Chapter 4
Muffled shouting woke Ronnie up.
His dreams had been restless, a maelstrom of images dark and bloody that left his throat burning and his back a snarl of knots. In them, he was trapped beneath the truck instead of getting thrown, screaming until he was hoarse as he tried to yank his legs free. Kenny, the kid from West Virginia who got transferred into his unit the week before, knelt at his side, trying to talk him into chewing his way free.
“Like the wild animals do,” he kept saying, echoing the stories about hunting he’d wasted hours regaling.
In the dream, Ronnie was almost convinced to do it, anything to stop the crushing weight, but then another bomb had gone off and Kenny disappeared, leaving him alone again.
For a split second after waking, he wasn’t so sure the shouti
