Desolation

Wilber pulled out a highway flare, removed its cap, and struck the button top with the cap’s coarse surface. A red flame shot out of the top. Hopping up on top of the wall, he leaned over and dropped the flare into a little dug-out channel that led down the hill. A small blue flame hissed a path through the channel down the hill, toward the surprise he had set up for his enemy. Staying perched on the wall, he could hear the enemy’s movement now, just below him. The clunking of boots on metal told him that some were attempting to climb his barbed-wire fence. A giant whoosh reverberated around the hill, announcing the unwrapping of his surprise. Had anyone been able to look up and see Wilber’s mug dangling over the rock wall’s edge at that moment, they would have seen him wearing a wide, shit-eating grin. The sun’s light filtered by the canopy of trees above would have made his face pale, but then his features burst with brightness as when one’s face first catches the sun as it edges over the horizon at sunrise. He didn’t squint or blink once.

After the eruption of the blinding light, a suffocating blast of heat pushed Wilber off his rocky roost, as his defensive line of fire consumed the air and many of the enemy around the hill’s bottom. He’d created it with five days of digging on the other side of the security fence and filled it with a combination of homemade gel fuel and gunpowder. It worked better than expected.

There was a lot of screaming in the chaos of death below, some of it angry commands, some confusion, and much from the sad-sacks who were hit by his burning gel material because of their proximity to the fire pit when it erupted. He could see many of the enemy’s troops now, some covered in flames, frantically running like dozens of red flaming ants.

“Fire!” he yelled. And with that, from all along the ridge line, shots rained down on their enemy, this God’s Army that was trying to take away his land and his life.

~~~

Danny King was running faster than he ever remembered running before in his life. His sister told him, “When you hear gun shots, run!” And so he ran, and ran, not even slowing down for the “wait Danny, wait” calls behind him from his captors when he escaped. He ran through the trees along the river and then through the river until he came out in a clearing and there she was, just as she said she would be. “Darla!” he shouted, a jubilant grin on his filthy face.

“Danny?” Darla turned to see her brother running toward them. “Oh thank God, you made it!”

Another voice between them shouted, “Freeze, deserters.”

Darla stopped to see a man coming out from a bramble of bushes near the watering hole. He had been watching them this whole time. The man kept walking, his rifle pointed at her and Joselin.

“Darla,” called Danny, still running.

She wanted to stop him, but he was a cannonball, unerring in his trajectory to his target, his sister’s waiting arms. She moved forward a step in a bid to catch his attention.

“Freeze or I’ll shoot,” Sam Snodgrass announced, holding the gun on the deserters. Then he saw a flash of light on his right and witnessed her move aggressively toward him, and the other woman started to raise her rifle—

Danny rushed past Snodgrass, ignoring him completely.

—and Snodgrass squeezed his trigger.

Danny hit Darla full speed, knocking her down. They both rolled like a ball, and collapsed in a pile.

They lay still, but Joselin and Sam moved closer to each other and them. None of them made a sound. Above them a large hawk screeched, frustrated at the intrusion on its territory and the distant cracks of gunfire.

Then, muffled cries from the pile.

Darla lifted her head and looked down at her little brother, his head cradled by one of her arms.

He looked up, confused and unsure of what just happened, foggy from his tears of joy still pooled in the banks of his eyelids.

His sister was upset; she was crying, her eyes red. He was feeling very sleepy. “I’m tired, Darl…” His eyes closed.

“Oh God, no!” she blurted, holding him tighter. She felt his little body go limp, his short life gone.

“Noooo! Please, not Danny.” There was no stopping her tears.

Joselin shook from her trance, realizing Danny’s shooter was still standing there, watching. In one smooth motion, she aimed her rifle and emptied every round into Sam, in retaliation. His frame rocked and shuddered as each shot pulverized his body and face. When her rifle fell silent, he flopped over dead.

She walked over to Darla, who was rocking back and forth. Unsure what to do, she just stood over them and mourned with her friend.

“Oh God, why?” Darla enveloped Danny’s body in her arms, burying her head against his face. The ground below them shook. Her anguish was like tremors that traveled from her through the ground out into the world.

37. Agabus

Fossil Ridge, Illinois