Wild, Tethered, Bound Read Online Free

destruction, his foot came to rest beside a cast-iron cook pot. It took him a few moments to make sense of what he was seeing. The cave—where he had found the shepherd and his daughters—was a pile of rubble. And protruding from the rocks was a tiny foot with a dried trickle of blood down the ankle.
    God . They were under the rubble!
    Nick dropped his rifle. With gloved hands, he shoveled pebbles aside and hurled stones into the forest. Past and present horrors twisted together and under Nick’s hands and the stones became the warped steel of a wrecked. The struggle was the same. The result was the same. Three broken bodies emerged.
    From the way they were laying together, Nick knew the little girls had huddled with one another for protection from the shelling, just as he had seen them the first time. It had not saved them. He had not saved them. Again, he had not saved them.
    How many air strikes had he called in that ended up like this one? How many mistakes had he made in his life that ended up with people dead?
    Lifting the littlest corpse into his arms, he saw she was clutching something. Gently, he opened her hand and found a half-eaten candy still in its wrapper, a little piece of sweetness she had not lived long enough to finish. And a sound of grief came out of him—something between a retch and a sob.
    That’s when pain hit him between the shoulder blades, a searing sensation like being cleaved with an ax. He was out in the open, so he shouldn’t have been surprised to be shot, but he’d never heard the bullet coming. Still, it threw him to the ground. Reeling from the pain, Nick crawled a ways before he was hit again. He fell face-first into the dirt, the taste of scorched pine needles in his mouth along with the bile.
    Whatever hit him was tearing him apart. It ripped through his torso, exploding behind his skull. He was sure he’d lost his right arm because, in the fog of the pain, he saw it move away from his body. He shrieked as his left leg came apart with a hideous shredding sound.
    Then Nick lost consciousness altogether.
     
    Soldiers near death sometimes claimed to see Jesus. Some saw a bright white light. Nick wondered what kind of narcissist he was that he saw himself . It was like some out-of-body experience, looking down where his corpse lay on the forest floor. But then he saw his own face looking back at him.
    It was his face, wasn’t it? Only with as fierce a stare as a lion. Nick turned his head and saw a third self sitting naked beneath a destroyed walnut tree, arms stubbornly folded. It was like he’d been split in three. Three heads. Three bodies.
    What the fucking hell?
    Nick felt himself for blood and bullet wounds, but found none. It was the dissonant sounds of the dying forest amplified through six ears that hurt him. His limbs were stiff and unwieldy. He tried to lift his right arm, but the Nick under the destroyed walnut tree was the one whose arm moved. Now, with six arms to move, it took a moment for him to get the correct limbs under control.
    Still convinced he was dead, the uniformed Nick pulled himself to his feet so as to better appreciate whatever hell he’d been condemned to. He was shocked to find himself weak with thirst and hunger.
    So this was hell, then.
    He finished what little water remained in his canteen then noticed the walnut shells cracking beneath his boots. He doubted they were real. It had to be some kind of trick. Like Tantalus in Greek myth, would he reach for the nuts only to have them disappear? Experimentally, Nick gathered a few and popped them into his mouth, only to be rewarded with the rich taste of walnut.
    Dazed, Nick pocketed the rest of the nuts and started walking, somehow knowing that his other selves would follow. And they did.
    All three of him ended up where the little girls still lay dead. Was it his eternal punishment to endure seeing their tiny corpses through three sets of eyes? Was this his fate—to be split and broken into pieces