There Will Be Killing by John Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

his eyes felt like they were spinning in their sockets. He was dizzy, hyperventilating, and he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t even control his own bladder while Gregg shouted:
    â€œLet’s go, let’s go!” Gregg and the other man were up and running. Even if his own life depended on it, Izzy could not follow. All he could do was look at Gregg’s back—which suddenly stopped its retreat as Gregg glanced over his shoulder, saw Izzy still down on the ground where they had left him.
    â€œIzzy!” Gregg raced back to help him up and had him halfway to his feet when the high pitch of another mortar shrilly screamed and they both dove back to the ground, and watched the burning, white phosphorous mortar hit almost directly in front of where they were going to run for the safety of the bunker.
    Their companion, the one who had urged them to run with him, turned into a gory cartoon character. For a moment, his legs seemed to be moving from his severed upper body and Izzy could smell seared flesh. He wasn’t cognizant of crying, but it felt like hot tears were racing down his cheeks while he tried not to choke on his own vomit as some important part of him, a part of his self since boyhood that had been raised on Disney movies and Cub Scout meetings departed, never to return again.
    Covered in every conceivable bodily fluid except blood, Izzy knew a terrible truth that would forever haunt him: what saved his life that day was that he was not brave; he was too scared to move. The brave man, the man doing the smart thing of getting to the safety of the bunker, was cut down by a random and malicious darkness of fate that cared not a whit for right or wrong. And if right or wrong didn’t matter, what did?
    Survival.
    Gregg’s chest was shaking from holding in his silent sobs. Izzy would have offered him a tissue if he’d had one handy like shrinks always did back in the world. But they were no longer in the world and he was no longer the Israel Moskowitz who had arrived in Vietnamjust that morning. Izzy really didn’t know who he was anymore and he had no idea who or what he might become. He only knew that if he was going to survive and get the hell out of this hell-hole, he had to be smarter than the smartest guy he’d once been in the Columbia University med school.
    â€œWake the fuck up,” Izzy whispered as he wiped the snot from his nose with the end of a military-issue tee that smelled like piss and stomach juices minus any solid bits from breakfast, lunch or dinner. In order to survive you had to eat and so he would eat in the morning whether he was hungry or not. He had to eat and he had to remember his first, last, and only orientation, which defined this new reality that came down to four simple words.
    Izzy said them once more, only this time like he meant it:
    â€œWake the fuck up.”

The Nightbird takes flight to distance itself from the piercing whistle of mortars. The feathers of the bird make no sound as it swiftly moves through the sultry evening towards the jungle, then lights in the branches of a tree and watches.
The LRRP team moves quickly and efficiently. Several of them are new but they are highly trained and this is what they do well.
Their leader is confident.
“OK, let’s hump it out there, one more click. Set up a perimeter, get ready to ambush and hurt some people. Move it! It’s getting dark soon.”
And soon it is dark and quiet.
The men are spread out just the way they have been trained to do. They wait in the gathering silence. It is in the silence of the night that the predator kills, moving with the soft silence of the panther, the quiet slither of the cobra.
The Nightbird watches one man sitting in his place just before the day dawns.
“Hey, hey, where are you guys, where are you?”
As the light comes up and he can finally see, he begins to shriek.
All the men are sitting around him and have their bloody cut off heads