Civil Disturbance

Someone was pulling me across the asphalt. I blinked away the darkness, staring at the hands locked around my camo-clad arms.

“Drop your rifles,” Davis had shouted. “They’ll spare us.”

Show mercy to us? Us, who had only stopped killing protesters when the bullets ran out?

Now I looked up into Davis’s eyes. The blood from his severed neck stained the fence post.

Then my captors jerked me upright. One of the skinny civilians our commanders had laughed at drew a machete.

“Why?” I asked. “We were only following orders.”

He placed the blade against my throat. “So are we.”