in the trench.
I felt myself breathe, nice and easy. Beside me, Walter still seemed tight. I whispered, “Cakewalk.”
“Sure.”
Boom ! It rained dirt clods. We all looked up as the trainee and the drill stood and dusted themselves off.
The procedure was the drill tackled the thrower instantly after the grenade left the trainee’s hand and knocked him behind the sandbags. Evidently people had a tendency to watch the grenade fly downrange. Nobody understood why people did that, since there were no points for distance or accuracy.
So, unless the thrower got a short fuse, then so long as the grenade even dropped a couple feet beyond the sandbags nobody got hurt. Your aunt Minnie could throw it far enough.
We moved to the on-deck circle.
I wasn’t exactly smiling, but with the Prozac II kicked in, I could do mis, now. The drill and trainee ahead of me moved up into the sandbag revetment. I looked over my shoulder at Walter, crouching twenty feet back. His eyes were wide. I gave him a thumbs-up, and he stretched a smile.
Prozac or not, my heart pounded. Second Platoon’s drill hoisted me by the elbow. “Our turn, Wander.”
The last thrower passed me on the way back, grinning and working his jaw to get the ringing out of his ears.
In a few seconds that would be me.
We moved into the sandbag revetment. I could feel Walter’s presence twenty feet behind me in the on-deck circle I had just vacated.
My blood chilled. What if he fucked up? Walter always fucked up. What if I got through it and Walter blew himself up?
I started to look back.
The drill grabbed my shoulders and held my eyes with his. “Wander? Listen up!”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
He was just running through the procedure, saying something. If anything happened to Walter, it would be like losing Mom again. Walter was my little brother.
“Got it?”
I felt myself nodding, then something heavy pressed into my right hand. Prozac or not, I shook.
It was going to be fine. What was going to be fine? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wanted things to be over with.
“Throw it! Wander!”
I looked down at my hand. The grenade trembled there, but it looked different. I could see the little hammer quite clearly. There was no lever. It spun through the air and tinged against a sandbag. I’d pulled the pin and released the lever and the grenade was still here. How interesting.
“Fuck!” The drill grabbed my wrist, and the grenade dropped from my flexing fingers.
Not flew.
Dropped. At my feet. It rocked there in the dirt, trailing a white-smoke thread from its top. The primer had detonated.
I had dropped my grenade with us inside the sandbag wall. In four seconds I would die.
The drill rammed into my chest and wrapped his arms, like a linebacker. Sandbags thudded against the backs of my thighs and we toppled backward, across the sandbag wall and out of the pit.
Two thoughts floated across my mind. So this was what happened when a trainee dropped a grenade. The drill just knocked himself and the trainee over the sandbag wall. As long as grenade and people ended up on op- posite sides of the sandbags, nobody got hurt. I was going to live.
The second thought was that Walter was running toward me, his mouth open, screaming. “Jason!”
Behind him, a guy in the on-deck circle grabbed out at the place where Walter had lain.
Walter dove headfirst, arms out like Superman.
I saw his eyes, scared and proud at the same time as his torso fell across the grenade.
Then the drill’s momentum carried both of us backward over the wall, and I saw only my boots silhouetted against the sky’s gray shroud.
My back hit the ground, the drill’s shoulder drove down on my chest, knocked wind from me, and I saw stars.
Chapter Ten
Breath exploded from my body like a detonating grenade. I lay paralyzed and tried to suck air. The grenade must have been a dud, thank God.
Plock . Plock, plock . Dirt clods rained down. One struck my cheek. Not a dud. The grenade had exploded. The drill lay across my body, so heavy his heart thudded against my ribs.
The dirt on my cheek was warm. I wiped it away and held it in front of my eyes. It dripped red. Flesh.
I tried to scream, but I still had no breath. I couldn’t hear anything anyway. Ruptured eardrums?
A silhouette jerked across the sky. A Smokey Bear hat. Fourth Platoon’s drill vaulted the sandbag wall alongside us. “Jesus. Fuck.” It sounded like he spoke through a pillow.
He yelled, “Medic! Get the fuckin‘ medic!”
Walter! I shoved the drill off me, sat up, and rolled to my knees. Other heads bobbed on the opposite side of the sandbag wall. I scrambled up, pulled myself across, and looked down into the revetment
Smoke swirled around people kneeling beside Walter. He lay facedown where he landed, his arms still stretched out. His cheek rested against the earth and his eyes were open. He looked fine, though his glasses were crooked, the way they got, even with that elastic band he wore around the back of his head.
Except that below his belt he was gone.
Just gone. He was just a head and torso, like a GI Joe doll thrown in the trash.
Somebody was screaming, over and over. It was me.
Chapter Eleven
The medic knelt beside me and pressed me back against the sandbags. “Easy, man! You’re okay.”
He inspected me. Somebody else looked over the drill who had knocked me out of the sandbag pit and maybe saved my life. To the extent Walter hadn’t.
“Not okay! Walter’s dead!” I wept.
A voice drifted from beyond the medic’s shoulder. “This one’s uninjured?” Ord bent forward, hands on knees.
“Yeah, Sarge. Shock, bleeding from the nose and ears. Maybe lost an eardrum. The other kid you saw…” The medic leaned toward Ord. “Sarge? This one’s on something.”
Ord stiffened. “What?”
“Look at his pupils.”
“He’s just agitated.”
“No, Sarge. Maybe just Prozac n. But he’s on something.”
“I was scared. I didn’t think I could do it. It was just two pills I had left.”
Ord grabbed my shoulder and squeezed, hard. I couldn’t tell whether he was mad at me, or he was trying to get me to shut up. I shut up.
The medic said, “You know regs, Sarge. I gotta write this up.”
Ord crossed his arms over his chest. Behind him they were loading a bag onto a Utter. Walter.
I couldn’t breathe. The medic held my cheeks in his hands and made me look at him. “You just took Prozac? Like within an hour? Nothing else?”
I nodded.
