A soldier shoved him forward, said, “Stand right there and don’t f**king move.”
“Why?”
“We have to inspect you.”
“For what?”
“Shut the f**k up.”
Jack stood in a line of ragged-looking people, some of whom had begun to cry.
The soldiers were backing away, Jack’s head swimming with the smell of whatever was cooking across the field.
As he glanced back toward the tents, his eyes caught on the several thousand square feet of raw, freshly-turned earth that he and the other prisoners stood at the edge of.
He looked at the bulldozer again.
By the time he understood what was happening, the two dozen soldiers who’d herded them into the middle of the field were raising their AR-15s.
Someone said, “Oh my God.”
Several prisoners took off running, and a soldier squeezed off four controlled bursts. They fell and the prisoners were screaming, others trying to flee, and one of the soldiers yelled and they all opened fire at once.
The noise was tremendous. Slap of bullets into meat. The schizophrenic madness of the machineguns. The screams. All down the line, people were tumbling back into the pit. Maybe two seconds had passed, the muzzleflashes bright in the evening, and the soldiers already edging forward and still firing.
It felt like someone punched him in the shoulder, and then Jack was staring up at the clouds which were catching sunlight on their underbellies, people falling into the pit all around him. Bloodspray everywhere and the smell of shit, urine, and rust becoming prevalent like the sensory embodiment of terror, warm blood leaking all over him, down into his face, appendages writhing all around him. Then the shooting stopped and there came a moment of silence, Jack’s ear drums in shock, recovering from the noise, before the sound of a hundred dying people faded in. If Jack had believed in hell, he couldn’t have imagined it sounding any worse than this chorus of agony—groans, moaning, weeping, screaming, people dying loudly, quietly, some cursing their murderers, some begging them to do what could not be undone, some just asking why. And the realization slowly dawning on Jack amid the horror—I’m still alive, I’m still alive.
A voice lifted out of the open grave, “Oh God, please finish me.”
Jack’s shoulder was burning now.
He could see the soldiers standing at the edge of the pit, Jack thinking only of his children as he pulled several bodies over him, and then the machineguns erupted again with a blaze of fire, and he could feel the bodies that shielded him shaking with the impact of the bullets. Shit himself waiting to be shot, but it never happened.
This time, when the guns went quiet, the groans were half what they had been.
Jack’s entire body trembled.
He willed himself to be still.
The soldiers near him were talking.
“—don’t serve that meatloaf again. Fucking rancid shit.”
“I love the mac and cheese though. Don’t disrespect.”
“Oh, hell yeah. You got a crawler over there.”
Two bursts from the machinegun.
“All right, boys, who drew cleanup?”
The light was abandoning the sky, and there was little in the way of groaning now, just desperate breathing all around him.
“Nathan, Matt, Jones, and Chris.”
“Well f**king get to it, boys, and before you lose your light. We’re going to party tonight. God, this is going to be a pretty green piece of grass next spring.”
Jack could hear the soldiers walking away, the sound of distant voices, still some movement in the pit.
As one of the bodies on top of him began to twitch, a noise rose up at the far end of the pit, followed by another and another, the last one close to where he lay.
He watched as one of the soldiers climbed down into the pit. They held a chainsaw with a three-foot guide bar, wore a white vinyl apron, a helmet with a plexiglass faceplate. He started across the top layer of bodies, slashing at anything that moved.
Jack tried to lay still, ignoring the burn in his shoulder.
The body on top of him sat up, and in the low light, Jack could see her long, black hair falling down her back. She was crying and he reached up to try and pull her down, but the soldier with the chainsaw had already seen her and was wading over through the bodies.
Jack heard her scream just barely and then the soldier swung his giant chainsaw.
She fell back onto Jack and the blood flowed, blinding him, choking him, and he lay there unmoving as the solider passed by, the noise of the chainsaws growing softer.
Someone yelled, “Jones, look at this guy. Untouched. Didn’t even catch a bullet. Keep playing dead, motherfucker.”
The two-stroke wailed and there were seconds of the most horrendous screaming Jack had ever heard, and then the chainsaw motors idled again.
The soldiers wandered through the pit for another ten minutes, and then the chainsaws went quiet and the voices slipped out of range.
Jack didn’t move for a long time. The blood that covered him becoming sticky and cold and not another sound daring to lift out of the open grave.
His shoulder throbbing.
The clouds overhead gone dark and the sky almost void of light.
He pushed the headless body off of him and sat up.
Off in the distance toward the tents, a bonfire raged and there were fifty or sixty men gathered around it, their laughter and voices carrying across the field.
Jack crawled onto the surface of the pit, a few people still barely hanging on, groaning as he moved across them, one man begging for his help. The pain in Jack’s shoulder making it nearly impossible to set his weight on his right arm, but he finally reached the back edge of the pit and climbed out into the grass.
He kept moving on his stomach across the field through that strange and fleeting grayness between twilight and night. A hundred yards out from the pit, exhaustion stopped him. Still had a fifth of a mile to go to the trees, but he couldn’t catch his breath. Lay on his side watching the bonfire and the soldiers in camp, the reflection of the fire bright off the shine of their black leather boots.
Jack crawled again.
Another twenty minutes before he passed through the wall of trees, stopping ten feet inside the forest. Retched his guts out though there was nothing left but the sip of water he’d had hours ago in the back of the tractor trailer.
He crawled to the nearest spruce tree under an overhang of branches.
On the cusp of pitch-black darkness in the shadow of the forest.
He touched his right shoulder—painful and hot, though not as bad as the last bullet he’d stopped. Couldn’t see the wound, but running his hand along the back of his shoulder, he thought he could feel the exit hole—a circular flare of burned skin.