He was two blocks from the bar when he heard the woman screaming.
John had always figured there were distinctive levels to screaming. On a scale from one to ten, a one can be compared to that of two-year-old opening presents at their birthday party. A ten is the scream that comes when the earth opens up beneath your feet, and you start that long plunge into hell.
He gave this one at least a seven.
John ran down a side alley, through an open doorway, and up the stairs into one of the many tenements that threatened to collapse into the town square.
The scream came again as he reached the second-floor landing. He ran down a hallway that was empty of the riff-raff that normally slept inside when the rainy season was in full force.
The third scream made his skin crawl, and he bumped it up to an eight as he slammed into the apartment door without pausing. He busted into the apartment in time to see a dreadlocked man with a meat cleaver going after a woman who had a kid clinging to each leg.
John’s crashing through the door snapped the attacker’s attention away from his victims. He was as tall as John, but slender, the kind of slender that you equate with drug use or disease.
Her attacker turned from her and came toward John with the cleaver. He was too close for John to unsnap the strap on his side arm. He should have already unsnapped, but peacekeepers weren’t supposed to shoot first.
He swung at John with the cleaver and John sidestepped into the apartment, trying to place himself between the loony and the woman. Mr. Deadlocks anticipated John’s move and cut him off. John waited until the cleaver’s next swing and stepped inside after the blade passed. Before his hand could start back, John looped an arm over his and immobilized the cleaver. A swift chop of John’s free hand broke the man’s collarbone, and he dropped the cleaver.
Without the cleaver, he wasn’t much of a threat. John took the wind out of his sails with a few punches to his belly, and then bounced him off the wall until he passed out.
Luck.
What was it that made some people luckily and some just dead?
Luck made him turn in time to see the woman swinging the cleaver down toward his head.
Only fast reflexes got his head off the chopping block.
Almost.
She didn’t split his skull, but she creased it from eyebrow to jaw.
John staggered away from her as she drew back for another swing. He dropped low and swept her feet out from under her with his right foot. She fell hard.
Before she recovered from the fall, he had snatched the cleaver out of her hand. He stood over her; the cleaver in his right hand, as blood from his face cascaded onto hers. She blinked, trying to clear her eyes, and raised her hands to ward off what she thought was coming.
John stared at her with his clear eye. She was young, perhaps even younger than he. A roaring filled his ears, and for an instant, he couldn’t place the sound. Then he noticed the screaming children huddled in the corner of the small apartment. They watched terrified as John tried to decide what to do with the cleaver.
It didn’t take long him long to realize what a fool he’d been.
He left the cleaver buried in the apartment’s doorjamb and went looking for the UN first aid station.
He made it as far as the camp entrance before he started feeling lightheaded. The gate guard took one look at his blood-soaked uniform and radioed for an ambulance. John thanked him and sat down against the side of the guard shack to rest. The guard started asking him questions, and John tried to answer them, but he was getting sleepy. He didn’t remember the ambulance arriving.
When he woke up, the Gunny was standing over him. John blinked his unbandaged eye and greeted Gunnery Sergeant Zim. “Morning, Gunny. What brings you out?”
“Damn it, Lieutenant. Do I have to watch you twenty-four hours a day?”
“Come on, Gunny, it could have happened to anyone.”
The short gray hairs on the Gunny’s head glistened in the artificial light as his head shook sadly from side to side. “Lieutenant, it couldn’t have happened to anyone who followed SOP. It shouldn’t have happened to anyone that I’ve spent so much time training. What have I told you about being a hero?”
“A hero? Gunny I wasn’t trying to be a hero, I was–”
“Don’t give me that. I saw the gate SP’s report.”
John tried to remember what he’d told the shore patrolman at the gate, but it wouldn’t come.
“You were trying to save some woman, and she ended up trying to kill you. If you’d paid any attention to me over the last year, you would have called for assistance before you ever entered that building.”
“Ah, Gunny, there wasn’t time. I’d have called if–”
“Wrong answer, Lieutenant. There’s always time if you’re not trying to be a hero. The standard operating procedures insist that no one gets involved in local fighting without the commander’s authorization unless UN forces are under attack.”
“Hell, I–”
“Yeah, I know what you’re going to say, ‘There wasn’t time. It was a judgment call. You did what you felt you had to do.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Ah, do you think the Colonel will buy it?”
The Gunny shook his head again. “No, I don’t think he’ll buy it, but for official purposes, he will. Hell, he may even give you a medal, but you aren’t fooling anyone.”
“I don’t want a medal.”
“I’ll tell him you said that, but the Colonel has to keep the politicos happy. If one of his men gets cut
