Distress I

A little thing I wrote today, I’m doing something different with this and just bear with me on this, it’ll get interesting.

Distress I

Jonathan looked at his trinket from fifth grade; it was a cylinder like shaped section of a tree branch with the bark shaved. Engraved was ‘Jonny Reeves 5th Grade Field Trip 2001’ and it made Jonathan think.
“Mom, can you believe it’s been eleven years?” His mother looked up; they were in his room cleaning it before he shipped off.
“Since what, Jonathan?”
“Since this! I mean it didn’t seem that long ago!” She looked in his hand and saw the trinket.
“Oh I remember when you were only two weeks old, sitting in my lap sleeping away. Time flies, Jonathan, it flies.” She looked at his army uniform he was wearing, the ACU fatigue de-bloused and without his cover. “And now my baby Jonathan looks down to me and is going across the world.”
He looked up from his trinket. “Don’t worry mom, I’m going to Afghanistan, nothing to worry about.”
“But for so long!”
“Mom, it’ll be just like collage. I’ll be fine, I’ll come back, I always do.” He looked back down at his old trinket and thought what trinket he’d bring home from his tour of duty. He smiled and started rubbing his thumb across the grain.
Mrs. Reeves stopped rubbing her thumb across the trinket.
She wiped her eyes.
“He’s not coming back.”
She was pale from the moment she saw them, the two people a mother never wants to see, two Class A dressed service men or women slowly walking towards the door. “How could this happen?” She was solemn, dreary, in shock and was starting to bawl. Mr. Reeves saw the car from the garage and ran to the doorstep with a happy face that instantly went to one of horror as he turned the corner and saw the depressed faces.
“Terry he’s not coming back!” She fell to her knees and cried, rubbing the trinket against her cheek. Mr. Reeves swore and teared up bad, he fought back tears as much as he could, he swore upon God, the devil, and after he heard the response; history.
“Poppa Reeves, JJ isn’t dead! He’s MIA!”
“We never should’ve named him after your father!” Terry’s father, Jonathan, went MIA in Vietnam. The man that was talking was a close friend of Jonny and the family; he went in with Jonny and was by his side until it happened.
“Momma Reeves, he’s not dead, we found his GPS signal where he left us, it didn’t kill him.”
Mrs. Reeves had calmed down after hours of bawling. “It?”
“It was a living machine, a sentient, as they liked to be called, one of them sentient T seventy twos got the drop on our squad. It came out of a wall and ran right into the second Humvee, pushing them into a house. Then as we’re scrambling it snaps a shot on our heavy truck with the AT rockets in it-”
“What the hell happened to my baby!?” The officer woman in the living room jumped at Mrs. Reeves yell.
“A shot blew up his Humvee and he was launched into some building, he screamed in there but my squad leader dragged me away.., all the way to base.” The Reeves saw him start tearing, too, and the pain and nightmares the haunted him after leaving his brother like that. He jumbled his words but his next message went:  ‘I snuck out in the night and found his GPS, radio, and some angle wraps’ and that uplifted Mrs. Reeves.
Mrs. Reeves felt something deep within, felt something only a mother can feel, something that can only be described as: “My baby’s alive! I know he’s alive! Gods telling me he is!”
Meanwhile at this time Jonny is having a great time off duty.

Fin Distress I

BTW he left in 2012, this takes place in about May 2013.