1
Kevin
Itap my fingers on the cold glass in my hand. The swirling intoxication wraps around me until I’m deadened. That’s exactly what I need to feel. Dead.
The rich, golden liquor smothers the demons who roar in my head and tell me just how worthless I am. As if I need a reminder. Seeing her with him breaks me. The pain burrows into my chest and shatters my heart as if it were glass. I’m not surprised she’s with him. She was always with him, even when she was with me. Instead of recoiling like she did with most of our interactions, she lit up when she saw a text from him. When she closed her eyes every time I fucked her, I knew damn well she was thinking of him instead of me.
I slam back the remaining liquid, trying to bury these feelings. Fuck feelings.
I lie back on the couch and watch the clock tick by the hours instead of the minutes. One turns to two, and three and four soon follow. How long have I been awake? What fucking day is it?
My skin crawls as another sunrise treads on the heels of another sleepless night. People love sunrises—waking up early to watch the sun peek from beneath the horizon—but not me. They just make me angry. They slap me in the face and remind me I have to get up and try to be normal. They make sure I know that every ticking hour before them was sleepless.
I need drugs. I need sedation. Yet another memory flashes through my mind, haunting me like it always does.
In this memory, I led my soldiers around the corner of a dilapidated building, leaving our backs exposed as we followed a ghost. I should have known better. I burst through a doorway, scanning the room with my rifle. A woman with a child against her chest screamed. They both did. I tried to calm her down, but she yelled over me. I raised my voice, but yelling in English did nothing to calm her panic as she spewed sobbing words in Arabic. Thick lines of tears rolled down the child’s cheeks.
Through a dark doorway on the other end of the home, a gunshot rang out. The ghost. The muzzle blast cut through the darkness, and I recognized the flash of light before I registered the sound. A loud, reckless spray of shots flew toward us. I instinctively raised my rifle in that direction and fired an uncountable number of rounds into the room. Bullet holes littered the crumbling wall.
A man wailed from within the room. He cried out words I couldn’t understand. His bawling, his wife’s scream, and a high-pitched ring filled my ears.
I turned on my flashlight and pushed further into the house, motioning for my men to watch the woman. Her hand moved along the blanket beside her. The wailing stopped, and a loud silence took its place in the darkened room.
My heavy footsteps thundered along the floor. My rifle surveyed the area—an extension of my eyes. The man lay crumpled on the floor, clutching his bleeding abdomen. He hurled words at me in a language I could only marginally grasp, but I knew enough to understand he was cursing me the fuck out and praying to God. A rifle lay by his side, and his finger remained curled around the trigger. He took a sputtering breath that blew more blood into his beard. His chest stilled.
I never trusted a dead man. I walked over and kicked his gun out of his hand, the metal clanking as it slid across the floor. I nudged him with my boot, and his head lolled to the side. Ghostly sounds—gunshots, the cries of the inconsolable wife, and the child’s screams—echoed in my mind.
As I turned to leave the room, I spotted a crib.
Fuck.
I took a deep breath and stepped toward it. A crimson-stained blanket covered a mound within the small bed. There was no reason to check for a pulse—the baby was motionless and silent. No child could have survived such devastating destruction to its tiny body.
I walked back to the man and lifted him by the collar of his shirt, shaking him like a toy within a dog’s jaws. “Why! Why the fuck would you shoot at me with your goddamn baby right here!” I dropped him back to the ground, and his body let out a hollow thud as it collided with the floor.
I killed the most innocent of innocents. How could I live with that?
One of my men yelled in the next room. “Drop the fucking knife!”
I could recognize Still’s voice anywhere. He was usually so timid. The only time I heard him raise his voice was in an emergency. Yelling meant that something was hitting the fan real fucking hard.
I ran back to the main room. Light illuminated Still’s panicked face. The blade’s rusty handle protruded from his neck, and blood spread around his hand as he grabbed at his grievous injury. He stepped back against the wall, eyes wide with fear.
The sound of gunshots exploded around me as one of my men emptied a magazine into the woman. When he’d depleted it, his fingers flew to a fresh magazine in his chest rig. I knew he was tempted to reload his weapon and unleash more hell, but I halted him with a gesture of my hand.
Only the sound of the screaming child rose above Still’s gasping breaths. I went to his side and held him up as he looked beyond me, mumbling things I couldn’t hear. Blood sputtered from his mouth as he talked to whoever he saw behind me.
“You’ll be alright. I’m right here,” I told him, trying to comfort him. I held him close to me because I knew nothing was alright. He wouldn’t survive being carried out of here. “Think of your little girl, Still.”
I fought away the heat building behind my eyes. I couldn’t cry in front of them. I couldn’t let myself feel what I needed to feel. I patted his chest pocket and pulled out the picture he held so near to his heart. Blood stained the corner, but I couldn’t leave it to become more bloodied. I tucked the picture of his wife and child into my pocket before helping guide him to the ground as the panicked rise of his chest halted entirely.
Fuck.
* * *