Jeff Hirsch: The Darkest Path

When I woke up in the examination room, I was handcuffed to the bed.

A loop of steel circled my right wrist, holding it fast to a guardrail. My left arm lay throbbing by my side, the skin swollen taut from where Sergeant Rhames had broken my wrist with a baseball bat.

My head swam as I lifted it off a thin pillow. The room was nearly empty, nothing but the cot I was on, a discolored sink, and a few cabinets. A rush of air kicked on from somewhere above me. I searched the ceiling and found a single dusty vent. Air-conditioning.

I’ve done it , I thought. I’m here.

I closed my eyes and thought about James, hoping my little brother’s face would ease the pounding in my chest. I pictured him moving through our barracks, turning the chaos around us into folded clothes and tidy stacks. He said that cleaning calmed him and, even though I made fun of him for it, the truth was that seeing him do it calmed me too. The day before I left, I didn’t make my bunk, just so I could watch as he tucked the sheets beneath the mattress and then smoothed the wrinkles flat with the palm of his hand.

My pulse stilled. I breathed. A door opened and someone shuffled into the room.

“Well, you must have really pissed somebody off.”

I didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

“Multiple shallow cuts as well as bruises over your chest and arms and face. Your wrist is fractured. I think I can put a cast on it, but I can’t spare any pain meds. Your friends in the Glorious Path are to thank for that.”

I opened my eyes. The doctor was short, with thinning brownish-gray hair. An awkward belly poked out of his white lab coat and hung over his camo fatigues.

“They’re not my friends,” I said.

“Ah, the dead arise. It’s a miracle. What’s your name?”

“Where am I?”

“Okay,” he said, making a note on his clipboard. “Path John Doe it is, then.”

“I’m not Path,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“Funny,” he said. “The Army of the Glorious Path isn’t exactly known for its revolving-door policy.”

My tongue darted out over my cracked lips. “Can I have some water?”

“If I can have a name.”

“Callum Roe. Cal.”

He lowered a canteen to my lips. I drank until he pulled it away from me.

“You’re in the infirmary at Camp Victory,” he said. “I’m Dr. Franks. One of our patrols found you out in the desert and brought you here.”

“I need to see your base commander.”

“Oh, sure,” Franks said with a chuckle. “I keep my sidearm in my desk — maybe you’d like to take it with you.”

I glared at him until he chucked his clipboard onto a nearby table with a sigh.

“All right,” he said. “Why do you think you need to see the commander?”

I swallowed hard. Could I really do this? Would he even listen? My pulse raced, but I made myself think of James moving through our barracks, slow and deliberate, setting everything in its place.

“Because if you don’t let me see him,” I said, “everyone in his camp is going to die.”

Dr. Franks led me from the chill of the examination room into the hundred-degree blast of the California desert.

Camp Victory was smaller than I thought it would be. I counted no more than ten dusty buildings, a mix of repurposed civilian houses and corrugated-steel huts. They didn’t have much in the way of vehicles, just a couple Humvees with .50 caliber machine guns on the roof, a troop carrier, and a single decrepit-looking Apache. What they lacked in mobility, though, they made up for in perimeter defense. The whole place was surrounded by a high wall — a mix of concrete slabs, sandbags, and steel fencing. Gun emplacements sat every ten to fifteen feet, each one manned by a team of hard-looking Fed soldiers.

While most of the base was military, there was also a sizable civilian population that must have been drawn from the two small towns the base protected. The civilians seemed to be acting as gofers and nurses and mess-hall attendants. I felt sick just looking at them. They had no idea what was coming.

We stopped at a small plywood building at the center of camp, and Franks conferred with a guard. I stepped back, looking up at the red, white, and blue flag of the Federal Army, whipping about in a dry wind.

I shivered as we moved out of the heat and into the chill of the commander’s office. A small air conditioner teetered in the window above his desk. Below it was a computer, an electric lamp, and a handheld calculator. I stared from one to the other, tracing their contours like they were relics from some lost world. Nathan Hill said it was reliance on things like these that made the Pathless so soft. Followers of the Glorious Path were stronger, he said. They didn’t need toys.

Franks shackled my wrist to the chair and sat me down. My arm itched under a plaster cast that ran from just below my elbow to halfway down my palm. My fingers, bruised black and red, stuck out at the end. On top of that, the simple walk from the infirmary had every one of my injuries throbbing at once, igniting a headache at the base of my skull. Franks handed me two aspirin, and I chewed them like candy.

“You just tell him what you told me,” Dr. Franks said. “Answer his questions and you’ll be fine.”

The door behind him opened and a gray-haired man swept in. He wore a standard camo uniform, no rank insignia, just a stars-and-stripes patch and a tag that said Connery. He sat down across from me without a word.

I’ve always been small for my age, five feet five, and so thin you could see my ribs through my T-shirt. Still, I cringed down into my chair, trying to make myself look like even less of a threat. If I had learned anything in the last six years, it was that there was nothing people like Connery enjoyed more than feeling big. Give them that and they just might listen to you.

“So,” Connery said, regarding me with watery blue eyes, “I hear you have things to tell me.”

I took a shaky breath and let it out. Here we go.

“There are nearly two hundred Path soldiers a little over ten klicks to your east,” I said. “They have armor and air support and they’ll be here just after midnight.”

There was no change in the stony composition of Connery’s face. His thin lips were set and straight. Painful seconds passed and then he turned to his computer. He tapped a key and sent a blue glow over his face.

“Thanks for bringing him in, Dr. Franks. That will be all.”

“Sir,” Dr. Franks said. “Don’t we have to at least—”

“If there was a significant force of rebel fighters on my doorstep, I think I’d know about it.”

“You know how they work,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “They scatter their forces, put them in small groups that can’t be discovered. They only join up at the last minute and then—”

“Son, even if the Path did have a force that size in the area, they’d be headed to Greenfield. It’s a far more strategically valuable piece of land. If you want to control the region, you go there.”