Darkness After Midnight — John F. Russo

Poignantly brutal from the harsh African lands notoriously known for their complete disregard of women's rights and human dignity. Lives wasted for the profiteering of a few for mineral rights of a country at war with itself. Millions have been displaced, tens of thousands have been murdered and raped, the innocence of children have been stripped from them, and forced into military slavery by civil conflict created by two men, who took an oath to protect and uphold the constitution of this adolescent country of only four years, South Sudan. Lt. William ‘Billy' Clark had to make a decision and then live by it as he was sent in to eliminate one of the warring factions. An over-compelling fear of being set up made his choice, and then he took to the heartland as he was hunted down as a governmental escape goat by PAG. His loner life changed when he met ‘Maysa', a young woman who had been banished from her village after being raped by an elder and together they forged through, saving thousands of lives with little consequence to their own. The double-cross of a soldier set Africa afire as Washington employed, the newly developed PAG (Particular Aura Generation) to find this man and extract in. He struggled to escape alone, until he met a young woman with child, and then their journey became complicated for the ones that searched for him. The tone of today's injustice in South Sudan sparked their path for survival and the reader's enlightenment to the atrocities that affects us all. “The smell of burnt bodies and dismembered torsos abound the dusty roadway as they eased each step through this sordid slaughter. Ripped clothing exposed the naked, battered bodies of women as they lay beside their slain babies and the saturated soil attempted to swallow more of the spilt red fluid. Huts smoldered in the deluge of destruction without consciousness. The barbarity sickened the soldiers as they reconn'd the area for any semblance of life. Nothing was left untouched �" as if an Atomic bomb had been dropped, but this was obviously the brutal force of betrayal by man's hand.”