and under control. The hajji would implicate himself as an insurgent, killing the man in the house would be justified and they could move forward with tracking down every last bastard responsible for Wharton’s death. I have no notion of being hanged for half treason, a great patriot once said. The pure notes of this rang in Elias like the first chord of a song, not because he would commit treason either in half or in full, but because the army had shaped in his soul the belief in being all in, and in his life there would be no more half-assing. Since childhood he had fought the bugaboo of his own lethargy, that and the timidness he liked to cover up with one cocked, ironic brow—but no longer. Gone was the fat-ass kid forever getting shouldered into lockers and bleachers, who could laugh it off, who fantasized extensively about going down on the girls who struck his fancy but could not ever bridge the gap that would make it happen. Now he was the real Elias, the soldier with the M16, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and sporting abdominal muscles you could bounce a quarter off. His center of gravity was low and stable, he did not laugh it off and once he got out of this sand trap and into a place where sex was legal, he would make it happen. Oh yes.
The staff sergeant, still shouting, jabbed his rifle into the ribs of the hajji. Elias scanned the top of the wall. It all happened very fast. The boy in the corner, the kid, let out a Braveheart cry and rushed toward the staff sergeant, head down, arms pumping. And Elias dropped him. Just like that, he aimed and fired, and the kid fell to the ground like a duck. The woman in the hijab howled, then shrieked, stretching out her zip-tied wrists toward the boy. She flopped sideways in the dirt and began inchworming rapidly toward him, ignoring the shouts of the soldiers to wadrega, wadrega, wadrega. Then another shot snapped the air—that would be Kitson, who easily freaked—and the woman finally stopped as ordered, but not of her own volition.
The baby began to cry again.
Something inside Elias’s head, a place apart from the instinct that saw threat in the kid’s run and squeezed the trigger by reflex, began to whir like an airplane engine. Reflection was a horror. By the light of it he knew—of course he knew, it was obvious—that his shot had been unnecessary. The kid could easily have been stopped by a large adult hand or a solid kick. He was unarmed. He could have been restrained with a thin piece of plastic. The two girls huddled in the corner and he was making a grand show of being brave for them. That was all. And now the woman was dead, too. None of this was right, it was unraveling, the signals getting tangled and jammed. If you didn’t have control, you had nothing. No safety. No authority. You were just a pack of fuckers shooting people for no specific reason.
The sister, she stood shouting in the corner, her eyes covered by the other girl’s hands. Manan, Manan, she called at the boy in a sharp voice, as though she expected her brother to get back up; she must not know yet that her mother was dead. He looked at her shouting mouth, the hands cupped over her eyes like the bulging closed lids of a lizard, then behind her to the other girl. The green-eyed girl stared back at him, her pupils tight against the light, the kohl thick and unsmudged. She was a plant. She knew he was Elias from New Hampshire, slumming in the land of the savages, faking at being an American badass. The difference between cyborg and savage lies in a single shot.
It was an accident.
He could absolve himself for each he had killed as a machine of war.
He could never forgive himself for a human failure, for that was something he owned alone.
It was one of the things he shoved down, and locked away, and carried home.
Chapter 14
Cade
The first Sunday I had off, I drove down to the U-Store-It and rolled up the door on that storage unit where Elias used to lift weights. All of the customer’s crap was still there, exactly how we’d left it years ago. Gradually, taking my time about it, I moved the whole weight