Run - Blake Crouch [79]
Over his shoulder, Jack spotted several buildings, and though impossible to be certain in the lowlight, they appeared to be surrounded by small airplanes and a handful of private jets.
Everywhere, soldiers were directing the prisoners toward a collection of tents a quarter mile away on the far side of the field.
“Hot food and beds,” someone yelled. “Keep moving.”
Jack looked for the man who’d cut his finger off, but he didn’t see him.
They crossed the asphalt of a runway. The tents closer now, and straight ahead, less than fifty yards away, a mountain of dirt and a bulldozer.
Jack smelled food on the breeze.
On ahead, people were stopping near the pile of dirt and he could hear soldiers yelling. They were lining the prisoners up shoulder to shoulder.
A soldier shoved him forward, said, “Stand right there and don’t fucking move.”
“Why?”
“We have to inspect you.”
“For what?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Jack stood in a line of ragged-looking people, some of whom had begun to cry.
The soldiers were backing away, Jack’s head swimming with the smell of whatever was cooking across the field.
As he glanced back toward the tents, his eyes caught on the several thousand square feet of raw, freshly-turned earth that he and the other prisoners stood at the edge of.
He looked at the bulldozer again.
By the time he understood what was happening, the two dozen soldiers who’d herded them into the middle of the field were raising their AR-15s.
Someone said, “Oh my God.”
Several prisoners took off running, and a soldier squeezed off four controlled bursts. They fell and the prisoners were screaming, others trying to flee, and one of the soldiers yelled and they all opened fire at once.
The noise was tremendous. Slap of bullets into meat. The schizophrenic madness of the machine guns. The screams. All down the line, people were tumbling back into the pit. Maybe two seconds had passed, the muzzleflashes bright in the evening, and the soldiers already edging forward and still firing.
It felt like someone punched him in the shoulder, and then Jack was staring up at the clouds which were catching sunlight on their underbellies, people falling into the pit all around him. Bloodspray everywhere and the smell of shit, urine, and rust becoming prevalent like the sensory embodiment of terror, warm blood leaking all over him, down into his face, appendages writhing all around him. Then the shooting stopped and there came a moment of silence, Jack’s ear drums in shock, recovering from the noise, before the sound of a hundred dying people faded in. If Jack had believed in hell, he couldn’t have imagined it sounding any worse than this chorus of agony—groans, moaning, weeping, screaming, people dying loudly, quietly, some cursing their murderers, some begging them to do what could not be undone, some just asking why. And the realization slowly dawning on Jack amid the horror—I’m still alive, I’m still alive.
A voice lifted out of the open grave, “Oh God, please finish me.”
Jack’s shoulder was burning now.
He could see the soldiers standing at the edge of the pit, Jack thinking only of his children as he pulled several bodies over him, and then the machine guns erupted again with a blaze of fire, and he could feel the bodies that shielded him shaking with the impact of the bullets. Shit himself waiting to be shot, but it never happened.
This time, when the guns went quiet, the groans were half what they had been.
Jack’s entire body trembled.
He willed himself to be still.
The soldiers near him were talking.
“—don’t serve that meatloaf again. Fucking rancid shit.”
“I love the mac and cheese though. Don’t disrespect.”
“Oh, hell yeah. You got a crawler over there.”
Two bursts from the machine gun.
“All right, boys, who drew cleanup?”
The light was abandoning the sky, and there was little in the way of groaning now, just desperate breathing all around him.
“Nathan, Matt, Jones, and Chris.”
“Well fucking get to it, boys, and before you lose your light. We’re going to party tonight. God, this is going to be a pretty