Every Art and Artifice
by the stylus
A not my typerwriter story: It's hot in the poor places tonight.
Notes: Super Beta-Woman was played by Christine. Faster than a speeding qualifier, able to abridge run-on sentences with a single pointed look, stunning in the lycra outfit and cape.
I will strive always, to excel in every art and artifice of war. I know that I will be called upon to perform tasks in isolation, far from familiar faces and voices, with the help and guidance of my God. I will keep my mind and body clean, alert and strong, for this is my debt to those who depend upon me. I will not fail those with whom I serve. (from the US Army Special Forces Creed)
The sun was blinding after the interior of the tent. She raised a hand to shield her eyes, but it was little help against the heat haze shimmering off the surface of the sand.
"Hey, shiksa. Cup of coffee? Get the sand outta your mouth?" She could just make out a grin on his dusty face.
"You're a lifesaver, Ghost." She took the cup of coffee from his outstretched hand and sank down bonelessly against a discarded supply crate. Though it was still too hot, she drank. By now there was sand everywhere: washing didn't get it out of your hair and brushing didn't get it out of your teeth. But the hot, bitter liquid chased the taste of blood away. The caffeine might even get her through the rest of this shift. She leant her head back and closed her eyes.
"Looked like you caught a bad one," Ghost said, his eyes on the impossible horizon. For a long moment there was only the faint noise from the med tent and the wind. "He gonna get to keep that leg?"
She pulled her cap over her face, though worrying about sunburn now was definitely an exercise in futility. "No."
"Shit."
There didn't seem to be anything to say to that. In fact, it summed up the situation pretty neatly as far as she was concerned, so she just concentrated on ignoring the heat and the grit and the smell of blood and vomit. When had someone thrown up? She hadn't even noticed.
"Listen, tomorrow's Ramirez's birthday. Me and Smith talked some of the mess grunts into making a cake, so we're gonna see if we can't get him to smile."
"Sounds good. And he ought to smile. He's shipping home to his wife and kid next week."
"Yeah. Plus, if he dies of despair, he's totally gonna fuck up our perfect record."
She snorted. They were all worried about Ramirez, but there didn't seem to be much to do. She and Ghost had flown him back after the blast, holding his internal organs in with their hands. He'd be right as rain in three months, new skin where the burns had been and only a few scars to show for it, but he couldn't seem to shake the shock of it all. She supposed seeing your truck with your teammates go nova right in front of you might do that, though she suspected if it happened right now, tired as she was, she wouldn't bat an eye.
"No thanks to you, though, butter fingers," she teased. The others had still been screaming as they'd pulled him free, but he'd been the only survivor.
"Hey, now. It wasn't my fault that damn pilot decided to take the Space Mountain route home." The chopper had hit a nasty spate of turbulence and Ghost had skittered across the floor like spilt marbles. Their textbook strategy of holding on like hell to all the things that made Ramirez bleed and breathe had been abandoned as she struggled to keep him together minus an extra set of hands. They'd laughed for days about it in the mess, with Ghost doing a pantomime of her using everything at her disposal—including, memorably, her chin-- to keep the viscera from slipping too far, while she clawed at the air to imitate him dragging himself across the chopper floor. It hadn't been neat or sterile, but Ramirez was going home with everything he'd come with, which was good enough.
"Speaking of the bugs..." he trailed off just a split second before she heard it.
She sighed, and pushed her cap back. A few moments later, the incoming choppers crawled over the horizon. "Damn." She tossed the rest of her coffee into the sand at her feet and hauled herself upright. "Back to work."
"When this is over, Mouse, I'm gonna sleep for a week." His spine cracked perilously as he, too, pushed himself off the sand.
"You and me both, Ghost. You and me both."
Time had no meaning inside the tent. The air was stifling and the sweat itched as it slid down the track of her spine, but the discomfort was academic. The only important thing was the panicked face of the Private and the shallow sound of his breathing as she probed at the ragged edges of the bullet wound. He looked painfully young, and she feel see him struggling against his fear. Once she ascertained that the entrance and exit had been clean and that the projectile had miraculously missed all his major nerves and arteries, part of her brain wondered why they were bringing Army casualties to an Air Force tent.
She closed, cleaned, and dressed the wound automatically, her hands moving without conscious direction from her brain. She kept up a steady stream of inane banter while her hands worked, having found that it kept the patients calmer and still. Private Barnhardt—Chase, he corrected her—said that he was from Beaufort, South Carolina and that he had played quarterback in high school. By the time he got around to recounting his love of fishing, the job was finished.
Taping the last of the bandage down, she smiled at him, again noting how young he looked. A nurse had run an I.V. drip into his opposite arm, easing fluids and pain meds into his system; combined with the local she'd injected into his shoulder, it had taken the edge off his panic. She reached up with one hand and unhooked her mask from behind one ear.
"Well, Private, you got very lucky. You're going to be just fine, and that shoulder should heal with no complications." She smiled at the look of sheer relief that passed across his tanned face.
"Thank you, ma'am," he slurred.
After a moment he turned his head away and spoke again, so softly she almost missed it: "I was so scared."
"Hey." She kept her voice soft but sharp. If her gloves hadn't been covered in his blood, she would have touched him in reassurance. "Everyone's scared, all right? It's the ones who aren't scared who get themselves killed."
He slowly turned back to meet her steady gaze. Finally, he heaved out the breath he'd been holding.
"Yeah. Okay." She wasn't sure if he was agreeing with her or trying to convince himself.
Julia fortuitously appeared behind the head of the gurney. "Private Barnhardt, this is Nurse Ciampi," she told him as Julia stepped around into his field of vision. "She's going to see about getting you settled in a bed, ok?"
He nodded, and she stepped back as Julia laid a comforting hand on his uninjured shoulder and began to fuss gently over him. Julia had been around forever, seen more than most of them could imagine, and reminded all the scared kids of their mother or favorite aunt. He was in good hands.
The gloves and surgical smock made a sucking sound as she pulled them off and crumpled them into the biohazard waste bin. Her mask quickly followed. At least with the gloves off she could run a tired hand through her hair.
Looking up, she noticed Colonel Devlin, deep in conversation with a dark, well-built man dressed in Army fatigues. Devlin was the flight surgeon in charge of their medical team. She had only peripherally registered his entrance while she assessed Barnhardt's entrance and exit wounds. While she worked, the whole world had a tendency to recede.
She studied the visitor for a moment, her eyes straining in the green, close light of the tent. Career military, and not a desk job, either. He was muscular but carried it easily, and even on his dark skin an outline of his sunglasses had been tanned into place. She also noticed that when he stood still, as he was doing now, he stood absolutely still, without the slight movements that most people made while at rest.
She finished clearing the trauma area, and when she turned back the stranger's eyes were following her. He glanced impassively at Devlin, who looked resigned, and then slowly scanned the rest of the tent. Shaking off her curiosity, she headed for the exit, noting with satisfaction that the clock above the drug cabinet indicated her double shift was finally over.
Devlin stopped her as she strode past. "Lieutenant."
"Sir." She stopped and turned to face the two men, drawing herself up to attention. Normally the medical personnel were fairly informal. Days spent up to their elbows in chest cavities, stitching lacs and rehydrating grunts quickly bred close relationships. A sense of intimacy was important for the patients who trusted them to fix what was broken. But something about this preternaturally still man seemed to preclude any assumptions.
"Are you off, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir. My shift finished at 1400."
"Good." Devlin's face didn't give much away, but he spoke in the sort of toneless voice that he usually reserved for new personnel who were making stupid mistakes. She didn't think there was anything good about the situation.
"This is Master Sergeant Gaddy. Master Sergeant, Lieutenant Fraiser."
"Master Sergeant," she nodded. He stared back at her impassively. She had the feeling of being thoroughly assessed.
"You and Sergeant Rosenberg will be temporarily assigned to Master Sergeant Gaddy's command beginning immediately," Devlin continued.
"Sir?" Whatever she had expected, this was not it. Medical units were by nature set-- even the tents were hell to move. And she was Air Force military at that.
"Gather your things, Lieutenant, and report to me at the landing area at 1430. Pack light." Gaddy's voice was as blank as his gaze.
She heaved an internal sigh as the thought of sleep faded. "Yes, sir." She nodded to Gaddy. Devlin shifted uncomfortably at his side and something began to flutter in her belly at the small sign of his unease.
"Dismissed." Devlin spun on his heel and headed out of the tent into the desert afternoon. With a last glance at Gaddy she, too, exited the tent and set off for the barracks at a trot, squinting again against the sun. To stave off her growing apprehension she began a mental list of items to pack.
"Dammit," she said. "If I'd wanted to be a desert rat, I'd have just joined the Army. Saved myself all the trouble of college and med school." They'd been on the ground all of five minutes and already the sand was everywhere. She could feel it crunch as she clenched her jaw.
"You couldn't have joined the Army, Mouse. They have height requirements."
She snickered and reached up to readjust the unfamiliar night-vision goggles. "Shut up, Ghost." His teasing was reassuring, though, as was his very solid and familiar presence at her back. In front of them, the broad shoulders of Master Sergeant Gaddy moved swiftly and silently through the darkness. A glance over her shoulder confirmed what her ears had already indicated: the chopper was heading away into the falling night, leaving them in, as far as she could tell, the exact middle of nowhere.
"Shh," the Sergeant behind Ghost murmured unnecessarily. Gaddy hadn't bothered to introduce him on the flight out, and there was nothing on his uniform beyond the black and silver of his Special Forces patch to help her identify him. This was definitely uncharted territory. She concentrated on keeping her feet moving in the shifting sand, cursing everyone around her for having legs that seemed twice as long.
They soon came to a rocky area and began to climb. Her med pack weighed twice as much as when she'd cinched it on, and her sidearm was digging uncomfortably into her skin as she scrabbled up the rock. Behind her, she could hear Ghost also working for his footing. Their two companions were almost noiseless in the full darkness. Her lungs began to burn.
It had been quite the afternoon. She and Ghost had been hustled into a chopper and flown in a direction that her wrist compass indicated was front-ward, then unceremoniously deposited at a camp that showed all the signs of having been hastily erected. "Get some sleep," Gaddy had growled. "I'll be back for you at 1740." Then he was gone, leaving them dazed and sweating under the glare of the mid-afternoon sun. When no answers seemed forthcoming, they'd simply crashed out on bunks in an empty tent.
She'd been dimly aware of patrols moving on the perimeter at regular intervals and the unnatural silence of the place after the often raucous medical facility. Then she'd fallen asleep and hadn't been aware of anything until Gaddy's hand on her shoulder and his clipped instructions to get into her desert BDUs. An hour later they were moving through the desert, the borrowed night vision goggles shrieking the outlines of the world in green. In med school they had drilled it into her head that it was important to be prepared for everything. She was pretty sure this had never crossed their minds.
The darkness was a fist at her throat.
The medical camp was never dark; there were perimeter lights, lights to work by, and even the soft glow of the machines that monitored patient's vital signs. It was never truly quiet, either, even at night. The generators growled steadily, and people were constantly coming and going. It could have been a problem had residency and basic training not conditioned her body to sleep whenever possible.
Out here, the silence only made the darkness more vast. Occasionally something stirred outside their small party, sounds half-formed or half-heard, the unfamiliarity of the terrain preventing identification. Every scrape of her boot vibrated through her body. Her breathing was louder than she ever remembered it being, her nerves tuned to a wary state of alert even as fatigue crept in at the edges of her perception.
She estimated that they'd been on the move for almost two hours, though her watch was unreadable in the darkness. Ahead of her, the compact form of Gaddy moved surely. Relentlessly. She could feel Ghost tiring behind her, an awareness born of their time spent together in a battlefield existence that was no less a crucible for being located behind the lines. Mostly behind, anyway, she amended.
Distracted by her internal irony, she almost drove her head between Gaddy's shoulders. She managed to stop just short, belatedly realizing that he'd held up his left hand to signal. He gestured to them to wait and slipped off before they could indicate their understanding.
It was even quieter than before, and her hand drifted uneasily toward her sidearm. Gaddy and the Sergeant were both carrying much more firepower, and she was glad of the silent man behind her and the M4 slung across his shoulder. Gaddy had briefed them tersely, giving them only enough information to be prepared, but her imagination was conjuring up all sorts of possibilities now that she had time to think about something other than speed, silence and not slowing down the team. This was deep into territory still held by Iraqi forces, she knew, hence the wait until nightfall and the long hike from the insertion point. There had been little choice. She had jumped a few times—Ghost too, probably—but they were both a long way from being combat certified parachutists. Somewhere out there in the dark, among the alien landscape and the hostile forces, were a wounded soldier and a dead medic. "The 18-Delta went down," Gaddy had said, and nothing in his voice or face had betrayed anything of how he felt about the dead Medical Sergeant eulogized only by his team designation.
The straps of her pack bit into her shoulders and the NOD goggles sat uncomfortably on her head, but she stood as still as she could, straining at the darkness. Her faced itched under the greasepaint but she didn't dare move. Her heart was beating so loudly that anyone within a hundred meters had to be able to hear it.
"Can you believe they're making us wear greasepaint at night? I hate this stuff. I think I'm allergic to it," Ghost had groused good-naturedly as they dressed.
She had tried to give him a smile in thanks for the levity, no matter how strained, but she must have betrayed her uncertainty because he'd stopped, one half of his face artificially shadowed, one naked, and put his clean hand on her shoulder. "I got no idea what we're doing here, Mighty Mouse, but whatever it is, we'll do it good, eh?"
She touched his elbow then. He was right, and her job was not only something to focus on, it was something she could do. "You bet we will. Thanks, Aaron."
It had only been a few hours ago, but it seemed like days. She focused on controlling her breathing until Gaddy returned.
After fifteen minutes or fifty—there was nothing to mark the time—the Sergeant touched them both on the shoulder and pointed into the darkness. A heat shape of green swam into her field of vision and they trekked off again, Gaddy's familiar shoulders her guide.
As they approached the remains of the skirmish the smell of burnt flesh was strong enough that a few months ago it would have made them gag. Now she just flicked Ghost what would have been a meaningful glance had their eyes not been obscured. Movement at the edge of her vision caused her to start until she realized Gaddy had already seen and acknowledged it. The SF soldier faded back behind the rocks as the group passed, keeping watch over the way they'd come.
Cradled in a clearing formed by dumpy rocks, a man was lying on the ground. The status monitor in her head ticked over: breathing shallow, probably due to pain. With the NODs on her face, visual details were impossible. She ripped them off while she slung off her pack and knelt by the wounded man. The ground here was rocky and bit into her knees through the legs of her BDUs; she ignored the pain and the rising panic.
The darkness was incredibly dense until Gaddy shook a light stick, giving her the first good look at what had dragged them so far from anything familiar. Two bodies, one in native dress and one in a Special Forces uniform, lay a few yards apart in the shallow basin. Her fingers confirmed her initial suspicion: only one was breathing. The soldier, Hispanic if she had to guess, far too young if she'd been asked, lay under a covering of thermal blankets, his face a wan green not all due to the light. Ghost crouched across from her, their hands working together to peel back the blankets covering the prone form. The foil was unbearably loud.
She spared a moment to glance up at Gaddy where he stood over them, his face still obscured by the NODs. "Do what you can for him," he said. She nodded once, shortly.
"We've got to be moving before first light," he added. Then he was gone, vanishing into the darkness over the shoal of rock that cupped their position.
She was glad, as they stripped clothes and quietly ran through the alphabet checks, of the hundreds of hours she and Ghost had already logged working together. Flashlights from their packs provided light that was far from ideal but at least not so sickly green. A tightness between her shoulder blades meant she was aware of a dead man's eyes behind her, and several times she caught Ghost darting quick glances at the body that lay just outside their small patch of light.
"Airway clear."
"Breathing shallow." There was relief at feeling the wounded man's heart under her hand as she moved the stethoscope across his chest, even at its hummingbird pace.
Someone had been here before them, which was the only reason there was anything left to work with. Most of the major bleeding had been slowed or staunched. While running a saline line Ghost found a puncture wound in his left elbow where an IV had probably been. Whoever it was either hadn't had the skills or the time to do anything about the shrapnel that ridged his chest and shoulders on the right side or the tib-fib fracture in his right leg except shoot him full of drugs and hope for the best. If the pulpiness was any indication, whatever percussive force had shattered the metal had done the same to a few ribs. "I hope to god the spine's not compromised," Ghost said, and she fervently agreed. If they had to transport soon, they weren't going to be able to do anything more than slap on a c-collar and hope for the best.
The sound of feet scrabbling made them both start back. A figure dropped in beside them at a crouch and shoved his goggles to the top of his head. Not the sergeant who'd accompanied them on the march in, she quickly decided. This man was shorter and stockier, built like the broad side of a barn and with a face just as angular. He met her gaze calmly before she shifted her attention back to the most worrying problem: a jagged piece of metal nearly four inches wide and at least as deep that should have hit a lung by now and miraculously hadn't. There was a hole in the shoulder from a gunshot, but it didn't appear to have hit anything critical and their predecessor had gotten as far as a sterile bandage.
In her peripheral vision, she saw him jerk his chin toward their patient. "How is he, Doc?"
She wished she could shrug without puncturing something else in her patient. Ghost, sensing her impatience with the interruption, answered for them both. "Not good. We're working on it. Pretty clean shot through the shoulder, coupla busted ribs, a leg well broke, tons of minor bleeders and a pretty damn good infection from getting carved up like it's Thanksgiving." He pushed a broad spectrum antibiotic into the IV while he talked, and then put a gentle hand on the wounded man's sweating brow to calm his twitching. He'd need more painkiller soon.
She could sense the stocky soldier's frustration but spared it little thought. They always wanted more information than she could give. He settled for a terse, "'kay," and started to move off again, presumably back to the watch he'd been keeping. He turned back, though, and stood like a shadow for another moment.
"His name's Martinez, Paul Martinez. I just thought you should know."
She'd been working on a way of getting the shrapnel out without slicing any of the thin membranes inside Martinez when he took the decision out of her hands. Ghost had had his hands full changing the drip over and she'd been turned around, rummaging in her medpack. She turned back at the sound of a groan in time to see Martinez shift and flail wildly, his hand coming up to pull at the source of his pain.
"Shit," Ghost said, grabbing at Martinez, but she was on the near side and got there first. In the end, she had to use her left knee to pin his arm. One quick check with the stethoscope made it was clear that if they'd gotten this far on luck it had abruptly run out.
Her mind and her hands moved faster than her mouth. "He's got a pneumo," she hissed, already moving to re-check. The right lung sounded like silence. They'd done this before but never this quietly, never at night and behind enemy lines in what she was coming to suspect was the neighborhood of an ambush. "We're going to have to put in a chest tube." Ghost pushed enough meds to keep Martinez comfortable and still. One knee still on the injured man's arm, her hands were free to rummage for the occlusive gauze which had wedged itself deeply in a mesh pocket of her field kit.
The time for finesse was long gone. Ghost opened a sterilized set of forceps handle-first in her direction. As the shrapnel emerged, the back of her mind was the only part with enough time to marvel at its ragged, bloody edges. The world consisted only of four hands and the man before them. Blood made everything slick and obscure. Ghost did his best to get it contained while she threaded the tube in. They ought to have been worrying about infection and contamination, but the sand was everywhere and the lung was collapsing. The tube slipped once before she could stitch it in place. Sweat stung at her eyes, and Ghost was breathing hard as he set up the suction.
When it was finally finished she sat back on her heels and let the adrenaline drain down through her body like a tide ebbing. She used the back of her arm to swipe at the strands of hair clinging to her forehead and rolled her neck. One hand on the light, Ghost looked the hell she felt. She could see in his face the white shade that must have earned him his nickname right before he puked all over his first cadaver.
"Take five," she told him. "I'm gonna start on the gunshot in the shoulder, but I don't think there's much more we can do 'til we get him back. We'll splint the leg, but nothing looks like it's spurting or seeping too badly." Tib-fib fractures were famous for slicing through anything in their path. This one was going to be another source of potential infection, but hopefully nothing worse.
"Roger that." He passed the light over and stood slowly. "Damn, but that fucked up my back. We gotta get some chairs or something if we're gonna make a habit of this."
She snorted quietly while she timed Martinez's pulse with her right hand. "Yeah, I'd like to see you put in the requisition for that."
"Hey, I got all kinds of connections."
"Ghost, there are some parts of your life I am quite happy to be ignorant of."
"Someday you'll come around to my charms."
"Someday the sun will burn out. I'd say it's a fifty-fifty shot which will happen first."
He moved off to where they'd dropped all the non-medical packs and she could hear him pulling off his gloves and rummaging through their supplies-- probably for a canteen, she thought, tasting the dry sourness of her own mouth.
She was distracted by the wound she hadn't had a chance to treat. It was a clean through and through, so at least this probably wouldn't be the thing that thing killed him. The medic had at least stopped the bleeding, though the bullet had probably done most of its own cauterizing work, and the color was good. She decided cleanliness was more vital than any further work. Maybe this, at least, wouldn't infect. She had begun redressing the wound when something shocked her still.
It was a wet sound.
A sound like someone choking.
It was a sound from Ghost's direction.
The light had fallen so it was hard to see anything distinctly. Something hulked behind Ghost, something human and breathing hard. She crabbed her hand along the ground until her fingers bumped the metal of the flashlight and swung it up wildly. The light wavered. The scene did not swim into view; it leapt at her.
Her hand moved of its own accord because they had taught her to do this, the bastards. She had taken an oath to prevent it and then they had trained her until she could do this in her sleep. She was wide awake. Her hand was the only steady part of her body. The man's eyes were wide open, fear-wide and so bright in the dark. A rose bloomed hungry on his forehead.
He crumpled behind Ghost as if he were moving through water.
She never heard the rest of the unit converge on their position. Her ears would have rung from the report by then, but she never remembered having heard the shot. There was only the wet, sucking sound that was Ghost drowning in the darkness.
The toe of her boot scraped across Martinez's body as she strained towards the crumpled form, but something anchored her shoulder from behind. When she twisted there was surprisingly firm resistance. He held a gloved finger over his blacked out face where the lips should have been. That had been her voice, then, repeating it over and over again. Oh, god. She bit her teeth together until her jaw ached and waited for the sound to stop.
Until he took her gun she did not know she was still holding it. He calmly flicked the safety on and then handed it back to her. Her hands were still steady as she settled it into the holster on her thigh. The man behind her took the flashlight and switched it off, rendering her blind without her goggles. She clamped down hard on the panic that rose like flames in her chest and throat.
He didn't let her shoulder go until his team had ringed their position in the clearing and secured the enemy soldier, and then she nearly fell over with her own forward momentum. Five long strides brought her to her knees beside Ghost. He'd stopped making any noise, but the silence was only marginally better than the sound of him dying. The slice across his throat was clean and deep and red like a smile. With two steady fingers she perfunctorily searched for a pulse she knew she would not find and then reached up to close his eyes. Her hand left red streaks across his face.
Two men carried Martinez between them and she had one end of Ghost's litter. It tilted crazily down from the hands of the six foot-something sergeant whose back she was following. An irrational part of her wanted to lift higher and higher until the black bag that used to be someone tilted down into the ever-marching ass. Until Ghost kicked him in the ass. He would have appreciated the joke.
Her arms wanted to pull apart from her body. She was aware of pain peripherally, like background noise to the cavernous blankness of her mind.
When they crashed for fifteen, one of the sergeants—not the one who had taken her gun— stared at her too hard. He put a hand on her shoulder and said: "It was a righteous shot." Every muscle hurt. Her head hurt.
She'd mostly forgotten about killing a man.
Moving again, she tried to compose the letter in her head, but never got any farther than "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg." The salutation echoed over and over again in time with the cadence of her feet moving, drowning out the sound of his last, wet breaths.
The debrief was torturous. She'd come off the Apache blinking stupidly in the resurgent sun to realize it was morning—that the longest night of her life could be measured in hours. It had been replaced by a gallingly sunny day. Martinez had exited first in the hands of the med team that had been awaiting them onboard. As she'd gathered herself up, she'd cast a last long look at the black bag strapped down to prevent its shifting during flight.
Thankfully, her mouth seemed to be doing just fine without the assistance of her brain. Apart from the fact that she couldn't seem to stop moving—her left leg jogged up and down constantly and her hands wouldn't stay put—all she wanted was a horizontal surface and a pillow. Sounds came like she was underwater, slow and thick. In the light that filtered through the green canvass, everything had a bilious drowning hue.
"Thank you, Lieutenant."
"Yes, sir. Sir, I…"
"Yes?
"It's just—about his family…"
"We'll take care of it, Lieutenant. You're dismissed. Get some sleep."
"Yes, sir. Thank you."
In the heat in her bunk her heartbeat felt too slow. She fought to keep her mind empty until the darkness swept over her.
She slept like the dead and woke dry-mouthed to the sound of laughter. The air was warm and close, like a hand pressing on her face. She rolled quickly, without time for her boots, and made it outside the tent just as she began to retch. There was nothing to bring up and no relief from the heat inside or out. She stood bent double outside the shade of the tent, letting the bottoms of her feet scald against the sand until something brushed her shoulder.
"Janet?"
The figure was a dark spot against the sun. She straightened slowly.
"Janet?" Julia Ciampi's uniform was covered with setting stains, at least one of which must have been blood. In her free hand she held a plate with a slice of cake, its chocolate icing rapidly melting.
"Julia?" She swiped the back of her hand across her mouth, surprised when Julia caught it.
"You're shaking."
"Yeah." She hadn't noticed.
"Water?"
"I haven't—I mean, I should…" Julia was already disappearing into the tent. She reemerged with a bottle of water where the cake had been.
"Drink."
"Thanks." She handed the water bottle back and ran a shaky hand across her face.
"Don't mention it. Listen I've gotta—"
"Yeah. Go."
"Right." Julia turned to glance over her shoulder as she walked away. "You going to be all right?"
"Yeah." There didn't seem to be but one answer.
Had there been less work, people might have dropped in to talk about it. Had there been less work, she might have slept less and thought more. The absence of Ghost meant an extra half-shift before she could roll herself into bed with her socks still on her feet. By the third day the tightness was mainly in her chest.
On the fifth day she watched herself tear the heart out of a man's chest.
A sharply spoken "Janet?" brought her back to reality. The chest cavity was open and her hands were rhythmically massaging the heart of the unfortunate airman who'd arrested after a massive pulmonary embolism he was too young to have. There was nothing to indicate that she'd performed a Mortal Kombat-style finishing move on the patient; the level of worry on Mitchell's face didn't seem high enough.
"You all right?" His resonant voice sounded as though it were coming from the other end of a tunnel—one filled with water. She glanced down again, to where his much larger hands gripped the clamp that was currently embracing Too Young's thoracic aorta.
"Yeah." Except they were doing surgery in the desert and no one could spare a hand to wipe the sweat from her forehead. It was driving her crazy, just like the flat electronic wine of the heart monitor. The temptation was to squeeze harder, faster. She bit the inside of her cheek instead and tasted iron. "How's your wife doing with the new baby?"
"If the damn sandflies don't kill me before I get home, she will. Apparently Junior has colic and insomnia. I think her mom's about to move down to help out for a few months, though. So maybe that'll buy me some time." She leaned a little into the warmth of his steady bass voice.
"Hey!—I think we're getting a rhythm."
They were. Too Young was going to get to be older.
On day nine she crawled down the neck of a bottle of contraband. She didn't even like Garcia, but he was angry, too, and had an endless supply of lighter fluid with a whiskey label.
"This shit," she felt compelled to point out, "is probably not even licensed for human consumption."
"Nope."
"And I should know. I mean, they pay me to know about bodies and… things. That make them, y'know, go. And stop."
"That's why you're the Doc." Garcia leaned his head back against the tent, the shadows distorting his sharp face. "But if you ask me, most of the shit we eat and drink out here ain't fit for rats. 'Least this is my choice."
"Yeah." She tried, unsuccessfully, to fight back a hiccup. "In med school, at the end of finals, we used to buy a bottle shooter and a bunch of Southern Comfort and see whether we'd die from alcohol poisoning or end up in a hyperglycemic coma first."
"So? Which was it?"
"Huh? Oh, neither. It was always too sweet to get that far. It just made us feel awful the next day. Most people puked, anyway."
"I once drank a fifth of Jim Beam on a dare…"
It didn't matter. Nothing seemed to matter.
She came to with Mitchell's hands under her arms.
"Goddammit, let me go."
"All right." Without the support of his grip, she promptly fell flat on her ass. "Wanna try and get up on your own? Or you gonna let me help you?"
She didn't bother to push her hair out of her face, just raised both shoulders and let them fall. Tears pressed at her eyes—certainly a result of the percussive impact of her tailbone on the ground. She wasn't so short it didn't hurt to go from standing to sprawled at the speed of gravity. She choked out a strangled laugh. He would have appreciated that joke.
"I heard," Mitchell said, as he once more hauled her to her feet. "They said it was a righteous shot. Nothing you could have done for Aaron, neither. Trust the Army to take nine days to find its own ass with a hand mirror and a flashlight."
The room swayed horribly but she didn't suddenly change decks, so she risked a swipe at her unruly hair. "Amazing how closed those inquiries are," she said. She felt a little more human being able to look Mitchell in the eye. Well, if she craned her neck back far enough—which made the room swing around like a fun-house ride. She settled for looking him in the sternum.
"Yeah, well. We all care about you, Mouse. We're just looking out for our own."
"I can take care of myself." She shook off his arm. "And don't. Fucking. Call. Me. That." By the last word she could feel the scream lumped in her throat. But she was still on her feet.
Garcia didn't look any better for the wear; he was slumped in the corner like a ragdoll short on stuffing. Two empty fifths lazed beside him in the sand. That would explain the feeling of being both too heavy and too light.
"Chill out, Frasier. Let's just get you back to your bunk."
It was the tone they used with patients too freaked out to understand what was going on around them. It made her spine burn and her jaw clinch like a fist. It was the voice for crazy people and invalids.
The tears wouldn't come, but the bottle was in her hand before it was in her thoughts and she hurled it against the side of the tent. "Goddammit!" Her voice sounded rusty, even to her ears. "Fuck!" she screamed as it bounced harmlessly off the canvass and dropped to the sand. Then, more quietly, "fuck." She dropped down where the bottle had landed, shoulders shaking and eyes dry. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that Mitchell had gone totally still.
She repeated the word over and over, testing it edges in her dry mouth until all meaning was gone. Then she sat back on her heels, empty and exhausted.
Mitchell still hadn't moved. "Janet?"
She turned slowly towards him. "I hate this place. You can't even break a goddamn bottle out here. Everything's wrong. I wanted to write his folks, tell them… I can't. Everything's wrong."
He nodded. "Yeah. You ready to go now?"
"I want to go home." She sounded like a child, felt like one, but she didn't care.
"I know." He lifted her, one more time. When she stumbled before the tent flap, his strong hand was under her elbow.
Outside was almost as dark as in, at least where the floodlights didn't penetrate. Mitchell stopped in front of her tent to let her get her bearings before he released her. "Get some sleep, huh?"
"Yeah. Yeah, ok." She wasn't up to saying thank yous.
On the tenth day the pain mugged her and shook her down for loose change. "There are two elephants sitting on my optic nerves," she told Mitchell before he could ask. "And two more dancing a rumba in my brain." She left the weekly status meeting twice to throw up, but by dinnertime she could turn her head without immediately regretting it.
On the eleventh day her body hurt less.
On the fourteenth day she saw the nameless man fall in her dreams, the enemy with no face and her bullet in his blood. The shrink they had assigned her to took it as a sign of progress. She took it as a sign to stop dreaming.
"Does it bother you that you killed a man?"
"It bothers me more that I let my friend die."
"We've already established that there was nothing you could have done differently in the situation."
"That's not what you asked. And anyway, it doesn't change how I feel."
"You need to allow it to."
"You need to know I'm only here under orders."
At some point there were weeks again. She requalified with her pistol on the dispassionate paper targets and then got to spend an hour shrinking the experience with Dr. Feelbetter. There had come a point where she'd agreed to take things under advisement in the hopes of getting out of the sessions faster and this was no exception. It was futile to explain that she could kill someone more easily and neatly with a needle of the wrong drug than with a gun she rarely carried. That, in fact, she had the opportunity dozens of times a day. That she was too tired, always too tired, to be angry or guilty or whatever else she was supposed to be.
Julia went home on leave and a new, maternal nurse came in her place as though the Air Force had a stock of them waiting to be sent out into the field to comfort the young and the sick. His replacement came, too, and she made it a point not to ignore her and pointedly to tell Dr. Feelbetter about her not ignoring. The replacement was blond and perky and fresh-faced with a name that ended in y, and Janet would never have liked her anyway.
She ate the terrible food they served in the canteen and drank water that tasted of iodine and lost weight in the searing heat of the day. She played a thousand games of poker and wrote a letter home that she never sent and swapped books with the anesthesiologist in the next bunk.
And then, quite suddenly, the order came to fold up their tents and go home.
The patients went first, in huge transport planes specially rigged to hold IVs and lock stretchers tightly into place. They disappeared into the bellies of the great green beasts and flew to Germany or Italy or all the way back to the US. The sounds in the camp died down until it had the feeling of an abandoned gold rush town, a place built and settled in haste and then left to be consumed by the land.
They took the med tents down with something like reverence. Sooner than she'd expected, her own name came up on the transport list. She crammed all the clothes she never wanted to wear again in her footlocker and brought out the few she'd been saving that were cleaner than the rest. She shook out her shined boots, packed a thick book for the flight, and thought long and hard about a warm shower.
The picture of them together at their passing out ceremony was still in her wallet where it had always been when she boarded the plane. She found herself seated next to Garcia, who looked less sullen than she had ever seen him.
"Damn, but I'm glad to be going home."
She nodded politely and smiled, trying to decide whether or not to take a last look out the window behind her head.
"I hate this place," Garcia continued. "Sand everywhere. People getting shot at, blown up—and what for? So we can go home and people can wave their little flags and think how great it was we saved the Kuwaitis. Who gives a fuck about the Kuwaitis?"
Months of the same song had enabled her to tune in and out like a radio. As the plane began to lift off she did not turn to watch the camp recede. She could picture it in her mind's eye: sparse spots of green growing smaller and smaller as the desert expanded in all visible directions, grey and formless. She closed her eyes and rested her head on the throbbing wall and thought about her mother's fried chicken and the hard narrow mattress of her childhood bed.
She was so tired. Maybe when she woke up, wherever she was, it would be tomorrow.
Fin