“How many people died here today because of you, Mr. Talbot?” Spindler asked snidely.
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I shot back.
“Those aliens only dropped that bomb because their position was overrun,” Spindler replied.
“I don’t think you get it. For being an educated man, you certainly are kind of a stupid shit.”
“Enlighten me, then,” he replied.
“It’s our position that’s been overrun. The aliens own everything now, we are desperately trying to regain what was once ours.”
“By having it destroyed?”
“I’d rather the scorched earth method then have them take everything!” I yelled quietly. I knew it made no sense, but the force behind the words spoke volumes itself.
“Relax, this is merely a debate,” Spindler said, condescendingly.
“This is no fucking debate! Does this look like a fucking debate? This is an all-out war, you dipshit. Man has raced to the top of the endangered species list and you were willingly putting yourself in position to take out one of the last strongholds. I should have just put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.” I brought my rifle up, the barrel was mere inches from his eye, it would have been so easy to just pull that trigger and be done with it and him. Blake’s brother was shying away from the whole episode. Everyone was still. The only thing that moved was the sweat free-flowing down Spindler’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Spindler said softly.
“Damn right, you’re sorry!” I said, still shouting, driving the barrel into his cheek. “He said he was sorry, Michael,” Dee said. “Isn’t that sufficient verbiage in your culture to allow you to stand down from your present course of action?”
I wasn’t expecting him to be the voice of reason. I pushed Spindler away with the gun. He would have a circle imprint in his face for a few more hours. I strode ahead to get away from Spindler, afraid that I was still close to murdering him.
“You alright?” Brian asked, coming up on my side.
“I will be.” And I said no more.
***
It was getting dark rapidly and I still didn’t think we had covered half the distance back to The Hill. Between Spindler and the old man, we were just about crawling. We stopped for at least the twentieth time and not a moment too soon as an alien fighter screamed by.
“Dee?” I asked.
“Looks like they’re prepping for another landing,” he said, shielding his eyes from the setting sun and the glint of light off of the multitude of ships lining up in the sky.
“It looks like this is a full scale invasion.” Brian whistled.
“It is a large percentage,” Dee answered.
The ground rumbled as ship after ship made land contact.
“We need to press on,” I said, standing up.
“My… my husband can’t go on,” Gloria said.
“Well, he doesn’t really have many other options. Hey Brian, will you help me?” Brian and I each got under a shoulder to help the man to his feet.
“Michael, I can carry him,” Dee said.
“You’ve done enough, let me do this,” I said, Dee nodded in understanding. “You ready, old timer?” I asked.
“I was in the Greatest World War,” Vern replied.
I thought that an understatement, I was thinking the one we were mired in now might have usurped it.
“Why don’t you tell us a story to help the time go by?” Brian asked and that was the only window the man needed.
“We were on Tarawa, I was in the 6th Marine regiment. I watched as our ships bombed that island into the Stone Age. We didn’t think anything much bigger than a cockroach was going to be able survive that barrage or so we hoped.”
***
“What do you think, Vern?” Private Killinger asked, coming up to his friend PFC Banks.
Vern was leaning against the railing, smoking his second straight pack of Pall Malls, watching as shell after shell left the battleships and crashed into the tiny island beyond. “I think we’re going to sink that island before we ever get a chance to land,” Vern said, tossing the remains of his filterless cigarette into the ocean, almost swearing that he could hear it sizzle out as it hit the water below. His senses were so dialed up for the oncoming invasion, he thought maybe it wasn’t so much his imagination. He pondered that even as he lit another cigarette.
“Wouldn’t that be something!” Killinger replied. “I wish it would, I’d be happy if I never had to look at those yellow devils again.”
Vern nodded in agreement. They had been briefed on how savage the enemy was but words meant nothing when you were actually confronted by an enemy that seemed completely unconcerned with life, their own or his. He had watched in horror as wave after wave of attacking Japanese had come at their machine gun nest on the Philippines with nothing more than swords and bayonets. It was all he could do to run enough ammunition through his gunner’s weapon to keep them at bay. The Japanese seemed all too willing to sacrifice their bodies to the American bullets.
And that was even before the Americans had started to turn the tides of the war and go on the offensive. Vern was in no rush to see what a desperate Japanese soldier was capable of.
“Nothing can survive that, right?” Killinger asked as another barrage lit up the night sky.
“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Vern said, finishing another cigarette. He could swear that he saw his friend shake with tremors, but it could have been the vibrations of a new volley. “You should get some sleep,” Vern told him.
“You gonna hit the rack?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there soon,” he lied. Vern stayed there long enough to watch the sun come up and still the bombs arced over him. “What’s left to destroy?” he asked himself, looking through a pair of field binoculars. And then there was blissful, peaceful, terrifying quiet. Because the quiet now meant that men, flesh and blood men, would be getting into their troop transports and heading to that desolate black lump of coagulated lava. Vern could not discern the importance of the target other than to tell the Japanese, ‘Hey, we’re coming, this one’s for the Arizona!’
Vern shuffled into one of the first troop transports. They were stuffed in so tight he could not even check to make sure that his rifle was packed correctly in the plastic to keep the sea water out of its inner workings. He nodded to Killinger who was among one of the last into the small boat. Vern figured he would hook up with his friend once they got ashore. None of the men spoke as the boats traveled across the choppy water, the drone of multiple motors masked some of the vomiting as scared old boys and, young men prepared for battle. Nothing could have prepared those doomed souls for the next few minutes as they headed ashore. Heavy machinegun fire laced with tracers blew through the ranks of the men as the transporters opened their heavy metal doors. Marines were blown apart as rounds usually reserved for armored vehicles ripped through them.
Vern watched as death advanced row upon row over his fellow Marines. He quickly scrambled up the side of boat and plunged into the waters. Bullets tore through the water leaving white trails as they passed by. The clear water quickly became cloudy with the blood of his fellow warriors.
More and more of the Marines in the boat had followed Vern’s lead and were plunging into the water to escape the projectiles only to be dragged to their deaths in the water as the their heavy gear weighed them down. Vern shrugged his pack off as quickly as he could, trying to gain buoyancy. He had always been a strong swimmer, but even he was having great difficulty treading water in combat boots.
Men screamed for their mothers as Japanese lead answered instead. Vern had finally rid himself of enough gear, to come up and get his first breath of air in nearly a minute. Dead bodies floated all around him like a macabre game of bobbing for apples. He made sure to stay away from the transports boats that were garnering the lion’s share of rounds. He made his way to shore as quickly as he could without attracting any fire from the opposition.
He was finally able to pull himself up against a small outcropping of rock in about a foot of water but it shielded him completely from the Japanese entrenchment. Boat after boat was getting hammered until some much needed air support came in and started firing directly on the Japanese. Within a few more minutes his secluded spot on the beach was actually becoming the beachhead.
“Someone’s going to pay for this!” an eager corporal said to the burgeoning crowd.
Vern knew the words for what they were; bravado, trying to cover over abject fear. He saw nothing wrong with whatever would get any of them through the day, though. It was ten minutes later when a gunnery sergeant finally made it to shore that the Marines could go on the offensive again.
“We stay here like cowards or we go out there like heroes!” the gunney shouted.
Vern was scared to his core at the thought of dying, but to live without honor was worse. The gunney’s words had struck a chord, inch by blood-soaked inch, those Marines had taken the beach from the Japanese. It was late into that first night when the last of the machinegun nests were silenced. The ensuing quiet had been damn near blissful until Vern began to think of Killinger. He was certain his friend had fallen in those first few moments, but he spent a good amount of time going from encampment to encampment, hoping to come across his buddy. All he saw was ghost images overlaid on vacant faces. None of them would ever be the same after that day, some would deal with it better than others, but all would remember it.
***
“It was that second day that I got wounded. Got a Purple Heart and discharged from the service,” Vern continued.
“Wow,” I said, mesmerized. Vern’s recounting of the story had been so visceral, so authentic, I swore I could smell the smoke from the spent shells.
“How’d you get injured?” Brian asked, hefting Vern up as we continued forward.
“Well, you know the Japanese had dug themselves deep into that rock. That was why our shells didn’t do as much damage as we thought they would. Damn, they were as much as twenty to thirty feet underground, probably playing cards and drinking saki while we dropped bombs all over them. So as soon as the shelling stopped, they knew what was coming, they grabbed all their gear and they made our landing a vision of hell on earth.”
“I don’t think I could have done it,” I told him in all honesty.
“Oh, I think you could have,” he said, giving me a wink. “I know who you are.”
“This sounds much like our rebellion,” Dee added. He had been listening as intently as any of us.
Vern craned his neck to look up. “Well, um.”
“Continue, worthy hu-man,” Dee said.
“That’s a compliment,” I told Vern.
“So that next day, after not sleeping again, I knew I wasn’t going to find my friend.”
“My brother,” Gloria added.
“I went to Jack’s house, Gloria's brother, when I got out, just to tell his parents that Jack had died honorably. But that’s not what they wanted to hear, it does not matter in which way you die, they are all a finality. They wanted to know how he had lived so I spent three days with Jack’s family. He had two younger sisters and a younger brother not much older than that little squirt up there.” He pointed to the boy on Dee’s shoulders.
“My sister Connie was very smitten with him,” Gloria said, rubbing Vern’s shoulder. “She didn’t talk to me for almost a year after we got married. It was among some of the most peaceful moments in my life.” Gloria laughed, as did Vern.
I could tell it was an old inside joke amongst them and they enjoyed it immensely.
“I wanted to be around the man who had been with my brother,” Gloria said with a faraway look in her eyes.
“And she helped me to heal both physically and mentally, maybe even spiritually,” Vern added that last part and looked at us all quickly to see if we were going to judge him for potentially having feelings.
He was barking up the wrong tree if he thought I was going to give him any grief. I struggle with my feelings between each heartbeat.
When he was content that nobody was going to call him out on it he continued his narrative.
“The goal that day had been to completely cross the island. It was only three miles across—how fucking bad could it be?”
“Vern, there’s children and you know I don’t appreciate that language.”
Vern shrugged.
“Good thing she’s not around me much,” I whispered in his ear, conspiratorially.
Vern grunted a laugh, I could tell the old timer was hurting, but he was soldiering on.
“We were about a half hour in. My job was to keep an eye on the men with the flamethrowers. It was the only weapon effective in getting the Japanese out of their holes or kill them where they lay. The problem was that nobody was watching my back. We had just passed a hole I didn’t think a skinny badger would be able to fit in, so I told the flamethrower to keep going forward. This goo—”
“Vern!” Gloria chided.
“So this Japanese fella wriggled himself out and stuck his bayonet straight through the back of my knee. I wished he had just shot me the pain was so intense. The Marine on the other side of the flamethrower saw what was happening and was able to kill the soldier before he was able to pull that bayonet free and finish the job.”
I was cringing at the pain he must have been in.
“They stuck me on a stretcher with that damn rifle still sticking out of my knee, nobody wanted to touch it. Every jostle was worse than the previous. I thought I was going to go insane with the pain. It was when I finally got back to the beach that a sergeant there plunged a morphine shot into my arm.
“What are you idiots stupid or something? The sergeant had yelled at the men for not having given it to me earlier.” Vern laughed. “I would have kissed him if I didn’t think the other guys would have thought me fruity or something. Even then I think I would have done it if I could have gotten up. So they put me back on one of those God-forsaken transport boats and shipped me over to the medical ship. I was mostly unconscious, but I remember one of the doctors saying what a fine souvenir I had brought back with me. I didn’t see it that way. When I finally awoke from the surgery, I gave it to the doctor that had taken it out of me. He couldn’t have been more pleased and I never wanted to see the damn thing again anyway.”
“That’s a hell of a story, Vern,” I told him.
“Not near as exciting as yours, so I heard,” he said, limping along.
“If we have enough time, maybe I’ll tell you,” I told him.
“I’d like that,” he said, grimacing. I think he was more enamored with the thought of having enough time rather than listening to my story, but that was fine with me.
“I smell hu-mans,” Dee said. “We are close.”
“Dee, get behind me,” I told him. Dee looked at me funny like what the hell was that going to accomplish. “I know, I know, but I don’t want any trigger happy sentries putting a bullet in you.”
He shrugged, but did as I asked.
“Captain Talbot?” a voice came from beyond a small copse of trees.
“One and the same,” I answered.
“But you’re dead,” the same voice said.
“I beg to differ,” I told him. Three armed Hillians came out of the foliage, I remembered seeing their squad leader around the base a few times.
The corporal looked over to Dee. I could see his hands tense on his weapon but he made no threatening move.
“Corporal, could you’re men please help with my new friend, Vern, here?” I asked. I was definitely beginning to fatigue.
The corporal made some arm movements into the bushes and two more men came out, carrying a stretcher. I thought that was pretty fortuitous and my expression must have given me away.
“The general sent a bunch of patrols out in the hopes that there would be some survivors.”
“I’d really hoped I’d never get in one of these things again,” Vern said with some
dismay. “But right now it looks like a Sealy Posturepedic.”
“What about him?” the corporal asked pointing to Spindler.
Dee seemed to forget he was even carrying the slight man. “I would like to stretch my arms. Thank you,” Dee said, holding Spindler out like a loaf of bread.
“I know the going is tougher,” the corporal said once Spindler was situated on a stretcher. “But we have to stay within the tree line. There have been enemy fighters patrolling the entire region. Seems that something got them pretty upset,” he said, smiling at me.
“I had nothing to do with it.” I gave him my standard answer usually reserved for the police. “Who else is out here?” I asked the corporal as we got underway again.
“Sir?” he asked.
“Someone saved our ass back there—who else are you looking for?”
“Major Wagner, sir. He’s still unaccounted for,” the corporal answered. My face fell with worry for my friend. “But that could have changed, sir, we’ve been out here for hours and we are under strict radio silence.”
“Corporal, do you mind if me and my large friend here go on ahead?”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Vern, Gloria—I’ll see you both. Boys, you be good. If this man tries to escape,” I said, pointing to Spindler. “Shoot him.”
I thought the corporal thought I was kidding at first but there was no mirth on my face.
“Yes, sir.”
“You ready to make some time?” I asked Drababan.
Dee snorted. “What makes you think you could keep up?”
I started running before he finished his sentence. I was young and in the best shape of my life, so the running came easily enough but what spurred me on even faster was the sound of giant branches snapping as Dee cut a path behind me. They impeded his progress enough that he was not able to overtake me.
“If I catch you, I will eat you,” Dee yelled from a few steps behind.
That’s some scary shit any way you cut it. Growing up, I’d had dreams of being chased by zombies, but they weren’t fast, green, and huge and they sure didn’t talk.