Killing - An Excerpt from the New Novel by Vic Fortezza

He soon found himself in a familiar place thick with foliage, damp with dew, and smelling of the Fourth of July. The moon, although full, provided little illumination. The blackness was vanquished occasionally by the flight of a roman candle and the passage of bottle rockets. The noise was deafening, cherry bombs exploding everywhere, aerial bombs overhead. Oohs and ahs arose from the darkness. A huge crowd was observing the display. He was a much younger man now, smiling, enjoying the pyrotechnics. Soon he was afraid, however, as someone called out something about birds on the wire. He looked up at the phone lines, a sparkler in each hand, and saw nothing. He was alone amongst the crowd, heart pounding. His pores opened. Perpspiration coated his flesh. He could feel the grime on his face. Suddenly he was older, middle-aged. And it dawned on him that it wasn't a fireworks exhibition he was watching, although it bore the aspects of one. "Here they come," someone shouted, raising up and firing a rifle. He crouched in a hole in the ground, the shooting so intense he dared not lift his head lest it be blown off. Tiny, fiery projectiles, not bottle rockets, peppered the sand bags around him. "Open up, Genteel, open up!" someone shouted urgently in a southern drawl. Suddenly he realized it was he who was being addressed. How he hated the mispronunciation of his name. Would they ever get it right? Angered, he sprang erect and joined the fray, crying out as he sprayed the shadows ahead. Phantoms were running everywhere in different directions. "Chinese fire drill," said Mr. Mitko, his ninth grade gym teacher, observing from the platform from which he conducted the class. He was constantly whirling and firing, whirling and firing, the phantoms no longer directly ahead but all around him. He held his ground, standing tall as fiery missiles whizzed past him like thousands of cigarette butts flicked into the night by a thousand Deannas. There was no sense crouching or laying low - he was going to get it, anyway. He would not allow it to happen to him while he was on his belly. And he was going to take as many of the shadows with him as he could. There was no front, no unit. It was every man for himself in separate, decisive engagements. Spinning, he nailed one in the hip and saw a weapon fly against the moon. Turning in the nick of time, he put a burst into a belly and barely flinched as a bayonet grazed his calf and stuck in the ground beside his boot. "C'mon!" he said. "C'mon!" He yelled like a cowboy as a flare, not a roman candle, tore through the night, illuminating the swarm. To his right, a few yards away in another foxhole, a shadow was inserting the tip of a rifle into the mouth of someone who lay wounded, helpless. "Nooooo!' he cried, squeezing off a round a fraction of a second too late to make the save yet striking the target, which fell, then struggled to rise, to regain its form. He raced toward it and knocked it flat with the sole of his boot. Foliage was growing from the top of the phantom, which lay at his feet, at his mercy. Was it antlers? Why would a deer be in disguise? He gazed more closely and found a pair of slanted eyes rivetted in terror. Suddenly everything became clear. He knew exactly where he was. He inserted the tip of his weapon between the thin lips and past teeth that fought defiantly against violation, and fired repeatedly, shouting at each burst: "Deah!" "Deah!" Suddenly the face was a different one. It was Junior's. "Nooooo!" he cried, too late, having fired. He crumpled to the earth, wailing.

"We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do." - Francis Bacon

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