Every day there was war.  A civil war, across the border.  It was heard and seen, day and night, from across the border.  Bomb blasts made the air roar with the passionate jazz of dry thunder.   In the daytime, the mountains billowed smoke like an active volcano, while the night sky blazed as if the combatants had blasted open the Inferno.  Sometimes there was quiet.  Holy days, a few of which were honored.  And truces, a few of which lasted nearly a week.  But these were rare.  The fighting went on and on.

            The village at the foot of the mountains was on the border, the right side of the border.  Here it was safe.  No artillery disintegrated the buildings, no snipers fired into the streets, no bombs erupted the earth.  But the war seeped into the village like pus from a suppurating wound.  Refugees staggered down out of the mountains in a torrent of misery, a flood of scarred flesh.  Some tried to drag their old life with them.  Some were half naked.  Some walked, some crawled, some were carried.

            The U.N. people tended them.  A camp, inexorably growing, had been set up outside the village.  Here the refugees were fed, clothed, either healed or buried.  Some were shipped to other countries where they had been granted asylum.  Some returned to their homeland to rejoin the fight.  But most remained, cared for by the U.N. people.

            “They are dragging our country down.”

            “We aren’t killing each other as they are, so why should we have to suffer.”

“Look at them, all they do is lay around all day, they don’t do anything, they know the U.N. is going to take care of them.”

            “Why should we take them in, we can’t even take care of our own people?”

            “We should ship them all back to where they came from, let them live in their own filth instead of bringing it here to us.”

            The five young friends, in their mid-teens, often held conversations such as this.  The civil war across the border had been going on since early in their childhoods.  This was the world to them – a nearby holocaust they could see but not feel, leaking its refuse into their home.  A toxic spill.  The older they grew the more resolved they became to do something about it.

            He appeared at the edge of the camp alone.  Most of the day he would lay in the sun, swaddled in a thin blanket.  He required help to stand.  Once upright he required help to walk.  He seemed young, though how young was hard for the five to judge since all they ever saw of him were thin legs and thin arms and a sunken hollow face.  What they had noted were his eyes.  They shone fiercely, blue embers sunk deeply into the cold ashes of his body waiting to be fanned into a blaze.  Those eyes had witnessed horrors, those eyes had survived horrors, given time those eyes would return to the horrors with a vengeance.  But now they merely stared into the distance, or slept, or read.  His sole possession was a holy book, all that he had brought with him out of his hell and the contents of which would surely propel him back into it.

            “This one is dangerous.”

            “Yes, he is a killer, he could kill with those eyes.”

            “Once he is well he will return, to kill some more.”

            “Or maybe he will kill us.”

            “He is wild, he is crazy, he doesn’t belong here.”

            The five young friends decided this one would go back, before he mended, before his body grew as powerful as his eyes.

            The friends gathered late one dark night at the perimeter of the refugee camp.  He was asleep, in his blanket, with his holy book secure in his grip.  They crept in quietly. Swooped down upon him.  He awoke, but did nothing.  He did not even cry out.  They grabbed his blanket and lifted him by it.  He was so light, so still, so quiet.  They rushed with their captive through the dark night out of the refugee camp up into the mountains, towards the border.

            The five did not know where the border was.  It was in the mountains, close.  But none of them had ever ventured into the mountains before.  As children, they had been forbidden.  The mountains were dangerous, another country, the country of death.  They had wanted a dark night so they would not be seen in the camp.  Now they could not see where they were going.  Walking was difficult in the dark, through wilderness, with their burden.  But they struggled on, upward, into the mountains.  They wanted to be sure to cross the border, to take the refugee back to his own country, where he belonged.  They had no fear of becoming lost, all they had to do to return home was go down, out of the mountains.  So they forged on, upward, deeper.

            “This is far enough.”

            “Are you sure we crossed the border?”

            “Yes.  Even in the dark I can see there has been much fighting here.”

            “Then let’s leave him right here.  We’ll take his blanket back, it doesn’t belong to him.”

            “And we’ll take his heathen book.  We should burn it.”

            It was when they unwound the blanket from around him and removed the holy book so easily from his grasp they realized he had died.  At first, they recoiled from the body they had so unceremoniously dumped upon the ground.  But then they had to check, to make sure he had not merely passed out or was trying to fool them.  He was dead, had passed away while in their care.  They had witnessed so much horror and death on the tiny flickering screens of social media.  But this was close, this was real, the first time they had touched death.  So they reverently returned the holy book to the hands they placed upon his chest and spread the thin blanket over the thin corpse.  They all bowed their heads for a moment of silence then, not knowing what to say, they simply walked away.

            The five were soon lost.  Going downhill led to another uphill grade.  Turning back downhill led, again, to another hill.  They made so many twists and turns in the bombed-out jagged terrain in the following hours they eventually collapsed in exhaustion.  And frustration.

            “I understand why so many flee this country.  It is crazy.”

            “They flee because of the killing.  We haven’t seen any killing.”

            “Except for the trees.  We’ve seen plenty of killed trees.”

            “And the refugee.  He’s dead.  We killed him.”

            “No we didn’t.  He was dead when he walked into our country.  He was just too stupid to fall down.”

            The bickering soon subsided.  They were too weary, too worried, to keep it up.  Shortly they pulled each other to their feet and set off through the darkness once again.

            The five young friends walked into a garden, one of them losing his footing on the furrowed ground and pitching forward onto his face.  Upon closer inspection, they could tell the garden had not been tilled this year, perhaps not for several years.  But it had been a garden once.  A house would be nearby.  They were out of the wilderness.  Perhaps they could ask directions.  They practically walked into the house before they saw it.  It loomed up suddenly before them out of the black.

            A baby cried from within the house.  Someone stirred inside.  The five felt their way around the outside of the house.  They came upon the splintered remains of a porch.  Looking in through the open doorway, they saw a light within, flickering candlelight, moving about erratically.  The first light of this long night.

            The baby stopped crying.  Then the light floated through the blackness toward them.  As it neared they could see the candle was held by an old woman, her other hand holding a small baby on her hip.  She stepped out onto the shattered wood of what remained of the porch and began talking excitedly.  But it was all gibberish.  Not one of the five could understand her.  But the baby could sense her alarm and began crying again, louder than before.  They tried to reassure the old woman with conciliatory gestures, tried with hand movements to explain that they were lost and were merely trying to find their way home.  But in the flickering candlelight, their motions were easy to misinterpret.  The old woman became more animated, nearly hysterical.  The baby screamed.

            The night exploded!  In brilliant light and gunshots!  Then screams, adult screams, of pain and terror and confusion!  The friends were blinded, their eyes having struggled for so long with such a dark night.  They heard loud shouts.  Harsh words barked in a foreign tongue they did not understand.

            “Don’t shoot!  Don’t shoot!”

            “We’ve got to raise our hands.”

            “I can’t!  I’m hit!”

            “John’s dead!  They killed John!  He’s dead!”

            And the baby screamed.

            “Up!  Up!”  The orders were heavily garbled, but comprehensible.  The three that were able struggled to their feet, raising their arms high.  Their vision was beginning to return.  Three men approached, guns leveled at them.  One spoke.  “What?”

            “We’re lost!  We’re just trying to find our way home!”

            “We’re from across the border!  We don’t belong here!”

            “We’re not soldiers.  We don’t have guns.  We don’t want any trouble.”

            “Why did you shoot me?  I didn’t do anything!  Why did you kill John?”

            The man who had spoken moved quickly to silence the wounded young friend still on the ground with his rifle butt. Then he faced the three who were standing.  “Why?”

            “We were returning a body.  We were bringing a body back to its homeland.”

            “Where?”

            “In the mountains somewhere.  I don’t know.  We got lost.  We couldn’t carry it any further.  We took care of it the best we could.”

            “Side?”

            “Which side?  Was he on?  I don’t know.”

            “Baby!”  They all turned to look down at the baby.  It squirmed madly, blue-faced from screaming, upon the chest of the old woman, who lay still upon the ground.  The three looked nervously in confusion from the baby back to the soldier, fearfully eyeing the bloody stock of his gun.  “Baby!  Baby!”  He motioned at it with his rifle.

            One of the three stooped for the baby.  It was covered in blood.  As he took up the baby from the old woman’s chest it hushed, exhausted from its screams.  The baby snuggled up contentedly in his arms.  Perhaps it was unhurt, perhaps the blood it was soaked in was all from the old woman.

            “Go!”

            “What about our friends?”

            “Go!”  Again, so fast, the rifle butt propelled the two unburdened ones forward, away from the house.  The one carrying the baby quickly followed.  The two armed men backing up the one who had spoken stood aside to let them pass.  The spotlight which had been fixed on them was swung away, apparently by a soldier they had not seen.  There was no telling how many were out there, in the dark, with their weapons trained.  The light now illuminated a narrow deeply-rutted lane.  Going downhill.  The three young friends, with the baby, descended, never looking back.

© Mike Sherer

Mike Sherer lives in West Chester in the Greater Cincinnati area of southwest Ohio. His screenplay ‘Hamal_18’ was produced in Los Angeles and released direct to DVD. It is available to purchase at Amazon or to rent at Netflix DVD. His mystery/fantasy novel ‘A Cold Dish’ was published by James Ward Kirk Fiction and is available at Amazon in paperback and digital format. He has published thirteen short stories and three novellas (with another short story and another novella under contract to be published). Links to his published works are available on his web page, www.mikesherer.wordpress.com, where his completed blog ‘Flanging’ is posted, along with his new ongoing travel blog ‘American Locations’. He is currently trying to secure representation for his MG novel ‘Shadytown’ while also working on his adult fiction novel ‘Souls of Nod’.