“Turn the Page”—Metallica
MOTHERFUCKER. I WAS GETTING too old for this shit, and I was only twenty-seven years old. Too much shit. Getting shot—twice—blown up, stabbed. Yeah, that was the latest. We were clearing a building and this motherfucking kid stabbed me in the side as I slowly turned a corner. He damn near got shot in the fucking face. At the last second, I realized it was a kid and I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, his giant Ka-Bar still sticking out of my side.
“Jesus, Gunny. You have a fucking knife sticking out of your gut!” The young corporal looked at me like I had a dick on my forehead. This was his first mission in the big A with us. He had promise, but at that moment, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at him as I gritted my teeth in pain.
“No fucking shit. Can you take this rug rat and get him out of my sight before I wring his goddamn neck? And get the fucking corpsman in here, like now!.” The telltale light-headedness was swimming at the periphery of my vision, and I knew I may not be standing long. Looking down, I watched the drips of crimson blood as it splatted on the floor and the toe of my boot in what appeared to be slow motion. The room began to waver, and I knew I better sit before I fell and made the situation worse.
Sliding down the wall, I tried to take slow, deep breaths, but the pain was getting to be excruciating. Ripping at the shemagh around my neck, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Through a haze, I heard the muffled voices of the corpsman and my team as they laid me down, worked on me, and called a 9 line MEDEVAC. Shit. This wasn’t how I thought I’d go out. I had been a skilled, methodical machine who had fast-tracked his way up to the rank of E-7. Obviously I was losing my edge. I really thought I would go out in a hailstorm of bullets.
My head flopped from side to side as they carried me on a makeshift stretcher up so many damn stairs, I felt for sure we were heading to heaven. “They won’t let me in,” I mumbled.
“It’s okay, Gunny. We got you. It’s gonna be okay. Just stay with me. What’s my name?” The corpsman held my face to get me to focus on him.
His name? Fuck, he had a name? Focusing on him wasn’t working, though I tried. It was a losing battle however, and I could only see his vibrant green eyes as everything else was swallowed up by a seeping blackness. Then everything was dark.
“It’s about time you fucking woke up.” The familiar voice rang through my ears. Grit coated my eyes, and my lids were heavy as shit. When I reached up to rub my eyes to clear them, all the shit taped to my hand scraped my face.
“The fuck?” Blinking repeatedly until my fuzzy vision began to clear, I looked up and saw Erik sitting by my beside, elbows resting on his knees. “Madre de Dios, what the fuck are you doing here? And where the hell am I?”
Chuckling, he stood and stepped closer to my bed. “Well, you’re about three feet of small intestine shorter, and you’ve been in and out of consciousness for the last few days because you ended up with an infection, probably from that nasty-ass fucking Ka-Bar pig sticker they removed from your side. Now you’re here at Walter Reed. And I rode out here to be with you, because you’re a stubborn-ass motherfucker and you still have me listed as your emergency contact instead of your family. This wasn’t something I could keep from them, however, so your abuela and pops just got here, and they are getting settled in the Fischer House.”
My head dropped back to the pillow, and I closed my eyes. “I feel like I got run over by a fucking Mack truck. Goddamn. I need to get back to the team. They need me and here I am lying in a damn hospital bed.”
“Maguire, when are you going to quit doing this to yourself? When is it going to be enough? The next time, you may not be so lucky, and then I’ll be sitting by your goddamn graveside instead of your bedside.” He sounded mad as hell, and I looked at him in shock. His hands gripped my bed rails so tight his knuckles were white. “And what about your abuela? Her poor heart can’t take much more of this shit.”
“What the fuck are you doing here if all you’re going to do is chew my ass?” Bone weary, my voice sounded as tired as I felt.
“I’m here because you’re probably my best friend and I love you. But fuck, this is the third time I’ve been by your bedside. You aren’t a cat. You don’t have nine damn lives. I’m begging you. As your friend, I’m begging you, please… get the fuck out while you still can.”
My eyes popped open in surprise. “Get out? And do what? This is what I know. This is my job. It’s what I love.”
“Do you? Really? Because if you truly love killing, you’re more of a coldhearted bastard than I ever thought you could be. We all had loyalty and love for every member of our team, but the fucking Marine Corps doesn’t give a shit about you, and they’ll keep sending you out there until you’re dead or wishing you were.”
He had been out so long he didn’t understand. The adrenaline, the rush, the satisfaction of a successful mission. Had I done my fair share of killing? Yeah, probably, but that’s what I was trained to do. That was what I was supposed to do. It was war. It was the nature of the beast. If I didn’t kill them, they were going to kill my battle buddies, my team, innocent people… and that wasn’t happening on my watch. It wasn’t necessarily about the Marine Corps itself, it was about my team.
“¡Dios mío! Mi pobre niño… Oh, Kayde.” The sound of my abuela’s tearful voice made my heart hurt. Seeing the tears slipping down her face made me feel like I’d been stabbed all over again. Fuck, it was like being a teenager again and seeing how bad all my transgressions hurt her. It made me feel like shit, and Erik’s words began to pierce through my emotional armor.
“Abuela, I’m fine.” Except no amount of words would convince her of that for as long as I continued to be strapped to a hospital bed. There was very little I hated more than being stuck in a hospital. It left me feeling trapped. Cornered. Vulnerable.
Fuck, I could smoke a bowl right about now, even just a hit, and I haven’t smoked since joining the Marines almost ten years ago.
Okay, that’s a lie. One time. One time, I had foolishly smoked.
It was while I was on my first leave home. It’d been a shit day because I went over to see Christian to try to make amends. Well, Tyler was there… with Sera. When I saw him tangle his hands in her hair and kiss her, I became so angry, I wanted to break shit. Instead, I went out, got high as fuck, avoided seeing them, then drank water like a fiend the rest of my time home. Luckily, I never got piss-tested after I got back, but I was scared shitless for about three weeks after returning to duty. I never did that shit again. My career had meant everything to me.
Had. I’d just said my career had meant everything.
Abuela continued to fuss over me, and my pops tried his damnedest to get her to calm down, but you had to know my abuela. The tiny woman was a force to be reckoned with when she got worked up. On and on went her Spanish tirade that only I understood.
Erik had gotten up to stand by the window, talking to someone quietly on the phone. That’s when I noticed the leather vest he was wearing, with a patch on it that read “Hacker.” I wondered if it had something to do with his computer skills, which were legendary. When he turned, I saw the big patch with what looked like Hades. “Demented Sons” arched over the top, but the rest I didn’t catch before he turned around to face me again.
After ending his call, he came over and tapped my foot. “I’m going to go grab a bite to eat, give you time with your family. We’ll talk when I get back.” With my nod of agreement, he shook my grandfather’s hand, hugged my abuela, and left the room. The nurses fell all over him as soon as he walked out the door. Typical.
When I chuckled, my grandmother poked me in the shoulder. “¡Mira! It’s not funny. I’m being serious right now! You know I was all in favor of you joining the military, mi hijo, but this is too many times we have come to visit you in the hospital. It’s not right. You’re too young to be gone from this earth, and that’s what’s going to happen next. I feel it in my bones and that… that will kill me.”
Sobering, I looked at my abuela with guilt heavy on my chest. “Abuela, I don’t mean to worry you. It’s not like I planned on some kid stabbing me. I’m careful. Just sometimes shi—uh, things happen. Maybe it’s God’s will. Maybe it’s what I deserve.” Her gasp at my words told me I said them too loud. I didn’t really mean for her to hear that last part.
Thankfully, my nurse came in at that moment and informed us all that it was time for my IV antibiotics. No matter how much I loved my grandmother, she could be a little spitfire, and she had been ramping up to give me the ass chewing of a lifetime.
My grandfather wrapped his massive arm around my little grandma and placed his free hand over mine in my bed. “Mi hijo, we love you. What your grandmother is trying to tell you is that we worry about you, just as we did your uncles, but you’re a grown man and your life choices are your own.” With a last pat of my hand, he moved to steer my grandmother out of the room, whispering that I needed rest and he needed food.
Abuela leaned carefully over the bed, making sure not to bump any of my lines or my injury, and gave me a hug. Raising my right arm up to hug her back pulled on my abdomen, and I winced in pain. She tried to hide it, but I saw the tears in her eyes. It made me feel like shit. It also made me think.
What was I really trying to prove? As Marines, we all knew the things we did made a difference in the small scope of life, but in the big scope? Yeah, not so much. Most of the people we were helping didn’t give a shit; others had selfish reasons for wanting our help. Only a few were actually grateful. Initially I joined the Force Recon unit because I was young and wanted excitement, danger, and thrills. Lately I’d been feeling every mission. My body felt like that of a seventy-year-old man sometimes. The problem was… what the hell would I do with myself if I got out?
It was too late for me to be a cop. I’d seen too much. Skated on the edge of morality, sanity, and ethics too many times to be a good cop. My conscience and heart took a sabbatical a long time ago and had yet to return. The patience and commitment to be a doctor didn’t interest me, though when I was young, I had briefly and secretly thought of being a surgeon. The only reason I had wanted to be a cop in the first place was because Christian and Tyler wanted to be cops. Look where it got them. Tyler was six feet under, and Christian hadn’t been able to find his killer.
No, it wasn’t Christian’s fault the killer hadn’t been found. I got that he was a single man, but you would think when one of their own was shot down in cold blood, they would’ve made a more serious attempt at finding his killer. Instead, most of the detective work had seemed to fall on Christian, when that wasn’t his job.
All these things I knew because of Erik. Maybe it was wrong of me to ask him, but I had him hack into the police data systems to look for what they had found and what they were doing to find Tyler’s killer. The lack of information pissed me off. The official investigation had been handled in such a shitty manner that the entire force should be ashamed.
The problem was, even with Erik’s mad skills, he had come up empty-handed. It was like someone intentionally didn’t want to find the killer. Maybe I should get into private investigative work when I finally got out. I just didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what was right for me.
I had wanted to find Tyler’s killer to give Sera some closure, but I knew I had to do it from a distance. Over the years, any time my abuela brought her name up, I cut her off. There was no way I could handle hearing about her, especially after Abuela slipped and mentioned she was dating. A knife straight to my gut hurt less than that.
So what I did know was I didn’t want to return to San Antonio. By now, Sera must hate me, and she should. The way I left her that last night was such a dick move. Shit, the whole night was a dick move. It had left me feeling so fucking disgusted with myself, I had gone back to duty reckless. Of course, it hadn’t taken me long to ditch the recklessness, because it almost got me and my team in some deep shit. Thankfully I had pulled my head out of my ass before I compromised our mission or our lives.
Maybe Erik and my family were right. Maybe it was time. Time to start a new chapter in my life.