Walker
Jonas glancing over his shoulder, looking at me for reassurance. Me yelling at him to stay frosty.
My breathing’s shallow, my attention focused on the surrounding countryside. There’s silence all around, grave-like silence, rent only by the cry of a bird of prey. Something’s not right. I can sense it. Something about the car and the way it’s sitting on the side of the road. Sunlight glints off the windshield and for a moment I’m blinded, both by the light and by the realization of what it means.
I open my mouth to yell out, but Harrison has reached the car and my command is obliterated by the roar of an AK-47. Bullets start to pock the car. The windshield shatters. We’re under attack. My men hit the ground, dive for cover—Sanders behind a rock, Sanchez and Lutter behind the car.
I start firing back, lying flat on the ground, bullets whipping past my shoulder, smacking into the dirt all around me. It’s an ambush. I call in our position. Yell for backup.
Beside me Harrison goes down, pitching face-first into the dirt. Bailey—loudmouthed, nineteen years old—is lying in the center of the road, clutching his leg, screaming a high-pitched scream that cuts out in the next second as a bullet slices through his windpipe.
I ignore the dancing bullets and sprint toward him, lace my arm beneath his shoulders and drag him back, off the road, down into a ditch. His eyes roll in his head, big with fear, bright with pain. He makes a choking, gurgling sound and blood foams over his lips. My hands are hot with it, slick with it. I fumble for the tourniquet on my belt.
Taylor, the unit medic, is at my side. He jabs a morphine shot into Bailey’s thigh and snatches the tourniquet from my hand. I roll onto my stomach, poke my head above the ditch, and do a head count.
Sanchez and Lutter are still sheltering behind the car, taking turns to spot and return fire. Sanders, barely concealed behind a boulder, makes a mad dash for it, out into the open, before throwing himself down in the dirt beside Sanchez. He’s opting to ride out the ambush with them, behind the solid wall of metal.
The car. They’re trying to get us all to shelter behind the car.
I stand up, my knee jolts out, a hot eruption of pain behind my kneecap. “Sanchez!” I holler. “Get back!”
Sanchez looks in my direction.
“The car!” I yell.
I see the flare of understanding cross his face, and then it’s gone, obliterated by a wall of white light that opens up the sky, rips apart the earth beneath my feet, and sends me hurtling headfirst into an abyss . . .
. . . And then I hit the ground like a meteor crash-landing to earth. My ears ring. My heart’s a clanging bell. I can’t stand up straight. I veer sideways like a drunk, stagger, fall, stand, stagger again, blinking through a haze of dust, my ears singing, ringing. I’m in the center of a sandstorm. Where am I? And then the swirling clouds part almost biblically, and on the ground in front of me I spy a boot. I stare at it for a moment, confused. What’s a boot doing in the middle of the road? And what’s that inside it? That white stick surrounded by stringy red meat. It looks like an uncooked leg of lamb.
My eyes blot and blur as the boot pulls in and out of focus. It’s a foot. Inside the boot. I career in a spastic circle. My gun. It’s in my hands. I don’t remember taking aim, but I have. But I can’t see to shoot and I weave wildly, jerking the rifle this way and that. I still can’t hear anything beyond the alarm going off in my head. Are we under attack still? Where is everyone? Where are the others? Automatically I fumble for my radio and scream for a CASEVAC. We need helicopter support. Medics. I hear a crackle, a response. Alpha Whisky Tango. What the fuck does it mean?
“Sanchez?” I yell, but my voice sounds like it’s coming from an underwater cave and my throat feels as if it’s been stripped with paint thinner.
My eyes fall on Taylor, the medic, down in the ditch not three feet from where I’m standing. I collapse beside him in relief, calling his name, and that’s when I see his helmet’s been blown off and a piece of metal from the car has embedded itself into his skull like a Halloween knife. He’s dead. His eyes stare at me sightless, already filmy.
I can’t compute. I stare back at him and the world starts spinning around me, the edges of it slamming into my sides, forcing the air out of my lungs, and blackness begins to roll around the edges until I hear a whimper and realize that Taylor’s fallen on top of Bailey. I roll Taylor aside, trying to ignore the thud as his body rolls down the sloping hillside and smacks into a rock, and I discover Bailey, his face ashen, the tourniquet around his throat a red rag, ghoulish against the white of his dust-coated skin. His hands paw pathetically at it as though it’s a hangman’s noose he wants to loosen.
I take it all in with a madman’s sense of horror and a dead man’s numbness. This isn’t happening.
Bailey’s staring up at the sky, trying to breathe, but the air is rattling like loose change through the hole in his trachea. I bend down beside him, grab for his hand before he manages to pull off the tourniquet, but his palm slips from mine, slimy with blood and gritty with dirt.
“It’s okay, help’s on its way,” I tell him, but he doesn’t seem to hear.
I look up, cast around desperately. Where are the others? I called it in. Where’s the help?
“Sanchez?” I yell. “Lutter?” Smoke scours my eyes. All I can make out is the iridescent glow of the flames shooting out of the car. And that’s when I remember where Sanchez and Lutter and Sanders were sheltering before we got lit up.
I move toward the fire, throwing up an arm to protect my face from the heat. I’m aware of a jack hammer slamming into my knee and a white-hot poker jabbing at my shoulder, but the searing heat of the fire cancels it all out.
Terror cancels it all out.
“Harrison!” I shout, and then I see, through the choking black smoke, lying amid the wreckage of the car, a body, or at least what looks like a body.
I drop to my knees and cover my mouth to stop the smoke from filling it and start crawling toward it. The car is burning fiercely. If the engine’s full of gas then it’s going to explode any second, but I keep going. My hand closes around a leg, maybe, or a torso perhaps—something wet, something mulchy. I pull my hand away. My eyes are streaming—I can’t see. The contents of my stomach are halfway up my throat, filling my mouth. I fumble again on the ground.
My fingers make out a hand, trace up an arm. They sink into mud. Not mud. Warm. A face. Half a face. Sanders. Not Sanders. I reel backward onto my haunches. Flames lick my back. Acid creeps up my throat.
A murmur. A voice. Alive. Someone’s alive. I crawl to a mound a few feet away. It’s Sanchez. His helmet is half off. His face is black with grime, smeared with blood. I grab him by the shirt. Alive. Be alive. His eyes roll back in his head then forward.
“My leg,” he says through gritted teeth. “I can’t feel my leg.”
I glance down. There is no leg. There’s just shredded uniform and a fragment of bone poking out of the fabric and lakes of blood. So much blood. I thought I was kneeling in oil that had leaked from the car.
Sanchez hacks, his lungs filled with smoke, and the effort makes his eyes roll further back in his head. I force my arm under his shoulder and drag him a few feet away from the car, then I tear his tourniquet off his belt and wrap it around his thigh. When I’m done I bend once more to heave him over my shoulders. We need to get away before the car goes up. Sanders. Forget Sanders.
Sanchez, face black with grime and sweat, grabs my shirt in his fist. “Lutter,” he hisses before he falls back with a grunt to the ground.
Shit. I turn around and scour the area around the car, and then I spot a body a few feet away, lying half in and half out of the ditch. I glance at Sanchez, then drag him a few more feet from the car, praying it’s far enough if it blows, and the whole time I’m thinking of Bailey and how I need to get back to him and move him and how the fuck am I going to move him and Sanchez? And what about Lutter? Don’t think of the others. Don’t think of the dead. And where’s the helicopter? Where’s the Cobra? Where the fuck is the CASEVAC team?
My leg won’t work properly, keeps twisting the wrong way, but I ignore it and limp over to the ditch. Lutter is lying there on his side, half his body buried beneath a hunk of twisted metal. I throw myself down beside him. He’s alive, breathing, but there’s blood trickling down his temple.
Instinct has kicked in, has taken over. The rest of my brain is in chaos, cannot put it all together, but there’s a quiet, isolated part of me—the part that was trained especially for this one moment—that clicks on like a pilot light. Methodically, pushing everything else to the side, I start checking Lutter for injuries. I need to free him, see what the damage is, but when I heave my weight onto the still smoldering engine block that’s pinning him to the ground, it won’t budge. Lutter lets out a groan.
“Get Sanchez,” he hisses at me, his mouth tight with pain.
I glance over at Sanchez, ten feet away. And then past him to where I left Bailey, lying in the ditch. And then I remember Jonas. Jonas? Shit. Where is he?
A bullet slams into the dirt by my foot. I duck. They’re still out there. I swing my rifle into my hands and take aim, but through the wafting black smoke there’s nothing to aim at. No clear shot.
That’s my cover, I realize. The smoke. I shoulder my rifle and glance between Lutter, Sanchez, and Bailey. Time stands still. Choose. Choose. Choose. I can only carry one. The decision is made by the cold, rational part of my brain that’s taken over.
Take Sanchez. Bailey’s as good as dead.
Another bullet ricochets off a rock an inch from my foot.
Lutter’s alive and might survive until help can get here. I can’t free him on my own. Sanchez is bleeding out. But there’s a chance he might live. A small chance, yes, but if I leave him he’ll die for sure.
Decision made, just like that, sentencing Bailey to death like I’m playing a round of poker for bottle caps. I crouch low and dart back over to Sanchez.
“My leg?” he mumbles when I reach him. “What’s happened to my leg?”
I ignore him, and I ignore too the other part of my brain that has started to stir, that has begun to question the decision I’ve just made. There’s no time.
I throw Sanchez’s arm over my shoulder, heft him across my back and stand, wobbling dangerously as my knee buckles and my shoulder explodes. Pain lights me up from the inside.
I make it ten meters, and then, as I stumble under the weight of Sanchez, the car explodes at our backs, searing the shirt off my back, and the roar fills my ears, hollows out my head, obliterating everything and sending me hurtling into the ditch.
I lie there, buried beneath Sanchez.
And then, air scorching in my lungs, I force myself to my knees, to standing, and I start to move, still carrying Sanchez across my back. And the smoke is so dense I’m walking blind.
The smoke doesn’t clear. I can’t see where I’m going. All I can see are Lutter, Bailey, Jonas, Taylor, Sanders.
The boot.