In the Valley by Jason Lambright Page A

of a woman? The female of the species was still terra incognita for Paul and would always be so.
    Their trysts, given different circumstances, might have led to something else, but Paul was running out of time. Maybe the brief, sweet time they enjoyed together was a function of his limited time—a relationship with a declared expiration date did hold its attractions for some people after all.
    The couple went to parties, shopped, and made love on the chill, rainy days. It was good but too short by far. All too soon his time of freedom was over.
    He sat on his bed and thought of what a cliché the whole situation was. What a timeworn theme: the space-travelling soldier with a day left of leave.
    He had to report for his flight to Cuba tomorrow. Time had run out. Yesterday, he had taken his leave of Amy; she had cried. It felt horrible then; it felt horrible now. But like someone shoveling dirt over your grave, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
    “Paul?” came his mother’s voice. “Paul, are you in your room?” she asked. He answered her, and she came up the steps. Paul had been trying to figure out what to bring with him on his trip to the eternal stars. Stuff was scattered around his room. The disarray annoyed him—these days, he liked everything put in its place, tidy and neat. He even lined his shoes up under his bed, even though he mocked himself for doing so. His door was open, so his mother walked in.
    “Paul, I have something for you, for your trip.” Her voice cracked over the word “trip.” Paul looked at what she was carrying and heard the emotion in her voice. It was his quilt, the one he had had on his bed for years—if something like the quilt could rightfully be called “his”; better said that the quilt had been borrowed over long generations.
    Oh, Mother, he thought. His family had never been big for emotional displays. But Paul knew how much love was in that blanket. He had just figuredout what he would surely take. The rest of the stuff was junk, except for the scarf Amy had given him and a switchblade his father had bought. He stood, hugged his mother, and took the quilt.
    It was time to turn the page.

P aul not only thought—he knew that he needed to turn a new page in the book of his life. Hopefully, the new page wouldn’t be the catastrophic script he could see coming from the insanity he was currently engaged in. Teaching these guys on Juneau 3 about how to find bombs before they found you was starting to fray his nerves a bit, and they were already plenty frayed.
    Paul had been on Juneau 3 for about two months, and the journey just kept getting crazier by the minute. The colonel, his commander, had turned out to be a guy with a fertile imagination and boundless courage. He was also in possession of a seemingly limitless depth of knowledge on how to conduct counterinsurgencies “from the bottom up,” as he liked to say.
    Today’s bright idea was going into a known hostile village to look for bombs. The village was called Nagamas, and he was patrolling the streets with the Juneau Army because intel had heard there was a bomb threat there. Rumor had it the provincial police had been blown up in Nagamas twice the week before. The effect of the rumor was that Second Company, Juneau Army, was patrolling the village’s mean streets a week later. They were looking for bombs on foot.
    The colonel had been specific: where the Second Company went, so went Paul and his not-so-trusty (as of yet) sidekick, Z-man. It wasn’t high enoughprofile of a mission for the colonel to be there in person, so Mike’s icon was tagging along on the trip.
    Mighty Mike himself was on a small firebase in an area they called “the Belt,” about twenty-five klicks north. He had his own party he was attending to: last night one of his First Company soldiers had rolled a ground-car, and Mike was currently engaged in cleaning up the mess—while keeping an eye on Paul’s mission for the colonel.
    Mike was