Part 6 ~ Kellogg

[The Sound of the Firing Guns] Twelve different people, twelve different viewpoints. The thing that links them is one battle.

PART 6

This was faster than he had ever gone before but he could still taste the dust from the army horses and feel it biting at his face and hands. Writer’s hands. Not strengthened by rough reins and beaten by climates or used to wielding a gun. The only weapon he chose was a pen and though it could easily slash reputations, it couldn’t slash skin or puncture bloody holes, as he had witnessed in the few hours he had been here.

He shouldn’t have been here.

He knew the orders. No news correspondents.

Yet here he was, blood staining his hands where ink should have been, and paper cuts being stretched.

He had never sweated so much in his life. It was getting in his eyes, steaming his glasses, clinging to his clothes and he could barely see what he had scrawled in his notepad for the way the words had smudged. He shouldn’t have had the pad out at this speed across the plain but it was the only thing that was giving him any sense of security. He wanted to write everything down, as if the mere acknowledgement of these worries and thoughts would render them redundant but he couldn’t without slowing down and the horseman closest to him was getting smaller and smaller by the minute anyway.

And he could hear them.

They were behind him, at his sides, in front of him, above him, below him and they were loud, imprinting themselves right into his very core. He turned this way and that but they were hidden behind the mist on his glasses and the world appeared as large, distorted hues, rising and falling, dipping and climbing. He tried to wipe them but the hiss of a bullet piercing through the air and narrowly missing the delicate bones in his hand immediately made him lurch back.

It could have only been a few seconds yet in those moments, the hysteria set in. It made everything spin, it make everything pulsate, it made everything stutter and the only thing he could do was wildly dig his spurs into the belly of the mule. Faster. Faster. They were getting away, fading further and further into the horizon, the gap becoming an infinite corridor of grass, hay and one tiny flower blossoming into a �"

His head snapped backwards and the splattered colours on the edge of his vision morphed into darkness. The ink from the pen turned red and suddenly, he was falling, endlessly, as the sky widened into a blue expanse splintered by trees and his notepad floating weightlessly through the air. He watched it soar with a blank stare and reached for it as he hit the ground, feather-soft, painlessly.

It landed on his chest, stained red and black. A soft breeze eased shut his eyes and ruffled the pages.

I go with Custer and will be at the death.