Mile High Club - SCP Foundation

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Five of us stalk the scrubland: monsters, crawling up and down the Koh-i-Baba mountainside, waiting and watching for an army of zombies to flush out a man with fire in his eyes. He’s holed up at the base of the mountains, a village nobody cares about in the middle of a war that nobody knows about. I bet it was a nice place to live. Quiet, comfortable, peaceful. A place where everybody knew your name.

It’s empty now: a collection of houses and streets stalked by Soviet corpses we dredged from the desert. The only name that matters belongs to Anwar. His backup — a force of the best counter-snipers the mujahideen could muster — are being picked apart by vultures across the ridge.

The sky is gray but too dry for anything but dust. Heat lightning streaks through the sky and crashes to earth out in the desert. My sweat is poaching me in my ghillie suit and I haven’t eaten anything in almost a week. I’m covered in mosquito bites and forgot to take my anti-malarial pills. The Browning machine gun is so heavy that my arms ache even with the tripod. And to top it all off, my helmet is stuffy. All that orichalcum in the lining to keep Anwar’s thoughts out. Unfortunately, it also keeps mine in.

Harriet sees the way my fingers lock around the rifle and wriggles over to my prone form, feeding a wad of chewing tobacco into my mouth. The chewing vents my nervous energy and nicotine does the rest. My fingers soften and my head clears up. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes back.

Exhale. I tweak the Browning slightly and center my scope on a small shimmer of light under a dusty tan overhang across the ridge. It might be a heat mirage, or a freedom fighter with my team in his sights. I’m positive we killed them all… do I want to take that bet?

Goddamn it. The nicotine punctures the wound-up ball of hate in my gut; its caustic cargo floods me with a sense of righteous rage. Fake righteousness, but how else do you kill for fake reasons? Everyone has their ways. Mann drinks; Kondraki’s racist; Clef just enjoys killing people. At least Harriet —

A sharp crack derails my train of thought, picking up amplitude and distortion as it bounces around the caldera: the source, a Lee Enfield rifle somewhere across the ridge. Harriet pushes my scope downwards until it highlights a ragged, man-shaped thing in the middle of the village street — a mummified Soviet corpse we hauled out of the desert sands last week, sans its arm and most of its belly. The zombie takes one more tottering step through the village street before falling on its back, a bullet hole where one of its eyes should be. Courtesy of one of the surviving mujahideen.

Harriet grits her teeth and takes a deep breath. My wife’s face fragments into staticky bits, emitting syllables from an undead language that crawls over my skin, infests the commlines, and worms across space into the corpse’s ear, threatening it into jerkingly standing up and pointing a decaying finger towards its killer. Satisfied with the answer, Harriet’s face reassembles itself as she ends the hellish chant. The Soviet keeps pointing, waiting for orders that will never come.

“The bullet hit from the north,” Harriet says into her earpiece. “Based on the angle, I’d estimate a klick up. See anything?”

“There’s an overhang on that side I was scoping out,” I say. “Mann, take a look?”

A Browning heavy machine gun barks once in response. A moment later, Mann calls in. “Kill confirmed. Anyone left?”

Harriet concentrates again, reciting a short ditty in a crucified language that bites into our ears and waits.

“Just the target,” she says after a moment.

Clef follows up. “Third eye’s lit up the northwest quadrant of the village. The schoolhouse. All points, confirm eyes on target.”

I look at the overhang for another second, then point my scope to the schoolhouse. The glow is metaphorical, but if the ukulele man’s third eye is seeing something then it’s probably Anwar.

“Eyes on target,” we all repeat.

“Harriet? Kick it in.”

We all hold our breaths as a half-dozen corpses with guns assemble outside the schoolhouse. Five of them shamble to the windows; one drags itself up to the front door. Dust swirls around them.

Pin-drop silence.

Six undead bodies crash into the building. In response, its roof spontaneously transmutes into fire and smoke. Hovering over it is a man with an immaculate white turban, embroidered vest, and fire in his eyes.

“Shoot!” Kondraki barks.

Four fingers pull their triggers. Four experimental railguns scream. Four hypersonic bangs ring out through the air as our beryllium-bronze bullets bore through Anwar’s body at Mach-26, blowing him into a firework of bone and blood. The sounds ricochet around the caldera, overwhelming all others in a perverse form of camouflage. As it fades out, we all exhale.

Anwar reappears unblemished in my scope.

Clef has just enough time to say, “He’s alive —” before becoming two-dimensional in an explosion of blood. Anwar’s fist reaches out from the space between his words and crushes Mann like a bug. Kondraki’s got sights — pulls trigger — dies screaming. But a beryllium-bronze BMG round bores through Anwar’s brainstem as he apparates between them. Anwar staggers, screams, bursts into an afterimage as he’s reaching for Harriet.

We don’t breathe. A million and a half thoughts run through my head before an explosion down below shakes them all away. It’s Anwar, hovering over the village: splintering in mid-air, clutching at his head every few seconds before his limbs and head detach from his torso and then re-attach.

“Clef? Mann? Kon?” Harriet whispers hurriedly onto the comms. No response. She recites a short ditty in a crucified language that bites into our ears and waits.

No response.

“Fuck!” Harriet says. “He flattened them. There’s not even enough of them to puppet!”

She squeezes my hand. “It’s just us.”

I feel it before I hear it — something cracking off my helmet and rattling my brain, then Harriet’s reflexive grunt as it crunches into her chest, then the distorted bark of the Lee Enfield proclaiming her death. Scrubland bites into our clothes with every bump as we roll down the incline to the safety of the ridgeline.

I hit the rock first and then Harriet smacks into me, winding me with her rucksack. My head is spinning and I can’t breathe but still sit up and roll Harriet onto her back. Reflex inhales for me; the pain bites through my diaphragm and shocks my head into stillness. I inhale again and slice through her clothes to examine the damage.

Her ghillie suit is soaked in blood. The entry wound is ugly; the exit wound is uglier still. She grips my hand as her breathing becomes more labored. My head burns and my stomach seizes. I don’t understand it. There was nobody left to shoot. Harriet made sure.

And yet there’s a hole through her aorta. She’s going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it. My breathing accelerates and my hand shakes in hers. Her grip tightens and she splashes my hand into the sticky puddle of blood pooling in her suit. I instantly grasp its significance and dip shaky fingers into the puddle.

Harriet starts to sing — quietly, in a martyred language, as I draw a haphazard but intricate series of inlaid pentagrams on her forehead. Her song quiets as her breathing slows, but the lyrics are steady. As she finishes the song, she squeezes my hand one more time and I squeeze back. Then I kiss her forehead as she dies.

An electric shock travels up my jaw into my limbic system as the soul of Harriet Eisenberg, necromancer and pianist, enters my hippocampus. The process feels like an aggressively bad ketamine trip.

Good grief! Harriet says in my phonological loop. I wasn’t sure that would work.

You told me you had tested it! I think.

Yes! On myself.

I roll onto my back, behind a nearby pine tree, and exhale in relief.

What the hell happened? You said his backup was dead!

They were! Harriet sounds as frustrated as I feel. Nobody said he could resurrect them.

How do you feel?

Sick, Harriet admits. I can’t reach any of our ground assets.

Ouch. What do we do with your body?

Let me see…

Syllables in an undead language echo through my phonological loop. I stare intently at the corpse, expecting it to sit up. It doesn’t.

Why isn’t it working?

I was worried about this. Honey, you’re the funniest and bravest and smartest man I know but… your brain is kinda cramped.

Ooog. Should we abort?

Absolutely not, Harriet thinks. He’s wounded — we’ll never get a better chance. We’re getting that prick and then we’re going home.

I inspect my rifle carefully and find a blown fuse on the side. Looting my wife’s corpse for a fresh one makes me feel like a bastard, but Harriet seems amused. I pop the fuse and a fresh magazine into place, then drop to my belly and start crawling up.

It’s slow going. I’m terrified of sneezing and expect to be turned inside out at any moment. As I wiggle up the slope, my thoughts drift back to the first time I met Anwar — in Kabul, three years ago.

“Charles?” That’s the first thing I hear from the man with fire in his eyes: skinny brown man in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting a trimmed black beard and low pompadour, stowing a dead lighter into his pocket just outside the theater. The night is dark and I’m inclined to share; I saw him leave my auditorium ahead of me. We’re friends by film reel.1

“Charles Gears?” he says.2

I light him up first to be nice, then reach into my pockets and pull out an empty wad of cardboard. He snorts once at my bemusement — before I can think to be irritated, he proffers a cigarette. I accept the token and light up gratefully.

He inhales, then speaks in Dari, tilting his head to the cinema. “< You’re here to kill me? >”3

I shrug. “< My wife is dead. Someone has to pay for that. >”

“< You! > ” the man says. “< You brought her here. Her death is on your head. >”

“< I tried to stop her! Tried to get someone else. She came to keep me safe and you killed her, >” I challenge him.

“< I didn’t kill her, and you didn’t have to come. >” He exhales through his nose, watching the smoke waft upwards. “< Could’ve — nn — could’ve had someone else come put a bullet in my head. Would feel less personal. >"

“< You want me to apologize? >” I say. “< Because I will. Anwar, I’m sorry you have to die. I’m sorry that my wife is dead. I wish these things didn’t have to happen. >”

“< They wouldn’t have if you hadn’t come here, >” Anwar says.

“< If it wasn’t me it would have been someone else! >” Tobacco smoke rolls over my tongue. “< It had to be me. You deserved that much. >”

“< I feel — arg — honored, >” the man says. Our cigarettes run out at nearly the same time. He offers me another. “< What a privilege it is to die at your hands, meri jaan! >”

“< Would you have preferred if Kondraki did it? >” I say. “< Because he’d have called you a towelhead while he did. >” I take my lighter out and spark him up. The lighter is going for my lips when it slips from my grasp and breaks into bits on the concrete.

I curse. Anwar looks amused. “< You have a lot to answer for. Lucky I have a way you can redeem yourself. To make sure Harriet didn’t die for nothing. >”

Instead of pulling out his own lighter, he leans forward so our death sticks are touching. I’m too baffled to do anything; he holds steady for several seconds as the embers on his cigarette light up mine.

“< Help me fake my death. >”

He pulls away as I breathe in. Seconds pass. I nod. < “Okay.” >

“< Excellent. Ach — that white dog got me bad, Chuck. I’ll need your utmost cooperation… >” he says as he swivels and starts walking into the night.

My hand drops to my hip, tightening around the butt of a Makarov. At this range I’ll have no problems taking him out. I breathe in deeply, eying the back of his neck. He pauses, standing on the sidewalk, illuminated by a streetlight.

“< Chuck? >” he calls.

My lips suck at a cig that isn’t there as a sharp pain radiates through my arm and an unexpected sun blinds me. I almost scream but bury my face into the dirt at the last second.

Chuck! Harriet thinks. Breathe. Breathe…

I obey, settling back into place and exhaling silently as I wipe flecks of grass from my face. I’m almost at the tip of the ridge again — where I was when she died.

You weren’t saying a thing. Had to give you an Indian burn. You okay, sweetie?

I — got caught up in some thoughts. Old war stories.

Honey, now is not the time. Do that on the plane home.

Sorry, I think as I crawl the last agonizing yard and look out across the awful caldera.

Corpses stagger blindly through the village, stumbling and tripping and shattering themselves. They crawl on shattered knees and drag their dismembered torsos forward by their one remaining arm. Far above the scattered army of the damned, halfway between the earth and sky, Anwar reconstitutes himself. His limbs are attached, but now they’re rotating around his body: hands, legs, even head traveling around the perimeter of his torso. I scramble for a reason to hold my fire —

Ugh, Harriet thinks. No way I want to risk that shot.

Agreed, I think.

Let’s find his —

A geyser of dirt splatters my face and sends me reeling. A split-second later, we hear the distorted echoing bark of a Lee Enfield.

Fuck!

The last sniper. Bastard must’ve spotted me. No time to find another spot. We have to make our stand here, under this cluster of pines.

At least he still needs to pull the bolt action back.

My scope highlights the overhang across the ridge, centered on a boulder just big enough for someone to lie damn near under it. There’s a fuzziness around the space that could be heat shimmers. Or a collection of mental patterns tricking my brain into ignoring the man whose sights are centered on my forehead.

Do I want to roll those dice?

A flat patch of haze at the base of the rock suddenly becomes sharp white — like a beam of light through a curtain. A reflection, angled directly at me.

I pull the trigger. The Browning kicks a beryllium bronze slug into a man’s body at hypersonic speed. Not mine.

Still alive one second after hearing the bang, I exhale in relief. No doubt he was already lining up the shot when I saw him. He might have even pulled the trigger first — my bullet was just faster.

“< Hell of a shot, >” Anwar says. “<Spectacular, the way you put a bullet in a young man’s gut like that. Even a new personal best — two kilometers!>”

He props himself up on the pillow. The sun’s too high to see through the window now and the bed is stiff, with eggshell white sheets, but the blanket is too warm to leave.4

“<He shot my wife!>” I say in groggy, broken Dari. “<What was I supposed to do?>”

“<That ghoul?>” Anwar replies. “<You married it?>”

“<Her name,>” I say. “<is Harriet. She can control the dead — and she’s exceedingly good at what she does.>”5

“<You consort with those kinds of people?>”

“<Sodomy is punishable by death, innit?>”

Anwar’s eyebrows raise up. “<We imported that from the West.>”

I lie back down and wait. “< Don’t look for an apology. That sniper would’ve killed me otherwise.>”

“<He would have, wouldn’t he?>” Anwar languidly takes my hand. “<A seventeen year old boy who wanted to be a singer, handed a broken gun older than his father and told to shoot an invisible man, all because he liked to play with slingshots. He would have absolutely gotten you, the crack Foundation agent with buckets of blood and a shaytan’s rifle in his hands. >”

“< You’re the man of God. Could’ve saved him, >” I shoot, pressing Anwar onto his back. It’s too early in the day to do anything but put an inquisitive chin on his chest and wrap my arms around him.

“<You’re right! >” he says, staring at the ceiling. “< Maybe I could have made him invisible. Maybe I could have stopped a bullet made of untouchable metal. Maybe I could have told him to run far away. >”

He sighs. “< I couldn’t because I can’t. Gharsanay was dead the moment he entered the story. >”

“< Who? >”

“< A teenager. >” Anwar cranes his neck to match my gaze. “< How do you do that — reduce us so instantly? What makes me a god, and him a target — but neither of us men? >”

“< You’re a weapon >” I say. My hand clenches across his skin. “<I have three dead comrades proof of that. >”

“<And you aren’t?>” he shoots back. “< How many Afghanis have your bullets in them? How many of my comrades did your wife tear from the ground to stalk me? How many more children are going to walk on land mines? Why are our deaths normal? >”

“<They aren’t!>” I explode. “< This is literally the best-case option. We had an entire division of people look into the future to make sure! >”

“<Best case for who?>” Anwar throws a hand over my back and presses me against him. “<Chuck, I just want to play football and watch cinema. Instead I have to whore myself out to the Americans because they aren’t the ones shooting at me!>”

He squeezes me tighter and bites my hair. Bastard. I clench my teeth and push out of his arms, rolling onto my side away from him. His breath rolls down my neck as he moves closer and spoons me. “< Please, Charles. I need your help. >”

“< To fake your death, >” I breathe. He’s warm and soft and prodding. “< I’m in… on one condition. >”

I can feel him squinting at me. “<Which is…?>”

I roll over so that our noses are touching. His eyes are a beautiful shade of hazel. “<My wife. Harriet. Bring her back to life. >”

Anwar blinks and licks his lips. “< I don’t have that power. >”

“< I’m already in your bed, no need to lie to me, >” I say. < “ You brought Gharsanay back, didn’t you? Resurrect my wife and tell him to leave her alone. >”

“< And then you’ll help? >” he asks hopefully.

“< And then we’ll help. >”

“< Are you kidding me? >” Anwar sits upright. “< She’ll shoot you in the face the moment you suggest it! >”

“< She won’t! >” I prop myself onto my elbows. “< I’d stake my life on it. I’m not part of your plan until she is. >”

Outside, clouds obscure the sun and darken the room. Anwar swings his legs over the edge of the bed and contemplates the wall.

“< You need my help, meri jaan, >” I say. “< Deal or no deal? >”

Harriet grits her teeth and takes a deep breath. My wife’s face fragments into staticky bits, emitting syllables from an undead language that crawls over my skin, infests the commlines, and worms across space into the corpse’s ear, threatening it into jerkingly standing up and pointing a decaying finger towards its killer. Satisfied with the answer, Harriet’s face reassembles itself as she ends the hellish chant. The Soviet keeps pointing, waiting for orders that will never come.

“Hey sweetie,” I say.

Harriet looks down at herself, then back up at me. Then I pull her down the hill and she’s sitting on top of me and we’re making out like teenagers again. Sweat fills my eyes and mosquitoes snack on my face but all I care about is her tongue inside my mouth and her hands fumbling with my pants.

“< Charles! Do that some other time, >” Anwar chides me. I shake my head. There’s a table in front of me: white, square metal, with an intricate filigreed design inlaid on top. Anwar sits in a black metal chair on my left. I remember this place now: a cafe in Kabul.6

Three years ago, a pair of Foundation auditors sat on identical chairs opposite us. In this diorama pilfered from memory, they are Harriet, to my right — and a young Afghani boy across from me, wearing a Soviet ghillie suit that’s two sizes too big for him. He’s too young for the thousand-yard stare on his face.

“Gharsanay!” Anwar says to the boy. He jerks and looks to Anwar. “<Brother! What’s happening?>”

Harriet gives me a side-eye. I forgot she doesn’t speak the language.

“< It’s fine, >” Anwar says to Gharsanay. “< I’m here. I’ll take care of it. >”

“I saved you too,” he tells Harriet in English. Four coffees arrive in front of us, on a nondescript platter held by a faceless man wearing clothes that I assume are stereotypical. The coffee has no taste.7

Anwar lays his hands on the table. “Harriet. I brought you back to life at Charles’ request. Take it as a show of good faith. ”

Harriet’s eyes flicker in my direction. “For what?”

“I need Charles’ help. Let me fake my death and… well, for lack of a better term, co-habit him .”

“Excuse me?!” we both say. The boy just looks confused.

“Listen,” Anwar says. “Charles is special.”

“Damn right he is,” Harriet says. “Your powers have rotted your brain if you think you’ll lay a finger on my husband.”

“No. He’s special,” Anwar says. “I can read minds and work miracles — not because I’m a man of God, but because I can see Him! The being at the loom of destiny, the being weaving the threads of fate. I can pull those threads. That’s how I brought you and Gharsanay back to life. I changed those stories.”

“What’s this got to do with me?” I ask.

“There are layered forces at work here,” Anwar continues, “guiding the stories we’re told and the stories we write. We’re propagating their interests through forces they’ve even made us averse to thinking about. Even He isn’t immune to them — they influence the very cloth of destiny. I can only touch what’s already been written — help the people that destiny chooses to name.”

He points at me. “But Charles, those forces work for you. The powers that be control fate to work for men. For men like you.”

“You want to hijack those threads,” I say out loud. “Pull on them so they give the people you want a happy ending.”

“So they give everyone a happy ending!” Anwar says. He chugs half his coffee and wipes his mouth. “The Soviet’s war is pointless. The Foundation’s is pointlessly cruel. Let’s combine our strengths. Let me live in your mind — you retain control of your thoughts, your body, your being. I pull fate’s threads to accelerate your rise to power. We reach the top of the Foundation — seize control, change the status quo, make this world a better place.”

“Our mission is bigger than politics,” Harriet says.

“Your mission is politics!” Anwar says. “We have the same goals. Normalcy doesn’t mean stagnation. Normalcy doesn’t mean defending the power structures that grab our necks and rub our faces in the dirt. It’s a fiction fed to all of us by our masters.”

He takes my hands in his. Harriet glances between us. I can’t parse the expression on her face and it worries me.

“Normal should be a world where this war never happened — but it can also be a world where no more war will happen. Please!”

He looks directly at Harriet.

“I want the best for us all! The Foundation would have let you stay dead!”

“No,” Harriet says. “They taught me to stay undead.” Her voice deepens and her face splinters. I look away as she chants in a martyred language.

Anwar looks baffled. “What is she saying?”

Bite marks appear on his shoulders. Then his body. He screams.

I blink furiously, struggling to adapt to the sudden dusk. I hide under my dust cover for a moment on instinct, then hear the screaming from down below. My scope highlights Anwar reborn — a man with an immaculate white turban, embroidered vest, and fire in his eyes.. Rotting bodies in desecrated uniforms bite at him and instantly burn at the touch.

Harriet pulls at me and rolls me down behind the pines. A moment later, a man’s roar obliterates the trees entirely. This must have been what it was like for Oppenheimer at Trinity — a blinding flash, scalding heat that forces us to press our faces into the dirt for salve, and an earthquake that shakes my wisdom teeth out of their sockets. I lift my face up gingerly, sharing a glance with Harriet, then spit them out.

We peek over the ridge. Anwar stands on the ground, surrounded by huge piles of ash. There’s nothing left of the village.

And then a bullet blows through the Browning and drives a thousand little metal and glass flechettes into my side. I groan in pain and roll down the incline, clutching my wounded arm. Gharsanay.

“Charles!” Harriet says. She slides down the hill and examines the wound. I try to move my shoulder and it slaps me in the face for it. My grimace tells Harriet all we need to know.

“This is normalcy?” Anwar bellows, his voice carrying not through the air but our minds. “Ruined lives, shattered homes, an entire culture wiped to bits because I was next to it?”

I look desperately at Harriet. I’m out of ideas. We’re as good as dead.

Harriet does not respond to this the same way. She stands up and pulls a white hankie from her suit pockets, climbing up the hill and waving it.

“Harriet?” I ask. She turns back and winks at me.

“We surrender!” Harriet calls. “A parlay. Rebuild the town, merge with Charles. In exchange for our lives.”

I can feel Anwar’s confusion without even seeing him. The exact same feeling is running through me.

“Do it,” she invites him. “Rebuild the town.”

The feeling of a ketamine high, mixed with a ripping hangover and a sudden, biting urge to vomit sweep over me. In the next moment, I look out at a collection of houses and streets stalked by Soviet corpses we dredged from the desert. The only name that matters belongs to Anwar. His backup — a force of the best counter-snipers the mujahideen could muster — are being picked apart by vultures across the ridge.

The sky is gray but too dry for anything but dust. Heat lightning streaks through the sky and crashes to earth out in the desert. My sweat is poaching me in my ghillie suit and I haven’t eaten anything in almost a week. I’m covered in mosquito bites and forgot to take my anti-malarial pills. The Browning machine gun is so heavy that my arms ache even with the tripod. And to top it all off, my helmet is stuffy. All that orichalcum in the lining to keep Anwar’s thoughts out. Unfortunately, it also keeps mine in.

My arms ache. I have a functional Browning. And a line of sight on Anwar.

Harriet barks a short line in a martyred language. A horde of monsters closes in on the man, dogpiling him and ripping into his flesh.

The crack of a Lee Enfield rings out and rips into the zombies. It only takes me a moment to swivel the scope on the overhang across the ridge, centered on a boulder just big enough for someone to lie damn near under it. There’s a fuzziness around the space that could be heat shimmers.

I pull the trigger and look back at Anwar. His eyes burn as he lays waste, so I shoot him in the eye. He collapses in the air, hovering on hands and knees.

“< Please! >” he wails. My hands shake. I don’t look at Harriet. The railgun screams again, followed by Anwar as it removes his other eye.

“< Charles… >” he moans piteously, sinking to the ground.

The horde of zombies falls upon him. Harriet and I grip our skulls as sheer pain overwhelms us: the instinctive bite of betrayal and the simple physical burn of being eaten alive. Anwar’s face is distorted in a rictus of agony. His scream is inaudible under the gnashing of teeth. I can’t bear to look at it — so I help him the last way I can.

The helicopter comes to pick us up the next day, on the outskirts of the mountain. I’ve never been happier to see the olive pelican and actually look forward to bruising my tailbone on its seats. Harriet’s barely spoken to me since I killed Anwar. I don’t know what happened to Gharsanay. I hope I missed.

We clamber into the chopper and take our seats. I look out at the Afghan desert for the last time before the ramp raises and seals us in the stuffy bird.

The ride is smooth but tense. Harriet’s never this quiet. She’s always hyping me up to the pilots. I don’t know how to start a convo either — she always does it for me. I try to hold her, but she pushes my arm off.

The pilot announces that we’re an hour out from Kabul and perks Harriet up. She reaches for my hand, then stops, looking pointedly at the cockpit.

“Harriet?” I ask, extending my own.

My wife doesn’t answer. I wait, my stomach churning and my head pounding.

“Charles…” Harriet’s voice is quiet. “You’ve always been open with me right? Always told me the truth?”

“Always.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

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Footnotes

1. But he didn’t know my name then. He just asked me for a light.

2. This isn’t a memory. That sniper’s bullet must have cracked my helmet and let him in.

3. I try to think about Harriet — the mission — my dead comrades. Their names bubble into my mind — then a twisting, wrenching ache stretches down the side of my head into my arms. I retreat instinctively to the safety of Anwar’s mind game.

4. Anwar always did have softer sheets than me.

5. I hope the pride in my voice comes through. Can’t tell in a flashback — even one this twisted.

6. I’d never been here before but had heard rave reviews about the coffee; it seemed like the perfect place to plead for Anwar’s life.

7. All I remember from that day is Anwar, and his fate in my hands.