It is time to reload.
Gunny asks what he thinks he’s doing. Gunny sometimes doesn’t seem to understand who is in charge here. Gunny doesn’t appreciate patience or understand that you can respect the bad guys, no matter how bad they are. Jeremy knows he would have been an outstanding gunnery sergeant, if they’d given him the chance. He would have been an example for the men. Of how you fight back from adversity. How you never say die.
Only they didn’t want him, did they?
No, Gunny is quick to remind him. They did not. He tells Jeremy to get his mind back on his business, and that he is going to have to go down there and finish the job with the .45 that is tucked in his jeans. And he is going to have to go down like right now, because this is what you call a Mexican standoff, except for the fact that Jeremy has two guns and the man who had one gun now has a broken arm and is bleeding torrents, so move before somebody comes along that road.
Jeremy wants to know what’s so special about that hippie chick. She’s a fucking girl, and maybe she’s a liar and dark-spirited, but why is she so special?
Gunny tells him that it’s over his head, that he’s on a mission he needs to finish before he can start his new life in Mexico. That he just needs to go down there and kill her, and then he can leave the rest of them to rot, as far as he cares.
But why? Jeremy wants to know. What’s the big deal about her?
Gunny seems a little agitated. A little pissed, really. He looks like he wants to spit blood and fire.
It’s about the war, he says.
Yeah, Jeremy knows that already. It’s about that lying video. About the lies that say we went over there and killed children. Just shot them right out of their shoes. Shot them knowing it was murder. And then came back over here and didn’t tell a single solitary soul, because we were good guys, loyal and patriotic, and that’s not something you can talk about, not even to your buddy who does nothing but offer you an empty smile from his wheelchair at the Veteran’s Hospital in Temple.
Nice day for a white wedding.
Yes it is, he thinks.
Jeremy stands up like a soldier. He begins walking through the rocks toward the road, and the building beyond. He is hot and thirsty and ready to finish his mission. With two more strides he goes crash into the first moment of the rest of his life and he walked to the white car. He held the rifle at the ready, and his other hand went under his shirt to touch the automatic pistol. He could feel Gunny, walking at his side. He passed the skinhead, lying on his belly alongside the crumpled van. Where was the pistol? It had fallen somewhere around here.
One of the others must’ve picked it up. He drew his .45 and, holding it ready before him, he eased toward the building, step after step. Gunny was beside him, and Gunny began to chatter about killing the girl like an excited kid on his way to a carnival.
Terry heard music. It was himself, playing ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ on the Vox Continental. He was hurting. He was fading in and out, like a broken speaker. His wires were severely damaged. But oh, that music he could hear. He knew he was dying, but if he could hear music to the very last…then what was death, but an all-access pass to a bigger stage?
But this thing underneath him, whatever it was, hurt like fucking hell.
It was underneath his left side, pressing into his ribs.
He slowly shifted his body. His breathing gurgled like the pipes in a motel he remembered. He felt under himself to move that hard pain so he could listen to the music in peace, and his hand fell upon something metal. His fingers made out what it was: True’s pistol.
He was aware of someone moving past him. Walking toward the building where his friends had gone. It was a man wearing a ball cap. It took Terry a few seconds to focus because his Lennon specs were gone and everything was blurry and turning red, but he could make out that the man was carrying a rifle and a handgun.
Terry thought he didn’t have a whole lot of time or a whole lot of strength left. But maybe he was where he needed to be, when he needed to be there. He put his hand on the grip and found the trigger.
He sucked in his breath and rolled over to bring the gun up, and as the man caught the movement and started to turn Terry squeezed the trigger just as he used to do on the firing range in Oklahoma City. The bullet went in low on the left side, a few inches away from the spine, and when he felt the jagged ripping pain Jeremy knew he was in deep shit, because it had been a killing shot. He staggered, and he heard Gunny give a sigh of exasperation, as if this was the stupidest thing that could ever have happened in the world, but Jeremy thought Gunny had been too busy crowing about killing that girl to be watching his back.
Terry tried to pull the trigger again, but his finger and hand would not obey. His arm gave it up too. The pistol fell to the ground. Jeremy walked to him, more angry at Gunny than anything else. He thrust the .45 out at Terry’s face, about to blow the head apart, and then he saw Terry faintly smile and Terry’s eyes glaze over as he died.
Fucker looked like he was hearing something that could not be heard.
Gunny told him to get in there and finish it, because now he knew where the gun was. Kill the girl, Gunny said. Okay, kill them all, but kill the girl first.
Jeremy nodded. He could feel the blood running out of him. His shirt was wet back there. Maybe a nicked artery. Sonofabitch. Fucking amateur had gotten off a pro shot. He wanted to laugh, but he feared he might start crying, and that was not how he wanted to go out. Besides, he did have the mission to finish. But he wasn’t getting to Mexico in this lifetime. Neither in this lifetime would he be working for the federales, or have a house on the beach, or find a new career as a hit man, or be much of anything in a very short while.
He did cry, just a few tears. He was crying when he walked to the edge of sun and shadow, and he saw them in there because they had nowhere else to go. Most of the roof had fallen in and the timbers and rubble blocked the way to the windows at the rear. The man with the shattered elbow was lying with his back against the stones, his face bleached by pain, a glass cut bleeding over his right eye, one arm supporting the shattered elbow. His polo shirt used to be white. The drummer girl was beside him, her eyes fixed upon Jeremy with terror. In her hand was a rock, like she was about to throw it. He said, “Don’t do that.” His voice sounded distant.
Nomad shifted his position. He was standing where he’d been desperately trying to dig through the debris to one of the windows, but it was hopeless. His right ankle had twisted as he’d tried to support Terry, and had twisted more severely when he’d helped True. Beside him was Ariel, her hands scraped and dirty from working at the same mound of rubble.
Jeremy sighed. He decided he would not finish them with the pistol after all. They were not Blue Falcons, and so he would take them out with respect. The pistol was so ugly, but the rifle was a work of art. He pushed the .45 into his jeans, and touched the wound at his back. His hand came back looking like a crimson glove. He chambered a round and saw with disgust that he was getting blood all over his weapon.
On the ground, True said hoarsely, “Jeremy. Sergeant Pett. No.”
Kill the girl first, Gunny instructed, as if Jeremy had forgotten already.
Ariel had realized two things: Jeremy Pett was probably bleeding to death from the wound Terry had delivered, and he was going to kill them all.
Those were the facts. Another fact was: she knew what had brought him here.
Though her knees trembled and she peed a little bit in her panties, Ariel stepped forward.
“You want me,” she said.
Because it was the truth, and it was the only way.
“Ariel!” Nomad reached for her and limped after her but she didn’t even look at him. When he grasped her shoulder and tried to turn her to face him, she pushed him back.
“Yes, you do,” she told Jeremy. Her voice was calmer, now that she’d decided. She could look him right in the eyes and accept it. “I am what you want to
kill. You and whatever’s with you.”
“Shit,” he said, amazed. “That’s Gunny. Can you see him?”
Ariel said. “I’ll go with you, out of here. If you kill me, would you let my friends live?”
A trick, Gunny said with a wary sneer. Kill her where she stands.
But Jeremy, who felt his time streaming from him, frowned and said, “Maybe.”
“No way! No way!” Berke’s face was streaked with tears. She stood up, still gripping her rock.
It had occurred to Ariel that if she could get him far enough away from the others, even if he killed her—when he killed her—he might not be able to get back.
“I’m ready,” Ariel told Jeremy. Her voice threatened to crack; she wouldn’t allow it. “The thing that’s with you wants me dead. So if you need to do that, I’m ready. I’m just asking you… please, to let my friends live.”
A trick, Gunny repeated.
Nomad picked up a board with nails sticking out of it. His face was gray and bits of glass were caught in his hair. He tensed, about to lunge forward as fast as he could—if he could—and start swinging. Ariel saw Jeremy’s bleary eyes fix on him, and she said quietly, “John, don’t.”
She came closer to Jeremy Pett. She came right up next to him. She looked into his face without fear, and she said the three hardest words she’d ever spoken in her life.
“Walk with me.”
She reached out to take his bloody hand, and to guide him away from her family.
Jeremy stepped back.
Something is wrong here, he thought.
Something was all mixed up. The good and the bad and the weak and the strong, all mixed up. It seemed to him that she should be sobbing and begging for her life. He had the rifle. She had nothing. He didn’t understand this; it went against all his training, that a weak unarmed enemy could look at a rifle and see their death in it, and not fall terrified before it. And she was weak. She was a weak, dark-spirited…
…liar?
He felt like he was about to pass out. It was close on him, this oncoming darkness. He could feel himself not only bleeding, but filling up with blood on the inside. He was a bladder, and something was about to burst.
I did kill a child, he thought. I did. I committed murder. I did.
It had eaten at him for so long. It had chewed and chewed at him, down in the belly of the beast. It had misshapen him, and warped time into a long midnight that never moved. It had driven itself into his bones, and made a nest in his heart.
It was pecking at him, even now. It never stopped.
Peck.
Peck.
Peck.
God had punished him for that murder. He was certain of it. Call it fate, if you wanted to, but it was God who made him pay. But Jeremy thought, as the world began to slowly turn around him and the taste of blood was thick in his mouth, that if only…if only he’d been able to tell someone about it. To tell Karen, and ask her to pray for him, but the accident took her away before he could. To tell his father, and get a kind hand on the shoulder, but it would only be another fist. To tell any of the officers, or the men, or any of the doctors at the hospital where he hoped one Wednesday somebody would ask him how he was doing. To have someone…anyone…listen, and say what he needed to hear most in this world. But, as the Christian In Action had said, our meeting never happened.
And now, in a place where it was the least expected, the person he’d least expected to help him with this burden was listening. Of all people, it was the hippie chick. She was standing before him, unafraid of his rifle, and he could tell she’d made up her mind to die for the others, and what more could you say about a person?
“I murdered a child.” Jeremy said to Ariel. “In Iraq.” The words came out with thorns on them. They were tough to dislodge. “I’m not a good guy. But the others…the soldiers…they weren’t all like me. You were wrong to say those things. We didn’t go over there to kill children. We went to do our job. They weren’t all like me.” His voice shattered, and fresh tears began to course down his face. “Do you hear?”
She felt what he wanted. His eyes were frightened, and he was starting to waver on his feet. She focused on this moment, this moment alone, and with an effort that redefined the limits of her willpower she put aside her grief at the things this man had done.
She knew. And she knew that whatever was with him in this place, whatever had brought him on his long journey, whatever it had promised him, whatever it had proclaimed, it could not give him what she was about to offer. It was so simple, yet so important that the lack of it could crush a soul.
“I hear you,” she said.
Oh my God, Jeremy thought. Oh Jesus… I have killed innocent people. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Maybe this band had been harsh in their interview with Felix Gogo. Maybe they’d been wrong in their judgement of his fellow soldiers…but how did the video itself lie? How was it not an accurate depiction of the choices that a soldier had to make, and no matter how tough you were trained you only had seconds to decide matters of life and death? How was it not the truth, showing the darkness that can swirl down in an instant and peck you to pieces?
I am the liar, he thought. Me.
And Gunny.
Gunny’s a liar, too.
There is no need to kill anyone else today, he thought. This battle is over.
Jeremy felt his face begin to come apart. A knot rose, writhing, on his forehead. He reached up and pushed it down. His right eye began to sag from its socket. He took his fingers and put it back in its place. His mouth opened, wider and wider, and his jaw began to unhinge, but he pushed his jaw up with one firm hand and his mouth closed and the little ripplings and tremors that moved across the plains of flesh and bone ceased to be.
He shivered. He lowered his rifle, and when he did a small figure stepped out from behind Ariel Collier, and held onto the edge of her dirty blouse with one hand, and from the shadowed face the voice of a little boy said, Daddy? You can come home now.
Gunny screamed in Jeremy’s ear that this thing lied.
Screamed that it was not what he thought. Screamed that it was a trick, that he should not—could not—let his eyes fuck up his brain. Screamed You have a mission, you dumb fuckstick.
But for a brief moment, as Gunny shrieked and babbled in first one ear and then the other, Jeremy Pett was allowed to see beyond the glass.
They were not alone in this ruined place.
There were other figures, at the edge of sun and shadow. They stood amid the rubble, behind Ariel Collier, John Charles, Berke Bonnevey and Truitt Allen. They stood silently, only watching. But Jeremy heard Gunny give a cry that began with bitterness and ended with ache. Jeremy looked from the hippie chick to the long hair to the drummer girl and then to the man on the ground. He looked at the small figure, whose eyes held centers of light that made Jeremy think of candles.
“Please forgive me,” he said to all of them, to every listening ear. He backed away. He dropped his rifle.
He walked a distance, to get his bearings, and then he began to slowly and painfully climb a small rise of shale and stones that stood behind the building. Halfway up he took the .45 from his jeans and dropped that too, and then at the top of the rise he faced a huge expanse of open desert, brown-dusted and white-streaked under the hot blue sky.
He went on.
He was sure the Elysian Fields lay in the direction he was travelling. He wouldn’t get there today, though. It would be a long, hard journey to—
He fell. He felt no weight on him, but he had the impression of hearing wings and the dry rattle of claws, and the sensation of something gripping his back and chewing at his neck. He tried to get up and could not. Tried again, but failed. He felt scrabblings at his flesh, and the noise of huge wings thrashing the air just behind his head.
Maybe on one side ten thousand times ten thous
and screamed and capered, and on the other side ten thousand times ten thousand shouted and cheered for the man in the arena, the bloodied man, the man forsaken and cast aside, betrayed, yet the warrior spirit never broken.
It all came down to sharp edges, the wings of a crow, black origami.
That, against a Marine who was determined to stand.
Jeremy cast it off like an old skin. He walked on, staggering. The horizon was lost in the red descending mist. He knew he wouldn’t get to the Elysian Fields today. He had too much to account for. Too much innocent blood on his hands, to be allowed entrance today to the Elysian Fields. But wherever he was going, it would be a step toward the Elysian Fields. He told himself that whatever he had to do to get there, even if it was the impossible, he would find a way. He would never give up the fight to reach his wife and son—whatever they had become—on the other side of this.
The thing descended upon him again, but this time did not drive him down. As he staggered forward it beat at him, and clawed his back, and tore at his head with a beak like a piston.
His back bowed but unbroken, Jeremy remembered something Gunny had said to him, in the truck on the highway outside Sweetwater. That had been a lie, too. Its opposite was the truth.
“Without me,” Jeremy whispered to the enraged air, “you’re nothing.”
He shrugged the thing off. It whirled around him in a dark blur.
Gradually, whirl by whirl, the dark blur subsided. It did not vanish so much as it melted, oozing itself away in tendrils and chunks that also melted away into smaller and smaller pieces.
Jeremy fell to his knees.
He drew a breath, and he had a good look at the land that lay before him. Black clouds were rushing toward him, shot through with terrifying pulses of electricity. He smelled the ozone of war, the burnt scent of calamity and chaos. He figured he was in for a long hitch.
And in the last few seconds until his next mission began, he braced himself for the storm.
SIX
The Last Song