“Do you mind?” she asked with a tilt of her head, looking up at him to showcase her long lashes.
“Not at all,” Darren said, unable to hide the beaming grin. In his own way he had been trying to flirt with April since the first time Tina brought her over months ago. Really, Rick thought it was a pathetic thing to watch, especially considering he could tell that April liked him anyway. He could always tell these things, he thought. “Let me just grab my book and I’ll be right back.”
Darren grabbed the railing and sprinted up to the second story, his feet hardly touching the ground.
“Go on,” April whispered to Jill, raising her eyebrows and giving her friend a nudge. Jill gave April a subtle nod and walked tentatively into the middle of the room. She was shorter than her friends and on the thin side. Her legs and hips were tight from her cross-country days in high school, her stomach rippled with muscle, though she never allowed it to show. To her, it seemed almost masculine, especially with her small breasts. They weren’t nonexistent, just…cute. Everything about her was cute: her button nose, her timid smile, the ridges of freckles beneath her pale blue eyes, even her cropped blond hair that fell just to her shoulders.
“Hi, Rick,” she said, easing up behind the desk chair.
“Hi, Jill,” he said, jerking his shoulders to the right as he used his whole body to make the joystick fire a battery of flashes at some sort of mutant creature crawling toward him through a dark hallway inside the monitor.
Jill looked quickly back to April, who just waved her on.
“I like that hat,” she said, biting her lower lip. Had she really just said I like that hat?
“You a Seahawks fan?” he asked dubiously.
“Yeah,” she said, wincing in preparation of a barrage of questions designed to discredit her. She hadn’t watched a game since she had gotten her driver’s license two years ago. They weren’t still playing at U Dub; what was the name of their new stadium? It wasn’t the Kingdome. That was their old one. What was it?
“Cool,” was all he said.
“Yeah.”
She looked back over her shoulder to April for guidance, but Darren pounded down the stairs with a beaming grin on his face.
“We can sit at the kitchen table if you want,” he said.
“Sure,” April said, following him through the doorway into the adjacent room.
Shoot, Jill thought. She was on her own.
“So what’s Gina really like?” Rick asked without slowing his finger on the trigger.
Jill sighed dejectedly, unable to maintain the façade of a smile.
“She’s nice enough, I guess,” Jill said, letting her arms fall to her sides with a slap.
Rick was absolutely clueless.
Shaking her head, she walked over to the couch and leaned across, parting the blinds. All of her sisters were out on the lawn, each of them the epitome of beauty in a different regard. She wished she was more like them. She wished she had more provocative curves. She wished she could pull off the outfits the others wore without a second thought. She wasn’t really one of them. Sure, she got along just fine with all of the other girls, but when she stripped the matter down to the bare bones, she got in because both her mother and grandmother had been Kappa Delts. It had been a foregone conclusion before she even applied to school.
She looked back at Rick, his whole body absorbed by the game, wishing she had half of the confidence of the other girls. Why did he have to be so oblivious?
April giggled in the kitchen, and Jill could almost picture her friend place her hand atop Darren’s, the laugh ending in a silence through which their eyes met, locking a moment too long, before she tugged back her hand.
She turned her gaze back to the window.
The bodies of her sisters lay scattered across the lawn in bloodied heaps like fallen leaves, ashen limbs tangled, large bruises like eyes staring back from withering flesh. The grass was bled black. Clouds of insects swarmed over the carnage, the bodies crawling with them.
Jill screamed.
“What?” Rick blurted, spinning around in the chair.
“Oh, my gosh. Jill!” April gasped, dashing into the living room.
Jill looked from Rick’s face to April’s, all of the blood drained from her own. Her right fist curled into the drapes to help her manage her balance as the room had begun to spin around her.
“What the hell’s wrong with her?” Rick asked from beneath raised brows.
“Jill?” April called, rushing to her side. She took the smaller girl by the left arm, steadying her.
Jill opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
Her face a twist of conflicting thoughts and emotions, Jill turned back to the window, jerking the curtains away with a trembling hand.
Her sisters were still sprawled out all over the lawn, only they were as she knew they had to be: reading books beneath the shade of the trees, browning with their headphones on, turning the pages of schoolbooks with oily fingers, sipping tea from glasses sweating with condensation. The grass was bright green, and the air around them was rife with nothing but the precious rays of the pristine sun.
Her knees gave out, dropping her onto her rear end on the couch.
“Are you okay?” April whispered into her ear. “Jill?”
Jill opened her hands on her lap, turning her palms to the ceiling above. Her jaw fell slack.
What’s wrong with her?
Is she all right?
Girl’s out of her gourd.
He was holding my hand.
Is she drunk?
I think she’d let me kiss her.
I hope we don’t have to take her to the hospital.
Voices called chaotically to her from all around the room, though when she was able to steal her stare from her trembling hands, she saw that they had all crowded around her, claustrophobically leeching the air from her. She started to wheeze, laboring to draw breath.
She’s hyperventilating.
I could cop a feel and no one would know.
What’s going on down there? Can’t this wait another five minutes?
She’s wigging out.
The voices assaulted her from all sides, attacking in a riot of sound from the spinning room like so many flying fists.
None of their mouths were moving.
“Jill?” April said, her voice resonant with fear.
“I’m okay,” Jill managed to say, pushing herself from the couch to her unsure legs. She wobbled from side to side before righting herself and heading for the front door.
Something was wrong. Really wrong.
By the time she hit the street, she had to bury her face in her hands to hide the tears.
VII
Northern Iran
IT WAS ONLY WHEN HE SMELLED HIS OWN BURNT FLESH THAT ADAM KNEW he was alive, and the sudden rush of pain made sure to drive that point home. His neck buckled back with the throes of a scream that was never able to rip through his parched throat, though it felt as if it had torn a strip straight up his trachea. The warmth of the sun permeated his closed eyelids with an orange glow. With all of the sand packed into his tear-crusted eyes, opening them was like raking sandpaper across his orbits.
“Don’t try to move too quickly.”
It was Keller’s voice.
A wash of cold water passed over his lips and he had to sputter to force it to go down. It had a bitter taste like it had been pulled from a river downstream from a herd of yaks, and his first thought was of giardia ravaging his intestines, but right now it was the most divine substance he had ever consumed.
“There isn’t much,” Kotter said, a black shape blotting out the rising red sun and the wavering aura of the desert heat. “We need to make it last.”
“One more,” Adam croaked, propping himself up on his elbows despite the raging protests from his field-bandaged shoulder. He could barely peel his tongue from the roof of his mouth to allow his lips to open wide enough.
Kotter leaned
over him and tipped the helmet just enough to splash across Adam’s mouth. He no longer looked like Gabe Kaplan. Only the right side of his head still had hair, while the left was singed back to the blistering scalp. His left eye was encircled by angry-red skin, and there was no hair left on his eyebrow or eyelid. What little remained of his formerly thick mustache was fried to scorched curls burnt nearly to the flesh. Fresh blood seeped through the cracks in his lips when he spoke.
“Think you can walk?” he asked. “There’s no way we can drag you guys any farther.”
Adam nodded, and somehow managed to roll over onto all fours and tentatively push himself up on legs that felt like noodles. He reached gingerly over his shoulder toward his back. It felt as though the metal was lodged all the way clean through.
“We removed the shrapnel and were able to bandage it, but it’s Jimmy-rigged at best,” Keller said.
Adam’s legs gave out and deposited him again to the sand on all fours. He panted, trying to force his eyes open against the ferocious agony.
The pain in his shoulder abated just enough to allow him to open his eyes and look around. Red rocks towered over them, reaching like skyscrapers into the blood red sky. It reminded him of the Garden of the Gods back home in Colorado, though there were no purple, snow-capped Rocky Mountains behind. No pale blue sky. Just these sheer cliffs already coming to life with brilliantly-colored lizards with spiked tails and thickly-scaled serpents staking their claim to the prime basking surfaces, and the dust-riddled sky above leeching the sun’s rays. Squinting against the glare, he rolled over onto his rear end, bracing himself gingerly on his arms.
Uninterrupted desert stretched to the eastern horizon, shimmering like a field of diamonds before the dawn.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to walk?” Keller asked.
“Yeah,” Adam whispered, finally mastering his equilibrium and rising to his feet. “Where are we anyway?”
“I’m not precisely sure, but I’d guess roughly 10 miles southwest of Ali Sadr Village. If I’m correct, from there we can find transportation to Tehran, which ought to get us to the Caspian Sea in time for retrieval, so long as we keep moving.”
“What happened back there?”
“Tank.”
“The Syrians crossed into Iran?”
“Best I can figure. I wasn’t about to stand around waiting for an introduction.”
“I never even saw it.”
“I guess it snuck in under the dust storm, but that’s also what allowed us to get away.”
“Don’t you think the Army’ll send choppers out for us once they notice we’re missing?”
“If they ever notice,” Keller said, shielding his eyes against the sun. The right half of his face was still black. Tears poured unimpeded from the right eye, thickening with dirt, but it didn’t move with the left eye scouring the horizon. It just stared blankly ahead. “For all they know, we loaded up in our trucks and are on our way to the removal site. I keep watching the sky, but so far nothing.”
“So we’re on our own, then,” Adam sighed.
Keller nodded, turning back to the desert to the east where he could see nearly to the end of the world, and wondered why a Syrian tank would have attacked a refugee camp on Iranian soil. It made absolutely no sense. Surely they couldn’t be preparing an offensive against Iran, who had already entered the nuclear age. The only reason they would have even considered being so brazen was if—
“Saddle up,” Keller said, turning his attention to the north. If he was right, the journey was going to be a lot more perilous than he could even imagine.
* * *
Adam could tell something was eating at Keller, but, under the circumstances, that was only to be expected, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more than the soldier was letting on. They had been traveling north along the foothills of the Zagross Mountains for close to two hours, or so he surmised by the position of the rising sun, which was turning the day into a sweltering oven. If they were headed toward Ali Sadr, then surely they would have already begun heading away from the mountains. Unless they weren’t going to Ali Sadr after all. But where else could they be going?
Keller trudged a good half dozen paces ahead of the rest of them, his eyes fixed stolidly to the north, only turning around long enough to ensure that the others were following in his footsteps to mask their tracks. Sweat glistened on his skull, an aura of heat emanating from him. His service pistol never left his right hand, which constantly sought a better grip on the handle, while the sun glinted magically from the serrated blade in his left.
Adam lagged behind, doing his best to just place one foot in front of the other while he supported the weight of the tattooed man, whose left arm was wrapped around his neck. The man’s abdominal wounds had nearly completely healed overnight, leaving little more than ugly crescent scars that almost looked as though the scar tissue had grown across the gaping lacerations and closed them like so many small mouths. And Adam was certain that he had heard the man’s left fibula snap beneath his knee when they had been fleeing the assault at the camp, but the man walked on it as though nothing had ever happened. Even the color was starting to come back to his face between the ominous markings, but there was something about his eyes that had changed. They were no longer fathomless pits of warmth and softness as he had seen them when the man had healed the girl’s arms, but now looked to be carrying a weight of sadness that hurt Adam to look at. So he kept his eyes on the sand, making sure that one foot preceded the next, occasionally looking back to make sure that they hadn’t lost the others.
Kotter trailed in the rear, and by now it looked as though Thanh was supporting him every bit as much as he supported her. His face was dripping with sweat, his eyelids blinking frantically to keep the stinging droplets from creeping into his eyes. Every so often, his irises lolled upward, but with obviously great exertion, he forced them back down and concentrated all of his strength on staying on his feet.
Thanh struggled to balance the much taller man, though she didn’t really appear to be in any kind of shape to be doing so. A long gash bisected her face from her hairline, over her right eye, and all the way down to her chin. Whatever had sliced her had torn her tan jacket as well. She held it tightly closed with her free hand as though to allow it to fall open would expose her chest.
There had been another patient with them as well, but he had died during the night while Adam was still unconscious. There hadn’t been much time to bury him, so they had done what they could and hurriedly mounded sand atop his corpse, hoping the camel spiders wouldn’t exhume him too quickly and begin to devour his viscera.
Adam tried not to think of the little girl and her mother, whom he had personally shoved into the back of the transport vehicle that had proven to be their deaths.
“Shouldn’t we be heading to the east?” he called ahead to Keller, forcing the thoughts from his mind.
“We’re on course,” Keller called back, but even Adam knew that wasn’t the case.
“We have to avoid Ali Sadr,” the tattooed man whispered into Adam’s ear.
The man hadn’t spoken since they had begun their trek that morning.
“Why?”
The man just looked to him with those pained eyes.
Adam looked away.
“Wait!” he called.
Keller froze in place, his stare fused to the horizon where the foothills advanced into the desert from the west, forming jagged castles of stone directly ahead. Spotted clusters of withered palms were barely discernible like toppling columns from the rocky ruins of that natural structure.
“Everyone take a break,” Adam huffed, removing the man’s arm from his shoulders and helping him drop to the increasingly hard terra.
“We don’t have time for this!” Keller barked, storming back toward them. The lid had dripped halfway down over his dead eye, while his good one blazed.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Adam demanded, squinting to blot out the s
un so he could see Keller’s reaction. Thanh eased up on his right side while Kotter plopped down onto the ground amidst the random tufts of yellowed wild grasses.
“Everything’s under control,” Keller said, though the harsh edge in his voice betrayed his words.
“If we keep up this course, we’ll overshoot the town,” Thanh said.
“We should have been headed far more to the east by now,” Adam added.
“I want to stay close to the mountains. If anyone were to come upon us in the middle of the desert, we’d have nowhere to hide,” Keller said, sighing and removing his helmet long enough to run his fingers through his sopping hair.
“If we stay this far to the west, no one will be able to find us. They’ll be looking over the desert while we’re climbing through the foothills,” Thanh spat, exasperated. “We’re not catching a bus from Ali Sadr to Tehran, are we?”
Keller turned back to the north. The back of his neck was bright red already.
“Those trees ahead signify that there must be some supply of water. We just need to push a little further—”
“What’s going on?” Thanh nearly screamed.
Keller turned to face her, smoothing his hair back and donning his helmet.
“Something about the tank doesn’t sit right with me,” he finally said, rubbing the crusted dust from his eyelashes.
“Like the fact that it destroyed our entire camp?” Kotter said.
“Tanks aren’t long range assault vehicles. They’re meant for combat, not reconnaissance. And this tank was alone. The only reason a single tank would be deployed was if someone didn’t want to draw attention to the objective, and if the expected resistance was to be minimal. There’s no way that a tank crossed from Baghdad through the mountains along the Gave Rud. The slopes are nearly vertical. This has all of the signs of an ambush.”
“You think it was one of our own?” Thanh asked.
“Maybe not American, but I’d wager a vital organ that it was dispatched from somewhere within Iranian borders.”
“While we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal,” the tattooed man whispered.
The Fall Page 6