Frays scooted just a tiny bit closer so that she could change her grip and hold Lacey’s hand. She spared a glance at the man and could see that he wanted to put his arm around her. No. she told herself Not now. Not right now. The wind shifted blowing the smell of cooking meat across the field making her stomach growl. There was to be hot dogs and hamburgers for lunch maybe even baked beans or salt potatoes… A real Independence Day picnic.
Frays looked down then climbed to her feet and hurried off towards the Resettlement Center. All of a sudden she wanted to be as far away from everyone as she could get. She jumped when she almost ran right in to Tom. “Hey. Sorry.” the medic said and gave her a small nervous smile when he recognized who had nearly run into him. He looked down into the woman’s eyes brushed the palms of his hands against her arms as if he were trying to help her get steady on her feet. “Are you okay?”
Frays danced quickly away from the man. “Fine. Leave me alone.” she grumbled under her breath and set off again. Frays rolled her eyes when she heard Tom’s footsteps following after her and gaining speed. “Look LEAVE ME ALONE.”
The medic reached out and caught Frays by the arm spinning her around. Frays stiffened coming within a hair’s breadth of punching him. “Will you just stop and talk to me a minute?” he implored. “Please? What’s wrong?”
Frays gawped in disbelief at the man. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?!” she asked her voice rising in shock and incredulity. She shook her head slowly. “My. Son. Is. Dead. Excuse the heck outta me if I’m not in the mood to flirt with you.” Frays turned and tried to leave but Tom caught her arm again. The woman squirmed and twisted her forearm out of his grip, a fist cocked and about to break Tommy’s nose. “Keep your hands off me.” she warned in a voice that dripped venom and spite.
She wiped a couple of tears off her cheek as she stormed off, not caring anymore if the jerk was following her or not as she reached the parking lot of the former Wal-Mart. Carl’s voice calling her name reached her from under the trees where the kids’ playground equipment was set up. She had sat on the blanket with Becca and Paulie and the other little ones during story time in the morning a few hours after breakfast. The little boy had seemed fascinated by the little baby growing in her womb and would put his head in her lap sometimes so he could feel her son moving against his cheek…
Carl caught up to his sister and seeing the pained look on her face, felt a couple tears start down his cheeks too. Not knowing what else to do he walked up and held her tight to his chest. The grief and shame and anger battered against the wall finally somehow able to break through. She started sobbing quietly into his shirt the strength going out of her legs a little as he led her back under the trees. They sat there together against a massive oak tree crying on each other’s shoulders while the almost surreal sound of the baseball game went on behind them.
On the other side of the compound Jason Maddox stood outside a trailer smoking a cigarette with Henry Tiller. The two of them had worked together guarding fat ass State Department desk jockeys for a couple years over in Yemen. Henry tossed his head towards the trailer next to them. “How’s Barry doing?” he asked.
“Shitty, man.” Maddox said under his breath. He blew a plume of smoke out of his nose and flicked some ash off the end of his cigarette. “I told him a long time ago to get the fuck off that shit.”
“It’s all that fuckin’ bitch’s fault.” Henry spat. Truth be told he had something of a chronic marijuana habit and he had been looking forward to getting good and toasted after they got the airdrop squared away. “Do you think we should take him to the medics?”
Maddox shook his head. “And tell her what?” he said tensely as he pointed towards the man’s trailer. “Beg your pardon ma’am but could you do something for our friend? It seems that he can’t stop shitting himself since you tossed out his smack. You fuckin’ retard.”
“She’s gotta have some good shit.” Henry suggested. He took one last drag on his cigarette then flicked the butt out into the parking lot. “I’ll bet we can find that fuckin’ dope she took. Did you see that shit? That stuck up little cunt stuffed our dope in her pocket. Probably got a bunch of fuckin’ oxy and shit too.”
Maddox grinned. “Might be, Henry. Might be.”
Lieutenant Beth Haskins sat at her desk, enjoying the peace and quiet while everyone else was on the other side of the compound watching the baseball games. She had sent Tommy over there to keep an eye on things and be on hand in case somebody turned an ankle or something. Mike and Specialist Rodriguez were cleaning up the place. Daryl was not due back to work for ten more hours. Beth grinned at the paperwork on her desk. There were only a few more forms then she was going to get lunch for everyone then unroll the futon she had found in the back of the Supply Depot and take a good long nap.
She considered making herself a cup of coffee in the little single cup coffeemaker sitting on the table across the room but decided against it. The five pound can of Folgers was about a quarter full so it was down to strictly emergency only use: forty eight hour duties, sleepless nights filled with paperwork and requisition forms and other administrative tasks. The doctor toyed with the idea of making Specialist Rodriguez her clerk. It might make it possible for her to actually get more than a handful of hours of sleep at a time.
A noise outside that made her sit up and look confusedly at the wall across the room. She could not tell what the hell it was but hopefully Mike or Daryl would deal with it. Somebody pounded on her door hard enough to make it rattle in its frame. She stood and was almost to the door when it exploded inward sending shards of wood flying.
Before Beth even knew what happened a rough hand grabbed the collar of her NWU blouse and something struck her on the side of the head hard enough to make stars fly across her vision. Her legs turned to bundles of boiled spaghetti attached to her hips. A rough hand tugged her pistol out of its holster and flung across the room where it struck the wall with a clunk. Whoever smacked her then pushed her hard against the desk and spun her around bending her over the office furniture. “Where’s the fuckin’ drugs, bitch?”
Whoever it was that had bent her over her desk and jammed what felt like a gun barrel behind her ear as hands patted at her pockets. Her brain spun like a top and whirled as she tried to keep from throwing up all over her desk. Not my paperwork… Haskins thought distractedly. The weirdly disconnected medically trained part of her brain was reasonably certain she at least had a concussion at this point. Cerebral Hematoma?
The gun barrel pressed hard into her in the back of the neck again bringing her back to the here and now. Something warm she guessed to be blood ran down the side of her head. “The fuckin’ drugs, bitch.” a voice growled again. Whoever it was spun her around and now she really did gag on acidic bile. The gun barrel was now pressed under her chin hard enough to tilt her head back. It took a second but her eyes managed to focus on the face behind the growly voice and gun. “WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY, YA FUCKIN’ WHORE!?”
The woman’s head whipped back and forth as he shook her. The hand holding a fistful of her NWUs let go and Haskins collapsed into a heap next to her desk. She concentrated mainly on trying to keep the roiling contents of her stomach down. It sounded like a bear was tearing her office apart and throwing furniture around. Haskins swallowed bile and blinked. The door to the hall was hanging open by one hinge.
Haskins took a deep breath, swallowed hard and struggled to her feet. She somehow made it to the door on legs made of wobbly rubber and fell into the hall. The woman tripped over her own feet and landed hard on her stomach. The doctor struggled to her hands and knees and crawled a few more feet down the hall before managing to get to her feet again.
“Mike! Daryl!” Haskins tried to scream at the top of her lungs. Her voice came out as a strange little whimper. The woman careened off the wall and fell through the open door of a storage room a little ways down from her office. She lay on the carpet panting and struggling to try and get back up. Every
fiber of her being was screaming at her to get up. Run. Get away. But for some reason her body was not listening to what her brain was shouting at it. She did somehow manage the small victory of rolling onto her stomach so that if she passed out and vomited she might not strangle on it.
Rodriguez heard the noises coming from Lieutenant Haskins’ office was but did not dare try to get up and see what the commotion was. All of her attention was focused on the nervous tick the man in front of her seemed to have in his arm. Ordinarily this would not bother her all that much but the man had what for all appearances seemed to be a loaded M11 aimed at her face when the Blue Diamond guy did not point it at Mike. “You got the shit, Vinnie?” the burly man shouted to his comrade. “C’mon! Let’s get the fuck outta here!”
“Listen…” Rodriguez said in a low calm voice as she kept her hands splayed on the desk in front of her. “Let’s…just calm down.” She recognized the look of manic hunger in the man’s eyes. The woman had seen it in the mirror during the first weeks of kicking her addiction to narcotics and booze. She would have killed for half a Percocet and a swig of mouthwash… “Nobody has to get hurt here, alright?” Rodriguez mouth felt like it was lined with sandpaper when she swallowed. “Just take what you guys want. Nobody’s gonna stop you.”
The door next to the desk whooshed open and the mercenary fired two quick shots at the sudden movement. Rodriguez winced at the noise and concussion of the muzzle blast on her face. It took her a moment to realize that the man had not shot her but instead had fired into Corporal Waterman’s chest when he came into the room. She was half out of her chair when the man stopped her by pressing the barrel of the gun against her temple and forced her back down into the swivel chair.
“No way, bitch.” the gunman hissed between clenched teeth. “You just stay right the fuck there.” A few feet away Corporal Waterman made a few gagging choking noises as he strangled on the blood filling a rapidly collapsing lung. Rodriguez spared a glance at the dying man out of the corner of her eye.
“C’mon man.” Mike said as he rose to his feet and started towards the wounded corporal. “He’s dying. Frannie I nee-” The mercenary took the pistol out of Rodriguez’s face and smashed the medic across the temple with it making the portly man sit back down clutching his forehead. Rodriguez almost rose to a half crouch before the gun was now squashed against the bridge of her nose.
The second mercenary came out a few moments later with his hands full of pill bottles. “C’mon. Let’s fuckin’ beat it.” the other gunman shouted as he sprinted towards the door. Rodriguez almost stood and chased after them until she remembered that her weapons were locked up in the room behind the desk. She looked helplessly at the fleeing men’s backs as they rushed out the door then the two of them started trying to see what they could do about Corporal Waterman. Rodriguez knew from experience that it probably would not be much.
“Frannie, go get Doc.” Mike shouted as he struggled with trying to get Waterman’s bleeding to stop. “Tell her it’s an emergency! Go now!” Frannie nodded dumbly and rushed off towards the doctor’s office. Part of her could not help but wonder if she was asleep and dreaming the whole thing. The last few minutes certainly did have the detached feeling of one of her Afghanistan flashbacks. Am I losing my mind or is this actually happening? Rodriguez thought as she burst into Lieutenant Haskins’ office.
The door was off its hinges and the inside looked like a bomb had gone off. Rodriguez’s heart went into her throat when she noticed a few large drops of blood on the desk and spattered on the floor. There was an M9 on the floor across the room. Her brow wrinkled in concern she bent, picked up the weapon and verified that it was loaded before tucking it into the waistband of her trousers. However Haskins was nowhere to be found…
“Lieutenant Haskins!” Rodriguez shouted into the hallway hoping that maybe the woman had been in the latrine a few doors down when the mercenaries had shown up. “Ma’am? You can come out now! Ma’am?! Corporal Waterman’s been hurt! We need you!”
Rodriguez hurried into the ladies’ room a few doors down and checked the stalls. No Lieutenant Haskins there… She swallowed hard and tried to shake off the feeling that she had wandered into a nightmare. “Ma’am? Where the hell are you?” the woman shouted now starting to get really unnerved. “Ma’am? Get your skinny ass out here right now!”
Rodriguez sprinted back towards the desk and stopped outside an open door a little ways down from the doctor’s office. She had no idea how she missed it being open on her way by. On a chance she stuck her head inside the room and spied the soles of a pair of boots a few feet inside the room. “Ohholyshitfuck.” Rodriguez squeaked as she rushed to the figure’s side and knelt beside it.
Mike looked up when Rodriguez came back into the lobby area. The woman looked pale and he wondered for a second if he was going to have to try and take care of another casualty. “Where the fuck is Lieutenant Haskins?!” he asked somehow keeping himself from shouting at the woman as she approached. Rodriguez stopped a few feet away and stared down at him as if she were trying to figure out if what was going on was actually happening or not.
“S-She’s dead.” Rodriguez managed at last. Her mouth felt like it was full of cotton as she watched Mike trying to save Corporal Waterman. She stood there blinking and concentrated on breathing in deep the way her therapist had taught her to try and control her panic attacks about a millennia ago.
“What the fuck do you mean?!” Mike shouted at the semi coherent woman. “What the fuck happened?!” Rodriguez stood there with her chest heaving as more of the color started to leech out of her face. The scars on her cheek and face stood out like maggots on her skin.
“How the fuck should I know?!” Rodriguez shouted back. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to catch her breath, the horrors in front of her getting all mixed in with horrors from another place on the other side of the world. “She’s fucking dead, alright?!”
A few people came in probably drawn by the gunshots. Things started to get a little weird and disjointed after that: Rodriguez barely remembered sitting at a desk in the Security Forces office and giving a report. Somebody told her she could go so she wandered back over to the Resettlement Center and had a shower. It was lukewarm but helped the confused jumble of the past hour or so come into some sort of focus. Then she was lying on her cot in her room staring at the ceiling…
“Frannie?” a voice said from the doorway. She looked up at Carl as he tentatively entered the room. Female barracks were at least on paper off limits to male personnel however she and her three roommates had boyfriends come by and they had all worked out a system so that nobody ever intruded on each other’s private time.
She sat up and rushed to Carl, burying her face in his chest. “Tell me I’m here. Please please tell me I’m here and not there.” Rodriguez whispered fervently into his shirt. He held her tight and kissed the top of the woman’s head, savoring the smell of the soap in the woman’s hair. “Tell me I’m here. I don’t wanna be there. Where the hell am I?”
“It’s alright, Frannie.” Carl whispered into her hair as he smooched the top of her head again. He desperately hoped that she was not going to start crying. Holding his big sister while she sobbed her eyes out a few hours ago had been bad enough… “You’re right here with me. I got you. You’re okay, Frannie. Shhh…it’s alright, baby.”
Chapter Six
10 July 2011 1832 hours NorthCom Forward Operating Base Freedom Sanford, Maine
Sergeant Hanes looked at the paperwork in front of him and cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.” he said quietly as he shuffled the papers around for a moment. Ordinarily this would not have bothered him but… “According to witness statements two Blue Diamond Group personnel attacked the Med Center looking for drugs. During the course of the robbery one of the men, identified as Derek Yates, held the desk personnel at gunpoint while his companion, identified as Vincent Morales, went into Lieutenant Haskins’ office. During this time Mister Yates shot and kil
led Corporal David Waterman.
After the two men had fled the scene making off with all of our pain meds, antibiotics and what I’ll be generous and put in my official report as some evidence that Lieutenant Haskins was holding onto for us one Specialist Francesca Rodriguez discovered Lieutenant Haskins deceased on the floor of an examination room next door to her office. Official cause of death appears to be blunt trauma to the head, apparently from being pistol whipped.”
Major Tennyson looked like he had been through the wringer. The grizzled Marine officer nodded gravely. “Alright. Thank you, Sergeant.” he said quietly. The older man sighed heavily. This was just the sort of thing that he would have gone to Lieutenant Haskins for to see what she thought of it. “Go get Deputy Secretary Bouchard and bring him here. Now.”
Major Tennyson stared gravely at the small table that served as his desk. His first inclination was to tell Bouchard and his bully boys to get the fuck off his FOB and anybody who did not like it, as his grandfather would have put it, could take it up with Sam Colt.
He sighed heavily. Making all these funeral arrangements was starting to take its toll on him. He had lost count of the number of people buried in their makeshift cemetery. Up until earlier this afternoon the worst had to be assigning the detail to bury Sergeant Frays’ son. The poor little guy never even had a chance… It had taken everything he had to not give the poor woman a hug during the award ceremony where she got her Purple Heart. He had found himself admiring the woman’s resolve too. He did not know if he could have held up quite so well under the same circumstances…
Someone knocked on the major’s door a few moments later. A stocky guy in a polo shirt and khakis walked in without being invited making the major scowl at him. The man cleared his throat and scratched at his thin, neatly trimmed beard. “I…I’m sorry to hear about Be…Lieutenant Haskins.” Deputy Secretary Bouchard said quietly, his manner like that of a bullying schoolboy called into the principal’s office. “She and I had our problems but I liked her. She’ll be missed.”
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