Small Acts
The Gate Change

Ezra Doss

August 25, 2026 · Part 5 of 10 · 2 min

For a second the world went very quiet, the way it had once before, in the half-breath after an IED and before the sound of it finally arrived.

"That's me," Callum said. "Gideon, that's my photo."

He understood it the way a body understands cold water — all at once, everywhere, before the mind catches up. They thought he was dead. Somewhere between the ambush and today, somewhere in nineteen days of silence, the story of what happened to him had gotten it wrong, and nobody had ever come back to fix it.

And then, sickeningly, he knew exactly how.

Corporal Ezra Doss. Same build, same year group, gear tangled with Callum's own in the chaos of triage after the ambush — their packs had gotten swapped in the scramble, and Callum's spare set of tags had been in an outer pocket of a rucksack that wasn't his own by the time anyone was sorting bodies. Ezra hadn't made it. Somebody, exhausted and grieving and doing an impossible job under fire, had matched a dead man to the wrong dog tags.

"They buried the wrong name," Callum said, and his voice cracked on it in a way he didn't recognize. "Or they're about to hold a service for one, at least. Gideon, drive. Please. Now."

Gideon didn't need telling twice. He hauled the truck back onto the road, engine grinding up through the gears, needle climbing past the speed limit in a way a retired chaplain in a twenty-year-old Ford had no business doing.

"How far?" Callum asked, gripping the door handle like it could make the truck go faster.

"Twenty-five minutes, if the road's clear."

It wasn't the road that betrayed them.

A warning light flared amber on the dashboard, then red, and the engine note dropped from a growl to a stutter to something that sounded, unmistakably, like it was dying. Gideon pumped the gas. The truck didn't answer. It coasted, losing speed in long, sickening degrees, until there was nothing left to do but drift onto the gravel shoulder and stop.

Steam curled up from under the hood.

"No," Callum said. "No, no — not now."

Continue the story Part 6: Rafferty's Garage →

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