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

cared much for this remark. They all turned away from me and looked vacantly out the empty windows.

I wondered if the parents of the dead children could possibly forgive us. But I knew better. If you killed children, I thought, the world stirred in the end, and somewhere someone would be expecting justice. No one said it, but the real question looming over us was whether the city would discover us before the Army.

Just as an awkward silence settled over us, I heard a UH-60 Black Hawk rotor beating faintly in the distance. I’d been in the cavalry long enough to distinguish the sounds of different helicopters. The UH-60 was heaven or hell, life or death, depending on who you were. We held our breath, but it turned and flew off in another direction. The slap and thump followed in its wake, a retreating wave.

Then there was another one, a lone Cobra. They were gathering, several of them now, circling and moving toward us. We all stood, and we could just make them out as small dots on the horizon. Santiago told us to put our rucksacks on and to get ready to run down the steps to the field below. The helicopters were cutting in fast, flying low over the rooftops. It was gorgeous, beautiful, exactly what we’d been longing for.

My rucksack was heavy, and it bounced around on my back and hips as I ran down the steps. We stopped at the bottom and crouched behind the low concrete wall that separated the field from the stands.

Just as the first UH-60 began to descend into the stadium, an RPG sailed past it unexpectedly. The helicopter pulled up clumsily. Another Black Hawk tried to land and we started onto the field to meet it. But as it settled in the middle of the field, another RPG sailed out of one of the long tunnels that led onto it. We watched as the mouth of the tunnel slowly filled with a motley assortment of fighters. Then the .50 caliber and the minigun on the UH-60 started firing into the tunnel, and we all made a break for the helicopter.

The enemy was fast and there were enough of them to cover the ground between us and the helicopter. Cooper was running a few feet in front of me when he took a bullet and doubled over to the ground. I grabbed his LBE strap and dragged him back to the low concrete wall where Santiago and Zeller had retreated. The stadium was filling with smoke. They had us pinned down.

Cooper was bleeding profusely from a wound in his chest. The helicopters weren’t doing much good. Bullets hit the wall in front of us and cracked overhead. Cooper’s lips quivered, but I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to say something or simply to breathe. I put my head close to his lips, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I pushed a compound press down over the wound. I’d never touched another man’s blood before. I tried to imagine that it was something else.

“We’ve got to get to that bird,” yelled Santiago.

“We won’t make it across with him,” I said. “They’ll tear us up.” But I knew that we had to move.

Santiago lifted Cooper into a fireman’s carry and we all took off for the helicopter, bullets flying around us. We didn’t get far before an RPG sailed close overhead and we hit the dirt, Santiago falling awkwardly beneath the weight of Cooper.

Then another RPG flashed past the tail of the Black Hawk and into the stands behind us. The explosion seemed small and weak for a moment, then it was deafening and the world went silent. After a few confusing moments I could hear again, barely, through a high-pitched whistle in my ears.

As if to join the small amount of smoke emanating from the stands, a puff of black exhaust kicked out of the engine of the UH-60, which seemed to shudder as it pulled back up above the field, the door gunner firing at the tunnel. I saw Heath and Fizer in the helicopter next to the door gunner, firing their weapons as well.

The helicopter shook and sputtered. There was a hole in the tail of the aircraft, and more dark smoke coughed out of the engine. Then suddenly a large caliber gun opened up at the helicopters from another tunnel. It looked to be mounted on a light truck.

“I can’t carry him alone,” Santiago said. There was blood on his cheek and shoulder.

Zeller grabbed Cooper’s legs and the two of them carried him toward a tunnel.

A Cobra helicopter set its nose at the truck and fired. A rocket crashed into the truck and that part of the stadium sagged with the weight of the explosion. Now rockets were flying from all directions. I could feel the dull chop of the blades as the helicopters turned and tried to land again. The air was thick with black smoke that tasted like burning metal.

Then suddenly the helicopters turned away. I felt the thud of the rotors as they faded into the distance. They were leaving us there.

After a brief pause, Santiago pointed toward a large opening across the field that looked like the main gate. Santiago and Zeller each grabbed one of Cooper’s LBE straps, I slung my weapon and grabbed his legs, and we made our way toward it. We went unnoticed through the smoke and stench of the wounded.

As I ran, I gagged and spit to get the taste out of my mouth. We moved forward, surrounded by moans and unintelligible curses. Beyond the smoke, the world was all eyes. I tripped over a body and braced for a scream, but there was no response.

As we made our way out of the stadium, I took a single look back and saw a woman trying to emerge from the smoke. She was dragging herself along the ground, wounded badly. I thought for an instant of