Dangling down from the young soldier’s lower torso was a loose tangle of intestine. He occasionally reached down at it to try and collect it, but was always unsuccessful.

Trying to avoid looking at the gore, I looked to the young man’s eyes and saw a kind of fear I had never laid my eyes upon. There was a tragic knowing and pain plastered upon the young man’s wet eyes. He wiped away the moisture and steadied his gun as he approached the bed.

“I killed him,” George’s words slipped into my ear before they were interrupted by shouts from the young man.

“Akuma ga anata o mitsukerudeshou. Itsuka anata wa kono itami o shitte irudaroushi, wareware wa futatabi au yoteidesu.”

“I will never know what that means, but it will haunt me in my dreams till they take me out of this place in a coffin,” George lamented.

The soldier had made his way through the hot fog, right next to us. My Frontier Pizza shirt clung to my heaving chest, coated in sweat. He leaned forward and screamed right into my ear.

“Anata mo shinde shimaimasu.”

My body was stiff, frozen in shock. I felt the wind of the young soldier’s hot breath on the skin of my scalp left naked by the part of my hair.

Then it was all gone. I looked over past George’s gray head of hair to see no Japanese soldier pointing a gun at us, no fog billowing in like we were in a small town haunted house attraction around Halloween, no smell of past meals rotted between unbrushed teeth upon my neck. Just me and George, awkwardly stuck together at the foot of his bed.

“I found out what that last one means,” George broke through the fresh silence.

“What?”

“The last thing he always says before he goes away. I heard the phrase so many times, I remembered it and asked Tokinari, the Japanese fellow in here, what it means. He said, you will die too. That’s what it means.”

“Oh,” I said and started to pull my head away from George’s.

George locked eyes with mine once our faces were a comfortable distance away from each other’s.

“I killed that boy in Okinawa, but I didn’t have to. We were done there. We were done. I walking back to my group and that little bastard ran right across my path. I tried to act like I didn’t see him at first, we could each go our own way, back to our wives and kids, but he came at me. His gun must have been empty, because he tried to wrestle me. I had to rip at him with my knife. My muscles still have the memory of the tearing, the ripping. My heart still knows the race of seeing his knife flail wildly right past my vision until he stopped moving. I can still feel that hot blood seeping onto me. Have you ever felt hot, blood? I hope not.”

George suddenly looked exhausted. His muscles slacked, his hair mussed, his wrinkled skin coated with a thin, glimmering coat of sweat, his eyes glued to the floor. He looked like he had truly just relieved that moment right there in his depressing little room at the end of the hallway with a random pizza delivery guy who just wanted the nine dollar and change tip he received.

It took me a few moments to realize we were holding hands.

Sleep became a challenge. I couldn’t get the images, the sounds, the smells of George’s room that night out of my head. However, the longer my sleepless nights went on, the more I thought the vision of the Japanese soldier was actually the “It’s just a cat” scare of my interaction with George. The deeper horror lied in the firm grip George placed upon my elbow, the dejected look in his eyes when I told him I was leaving, the pleads when he begged to me to stay. The deep feeling of guilt in my gut which sank in once I sat down in my car. The fact it still had yet to leave in weeks.

Exactly what was more troublesome become irrelevant once I decided something simple. I would not go back to the retirement home for a delivery, someone else could handle that, or if I had to, I would just drop the pizza off at the front desk.

The days and weeks went by with no deliveries to that god forsaken old folk’s home at the edge of the town. Even driving by it a few times on other deliveries sent shivers down my spine. I tried to not look at it anymore.

The thawing Minnesota Spring had done its good by boosting my mood as much as it probably could. I had moved back from the sunny Winter skies of California in the dead of Winter and it seemed to make my unmagical mystery tour of shame of delivering pizzas to disappointed faces that much worse. Now, the coming Summer sun had sucked the snow off of the trees and created a shining world of beauty accompanied by a promotion to assistant manager at Frontier Pizza. The promotion meant I would be done delivering pizzas before the end of summer, once they hired a replacement.