Love or Hate? by Rob Bronson

Author:Rob Bronson [Bronson, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bronson
Published: 2021-08-13T23:00:00+00:00

Story One (Continued)

Afghanistan

1975 (Thirty-Six Years Before the Vault)

The mother and father walk either side of their son. They have to drag him towards the Russians because he can no longer walk by himself.

The father turns back to his other son—the older one. He mouths something. The boy cannot hear, and he cannot lip-read, so he has no idea what his father is trying to tell him. All he knows is his head is pounding because he is surely about to die.

The older boy looks down at his bandaged hand. His father had smashed it to pieces in an attempt to save him the horrific fate of a suicide bomber. But that hadn’t fooled the two Mujahideen, and here he was—walking to his death with his younger brother being dragged up ahead by his mother and father.

He feels the weight of the jacket sap his energy. He hears an ominous click. And he knows what that click means …

He looks up to see his father for the last time. Time seems to be temporarily suspended … and then a blinding flash sears his face.

This is immediately accompanied by a sickening boom and a shock wave which picks him up and hurls him backward. His tiny body is thrown back against a house. If he hits the stone wall, he will die. He doesn’t.

He is thrown against a dilapidated front door. It gives way, and his body thuds onto the dirt floor inside the house. A shroud of dust swirls around the boy. But he is not dead.

In fact, there is hardly a scratch on him. The only physical injury is his crushed hand—courtesy of his father, the blacksmith. He knows his father is dead, and so too, are his mother and brother.

The boy lies in the darkness still wrapped up in the jacket—a jacket which was meant to kill him and the Russian soldiers ended up saving him from the force of the explosion. It also softened the impact against the wooden door and the floor.

But the explosives are intact, and he knows, as the timer was set seconds after his brother’s, they will go off at any moment. He hears the timer tick and wants it to go off so he can join his family and be with them forever.

At first, he can only hear the ticking, and then there is another noise—the noise of a family crying in the corner. They huddle together and cry as they know the blacksmith, his wife, and youngest son are all dead. They cry because the American family deserved better. They knew this American family had flown all the way from America to help victims of war—only to become victims themselves. They cry also because they can see the padded jacket tightly secured around the blacksmith’s other son, right in front of their eyes. And they know exactly what the jacket contains.

The boy doesn’t look at them. He looks up at the ceiling and just waits for his turn. The ticking stops. The combination starts.

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