The Devil's Right Hand - J. D. Rhoades [4]
She had been right, he mused. Not in her surface excuse about not dating an employee. He could see the real reason when she gently turned him aside from his pursuit of her. She always did so with a soft laugh or a self-deprecating joke about being too old, but the sadness in her eyes told the real story. Too much baggage, her eyes seemed to say. Too much mileage over too many rough roads. And she was right, he thought. For both of them. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
Gravel crunched under his boots as he walked away from the looming bulk of the Bradley fighting vehicle. He had always thought of deserts as soft places, cushioned by sand. This place seemed to be mostly crushed rock and tiny pebbles that always managed to work themselves into your boots. All the sand seemed to come to rest in any mechanical or electronic gear. He looked back and cursed the dead GPS receiver inside the Bradley. He had no idea where they were.
“Shit,” he said under his breath. His squad was in the vehicle, most of them asleep. He had to figure out some way to get them home. He unzipped his pants and took a piss on the desert. It summed up his attitude about this place as no other words could.
When he was zipping himself back up, he registered the noise of the rotor blades for the first time. It had to be a Coalition aircraft; the raghead air force had been swept out of the sky weeks ago. He turned towards the sound, waving his arms above his head. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey...”
There was a ripping sound, like the sky being torn open. A bright white bolt like a lance of flame leaped from out of the darkness and struck the Bradley. The boxy metal shape seemed to bulge outward for a split second before erupting in flame from every opening. The concussion knocked him flat on his back. He lay there for a second, staring stupidly at the sky. He saw metal hatch cover cross his field of vision, whirling across the sky like a UFO. Then he heard the screams. They were burning, but he couldn’t get up. His limbs refused to respond to any command that didn’t involve curling up into a ball. He could hear himself screaming as well. There was another white flash...
He jerked upright in the seat, panting like a distance runner. He flinched as a white tree of lightning arced across the sky, followed by a sharp detonation of thunder. It had started raining again. Keller put both hands on the wheel and waited for his heart to stop pounding. He started the car and drove away.
There was a crowd at the graveside, listening to the preacher’s words with the pinched, stoic expressions of people that had been expecting bad news and soon expected to hear worse. The cemetery was well-tended, bordered by woods on two sides and the small white church on another.
Everyone gave a wide berth to the big man in the brown suit. He stared down into the open grave in silence as the preacher intoned the last few words of the service. A few of them looked at the diamond and ruby rings on his fingers and noted the cut of the expensive suit, but no one made comments, at least in his presence. The man had not been a part of their lives for years, but his reputation for random and vicious fits of temper was still legendary.
When the preacher’s voice trailed off into a nervous mumble, the big man looked up and looked at him. His eyes were hidden by tinted sunglasses, but after a moment, the preacher looked away
and cleared his throat. The big man turned away without a word and walked off towards the line of beat-up cars and trucks in the gravel parking lot. He paused a moment to brush the dust from the cuffs of his pants and opened the door of a large brown 4 x 4 pickup. Letters across the top of the dark-tinted windshield said “INDIAN OUTLAW”.
He got into the truck and sat down, leaving the door open. The truck’s oversized wheels raised the pickup off the ground high enough that the man’s snakeskin boots dangled a few inches from the ground like a child’s in a grownup chair. He waited.
The group at the graveside had broken into smaller knots, discussing