Usher's Passing

by Robert McCammon

And then she found her voice, and though she couldn’t hear herself over the noise, she screamed, “Stop it you bastard stop it you murderer stop it!” The artillery pieces were razing the mountainside. She saw leaping tongues of fire where the shells hit. Standing up, she groped through the descending pall of smoke, bumping into people, tripping over dazed bodies. A shape approached through the haze, and only when she was right in front of him did she realize it was Erik. “Why?” she screamed. “Why?” He stopped, blinked at her. His smile was hanging lopsided from his mouth. “Because,” he said, and it was then that Nora realized the cannonfire had ended, “I can.” Then he brushed past her, like a sleepwalker, into the thickening whorls and eddies of smoke. She stood watching the fires burn on Briartop Mountain, and she began to sob. At her feet, tiny American flags blew across the ground in the scorched turbulence that the howitzers had created.