Page 28 of Salt Kiss
Sims, I say again, swinging my eyes back to his gun.Stop it right the fuck now.
His hand is still shaking, shaking so hard, and his eyes are begging me.Put your gun down, Tristan. I’ll make it fast for them. I’ll let the whole squad go. Just put your gun down and walk away.
Sims. My best friend. He shares his Nintendo Switch with me, steals my Pop-Tarts; he helps me hold on to the memory of McKenzie. He’s kept me safe for three of my four deployments, the shield at my right when we’ve cleared villages, dry creeks, and damp mountain caves.
And he’s about to kill the people we’re supposed to protect.
I don’t drop my gun.
Tristan, he says, and he’s begging me now. Begging me to let him kill a democratically elected leader and three civilians, two of whom are kids.
...my best friend wants to kill two kids.
The look on Sims’s face when I raise my gun to his chest is awful. Now I’m begging him right back.Fucking, please, man, fucking stop it.
I have to do thisis what he said, and despite the desperation in his face, the shaking hand, I hear the dead, dull certainty in his voice. I know then.
I know there’s no stopping him.
It doesn’t matter that he points the gun at me now. I would have had to shoot him anyway because I’m the lieutenant and Jesus fuck,they’re kids—but it does sting, in a stupidly irrelevant way, that he would raise a gun to my chest.
I gave him my fucking Pop-Tarts.
Tristan, please, he says, eyes wild, but his voice is the same dull, inflectionless tone.
I move first, dropping the barrel of my gun as I duck to the side to put myself between him and the soon-to-be prime minister. I squeeze the trigger as I do, and my bullet strikes true—his knee. He buckles and I think,okay, we’re done now, he knows this is over, but even as he buckles, his gun is lifting.
He’s still going to try to shoot them.
The other soldiers around us—having watched the entire exchange in frozen shock—react, their own guns finally moving, but I’m faster.
My next bullet tears through Sims’s throat.
And that’s when dream splinters from memory. In my memories, Sims dropped like a sack of potatoes, a hand flying weakly to the side of his neck. There was blood everywhere, and I was calling for medevac, I was lunging forward and clapping my hand over his to add more pressure, I was looking down into his pale gray eyes and telling him to hold on, that we were going to save him, and his face was full of fear and he sputtered words full of blood,family...ease... family...ease...
I’ll make sure your family is comfortable, I told him,as much ease as they need.
And his free hand reached up, like he wanted to grab the vest of my body armor, and then with a choked spray of blood from his mouth, it dropped back to the ground.
He was dead.
But in my dream now, he doesn’t drop. Instead, blood gushes slick and crimson from his neck and he shoots the woman behind me. I shoot him again, through the eye, and he steps forward, a gaping hole in his head, and he fires at someone in the car behind me. He’s killing everyone and I can’t stop him.
I shoot and shoot and shoot, and he keeps coming, bloody and pulpy and horrible, a monster from a movie, a nightmare from the grave, and he opens his mouth and it’s just blood and broken teeth and he says,I hope they prick you when they pin that medal on. I hope you have to bleed like me. I hope you get to tell everyone what real heroes do.
Stop, I whisper, but he doesn’t stop.
Shards of white teeth fall from his blood-slick lips as he speaks.How could you not know I was going to do this? How could you not see me faltering, struggling—how could you kill me when you didn’t even try to help me first—
I’m crying, but I need to keep shooting him, and I can barely breathe, and I need to scream, and I can’t. I’m making no sound because I can’t breathe, and then I realize I’m choking on blood too, on broken teeth and the pulp of my own torn open throat—
“Tristan,” comes a voice, solid and firm. “Tristan.”
I’m still choking on teeth and flesh and Sims is still lumbering toward me.
And the voice comes again.
“Tristan.” A hand is on my shoulder and then on my jaw. My eyes flutter open and it’s not the nightmare-Sims, but my boss, shirtless and bent over the recliner. And I still can’t breathe.
