He couldn’t remember how long he’d been here. He couldn’t tell if the ambient glow was from the fire he’d seen earlier, or if it was just the red haze of pain. Suddenly the light changed. Yellow lines swept across him and a face swung into view. Sergeant Iain Wentworth. Behind transparent goggles the man looked down sadly, a pity that Shaffer felt he deserved. His accomplice stood behind him, indifferent and wrapped in shadows, with several weapons slung across his back. They’d looted the rest of the Section. The others would all be dead. “Traitor…” he said.
Wentworth’s lips moved, but his words travelled as if through deep water. “I’m no traitor. It’s the CO and his officers who are traitors. They betrayed all of us.” He continued speaking, but the details were lost, and Shaffer didn’t feel like arguing. Then he said something else; he was offering to end it. Shaffer’s wounds were going to kill him, he said.
“No…” his voice croaked. He could barely speak, barely think. If his life was over then it was over, but before he died he was going to suck up every last bit of it. This might be all he had left but he’d make the most of it. “Light…” it was difficult to speak. “Sun…” Wentworth and his friend looked at each other. They spoke but he couldn’t make out the words.
Putting down the looted kit, they picked him up by the shoulders. It hurt, but everything hurt, so he didn’t mind. Between them, they carried him up to the surface.
It was funny, he thought, how he wasn’t angry at Wentworth for doing this to him. He hadn’t forgiven him; Wentworth was still his enemy. He’d carry that to the grave — the thought almost made him laugh — but still, he felt no bitterness.
A memory came to him then. His first girlfriend, what was her name? She was in the Service Battalion when she died. He remembered how it felt the first time he’d slid his hand up her shirt and cupped her breasts through the training bra. They’d kissed for hours but he’d been too nervous to touch the nipple with his fingers, the hard nub had been pressing into the palm of his hand while his fingers played with the straps.
By the time Raxx and Wentworth reached the surface Master Corporal Schaffer was dead.
The sun had returned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Davis M.J. Aurini was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario before moving to Aidrie, Alberta in the late-eighties. After High School he traveled back and forth across the country, spent seven years serving as an Infantry soldier in Canada’s military reserve, and studied History at McMaster University.
He currently lives in Calgary, and contributes to the alternative-right blogosphere at StaresAtTheWorld.com
Copyright
As I Walk These Broken Roads is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Davis M.J. Aurini
All Rights Reserved
ISBN-13: 978-1480121829
ISBN-10: 1480121827
BISAC: Fiction / Science Fiction / Military