CROSSROADS by Steven Nedelton (sight word readers txt) 📖

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AN AMBUSH

Today's The Judgement Day.

I’m the prosecutor and the judge.

He stood in the parking lot of a small restaurant and thought that mind is all about chemistry, and that soldiering and chemistry do not mix.

The nearby highway rumbled occasionally and the chilly, drizzly dawn reeked of unburned diesel fumes. The fresh asphalt smell bonded with the fumes and drizzle. His nose ached from the corrosive mix.

Still dark. He was sure he had the cover he needed but glanced once more at the faint yellowish light above the restaurant’s entrance. The proverbial ‘clothes don’t make a man’ was all wrong. In the obscure light, dressed in a long, dark, trucker’s coat, rubber boots, and a winter cap with ear flaps, he faded into just another Ivan.

I’m the executioner, too.

He leaned against the doorjamb of his wife’s Moskvitch, sensed the wet cold seeping through his coat and, shivering, rechecked his wristwatch. The luminous dial indicated five. The restaurant would open shortly, though it was still too early for most customers.
It’s time to move. Sokolov will soon be here for his boiled eggs and blini.
He shut the car door without disturbing the silence of the parking lot, and, avoiding the noisy crunch under his feet, started across the gravel. Seven or eight meters from the restaurant’s doors, on the paved walkway, he figured he was close enough and stopped by a telephone pole. He dropped his shoulder bag on the pavement.

He ached for a smoke. He fished a cigarette and matches from his shirt pocket, struck a match against the rusty steel pole, and lit the cigarette. The sulfur quickly invaded his nostrils, though the cigarette tip only reluctantly flared in the damp darkness. When it did, the minuscule flare grabbed him and threw him back into the midst of a battle.
Afganistan. His tank bucks and rocks after each deafening salvo, and the air explodes with the Mujahadins’ American missiles. Then the nauseating stench of gunpowder, cordite, and sweat, and the yelling, screaming, and bastard death sown all around like the seed behind a farmer’s plow. Jihad! Jihad!

they shout.

Deluded peasants on opium.

He tried to forget that past but couldn’t. It loomed from behind like the dark sky above.
“Those memories don’t fade, brother—they never do,” a veteran had once stoically counseled him while licking the edge of a square bit of thin, grayish paper filled with soggy tobacco, that he rolled into a cigarette between his yellowed fingertips. “I reckon we’re stuck with it. You’re lucky you’re left in one piece—look at me. A few rubles now and then and”—he sneered—“ I can predict ya the rain and snow more accurately than that Moscow...TV channel.”

A hero without legs. A hero without a home. Politicians tell you go, Soldier, go; kill, prove you’re the right stuff. Pretty and not so pretty women hug you, wish you luck. A year later you find out it was just that they were young—they couldn’t wait forever.
And the politicians live on, into history.
He felt lucky to be out of that hell. People were like deer, rockstill in front of headlights when they should be running for it.
Whenever he drinks too much, he wishes he had stayed in the rock-strewn no-man’s-land, next to his brethren.

He observed the restaurant’s entrance, wondering if he would end up in an asylum—for the sane—thanks to his wife’s father’s Party connections, or if he’ll hang like a common criminal. Will Valentina denounce him on the spot and remarry a week later? The marriage matters were trivial to him but to Valentina they were preeminent.
Her long legs in white and her killer looks, plus her status... Her intent was to impress the world, yet she abhorred crowds. Imagine Valentina legless.
He turned away from the restaurant and stood sentry-like; smoking, waiting. The instructions hit him again: Colonel Sokolov must die.

He rechecked his wristwatch and noticed time had somehow slowed down. Even the secondhand was dragging. He shook his head, tried to rewind the already wound mechanism that was his brain.

Ten minutes later, the Zil finally arrived. The sound of its motor remind him of an angry guard dog’s growl. It occurred to him that Sokolov’s Zil, that inanimate machine, somehow recognized him and hated him for what he was about to do—truly absurd.

He drew a deep breath to clear his mind and listened to the engine rev for a while longer. When it quieted, he dropped his cigarette butt and picked up the bag at his feet. He slung it over his shoulder, then slid his hand into his coat pocket. Lowering his head, he hid his face behind his coat’s large lapel and pretended to bend under the weight of the empty bag. Then he began to rock side-to-side, as if staving off the cold.

Like a hungry wolf stalking a deer, he listened to the Zil’s heavy car doors open and slam shut. He listened to the heavy gravel crunch under their feet, to Sokolov’s bodyguard, Stepan, cursing the puddles; to Sokolov’s muffled, “yeah, yeah, yeah.” When he
sensed them passing behind him, he tore the gun out of his coat pocket, whirled around, and fired. Four shots—two and two more—then three until the magazine and gun are empty. In his subconscious he was back in his childhood, in the freezing cellar, his father’s butcher mallet’s slamming a frozen carcass.

The two men fell—thrown sideways—sprawling across the pavement like two slaughtered, bloodied animals. A crimson liquid spread out before his eyes.
He observed their hands and legs jerk, twitch, fall silent. The heads were mostly gone.

He quickly reloaded the gun, and, still leaning forward, whirled around, searching for a construction worker or a truck driver, for anyone around. For anyone who could betray him. He’d shoot them, too.

There was no one to be seen.
He pocketed the Makarov, and, as if released from an otherworldly power-hold, he finally ran. He stumbled and slid across the wet gravel toward the Moskvitch, straining to hear screams of “Stop! St-o-o-p the
murderer! St-o-o-p him! Po-o-olice!” But he heard no shouts or sirens, nothing but the rumble of the truck convoys on the nearby highway and the heavy click-clack of a passing train. He finally reached the car and opened its door. He collapsed into the driver’s
seat muttering, “I’m free...I’m free”—words that would only make sense to him and a certain woman doctor...no one else.

Publication Date: 07-03-2009

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