The End Has Come and Gone

was a transition.

He watched from the roof of the car as his own head was thrust back, the right side having caved from the impact of a high velocity 30-30 hollow tip round. His cheek was the first to accept the molten metal. Next, muscle and nerve endings separated as the bullet burrowed further. The impact into his jaw shattered it in four places. Eleven teeth crumbled under the assault and still the bullet pushed on. The back of his skull finally released the offending impact as the bullet came to a stop in the head rest.

Job watched with some detachment as his friend first screamed frantically and then tried to wrest the wheel from the twitching hands of the steering corpse, Job’s foot had lodged down on the accelerator, causing the car to top out at 130 miles per hour. The essence that was Job moved a few feet higher from the scene just as the car began the first of its twelve somersaults. It was the fourth spin that sent Kyle hurtling away. Job was finding it more and more difficult to relate to the events that were unfolding before him. A higher calling was beckoning. And then he found himself in the Field of Flowers, an inner peace that every man strived for settled on him like a warm blanket. He took two steps to the comforting light before the serenity was ripped from his shoulders. Light faded to Dark. He ran as far and as fast as he could away from the hate, the pain, the misery, and the torment, but it was not quickly enough as his world faded to black.

Ron watched in awe as the police car finished the last of its death throes, screeching metal succumbing to the pissed off caws of disturbed crows. He didn’t know what they were bitching about, they'd dine well tonight.

Tony ejected the spent shell casing from his rifle and with the bolt action drove another into place.

'Dad! Wow!' Ron said with true amazement.

'Keep your focus, your daughter is still out there.'

'Yeah, but still…'

'We'll celebrate when this is over,' Tony told his son. It had damn near been sixty years since he had shot a human and it sucked now as much as it had then. The Japanese on Tarawa had been a ruthless enemy committed to the extermination of the Americans who had the audacity to land on their soil. Tony and a platoon of fellow Marines, due to intense shelling from the Japanese, had become separated from the larger battle group they were assigned to. For four days those forty men had held on to a knoll roughly the size of a football field. The Marines had not slept the entire time as the Japanese sent everything they could at the detachment.

The Marines had bloodied their hands as they dug down as deep as they could with their small shovels. Mortars, grenades and withering machine gun fire rained down on their position almost the entire time. The only breaks in the devastating arsenal assault were when the Japanese would launch a charge. Seven times they came and seven times the Marines had rallied. Their dogged persistence and crippling marksmanship repelled the Japanese.

After the third assault, grumblings of Tuefelhunden came to the fore in the ranks of the Japanese troops, the German word for Marines which quite literally translated into Devil Dog. For what demon must they be fighting that could survive the shellings and the hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese soldiers that kept assaulting their position.

Tony, a mere corporal, found himself in charge of the remnants of his platoon as his lieutenant was killed and the gunnery sergeant was incapacitated by a gunshot wound to his abdomen. The snot-nosed 19- year-old was going to do his damnedest to keep the remaining twenty-two of his fellow Marines alive. He kept his word to fifteen of them. A battalion of Marines had finally pushed far enough inland to encapsulate the ‘Fighting Fifteen’ as they became known in the papers back home. The Japanese initially feared that the gates of Hell had been ripped open as thousands of Marines poured out of that small hill; they turned tail and ran as if their very souls depended on it. Tony had always hated the moniker the newspaper thrust upon them. Twenty-five of the finest men he had ever known had lost their lives in a land God had forgotten, and apparently so would the people back home.

'I see Meredith!' Ron said excitedly.

Tony once more brought his eye down to the sighting aperture.

Even at 110 miles per hour, Officer Gibson took in all the information around him. He had been a good cop once and those skills made the leap into psychosis with him. He first noted the pickup truck strategically parked on the on-ramp. He also noticed the smoldering wreckage that was Job and Kyle. Most disconcerting though were the two riflemen taking aim on his position. He had absolutely no hope of returning any sort of covering fire, his only hope was to use the car in front of him as a shield.

'There's Dad!' Meredith exclaimed.

'Not yet girl!' BT yelled as Meredith pulled a hand off the steering wheel to wave at her father. BT looked back at the cop, hoping that he had been too focused on them to notice the cavalry, but it wasn't to be. The cop car started to shift over to Meredith's left, and then the cop gunned it so that his front quarter panel was even with Meredith's rear.

'BT, I'm sorry he got past me,' Meredith said frantically as she looked at the police cruiser in her side view mirror creeping up.

'Let him,' BT said coldly.

'You said to not let him,' Meredith responded.

'If I learned nothing else from your uncle, I will now be able to go the grave with the ability to adapt.'

'The grave?'

'Figure of speech. I hope,' BT mumbled.

'Did you just say, 'I hope'?'

'I did not say that out loud.'

'You're right, I just made that up. I'm driving 110 miles per hour down a highway with a psycho cop chasing our asses and I needed to add a little more flavor to the mix.'

'Sorry,' BT said, looking over his shoulder at the cop car which was just a few feet from pulling even.

Officer Gibson liked his position, he was damn near parallel to the bitch and her black boyfriend, another quarter mile and they'd be past the other pick-up truck. Then he'd shoot the life out of the both of them, repeatedly. He'd be long gone before that other truck would ever be able to catch up. Screw it, maybe he'd wait for them too, death did not discriminate. 'Should almost be past them,' he said to himself, doing the calculations in his head. The bigger truck to his right had him completely shielded.

'NOW!' BT shouted.

'Now what?!' Meredith screamed, looking around for some new threat.

'Slam your brakes! Put your foot through the floor board!'

'Don’t you yell at me!' Meredith shot back, even as she used her entire frame to stand on the brake pedal. The truck bucked, the ass fishtailed, tortured brake pads melted under the intense heat. BT had to brace himself against the dashboard from the forces applied to his body. Smoke shot out from all four braking points and the rear end threatened to come completely off the ground.

Officer Gibson took a second longer to react as he was already enjoying the mythical killing fields. As the front end of the truck slid past him he was awarded the view of two of the largest rifle barrels he thought he had ever seen in his entire life. 'Fuck…'

The smell of burnt pads hung in the air as Meredith's truck limped to a stop. The screech of metal on metal thankfully came to a halt in another three hundred feet. The right rear wheel having completely