Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 19:39:18 -0300
From: Ruthless <ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca>
Subject: Shoot First  1/2

SHOOT FIRST	by Ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca	1/2

	When we went inside the building there was a dead Unie soldier
lying on his back at the foot of the stairs, a lot of plaster down in one
room that had once been a formal atelier, broken furniture strewn across
the floors and a strong smell of sewage, mouldy blood and shell grease.
Other than that, the house was real intact. It even had glass in the
windows. Our boots crunched softly on the broken plaster. Peter Pevensey,
and a blond haired soldier who had a 214 unit-stripe instead of ours, had
followed me inside out of the wind.

	We stood in the front hall of the shivering house. The house was
trembling like a man with malaria, because of the artillery fire but we
didn't notice that. After five, no six, straight days of bombardment, you
just didn't register anything that wasn't landing close by. Inside it was
warmer.  The walls deadened the sounds outside, numbing them.

	The guy from 214 fished a pack of cigarettes out of his breast
pocket. "Smoke?" He held them out with a hand that shook like the house
did, but I didn't register his trembling especially at the time either.
Peter and I both shook our heads. We waited for him to light up but he
pushed the package back. He was so blond that he was looking kind of
green. Fatigue can do that to you.

	Just for a few moments, standing there was enough. Our breath
fogged faint traces. I felt the ugly smells instead of feeling cold prickle
in my nose. A lot of the debris on the floor was Unie stuff, the wrappers
torn off of shell dressings and cardboard ration packs. I looked down.
There was a woman's pink dress ground into the plaster below my feet. Maybe
someone had been trying to loot it. The Unies, as evidenced by their
refuse, had made use of this building before us. It was the sixth day of
the counter attack and I was dead tired. To be standing in a stinky, cold
house where it wasn't quite so cold was enough.

	None of us said anything. The wrappers from the ration packs
reminded me that I should eat, if I had anything to eat. I couldn't find my
stomach so I didn't know if I was hungry or not and I didn't remember if
I'd eaten or not since the Sergeant had last handed the packs out. I stood
and considered it.

	It was my twenty-eighth day in the field. Our orders were to kill
anything that moved: Shoot first and think later, that was the way to stay
alive. They had drilled this into us urgently.

	There wouldn't be any civilians, they had briefed us, but if there
were any alive in the Unie occupied territory, they were fifth columnists,
Independantists, or terrorists of some type and the Unie had left them
alive on purpose. They would be more dangerous than the Unie. The only
civilians I had seen had been dead about a week and a half, swollen up like
sausages and then frozen, and I had seen plenty of them. I had also seen
plenty of Unie bodies. They hadn't been given orders for an official pull
back so we had been shelling and then slaughtering them house-to-house for
the entire six days. But the only thing that I had killed was a dog, which
had probably already been wounded. When I had seen the size of what I had
shot I had thought for a moment that it was a baby and when my unit mates
had seen what I had killed they had had a good chuckle.

	"What to get some shut eye?" Peter said quietly.

	I considered that too. It was mid-afternoon. "Yeah." I said. It was
quiet, we weren't expecting a counter attack and if there were a counter
attack, then the Unie artillery or bombers would warn us that we were under
fire.

	The dead guy at the foot of the stairs gave a deep sigh.

	I didn't just hear that, I thought, I couldn't have. In front of
me, Peter and the blond still had no expressions on their faces, but they
stared past my shoulder and they were looking at whatever had made the soft
sound I had heard with a shell-shocked blankness. I turned around slowly
and somnabulisticly. The Unie's gun was propped against the wall about six
feet from him. His uniform was the blotchy brown colour that comes from
combining blood with khaki and letting it dry out.  We scuffed softly
forward and stood in a ring around him at the foot of the stairs.

	The guy was asleep. I thought unconscious from his wounds, but when
we stood around him with our automatic rifles, the quality of the light
changed and then his eyes came open. He gave a small jerk. His head and
shoulders came up a bit but then he didn't move. He had a couple of week's
dirty beard on his face but for all that I could see his expression.

	Eyes wide, he took it in. Then he looked annoyed. His eyes rolled
up in disgust even. I could read his expression just as clear as if he had
said what he was thinking aloud. I didn't know what the Unie for "Oh,
shit!" was, but if he had said anything, that was what he would have been
saying. There he was sleeping peacefully and he'd let three Americans get
the drop on him.

	He never reached for his gun. Three high-strung Americans were
pointing assault rifles at him. Three Americans who just stood there and
looked and kept looking and then having gotten a good look at their first
Unie prisoner of war, kept looking some more.

	His mouth firmed up. He squared his shoulders some and stayed on
his back. He didn't try saying anything. It was the kid from the 214 who
spoke in a voice that was gravelly like he'd forgotten to clear it. "He's a
Unie."

	I turned my head and looked at the kid. I know we are all suffering
a bit from combat fatigue, I thought, but that is really belabouring the
obvious. "Yeah," said Peter. "A wounded Unie.  I guess he got left behind."

	Now, what we were supposed to do next was obvious. Step back
because we were a little too close and might be in each others line of fire
and use the rifles to ensure that if he was carrying a small arm he would
never get a chance to snatch it out. Our orders, to put it clearly, were to
waste him.

	"How badly wounded do you think he is?" My voice sounded like I had
forgotten to clear it too.

	"I don't know," said Peter. "Do you want to check?"

	"Okay." I said.

	Shoot first, think later, the sergeant had drilled us. All the
same, I turned my rifle up and as Peter and Blond stepped back, I squatted
carefully and laid my hand on the guy's chest. Looking down I could see it
clearly. My hand was dirty, like I had been digging in earth. His uniform
jacket was close to the colour of earth, because of the blood in it. I
pawed him. I didn't come up with the exact source of the blood, but I did
discover that he had no small arm in his pockets or on his webbing belts. I
also couldn't help meeting his eyes.

	The Unie had brown eyes. They looked like bloodshot cue balls. They
turned up inquiringly. They were alert eyes, not the eyes of a guy fogged
out on morphine or half dead.  Adrenalin had probably cleared his brain. He
was taking his predicament pretty calmly too. I kept my hands patting slow,
not roughly so he wouldn't freak out on me. When I stood up, I picked up
the Unie's weapon. "He's not armed, guys."

	"Where's he bleeding?" Peter asked.

	"I don't know." I said.

	"Didn't you find it?" Peter's voice got waspish.

	I've known Peter Pevensey, or known of Peter for a lot of years. He
and I were at the same high school. He was the jock with the smart mouth
that I hated. He lost the smart mouth while we were in basic training, and
somewhere along the line I forgot that I hated him. I got used to his ways.
With the casualty rate we had, all that counted was if a guy did his job or
not. Peter always did his job. It was irrelevant to remember if I liked him
or hated him. So I ignored the sharp tone.

	"Fuck off." I advised Peter. "You look."

	The Unie was breathing deep and scared. He wasn't acting scared,
but his breaths were coming up from the bottom of his lungs and his fists
were balled. Looking at him, I was aware that there was something that I
was being careful not to try to figure out. >From the puckered up
expression on Peter's face, I would say that he was trying to figure it
out. "Think he can stand?"

	I passed the Unie's weapon to Blond and went on my knees again
beside the Unie. I pulled on his shoulder and levered him up. He came up
surprisingly easy and, as I got him on his feet, I turned his wrists up so
that he was holding them above his head.

	The Unie was an average guy. He was the same size I was. He was
dressed in a heavy green uniform, the wrong shade of green. He was kind of
pasty looking though. I figured that was blood loss. He moved his lips like
he was going to say something but it was just a quiver of unspoken sound.

	I think it was Peter's idea to take him upstairs. Anyway, Peter
gestured with his gun and he backed up the stairs warily and Blond and I
followed with the prisoner ahead of us. I pushed the prisoner but he didn't
buckle enough to fall down and all the way up I thought, If he folds up and
collapses I'm going to have to step aside because I am so tired I don't
think I can catch him.

	Peter swung his rifle from room to room on the upstairs
landing. Nothing: Just what had once been a dressing station. It was like
walking on leaves. There were IV bags and wads of bloodstained bandage and
plastic bags that slithered and hissed. It all came to the top of our
boots.  In one of the rooms there was a double bed, heaped up with an
untidy mound of quilts. Peter walked us all in there.

	"Okay, now. Find out where he's wounded." Peter directed me.

	"You do it."

	The prisoner faced us with his chin up and his eyes wary. He was
looking at each one of in turn frowning, and in the bewilderment of his
frown, was an increasing anxiety that looked like disgust again on his
face. You could see that he was thinking, What are these guys doing? And
that he didn't trust us one bit.

	Neither Peter nor I moved. Blond put down the two rifles he was
carrying and went up to the Unie again. He pawed over him, much like I
had. Only Blond wound up searching the Unie by feel mostly, keeping his
face turned awkwardly away. I could tell that he was avoiding meeting the
Unie's eyes. "I can't find a hole in his clothes." Blond mumbled.

	"Peter," I said. "Why are we checking him for injuries?"

	"That's what it says in our regulations," Peter said
irritably. "It's even in the Geneva Convention. If we take a prisoner and
he's wounded, we have to give him medical treatment for his wounds."

	"Yes, but..."

	"It's probably only a small opening. Look under his clothes." Peter
ordered Blond. We had all seen plenty of dead guys who didn't have any
obvious marks on them, so what Peter said made sense. There were plenty of
bullets zipping around, small enough that they wouldn't leave a hole in
cloth bigger than a cigarette burn.

	"But we can't take prisoners." I said. "There's no provosts
anywhere near here to turn him over to."

	So Blond opened the Unie's jacket up and his shirt under it and
began sliding his hands around underneath. The Unie was meeting my
eyes. Brown, foreign, enemy eyes were fixed mutely on mine. He didn't give
Blond any trouble.

	"Pull his jacket off. Yeah." Peter said.

	Webbing belts, stiff filthy khaki and limp green cloth began to
form a heap at the Unie's feet.

	"Peter," I said. "What are we trying to do? If we bring him out
there, the sergeant's just going to shoot him."

	"No, he's a prisoner!" Peter said angrily. "Once he's a prisoner we
have to take care of him!"

	I realised why Peter was making the big deal about trying to treat
the Unie's wounds. It was because Peter didn't want to march the Unie
outside and stand him up in front of our sergeant. He was doing this to
delay doing that.

	"Find it!" Peter said. Blond kept pulling clothes off. The Unie's
arms had to come down of course and he half put them back. I saw a
beautifully muscled torso, thinly furred, two dark nipples the size of a
dollar coin, a narrow navel, a belly that was jumping with each frightened
breath.  There wasn't much blood under his shirt. There wasn't any. There
were a few grazes, one on the back of his arm just above the elbow, but so
little that if you had that and you took it to a dressing station, they'd
put their boots in your ass for malingering.

	Why Blond took off the Unie's boots, I don't know. But Peter and I
didn't stop him, so Blond did that and yanked the enemy soldier's trousers
down and off. He stood naked. Blond inspected him closely. The Unie had a
cut cock. It was thick and limp, and he had balls that were shrivelled up
tight, but were still the size of small Christmas oranges. He didn't keep
his hands up.  He held them down swaying in front of his crotch as if he
didn't know if he should cover up or not.

	Blond stepped back, and there was nothing to keep me from getting
an eyeful of the naked prisoner. "Ummm..?" said Blond. I guess I was
goggling at our prisoner as if I'd never been in a room with a naked guy
before.

	Peter looked. Blond looked. We were all looking at the prisoner's
cock. It was a perfectly normal, if large cock. The guy was completely
unwounded. He was shivering violently.

	In my pants, I felt a stirring. I guess it had already started
while Blond was stripping the Unie. Now that I was looking at him
completely naked, my cock was straining at the fly of my trousers. Shit. I
eased my hips back, changed my stance so that it would be less obvious. I
snuck a look at Peter. Christ, I thought. If Peter sees that, he's going to
realise that I go for guys.

	But Peter was gazing at the prisoner. "Okay then... I guess he's
not wounded." He said dumbly. "I guess it wasn't his blood. I guess, he
looks like he's okay..." This house had been a Unie dressing station. It
made sense. It had never been his blood, but the blood of other Unie
soldiers whom he must have been helping earlier.

	I looked at Blond. Blond had a weird little smile on his face. I
looked at the prisoner again, because really that was all I wanted to look
at. He had a beautiful body. All he had on was a tiny chain necklace around
his throat. His ribs stood out like weals. He was just shuddering with cold
and the mist was coming from his mouth in thin white wisps as he
gasped. His face was sealed up, dumb, a study in misery, with a flared nose
and crooked trembling lips and eyes like targets. He had been stripped
naked at gunpoint and he thought he was going to die. The courage that he'd
had at the foot of the stairs had left him. All that was left was misery
and fear and humiliation.

	I had a memory suddenly. The memory was of my embarkation leave. I
only had twelve hours, not enough time to go home, but my Mom and Dad and
two sisters had driven down all the way to the base to spend it with
me. We'd gone out for hamburgers and while the women were eating my Dad had
asked me to come outside the hamburger shack so he could ask me
something. I had been incredulous.

	My Dad is one of the most patriotic, rigidly moral people I
know. He says it's his duty to pay our taxes to provide roads and
schools. He's told me that I must never, ever go on welfare, better to
starve first, that he would always support me first. Lying, stealing,
cheating in any way, cowardly behaviour; I've never seen him do anything of
that kind. But there he was telling me that he had civilian clothes and a
fake id in the car all ready for me, and if I was willing we could get in
and drive until we got to the nearest border.

	"You want me to desert!?!" I could not believe it.

	"I'm afraid something really bad could happen to you." he'd said,
his voice too even with tension and the desire to convince me.

	"I'm not afraid of getting killed." I'd said.

	"I'm not afraid of your getting killed either. You're a man. That's
your decision to make.  I'm afraid of something else."

	I had thought he was afraid I'd become a cripple, or have to die
painfully and slowly.  What else could he mean? "No, Dad!" I said. "I'm not
deserting. I'm not going AWOL. I'm prepared to face what might happen."

	Standing there in that bedroom, suddenly I got an idea that this
was what my Dad was afraid of when he said something really bad could
happen to me. He was afraid that I would get into a situation like this. We
were tormenting the prisoner. We were going to have to shoot him dead,
while he was helpless, and what we were doing in the bedroom was tormenting
him first.

	The sound of my own indrawn breath was so loud that it started
me. I moved quickly and jerkily. I gestured at the bed. "Get in it. Go
on. Get under those covers." I blurted loudly.

	The Unie understood my gesture if not the words. He was happy to
scramble swiftly under the heap of bedding. On his way I caught sight of a
smooth muscular looking backside with tight ass cheeks. Then he was sitting
hunched up, pulling the covers around him to cover up his nakedness.

	Peter and Blond looked at me startled. They looked from the Unie to
me. I had broken up the tableau but they didn't mind that.

	Blond's teeth were chattering when he spoke. "He's right," he
said. "I mean, we take him out there he's going to get shot. Soon as we
bring him out where the other guys see him. We're going to have to shoot
him." His voice was sorrowful.

	"It's not right to shoot prisoners we took." Peter said stubbornly.

	"It's not right." I agreed quietly, "But the minute they see he's
not an American, someone's going to pull their side arm out and shoot
him. I've seen that. You've seen that. Haven't you seen that?'

	"Yes." said Blond.

	We looked at the Unie and at each other. I swayed on my feet. Blond
gave an unlovely sniff and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. I am
too fucking tired to solve this, I thought.  Peter looked down at the floor
and around the room. He was thinking hard. He wasn't looking at the Unie or
at us.

	"I don't wanna shoot him, but..." Blond said.

	"Well, you don't have to shoot him. But someone else is going to."
I said.

	Blond shifted uneasily. "One of you two?"

	"I'm not shooting him," I said slowly "Unless the sergeant commands
me to. A direct order.  Otherwise, I'm not."

	If I disobey a direct order, I thought. Would the sergeant shoot
me?

	The Unie said something. He said it quiet, maybe it wasn't a whole
question. It didn't mean anything to us. I threw a sickly smile in his
direction to reassure him.

	"What are we going to do?" Blond asked.

	"I don't know yet." I said.

	"Can I offer him a cigarette?"

	"Okay."

	Blond fished out his pack of cigarettes again and offered one to
the Unie. A tremulous smile came out on the Unie's lips. He shook his
head. Blond put the pack back.

	"Offer him food." Peter suggested.

	There was a general rummaging. I found that I had two ration packs
tucked in my pockets, which meant that I'd most likely gone nearly two days
without eating. No wonder I feel like shit, I thought. I held out some
crackers. Blond held out a granola bar that he'd found in his pockets. The
Unie looked at us both, one then the other. Then he reached out two grimy
hands and took both the offerings. As I stood, I started to chew on a bit
of the dry sausage from one of the packs and the Unie ate his granola bar.

	"He's hungry." Blond said.

	"Look," said Peter. He sat down on the foot of the bed. "You guys
are right. If we bring the Unie out where the other guys can see him, he
gets shot. If we don't want him shot, we'll have to get him to a provosts'
post behind the lines."

	I considered that. Slipping away from our unit, that wouldn't be
hard. Blond had already mislaid his unit. That was why he was running
around with ours. It wouldn't be too difficult to take off. But getting him
through the lines to the provosts?

	I honestly, seriously considered it. The thing was, I realised that
that was what my Dad would have done. He would have disobeyed orders, gone
missing from his unit to keep a guy alive and save a human life. But I
wasn't even sure which direction behind the lines was, and I knew that we
couldn't avoid running into other units other than our own. Those units
were just as likely to shoot him as our own was.

	I dug my canteen out. We passed them around. Blond was carrying two
canteens. We passed them around to the Unie as well and he drank the
frigid, near frozen water the same way we did. I started to sway again. I
sat on the bed.

	This put me rather too close to the Unie, so Peter behind me got up
to give me some more space. I'm tired, I thought. I gave up trying to
puzzle out a way of keeping the Unie alive. It was too bad, but he was
going to be shot and I was going to let it happen. I wasn't going to be
able to stop it, any more than the Unie could. I looked at the Unie with a
glazed smile on my face.

	He's got a gorgeous cock, I thought. I wished he wasn't in the
bed. A perfectly good bed to lie down on and there was a fucking Unie
prisoner of war in it.

	"Umm, maybe we should let him get dressed?" Blond said.

	Good idea, I thought. Get another look at that fantastic cock of
his, and then I could take the bed.

	"No." said Peter. "He's not going to try anything like that. He
knows he can't get away from us if he's got no clothes on."

	"Yeah, but he's naked." Blond said. I guess he was thinking about
the humanitarian aspects.

	"So?" Peter responded. "He's under the covers. We're not letting
him die of exposure."

	"What do you think we should do?" Blond asked me.

	"I think we should get under the covers and warm up." I said.

	I didn't say it thinking about what it meant. I just said it
because it was what I wanted to do.  But Blond sat down behind me and after
a second Peter sat down on the other side of the Unie soldier so that we
were all in a row, sideways on the bed. Peter was against the head of the
bed, then the Unie soldier and then me and Blond behind me. It was a double
bed. There was a lot of heaving about and tugging on the blankets. There
were a lot of blankets but not much room. The Unie got pushed over so that
he was against my shoulder and Blond was against my other shoulder.  Peter
kept pushed so he wouldn't have to touch the wall. The Unie wound up nose
to nose with me.

	Is this some kind of abuse? I thought. I pulled my knees in. We
were all knees under there, and shoulders. Something on Blond's belt had a
metal bump that was sticking in to my waist. I decided it wasn't abuse, but
it was a damn stupid way to guard a prisoner. If he wanted to fight he had
us in range and all our rifles were stacked against the wall. Suppose the
little fucker had taken unarmed combat training?

	It wasn't so bad under the covers, for all that it was crowded. It
felt real good to be lying down. It felt good to have another man's warmth
close along my back. I didn't mind the metal thing on Blond's belt, because
I could have his body heat. The only thing was that the Unie between Peter
and me was very naked. I could feel that he had no cloth on his arm where
it was pressed into my side, and that his thigh lying close on my thigh was
nude. I had a naked man almost in my arms.

	Peter was looking at me over the Unie's head.

	"How long is the break?" Blond asked behind me.

	"Couple more hours maybe." Peter answered him.

	I had a hard on again. The Unie didn't smell so bad for a guy that
had been covered in blood. Actually he had a warm, unfamiliar body odour
that was kind of attractive. I lay on my back carefully, to make sure that
none of the guys realised that I had a hard on. That meant I was taking up
a lot of room, not lying on my side. Peter saw lying on his side facing the
Unie and me.

	"You still cold, Georgie?" Peter asked me.

	"I'm okay."

	"How about you, Blond?"

	Blond laughed. "This feels funny. I mean, he's an enemy..."

	"Yeah." Peter agreed.

        End of Part 1
        By Ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca