Fade to Black - Proof

by Jeffrey Wilson

  Jack was oblivious to whatever activity might still be going on around him on the sidewalk. Instead he leaned over cautiously and peered over the ragged edge of the torn sidewalk into the black chasm. Deep in the blackness of the hole, he thought he saw little pinpoints of light. Then he felt a hot, dirty wind rush out of the hole and blow dust into his eyes, blinding him. As he fought the tears in his eyes, trying desperately to focus into the darkness, he heard another sound over the now howling wind. He strained to catch it again. He was uncertain whether it was just the wind he heard, which grew now to a nearly animallike shriek, or a haunting voice. Then he heard it again.

  SAAAR’NN……..SAR’N STILLLLLLMAAAAAANNNNNN!

  What in the fuck!?

  Then the wind mixed suddenly with blowing sand, which poured out of the hole like a giant throat vomiting up dry desert. It lifted Jack into the air and he tried to scream, but was choked by the sand which filled his lungs and eyes. His chest burned and turned tight as he struggled to get air. A familiar burning pain grew in the center of his throat and he tumbled upwards for a moment. Then he felt strong hands on his arms and legs, a pair of arms wrapped around his chest. The blowing sand reversed and he was pulled with the cyclone of an Iraqi desert down into the black pit in the sidewalk.

  The last thing he heard was a coarse rattling laugh and a voice.

  You belong with us Sar’n.

  Then his mind went as black as the void into which he fell.

  Chapter

  20

  Jack was unable to move, blind and paralyzed, and realized he was going to suffocate, buried under a pile of sand. His mouth was full of the foul dust, and he was unable to open his eyes. His chest bucked, his body trying desperately to find a swallow of air to pull into his lungs. He felt himself slipping again from consciousness.

  Just as his mind faded, he felt strong hands grab at his shirt and arms and lift him slowly and heavily, pulling him from the sandy tomb. He felt more hands brush roughly across his face and eyes, and another set of fingers probed his mouth, scooping out handfuls of wet dust. He coughed violently and the cough caused a wracking pain through his whole body.

  “We got him, Commander,” a familiar voice said. Jack’s body continued to convulse with uncontrollable coughing, intermixed with harsh wheezes as his lungs sucked in desperately needed air. His mind began to clear.

  “Set him against the berm,” another voice said. Jack recognized it immediately.

  Hoag.

  He felt a little strength begin to flow into his arms and legs and pushed angrily at the hands on his face. He wiped at his eyes with the backs of his own hands instead and felt the burning pain in his chest subside. His gasps slowed and he felt finally like he might live.

  He opened his eyes and blinked away the tears and remaining sand that clouded his vision. There were four silhouettes in a loose circle around him, but his vision was still too cloudy to make them out. It didn’t matter. He knew who they were. Jack felt a new and growing panic inside his mind. He was not, in any way, in fucking control of any of this. This was much bigger than his mind. Lewellyn was dead wrong. The names in the paper were sure to match the battered figures he would see when his vision cleared.

  “Should I give him something to drink?” Simmons' voice asked. It was mushy and wet, like he remembered it being from his yard.

  “Where are you gonna git him somethin’, dick-cheese?” Kindrich’s slow Tennessee drawl asked.

  “Just give him some air and a minute,” Hoag’s voice commanded.

  “Roger that, sir,” Simmons said. Then he added, “He looks kinda funny with all of that long hair and shit.”

  “Yeah,” Bennet said, “he done gone all civilian on us.”

  Jack blinked a few more times and his vision cleared somewhat. The figures were still clouded in darkness, but they were sharper now. He found that he was leaned against a sand berm, his legs stretched out in the dirt. Jack saw that he still wore his jeans and tennis shoes, which calmed him for some reason. He gave one last heroic cough and spit a mouth full of sand into the dirt beside him. Then he raised his head and stared at Hoag, venom in his gaze.

  “What in the fuck is going on?” he demanded.

  The chaplain sat next to him and patted his shoulder. His eyes were soft behind the round glasses, but his look did nothing to calm Jack’s rage. The look incited him more, if anything.

  “Sorry, Sar’n.” Hoag said with sincerity. “I know that was a lousy way to get your attention.” He took off his glasses and again started his irritating ritual of cleaning them on the corner of his digital cammie blouse. Jack resisted the overwhelming urge to smack the shit out of his cherubic face. “I’m afraid we’re running out of time, Casey,” he said.

  “Time for what?” Jack demanded, and rose to his feet. The small circle of Marines behind him backed up a step. Jack resisted the urge to look at them. He knew what he would see. Simmons with his bloody half face and toothless skeleton grin. Kindrich with a quarter‐sized hole over his right eye and the back of his head completely gone, yawning open over a bloody grey mush of brain and bone. And Bennet. He last saw Bennet take a round in the face behind the wall in Fallujah, but he had a fair idea what that would look like. To look would be to give up more control, which he had precious little of at the moment.

  At least his anger covered up his horror and fear.

  “Casey, you need to come back.” Hoag said simply. “We are almost out of time and you need to come back.” Jack felt a hand on his shoulder from his men behind him, but shook it off without turning.

  “This is bullshit! This is all a nightmare! I created all of you,” he screamed.

  “How do you explain this?” Hoag asked. Jack saw that he was holding out his newspaper to him.

  “This is bullshit, too!” Jack said. “And why do you all give a fuck about me dying in Fallujah anyway? Why is it any of your fucking business?” Now Jack did turn to look at his men. “Just leave me alone. I am with my family now, so leave me the fuck alone!”

  “You belong with us, Sar’n,” Simmons said simply. In the pale moonlight Jack saw dark blood on the boy’s chin again, which Simmons wiped away with the back of his hand as if embarrassed. “We’re all in this together.” There was a childlike innocence in the voice and Jack felt himself drawn to the kid in a paternal way. Simmons. The boy whom he had held, forehead to forehead, when the shit hit the fan in Fallujah. Just a child.

  Bennet stared off over the berm now. He put a cigarette to his mouth and took a raspy drag. With revulsion Jack saw that smoke dribbled out from a myriad of little puncture wounds in the side of his neck. Jack turned away, his stomach churning. He looked again at Hoag who watched him impassively, his glasses now back in place on his round face.

  “And who the hell are you in all of this anyway?” Jack demanded. “These guys, I know. They’re…” he stopped. They’re what? “Well, in my nightmare anyway, they’re my friends, part of my team. But just who in the fuck are you, Commander?”

  Hoag looked down with what Jack sensed was a real sadness. He smoothed out the wrinkled paper in his hands and handed it over. Jack took it, his face wrinkled in confusion. What was he supposed to look at? He saw the page was again opened to “The Human Toll.” He had seen this, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t want to look again at the names of his friends.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Third name from the top. Second column.”

  Jack looked down, straining in the poor light to see the words on the page. He found the second column of names and counted down to the third one.

  Emmett G. Hoag, 41, USN

  Ramadi, Iraq

  Jack looked up again at the Navy chaplain, whose face was twisted in anguish. He looked older now. The commander reached both hands to the bottom of his cammie blouse and pulled up the front of the shirt and the green T-shirt underneath. Jack stared in horror at the giant gaping hole in the left side of his chest, which continued across and turned downward over t
he slightly pudgy belly. Through the large hole in the chest Jack saw the gnarled, fingertips of torn ribs, bits of bloody meat hanging from them. In the center was a grey pool of mush that had once been a lung. From the bottom of the gaping gash in his abdomen, a few feet of intestines protruded and hung like links of sausage over the waistband of his pants.

  Hoag pulled his shirt down just as Jack tore his eyes from the horrible sight. Too late to prevent the image from being burned permanently into his mind, he was sure.

  “I was on a convoy heading back to Baghdad from Ramadi when we hit an IED,” Hoag said, referring to a roadside improvised explosive device that the insurgents made from electronic equipment, like cell phones and radios, linked to unexploded rockets or bombs. “Four other Marines were wounded, but I was the only one killed.” He looked at Jack with sad but even eyes. “It happened the same day that you guys were hit in Fallujah. The same day you were all killed.”

  The words stung at Jack’s overloaded mind, taking away his breath. “No…” he whispered softly. Oh, God, no! No, this was bullshit! This was a nightmare! This was some madness his mind chose to torture him with for reasons that still were far from clear. Suddenly being crazy didn’t seem like such a horrible thing. Anything was better than this. What about Pam, his true love and whole life? What about Claire, their beautiful little girl? If he was crazy he could still see them (at least on visiting days), but not if he was dead. No, this was total FUCKING BULLSHIT! Jack felt himself sway, or more accurately, he felt like he was still and the whole world swayed around him. He was barely aware of Hoag’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Now, I don’t understand it either, Sar’n. Nothing in my education or training in the clergy helps me understand any of this. But I know one thing.” His hand gripped Jack’s shoulder tighter, hurting him. He seemed not angry, but desperate. “None of us can go until we all go together.”

  “Go where?” Jack heard his own voice, far away, ask.

  “Away from here. I don’t know where we go next, Casey. But we are stuck here until we all go together. And,” there was panic in his voice now, “we are running out of time!”

  Jack’s mind swam in circles. “But…but, I wasn’t killed.” He pleaded. “I was wounded. I was hurt bad, but I wasn’t killed.”

  “Yes, you were.” Hoag said. His voice sounded hysterical. “Yes, you were! We all were!” Jack saw a growing red stain on the front of the chaplain’s uniform, and Hoag reached unconsciously to his belly with his free hand, holding his guts in while he yelled. “Goddamnit, Casey, we are running out of time!” He let go of his belly and shook him by both shoulders now, but Jack barely felt it.

  “My name is Jack,” Jack said in a soft and childlike voice.

  “WHAT?” Hoag was now totally ape-shit, hollering and shaking him. Jack grabbed him by the wrists.

  “My name is Jack.” He said again, louder and evenly, with more confidence.

  “NO, IT IS NOT!!” Hoag screamed. Jack heard a tearing sound and saw a loop of bowel slip out from under Hoag’s shirt. The commander screamed again, and shoved Jack backwards. Jack fell, but instead of crunching to the ground on his back, he continued to fall, disappeared into the sand, and was swallowed up again by the blackness.

  Chapter

  21

  He looked up into the sky from his position on his back. The purple hue of sunset was gone now and he saw only black night and pinpoint stars. It was incredible how many stars he could see out here in the desert, without the lights of civilization stealing away some of the darkness. Casey remembered his time aboard the LHD amphibious assault ship his unit had been assigned to—the “Gator” as the Navy sailors who crewed her called it—bobbing out in the dark night of the Indian Ocean, just a couple of years ago. He had seen stars like this then and remembered the feeling of standing up in the catwalk, the ship running with its lights out in total darkness. He had felt like he was floating in space, surrounded by only blackness and those stars. This sky was much like that.

  His sense of serenity was stolen from him as a red tracer from a burst of 7.62‐millimeter gunfire, likely from a Humvee‐mounted machine gun, streaked over his head, accompanied by the familiar bop…bop…bop. He became aware of movement and voices around him again and tried to concentrate on the sounds—to make out words to help orient himself. He felt pain as a hand touched his tensely swollen neck.

  “It’s getting worse. It’s getting bigger,” a voice said. “We have to get him the hell out of here.” He thought it sounded like Barton’s voice.

  “Look, Doc,” a disturbingly familiar voice said, “I would like to get him on the bird as much as you, but we just can’t yet. We have to get control of this street, or they’ll just shoot the bird out of the fucking sky.” There was a burst of gunfire, very close this time. “Do what ya’ can, Doc. Maybe I can get you out of here in the next fifteen minutes, okay?”

  “We’re running out of time,” the Battalion Surgeon’s voice said. “He’s bleeding to death from his neck, and I think he’s bleeding into his chest, as well. We’re going to lose him if we don’t hurry.” There was a sound in the voice that Casey definitely recognized.

  Fear.

  “Do what ya’ can,” the familiar voice he couldn’t place said again. Then there was a rustling of activity as the owner of the voice moved away. “Get me mortars off the LAVs on that row of windows—that row right there. We need to end this shit.” The voice faded away.

  “Morphine?” HM2 White’s voice, this short but wiry little corpsman from New Orleans, asked. Everyone called him Shorty or Mini-Me.

  “Can’t,” Barton’s voice said. “His blood pressure is getting too low. I think, though,” more rustling as he stared again up at the night sky, “that we need to put in a chest tube on the right side. I think he’s filling up with blood. I can’t hear much air moving on that side.”

  “Okay,” Shorty said, and Casey again heard activity. “I’ll hang two more liters of fluid. Wish we had some fuckin’ blood to give him.”

  “Yeah,” Barton agreed. “Wish we had a fucking OR to give him. Prep his chest.”

  He felt a sudden burst of cold on the right side of his chest, then rough scrubbing. He was pretty numb now; he was aware of pain, but didn’t really feel it. He tried to think about something else. He felt dizzy, or maybe swimmy was a better word. It was like he was floating in a warm pool. His eyes focused again on the field of stars above him. He was becoming increasingly aware that it was very difficult to get air into his lungs. Each breath brought with it the raspy, whistling noise, followed by a gurgling that he felt more than heard. He thought the gurgling might be from inside of him.

  There was a sudden stab of pain in his chest and a burning, but again he was only vaguely aware of it. He thought of Pam and Claire. He wondered what they were doing. With all his might he concentrated on seeing their faces in his mind, closing his eyes to help picture them more clearly.

  He felt pressure more than a pain now, deep in the right side of his chest, like someone was standing on his rib cage.

  “Let me have a hemostat,” Barton’s voice said. “I’m nearly there. Just gotta pop in.”

  There was a fleeting pain, then more pressure, and he felt a sudden rush of wet warmth on his right side and arm.

  “Holy fuck, that’s a lot of blood.” Shorty’s voice now.

  “Easy. Just give me the tube.”

  He felt another burning, this time extending all the way up into the right side of his neck. He realized that it was a lot easier to breathe, however, and his mind cleared just a little.

  “Jesus, Doc,” Shorty said from the darkness. “Did you expect all that friggin’ blood?”

  “Just give me a stitch and get a bunch of tape ready,” Barton said sharply.

  It was definitely easier to breathe. He let his mind drift back to the game of picturing his family, and could see them quite clearly now, Pam and Claire, sitting in the front yard. They waved to him, as if in one of those old home
movies without sound. He tried to raise his arm to wave back, but couldn’t. He smiled anyway.

  The picture flashed suddenly to a new image. Pam looking up at him from their bed, her hair on a pillow, sheet pulled up to her bare shoulders. Her lips were moving. She was trying to tell him something. He strained to listen.

  “Come home, baby,” Pam’s voice said. It was muffled and far away. “Please come back, Casey. Please don’t leave me…”

  “Daddy, Daddy…” Claire’s voice sounded muted and tinny.

  He had to get home. He couldn’t leave them. He couldn’t leave his life with them, not now, not yet.

  “Please,” he tried to say. But there was no sound except the wheezing gurgle and now a new, bubbling sound. But he felt his lips moving.

  We are almost out of time. We have to all go together.

  Hoag’s voice.

  Please Sar’n. You belong here with us.

  Simmons’ young, pleading voice.

  No. No, fuck all of you. This isn’t right. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I want to go home to my family.

  He concentrated with all his might, his eyes closed tightly, tears hot and wet on his face.

  I’m coming, Pam.

  The night sky lightened, not abruptly, but gently, and was replaced little by little with a swirled stucco ceiling and a slowly turning fan. As he watched in fascination, wide‐eyed, the dusty night sky was replaced by the familiar ceiling of his bedroom. As it changed, the sounds, the gunfire and rockets, the shouting voices, faded away. Like someone slowly turned down the volume on a television show, until finally it was gone, and he heard only the barely audible creak, creak of the ceiling fan.