him?
As Zara appears to be driving for the sake of driving, Peter asks, “Not to destroy your concentration, but do you know where you’re going? The faster you go, the more likely those tires will fail. So hopefully we have a specific place in mind. Just saying.”
Without a flinch, Zara responds, “I planted a tracer in Jean-Paul’s MoxWrap.” She taps the center console screen, bringing up a map. “He is fifty klicks from here, h
eading towards the AC lines. I cannot believe the Catholic pope would be conspiring with the Arabic Confederation. Sending an assassin team, even.”
She glances at Peter for a second. “You know he was lying to us all along. He never had the dreams like you do. He never renounced his vows. And he transmitted our information to these beasts, the ones who raped me, and who stole my object.” She reflects a second and amends, “Our object.”
Peter points to the screen, where the tracking blip has taken a more southerly direction into New Kurdistan, and not into the Arabic Confederation lines. Zara is exasperated. “Why? It does not make sense. They are going to take the object to the Kurds.” She tries to accelerate, but the tires begin to vibrate horribly.
She laments, “They are moving thirty kilometers per hour faster than us. Unless a miracle happens, we are going to lose them.” She glances at Peter. “Once they cross the Turkish border, we have lost them. The Turkish border guards are not going to let me pass with my history, and certainly not with these weapons.”
With that Little Boy look, Peter asks, “Zara, you know I want to help you any way I can. I felt so helpless back there, and they almost…almost…to you.”
Since she met this Little Boy, this man, a part of her has begun to regrow. Her compassion. And her compassionate self says, “Peter, your odd yelling distracted them just enough that I could subdue them. You were not so helpless.”
So happy that perhaps he was meaningful to her, Peter asks, “So maybe I helped save you? I was a little bit of a knight coming to your rescue?”
Hiding her chuckle, she says, “Yes, you were, Peter. I will forever be grateful.”
But deep inside, she knows that her oddly timed period saved her more. For Muslims, even Aymen, vaginal intercourse with a woman during her period is forbidden by the Qur’an. And his disgusted pause, along with Peter’s bloodcurdling scream, allowed her to subdue them.
Still, she ponders how her period came so early. Her last one ended only six days ago. And the bleeding stopped as soon as she subdued these beasts.
Peter interrupts her thoughts, asking, “Zara, do you believe in miracles?”
“Why, Peter? Why do you ask?”
He holds up the fragment. “I should be dead from Aymen’s gut shot. But I put this on my belly for safekeeping, and it kept me safe.” He points to the area where the bullet ricocheted off him.
As Zara ponders these questions of miracles, Jean-Paul’s dot stops moving on the center console screen. She looks and says, “They have stopped outside of Harran. Why? It is near neither the AC forces, nor the Kurdish, nor the Turks. They are dead in the middle.”
Peter mumbles, “Maybe they don’t want anyone to interfere.”
Interfere with what? is the question Zara ponders.
Peter takes her hand in his and rubs softly. She looks at him, wondering why. He ponders Dr. Beverly’s words about not pressuring PTSD suffers to talk about past traumas, but he is nonetheless logically compelled to ask gently, “I don’t mean to probe a topic that might bring back past pain, but what did Aymen mean when he said he and his brother owned you?”
Zara turns away from him, wanting to take her hand back from him, wanting to hide her tear. As her mother trusts him, as her grandmother trusts him, as he is the only man yet who has not lied to her, she finds the courage to trust him too.
She purses her lips and then replies, “They kidnapped me and my sisters, Rona and Diyar. They kept them as their sex slaves for nearly a year. And they coerced them to submit to their perversion by torturing me in front of them. And then they claimed I was Christian as an excuse to sexually abuse me as well. Finally, I escaped, killing Skander in the process. I obliterated his penis in my rage over what he had done not to me, but to my sisters.”
She looks to see Peter’s expression and determine he is okay to hear the rest. “For years, I hunted down all the men involved in kidnapping and raping of the women of my sisters’ village. I killed each and every one of them in the most heinous, brutal way possible. Only Aymen I could not find. That is, until today.”
She takes several deep breaths and rubs Peter’s hand. Their moisture on each other helps comfort her to finish her story. “Peter, revenge has no redemption. I thought I would find solace in their brutal and savage murders. But there was none. I was left desolate after I had done the unspeakable back to them. I was lost. Only the words of the Prophet comforted my dark soul. Only his words would be my salvation.”
She rubs his hands some more and then takes her hand back, saying, “I do not want to talk about this anymore.”
So wanting to be the one she can lean on, Peter refuses to let her retreat into her sorrows. Something must be said, and he is the one who must do so. “I’m no expert on your language, but didn’t that Aymen guy call you something exactly the same as Rohat did?”
Her first instinct is to hit him, but it finally dawns on her. Why did Aymen say that to her? How did Aymen know that Rohat had called her a donkey slut when she fled with Zengo, and again when she was home a few days ago? She now comprehends what Peter is suggesting. Not tormenting her for her mistake, for her punishment, but to raise the question of why Aymen and Rohat would get together and why they would want the object. And that priest—where does he fit in, much less the Vatican? Jean-Paul had a gun on Rohat, but maybe this was merely another part of his act.
She reaches out for Peter’s hand again, and he flinches, afraid of what she is going to do. She gives him the look, saying, “With all we have been through together, you should know I am not going to hurt you. I want you to be safe.” And he slowly offers his sweaty hand. They touch. And the peace, the beauty, the harmony climbs up their arms into their souls.
The very soft Zara apologizes. “Peter, I treat you so hard sometimes, and I should not. It means so much that you still come back to my side, to my aid, no matter what I might do to you as the pains in my soul lash out. Please, never stop. Please.”
Hours later, as dawn tries to break through over the mountaintops demarking the Kurdish lines, the roosters’ crowing hides the sounds of Zara and Peter positioning themselves behind a rise just under five hundred meters out from the truck carrying the object. The assassins have their trucks parked near the edge of a farm. One whose residents have fled due to the impending invasion of the AC. Zara sets up her once-retired Spetsnav sniper rifle and night scope while Peter puts on the headphones attached to her parabolic microphone.
Zara whispers that she sees two trucks and eight, maybe nine assassins. As she scans, she stops and gasps. Peter asks what she’s found, and she replies that she sees a cage, and Jean-Paul is being held captive in that cage. God forgive her for what she was thinking about him, for they have tortured him. She whispers for Peter to focus the microphone that direction.
Peter whispers back they are taunting him over his faith. That they will burn him if he does not renounce his false faith and submit to the true Creator. They pour gasoline over his head, and he cries from the pain in his eyes. Zara spies one of them flicking a lighter. She adjusts her scope and readies to fire.
A panicked Peter pushes down her rifle. “He’s innocent. Don’t shoot him.”
Zara removes his hand and re-aims her sniper weapon. “Jean-Paul said he would rather be dead than burned alive. I need to shoot him now out of mercy.”
Peter is conflicted. Is this what Alexander meant when he said that his little Zara was one of the most compassionate people he’d met? Is killing out of mercy part of that compassion?
Her finger about to pull back slowly on the trigger, she sees the lighter being put away. What happened? Something happened. And then she sees him. Unmistakable. Her cousin. Her breast-punching, donkey-slut-calling cousin, speaking with someone who looks so American.
She asks Peter to listen in. He gasps, “That cheeky bastard. I can’t believe it.”
Zara puts down her rifle and sits up. “There’s too many of them. I cannot take out enough of them before they light up
Jean-Paul.” She puts her head down in resignation.
Peter puts his arms around her and hugs her. He brings the object fragment out and puts it her hands as she looks at him, very puzzled. He kisses her forehead and begins to undo her tunic buttons.
“Peter, what are you doing? Not now. You men. You get into battle, your hormones rage, and have to have sex.”
Putting his hands around her cheeks, he says, “No, not that. You need to go back with me to see that woman at the temple. She did something there, but I can’t clearly picture it. You need to do what she did.”
She stares at him in disbelief. Does she trust him on this, or are they just going to make out while Jean-Paul is flamed? Her instincts are to start shooting and kill as many as possible. She stares at him for but a brief moment, and the innocence in his eyes, his face, overwhelms her. Against her instincts, she joins her hands with his around the fragment, leans in and kisses him. She lets him rub her heart over her shirt as she rubs his. And as their minds enter the zone of peace, of harmony, of clarity, an image becomes clear, and she knows what she needs to do.
And she prays. She prays with Peter in her. With her.
As the sun rises, what should be warmth and clarity is obscured by rapidly forming dark clouds. Zara breathes deeply in synchronicity with Peter, and day becomes night.
Zara looks up. “Get in the driver’s seat of my truck.”
The epitome of horror flashes across Peter’s face. “Zara, I don’t know how to drive. I take the bus.”
Once again stunned that this person is her other half, she says, “Does not matter. Aim my truck at the one carrying the object and push the right pedal down all the way.”
As she literally has to shove him into the driver’s seat, the clouds, dark and angry, beg to speak. Beg to bark. Beg to spit out their fury. And as Zara gets into the passenger seat, sniper rifle in lap, she knocks out the windshield with her rifle and tells Peter to punch it.
Her mistake putting him behind a wheel. As the rain begins to pelt them through the open windshield, Peter punches, then lets up, then punches again. Yes, indeed, he did not lie. He cannot drive. She yells at him not to use the brakes and to ram their truck, and just then, the first lightning bolt cracks down, striking the object, and the gas tank of the truck it sits upon explodes. Blinded, Zara stretches her foot down on his and jams the accelerator to the floor, shooting out the front at anything that looks human.
The Matriarch Matrix Page 46