Chapter 8

North Carolina Theater of Operations,
Suburbs of Winston-Salem
April 9, 2011

“Incoming! Move this tent now!” I heard rather disturbing orders from the commander of my medical team, but so be it.

“Rat bastards! Now, I’ll have to triage them! There’s no saving them now!” I cursed as I realized that any hopes of saving three fine young soldiers went down the drain.

Enemy rocket fire was no joke, even if their supplies of rockets had to be dwindling drastically by this point. It was a bluff, I was convinced of it, but it was a rather brazen and determined bluff at that. Some six thousand or so die-hard Klansmen held this part of the greater Winston-Salem metropolitan area, and they weren’t ready to give up the fight just yet. The upside of fighting the Klan, of course, was that these guys were too fucking stupid to remove their hoods yet. We could all see the hooded sons of bitches coming every single time.

Even so, they were some dogged fighters, unyielding and eager to attack rather than defend constantly. This enemy didn’t retreat, but cost him more and more manpower by the day, even by the hour. He was the most aggressive foe yet, filled with hate and malice, it was clear to me, but it was also a fatal blunder to carry on so fanatically. His courage was suicidal bravado, little more than that.

This Imperial Wizard’s style was always full-frontal assault, almost as if he never heard of tactics at all ... well, maybe he hadn’t. He held his ground and dealt out plenty of his casualties, but his lines thinned out continually, which meant that our victory would be complete and we wouldn’t have to take that many prisoners by the end. The word “wizard” was supposed to indicate wisdom, but I had yet to see any proof of that. The bad news was that his fierce resistance cost us considerably in blood and treasure to quash any opposition from said camp.

“Any captives yet? Any surrenders at all?” I wondered aloud now as we finished moving to the new spot.

“Nope, as usual. No quarter given or asked. The Kluckers are determined to be martyrs for their pale version of Christ. Those asshats are in for a rude awakening at the Pearly Gates, if Jesus is real at all. They’re not expecting an olive-skinned Mizrahi, are they?” Second Lieutenant Aaron Goldberg, one of my fellow nurses, observed with some Schadenfreude at the notion of their shock.

“Yeah, I seriously doubt that they picture the Nazarene that way. Though if he is real, there’s better than even odds that they’d meet Old Scratch instead. Even if I had to go to Hell myself, it would put a smile on my face to listen to their screams as they’re tortured side by side with me forever,” I chuckled now in spite of my frustration.

“With that attitude, I doubt that you’d need to worry. Satan would hire you on the spot as one of the tormentor demons, sir,” Sergeant Kara Soares laughed with her own type of dark humor.

“Would he now? It doesn’t seem to bother you, though,” I said as I fought back tears again at the sight of the first of the trio dying on me.

I was usually pretty hardened to that by now, but this seemed a real waste, so it hit me harder than it often did. Kara, one of my patients rather than one of my nurses, pushed her dark brown hair back from her face on her stretcher as she waited for us to reset the hospital tent now. She then winked at me, reminding me that she wanted to jump my bones soon and she made no secret of the fact. Of course, she also wanted to fuck Aaron, but those goals weren’t mutually exclusive, were they?