Everyone Dies in the End #12.5

Cindy

“She’s a witch!” The accuser was young, skinny, and black. And frankly, if he hadn’t been toting an M-16 assault rifle with a grenade launcher slung under the barrel, Cindy would have laughed at the bad Monty Python parody.

“And you’re an idiot,” she spat back. They were in the street of Cameroon, the firefight not a half-hour distant. Lieutenant Dixon stood beside her, the sleeve over his left arm removed, a blood-spotted bandage over the wound. The asphalt was littered with the wreckage of vehicles and lives, the air thick with the stench of hot metal and burning rubber. Bullet holes pock-marked the quaint store fronts, and shattered glass glittered like jewels among the dried blood staining the asphalt. In the distance small arms fire popped like a half-hearted 4^th of July celebration, as two of Dixon’s squads chased the fleeing Spetsnaz.

A handful of soldiers collected the American dead and tended to the wounded, and the machine gunner on the sole-surviving M-113 kept a wary out for any remaining Soviets. It was one of the handful that accosted her. “I saw what you did.” His nervous eyes shifted to the small gaggle of soldiers drawn to his voice. “I saw what she did.” He nodded. “Yes, I did. She disappeared, disappeared into thin air, I tell you. One minute she was there, the next she was up there,” he pointed to the windows above their heads, “killing Russians.”

“Yeah, killing Russians,” the M-113 gunner shouted down from his perch on the box-like armored personnel carrier. “Killing, freaking Russians, that’s all that mattered. I don’t care how she did it. The point is that she did it. She saved our ass. She saved your ass.”

A mumbled chorus of “Hell yeah,” and “You got that right,” came from the assembled soldiers. A stocky soldier with a short Mohawk and bloody bandage circling his head spit on the ground, his eyes boring a hole through the black kid’s face.

The skinny man’s eyes darted face to face, his face a portrait in disbelief. “But the good book…”

“Oh please,” Cindy interrupted. “I’ve never read it, but I’m thinking that somewhere in your good book,” she let the last two words roll off her tongue like it was anything but, “that somewhere in those thousand-odd pages, it says, thou shalt not nuke the ever-loving crap out of your neighbor, that thou shalt not exterminate half the planet, lay waste to two or three continents, or kill your brother on sight.” She panted, furious from the exchange. “Maybe we should worry about that part of the good book. You think?”

“”What you did isn’t natural. It’s…”

“Save it.”

Dixon’s voice cut through the air like a high-powered bullet.

The young private turned to face his office, “Sir, I…”

Dixon cut him short. “Which word did you miss, Burnside? Save or it?”

Dixon paused. Cindy thought he paused as if he intended to say something else, something about a girl that could move without motion, disappear now and reappear later, but he didn’t.  When he did speak it was with a softer voice than a moment before.

“We have important things to worry about, Private Burnside. We have fallen comrades to bury, wounded to tend to, and…” The popping of distant small arms interrupted the sentence. Dixon hooked a thumb over his shoulder, in the general direction of the small arms fire. “And there are still some bad guys out there. Let’s worry about that, and leave the sleeping dogs in our lives to lie. Don’t you think that’s a good idea, Private?”

Thirty minutes later they were ready to go, dead buried, wounded left with the recently freed, and very grateful, denizens of Cameroon.  A large-bodied pediatrician promised to look after the soldiers, “as if they were my own kids.”

The convoy was as ragtag as ragtag could be. Only one M-113 remained, and its sides were scared with the bright smears of Soviet bullets which struck but failed to penetrate the thin armor. The remaining soldiers had climbed into Ford F-150 pickup, painted in blotchy black and green camouflage, painted in hopes of hunting trips that might never come to pass. Cindy sat next to Dixon in a rust-colored Jeep CJ-6. Both vehicles had been presents, for lack of a better word, from the citizens of Cameroon. He drove; she kept watch on the passing fields. The silence lasted for almost 10 miles.

He turned to her, the blue eyes achingly honest. “What did you do back there?”

Her silence lasted another five miles, and she doubted her words were worth the wait. “I’m not sure.”

           Dixon sighed as they passed a bent green sign announcing that Charlotte was but 31 more miles.