Jeff Brackett - Half Past Midnight

I did, though it wasn’t at all what I expected. There was a stick-on label that read “TURRET” over a console. Next to it was what looked like a kid’s video game joystick. I pulled tentatively on the joystick and saw the turret begin to turn, and an opening appeared in front, growing larger by the second. A separate compartment for the driver, I realized, just as a hand with a pistol appeared through that opening.

I flipped the lever on my rifle to Auto and fired a half a dozen rounds into the tiny compartment. The driver twitched once and fell forward in his seat with the Abrams still accelerating.

Before dropping into the tank, my hearing had been slowly returning, but the firefight in the enclosed cabin brought back the familiar ringing that had been my constant companion since the blast that had thrown Billy. Touch, sight, and smell kicked into overdrive to compensate for my lost hearing. Suddenly, the scent of gunpowder and blood was overwhelming, the feel of blood seeping through my clothing from the seat nauseating.

Standing in the seat, I prepared to climb out of the tank. It looked like I was going to have to jump, and I wanted to do it before the Abrams built up too much speed. Then I saw where we were headed. Larry’s men were dead ahead, cheering and waving at the tank, unaware that it was driving itself and would run over their barricade in less than a minute.

They thought I was one of the crew. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I looked at the fifty caliber machine gun in front of me and took the grips in hand. It only took a few seconds to find the manual controls, and only a few more to give Larry’s thugs the surprise of their lives. The last man went down just seconds before the tank crashed into the barrier of cars; the lurch as the Abrams flattened the automobiles dropped me back into the seat. There were only seconds left before I slammed full speed into the side of the Sears building.

In retrospect, it probably would have been smarter for me to have just closed the hatch and stayed inside the tank than to have jumped, but by the time I realized just how fast I was really going, my choices were rather limited. I was already outside, on top of the tank with the department store rushing at me at about forty miles an hour. It was either jump or take my chances sitting on the outside of the tank as it slammed into the building. Visualizing a wall of bricks falling on top of me, I decided to jump.

The ground rushed up at me, and then there was darkness.

“Come on, Jefe. Time to wake up!”

Why was it that lately, I always seemed to awaken to the feel of someone shaking me and calling my name? There must be a sign on my forehead that read, “Go ahead and wake him up! He doesn’t really need any rest.”

I tried to tell whoever it was to stop shaking me and let me die in peace, but all that came out was “Shunnggghhh.”

“That’s it, Jefe! We almost home.”

“Stop shaking me,” somehow got lost in translation once more, although “Shtothing ma,” was closer than the previous grunting.

“Come on, Sensei. You can do it.” Sarah’s voice caused me to turn my head, an act which I had immediate cause to regret. Sudden nausea and dizziness accompanied by pain sent excruciating flashes of light to my brain, which for some odd reason, seemed to remind me that my eyes were still closed. I opened them without thinking, causing even more agony.

“Umph!” I explained firmly, clenching my eyelids tightly closed once more. Now, if I could only get them to stop shaking me.

“He acts like the light hurts his eyes,” Sarah said.

“Of course it hurt his eyes! Don’ it hurt your eyes when you first wake up? Come on, Jefe!”

This time Rene’s voice accompanied a firm slap to my cheek. The pain in my head hurt immeasurably worse than the slap could account for. “Ow!” The single syllable was simple enough to make it through my scrambled neurons exactly as I had intended. For some reason, however, it only seemed to encourage another light slap.

“Good, Jefe! You need to wake up an’ stay awake. You hear me?”

When I refused to answer, someone decided to raise my eyelid to see if I was really home. I jerked my head away and immediately suffered another wave of pain and nausea.

“Jefe, you gotta concussion. You gotta stay awake! Fight it, Jefe. Open you eyes!”

I cracked one lid a fraction of an inch and squinted at the two women hovering over me. Both Sarah and Rene smiled when they saw that I was mostly cognizant.

“Stoshnme,” I mumbled, but it only earned a puzzled frown.

“What he say?” Rene asked. Sarah shrugged.

I took particular care with my pronunciation, forming my lips into the proper shapes and enunciating slowly and deliberately. “Stob. Shakin’. Me!”

Rene laughed. “Ain’ nobody shakin’ you, Jefe. You in the back of a Humvee an’ we takin’ back roads to keep from being spotted. The roads, they jus’ a little bumpy.”

I braved the light, cracking my eyelids a bit more. Sarah nodded encouragingly. “That’s good, Sensei. How do you feel?”

“Like I’m gonna throw up and die. And not necessarily in that order.”

“Considering what you’ve been through, I’m not surprised.” She placed a carbine in my hands. “We were able to get some people back to see what you and the others did with that ambush of yours. We found this and the rest of your squad, most of them dead.”

“Most of them?”

“We found Billy and that Filipino guy still alive. What was it, Ed, Edward…?”

I laid my head back and smiled. “Billy and Edwin. They’re all right?”

“They say Billy’s going to be fine. Don’t know about Edwin. He looked pretty bad.”

“How about Ken?” I feared what I might hear. The last thing I remembered was the tank rushing directly at the building where Ken and the rest of our people were holed up. My imagination supplied countless scenarios involving a runaway Abrams crushing them all to a pulp.

The reassuring answer came from the driver’s seat in front. “I’m doing just fine, thanks to you and your asinine stunt with that tank.”

“Ken!” Grinning from ear to ear, I struggled to sit up. Rene and Sarah helped me, and seconds later I was clapping Ken on the shoulder as he tried to drive and look back at me at the same time.

“’Bout time you woke up.”

Somewhere on the ride back to the factory, I lost my battle with consciousness and succumbed once more to the exhaustion that permeated my being. At least I had something to smile about when oblivion reclaimed me.

My next coherent thoughts involved intense feelings of vertigo and the uneasy, not-quite certainty that something was wrong-not threatening, but still wrong. Confused, unsure of where I was, my mind tried to sort through a collage of unfamiliar sensations.

Soft cushions, the smell of mildewed fabric, and the dank, humid atmosphere served to let me know I was no longer in the back of the Humvee. I heard the echoes of voices in solemn conversation beyond the door of my room. I concentrated on the voices. Only a word or two made it through, but I recognized my wife’s, and her tone was somewhat less than friendly. My memory was a bit fuzzy, but I recalled flashes of her alternating between laughter, tears, and anger when she saw my condition upon my return from our raid. Then, after examining my head with the experienced eye of a nurse’s daughter, she had decided I was in no real danger and prescribed compresses and bed rest, concussion notwithstanding.