The van was right where they’d left it, stashed beneath a mottled, indigo tarp and out of easy sight. Leo snatched the tarp, and Hernandez got the back open. Frost got Sarah onto the medical bench, and cut the restraints. When he realized he’d used the padre’s kris knife he threw it out into the trees. Hernandez strapped the girl in, crouching down and checking her vitals. Leo climbed behind the wheel, and Frost got into the passenger seat. Dikeledi slid into one of the rear-facing jump seats, fastened her belt and watched out the window. She never let go of the pistol. Doors slammed, the engine rumbled, and minutes later they were on the highway.
The silence stretched thick as midnight. Leo drove with both hands on the wheel, eyes flicking from the road to the mirrors and back again. Frost took long, slow breaths. His fingers moved almost of their own volition, as if he was playing a piano only he could see. Hernandez coughed and shuffled, clicking a pen flash into Sarah’s eyes and checking her pulse. He coughed again. Then a third time.
“What’s your malfunction, Hernandez?” Leo said, jerking the wheel into the fast lane and stepping down on the gas.
“Nothing,” Hernandez said. “It’s just the girl.”
“What about her?”
“Her vitals are off,” Hernandez said. “No immediate problems, but I can’t put my finger—”
“She is pregnant,” Dikeledi said.
Leo swerved. Frost swore. Hernandez lost his grip, and banged his shoulder against the wall before falling onto the floor. The van coasted. Frost turned around slowly, looking at Dikeledi.
“Pregnant?” he repeated. “Pregnant with what?”
The girl wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Sarah, and her face may as well have been carved from the same, dark stone as the bridge. Then without a word Dikeledi raised Leo’s pistol and fired two rounds into Sarah’s belly. The gun roared, deafening in the tight confines, and blood fountained as the hollow points ripped through the girl’s innards. Before Dikeledi could fire a third shot, Frost put a bullet in her head. The gun fell from her hand, and she lurched against her safety harness.
Leo drove, and his leather gloves creaked as he gripped the wheel. Hernandez tried to staunch Sarah’s bleeding, alternating between praying and cursing. Frost slid his sidearm back into its holster, and stared through the windscreen.
“Dammit, Frost, get back there and help him,” Leo said.
“No.”
Leo went still. He slowly turned, and looked at Frost. “What do you mean, no?”
For a moment Frost gave no indication he’d even heard. He kept staring out into the night, his fingers keeping time with the broken, white lines. When he spoke his voice was very soft. “Where do you think all those things came from?”
“What does it fucking matter where they came from?” Leo said. “There’s no time for this—”
Frost looked at him. His eyes were bright, and glacially cold. “She’s pregnant Leo. Pregnant with what?”
Behind them, Hernandez started screaming.
Little Johnny Jump-Up
Christine Morgan
Mullins was first to admit to having seen the boy. He did so in a way that said he expected to be ridiculed for it, laughed out of camp, made fun of… or be accused of sneaking the drink, wild tale-telling, or worse.
As it happened, we’d all seen him.
We’d all seen him, and the accounts, they lined up too well to be anything other than the truth.
That we could each describe him to a fare-thee-well, that was nothing surprising. We’d all gotten a plain enough look, plain and sorrowful, when Sergeant Lewis picked him up from the Virginia mud.
How the rain had come down that day. Washed the smoke from the air but raised steam from the ground in its place. It raised steam from the bodies of the fallen as well, even as it washed the blood from their ashen faces. The smell of wet wool hung heavy in the air, mingling with the sharp stink of spent powder, and the lower stink of death.
There was scant dignity in it, death. Same as for war. Might start off proud, with talk of God and glory, flags waving, the fifes and drums, cavalry sabers flashing in the sun, muskets gleaming… but what was there by battle’s end?
Death.
Stiffened limbs and cooling flesh. Mouths agape. Eyes staring. Whether your uniform was of the blue or the gray, there in the mud and blood it no longer mattered.
Some men, the lucky ones, went easy. Went quick. Never saw it coming, or it was over before they barely knew. A shot, a jerk like being horse-kicked, and over they’d go, dead before more than a look of surprise even began to form on their faces, before the red stains blossomed and spread on their shirts.
Others, not so much. Others fell with their legs blown off or their guts blown open, bones shattered; men who were just sacks of shredded meat held together by ropes of gristle; men with their brains bulging through snarls of hair-clots and chunks of broken skull… screaming their agony… howling for mercy and for mother… scrabbling to hold parts of themselves together or pick up parts no longer attached…
No, there was precious little dignity to be found among the dead. Or the dying. Or the living, for that matter. We’d seen brave men cowering, begging, pissing themselves in their terror, and that wasn’t always even in the thick of the battle. We’d seen men who’d been just chock-full of boasting faint like church biddies with the vapors at the first boom of the cannons.
It tried the soul as much as it tried the body, war did. They liked to say how it’d bring out the best in a man. Often as not, it’d do the opposite. We knew of men who’d slunk away and run, deserters, yellow-bellied dogs, despicable, but could anyone blame them? When you’d seen your friends and brothers dying all around you, when you had to crawl over corpses — of those selfsame friends and brothers, like as not — or ignore the pleading clutch of desperate hands so you could save your own wretched life… oh yes, it tried the soul.
Death was bad but survival wasn’t always pretty either. Sometimes, what went on in the surgeon’s tent was more horrible by far. Bonesaws and amputations; the cautery iron heated until it glowed red-hot and sizzled the wound with the smell of roasting pork or frying bacon; the gangrene, and the maggots poured into the sores to gnaw away the infection…
Then, about when you’d thought you had gotten numb-minded to it, inured to the horrors, something would come along to prove you wrong.
Something such as the boy.
He shouldn’t have been there. He had no earthly business being there. On a battlefield, on such a dark and rainy day.
What had possessed him? All we could reckon was that he’d been out looking to have himself an adventure, or maybe hoped to steal himself some food — not that he would’ve had much luck, supplies being what they were. Or could be he was looking for someone, his daddy gone marching off to war or the like.
We’d never know. All we did know was that he shouldn’t have been there. He shouldn’t have been there; none of us had seen him until it was too late… and it was the mules. The damned mules.
If we’d still had the horses it might not have happened. The horses were better about it, not as prone to panic. We’d had six, but two had been shot, one took sick, and that bastard Hollister ‘requisitioned’ the others out from under us — his detachment had more need, he said, more import. A 12-pounder Napoleon was more use than our old bronze 6-pounder, the one we’d dubbed Little Johnny Jump-Up because of the way it leaped when fired.
Lewis had argued, but that bastard Hollister was on better backside-kissing terms with the commander. So, he got our horses and we had to make do with the damned mules.