By Curtis Craddock
“Up, marine,” shouted the corpsman, lifting Rifleman George Grayson to his feet. He felt a bit fuzzy around the edges and had a hard time telling up from down.
The last thing George remembered was rucking down a rock-strewn gully in the middle godforsaken nowhere, his eyes peeled and his next on a swivel trying to look everywhere at once. The enemy was out there somewhere. Ahead of him Boots Matheson laughed at bad joke Shandar Kapoor had just told him. Bad jokes were the only kind Shandar knew, which is why he told them to Boots who would laugh at anything.
Behind him big Paul Conroy rolled his ankle on a loose stone and cussed hard enough to making the offending bit of sandstone melt.
“You alright?” George asked Paul.
“Fine,” Paul said, but he came up limping. George knew better than to mention it. That would only make Paul more determined to do nothing about it. Let him walk on it a bit without comment and next time they stopped to rest, George would coax him into letting him at least wrap the sprain.
At the front of the line, Chester Lindman made a hand sign for silence—
And then the world exploded.
Bright. Dark. Loud. Quiet. Pain. Release. It all happened way too fast for George to register any of it fully.
And now the sun blazed bright, so bright that the sky had turned white, and he could not see the corpsman’s face except as a silhouette. Only by the bloody red cross on his helmet did George know his specialty.
“Shake it off, marine, you’re gong to be okay now. The worst is over.”
“What happened?” George could not look at the overwhelming sky, so he looked at the ground, at the rocky gully, at the smoking crater where the rocket had hit, at the blood and body parts, at the corpses. There was Boots and Linkman and … all of them. His whole patrol was dead.
“Good God.” George’s knees failed and he collapsed. He fell forward and caught himself with on his palms. His gut wanted to hurl, but it seemed to be empty, the nerves that strung it to shock and grief had been cut. Everyone was dead. Everyone except…
It was then George saw his own face, what was left of it, staring up at him from the gully floor. Clearly a big chunk of shrapnel had hit him, cleaved half his skull and most of his face away.
“Jesus Christ,” George scrambled away from his own corpse.
“Merciful Christ,” said the corpsman, gripping him by the shoulder. The corpsman’s hand was solid, the only solid thing in the world. “Now, come, it’s time for you to meet him.”
“Meet—” George said, still struggling to keep up with current events. Then again it was pretty hard to think with his brains spattered all over this fucking desert.
“Yes. You’re going home,” said the silhouetted corpsman. “To sit with Him in His Father’s house, as you were promised when He redeemed you.”
“Oh,” George said. He was going to heaven, really and truly. The promise had always been there, ever since the day he was saved, but it was a promise on which the particulars had always been a bit abstract. His meemaw would be there, surely, and that was a lovely idea. He reflexively turned to call his patrol to come with him—they would love his meemaw, and she would love them—but they were all conspicuously absent from this ultimate roll call.
George turned back to the corpsman. “My patrol?”
The corpsman shook his head, a great sadness rolling from him like a tidal wave. “They were not redeemed.” He gestured to a spot a little farther along the gully where the sky’s blazing brightness did not touch.
The absence had no real shape, not a like a hole or a gate, but it definitely led somewhere, somewhere light and hope had never been, a place or tortured screams and suffocating silences, of hopeless endless despair. It was the path to Hell.
Horror chilled George’s soul, “But they’re my patrol.”
“They were not redeemed,” said the corpsman. “They rejected His salvation, disobeyed His law.”
“Bullshit,” George said. “They’re good men. Hell, Shandar’s holier than all of us, prays like five times a day—”
“Shandar Kapoor was a Sikh,” The corpsman said. “A false faith. And Boots was an atheist, even in the foxhole.”
“Not Paul,” George said. “He sat right next to me in church.”
“Paul Conroy was an unrepentant homosexual,” said the corpsman. “And Lindman was Jewish. Only you are redeemed.”
“Paul was a faggot?” George asked, and felt bad for saying it. Paul was a goddamned rock of a marine, even if he was a stubborn bastard.
“Unrepentant,” confirmed the corpsman.
“And so they’ve all gone to Hell,” George prodded.
“Those are the rules,” the Corpsman said. “But you are saved, and you must come. Once you meet the holy of holies you will forget all this, and all will be well.”
Forget all this? Lord knew there were things George would like to forget, but not his buddies.
“Look,” he said gesturing at the bodies. “There’s better men here than me.”
The corpsman shook his head and another wave of sorrow passed over George. “The fate of a man’s soul is not determined by whether he was a good man or a bad, only if he was redeemed.
“So I’ll be sitting at His right hand while my buddies are burning in Hell.”
“His glorious presence is your reward.”
A sudden anger filled George, hot and bright. “I didn’t see Him in Afghanistan carrying my sorry ass ten miles through hostile territory when I got shot in the leg; that was Sandoor.”
“He sent Sandoor to you,” said the Corpsman.
“And then he sent Sandoor to Hell.”
“Sandoor sent himself.”
George would have spit on the ground if he still had the ability to spit. He was not a particularly thoughtful man, but he knew certain things for sure. If he need covering fire, he called a marine. If he needed evac, he called a marine. If he needed whiskey in some godforsaken place he asked Boots. Only if he needed the ineffable did he ask God.
And now that he had reached the ineffable, he found that it was, in fact, effed.
“Sorry corpsman,” he said. “No can do. I ain’t leaving my buddies behind.”
“You don’t have a choice,” said the corpsman. “If you reject His grace now, it will be forever.”
George decided that he did not like this corpsman, this lackey. “Then it ain’t worth having. Tell your boss this.” He ripped off a mocking salute. “Semper Fi!”
Then he turned and marched into the darkness. He’d spring his buddies and then see what Satan had to say about it.
+++
When George had gone, a chaplain stepped up beside the corpsman. “Lost another one?”
The corpsman stared after the marine. “All of them. The whole patrol. None of them would go on without the others.”
“So they passed the test,” said the chaplain smugly. “And the will all find a better place together.”
The corpsman gave him a baleful look. “They resisted temptation. Perhaps the above does not appeal and the below does not frighten enough.”
The chaplain considered that for a moment that might have lasted a nanosecond or a million years. “Perhaps you should be thankful that they are not all actually marching into darkness with vengeance on their minds, because then you’d actually have to fight them.”
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