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Blurb:
One man was a person who overcame his fear and through quick action saved dozens of lives. The other was a sick masochist who got too much pleasure out of tormenting and abusing prisoners. Isn’t it odd how the home town crowd picks their heroes?
Excerpt:
Harold and Saunders jumped from their position in a single motion, as if they were dancers who’d practiced the move for years. About a hundred and fifty yards in the distance, an old Dodge van sped toward the roadblock. If it had a muffler, it was so badly shot it wasn’t doing any good. From the looks of things, the driver didn’t have any intention of stopping.
It was a hundred yards away and closing in. Harold grabbed the 230 out of the back of the Humvee. He shouldered it and stood at the ready.
“I repeat,” Burgess commanded. “Stop your vehicle or we will open fire.”
If anything, it sped up.
Harold was already peering through the sights of the grenade launcher. For him, time ground to a halt. He could look around him and see the bus from the city that had just stopped to be searched. At least three dozen women and children filled the seats. All they wanted was for the Americans to allow them to leave a city where extremist maniacs were killing anything and everything that moved. They didn’t want to hurt anyone, and they sure as hell didn’t want to get hurt.
He looked at the twelve men of his outfit and suddenly had an image of the wives and the mothers and the daughters who waited for them at home. His orders were to wait until the vehicle was within fifty yards. The lumbering van was seventy-five yards away and not slowing a bit. Harold knew he was supposed to wait – but he just didn’t care. All those people around him and the ones who loved them counted as reasons why he didn’t wait for Captain Burgess’ command. He let loose the grenade.
The van went up in a thunderous explosion. A black cloud mushroomed two hundred feet into the sky, and every man standing fell back on his ass with the force of the blast. The windshield in the bus shattered into millions of tiny shards and the sounds of the women and children screaming pierced Harold’s ears like scalpels.
Pulling himself to his feet, Harold hopelessly tried to pound the dust out of his uniform and brush it out of his hair with his bare hands. The ringing in his ears just wouldn’t go away. There was no way that explosion was simply the result of his grenade. For that kind of fury, there had to have been a half ton of dynamite in the damned van. Either that, or there was a couple of hundred pounds of plastic explosives.
Burgess did a quick inventory of personnel. A few guys suffered minor shrapnel injuries, but nobody was seriously hurt. The only real damage, aside from the dead van, was the windshield on the bus. The captain walked over and put a hand on Harold’s shoulder.
“Son,” he said. “You probably already know this, but you saved a whole shit load of lives just now.”
Harold just nodded and stared at the smoldering wreckage in the distance.
Author bio:
Michael Graves is a husband, a father and a writer who wears many hats. His day job as an information technology professional pays the bills and he spends his spare time writing books for the computer industry and fiction. You can find Graves’ short stories between the covers of magazines such as ‘Combat Magazine’, ‘Writers Post Journal’, ‘T-Zero’ and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in ‘The Journal of Modern Post’, ‘Opinion’ and ‘The Dead Mule’, and he was the editor of two volumes of short stories by emerging writers. ‘Assault on Fiction Island’ was his first full-length fiction novel, released in 2005.
