January Dawn (22 page)

“A week later, I stole the master’s pistol when he wasn’t looking and wandered out into the woods to this little green pond that I liked to visit from time to time. I took off all my clothes, folded them and placed them at the base of the magnolia tree that shaded the pool. I waded out into the water, pulled the hammer back and put the muzzle up under my chin. At that moment, I didn’t see any other choice. I knew I was stuck in a hell I could never escape from. When I pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Again and again I pulled the trigger, still nothing.

“It wasn’t loaded. I cried and cried and thought about drowning myself. But for a second, I paused, and the clearest thought came to me. It was something I heard Mr. Jeffries mention. Something about the military and how he enlisted when he turned eighteen. And then, like that, my path was clear. I would escape and join the military. Four years, I can do that, I thought, and for four years I lived off of this promise to myself before I managed to finally escape. To this day, I still haven’t forgiven myself for pulling the trigger. I am where I am today, because I found another way.”

When I let it all out, I felt freed of a hefty burden. It’s a dark memory, but a powerful one. I hoped it would snap my friends out of their rut and make them hope again.

“Boo hoo. It’s a sad story, sure, but it doesn’t help our present situation,” Junior said.

“Junior, what the heck?” Shannon said.

“Oh, shut up, Shannon. This whole war is bullshit. This country is bullshit. My father is bullshit. It’s one big damn lie,” he said, standing up in an outburst of lapsing sanity.

“Junior get down,” Shannon said.

“What the hell are we fighting for anyway, huh? Do you know? Because I don’t. They have us all trapped in this city dying like rats.”

Friendlies all around us yelled for him to shut up and get down. Junior completely ignored them and kept on with his rant.

“Junior get down!”

“We lose more and more men each day. For what?” He threw his helmet to the ground and beat at his chest, taunting the sniper. “Come on, right here, you bastard.”

“Junior!”

Shannon raised up, grabbed Junior by the collar and shoved him down back behind cover. He thought he could move fast, but the sniper was faster. The bullet pierced Shannon’s throat and exited out the back of his neck. A second later, another shot reverberated down the street. Carrigan announced her kill over the comms.

I slid over to Shannon and pulled his head up into my lap. He was still alive, struggling to breathe and gurgling a mouthful of blood. With every agonizing breath he took the air would exit through the hole in his neck. He was slowly suffocating.

“Shannon, listen to me. It’s going to be alright, okay? I’m right here,” I said.

Still struggling to breathe, he kicked his legs and grabbed at me. I put pressure on the wound, but the blood poured through my fingers. Junior was out of his mind with regret. He was crying and kept repeating that he was sorry.

“Shut up and get a medic dammit,” Alex said, shuffling to retrieve his field med kit. “Medic!"

“Look at me. You hold on, you hear me? You’re going to be okay,” I said. Alex passed me a gauze pad and I packed it on to the wound. It was instantly swallowed by a blanket of blood. I applied another and another.

When he looked up at me in that moment of sheer fright, I could see everything through his eyes, the pain, the loneliness, the fear, all of it. I tried to comfort him. I wanted him to know that I was there and that he wasn’t alone.

“Think of your family. They’re here for you. We’re here for you. You’re going to be alright.” I kept repeating that over and over again. “You’re going to be alright. Shhh, it’s okay, you’re going to be fine.”

When he died, I felt him go. His weary spirit drifted off into history. I held his body wishing that it would have been someone else. He didn’t deserve this.

I looked down at the blood on my hands and wondered why the world was filled with such cruel, unforgiving men that wished nothing but harm and ill will. Why is it that good men are the ones to suffer?
Men
? Shannon was still a boy.

Alex shut Shannon’s eyes and we both grieved in silence. I don’t know why, but I thought about Shannon’s little sister, and how she would grow up without her big brother.

Carrigan came down from her perch and collapsed to the ground when she saw Shannon’s body. Junior returned with Teague and a medic in tow. The medic did a cursory pulse check, shook his head and walked away.

“This is why you keep your head down,” Teague said, stripping Shannon of one of his dog tags.

“He was just a kid,” I said.

“He signed up for the game. He knew the risks.”

“This is not a game, Teague. He’s
dead
,” I said, brandishing my crimson hands.

“He died in the name of the Confederacy. What more can you ask for?” He said, turning to walk away.

“You asshole. You’re the only one here that is still fighting for the Confederacy.”

“Excuse me? The Confederacy is what saved you from a lifetime of slaving on some poor farmer’s land. She took you in, gave you a home and trained you to be a killer, so that you can protect that home. Yet, here you stand, turning your back on her.”

“They trained me to be a soldier, not a killer. You’re the only killer here.” The commotion had started to draw in a crowd. The other Echo Company men swarmed around us, watching eagerly as I challenged the company commander.

I took this opportunity to expose Teague for what he really was. “You killed Captain Elroy. You shot him in cold blood because you wanted the company for yourself.”

The men around us grew red with anger and circled in. Several insults were thrown from the crowd.

Teague looked around nervously. “Those are some serious accusations, Private Tennpenny. What proof do you have?”

“It’s true. I was there. I saw the whole thing,” Carrigan added.

Teague came face to face with me and looked down his nose at me. His sinister smile always irritated me. I wanted to beat his face in. If it wasn’t for Alex grabbing ahold of my arm, I would have. I could have killed him right there, put a bullet in his skull and nobody would have said a word. That’s for damn sure. We’d just walk away and continue on.

“I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” he said. “Now your mouth keeps running. You better catch it before it puts you in an early grave. You don’t realize that you’re just a pawn, a harmless rodent lost in the game of war. There are bigger plays going on that you don’t understand, because you’re nothing but a simple minded fool.”

The tension in our group of beaten and battered men grew palpable. I was ready to throw down, until Teague’s radioman butted into the conversation and handed him the phone, “Sir, Command’s on the line.”

“This is Echo Actual. Yes sir. Yes sir. I understand sir. Echo Actual out.”

Teague threw the phone back at the radioman. “What kind of shit did you pull?” He said as he jabbed his finger into Alex’s chest.

“Sir?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Redman. What did you do? Or was it you? It had to be you.” He turned to Junior. “You contacted your father somehow, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

Teague’s face burned beat red and the veins in his neck swelled.

“Is there something wrong, sir?” Alex asked, equally confused with the turn of events.

After a brief pause, Teague said, “General Gammon wants to see you at Central Command. All of you.”
Why would Gammon want us?

“Where is Command at now, sir?” Alex asked.

“Figure it out yourself. As of now, Second Squad is no longer a part of Echo Company. So run along and go brownnose General Gammon some more. Oh and Redman, try not follow in your father’s treasonous footsteps and sell out your own country.”

Now it was my turn to restrain Alex before he took a swing on Teague.

“Let’s go, Alex. If we get going now, we can make it to Command by nightfall and we never have to see this joker again.”

“Or I can kill him now, and save everyone a lot of trouble.”

“You’ll see me again before this war is over. You can count on that,” Teague said.

We turned our backs on Teague and left him to deal with the fuming tempers of all the Echo Company men that now knew him to be a cold blooded murderer.

The butcher had another dose of social justice coming his way.

Around sunset, we settled down in a public square in the middle of downtown. Some boys of the 116
th
Field Artillery Regiment were set up there. They had chopped down all the trees to give themselves a clear avenue of fire for their big guns. They were kind enough to give us a tent to stay in overnight. We didn’t get much sleep that night needless to say. The noise from the big guns was earth shaking.

It was early the next morning before we found Central Headquarters bunkered down in the middle of Forsythe Park, a mile south of where we had slept. The hive was buzzing with activity. We asked around for General Gammon’s CP, but every time we asked, we’d get a different answer and we ended up walking in circles through the maze of olive green tents. Finally, we got some good Intel that led us to the General’s Command, a rectangular tent walled up on the outside with sandbags.

The two sentries at the door stopped us. “Authorization?”

“We’re from Echo Company, Combat Infantry Brigade, Ninth Infantry Division. We we’re given orders by General Gammon to come to this location,” Alex said.

“Sorry, you must have a clearance I.D.”

“We don’t have one.”

“Then you can’t enter.”

“It’s okay, they’re with me,” a voice from behind us said. It was a young man with a golden oak leaf on his lapel. The Major beckoned us to follow him into the tent. “I’m Major Scott, General Gammon’s Chief of Operations. The General told me you were coming. I was expecting you a little later though.”

Major Scott was in his early thirties and had a handsome clean shaven face. He was wearing an immaculately pressed black tunic, common amongst intelligence officers. He looked oddly familiar. And then I remembered that he was the man I had seen during the party at the Redman home.

“Where is the General?” Junior asked.

“That’s classified and way past your security clearance.” The irony of that statement didn’t escape any of us, considering who he was talking to.

The tent was way more spacious on the inside than it looked on the outside. There were a number of intelligence and logistics officers fighting hard from behind their desks, crunching away numbers and shuffling papers.

At the center of the tent was a large table with several maps spread out on it. Next to it was an impressive array of computer monitors three screens high and four across. There were two men busy wagging their heads back and forth at each of the screens and marking down anything of importance.

Major Scott opened his mouth to say something but paused as two Legion officers walked by. They had on the blue camo like Teague.
More Legionnaires? They’re everywhere.

When they left the tent, he said, “The General should be back no later than tomorrow morning. In the meantime, I was told to take care of your every need. You guys look like you’ve been through hell. The Ninth has been through the ringer the past week. The Midnight Ninth is what we’ve been calling you, since that daring raid across the river last week. Hell of a job. Too bad Arrow Head didn’t work out as planned. It was a valiant effort.” Scott puffed out a deep breath. “Anyway, I was told to keep you here until the General gets back, but as you can see, we are a little busy managing a city under siege and I can’t have you getting in the way. So, if you’d follow me, I’ll find you an empty rack and then I have a surprise for you.”

That surprise was a mobile shower unit, a rectangular trailer with a network of water pipes running bare along the ceiling. We couldn’t believe it when we saw it. The Major presented it to us, said it’s all ours and then left us to our primal fascination.

For the first time in nearly two months, I shed myself of my tattered fatigues and soiled underclothes for a luxurious occasion of a hot shower. It was no luxury shower like at the Redman’s, but it did the job.

When I stepped underneath the shower head and pulled the lever, a heavenly blanket of steaming hot water cascaded over me. For a second, I was lost in sheer elation. It felt so soothing. The others gasped as they experienced the same satisfaction.

I instantly felt cleaned and purified from the filth that coated my body and I drifted off into a state of total relaxation.

All through Basic I went out of my way to hide my scars from everyone, but now I didn’t give them a second thought. These are my brothers--
and sister
. We shared the unshakable bond of brotherhood and comradery that only combat could develop.
Maybe it was childish of me to fear them before, but now I knew that my friends would not judge me based on something as trivial as a couple scars.
These scars are a part of me. Whether I like it or not, it’s time I start accepting that
.

I used my fingernails to scrape away the dirt that wedged itself into the tight nooks within the embossed lettering of my dog tags. The familiar clanking of the metal dog tags brought back memories of that last night on the beach I spent with Tess.

After all the fun subsided and our fast beating hearts settled, we lied wrapped in each other’s arms and stared up at the stars. Tess rested her head on my chest and twirled my dog tags around in her hand.

When I closed my eyes, I could still see her head rising and falling softly as I breathed. She didn’t say a word for several minutes. I could tell she was thinking about Alex and me going off to war. After a few more minutes of silence and watching her head bob up and down, she told me that I had a strong heart and that I should always follow it.
Only if I could see her face one more time and hold her hand in mine.

I bent my head and let the gentle water caress my body from my head to my toes.

“Colton, are you okay?” Alex asked.

“Yeah, why?” I followed his eyes to the floor where a pool of red water swirled about my feet before it disappeared into the drain behind me. I reached up to my neck and flinched from the sting.

“My stitches broke open.”

After the shower, we donned new fatigues, bandaged up my cut and found a few empty racks in the nearest barracks tent and got some much needed sleep.

Twenty four hours of sleep to be more specific.

We woke the next morning rested and hungry. Once we filled our bellies with hot grub from the field kitchen, we waited for the General in the Command tent. Major Scott gave us our own little corner to play in while he made a few frantic phone calls. The General didn’t show up when he said he would.

We sat around cleaning our rifles and playing cards, wishing the General would come back and answer our questions as to why we were there.

Junior tapped Alex and me on the shoulder. He pointed to a desk across the room where a female officer sat doing paperwork. She had her red hair balled up in a bun on top of her head.

“Told you,” he said. We could only manage a sarcastic grin. Humor seemed like an alien concept to us now.

Nobody knew where the General was until he appeared around midday, alive and well. Scott was ready to pull his own hair out.

“There they are,” Gammon said shaking hands with all of us. “So few of you. I was expecting more.”

“It was a long road to get here, sir,” Junior said. His handshake lingered with his son. Gammon was glad to see him alive, I could see it in his eyes. But it was obvious he was troubled by something else.

“And it’s a long road out of here. Come, follow me, we have no time,” the General said, leading us outside through the tent city to a Humvee parked on the side of the road. He hopped in the driver’s seat and told us to get in.

“Sir, where are we going?” Alex asked.

“In due time, Sergeant. First, let’s get out of here.”

The General was acting fidgety and nervously looking around as he guided us through the road blocks down the street toward midtown.

“Why did you pull us off the line, sir?” Junior asked from the passenger seat. When the General ignored his inquiry, he added, “General?...Dad?”

“I asked for you for a reason, son. I need your help.”

“For what?”

“Security. I can’t trust anyone else. The damned Legion is everywhere now. The President has infiltrated every military unit across the country with his paramilitary. He’s trying everything he can to prolong this war. The bastard still believes we can win.”

“What’s going sir? I don’t understand,” Alex said.

The General stepped on the brake and parked on the sidewalk in front of The Sentinel, one of the tallest buildings in the Savannah skyline. It was still relatively untouched by the fighting.

The streets were quiet. The last friendly soldier I saw was four blocks back the way we came.

Before we entered the building, Gammon stopped us on the steps and said, “Have your guns on safety and do not fire unless fired upon, do you understand?”

“Sir, please explain what is going on,” Alex said.

“Do
you
understand?” Gammon asked sternly. “I will explain everything to you in due time, Sergeant. The longer we delay here the more lives are lost.”

The lobby was empty and quiet, save the low drone of jazz music playing in the waiting area. We took the elevator to the eighteenth floor, the very top, and stopped in front of the door labeled 1801.

“What’s about to happen is very important. When we enter this room, you are to refrain from any outward reaction. Remain stoic and professional no matter what. Look like the battle-hardened soldiers you are. There are no enemies here, but keep your weapons at the ready just in case. Spread yourselves out, but Tennpenny, I want you at my side.”

Gammon put his hand on the door handle and said, “Everything will make sense in time.”

We entered the living room of what looked to be a studio penthouse of sorts. The large apartment was built like an amphitheater, with the kitchen at the top, living room in the middle and the bedroom at the lowest level. At the far end was a window that stretched from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, providing a panoramic view of the south side of the city.

I kept a blank expression on my face, even though on the inside I was burning with fury as I noticed the half dozen men wearing United States Army uniforms. They were spread out along the far wall. Some of them had rifles hanging at their sides.
We should shoot them all right now.

One of the men stepped forward and shook hands with Gammon. He had on green camo fatigues and a black beret.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. General Gammon, a traitor?

“General Taylor, I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me considering the circumstances,” Gammon said.

“War is a busy time, Dominic, but I always make time for old friends,” the man said.
Old friends?

The man standing next to him offered his hand.

“General Gammon, this is Alan Barnes, the Assistant Secretary of State. Mr. Barnes, this is General Gammon, Commander of Confederate Forces in the State of Georgia.”

Alan Barnes was a balding man with a pair of wide-brimmed glasses, a small nose and shiny shoes. He wore a fine tailored black suit with a blue tie.

“It’s an honor to finally meet you in person, General. Shall we?” He said, indicating for them to take a seat on the living room couches. The man looked out of place surrounded by all the military uniforms.

As Gammon took his seat, I positioned myself right beside him and kept my rifle ready with my finger on the trigger guard, ready to flip the safety off in a moment’s notice. I stared straight ahead. It was safe to say that my face didn’t have the nicest expression.

“Perhaps your, ugh, guard dogs can relax a little,” the nerdy looking man said, nervously shifting his glasses.

“There are a lot of men that want me dead, Mr. Barnes. Forgive me if I keep my bodyguards close,” Gammon said.

“Very well then,” Mr. Barnes cleared his throat, still obviously unsatisfied with the amount of guns in the room. “I presented your proposal to President Fairchild. He declines on the grounds that many of the provisions for which you claim have been null and voided in recent days as our forces continue moving westward. However, the President is very eager for this to be the last negotiation and he ordered me not to come back to D.C. without a successful resolution. Here is a draft of a new agreement drawn up by President Fairchild and the War Department. Please, take a moment to look it over. We can discuss any stipulations that you may have when you are finished.”

Gammon took the piece of paper and read it thoroughly.

“I don’t understand what he’s asking of me in this.”

“Both our nations are weary of war, Dominic, and this war is nearly over. The Confederacy will not survive to see the turn of the New Year. You and I have been in too many wars to know that the bloodshed does not end with the peace treaty. The violence and the disorder that follows the resolution of war can often times be just as destructive as the war itself,” General Taylor explained.

“You are a strong and capable leader, General. Your people look up to you for your devout leadership. That’s precisely why our President wants you to head the provisional government that will help restore these states to the Union. Our people are intertwined by blood. President Fairchild does not want to see any more fellow Americans die. It is only through a peaceful reconstruction through which we can achieve the greater glory of a restored American Union,” Mr. Barnes said.