Low Country by Eric L. Haney

Author:Eric L. Haney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

THE WEATHER HAD CLEARED A LITTLE during the night, and the next morning a few shafts of sunlight managed, here and there, to find their way through gaps in the clouds.

I had slept all right but had been awakened once by a recurring dream. It’s one that has its source in my days as a young soldier.

It is December 19, 1989, the first night of my first war, and we are in a vicious firefight in Chorrillo district, the wooden slums of the old city of Panama. The buildings have caught fire from the tracers and the detonating shells and are burning furiously. Thousands of civilians, fleeing the conflagration and crazed with fear, run screaming through the streets, oblivious to the battle that rages around them.

My squad fights its way deeper and deeper into the heart of the city. We pause in a narrow street, and then, above us, I hear screams. I look up, and there on a third-story balcony I see a person—a man or woman, I cannot tell. But the flames of the burning interior are licking out over the person and I see smoke as the clothes begin to scorch. I’m horrified at the sight and feel helpless to assist.

“Jump!” I shriek at the top of my lungs, trying to make myself heard above the raging firefight. “Jump!”

But then I see that the person is trapped. The balcony is wrapped in iron burglar bars—bars meant to keep out intruders but now separating the person from safety and life itself.

I want to look away, but I can’t. I now see that it is a woman. She grabs the iron bars and shakes them with her entire body as she tries madly to escape the greedy flames. Then, she throws back her head and howls in agony as a broad tongue of fire reaches out, and her hair goes up like a torch.

“Do something!” I scream in impotence and terror. “Somebody do something! She’s burning to death! She’s burning!”

Blamm!

A single shot rings out from behind me. The woman’s hands fly from the bars and she smashes to the floor of the balcony and out of sight; her frenzied screams of tortured agony silent now—replaced by the roar of the raging fire.

I look over my shoulder, and there stands my squad leader, Sgt. Marcus Evans, his rifle still to his shoulder, and his face drenched in a greasy sweat. His stares fixedly at the balcony—empty now but for the flames gushing obscenely from the door behind.

Evans slowly lowers his rifle and then looks imploringly, hungrily, at each one of us huddled there in the narrow street of the burning city. We stare back at him with empty eyes—seven soldiers, stunned by the dawning comprehension of his merciful yet horrible act. We are mute, and time stands still.

Evans turns his face to me. “Move out, Tanner,” he says in a quiet voice, one I can barely hear above the roar of combat and conflagration.

I give a last glance at

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