Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

horses trot out from cover of the verdant firs, faster, nimbler than the trucks.
    An explosion spooks the horses. The motorcycle comes roaring back through the greasy smoke-curtain. The sidecar is empty. The officer—
    "Get in!" the driver shouts as he slows to swerve around the crippled truck.
    Joseph topples in and hangs on. The motorcycle accelerates to catch the tail of the fleeing convoy. His cane falls by the wayside. "Take my pistol and shoot at the horses," the driver instructs, passing him a Nazi-issue Luger. Joseph knows the provenance. The wind whips his hair flat against his head, and his face is drawn tight against the bones of his skull as he takes the pistol. His mouth curves into the smallest and bitterest of smiles.
    A horse gallops through the smoke. More follow. My point of view hovers somewhere by Joseph's left shoulder. We hurtle and jounce over the terrible road, the driver fighting to keep us in a straight line while maintaining top speed. We're gaining on the convoy. Pulling away from the horses, their fluid, graceful gallop no match for a BMW 750cc engine.
    Joseph aims. I don't know if he can shoot. I don't know everything about him; I have so many questions I'll never get to ask.
    Joseph, don't shoot them. I do not believe that taking a life will gain your own, not now. But even my silent warning lacks conviction. I want him to live so badly.
    Perhaps he has decided to fire into the air...
    The motorcycle rounds a curve, and yes, the convoy is right there . But there's a woman lying in the middle of the path. Brown mud on a blue dress. Black buttons.
    The driver doesn't know, or doesn't care, that she's dead. He swerves.
    The front wheel slots into a deep ditch filled with watery mud, and the motorcycle flips. The Luger flies away, unfired.
    The dead woman's eyelids spring open; a cold, pale green light flashes forth. Like glowworms shining up from the bottom of a well. She sees me. She nods. It's time.
    I'll be free.
    At last, after all these years waiting. Because it isn't supposed to be like this. Nobody told me the way these things are supposed to be, but I understand them anyway, intrinsically. Death comes on silent feet and I follow in her shadow. I am called into being and then gone again, a worker bee with one purpose and a tiny, almost utterly inconsequential existence.
    But Joseph and I have had a way of outliving fate and I am become ancient.
    The motorcycle hangs upside-down in time, suspended in the air like a mist-veil shrouding a waterfall. Joseph's face is frozen in a flinch, hands clasped over his head and forearms shielding his face. It won't do him any good.
    This is it.
    The motorcycle hits the earth, its body crumpling like a tin toy. Joseph's body crumples too as he's flung from the side car. The incredible force of it slings him against a fir trunk with such violence that he bounces back into the mud of the path. And lies silent. A fracture resounds in my inner senses—twenty feet away, the driver's neck has snapped, it's not Joseph, no, that would be too easy, damn it. I must take him. Power swells in me. I am the one who walks between, the one who is charged to carry.
    The one he sees lurking in imperfect reflections, staring at him with his own eyes through darkened window panes.
    All I've ever wanted was to ease his pain. He lies on his back, mouth moving as if he means to speak. Hot blood washes over his lower lip—lungs punctured, then—and yes, his chest does look somehow deflated. Not speaking. Gasping weakly for air, too broken to fight or thrash. His brilliant grey eyes are glassy, unfocused. All around, the forest is suddenly as hushed as first snow and we are in an age before war and motorcycles, before man. Death.
    It will all be over soon. Joseph's hands, bent and bloodied, twitch and twitch and go still.
    Take him. It's time.
    His dying brain will light up in fireworks and he will see me, see himself in me, and he will know me as I have known him. We will go together into our unknowable future. I will lead him, even though I am not a guide. A fall frost will sugar his body. The war will go on. Here. All over the world. We are so small.
    But in this moment, we are massive.
    And I know that I have a choice . It's the war, maybe, a war like this earth has never known before, breaking all the old rules, feeding the maw of death like a conveyor belt, loosing chaos across land and sea and sky. Or the old magic of this forest, the residue of thousands of