Take it. It’s your love too.
I loved her. My cracked, tarnished heart that was scared to love, loved Autumn Caldwell. My soul sang the words I could never say to her out loud.
The nib of the pen touched down and I wrote my name. My name. Weston. Because that’s what she called me, always. Only. I was her Weston, until the day I died. This day, maybe.
I had just finished the ‘n’ of my name when the first bomb hit.
The concussion rocked the earth and sent debris raining down. Someone in the rear screamed in pain. Was it Erickson? I crammed the paper into my pocket, underneath my body armor and grabbed my weapon. My headset was filled with chatter.
“Incoming hostiles, half-klick south.”
“Copy that. We got refugees ahead of them, northbound.”
“Not regime, hajis.”
“Fuck.”
“Go, go, go!”
Connor scrambled to his feet and we shielded our eyes from the explosive bursts to the south. Jagger, our communications officer, shouted into his comm for immediate air strike assistance.
“The north attack earlier was a diversion,” I muttered, taking cover with Connor behind a hunk of rubble. “We never looked back.”
“They said refugees,” Connor said, his face grim, no trace of his trademark smile. I hoped by the time he got out of here, he’d find it again.
Bullets tore the air and exploded plaster chunks tore into flesh and bone. As the sun crept over the eastern horizon, it revealed a train of weary refugees—old men, women and children—running in a panicked clump as gunfire cut the air apart. They’d fled from the south and now the enemy, who knew the terrain better, was mowing them down.
“Fuckers are using them as cover,” I muttered. I started to take aim and realized Connor wasn’t beside me.
“Connor? Connor!”
Then I heard crying.
Somehow, under the barking orders, gunfire, and exploding rubble, I heard a child crying. In the pandemonium of refugees taking cover among us, a single little boy stood apart. Immobile in the chaos, weeping over the body of his dead mother.
Connor was running for him. He didn’t see the group of hostiles crouched behind the burned-out shell of a building. But I did.
“Fuck, no! Connor, stop!”
I ran after him, getting off a few rounds at the insurgents hiding behind a crumbling wall of scorched stone. Firing made me too slow. I had to save my breath and run.
The most important race of my life, with a weapon in my hands, slowing me down. My gear weighed a thousand pounds. It would flatten me to the track like a giant hand, while everyone I loved raced off and disappeared.
I’ll never reach him. I’ll never reach him. I’m going to lose…
The thoughts pounded in my head with my bellowing breath. Connor was in the open without cover, running straight through gunfire. I ran after, bullets whizzing past me from all sides.
This is it. It’s coming.
Connor was nearly to the kid. Plumes of dust and smoke fogged the street in a brown haze. Swirls and eddies billowing. Clouds parting to show an insurgent posed like a bowler about to throw a strike. The pendulum swing of his arm and the grenade rigged from a mortar round flew slow-motion in the dirty air. It rolled and jounced across the rocky soil, its course never veering from its target.
The child.
And Connor.
I channeled everything I had into my legs, forcing them to move faster than they’d ever run before. This was a race for life. Connor’s life. I was running the race of his life.
I was nearly there. I could see Connor’s eyes fixated on the child and determined to do something right. Something heroic and good that would make his parents—and himself proud. Unaware of the incoming danger. He didn’t understand the child was already lost.