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“Where we going?” Marci asked, ducking and following him into the trees.

“You’ll see.”

“You think I’m just going to follow you blindly?” she asked, sounding indignant.

“No. Feel free to stay on the path. Stray bullets be damned.”

“Humph.”

The choppers suddenly wheeled around moved away, southward. Quiet slammed into the meadow like a thunderclap, neither side moved. Ghosteye kept glancing toward Beth, slowing in his rush toward the boulders.

“Drop! Your! Weapons!” the Director yelled, emphasizing each word, his British accent making the order sound dignified.

Marci gasped. “He’s British? And he works for
them
?”

“Guess so,” Ghosteye huffed, finally reaching the collection of large, round boulders. They were smooth yet pocked, like they’d been deposited eons ago by a volcanic eruption miles off.

“British people don’t
torture
, do they?” She sounded shattered.

Ghosteye laughed. “I don’t think nationality enters into it. But, yes, they do.”

“Or what?” He heard Beth shout through the megaphone.

“Or we’ll open fire!” the answer came.

“And risk yourself? I don’t think so.
You
drop
your
weapons,” Beth retorted.

How’s he going to answer that one?
Ghosteye wondered. Doing what she asked would appear weak, but not doing it could only mean opening fire. With the Director standing directly in front of his men, that would be a death wish. So, he most likely never intended to let his men fire. Then what did he want?

Ramone.

Ghosteye felt his heart implode. His limbs filled with adrenalin. He wanted to run, to the Director, to Bethany, to Ramone, who he now saw picking his way out of the tree-line, down the slight hill into the meadow on the opposite side of the area from Ghosteye.

A song burst into his head—the perfect song, the song he would have cued for just this moment were he editing it—and he hated himself for thinking of it.

“Stop!” Ramone shouted.

Heads swiveled in his direction. From the tree-line behind Ramone, Blythe burst forth, rushing after him, to stop him, probably. Ghosteye snorted derisively, as though she could stop the man now. As though.

“Get back, Ramone,” Beth yelled into the megaphone.

“Ah, Ramone. Come, join us. You’re the reason I’m here anyway.” The Director took a step toward Ramone, arms opened as though he’d embrace the other man.

“Ramone, no!” Blythe shouted. Soon he was in the middle of the meadow, between the two opposing forces, hands raised in surrender.

“Get back, Blythe,” he called to her, she slowed, but didn’t stop. He glanced back and forth between Bethany and the Director. “This doesn’t have to end like this! There must be a peaceful resolution, no violence is necessary.”

The Director laughed, his fat lips pulled over his teeth in what looked like a grimace. “Violence? The world
is
violence, dear man. You’ve shown us that, with your little invention, your little cameras capturing every minute of the human experience. Now we know what goes on behind closed doors. Even that phrase means nothing in the vernacular—it has no reality to make the abstraction solid. Closed doors? All doors are open. And there is violence everywhere.” His deep voice could be heard across the meadow, echoing coldly, the meaning of his words striking a morbid chord in Ghosteye. The others felt it too. No one said anything for a moment.

“Get out of the way, Ramone,” Bethany said into the megaphone, finally breaking the stillness.

“All the more reason to avoid unnecessary violence,” Ramone said, looking at the Director. Blythe had joined him, her arms crossed, her head tilted low like a bull about to charge. She looked a challenge at both sides.

“Good girl,” Ghosteye whispered, smiling slightly. No one would open fire with both of them there. Would they?

“That gives us no reason to resolve this without force. We’ll do what’s necessary. Come with me and perhaps I’ll let your snake-headed friends live.” The Director stepped forward, his forefingers resting on his top lip thoughtfully, head slightly bowed. “Let’s go. I have work for you to do.”

“You think I trust you? After you sent your hellhound after me?”

“Ramone!” Bethany shouted, “I’m giving you thirty seconds to get out of my way. This is
my
bargaining session!”

“What? You mean Elliot?” The Director laughed. “I didn’t send him. Had I known
who
m
he was going to interrogate, I’d have gone myself. You’re punishing me for a mistake I didn’t make. Come then, let’s go.” He waved an impatient hand, gesturing for Ramone to join him.

“Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, eighteen,” Bethany counted.

“What’s she doing?” Marci hissed at Ghosteye.

He turned to look at her and shook his head. “I thought she wanted to trade him. Maybe she just wants to slaughter the soldiers.”

“And Ramone? This wasn’t our plan,” Marci said, sounding irritated.

“If I go with you,” Ramone was saying, “You swear there won’t be any bloodshed here?”

“I can’t promise that, my good man, this
is
war, after all.”

“Swear it!” Ramone shouted, nearly growling, his voice sounding more violent than Ghosteye had suspected it ever could. “Swear it! Or we have no deal and your men will die as surely as these people will,” he motioned toward Bethany’s side of the meadow.

“Fine. Fine, come on then. Come with me,” he beckoned for Ramone to join him.

Ramone hesitated, unwrapping Blythe’s fingers from his wrist. She pled with him, looking into his face. Ghosteye couldn’t hear what was said, but he could see the frustration in Blythe’s movements. She shook her head fervently, and Ramone shook his back. He cupped her cheek and then stepped away, striding across the uneven ground, his movements sure and confident. What did he think he was doing? This wasn’t their plan. How could he trust that slimy, evil man? Just for the promise of no bloodshed? Was his life, his freedom, really worth that exchange? They would exploit him somehow. Ghosteye was certain of it.

“No, no, Ramone.” Ghosteye heard Marci whisper, and he felt the same anguished response in his own heart.

Everything happened at once then, slowly, as though a slow-motion effect were applied to the scene. The deafening report of a gun filled the meadow, splitting the atmosphere in half. Ghosteye didn’t know from which side it came. The choppers were returning, their blades hacking through the air, kicking up a stiff, cold wind. Ramone ducked, but continued to run, his hands up as though to protect his head. A soldier behind the Director dropped, and the others began to charge forward, their guns held to their shoulders, stocks by their cheeks, scopes sighted, while Bethany’s hippies took a knee and fired almost indiscriminately at the mass of soldiers—and still, others ran, back over the crest of the hill.

The Director managed to slink to the side of the meadow, latching himself to a rope that dropped from the first chopper to arrive. And then Ramone was next to him, though now he appeared to no longer want to go with the Director, who would have nothing of that. The fish-faced man brought an elbow down on Ramone’s shoulder, near his neck. Ramone collapsed, the Director caught him, and held onto him as they were pulled upward, away from the milieu, away from Blythe who reached the spot directly beneath the rising Director and Ramone—she fell to her knees, arms stretched upward—and away from Marci who was quietly crying beside Ghosteye. How he heard her, he couldn’t be sure, but he put an arm around her and pulled her into his shoulder.

All of these things occurred in a matter of seconds that stretched into an eternity for Ghosteye.

*****

“Strip him,” Bethany ordered Chance.

“What?” Chance choked, disbelief turning the corners of his wide mouth downward.

“He’s a non-entity,” she explained, continuing. “We need his body armor. Don’t you get it? When he joined their
military
, he was erased. He’s effectually dead. Well, he’s literally dead now, but before we killed him, he was figuratively dead. The cameras didn’t see him. None were assigned to him. They do it for all their soldiers. They even tell the families they’re dead and put on a funeral, closed-casket, claiming they were horribly mutilated in some kind of explosion. I know. Personal experience.” She looked down at the body, the head was a bloody mess from the several gunshot wounds. Her innards turned cold, confronting the dead like this again.

Chance glanced at her, then at the body, then at her again. With a sigh, she bent down and began removing the corpse’s vest, boots, and body armor. “They left them here. You think I’m a monster? What kind of group does this to their men? Leaves them, dead, on the battlefield for the vultures and other scavengers? And why would you go along with that, as a soldier?”

Bethany put the items she removed into a pile. She tried to do it slowly, reverently, with respect for the fallen soldier. She may not agree with their methodology, but she could still be respectful of the dead. Chance still hadn’t found his voice. He was shell-shocked. Killed his first man only an hour before. She’d seen it before. “Listen,” she said with a sigh, still working on removing the armor. “I know how you’re feeling. Detached. Cold. A little sick. It will pass. Battle is ugly. It’s kill or be killed. We lost men too. And women,” she said, remembering that one of the girls who’d accompanied her to the bunker had been killed. She lay only fifteen feet away, pale, cold, and bloody. Bethany still hated the vacant expression of the dead. The empty, dull eyes that screamed how the soul was gone. Until she’d seen the eyes of the dead, Bethany had been sure there was no soul. No god.

“It’s just,” Chance said, his voice catching, sounding sick, disgusted with himself. He rubbed a dirty hand across his face, smearing over his cheeks. “They’re gone, you know. Gone. And I
did
that.”

“Say a prayer, if it helps. This is war, Chance. The rules are different during war.” She finished and stood, dusting her hands off, leaving the corpse clothed. These soldiers wore body armor on their trunk. The wounds that killed them were in their heads. Or upper thigh, where a major artery was severed and untreated—they bled out in a matter of minutes. Beth had even seen a small caliber bullet in the thigh kill a man—it went in and ricocheted around, never actually exiting, just bouncing off bone, tearing up the major organs till he was dead.

Most of the casualties were on her side, she noted, pursing her lips in chagrin. That was to be expected, really, what with the technological advantage of her opponents, not to mention their superior training. Bethany hadn’t even had a chance to school her soldiers in how to fire a damn RPG at a chopper. So over two-thirds of the Organization’s soldiers got away unscathed. Two-thirds of Bethany’s men were dead. It was like pitting a pre-Columbian tribe against World War I era soldiers.

Her heart was heavy as Chance and now William, followed her around the meadow, the post-battle quiet a deafening roar in her ears—as much from having no protection against the blasts of gunfire during the skirmish, as from that unearthly sound of being surrounded by the dead.

If she hadn’t been more accustomed to battle, to watching men die, and if she still believed there was no God, no soul, nothing that followed afterward, her sorrow at the sight of the fallen would have been unbearable. And still, she knew that later, in the privacy of her own tent, she would grieve. For now, graves must be dug.

“Gather the others,” she said, turning to William and Chance, raising her chin in defiance at the grief staring her in the face. “Do what I just did to the
Decemviri’s
soldiers. Do it. Look at me,” she said when they shifted uncomfortably and avoided her gaze. “It’s a necessity. The next battle may depend on it. Oh, you thought this was it? What of Ramone? Nothing’s changed. We accomplished nothing.”

“Ramone wanted to leave,” William answered, his baritone managing to sound fragile and scared. “He betrayed us.”

“He was trying to avoid
this
,” a nearby voice said. Turning, they saw Ghosteye gesturing at the dead with his crutch. “It didn’t work, obviously. But that’s what he was doing.”

“How can you be so sure?” Chance asked, looking like he might punch Ghosteye for suggesting a traitor actually had good intentions.

“I know him,” Ghosteye answered. The blonde college-girl hovered behind him, her eyes shifting as though she expected the dead to rise and begin attacking her. She kept rubbing her arms like she was cold. “He had a different plan, of course, well, we did. Beth’s plan was to give him up as a bargaining chip, wasn’t it, Beth?”

Everyone looked at Bethany, an accusing look in William’s brown eyes, a look of doubt in Chance’s green. “Is that true?” William asked.

“Er, well, the thought occurred to me,” Bethany admitted.

“Tell us the truth,” Chance pled, his voice a whisper. There was a desperation in his face, like he couldn’t stomach the truth. How could she explain that she was willing to do almost anything to restore some semblance of privacy, to stop the maddening trajectory of their society, somehow, without sounding like a heartless beast?