The end of the tunnel loomed. He was there, not twenty meters away in the flashing dark, standing square in the middle of the courtyard, a row of rumbling gun trucks behind him, orange slashes arcing upward from all their turrets.
Tumult all about him, soldiers slugging ammo cans from the trucks, medics bearing litters toward them. But he stood there amidst it a picture of calm, his rifle hanging idly at his side, gazing upward at the inferno in the hillsides with the bearing of a man who has stepped out to the veranda to enjoy a Fourth of July display on the next field over.
At the end of the tunnel a medic squatted under the breezeway, hunched over a pair of prostrate legs, back turned. Black saw the medic’s form bouncing and rushing at him with startling speed.
His confusion passed when he realized he was running at the medic. Of course.
Yes.
He pulled the startled kid entirely off balance doing it, nearly spilling himself, but the pistol tugged free in his grasp, free of the medic’s holster. He completed a stumbling three-sixty, feeling like he’d barely broken stride, and felt his stomping boots smack on mud. Felt the cold air again. Saw the face, which had turned now and was looking over Black’s head to the mountains.
It was a forgettable one, angular and unhandsome, taut with years of underestimation and underappreciation. But the burn in Pistone’s coal-dark eyes as he soaked in the spectacle above them was all Black needed to see. A half second’s glance to feel certain as he stamped ahead, bootsoles skidding beneath him, and squared the pistol in the air before his face.
The force of the medic’s running tackle spun him from behind, sending the two of them tangled together to the ground. They smacked hard and slid, cutting a black trough across the slick surface now speckled in soft gray.
A single shot cracked into the dark as they struck. Black’s sole contribution of violence to the day.
“Goddamn it, sir!”
The voice was so far.
“What the hell!?”
He felt himself pressed into the moist earth as the medic sat on him with all his weight. Felt the pistol pulled easily from his reaching hands. Felt the cold seeping through his uniform layers to his skin.
Heard another voice shouting at the medic, the voice of a sergeant to his soldier. Something about Black being altered and to stop fucking around and stick him already.
And his own voice, someplace distant, screaming upward at the spectacled face that stood looking down at him now, splashed in shifting orange light. At the same coal eyes. Screaming at those eyes that They were your guys.
The needle didn’t hurt as it entered his injured arm. He felt nothing as its contents coursed through him. Pulled him downward.
Illuminated flakes fell gently into his vision, drifting between him and those eyes. He saw but did not hear the words that were spoken down to him in return. He understood them, though, and knew he would not forget them.
But the speaker turned away, and Black lost them as his straining limbs slackened and he sank lower, let them swirl away as particles of smoke before his waving hand. Let them free of his grasp and found his dark rest in ashes and snow.
—
He’d never been a good singer. Hardly could carry a tune. His sister made fun of him for it. But he’d never cared much.
Mostly he sang alone anyway. He’d sung through all his albums during the dark Land Nav nights in training. Sung himself all the way over the mountains and up here when the lieutenant told him to go. Sang when he was farthest from safety.
The rumbling surged in the distance. Corelli sang on, barely above a whisper, in a quavering boy’s voice.
See him in a manger laid
Whom the angels praise above
It must have been thunderous where they were. He listened to the awful far tumult and sang to the stone floor as the snow outside settled to the ground.
While we raise our hearts in love
Gloooooo-oooooo-oooooria
In excelsis deo
The shape filled the doorway, framed black against the early evening.
Only what I have earned.