Harvest Earth by J.D. Laird Read Free Book Online Page B

nuts and lukewarm milk, Gabriel’s body is recovering, even as his mind is slipping. After relieving his bowels in the department store restroom and feeling guilty when he can’t get the toilet to flush, Gabriel pulls himself back out into the empty streets. Gabriel has forty-five blocks separately him from the department store and where his children go to school. More focused on this, he concentrates on the distance and draws a map in his head. From his daughter’s school it is another ten blocks to his apartment.
    Putting one foot in front of the other Gabriel begins his march. He ignores the signs of death all around him. Instead he focuses on the promise of two young lives up ahead.
     

 
    10    Madison
     
     
    Fighting off the urge to drift off to sleep Madison and Dale talk to one another for what turns into hours. They sit in the dark, his head on her lap, as they wait for time to pass. The hope of help arriving unexpectedly is ever on their minds. Besides each other their only other company is the darkness and sounds of shifting rock. The distant moans that Madison had heard earlier have stopped a long while ago. Madison conserves their flashlight’s battery by keeping it off.  Their stomachs are empty and Madison can feel her bladder on the verge of exploding. But the airman pushes these urges aside, just like she pushes aside the urge to yell and scream frantically for help. Claustrophobia is setting in. But instead Madison talks and she listens.
    While they had “known” each other for two years the two coworkers really knew nothing about one another. Dale told Madison about his life back in Georgia.
    He told Madison about how he had grown up in a suburb outside of Atlanta in a well-off neighborhood. His father had been in the film industry and had enjoyed the boom that came to the area in the early part of the century. His mother had been an artist, a painter, who was well-known for her landscapes. They used to travel the world in search of new hillsides, seashores or sunsets for her to paint. That was how Dale had become interested in new cultures and languages. By the time he was ten years old he could speak Mandarin and some dialects of Hindi. His parents encouraged his passion. They got him tutors after school, sent him to special language camps and provided study abroad opportunities for him whenever they had the chance. Dale had grown up an only child. His pen pals in Japan, India and China were his siblings.
    When Dale was eighteen years old he left home and spent a few years traveling the world. He used his boyhood contacts to get jobs teaching in countries all over Asia. It wasn’t until Cambodia that he had heard the call to join the Air Force.
    He was at a bar in Phnom Penh having drinks with the locals when a group of U.S. Marines came in. They were all on leave and clearly already drunk. The marines were loud, rude and itching for a fight. They found the confrontation they looking for. As the violence broke out, one of the Marines punched a hole in the wall of the bar. He shattered the bones in his hand. It was then that the fighting stopped.
    One of the men that Dale had been drinking with was a doctor. He wanted to help the soldier but the Marine refused, unable to understand what the doctor was saying. The language barrier was too great. It was then that Dale stepped in serving as translator between the two people. The Marine had his hand splinted and placed on ice. He and his friends apologized for their behavior. One of them even left money behind to pay for the repairs to the wall. Three months later when Dale returned to the United States he signed up for the Air Force.
    Dale’s parents paid for college while he was serving in the Air Force’s ROTC. But the time he graduated he was an officer and was quickly deployed to serve as a translator for an intelligence gathering unit in Guam. He was only serving there six months before he was pulled for a secret assignment at their