Colin said, “Brigid, you’re wanted in Recovery.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your patient with the head wound. If I were you, I’d go take a look.”
I went. The boy with the wound was alive. I knew that when I went back to the O.R., the girl who was dying on the table would be lying in a bed, intact and dead.
I dropped to my knees outside the hospital, and once again, I prayed. “Please, help me understand. Am I helping? Is this good for anyone? Are you testing me? And if so, why, dear God, why?”
I finished by asking Him to bless everyone, and then I went back to work. I spoke to all my patients. I held their hands, told them that they would be okay, and I closed the eyes of the ones that died.
That afternoon, I walked over to the radio and shut off the Red Sox game. I had no idea if my team was winning or losing, and for the first time in my memory, I didn’t care.
Chapter 17
THE LOUDSPEAKER crackled and squealed, and then Jup’s amplified voice boomed, “Wounded at the gates. We’ve got incoming wounded.”
Sabeena and I had been making beds, but we dropped everything and ran for the donkey cart where Jemilla and Aziza had already grabbed places in the back.
I knew this donkey. Colin had named him Bollocks, and he was wicked stubborn. Sabeena took the reins, clucked her tongue, slapped the reins against his back, saying, “Come on, Bollocks, you old goat. Let’s go.”
But, while he brayed, twitched his tail, and stomped his feet, he wouldn’t move forward, not an inch. And we didn’t have time to waste.
I got out of the cart and went around to his head, where I scratched his forehead, wiped some dirt out of his eyes, palmed his muzzle. And I said, “Bollocks, please, no funny business. Be good. I’ll make it up to you. Do we have a deal?”
When I got back to the cart, I saw that Father Delahanty was sitting in back with the girls. Colin started up his Land Rover, and Victoria and two boys got in.
We followed Colin, choking on his dust, and when we reached the gates, they were wide open.
Gunshot victims had been dropped right there, where they waited for help outside our gates. Some were alive; all of them were a warning. The moans and cries of the wounded were horrific and almost unbelievable. It was as if a Breughel painting, The Triumph of Death, had come to life between the gateposts of our settlement.
I scrambled out of the cart and ran with my bag, passing wounded UN workers as well as our own downed people. Father Delahanty was right behind me, and Sabeena was bringing up the rear. My eyes were on the wounded, lying in the dust, many of them writhing in agony. I never noticed the Grays, boiling up over the riverbank on foot, until they were spraying bullets at us with their AKs.
Nothing about my life in Boston could have prepared me for an attack like this. Father Delahanty grabbed me by the arm, and we ran back through our useless chain-link gates. Everyone who could flee was doing so, and I saw the young men, our self-appointed volunteer militia, along with UN workers, staging a defense.
Sabeena had been racing ahead of me and was now standing at the cart. I ran toward her. And then I felt a sudden weight on my arm, Father Delahanty pulling me down. I knew he had stumbled, and I whipped around to help him to his feet. But he hadn’t simply fallen. He’d been hit. I dropped to the ground beside him.
“William. Father. Hang on. Help is coming. We’ve got you.”
He rolled to his side and coughed up blood. I looked around for help. Colin was leaning across the hood of his Land Rover, firing on the Grays, who were now coming through the gates.
I yelled, “Sabeena! Help me!”
She had her hands full. The girls were with her. Bullets were flying. I wasn’t sure that she had even heard me.
I said to Father Delahanty, “I’m going to help you up. You have to help me get you to your feet. Grip my forearm.”
But he didn’t do it.
He was losing so much blood. He was going into shock.
And then he said in a whisper, “It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”
“You have to get up,” I said. I was frantic.
“I must confess.”
I sat back down beside him and held his hand. I wanted to fall on his chest and cry, but I contained my sobs and tried to keep my voice even.
“Tell me,” I said.
Chapter 18
COLIN SWORE all the way back to the hospital. Victoria sat in the backseat with me, held me while I sobbed. Behind us, in the rear section, was the dead body of my new, late friend, Father William Delahanty.
I knew so little about him, but enough to know how good he was, enough to be able to speak over his grave, enough to be able to tell his parishioners and friends in Chicago how kind he was and how bravely he had died.
If only I could.
I stared out the window at the dust flying up from our tires, turning everything outside the car an opaque ocher-brown.
I was picturing the devastation we had just left at the gates. I didn’t know how many people had just died, but I thought all of our attackers had been shot or had run away. Still, I was sure that this skirmish was not the full force of Zuberi’s army.
The young Gray murderers were scouts or recent recruits, wearing the rebel group’s colors and leaving bodies and the letter Z before the real onslaught began.
We parked outside the hospital. Eyes followed me from the waiting benches to the O.R., but I was single-mindedly looking for Ahmed and Rafi. I found them stoking the fire for boiling water and asked them to take Father Delahanty’s body out of Colin’s car and put him in the O.R. until I could tend to him.
I went back through the O.R., and I got a bottle of water from the shelf over the sink. Half the water was for me. I went out to the cart and poured the other half into Bollocks’s mouth. I patted his shoulder. I talked to him about what a horrible day this had been.
“It’s not over yet, Mr. B.”
Sabeena came outside and stood next to me.
“I can’t find Jemilla.”
“But…she was with you. I saw her in the cart.”
“I turned my back to help a woman into the cart, and she disappeared. I shouted, I looked, but we had to go. And now I can’t find her anywhere.”
“And Aziza?”
“She doesn’t know where Jemilla is.”
Jemilla didn’t come back to the hospital, and I was pulled into so many pieces, I couldn’t look for her. No one could. I worked with Victoria. I assisted Jup. Jimmy assisted me. By the time Colin came back on duty, we had a collection of extracted shells in a quart-sized pickle jar, and patients sleeping against the outer walls of the building, all the way around.
I went to bed knowing that I had to find a beloved child and bury a friend in the morning.
Chapter 19
WHEN I woke up in the heat of my room, I was immediately flooded with dread. Where was Jemilla?
I dressed quickly and jogged to the O.R. Father Delahanty’s body had been wrapped in a sheet marked with a cross and was lying in the back of the donkey cart. More bodies were being carried into the cart, all to be buried in a single, large grave, as there was no other way to do it.
But I would be there for Father Delahanty.
Or so I planned.
Colin came over to the wagon and said, “Brigid. We found Jemilla. She was shot—no. No. She’s alive. But she’s asking for you. She won’t let anyone else examine her.”
“I’m coming. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Colin turned his back to me, but he didn’t leave.
I sat beside the priest who had spoken his last words to me. I prayed, “Dear Lord, please look after this good man, Your servant, whom I came to love so quickly. I promised him I would tell his friends what happened to him. And that he was in Your care when he died. Thank You, God. Amen.”
I wiped my cheeks, and when Colin turned back to me, he helped me down from the cart.
Jemilla was lying on top of the bed
ding in one of the iron-frame beds in the O.R. She pulled her shirt away and showed me the bullet wound in her right arm, just above the elbow.
“Oh, darling,” I said. “This really hurts, doesn’t it?”
“I wrapped a piece of cloth around it tightly until the wound stopped bleeding,” she said.
I grinned at her. “That was exactly the right thing to do.”
I examined the wound. The bullet had gone through the back of her skinny biceps and had exited in the front. I asked her, “Where were you? Why didn’t you come to me or anyone here?”
“I passed out,” she said, shrugging. “How bad is it?”
“I’m going to look at this with an X-ray. But I think that shot missed the bone. That’s pretty amazing.”
“I can still shoot with my right hand?”
“Hold out your arm. Make a fist.”
She did it.
“You’re good,” I said.
“Okay,” Jemilla said. “I’d like to go to sleep now.”
I cleaned and closed the wound, and when I was finished, I asked Colin to carry Jemilla to my room.
After we’d tucked Jemilla into my bed, Colin said, “I need to talk to you, Brigid. And I don’t want you to fight me. Please. Just do what I say.”
“What, Colin? What are you talking about?”
“You must go home. There’s nowhere to hide. This hospital, this camp, is going to be overrun by Zuberi, and you know it.”
I switched my eyes to the girl in my bed, but Colin kept speaking. “It’s inevitable, Brigid. This place, what we’re doing here. It’s turned into a bloody suicide mission. You have to get out. And better a few days early than one minute too late.”
I took in a ragged breath and tried to absorb what he was telling me.
I asked him, “And you?”
“I’m going back to England as soon as I can arrange it. I’ve made calls. I’ll make calls for you.”
The breath went out of me. I looked down at the dirt floor of my room, feeling bereft. My heart was broken in more ways than I knew a heart could break.
Colin reached out and gripped my shoulders. I looked up, of course, and he pulled me close. And he kissed me. I kissed him, too. I never wanted the kiss to end, but for those few moments, I felt that nothing else was real.
And then the kiss did end. Colin dropped his arms and said to me, “I’ve tried so desperately hard to just be your friend, Brigid. I just couldn’t bear to care about you and to lose you.
“Please do what I say, dear. Please go home.”
Chapter 20
I WAS having a very vivid dream.
In it, Father Delahanty was alive. He was seated inside the confessional, and I was on the other side of the screen. I couldn’t see his face, but it was definitely him, and he was earnestly explaining something, possibly arguing with me, but whatever he was saying, it was important.
And then his words were flushed out of my head by someone shaking my shoulder.
“Brigid,” said Sabeena. “They found the BLM soldiers.” I had been sleeping in the buff. I grabbed the sheet up around me and said, “What? Where?”
“There was a massacre about fifty miles north of here. There may be survivors.”
I blinked at her, open mouthed.
“Snap out of it, Doctor,” she said. She tousled my hair. “We have to go.”
“We’re leaving?”
“Correct. Please clothe yourself and hurry to the O.R.”
She put a bottle of water and an energy bar on the stump of wood next to my bed and fled.
A massacre? Please, God, let that be a gross exaggeration. I talked to myself as I dressed, swore like mad until I found my left shoe. Then I pocketed the energy bar, grabbed my kit, and headed out.
Sabeena was waiting for me on a bench outside the operating room. She had her kit, and a canteen was strapped across her chest. I ducked into the O.R., filled a canteen, and snatched up the mini X-ray machine. After that, we climbed aboard the donkey cart, and Sabeena took the helm.
Sabeena had well-developed intuition and was right more often than anyone I knew. She had been known to anticipate incoming wounded before trucks, carts, or helicopters arrived, and—more than I could do—predict whether a patient was going to survive or die. She was superb at reading moods, too.
Now she said, “I had a very bad feeling when those soldiers left the settlement. Sometimes I hate to be right.”
Our cart rolled out down the dirt track that passed between our compound and the tukuls. We passed families clustered around cooking fires and children playing in the dirt, and by the time we reached the gates, the whacka-whacka din of a descending helicopter made me cover my ears.
Colin was already there, waiting for the chopper to land. He and Bailey got out of the Land Rover, followed by Jimmy and Vander. Colin walked toward me, scowling as he said, “Brigid, Sabeena, no. You can’t come with us. Don’t even think of arguing with me.”
Sabeena jumped down from our cart, pulled her satchel after her, and said, “I don’t work for you, Dr. Whitehead. I go where I’m needed. And if you don’t like it, you can go to hell.”
I grabbed my kit and got out of the cart after Sabeena.
I yelled over the racket, “I don’t work for you, either, Doctor!”
Colin was exasperated, but he was clearly trying to control his temper. He stepped in front of me, blocking my way.
“Brigid,” he said at full volume, a foot from my face, “the intelligence on this so-called military action is sketchy. We don’t know what we’re going to find. The four of us,” he said, sweeping his hand to take in the three other male doctors, “will assess the damage and transport survivors back to hospital. The best thing you can do is be ready for us, get it?”
I shouted back, “Colin, we’re coming! We’ll make ourselves useful, I promise.”
“Why are you so stubborn?”
I glared at him. “Are you stubborn?”
The helicopter landed. It was a large Mi-8, a Russian-made aircraft, common in South Sudan. This one had the blue UN logo on its tail section. The rotors sent up a blinding dust storm.
Sabeena and I ran toward the chopper, her incongruous pink Skechers slapping the dirt.
I wondered what her intuition was telling her now.
Chapter 21
SABEENA AND I sat next to each other in the cargo bay of the huge helicopter. We took turns peering through a scratched Plexiglas window as the helicopter flew over the battlefield, the engine and the rotors providing the sound track to the hellish sight below.
I saw hundreds of bodies. Some were in heaps, and others lay like far-flung sticks as far as I could see.
As the helicopter descended, I identified the uniforms of the dead. Many wore the camouflage and red scarves of the Gray Army, but the BLM, in gray-and-green fatigues, outnumbered the Grays two to one.
I didn’t know many of the BLM soldiers personally, but I felt that I knew them all. Most were Americans my age, from small-town USA and from cities like Boston. They had come here to help these savagely victimized and disadvantaged people whose roots they shared.
Because of their selflessness, these brave kids had died not only terribly but anonymously. Not even their bodies would go home. There were no refrigerated trucks in South Sudan. The BLM dead might be photographed for later identification, or not. But for certain, the corpses of both armies would be bulldozed into mass graves.
Our helicopter touched down, rocking on its struts. The engine whined, and the pilot shut it down. Colin helped me out of the cargo bay, and for a moment, he held me above him and looked into my eyes.
I wanted to say something meaningful, but I was still annoyed with him. I couldn’t find the right words—and then, the moment was gone. My feet pounded the ground as I ran across the flat and stinking field, sending up flights of vultures as my colleagues and I looked among the bloated bodies for signs of life.
The immense number of bodies finally stopped me cold
.
I stood on the flat, brown field that stretched from nowhere to nowhere else and took in a panoramic view. My first estimate had been wrong. There weren’t hundreds of corpses. There were thousands. The BLM soldiers had been shot, and many had also been hacked with machetes and decapitated.
A hot wind blew the stench of decomposition across the field. Tears sheeted down my face. No healing would be done today.
And then I heard Sabeena shout, “Over here!”
She was hunched over a body that seemed to be twitching. I ran with my kit in hand, sliding the last few yards on my knees to where the wounded soldier lay. His breathing was ragged, and I counted six bullet holes punched into his bloody uniform. Somehow, he still held on to his life.
“We need a stretcher!” Sabeena shouted out through cupped hands. “Stay here,” she said to me, and then she ran toward our chopper.
I lifted the young man’s head into my lap and gave him a sip of water from my canteen. He coughed and asked for more.
I gave him another sip, and I pinched his thigh.
“Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“Can you move your feet?”
His expression told me he thought that he had moved them, but I was sure he was paralyzed from the waist down.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Nick,” he said. “Givens. My parents live in Biloxi.” He gasped. He grabbed at the chain around his neck, pulled it over his head, and pushed it and his dog tags into my hands.
“Givens. Melba and Roy. They work. At the high school.”
I said, “Nick, you have to keep your ID with you,” but he shook his head and looked at me with huge, pleading eyes. He knew that he had very little time left.
I said, “I’ll find them.”
I was holding the young man’s hand when automatic gunfire sounded behind me.
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