Roberts stared at the window, watching it rain through the plastic of the oxygen tent. The machine helping him breathe hissed and beeped next to him, pushing oxygen into the tubes that went up his nose and into his lung.
Pain rippled through right arm, down his elbow, making his fingers burn and tingle, his arm underneath his back somehow.
Specialist James Roberts, First Squad, Third Platoon, 2/19th Special Weapons Group, reached up and rubbed the stump of his right arm, ignoring the phantom sensation of a limb missing for several days, without taking his eyes from the window where water was streaming in rivulets.
Patch and the others are out in that, he thought to himself. I wish I was with them. I just want to go home, to my barracks room, to Atlas.
His eyes went to the table next to his bed. Two plastic bags held two different stuffed rabbits, gifts from Patch. The newest one was a pale summer-sky blue with a white stomach.
The other he had taken home after the last time he had been in the hospital.
It's over, he thought to himself, going back to staring out the window. I was going to be the next Sergeant Major of the Army. I was going to do twenty or thirty years, go Special Forces.
His brain told him his arm was over his head but he ignored the sensation. The pain of the rotting marrow in his arm rippled through the phantom limb but then vanished.
The machine hissed, helping him breathe, his remaining lung strained by infection.
He stared at the window, silently.
The rabbits just watched.
YOU ARE READING
Third Person - Complete
Historical FictionPFC James Roberts just wanted to serve his country, like his father and grandfather. He left his middle class life to join the military with the hope of making his family proud. Graduating top of his class in Basic Training, attending Advanced Indiv...
