Free Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery

their sheets, danced down the middle of the tunnel in a line, arms locked, legs kicking in unison while the invalids clapped and cheered. The staff powerless against them. They ended by the sewer outlet at the riverbank, their feet in the water, daring each other. Come on, drink it. What do you have to lose? One of them did, and died four days later.
    The highway above boomed with trucks, one after the other in a steady beat. A diesel caravan moving north, toward the front, drawing a wake of shouting and engine trouble. The prostitutes all waving good-bye. Come back soon. They knew they would never see those boys again. Sergeant Foote almost missed the old train station, which was hunched in a hollow on the side of the road, bristling with wires, antennae. Soldiers bustling in and out, hollering orders. As if the news had not reached them about the Big One coming in—the war was calamity enough and their eyes were fixated on its hot edge, the place where people burned alive, where the world was always ending, over and over again. An apocalypse at the tip of a shell, a bayonet, a turning bullet. There were people leaving the world at the very moment Sergeant Foote stepped into the station, hundreds of souls departing as her boot swung through the air, tapped against the tile. The air swarming with the dead, and the war still on, torching gardens, pushing over buildings. Pointing its smoking finger at the unlucky few who would go next. You. You. And now you.
    The inside of the depot was dust and dingy wood. Marks all over the ceiling, long scratches in the beams. It had been a train station, then empty, then a boat shop, then empty again. It seemed as though the screeches of the trains against the rails, the jokes of the boat jockeys behind the counter, still moved through the thick air among the rafters. But the field commander could not hear them, sitting in the dark space behind a wooden desk too large for him, surrounded by stacks of paper, the overwhelming records of death, to the south, to the north. The price of the campaign, of decisions he was making. He did not look at them for long. The tap of Sergeant Foote’s boot startled him. He saluted from his seat, beckoned with a gloved hand for her to approach.
    “Counterintelligence,” the field commander said. Pronounced it with such forceful precision that he broke the word in two. “Counter,” he said, “intelligence. Is the nature of your assignment. Though not intelligence as you understand the phrase. Perhaps espionage would be better. In the sense that violence is not precluded from your options.”
    The field commander was a tiny man wearing very large circular glasses with such a heavy tint that Sergeant Foote wondered if he was blind. She was ten inches taller than he would be standing, and he was sitting down. She looked at the woodwork. The closed metal shutters over the windows, rattling with every passing truck. The beams. Anything but so far down at him.
    “I understand,” she said.
    “These are your targets.” He pushed a stack of twelve photographs toward her. They weighed too much, were printed on the wrong paper. Each of them shots of crowds. A mob on Union Street in Harrisburg. A demonstration near the capitol. The market near the river. Each one pocked with two red circles around out-of-focus faces. Desperate to catch up with their subjects. Heights. Stance. The curve of an eyebrow. They were Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite, but in the photographs, they were unrecognizable. Disappearing.
    “This is the best you have?” she said.
    “Afraid so.”
    For a moment the field commander froze, eyes squeezed shut, shuddering. As if succumbing to a shock moving through his body. It took too long to pass. Then he moved three piles of papers to the floor, the last records of several hundred dead men. Brought out a tattered map, spread it across the desk. It was of central Pennsylvania, though that was not obvious. The ink was fading in places, smudged