A short excerpt from Behind the Eyes — hardback on Amazon, December 2026. Jacksonville now, Abu Ghraib then — and her in the dark between the mortars.
By E. Michael Davis II
He had the Talha files open and the names still blank. He was thinking about Abu Ghraib, and about her, when the sound hit. DOOM. A dumpster lid dropped in the parking lot below, hollow and low on the empty, stinking box. The smell of rot and warm asphalt came up through the cracked window. A plastic bag skittered across the lot and caught on the chain-link, and hung there, breathing.
FOOM. Far off. Then another. Abu Ghraib, early 2006, and the low launch of the mortars, one after the other, the sound that always meant they were already on the way. He was walking across the LZ next to the DFAC, a hundred and ten yards from cover, in the kit they all wore outdoors that year because of the mortars and the snipers – helmet, ballistic glasses, the vest heavy on his shoulders – and the bat belt with its two thigh rigs, the M9 in its Safariland holster riding one leg beside the expandable baton, the IFAK and the radio and the glove pouch and the cuffs riding the other. He ran, and all of it ran with him, slapping and dragging, across the dusty concrete and the packed ground with an inch of moon dust on it, the first impacts already walking in. The QRF was running for their trucks. One round landed in the middle of them. CRUMP. The trucks and the men disappeared in a geyser of dust. The air moved the way it did – ripples of shrapnel, the shockwave, the world briefly out of true – as he dove into the bunker. Moon dust coated his teeth. The smell of burned propellant and hot dirt filled the low space.
He rolled over onto his butt and sat up, ready to key his mic to call Shadow Main. Then the perfume reached him, and he forgot the mic. Not the cheap, sweet stuff some clerk had worn down here for a rendezvous between shifts. Hers. Warm and clean, a little green underneath, the scent that lived in the hollow of her throat and in the collar of every shirt she ever stole from him – here, in a concrete hole that stank of propellant and moon dust and other men’s fear. He breathed it in, and the bunker went quiet around it. Then her hand. Flat on his forearm, two fingers against the inside of the wrist, the way she always did it. Warm. Still. The name she used for him already in the touch. He did not turn his head. He knew that if he turned he would see her eyes in the dark – blue, the way they were most days, with the green waiting under it – and he knew just as surely that if he turned there would be nothing there but dust. So he kept still and let her be there. The mortars thinned. The dust settled. He could feel the chair again, the edge of the desk, the fact that his hands were still his. She kept the palm there until his breathing matched hers, then moved it to his shoulder and left it there. No questions.
He opened his eyes. The office was empty. The laptop was still on. The dumpster was still and still stinking somewhere out there. A car door closed in the lot. He was not running. But the perfume was still there – faint, under the rot and the warm asphalt, in an office she had never set foot in. He sat very still and breathed it until it was gone, and he could not have said, then or ever, whether he had carried it up out of that bunker with him or whether it had been waiting for him here. The weight on his forearm was lighter than her hand had been, and she was not in the room. He wondered how she had calmed him when she was no longer there. The bag was still stuck to the fence.
More at Behind the Eyes. Hardback on Amazon, December 2026.
