The first thing weary eyes saw when they forced themselves open were the equally weary eyes staring back. If the body they were in had any strength left, it would have jumped or yelled in surprise; however, their body was immobile and weighed more than a jeep.
Ugh, jeeps. The body hated jeeps because they bounced around so much. The memories hated jeeps because a certain ride in one of them had been permanently slashed into it. As the memories were pulled out of the clouded mind and began to play across the eyes, they snapped shut and the mouth let out a pitiful groan.
“Nurse? Nurse!” It sounded like a man with a New York accent, but his voice was drown by the roar of the jeep as it flew over the dirt road as explosions created even more craters.
A hand scrambles for a hold on the seat. The other forces a helmet farther over brown hair. To the left, the driver spins the wheel – as though he’s playing roulette – and prays the jeep won’t send him into the line of fire.
Things blur. Time speeds up. The eyes settle on seeing black. The stomach, however, settles on being upset.
“Nurse! Aw geeze! Nurse!” The voice is back. This time it doesn’t go away completely, it merely drops to a low buzz.
“On your feet soldier,” a gruff, new voice demands. “I didn’t say you were finished.”
Splashes of color realign themselves into dirt and a pair of overly polished combat boots. The colors are slow to follow as the view gets shakily higher. When it stops, it’s almost looking a man in the face, but that’s still too high and the colors can’t decide where they go.
The eyes and mind may have been confused, but the body recognized the feeling of pain it was swimming in. The back forced itself to straighten up. The legs and hands twitched uncontrollably. The teeth bit the tongue to silence the screams.
Metal. That’s what the odd glint is. A metal barrel pointed at the leg. A hand spins the chamber and stops it. The trigger is pulled. Nothing happens.
“What’s that? You didn’t flinch that time.”
“No sir.” The mouth responds before the mind can stop it.
“Why?”
“I knew the chamber wasn’t loaded.”
The chamber spins again. The leg’s muscles tense up, they expect the pain. They’re wrong. No bullets fly. No power is ignited. Instead, something crashes into the jaw and sends it to the ground.
There is silence in the ears, except for the throbbing, and the mind feels at piece not knowing what will come next. Instead the legs felt something warm and wet running down them. The smell was disgusting. The stinging as the warmth flowed over old wounds was numbing.
Soon, the body realized, it was completely numb. Nothing felt. Nothing heard. Nothing moved.
The warmth was gone, replaced by a nipping coldness in his mind. Before more memories could come, the mind was gone. It floated on a glacier in the arctic.
“Hey, doc? He gonna be okay?” Private Nathan Stern asked a man in a white coat as he and some hairy nurse loaded the boy in the bed next to him onto a gurney. “Doc?”
Nathan settled back into his pillow as the doctor hurried off. They’d told him Walter was with them. They hadn’t, however, said he was half dead and lying in the bed next to him. Various emotions had tugged at his stomach as he watched him for nearly three hours.
Guilt was the most prominent. It summed up all the others: sorrow, fear, respect, anger, horror, love. Walter was a good boy; he hadn’t disserved what they’d done to him. Sure, the first day was great since the guys weren’t all over him, calling him a fag or queer and pushing him around. After that, he realized the kid was in the same boat he was, if for different reasons.
He’d overheard the commanding officer telling him off for various things before a few key words slipped out. Words such as “heathen”, “psycho”, and “gypsy cunt”. None of it made sense at first, but then he noticed how Walter always seemed aware of things that were happening, before they happened.
The rest of the week had been a game of hide and seek. He would hide Walter, and the rest of the guys would try and seek him. The boy, however, wasn’t very good at staying hidden because his damn job kept him sprinting about like a rabbit.
Private Stern had explained all that to a strange man named Freedman hours before Walter opened his eyes.
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