Leaving behind his wife Alicia and his son Leman for the war europe an year ago was the second hardest thing Edmund had ever done.

The hardest was leaving behind his friends broken body lying on that landmine near Berlin.

They were walking together on a patrol near the western offensive towards Berlin. Just a few miles out of the main city.

It was a routine patrol.

They must have done thousands of them by then.

Check the perimeter,rerun the parameters.

Clear any enemy, get back to the unit.

Being the forward reconiassiance team caution had been imprinted in them by the trainers back at fort Knox, but as the war progressed and the Germans fell back, the need for such caution seemed over.

The germans were defeated, falling back at every engagement.Resignation remained on every german soldier they killed,there weren't many of them left now ,you could see twelve year old boys manning artillery equipment in their oversized uniforms.

Just a normal everyday patrol.

Like every other day.

Until of course it wasn't,

The first sense of unhappening edmund felt was his displacement through a meter and half of air,simply being uprooted from the ground like a sapling in a storm and thrown away and apart.

Then came the blessed dark.

Edmund didn't remember how much time had passed before he came to his senses, it was like waking from a deep night's sleep.

His brain still in that deep mental fog as movement and sensation started coming back to him.

His face snarled in a rictus of pain and confusion,as with awakening came all the agony that oblivion was keeping from him.

His shin screaming in pain, his right forearm bent at an obtuse angle,his ears ringing with a tinnitus which wouldn't just go and his mind addled by overwhelming pain.

He must have sat there for only few minutes but they felt like hours.He picked himself up in that state of shock which soldiers always come into after a brutal battle, adrenaline dulling the worst edges of pain and giving him a vicarious courage.

And he looked behind.

And all he sees is just red.That memory covering everything with a red light,somber and still but still filling his soul with horror.

His best friends broken body lying on a landmine. Blood on the ground,congealed around his brothers abdomen,the body torn apart at abdomen,entrails lying around and so much of blood, ,coloring the camo a fugue shade of dirty green red,red,red,red.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Coloring the white snow red,an accusing shade of crimson that seems to scream to Edmund

why me why me why me, why not you?

Edmund picked himself up and hobbled towards his best friend a man with whom he had imagined himself growing up old, with the two of them smoking pipes in that lawn behind Edmund's house which his mother was so proud of, grumbling and cussing everything just like old war veterans are supposed to do,their children playing mock swordfighting with oak branches and them criticising them, just like their fathers used to do.

He reaches his best friend,still in a state of unbelief and apathy, not comprehending that there will be no more inside jokes, no more hunting trips in the woods,no more talking about the books they had read yesterday...there will be no more grumbling and smoking pipe together in that lawn of theirs.

His friends face is whole, a miracle considering the state of his shredded lungs which came out of his uniform like paper in a shredder.

The part below his friends belt has no existence anymore, it is simply not there, like a child used a rubber to wipe it out.

Blood froths out of his friend's mouth staining the lips an arterial red.

But,

But,

But he can see his friend is trying to speak something.Or is it just a figment of his imagination?

Edmund heaves himself towards his friends head,trying to understand what just maybe the last words his friend speaks to him.

He can see every drop of his friends blood on his lips, he can see his friends breath condensing in the cold winter, he can even see the jagged laceration over his friends left eye, from which his brains are leaking out.

He can see everything.

But he can hear nothing.

He cannot hear a damn thing.

A deep part of his intellect realizes the concussive blast of landmine has made him temporarily deaf but these things come to him at a later time as he revisits the memory in his bunk later on.

That moment he knows only that he has to hear what his friend is speaking. He has to know what his friend is speaking.

To hear

To hear

To know

A deep need superseding the pain from his several compound fractures,superseding all his senses, superseding all his faculties

His friends lip move again

Edmund realizes he can still read his friends lips, he can read them move despite the blood bubbling out of his mouth.

And Edmund reads the word 'Run'

run?

run? why run?

'I can't leave you behind' Edmund mumbles to his brother.

But his friend keeps on chanting the same word like a prayer to the divine.

'why run? why?why leave you behind?'

And with a start Edmund realizes where there are landmines there will be Germans,

And as soon as his faculties return with this sobering thought, a bullet richochets, leaving a trail of smoke in its path.

Edmund realizes he can't carry his friend, there's no more time, no more time to stay with his friend in his last moments,no more time to talk to him and he realizes that and with all that he realizes that all those memories and dreams will never come back.

He picks his gun and charts a way towards friendly lines, giving his friend a last look.

There's so much blood, so much blood but as he moves away Edmund swears, by God he swears he can see his friend look at him with his remaining eye,the blue iris trailing him as he gets out of the clearing and a trace smile on those crimson lips.

It's been 6 months, the war is over, Hitler dead Berlin in ruins, and everyone returning back to home.

Enormous carriers and ships taking good old Americans back to the land of free. They are all heroes, celebrated in Europe as liberators. Edmund is a hero, his wife says in the letters that had reached him in Paris.

Edmund is in a train, in a few minutes he'll be at home.

.

He'll have his wife and son Leman waiting for him at the station. He sent a letter a month back informing them of his homecoming.

The nightmares have become less often, he can almost sleep a full nights sleep, it is nothing like those days when he'd wake up screaming in the night drenched in sweat,his friends accusing eyes looking at him,his vision red with his friends blood, his ears ringing with that terrible tinnitus and that scent of death following him everywhere, everywhere

Even to home.

Edmund alights at the station, his son leman and his wife sitting at a chair on the platform.

Leman is a big boy now, he can even walk. He has grown taller, with mischief in his blue eyes he gets up from his mothers lap and waddles towards Edmund, Alicia trailing leman to make sure he doesn't fall

Edmund picks him up in his arms,his wife looking at both of them with love and joy.

Leman suddenly grips his hair and gives him a long sloppy kiss and bites his cheek and with a start all the tension he has been holding dissipates.He realizes he finally feels at home with

All of a sudden a memory comes unbidden to him, his friend and him in his mothers lawn playing mock swordfighting,his friend telling how he thinks Cathy is beautiful and how she smiles at him whenever he looks at her and he is in with love her and how he'll marry her and have three kids and how they will name their firstborn with each other's names because they are best friends.

This his friend says with religious solemnity and takes Edmund under the old oak beside the creek to pinky promise.

Edmund will name his son leman and leman will name his son edmund.

And even though he knows there will be no more children with the name edmund running around,as he looks into the deep blue irises of his son he knows his friend the tenacious bastard still lives.

Leman is still alive.

He smiles, a genuine smile,a genuine smile after so many months, a real smile, a smile spreading around his cheekbones and making his eyes crinkle.

A happy joyful smile, ,

With that he knows atleast today,

Today atleast,

There will be no nightmares.