And it smelled like chicken. Lots of chicken.
Keo had been in more than one battlefield in his lifetime. It was how he used to make a living.
How he used to have to make a living.
These days, things were different. He didn’t have to do any of this. Heck, he didn’t even have to be here.
But he was, anyway, even if he couldn’t remember why at the moment.
No matter. He was still alive.
Barely.
But barely was good enough, considering what had happened to the others.
More body parts.
Blood on the sidewalk and streets.
Everywhere.
It was bad. It was really bad.
Keo tried to shake away the banging drum inside his head as he watched bodies continue to stream out of what used to be Bunkhouse #17. People were starting to gather around them, wading through the smoke.
Civilians. Workers that were supposed to be in the fields but hadn’t yet left, and were now moving toward the blast to help.
The blast.
Someone had blasted the building.
His mind’s eye flashed back to a few minutes earlier (or at least he thought it was just a few minutes earlier) before the explosion, replaying the events:
…the kids playing soccer in the street…
…new Shitties arriving in wagons…
…Lance riding his horse alongside him…
…old men sitting in front of the apartment stoops chatting…
…women hanging out of windows…
…a guy in a drab olive-green army jacket…
…a guy in a drab olive-green army jacket…
Keo had almost hit the guy with the soccer ball, but the man had been quick enough to duck. Just before he hopped up the curb and knocked on Bunkhouse #17. Then he’d gone inside.
…then he’d gone inside…
After that, everything was a blur. Not that Keo couldn’t figure it out even if he had no clue about the why of it. The what was pretty easy.
Knowing, though, didn’t help him right now.
He managed to reach over and grabbed a streetlight with peeling black paint—he wasn’t sure if the paint had been peeling before or had been caught in the explosion—to steady himself and remain on his feet. He glanced around again, following gray soot-covered forms as they continued to stagger their way out of the holes in Bunkhouse #17.
Holes, because there were more than one. Three that he could see, spaced out along the front of the building. Whatever the bomber had strapped himself with, it’d caused some serious damage. Keo didn’t even want to think about how many were dead inside.
He didn’t want to think about that at all.
Civvies were helping the injured, grabbing them as they staggered around the streets and sidewalk around Keo like sleepwalking children. Keo had seen shellshocked soldiers before. When you got hit—and hit hard—it was difficult to get your head around what had happened. It would be hours, maybe days or weeks, before these poor saps knew that a man strapped with explosives had stepped into Bunkhouse #17 and killed himself.
Keo gripped the cold metal pole tighter as he looked around, shaking his left arm to get it working again.
…shaking his left arm…
Good. It was still attached to his shoulder. Damn, he’d been a little freaked out at the possibility he might not have it anymore.
But there it was, moving from side to side. It was numbed and there was blood dripping down his forearm from inside the long sleeve, but everything appeared intact and accounted for. Appeared, anyway.
Let’s hope for the best and prepare for the worst, pal.
Except he didn’t really want to because the worst was, well, worse. Keo liked having two arms. There was something nice about that. Something really nice.
“Hey, you okay?” a voice asked.
Keo wasn’t sure who was asking. It sounded feminine, even sweet, but maybe that was just the continued ringing in his ears playing tricks with him.
“Hey, buddy, hey,” the voice said.
A soft hand touched his shoulder and turned him slightly. Keo would have resisted if he could, if he had the strength to do so.
A lightly tanned face—no, not tanned, but black—peered at him, the woman’s head cocked slightly to one side. She was looking him up and down. Not tall—maybe five-two, and way too thin for what he thought were impressive breasts that made themselves known behind a tight gray sweater—
“Are you kidding me?” she said.
“What?” Keo said. Or thought he did.
She glanced down at her chest, then back up at him. “Are you kidding me right now, buster?”
Ah. I was staring at her boobs.
Bad boy. Bad boy!
He might have laughed. Or chuckled. Or let out something that sounded like amusement, because the woman rolled her eyes at him before grabbing his arm and throwing it around her smaller frame.
Man, she was small. He was afraid he might send both of them sprawling back to the ground, right on top of all those sure-to-be painful jagged bricks and rocks and glass. But somehow she managed to keep them both upright and began helping him across the street. Keo let her—not that he could stop her—and tried to help out as best he could by forcing his legs to move one at a time, one at a time...
A young man with a buzz cut ran up to them, waving his hands in front of his face and trying—but failing—not to cough. “What happened? Jesus Christ, what happened?”
“Some kind of bomb,” the woman said. She turned slightly to look back at the building. “Go help the others.”
“How?” the man asked.
“Any way you can.”
Keo wasn’t sure if the guy understood, because he didn’t move. Instead, the man—he was at least twenty years younger than Keo—stared at him.
“Go!” the woman said. Or barked. Keo was pretty sure she barked, because the guy quickly snapped out of it and ran toward the chaos.
Keo glanced over his shoulder to follow Buzz Cut and got an even better look at the remains of Bunkhouse #17.
He wasn’t quite sure how the building was even still standing, but it was. There were ten floors to it and it didn’t look to be in any danger of collapsing on itself, even though the blast had taken out most of the lobby walls and a good chunk of the second floor. More people continued to come out of the smoke and rubble, civilians rushing to help them from every side. If Keo didn’t know any better, he’d swear they’d practiced something like this before and everyone knew their roles. That couldn’t have been the case, because he’d never heard of Shaker Town coming under this kind of attack.
Not everyone stumbling their way out of the building was injured. The ones exiting now looked more stunned than hurt, waving everything from clothes to hands to magazines to clear the clouds of vaporized concrete from their eyes.
“Come on, let’s get you some help,” the woman was saying.
Yes, that was probably a good idea. He’d gotten some feelings back in his left arm, but he didn’t think he was going to be throwing a football with it anytime soon. Not that he could have thrown a pigskin even when he wasn’t injured but, well, he could have done a better job than his current status.
His legs were moving just fine now, and he kept up with the woman. At least, Keo didn’t think he was letting her do all of the work. At this point, that was the best he could muster.
A patch of red hair on the street, poking out from underneath a large slab of concrete. There was a body underneath what used to be a piece of Bunkhouse #17’s walls which had been blasted nearly across the street.
…there was a body underneath…
…patch of red hair…
Keo was staring at the hair, wondering if the kid was already dead, when he felt a tugging. The woman was trying to move him because he was frozen in place. Despite his weakened state he was still bigger and stronger than her, and if he didn’t want to be moved, then she wasn’t going to mak
e him.
“Come on,” she said. “Are you okay? Come on, we have to get you help. You’re bleeding all over me.”
He was? He didn’t know he was bleeding. Was it more than just the blood dripping from his left forearm?
Maybe that was why there was metal in his mouth.
“The kid,” Keo said. Or managed to croak out.
“What kid?” the woman asked.
“The kid,” Keo said, staring at the red hair.
The woman followed his gaze. Unlike him, though, she snapped out of it faster. “Come on,” she said.
Keo began moving again, trying to keep up with her the best he could. They walked past the slab of concrete. It was partially tilted, and he could just glimpse dirty white tennis shoes poking out from underneath.
He looked forward, trying to shake off the ringing in his head. “Lance.”
“Who?” the woman said.
“Lance. He was back there, with me. I gotta find him.”
“You can’t help him. You can’t even help yourself right now.”
“I gotta find him…”
“We’ll find him for you. What’s his name again?”
“Lance.”
“Lance. Right. We’ll find Lance for you, don’t worry.”
“You will?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You will?” he asked again. He sounded pathetic even to his own ears. He blamed it on the pain.
“You betcha, buddy, you betcha,” the woman said.
He was pretty sure she was just humoring him because she didn’t stop half-carrying, half-shouldering him to the other side of the street, where two other people—a man and an elderly woman—hurried out from one of the buildings to help.
Then they were laying Keo down on the sidewalk, and someone was trying to force-feed water down his throat while someone else was dabbing at his cheeks with a wet towel. The woman who’d helped him was giving orders. She was pointing and shouting.
For a second—just a second—she reminded him of Lara. The way she took charge, giving orders and looking completely unflustered by the situation.
But she wasn’t Lara.
Lara wasn’t here with him. She was back at Black Tide, about to give birth to their child.
And he belonged alongside her, but he wasn’t.
Instead, he was in Shaker Town, trying not to die.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda, pal.
…shoulda, woulda, coulda…
Six
Keo wasn’t sure when he lost consciousness. Hell, he wasn’t even sure when he closed his eyes. But suddenly he was looking up at a cracked ceiling with a fan turning slowly above him. Not that the fan was moving on electricity; it was just wind coming from the open window to his right, pushing it round and round and round.
He glanced over at the window’s direction and could just make out voices outside. The fact that he couldn’t see anything out there told him he wasn’t on ground level, so the speakers were somewhere below him.
He wasn’t the only person in the room. Two others lay on the floor nearby. A man and a woman. Both were heavily bandaged—the entire left side of the man’s face was covered with gauze. The woman’s arms and legs were just as heavily bandaged. They were both either sleeping or unconscious. For their sakes, Keo was hoping for the latter.
Keo sat up. Or tried to. He got as far as three inches off the carpeted floor before he lay back down with a groan.
Yeah, let’s not try that again.
Not yet, anyway. His legs felt okay, and he had sensations in both arms again. He lifted his left. Someone had cut away the sleeve to gain access to it, so he was walking around with one long sleeve and one short. He was able to raise it, if with some pain. Not a lot, but some. That was okay. A little pain was better than no pain, because no pain meant he’d lost the arm. Right now, it was just covered in a layer of bandages.
Medical ointment tickled at his nostrils. It was coming from him and his two roommates. The whole room was covered in the stuff.
He thought about rolling over onto his stomach so he could try pushing himself up onto his knees, but decided that was probably not a very good idea. He reached up and felt along his temple instead.
There was something on his forehead that hadn’t been there before.
Stitches.
Swell. I just got prettier.
No wonder he’d been suffering through a drumline after the explosion. Compared to the others, he’d gotten through the blast relatively scot-free. That was certainly something his two roommates couldn’t say.
…or the kid with red hair.
Keo sat up. Quickly, without thinking about it.
And this time managed to get up all the way. The carpeted floor felt good, but he didn’t want to take too close of a look. There was blood and dirt and caked mud around him, and he had no illusions it wasn’t the same under him.
What was that old saying? Ignorance was bliss?
Keo slowly rose to his feet, then walked over to the window. Both legs were working well again. He’d been worried about them, too. There was no telling where he’d been struck by flying debris.
But he was up and about. That was good. That was really good.
Keo leaned against the wall, half for support and half—no, that was really just it. He was a little afraid he might fall if he didn’t have something to keep him propped up. He trusted his legs, but maybe he was just being a little too optimistic. People did say he could be way too optimistic for his own good.
Really? Since when, pal?
He chuckled to himself. What was he thinking? It was the opposite. That was why he needed someone like Lara in his life. She was the antidote to his pessimism. His happy pill to his assholeness.
He’d been wondering if it’d been a day or more since Bunkhouse #17 was hit. He found out the answer to that when he looked out the window. The woman hadn’t brought him very far from the explosion. In fact, he was in the building—the third or fourth floor, as far as he could tell—just across the street from it.
So that was why he could still smell explosive powder in the air. He was wondering about that.
Bunkhouse #17 had seen better days. It looked worse from his new vantage point than it’d been when he was on the sidewalk, and it had looked pretty goddamn bad then, too. From up here, though, it was a mess. A real fucking mess.
There was still the acrid stink of explosives in the air, but any fires or smoke had been cleared or put out. Blood splatters, some bigger than others, crisscrossed the streets. The people that had bled them were either inside rooms like the one Keo was in now or, for the unfortunate ones, lying in the body bags that lined the sidewalk. He counted eleven in all. That wasn’t too surprising. In Keo’s experience, there were usually more wounded than there KIAs in suicide bombings. And that was exactly what this was. Keo had spent too much time in the Middle East to not know the telltale signs.
There wasn’t very much activity outside, with only a few armed people standing along the sidewalk. Were they guarding the bodies? If so, Keo wasn’t sure why. There were more civilians out there than non-civvies, many of them picking up after the damage in the streets, using hands and wheelbarrows to haul away the debris. Soon, the streets would be completely clear and you’d probably never know what had happened.
Well, except for the blood.
Unless they were going to hose this stretch of Shaker Town down, then there was going to be blood out there for a long time. Not that anyone walking by wouldn’t have known something bad had happened. The big holes in Bunkhouse #17 weren’t going to go anyway anytime soon.
“Already up, huh?” a voice said.
Keo glanced behind him as the small black woman who’d “carried” him here entered the room. He hadn’t heard the door opening at all and found that extremely disturbing.
“Yeah, couldn’t sleep with all the stink of death,” Keo said.
She narrowed her eyes back at him. “Was that a joke or something?”
“Hunh.”
“That’s usually the right response.”
She smirked, before kneeling next to the bandaged woman. She had a stethoscope around her neck and was listening to the other woman’s heartbeat, then checking her pulse.
“You a doctor or something?” Keo asked.
“Or something,” she said.
“Touché.”
She got up and moved the short distance over to the man, and did the same to him.
“What’s going on out there?” Keo asked.
“What do you think?”
“Looks like a mess.”
“It’s that, all right.” She got up and walked over to him. “Let me check you.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
He stood still and let her do her job. She was staring at him as she listened to his heartbeat.
“What?” he said.
“What?” she said.
“You’re staring at me.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
She shrugged. “What’s your name?”
“Chang.”
“You don’t look like a Chang.”
“What does a Chang look like?”
“Chinese.”
“I am Chinese.”
“No, you’re not.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’re not Chinese.”
“Half?”
“Not even that.” He thought she might keep the topic going, but instead she pulled her stethoscope down and took a step back. “Any pain?”
“A little.”
“From one to ten.”
“What’s one? Also, what’s ten?”
“So fine, then.”
He smiled. “Yes.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but it was mostly true. Mostly. The pounding in his head had stopped, and he was getting better control over his legs and arms with every passing minute. Not 100% by any stretch, but better than before.
Road To Babylon | Book 10 | 100 Deep Page 5