Read Online After America by John Birmingham - Free Book Online

Apaches, the young fighter allowed himself a small measure of pride in how far he had come. There was a time when he thought of his first allies, the small band of Ugandan child fighters by whom he had been abducted and with whom he fought for five years, as the finest, the toughest, the most ferocious warriors in the world. Now, hunkered down thousands of miles from home, or at least from the continent he called home, he thought of his first band of comrades and their fabulously cruel commander Captain Kono as nothing more than stupid savages. They fought for the same reason he had fought. Because Captain Kono and his men had taken them from their homes, murdered their families, and threatened to kill them if they did not fight for him. Yusuf checked his weapon one last time, looked around in vain for the other mujahideen who were supposed to be manning a strongpoint with him, and mouthed a quiet prayer of thanks for the opportunity the emir had given him not just to escape Kono and the ridiculous Lord’s Resistance Army but to lift himself up into the light and the forgiveness of the one true God.
    “Allahu akbar,”
he said quietly to himself. Not fiercely, not boastfully, but quietly and piously and most of all with great love in his heart for the infinite forgiveness that Allah had bestowed upon a former infidel such as he.
    He crouched down below the lip of his fighting pit. The emir’s men had trained him well. He knew all about the wondrous technology with which the Americans still fought in spite of the great blow God had smashed down upon them. He knew that merely popping his head up for just a second or two might be the last thing he ever did. It made the stupid, animalistic laughter and shouting of the other fighters, who were
still
apparently dancing around the rocket trucks somewhere behind him, all the more galling. Had they learned nothing?
    The answer came in the form of a sudden high-pitched screeching sound as the Americans finally reached out with their own rockets and missiles. Yusuf burrowed as deeply into his little pit as he could and breathed out to protect himself from the waves of overpressure that surely would follow the impact of the aptly named Hellfire missiles. Huddled into a tight ball, pressing himself into the earth, he had only the vaguest impression of the sky above the island suddenly turning lethal. Whereas their rockets, launched from the back of trucks driven in darkness over the long causeway from the mainland to this former migrant-processing center, had lanced through the air like the spears of Zulu warriors, the American attack seemed to fill the entire space a few feet above his head with roaring death. There was no
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
of volleying rocket fire. There was only a huge and instantly terrifying eruption of noise and fire and smoke as the very earth seemed to shake beneath his cowering form. Shock and horror rolled over the boy soldier as he thought it possible the Americans might just demolish the entire island, pouring fire onto the rubble until it subsided beneath the waters of the river.
    He did not know how long he lay there, quaking in fear. His abject terror was so great, so overwhelming, that a few times he felt himself subject to a whole-body hallucination, the feeling that he was being squeezed out of his mortal remains in the bottom of his bunker. His mind seemed to float free of the hell in which his body was trapped, but it did not escape, falling instead down a long dark tunnel at the end of which a smaller, younger version of himself lay quivering in fear many, many years ago. As in a dream, he had no grasp of the hard edges of this vision. It was more a sensation and a few half-remembered images he had long ago tried to forget. His mother screaming in pain after Captain Kono’s men had cut the lips from her face. His tiny, spindly little boy arms shaking and useless, all but paralyzed with mortal dread as he held a makeshift club and stood over his