Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

“We’ll be on top of you in two minutes, one-three. Are you still under fire?”

“Hell, yes, we’re still under fire. We fell back to the house across the street. There ain’t no more place to go. We’ve got wounded. We need an extract, and we need it five minutes ago.”

“We have signal,” her copilot said, and she glanced at him and saw it was her SERE instructor, Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright, his lanky frame taking up all the cockpit space and then some.

“Master Sergeant? I didn’t know you were flight-certified.”

“Pay attention, Fergusson. You might live longer.” The sun on the water flashed unbearably bright as they overflew the river. Then they were roaring over low buildings, dun and cement, and he said, “Target acquired,” and she said, “Fire,” and the Black Hawk’s frame shuddered as the AGM-114s launched out of their cradles, and they streaked away faster than the eye could follow and half the target building exploded into dust and fire and oily black smoke. They flew into the black roiling column, the sound of the explosion carrying over the rotors, through her helmet, and she rode up, up, up on the high hard thermal, rising out of the smoke as the remains of the building burned beneath them.

“One-three Foxtrot, I need an LZ,” she said into her mic. “Do you have enemy fire?”

“Negative, Bravo five two five. You smoked ’em. We’re establishing a perimeter now.”

She dropped the helo like an express elevator, leaving her stomach somewhere above the floating debris. The ambulatory of the one-three had cordoned off a dirty square flanked by burning rubble and mortar-pocked houses. She touched down and cut the engine. She looked around. There were bodies everywhere. Everywhere, circling her landing zone, heaped over the dirt and the cement, men, women, children, white shattered bones and black burned skin. “Oh my God,” she said.

Then they were standing outside. The stench was beyond bearing, shit and burned insulation and rotting meat. Hardball said, “The lawyer, testing Jesus, asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’”

So many bodies. So many lives. So much death. The wounded of the one-three squad were lying on the broken concrete, body after bloody, blasted body, all in urban camo except for one. One was in khaki and brown. “We need extraction!” a sergeant yelled.

The helo was gone. Clare looked around, panicked.

“What does the Lord require of you,” Hardball asked, “but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”

“Where’s the ship?” Clare cried. “Where’s the goddamn ship?” A pair of EMTs hoisted a gurney. The man in khaki and brown was on it, packed with blue emergency bandages that had bled through in ragged purple blotches. “Where are you going?” Clare screamed. “We’re extracting as soon as I find the ship! Bring him here!”

The EMTs passed her and she saw him in fragments: his sandy hair, the oxygen mask, one boot lolling off the stretcher. She saw his hand, tan, limp, still wearing his wedding ring. She lunged toward him and Hardball was in the way, soaking in blood, reeking of it, and he caught her and held her, saying, “This is my commandment to you; that you love one another as I have loved you.”

Then the EMTs threw Russ Van Alstyne’s dead body into the charnel house flames and she sat bolt upright, screaming and snot-faced in the darkness of her bedroom.

“Oh, God, help me!” Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might stroke out. She half fell, half crawled out of her sweat-tangled sheets and staggered to the bathroom. She braced her hands on the cistern and vomited into the toilet, spasming over and over again until there was nothing left. She sank weeping onto the tile floor.

She sat there for a long time, tears smearing across her cheeks, her whole body shaking. She squeezed her eyes shut against the flashes of shattered and burned flesh, afterimages imprinted on her retinas. She tried to pray, but the vision of Russ, bloody, broken, dead, wiped all the words from her mind, and she was left with nothing but the most elemental plea. Help me, God. God, help me.

I don’t think I’m fine at all.

She had left her clutch on the shelf over the towel rack, emptied of the lipstick and compact she had carried earlier this evening. Yesterday. She pushed against the edge of the tub and listed to her feet. Reached for the clutch. Pulled out the creased brochure. There would be somebody at the community center starting at eight o’clock when the gym opened. Nine at the latest.

She looked out the bathroom’s small window. Venus blazed large and bright among the fading stars. She could see the silhouettes of rooftops and chimneys and trees against the sky, but she couldn’t make out any colors yet. She smoothed the brochure against her aching stomach, over and over again, and then sat down on the cool tiles to wait out the coming of the light.

Hadley Knox stretched her legs out on the grass and watched the other parents waiting for the Millers Kill Middle School cross-country team to reappear from walking the meet course.

There was a trio of mothers near her, women she had seen at the school but never met. They were chatting and laughing in canvas camp chairs with their pedicured feet propped up on coolers. They wore crop-legged chinos and drapey cotton sweaters, bits of gold dripping off their wrists and circling their necks. Hadley was in jeans and her police academy T-shirt, with nothing but a Goodwill windbreaker to keep the grass from staining her butt. She must have missed the memo that said they were supposed to dress like they were going to the damn country club.

She recognized a few faces here and there, from school concerts and open houses. There was one man she knew she had seen at St. Alban’s, and another she had ticketed for doing fifty in a thirty-five zone, but there wasn’t anybody she knew well enough to wave over and start shooting the breeze with. Two years she had been living in Millers Kill-two and a half-and she didn’t have a single friend.

Jesus, listen to your pity party. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Her life was exactly the way she wanted it. She had Hudson and Genny and Granddad. She had a job, and a house to run, and she even went to church every Sunday, although that was more for the kids’ benefit than her own. The occasional bout of loneliness was the fee for controlling her own life. It was a fair trade.

A stir of excitement brought her attention to where the woods opened up to clear land. She recognized the Minutemen blue-and-white on the ragged clump of middle schoolers emerging from the trail, spotted Hudson and his best friend Conner and Eric McCrea’s boy, and a grown-up in the midst of them, impossibly tall and redheaded and what the hell was Kevin Flynn doing with her kid’s cross-country team?

Hudson was half a length ahead of Flynn, who seemed to be hanging back, talking to the stragglers. Hadley propped a smile on her face as she approached the snapping tape dividing the runners from the spectators. “Hey, babe. How’s the course? Any cow patties you have to watch out for?”

Conner and Jacob McCrea cracked up. Hudson looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or be embarrassed. “Oh, man, can you imagine,” Conner said. “Stepping in one and it sticking to your shoe?”

“Stepping in two!” Jake started clomping around, his sneakers encased in imaginary cow patties. Hadley thought about Eric, already planning for this kid’s future in college. Hard to believe these boys would ever be mature enough to leave home.

“Okay, guys.” Kevin’s voice carried over the boy’s snorts and moos. “Go see Coach. He’ll get you signed in. Remember what I said about the final downhill stretch.” He paused in front of Hadley while the team moved on toward the crowded starting line, Jake demonstrating the double-manure maneuver to everyone. “Hey, Hadley.”