The Bible or the Axe by William O. Levi

Author:William O. Levi [Levi, O. William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57567-649-4
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2005-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

An Unexpected Turn

Gradually, the faces of my friends faded to outlines and then shadows as the light waned. I could hear the shuffling of feet as soldiers and prisoners shifted positions in the hard seats, and I could see the occasional flare of red when one of the soldiers took a drag off his cigarette. Although I was exhausted, there was no way to rest. My mind continued to form prayers, sometimes coherent and sometimes not. Occasionally, rough spots on the road would jolt painfully up my spine as the lorry’s wheels dipped and bounced. The constant grating noise from the old diesel engine made my head throb and my ears ring.

We had been traveling perhaps three or four hours when the lorry’s engine noises suddenly increased in pitch from a grate to a whine. I could feel a new vibration shake the old truck so that my teeth rattled. Over the din, I could hear the soldiers complaining to one another in Arabic. Then, without warning, the engine sputtered and died. The lorry ground to a halt along the rough path that served for a road.

It was a moonless night, black as pitch. There was cursing and more shuffling of feet as the soldiers pulled on the parking brake and lifted the hood. I heard the driver call to the cigarette-smoking soldier, something about a light. Inexplicably, the soldiers who had been guarding us hopped off of the lorry and went around to the front of the vehicle to help inspect the engine. For that uncertain moment, we were left unguarded.

The three of us needed no further prompting to know that this was our cue. Without a word, we jumped from the back of the lorry and ran blindly into the darkness. In the few seconds it took for the soldiers to register the sound of our feet hitting the ground, we had already made some distance. There was shouting and confusion among the soldiers, and a few seconds later we heard the sound of assault rifles. Although the shots were fired in our general direction, there was no way the soldiers could see and aim accurately in the blackness. We were all fast runners, used to sprinting through the wilderness. Raw fear lent us speed and sharpened our senses as we ran. I could hear my friends nearby, crashing through the underbrush, and I used the sound to guide me.

In the back of my mind it registered that the shouts of the soldiers were increasingly distant. I knew they were giving chase, but they were running blindly too. We had a head start, and we were running for our lives—without guns and gear to weigh us down. I can’t say how long the soldiers chased us, but I know we kept running long after they had turned back. They were probably more concerned about the inconvenience of spending the night in the middle of nowhere with a broken lorry. It would be a long walk for them in the morning if they couldn’t repair it.

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