Black and Green (Part 5)

This is the second to last installment of the series. Thanks to those of you who've been following along!

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Green:
   Risen sat in the bottom of a wooden box roughly the size of a coffin stood on end. There was just enough room, if his knees were tucked against his chest, for him to sit. It was hard to breathe in that position. The twisting knife of pain in his side didn't help either.
   He could hear the patter of rain against the wooden walls. Chill water crept in along the floor to wet the seat of his pants. He shivered and pressed his bound hands tighter against his stomach. His heart stuttered in his chest when the lock on the door clattered. The door swung open. A woman stood there, her blonde hair close cut beneath her cap. She wore a gun.
   "Get up," she said.
   His legs were cramp, numb when he stretched them out in front of him.
   "You heard her, greenie," a man said, stepping up beside the woman. "On your feet."
   "I've got this, Beck," the woman said.
   Beck ignored her and reached for Risen's wrists. He jerked Risen forward and to his feet. Risen gasped, falling promptly to his knees. Beck cuffed him across the side of the head. Risen felt as though his skull had shattered. A blaze as bright as lightning lit up the inside of his head, gradually fading to hot red. For several minutes, he couldn't see or hear anything beyond that hot red behind his eyes and the roar of his pulse in his ears. Blood trickled down the back of his throat, bringing with it the taste of iron.
   By the time he got his head clear, he had been dropped into a metal chair in a gray tent with a single light shining into his eyes. He squinted, but that caused too much pain. He closed his left eye completely, which helped. He could just make out the colonel in front of him, freshly shaved and wearing a crisp, black uniform with silver piping along the shoulders and a plethora of small, colorful patches across the left breast. A new bandage had been spread across the side of his face. It was matched to his skin tone so it was almost invisible, but Risen knew where to look.
   "I'll talk to him alone," the colonel said with a brief flick of his fingers toward the others.
   A gust of chill rain against the back of Risen's neck told him that they'd gone. He lowered his eyes to his knees, away from the light. He didn't flinch when the colonel reached forward with a knife and cut the plastic cuffs from his wrists.
   "Have they fed you?" the colonel asked.
   "I got nothing to tell you," Risen said blandly. "I been lost out there for months. I don't know anything you could care to hear." He picked at the grim and blood crusted beneath his fingernails.
   The colonel moved over to the far side of the light and came back after a moment to hold out Risen's tags. Risen hadn't realized they'd been taken. When he stretched his hand out, the colonel drew the tags back.
   "Captain Zedekiah Risen," he said as he ran a thumb over the raised stamping. "I ran your number through the system. I didn't expect to get anything. Your methods of record keeping baffle even our most brilliant men. In any case, I did find something of interest."
   Risen let his hand fall back to his knee.
   "You're on the dead-list from a few months back."
   That news didn't surprise him. He knew they'd thought he was dead, or they wouldn't have left him behind, buried in a hasty cairn. What surprised him was that the black side had access to their dead-list. It made him wonder how far the colonel's intelligence extended.
   "I don't care much for deserters. No matter which side they come from."
   "I'm not a deserter," Risen said with as much heat of indignation as he could muster. Blood rose to color his wan cheeks beneath his unkempt beard.
   "Then what were you doing playing dead in the hollowland?"
   Risen pressed his lips together and tucked his hand beneath his jacket. "I don't got anything to tell you."
   "So you've said before," the colonel replied impatiently.
   "Are you going to kill me?"
   "Not just yet." The colonel clasped his hands behind his back. "I don't believe in wasting any resource. However small it may seem." He paused, then leaned forward. "I believe you know more than you pretend."


Black:
   When Risen had been taken back to what the soldiers had affectionately, if morbidly, named the graveyard, Colonel Marsh returned to his own tent and sat down behind his desk. Everything that had been taken from Risen's person was spread out on top of the desk. He set the tags down with everything else.
   "Lieutenant," he said.
   The other man looked up from his cot where he sat with a book in hand. "Sir?"
   "Tell me, what sort of man uses all but two of his bullets to save a man he doesn't know."
   "Sounds like a daft fool of a man to me," Lieutenant Carver muttered.
   "Perhaps." Marsh shook his head as Risen's words came back to him. You're just a man, aren't you? Could he really believe that though? Was he able to see past the color a man wore? If Risen could do such a thing, Marsh thought, then he was far more skilled than Marsh himself. He leaned back in his chair, feeling the tightness of the bandages across his chest and the dull, painless throb in his healing leg. He might have survived until his men arrived. Then again, he very well may not have.
   "Take him to the medical tent," Marsh said, startling Carver out of his reading once more, "and see he gets something to eat."
   Carver got to his feet at once and shrugged into his jacket. "Anything else?" he asked.
   "No. Let him stay in the med-tent tonight. I'll see to him in the morning."
   "Yes, sir," Carver said and went out into the rain.