Fireflies are slow moving insects with lazy, undirected flight patterns. This is why so many of them wind up imprisoned in jars. But give them a fly-sized portion of Adderall mixed with PCP and suddenly the firefly transforms from the millennial of insects into something with extreme focus and energy to spare. Watching one of these pharmaceutically enhanced bugs would probably look a lot like a tracer bullet racing through the sky.
Nobody in Fireteam Lunchbox was thinking anything about this as they saw tracers coming at them in the darkness. The dominant thought in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) was “Holy Shit!” Except for team’s leader, Corporal Kace McCrae. As a southern man with a seminary degree and a future as a pastor with a big-haired wife, the S word never made it past his lips.
Lance Corporal Tuco, the groups automatic rifleman, turned the wheel hard to the left as the bullets sliced the air above the JLTV. He hit the gas and navigated the nimble vehicle off the hot pavement of Babylon Resort Street and eastward, off-road, and into the sand. Tuco, Kace and the two men in the backseat, Rix and Auroch, piled out of the transport and hit the sand with the practiced, deliberate motions of military professionals.
The dramatic combat roll into the Iraqi soil would have rated a ten for style and execution in the Olympics, but it turned out to be unnecessary. It appeared that the shooting stopped after that first, poorly aimed, volley at their vehicle. The moon was full and its light reflected off the sand, giving the soldiers excellent visibility. The tiny patch of Hillah, Iraq was lit up enough for them to see a dust trail a couple hundred yards to the north, disappearing into the desert. The sound of an engine faded as it sped away.
Tuco spit sand out of his mouth. “S’pose it was them?” he asked, already knowing the answer but still succumbing to the all-too-human need to occasionally ask the most obvious of questions.
Kace looked to where the dust cloud faded. The noise of the fleeing vehicle still resonated in his ears. From the sound of it, it was a vehicle in serious need of an oil change and perhaps a hug. The fact that the assailants escaped into the desert without causing spontaneous bullet-sized holes to erupt in their chests pointed to the most obvious conclusion. “Yep, there go our shooters.”
The men climbed back in the vehicle and drove to the place where they saw the dust trail originate. Tuco slowed to a stop and Kace stepped out. He walked slowly in front and picked up the shell casings that lay in the sand. Tuco gunned the engine while Kace was still in front of the transport and let up a little on the brake, causing Kace to reflexively jump back. Tuco giggled like a twelve-year-old who had just discovered he could burp on command.
Tuco, born Cicero Bruno, was on his third tour in Iraq. He was awarded the nickname, “Tuco” during his second tour when an IED exploded under his Humvee, killing his teammates. He was declared an MIA when all that was found of him were bloody shreds of the Hawaiian shirt he was known to wear under his fatigues. Three days later, Bruno shambled into Grizzly base in Al Khailis, severely dehydrated, and over seventy miles from the wreckage. His sun-baked, olive skin was an even darker shade of Sicilian, and he had decorated his M249 light machine gun with what looked like human scalps.
Bruno was too delirious from exposure and thirst to be debriefed. He kept repeating, “What happens in the desert, stays in the desert” and ranted about water soluble camel spiders and how mirages were jerks. An incident report later detailedBruno’s miraculous survival through scorching enemy territoryand, for the first time in military history, the description, “one tough son of a bitch” was entered on an official record. A Colonel noted that Bruno’s journey was akin to Tuco from the film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and the nickname Tucostuck. Meanwhile, the mysterious skins that that decorated the gun were identified as goat hide, quietly incinerated, and never mentioned again.
Seated next to Tuco, and yelling at him like a backseat driving wife was Private First Class (PFC) Rix. Like so many in the 3rd battalion of the 23rd marine platoon, Rix was not his real name. It was the men in your company who would look into your soul and decide what to call you. Or they would just choose what seemed funny at the time. Rix tried to get ahead of the curve and manufacture a nickname for himself. Being a fan of both history and any miniseries that featured a shocking amount of nudity, he tried to make the name Crixus happen. It never works out well when someone tries to create their own nickname. The rest of the platoon just started calling him Pricksus, which after time was shortened to Pricks, and eventually, mercifully, to Rix.
Some people tried to feel sorry for him but this is exactly the sort of thing most people would expect from a ginger daywalker named Gavin to get mixed up in.
Auroch’s massive silhouette could be seen behind Tuco and Rix. PFC Austin Rees, aka Auroch, was seated in the middle of the rear bench. His shoulders seemed to take up most of the space in the vehicles backseat. Austin came to the Marines after spending a couple of years at Michigan State University (MSU). After getting his prerequisites out of the way for a major he never really decided on, he figured a couple years in the military may give him some direction, and help to pay for his next couple years of college.
Very few people knew what an Auroch was when he arrived. The name didn’t even catch on until he mistakenly left a letter from home out on his cot. More than one person in the platoon had some rather profound boundary issues. This meant any correspondence that was left open and available soon became as public as an issue of USA Today. Once they figured out how to say the word, people thought it was funny that he was named after a vacuum that had its own late night infomercial. Eventually somebody remembered was Google was, and looked the word up on their phone. To their surprise they discovered that an Auroch was not an overpriced cleaning product, but rather an oversized, extinct species of bull. Of course when you’re the size of Austin Rees, Auroch is exactly the sort of nickname you can expect when you go to a college that specializes in agricultural studies and tequila fanny bangers.
Rees was about six foot, five and two hundred eighty pounds. His build suggested that his career options included everything from professional powerlifter to maybe a butte or a subcontinent. He was the very picture of the strong, silent type. While he smiled easily, getting ten words a day out of the man was a real chore. For him, words were often not necessary. His face frequently told a story that needed no narration. As he sat behind Tuco and Rix, watching them argue about Tuco’s driving skills, Kace could see in Auroch’s expression that he wanted to knock Tuco and Rix’s heads together like Moe administering some random, slapstick justice on Larry and Curly.
“Settle!” Kace managed to yell the command in a whispered voice. Tuco took his foot off the gas and let the vehicle relax into a quiet idle while Rix just shut his mouth and allowed his tongue to do the same.
Kace McCrae was the fireteam’s leader and ranking officer. If he had a nickname he wasn’t aware of it. While he was sure that a lot of his comrades referred to him in ways other than his name, (most of them ending with the word bag or hole he supposed), Kace was content as long as, to his face, they used the only moniker that meant anything to him at the moment. Corporal.
Kace looked at the tire tracks in the sand and watched them stretch north into the distant horizon. Kace didn’t much like the sand. Outside of the fact that it managed to lodge itself in places that could be considered sexual assault, there was a bleakness to staring at an endless ocean of sand that he found depressing.
If anyone bothered to ask the sand what its opinions on the topic were, it would say it didn’t much care for Kace either. Sand believed it was more about sun, fun, ratchet spring girls spreading crabs from one healthy host to another, and pretentious guys named Cassidy strumming guitars around a campfire for girls named Sunshine. Sand wanted nothing to do with religious guys from South Carolina, like Kace, who walked around holding Seminary degrees and presumably judging their fellow man. These guys typically weren’t fun. Except for Jim Bakker, he turned out to be a hoot. Sand loved him.
Today Kace and the sand put their differences aside and were both all about hunting. The sand preserved the tire tracks from the light pickup truck the enemy drove away in and offered up the shell casings from the fifty caliber machine gun they attacked the fireteam with. He could see a grouping of spent shells at the place where they stopped to fire and a trail of them, like smoking breadcrumbs, as they kept firing while driving away. The Corporal almost thanked the sand as he stuffed the shell casing back into his pack. Kace could hear the brass of the spent shells clinking against the small, glass bottle of holy water he kept in his rucksack.
He wasn’t a superstitious man, well okay, perhaps he was. He did make sure to keep holy water on his person in a war zone. He would sort out later whether or not he superstitious but for the moment he hoped the shells hadn’t cracked the bottle. Spilling holy water before engaging the enemy smacked of all sorts of bad luck. He picked up his pack and stuffed himself and his gear in the back seat with Auroch and they drove off, following the tire tracks in the sand.