Free The Badger's Revenge by Larry D. Sweazy

ever take.
    The war never left him—or any man who saw battle, for that matter. Most days he could push away the ghostly battle screams, disassociate himself with suitable tasks of some kind to make the memory vanish.
    But today was not most days.
    The only comfort that came to his mind now was the pure and true fact that he had lived to see another day—then, and hopefully now.
    Survival of the battle in Georgia came mostly at luck’s hand. Most men didn’t have such good fortune—his mother prayed for him, he knew that, but he couldn’t credit her holy actions as the cause of his survival.
    Antietam was a bloody day, the casualties so deep it was said that nearly eighty percent of the Texas Brigade had been killed on that single day. It was a larger loss than any other brigade suffered in the whole war, on either side, from beginning to end. And Josiah had been there in the thick of it. He still bore his own scars from the battle, though he tried to ignore them. Now it was impossible not to consider his own mortality, just like he had in the last moment of retreat to the West Woods at the end of the battle, broken, bleeding, running for his life, stumbling over more dead men than he had ever seen in his life, or hoped to ever see again.
    There were streams of blood running in every direction, moans and groans filling the air.
    If the Grim Reaper was actually working the field, then he must have been sweating at the brow—working hard carting off the dead to whatever realm the wraith came from in the first place.
    The surgery tents were in full bloom, the surrounding ground red and muddy with blood, crates overflowing with amputated legs and arms. Screams mixed in the air, too, and as night fell, the cries of pain did not stop. The owls remained silent. Gone. Or watching, from atop the trees, the madness of men.
    Josiah had been certain it would be impossible to survive another day after that. But he had.
    The win at Antietam was a fragile but certain victory for the Union. In the days that followed, the blood that was left behind on the fields of Sharpsburg and Antietam gave Lincoln a window to fight back with his words and ideas. He released an early version of the Emancipation Proclamation , further isolating the rest of the world, particularly England and France, against the Confederacy— at least to the point of ceasing to offer any financial aid to the cause.
    It was a blow from which the South would never fully recover.
    There had been no way for Josiah to know, of course, that he was fighting a losing battle on that bloody day—just as there was no way now to know the outcome of his current, dire circumstance in an unknown barn in Comanche, Texas, nearly twenty years later.
    This day, and Antietam, all felt familiar. Too familiar, and that was the troubling part. Coupled with his own physical weakness, he felt like he had given every ounce of his being to win a futile war, and it still was not enough.
    Josiah held his breath, tried not to move, steadied the barrel of the Spencer the best he could.
    A mouse ran over his right hand, flittering across his skin in fear, fleeing as quickly as it could.
    The rodent didn’t startle him. He was aware of its presence, as well as the village of them that lived in the hay mound, so he was not surprised when they decided to run. He just hoped they would go one at a time, scurry from the light deeper into the hay instead of outward, drawing attention to his position.
    He remained still, unfazed, as the light inside the barn grew brighter.
    The smell of coal oil filled interior, the threat of fire a concern to animal and man alike, but more so to Josiah. He had seen the aftermath of a fire in a barn, seen the charred human bones of someone left behind, and now that fate could very well be his.
    Odd thing was, he was certain he heard the horses outside fade into the distance. They had not stopped scouting, searching for him, so he was a little