POCKET CHANGE
by Sharon R.

Chapter Eighteen
Collateral Damage

"Luka?"

A beautiful feminine voice caught his attention. When Luka finally dropped his head and glanced to his right, he thought he was seeing things at first. Ahead of him somewhere was the boy he may have just placed into the hands of evil men. And standing next to him was the wife of his best friend - his friend who was lying dead up in the mountains. Most assuredly, she and Sean did not yet know of Joseph's fate.

He stalled, frozen in time and in being, his head pivoting from the kind smiling face of a gentle deserving wife and mother to the distant child he left behind of his own accord. That empty feeling in his heart that made it so hard to breathe punctured by the staccato of the gunfire and artillery was not lost on Luka. He had been there before and believed that no one person would have to endure that feeling twice in a lifetime. Life is cruel. Unjust.

"Luka!" Toomay was relieved to see Carter and Luka alive. "I knew you would be alright. I prayed and… and… here you are!" With that, she threw her arms around him.

He put his arms around her as well looking back to see her children sitting with Carter, laughing and joking with him. Carter and Luka shared a world of memories and thoughts as they glanced through each other's eyes at that moment as they went through the motions of greeting the family. He just did not want to move forward in time, to talk about what had happened to them. To be the one to give the worst news Toomay would ever get in her life.

Sean broke up the reunion. "Come on now. We need to get moving, but we can talk at the same time. Here," Sean handed the two doctors the backpacks they had traveled to the Congo with, "we didn't have time to get everything out of the house, but we did manage to grab these."

Luka stood staring down at the backpack he had long forgotten about. Mostly toiletries, papers and a book or two, but a piece of them at least. As Sean and Toomay walked out of the street towards the shelter of the bombed out building, Luka found himself unable to move his feet, staring blankly.

"We have to tell them." Carter's voice startled Luka, but it was subdued and meant only for the two of them. As they, again, exchanged looks, Carter nodded slowly, raising his eyebrows slightly as though answering Luka's question telepathically. "I, um… I can…"

"No. I will." Luka cut him off.

"Getting you out of here is not as easy as you think." Sean guided them around the corner and down the street. "We are far from peaceful civilization. We had heard that you may be freed, but had no control over the direction we took ourselves. Almost fate that we met up, eh?"

"Why aren't you in Kinshasa?" Carter asked.

"Well, when I got the call on the satellite phone that you two had possibly been captured by unfriendlies I drove back to Joseph's house. Things were beginning to fall apart all over the country, especially in the jungle areas near the borders."

This information was new. "So you had heard from Joseph?" Carter's curiosity got to him.

"Yes, he was at the clinic and had just given the Vancomycin to the nurses. The women were evacuating the clinic and had just left with the girl and her father."

During their hustle through the streets, Luka would steal frequent looks at Toomay over his shoulder. "And…?" He was delaying the inevitable.

"And that's when soldiers broke into the house and told us to leave. Rebels were close by and we needed to get the children as far from the action as possible. We didn't have time to wait for Joseph." Sean stopped and looked ahead at a well-lit area. "That's where we need to be."

When they got to the make-shift UN compound, Sean disappeared momentarily only to return with a group of men in a military truck.

"Gentlemen, these men are from Uganda and they are here to help you. They are going to drive us to the Ugandan border, but that's as far as Toomay and the children can go." Sean picked up on the strange silence. "What? What is it?" Carter and Luka looked at each other then at Toomay. "I'll make sure she is taken care of. But we cannot leave the country and expect to meet up with Joseph again."

Again, the two doctors stood in awkward silence, their emotions dictating their hesitant mood. But it was Toomay that latched onto the moment.

"Do you know about Joseph?" Her dark hand gently tugged at his upper arm, begging for answers. "Luka?"

Luka nodded, his dark eyes giving away the apprehension. "Toomay, we didn't know until…" he looked down at his feet, across at the truck, everywhere but in her eyes. And he couldn't get the words out. It was an uncomfortable silence as Luka tried in vain to tell Toomay, his mouth moving, the words stuck.

"Evidently he was being held at the same camp as we were," Carter interjected, "and it wasn't until the last day that we found out." He looked to see that the children were out of earshot, playing at the rear of the truck, then lowered his voice even more. "I'm sorry, but, they took us out and… and we were blindfolded… and… we didn't know, Toomay…" Carter closed his eyes, taking a deep breath in hopes that it would clear his mind of those awful memories just long enough to get out what he needed. His brain just couldn't make it past those memories and this time he was the one unable to talk.

"We were taken to an isolated area in the jungle," Luka picked up the story but soon realized that Toomay had guessed the ending already, her hands to her mouth holding in the screams she so desperately wanted to let loose, "and put to our knees. I'm so sorry, Toomay, but they shot him in the head." There it was, out in the open.

Grasping Luka's shirt tightly with one hand and stifling her anguished screams with the other, Toomay fell to her knees, Luka in tow. Protecting her children for the moment by swallowing her screams, her eyes said it all.

"I don't know why they… why they killed him and not us." Luka kissed her gently on the head while trying to comfort her as she silently wailed for her stricken husband.

"I do." Carter mumbled. "Jules. Sick son-of-a-bitch."

"Jules?" Sean perked up. "Jules Akonda-Bouche is the most hated War Lord in Africa." He had been leaning against the side of the truck, his head resting on the cold metal, hiding his own grief. "If he is the one who had you, you are both lucky and unlucky to have survived. They must have taken Joseph when he was coming back down from the clinic. They knew all along," Sean said to himself, "they had to make an example out of someone. Bloody hell!"

"I'm sorry," Luka tried to comfort Toomay, "I wish I could…" He wished he could have finished that sentence. With not much fanfare, the UN peacekeepers hustled the group onto the back of the truck and took off into the darkness, Toomay alternately cradled by Luka and Sean, Carter resting his pained body while trying to keep the children, who had not been told yet of their father, calm and occupied.

The former livestock truck rambled over the roads, probably too fast for its own good, the old worn gears grinding, the wood planks that made the raised sides clattering incessantly. Although they could exchange looks, there was no use in trying to talk above the racket, not that anyone wanted to. They passed the masses of hungry and homeless as they walked in columns both into and out of Bunia. They straggled along not sure which way they should go. Simply following - following.

None of the smells was pleasant and a time came when they were no longer able to distinguish between sewage and death as they intermingled and became one in the same. In the breaks of the column of marchers, Luka could see the bodies being buried. Some victims of war, others of collateral damage. Except that collateral damage in the Congo was from the lack of anything more than bombs. Then there were the babies. Not one without a distended belly of malnutrition and worms. They had no more energy to make any sounds. They didn't smile. The moms didn't smile. And the flies… the flies were so numerous they prospered from the perch on the babies' faces to the point that they were as accepted as a benign freckle. He just could not look anymore and diverted his eyes away from babies to what was in front of him. Carter.

Luka spied a pasty and clammy skinned Carter checking his own carotid pulse. He mouthed, "You OK?" In return, Carter pointed to his chest and flitted his fingers. Experiencing some atrial flutters, Carter was beginning to lose physical ground again.

With Toomay's head on his chest, Luke reached out and tapped Sean on the arm.

"I need to get some fluids into Carter. IV fluids," Luka shouted in the direction of Sean's bent ear, "now."

"One thing at a time. He can get to his feet, that's a lot better than most folks around here. I can't promise anything before Kampala," Sean answered, "but I'll see what I can do. And I'll do my best to find that package for you… what was his name? Mbuto?"

The truck stopped and another pulled up beside it. Carter hoped that something else more comfortable would come along, but as it turned out, the truck was for Sean, Toomay and the children.

"The peacekeepers will walk you across the border and get you to a chopper. Mr. Bongala told me that there is transportation waiting for you in Kampala. Dr. Carter, will you be OK?" Sean noticed that Carter was the only one not yet out of the truck bed.

"I don't know," Carter finally admitted as the adrenalin rush waned, "I don't think I can go much further."

Pointing in the distance, Sean hoped that Carter had just a bit more stamina left in him. "Do ye think ye can get to the other side of that bridge?" With all they had been through and the years he spent outside of his native Ireland, his accent remained and almost sharpened when the seriousness of the situation called for it. Carter studied the terrain, looked back at where they came from and nodded. He'd do what he had to to get out of that hellhole.

Parting words were not needed as the gentle touches and hugs were exchanged. Luka was spirited by Toomay's stoicism for the children's sake. The two shared a brief but heavy tear as they each put a hand on the other's cheek, Luka leaning forward to drop his forehead tenderly on hers.

"I'm glad that he wasn't alone, that his friends were with him." Toomay reached out and tenderly held onto Carter's hand while still in Luka's arms.

Once again, the two doctors shared words through their eyes as they acknowledged only to each other the horror of the killing field. Had Joseph even known that the three were together? They didn't know, but kept that to themselves.

Having crossed the bridge and escorted into Uganda by the peacekeepers, Luka and Carter were whisked to a military helicopter, buckled in, and without so much as a word of welcome, dragged up into the sky and flown far from the warring factions of the Africa border wars.

"Isn't Uganda where that dictator Idi Amin lives? The one that was supposed to be a cannibal?" Carter shouted to Luka over the ruckus of the chopper.

Surprisingly one of the soldiers spoke up. "Not since 1979. He's in exile in Saudi Arabia and in failing health. Uganda is a modern, prosperous country now under Democratic rule."

Two armed soldiers took up positions at each side, the crew up front, and other than Luka and Carter, only one other person was aboard for the ride. The man - a white man - sat just behind the cock pit in the shadows, said nothing but stole looks at the doctors periodically. The hitch hiker rocked and rolled with the chopper as it was pounded by the wind and rain, seemingly unaffected. Luka and Carter raised eyebrows at each other as they hung on for what was to be the start of their long journey home.