The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

dumb to his course.
    â€œOnce we’re in, ease off,” Vollmer said.
    â€œRoger,” the driver said, repeating the word as if to reassure himself.
    I concentrated on taking photos, putting the lens of my SLR up against the armored glass to reduce the distortion. We passed under the roof of smoke, and suddenly it was as if a heavy net had been thrown over the sun, everything around us taking on a sepia quality. I could still hear the thunder of the Bradley ahead of us, wavering and distant like a receding train. The smoke parted for a second, and I was able to get a better look at the street. Slate gray and ringed by high cinderblock walls, the houses were basically middle-class dwellings, nearly identical to the homes I had seen in Mexico years before. I half-expected to see kids in Chivas jerseys chasing a soccer ball down the block. The street itself was ominously empty, only the usual trash and palm leaves decorating the blacktop. There was a strange lost feeling to it all, as in an empty house, the rooms without furniture. The world seemed deserted, the last humans having abandoned the earth. The smoke thickened again, mysteriously. Beside me, Reaper was quiet. I looked up at the gunner in the turret. I had been told that it would be up to me to pass him ammunition if he needed it. Without knowing why, I began to tighten up a little and then a little more. I didn’t have a thought in my head, but something was happening in there.
    â€œHey, Vollmer, dude, I know I’m just baggage, but this street sucks, and now we can’t see shit.”
    He ignored me. Alone with his thoughts, he turned his head from side to side. We began to slow down. There was some talk about stopping and dismounting some scouts to investigate the fires. We had come to a halt when someone in the Bradley called back to us. We were in a cul-de-sac, boxed in. “We’re turning around,” they said.
    â€œRoger,” I heard Vollmer say tiredly. “So are we.”
    The driver put the Humvee in reverse.
    â€œScan our six o’clock,” Vollmer yelled up at the gunner, grasping his calf. “We’re gonna pivot and let the Bradley—”
    And that was as far as he got.
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    Virtually everyone who survives a traumatic experience recalls that certain details surrounding the event have a special vividness, seeming to glow in the imagination with an inexplicable intensity. Extreme events require extreme explanations, and it is as if the mind cannot, even for a moment, tolerate the idea that such absurd things can be allowed to happen, that the universe is random, a cacophony “of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In the wake of trauma, the mind seems to develop a ravishing hunger for meaningful facts, the raw materials from which a story can be fashioned. As the novelist and compulsive storyteller Isak Dinesen once wrote, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story, or tell a story about them.”
    Sometimes, and particularly with respect to traumatic narratives, these stories take the form of portents and premonitions, as if the trauma in its unalloyed power is able to reach forward through time, disrupting the present; in
The Hour of Our Death
, Philippe Aries observed that in Arthurian mythology, “death does not come as a surprise, even when it is the accidental result of a wound or the effect of too great an emotion, as was sometimes the case. Its essential characteristic is that it gives advance warning of its arrival.”Western literature, he points out, is full of such warnings: auguries, omens, doppelgangers,
memento mori
, reminders to the faithful that death is forever on the horizon. In the
Chanson de Roland
, the stories of the Round Table, the knight Gawain is asked, “Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?” Gawain replies, “I tell you that I shall not live two days.”
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Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
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    Had I