Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

“Yes. Daniel Ellsworth. He’s a producer for EBS, an educational cable network.”

  “He knows these crates?”

  She shook her head. Ellsworth was oblivious to them, and she meant to keep it that way. The less he knew, the safer everyone would be. “Let’s get these open,” she said, kneeling to the red Mastercraft toolbox she’d scored from one of the Canadians. She pulled out a sixteen-inch pry bar and a hefty slot screwdriver.

  Jasha took the screwdriver. “The wood. I want the wood.”

  Even the crates were negotiable. Cut into smaller pieces they could be burned for heat. Brenna knew the value of firewood in a city already denuded of its trees so she always ordered wooden crates. A smile quirked the corner of her mouth. “As part of your pay?”

  He nodded. “For my mother. She is cold all winter. I will drive you one extra day.”

  “Okay.” She tucked her chin against her chest and nailed him with a mocking look. “But—suggestion, Jasha? You want something, never say it’s for your mother. A tone of…gentleness…comes into your voice. And that’s a dead giveaway. Anyone other than me would charge you five times as much for it.”

  “Anyone else I negotiate with thinks my mother is dead.”

  She smiled. “The wood is yours.”

  “Ha! You see? You Americans are so sentimental. I would trade two days driving to get this.”

  At the table in the bar, Daniel stood over Geoff. “Roll up your sleeves,” he ordered.

  “Darling,” Geoff declared. “If you want to undress me we should go up to my room. No need to shock the others.”

  “Cut the bullshit, Geoff, and show me your arms.”

  Geoff clasped his hands on the table and laced his fingers. “Oho! You’ve been talking to Miss Marple, girl detective. How long have you known her, Danno? A week? Two? You and I go a hell of a lot further back than that. How come she ranks so high?”

  “Do it.”

  “I don’t see a trust thing—”

  Daniel caught Geoff’s wrist, held his arm out straight, and slid the threadbare T-Shirt up his arm. “Jesus.” He let go in horror. Tracks. And lots of them.

  Geoff yanked his arm back and slapped the sleeve into place again.

  “Jesus, Geoff.” Daniel pulled a chair out and sat in shock across from his old school friend. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Geoff licked his lips nervously. “Can I order a drink?”

  “No.”

  Geoff fished in his T-shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, lit one and sucked in a defiant lungful of smoke. “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t lived it.”

  “Try. I want to know how a friend of mine fell from the top of the world into the pit of hell.”

  Geoff picked a bit of tobacco off his lip and took another deep drag. “It’s scary at first, but you’re attracted to it in this primitive, macho kind of way. You want to test yourself, see if you can take it on, like a contest. It’s the ultimate challenge. Life and death. But you don’t know what to expect until the first time. And then—my God—the rush of it, the sheer excitement, the intensity. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever experienced. All your senses come alive. Vision, hearing, taste. And oh, the sex. Everything else falls away and all you want is more.”

  “More drugs.”

  “No. Not drugs, Daniel. War. It’s war that’s addictive, war that’s so intoxicating. It makes everything so simple. Everyone’s in the same boat, stripped of pretense, just trying to survive. You and the next guy live through a firefight, and you’re best friends. You’re not alone, especially in the press corps. Plus, you have a story, a sense of higher purpose, and it all seems so important.” Geoff’s cigarette trembled in his fingers. He put it to his lips again.

  “But then—?”

  Geoff ticked off his ashes. “Then you discover it’s a sham. There are no good guys, no bad guys, no freedom to make moral choices. It’s luck: Step on a mine. Get shot through your window. Live through the day. Whatever. There’s no God looking down.” He sucked the last toxic lungful out of his cigarette and crushed the butt into the ashtray, systematically smothering every last burning ember. “Journalists—we’re not observers here. We’re participants. We all get punished for what we see.”

  “Christ, Geoff. Come home.”

  “Home?” He snorted. “There’s no path out of here.” He glanced over Daniel’s shoulder. “Hey! Look who’s coming. Lady Crusader, all freshened up. By the way, there’s a pool going, about who’s gonna get his prick past her panties. Pot’s rich, too. She hasn’t been banged since she got here, so she’s gotta be—”

  “Stop it. You’re being crude and disrespectful.”

  Geoff raised his voice “Hey, Brenna—”

  Daniel leapt to his feet and blocked Geoff’s view of her with his body. Knuckles on the table, shoulders high, he leaned across and put his face in Geoff’s. “I said, enough.”

  Geoff’s eyes slid appraisingly over him. “Well, well. Milord doth fancy the Lady Lavender. He defends her honor.”

  Brenna’s shadow reached the table. She tipped her head, regarding their interaction. “Provoking the silverback, Garrett?”

  Geoff opened his mouth to speak, then just stared at her. “Gee. I can’t think of a riposte. Must be time for my magic potion—right after I go toss a chunk of money in the betting pool.” He pushed back his chair, grasped the table for support, and rose like an old man with Parkinson’s. Shuffling forward, he caught his toe on a chair and stumbled.

  Daniel caught his inner arm and steadied him. “I’ll help you get home, Geoff. Find you a rehab center…”

  Geoff squeezed Daniel’s shoulder. “You’re such a clueless fuck,” he said, and punched him fondly. “Have fun in town.”

  Daniel didn’t release Geoff. “Did you do anything for the money I advanced you?”

  “Oh! Yes, yes, yes. I forgot.” He patted his pants and pulled a narrow notepad from his right rear pocket. The cover was cracked from wear, its graphite-smudged pages thick from handling. “It’s all in here,” he said, flapping it against his open palm for emphasis. “Ruthless generals. Righteous insurgents. International indifference, and of course the usual shelling, shooting, and rape.” He picked up Daniel’s hand and pressed the notepad into it. “I bequeath it to you. Works in any country. All you have to do is fill in the names and change the dates.”

  Standing beside Brenna, Daniel watched Geoff shuffle out of sight, a once-good man incrementally eroded into this ruin.

  She unzipped a pouch on the side of her backpack “Here.”

  “What?”

  She withdrew a new three-by-five spiral notebook and a half-pencil with a just-sharpened point. “Just in case you decide not to use Geoff’s notes.”

  The VW Golf’s headlights panned across the garage. It looked like a parking lot at a demolition derby. Every car in sight was junked or bullet-riddled.

  Daniel clung to the Jesus strap in the back seat of the battered green car as the fixer, Jasha, roared up the parking lot ramp into a gray and drizzly day. The front seat of the car was loaded with boxes, so Brenna was sitting in the back with him, leaning against the opposite door. Her face was taut with apprehension, her grasp on her camera so fierce her knuckles looked like white knobs. As soon as they hit daylight, Daniel heard the city’s unrelenting heartbeat. Poom, poom, poom—visually accompanied by billows of smoke erupting from the mountainside across the river.

  “Hold on!” Jasha shouted. He floored the gas and accelerated savagely across two hundred yards of open parking surface. The car fishtailed wildly on the rain-slick pavement. Jasha hit the brakes and spun the wheel hard left. The wheels screeched and the VW started sliding sideways.

  Daniel shuddered. We’re gonna flip.

  But Jasha maintained control and the car sped neatly out onto the boulevard that ran through the center of the city. Leaning forward over the steering wheel, Jasha zoomed ahead. His eyes darted everywhere, even upward, assessing danger. Driving one-hande
d he sped through the downtown business section with the speedometer needle vibrating at the hundred kilometer mark. Sixty miles an hour.

  Images flashed past the car like a tail of film spitting wildly out of a projector: gutted buildings, a businessman with an attaché case running from sniper fire, a burned-out car that looked like rusted lace, truck trailers stacked two-high to give cover from snipers, rubble plowed into berms that stretched for blocks, traffic medians crowded with grave markers.

  It was so wrong, Daniel thought. The streets should be swept, the buildings intact. People should be shopping, taking their kids to school, greeting their neighbors on the way to work.

  Jasha leaned on the horn at an open intersection with an angular branch to the left that led up a mountain, and an acute angle to the right that led to the river. He shouted a warning, then jammed the brakes and turned the wheel hard left. The VW veered, fishtailed off the main boulevard and bounced into the two ruts that snaked up a steep road crowded by bombed-out houses that looked like executed civilians crumpled to the ground.

  The car began the ascent, picking through the carcasses.

  Out the back window, Daniel’s eye caught something rare. Open space. An unobstructed view down a wide boulevard to the river—and a thicket of tanks, mortars, and rocket launchers bristling on the mountain ridge across the river. All aimed this way.

  Smoke puffed in the gray haze hanging over the mountain. Shells. Headed right for them.

  He looked at Brenna in terrible realization.

  All the color deserted her face. “Jasha!”

  Jasha punched the gas and the Golf’s engine shrieked. Brenna curled over her camera and covered her head with her hands. Daniel laid his arm across her back and cupped her head. Christ. Oh, Christ. He ducked, his heart banging wildly. They were totally exposed.

  Poom-poom-poom.

  Mortar burst behind the car and buffeted them forward. More fired off the mountainside. Gunners were tracking their path, firing, reloading, and firing again. Explosions chased the car.

  Jasha squealed around an S-shaped bend. A shell detonated to their left. The concussion pawed the car like a giant grizzly, sweeping it sideways. The rear window burst and tempered glass, dirt, and thick smoke billowed into the car. Debris banged the roof, the hood, the trunk. Jasha cursed fluently and fought the wheel. The Golf caromed from side to side, up and over the ruts and onto piled refuse. Chunks of rubble and loose garbage thumped the undercarriage.

  Sweat ran down Jasha’s dirt-encrusted face in filthy streams.

  Dirt and tempered glass littered Daniel’s lap. He coughed hard and sent dust cascading off his hair. Wiping the earth from his face with the sleeve of his jacket, he spat the grit from his mouth.

  Brenna, hunched over her camera, didn’t move.

  Alarm shot through Daniel. “Brenna?” He shook her shoulder. Dirt and cubes of glass slid off her back. “Brenna.” He pulled her shoulder, sitting her up. “Brenna, look at me.”

  She stared blankly.

  “Jasha! There’s something wrong with her!”

  Jasha glanced in the rear view mirror.

  Daniel knelt on the seat beside her. Was she even breathing? He tipped her head back and watched. Her chest rose. Air intake sounded clear. He took the camera off her lap, set it on the boxes in the front seat, and quickly checked her. No bleeding, no limbs akimbo, no visible injuries.

  What the hell was wrong? He took her face in his hands. “Brenna. Brenna. Can you hear me?”

  She cocked her head slightly in his direction, like someone trying to pinpoint a distant sound.

  Jasha frowned. “Two minutes to hospital,” he said. He shoved the gearshift upward, cleared the curve to the straightaway, and sped onward with the blown-out front right tire flapping against the pavement.

  Poom, poom-poom. Shells started coming off the ridge east of the hospital now, closer and louder than the mortars from the river.

  “We are almost at hospital,” Jasha shouted. The complex lay ahead. “I will stop fifteen seconds. No more. Nationalists shell hospital. Get Brenna inside. Fifteen seconds only.”

  “Brenna,” Daniel said to her. “When we get to the hospital we’re going to get out on my side of the car, okay?” He spoke with a calm he didn’t feel, keeping his voice deep and soft, hoping she would tune into the tranquility he was trying to convey. He lifted her feet to his side of the floorwell and pulled her hips closer, readying them to get out.

  Jasha banged his fist into the horn and blew a series of frenzied warnings. Brenna startled. Under a mortar-ravaged portico a woman in nursing whites opened a wood-covered door to receive them.

  “We’re here,” Daniel told Brenna. “We’re going to get out of the car as fast as we can, okay?”

  Jasha screeched to a halt. Daniel pulled the handle and flung the door open. He got his feet onto the pavement then ducked back inside to guide her out. “Come on, honey.” He reached across her lap, slid her nearer the door, and swung her legs out.

  “Hurry,” Jasha warned. “Hurry.”

  Brenna stumbled awkwardly to her feet.

  “Go, go, go!” Jasha shouted, clunking the car into gear.

  Brenna swayed. Jasha screeched away, rear door swinging. At the entrance, the nurse called and waved frantically. Daniel chucked Brenna over his shoulder and ran for the entry.

  The Nationalists fired from the ridge.

  Two shells landed in quick succession, shuddering the ground, spattering the receiving area with debris.

  The nurse yanked Daniel through the door, and slammed it shut behind him.

  Panic gurgled in Brenna’s throat.

  “Shh,” he said—as if that negated the power of artillery over a fragile human body. “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.” He followed the nurse past boiling knots of wounded civilians to an ankle-high canvas litter that scarcely cleared the filthy floor. He lowered Brenna onto it cupping her head as she buckled.

  The nurse pulled a stethoscope out of her pocket, crouched before her and saw her clearly for the first time. “Oh! Brenna.” She recognized her. The nurse asked her a question in Kavsak. He didn’t know what it translated as, but it scarcely mattered. Brenna was too dazed to answer. The nurse turned to him and rapid-fired questions at him. What happened? That would be the logical question, so he answered: “Explosions,” illustrating his meaning with hand gestures and the sound effect.

  The nurse assessed her rapidly, signaled him to wait, and threaded her way through the teeming triage area to a treatment area behind the nurse’s station. She stopped beside a woman in a once-white lab coat who was wrapping gauze around a black-haired boy’s eyes. Daniel made out the words Brenna Rease. The doctor lifted her head with sudden interest. Here? she seemed to say. Where? The nurse pointed. The doctor leaned in and conferred with her, eyes never leaving Brenna. Handing the roll of gauze to an assistant, she strode toward them.

  The woman was fifty-ish, with straight black collar-length hair that had a broad swath of white in the forelock. She exuded an air of weary competence that inspired confidence at first glance. She sat on her heels in front of Brenna, cocked her head, and silently scrutinized her, her eyes poring over Brenna’s body. The doctor possessed a remarkable air of stillness, of focus. He bet that only Brenna existed for her at that moment.

  Suddenly, a noisy band of civilians burst inside the emergency area, shouting, carrying a man with blood running down his face. Mortar rounds followed their arrival, setting off a new round of curses and cries in the room. Brenna shuddered violently.

  The doctor stood. “Come on,” she said in English. “We have to get her out of this chaos.”

  “Bren. Can you stand up?”

  Brenna uncomprehendingly lifted her face to his.

  Hands around her waist, he pulled her to her feet, draped her arm around his shoulder. She stumbled. He pulled her closer to his side, bearing most of her weight. “Here we go,” he said, and followed the doctor, murmuring encouragement, doubting s
he understood him in any specific way.

  Lurching down the hallway, he followed the doctor into a storeroom stacked with boxes. The doctor indicated the small bed nestled among the stacks, and he eased Brenna onto the mattress. She jerked, dug her hands in, gripping it, and began to shake uncontrollably.

  Daniel sat beside her, chafing her back with his hands.

  Oh, she groaned. Oh.

  A shaft of light split the room. The nurse entered with a syringe. Pulling Brenna’s shirt from the back of her pants, she grasped a fold of skin, and smoothly injected a clear fluid. Brenna leaned heavily into his shoulder.

  “What now?” he asked the doctor, worried and perplexed by Brenna’s symptoms.

  “She’ll sleep for a while.”

  “Then?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Then we’ll see. I’m Mariana, by the way. Mariana Lazarov.” Her English was American. He figured she’d studied in the States.

  “Daniel Ellsworth,” he said quietly, covering Brenna’s ear so the conversation wouldn’t wake her. “What’s going on with her?”

  “She’s had a psychological break. We see it a lot. It’s a type of emotional self-defense—a detachment of oneself when the stimulus becomes overwhelming, accompanied by a reduced awareness of one’s surroundings, a feeling of unreality, even amnesia for an important part of the trauma.”

  “Is it permanent?”

  “It can be long-lasting, yes. With her, it’s difficult to assess if this is an acute episode triggered by the drive up here, or an exacerbation of a long-standing post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, starting after the events in Tel Aviv—“

  Tel Aviv?

  “—Probably a mix of the two. No one can endure this city forever. Even Brenna, who is so adept at crushing her emotions. Of course, that control is also her undoing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The best treatment is getting her to talk about what happened. She has to process what she sees, not lock it inside as she does.”

  “What was the injection?”

  “A light tranquilizer. I want to give her body a break,” she said. “Tell me. Did something in particular happen on the drive up here?”