The Dust of Death

Chapter 1

My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

Psalm 22:15.

He is my friend, this uniformed man who stands beside me, but if he stood, say, thirty yards away, I would not hesitate to kill him. We are armed alike; we look alike. He could be my brother, so close I feel to him. But he is not.

Not my brother.

Until a few weeks ago, he was a stranger.

He is just the guy who fights the Huns beside me in this trench – this godforsaken hell hole on foreign soil I do not call my own.

We have been ordered here, like so many others, from nations all over the globe. And we do not refuse. We follow orders and move inside these tunnels like the rats that live among us. We curse and swear, but we submit. We do not refuse.

Refusal will only reward us with a shot of lead and the label of coward. For the next four days, this crudely shoveled canal of mud and slime is our home.

So, here I lean against this wall beside my friend.

My comrade.

My brother-in-arms.

My buddy.

And he points up at the gray sky and smiles.

"I think we'll be alright," he says, "till night. I feel it in my bones."

But, he is wrong.

We hear the whistle, the whine, the great boom of mortars, aimed to fire at a high angle and drop Death into our trench. We scurry and scramble into our little dugout, praying that somehow the gods of war will favor us today and let us live. Cramped and stinking of fear, we huddle. We shiver and shake like naked babies abandoned in a snow storm.

Head between our knees.

Praying, pleading, cursing.

The blast is close. The boom is loud. We scream, but no one hears us. We are deafened by the blast.

My friend and I.

My friend.

But we are relieved. We have survived. Our knees are like water. Our prayers have been answered. We have survived this close call. We look up into the square little hole of light that filters into our manmade cave of earth.

Our little hole of safety.

It happens too quickly.

The second explosion.

The mountain of dirt and debris and shrapnel is thrown into our little cave. We are trapped! To suffocate! To experience a slow and agonizing death! In utter blackness, over the din of bursting shells, I hear him scream! He is tearing at my flesh like a madman! And there is no escape!

He woke, drenched in sweat, screaming as loudly as the soldier of his dreams.

*****

The words, The Cupid/Archer Detective Agency, were painted in fine navy letters on a panel of frosted glass, accented by a thin outline of gold leaf, crisp, professional, and exactly the way Flix had pictured them in his mind. His partner, Phalen Archer, had thought that Flix was joking when he suggested the name. But Flix/Archer, Florian & Phalen, Valentine/Archer, and any number of other combinations of their two names had not lit Flix's fancy.