Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 11

CHAPTER SIX

Harry ripped at the tent zipper, cursing his shaking fingers. Pulling the flap aside, he reached in to touch her. It was dark in the tent; all could see was a shape in a sleeping bag.

“Brenda?” he asked ever so tentatively.

His fingers touched wetness and she gasped, words quickly spilling from her. “Harry, is that you? What happened? It hurts so much....”

“One minute—I’ll be right back.”

He ran for a battery-powered lantern and the first-aid kit that they kept in the big canvas tent. His mind raced as if filled with amphetamines, random thoughts and memories flitting about the stage of his mind, at the same time that the task at hand received focused attention. He knew the effects of those drugs, having popped the pills the Army gave him on long missions and in surveillance jobs that required a soldier to stay awake and alert. Seedy drug pushers who pushed speed and uppers on the street went to prison, but not the Army.

As he grabbed the first-aid kit, he felt an awful sense of déjà-vu from a time over a decade past, though that other first-aid kit had been wrapped in brown, desert camouflage, with a red cross on it. One of the men of his team, a sergeant from Michigan, had sprayed too widely with his SAW and the bullets hit a little girl as well as a Taliban fighter. The fighter’s AK-47 assault rifle had slipped from lifeless fingers as the girl dropped beside him, her long dark hair sweeping across her face.

Harry pounded back to Brenda’s tent. Dawn was only minutes away. Setting up the lantern, he pointed it inside. Blood stained her right forearm. The tissue around the wound looked torn and he was alarmed to see blood pumping out. An artery had been nicked. Harry popped the kit open. It was a complete kit, with bandages, scissors, two splints, a variety of small tubes of medicine, and a manual that he had no time to read.

He ripped open a bandage with his teeth, pressed it down on her wound, then wrapped the bandage around her arm and pushed the tape together. His hands were slippery with blood; it had already saturated the bandage. He needed to make a pressure bandage. Rooting through the kit, he found two more bandages. Leaving one bandage rolled up, he pressed it over the wound and wrapped it tightly in place with the second bandage. If the artery did not stop flowing, he would have to resort to a tourniquet, and Brenda would probably lose her forearm.

“Harry, what are you doing?”

For a moment he considered lying—for her own good, of course. But she was too smart; even in shock she would realize what had happened, so he went for honesty. Mostly. “You’ve been shot, honey. I just need to stop the bleeding. You’ll be okay. It’s only flesh wounds.”

“Shot? Who would shoot me?” Her voice sounded distant to him, as if she was calling from another country.

The little girl, perhaps only ten or eleven years old, had blood on her lips and an ugly hole in her upper chest. The team’s medic ripped open the medical kit and grabbed a bandage that he handed to Harry and ordered him to press down on the wound. Harry obeyed and watched the medic prepare an IV.

Harry searched Brenda for more wounds as he talked to her. “I don’t know who they were, some guys from back east.”

He tugged at the zipper of her sleeping bag. It was soggy with blood and he had to jerk at it to force the zipper to move. She moaned. “That hurt.”

“Sorry, honey. I’ll be more careful.” He partially crawled into the small tent and unzipped the bag all the way to her feet, then withdrew so that he could see what he was doing.

“Where’s the person who shot me?”

He pulled the sleeping bag open and found her wearing pajamas. Dancing bears and flying birds decorated them. He had seen them before, when she had gotten up early to relieve herself without bothering to change her clothes. He did not find the motif incongruous at all—a perfect match for her personality.

“I killed him. Killed both of them.” Those words cut the chatter from her.

He found more blood under her left breast. He pulled up her top far enough to see the neat small hole from a .22 near the bottom of her ribs. Little blood was coming out. “I have to roll you over onto your side for a moment, honey. It may hurt, so I’m just warning you.” He pulled her over and was gratified to find no exit wound. He didn’t like the idea of a bullet inside her, near her lung or in her guts, but at least he didn’t have the jagged hole made by a tumbling bullet leaving the body. There could be internal bleeding. Probably was, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

Rolling Brenda back, he reached for another bandage.

The IV went into the little girl’s small arm easily and the medic squeezed plasma into her. She tried to talk, but only bloody bubbles came out. Harry stepped back, reached for his mike and called for a medevac helicopter. Kneeling beside her, his eyes blurry with tears, he prayed to the God of his childhood that the girl would live.

Harry taped the bandage to Brenda and she bit her lower lip and shivered with pain.

“I have to get my truck,” Harry said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

A faint smile creased her features. Harry dashed for his truck. Partway there, he remembered his keys. He found them in his tent and hurried to the truck. Sliding into the driver’s seat, the keys slid from his fingers. He realized that his hands were slick with Brenda’s blood. Maybe even blood from the man from Boston was mixed in. He hoped not; it seemed a desecration to have the blood of a murderer combined with that of an innocent. He wiped his hands on his sweat pants and picked up the keys.

The engine turned over on the first try. Enough of the sun had risen to clearly light the camp, with crisp morning shadows, as if the day had not turned ugly. He drove into the camp and stopped near Brenda’s tent, careful to not spray dust towards her.

He found her unconscious. While alarmed at this, he was also grateful. Talking to her was an awful strain. He thought about putting her in the back of his truck, laying her on the foam pads there, but he worried that she would roll off. He carefully picked her up, as tender as a father with a baby, and carried her to the passenger’s seat. He sat her up, secured her seatbelt, and checked the bandages. Bloody, but not soaked through.

The girl’s mother came running up, holding her dusty burqa up above her sandals so she could move more quickly. She was not screaming. Harry looked at her eyes, outlined by a rectangle of dark cloth. Her glistening eyes were resigned. How many children and relatives had she already seen die in three decades of war? Harry found that fatal acceptance unnerving and infinitely sad.

Harry drove quickly out of the camp, wincing at every bump. When he reached the car that the two would-be murderers had come in, he turned off the road and drove over brush to get around them. He glanced briefly at the car as he passed—a mid-sized sedan that screamed rental.

The medvac chopper landed a couple of hundred yards away, where the boulders dotting the hillside allowed merely a tricky landing, rather than an impossible landing. Harry shielded the medic and the girl from flying grit with a blanket, then they used the blanket to make a sling to carry her to the helicopter. The medic climbed in with her, but the mother hung back and shook her head when the medic motioned for her to come aboard.

Harry heard later that the girl lived. Not the outcome he expected, but he remembered the lessons from catechism from his childhood, and prayed again, thanking God for that child’s life. He regained his faith that day; not a faith that took him to mass or to confession, but a faith that found comfort in reading the Psalms and the Proverbs and praying when in need. He knew little theology, though he recognized that this was because of laziness, not some ecumenical inclination.

That had been eleven years ago, and now he prayed for Brenda. No words, just a yearning for her to live, an incoherent beseeching of the universe. Let there be justice, let the innocent live. Let Brenda live just as the little girl in Afghanistan had lived.