Rise and Walk (6 page)

Walking point was nerve-wracking. Gabe knew that at any moment a high velocity paintball could smack him in the chest, the thigh, or worse, directly on his lightly protected hands. The idea of taking a hit in the face was fine with most players. The facemask provided good protection. He wore a groin cup during matches for the same reason but he had never had to test it. He was thankful that he had yet to get hit in such a sensitive area. Walking point to draw fire brought up these kinds of thoughts. He was sweeping his attention and gun barrel slowly from side to side looking for the enemy but all the careful concentration and quiet made the back of his mind busy. To the south he saw a referee on the slope of the hill lift a radio to his mouth. The ref was wearing his communicator microphone connected to his goggles, but still lifted a radio to his mouth.
Microphone malfunction
, Gabe thought and paid it no more mind. The enemy was out here somewhere, gunning for him; waiting to put a red ball of paint in his crotch and test the effectiveness of his cup. Gabe cringed at the thought. He wanted a first place trophy in the worst way. He wanted to make sure his men got some money for their efforts. But he also wanted to have children someday. He slowed his pace without realizing that he had done so and continued into the brush with greater care and focus.

Tony followed on Mason’s nine o’clock, to his left and a little farther back. A large pathway meandered through the trees, dividing the match field. Tony kept an eye on the path while staying in the thick foliage. He figured that their local opponents might lack the good sense to stay off the path. The enemy of the day was Hillbilly. These locals were probably used to hunting while drinking beer, rifles carelessly off safety, breaches loaded. The kind of guys who would eventually shoot one of their buddies by the time they had their second divorce, from their cousin of course. Tony knew better than to underestimate an opponent but he liked to make fun of people, even if it was only in his head.

He noticed something through the brush to his left. Stopping instantly, he angled his weapon towards the movement. With his camouflage outfit and stealth he should go unnoticed. Tony knew that the human sense of sight relied mostly on movement. It was a leftover from our more primitive existence. When one looked directly at something the mind tried to make a connection from the shape of what it saw. Something man shaped was a man; something tree shaped was a tree, or so the mind told us. The broken patterns and random dark colors of his camouflage were designed to blend in with nature. It wasn’t until you started to move that one could recognize the form as man-like. Movement, or the lack of movement, was a factor. Human peripheral vision is quite sensitive to motion even in the very dark. If he stayed motionless, he should be invisible. He waited a breathless beat, eyes penetrating through the trees. A field judge walked down the path, oblivious to Tony’s presence. Tony followed him with his rifle and smiled, removing his finger from the trigger.

The impact on Travis’ back stung like an electric shock. It caught him dead center in the spine. The force of the blow sent small misdirected signals through his nervous system. Unable to control his muscles, he dropped his rifle and fell to the ground. As he fell three more blasts followed, one striking his shoulder adding to his pain. Billy whirled around to assist his best friend and caught a dose of flying paint in the forearm. It hurt, but he ignored it and swung around to return fire. Technically he was out but Billy didn’t want to give up until called out by a ref. He wanted to tap at least one of his adversaries. He fired blindly, dropping to one knee to minimize his height and profile as a target. He heard running foot falls to his left. Billy raised his rifle to the plastic mask that protected his face and took careful aim. A whistle blew.

“You’re out,” a referee hollered. Billy raised the rifle over his head, stood and allowed the referee to remove his armband. He cursed under his mask.

Gabe turned to run back to the action. A single burst sounded behind him and a split second later he was thrown off course by a Charlie horse in his right hamstring. Just below the butt cheek a flying red mass of defeat slammed into his leg. He fell to the ground face first, thankful for his facemask. He rolled to his back and looked up. He saw a hillside ref, blow a whistle while pointing in his direction.
Damn
, he thought,
where the hell did that come from?
Gabe sighed, switched his weapon to safety and threw it to the ground.

Moments after the first sounding of the battle, Mason and Tony sprinted towards the action. Tony was set to cover Mason as he ran across the path when Travis and Billy came through the brush on the other side. Travis struggled along with Billy’s help. Gabe fell forward out of the brush limping. He removed his mask and cursed loudly.

“Fuckin’ ambush,” Gabe said passing a referee.

“It was like they knew where we were,” he wondered out loud while looking at the ref accusingly.

Tony looked at Mason. The outburst was for their benefit. Gabe was trying to let them know that something unfair was at work. Mason lifted his mask and spat.

“Still got over an hour,” he whispered to Tony.

“Change of plans?”

“Button hook east, stay in the bush. They’re confident now; we’ll have to reduce their numbers.”

The two men made their way back deep into the trees.

NINE

Veronica splashed cold water on her face. Her nerves had settled with the change of scenery. She looked at herself in the tin plated mirror of the camp office bathroom. The mirror was made of unbreakable metal and didn’t reflect well. The image presented was slightly warped. Veronica stared for a moment feeling distorted from within. She let out a deep breath. It had been almost a year since she had felt that overwhelming anxiety. The strange sensation that she wasn’t really in her body hadn’t plagued her since after the death of her father. She grieved for a time after his passing. Soon after the funeral she had suddenly realized how alone she was. Spending almost seven years devoted to her dad had left her without purpose. She had things to busy herself. She had the goal of studying medicine but almost nothing else. Veronica floundered at San Francisco City College in remedial Math and English classes. She had to make up for lost time in basic courses to gain entrance to the classes that really interested her. With extreme patience, she labored to complete arbitrary scholastic tasks while silently suffering with her loss. She lasted a year in the city alone. Her last semester at SF City College, she had taken sixteen units. Veronica had shoveled education into her brain the way a fat kid eats a birthday cake; as fast as possible, lest someone else get more than their share. She had taken Intro to Algebra, Critical Thinking in History, Intro to Psychology, Biology with a lab and English. Her last final over, she bent down to tie her sneakers. The string broke low in her laces, leaving her no way to secure her shoe. She began to cry. Veronica had no idea what was happening to her. Her elaborate system of emotional defensive barriers seemed to collapse. The broken shoelace, a small and simple issue, was the last straw. The ride home on public transportation was a trek through emotional chaos. She pretended that everything was all right and to the untrained observer on the street that is how she appeared. Inside, she was screaming.

She had been uncomfortable in large cities since she was eleven years old. Since that October day when her father took her to a baseball game, her life had changed forever. They had gotten lost on the serpentine assemblage of concrete and asphalt that made up the Oakland, California highway system. Her father had just exited the interstate to a not so savory part of town in search of a gas station when the earthquake hit. The car shook so violently that she thought they had run over a patch of rutted dirt road. Her senses would have attributed the shaking to the car having a bad suspension if it were not for the loud rumbling. Her father pulled over right away and held her hand with reassurance until the quake ended.

The Loma Prieta earthquake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale. Moments later, several people started running past Veronica’s car asking for help. The upper level of the Cypress freeway had collapsed onto the lower deck trapping hundreds of motorists. Feeling his duty as a doctor, Veronica’s father identified his profession to one of the worried men. The man jumped into the back seat and directed them to the scene.

The earth had stopped shaking only minutes prior to their arrival at the structure yet one had to wonder how so much damage could occur in so little time. Veronica was stunned as she got out of the car by the number of cries and pleas from the double-decker concrete sandwich. Thick black smoke crawled out from the thin access in between the smashed road beds. A man had climbed up on the first deck, balancing himself on a cracked support column. He was yelling to another man on the ground to find a ladder and “something to pry the door open.” He was a black man with a rough appearance. Someone that the young sheltered Veronica might have been afraid of in other circumstances, but not then. He was an everyday hero, casting aside his own safety to help a stranger. The man had tears of frustration in his eyes as he tried to talk to someone trapped in the structure. She would never forget the man’s courage.

She was deathly afraid, not for herself or so much for those trapped, but for what her father might do. She didn’t want him to put himself at risk and possibly get hurt. She ran to his side and hugged him. The young Veronica begged him not to go. She didn’t want to lose her daddy. He knelt down to her level, like he always did when he wanted to tell his daughter something important.

Veronica shook off the cascade of memories, stopping up the passage to her past. She was desperately laboring to learn to become a doctor so that she could be there for others who needed her. She was there for her father in his final moments when he had needed her. As she spied her countenance in the distorted mirror, things became clear. She had spent a great portion of her life being needed. The encounter with the man in the store had revealed something that Veronica had a hard time admitting. She was too accustomed to putting others first and ignoring the fact that she had needs.

The bathroom was quiet and all of a sudden very lonely for Veronica. She wiped her face with a paper towel.

“I don’t have to figure it all out today,” she said aloud to herself in the mirror and left.

When Veronica rejoined her work in the store she noticed a middle aged man trying far too hard to engage Nikki in conversation. Nikki appeared to be reading a copy of
the Journal of the American Medical Association
that Veronica had brought from home. This caused Veronica’s eyebrows to rise in an amused expression. Nikki never read anything more difficult than a Cosmopolitan magazine. She had never seen Nikki take the slightest interest in JAMA. Yet there she was, trying to pretend to be very interested in the magazine and not in what the man had to say.

The man opened a beer while trying to interest Nikki.

“No open containers in the sales area,” Veronica said sternly as she walked behind the counter. Dejected, the man looked at his beer. He meekly lifted his hands in a defensive posture, collected his belongings and walked out the door. Veronica approached Nikki with a knowing look.

TEN

Tony Sanchez navigated the soft forest earth with careful steps. He moved with all the silence that his large frame would allow. Considering his size, he was almost catlike. Tony moved from concealed position, to concealed position. Just like in all the military manuals he and Jack had read as kids; he knew that one had to have a plan when you left cover. Tony had a plan, and it meant that for a moment, he had to be exposed. His protective eye goggles itched as they rubbed on his forehead but they had yet to fog up. Tony would need to see well to target the enemy during this contest. He had his eye on a ditch to his right and planned to jump into it once things got more exciting and they soon did.

Paintballs whizzed past Tony’s right, humming in the air. The volley of plastic encapsulated paint blocked his exit. Instead of jumping to his right and the cover of the embankment, Tony realized that the enemy had targeted the ditch for an ambush. Three of the enemy would push him towards the ditch, while the other two would zero him when he jumped in. Tony loved it when he saw through a ruse. He prized his intellect’s ability to see what could be overlooked by others. He flattened out and kept his head down. For the moment he would be difficult to hit. It shouldn’t be a long before Mason took his cue. In the sudden chaos of the battle, Tony adjusted his contingency to reflect the fluidity of the situation.

“Where are you man?” he said under his breath. Hugging the ground, he couldn’t help but count the number of gun muzzles that were coughing cold CO2 at his position. Three to the left and two staggered diagonally to his right. Neither had a good shot at him while he lay close to the earth obscured by thick foliage. The enemy had closed their noose too soon. Three more paces and they would have had him.
Good
, thought Tony,
the gangs all here
.
Jack should be near the two on the right, not long now …

With great stealth Jack Mason moved in behind the closest opponent. He stayed low, rifle slung close, secured to his body. The light sounds of his footfalls were covered by the loud reports of enemy paint blasts. Mason shot his left hand around his victim’s facemask and with his right; he produced the large felt tip marker. Mason drew a dark red line across his enemy’s throat. The man fell away in shock as Mason disarmed him, seized his weapon and put two blasts of red paint into his confused victim for good measure. The red team member writhed in pain as Mason dropped to the ground and used the suffering red team’s fetal body as cover. The scuffle drew the attention of the other red team member nearby. Mason delivered two game ending taps of red paint to the man from his teammate’s weapon. Jumping to his feet and racing towards Tony’s position, Mason fired a spread through the trees across the path to cover his teammate. Tony, sensing that the time was right, rolled into the ditch where he planned to reposition and try to pick off their last three opponents. Somewhere in the distance Mason heard a referee’s whistle blow twice, indicating that two players were out of the game. Mason’s smile was hidden by his facemask.