Cards in the Cloak Read online

Cards in the Cloak

  by Jeremy Bursey

  Copyright 2015 by Jeremy Bursey

  All rights reserved.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Part 1: The Fast Journey of Life

  Chapter 1: Into the Game

  Chapter 2: Dafodil

  Chapter 3: Civilian Hunter

  Chapter 4: Crash and Fall

  Chapter 5: Traveler in a Strange Land

  Chapter 6: Family Man

  Chapter 7: Boom

  Chapter 8: Beach House

  Chapter 9: End of the Road

  Part 2: The Slow War with Death

  Chapter 10: Death Pellets

  Chapter 11: The Unwanted Visitor

  Chapter 12: Old Man Walking

  Chapter 13: The Choice of Bingo

  Chapter 14: Black Jack or Die

  Chapter 15: Borrowed Time

  Chapter 16: The Slowest Road Trip Ever

  Chapter 17: Destination

  Chapter 18: Beginning of the Road

  Author’s Note

  Ebook Version

  About the Author

  Other Books

  Contact and Questions

  Bonus: Figments of the Imagination (Prologue)

  Bonus: Figments of the Imagination (Chapter 1)

  Part One

  “The Fast Journey of Life”

  Chapter 1

  “Into the Game”

  Norman Jenson was just shy of nineteen the first time he looked death in the eyes. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stare at it for long. Gave it more of a fleeting glance. If he had blinked, he might’ve missed it. Nevertheless, the connection gave him the chills.

  It happened not long after he’d gone through the forest. Much like the journey Little Red Riding Hood had taken on her way to Grandma’s house, he was trekking down a narrow path through a dense wood, barreling down hard on an enemy that he didn’t know he was about to face—well, a different kind of enemy than the one he knew he was facing—when reality nearly struck him between the eyes. But that reality wasn’t clear to him here. It was obvious only according to what the crazy guy at the front of the pack was yelling over his shoulder:

  “This is it, boys! Welcome to hell!”

  The platoon section leader was not exactly the motivating type, Norman thought. The guy probably thought he was. But he had picked the wrong set of words if inspiration was his goal. The excitement and adventure Norman was looking for didn’t culminate in such a joyless expression. He had rather the guy shouted something like Welcome to fun! or It’s time for a gun party! Really, anything with celebration in mind. After all, they were about to kick the tar out of the German Army, or part of it at any rate. A more appropriate battle cry would’ve been appreciated. But he didn’t get that. War was basically unkind.

  But he knew that going into battle. It wasn’t as if he had a choice to debate it. Uncle Sam had essentially told him to take the war pill and like it.

  After spending a few weeks in September going through basic training, he was sent out to France to join the Thirty-third Division to fight against the German Army. He joined the battle just east of the Argonne Forest as part of its infantry division. By mid-October, his company had arrived. And now he was feeling the stress butterflies moving from his head to his gut. Every step he took along that forested path was a step he feared would lead to vomiting on his pants. The Army had told him prior to deployment that anything that happened in the field would remain that way until the war was over. That included any superficial injury, any decay of hygiene, and most certainly any change in the cleanliness of one’s pants. They’d given the warning to liberate the soldiers into fighting hard rather than to demand sustaining the immaculate condition of their uniforms, which was more important during basic training days. Nonetheless, Norman didn’t want to be that guy who was known companywide for fighting the German Army with vomit on his pants. It suggested too much a dichotomy of courage. So, he held his stomach as he ran.

  Norman’s company was moving too fast, but he fought to keep up with it nonetheless. Basic training had taught him the maneuvers to stay alive, but not those required to keep up with the athletic warriors in the lead. They wasted no time bounding over boulders and brooks, down through craters and up over hills, around concrete walls and past tangles of barbed wire, to reach the front line where the rest of the First Army was gathered. They were promised a brutal fight. They were promised blood. And Norman was looking forward to it. Sort of.

  Growing up in the Northeast, he had his share of forest adventures, but none that came bundled with adrenaline. Sure, he had to fight off the occasional snake. They’d get pretty nasty in the creeks near his childhood home. But he was never really in danger of getting bitten by one. He had always just assumed he could outwit the poisonous ones. Death was just an idea. Not really applicable to him.

  So, when as a fourteen-year-old he’d first heard about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the archduke of Austria, and his wife, Sophie, he had realized that death was something that could come around the corner. But more importantly, as the world had begun to hedge its infantry and start its march against the nation responsible for declaring the war, he had realized that with death also came a sense of vengeance, and loyalty. That was when he had realized that fighting was more exciting than dodging snakes down at the creek.

  It had taken almost three years for the United States to enter what was now called the Great War and another year and a half for Norman to enlist. His friends had been urging him to go since his eighteenth birthday, in spite of his great reluctance to engage in intense gunfire and almost certain death, but when he had brought up the question to his parents if this was a good idea, they had kept telling him he was too young, and every effort he had made to cave in to peer pressure and sign his name on the line anyway, his father was standing at the front door with a whip in hand to stop him. It wasn’t until two months before his nineteenth birthday that the country had drafted him into war, and his parents, due to national obligation, had finally given up on trying to keep him home. His father, who was not yet forty, had decided he would go, too, just so he didn’t look like a coward to his own son.

  His father ended up earning a medal of honor for his service, ironically. Norman, not so much. But he tried.

  Now Norman was on a northeastward march through the Argonne Forest, struggling to keep up with the front of the platoon section. The soldiers were in a hurry to reach the front line. Rumor had it that the companies before them were getting slaughtered. Those rumors fueled his immediate regret for ever coming here, whether by choice or by requirement.

  “Keep it moving, you maggots,” said the sergeant at the front of the line. He hopped over a log and ducked a fallen tree along the jagged path that cut through a bloodstained forest. “Death waits for no man!”

  “You don’t have to keep calling us maggots, sir,” said the combatant behind him. “We’re right here.”

  “Right you are, you slug,” yelled the sergeant. “Keep it moving anyway!”

  Sometimes the insults sp
urred the soldiers on, sometimes not. The sergeant was known platoon-wide as the pushover who tried to motivate through name-calling. He was fairly new to the Army himself. In fact, much of the company was made of soldiers who were running businesses or attending college less than two months earlier. No one really knew what they were doing. But they were clueless together!

  Norman wasn’t the slowest in the pack, but he was pretty far back compared to the sergeant and the five leads, who were all so loud that he could hear them arguing. The guys closest to his position were quieter. For them, they were disengaged from the conversation completely. They were too busy listening to the trees, waiting for that moment when the enemy might spring up out of nowhere and come descending on their heads.

  “Never know which krauts be hiding in them branches,” said a boy close to him. “Gotta keep an eye open.”

  “Amen,” said another. “Can’t wait to go knocking them out of them trees like they be squirrels or sum’such.”

  Norman regretted joining the Army. It was in times of listening to the guys around him saying insane things that he wished he had defied orders and stayed home. It also hadn’t helped that he had yet to see active battle. He’d heard about it plenty, of course, but this was the first time he would see it up close. And he had no idea what he was getting into. The news he had heard prior to deployment kept saying that this was so far the bloodiest war in the history of the world. He didn’t love that he was a part of that.

  As he pressed on, he could hear the war closing in, as if the treetops had contained the greatest acoustics in the world.

  “How much farther?” asked another boy, who was probably eighteen. “I want to see heads explode.”

  “The head you’ll see explode is your own if you ain’t quieter,” said yet another.

  Everyone in the company had talked like a badass that day. But none were feeling particularly brave. The louder the distant gunshots had gotten, the heavier that Norman’s heart pounded, and, he was certain, the louder he could hear the boys in his squad’s hearts pounding. It was beginning to sound like a tribal drum march—the theme song to their march.

  When the bloody trees parted, Norman could finally see the battle up close. A mass that appeared to be in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps the entire First Army, was climbing in and out of the concentric rows of bunkers. Each soldier was trying to edge closer to the enemy, forcing it back. But the motions were so slow it seemed as if no one was moving forward at all.

  “Down here, you maggots,” the sergeant yelled, when Norman and the backend of the platoon had finally cleared the Argonne Forest.

  Norman saw the sergeant waving them all in, as if he was a schoolmarm calling them in from recess to start their next lesson.

  The rest of the company climbed down into the bunker with him, where medics were racing around tending to the wounded, and rats were racing around the medics trying to get in a nibble for lunch, and the living were loading up their rounds for the next volley of firepower. The smells that wafted up from the guts of the trenches—too awful to synthesize, but they all combined to replicate an old sewer—caused Norman to vomit in his mouth. He swallowed it before he could spill it on his pants or add to the mixture of nauseating horror.

  “You, soldier,” he heard the sergeant say.

  He noticed the sergeant waving him in. Norman squeezed past a group of Frenchmen who were sharing a slice of bread, and nearly tripped over another soldier who was on his knees urinating against the trench wall. He kept telling himself not to vomit on his pants as he pushed closer to the sergeant.

  When he reached the rest of his company, the sergeant passed them each a single playing card. Sixteen men were holding cards when he was finished.

  “The game is Black Jack,” he said. “You’ll each take a card from the pile. Winners fight last. Losers fight first. Understood?”

  Norman didn’t. He didn’t know the game.

  “Yes, sir!” the rest of his company shouted.

  Each man reached into the card pile that the sergeant had scattered around his feet. Norman didn’t quite get it, but he reached into the pile just the same. Then he held his two cards to his chest.

  “You can look at your cards,” a fellow soldier whispered to him.

  Norman did as he was told. There was a five on one and a seven on the other. He saw red hearts on the five and red diamonds on the seven. He wasn’t sure if the symbols meant anything.

  “Anyone want to hit?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes, sir!” said a small group of men.

  The sergeant picked up the entire pile and passed cards out to those who wanted one. Norman hadn’t been part of the formal request, but he decided he would take one anyway, just for the sake of solidarity. He had picked up a ten of clubs, which he remembered from some repressed memory was the proper name for the three-leaf clover.

  “Anyone else?”

  No one else asked for another.

  “All right! Show ‘em!”

  The men showed their cards.

  “Black Jacks, you may hang out with me! Twenties through seventeens, you go fourth round! Sixteens through thirteens, you are courageous pansies, and can go third! Twelves and under, you are a disgrace! You go second, just long enough to think about how spineless you are! Busts, you go now, since you’re so gung ho about overshooting your limits!”

  Norman wasn’t sure what he had. When he showed his neighbor his cards, the soldier patted him on the back.

  “You’re a bust,” he said. “Good luck up there. Maybe play a better hand if you survive.”

  Norman’s heart sank. He was actually very bad at card games. It was the reason he stopped playing Crazy Eights as a child. Didn’t like the idea of luck determining his success. He preferred skill.

  “Thanks,” he said.