The echo of gunfire thundered across the sun drenched mountains, ricocheting in booming roars over the rugged desert.
Specialist Martinez and the soldiers of Forward Operating Base Golden Gate observed from behind the Hesco barriers built into the undulating swell of the mountain. The gunfire clattered and crashed, reverberating against the teeth-like ridge. The final burst faded and was swallowed by the immeasurable silence of the valley, and the soldiers stared as if seeing beyond the harsh landscape and into the heart of war itself.
“What the fuck are they shooting at?” Lee said.
“As long as it ain’t us,” McCray replied.
Martinez frowned, thumbing a blue and orange baseball team’s color bracelet, the same that, thousands of miles away, his son wore. Months into deployment, and he had survived ambushes, IED attacks, mortar fire, and countless firefights.
Fear was an ever present companion. And yet, hearing their enemy fire upon something other than them sent a deeper disquiet through Martinez’s insides.
He was not alone. Staff Sergeant Mitchell doubled guard for the coming night, and the men did not protest. No grumbles or sarcastic remarks. The howling wind carried the stillness of a watching predator, the held breath of dread, and no one ignored it.
The men went to their tasks, losing themselves in routine, the daily grind of survival. The radio chattered with reports of dead and fleeing enemy spotted in the near distance. Questions creased the men’s faces, but none dared ask that which froze their hearts: if not them, then who was killing their enemy?
The sun shaped the shadows until they were black doppelgangers of the mountains. The horizon burned red, and then darkness bathed the valley. A few lamplights were all the evidence that the FOB was still there, pinpricks in the ancient curtain of night.
Martinez held his gun close, counting the moments until he could once more sit beside his family, watching a baseball game. Win or lose, it did not matter. As long as they…
A body crashed into the radio equipment, charred, broken, lifeless. Before Martinez could scream, a roar tore the silence, rising into a hellish shriek. Then a geyser of flame carpeted the base from the ridge, muffling the screams of burning men.
Martinez stared wide-eyed into the darkness above, spying in the glare of fire what should never be seen, a monster borne out of cruelty and etched into mythology, there forgotten for the true horror that it was.
He screamed and fired his gun…
After, when the men in the suits were gone, when his discharge came with the signed promise that he had witnessed the men of his unit die in an accidental explosion, Martinez sat beside his son at the game, trying to savor a hotdog. But when the bat cracked and the crowd roared, he heard the cry of a monstrous voice, felt the breath of flame and death, and understood that the wilds of the world were the empires of abominations.