First to Burn

by Anna Richland

  She knew he ran faster. He was waiting for her. So stupid. They’d make those rocks, make them, make them.

  As they did, a soldier grabbed her forearm and jerked her to the ground faster than she could dive. Her shoulder scraped stone as she toppled into cover, safe, and even the searing air trapped with them between the car-size boulders was a gift. Rolling to her side, she sucked in enough oxygen to cheer. “We made it!” She turned to share her exultation with Wulf.

  He was sprawled on his stomach next to her, fingers spread in the dirt—slack.

  “No!” She scrambled to roll him. Underneath, dust had blackened and clumped on the blood-soaked ground. “Wulf!”

  His gear wouldn’t open, so she yanked the strap cutter off her vest. His chest rose, but not on both sides. Pneumothorax.

  “Medic! Medic!” Screw his name. “I need a chest tube!” Dammit, she’d donated everything from her ruck to the Afghans.

  Wulf’s blood covered her hands as she cut through his shirt to a palm-size exit wound on his right pectoral. A slippery red mess obscured her visual of the shredded flesh, but she knew he wouldn’t need a chest tube if air escaped the cavity on its own. The left side of his chest rose, so he had one working lung, but she heard a Darth Vader suck.

  “Medic!” She tore Wulf’s hemostat bandage off his gear. Her hands couldn’t shake or the bandage would stick uselessly to itself. “Where the fuck is the medic?” Clotting adhesive would help control hemorrhaging at this spot, but she needed another for the entry point.

  Chris Deavers yelled coordinates into his radio handset. Everyone ignored her and Wulf, as if they were too busy shooting to care that their sergeant was dying.

  Whump-boooom. A wave of air solidified and hammered into the back of her vest. Spinning fragments impacted above her head. Visions of shrapnel injuries terrified her, but she kept pressure on the wound.

  “Deep breaths, Doc.” A young sergeant dropped to his haunches at Wulf’s feet.

  “He can’t—”

  “Meant you.” His Deep South accent radiated calm as he screwed a metal launch tube into tripod legs. “Don’t you worry, ma’am. Those fuckers suck with mortars.”

  “Who’s the medic?” She pressed harder on Wulf’s chest.

  He glanced at Wulf as he pulled a fin-tailed canister from his gear. “Wulfie don’t need help.” He spoke so slowly she wanted to punch him.

  “He’s not dead!” She wouldn’t allow him to die, but he’d lost so much blood.

  “Ain’t that the truth.” He slipped the rocket into the tube’s mouth. “Now you cover your ears and look away, ma’am, while I show how a Bama boy uses his ruck rocket.”

  She managed to turn her head as the young soldier yelled shot out, but the foam earplugs she’d worn on the helicopter were more wish than protection from the sound punch.

  “Splash over,” he called, saying oh-vahr like this was ordering up an egg. Well, screw him and this whole team.

  “Inflate, dammit!” she yelled in Wulf’s face, but he didn’t move. “Keep breathing!” With the pressure bandage sealing the exit wound maybe he did need a chest tube to let the air out of the cavity between his lungs and chest wall. She wasn’t a surgeon. She treated diarrhea and flu, pulled muscles and common shit. She’d never handled a wound like this by herself.

  He could die.

  Where was the entry wound? So much blood, she couldn’t find the point of entry.

  “Shot out!” Boom. Another mortar. “Splash oh-vahr.”

  Left armpit, entry wound. She stuffed it with the bandage from her own gear but blood soaked through.

  “Apaches ETA three minutes!” Chris relayed news of the attack helicopters coming to support them. “Blue Deuce and friends.”

  Lives could be lost, saved and lost again in three minutes. But not this one.

  Automatic weapons, men yelling, radio static, incoming mortars landing obscenely close, others launching back from closer—the noise crushed her. She wanted to curl her arms over her head, but she kept pressure on the makeshift bandage and—Yes!—both sides of his chest rose. That wasn’t enough. His bleed had soaked his dressing. The bullet must’ve nicked something. He’d need a transfusion soon, and the ability to give one was another thing she didn’t have.

  A second soldier crawled over. “Looks bad this time. I’ve got saline.” He pulled out a pouch of fluid and yanked Wulf’s arm from the remainder of his sleeve. He had to be the medic.

  Instead of swearing, “Took your fucking time,” she managed to say, “Give me another hemorrhage dressing, and he needs blood or plasma. What have you got?” She jockeyed to keep her hands on the bandages, but the medic’s armor-plated torso squeezed her farther down Wulf’s body until her arms extended past where she could apply adequate force.

  Shrugging, the medic glanced at the saturated dressings. “No point wasting another.” He slipped the needle in Wulf’s vein on the first try. “Might need it.”

  She bumped against him to reposition herself closer to Wulf’s wounds. “Wulf needs it!”

  “Don’t think so.” He nodded his head at Wulf’s chest. “Bleed stopped.”

  “Don’t tell me my job!” As she argued, she realized that blood no longer seeped through her fingers.

  “He’s my team, so I will.” The medic squeezed the intravenous bag to move it faster. “Pump saline, nothing else. No drugs, nada.” He shoved the bag at her, and she released one dressing to grab it. “You don’t do anything for him.” He crowded close. “Understand?”

  She did. Anything could happen—it already had happened—and she had no one to trust. These men were willing to let Wulf die, and she was in their way.

  * * *

  Within ten minutes, the Apache attack helicopters had completed their lethal work and circled like sharks scenting chum, but after the rain of Hellfire missiles, the attackers in the hills surrounding the boulder fortress couldn’t be more than ash piles.

  Theresa bent to Wulf. “Medevac’s coming. We’ll get you out.”

  His eyelids fluttered.

  “Wulf!” Her throat clogged as he stared at nothing. “Hang on!”

  “Dust-off’s here, Doc.” The Southerner sounded like he’d answered a doorbell. When her cramped legs wouldn’t unfold, he hauled her to her feet. “Captain D, you willing to take the doc while we load Sergeant Roadkill?”

  “Watch out for him!” She staggered on numb legs and strained to reach Wulf, but Chris’s left hand manacled her upper arm.

  “Bravo Squad, pull security for the aircraft recovery team.” While Chris ordered half the men to stay on-site, he marched her to the rescue helicopter.

  “He needs a litter!” she yelled at the two men carting a sagging Wulf.

  Instead of listening, they dumped him on a seat and handed him a peanut butter packet from a meal pouch.

  “He can’t have that!” He’d hit surgery as soon as they landed at Caddie, and most likely be pushed forward to the main hospital at Bagram, so he was nothing-by-mouth.

  When Chris dropped her arm to give the pilot a thumbs-up, she lunged for her patient.

  The helicopter’s surge flung her sideways and the landscape dropped away through the open doors. She tried to find a handhold or a safety line to grab, but a track embedded in the floor caught the toe of her boot. Skidding, she slapped air when the Black Hawk banked. Rocks blurred behind the door gunner. As the helicopter gained height and speed, the opening pulled her like a drain sucking water. She leaned away, but her soles couldn’t grip.

  Everything seemed to stop except the ground rushing past at the bottom of the slope that, seconds before, had been level.

  She was falling.

  Chapter Eight

  The helicopter banked the opposite direction at the instant the back of Theresa’s bulletp
roof vest jerked. Airborne, she felt, for a millisecond, what an astronaut must experience without gravity, before her landing jarred every vertebra between her tailbone and neck. Someone’s hard-shelled knee pad slammed her chest armor and another bracketed her spine.

  Her lungs expanded with a breath she hadn’t expected to own. Almost unbelievably, she hadn’t cartwheeled out the door. Who’d yanked her from the brink? She shoved her helmet higher on her forehead and twisted from her huddle to identify her savior.

  All colors except blue had vanished from Wulf’s eyes, and his cheeks conformed to his skull. He looked cold and drained as he slurped the traces of peanut butter from the packet. Next to her jaw, his other wrist trembled where he gripped a loop on the shoulder of her gear. He’d saved her again, but his heroism might have cost blood he couldn’t afford to lose.

  She stretched for the sliced flaps of his shirt.

  “Stop.” His lips were easy to read over the noise of the engines.

  “Wound check,” she yelled back.

  “Don’t.” He shook his head from side to side as he reached for her wrist. “No.”

  “I have to.” She blocked him with one hand and laid her other palm over the bandage. His body was feverishly hot, oddly so when chill and shock were the common responses after a serious injury.

  He slumped, eyelids lowered and chin tucked to his chest as if he was ashamed. He shouldn’t have been, because she was the one who’d run too slowly, not him. Her fingernails caught the edge of the gauze. She meant to check for fresh bleeding, but the bandage peeled into her hand like wet paper and revealed his chest, whole and white. It wasn’t bloodless white, but a healthy bread-crust color with traces of veins and dark blond hair.

  “Wulf!” She couldn’t pull her eyes from the textbook perfection. Minutes ago she’d pressed her fingers into a three-inch hole right there, where her blood-streaked hand stood out dark and filthy against his unbroken skin. Prepared to celebrate, she stretched toward him from her spot between his knees. “You’re—”

  She shut up when she saw the despair etched on his face. The main rotor’s thw-thw-thw pounded a question into her brain: how-how-how? The blood on his sliced-up clothes didn’t lie. He had been shot through a lung, a killer shot, but he’d healed in minutes.

  Then the pieces connected. The medevac calls, the missing paperwork, even the blood in Nazdana’s mouth after her seizure—he’d been injured, but, like today, he’d walked away whole. This was the secret the team had tried to conceal in the gym.

  The rhythm of the helicopter rocked her against his legs, but she was too numb and shaky to push herself from the metal deck. They stared at each other in a parody of an embrace, his arm cradling her shoulder, one of her hands on his leg, the other spread across his bare chest, while liquid pooled in his eyes.

  Finally the Black Hawk surged forward, and the changed motion broke their stalemate. He signaled to someone past her shoulder. Big hands hoisted her into a seat.

  “Don’t move.” Sergeant Kahananui’s broad face resembled an unsmiling idol as he buckled her harness. “Don’t talk.”

  Demanding answers from the wall of silent men would be pointless. In addition to Wulf, slumped in his seat, the two door gunners and Deavers stared out of the helicopter. The Hispanic medic watched Wulf, and the young Southerner closed his eyes. Beside her, Kahananui read the label on a bottle of water as if it was a skin magazine. No one looked at her or met her eyes. Everything appeared to be normal, yet nothing was. No one so much as twitched until Wulf removed the intravenous needle and folded the empty saline bag into his cargo pocket. Then the medic tossed him a roll of duct tape to secure the sides of his shirt and vest where she’d sliced the Velcro. The efficiency seemed frighteningly routine from a man who should have been dead.

  She had so many questions, but the rules her mother had established about her stepfather’s garbage business flooded back as the rescue flight stretched. Even Miss Smarty-Pants doesn’t need to know everything. She understood that the team’s secret wasn’t her affair, but whatever had given Wulf this healing ability could save hundreds or thousands of soldiers. It would advance trauma care and possibly end combat deaths.

  The end of death.

  Her hands shook. Clutching the fabric of her cargo pants didn’t stop the trembling, so she jammed her fists into her armpits. Was Wulf part of an experiment? Now that she knew, what would happen to her? The air was cooler at this altitude, but the bumps up and down her arms had nothing to do with temperature. How far would Wulf’s team go to keep his secret?

  One step at a time. First she had to get away and pull herself together.

  Deavers and the other men wouldn’t look at her, but she reminded herself they were American soldiers like her. They’d saved her today. Wulf had saved her twice. The man who’d eaten her mother’s cookies, who’d held her hand in the dark and cared enough to translate for a desperately ill Afghan girl, that man wouldn’t hurt her. She clung to her faith in him, despite a whisper of doubt that asked, Wouldn’t he? Is he who you think he is?

  The forward motion ceased as they hovered over the airfield at Caddie. Less than one minute to landing, and suddenly every pair of eyes focused on her. She felt pinned.

  Were any of them who she thought they were?

  No sticking around to find out. Her thumb slipped under the buckle’s release mechanism, and she pushed the soles of her boots against the metal deck, ready to bolt.

  * * *

  Theresa locked the female shower unit’s door and stowed a clean uniform on the bench with the relief of a homecoming. Between her years in college and med school dormitories, her residency apartment and cheap off-base housing, she’d spent a dozen years behind plastic shower curtains whose speckled bottom seams didn’t bear inspection. Worse, she’d stored shampoo and soap in her indestructible caddy longer than she’d been able to buy a drink.

  Hot water sluiced over her body and created a cloud of steam that separated her from the day’s events. She attacked her fingers with a nail brush until her hands pinkened. Not an iota of Wulf’s blood remained in the creases or under her nails, but even with the evidence of his injury washed down the drain faster than the wounds had disappeared from his chest, she knew his healing hadn’t been a dream.

  With everything she understood about the human body threatening to change, how could the face looking back from the mirror while she combed her hair be the same? The head tilted when she needed to reach to pin her bun, and the fingers in the reflection obligingly buttoned a clean shirt, but she felt removed from that person.

  Dressed, she rolled her stained shirt carefully into a zip-closing bag and concealed it with her towel. The blood smears were the only evidence to support what she planned to tell Jennifer.

  On her black sport watch, the day flashed: TU. Tuesday. Today was Tuesday and—oh shit, tomorrow—Wednesday she had to report at 0400 to the helipad for an 0500 lift to Bagram Airfield in Kabul. She had a seat on an air force flight to Kuwait City, where she’d switch out of her uniform and catch a commercial flight to Rome. The black civilian carry-on her roommates took turns using on leave waited, packed, at the foot of her bunk. She’d loaded it yesterday, expecting today to be hectic.

  Hectic described today like stomach bug described Vibrio cholerae bacterium.

  A reverberating knock on the bath unit’s aluminum door spun her around.

  * * *

  Braced on the wall across from his commander’s desk, Wulf acknowledged his miscalculation. Forty minutes ago when Theresa tore out of the helicopter, he should’ve followed her and untangled this clusterfuck, instead of trailing after Deavers to coordinate the downed aircraft recovery team. His captain and Kahananui had that situation handled. With the last man inbound, the disabled Black Hawk sling-loaded under a heavy-lift CH-47 Chinook and the incident report delegated to Cruz, he could no long
er ignore his woman problem.

  Letting go of his support made his head wobble, but before he could find chow he had to shower off the blood. If the stars favored him, maybe Theresa hadn’t yet talked to anyone about what she’d seen.

  “Hold on.” Deavers spoke around the tobacco in his cheek. “The drugs in the container we found with Morgan are moving.”

  “Damn.” He didn’t need this now, not when he felt like the walking dead. “Where?”

  “The marked load’s part of a Black and Swan convoy to Peshawar. Presumably to a ship in Karachi.” The squint lines around his commander’s eyes announced that he wasn’t finished.

  “And?” Wulf’s lips were too stiff from his effort to stay upright to say more. He needed ten times his normal calories after the amount of collagen his cells had burned regenerating his muscles and skin. Peanut butter and sports drinks kept him conscious, but he needed more carbs and fats, a lot more, to feel human.

  “Someone ought to eyeball the load. Collect HUMINT and determine the destination.”

  Human intelligence gathering in Karachi, Pakistan, required a fluent speaker of Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi and Sindhi. Wulf knew only one screwed soul who fit the bill.

  “Someone means me?” Didn’t the captain understand what was on the line if Theresa poked deeper into his life? She’d searched for his medical files once, and now she had a reason to dig. “You realize I’ve got to find the doc—”

  “Out of it, aren’t you?” Deavers spit in his cup. “Bama Boy’s keeping an eye on her.”

  “What if she talks?” He scratched his chest. Until his body pushed out the fabric shreds and other debris trapped between the new cells, his skin would itch worse than a week-old jockstrap.

  “He’ll keep her roommates away. Doesn’t she head out ASAP for midtour leave?” Deavers rifled papers on his desk. “Sure I can forge a Red Cross message requiring you out of theater for an emergency too.”

  “Ahh.” Wulf sagged against the wall. He should’ve had faith, but that commodity was scant when his tank was this empty. “Where would my emergency be?”