by Hill, Teresa
On the floor in the row of seats in front of Mace was the young woman with the baby. She looked completely freaked out and the baby was crying pitifully. If Mace made a move toward Carson, he’d put that woman and her baby in the line of fire.
He caught the mother’s eye and motioned for her to get herself and the baby up against the outer wall of the train, but she didn’t seem to understand or was too freaked out to move.
He reached for her beneath the seat, wanting to tug her toward the wall, but she cringed away.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted again, aimed at the back of the train. A couple more people had tried to get out. They were on the floor and bleeding now.
The young mom wailed. She hadn’t moved.
Mace turned back to Harold, still on the phone. “Do they know where we are yet?”
Harold nodded.
“Tell them Car 12, downstairs, one gunman, white male, mid-forties, short brown hair, dark blue shirt, armed with an AK-47, standing in the front of the car. Five people shot, I think. How long until they’re here?”
Harold held up five fingers.
Okay. Five minutes.
Mace noted the time on his watch. They’d hear the sirens soon, and that would likely freak out the gunman even more. Would he open fire on all of them then? Or turn the gun on himself? Or both?
What was the best chance most of the people here had of surviving this?
Staying down had worked reasonably well so far, for those who hadn’t moved. Mace didn’t think the gunman was a terrorist. He’d have already sprayed the whole car with bullets if he were. He’d go from car to car, doing the same thing. More likely, he was a stressed-out guy who’d fallen over the edge and decided shooting up a train sounded like the answer.
The French kids were still sheltered by their parents against the outside wall. Best place they could be, if they had to be in a train car with a gunman. Mace wasn’t so worried about them.
The woman with the baby hadn’t moved.
He’d seen little kids injured in terrible ways and seen some die. It was the worst fucking thing in the world. If he got closer to this mom and tried to move her and the baby, would she stay quiet and let him this time? Or would she start screaming and struggling? If she did that, Mace would probably get all of them killed, and then he really would hate himself.
Back to Carson. Still conscious. Still pleading with his eyes for help, his hand still reached out toward Mace.
God, this world was just too fuckin’ hard sometimes.
He held Carson’s gaze for a few moments, trying to reassure him.
Back to the young mother. He had to get her and her baby toward the little bit of safety there was in this train.
Mace pointed toward the baby, then motioned for her to pass the baby to him under the seat. She shook her head frantically. Mace nodded, “Yes.”
She didn’t move.
He mouthed, “You, baby, wall,” and pointed. It was hard to be authoritative while pointing and mouthing words. Then he realized she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was looking at Harold, who was reaching for the baby, who was closer to Harold. He got hold of the blanket the baby was wrapped up in and tugged until the baby slid into his arms. Harold put the child between him and the side wall.
The mother looked like she was going to scream, but she didn’t. She was trembling so badly, Mace wasn’t sure she could move, but she finally did, crawling on her belly to the wall until she was with her baby again.
“Good job,” Mace told her and Harold, then slowly belly-crawled forward into the space she’d just vacated.
It put him a few feet closer to the gunman and Lt. Carson, who was trembling, sweating, his breathing becoming labored, but he was still conscious. “You’re doing good,” Mace whispered. “Just a little bit longer.”
He judged his new distance to the gunman, whether he could complete a leap before getting shot. Maybe. More likely than it had been when he was one row back. If the man would just point the gun toward the floor or out one of the windows …
Instead, he now held it down at a forty-five degree angle. If he fired, the shots would go into the people in the first two rows. Not acceptable.
But waiting like this was hell.
Give me an opening, Mace begged silently. Just a tiny one. I’ll take it.
On the floor in the next row in front of him was a body. Mace didn’t think he could drag it over to make room for himself without catching the gunman’s attention, so he wasn’t getting any closer that way.
Again, he judged the distance between them, the position of the gun, Carson’s shallow breaths and the sinking look in his eyes.
How much time did the kid have?
How much time did any of them in this train car have?
A second later, he heard the faint sound of sirens. Moments later, the gunman did, too. They were coming from the left side of the train. The gunman turned toward the sound. The gun’s barrel turned with him. Mace took a flying leap at the guy.
Screams followed, and shots. Mace hoped they were off-target and out the windows.
Mace had the gunman in his grip now. His knife had a short blade. It wouldn’t go deep. Mace aimed for the gunman’s neck, hoping to hit the carotid artery. His other hand went for the AK. He didn’t make it fast enough. It cost him a bullet or two in the arm, maybe his shoulder. His left arm fell to his side, useless, but he still had his body and his right arm.
Mace filtered out the screams and everything else around him. It was just him and the gunman. Mace’s knife struck the man’s neck. Blood came out in spurts, probably in time with the man’s heartbeat. He’d hit the artery, but he hadn’t severed it. He still had work to do.
They struggled over the gun. Damned, useless left hand and arm was seriously pissing Mace off. He used his legs to knock the gunman off his feet and followed him down, aimed his knife at the man’s groin and the femoral artery.
Mace tried to break the guy’s neck, but he couldn’t get a firm grip. Too much blood.
Finally, he got a tight hold on the AK-47. He pulled it out of the guy’s hand. He twisted the gun around and shot him, double-tap to the head.
Damned messy, but effective.
Mace sat up, caught his breath and waited for the ringing in his ears to subside so he could hear again. He checked to make sure the gunman was truly dead and it was safe to take his eyes off the man.
Then he could look around the train car. Two people in the front row, dead. He wasn’t sure about the people piled up at the back door to the car. They were too far away. He’d have to step over Carson’s body to get to them, and there was no way Mace was going to do that.
He started a half-crawl toward Lt. Carson as he called out, “Harold? You okay?”
“Yes,” came the answer.
“The baby?”
“Safe out the back door with the mom.”
“Kids across the aisle from us?”
“Same. Out the back door.”
“What are you still doing here, old man?”
“I think you broke my leg when you shoved me to the floor.”
“Sorry about that.” Mace laughed, just for a second, before he reached Lt. Carson.
“It’s all right,” Harold said. “You probably kept me from being shot. I’m grateful to be alive.”
Carson was still alive, too. His eyes were open, barely, not quite focusing. His breathing was extremely shallow. Mace checked for a pulse. It was faint but there.
“Hey, Carson. It’s over. Gunman’s dead. Cops are outside. Paramedics should be here soon. Hang on, okay? You’ll be in a nice hospital soon, doped up on some very nice pain meds.”
Carson sighed. The ends of his mouth curled up a fraction. “You got him?”
“We got him. We did. You did good, kid.”
“Wasn’t fast enough.”
“Not enough to keep yourself from getting shot, but you put your body between him and everybody else on this train. Trust me. You did just fine.
”
Mace peeled off his own shirt, one-handed, then rolled Carson onto his back. Time to see what he could do to stop the bleeding. He pulled up Carson’s t-shirt. There was so much blood on his torso, it was hard to see where it was coming from. Three different places, the worst mid-way down his chest, scarily close to the abdominal aorta, the main blood supply to the lower half of the body.
Mace assessed Carson’s condition again — even weaker pulse, slow, shallow breaths, fading consciousness — and considered the position of the wounds and the amount of blood he could see.
Carson was likely bleeding internally, bleeding badly.
Fuck.
“Harold? You still have my phone?”
“Yes.”
“Tell whoever’s out there the shooter’s dead, and we need medical help now. Do you see my bag? The black backpack. I need some of the medical supplies in it.”
Mace put his folded t-shirt over the bullet wounds and pressed down hard to slow the blood loss. He hoped it would be enough to keep Carson alive until the paramedics arrived. He really wished his other damned hand and arm were working right now.
Help was so close, but he could feel Carson fading. Mace abandoned the pressure he was holding on the gunshot wounds for a few seconds and raised Carson’s legs up on a seat, wanting to keep as much of the man’s blood as possible going to his vital organs.
Harold called out, then tossed Mace his bag.
“If you can get over here, come and help me.”
Digging through his bag, he found a packet of QuikClot gauzes. He rolled them up tightly and pushed them into each bullet hole. Carson screamed as they went in.
“Sorry. Had to be done,” Mace told him, then went back to putting direct pressure on the bullet wound closest to the abdominal aorta.
“Carson, come on,” Mace yelled. “Almost there. Tell me about your girl. She teaches school?”
“Mmm,” Carson said.
It might have been a response. Might have been an expression of pain. Mace couldn’t tell.
“Bet you can’t wait to get home to her. It’s probably gonna happen sooner than you think, too. Getting shot like this? I bet nobody ships you back to Saudi. Bet you’ll get a nice trip to a hospital in the States to recover and you’ll be with her in a couple of days. I know you like the sound of that. What was her name again?”
Carson’s mumble was practically incoherent, but Mace could detect a D sound, which helped him remember.
“Dani, right? That’s her name? Keep thinking about Dani, man. You didn’t even get a honeymoon yet, right? You don’t want to miss out on that.”
He thought he detected a faint smile on Carson’s face, so he kept talking about the girl, girls in general, marriage, kids, anything that might help Carson hang on.
They were so fucking close.
Harold dragged himself over to Mace. “You’re bleeding,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“A lot.”
Mace glanced at his useless arm. He’d known he was bleeding, but he’d lost more blood than he thought. Adrenaline was powerful. It kept people going when they should be sprawled out on the floor, unable to move, in pain. “Shit.”
Now that he’d seen it, he was starting to feel it more.
The pain, the weakness.
He did not have time for this.
“What can I do?” Harold asked.
Mace pushed the clotting-powder-treated gauze toward Harold.
“That. Put that over the bleeding.” He leaned more of his body weight onto Carson’s wounds and twisted around until his bad arm was facing Harold. “Then pressure. As much as you’ve got, old man.”
Harold shot him a wry grin at being called old. He was sweating profusely and gritting his teeth. Mace must have really messed up the man’s leg, but he was still trying to help. But he wasn’t able to put the kind of pressure on Mace’s wounds that would stop the bleeding.
“Use your shoulder and the weight of your body, not your hands and arms,” Mace said.
Harold figured out how to put the top of his arm into the natural pocket between Mace’s upper arm and shoulder and leaned into it. It hurt like hell, but the bleeding slowed.
“Good. Good job,” Mace said.
“What about our friend? Is he going to make it?” Harold asked.
“I think so. Where the hell is EMS?”
The German police showed up, giving Mace more hope. He knew enough German to tell them to send medical personnel right away, but Carson’s breathing turned shallower still, gasping, with long seconds in between.
Mace yelled again for help. He pantomimed CPR to one of the German police, who knelt beside Carson, checked for a pulse and then set to work. Someone dragged Harold off Mace. Someone dragged Mace off Carson and laid him out on the train car’s floor beside the kid. Mace was fading from consciousness himself.
The paramedics finally arrived.
Come on, kid, Mace thought. Don’t do this. Not now.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mace
He hated telling her that story, but it had to be done. She had a right to know the decisions he’d made that day.
“We were so close,” he said. “The German emergency medical system is different from ours. They dispatch doctors to scenes, do more in the field to stabilize patients before sending them on to hospitals. If they’d had a few more minutes, they might have opened him up right there. If they’d been able to clamp the biggest bleeder … I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
When he finally made himself look at her, tears were pouring down her cheeks, but she said, “Mace, I don’t doubt for a moment that you did absolutely everything you could — ”
“He bled out in front of me, begging me to help him, Dani! I made a choice. I decided I had to wait until that gun wasn’t pointed overhead, where, if the guy started shooting, he’d likely hit more passengers. I had wait until I could get closer to have a chance of getting him before he sent more bullets flying through the car we were in, and there were children there.”
“I understand. Do you really think Aaron or I would have expected you to put his safety above everyone else’s? Even children's? I’ve heard him talk about the kids he’s seen on deployments, how they get caught in the middle of things and hurt. It broke his heart. He would never have wanted to live if it meant children dying.”
Mace was a mess, all torn up, the memories of that day so strong it was hard to understand the present, but he thought she just said …
“And you made it. Did you do what you were trained to do?”
“Yes. You have to think about what will lead to the most people surviving.”
“Okay. Has anybody said that you did the wrong thing? Or that they thought they could have done better, under the same circumstances? I don’t believe that.”
“No.”
“You got a medal from the President and the German Chancellor.”
“I don’t give a fuck about a medal. They pass them out when people die, and you survive. It’s a shitty thing.”
“Or maybe when a lot of people survive who might not have if you hadn’t been there.”
“I hate medals.”
“And I hate seeing you do this to yourself.”
She surprised him by climbing onto his lap and wrapping her arms around him, snuggling close. It felt so good to have her there. And he had never imagined she could be so accepting of what he’d done, or how it had ended for Aaron.
She leaned up and kissed his cheek, then pulled his head down to hers. Looking him right in the eyes, she told him, “Aaron made a choice that day. He chose to jump in front of a man with a gun. Maybe it was mostly instinct. Maybe he didn’t have time to think. But I believe if he had, he would have done the same thing. I think if he knew most of the people got out of there alive — and all of the children — he’d have been okay with his choice.”
“I wish I could have brought him home to you.”
“I know, b
ut Mace, I’ll never blame you for surviving when Aaron didn’t, and I’m grateful you brought yourself home to me.”
That was a gift he’d never expected from her. Not just forgiveness, but insisting there was nothing to forgive. And her being grateful he’d survived and found her? Mind-blowing.
“I love you,” she said. “I spent a lot of time going over it all in my head as I was sitting here the past couple of days. If Aaron had survived, you’re the kind of man he would have grown into, and I think he’d have wanted us to be happy.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Will you take me home now?”
He nodded, still dumb-founded. He’d been so sure he’d lost her for good.
But here she was, offering him acceptance, understanding, love.
She eased off his lap and got to her feet, and tugged him to his feet. She started to walk away, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t. He had something left to do.
“Give me a minute.” He let go of her hand and sank down to his heels in front of Aaron’s headstone. As Dani had done, he pressed his hand to the letters that spelled out Aaron’s name.
Kid, he thought, I bet you knew you were the luckiest guy in the world when you met her and during the time you had with her in Greece. I’m glad you pulled what you did with that fake wedding. I’m glad she has those memories, and she’ll always know you wanted to marry her.
I want to thank you for jumping in front of that gunman on the train. It could have been so much worse that day. I hope you’re proud. Who knows how many people might have been shot right away? By doing what you did, you might have been the one who saved me that day, and if you did …
God, what do I say to you for that? I love her. I will always do my best to take care of her and see that she’s happy. I won’t ever make her feel like she shouldn’t remember you or love you. She has a big heart. She has room in there for both of us.
I’m gonna marry her one day. For real. Don’t know how I’d ever top the ceremony you pulled off. Greek Island, the Mediterranean, that sunset, but I guess this isn’t a competition, that we shouldn’t ever make it one. We both love her. She can love us both.