American Prince

I shook him off, staying on my knee and firing. I could almost tell where they were shooting from, almost, and if I just got a little closer…

“Embry,” Ash said. “Get the fuck on your feet.”

I ignored him and moved forward to the next doorway. I was going to nail those motherfuckers, I knew it, and all the rage and certainty fused together in my blood, pounding through my body. I hated them, I hated this building, I hated the smoke and peeling paint, I hated the cold sweat on my neck as bullets buried themselves in the wall around me.

They let loose another volley, short bursts of fire, and I finally pinpointed the corner they were shooting from. I kept my body low, but I moved into the center of the hallway and let loose onto them, shuffling backwards but still exposed because fuck it all, I was going to put them down like dogs—

A sledgehammer hit my shoulder.

I staggered back, the breath knocked out of me, looking down in a daze to see where the sledgehammer had come from, but it wasn’t a sledgehammer at all. In fact I couldn’t see much of anything in the smoking darkness—except for a growing wet stain on the shoulder of my combat jacket, right outside of where my body armor ended.

And then another sledgehammer tore through my calf. I felt the fire and tear of it, the hot blood running into my sock. I’d just washed that fucking sock.

“Shit,” I said calmly, and then laughed. My voice sounded so funny, so mildly surprised, like I couldn’t find the keys to my Audi R8 or my favorite watch or something. Still laughing, I raised my gun and kept shooting back, shooting and shooting for what felt like several hilarious hours, but was probably only a few seconds.

Maybe less, because Ash was there shouting at me, clearly upset, clearly panicked, and it bothered me to see Ash panicked. I liked it better when he was calm. Why couldn’t he see how funny it was about the sock? About my voice?

I tried to tell him, but when I spoke, the words came out in jagged tremors and the only words that came out were blood and sock and Audi. He bit his lip and swept his gaze from my bleeding shoulder to the spot where blood had begun to drop from my leg to the floor. “Little prince,” he said, his voice breaking. “What have you done?”

Bullets tore into the linoleum next to us, and I saw the moment he became stone again, the minute he became an Army captain and not the man who once begged me not to disappear. He hooked my arm around his neck and—as an afterthought—lifted his assault rifle with his other hand and shot into the smoke as we retreated backwards, almost all of my weight on his sturdy shoulder. The giddiness had faded and the pain had come, stealing my breath and my thoughts, like a hook in my stomach that kept my ribs from expanding all the way.

“North stairwell,” Ash said as we got close to the elevators. “There’s no way you can climb down that shaft right now.”

He saw the look on my face and added, “I’ll be right there with you. But you need to go first.”

The pain robbed me of my will to argue. I let him ease me to the floor and then I did as I was asked and crawled to the stairwell, a one-armed, one-legged crawl that left a smear of blood behind me. Ash kept shooting, dodged fire, tossed a grenade or two down the hall, shouted things into the radio to the men downstairs—he was a one-man battle in and of himself, single-handedly bearing the brunt of the enemy’s malice and saving the rest of us at the same time.

I made it into the stairwell, pulling out my handgun with a shaking hand in case it was occupied. It wasn’t. A moment later, Ash joined me, kicking the door shut behind him and pulling out his flashlight. My whole body was shaking now, violent shivers, pain racing along every nerve’s pathway with vicious, electric sizzles, and there were moments where life seemed to fade in and out: static, then Ash with his flashlight, then black static once more.

“Little prince,” he said. His voice was so far away and so close at the same time. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

I tried. I really did. But despite the adrenaline surging through me, I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t keep the static from crowding at the edges of my vision. I remember grabbing at Ash’s jacket and telling him to leave me behind and to save himself. I remember him dropping a quick kiss onto my helmet. “You’re not Patroclus yet,” he said. “You’re not dying here.”

I’m still not sure what all happened next. I was carried, I know that much, and there were more gunshots, more moments where panic and adrenaline plunged me into the kind of prey-alertness that had my heart hammering and the blood spilling out of me faster and faster. There was a moment when I remember sitting on the ground as Ash pulled a rucksack off a dead Carpathian soldier and rifled through the contents. Another moment when I heard him cursing after trying to hail help on the radio multiple times with no response.

And then the moment when I finally came to completely, gradually swimming up through a hazy layer of strange dreams to see Ash’s boots pacing in front of me and a pile of rucksacks and our body armor next to me. Night had come, and in the forest, it had come with a vengeance, sweeping darkness like a layer of paint under the canopy of trees. It had also brought a thin breeze that wiped at my skin with cool fingers. I shivered.

The boots stopped. “It’s too dangerous to light a fire,” Ash said, “but I can give you my jacket. We might be here a while; I can’t get anyone over the radio for an evac and we got separated from everyone else. I took off your armor to work on your shoulder—and mine to make it easier to move you around—but we should probably put it back on soon. How are you feeling?”