Free The Third Target by Joel C Rosenberg Page A

appeared to be dying down. Then again, maybe that was wishful thinking.
    “The bag   —what’s in it?” the boy asked at long last, pointing the pistol at my backpack.
    Startled, scared, not sure how much to say, I stammered, “Oh, uh, you know, just some stuff. Notebooks, pens, whatever.”
    “Food?” he asked in a barely audible voice.
    “I’m sorry?” I replied, not sure I’d heard him right.
    “Do you have any food?” he repeated, only marginally louder now.
    “Oh yeah, well, a little   —not much   —just some apples, some PowerBars, that kind of thing.”
    “Give it to me,” he said.
    “Which?”
    “All of it   —whatever you have.”
    Was he serious? Didn’t he want my wallet, my cash, my credit cards? Then it dawned on me these would do this boy no good. There was no place for him to buy food no matter how much money he had. I took the pack off, set it on the ground, and unzipped the top.
    “I haven’t eaten anything but a few olives in the past three days,” he said as if reading my thoughts.
    I stopped what I was doing and looked up. What he said stunned me   —not his words but the way he said them. There was no emotion in his voice. None. He wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t a little kid whining or moaning or asking for sympathy. He was just stating a fact, and come to think of it, I don’t think he was even saying it to me. It was almost as if he were saying it to himself. I just happened to be standing there.
    As I looked more closely, I saw how his loose his trousers were,how they barely hung on his emaciated frame. His gloveless hands, gaunt and bony, looked cold and raw.
    Who was this boy? I wondered. What was his name? Where did he live? How did he spend his days? Who looked after him? Did anyone, or was he just roaming the streets at night, gunning down strangers in hopes of finding a little food? I wanted to ask him so many questions. I wanted to write a story about him, put him on the front page of the Times .
    But he waved the gun at me, hurrying me along. He was growing impatient, and I could sense how dangerous it would be to try to engage in conversation. Whoever he was, he had long since lost his innocence. He had seen too much, done too much, and he didn’t want the world to know. His world had contracted. His only aspiration was to survive the night, not tell his story, yet in that cold, dark street I wondered if even his will to live would last much longer.
    “Never mind,” he said with a sudden urgency. “Just give me the bag.”
    Again I looked up at him. I could see in his eyes that he meant it. There would be no arguing. No negotiating. And he wasn’t going to ask twice. I zipped up the backpack. It wasn’t simply filled with notebooks and pens and a bit of food. It also held a brand-new digital camera and telephoto lens and a digital audio recorder, all property of the Times . I cautiously took a few steps forward and held it out to the boy. For a moment I wondered if he would look inside and then shoot me for not telling him the full contents. But then I saw he was getting edgy, anxious to get moving, off this street, back into the shadows. I set down the pack and carefully backed up to where I had stood before.
    Glancing around in every direction to see if the coast was clear, he reached down, stripped the dead soldiers of their ammo, stuffed the magazines into one of the side pockets of the backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and ran back into the long, dark hallway.
    Before I knew it, I was standing all alone in the middle of the rubble-strewn street, just me and two new corpses. I knew I should run. To stand there was to be a target. But I just stared at the two soldiers and the sheer terror in their eyes.
    My brother liked to talk about heaven and hell. That’s what he’d been trained for. That’s what interested him. Until now, I’d honestly never thought much about one or the other. But at that moment, I realized I could not say these men