Between Here and the Horizon

by Callie Hart

  A lead weight dropped through me, pulling at my insides, making my head reel. Fuck. Ronan. Ronan was hurt. Ronan was dead. Ronan had been captured, and was about to be executed on national television. A thousand gut-churning possibilities raced through me simultaneously. “What is it? What’s happened, Private? Spit it out, for fuck’s sake.” I was close to slapping him.

  “He’s sick, sir. Or at least we think he is.”

  “How? How is he sick?”

  “He’s just sitting on the floor. He won’t get up. It’s like…like he can’t hear us or something. We took the building back. We killed nearly every single one of those bastards. We were celebrating, cheering and whatever, and that’s when Simmons saw Captain Fletcher fall. He thought he’d been shot, but…there’s nothing wrong with him as far as we can see. He’s just…lying there.”

  “Have you radioed it in?”

  The private shook his head. “No, sir. We knew you were on mission. We thought we’d better, y’know…come find you first.”

  “Right. Thank you.” Definitely not the protocol Ronan’s unit should have followed, but I was glad they hadn’t called in medics. The reason they’d held off was obvious; Ronan was in shock. Shock was one of those things. You could snap out of it in a heartbeat, like nothing had ever happened, or it could cripple you for the rest of your life. Either way, there was nothing a medic could do that I couldn’t at the moment. “Take me to him.” And then, to my own men, I said, “Head back to base. Go eat. I’ll be back in a moment. If anyone asks, I came back with you, okay?” As one, the guys all nodded. Even Rogers.

  Fifteen minutes later, my shirt pulled up over my mouth to filter out the dust as I ran, the private led me to Ronan. He was sitting up, back leaned against the skeleton of a burned-out Jeep, and his face was splattered with blood. Hands, too. Uniform soaked. It was everywhere. He looked like some crazed serial killer, drunk from the high of the kill.

  I sank down into a crouch in front of him, placing my hands on his shoulders. “Jesus, man. You’re a mess.” I tried to smile, but it felt wrong, like I was probably grimacing instead.

  Somewhere, someone said, “Holy shit. I heard he had a twin, but that shit is bonafide crazy.”

  Ronan blinked; his eyelashes were clumped, dried blood caking them together. “Hey,” he said. He was dazed, his pupils unfocused. “Heard you were out tonight, too.”

  “Yeah, man. Doing clearance. No drama on our end. What’s the deal with you, though? You taking a moment to get your shit together?” I laughed, trying to make light of the fact that it looked like Ronan was seriously fucked up.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I just need a minute is all. You think…you think you could…?” Glancing around, he gestured toward his men.

  “Of course. Of course. You stay here, okay. I’ll be right back.”

  I rallied his guys quickly, ordering them back to base with the few prisoners who remained alive. None of them seemed like they wanted to leave Ronan, but they did as they were told, anyway. We weren’t alone. There was still plenty of military personnel knocking around, sifting through the rubble, looking for survivors or escaped fighters. It was safe for the moment, or as safe as Afghanistan ever got, anyway.

  “Ronan? Ronan, what happened, man?” I sat down next to my brother, talking quietly. His eyelids flickered, but he kept staring straight ahead, refusing to look at me.

  “There was a man,” he said slowly. “A man. He was trying to take a weapon from one of the dead bodies over there,” he said, pointing. It was hard to see the bodies he was talking about amongst all of the debris on the ground, but I nodded. “And I was here,” he continued. “There was so much smoke in the air. I couldn’t see really well, but I took my gun, and I aimed and fired. I missed twice. He had enough time to free the weapon he was trying to take, and he started firing at me. Screaming. He was screaming so loud. I could hear him, over the other gunfire and everyone else yelling and shouting. This…this high-pitched wailing sound. It was awful. I fired again. And again. And again. Eventually he went down. The wailing didn’t stop, though. He was still, wasn’t moving. I was sure he was dead, but the crying just wouldn’t stop. And then the dust cleared a little, and I saw…I saw. He wasn’t a man. He was a woman. And the crying…”

  He trailed off, his words sounding thick and distorted in his throat. A tear welled up and fell, streaking down his face, cutting a pathway through the blood and dirt and sweat that stained his skin. “The wailing finally stopped. A long, long time, though. It carried on for a long time, Sully.”

  “It’s okay, man. It’s okay.” I threw an arm around him and pulled him into me, feeling sick. Ronan fought to breathe, panting in short, sharp, shallow blasts that made his ribcage rise and fall erratically.

  “You have to go. You have to see,” he said. “You have to find out for me.”

  “No, Ronan. Let’s just get you back to base, okay? Get you washed and some caffeine inside you. I think Daniels has some whiskey stashed—”

  “Fuck, man, just go and see!” Ronan bucked against me, trying to get to his feet. There was a wild, horrific look in his eye that said he’d go over there and look himself if only he could figure out how to stand up.

  “All right. All right.” I pushed him back, forcing him to sit. “All right. I’ll go, I promise.”

  The walk over to the woman Ronan had shot was the longest walk of my life. They say time stretched in situations like this, and it really did. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to confirm what Ronan suspected. When I made it to the foot of the stairwell across the other side of the street, a body lay prone on the ground, and I immediately saw the long, messy braid of hair sticking out of the material wrapped around the head. The hands, still gripping hold of the rifle, were small and delicately cut, though incredibly dirty, muck shored up in crescents under the nails.

  Stooping, I ripped the Band-Aid off quickly and rolled the body over.

  There, just as Ronan expected, was the baby.

  Maybe a year old. He’d lost one of his socks, though somehow retained the other. White, dirty, with Converse printed along the sole. I didn’t even know Converse made socks that small. His skin was pale, his tiny hands clenched into fists. His eyes—pale blue. Striking. Unusual—were open. Through his left shoulder, a neat hole the size of a dime had ripped through his little t-shirt, and a stream of now black blood had poured free, staining the concrete beneath him.

  “Is it dead?” Ronan yelled. “Is…is the baby dead?”

  God. How to tell him? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  I closed the baby’s eyes.

  Gritting my teeth, I stood up, turned around, and walked away. “There was no baby, Ro. It’s just a guy. Just a guy with long hair, that’s all.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Conundrum

  The hangover to end all hangovers.

  That’s what they were going to have to put down on the cause of death section of my death record. Because this hangover wasn’t just a hangover. It was brutal. Vicious. Personally wanted me to suffer. And boy, was I suffering.

  “Here. Take these.” Rose held out two small white pills, and I tossed them back without even asking what they were. She wasn’t the type to keep random, unmarked pills in her purse, so I knew they couldn’t be too bad. Chugging the glass of water she handed me to wash them down, I felt my gag reflexes stretching their legs again. I’d already thrown up once. I wasn’t really looking forward to doing it again. I lay back on the bed, the back of my hand resting against my forehead like some medieval damsel in distress, and Amie snickered under her breath. I cracked an eyelid open.

  “What are you giggling at, you little monster?”

  She grinned, burying her face into the mattress next to me. She was sprawled out on her front beside me, wearing an oversized t-shirt of Ronan’s that scraped the floor whenever she stood up. “You,” she informed me. “You’re making funny noises.”

  She was referring to my groaning; every few seconds it fel
t very necessary to groan as loud and as long as I could manage. “I’m not feeling well. I’m allowed to make funny noises.”

  “She had too much to drink,” Connor added. Slowly, in tiny increments, Connor was coming back to life after Ronan’s death. He still played the part of angry little boy very well, but he actually responded when you spoke to him now, and this morning he’d voluntarily followed Amie into my room and parked himself in the chair by the window, book in hand. Rose had stopped by to return some salad bowls I’d loaned her from the house for the party and found me miserably trying to make them breakfast. Packing me back off to bed, she’d fed the kids and brought me some dried toast, though I hadn’t touched it. Just the smell was making me feel nauseous.

  “Daddy drank too much sometimes,” Amie said.

  “He’d go running in the park,” Connor added. “He said it helped him feel better.”

  The prospect of walking anywhere, let alone running, made me want to retch. “I think I’ll just wait here until the room stops spinning if that’s okay with you guys.”

  Amie patted my hair with a sticky hand. “You want pancakes? Pancakes always make me feel better.”

  “I don’t think pancakes are gonna cut it this time, monster.” Amie looked horrified, like she couldn’t imagine a reality where this might possibly be true. Rose, on the other hand, looked like she sympathized all too well. I reached out and took her hand in mine. “Thank you. You drank twice as much as me so I have no idea how you’re functioning right now, but I’m very grateful.”

  “You’re welcome. What with the crappy weather and the short days, we’re all professional drinkers here. Stay too long and your tolerance will go through the roof, trust me.” Rose gave my hand a squeeze and smiled. “All right, you two. Let’s give Ophelia an hour or so to sleep, and we’ll go see if we can find any cool games to play in the cupboards. How about that?”

  Amie squealed with excitement. Connor kept quiet, but he got up out of the chair, hugging his book to his chest, and dutifully followed after Rose as she exited the room. He paused in the doorway, looking back at me over his shoulder.

  “Dad used to drink coffee with a raw egg in it, too. He always said that helped.”

  The advice was almost enough to send me rushing to the bathroom, hand clamped over my mouth, but I smiled and thanked him instead. A very short time ago, he would have said something scathing and enjoyed the fact that I was feeling shitty. Deflecting his anger toward Ronan onto me, and anyone else around him, had been a coping mechanism for him for so long. Dr. Fielding had said to give it some time, and there had been days over the past month when I thought he was never going to soften towards me, but gradually, slowly, it looked like Connor might be letting people in again.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. I tried to get comfortable in the bed, but it was futile. I felt like my bones were locked in their joints, my skin prickly and uncomfortable. After spinning around, getting tangled up in my sheets for what felt like a ridiculously long time, I gave up altogether and reached out for my nightstand—for Magda’s journal.

  Again, the need to read it was tempting. If I just gave in and read the entries in the journal, I’d have a direct line into the past. I’d know exactly what went down between Ronan, Sully and Magda, and I’d finally know why.

  But still…

  It just felt wrong.

  I finally dozed off, holding the journal in my hands. An hour later, Amie screamed with delight downstairs, waking me from fuzzy, uncomfortable dreams, and the guilt began to sink in. I was the shittiest guardian ever. If Sheryl knew I’d gotten drunk while Connor and Amie were being taken care of by a babysitter, she’d have them bundled up and on that boat and back to the mainland in a heartbeat.

  Never again. They were my responsibility now. I might not be able to take care of them for longer than six months, and I might not be able to persuade their uncle to take care of them, but I owed it to them to take care of them properly while they were still my wards. No more drinking. No more lying in bed, licking my wounds.

  I threw back the covers and proceeded to get dressed, all the while trying to shake off the conundrum that was Sully Fletcher. He was an enigma that I couldn’t afford to waste any more time on right now. Or at least for today. However, as I ran down the stairs, feeling marginally better than I did when I woke up, his face was still front and center of my mind.

  Escaping him seemed impossible.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sea King

  They say that tragedies come in threes. I’d never been a believer in fate or acts of God, per se, but when I woke up later that night to Connor screaming, voice hoarse, terror echoing through the house like a gunshot, I wasn’t shocked. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for something awful to happen, and now that I was going to be hit with the force of yet another disaster, I was already braced and ready for the impact. I scrambled down the hallway and into his room, mentally mapping out what I would do if he was sick or injured in some way. I already had a “go-bag” prepped and ready downstairs. The gas tank of the Land Rover was full. I knew the route to the tiny Causeway medical center like the back of my hand.

  I crashed through Connor’s door, rushing to his bed, but he wasn’t in it.

  “Look!” He was standing at the window in just his pajama bottoms, narrow chest bare, ribcage on show. His rainbow-striped hat was missing from his head—probably the first time I’d seen him without it since Ronan had died.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Connor, tell me what’s wrong!” I ran my hands over his body, looking for something out of place. Looking for blood.

  “I’m fine. I’m okay. Look, out there! Can you see?” He handed me his scuffed up binoculars, urging me closer to the window, pressing the palm of his hand against the pane of the glass. “Out there. In the dark. There’s a light. There are people in the water.”

  Outside, the night was black as murder. Black as ink. How he could see anything out there was a mystery. I took the binoculars and looked through them, though, squinting into the dark. Nothing. I couldn’t see anything.

  “No, not there. Here.” Connor grabbed my hand and angled me to the left, huffing impatiently. “We have to do something. They need help!”

  Again, nothing. And then…light. A faint flicker of light, yellow and weak, somewhere out at sea. Four miles? Three? It was impossible to judge distance with no frame of reference and no daylight.

  “It’s just an oil tanker, Connor. Maybe a cruise ship? Come on, let’s get you back into bed.”

  “No. Look again. Look harder. It’s a boat. A sinking boat.”

  Sighing, I did as he asked. No way he was getting back into bed without me settling this once and for all. He’d had a bad dream, maybe. He spent so long looking out of these binoculars every day that it wasn’t surprising he was having nightmares, imagining all sorts of things happening out there on the water. “Okay, Connor. I can’t see anything. I really—”

  I stopped. The prow of a ship was breaching out of the water, right there where he’d said it was. My eyes were acclimating to the dark, and I could see more and more with every passing second.

  The light was a fire.

  The reflection of it shone out over the water, silhouetting the huge rise and swell of the waves—waves that had to be as tall as the house. Each time the water rose, I could see…

  My mind went blank.

  There was just no real way to comprehend what I was seeing. People. People in the water. The ship was much closer than I’d first thought. Not four miles. Not even three. It couldn’t have been much more than six or seven hundred feet from the shore.

  “Oh god. We have to call somebody.” Without thinking I wrapped my arm around Connor and hoisted him onto my hip. He was way too big to be carried far, but I could make it to Amie’s room. She was still asleep, and barely roused when I scooped her up from her mattress. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay. We’re going for a little ride. Shhh….go back to sleep.”

&nbs
p; I took both of them with me back to my room, where I’d left my cell phone on top of Magda’s journal. “Who are you going to call?” Connor asked, anxiety causing his voice to squeak.

  “911, bud. I’m just gonna call 911. They’ll know exactly what to do.”

  Connor took the binoculars from me and rushed to the other side of the room, ripping open the French doors to the balcony. As soon as it opened, I could hear the wind howling outside like a wounded animal.

  “911, what is your emergency?” The monotone voice crackling out of my cell phone startled me. This was the second time I’d had to make a call like this. Never in my life had I needed to call 911, and since I’d stepped foot on this island, I’d had to do it twice.

  “A ship’s down. Off the coast of The Causeway. People are in the water. It looks like there’s some kind of fire.”

  “The Causeway, ma’am? Causeway Island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Emergency rescue services have already been dispatched to the crippled ship, ma’am. Be advised, the coast guard is already on their way.”

  “But how long until they get here? It looks bad. I don’t know how long they’ve got before the boat sinks.” My words were running together; it was a miracle she could even understand what I was saying.

  “Any moment now, ma’am. Remain calm. If you require any further assistance, please call back immediately.”

  “Thank you.” I hung up, not sure what to do next. I placed Amie, still sleeping, onto my bed and I went to find Connor out on the balcony.

  “They’re going to drown,” he said, handing me the binoculars. “The waves are too big.” He was shaking, shivering so badly that his whole body was vibrating. “We have to do something.” The wind was tearing inland across the water, buffeting the cliffs below the house and racing upward, whipping Connor’s words away with them. I could hardly hear what he was saying. He was afraid, though. I could see the fear plainly in his eyes.