“Is Steve dead?” I asked.
The doc shook his head no. “He had a grazing wound in his thigh. The other one was mostly a through and through. He’s stable, but sleeping.”
“Who else? Jamie and Mel?” I repeated.
“They’re fine. Working themselves to the bone, helping me take care of the injured.”
I sighed in relief, yet a tear for Luis slid down my cheek. I would have to be careful, or I’d turn on the waterworks. Grief was a feeling I knew all too well. Grief and feeling helpless.
“How’s she doing?” I asked, pointing to Courtney.
“If she didn’t have you to take care of, I’d probably have her on a suicide watch.” The doctor’s words were delivered in the quietest voice yet. “She took it really hard. She said they’d been talking about Texas, and starting a family when the world settled down some.”
“Where are they? The O’Sullivans?” I asked.
“They’re all in the master suite currently. It's at the end of the hallway. I just checked on Mr. O’Sullivan’s leg.”
“Ok, thanks, doc,” I said, pulling myself to my feet.
“You may want to get cleaned up first,” he said. “There’s a change of clothes on the sink.”
“There’s running water here?” I asked.
“Yes, and propane for the water heater. But if you are going to shower, keep it short. You know what Navy showers are?”
I nodded. “Doc, I’m sorry I’ve brought this on everyone. I just hope you all can forgive me.”
“You think everything’s your fault,” a voice said from under the covers.
“Hey, you’re awake?” I asked, pulling the cover back to reveal Courtney’s red eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
“I was dreaming of him,” she said, “and then I woke up and realized that he wasn’t here.”
She was one of the toughest ladies I’d ever known, but she looked broken. Probably the same look I wore all the time. There was a hint of grief in her eyes, but despite the tears, she looked flat, emotionless. Empty. Broken.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her.
She nodded and swung her legs out of bed, throwing the covers aside.
“Life happens,” she said in a quiet voice, “the living keep on living. Until they don’t.”
I didn’t have much to say to that, so I nodded.
“Thanks, Doc,” I said, standing close to Courtney.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours to check on you, but I have other patients. Others injured in the fight. I’ll see you soon.”
I waved a little dismissively and watched as he turned and left the room. The old man had lost the spring in his step that I’d seen three days ago.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked her quietly.
She shook her head.
“Ok. I’m going to take a quick wash up.”
“I’ll help,” she started to follow me.
“I think I got it,” I told her, walking slowly so I wouldn’t get dizzy and fall.
“I’ll wait at the door then, till you get in.”
“Do you need to talk?” I asked again, realizing that she was trying to stay close to me, not necessarily to help me wash up.
She nodded. “It’s all gone wrong somehow,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone.”
I turned around and stumbled back to her, pulling her close to me and hugging her as hard as I dared. Her sobs came and were mostly drowned out in my shoulder. Still, I held her close. After a few moments, she backed up.
“You smell,” she told me.
“That’s why I’m going to the shower,” I said grinning, “and you’re kind of ripe yourself.”
“That’s because I fell asleep next to you, holding the puke bucket. Don’t use the hot water up.” She almost laughed, but instead, it turned into a hiccupping sob.
“Promise,” I told her, noticing that she was crying again.
Clean up went fast. As soon as I was in the shower, Courtney walked in and sat on the toilet, staring at the floor. We didn’t talk. I washed up in a rush, loving the feel of being clean again and using real soap. After I had turned the water off from my rinse, she left. Once I dressed, she came back in and started stripping down. I left in a hurry, and when the water started, I cracked the door open and asked her if she wanted me to stay out or come back in. The doctor’s words rang in my head. Suicide watch. Her not wanting to be alone.
“Please,” was all I got from her.
I took her spot, sitting on the toilet until the water turned off and then exited, closing the door. She joined me moments later, wearing sweat pants and a white cotton shirt, the same as had been left out for me. She hadn’t taken the time to dry her hair, and it was making her shirt wet across her back. She started tossing the towel down, but I snagged it and gave her hair a brief rubdown, the way I would with Maggie’s.
“You want the comb?” she asked.
I stared at her, and then smiled when I got what she’d meant. I used to brush Mouse’s hair when I got worked up or upset. It was the little girl’s superpower: distract the tall people, keep them talking, make them feel better. Courtney had been there for a lot of Mouse’s superpowers while I’d healed, after breaking her and another group of ladies out and hustling them away from a sadistic gang.
“No thanks, I’m good,” I told her.
“I’m not, not really, but I’ll survive. Don’t let the doctor scare you. I heard what he said.”
“If you want me to comb your hair…”
She shook her head and opened the door to the hallway. My attempt at a joke had failed. Hard. She waited for me to get out of the doorway before leading the way. Every step closer to the O’Sullivans room filled me with dread. Did this attack on his home and compound happen because they’d broken me out and shot up the DHS goons? Were they coming after them for getting out of the FEMA camp with people and vehicles? Why were they holding and processing people? I had so many questions still.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the door at the opposite end of the hall.
The upper floor, I noticed for the first time, had a beautiful wide hall that ran center through it, with the staircase intersecting, making a T shape. Several doors were on each side, with a larger ornate oak door at the end where Courtney had led me. I knocked and heard a soft, “Come in.”
“Hey Dick, hi Courtney,” Mel said standing up and walking toward me.
“Mel,” I murmured.
The bedroom was set up the same way as the guest room I was in was, but a bit larger. A queen size bed dominated the center of the room with two chairs facing each other, near a window that overlooked what looked like a lush field of hay or tall grass. Steve was sleeping on top of the bed, a thin blanket pulled over him. Lying next to him was Jamie, one arm wrapped protectively around him. Her eyes were looking at me over his snoring form.
“How is your dad?” I asked her.
“He’s going to be ok. We got lucky that the Doc was a prepper, too. He had all kinds of medicine stocked up.”
Jamie disentangled herself slowly, so as not to awaken her husband and walked over, wrapping Courtney in a hug and burying her face in Courtney’s hair.
“How are you holding up?” I heard her whisper.
Courtney’s shoulders hitched again as she started to sob softly.
“How are you feeling?” Mel asked me, looking first at her mom and Courtney and then back at me.
“Horrible,” I admitted, “but I’ll live.”
I regretted the words as soon as I’d spoke them. I knew how insensitive it must’ve sounded. Hollow and empty.
“Hey, we’re glad you’re ok,” Jamie said, breaking her embrace with Courtney and giving me a quick hug.
“Dick, I’m glad to see you on your feet. God, we need your help,” Jamie said.
That was like a bucket of cold water thrown on my head.
“You’ve got it,” I said. “Other than the DHS goons, what else?”
“That’
s just it. The deputies here are good, but they’re not soldiers. We were lucky in stopping the first two pushes. I’m worried they’ll be back again.”
“Wait, the farm was attacked twice?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Mel said, “it’s been sort of rough.”
“Hey, you’re alive,” Steve said, making us all turn to look.
He was pulling himself into a sitting position, one leg heavily bandaged.
“Mostly,” I said. “How are you holding up? Doc told me you caught two rounds.”
“First one grazed me, second went through the meaty part,” he said.
His body was covered in sweat, much the same way mine had been when I’d felt the withdrawal coming on.
“They always go through a meaty part,” I said deadpan, and he gave me a weak smile.
“My wife is right. We need your help.” He stated it as a fact, rather than a question.
What about moving on when I’m healed up? I thought to myself. I mean, he’d made it clear, but had that been the irrational, emotional part of him talking before, or was it his rational part, knowing the trouble that I’d bring to the group?
“I’ll help,” I told him, “but your rescuing me has brought this on. Are you sure you don’t want me to leave?”
Jamie looked to me and then to her husband, and went over and sat down next to him. Steve motioned for me to take a seat. Courtney sat on the foot of the bed, Mel took the other chair. We both turned to look at the bed.
“No,” he said, rubbing a hand across his face. “They would have come for me, no matter what. I was barely tolerated by the DHS, but they had orders and so did I… Until we broke out. I had hoped that with our numbers that they wouldn’t have even tried this.”
“We’re vulnerable here,” I told him. “All it’d take is some mortars positioned and a forward observer to walk the rounds in. I was out for most of the trip in here, but from what I can see from the windows, the land is pretty flat for miles.”
He nodded. “I’ve got my men watching a five-mile grid around here. We’re the only place left in the area with folks, so any movement or people would get called in. It’d buy us enough time to make it to the bunker.”
“So what happens if they take out your sentry from long range, and then walk in and set up? Do you have enough coverage to stop that from happening?”
I wasn’t trying to be a dickhead, but I suspected that was how I was coming across, judging by the looks on Jamie’s and Steve’s faces. Mel just looked at me blankly.
“I don’t know,” he said after a long pause. “That’s why I need help. I know police action, but I don’t know what the military is going to do.”
“Those DHS weren’t military. As little as I saw when you guys busted me out, I could see that they couldn’t have held up to a crack military unit.”
“Yeah, but it’s not just DHS who came in. Some of their fallen were wearing NATO gear and patches…”
Then it came to me, the foreign voice on the radio… and, of course, there had always been rumors since the Patriot Act had been voted in, that NATO would be used as a police action in the USA because the government couldn’t trust our own military. Their oath was to the people and the Constitution. Those who believed that were generally thought to be paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing types. But now, I was seeing that many of them could have pegged everything correctly.
“I don’t think I’m in fighting shape today,” I admitted, “but once I get some food in me, I think I could walk around and start looking at things. How the property is set up. Maybe come up with a plan before we do some recon?”
“Recon?” Jamie and Steve chorused.
“Dick is probably going to hit them first, if possible,” Mel said. “It’s what he did in Chicago.”
“He did what?” Steve asked.
“I’ll let your ladies fill you in,” I said, feeling dizzy. “You should rest. I’ll come back up here when I know more.”
“Ok, good. Talk to Daniel Wright. He’s my righthand man. I think he’s either at the bunker in the barn or at the front gate. Having me down is probably making him run around like crazy…”
“Just so we’re clear,” I asked, “I’m going to help, but if we’re attacked right now, how many people here can be expected to fight?”
“All of us,” Steve said. “Even me. I think… I’m worried that the time for negotiations between us and them is over. It isn’t just that they want you. It’s the fact that we broke out right under their noses, and left them vulnerable inside. The camp wasn’t that well-protected to begin with.”
“How bad was it in there?” I asked.
Mel answered, “It wasn’t bad for us, but we weren’t there long. People had to work, though: firewood, gardening, cleaning…”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “Everyone working for their dinner and housing?”
“Sort of,” Jamie cut in. “But you couldn’t just leave if you wanted to, and if you didn’t get your quota of work done, you didn’t eat. There were rules there that were tricky, so if you messed up, you’d have to go to the detention side of the camp.”
“Detention? The whole camp sounds like a prison.”
“As true as that is,” Steve said, his eyes half closing, “detention was worse. With Martial Law, they could do anything. A firing squad used to be normal. Now, they are saving ammunition because hanging people is cheaper. They can reuse the rope.”
“You let this go on?” I asked, surprised.
Jamie and Mel both turned to look at Steve, whose eyes opened wide. He didn’t look happy at my question.
“What was I supposed to do?” he demanded angrily, almost growling the words out.
“I don’t know, Steve. What did your oath to your badge ask you to do?” I asked standing up, and started walking toward the door on wobbly feet.
“I’ll come with you,” Courtney murmured, moving to follow.
“My oath?!” Steve spat. “A fat lot of good it did when there were no more laws to enforce, except what the government told us. When I got a chance to get people out, I did. What would you have done differently?”
I knew his question was supposed to be rhetorical, but I answered him anyway.
“I would have killed the traitors, to a man. I would have burned them alive, blown them up, or shot them.”
“So, you’re a one-man fucking Army?” Steve asked, sarcasm dripping from every word.
“No, sir,” I said, making it sound like it was spelled like ‘cur’. “I’m a rifleman first, a Marine second, and a Devil Dog to the end.” I started walking again.
I could sense movement behind me, and guessed it was Mel moving closer to the bed to talk to her dad. I could hear parts of a hushed conversation as Courtney pulled the door closed.
“I don’t think he realizes that you were serious,” she drawled.
I turned and looked at her. For once her eyes were dry, but her cheeks still had lines of moisture drying on them.
“Most people never take me seriously,” I told her. “Especially, when I’m everything they don’t want to see kissing their wife. Junky, bastard, a reminder of their own failures.”
“What was that you asked him about wanting you to stay?”
“Right before treatment, he told me to move on as soon as I healed up. He didn’t want me around Jamie.”
“I don’t know whether that’s funny or not,” she said.
“Not ha-ha funny, but I don’t blame him.”
“You’re going to blame yourself for all of this, aren’t you?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “That’s why I’ll stay and help, even though it burns his ass. Part of it is my fault.”
“How do you figure that?”
“I wasn’t watching the road behind us, as I should have been. Then, there was the whole bringing NATO into it when they broke me out, killing everyone in the interrogation compound.”
“You really think they would have allowed us to just escape with ev
eryone else? We had to get you, and it was my fault for giving them your name. If I hadn’t, maybe they wouldn’t have been so hard on you, and then when we broke you out, they attacked. I lost Luis,” Courtney was almost whispering now. “It’s kind of our fault,” she said as I stepped off the bottom stair.
The downstairs was bustling with people and activity, unlike three days ago when I had been brought in. The couch had been pushed back against the wall, and three men were laying on sleeping pads, blood-stained bandages covering various body parts. I could hear some banging in the kitchen, and the smell of something heavenly was drifting out. I headed that way, and Courtney put a steadying arm on my shoulder when I wobbled. The sandwich half hadn’t been enough, and I was weak with nausea and hunger.
“Easy,” she said, “I can’t pick you up.”
“I’m a little light-headed. I need more food. Oh, I uh… ate your part of a sandwich that was left.”
“That’s ok,” she said. “I wasn’t hungry.”
I understood that. Grief and loss often manifested in a lot of ways, loss of appetite being one of them. In the short term, it didn’t hurt anything, but I worried she’d let this become something all-consuming. I knew the difference between revenge and justice, but sometimes a little bit of both worked well in a situation like this. In the meantime, we had work to do, once we got squared away with some grub.
“Well, you should eat,” a portly woman said, coming out of the kitchen wearing a red and white checkered apron.
Her cheeks were ruddy, and she used a wooden spoon to point and punctuate her words. Curly red and gray hair peeked out of the edges of a baseball cap that’d been put there to hold the hair out of her face. It was a Cornhuskers hat. I smiled.
“She probably should,” I said.
“Who are you?” she asked, turning the spoon on me.
“Dick Pershing, ma’am, and I was coming down to see about some grub.”
She gave me a once over and then asked, “You the junky who was detoxing upstairs?”
I heard Courtney gasp, but I was nodding. I wasn’t ashamed. I’d given up my dignity when I’d let my wife walk out of my life because I couldn’t control myself.
“Yes, ma’am. All good now.”
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 40
