When Mortuus opened his eyes, he was lying in a field of tall grass. The birds echoed around him, and the sun beat down his bandaged skin. The ground was wet and mushy mud from a recent rainstorm. "My head... Where am I?" Mortuus grumbled and felt for a bruise on his head.
Mortuus stood and walked through the grass. The air smelled like wildflowers and gunsmoke with hints of black powder. It brushed against his legs as he waded through the shrubbery.
As he pushed aside the blades, he neared a camp of soldiers. He saw they had ace cards in their helmets as he walked toward them. Vietnam, Mortuus had read about ace card superstition the soldiers had. Even as he stood before the soldiers, they looked through him like he wasn't there.
They were laughing and talking amongst each other, just hanging out as if they weren't in the midst of a war. Some of them were even sitting beside an overturned box playing cards while they sat on milk crates. The makeshift table had cards laid out, and scattered around them were bullet cases and wood poker chips.
One of the soldiers was a skinny kid with blonde hair and blue eyes, clearly a tunnel rat. His small stature was perfect for shimmying down the tunnels. He wore an olive shirt with torn sleeves, making his arms look like twigs. He wore torn jeans and a black leather belt holding a holster. At his side was a pistol, and below it was a knife.
He was probably only seventeen but could have easily passed as twelve years old. Mortuus walked beside him. The kid had no idea anyone was there beside him. Mortuus looked at his dog tag, "Private Camargo?" He read aloud. A silent voice in his head told him this was most definitely Willem.
"This was before your accident," He mumbled as if the hallucination might hear him. As Mortuus placed his hand on young Willem's shoulder, he was taken to another time. He was now standing in the middle of a shootout.
All around him, a rain of bullets was flying, blood soaring into the sky as bullets pierced the skin. Screams of agony as soldiers, young and old, fell to the great beyond all around him. To his right, a grenade exploded, sending a man's body scattering in all directions. The sound of the exploding grenade made his ears ring as it was close.
Another grenade exploded, and Mortuus ran, trying to avoid bits of shrapnel. Someone was being blown apart or shredded by bullets and shrapnel everywhere he went. With his hands on his ears, Mortuus ran through. Ears ringing and tears streaming.
Mortuus finally located Wilem in all the confusion. He ran towards young Willem as he saw him running from the hellfire around him. As he got closer, he could only watch in horror as Willem was shot through the chest dozens of times.
Willem's chest was thrust back with force as each bullet collided, blood spraying. His eyes went wide, and his breath halted as he fell backward, his head hitting the ground. The world around him slowed, and his breath became heavy and audible. Everything seemed to move in slow motion as he watched the young man die.
Blood steadily gushed from each hole in Willem's chest. He fell to his knees beside the young man, too stunned to do anything. All he could do was mutter Willem under his breath in broken desperation to make sense of the scene before him.
Mortuus knelt, his hand under the young man's head. He held him close, feeling his pain. Maybe It was just a hallucination, but it felt so real. He had learned long ago that his actions couldn't change the events.
Willem's eyes opened slightly before rolling back in his head. He opened his mouth slightly, blood dripping down onto his shirt as he tried to speak. Willem was dead, and Mortuus couldn't do anything to change that.
Mortuus sat there with Willem's corpse in his arms. He slicked the boy's blond hair back out of his face. He wanted to beg God for the child's life to be returned. He wanted that, but nothing could change it. Mortuus had long since decided that God didn't care about the ones he made.
"How could a loving god leave such tragedy on a world of his own creation?" He questioned. It was something that many people hated hearing.
He held the poor boy to his chest, ugly sobbing as he hugged him. This poor kid would never see his parents one last time or kiss his fiance, whom he'd proposed to shortly before being drafted.
Mortuus slowly began returning to reality, his vision returning to the bedroom as he rocked the hallucination. He didn't want to leave the poor boy there alone.
Mortuus sat there with Willem. Both knew what had happened, but only Mortuus saw it. "You poor kid, Willem." He said as he stared down at his own boots.
"I don't need your sympathy, E-5." Willem said coldly through his teeth, dropping the pack, which clicked to a magnet on his belt. In the shine of the pack's light, Mortuus could see the glimmer of a pocket knife at his side.
Mortuus winced, preparing for the stab, but Willem took the knife to himself instead. With scary precision, Willem peeled back the layers of his skin with the knife. It had only been a few seconds, but he'd already cut deep enough that Mortuus could see his bones. He watched in horror and curiosity.
Willem was digging into his hand with the knife and seemed to be sharpening the bone marrow. The blood rolled out slowly as he worked the blade into ligaments and arteries.
Willem continued to carve until his hand had fallen from its tissue onto the floor with a blood-soaked plopping sound. The stubble of his wrist was shaved down to a bone shank, the blood outlining its glaring buttermilk white.
He looked carefully at the bone he had sculpted into a razor point. "I'm very sorry for this." Willem said before placing his unharmed hand on Mortuus's shoulder, keeping him still while he stabbed the bone into Mortuus's neck.
He dug the blade deep, holding it and twisting into it like a corkscrew, stopping as he heard the wet snap of Mortuus's spine. He pushed Mortuus's chest as his breathing stopped. The slight touch caused him to fall back onto the bed.54Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡezEDsmEvGK
