Page 13 of What I Should Have Done

Every breath drawn was strained for fear that I’d alert whoever, or whatever that was, to my position.

Adrenaline shivered down my skin.

The not-knowing was not something that they had warned me about in training. Waiting, yes. But this certainty that the grim reaper was waiting at the edge of the valley with the uncertainty of how he was going to show his scythe to take us from this world, that was not.

Scanning the desert once more, I heard it before I saw it—a familiar thwomp.

“GET OUT!” I screamed as a mortar shot through the sand, sailing roughly an inch above the ground.

The team raced out of the door just as the projectile made contact with the side of the building.

Cement flew apart, the blast shooting out in a cloud. And I couldn’t see them anymore.

I couldn’t hear them.

My ears rang as I swiveled the rifle, desperation filling the deadened pocket anticipation had left.

Another thwomp.

And a second mortar sailed through the sand from the same place as before.

“Phoenix!” I shouted. The blast reverberated through the valley. My body shook; my rifle trembled beneath the impact.

Yet Dom didn’t answer.

There was nothing but tan dust swirling into the sky.

They were gone. My team was gone.

The building collapsed, broken in shambles, shattering to the ground that vibrated beneath me. Sand sprayed upwards, clouding my surroundings. The valley was a ball of fragmented dirt.

Swallowing the panic flooding any of my focused rationale, I narrowed my scope in on the location that the two mortars had come from.

“Viper! Matrix!” I hissed into the radio, but nothing except crackles and a third thwomp met my ears.

A new mortar sailed into the cloud of debris raining hell down in the valley.

Bracing, it slammed into more of the building that I couldn’t see. The impact rumbled beneath my stomach.

“Bernie? Tank?” I asked through the radio as a groan of metal pierced the crumbling of cement and stone. “Anyone.”

The sand beneath my belly shook. Pebbles vibrated on top of the boulder next to me, bouncing onto the blanket shielding me from sight.

Squinting through the rising debris, a hole in the dune appeared. Like a tunnel cut through a mountain for a train to track through, a similar passage formed behind a garage-like door rising in the side of the dune.

Gradually, as grains of sand continued to drape across the dark opening like a waterfall made of dust, the area behind the camouflaged door exposed a much easier route to and from this crater that my team was trapped in. Glinting in the dark tunnel behind the new opening, the blurry outline of a vehicle idled, waiting.

“COME ON GUYS! SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING!” I shouted into the radio.

Peering through my scope, moonlight bounced off of the gatling gun mounted to the top of the lingering dune buggy.

Shit, shit, shit.

Sighting in the tan sand rail, its engine suddenly roared, and it blazed like lightning into the valley. Squinting through the debris from the blasts, I counted five insurgents, including the one standing behind the gun.

Sand sprayed out behind the buggy’s wheels as a second sand vehicle joined the first, toting the same occupancy.

Outnumbered and outgunned, my stomach dropped, and nausea curdled in my throat.

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