Blog as a Weapon II

A quarter of a mile away, the screaming stops as well as the rendering.
Were there any living birds in this part of Pennsylvania anymore, they would be silent. Expired humans standing upright, waiting.

The colonel staggers to the back of the jeep. Into the supplies for a second round. Wastes potable water over parched red clay. Nothing but empty cartridge boxes, he throws them aside. Her clothes, ah god, her shirts and her smell on them, the forever emptiness of her Peruvian sweater. He looks back to where he’s laid her against the tree, she looks peaceful, he thinks, something she rarely ever was in life. His breathing slows.

He can hear the noise of whatever’s left of his group back over the hill. Jan and Jim, their three kids, the other boy and girl with no names, that hadn’t spoken since they found them in the culvert. He moves the sweater exposing the circus mallet they used to erect the tent they had to leave behind outside Butler. All of four foot long, maple handled with a head bound in iron the size of a breadloaf. A man needs a hammer to build a house, he thinks. He shoulders the thirty pounds of it and walks back through the trees like John Henry.

In the moonlight he notices the trees, all poplars, with the regularity of marines in formation. A grove, neglected with scrub under it, perhaps by the very uncrumpled dead at his destination. He lays the tool against one and removes his shirt exposing his girth, not fat but a big man, skin-filled to bursting, and shining, bald head to belly in the moonlight. No use leaving anything in the way for them, he thinks, as a perfect offering.

No one’s bothered to turn off the generators so the lights are still running, with the chugging sound of it and the smell of gas as he crests the hill.
Kurtz, descending, with the lights on.
As They leave whatever is ground born or hiding or still thrashing and come for him, there is Kurtz, mallet aloft, pink and shining, and running now to greet them.

The first one, in a new suit, smeared with dirt and gore has his head exploded like a watermelon, as does someone’s mother-in-law behind him. They come slowly and eagerly, they reach for and surround him, and he keeps swinging, a man at work and silent. They fall before him like tall western firs under Paul Bunyan.

Kurtz of the Hammer, they might say, if they still had a language,
Kurtz the Gore Smeared,
Kurtz Forever Swinging Under Poplars.