The Dealer of Hope_Adrian's March_Part 1

by Chris Philbrook

  He heard Rasa cry out in pain as the biting sand continued to eat at the soft skin of her face and arms. He reached over as best he could and shielded her eyes with a gloved hand. As Thomas pushed forward–sent to the left and right by the wind like a drunken bum–he saw the world turn a bit brighter in a specific direction. Guessing it was the side of a home he pressed forward with newfound resolve, and reached the smooth stone side of the structure. He coughed heavily into the bandana he’d covered his mouth with, hefting the small girl in his arms so as to not drop her. He slid his shoulder down the wall, leaning heavily on it for stability until he saw the darker frame of the entrance appear. Thomas put his back to the wall and kicked to the rear like a workhorse over and over until the door smashed off the hinge and fell in. Once sure the door was down, he spun inside and entered the home, hoping for refuge against the abrasive sand made deadly by the wind. Dipping inside the building quickly, he only barely heard the nearby gunfire over the roar of the world.

  Glen’s instinct to slide down the wall of the home he’d entered proved to be lifesaving. As his back skipped across the rough interior wall of the common space of the home he watched as the muzzle flashes of an AK-47 barked at the doorway he’d only a split second before been standing in. The fatal funnel had that moniker for a reason.

  The flashes were low, waist level. The SEAL judged that the shooter sat on the floor. Glen already had his weapon in his hand, and he ripped off a short burst on full auto at the space where the flashes had just subsided. He couldn’t see in the pitch black of the room if he’d hit anything, but no more muzzle flashes came from the floor. He made an educated guess where the shooter lay and he popped off another short burst. Insurance.

  Glen moved on as his eyes adjusted to the darkness and the familiar ringing set into his ears. Another door was to his right. This door was thin and flimsy, designed to separate interior rooms from one another. Sensing the entire house was a bad place, filled with danger in every room, he operated on gut instinct and sent a third of his magazine through the door, annihilating anything living on the other side. He heard the wet thump of an adult body hit the floor on the other side of the door, and booted it open. Beyond the kicked-in door sat a small, square bedroom not much bigger than a mattress, and in the center lay a fresh dead body. His handiwork. He looked back to the common room and made sure that the original shooter was still down, and took stock of them as his eyes adjusted to the differing light inside the home. Both wore the typical garb of insurgents. Dark wool vests over magazine bandoliers, loose fitting pants, shirts, and sandals. Perhaps these people were just locals, protecting their home from an intruder coming in from the storm. Perhaps not. Glen felt they were Taliban survivors who’d simply taken over the home after the undead had risen. Now he’d never know and it didn’t matter. He lived and they didn’t. The cold mathematics of war and survival.

  Glen wrenched the interior door off the weak hinges keeping it up, and propped the door into the larger frame of the entrance to the home. The wind and sand breaching the living space diminished dramatically, and he fell back to the security of the tiny bedroom, hoping his partner fared better than he was. When he saw the body of the gunner in the living room stir back into unlife, he drew his service knife and set out to finish again what he’d done just moments before.

  Thomas’ mind lost focus and drifted to concern as he entered the building. He had just heard the very familiar sound of an AK fire, and it had been close. He gathered his wits with battle hardened acumen, and pushed into the hallway of what appeared to be a tiny school building. Barely audible in the building he and Rasa were in, Thomas heard a burst of M4 fire followed a second or two later by another. The shots were near the initial burst of AK fire. Whatever had fired at Glen had eaten at least a half dozen 5.56mm rounds. Thomas smiled and the concern he had faded a tiny amount.

  His grin died a second later. An arm’s length ahead of him a figure appeared suddenly. He heard Rasa scream out in fear and he recoiled, half dropping her as he reached to his side for his weapon. The figure stood a full foot lower in stature than he did, and it shuffled forward hobbled and broken, tipping and lurching with each step. Thomas gave Rasa a half push, half toss to get her behind him as he lifted the muzzle of his M4. The weapon’s safety flicked up from training, and he stroked the trigger several times, letting the muzzle lift walk the weapon’s barrel higher, bringing his following shots directly into the face of the menace standing in front of him. His fifth shot landed in the open mouth of his target, smashing the head of the person apart as if he’d hit it with a jackhammer strapped to the hood of his Dodge pickup back in Coronado.

  The headless body tumbled backwards, and Thomas saw the reason behind the height of his attacker. His legs had been eradicated halfway between the knee and ankle by a mine or IED most likely. The body twitched twice then came to a rest in the stained tile hall. Thomas licked the dust off his lips and spat the filth out, forgetting he had the bandana across his face. He felt the grimy mucous stuck to the fabric rub against his chin and he pulled the cloth down, disgusted by the sensation. He turned and watched Rasa get to her feet. She looked battered and dirty, but whole.

  Thomas gave her the thumbs up. “Okay Miss Rasa?” He asked.

  She nodded and returned his upright thumb.

  “That’s my girl.” Thomas pointed a finger at the floor, telling her to stay still until he returned. She nodded and scooted her back against the wall, shielding herself from the storm outside the open doorway. She reached over and pushed it shut, propping her foot against it to hold it mostly closed. The big Navy SEAL raised his weapon to his shoulder and stalked away to search the small building for more threats, both dead and alive.

  The sandstorm raged on for hours, eclipsing not only the sun and sky, but the remainder of the day as well. The storm quite literally ate the rays of hot daylight as if it were some mythical beast from legend that feasted on lava and hope. The two men were isolated from each other while the storm raged on outside. Separately they had come to the conclusion that trying to move about the town completely blind was foolish. Glen was concerned about more Taliban threats while Thomas was deeply concerned about the remaining dead and their ravenous hunger for the flesh of the few still left alive. Two different experiences by two different men in two different buildings resulting in two different concerns. Thomas had found and killed two more zombies in the classrooms of the building he and Rasa hid in.

  Thomas exited he and Rasa’s den of safety first. The special operations warrior knew that Glen wouldn’t have gone deep into the village alone, so after affixing his night vision equipment to his helmet and shutting Rasa safely inside a sturdy closet, he stepped out into the cool and calm Afghanistan night. Sand, dirt, and scattered debris covered everything, everywhere. As he searched and scanned the confines of the small alleys he was reminded of the television footage of towns in the aftermath of a tornado, or hurricane. It looked as if the very hand of God had come down into his sandbox filled with toys and shaken everything up, sending all his divine possessions askew. He wondered what would make God so angry. Thomas tried to focus on dangers rather than disorganization, and moved back towards the gate entrance.

  The center road into the village was perhaps twenty feet wide. Thomas moved to the end of the school building and stopped, not wanting to cross the space in between, even under the cover of darkness. Enough moonlight poked through the few clouds above that he’d still be quite visible to someone with ordinary eyes. The young Ring brother crouched at the corner of the building without exposing himself and waited a moment to listen. Thomas snatched up a stone the size of a ripe plum from the ground and gauged the distance to the building directly across the way. It would have been the most logical place for Glen to have gone in the blinding storm earlier that afternoon. The SEAL drew his thickly muscled arm back and rifled the rock into the stony side of the home, sending a resounding CLACK into the night air. He found two more rocks of similar size ne
arby and fired the two of them one after another into the house within a foot of the first rock’s point of impact. A few moments later he saw a dark green tinted shadow appear from the doorway of the building, and he knew he’d found Glen.

  Glen moved to the corner of the building he’d been hiding in and waved to Thomas. He whispered, “You two okay?”

  Thomas nodded, “Yeah. Had three dead tangos in the small school building, little hairy for a second but nothing big. You good to go? I heard AK fire.”

  Glen grinned and fired off a thumbs up. “Yeah I had two inside my hole. They were locals with AKs. Insurgents probably. Took them both after nearly getting stitched up the midsection. Little worried though dude. If you had zeds, and I had Taliban, this whole place is likely to be a giant fucking bucket of trouble. Soup sandwich action for sure. We need to skate and skate fast.”

  “Roger that. I don’t want to clear a village of what? Two or three hundred with just two shooters. We’ll run dry of ammo far too fucking fast. You retrieve the AK from the house?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s still there. I’ll grab it before we exfil out of here. I think he has five magazines on his chest unless I shot holes in them. That’d be a nice injection of ammo. We’ve still got a long fucking way to that FOB. Three miles at least and the ground between here and there is apt to be covered in dead bodies and insurgents. Might be just as bad as this fucking town.”

  “Okay. You go back and get that AK; I’ll grab Rasa and give her the bad news. Meet back here in one minute and we slip out the way we came, and skirt the whole town and keep heading towards the FOB. If we’re lucky, we’ll slip out and by anyone nearby.” Thomas raised himself up to his full height as Glen did the same. Glen nodded, and both men turned to attend to their task.

  Rasa looked up at Thomas as he opened the door. She looked scared to Glen, but her expression instantly turned to relief when she recognized him. Thomas slung his rifle quickly and produced his small spiral-bound notebook from a pouch. He wrote to her, and they swapped the book back and forth until the conversation was finished.

  The village is filled with the dead. We must leave to go somewhere safer.

  But what about my Aunt and Uncle?

  Rasa, I’m sorry, but they are likely to be dead, or held by the Taliban as prisoners.

  We must check.

  We cannot. We don’t have enough bullets to do that, and then reach safety. We must choose one or the other, and we have chosen safety. Maybe later we can return for your family. With more soldiers.

  Okay. We will return later. With more soldiers. And bigger guns too.

  Rasa smiled, pained but happy at the compromise. She was concerned deeply for her family, but she already knew it was a dim hope that they were still alive. It was Allah’s will that they live or die, and if they had been called to him, then she would mourn their loss, but celebrate their good fortune to be with the almighty.

  After getting the little girl to her feet, the two exited carefully back into the alley facing the wall. They crept down to meet Glen. Thomas checked their rear as they moved forward, paranoia getting the best of him for a moment, fearful that the girl would be snatched away from him. He’d seen too many horror movies late at night with his brothers to trust a quiet street, especially in the revelation that the dead were returning to life, hungry and bitey.

  When he looked back to the space between the two buildings, he saw a handful of robed and loosely garbed men walking down the road to the town’s exit. They were each hefting AK-47s or RPG-7s, and they were no more than ten feet away. The sigh sent an icicle straight down his spine. Thomas shoved the girl behind him, using his own body as a shield as he heard one of them scream the last thing a SEAL wants to hear a man holding an AK-47 say;

  “ALLAHU AKBAR!”

  Thomas watched in perfect slow motion as one of the men’s gun started to chatter out thick and heavy 7.62mm rounds into the dirt, kicking up pocks of dust in his direction. In a millisecond the rounds would start pounding through his body, ripping flesh from bone, and sending his soul into the afterlife.

  Glen’s reflexes had been finely tuned during his four years in the teams. He’d been in more firefights and shit situations than he had memory to spare for and the training in between never stopped. What his mind didn’t remember his body did. It’s all muscle memory after all one of his shooting instructors had said to him one day during SQT.

  Glen heard the man yell “GOD IS GREAT” in Arabic and then start firing, and by combination of good fortune and those four year’s worth of muscle memory, he started spraying 5.56mm rounds into the street, hoping his unconscious mind, and trained body would put two and two together, and put at least a few rounds into the shooter that was trying to kill his best friend.

  The M4A1 that both Glen and Thomas carried had a fully automatic setting that was able to empty the entire magazine in around about two seconds, give or take a fraction of a second. Normally, the SEALs would never, ever do this, but this was not a normal moment by any means. The heavier, slower AK was already firing on full auto, ripping the silence of the night apart like an angry lion’s roar. The smaller and faster M4’s aural assault was tiny by comparison; Glen had affixed his suppressor. Unfortunately for the five men standing between his barrel and where his bullets were heading, the lower sound volume meant they were no less riddled with bullets.

  Glen’s first high velocity rounds were sent to their target by some mixture of divine providence, incredible luck, experience, and formidable skill. The first round blew the man’s knee out, twisting his body. The second and third rounds hit his arm, shattering the elbow, rendering the limb useless. As Glen twisted the weapon to the side the other 27 rounds in his magazine punched holes in every single man still standing. The 5.56mm rounds laced their bloody way through torsos and limbs alike, sometimes traveling so fast the only reaction the wounded had was to clutch at the sudden burning sensation where the new hole in their body appeared. All that remained was the fall to the ground below where they’d bleed to death.

  Across the way Thomas watched as the puffs of dirt heading his way from the AK rounds suddenly kicked to the side, missing him by less than a foot. Despite the very same imminent death heading his way, he’d been raising his own weapon to start firing the entire time, and when the puffs passed him, he was already squeezing the trigger. Thomas’ weapon was not suppressed like Glen’s, and the reports issuing from the barrel were rapid, and ear splitting. The group of men standing in the street was caught in a two-fold valley of death.

  Both SEALs ejected their spent magazines half a second apart. Thomas’ hands moved faster on the reload, and he had his weapon back in the fight first. On the ground one of the wounded men had sat up a few inches, and pulled the trigger on his Russian weapon. Thomas stood in the line of fire and knew it. He watched in the green light of the night vision equipment as the weapon’s flash threatened his direction. The bright light coming from the gun looked like the petals of an insane flower that belched lead and steel, not pollen. He launched out of the way, landing on his stomach hard, nearly emptying his lungs of air. He felt no impact from slugs, nor the horrible sensation of burning rounds piercing his flesh. Holy shit, he thought realizing his new position on his stomach gave him no line of sight to the man still shooting at him. He’d be perforated where he lay if he didn’t figure something out.

  Glen had no problem with his line of sight. He shouldered his weapon and with a single squeeze of the trigger, and subsequent cough from his weapon, the man threatening his partner had his head exploded, and he flopped down to the ground leaking his brains. The remainder of the men in the sandy street were either dead, or were moaning in a sad, wet way as blood filled their lungs and throats from fresh, ragged wounds. Glen scanned the peripheral area for any kind of movement as Thomas quickly got to his feet.

  “You alright?” Glen asked as he pulled out his service knife again. It didn’t make sense to finish the men off with a gun. Firearms were loud, an
d it was a waste of ammunition to shoot a man that wasn’t a threat.

  Thomas brushed his chest off and quickly gave his body the once over. Many wounds didn’t hurt. He was clear of blood and pain. “I’m okay. You alright?”

  “Yeah. How’s Rasa?”

  Thomas’ adrenaline spiked as he realized he’d left the young woman entirely alone just ten feet from a major gunfight. “Fuck,” he said as he jogged over to the side of the building where he’d more or less shoved her.

  “Rasa!” He barked out uselessly. Her ears would never let her respond. Thomas jumped around the corner of the building where he expected her to be as Glen’s grisly knife work began. Thomas saw the little girl crouched down against the base of the school’s wall, sitting very still. Thomas dropped to a knee and put his hand carefully on her shoulder. The thin girl raised her face up to her American companion and Thomas knew instantly something was wrong with her. Her coffee toned skin had thinned in color and she had the look of a drained husk about her. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she slipped to the side, into the oblivion of unconsciousness. When her shoulders hit the ground Thomas saw a huge dark stain in the dirt below where she’d sat.

  “GLEN! SHE’S HIT!” Thomas screamed, getting his backpack off his shoulders. Inside was the medic’s gear that could be her sole chance at survival.

  “Be right there!” Glen said, bringing his M4 up and around. It pumped out two fast rounds into the skulls of the final two bodies. It wouldn’t be helpful at all if they sat up and attacked them while they attended to Rasa.

  Thomas had his knife out almost immediately, using its razor sharp edge to slice Rasa’s clothing in half, revealing the rack of bones that she really was. He tugged her arm roughly, pulling her so she was flat on the ground in front of him rather than leaning against the wall. He rolled her over, looking for what had caused her to bleed out so much, so fast. Directly below her protruding pelvis, right where the longest of the leg bones reaches up to connect, she had a channel of flesh carved out of her. The joint was exposed, and the muscles and connective tissues were flayed apart. The wound stood as a morbid monument to the effectiveness of the AK.