The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  I pulled a digital camera from a pouch and made sure the target’s limbs were inside the frame. The round blew a fist-sized hole through his back and out of his slender chest. I snapped five photos. Every one was too dark, only revealing the target’s illuminated face and nothing else. I cupped my hands on the camera’s screen to see if it was good enough. His mouth was wide open, like Granddad had described. I asked Gibson to point his flashlight at the rest of the target to get a clear shot. A bright image of the body filled my camera’s viewfinder, and I snapped another photo. Gibson inched closer to the trunk to look inside.

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “You won’t believe what’s in here man. Fuck.”

  Gibson slammed the trunk and punched the taillight with a gloved fist. It was a jab at first, and then he hit it again, over and over, harder each time. Chunks of white and red plastic fell onto the target’s head. “Stupid fuck. Stupid fuck,” he whispered through his teeth, and he could have been talking to any three of us.

  The target didn’t look like a man this close up. His face was smooth and hairless and his eyes were rolled back and glinting white, like a doll’s plastic eyes. I stood next to Gibson and looked in; stacked inside were bags of rice and the blood of raw lamb’s meat pressed against the sides of plastic bags. Gibson lit two cigarettes and handed one to me. “Haj, man. God damned stupid as shit.”

  A courtyard gate rustled at the house closest to the intersection, the only house on Blue Babe with the lights still on. Gibson spun on one foot and pointed his rifle toward the gate. A woman in a headscarf emerged from the shadows, and then another, with a man following with a white sheet. Sergeant Matthew rushed over and stood in front of the gate. “Get the fuck back!” he yelled, and motioned with his arm to turn around. Two more men filed past Sergeant Matthew, ignoring his gestures. Music streamed from beyond the open door of the house.

  The group laid the sheet onto the ground, and one woman picked pieces of the taillight out of the target’s hair as another crossed his arms over his chest. They lifted the body onto the sheet and rolled it tight, fastening it with a green sash. Sergeant Matthew had quieted to a whisper. “You can’t do that,” he said to one of the women as they shuffled by, ignoring his commands. “You can’t take his body. Not yet.” One of the men stopped to look us over. Ebnee, he said. Ebnee. Ebnee. He made a cradling motion with his arms, then pointed at his lifeless ebnee.

  Gibson’s shoulders relaxed and he inhaled a new cigarette as the rest of the team faced away, looking for threats. The Iraqis lifted the body on their shoulders and walked back toward the house. The air chilled suddenly, like the last week of summer in Montana, where the heat felt heavy and full before cool wind swept off the mountains. Gibson tossed his cigarette onto the road. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Before more hajis hear about this shit.” The Iraqis closed the gate behind them, and somebody stopped the music.

  The team scrambled into the truck as I pretended to pull security, but I kept staring at the house. I wanted to go in there and tell him that his ebnee was my first, and it was past curfew and he shouldn’t have been there, but I was still sorry and understood, because I am my father’s ebnee too. After a moment I turned to load up in the truck and crumpled onto the bench.

  Gibson came down from the hatch as we headed back to the outpost. “I don’t think that one counts,” he said. “But don’t worry. We got time.”

  Battalion pulled our platoon out of that sector the next week. They were reviewing the procedures of small kill teams after our incident. We never left the wire again. The squad passed the time at the poker table, the same twenty-dollar bills endlessly shifting among players. Most of the guys went down to the phone bank to call their wives and girlfriends. I sent my dad an email as he was readying a trip to Montana when I came home. Everything was fine, just packing and cleaning, nothing to report, but the phones are broken, I lied.

  I spent a lot of time on my cot, recalling the stories my dad told me from when he was young, of Granddad leading him through dense pines at Beaverhead Forest as winter settled in around the tree stand. Their own small kill team. Dad told me the Mauser which Granddad kept over the fireplace belonged to his first kill. It was a heavy instrument that traveled seven decades since it was stamped with a swastika on the bolt and assigned to a soldier bound for the Western Front. Granddad had plenty of guns, but my father was too young to hold this one, and it stayed on the mantel for several more years. It gets easier after the first one, Granddad said to him then, peering up over the flames rising through the chimney.

  Granddad learned that lesson in Bastogne, when the counterattack came after the artillery barrage transformed ancient trees into foot-long shards of wooden shrapnel. The wave of starved and frostbitten Germans was coming, and after the first one it was going to get easier. That’s what his sergeant told him as the machine guns began their grim chatter. He shouldn’t stop killing after that, the sergeant said, because the only thing worse than the first one is the second one never coming at all.

  BLEEDER

  by Matthew Robinson

  How much?” I say, one hand around her middle, one on the pistol grip of my M-4. She’s soft in my hand and smells like shampoo. She giggles and leans her face in, hair brushing my ear. I have no idea what the fuck she’s saying. I thumb her bottom rib, her half-shirt covering my hand, me touching skin. “Call me Sawyer.”

  “Sawyer,” she says.

  I pull her in by her bones and she giggles again. I press my barrel against her thigh, where it sticks out the bottom of her Daisy Dukes. I start to thumb my safety switch. “How much?”

  She says something else in my ear. Jibber-jabber. She pushes against my rifle and there is a massive pressure in my chest, my hands go cold. We’ve been negotiating for what feels like an hour, her not making a lick of sense, but I can’t commit money to her until my cock starts working. It’s just hanging. I have a hold of my first woman since we shipped and my dick has decided to go fucking AWOL.

  “You buy?” An old lady whose face is mostly forehead is at my elbow, out of nowhere. Her arms are crossed. She’s tiny but severe.

  “Are you the pimp?” I say.

  “You buy?”

  I try one last time to muster an erection, squeeze the handful of heat in my hand, but it’s useless. I shake my head. The pimp walks off and the girl takes a half-step away, hair pulling free of my ear, leg off rifle. She giggles again but less than before. I let go of her slow, my fingers drag down her side, catch on her shorts, I thumb her pocket on the way. “Oh well,” I say. I find a twenty in my pocket. “Whiskey?”

  She smiles, pulls a stray hair out of my chin-strap. I know it’s black but under the streetlight it looks gold. She lets it go. “Whiskey,” she says, and she’s gone.

  I’m left standing in the expanse of road between the main hotel complex and the Baghdad Hotel, where I stay. There’s less brass at the Baghdad, better food, a ’70s-era lounge with shag carpet and mirrored walls, and a guy who sells pralines and cream ice cream cups. I only come out for guard duty and to talk to locals. So far it’s the best part of this fucking deployment. The road runs along the Tigris, a shithole park takes up the space in between. The combat engineers move dirt around it during the day but right now it’s quiet. City lights on the far side of the water. It’s a good place to fire rockets at us from, on that other side, but there’s nothing happening so I’m standing between a gaggle of hookers and a herd of kids who are inching their way closer to me.

  “Go away,” I say.

  “Money,” one says.

  “Money? For what?”

  “We fight.”

  I pull a dollar out of my pocket. The talkative kid grabs the boy next to him and they wrap arms around each other. Talker’s knee buckles and they both go over, the kids around them cheer. They roll around on the pavement trying to pin the other’s shoulders like they were really wrestling, but it’s boring as shit so I say, “Time.”

  They get up and come over
, both smiling. Talker was on top when I called time so I give the buck to him. They run back to the group and all the boys start yelling. It’s all jibber-jabber and nobody’s pairing off. “Somebody hit somebody else,” I say.

  Two kids grab each other and the others cheer. I look at my watch. Nothing much happens for thirty seconds and I call time. I give the kid on top a dollar. Both are smiling. I still feel the girl’s hair against my ear. Smell the river in the wind.

  “Somebody hit somebody else.” Two boys fall down and everybody laughs. I laugh, lean against the lamppost, and look at my watch.

  “Jesus.” Behind me, Mills is coming out from the serpentine barriers on the hotel complex end of the street. We share a room back at the FOB. He doesn’t say much, which I like, and he keeps his shit squared away. But out here he just walks around being a sad sack.

  “What?” To the boys I say, “Time.” They get up and I hand one a dollar. The rest of the group starts talking all at once.

  “What are you doing?” Mills says.

  “Nothing, I was bored. Somebody hit somebody else.” Two boys hit each other and hit the ground.

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “For as long as man has existed.” Mills doesn’t laugh but I do. The kids are cheering. I look to the prostitutes, try to see the girl I gave twenty bucks to. They are at the mouth of an alleyway that fades into the unknowable. I want my goddamn whiskey. I look at my watch.

  One kid catches an elbow and cries out. “Time!” I say. The boys stand up, one bleeding from his mouth. “This is why we can’t have nice things.” I hand the other kid the dollar and he runs off. The bleeding boy walks back to the others, pulling his shirt to his mouth, soaking up blood. As it spreads across the cloth my face flashes hot, hotter than the night air. The smell of the Tigris turns sour and the wind stalls. It comes up from the other side, a garbage gust of wind blows fresh from the alley instead.

  “This is some bullshit,” Mills says. To the boys, “Go away.” They just look at him. “Fuck off, you don’t need to fight.” They look to me.

  “Somebody hit somebody else.” Two boys hit each other and hit the ground. I look at my watch. Fuck Mills. I scan the boys’ faces and they aren’t smiling. They’re yelling and pawing each other and it’s goddamn ruined.

  From the alley behind the hookers, the kid who busted the bleeding kid’s face is coming back with another, a huge boy almost the size of me, but fatter. There’s pressure in my chest and I swear to god I feel my dick move. “Here we go. Somebody’s ready to make some fucking money. Time!” The two fighters stand up. Neither has a mark on them but one is starting to cry. I hand a dollar to the other.

  The big kid steps up. “I fight. I fight.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  The fat kid turns to the group of boys. They all shrink back except the kid with the bloody lip—he steps forward, dropping the front of his shirt.

  When they stand facing each other, it looks hilarious. David and Goliath, if they believed that sort of thing. Bleeder looking up. Fatty looking down, smiling.

  “Don’t fucking fight,” Mills says. Nobody moves.

  “Somebody hit somebody else.”

  “Don’t—” Mills begins and Fatty grabs Bleeder around the neck in a sort of bear hug. Mills wants it stopped; he starts to raise his rifle at them because that’s how we stop things. If they were Iraqi cars Fatty would be a black Mercedes, Mills would just shoot him in the hood as a warning shot. I laugh out loud at the thought of a round blowing through Fatty’s grill and him slowly backing out of the fight, leaving little oil spots behind him. Mills lowers his rifle.

  Fatty cranks Bleeder’s neck. Bleeder winces. They fall, Fatty landing on top. Fatty hits like he knows how to hit. The other boys who cowered a few minutes ago when it was time to pick an opponent are cheering—rooting Fatty on.

  From the bottom, Bleeder is fighting back. He’s pounding small fists against Fatty’s chest, doing no damage, but he’s fighting back. Fatty lands a fist to Bleeder’s mouth. His hand comes away bloody. My hand is cold around my pistol grip and my cock is at half-mast. I can’t smell her shampoo but I’m almost sure I taste iron in the air.

  Mills steps forward but I catch his arm. “Don’t, they want to fight. Nobody’s here by force.”

  He pulls his arm free. “They’re here because you’re giving away dollars and they live in a shithole.”

  I shrug and turn back to the fight. They’ve rolled onto their sides, slapping one-armed at each other. The other boys are standing over them, yelling nonsense. Fatty grabs Bleeder’s hair, pulls, and slams his head into the street. I am rock hard. I smell shit and garbage and blood on the wind. My hands are still and cold and my chest loses its pressure all at once. Fatty lifts Bleeder’s head again, brings it down without argument. The dull thud bounces off the buildings and cement barriers, across the broken park and down the banks of the Tigris.

  “Time.”

  The boys are quiet. Fatty makes his way up. Bleeder is lying on the street. Fatty comes over to us, to me, his hand out, palm up. Bleeder starts checking his head for leaks. I hand Fatty a dollar. He looks down at the bill and back at me and says, “Money.” He pushes his upturned palm at Mills and me, wagging it between us. “Money.”

  Letting his rifle hang freely from where it’s clipped to his vest, pulling his hand behind him as far as it goes, Mills slaps Fatty in the side of his face. I jump at the sound, it happens so fast. Fatty falls on his ass, holding the dollar up the whole way down, like he’s trying to protect something breakable. The handprint stretches from his cheekbone to his ear.

  “What the fuck?” I say.

  Mills stands over Fatty, who is rubbing the side of his face with his free hand, looking at me from under thick eyelids. The eyelids of gunmen with nickel-plated pistols. Of Iraqi police who used to be Republican Guard. Of men who’ve lived long enough and eaten well enough to be fat and old in this goddamn country. He gets up and walks slowly away, dollar in hand.

  The other boys run away into the dark, leaving Bleeder sitting alone.

  Mills takes a twenty out of his pocket and presses it into Bleeder’s hand. He helps him up and Bleeder’s off and running as soon as he’s free of him. Mills just stands there, looking into the dark. He starts to wobble, takes a few steps to the edge of the street, and throws up everything he ate at dinner chow. He spits a few times, leaned out over his rifle. Wipes his mouth with his sleeve. The closest hookers walk over to him, put their hands on his bent-forward back. They talk quietly but it’s all jibber-jabber. “No, thank you,” he says. “I just spent the last of my cash.” At the sound of no they leave him, and he heads off towards the Baghdad. He’s soft and I fucking hate him.

  “Sawyer.” My girl from earlier steps out of the alley, paper bag in her hand. “Whiskey.” When she comes close I breathe in her shampoo-smell and get a hand on her middle—on skin. I feel a quiet fire spark up in my chest. Through my uniform and her cutoff shorts, I press my cock against her. She presses back.

  “How much?”

  TWO GRENADES

  by Elliot Ackerman

  Manuel Garcia took the stairs two at a time to Raleigh Upton’s room. He climbed the twelve flights, caught his breath at the door, and knocked. No one answered. There was nowhere else Upton would be at 0300. Manuel nudged the door open with his boot. Across the darkened interior there was a mound of blankets.

  “Captain Upton,” he said, listening.

  There was nothing, just the turbines of Haditha Dam vibrating their spectral hum. They lived in the Dam.

  “It’s me, Sergeant Garcia,” he said louder.

  A rumble of half-breathed curses came from under the mound. “What the fuck time is it?”

  “A little after zero three, sir. Can I come in?”

  “Well, Christ, okay come in.”

  Upton turned on the Coleman lantern above his cot. The dim light was easy on his tired eyes. His pasty body was naked except for a pair of OD g
reen shorts. He slid on his black shower shoes.

  “Sit down, Garcia.” Manuel perched himself on a camp stool behind Upton’s plywood desk. “What is it?”

  “I saw the patrol schedule changed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Tuesday patrol, it got canceled.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the one you promised me.”

  Upton crossed the room and fumbled through his desk. He found a spreadsheet and held it under the lantern. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll look into it in the morning.”

  Upton lay back on his cot. Manuel’s eyes wandered behind the Captain to a framed photo of a memorial service from a few weeks before. In it was a semi circle of empty boots and upturned rifles, each set bayoneted into the dirt, sticking up like so many candles on a birthday cake.

  “We had a deal,” said Manuel.

  “Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Gripper’s got a patrol heading out at first light. I thought I could get on it.”

  “C’mon, Garcia!” said Upton. “I’d have to change the manifests.”

  “After seven months you owe me this.”

  Upton didn’t like to see his friend plead. It’d been a long deployment. Upton had never known Manuel to ask for anything.

  “You’ve had a great career,” he said. “You don’t need to get yourself shot at to prove it.”

  Manuel wrapped his knuckles on Upton’s desk. “Really? That’s what you’re going to say to me?”

  “Does Gripper even have room for you?”

  “They’re going out shorthanded. They could use me,” said Manuel.

  “Where are they headed?”

  “Up near the 52 and 67 checkpoints.” In the bleakness of the western desert, the latitudinal northings on their maps were the only features anything could be named after.