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“Guten Morgen, friends! What is it that you three have there?” With a broad smile, Reinhardt ambled into the training room and spotted McCree, Lúcio, and Lena are hunched over an opened crate.
“Hiya Reinhardt!” Lena zipped over with a cheeky grin as she hung onto Reinhardt’s arm. “USA’s birthday is just around the corner, so Jesse’s made preparations!”
“Yeah, we’re gonna have an awesome party! I’ve never been to an American July 4 party before, so I’m pumped! There’s just so much stuff in here!” Lúcio zoomed around Reinhardt on his skates a few times before bouncing back to the crate.
“This itty bitty crate of firecrackers ain’t got nuthin’ on what my Ma used to let us blow up.” McCree huffed and drawled as he puffed a cloud of smoke from his cigar.
Unfortunately, Lúcio accidentally shoved McCree as he skated past and the man’s cigar fell out of his hand and into the crate.
A fuse lit with a high-pitched hiss.
“Bloody hell—”
“Shit—”
“Uh oh—”
With a deafening barrage of thunderous noise, the crate exploded into a multitude of blindingly brilliant colors—
—and then he was twenty-six and a Hauptmann of the Deutsches Heer once more, his jammed rifle digging into his side as he tried his hardest to stem the blood flowing out of the gaping hole in the chest of one of his men that hardly looked older than a boy. His unit’s medic was on the ground several meters away, the exposed bone of her collapsed skull stark against the wretched, blood-drenched sands of Al Kharijah. A deafening shatter signaled a RPG that blasted the lip of the deep ditch that he had dragged the remnants of his unit into, sending chunks of sandstone bouncing off his dented helmet and raising up a cloud of thick dust that choked his lungs. Another explosion to his far left sent another one of his men flying back, his rifle yanked out his hands from the sheer force, before he skidded to a stop with a sickening crunch against the base of a destroyed wall. The boy underneath him was crying out in rattling German, begging to go home to his mother as blood poured out his mouth and stained his crooked teeth.
The ruined remains of his left eye – a gift from a surprise machete attack – burned like hellfire through the numb detachment of the raging battle.
Another explosion shook the ground.
Another scream cut off into a death gurgle.
His unit was dying underneath the suppressive bombardment. The last he’d radioed in, command had relayed that reinforcements were still a handful of kilometers away. How had the insurgents obtained American tanks and weapons? The Americans were supposed to be fighting on the northern front in Bahariya!
“ Zurückweichen! Zurückweichen! WIR BRAUCHEN SICH UNTERSTELLEN!“ The words tasted like ash in Reinhardt’s mouth as he shouted to be heard over the roar of artillery fire and the several tanks rumbling dangerously closer to their position. With a grunt, he dragged the boy with him over to where the last four of his unit were taking blind potshots at any part of the enemy they could see while trying to keep from being headshotted by an unknown number of snipers hiding in the buildings. A few sniper shots pinged against the corner of the bullet-riddled and charred wall that Reinhardt took cover behind.
Fighter planes jetted overhead – identifiable as their allies, the South African military – and the shriek of gunfire and missiles shook the ground once more as the buildings around Reinhardt’s unit exploded into flames. Screams from the insurgents as sniper nests were destroyed and burning tanks flipped over was like heavenly music to his ears. The fighter planes circled back and bombed the area again before heading back in the direction they had come from.
Then, there was nothing but blessed silence as fire licked at the scorched debris of melted metal and smoking sandstone buildings. The back of Reinhardt’s helmet thunked against the wall as he let out a shaky breath, the tight band of utter terror around his lungs loosening just enough, that was echoed by the few men and women of his unit that still lived.
The boy he had dragged with him was dead, his glassy eyes fixed in terror up at the red-tinted skies above. Reinhardt reached over and closed the eyes, feeling the weight of the world pressing down even heavier on his shoulders. “ Es tut mir Leid, Gefreiter.”
A solitary Neynava truck bearing the desert camo of the South African National Defense Force rumbled in their direction from within the hazy distance.
“—NHARDT! REINHARDT! BREATHE!” Reinhardt’s head snapped to the side as a bare-knuckled fist drove into his cheek hard enough to make his jaw ache and he sucked in a breath of clean air. The old man blinked in confusion as the battlefield of Al Kharijah faded away just enough to reveal Angela’s extremely worried face. Lúcio and Lena were behind the doctor, wide-eyed in guilty horror. McCree was frantically throwing buckets of water over the remaining fireworks that hadn’t gone off.
“Was ist passiert? Wieso hast du mich geschlagen?”
“Reinhardt… do you know where you are?” Angela set her hand on Reinhardt’s arm and squeezed.
“Ägypten... nein. Ach, Gibraltar.” Reinhardt swallowed thickly. His blind eye burned with a phantom pain that had never quite left.
“Yes, you are in Gibraltar. The fireworks had been accidentally set off. You stopped breathing for ten minutes.” Angela’s hand squeezed his arm again before moving up to his shoulder to gently but firmly guide him away from the crate of explosives. “Come, I will make you some hot tea.”
“Ah. Danke schön.” With his face eerily devoid of his usual easygoing smile, he said nothing at all to the three youngsters as Reinhardt turned and allowed Angela to shepherd him out of the training room, his heavy footsteps haltingly unsteady and almost mechanical.
From the corner of his eye and no matter how many times he blinked, Reinhardt could pick out ghostly smatterings of blood-soaked sand piling up along the walls.