Chapter 8 - Blood and Brotherhood
The rain lashed sideways into the open door of the rusted pickup truck, soaking Marcus’s shoulders as he stared blankly at the man behind the wheel.
Thomas reached out, grabbing the front of Marcus’s plaid shirt with a hand calloused by decades of hard labor, and yanked him bodily into the cab.
"Get your boots in, little brother! We don't have all night," Thomas barked, his voice choked with a mixture of desperate urgency and long-suppressed grief.
Arthur vaulted into the truck bed with surprising agility, slamming the tailgate shut just as the back door of the diner burst open and a burst of suppressed gunfire chewed up the brick wall inches from the truck's rear window.
"Step on it, Tom!" Arthur roared, pounding twice on the metal cab roof from behind.
Thomas slammed the truck into gear, burning rubber against the slick asphalt as the vehicle fishtailed hard out of the alley, throwing a wall of dirty rainwater across the pavement.
Marcus sat in the passenger seat, gasping for air, staring sideways at the driver’s profile—the sharp jawline, the familiar scar across the left temple from a childhood bike crash, and the unmistakable emerald ring glinting in the dashboard illumination.
"You're... you're really alive," Marcus whispered, his voice trembling so violently he could barely form the words.
"The government said... they gave us a medal. They said you died a hero in the valley."
Thomas didn't look over; his eyes were glued to the blinding sheets of rain illuminated by the truck's fading headlights on the winding mountain road.
"The government lied, Marcus," Thomas said bitterly, shifting gears with a harsh grind of the transmission.
"Heroes get parades in Washington. Survivors get buried under aliases so the men who sent them into illegal firefights don't have to answer for their war crimes."
In the truck bed, Arthur crouched behind the cab, keeping watch through the rear window with his Colt .45 drawn, scanning the empty road behind them for headlights.
"They're not far behind us," Arthur called out through the open sliding rear glass.
"The local sheriff's department is in their pocket. If they catch us before we reach the VFW basement, we won't even make it to a jail cell."
Marcus gripped the dashboard as the truck took a sharp curve on two wheels, gravel spitting from the tires over a sheer cliff edge.
"What war crimes, Thomas? What the hell happened over there that made you hide for half a century?" Marcus demanded, turning sharply in his seat, demanding answers he wasn't sure he was ready to hear.
Thomas gripped the steering wheel tighter, his knuckles turning chalk white as he sped deeper into the impenetrable darkness of the pine forest.
"We didn't just fight the Viet Cong, little brother," Thomas whispered, his voice dropping to a terrifying chill.
"We were guarding a secret installation that wasn't on any military map—and the men who ordered the massacre of my platoon are the ones currently running this county's government."
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Before Marcus could process the horror of those words, the truck's engine sputtered violently, coughed twice, and the headlights flickered out, plunging them into absolute, terrifying darkness at sixty miles an hour.
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