PART III. It looks nothing like the videos his father showed him as a child, always marked CONFIDENTIAL or BURN AFTER VIEWING and containing images of executions or gun battles. The old man insisted they watch these things, especially in the years before the boys were big enough to hold a rifle properly. He puts the video back on the table. These things are not the reason he is here.
He is interested in the people selling these items. These are people like he has never seen before. None of them are warriors and he doubts any of them have even killed a man. Certainly none have taught their children like Kill Team One taught him. How then can they be expected to survive?
They do other strange things besides selling these useless trinkets. Twice each afternoon, all of the rags cease all other activities and fall to their knees. They place their heads against the ground in silence whilst their commander recites some sort of mantra. This goes on for seven to ten minutes each time, and seems to accomplish nothing of consequence. Each time Sid sees this, he is more confused than the last.
A boy nearly his age waves something at him from another table. It is a CD in a plastic case with a hand written label. His clothes are a collection of rags, most tan but some colored vibrantly, and his hair is a shade of reddish brown.
“Very good rap music,” says the boy. He smiles brightly at Sid. “Gangsta gangsta. Five dollar. Gangsta Gangsta.”
Sid walks away from the makeshift bazaar and on to what really interests him. Outside the six-foot HESCO barrier separating the encampment from open desert, the young children of the peddlers roam in the dust, talking and playing games amongst themselves near the rows of rusted old pick-up trucks parked there by their parents in the early morning. Many of them are involved in a game in which they kick a white and black ball along the ground while refusing to touch it with their hands. This is a very peculiar thing. He and his brother never played games like this as children. Where are the knives and rifles?
As he stands observing this strange phenomenon of kickball, his warrior’s eyes instinctively zero in on something none of the others have noticed. Far off from the others, half a mile by his judgment, a child runs screaming toward the rest of the group. Sid watches as a pack of snarling dogs emerge over the crest of the dune behind her – four of them, hungry and vicious.
He glances up at the nearest watch tower and sees two Americans engaged in idle chit chat, one laughing as the other gestures emphatically, the heavy machine gun next to them unmanned. As if it matters. The way the Americans shoot they would kill the child in trying to put down the dogs.
He ponders briefly if he should take any action at all. This screaming girl was unwise to wander so far from the others with no weapons of her own. He has no allegiance to her. Perhaps it is best to let the dogs tear her apart. She is a rag, after all.
The girl did nothing to threaten him, and he has no specific orders to kill her. It would hardly be an inconvenience to assist…
The other children begin to take notice when one of them points at the girl in the distance. They begin running for the encampment, some of them shrieking. By the time any of the adults react, it will likely be too late for the girl.
Sid rushes forward. In seconds, he reaches the girl. As the lead dog leaps to sink its teeth in, Sid stabs his knife through its throat and up into its brain. He swings the impaled dog around to bat another one away and then flicks it from the blade like a clump of garbage. The other two pounce for him at the same time, but they are no match. One gets the KA-BAR through its heart and the other Sid catches by the maw. He brutally twists its head completely backward, breaking both its jaw and its neck. This is not clean and painless, but a slow and gruesome process filled with the sounds of animal yelping and cracking bone and tearing ligaments.
When he is done, he looks to the last remaining dog as it crawls out from under its dead pack mate. The dog growls at Sid. Sid growls back. He bears his teeth and leans forward with his head down. The dog whimpers and runs off. From behind him, Sid can hear the boy at the video table shouting to him in Pashto, but he doesn’t understand any of it.
Sid only speaks two languages; English and Violence. Everybody speaks one of them.
Sid feels something tugging at his leg and turns expecting to see that one of the dogs is not quite dead yet and is gnawing on him. Instead, he finds himself looking into the bright blue eyes of the tiny girl as she clasps around his ankle. Tears and runoff from her nose drip down her face. She cries out something in Pashto over and over between sniffles.
“She says Allah sent you to save her,” says John Q, coming out from the encampment and chuckling at the scene in front of him.
“You speak their language?” Sid asks the master of disguise.
“You want to impersonate everybody you have to speak every language.”
The red-haired video vendor grabs hold of the girl and pries her off of Sid. He succeeds and then falls to his knees in the dirt at Sid’s feet. They both prattle on and Sid cannot understand any of it.
“Looks like you made some new friends, kid,” John Q says and then he bellows with laughter.
“What are they saying?”
“Mostly Praise be to Allah, Allah is great, the usual sand nigger shit,” John tells him. “The red-head says you can have all the videos you want.”
“Can you talk to them for me?” Sid requests.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Sid crouches down to meet the children face to face. By now the other vendors have gathered around to gawk and a small crowd has formed.
“Why do you pray?”
The boy answers.
“We pray to Allah and he shows us his mercy,” John says.
“Who is Allah?” he asks.
The boy answers.
“He says Allah is the one true God. Praise be his name.”
“Where is he?”
John interprets the question and the boy laughs briefly before he stifles himself.
“All place,” the boy says on his own, motioning around him.
“That’s impossible,” Sid says.
This time the little girl answers after John interprets.
“She says with God, all things are possible,” John tells him.
Sid stands. None of this makes sense. No one is everywhere. Clearly the children are mistaken. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why his father and Graveyard want to kill these people so badly for believing in something imaginary. He doesn’t understand why these people want to believe so badly. He doesn’t understand the need to have a purpose or a creator. He doesn’t understand, and he probably never will, but he doesn’t need to. It is not his job to understand, only to kill. He nods at the children as he turns to walk away. One might even say he smiles slightly. The little girl smiles back at him.
Victor is waiting for him at the entrance to the encampment. He sneers at Sid as he walks on by. Sid doesn’t know how much he saw, but the look in his brother’s eyes makes him very uneasy.