Shay Savage: Otherwise Unharmed

“Lieutenant Evan Nathanial Arden, Marine sniping expert, brought home with minor injuries and muscle atrophy, but otherwise unharmed.”

It wasn’t until after I came home that everything went wrong on the inside: kicked out of the Marines, based on a diagnosis from a doctor who mostly wanted to write a bestselling book, and eventually hooking up with a guy who led me into my current line of work—sniping for the Chicago mafia.

Catholic schoolboy gone bad.

My caseworker was nearby, talking to the unit manager of my cellblock about when I might be moved to the general prison population. I heard her say Mark Duncan, the name of the military shrink who was assigned to my case after my discharge. He had apparently been calling about me and was likely going ballistic because he didn’t see any of this coming. He took pride in his work, and he thought he had been helping me.

Maybe he had been helping; it just wasn’t enough.

Traci, my caseworker, was a chunky, blonde woman in her mid-thirties. She leaned over to look in my face as she spoke, but her words weren’t interesting enough for me to pay attention to them. Her hand touched my arm, and even though part of my psyche wanted to scream and flinch from the touch, I didn’t move.

I didn’t see the point.

How many hours or days had passed since I had been taken down and dragged from my apartment didn’t really register. I didn’t think it had been all that long, but time didn’t have a lot of meaning for me. My actions during that day replayed in my mind a lot—the look in Bridgett’s eyes as I fired my gun into her face, the desire to shoot everyone on a bus going up Michigan Avenue, and then eventually blowing the shit out of a noisy parking garage door; the terror of being shoved to the ground as the SWAT team took me into custody, begging someone to just kill me, followed by the relief I felt when I realized Odin, my Great Pyrenees, was all right; the ambivalence of seeing Lia in the hallway and knowing she was watching me as I was dragged off in handcuffs was enough to turn my brain inside out.

Lia Antonio.

She was the beautiful, dark-haired woman who found herself at my cabin in Arizona during my exile. She ended up in my bed and in my head far more than I expected or even wanted. Now, I clung to thoughts of her as much as I could—everything else I thought about was too full of gunshots, sirens, and blood.

I didn’t know how she managed to find me, and the serendipity of finding me at that place at that moment was fantastic.

As my thoughts raced around in my head, I heard the heavy footsteps of other inmates and prison staff as they moved around the infirmary, around beds and desks, and eventually out into the hallway. The things going on around me registered as they happened; they just didn’t have any meaning for me. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be a part of any of that.

I still regretted not taking a life—if I had done that, they would have killed me. If they had killed me, I wouldn’t be here now, wondering how the fuck I got myself into such a mess. I was supposed to go far—be smarter than this. I was supposed to have my whole life ahead of me.

“You’re a bright boy, Evan,” Mother Superior says.

I know she’s right. I’ve learned more in the past couple of years than she even realizes.

“You’re going to go far.”

“Just sign the papers,” I say as I push them across the desk and closer to her. As soon as her scrawl is over the bottom line, I bring them back toward me and slide them into a brown envelope. “Have fun with the next one.”

“Evan, you know-”

“Don’t,” I interrupt. “Just don’t do that. You know it’s crap as much as I do. You got what you wanted, and now I have what I want. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

She sighs as she looks at her hands on the desk. I half expect her to start rubbing at the rosary around her neck, but she doesn’t.

“What are you going to do now?” she asks.

“It’s pretty straightforward for an educated guy with no money,” I say with a shrug. “I’m going into the military.”

If they had killed me, I wouldn’t have seen Lia again.

Though the memories seemed ancient considering everything that had happened since my time in Arizona, I could still clearly see the look of desire in her eyes as her hand caressed my abs. The sound of her soft moans as I filled her ran through my head, and the feeling of her flesh against mine made everything else bearable.

Almost.

Then I would remember the bodies of my unit sprawled on the ground, the realization that one of my own had given up our location to the enemy, and the taste of sand filled my mouth again. My stomach tightened involuntarily, and I sat up slightly as my body tried to double itself over. I squeezed my eyes shut and didn’t even try to stop the memories. It didn’t work anymore, anyway, and it was too much effort to try to control it any longer.

Up on the roof of the base, rifle at my shoulder, I can see a figure walking in the distance, and I set my sights on him. As the crosshairs focus on his head, I can tell he is nothing more than a kid—maybe fourteen or fifteen. Through the scope, my view of him is crystal clear. His clothing is dirty and torn, there are smudges on his face, and a bruise over his left cheek. His eyes hold resolved terror.

He doesn't want this. He's going to do it, but he doesn't want it. He’s holding his arms out at his sides at an awkward angle, and it’s obvious he has something strapped under his arms and around his waist. When I refocus between his eyes, I can see tears in them.

I lower my eyelids for a moment before I secure my aim and fire.

One memory followed another as I remembered running through a hailstorm of bullets to pull my unit’s communication officer out of the line of fire. The captain of the unit was hit and unconscious, and I became the first Marine in years to earn a field promotion from staff sergeant to second lieutenant right there on the dunes. Carrying my captain over my shoulder, I led my unit out of the firefight and back to base.

With exactly seven weeks under my belt as a lieutenant, I’m staring at the bodies of all my comrades as they lie there in the sand. I feel slightly dizzy, and my stomach churns as I realize it’s not a dream, a hallucination, or a trick of the light. A slight sound behind me registers but not before I feel a sharp pain in the back of my head.

I gripped my hands into fists, tightening the muscles in my arms as I tried to pull them across my chest. All I got in response was the constriction of the cuffs around my wrists and the clanging sound of the chains against the bedrails.

My wrists are tied so tightly I can’t feel my hands. I’m sure if I could see them, they would be blue or black or some other unnatural color. I’m glad they’re behind my back so I can’t watch. As my hands go numb, the pain in my shoulders from my arms tied together increases a thousand fold. I wish I could pretend it’s all a nightmare, but I know it’s real. There’s no getting out of this.

The very concept of “pride” is completely foreign to me now, and I no longer care how it looks or sounds. I scream and beg as they throw me back into the hole.

I didn’t open my eyes but squeezed them shut so tightly my head was beginning to pound. I flexed my hands once to prove to myself I could still move them, but it made the cuffs tighten a bit more. I could feel a scream building in my throat, but I swallowed it down.

I guessed I had managed to pull a little pride back inside of myself at some point. I wondered when that was and figured it was probably around the same time Rinaldo took me in and gave me a reason to be. Regardless, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself—not here.