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Tuscarora Sunrise

There is no cold like that which fills the high desert at night. It is a cold that not even the sunrise itself can manage to defeat. For the first few hours of sunlight in the high desert can be as cold as the arctic only to finish the end of the day in the irrepressible heat that hammers normal men mercilessly into madness. It is said by some that the desert is the anvil of men’s souls and if that is so, then the cold morning of the desert is like a blacksmiths hearth before the start of the workday.

He fought hard to relieve the “charley horse” in his leg in the cold desert air, screaming silently only to himself for quiet relief from the pain that comes from not moving for hours at a time. His rifle lay relaxed and cradled across his lap on the dirty cotton poncho that was his uniform and his camouflage. He is a sniper. He was an assassin, a bringer of horror to those who would be so foolish as to walk in front of his rifle and scope within his ambush. With a single shot, he could bring fear to those who would trespass into his home, his hidden fortress of rock.

In the same way that all hunters develop a sense of the grounds in which they hunt, his prey were too far to see, to far to smell, to far to hear, but their presence was felt by the sniper all the same. The small field binoculars he carried to aid him in his task only confirmed what he already knew by “sixth sense” alone. In the distance, a telltale column of dust hung in the air over the ridgeline to mark the passage of men who were being betrayed by the very desert in which they moved.

They were coming, and it would soon be time to do what it was he had been trained to do.

He closed the bolt on his rifle and sighed quietly as he thought of his father. It had been 10 years since his father had gone. He kept a picture of his father and family with him at all times for good luck. A picture of his whole family as it once was; his father, his mother his younger sister and himself standing smiling in the summer sun in the front yard of a house that was now long since gone. They were like ghosts staring back him now, even though he was one of the faces in the picture. It was as if he hardly knew who those people were. Each night as he went to sleep he silently asked God to return him to the world in the picture, the world that once was, only to awaken every day to the disappointment of living in the world that is.

The years before the end came now seemed only like a dream, for the life he was living now was nothing like the cozy suburban comfort he and the rest of the world once lived in. Cars, Television, Satellite TV, Refrigerators, Ice, Plasma screens, video games, they were all gone now. All of the clean beauty of the world that was, had replaced with the plague, horror, fear and deprivation of the world that is.

It had all come to an end one summer day. He had been playing outside when a creeping silence fell over the neighborhood, punctuated only by the sound of news reports and parents shushing their children all at once. Something terrible had happened, something far beyond the day the buildings once collapsed in New York so long ago. His parents stood by and listened to the news from the radio because for some reason he didn’t understand at the time, the television did not work. Slowly the word had been received of what had happened. All at once, whole cities in the east had been destroyed. His parents were dumbstruck with horror, wondering if they too might soon fall victim to the hell that had engulfed the east.

There was no official word and little organization in the aftermath. City governments were organized to see that the lawns were mowed in the parks and the streets were well paved, they were not organized to tell people how to survive in a way that none of the inhabitants where really prepared to live in. The phones no longer worked, the radio was sporadic and information was slow to be received and even slower to be believed.

That first night of the new world, they all slept together downstairs while his father sat by the door with a rifle cradled in his arms, slowly rocking back and forth in the chair waiting for the terror to arrive at their doorstep. There was panic in hearts of the people in neighborhood and for the first few days there was a deep desire to leave, but there was nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Over the coming days the true picture of what was happening began to arrive and the news went from bad to worse. The government was largely missing in the initial attack, and what was left was hardly unified. A political battle for the remainder of the country was being waged, where many people wanted to declare large sections of the country as non combatant and neutral, where other parts wanted to go to war. In the midst of the horror that came after, the refugees, the deprivations, the horror of broken cities, those in political power chose to move into a civil war, which fractured into pieces what was left of the already broken country. The people who came to be called “progressives” refused to take part in any military action believing in the safety of good intentions, while the conservative factions cried out for retribution. It went beyond just those who were in positions of civilian political power. The military and the civilian branches of the defense organizations took sides in the civil war as well. Mutinies began to break out at sea, as ships crews began to argue amongst themselves what the course of action should be. Word was eventually received of military leaders who were defecting to parts of Europe to show solidarity with the rising world of the “ progressive” movement that was now rising from the ashes of the old world.

Where once you could find political debate on any street corner of the world, you could now find men hanging by their neck from trees with signs around their necks that said “warmonger” or “traitor” depending on what part of the country was controlled by what faction. When the hunger came, the blame for the horror only intensified and further split what was left of the world. In a little over a month, the world that once was had simply ceased to be as if it had never been. When the plague came, there was no more time for politics. You were either alive or dead; that was the extent of the remainder of the world and its politics.

His father was a member of the conservative faction. He believed in the world that once was and lived in hope that it would be once again. Over the course of several days after the initial attack, his father had gone into town to meet with the authorities to help establish some sense of order to their small town.

It was out of these meetings that a plan began to take shape.

The provisional government was raising an army. His father, along with all the other men were to go to help form this army in hopes of defending what little was left of the world that once was. His father and mother met at the kitchen table one evening and discussed what was to be. He had no part in the decisions that would forever affect the rest of his life.

The next day, his father spent a few minutes just sitting with his young daughter holding her in his lap and stroking her hair. After some time of quietly talking to her, she began to fall asleep. He stopped and set her aside and motioned to his young son. “Come along son, and help me pack” his father said. He began to pack a bag, much like his father had done a hundred times before in the world of business trips and the jets that no longer filled the skies.

As they began to fill the bag with the belongings his father needed in his journey, his father slowly began to work up the courage to talk to his son in what was to be the last time they would ever speak together. His father’s last words never left his mind over the 10 years they had been apart.

He looked his son in the eye and said:

“ A couple of years ago you asked me why it is that we fight, and I told you then that we fight to hold off the bigger war that will surely be if were to stand by and “do nothing”. Back then; we believed that had we done more to stop Hitler in the 1930’s that the world might not have seen 52 million dead, the Jewish holocaust and the use of atomic bombs. We believed that the lesson to be learned from that time was that if we fought tyranny early, at a time and place of our choosing, we could have avoided a bigger more destructive war that came later. In our time, like it or not, the war we tried to avoid was coming - not because we wanted it, but because like Hitler before them, the islamists needed the war in order to survive. Well my son, I’m sorry to say that we were too late. We waited too long to fight back, and now the war we hoped to avoid is here and I’m afraid that before it is over it wont be millions who die, but billions. The world that was is no longer, and we no longer fight to avoid one political situation or another, we fight only to survive. I’m sorry that we failed. I’m sorry that I failed you”.

His father sat and cried for a moment, then hugged his son and told him of “the plan”.

He and his mother and sister were to go in a convoy to eastern Idaho, where his grandmother lived. Idaho was also a place that was relatively secure from the war that was already underway. Idaho was one of the few places that had already decided to join the provisional government. It was not peaceful, but it was at least unified and free of the civil war that had gripped the states of the east and west coasts. Cities continued to be destroyed by atomic bombs and it was only a matter of time before their city was hit as well. What the enemy did not destroy, the progressives had made difficult by collusion and collaboration with those in the process of killing so many of their former countrymen and neighbors.

After holding his wife in his arms and saying his goodbyes, his father closed the door behind him and left his family for the last time. When he looked back at the house that was his home, it was with a slight wave of the hand, and no matter how much his son cried out for him to come back, his father never looked back again as he walked down the street to join the group of fathers who were also joining the army. His son never left the door until sunrise the following day. He has screamed all night and made himself mute in an effort to compel his father to come back. His voice would never again be the same as it was before. The sweet honey voice of childhood had been replaced with the sharp rasp of harsh reality.

It was the first night of his life where he went to sleep and asked God to return the world to what it once was, only to start the next day fresh in the disappointment of a prayer that was to be forever left unfulfilled.

10 years had passed since that night and “the long war” was still going on. He had gone from suburban child straight through adolescence and right into manhood all within the first 30 days of the war. 10 years later and he was an old man, just barely in his 20’s. The war had gone on, and through all of it no word had ever been received of the fate of his father or the men who had left with him on the night of last goodbyes. His mother and sister had settled into life in Idaho by staying busy in the daily effort that was required to stay alive in the new reality. His mother lived every day hoping for the word that would never come of the fate of the man she had loved in a world that was no longer.

The world’s progressives had long since passed into full collaboration with the enemy, having rediscovered the hard truth as adults of what all school children truly know of the bully. Where once there existed high minded governments and political movements who wished to avoid war at all costs, now only stood concentration camps and enslaved populations under the law of the caliphate and their allies. America, once called a “shining city on the hill” was reduced in 10 years to scorched earth, the unburied dead, open prairie scrub, the rubble of its great coastal cities and a few remaining outposts in the high mountains along its former center.

These few outposts defended along the frontier by snipers who lived in the hills. The Great Basin of the former state of Nevada had proven to be the meat grinder of armies much in the way that Afghanistan had once been to the empires of Europe. Its arid deserts and its mountain ranges had proven a tough barrier to the men who would come to take away the last remaining part of the world that once was.

“10 men before you fall” was the phrase they taught him at sniper school. The number always seems low to him, but it was enough that he understood the fact that while he may be successful in his tasks for a while; once he started shooting, the enemy would eventually find him and he should make every shot count before the end came. It was his duty to stop as many of the enemy as he could before they moved through his pass and into the next and a step closer to his mother and sister who were all that remained of his world that once was.

As a lone sniper in the hills of the Tuscarora canyon, he was truly “an army of one”.

The twilight was replaced with an unbroken sunrise that rose from behind over the mountain range that he was embedded within. The column of horsemen moved slowly down the canyon, unknowingly moving directly towards the snipers ambush. From the floor of the canyon the enemy rode on horseback in two columns, followed closely by foot soldiers. From their vantage point there was little that could be seen in the sunrise. The commander of the column raised his binoculars to his eyes and slowly scanned the horizon in front of him for any potential sign of the enemy. Seeing nothing but the rocks and high sierra scrub, he raised his arm and ordered the column to continue. His command rippled through the column of horses and men as they continued forward under the watchful eyes of the sniper.

The sniper noted the one man in the column with binoculars and the way the troops responded to his command. He then scanned the columns and picked his next four targets and made note of their position relative to the man who had just helped him pick his first target.

The sniper moved into his firing position prone to the ground and opened the front lens cap on the sniper scope. He noted the position of the columns as they moved towards the splotches of paint he had placed on rocks on the valley floor when he first established the ambush. The paint marked the range from his position as the enemy moved along, allowing him to measure the speed of their crossing and assist in his aim. With the sun directly behind him, the enemy was incapable of seeing anything in the shadow due to the contrast of light, yet the enemy itself was in full sunlight, making the snipers aim all that easier. It was an old magicians trick that served him well in the process of designing the ambush.

He took aim through the scope and steadied his rifle against his shoulder. In the scope appeared the khaki uniform of the enemy. The target halted his horse at the side of the column and stopped to take a drink from a small canteen, and for just a second, he looked up directly at the part of the mountain that hid the sniper from his view.

The sniper placed to crosshairs of his scope on the target directly on the small red star that the enemy wore on their caps. He smiled and thought of the justice of shooting directly through the symbol of the false religion that had so destroyed the world. His enemy, the Communist Chinese, who were now in full alliance with the islamists who had done so much of their dirty work as revenge for their 1000 years of exile from the favors of God.

The sniper was once a little boy who played on the front lawn of a suburban home in a land that no longer existed. Now he was a man in the ugly business of killing another. The wider and larger war that his father’s generation had hoped to avoid had now reached the life of his son. He was once just a boy, but now he was a professional killer and knowing his profession, he lowered his aim to the torso of the target to be sure that the first shot was hit; leaving the poetic justice of the shooting the red star for another time. He wasn’t fighting for ideals or philosophy or trade; he was just fighting for survival.

“10 men before you fall” he whispered to himself as he slowly squeezed the trigger. Between each shot that followed, he prayed to God that after it was all over he might be allowed to wake up in the world that once was.

Posted @ May 14, 2006 02:15 AM | fiction | Comments (11)