Ranger James Stone adjusted his sighting scopes. His fifty caliber sniper rifle had been his baby ever since the Iraqi sands where he waded through tons of sweat and sandy Hummer platoons zigzagging through the desert wadis in search of fresh hajji meat. His trigger finger was always sure, and each victim was a personal victory in his bag of continuing tricks.
Today, he was in a woods inside Arlington cemetery where the dead languished in line after line of carefully arranged graves. Each person became a member of the corps, something dear to everyone who ever walked the halls of West Point as a hammered cadet and felt his face beaten into red lumps by his older cadet tormentors. It was all a part of the game, and it produced a bond between men that never died. Thousands of dead soldiers, husbands, and sons reclined in mock innocence beneath the land that Robert E. Lee once owned, an estate that went from agricultural pursuits to the resignation of fates that far outweighed a leaf of corn waving in General Lee’s fine southern farm field just south of Washington’s corrupt square of land. Each soul buried on Lee’s farm with his bony toe pointing skyward earned a well deserved sleep. That sleep had been purchased through years of abject boredom polishing brass Union buttons. The boys in those graves had fired glinting federal rifles during their last painful moments of youthful death, anguish, and bitterness. As they died, their voices emitted dreadful moans inside the deadly midst of battle. When it was over, some of them were only pieces of their original selves. Some had only a hand or an arm left. Their other parts had been lost, disintegrated within horrid, bloody battles that tore them into shreds faster than their lungs could toss out their death screams. Such were these grassy graves of the military people stretching for miles into the hills of Washington where wars were started for no reason at all, most of which seemed to be always based on tawdry lies, each being concocted, fought, and waged for the elites’ profit ledgers.
James felt his rifle with tenderness. She was not only his girl, but his baby. He loved her. The bite she placed inside his shoulder whenever he fired her into his target’s shattering brains had always been good for James, because he loved a woman who inflicted pain, because love and pain to James were one and the same. A man was never born without the screams of his mother pushing him forward through her bursting thighs and a fine doctor’s hands covered with blood pulling him gently out of his mother’s weeping vagina.
It was the same with sniper death. The man or woman who fell from the hidden bullet in the darkness of the woods or on loud city streets bled just the same as in the birth canal. Life always marched grandly away through the madness of the sniper’s rushing bullet as it sailed in and out of the exploding heads of his carefully targeted victims.
James keyed in on his present Arlington victim, an unknown target who had nothing to do with his son’s death by Obama Care. James’s revenge nestled like a baby in his hands as his fifty caliber spat out death after death, revenge after revenge on the immaculately uniformed burial soldiers of Arlington. James’s magic fingers slowly and surely pulled its sweet hammer head into the ascending shell as its smooth projectile matriculated like a copperheaded dove of truth toward his intended target. James saw it sparkling in the air as it traveled into his distant target’s expanding head wound. He watched the youth’s blood splatter gushing out into the air. The finest of red pellets had been automatically emitted from the rear of his finely resplendent jarhead. The young man’s falling torso revealed how his freshly strewn blood spray had drizzled along the faces, shirts, and pants of those who had been watching his back. The youth's sudden and very silent death struck James’s carefully orchestrated terror into their hearts and souls.
James cross-haired the next man in his Browning gun sight. He saw him falling to the ground with his arms and legs dancing in a final death spasm. Through the lens, James also saw his second victim’s blood pouring like a reddening Pepsi spill onto the walls and floor of the Vietnam Monument down below. He shot eight more Arlington honor guards in the next forty-three seconds. Their deaths were just as neat, because all of them were exact, clean kills. Still unnoticed by anyone, James broke down his rifle, placed it in his backpack and walked his bicycle back to the neatly slithering path he had ridden there on, and headed toward Washington where he knew his work would never be quite finished.
“I have many miles before I sleep, and many promises to keep,” he muttered as his feet pumped the pedals of his bicycle.
The wind fluttered through his military clothes. James would always the khaki warrior, always the ranger and the killer, always the avenger of his son’s needless death from Obama Care.
Hell would freeze over before James would be finished avenging Brandon’s death.