Page 29 of Rescuing Josiah
This should have been where he died. His blood seeping into the sand along with the blood of his team. His brothers in every way that mattered.
But he wouldn't die out here. He’d survive, and have to live with the horrors of watching his team being slaughtered.
“Please,”he begged, already knowing no one could hear him because this wasn't really happening. He was trapped in a dream. A nightmare. Forced to watch his team die all over again.
How many times would he have to watch this play out?
Hadn't he already suffered enough?
His own screams joined the pain-filled ones of his team as the roar of gunfire filled the air. He watched in horror as the men dropped around him one by one. He watched himself go down, too, only those bullets wouldn't pierce his lungs, his heart, he was protected by a fluke. One that doomed him to live out the rest of his life when he wanted to be dead.
Once he’d watched himself fall to the ground, Josiah tore his gaze away from the pools of red staining the sand. Turning his head in the direction that the bullets had come from, he saw them.
Men.
Half a dozen of them.
If they hadn't had a traitor to allow them access to the base, they never would have been able to kill so many. Most of those men had escaped that day. When the other men and women on the base responded, the shooters had fled. Two had died in the return fire, but four of them had escaped in a vehicle, one that the traitor had set up for them.
He heard its engine roar to life, and when it took off across the sand, he took off after it.
Time lost all meaning, the world disappeared around him, it was just him, the Hummer, and the sand.
Nothing else.
It wasn't getting away. Not this time.
Those men had to pay.
They had to suffer for stealing his brothers from him, for not killing him, too. They had to die horrible, slow, agonizing deaths. Maybe that would soothe some of the roughest edges of his rage.
Somehow, despite knowing that a person could not run faster than a vehicle, couldn’t even keep pace with it, he began to gain on the Hummer. And as it pulled up outside a rocky cave entrance deep in the desert, he got close enough to grab one of the men.
Startled, the man swung his weapon at Josiah, but he merely huffed a mirthless chuckle, grabbed the weapon, and slammed it into his raised knee, snapping it in half.
“That’s not going to help you, not this time,”he told the man who was staring at him with wide, defiant eyes.
Slamming his fist into the man’s head, dropping him to the ground, he turned on the others. They fired off shot after shot at him, but he merely laughed as the body armor he wore repelled every one of those bullets.
Then he was on them, slamming his hand into four more heads, and one by one the four men dropped.
The weapons they’d used to kill his team, innocent men who put their lives on the line every single day to rid the world of filth like them, were next. He snapped them all like they were nothing, and then he took the offending pieces of metal and used them to bind the wrists of the men.
He wanted them to watch as he killed them. Wanted the anticipation of knowing what was going to happen to them to sink in as they watched helplessly, with no way to escape their fate. It had been sealed the moment they made a deal with a traitor to attack the base and kill his brothers.
Sliding out his K-BAR, he admired the sharp blade, and with a wicked grin, he pounced on the first of the men. They’d slippedaway before, disappeared back into the shadows, lived when they should have died.
Today, they were going to die the deaths that should have been theirs.
The man he approached yelled something, but Josiah couldn’t make out the words through the bloodlust pumping through his veins. The first swipe of the knife through flesh did little to satiate it, so he sliced again and again. Blood was everywhere, splattering him, staining the ground around him, covering the body of one of his team’s killers, but it wasn't enough.
More.
He needed more.
More blood to be shed to get justice for his team.
Turning on the next of the cowering men, he tossed his knife aside. This time he wanted to use his bare hands. Curling his fingers into fists, he pounded them into the man before him. Each strike was rewarded with a grunt of pain, and they fueled him, urging him on, and by the time the body before him was no longer recognizable as a human being, he was breathless, but riding the high of vengeance.
