by A. Anders
I grabbed Rose’s arm and pulled her as I moved. Looking up, I saw Brad. Spotted with blood, he held a smoking gun in his hand. Seated with an arm braced behind him, he was doing his best to aim.
When he fired again, I scanned the ground for Gray’s gun. I found it buried in the grass. I raced towards it to grab it, but not knowing if I had time to shoot it, I looked around.
What I saw in front of me made my face burn in terror. At least twenty of them were swarming towards us. Who knew how many more stood waiting beyond the tree line?
Brad fired again and like a flock of birds, the pack changed direction. It gave me the time I needed to retrieve Gray’s gun from the grass and fire. I shot at the one closest to me. I hit it, but it didn’t fall.
Their dozens of eyes were now focused on Brad and me. I looked around. Aiming, I fired at the one backing Thorin towards the cliff. It sprinted off.
Brad aimed at the one that snapped at Gray. It sprinted off. Finally, when I shot the one that refused to stop ripping at Bob’s lifeless flesh, the pack scattered.
I looked back at Rose, searching her body for blood.
“I’m fine,” she said still scared and out of breath.
I turned to the guys again. Brad was hurt, but he’d be fine. He was probably still shaken up from the blows I gave him. Gray rolled to his side and was probably catching his breath. Thorin had fallen to his knees and was crying in his hands.
Bob, however, looked bad. I moved to him, examining his wounds. A bit of blood dripped from his neck. My guess was that he had protected it in sacrifice of his legs because parts of his thighs were nothing but exposed meat.
“You’re gonna be alright,” I assured him. “Thorin, come here!”
Thorin came with tears still rolling down his cheeks. I tried not to judge him. Some people were built for situations like this one. Thorin was not one of them.
“Patch him up,” I ordered.
“With what?”
“Be creative!” I demanded.
My eyes shifted between the three fallen men. I examined their bloodied bodies, wondering how much of it I was responsible for. If I hadn’t been so damned quick to prove myself, they would have been able to protect themselves. Instead, they were grounded and half-conscious when the first hyena attacked.
I threw the gun down and roared in frustration. When I looked back at everyone, I realized that I had their attention. Staring back at them, I knew that I had to say the right thing.
“And this is why you don’t travel with your backs against a cliff!” I yelled.
It was a juvenile thing to say. After all, you can’t blame the kid if they don’t know how to read. You blame the adult who was supposed to teach them.
Still holding the butcher’s knife, I marched back to the hyena that died biting my leg. Standing over it, I kicked it onto its back. Getting onto my knees, I grabbed one of its hind legs and plunged the knife.
Sawing back and forth, I cut through bones and muscles forcing its release. As the limb fell into my hand, I looked at its face.
“You had my leg. Now I have yours.”
I stood up and turned around. Again, they were all staring at me. Okay, maybe I was acting a little crazy. Allowing them to get a better look at the leg, I explained myself.
“Dinner,” I said.
We hung around the area for about an hour longer. Then when Bob was strong enough to be more than dead weight on our shoulders, we took turns carrying him. Thorin and Brad were first, followed by Gray and myself. Rose offered to take a turn, but she was not a big woman and Bob was a big man.
By the end of the day, we hadn’t covered as much ground as I had hoped. Even beelining through the jungle, it would have taken us another two days with Bob on our shoulders.
Gray didn’t have to say what he was thinking. I could see it I his eyes. Brad and Thorin were probably thinking the same thing, but I had sworn to do everything I could to get everyone to the compound. I wasn’t about to leave Bob behind to die.
Finding a clearing, we settled in for the night. Smelling the soapy odor as the hyena thigh roasted, I wasn’t sure that it would be edible. It ended up being fine. It tasted tangy like all carnivores did.
“I like it,” Thorin offered, perhaps trying to get us talking. It didn’t work.
After another long silence, I was the next one to speak. I had been trying to find the right time. It was amazing how I could fall from a cliff face or fight off wild animals, yet being alone with Rose was what I was the most afraid of.
I swallowed hard and forced the words out as casually as I could. “Guys, I’m gonna take Rose for some alone time.”
“If you get it, then we do, too,” Gray said, lacking his previous conviction.
“Not this time,” I explained.
I stood, offering Rose my hand. She took it, and I wondered if she could feel my pounding heart through my palm. I hoped not.
Once we entered the woods and it was just the two of us, things became very simple. I was just a boy holding a girl’s hand while walking in the moonlight. All things considered, it was a nice night for a walk.
“Can we sit?” I asked, finding a spot where we could see the full moon through the canopy.
For a while, we lay there separately, staring at the sky, but when I lifted my arm, she accepted the invitation and snuggled in. She settled once she rested her head on my chest.
“I can hear your heartbeat,” she said.
I was sure that she could. It was beating hard, but as she caressed my chest with her fingertips, I couldn’t help but relax.
“I was in the military,” I finally said.
“I guessed you were. Why didn’t you want anyone to know?”
“There were things that I’m not proud of.”
“Did you kill anybody?” she asked casually.
“Yeah.”
The sounds of the jungle night filled the silence until I was ready to speak again.
“I had a fiancé. She was in the military too. She outranked me. Usually dating below your rank was against the rules, but I was in the Special Forces, which is its own branch of the military. It was a mobile infantry division. We ran the Tods.”
“What’s that?”
“The semi-itods?”
Rose looked up, still not sure.
“Semi-autonomous robots. They’re like the pawns here, but they’re bigger. They also have a lot more firepower… and you can make them explode.”
“So, what you’re saying is that they’re nothing like the pawns?” she teased, offering me a gentle smile.
I smiled back. “I guess not.”
I paused, allowing my mind to wonder.
“Jill had a brother.”
“Jill?”
“My fiancé. They were very close. She definitely loved him more than she loved me. I would tease her by telling her that, and she would say that she loved us equally in different ways. But it wasn’t even close.
“Jill didn’t want him in the military. But she couldn’t stop him. They came from a military family. He thought of it as his birthright.
“Josh made it into Special Forces. She was very proud of him. She pulled some strings and got him under my command. She told me to protect him with my life. And she wasn’t kidding.
“But once I met him, I could see why she was so protective of him. It wasn’t just because he was her brother.
“You ever met a person who was so purely good that you tried to be better around them just so you didn’t ruin their goodness? That was Josh. He was the type of man that people wanted to follow. He was the type of person who could make general or be president.
“But once Josh came under my command, Jill didn’t have to ask me to protect him. He was one of my men, and we were all brothers. I would have laid down my life for any of them. That what we were there for.
“Our platoon’s specialty was tribal areas in wartime hotspots. It’s what our Tods were wired for. The routine was that we would identify a su
spicious building, the Tods would break down the doors, lay down gun fire, and then scan the room for combatants and explosives.
“If they were successful and any threat was neutralized, they gave us the all-clear, and the boots went in to mop up. If they couldn’t secure the area, then we could set the Tods to explode.
“Well, one day we got an assignment. It was a multi-room one story in a tribal town. Nothing unusual. A suspected bomber. No problem. We moved in with our mobile base, released the Tods, and waited.
“The visuals indicated that the rooms were empty, and no explosives were detected. That was the all-clear.
“Josh took point. Manny and Phil covered the flanks, and I had the rear. But as soon as I stepped in, I knew something didn’t feel right. I ordered a search. We scanned the rooms. Still nothing.
“The last thing I heard was someone yelling my name. It was Josh trying to get my attention. After that, I felt a force hurl me to the ground, and I knew a bomb had gone off.
“I couldn’t hear anything, just a high-pitched tone. And the air was nothing but dust, and you could smell that chemical smell from after an explosion.”
“Did the Tods miss something?” Rose asked.
“Kind of,” I replied. “It was one of the Tods that exploded. The house was set up as a hotbox. It’s a room hackers use to highjack autonomous vehicles. They managed to highjack the Tods’ internals and trigger its bomb.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. When I got to my feet, I saw Manny and Phil on the ground next to me. I also saw the remaining Tod. Its display showed a coded countdown. The hacker couldn’t trigger an immediate detonation, so they set the timer to explode.”
“What did you do?” Rose asked.
“I had thirty seconds. I assessed the situation: two down, local. Crawling to my feet, I could see Josh in the second room. He was conscious and responsive but pinned.”
I paused as I remembered it.
“Actually, he saw me and was reaching out for me. I still couldn’t hear, but I was sure that he was saying my name. But I had twenty-five seconds before the second bomb went off.
“In a situation like that, you have to make quick decisions. I did. I grabbed the two men next to me and dragged them out of building… And I left Josh there to die.
“Forty feet was the safest distance to survive a Tod’s bomb blast. So when I got there, I dropped them, threw my body over them, and waited for the explosion. ‘It was a harrowing sight.’ That’s what I wrote in my report.
“The bomb went off, and the medical bot attended to Manny and Phil. When I went back for Josh’s body, there wasn’t enough to collect.”
“That’s awful!” Rose exclaimed.
“I remember being taken to the infirmary. I had lost a lot of blood. I had a lot of internal damage. A number of things had to be regrown.
“After five days, Jill came to see me. She had read the report, but she wanted to hear it from me. And I explained it to her exactly how I had written it.
“There were no words to describe how I felt. But she made her feelings clear to me. Before Josh entered my command, she stated that if it ever came down to Josh and me, and only one of us could come back alive, she expected it to be her brother.
“And I understood why she felt that. But I was still her fiancé. I still loved her more than anyone in the world.
“And I didn’t even realize I was doing it, but as I talked to her, I had reached for her hand. It was the touch of her skin that gave me the courage to ask, ‘Do you forgive me?’
“She pulled away. She walked out and never spoke to me again.”
“That’s terrible,” Rose said, genuinely heartbroken. “It wasn’t your fault. Why would she treat you like that? I feel bad for her, but didn’t you say that she was in the military?”
“She was a general.”
“Then didn’t she realize that something like that could happen?”
“I think every enlisted person knows it in theory. But you never really know it until it takes away someone you love.”
Rose and I laid in silence for a while. Rose was the first to speak. “Is that why you left the military?”
“No,” I said, dreading the question. “I left because they charged me with falsifying a report.”
“What do you mean?” Rose asked, confused.
“It was that one. They said things didn’t add up. They asked me to explain it, and I couldn’t.”
“Wow. What do you think really happened? Was it Jill?”
“What happened was that I falsified the report.” I paused, hearing the words echo in my mind. “I’ve never actually said that aloud before. But yeah. I did.”
“So… wait. The story you told me about Josh, that’s not what happened?”
“It isn’t. And the commission in charge of the investigation said that ‘the facts so badly matched the evidence that it looked like I wanted to be caught.’ They even gave me the opportunity to revise it. But I wouldn’t. So they kicked me out.”
Rose stared at me through the ensuing silence before asking me softly, “So what really happened?”
“I’ve never told anyone before.”
Rose rubbed my chest, and my eyes welled with tears. I took a stilted breath, trying to hold myself together, and then forced myself to continue.
“The first bomb went off just as I wrote in the report. I saw Manny and Phil lifeless on either side of me. And I saw Josh reaching for me.
“I knew how much time I had. I could either try to save Josh or I could save Manny, Phil, and myself. I would like to say that I chose to save Manny and Phil. But maybe who I was looking to save was myself.”
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I remembered what I had spent five years trying to forget.
“Anyway. I couldn’t hear myself speak, but I yelled, ‘I’ll be back for you, Josh. I promise I’ll be right back.’ But I knew I didn’t have the time. I was leaving him there to die. And I told myself that these were the decision I was trained to make.
“I dragged the two men out counting down in my head. Six, five, four. I was at one when I had gotten out of the blast zone. I covered their bodies with mine and waited for the explosion. Nothing.
“A second passed and then two. I figured my counting was off or that there was a delay. So I kept lying there, sure that it would go off at any moment.
“But the seconds kept ticking. I couldn’t decide what to do. Special Forces troops are trained to trust the reliability of their Tods. If we didn’t trust them, people died. That’s what they drilled into us. Yet nothing was happening.
“I decided I could drag the two men to our mobile base as long as I stayed low. Because if the bomb went off, and I went down, there wouldn’t be any friendlies left to save any of us.
“It took me a minute, maybe two to get them there. I got the medical bot to attend to them, and I stood and stared back at the building. I started to panic. Someone still had to get these men back to camp. If I went back in and the Tod went off, it would kill me, and Manny and Phil would die out here.
“But I had told Josh that I would be back for him, and I didn’t go back. I had to go back for him no matter what happened.
“But I also knew my duty. It was my duty to save as many men as I could. I had to think of the greater good and all of the things that we are taught as SEALS.
“But, at the same time, I couldn’t leave him there because that was Josh. So I ran back to the house, expecting to die. And when I got to the Tod, the countdown was off. I ran to Josh to tell him that I was gonna get him out of there. But when I touched him. I realized that he was dead. He died while I was deciding whether or not I should save myself.
“If I hadn’t been a coward, I would have run back into that building immediately, and Josh would have lived. But I didn’t. I had stood watching like a chicken shit and because of that, Josh was dead.
“I lost it after that. I couldn’t stop crying. An enemy combatant hadn’t killed him. I had. And he
had been a better man than I would ever be. Josh would have come back for me no matter the cost, whereas I had let him die.
“I couldn’t face myself after that. I couldn’t face what I had done. I knew I should have retrieved his body and taken him back to Jill, but I didn’t. I went back to the mobile base and exploded the Tod. I had thought that I could fool myself about what had happened there. But I couldn’t.
“That’s the whole story. That’s the truth. I’m a coward. All I am is a coward.”
The tears had never stopped rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t want them to. The least I could do was man up to what I had done. I didn’t deserve those tears. I didn’t deserve to be alive.
But it was then that Rose’s eyes caught mine. Her face looked so soft and kind. I clenched my jaw to keep it together, but staring into her gentle eyes, I felt my strength weakening.
“I want you to ask me what you asked Jill,” she said softly.
“What?”
“You said that you asked Jill something. Ask me it.”
I couldn’t go back there. I couldn’t say that again now that she knew the truth.
“I…”
“Please!” she exclaimed, taking my hand between hers.
I couldn’t, yet I had to. My heart raced. My chest hurt. My eyes burned. I was completely falling apart. Yet, somehow it came out.
“Do you… forgive me?”
“Yes!” she said emphatically. “Yes, I forgive you!”
My body shook. I did what I could to stop it, but I couldn’t. I cried. I lost it. All of the pain I felt poured out of me in a tsunami of emotions.
“Ford, you’re a hero. You saved three people that day. You didn’t know what would happen if you went back in. It could have gone off. You did the right thing.”
I couldn’t speak, but I shook my head “no.” She didn’t understand. I could have gone back. I told him that I was coming back, and I didn’t. I had time to go back.
“Ford, you did the right thing,” she said, bouncing my hand for emphasis. “You did the right thing!”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I fell forward collapsing into her arms. Those words… I didn’t want to think about whether I deserved them or not. All I wanted was to hear those words again… and I did.