near miss.

Surrounding the crippled war machine we waited for the men to fix it's busted guts. Turns out the repairmen were terrorists sent to destroy. The moment they got the tank working they cut us down. Like in those action movies where carnage is illustrated by the amount of flying chunks of cement blown apart by stray bullets, the grinning men blew the whole place apart, surface to air. Exposed, I had no choice but to batten down and close my eyes, hoping like a three year old, the tank would disappear. I open my lids, see the foreshortened barrel of the main gun staring me down from across the plaza. No slow motion jog shuttle to slow things down, before I could even hear the casement ejection sound of the 2 inch bullet firing, it had shattered my helmet into a hundred bitty pieces.