Warlord: Dervish

by Tony Monchinski

  “Shit!” She slammed the door. “The fuck, Jason?”

  “Don’t know. Thanks.”

  “Fuck you. I just like shooting sand niggers.”

  “Marvelous.”

  “Jason,” said Deirdre. “Bronson is calling you.”

  On top of the house, Jason found Bronson squatting against the wall overlooking the street. Keeping low, Bronson refused to present himself as a target to anyone below. Jason duck walked to his position.

  “How many we got?”

  “I seen five down that way—” Bronson indicated the direction the initial gunfire had come from “—at least another five that way.”

  “Shit. Okay.”

  Men’s voices called to one another in the street.

  “What we do, Jay?”

  By way of an answer, Jason stood, the M4 at his shoulder. In the split second before he opened fire his mind registered a handful of men—a few houses down, dressed in an assortment of t-shirts and dishdashas, trousers and camouflage cargo pants, sneakers and flip-flops. His first burst missed, raising dust in the street and scattering them, the men yelling and returning fire wildly. He fired a second and third burst before dropping down, the air around him snapping as return fire broke the sound barrier.

  “I got one.”

  “This ain’t cool, Jay.”

  “No, it ain’t cool. But we got the high ground.”

  “Yeah, right, the high—”

  “Let’s frag them. You ready?”

  Bronson wrapped his hand around the pistol grip of the M-203 mounted under his rifle. “Bet.”

  They stood together, facing in opposite directions, triggering their 40mm rounds and dipping beneath the parapet. After the grenades burst, an M4 barked from below—Letitia or Ahmed firing from the door.

  Jason trotted forward to the corner of the roof and stood. Three insurgents lay unmoving in the street: the first one Bronson and Letitia had dropped; the second he’d brought down with his M4; the third had been caught in the blast of his fragmentation grenade. Whatever men were on their side of the street were hidden from him, but the two men on the opposite side were exposed, and—worse for them—they were waiting for Jason to appear in the middle of the roof where they’d last seen him. He took them out with well placed bursts from the M4, dropping low as incoming rounds sought him out.

  Bronson huddled in the corner directly across from him, switching out magazines. There was the sound of vehicles in the street.

  “Sounds like the reinforcements are here.”

  Jason risked a glance over the wall. A compact car at the end of the block disgorged AK-wielding men. They were yelling back and forth to one another, excitedly. Stupidly. Jason bobbed back down as ragged bursts of gunfire smacked into the opposite side of the wall, concrete dust boiling up.

  “Fuck…” Bronson breathed, the gunfire momentarily abating.

  “Fuck them.”

  “Frag ‘em.” Bronson stood long enough to loose another 40mm round from his 203. He was already under cover when the grenade detonated, raising a SUV off the ground, spilling men out of its doors mid-air.

  “These fuckers is stupid.” Bronson remarked of the way the insurgents had driven directly down the street to their deaths. “These fucks don’t give a fuck.” He loaded another grenade into the launcher. “Fuckers die good.” He rose, fired the grenade, and dropped back into place. “Stupid fucks.”

  Jason reached up over his head and fired half a magazine out into the street and whoever was on it. The return barrage was deafening, the air above their heads rent by seemingly hundreds of rounds.

  Bronson removed two hand grenades from his webbing, peeling off the tape that secured their pins.

  “Give me one of those.”

  “You got your own.” Bronson pulled the pin from one grenade. “Don’t be lazy.” He tossed it over his shoulder and the roof wall. Someone on the ground cried out before it detonated. Bronson sent the second down behind it.

  Jason hopped up and fired the remaining half magazine at a car that had pulled up down the block. Men were piling out of it, pointing at him and the house. He triggered his M-203 and dropped behind the wall, cursing himself, knowing he’d been off with the grenade, hearing it explode in the street. The car’s engine revved and faded as it sped off. He slapped a new magazine home.

  “Jay,” Bronson was looking past him. “They gonna figure out to come up on these roofs sooner or later.” As if on cue, a gunman appeared on the rooftop three houses down, screaming how great god was.

  Jason promptly dropped him.

  “How you doin’ on ammo?” Jason focused on the roof and the stairwell the insurgent had come from.

  “I’m good.”

  “Are you chaps all right?” Deirdre called from the stairwell.

  “Yeah,” Jason responded. “It’s a party up here.” The high pitched whine of a bullet passed by overhead. “Tell Letitia to keep that door closed. She wants to shoot at haji, tell her to get her ass up here with us.”

  “It was Ahmed. And he closed it.”

  “Okay, good.” Jason thought he saw something, some movement from the stairwell. He sent a burst at it and waited. “You guys sit tight down there.”

  A few seconds passed before Bronson spoke,. “You think they can get in?”

  “Front door or this way,” Jason nodded to their own stairwell, summing up the entry points, never taking his eyes off the other roof. “They set this place up to fuck us up. Might actually work to our favor.”

  Bronson tossed a grenade over his shoulder as he had with the first two. As it exploded he pitched another past Jason in the other direction. A burst of gunfire followed the explosions and then the street was still. Off in the distance the muted reverberations of assault rifles and machine guns continued.

  “Who are these guys, Jay? Some kind of A-rabs?”

  “I don’t know. I seen a lot of different clothes.”

  “Think I seen some Chechens.”

  “Chechens?”

  “Yeah. They like them fuckin’ skull caps. Shits is woolen. In this weather?”

  “No shit.”

  Shards of concrete from the wall showered down on them, the booming discharge of a heavy machine gun moving closer on the street. Bronson stood and fired on a pick up truck, a fifty caliber mounted in the bed. The gunner’s red and white kaffiyeh trailed him, the truck speeding by the house. Blood misted as the man pitched from the truck bed and Bronson dipped back to cover Jason studied the stairwell the gunman had emerged from, waiting patiently.

  “Bronson, listen. Not to bust your balls…”

  “Which means you gonna bust my balls, right Jay?”

  “Yeah. Why Bronson?”

  “Why Bronson? You gotta ask?”

  “I’m asking. That your rap name?”

  “That shit? Nah. Another nigga calls himself that.”

  “You got a rap name?”

  “Yeah, J-Todd.”

  “J-Todd?”

  “Werd.”

  “So then what’s with Bronson?”

  “Maybe I tell you that some other time, aight?”

  “All right.”

  Several minutes went by without incident. “Yo, Jay, what was the kid like?”

  Jason was puzzled. “Who you talkin’ about?”

  “The kid. Rudy.”

  “I told you about him?”

  “You don’t remember.”

  Truth was, Jason didn’t. He’d thought a lot about Rudy during his imprisonment and torture, but he hadn’t been aware he’d spoken aloud of him.

  “He was…” Jason wasn’t sure how to put it. What was he going to say? That Rudy was a good kid? “…he was a kid, a fucking kid. Eighteen, nineteen, maybe nineteen. He never got to experience… nothing. I mean, he never got to experience life, its successes, failures.”

  “Least he didn’t get to experience those, right? The failures.”

  Jason shook his head. “I’d have wanted him to. Not taste
failure—that’s not what I mean. But to have the option, you know what I mean? To have the chance.” Jason watched the other roof, waiting for an insurgent to show himself. “That’s what it all boils down to for me. I wished he’d had that. A chance.”

  “A chance to what?”

  “To whatever. I don’t know…get married.”

  “Get divorced?”

  “Sure, maybe, alright. See, he’s never going to know what it’s like to come home from work to a family…to a little kid who’s waiting for you, to a wife who loves you. He’s not going to know what it’s like to have a job that you love or that you hate, and if you hate it you do it because it let’s you enjoy all that shit you love.”

  The gunfire in the distance no longer sounded.

  “You jus’ wanted him to have a chance to ride on them twenty-foes if that what he wanted, huh?”

  “Twenty-foes?”

  “Yeah, twenty-foes.”

  “That a rap thing what that is?”

  “Sure, could be,” Bronson grinned but the smile was almost immediately replaced by a frown. “Motherfucker talked to me ‘bout music. To me!”

  “You’re talkin’ ‘bout who I think you’re talkin’ ‘bout?”

  “Yeah. Motherfucker.”

  “He like rap?”

  “Fucker talkin’ to me ‘bout vibrating strings and shit. Knew I like music. Fuckin’ with my head what he was doin’.”

  “What he like?”

  “He wasn’t talkin’ bout any music I eva’ heard of,” Bronson divulged. “Get ready.” The men on the street were crying out to one another, trilling.

  First one assault rifle fired on the street, then a second, then a dozen. Bullets creased the air over their heads. The insurgents lined up in the street, firing on the roof, firing into the door and bricked window, their rounds pocking the house.

  “Shake and bake?” Jason looked at Bronson.

  “Let’s do this.” Bronson tossed Jason a phosphorous grenade. Jason already had his own in hand. Clasping the grenades, he used his index fingers to remove the pins. Bronson readied two high explosive grenades. Bullets abraded the concrete parapet behind them.

  “Fire in the hole!” Jason sent the grenades over the roof, one in each direction. Someone below yelled and Bronson followed suit, tossing his. The grenades detonated in rapid succession. Jason and Bronson rose quickly, firing into the street. Half a dozen insurgents were down, dead from the phosphorous and fragmentation. A dozen more scurried off, several wounded. Rapid, clipped bursts felled many of these before Jason and Bronson squatted down.

  “Allahu Akbar!” An insurgent burst from the stairwell Jason had watched, his arm drawn back. Repeated bursts from Jason and Bronson laid him low before he could pitch his grenade. It exploded on the roof, most of the blast muffled by the dead man’s body. Jason and Bronson reloaded from their chest pouches.

  “Knew he was gonna show himself sooner or later.”

  “Hey, Jay. Time to get back inside.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Look.” A wall of sand surged through the city. “Come on,” urged Bronson.

  They kept low, entering the stairwell. They secured the door with the metal bars. Jason was about to ask Bronson to go check on those below when Bronson said, “I’m on it”, disappearing down the stairs.

  The wind picked up outside and Jason lay his hands on the door, feeling it shift under his palms. The wood began to vibrate as the wind howled beyond the door. He was glad for the metal bars securing it in place. A burst of automatic rifle fire sounded outside, down in the street, followed by panicked cries which cut off as abruptly as they’d begun. The light in the stairwell was on the fritz, blinking on and off.

  Jason stared at the door. What was going on out there? It continued to shift ever so slightly beneath his palms, the metal bars keeping it in place.

  “Jason.” Ahmed joined him on the stairs. “More sand?”

  “Yeah, more sand.”

  “There is something not right about this…”

  “Something ain’t right, Ahmed. How are things downstairs?”

  “I think I killed two of them.”

  “Good shooting. You recognize them?”

  “They’re speaking Arabic.”

  “So we could be…?”

  Ahmed shrugged. “We could be anywhere.”

  Something began to tap on the other side of the heavy wooden door. Jason pulled his hands away, holding up a finger, enjoining Ahmed to silence. The tapping grew more forceful, moving around the door frame, as if testing something…Jason would be damned if he’d open it up and see who was on the other side.

  “The sandmen…” Ahmed whispered, his rifle aimed at the door. Jason remembered what Areya had said, how it hadn’t made any sense. He stared apprehensively at the door, and as he did so the tapping stopped. The howl of the wind ebbed. The door vibrated a few seconds more before it too ceased moving. The light overhead burned steadily once again.

  73rd Iteration

  “Jay.” Bronson came up the stairs.

  “You told them not to open the door, right?”

  “They ain’t opening it.”

  “Letitia’s gonna sit tight?”

  “Letitia’s scared shitless.”

  “Maybe she should be.” Jason looked to Ahmed, thinking of the tapping.

  “Here, I brought this.” Bronson handed over a bandolier of magazines, which Jason slung over his shoulder, thanking him.

  “Want to look?” Bronson motioned.

  “Someone was…” Jason hesitated “This is going to sound crazy, all right? Someone was knocking on the door just now.”

  “Knocking?”

  “Yes,” Ahmed confirmed it. “I heard this myself.”

  “Knocking how? Like little pigs-little pigs, let me in?”

  “Not funny. But yeah, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “If he’s on the roof,” Bronson raised his M4, “we ready for him.”

  “Okay.” Jason found his resolve. “I go left, you go right. Ahmed, you follow.”

  Aight and yes the others replied.

  The door opened upon an empty roof. Jason, Bronson and Ahmed fanned out, circling the pillbox, looking up with disbelief. Wisps of multicolored, swirling haze filled the sky, eerily aglow, an illumination none had ever witnessed.

  “Jay…” Bronson stood at the parapet, looking down where the street had been. Motes of sand wafted lazily about their house on four sides, ebbing and flowing. The cloud of sand extended around them for as far as they could see, blanketing the houses around them. “Fuck is that?”

  “Sand,” Ahmed offered helpfully.

  “House moved again,” uttered Jason, then, in a normal tone, “We only had the street on this side before. Now we got it on four sides.” He looked down into the shimmering sand. If he reached down he could touch it.

  “Don’t touch that shit, Jay.”

  “What? I wasn’t gonna—”

  “I seen the look on your face. Don’t main.”

  “This sky is not correct.” Ahmed squinted in concentration, focusing upon the feint spectral lines etched amongst the haze. “Where is the sun?”

  A metallic clank sounded below and the three men pressed close to the wall, squatting on their haunches.

  “What…?” Bronson’s question trailed off, each man intuitively realizing silence was their safest bet. The metallic jangle sounded again. Something large and mechanized was moving in the sand.

  Ahmed put his arm around Jason’s shoulders and bore him down to a seated position, their backs to the wall. “This is no good.” There was trepidation in the interpreter’s whisper. “No good.”

  “Shit.” Bronson hunkered low besides them.

  “I just want to see my family again, Jason. Yes?”

  “Shhhh.” Jason put a finger to his lips. They waited without speaking as the mechanical lumbering increased in volume, accompanied by an intermittent pneumatic hiss. Whatever the thing on the street was, i
t passed under and then by them. Jason waited until it had receded into the distance before he asked Bronson, “What’d you see?”

  “I don’t know,” Bronson appeared bewildered. “I couldn’t tell. Shadow. A big fucking shadow.”

  “Was it some kind of tank?”

  “No.” Having removed his helmet, Bronson poured water from his canteen over his head.

  Seeing his friend do so reminded Jason how thirsty he was. “Stay low.” He sipped from his Camelback.

  “This is bad…” Ahmed was distressed. “This is very, very bad.”

  “Ahmed, I need you to take it easy, okay?”

  “I just want to see my family. I just want to see my family again.”

  “You want to see your family again, you’ve gotta stay cool, understand?”

  Ahmed nodded.

  “Tell us about them.” Water dripped from Bronson’s brow.

  “Shoo?”

  “Your family.” Bronson removed a glove and wiped the water off his face. “What they like?”

  A genuine smile displaced Ahmed’s worried look. “Fatima—my wife—she is a beautiful woman. When she smiles…”

  “Takes your breath away?”

  “Yes, Jason, exactly. My Fatima has given me seven children, each as beautiful as their mother.”

  “Seven?” Bronson was taken aback.

  “And when I get back,” Ahmed answered proudly, “we will have more.”

  The three men shared a smile. Something small and delicate alighted on Bronson’s forehead. As he wiped it away, he looked at the smear remaining on his hand. Replacing his helmet, Bronson peered over the wall, rising to his full height. “Hey…”

  Jason and Ahmed stood with him, surveying the scene.

  The clouds of sand around the house had receded, revealing a street of raw, concrete block houses about them. The streets and buildings were marred with the remnants of a battle. Smoke rose from burning houses into the magenta sky. Drag marks and blood trails crossed the cratered street beneath them. The facades of the buildings across from them were bullet riddled. A bloodied, disheveled turban had been abandoned in the road. Grey-white matter floated out of the sky around them, like burnt newspaper.