John drew up his knees and felt the ache of his body as a slow burn. He reached for his helmet, but his fingertips only grazed the spinning cover. His left hand grabbed the side of his throbbing head, and he tried to wipe the blood off his mouth. Inadvertently, he slopped blood from his cropped hair across his teeth. He was pretty certain the back of his head remained intact and didn't leak gray matter, then shuddered as he realized the blood he tasted wasn't his own.

Still at war, John battled shock, pain, and a killer gag reflex. He flipped around to face the scene of the attack. Spread over the drenched pavement behind him lay the splattered remains of his fellow marine, Chase Brown. Though reality tilted in his stunned mind, John recognized his friend, even if only Chase's arms and legs remained. The left hand of the dismembered arm sported a band aid to cover a scrape the soldier received from a copper door jamb earlier that day. Chase would never have to worry about that healing.

Splayed out around the exploded car's smoking shell, lay bodies--Iraqi civilians and United States Marine Reservists alike. Arranged like spokes from a fallen wagon wheel, a few moved, but many didn't. At the edge of this grisly circle, there existed a clear ring where the destruction stopped. Nearby cars suffered shattered windows, while others a few yards on down the way were intact--save for some spidering in the side mirrors. A humvee parked on an angle showed one battered side, while the other looked showroom cherry.

He heard men shout and assumed they were on the other side of the destruction. He made an attempt to shout back, but his ears refused to recognize his own tone. A sound like the crashing ocean through a megaphone created an incessant drone in his head, far worse than after a Nugent concert, since no illegal substances swam in his blood stream to mute the experience this time.

John blinked hard and tried to focus his bleary eyesight. Reality refused to comply, for his eyes went further south on him. They showed him a strange mix of transparent forms traveling across his field of vision, not unlike people in a race. These shapes looked away, unconcerned with the carnage, and took hurried steps in apparent need of getting somewhere fast. Kern dismissed these as a frenzied band of locals viewed from his screwed up eyes. He attempted to put away the fact they all wore clothes, shoes, or armor only seen at home on a Crusaders reenactment weekend.

However, two solid shapes stepped from the gaping crowd of historical mysteries. They exchanged glances and then spat on the remains of Chase as they turned toward John. These men played no part of his glimmering hallucination. All too real, they didn't have the appearance of ghosts or the freshly-minted dead. Neither seemed to care if John Kern lay there. In another moment, a sudden panic seemed to set in to them. They gave him a wide berth before starting to run, as more shouts in English and the roar of troop machinery approached.

Not taking a chance the men weren't part of the insurgent group responsible, Kern ignored the continuing flood of semi-transparent shapes and took action. He dived forward and his long body clashed with one of the solid forms. John tripped up the other man, half-assed, who stumbled toward the expansive opening of the restored temple. This man skidded to a stop and looked back. John flopped on him, both hands gripping his target's hair. With no hesitation, John drove the man's face into the bricks that made up the waiting area by the Ishtar gate. When the man's nose broke under his driving force, John felt good. He'd broken many noses before, usually with his fists, but that feeling felt old hat to him, cartilage imploding and blood spewing. It also gave him a stake in a reality that seemed to blur at the edges, more and more. Over and over, he drove the man's face into the bricks until the fight left his victim. Unsure and not caring if the man lay dead, John pressed his knee into the man's back for leverage as he rose.

"I'm coming for you, John Kern."

The voice seemed to come from everywhere. No one could've been close enough to say it, and his ears were still so ruined the words never would've registered. Icy terror stabbed into John's senses and a bitter quiver rippled down his arms as he realized the voice came from inside his head. Not used to fear, he tried to write it off as nerves and the effects of the blast. He touched his dog-tags and the Celtic cross resting between them. All of the metal objects were wet with blood.

John passed through the Ishtar gate, dismissing the irony that he and his patrol chose this spot because of the locale. Chase had wanted to see the temple of Marduk. Well, John thought as he passed through the renovated ancient marvel, Chase got his wish. As the ethereal forms spun around him again, John hoped his friend and fellow troopers who died wouldn't be stuck at this site forever. The oldest man in the reservist troop at 38, John shrugged off the waste of Chase Brown's existence, cut short at 23. He had so much left to do. Anger fueled him. He wanted to get the men responsible and avenge his fallen Marines.

Though John wasn't sure whether or not he saw real ghosts around him, his chief concern was the one man in flesh who'd gotten away. If these spirits were a hallucination that was all right, he rationalized. The ghost couldn't touch him, but the fleeing man still must die.

Not knowing how far the complex went on, nor if the electronic light's Saddam's builders installed would be good to go the entire trek, John felt desperation seep into his unfocused self. He felt like a thousand little knives jabbed at him as he pursued the man. John weaved back and forth, following his target through the alabaster pillars. Each column was inscribed with what looked to be genuine glyphs from eras nearly forgotten. His rangy body shifted, as if dodging a punching bag, something John hadn't done in a while. Nevertheless, the punch-drunk feeling of being semi-concussed and zigzagging to avoid injury helped him. It made him strong in recollection of training for fights and the duty expected of him in the squared circle.

"Down here," a voice yelled at John from the end of the gallery. "He'll never escape you this way." A different voice than the one that seemed to threaten him earlier. This tone held crisp, military efficiency in it and didn't originate in his skull. Not sure of who or what could've outdistanced him into this temple, or if it were a caretaker of some sort, John was glad for the advice.

Suddenly, all around him were people. The shock of the crowd was enough to make John stop. He was a veteran soldier, even if a reservist. He'd fought in the first Gulf War and had all the goodness that went with brutal marine training. Thus, when John saw the hundreds of people in clothing not native to the period, he banished his first inkling of terror. Since these couldn't be folks from times gone past--be it Alexandrian era troops, Babylonian priests, or Sumerian images come alive from the glyphs on the walls--John's mind rationalized it as something else. A tour, a themed party, some silly thing like that he stumbled onto. The fact they popped in and out of his sight did his heart and aching head no good. The near transparent people waved and urged him to chase the man to the end of the gallery.

"Go, get him fast," one wizened sage told him. This fellow looked like something from the cutting room floor of a costume epic. Omar Sharif had nothing on authentic era looks, John thought, almost ready to sit down and embrace the obvious madness in his head.

On the trail again, doing seek and destroy in the innards of the temple, he laughed to himself, saying aloud, "If they were really spirits from the past, how could I understand their language?"

"I'm coming for you, John Kern." Once more, the threatening tone rippled across his brain.