The sergeant caught me watching. He flushed some, and told me it was a letter to his brother but he would just as soon talk no more about it.
I did not press the matter. After all, I knew Sergeant Lewis had just one brother, who’d died at Fort Sumter, back at the very start of the war. Died fighting for the other side, as it happened. Lewis said how they’d had harsh words the last time they spoke, and there’d never been a chance to square things between them.
Next morning, that letter was gone just like everything else, but the rock was exactly where it had been, atop the ammunition box.
There was not, to our mingled disappointment and relief, a reply.
Bit by bit we began to notice other little peculiarities.
The mules, for instance. The damned, confounded, stubborn mules. They grew so well-behaved, so placid and docile and compliant, that it made us almost uneasy. They stood as calm under fire as the best-trained cavalry horses any of us had ever seen.
Our powder never seemed to come up damp, no matter how bad the weather got. We’d hear that bastard Hollister swearing from halfway across the field how the blue hell he was supposed to fire his Napoleon with damp powder, but ours was always just fine. Bone dry, dry as salt. Our slow match never went out at an inopportune moment, leaving us unready at the fuse.
And we hadn’t had a misfire in… we couldn’t hardly remember. Since the boy. No misfires, no injuries to our detachment, not even with the way Little Johnny Jump-Up had earned his name. We had no powder burns, no poorly-placed toes crushed by the recoil, not so much as a cinder or speck of ash landing in anybody’s eye. Our 6-pounder, sneered at by the likes of Hollister, was proving one of the most reliable artillery pieces in the unit.
Reliable, and accurate.
Uncannily, even eerily so.
The sound had changed, too. Or so it seemed to us. The bark and boom of Little Johnny’s bronze throat now sounded like a shout of laughter, a child’s excited whoop.
Then came the day.
The dark day. The terrible day.
They were as surprised as us, there was that much at least. We hadn’t marched straight into an ambush. Nor had they. Both our armies must have simply been going along, trudging, heads down as the rain dumped in sheets and buckets from black clouds so low in the sky you felt you could reach up and scoop away a sodden handful. The lightning-flash and thunder-rumble all around in the hills made it impossible to hear much of anything else.
Until the bugles rang their brassy cries, that was.
Generals in their right minds, you’d think, might have held off until the worst of the storm passed. Maybe each reckoned the other side would be caught unprepared and unaware enough to offer up an easy victory. Maybe tempers and moods were just as foul as the weather that day.
Regardless, the battle was on before we half knew it. Slick grass and slicker mud… horses and mules stamping with their breath steaming in hot plumes… orders being yelled… men running… muskets and cannons being loaded…
Hollister’s 12-pounder took a direct hit and exploded into twisted shards of smoking metal. The blast shook the earth. Bodies tumbled. A string of rattling, thudding coughs followed — the powder packets from their ammunition box. I saw a man’s severed arm whirl clumsily through the air, a pinwheel of fingers and blood. Another man stumbled from the spot, hands clamped to his char-burned face.
We returned fire. Fast as we could, swabbing and ramming, loading, aiming. Little Johnny jumped with recoil. The wheels dug deep in the soggy earth.
A canister shot burst nearby, spewing deadly iron shrapnel. Mullins and one of the Brubakers went down. Carey’s cap was torn from his head, and a ribbon of scalp torn off with it. I felt a tug at my side, a jabbing needle-stitch from an impatient seamstress.
Our mules got the brunt of it, two killed outright, a third that should have been but was too ornery to die. The rest of the team suffered wounds of varying severity and their earlier uncanny calm was no more.
Sergeant Lewis opened his mouth to give orders but a musket ball smashed his jaw before he got more than a word out. He sat down hard, cupping his chin, blood and teeth spilling through his fingers. Carey started for him and fell, shot in the thigh.
The other Brubaker threw himself on his wounded brother. Dobbs, Thomas and I got the panicking mules unhitched from the limber before they could tip Little Johnny over. Trickling wetness soaked into my shirt.
Our unit was a shambles, disorganized. Some tried to rally a defensive line as the enemy infantry advanced.
Little Johnny Jump-Up fired again. Round shot plowed into the oncoming soldiers.
None of us were anywhere near the 6-pounder. Had we even reloaded?
I wrenched myself around, squinting through rain and pain.
Again, our smoothbore barked that sound so like a child’s whoop of glee. Fire belched from Little Johnny’s bronze muzzle. More round-shot flew, and more men were mown down.
And again.
The boy… our same small towheaded boy…
I saw him there, clear as day, capering and clapping his hands. I heard his bright, joyful laughter.
Then the boom of cannonfire and the crack of muskets shifted as the battle lessened near us and intensified further downfield.
Sergeant Lewis stepped up beside the boy, patting him on the shoulder as if to say that enough was enough. The boy smiled up at him. Lewis smiled back, his chin not smashed after all.
I looked again, looked to where the sergeant still sat, slumped over, a dark gory bib of blood covering him from his ruined jawbone clear down to his belt.
Yet there he stood, by the boy, whole and unharmed.
There also stood Mullins, cheerful while at the same time his own body sprawled dead and face-down in the mud.
Not Carey, and not Jed Brubaker, both of whom were badly hurt… Tad missed it, frantic as he was trying to save his brother’s life… Thomas, Dobbs and I all saw them and agreed.
We saw the three of them walk off together, until they vanished into the haze of smoke and mist rising from the battlefield.
The six others of us survived. The war went on.
But Little Johnny Jump-Up never fired again.
Covert Genesis
Brian W. Taylor
Staff Sergeant Solomon Watkins understood something strange was happening when the pilot, Captain Ruiz, said, “What’s that?” A heartbeat later a bright flash of bluish light — it reminded him of lightning — flooded through the cockpit and into the cargo hold. The metal frame of the C-17 vibrated and hummed all around him, like someone tapped a tuning fork. He pushed himself up in his chair and saw lights on the instrument panel flickering and flashing before going dark.
Watkins pulled his seat belt tighter when the co-pilot, Lieutenant Bigsby, yelled, “We’re hit!” It was all he could think to do to keep his mind off the fact that they were in real trouble.
The roar of the engine turbines subsided until clacking to a stop. All of them. At the same time.
“What’s going on up there?” one of the Delta Force guys shouted from the rear of the aircraft.
Watkins ignored him and listened as the pilots flipped switches, mashed buttons, and anything else they were trained to do during engine failure.
“Whatever hit us took out the electrical systems,” Captain Ruiz said to the co-pilot, his voice even, calm. “We’ve got to try and jump-start her.”
The C-17 went quiet. The aircraft swayed on the edge of a great and terrible fall. It was like sitting at the apex of the tallest hill on the tallest roller coaster Watkins had ever been on. He willed the pilot to find some kind of solution and get the engines running. Gravity, however, would not be denied. It wrapped invisible hands around the nose of the aircraft and pulled. Watkins’ stomach felt like it pressed against his throat.