October 31, 2012: Day Four

Max doesn't think he's ever walked so far. Every inch of him aches and with each new step, pulling his boot up out of the mud is just a little bit harder. His neck is covered in angry red bites from a mosquito who drank its fill while Max tried to sleep the night before, and he'd scratch if it didn't mean he had to take his hands off of his gun.

There's mud on his face and on his hands and underneath his fingernails, and he's pretty sure he needs to change his socks, but there's another three miles to go before they'll stop and rest.

There was a time that Max would've said something to lighten the mood, but the jokes all died in his mind about a mile back, when they marched past what looked a hell of a lot like somebody's foot.

"Come on, stop worrying about it. Nothing's gonna happen to me. I could go in the Army and not get shipped to anywhere. Play a lot of cards, learn how to box."

There are gonna be a hell of a lot of 'I told you so's' waiting for it when he gets home.

If he makes it home.

Sometimes he doesn't think he even remembers what home looks like.


Thirty-six hours later and Max is still sitting in a closet in some house off of Randolph street. He had to break a window to get in, but the glass is so dingy and the house so fucked up anyway, that he's sure that nobody lives there. It looks like nobody lives anywhere. Going on four days now, and the only other person he's seen is that soldier. That fucking faceless bastard that nearly shot him back in his apartment the other day.

It took Max the better part of an hour to lose him, ducking down alleys and trying to remember what the field manuals said about what you're supposed to do if you're caught without a weapon.

He doesn't want a weapon. He doesn't want to shoot one again. He won't shoot one again.

The siren comes and goes, the darkness comes and goes. Max only sleeps for maybe five minutes at a time, jerking awake in the near-darkness to sounds that only exist in his head.

He wakes and he thinks about Pru, about that day she hid from everything in that closet in the hallway. He said then that it was because she was hung up on him-- and he'd thought maybe that was the case until that noise she made that they could hear, even thought the door-- but it was never about that. Prudence did a hell of a lot of running, but that was the only time Max had ever seen her hide. And maybe this isn't really like that at all, but he can't help but feel like a fucking coward either way.

"The sun is up, the sky is blue," he mutters to himself, and it doesn't mean he's any less fucking terrified or that he finally gets up, opens the door and walks out to look for something to eat (he's fucking starving). But at least his heart stops pounding and the world stops spinning. He feels a little bit less like he's about to dry heave in the corner.

His timing's pretty good though, because just as all that stops, and the smell of ammunition starts to fade again, Max can hear the siren in the distance, signaling the oncoming dark. He comes to his feet and finally gets a good look around the closet, finding a bag of golf clubs in the corner opposite, tucked behind a few winter coats.

Max settles back into his corner, a white-knuckled grip on the handle of one of the wedges, and he waits. For the fourth night in a row, he waits.

The sliver of daylight leaking in through the crack under the door fades away, and the siren goes quiet.

He doesn't know how many more days and nights of this he can take. And at least before he shipped out, he was able to tell everybody goodbye. Does his sister even know he's gone? Shit.

"I'm so fucking sorry, Luce," he says, though he knows that the words aren't going to make it to her, that they'll just end up lost in the dark along with him. Lost like so many other parts of himself that he ended up leaving back in the jungle.

Max brings up a hand to push his hair out of his face, and when he pulls it away, there's moisture on it from his eyes that he didn't realize was there at all.

Time loses meaning between the sirens, so he's not sure how long he cries after that. Maybe a minute, maybe an hour. Either way, he feels like shit because of it, and his eyes are red when the door flies open and a solider with no face drags him out of the closet by his ankle.

It's just the one guy, just like before, but he can't pull away, he's so fucking strong. Max shouts and screams as he remembers stories told over card games in their tents-- that night he made out with four packs of cigarettes and half his platoon hated him for a week-- about guys disappearing. Guys whose bodies were never found, even when they were still alive, when they could have been shipped back home.

"Ngừng hét lên! Hãy yên tĩnh!" Charlie shouts, and lets go of Max's leg once he's got him down the front stairs and out on the sidewalk, and Max has taken a couple of knocks to the head from the stairs. Sprawled out on the sidewalk, his head pounding, it's almost three full seconds before he remembers the wedge, and even with his vision blurring, he knows he's got to get to it. But he doesn't get an inch before the butt of Charlie's gun comes down on his leg, hard.

"Fuck you!" Max cries against the rough concrete of the pavement, just as another pair of boots walk into his blurry field of vision. Everything starts to go black, even as he fights it. He can't breathe and he can't think, and the world is blurring at the edges.

The boot connects with Max's side and he curls up tighter with an involuntary cry.


Private Billy Shears ate his gun the morning after the ambush.

He'd been fine two nights before, all of them telling stories from their sleeping spots, trying to forget the blisters on their feet and the aching muscles in their legs. He had a girl back home, Rose or Rita or something, and they'd all gotten so sick of him bringing her up that they'd throw their helmets at him.

Shears was going to go back and apologize for not sending enough letters home. He was going to buy her a ring.

Instead, they'd found him during his watch, slumped against a tree, the ground equal parts mud and brain and bone.

They'd all thought about it at one point, but Shears was the first guy who'd done it. The first one who'd given the goddamn war a "fuck you" that it couldn't push back against. He'd found somewhere to run that wasn't jail or Canada.

Some days, they all wanted to quit. Some days they all wanted to take the easy way out, let the world go dark and leave that fucking jungle.


Fuck, it'd be easy.

But Max thinks about Pru in that closet, and Sadie and Jojo and their music, Jude and his walls covered in charcoal sketches, and Lucy. Lucy who already lost Daniel and lost Max twice already. Who visited him every day no matter how fucked up he was or how little he talked, chasing the haze of the blue syringe.

The next time Charlie's boot swings near him to connect with his side, Max grabs it, pulling the Faceless soldier down onto the pavement with him. The other shouts words that Max doesn't understand, and he's pointing his gun, but they're tangled up and he can't get a line on Max without possibly hitting the other guy.

It should be funny, that something from late nights at Princeton, two A.M. trying to wrestle a joint from his buddy who's hogged it for about three turns now, is coming in handy, but the humor is lost as pain rings out in Max's head and in his leg and side. His hands touch metal as they struggle and his hand scrapes against the concrete.

He elbows a blank face, and in the split second that Charlie's stunned, gets a full grip on the gun and shoots.

So much of it is luck. He should be dead. He should have died back in Vietnam, he should have died back in his apartment two days ago, and the faceless soldier should have blown him away just then. Instead, he's sprawled on the pavement, blood seeping out onto the sidewalk.

Max rolls and stands, and pain shooting through his leg threatens to put him back on his ass again, but he manages to stay up.

He empties the rest of his gun into the other guy, shouting at the top of his lungs, screaming until his voice is all but gone. He doesn't even realize he's out of bullets at first, his finger cramped and wedged against the trigger, hands clenched tightly around the weapon.

The street is silent.

He's alone in the darkness.

Max wipes blood off of his face and it smears from forehead to cheek, his legs give out from under him and his stomach turns.

When he opens his eyes, the sun is out and the sky is blue, but his heart still won't slow down.