Beneath the Stain - Part 2 (8 page)

Heath tilted his head back and laughed. He had a broad face—the kind that might run to fat if he ever stopped doing PT—but a good laugh, and kind brown eyes. Trav probably wouldn’t have banged him in the dark much less the light, but he sure did love the guy as a friend.

Mostly because he could laugh like that with a load of shrapnel in his ass.

They both paused, breathing hard, keeping panic and pain in check, and realized—

“The shelling’s stopped,” Heath assessed. “Our guy got off a couple of rounds from the turret—do you think….” He didn’t finish his sentence, probably out of basic superstition. Neither of them wanted to
ask
if they got the guy with the grenade launcher, because that would automatically ensure that a grenade would blow them apart in the next two seconds.

But still, things had been quiet for a while, with nothing but the moaning of the poor, silly, doomed goats.

And—oh hell.

They both heard it at the same time.

The children—the confused ones, herding goats. They were crying.

Trav took stock. He could move. Yes, blood, pain, abrasions, but Trav could move.  Yeah, the arm hurt like a sonuvabitch, but it functioned, and he didn’t need it to walk. “I’ll get them.”

He started out with the classic deception—helmet on the rifle. When the helmet didn’t get shot off, he removed his flak jacket (the edges were sanding the hell out of his stripped skin, for one thing) and cautiously put
that
up, with the helmet on top. And when
that
didn’t get shot off, he put the flak jacket back on (
ouch
) and snake-belly-crawled forward, peering around the tire of the upended Humvee.

First of all….

“Shit.”

“Shit what?”

“Communications vehicle is a hole in the road.”

“Shit.”

“And you know how we didn’t know anybody in this unit a half an hour ago?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that is
never
going to change.” Trav looked with sorrow at the other vehicles, burned-out and shattered, and at the bodies of the soldiers now scattered across the road like bloody chaff.

“Well that sucks,” Heath said, and they shared a moment—a breath—of mourning before they moved on to saving their own asses. “The kids?”

“I can get them. How’s your Dari?”

“About as good as your Farsi.”

“We’re fucking doomed.”

Trav belly-crawled quickly and took shelter behind the communications Humvee, which was, by far, the most destroyed of the three vehicles in the caravan. He did himself a favor and didn’t look inside—nobody was alive in there, and the rest could be a mystery.

He got to his feet and ran to the end of the vehicle, then checked up the hill from whence the original firing had originated.

Ah, yes. Another new hole in the road, fresh blood included.

Well, God bless his fellow servicemen—he sincerely wished he could thank the man at the turret for killing the enemy for him, but unfortunately, like everyone else in the damned caravan, he was a bloody hole in the road.

But the kids weren’t.

Trav got to his feet, AK firmly in hand, and ran to where the kids lay moaning in the pile of slaughtered goats.

They were both small, the girl smaller than the boy, and dressed in the colorful clothing of the province. The girl wore the traditional Afghani headdress in bright blue, and the boy had a small cap made of red felt, embellished brightly with gold. Both of them were wounded—but, like Heath, not fatally.

The girl’s arm was most assuredly broken, almost mangled, and Trav sighed. “I need to rip your dress,” he said awkwardly in Dari, and he was rewarded with her widened eyes and panicked ululation.
Great, Trav. You just told her you were going to violate her. Well done.

“No, no, no, no!
I need bandages
!”
he tried, and the little boy understood. He spoke to her rapidly in the patter of children. Trav was relieved to understand a few words of Dari, or a dialect of it, so this might not be the final climax of what was admittedly a pretty spectacular goatfuck.

The little boy pulled a knife—a sturdy thing, probably used mostly for food—out of his stocking and made the first rip in the little girl’s skirt. Trav looked at him for permission and ripped off the bottom six inches all the way around. Fortunately the skirt was long—probably a hand-me-down—and he shredded the piece he’d torn off into strips and set about binding the little girl’s arm to her side.

It must have hurt substantially, because at one point she let out a whimper and lost consciousness. Trav was grateful, and even more grateful for the extra strips, which he used to bind the abrasions on the little boy’s back, hip, and shoulder. Then he picked the little girl up and made his way through the dead goats. (The living goats had long since buggered off, which proved they had more sense than Trav.)

By the time he got back to the Humvee of origin, little boy limping at his heels, Heath had bandaged his own ass and fashioned a crutch out of some of the debris in the road.

“What’s the sitch, hoss?” Heath asked, his accentless voice making a mockery of his attempt to be a good ol’ boy. One of the things Heath and Trav had in common, actually, was that they both came from educated families. Both of them wanted experience, and an education, and a chance to serve their country, but the military hadn’t been their only option.

“The sitch is we’re probably…” Trav did quick mental calculations. Thirty minutes out at forty miles an hour equaled…. “Twenty miles from base. You’re wounded, so are they, and we need to hump ass back anyway. Did you find any canteens?”

“And MREs,” Heath confirmed, holding up a bag of provisions.

They met eyes, then looked at the little boy to see if he was game. The poor kid nodded like he knew exactly what they needed from him.

Then he passed out.

Heath carried the little girl, because she weighed about nothing, and Trav carried her brother. They made shitty time, because they both hurt and because running on the side of the road was a good way to have a close encounter with the local venomous wildlife if you weren’t careful.

After the first five miles, the little girl woke up and screamed for Trav, so they swapped kids—and the little boy started to lose it. In an effort to calm the little boy down, Heath started bribing him. The electronics were the biggest seller—they could tell by the boy’s excitement when Heath said “Xbox”—so Heath stuck with that. By mile ten, both kids were exhausted and there was nothing but the sun, the blood, and the pain.

That was when Trav started singing.

“Well East Coast girls are hip, I really.…”

Heath laughed briefly and picked up the next line. “Dig those styles they wear….”

They finished “California Girls,” which was a good one—nice running rhythm.

“What next?” Heath asked. “Anything but ‘Doo-Wah-Diddy.’” Because they got enough of
that
noise in basic, right?

Trav saw a mirage that served as inspiration. “There she sits, buddy, just a-gleamin’ in the sun….”

So “Cadillac Ranch” followed “California Girls” and was in turn followed by “House of the Rising Sun,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Mysterious Ways,” and so on, and so on, and so on.

The heat and the pain they managed to forget. But long after they’d gotten to camp and even after Heath had ordered the electronics delivered to the children as they healed in the infirmary and waited to be placed, the two of them still remembered that playlist.

“Music, Trav. The kind of music that gets under your skin and hauls your ass across the stinking desert. I
live
for that shit. I want to do something with that, you know?”

And Trav, who had only ever thought of music as something to sing along with in the car, was suddenly empowered by it. Just like Heath, he felt the drive of a rhythm and beat, understood the healing it could inflict on his soul.

Music. Whatever they did in the future, Trav hoped there would be music.

Part Three

Mackey Sanders doesn’t do anything easy—rehab is no exception. Never one to follow orders for the sake of being orderly, Mackey needs a reason, something real, to make him agree to Trav’s terms of getting clean. Trav knows he can’t be Mackey’s only reason to rehabilitate, but before he can convince Mackey of that, he needs to get to the heart of what’s been eating Mackey alive from the moment the band left Tyson.

Can Mackey’s family—can Mackey’s
band
—survive the fallout of Mackey telling the truth? More importantly, can Mackey?

A
MY
L
ANE
is a mother of four and a compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head. She adores cats, Chi-who-whats, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckle-headed macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever, or sometimes for no reason at all. She writes in the shower, while at the gym, while taxiing children to soccer/dance/gymnastics/band oh my! and has learned from necessity to type like the wind. She lives in a spider-infested, crumbling house in a shoddy suburb and counts on her beloved Mate to keep her tethered to reality—which he does, while keeping her cell phone charged as a bonus. She’s been married for twenty-plus years and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.

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