I Am God Read Free

with the distinct feeling that he was losing something. That both of them were losing something. He had only taken a few steps when Jeff’s voice forced him to stop.
    ‘Hey, Wen.’
    He turned and saw him, the silhouette of a man and a machine against the sunset.
    ‘Get laid for me,’ Jeff said, making an unambiguous gesture with his hand.
    Wendell smiled in reply. ‘OK. When I do, it’ll be in your name.’
    Corporal Wendell Johnson walked away, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his walk still, in spite of himself, a soldier’s walk. He reached the accommodation block without greeting or talking to anyone else. He entered his quarters. The bathroom door was closed. He always kept it closed, because the mirror faced the main door and he preferred to avoid his face being the first image to greet him.
    He forced himself to remember that from the next day onwards he would have to get used to it. There were no charitable mirrors, only surfaces that reflected exactly what they saw. Without pity, and with the involuntary cruelty of indifference.
    He took off his shirt and threw it on a chair, away from the masochistic spell of the other mirror, the one inside the wall closet. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed with his hands behind his head, rough skin against rough skin, a sensation he was used to.
    Through the half-open windows, like an emanation of thedarkening sky, came the rhythmic hammering of a woodpecker hidden somewhere in the trees.
    tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
    Memory turned in its vicious circle, and the sound became the muted splutter of an AK-47 and then a tangle of voices and images.
     
    ‘ Matt , where the fuck are those bastards? Where are they firing from? ’
    ‘ I don ’ t know. I can ’ t see a thing. ’
    ‘ Hey , you with the M-79 , throw a grenade into those bushes on the right. ’
    ‘ What happened to Corsini? ’
    Farrell ’ s voice , stained with earth and fear , came from some point on their right. ‘Corsini’s gone. Mac, too
    tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
    And Farr ell ’ s voice, too, dissolved into the air.
    ‘Come on. Wen, let ’ s get our asses out of here. They ’ re tearing us to pieces.’
    tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa … tupa-tupa-tupa-tupa …
    ‘No, not that way. There ’ s no cover.’
    ‘Holy shit, they ’ re everywhere.’
    * * *
    He opened his eyes again and let the things around him return. The closet, the chair, the table, the bed, the windows with the unusually clean panes. And here, too, a smell of rust and disinfectant. This room had been his one landmark for months, after all the time spent in a ward, with doctors and nurses bustling around him trying to alleviate the pain of his burns. It was there that he had let his mind, almost intact, back into his ravaged body, and had made himself a promise.
    The woodpecker conceded a truce to the tree it had been torturing. It seemed like a good omen, the end of hostilities, a part of the past that he could somehow leave behind him.
    That he had to leave behind him.
    The next day he would be leaving.
    He didn’t know what kind of world he would find beyond the walls of the hospital, nor did he know how that world would greet him. In fact, neither of those two things mattered. All that mattered was the long journey he had ahead of him, because at the end of that journey an encounter with two men awaited him. They would look at him with eyes full of fear and astonishment. Then he would talk, to that fear and that astonishment.
    And finally he would kill them.
    A smile, again devoid of pain. Without realizing it, he drifted into sleep. That night, he slept without hearing voices, and for the first time didn’t dream about rubber trees.

CHAPTER 2
    What surprised him during the journey was the corn.
    As he rode north, getting closer and closer to home, stretches of it started to appear at the sides of the road, meek in the shadow of the Greyhound bus. The ripples of the wind and the shadows of the clouds