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Uncertain. Then no.
I felt a small gust, like someone had blown across my ear, and when I turned around there were two more ghosts behind us. One of them was nearly in Jamie’s lap, but I decided not to mention this to him. He was playing it cool—cooler than Benny, anyway—but I didn’t know how far he could be trusted not to lose it.
“Two more,” I said quietly.
Both boys swiveled their heads back and forth.
“You still don’t see them?”
“No. ” Benny was shaking, but he wasn’t running yet. “But the grass over in the field. It’s moving around like someone’s walking this way. And I think…” He put out his hand, and it passed through the shoulder of one of the newcomers, “I think I can feel them. I feel something. ”
“Remember the recorder,” I said, hoping it would get him to focus on something else, and figuring there was no need to tell him that the “something” he felt was the inside of a dead man.
“Oh, yeah. ” He held it up again, having allowed it to droop forgotten down to his knee. He didn’t know where to aim it anymore, so he waved it back and forth, then settled on his original subject.
One of the other soldiers seemed to want my attention. I kept feeling his chilly breath on the back of my neck. I turned on the bench and faced him. “Do you agree with this guy?” I waved a thumb back at the first soldier.
He nodded. So did his companion.
Both of them were wearing more elaborate uniforms than the first. I thought they must be officers; and when I looked more closely I was almost certain that one had fought for the Union and the other for the South. I was somehow reassured to see that the war colors had come to mean so little.
“So Green Eyes is gone, and now you’re all awake. ”
Yes, yes, yes.
And suddenly, all three heads snapped to attention and stared hard at something beyond the edge of our vision. The three of them looked back and forth between each other and then to me.
You.
It was a small-enough word that I understood the shape of the ghost’s lips. He pointed at me, his hand coming so close to my face that he might have touched me—and I wondered if I would feel it the way Benny had.
I knew then that they understood the others could not see them.
He said another word, and I think it was “go. ”
I acted on that assumption. “Where?”
All three lifted one arm and pointed in the same direction. It didn’t help. It could have been east, west, or simply “behind you. ” I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know well enough where I was to say more than that they were all in agreement.
I would have asked them for clarification, but that’s when the gunshot sounded.
We three living jumped as if we were the ones who’d been hit. We reached for each other in that primal way, reacting to that instinctive electricity that seizes your nervous system when you’re still too afraid to speak, but past the point where you can only hold still.
Our spectral companions vanished, and we wished we could do likewise.
We stood and fell over ourselves; I banged my leg against the bench with a fervor that promised a bruise, and Benny tripped and joined me. “Calm down!” I hissed. “Everybody calm down. We don’t know what—” And I was cut off by another shockingly loud round.
I wasn’t sure what the battlefield did to acoustics, but I sure couldn’t tell where the commotion was coming from, and I doubted either of the guys could, either.
“Out. Everybody. Out of here. ”
“What are the ghosts doing?” Jamie asked as he started to run.
“I don’t know; they’re gone. Benny?”
“Right behind you. ”
“Where’s the light? I can’t see for shit. ”
