Bootfalls echoing on tile. He lay on his back in darkness, on a jouncing, traveling litter.
He cracked his eyelids and saw stone above him. Stone to his left. Light and air to his right. Too bright.
Cold.
The dark of a stone column passed through his vision. The courtyard.
Before losing consciousness again, he noted with mild and detached interest the great tumult and shouting all about him, the whumping force of concussion waves pressing down upon his chest, and the tremendous volume of rocket and automatic weapons fire that rained down on Vega from every direction above.
—
When he came awake next it was with a start.
His right hand, moving like a rubber fish, fumbled uselessly about his pistol holster. There was no pistol there anyway.
He opened his eyes and lurched upward onto his elbows, his head punishing him mercilessly for it. He twisted left and right, panicked. Bright lights spun and stabbed at him. Somewhere nearby was a powerful, muffled rumbling.
“Whoa, there, L.T.,” said a voice. “Easy.”
He flinched away from a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down.
“Easy, sir. Easy.”
Two hands now, firmer, pressing harder.
“Lay back, sir. You’re okay.”
A shape close in his squinted vision. Other shapes farther throughout the room. Some standing, some horizontal. The whole room seemed to vibrate every few seconds.
Explosions. Outside. He was indoors.
“Where’s Sergeant Caine?” he demanded, trying to crane his head to look behind him.
“You’re at the aid station, sir,” came the reply, in the cool tones of an Army medic. “You’re good.”
A single, searing explosion of light, inches from his face, washed out his vision. He wrenched away from it, grunting, squeezing his eyes as tight as they would go.
“Whoops,” said the voice. “Sorry, sir. Penlight. Here, try this.”
He opened his eyes reluctantly and followed the young medic’s index finger left, right, up and down. The effort of doing so made the cot shift beneath him. He grasped its sides queasily.
The kid pulled his eyelids wide and examined his pupils, nodding to himself.
“Dizzy, sir?”
He lay on a cot in a corner of the stone-walled room. Several casualties occupied other cots and litters. The nearest was awake, staring at Black silently as he held a soaked bandage to his upper arm.
Two medics stood crowded close around another, lying motionless and making weak wheezing sounds. A third medic lay on an exam table nearby, a red tube running from his arm to a transfusion bag slowly filling with blood.
Beyond that, a door, through which he thought he could see a portion of the courtyard. It was very, very noisy outside.
“Yeah, I’m dizzy,” Black answered impatiently. “Where’s Sergeant Caine?”
The young medic, coming into focus now, shook his head.
“Don’t know, sir. How dizzy would you say you’re feeling right n—”
“He hasn’t been through here to check on your casualties?”
“No, sir, haven’t seen him,” the kid answered in clipped tones. “But it’s pretty crazy outside right now, so everyone’s a little bit busy. Now, how—”
“What about Sergeant Merrick? Where’s he?”
“Sir,” the kid answered impatiently, “I don’t know where anybody is at except who’s in here right now in front of me. Now stop trying to sit up and lay back so I can check you out.”
He pressed Black firmly back to the cot and completed his exam in about thirty seconds, satisfying himself that Black was lucid and cogent, then rolling him gingerly to peek under the bandage on the back side of his shoulder. Black felt like he was going to keep rolling right off the cot.
The medic rolled him back again.
“What day is it?” Black asked, closing his eyes while the dizziness cleared.
“Sunday.”
“What time?”
The medic checked his watch.
“About fifteen thirty.”
He stood and turned to go.
It occurred to Black that he had no idea what time he’d arrived at the aid station. Nor for that matter what time it had been when Merrick and Shannon had found him.
“Hey, how long have I . . .”
But the medic was gone, back to his other casualties.
Black stared up at the stone ceiling, his mind racing. His head throbbed from his earlier effort at lifting himself, though his shoulder, and much of the rest of him, was now happily numb.
He turned his head gingerly and looked around at the other casualties.
No one had seen Merrick. No one had seen Caine.
They don’t know.
An enormous crash outdoors sent another wave of vibrations through the aid station. Guys cursed.
“That one was fucking close,” one of the medics spat, annoyed.
Get with it.
Grasping the cot rails with both hands, Black pushed himself fully upright. Angry sparkles filled his vision and his head felt as though all the liters of blood in his body were filling it. He put his boots on the hard floor and stood, knowing it was a mistake. The room careened wildly.
Willing the floor to right itself, his legs stiff as planks, he began to walk toward the door. He heard his soles scraping the tile but couldn’t feel his feet. He figured he must have looked like the Frankenstein monster.
His right arm was trailing behind him. Someone was tugging on his wrist, squeezing it hard with their fingernails. He yanked it away roughly and scuffed onward.
The metallic crash behind him made him turn. He looked dumbly down at the intravenous line running from where it was taped to his wrist in a taut diagonal back to where it was now dragging the bag stand across the floor.
He had only an instant to register blurry annoyance before realizing, as the room went sideways entirely and he saw the wall rising up to meet him, that turning around had been a mistake.
It smacked him, hard and cold. His cheek scraped along its surface.
“What the fuck, L.T.?”
The same medic, easing him sideways toward another wall. No, the floor. Floor was good.
“What’re you doing, sir?”
“Take me to the C.P.”
Why did his own voice sound so slurry?
“What?”
“I need to go the C.P.”
“C’mon, sir, let me help you up.”
The kid squatted next to him, trying to figure out how best to haul him up without injuring him.
“I need to go now.”
“C’mon, sir, we got other hurt guys here. Come get back in the cot.”
“I need to talk on the radio.”
The kid paused a half second.
“Right, sir,” he said, adopting the placating tones medics used on casualties who weren’t in their right minds. “The radio. Come back to the cot first.”
Black, slumped along the bottom of the wall, grabbed him roughly by the forearm.
“I need to talk on the radio now.”
The kid startled, wrenching his arm free.
“No, sir, you don’t,” he answered, urgency and annoyance in his voice. “You need to get back in your cot and stop fucking up my triage.”
His voice went cool again.
“Now, c’mon.”
He attempted to sit Black fully upright. Black pushed back against his efforts.
“It’s important,” he pressed.
The kid was agitated now, looking over his shoulder at the rest of the room.
“Shit,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Fine, sir, if you get back in your cot you can use my radio, okay?”
He reached into a little holster on the back of his equipment belt and produced his walkie-talkie, holding it up before Black’s face.
“Now let’s go.”
Black shook his head, regretting it immediately.
“Not that one,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “The radio. The battalion net in the C.P.”
The kid shook his head.
“Let the dudes in the C.P. take care of that shit, sir.”
“There’s no one there.”
The kid’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“Negative, sir, there’s dudes in the C.P. right n—”
“They don’t know what I know.”
“What?”
“I need to tell them.”
“Tell them what, sir?”
“Take me there.”
“What?”
“I can’t walk.”
The medic looked at him like he was crazy.
“No way, sir! It’s off the chain out there.”
He sent a thumb over his shoulder toward the direction of the noise.
“And you’re concussed as fuck and you lost a shit-ton of blood,” he finished. “I can’t take you outside.”
Taking too long.
Black grabbed the young soldier by both arms this time, tugging the kid’s body down toward his own until they were face-to-face.
“Do you wanna die here today?” he nearly shouted.
The medic looked at him blankly.
“Am I altered?” he demanded. “I’m talking to you, right? I can talk on a damned radio!”
He saw that he finally had the kid’s attention.
“I need to talk to Battalion!”
Had finally tapped the black reservoir of fear capped off below the surface.
“I’ll lie down on the cot in the C.P., but I need you to take me there, now!”
The wide-eyed medic searched his face. Something in him clicked over, or broke.
“Fuck,” he said.
Black released his arms and slumped back to the floor, exhausted.
The medic looked back over his shoulder at the room full of medics and soldiers. The wheezing casualty was now bellowing incoherently at someone or something imaginary, and no one was paying them any attention.
“Don’t tell,” Black muttered at the ceiling. “Just go.”
The kid turned back and squatted, muttering curses to himself. He worked Black into a sitting position, casting glances toward the chaos in the rest of the aid station.
Black assisted as best he could, which was hardly at all, and allowed himself to be slumped across the medic’s shoulders. He watched his view of the aid station go upside down, sending a wave of dizzy nausea through him. He groaned.
“You gonna hurl, sir?”
“No,” he said, thinking he just might.
The medic struggled to his feet. It was the same fireman’s carry Shannon had used, but this guy was about half Shannon’s size.
“Gonna be loud out there, sir.”
It was loud inside already.
“Got it.”
The kid did a little hop in place to shuck Black’s limp form higher on his shoulders, then he leaned forward and bounded through the doorway in a stomping half run.
“God-daaaaaammmmnniiiit!” he bellowed as the sound and light hit them.
—
Goddamn lieutenant.
He crashed upward through the dry leaves, gloving narrow tree trunks hand over hand in the steep parts, hauling himself forward, higher, closer.
Yawning mountaintops hung above him silently, the scatterfall of dried brush and cast-off tree limbs slanting away below and behind, hearing no sound but his feet and his breathing.
This ridge, then down the far side—no way around that draw—through the creek, then up one more and cut across the front. Good cover there, and fastest.
Too far.
One stomping foot in front of the other, legs pumping. Skinny branches snapping as he pushed through them. Brittle ground cover cracking. So much sound.
“Never catch a damn thing making all that noise, Rodney.”
It was like home, really. The dim mornings hunting with his dad and his brothers. He couldn’t get enough of it, the woods and the mountains. It was half the reason he joined the infantry. Truth was, this was damned beautiful country when you got down to it.
Damn Corelli. Damn dumb kid.
His heaving breaths made fog before his eyes. The other sound returned to him.
It came from behind, past descending ridges, the thump and thud, the unending cacophony echoing dull off mountainsides, chasing him all the way from where he was supposed to be, where he needed to be right now, over the peaks to find him and torment him here where he actually was.
Told him, told all of them, don’t listen to a stupid officer who thinks he knows something.
He couldn’t say whether it burned him more that he was going to die amidst this beauty, or that the stupid officer had thought right.
All this on me.
Panting and swearing, Merrick drove higher into the mountains.