AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She landed on her side, and the last thing I remembered before they hauled me away was the haunting emptiness in her pale blue eyes as they stared straight through me.
“What are you doing?” Five years later, I was screaming those words again, this time at the sailor whose shirt was in my fist. “There was a woman up there! With a fucking baby!”
Half of my platoon went still, and they stared at me, too, but their stares weren’t vacant—they were shocked and suspicious and ready to attack. They stared at me like I’d spoken to them in a foreign language.
Because I had.
Shite.
Releasing the sailor, I took a step back.
“What the fuck was that?” he shouted, allowing his comrades to help him stand. The rest of my platoon kept firing, too absorbed in their tasks and obscured by smoke to notice our standoff.
“He sounded like one of them.”
“Maybe he’s working for them.”
“That’s impossible. His father is—”
“I know what I heard.”
“I’m your fucking lieutenant,” I shouted—in Russian this time—“and you’ll address me as such.”
“You just attacked Antonov and screamed at him in English, sir,” one of the men who’d helped the gunner stand up said, still clutching his arm.
“Spy!” Antonov shouted, shoving a finger in my direction. “He’s a fucking Irish spy!”
I didn’t know who drew first, but in the blink of an eye, my pistol was pressed against the gunner’s temple, and five more were aimed directly at me.
“Stand down!” I yelled, realizing a moment later that the words had come out in English again.
Whatever the fuck I’d been pretending to be had turned to water in my fists. I couldn’t hold on to it much longer, and honestly, I didn’t want to.
“Stand down!” I repeated in Russian. “That’s a direct order!”
The crewmen looked at one another, confused and conflicted.
“Any sailor who does not holster his weapon immediately will be charged with insubordination. This is your final warning.”
As the men hesitantly lowered their weapons, I glanced back up at the smoldering remains of the white house with the yellow door. No one could have survived that blast, so I wasn’t expecting to find any signs of life. But that was exactly what I saw. A silhouetted speck of a person, possibly a woman or a child, was running along the top of the cliff.
And directly into our line of fire.
Charging toward the other artillery gun under my command, I dived for that gunner just as he yanked on the lanyard, sending a shell screaming into the side of the cliff. As we crashed into the plexiglass deck railing, I kept my eyes on the silhouette, up until the moment it disappeared behind a geyser of rocks and earth.
The toxic rage that had been festering inside of me for five fucking years ignited and boiled over, flooding my veins with a hatred so thick and so hot that it burned away the last tattered remains of the lie I’d been living.
Pinning the gunner on the ground, I unleashed my fury, my agony, and my guilt through my fists, relishing the pain in my knuckles as they collided with bone and split open on teeth. All that time, I’d been putting on armor to protect myself—to keep me numb, to hide my humanity—but now that it was gone, I realized that it had also been protecting them.
From me.
Countless hands seized my arms, wrenching them behind my back as they hauled me away from the bloody pulp of a man on the deck. My chest heaved, and my body shook as they shoved me against the wall of a storage room and pummeled me with their fists, their knees, the soles of their boots, but I barely registered the blows. Because at that very moment, a spotlight beamed down on the ruins of the house with the yellow door.
Someone had survived.
Relief washed over me as I squinted into the darkness, moving my head to get a better view around the helmets of the men who were restraining me. I was desperate for proof that I’d finally done something right, that my actions had saved at least one innocent life, but as soon as I remembered what that spotlight meant, what it was attached to, that fleeting joy was replaced with a frantic, nauseating sense of dread.
The drones were programmed to find survivors, not rescue them. Whoever was still alive up there wouldn’t be for long. They’d either die in ten seconds by gunfire or in two weeks after being raped and tortured to death. But either way, that beam of light was a death sentence.
