Jimmy

A horseman is much closer than his companions’ .His helmet has somehow dislodged. A white face is streaked with blood . Blood streams down the face. A white tunic is emblazoned with a Red Cross. Eyes blaze with a crazed desperation. It charges at the APC, lance suspended between the forward facing ears of the horse, its eyes equally ablaze with the same mad desperate fury.

Muzzle flashes light the surrounding dessert, steel jacketed ball ammunition kicks up dust all around the horseman .A cry from lips encompassed by a short black beard .The smell of horse flesh mixed with that of the fragrant dessert air. There is a wild whinny and a flash of hoofs tearing at his face, a rattle of accouterments as the stead races through the vehicle ,thunder and shouting echoing all around, horsemen twisting and weaving throughout the boulder-strewn dessert.

The bedlam subsides to be replaced by a quite broken only by a few weak moans, then nothing but the sigh of the cool breeze alleviating the days heat.

In the headquarters building at Tiberius a man looks through a west-facing window. In the night thunder rumbles faintly accompanied by streaks of lightening .The burn on his leg tingles, the pain increasing and then subsiding with the rise and the fall of the thunder.

"Oh well" he sighs "in a day or two I will feel no pain." A light rain begins to pitter against the partially opened window. He closes it as he, at the same time, untangles the blind wrapping itself upon the inside sash. There is a sudden burst of thunder that cracks with such a force as to literally rattle the windowpanes causing him to jump backwards , a startled expression upon his face.

"What the hell " he mutters "who was that . You can almost smell the sulfur." he adds as an afterthought.