Dragon Sword by Mark London Williams

child I
can’t shake.
    I only glimpsed them a little while
ago in a wrinkled photograph that A.J. had, and I only saw that for a moment in the wind, under the flickering glow of
a lighter held by Charlie.
    “ Right here’s where I baptized Dan,
and right over there’s where he confessed.” Facts and figures have
been spilling out of A.J. ever since we left the car. He spoke in
between huffs and puffs and grunts, as we tried to stay out of the
way of patrol cars heading out to investigate the wreckage on the
road, and scrambled down the cliffs to the beach.
    If I thought I was cold before, I
was even colder now, by the ocean at night.
    Apparently A.J. knows all these
back routes because he used to work here, on this army base, the
Presidio — but not as a preacher, as a cook.
    “ Preachin’s what I did on the
side,” he explained. “Makin’ scrambled eggs and potatoes and
chipped beef with gravy was what I did in the main. But the
preachin’s what got me known. I would just come down to the beach
and start talkin’ about visions I had, about how the world was
gonna be changed forever in our time, and not necessarily in good
ways. About how those who knew what was happening had to stick
together.”
    It was funny, but in a way A.J.
sounded like Mr. Howe. Howe is always saying there’s only a handful
of people who really know what’s going on. But he would never use a
phrase like “stick together.” Howe’s the kind of guy who says you
have to use secrets to fight secrets.
    But whatever it was that A.J. was
saying, apparently he’d get people down here on the beach to listen
“crack of dawn on Sunday mornings.” And as he talked more about
these visions he was having, he’d eventually get people coming up
afterward or drawing him aside and telling him things.
    “ Unburdening themselves” is how
A.J. described it as we stumbled through some bushes on the way
toward the shore. “Because the unspoken things in this world are
becoming more and more terrible.”
    So army guys who were getting
pictures from Europe of places called “death camps,” with “gas
chambers” in them, would come to A.J. to tell him about what they
were seeing, things they couldn’t put in the newspapers here.
“Things like this,” A.J. said as he held the picture out. It was a
fuzzy black-and-white print, showing a mother in a heavy overcoat
clutching a child. She’s turned away from a German soldier who
points a gun at her back. He’s about to kill the woman and child.
Maybe with the same shot.
    Even in the dark, under a
sputtering lighter, the image was burned into my brain. What was
that soldier thinking? He had a mother. He might even have been a
father.
    What kind of orders could possibly
force someone to do a thing like that?
    “ German government got machine-gun
squads in eastern Europe, goin’ around, takin’ Jews, Gypsies,
whoever they don’t like, linin’ ’em up and killin’ ’em all. They
let the bodies fall in ditches. Then they force other people to
help bury the bodies before they kill those people,
too.”
    The lighter was blown out by the
wind. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas anymore,” Charlie
said.
    A.J. shook his head. “The common
people ain’t safe after this war. Both sides are trying to build
rockets, and bombs that blow up entire cities all at once. They’re
workin’ on breakin’ atoms apart, too.”
    He meant nuclear weapons. It was
weird to think about a time when they weren’t around. Them or the
laser and space weapons that would come later.
    I mean, you just grow up assuming
there’s a chance the world could be blown up one day. You don’t
think about it; it’s just there. I wonder what it was like to be a
kid before they could blow everything up — did everyone feel
safer?
    “ That’s not all. They’re workin’ on
time travel, too. Both sides.”
    “ That’s not possible,” Charlie
said, sitting down in the sand. “Now you’re the one telling