“Nice,” Rachel said, swinging her chisel in front of her to test its balance. She felt like a knight with a new sword.
Howard knelt and picked up a second chisel.
“You coming?” she asked him.
He nodded, his yellows wrapping around her southwestern turquoise as if to protect it. That might cause problems; she’d have fought him on it, but it would have taken time that the man in the Lexus didn’t have. Besides, two people could drag a man to safety faster than she could alone.
“Bell?”
The girl’s head jerked up.
“I’ve called OACET. Jason’s a few minutes away. Lock the doors, stay away from the windows, and don’t open them until he gets here.”
With that, she and Howard pounded downstairs.
By the time they reached the ground floor, she could feel the fury seething from the mob. They were still a block away, but closing fast. The iron bar she had used to seal the door was still in place; Rachel bashed the end of the bar with the handle of her chisel, knocking it away, and she and Howard were out.
The city was screaming. Sirens, near and far, split the air. There were gunshots, and other sounds she couldn’t place, and the drone of helicopters as they circled overhead.
Behind her, Howard whispered a prayer. His colors fell to reds and grays and sickly yellows, a mix of everything wrong with the night—anger, misery, terror, guilt—twisting like a tornado…
Rachel grabbed him by the arm and pulled him after her.
The man in the Lexus had managed to open the door. That was as much as he could do for himself; he was bleeding from an ear, and unable to stand due to a badly broken leg. When Rachel and Howard reached the car, the man coughed, and tried to shut the door.
“Agent Peng, MPD,” she said. “We’re here to help.” With that, she wrapped her good hand across his back, stuffed her shoulder in his armpit, and hauled him out of the car. Howard pushed himself under the man’s other arm, and the three of them staggered as quickly as they could towards the warehouse.
“Thanks, thank you…” The man’s voice was weak, and his head rolled as if he couldn’t hold it steady. “’m Frank. Frank Bolden, from Homeland…”
“That’s nice,” Rachel replied. She had already run the E-ZPass on his windshield to get his name, and the parking passes on his car to learn where he worked. She had been amazed to learn that a bureaucrat from Homeland had not only survived what must have been a hell of a beating, but had also managed to escape an angry mob. Ten points for Homeland.
Bolden’s busted leg slowed them down. He was dragging it, unable to pick it up; his foot kept knocking against Howard’s knees, tripping him up as they ran. When Bolden lost consciousness, Rachel saw Howard drop his chisel as he struggled to keep his balance against the dead weight in his arms. She shifted as much of Bolden’s weight to her as she could bear, forcing them to pick up the pace…
They had almost made it back to the warehouse when the mob turned the corner.
“C’mon,” Rachel grunted. “Hurry!”
If they were lucky—if they were really lucky—Bolden’s car would function as a decoy. Its lights were on, the engine still running, and pressurized water was starting to jet from the cracked fire hydrant. It might be enough to hold the mob’s attention long enough for the three of them to disappear into the warehouse.
The three of them reached the side street, and Rachel kicked the door open at the same moment an angry shout rose up from the mob.
Caught! shouted her lizard brain. Leave them! Run!
She told her lizard brain to go fuck itself, and heaved Bolden into the lobby. The iron bar was where she had left it: she snatched it off of the ground and wedged it back into position.
“Get him into the elevator,” she whispered to Howard. The leading edge of the mob had reached the door and were shaking it to see if it would open. “My guys are on their way. We can close the doors and get it stuck between floors until help arrives.”
Howard didn’t move. Rachel took a moment to check his colors: they were still the same swirling mix of reds, oranges, and grays…
She wanted to punch him for freezing up on her when she needed him, but she made herself take his nearest hand in both of hers. “Howard?” she said. “We have to hold this room—not for long, I promise! Just a few minutes. Can you keep it together?”
He didn’t see her. “I didn’t know it would be like this.”
This time she slapped him. “Howard!”
He still didn’t move, but now he noticed her, his colors shifting to let her see her southwestern turquoise caught in the edges of his internal storm.
“Right,” she muttered. She abandoned Howard and Bolden, and turned her attention back to the door. The iron bar was holding, but there was a crack of night sky starting to appear between the door and its steel jamb. Rachel scanned the other side of the wall, and found knives, guns, even Howard’s abandoned chisel, all held in the hands of people who burned blood-red.
“I didn’t know it would be like this!” Howard said again, much louder this time.
“I’m sorry you thought your first mob experience would be all kittens and rainbows!” she snarled. Jason’s signal put her team at a block away and closing fast, and they still might not get there in time…
Rachel grabbed the door pull with both hands, put one leg on either side of the door, and threw her entire body into holding the door closed. The thermoplastic cast provided astonishingly good traction; she had the fleeting idea that she should start wearing one full-time.
Then the iron bar bent, just enough, and the muzzle of a gun appeared in the opening.
She didn’t move; she couldn’t. If she did, the door would open and that’d be it, game over, man! So she hung there with both feet off of the ground, in borrowed sneakers and a party dress, the familiar comfort of her ballistics vest lying on her bathroom floor at home…
I can’t believe I’m about to die because of date night, she thought, as the black eye of the gun found her.
There was a sudden impact along her left shoulder as she crashed into the wall, and she felt something in her left hand break when it was too slow in letting go of the handle. These were nothing compared to the pain from the kick; Howard must have had some martial arts training back in the day, as the perfect side kick he drove into her ribs knocked her clean across the room.
She landed on her face. That didn’t keep her from seeing the door fly open, Howard ramming her chisel into the stomach of the man with the gun, the man coughing, aiming, firing…
Howard’s twisting colors turned blue-black, and then were snuffed out like a candle.
“Rachel!”
She heard Santino shouting her name from ages away, felt Jason wrap himself around her pain in the link and draw as much from her as he could hold. It was enough; her good hand found the iron bar and she launched herself forward, swinging.
She held the breach.
It could have been seconds, or hours, or days, but she knew nothing except the sound of iron on meat until she heard: “Peng! Peng! Stand down, Peng!”
The adrenaline haze lifted. She saw Hill standing in front of her, hard in Army greens. She scanned the area; Bolden in the corner, still unconscious but alive. Outside, the mob, hurting, broken, running from her and the MPD. And Howard…
“Oh God!” It was both a prayer and a sob; she dropped the iron bar and staggered over to Howard’s body.
He had been shot at close range in the neck. It wasn’t pretty, and it had been instantly fatal; her diagnostic autoscript reported spinal cord damage.
Behind her, Santino’s colors faded to gray grief. “Rachel—”
“He saved my life,” she heard herself say. “I was about to… There was a gun pointed right at me, and he knocked me out of the way—”
“Come on,” Santino said. “Don’t… Just don’t.” He took her away from Howard’s body and guided her to the stairwell.
Jason was waiting for her
. She collapsed into his arms and he pulled her close, wrapping his hands around hers to share in her confusion and grief.
“We need to get you back to the mansion,” he told her. “You’re hurt.”
“I need to give a statement. I need… Someone has to do damage control.” For the first time she could remember, she didn’t feel the need to laugh and let off stress. She just felt numb.
“It’s chaos out there. No one has to know we’re OACET—it’ll be a lost detail,” he said, touching the side of her face. She thought he was trying to comfort her, until she realized he was wiping Howard’s blood off of her skin.
“Peng?”
Zockinski was kneeling in front of her. She pulled out of Jason’s sense of self to focus on him; Jason sighed in relief as she took the pain back. She stood and dusted off her coat as best she could, and fell into parade rest. Her ribs were screaming. “Need a statement?” she asked Zockinski.
He nodded. She ran through everything that had happened since he left the loft, and spent the most time on Howard’s decision to follow her downstairs, how he had helped her rescue Bolden from his wrecked car, how he had panicked, and then…
“He sacrificed himself to save me,” Rachel told him. Except for her voice, the shabby lobby was silent; even the EMTs loading Bolden on a stretcher were hanging on her every word. “There is no doubt in my mind that he knew what he was doing when he kicked me out of the way.”
She heard a small sob from above, and sent a scan into the stairwell. Bell and LaPonsie were on the second-floor landing, both of them standing with their backs to the wall to hide what was left of Howard from their line of sight. LaPonsie was weeping.
“All right,” Zockinski said quietly. “Peng, you’re done for tonight. You’re a wreck.”
She took stock of herself, and found Zockinski was right: there was Howard’s blood, of course, but there was another layer of blood drying over his. For the first time, she noticed the walls and floor near the door were covered in fluids and tissue—she didn’t often allow herself to cut loose, but when she did, she left her mark.
“I want to be there when you notify his next of kin,” she said, letting herself sit back down on the stairs. Jason took a deep breath, reached out for her hand, and went red as part of her pain moved into him. “He mentioned a wife.”
Zockinski moved towards Howard’s body; Hill turned green and stepped outside before his partner started searching for Howard’s wallet.
“Here we go,” Zockinski said. “Howard L. Rothbauer from Leonardtown, Maryland… Wow. Guy had a hell of a commute…”
Zockinski kept talking, but Rachel couldn’t hear him. There was nothing in her mind but poor Howard’s name—
Rothbauer.
That name hadn’t meant anything, before. Howard had been just another faceless nobody. A clue isn’t a clue when it doesn’t have a context, she heard herself think—
And then there was Jason. He called out to her, tried to find her through her shock, shouting! Slapping her through the link as hard as he could.
She barely noticed.
Rothbauer.
“Jason?” Rachel heard herself ask. “I need you to drive me to the hospital.”
TWENTY-TWO
TEXAS WAS ALWAYS ON HER radar. When she had been overseas, she seized on every mention of Texas, those little conversational connections which kept her memories of home where they belonged. One piece of information she had picked up along the way was that soldiers who were badly burned were sent to the USAISR Burn Center at San Antonio. It didn’t matter what branch of the military you were in; if you were a veteran and a burn victim, you went straight to Texas for treatment.
The exception was burn victims who also had traumatic brain injury. Then you went to Walter Reed.
No, not that one. The defrocked Walter Reed Army Medical Center had been closed a few years ago. Repurpose the historic buildings under different names, raze the modern ones to the ground, and it might be easier to forget the scandal, maybe, how the men and women who had served and come back broken were shoved into a vermin-infested hellhole. It had been replaced by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a multipurpose medical complex which spilled over into area hospitals and clinics.
One of these housed soldiers who would never recover.
She had expected some sort of resistance at the door, but she was covered in blood and had a military record besides: she had no problem talking her way past the receptionists, telling them as long as she and Agent Atran were at Walter Reed to receive medical treatment for their heroic roles in the D.C. riots, they might as well pay a fast after-hours visit to a friend.
They got off of the elevator at the sixth floor. Anyone watching would have assumed they were a couple: Rachel was past the point where Jason could pull pain from her via the link alone, and they had resorted to skin contact. Holding hands was easiest, although it meant she had to concentrate to tell her feet apart from Jason’s, and he kept shaking his head to clear it as her perceptions blurred his sight.
The rooms were small and close. Private rooms for each soldier: as Jenny had said, they were entering the post-antibiotic era. It was more convenient to put soldiers in shoeboxes designed to minimize exposure than to treat multiple infections after the fact.
She peered into each room as they walked the length of the hallway. The bodies in the beds lacked conversational colors—even those thin bubbles which had glided over the tops of the patients in the ICU was gone.
They stopped at the door of one of the last rooms on the hall. Jason peered through the window at the man lying on the bed, and gasped.
She didn’t try to see the man’s features (what’s left of them, that horrible part of herself whispered), or dwell on how the pieces of his head were held together by a flexible sheet of plastic. She peered past these to check his colors. There was no prismatic soap bubble here, either. His surface colors were red, thick red… Pain-red. Rachel went deeper, to try to see his core, and stopped when she realized that he was pain-red through and through.
She squeezed her eyes tight. It didn’t help: the old boy in the bed still pulsed red.
How much pain, she wondered, do you have to be in before it eats away your soul? How long does that pain have to last before it’s the only thing left of you?
Rachel took a step back, and flipped frequencies, searching. The chicken-wire window in front of her was coated in a collection of skin cells and oils. Squalene, sebum, a few other biological secretions she recognized but didn’t know by name… The imprint was mostly round, and was just about six inches above where her forehead would be if she pressed it against the glass while watching the living-dead figure on the other side. The metal sill below was covered in a film of fingerprints and more secretions, many of which looked like burst rings, like water balloons dropped from a height.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” she whispered.
Jason’s arms went around her, and she let him hold her while she cried.
“How did you know?” he asked when she finally pulled away.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her bad hand. “I didn’t. Not until after his father took a bullet for me. But I should have known when Howard walked into the loft—if you’ve never been there before, you can’t help but stop and stare. Howard didn’t even bother to look around.”
They had gone through Howard Rothbauer’s records on the drive to the hospital. Howard had said he was in construction, but that was an oversimplification: he had managed a laundry list of contracting projects, including utilities installation and maintenance. His company hadn’t worked on the Gayle Street update, but he would have known how to blend the canisters into the upgraded systems without raising suspicion.
“What do you know about Pat Tillman?” Rachel asked.
“The football player? The one who gave up his career when he volunteered to go to Iraq?”
She nodded. “You know how he died?”
“Friendly fire,
right?”
“Yeah. Our own guys took him down,” she said. “Nobody’s sure why, and there was a huge internal cover-up to keep the details out of the press. But…”
She turned her scans back to the shape on the bed. “Tillman’s death turned into a huge scandal because he was famous. But the same thing happened to a lot of other soldiers. Close combat can get… messy.
“This guy is famous, too,” she told Jason, tapping softly on the glass. “Not to the general public, like Tillman, but everyone in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command knows Keith Rothbauer’s name. He was at the Second Battle of Fallujah, and his unit was pinned down by heavy fire in Operation Phantom Fury. He got hit by a white phosphorus round.”
“What’s that do?”
Rachel paused. “Melts the skin.”
“Oh Jesus,” Jason breathed aloud, glancing at the shape in the bed on the other side of the glass.
“Yeah,” she sighed, then returned to their link. “Thing is, our side was the only one with WP rounds. And our side tried to deny using them as part of our offensive munitions.”
“That’s bad,” Jason said.
“No,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “Phosphorus burns on American soldiers are a problem. Bad is when an American soldier with phosphorus burns is shot and left to die on the side of a road in Iraq. Very, very bad is when the Iraqi physician who saved his life turns him back over to the United States, and the bullets that physician took out of the soldier’s body are American munitions.”
“A mercy shooting?”
“That’s the kindest answer. Could have been mercy, could have been mutiny. Or anything, really—war’s mindless. If there was any proof of a cause, we’ll never know about it. There was a massive cover-up. Evidence was lost, members of Rothbauer’s unit were stationed overseas before they could testify… Nobody was held responsible. The CID in Iraq were furious. They wanted accountability for one of our own who was used up and thrown away like garbage. They fought like demons to try to get to the truth, but…
“It’s not like the movies.” Her mental voice was sad and quiet. “The worst crimes usually aren’t resolved. Our commanding officers made a lot of promises to find out who was responsible, but nothing ever happened. The brass tried to wait us out, but the CID didn’t let it go. At the end of the day, they sent Rothbauer back to the States, with the promise he’d get the best medical care available.”
Maker Space Page 33
