End of the Road (14 page)

He lay on his stomach at the flap and with
the tiniest flick of a finger, lifted the canvas to look outside.
In the dark he could see nothing, only the remnants of a fire and a
pot turned on its side. No movement struck his attention, but then
from that angle, his line of vision wasn't the greatest.

“
Now, John,
hurry.”

Ralph's voice called to him, a beacon in
that dismal hell. Pushing himself up, John bolted through the flaps
and sprinted sideways, crashing into the trees. Gunfire exploded
behind and Ralph called for the retreat. The pine he ducked beside
exploded, splinters driving into the arm he had thrown over his
face, into his neck and chest. Stumbling, his foot caught on a root
and he fell hard on one knee.

Before he could straighten, he felt a hand
at his arm pulling him up. “We'd best run for it now.”

“
Thank you, sir.” Such
paltry words for a feeling of gratitude he could never
express.

He and the lieutenant, along with a dozen
other men fled the camp, leaving food and clothing behind. As they
crashed through the trees with shouts and shots behind them, John
felt a twinge of guilt that so many men had stayed just so that he
could sneak out Rebecca's letter. Never again would he sleep until
it was in his pocket safely tucked away.

Ralph led the men along the river as the sky
brightened and the day warmed. Stragglers joined the group and
slowly the regiment regrouped. The new day dawned miserably on most
of the men to whom the loss of food and shelter was a dark blow,
but to John, he felt the loss somewhat less. He bore his luck close
to his heart, lost and regained in a night.

They stopped mid-morning to regroup. Half
the regiment was lost in the woods and the rest were tired and
sore, a few wounded. John's arms itched and stung, although he'd
pulled out as many of the slivers as he could find while they
walked.

They built a make-shift camp, hunted for
squirrel and pooled the food from the packs rescued in the melee.
Without a fire, the camp was cold. John sat in a small group, his
back to the tree, still picking bits of wood out of his skin.

“
So what's in that letter
worth your life?” Smith, the gruff fellow who held the forward
position with Ralph, found a patch of moss and sat down.

Unfolding the letter, John skipped to the
part that he thought could somehow justify his actions, the small
section that might make sense to five men who risked themselves for
his damn romantic notions. The part he'd never read aloud before.
He swallowed and found the words he'd kept to himself for so
long.

With a rough voice, he read Rebecca's
letter. “You are going to be a father, and I pray this letter finds
you safe and bears you home to us. Every night I pretend you are
holding my hand and we are discussing names for our child, and
every morning I think I am one day closer to seeing you again. When
I feel the seed of our love blossoming within...” John blushed and
stopped reading. He skipped that part and read from the end. “I
pray you come home soon. All my love, Rebecca.”

The men were too rough and had seen too much
to do anything maudlin with the words. They clapped his shoulder,
wished him luck with the baby, and joked about whether he'd be
putting the letter in his boot for safe-keeping.

John returned the laughter. “I'll be sure to
keep it close from now on. Next time I go rushing back into a
fight, it'll be for some beef.”

With the afternoon sun warming the thicket,
he pulled his cap over his eyes and pretended to sleep.

In his thoughts he returned to his last day
with Rebecca before joining his regiment. He thought they'd made
the babe during his last night home with her, a frantic coupling
when the two shared equal parts of pain and love, wondering when
they would see one another again and worrying that this night would
be their last. Not that they spoke the words out loud. Words had
power.

A week later and John was back in his
regiment running up a hillock once more into a horrific slaughter.
By the end of the day with blood flowing in the fields, his lungs
full of smoke, and his ears ringing, John found himself exhausted.
A sharp crack pierced the air and John threw himself into a ditch,
finding himself next to Ralph.

It wasn't a smile really. One didn't smile
when the whole world was shaking loose, but John felt deep relief
at seeing Ralph unharmed. He gripped Ralph's shoulder and the two
men nodded to one another with solemn camaraderie. They shared the
ditch and looked out together on the field. The Confederates were
mixed up with the Federals and John worried more than once that he
might be shooting a friend.

He and Ralph sat side by side taking turns
packing down powder and reloading. When the volleys finally
stopped, John’s head ached and his ears hurt. They were signaling
to one another by hand and fighting in tandem. They waited for
several minutes, listening for the sound of the drum and the fife
above the random crackle of the shots taken. The confederacy was in
retreat. Feeling stiff and exhausted, John lifted his head like a
cautious turtle to see a strange field of men, most of them
stretched out like so many fallen branches, some long cold, some
still screaming for help. He scanned the horizon and when it seemed
safe, slowly lifted his head over the ditch.

Battle had taught John not to stand tall. He
always felt naked that first moment up, with an itch on the back of
his neck, the feeling that at any moment he would lose his head or
an arm or leg, and it made him hunch a bit and feel shaky. It was
just too easy to die on a battlefield.

Ralph followed him out of the ditch. Across
the field, other men were slowly coming out, shocked that after
hours of battle, the confederates had retreated. Weary to his soul,
John closed his eyes. He sought a memory of Rebecca, the moment in
the church when they first kissed before God and man and the stray
butterfly that meandered across the chapel floor when he pulled
away. He felt the sun on his face but the smell of sulfur
intruded.

A shout and John felt himself flying through
the air, pushed by the lieutenant as a shot crackled in the air. He
fell hard. Ralph was lying heavily on John. John pushed back,
rolling him away. Ralph gurgled blood with a shot in the lung, a
shot meant for John, and Ralph was breathing in a high-pitched
whistle. Three more shots rang out as men from Ralph's regiment
executed the shooter. But it was too late for Ralph.

John knelt beside the lieutenant. “Ralph?
We'll get you to the field station.”

Coughing blood and his voice thick with
fluid, Ralph stared at the blue sky. “I want to see my Mama.”

It felt strange hearing those words from a
man so brave. And when John heard Ralph speak, all he could think
of was Rebecca and that she was going to be a mother, and please
God, don't ever let his child die on a battlefield calling for his
Mama. As the light faded from Ralph's eyes, John felt cold, a
bitter coldness that somehow covered any fear or anger or
loneliness he should have felt. He knelt at Ralph's side for an
eternity too empty and numb to think clearly. And soon Ralph was
gone, to his own eternity leaving all else behind.

John sat by Ralph's side in a daze until
Jarvis found him and helped him stand. He didn't write again for
nearly three days and when he did, he was exhausted to the point of
illness. But it felt important. He might not have another chance to
say what needed to be said.

He wrote,
“
My dearest Rebecca, I look forward with
great longing to see you. I hope this letter finds you well. I fear
that the babe will come before I see home again. There is a man
here to whom I owe my life. If our child is a son, I'd like to name
him Ralph in his honor. Please go into the garden for me and spend
a few minutes looking at the daisies, and maybe at the same time, I
will be imagining you there.”

John stopped writing. It wouldn't be enough,
the naming of a son. But what more could he do? Ralph was already
gone, and it would be a long road home.

Back to Top

Copyright March, 2013 Jeanette Raleigh

Jeanette Raleigh is an
author and artist who lives in the Seattle area. Some of the
characters in “The Long Road Home” can be found in the novel
The Zombie-Cowboy
Two-Step
slated for release later this
year.

Chapter 13

Joint Venture

By L. S. Burton

Let there be light.

Every forty-five minutes the Earth was
reborn. With a hint of azure blue — a curved crack in the perfect
black of space — splashing across a mystery continent, a brilliant
flare wrapped white arms of light around the egg of the Earth and
gently coaxed it out of shadow.

Specialist Riley’s stomach
flip-flopped. One moment he was floating peacefully in the black
cradle of space, the next his legs suddenly felt heavy and he was
teetering two hundred miles up in the air with nothing beneath his
feet. The ISA hadn’t simulated
that
sensation for him during his sessions in the water
tank — that practical dread screaming from his hindbrain to
flail! Grasp something!

Gripping his toolbox tighter he put one hand
to the side of the station to steady himself, a bulge forming in
his throat, sweat melting onto his forehead as the sun raised the
temperature against his suit by nearly four hundred degrees.

“
Don’t look at it too
long,” said his fellow astronaut, Yuri, with his nearly-perfect
English, not looking away from the open panel of the shuttle. “You
don’t want to be throwing up in your suit. We have yet two more
wires to replace, and I need you. No good to be the first man to
drown in space, no?

Riley heard Yuri chuckle
over the com but Riley was busy focusing on the lines on the back
of his gloves and didn’t find the idea funny. This was his first
EVA, and absolutely everyone,
everyone
, had told him it would be
spectacular — to the extent that he’d mentally start a countdown
after a handshake — but words could barely begin to describe the
majesty and the panic of actually being there.

Nicolas, the other Russian
on their rotation, had tapped him with a grin inside the station
while he was going through his pre-breathe routine to say,
“
You’ll be the monkey hanging from the
tallest tree
.” Nobody back in Florida had
put it quite that way, but, as it turned out, that was a pretty
good way to put it.

But again … not
funny
.

Riley swallowed hard. He’d waited his whole
life for this moment, and even though he wanted to enjoy the bauble
of the Earth slipping by at five miles a second beneath him, it
wasn’t a good idea, and he focused on the side of Yuri’s helmet
instead.

Yuri was quiet for the moment. Doing
delicate work inside a suit was difficult. The fingers of the
gloves were thick and spring-loaded. Simply clenching your fists a
few times would make your tendons ache. Little wires were
practically impossible to pinch, and you needed to stretch your
fingers to rest them every few seconds.

Luckily, the blown motors that rotated their
solar panels weren’t vital to their immediate survival; they had
time to address the problem properly. Space was hard on equipment.
Too often the shuttle crews were little more than astro-repairmen,
and Riley was anxious to get this done and get back to his
experiments with tomato growth in zero-g. He wasn’t sure he trusted
Nicolas to follow his watering protocols properly while he was
out.

Yuri leaned back from the panel, shook his
head, then leaned in again. Riley readied to pass him whatever tool
he’d need, but a minute later Yuri leaned back and twisted his
shoulders violently, which caused his whole body to pivot.

“
Riley,” said Yuri over the
com. “Grab my helmet.”

Riley hesitated, unsure if this were another
of Yuri’s little jokes. If it were, it would be rather
unprofessional. Of all the deadpan Russian scientists Riley had met
over the years, he had to land a rotation with the only two
comedians….

“
Riley, my helmet, please,”
Yuri repeated.

Nicolas’ voice then sounded over the com.
“What’s the problem, Yuri?”

“
Just do it, Riley. It is
making me crazy.”

Riley was sure Nicolas was holding back
laughter. “Having difficulties, Comrade Golgin?”

Yuri rattled off a string of excited
Russian. Riley’s command of the language was rather good but he
couldn’t catch half of what Yuri was saying; almost certainly most
of it was swears, in particular at Nicolas’ use of “comrade.”

Carefully, Riley let the tethered toolbox
float next to him on its umbilical and grabbed Yuri by the helmet.
It felt weird to be doing, almost taboo. Yuri’s head jerked
briefly, then a sigh of relief fuzzed the com with static. “Oh,
that’s better. Thank you, Riley.”

“
What the heck was that all
about?”

On the com it sounded like Nicolas was
breaking himself apart with laughter.

“Nicolas,” said Yuri, “he’s
done this twice before. He moved the nose scratcher piece inside my
helmet just a few centimeters … just out of reach. That
durak.
The worst part,
once I realize, that’s when the itch is like fire.”

~*~

Thirty minutes later the
Earth slimmed down to a sliver, then a line in space, then
blip
, it vanished into the
deepest black imaginable. Without dust or the moon to reflect
light, Riley’s arm ended at the elbow in the shadow of the toolkit
he was carrying; every so often he’d wiggle his fingers inside the
gloves to make sure they were still there.