SHOOT FIRST by Ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca 1/2
When we went inside the building there was a dead Unie soldier lying on his back at the foot of the stairs, a lot of plaster down in one room that had once been a formal atelier, broken furniture strewn across the floors and a strong smell of sewage, mouldy blood and shell grease. Other than that, the house was real intact. It even had glass in the windows. Our boots crunched softly on the broken plaster. Peter Pevensey, and a blond haired soldier who had a 214 unit-stripe instead of ours, had followed me inside out of the wind.
We stood in the front hall of the shivering house. The house was trembling like a man with malaria, because of the artillery fire but we didn't notice that. After five, no six, straight days of bombardment, you just didn't register anything that wasn't landing close by. Inside it was warmer. The walls deadened the sounds outside, numbing them.
The guy from 214 fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. "Smoke?" He held them out with a hand that shook like the house did, but I didn't register his trembling especially at the time either. Peter and I both shook our heads. We waited for him to light up but he pushed the package back. He was so blond that he was looking kind of green. Fatigue can do that to you.
Just for a few moments, standing there was enough. Our breath fogged faint traces. I felt the ugly smells instead of feeling cold prickle in my nose. A lot of the debris on the floor was Unie stuff, the wrappers torn off of shell dressings and cardboard ration packs. I looked down. There was a woman's pink dress ground into the plaster below my feet. Maybe someone had been trying to loot it. The Unies, as evidenced by their refuse, had made use of this building before us. It was the sixth day of the counter attack and I was dead tired. To be standing in a stinky, cold house where it wasn't quite so cold was enough.
None of us said anything. The wrappers from the ration packs reminded me that I should eat, if I had anything to eat. I couldn't find my stomach so I didn't know if I was hungry or not and I didn't remember if I'd eaten or not since the Sergeant had last handed the packs out. I stood and considered it.
It was my twenty-eighth day in the field. Our orders were to kill anything that moved: Shoot first and think later, that was the way to stay alive. They had drilled this into us urgently.
There wouldn't be any civilians, they had briefed us, but if there were any alive in the Unie occupied territory, they were fifth columnists, Independantists, or terrorists of some type and the Unie had left them alive on purpose. They would be more dangerous than the Unie. The only civilians I had seen had been dead about a week and a half, swollen up like sausages and then frozen, and I had seen plenty of them. I had also seen plenty of Unie bodies. They hadn't been given orders for an official pull back so we had been shelling and then slaughtering them house-to-house for the entire six days. But the only thing that I had killed was a dog, which had probably already been wounded. When I had seen the size of what I had shot I had thought for a moment that it was a baby and when my unit mates had seen what I had killed they had had a good chuckle.
"What to get some shut eye?" Peter said quietly.
I considered that too. It was mid-afternoon. "Yeah." I said. It was quiet, we weren't expecting a counter attack and if there were a counter attack, then the Unie artillery or bombers would warn us that we were under fire.
The dead guy at the foot of the stairs gave a deep sigh.
I didn't just hear that, I thought, I couldn't have. In front of me, Peter and the blond still had no expressions on their faces, but they stared past my shoulder and they were looking at whatever had made the soft sound I had heard with a shell-shocked blankness. I turned around slowly and somnabulisticly. The Unie's gun was propped against the wall about six feet from him. His uniform was the blotchy brown colour that comes from combining blood with khaki and letting it dry out. We scuffed softly forward and stood in a ring around him at the foot of the stairs.
The guy was asleep. I thought unconscious from his wounds, but when we stood around him with our automatic rifles, the quality of the light changed and then his eyes came open. He gave a small jerk. His head and shoulders came up a bit but then he didn't move. He had a couple of week's dirty beard on his face but for all that I could see his expression.
Eyes wide, he took it in. Then he looked annoyed. His eyes rolled up in disgust even. I could read his expression just as clear as if he had said what he was thinking aloud. I didn't know what the Unie for "Oh, shit!" was, but if he had said anything, that was what he would have been saying. There he was sleeping peacefully and he'd let three Americans get the drop on him.
He never reached for his gun. Three high-strung Americans were pointing assault rifles at him. Three Americans who just stood there and looked and kept looking and then having gotten a good look at their first Unie prisoner of war, kept looking some more.
His mouth firmed up. He squared his shoulders some and stayed on his back. He didn't try saying anything. It was the kid from the 214 who spoke in a voice that was gravelly like he'd forgotten to clear it. "He's a Unie."
I turned my head and looked at the kid. I know we are all suffering a bit from combat fatigue, I thought, but that is really belabouring the obvious. "Yeah," said Peter. "A wounded Unie. I guess he got left behind."
Now, what we were supposed to do next was obvious. Step back because we were a little too close and might be in each others line of fire and use the rifles to ensure that if he was carrying a small arm he would never get a chance to snatch it out. Our orders, to put it clearly, were to waste him.
"How badly wounded do you think he is?" My voice sounded like I had forgotten to clear it too.
"I don't know," said Peter. "Do you want to check?"
"Okay." I said.
Shoot first, think later, the sergeant had drilled us. All the same, I turned my rifle up and as Peter and Blond stepped back, I squatted carefully and laid my hand on the guy's chest. Looking down I could see it clearly. My hand was dirty, like I had been digging in earth. His uniform jacket was close to the colour of earth, because of the blood in it. I pawed him. I didn't come up with the exact source of the blood, but I did discover that he had no small arm in his pockets or on his webbing belts. I also couldn't help meeting his eyes.
The Unie had brown eyes. They looked like bloodshot cue balls. They turned up inquiringly. They were alert eyes, not the eyes of a guy fogged out on morphine or half dead. Adrenalin had probably cleared his brain. He was taking his predicament pretty calmly too. I kept my hands patting slow, not roughly so he wouldn't freak out on me. When I stood up, I picked up the Unie's weapon. "He's not armed, guys."
"Where's he bleeding?" Peter asked.
"I don't know." I said.
"Didn't you find it?" Peter's voice got waspish.
I've known Peter Pevensey, or known of Peter for a lot of years. He and I were at the same high school. He was the jock with the smart mouth that I hated. He lost the smart mouth while we were in basic training, and somewhere along the line I forgot that I hated him. I got used to his ways. With the casualty rate we had, all that counted was if a guy did his job or not. Peter always did his job. It was irrelevant to remember if I liked him or hated him. So I ignored the sharp tone.
"Fuck off." I advised Peter. "You look."
The Unie was breathing deep and scared. He wasn't acting scared, but his breaths were coming up from the bottom of his lungs and his fists were balled. Looking at him, I was aware that there was something that I was being careful not to try to figure out. >From the puckered up expression on Peter's face, I would say that he was trying to figure it out. "Think he can stand?"
I passed the Unie's weapon to Blond and went on my knees again beside the Unie. I pulled on his shoulder and levered him up. He came up surprisingly easy and, as I got him on his feet, I turned his wrists up so that he was holding them above his head.
The Unie was an average guy. He was the same size I was. He was dressed in a heavy green uniform, the wrong shade of green. He was kind of pasty looking though. I figured that was blood loss. He moved his lips like he was going to say something but it was just a quiver of unspoken sound.
I think it was Peter's idea to take him upstairs. Anyway, Peter gestured with his gun and he backed up the stairs warily and Blond and I followed with the prisoner ahead of us. I pushed the prisoner but he didn't buckle enough to fall down and all the way up I thought, If he folds up and collapses I'm going to have to step aside because I am so tired I don't think I can catch him.
Peter swung his rifle from room to room on the upstairs landing. Nothing: Just what had once been a dressing station. It was like walking on leaves. There were IV bags and wads of bloodstained bandage and plastic bags that slithered and hissed. It all came to the top of our boots. In one of the rooms there was a double bed, heaped up with an untidy mound of quilts. Peter walked us all in there.
"Okay, now. Find out where he's wounded." Peter directed me.
"You do it."
The prisoner faced us with his chin up and his eyes wary. He was looking at each one of in turn frowning, and in the bewilderment of his frown, was an increasing anxiety that looked like disgust again on his face. You could see that he was thinking, What are these guys doing? And that he didn't trust us one bit.
Neither Peter nor I moved. Blond put down the two rifles he was carrying and went up to the Unie again. He pawed over him, much like I had. Only Blond wound up searching the Unie by feel mostly, keeping his face turned awkwardly away. I could tell that he was avoiding meeting the Unie's eyes. "I can't find a hole in his clothes." Blond mumbled.
"Peter," I said. "Why are we checking him for injuries?"
"That's what it says in our regulations," Peter said irritably. "It's even in the Geneva Convention. If we take a prisoner and he's wounded, we have to give him medical treatment for his wounds."
"Yes, but..."
"It's probably only a small opening. Look under his clothes." Peter ordered Blond. We had all seen plenty of dead guys who didn't have any obvious marks on them, so what Peter said made sense. There were plenty of bullets zipping around, small enough that they wouldn't leave a hole in cloth bigger than a cigarette burn.
"But we can't take prisoners." I said. "There's no provosts anywhere near here to turn him over to."
So Blond opened the Unie's jacket up and his shirt under it and began sliding his hands around underneath. The Unie was meeting my eyes. Brown, foreign, enemy eyes were fixed mutely on mine. He didn't give Blond any trouble.
"Pull his jacket off. Yeah." Peter said.
Webbing belts, stiff filthy khaki and limp green cloth began to form a heap at the Unie's feet.
"Peter," I said. "What are we trying to do? If we bring him out there, the sergeant's just going to shoot him."
"No, he's a prisoner!" Peter said angrily. "Once he's a prisoner we have to take care of him!"
I realised why Peter was making the big deal about trying to treat the Unie's wounds. It was because Peter didn't want to march the Unie outside and stand him up in front of our sergeant. He was doing this to delay doing that.
"Find it!" Peter said. Blond kept pulling clothes off. The Unie's arms had to come down of course and he half put them back. I saw a beautifully muscled torso, thinly furred, two dark nipples the size of a dollar coin, a narrow navel, a belly that was jumping with each frightened breath. There wasn't much blood under his shirt. There wasn't any. There were a few grazes, one on the back of his arm just above the elbow, but so little that if you had that and you took it to a dressing station, they'd put their boots in your ass for malingering.
Why Blond took off the Unie's boots, I don't know. But Peter and I didn't stop him, so Blond did that and yanked the enemy soldier's trousers down and off. He stood naked. Blond inspected him closely. The Unie had a cut cock. It was thick and limp, and he had balls that were shrivelled up tight, but were still the size of small Christmas oranges. He didn't keep his hands up. He held them down swaying in front of his crotch as if he didn't know if he should cover up or not.
Blond stepped back, and there was nothing to keep me from getting an eyeful of the naked prisoner. "Ummm..?" said Blond. I guess I was goggling at our prisoner as if I'd never been in a room with a naked guy before.
Peter looked. Blond looked. We were all looking at the prisoner's cock. It was a perfectly normal, if large cock. The guy was completely unwounded. He was shivering violently.
In my pants, I felt a stirring. I guess it had already started while Blond was stripping the Unie. Now that I was looking at him completely naked, my cock was straining at the fly of my trousers. Shit. I eased my hips back, changed my stance so that it would be less obvious. I snuck a look at Peter. Christ, I thought. If Peter sees that, he's going to realise that I go for guys.
But Peter was gazing at the prisoner. "Okay then... I guess he's not wounded." He said dumbly. "I guess it wasn't his blood. I guess, he looks like he's okay..." This house had been a Unie dressing station. It made sense. It had never been his blood, but the blood of other Unie soldiers whom he must have been helping earlier.
I looked at Blond. Blond had a weird little smile on his face. I looked at the prisoner again, because really that was all I wanted to look at. He had a beautiful body. All he had on was a tiny chain necklace around his throat. His ribs stood out like weals. He was just shuddering with cold and the mist was coming from his mouth in thin white wisps as he gasped. His face was sealed up, dumb, a study in misery, with a flared nose and crooked trembling lips and eyes like targets. He had been stripped naked at gunpoint and he thought he was going to die. The courage that he'd had at the foot of the stairs had left him. All that was left was misery and fear and humiliation.
I had a memory suddenly. The memory was of my embarkation leave. I only had twelve hours, not enough time to go home, but my Mom and Dad and two sisters had driven down all the way to the base to spend it with me. We'd gone out for hamburgers and while the women were eating my Dad had asked me to come outside the hamburger shack so he could ask me something. I had been incredulous.
My Dad is one of the most patriotic, rigidly moral people I know. He says it's his duty to pay our taxes to provide roads and schools. He's told me that I must never, ever go on welfare, better to starve first, that he would always support me first. Lying, stealing, cheating in any way, cowardly behaviour; I've never seen him do anything of that kind. But there he was telling me that he had civilian clothes and a fake id in the car all ready for me, and if I was willing we could get in and drive until we got to the nearest border.
"You want me to desert!?!" I could not believe it.
"I'm afraid something really bad could happen to you." he'd said, his voice too even with tension and the desire to convince me.
"I'm not afraid of getting killed." I'd said.
"I'm not afraid of your getting killed either. You're a man. That's your decision to make. I'm afraid of something else."
I had thought he was afraid I'd become a cripple, or have to die painfully and slowly. What else could he mean? "No, Dad!" I said. "I'm not deserting. I'm not going AWOL. I'm prepared to face what might happen."
Standing there in that bedroom, suddenly I got an idea that this was what my Dad was afraid of when he said something really bad could happen to me. He was afraid that I would get into a situation like this. We were tormenting the prisoner. We were going to have to shoot him dead, while he was helpless, and what we were doing in the bedroom was tormenting him first.
The sound of my own indrawn breath was so loud that it started me. I moved quickly and jerkily. I gestured at the bed. "Get in it. Go on. Get under those covers." I blurted loudly.
The Unie understood my gesture if not the words. He was happy to scramble swiftly under the heap of bedding. On his way I caught sight of a smooth muscular looking backside with tight ass cheeks. Then he was sitting hunched up, pulling the covers around him to cover up his nakedness.
Peter and Blond looked at me startled. They looked from the Unie to me. I had broken up the tableau but they didn't mind that.
Blond's teeth were chattering when he spoke. "He's right," he said. "I mean, we take him out there he's going to get shot. Soon as we bring him out where the other guys see him. We're going to have to shoot him." His voice was sorrowful.
"It's not right to shoot prisoners we took." Peter said stubbornly.
"It's not right." I agreed quietly, "But the minute they see he's not an American, someone's going to pull their side arm out and shoot him. I've seen that. You've seen that. Haven't you seen that?'
"Yes." said Blond.
We looked at the Unie and at each other. I swayed on my feet. Blond gave an unlovely sniff and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. I am too fucking tired to solve this, I thought. Peter looked down at the floor and around the room. He was thinking hard. He wasn't looking at the Unie or at us.
"I don't wanna shoot him, but..." Blond said.
"Well, you don't have to shoot him. But someone else is going to." I said.
Blond shifted uneasily. "One of you two?"
"I'm not shooting him," I said slowly "Unless the sergeant commands me to. A direct order. Otherwise, I'm not."
If I disobey a direct order, I thought. Would the sergeant shoot me?
The Unie said something. He said it quiet, maybe it wasn't a whole question. It didn't mean anything to us. I threw a sickly smile in his direction to reassure him.
"What are we going to do?" Blond asked.
"I don't know yet." I said.
"Can I offer him a cigarette?"
"Okay."
Blond fished out his pack of cigarettes again and offered one to the Unie. A tremulous smile came out on the Unie's lips. He shook his head. Blond put the pack back.
"Offer him food." Peter suggested.
There was a general rummaging. I found that I had two ration packs tucked in my pockets, which meant that I'd most likely gone nearly two days without eating. No wonder I feel like shit, I thought. I held out some crackers. Blond held out a granola bar that he'd found in his pockets. The Unie looked at us both, one then the other. Then he reached out two grimy hands and took both the offerings. As I stood, I started to chew on a bit of the dry sausage from one of the packs and the Unie ate his granola bar.
"He's hungry." Blond said.
"Look," said Peter. He sat down on the foot of the bed. "You guys are right. If we bring the Unie out where the other guys can see him, he gets shot. If we don't want him shot, we'll have to get him to a provosts' post behind the lines."
I considered that. Slipping away from our unit, that wouldn't be hard. Blond had already mislaid his unit. That was why he was running around with ours. It wouldn't be too difficult to take off. But getting him through the lines to the provosts?
I honestly, seriously considered it. The thing was, I realised that that was what my Dad would have done. He would have disobeyed orders, gone missing from his unit to keep a guy alive and save a human life. But I wasn't even sure which direction behind the lines was, and I knew that we couldn't avoid running into other units other than our own. Those units were just as likely to shoot him as our own was.
I dug my canteen out. We passed them around. Blond was carrying two canteens. We passed them around to the Unie as well and he drank the frigid, near frozen water the same way we did. I started to sway again. I sat on the bed.
This put me rather too close to the Unie, so Peter behind me got up to give me some more space. I'm tired, I thought. I gave up trying to puzzle out a way of keeping the Unie alive. It was too bad, but he was going to be shot and I was going to let it happen. I wasn't going to be able to stop it, any more than the Unie could. I looked at the Unie with a glazed smile on my face.
He's got a gorgeous cock, I thought. I wished he wasn't in the bed. A perfectly good bed to lie down on and there was a fucking Unie prisoner of war in it.
"Umm, maybe we should let him get dressed?" Blond said.
Good idea, I thought. Get another look at that fantastic cock of his, and then I could take the bed.
"No." said Peter. "He's not going to try anything like that. He knows he can't get away from us if he's got no clothes on."
"Yeah, but he's naked." Blond said. I guess he was thinking about the humanitarian aspects.
"So?" Peter responded. "He's under the covers. We're not letting him die of exposure."
"What do you think we should do?" Blond asked me.
"I think we should get under the covers and warm up." I said.
I didn't say it thinking about what it meant. I just said it because it was what I wanted to do. But Blond sat down behind me and after a second Peter sat down on the other side of the Unie soldier so that we were all in a row, sideways on the bed. Peter was against the head of the bed, then the Unie soldier and then me and Blond behind me. It was a double bed. There was a lot of heaving about and tugging on the blankets. There were a lot of blankets but not much room. The Unie got pushed over so that he was against my shoulder and Blond was against my other shoulder. Peter kept pushed so he wouldn't have to touch the wall. The Unie wound up nose to nose with me.
Is this some kind of abuse? I thought. I pulled my knees in. We were all knees under there, and shoulders. Something on Blond's belt had a metal bump that was sticking in to my waist. I decided it wasn't abuse, but it was a damn stupid way to guard a prisoner. If he wanted to fight he had us in range and all our rifles were stacked against the wall. Suppose the little fucker had taken unarmed combat training?
It wasn't so bad under the covers, for all that it was crowded. It felt real good to be lying down. It felt good to have another man's warmth close along my back. I didn't mind the metal thing on Blond's belt, because I could have his body heat. The only thing was that the Unie between Peter and me was very naked. I could feel that he had no cloth on his arm where it was pressed into my side, and that his thigh lying close on my thigh was nude. I had a naked man almost in my arms.
Peter was looking at me over the Unie's head.
"How long is the break?" Blond asked behind me.
"Couple more hours maybe." Peter answered him.
I had a hard on again. The Unie didn't smell so bad for a guy that had been covered in blood. Actually he had a warm, unfamiliar body odour that was kind of attractive. I lay on my back carefully, to make sure that none of the guys realised that I had a hard on. That meant I was taking up a lot of room, not lying on my side. Peter saw lying on his side facing the Unie and me.
"You still cold, Georgie?" Peter asked me.
"I'm okay."
"How about you, Blond?"
Blond laughed. "This feels funny. I mean, he's an enemy..."
"Yeah." Peter agreed.
End of Part 1
By Ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca