Walker
They say it’s normal for your other senses to heighten when you lose your sight. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know the smell of burning flesh clings to me. It’s there all the time, every breath I take acrid with it, making me want to gag. Even now, with the chemical stench of floor cleaner in my nostrils, I can still smell it.
They took the remains of my breakfast tray away and asked if I wanted another, but I shook my head. I don’t want breakfast. I want my fucking eyesight back. I want my life back the way it was.
I lean against the pillows and turn to what I guess is the window, but it could just as well be a wall I’m staring at. I’ve given up trying to picture things. What’s the point? The only images that fill my mind are the ones from that day. They play on a loop in my head. There’s no pause button. No way to record over it. That’s all I see. That’s all I think I’ll ever see . . .
• • •
. . . A blue sky unmarred by a single cloud. A broken-down, rusting car on the side of the road. Jonas glancing over his shoulder, nineteen years old—too young, too nervous—looking at me for reassurance. Me yelling at him to stay frosty. We’re on foot patrol in Helmand province. The most dangerous territory in Afghanistan. We cannot afford to be less than one hundred percent focused.
The tension crackles between us like radio static. My breathing’s shallow, my attention on the surrounding countryside, dry and dead as a mummified corpse. There’s silence all around, gravelike silence, rent only by the cry of a bird of prey riding the currents far above us. Something’s not right. I can sense it. My intuition’s riding off the scale. Something about the car and the way it’s sitting on the side of the road with all its doors flung open bothers me. Sunlight glints off the windshield and for a moment I’m blinded, both by the light and by the realization of what it means. It’s not the sunlight blinding me, it’s the reflection from a rifle sight.
I open my mouth to yell out, call my men back, but Lutter 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.
While half my brain struggles to compute—This can’t be happening. This is happening—the other half of my brain is already pinpointing the location of the shooters, estimating wind direction, taking aim. I start firing back, lying flat on the ground, bullets whipping past my shoulder, smacking into the dirt all around me. There’s more than one shooter. We’re being attacked from several directions. It’s an ambush. I call in our position. Yell for backup. I can’t hear anything—no roger that—over the noise of machine-gun fire. Did they hear? Are they coming? How long do we have to hold them off for?
Beside me Harrison goes down, pitching face-first into the dirt. Bailey—loudmouthed, twenty years old, on his second tour—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.
Heart on fire, adrenaline scoring acid through my veins, blood drumming in my ears, 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, slippery 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. Oh shit. With a burst of clarity, I see the plan.
The car. They’re trying to get us all to shelter behind the car. I scan the hillside where the gunmen are sheltering and catch a glimmer of sunlight bouncing off metal. Rocket launcher.
I stand up, my knee jolts out, a hot eruption of pain behind my kneecap. “Sanchez!” I holler. “Get back!”
I hit my radio button.
Sanchez turns to look at me.
“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.
I’m still falling.
• • •
“Hey, Lieutenant!”
It’s Sanchez. He always bangs his wheelchair into the door to announce his arrival. I hear the electric whir of the chair as he maneuvers his way into the room uninvited, and grit my teeth. It’s not that I don’t appreciate his company—it’s better than listening to Fox News all day and the endless bullshit from the stream of neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, and trauma counselors that flow through my room; it’s just that Sanchez is relentlessly positive. The guy lost a leg and an arm and you’d think he’d won a season ticket to see the Lakers. I don’t know what to do with that.
“You seen the hot new intern?” he starts before stopping abruptly. “Oh shit. Sorry, dude.”
Maybe if I ignore him he’ll go away.
“She’s Doctor Monroe’s daughter, I hear. You should check out the bazungas on . . . shit. Sorry.”
I grimace at him.
“She’s hot, that’s all,” he goes on.
Hot. Right. That’s a pointless descriptor for me these days.
“She looks like Vanessa Hudgens, only with bigger—you know . . .”
I have no idea who Vanessa Hudgens is, and even if I did I couldn’t care less.
“I don’t know what Doctor Monroe’s thinking, letting her into this zoo. It’s like throwing fresh meat to hungry raptors.”
Someone clears their throat in the doorway. I turn my head.
“Sanchez?”
It’s José, the medic guy who’s in charge on this floor. “You got an appointment over in prosthetics. You’re late.”
“All right, all right. I gotta go,” Sanchez says to me. “They’re fitting me for my bionic arm. I’m going to make Robert Downey Junior in his Iron Man suit weep with envy. See you later.”
José is still in the room, and now Sanchez is gone I can tell that there’s someone else alongside him. Maybe it’s the heightened senses thing, but I can tell it’s a woman. She’s wearing perfume—something that reminds me of spring: fresh-cut flowers, dew on grass—and for a moment it overrides the stink of singed hair and crisply burning flesh. I draw it in deeply, fill my lungs with it, but then an image of Miranda pops into my head. Unbidden. Unwelcome. I shove it hastily away. I’d rather suffer the images of bloody limbs and flying bullets than think about my ex-girlfriend.
“Walker, I’ve got someone with me. Her name’s Didi Monroe. You got a few minutes?”
“Well,” I say drily, “I was about to go run a three-minute mile and then maybe do some paragliding. Let me see if I can clear my schedule.”
“Nice to see your sense of humor returning,” José says.
“Who says I was being funny?”
“So, you got a few minutes?” José asks.
“No,” I say.
“Come on, you haven’t had a visitor in a month. Play nice.”
I take a deep breath. With the loss of mobility comes a total loss of privacy. Just another thing I’m expected to suck up without complaint.
“Fine, whatever,” I say, knowing that I don’t have a choice. They might call this place a “Center of Hope and Care,” but that’s just a fancy term for “cripple prison.” The only difference between this place and Guantanamo is that here they drive you crazy with positivity, and there they do it by blasting Barry Manilow and Christina Aguilera at you twenty-four-seven.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be back in half an hour,” José says. I roll my eyes beneath the bandage. Half an hour? I have to make small talk for half an hour?
If I had a choice I’d take the orange overalls and Manilow’s greatest hits.