all god's orphans
Chapter 43

By the time they had loaded the bodies onto a trailer and hooked it up to a truck, it was nearly ten o’clock at night. MacDunn assigned Brian and Buck to drive the corpses to a landfill about thirty miles away and dump them there. As they drove into the night, Brian’s head rang with a dull aching throb at the base of his skull. Buck, on the other hand, looked like a kid who just saw his first porn.

“Oh man,” He said at one point. “Those ninja guys are freakin’ cool, huh? Those black masks. I wonder if they’ll give us one of those. That would be awesome.” Brian didn’t answer. The silence suited him but it made Buck feel obligated to talk. “What do you think these guys did?” Brian shrugged.

“No idea.” He said glumly. The exit to the landfill came and went.

“Hey, where are we going?” Buck chimed in. “We’re supposed to take them down that road back there.” Brian still had nothing to say. “What are we doing?” Buck probed. Brian realized he was going to have to speak at some point.

“We’re taking them to another spot and burying them.”

“But Sergeant MacDunn…” Buck began.

“I’m not throwing these people in a landfill like they’re fucking garbage. Is that understood.” This was the first time he bothered to look Buck in the eye and the effect was immediate.

“Okay.” Buck replied sheepishly. “Whatever you say.”

“And don’t tell anyone about this, understand?” Buck nodded but looked away. Brian knew this meant he was probably going to betray him, but he doubted anyone would care that they had given the condemned a decent burial. He was pretty sure that no matter how “revised” the UCMJ had become, dumping enemy combatants into a landfill was probably still illegal.

Brian found the spot where the other executed bodies lay beneath freshly turned earth. He wanted them near each other for a reason. Something about all of this didn’t feel right to him and he suspected that there was another dimension to all of this. If he ever was court martialed, he wanted to know where evidence was that would back up his claims that he’d been following orders. They weren’t going to pin this on him.

The headlights of the truck lit a large area before them and they dug a pit beneath a clear night sky. Though neither of them would say it, they were glad that the hoods had been left on. As they moved the corpses from the trailer to their final resting place in the middle of nowhere in an unmarked grave, a terrible thought struck Brian.

“How long ago did you join up with the army?” Brian asked. Buck thought about it.

“I’ve lost track of time, but it wasn’t very long after that night.”

“Where have you been this whole time? Another base?”

“Yeah.” Replied Buck. “I was at AGO Delta for most of that time. We had…”

“Did you see any executions while you were there?”

“Naw, man.” Buck shook his head. “I heard about others replaceing dead bodies, but we never executed anyone.”

“So why are they starting all of a sudden?” Brian asked the night air, but Buck took it directly.

“No idea.” He said curtly, aping Brian’s reticence, but only for a moment. “Maybe these guys are with that group that’s been killing people.” Brian had not heard of this.

“What are you talking about?” He realized that he’d been in isolation since the beginning. He had not heard any news or much information at all.

“There’s some weird group called the Revelation Riders. I don’t know much about them, but I heard they’ve killed some people.”

“Killed people?” Brian thought of the bodies beneath his feet.

“Yeah they round up people and shoot them.” Buck said it matter-of-factly and Brian was once again stunned by his casual approach to death. He seemed not to think much of mortality.

“Have you seen them?”

“I’ve mostly stayed on base.” Buck sounded disappointed. “They don’t usually let me do anything.” That explained his excitement, Brian thought, but it was still creepy how easily he seemed to replace all of this.

The bodies of the condemned lay in a row at the bottom of the trench they had dug. A strange but powerful dread filled Brian’s heart and he realized he was probably being overly dramatic, but he couldn’t shake it. He hopped down into the hole and knelt beside the first dead man.

“What are you doing?” Buck asked.

“Checking for something.” Brian told him. He took a deep breath and removed the man’s hood. His chest dropped in relief. It wasn’t Daniel. He couldn’t say what had put that idea into his head, but it drove him on. He told himself it was because he had not seen Daniel in so long. It had been about two weeks, but felt much longer. He was worrying too much, he told himself.

He moved to the next one. He wasn’t Daniel either. The next body was more stout and shorter than Daniel, but he didn’t want to answer any more questions if Buck saw him only removing some of the hoods, so he unceremoniously pulled it off. A sharp gasp escaped him.

“What is it?” Buck moved so he could see. Brian didn’t think he’d made that much noise.

“Nothing.” He said. “It just….nothing.” There at his feet lay a woman. He hadn’t expected that, not because he didn’t think of women as being capable of criminal acts, but because her body had seemed so masculine. Now that he looked again, he could see that she had breasts, but the loose cut of the orange jumpsuit had hidden them. Her hair and skin were both dark and she looked to be about thirty, though Brian couldn’t be certain. He moved down the line and removed their hoods. Daniel was not one of them. At least he could relax a little bit.

Buck had walked back to the truck to get some water from his canteen, and in the few moments Brian would be alone with the bodies, he had another thought. Quickly, he removed the scanner from his pocket and pressed the first thumb onto that he could. It was a man in his early thirties. Dark skin. Clean-shaven. The scanner took a moment and then displayed a name and a face. “Carlos Mohammed” was probably not his real name, but there was no information other than that. Brian took the opportunity to scan another. This time, the man’s photo and name appeared along with large red letters reading “DESERTER.” Buck was heading back and Brian would rather not have to explain himself, but he took the risk to scan one more. It also labeled the dead man as a “DESERTER.”

Before all of this, Brian had read about the history of the US Army leading all the way back to the Revolutionary War. He understood that during times of war, penalties, even more minor infractions, were substantially harsher. George Washington had even had soldiers executed, or at least, he threatened to execute some, in order to maintain order. He understood this, but standing in the grave looking it in the face was a different matter. After all, who were we at war with? Nobody could answer that and the different answers that came from guys like Buck at the AGO ran the gamut from aliens to demons. He had almost stopped wondering and now he realized that was a luxury he could not afford.

It was well after one a.m. when they finished burying the bodies and almost everyone at camp was in bed when they got back. The lights from the scaffolding tower were off and the nights these days were filled with more stars than most people had ever seen. In the quiet of the night, it was easy to forget what had happened just a few hours before. As they approached the gate, the guard on duty held up a hand for them to stop. He too was wearing a black balaclava.

“Who is that under there?” Buck asked. He seemed to talk to everyone. The guard lifted his mask. Brian recognized him sort of, but Buck knew him by name. “Damn, Joe. That thing is so cool! Where did you get it?” Joe smiled and pulled it back down to cover his face.

“They’re pretty sweet, right?” Joe said. “There’s a whole bunch of them at supply. You should get one before everybody else does and they’re all gone.”

As soon as they parked, Buck went off to replace his very own secret ninja badass mask while Brian went straight to his cot. He fell asleep worrying about Daniel. Every day that passed without seeing him broke Brian’s heart just a little bit more. Soon, he feared, there would be nothing left.