The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (books for students to read TXT) 📕

the porch and watch their neighbors suspiciously while others were curious to see what might happen next. But in this city, where people were routinely hacked up with machetes, shot in the streets, or dying of famine and disease, they’d seen it all before.

Men with Kalashnikovs passed us indifferently, moving in the opposite direction. We might as well have been ghosts to them, haunting the wrong time and place.

When we heard vehicles approaching we hid in doorways or ducked into alleys in case they were the technicals we’d heard about, old trucks mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers. At one point we hid in the front yard of what looked to have been a great mansion. We stood among empty pots and planters, in an area where a beautiful garden once thrived.

About halfway to the stadium we stopped near a fountain that was the only decoration I could see in a massive plaza. It had been about forty minutes since we left the building. Kids mulled about. The fountain was empty and we took a seat on its lip. It was still unbearably hot in the city, but somehow the wind gave me a chill.

An astonishing number of children milled about in the plaza. This was a city for desolate and abandoned children.

Mangy dogs roamed among the children, in groups of three or four. For the most part people ignored them, but if they got too close people kicked them in the ribs.

There were vendors everywhere. Heath walked over to one of them and bought a beer. Santiago watched him.

“You brought money?” I asked Heath when he joined us again.

“You didn’t?” he replied.

“I couldn’t think of a reason,” I said.

Santiago took a five-dollar bill out of the little cover in which he carried his ID card. He walked over and bought six beers from a man as if he were simply a tourist. When he came back he handed one to each of us. I knew my stomach couldn’t handle it, so I put mine in my rucksack. The others sipped at theirs.

I watched the kids walking around us. They looked us over closely, inspecting our faces, uniforms, patches, and weapons.

When Santiago finished his beer he rolled the empty bottle toward a massive statue of a horse in the center of the fountain. The horse was the color of sand. Rearing back on its hind legs, it appeared to bite at the sky with its open mouth and menacing face.

As we were leaving the plaza, we hid in a doorway as an old truck rattled past. It was ludicrous, a junker of a truck mounted with a giant Russian anti-aircraft gun. A pickup truck followed, with about fifteen people packed in the back and hanging from its sides. They were armed to the teeth, and appeared to be prodding the city for something.

It took us several hours to jog from the plaza to the stadium. Once we’d arrived, we hid inside. Everyone breathed heavily as we sat in seats about halfway up from the field. The city roared dully behind us.

“Are you sure no one followed us?” I asked Santiago. He’d been at the rear of the squad.

“Give me the radio,” he said.

He tried the radio, but it didn’t make a sound. He switched out the battery for a new one. Still nothing.

“Is it broke?” asked Zeller. He already knew the answer. We all knew the answer.

“You mean we only have our squad radios,” I said.

We sat back in our seats. I put my feet up on the back in front of me, and dried my face briefly with a T-shirt from my rucksack. I took a sip of warm water and rinsed my mouth before spitting it out. I took another small sip and swallowed.

Next to me, Cooper emptied his canteen with loud gulps. He breathed heavily, and when he exhaled sweat and spit fell onto his shirt and pants.

Santiago took his Kevlar off and lit a cigarette. I wanted to remind him that a burning cigarette could be seen from miles away. It was a lesson Santiago himself had taught us before we left, illustrating it one night in an open field. “I am the light of this world,” he’d screamed at us from across a field, a cigarette held out in front of him to make the point. “This little light of mine,” he sang, “I’m gonna let it shine.” Everyone was stupid in Santiago’s world.

“When they can’t get us on the radio,” I said, “they’ll come looking. They know to find us here.” It was true, this was our extraction point.

“It’s just that it would have been nice to let them know that we started something,” Santiago said.

“We smoked the fuck out of those kids,” Cooper said, staring at the field.

“Yeah,” I said. He said smoke as if meaning to invoke the spirit world, as if it were an offering.

“Yeah,” I said, “we smoked the fuck out of some kids.” It made it sound like a light show, a matter of smoke and mirrors. Almost as if it could be undone.

“I was born here,” Cooper said out of nowhere.

Two dead boys. I tried to picture their faces, but I couldn’t. It was the same with love, I’d once been told. When you are away from the person you love, a girl once told me, if you can’t see their face, that means it is love.

The bombing seemed to be subsiding. I wondered whether the grand strategy would really work. Maybe you really could scare a city into submission. We’ll just wait here, I thought, and they’ll come for us soon enough. The night was giving way to daylight, to a full-fledged Sunday morning.

My ears hummed and my head felt heavy. I leaned forward and rested my head in my hands. So this was what combat is like, to engage the enemy and fire your weapon. I felt renewed in the world, alive and well. The heat of my sickness was gone,