Under The Sun's Embrace

• Luke Elliott, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2014

The sun’s warm embrace caressed the face of the Private. The very same sun of his homeland, so fierce and eternal; yet in this corner of the world different and menacing and all the while doomed to its inevitable fate the same as man. Comm. chatter aroused him from his stupor, with reality reasserting its dominance over the world and ruining everyone’s day. The ten men positioned around him peered into the void, their desert camouflage scarcely visible through the heat mirage that seemed a permanent addition to this god forsaken country.
“Private!” the yelling through his radio earpiece possessed the potential to deafen the deaf, and served as a marvellous representation of the harsh landscape which so graced his vision. Each gravelly intonation the Captain’s voice perfectly matched one of the many jarring rocky outcrops dotting the hillside, all as vague as his reason for being here.
In a tone only slightly less appealing than the Captain’s scar torn face, “Raise Wasinski, he should be back from patrol by now, that slow piece of...” thankfully the comm. cut out leaving the Cap’s choice of vocabulary to the imagination, not that it was a task requiring a degree in order to achieve.
The Private nodded his silent acquiescence. “Yo Wasinski, you out there?” The Privates eyes prowled the land waiting to catch a glimpse of the man who he had grown up with, who had had his back through a thousand fights and who wouldn’t hesitate to lay his life down to protect; his literal brother from another mother. “Yo Wasinski?” only static greeted his voice.
A flash caught his eyes in the distance. Stupid heat. An indistinct figure appeared out of the dust. Wait… another, and another. “Sir we have movement at ten o’clock, three figures, potential hostiles.” The background noise of ten weapons being cocked didn’t even register in the Private’s mind, for the figures were now within visual range and one of them was Wasinski, held in place by two men, Ak-47 assault rifles trained on the back of his friends head.
Time slowed. The sound of the incessant static in his head faded and two words spoken in poor English surpassed the void between the opposing parties.
“You die!”
The crack of the gun echoed throughout the ghostly hills; Wasinski’s body becoming merely another addition to this hell hole.
“NOOO! NOOOO!” The pained cries of the Private pierced the hearts of the men around him, who repaid him in kind with a blistering volley of fire in the direction of the two murderers. The two bodies were shredded, no longer distinguishable as human. Gunfire erupted from the hills, long tongues of fire spewing forth from every available recess. Three men fell in pools of their blood and the next bullet struck home. Pain... Darkness.
Light. A stranger stood over him, his eyes a silent message of farewell. The long blade made its home in the Private’s heart, all under the eternal stare of that familiar sun.