Shell Shocked by Eric Walters

Author:Eric Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2008-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I STUDIED THE FRONT PAGE of the latest edition of The Commando. It was posted on the bulletin board of the building I worked in, and in every other building around the facility.

There, above the fold, was one of the pictures I’d taken of the burning bus. It was a good picture. But that was the only thing in the whole article that was real. The story was about how the bus had overheated, resulting in a fire in the engine. It went on to say that three people, “the driver and two passengers who were on the bus,” had suffered “minor injuries” and that the bus itself was “beyond repair.” I guess that was true since it was now in a few thousand little pieces, none much bigger than the size of a seat cushion.

It wasn’t so much what it did say as what it didn’t. There was no mention of sabotage, dynamite, Jack driving the bus away or our names at all. My first chance at a big story—a story I’d witnessed myself—and I didn’t get to write it. Mr. Chalmers wrote it, but he only wrote what he’d been told by Mr. Granger, and that was what Bill had told him to say. I’d learned that Bill was a master at making up stories on the fly. When he told the story it was so real, with so much detail, that if I hadn’t been there myself I certainly would have believed him. After the war was over I could see him becoming a famous author, maybe writing spy stories—who knows, they might even become movies. I could picture Little Bill as some sort of secret agent guy, cool, calm and lethal. Then again, I knew nobody would ever write about any of this. The Official Secrets Act would make sure all this secret agent stuff stayed secret.

I knew the truth and I knew this was all a lie, but I figured in this case lying made sense. There was no need to worry the people in the plant, and it was best to downplay what Jack and I had done. There was no point in drawing any more attention to us, and this story kept us out of the picture. Really, not many people had seen us at the scene. There’d been only a few people standing by the bus, and then it had all happened so fast and we’d got far away pretty quickly. When the bus did blow up there’d been nobody out there in that field but Jack and me. And if it had blown up a few seconds earlier, we would still have been out there in the field … scattered around in little pieces so small you wouldn’t have known they were parts of a person.

At least that’s what Bill had told us when he’d led our debriefing the next day. Most of Jack’s hearing had come back by then, but he didn’t have much more to add to what I’d already told Mr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.