Bring Down the Stars

by Scott, Emma

  I had just finished the ‘n’ of my name when the first bomb hit.

  The concussion rocked the earth and sent debris raining down. Someone in the rear screamed in pain. Was it Erickson? I crammed the paper into my pocket, underneath my body armor and grabbed my weapon. My headset was filled with chatter.

  “Incoming hostiles, half-klick south.”

  “Copy that. We got refugees ahead of them, northbound.”

  “Not regime, hajis.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Go, go, go!”

  Connor scrambled to his feet and we shielded our eyes from the explosive bursts to the south. Jagger, our communications officer, shouted into his comm for immediate air strike assistance.

  “The north attack earlier was a diversion,” I muttered, taking cover with Connor behind a hunk of rubble. “We never looked back.”

  “They said refugees,” Connor said, his face grim, no trace of his trademark smile. I hoped by the time he got out of here, he’d find it again.

  Bullets tore the air and exploded plaster chunks tore into flesh and bone. As the sun crept over the eastern horizon, it revealed a train of weary refugees—old men, women and children—running in a panicked clump as gunfire cut the air apart. They’d fled from the south and now the enemy, who knew the terrain better, was mowing them down.

  “Fuckers are using them as cover,” I muttered. I started to take aim and realized Connor wasn’t beside me.

  “Connor? Connor!”

  Then I heard crying.

  Somehow, under the barking orders, gunfire, and exploding rubble, I heard a child crying. In the pandemonium of refugees taking cover among us, a single little boy stood apart. Immobile in the chaos, weeping over the body of his dead mother.

  Connor was running for him. He didn’t see the group of hostiles crouched behind the burned-out shell of a building. But I did.

  “Fuck, no! Connor, stop!”

  I ran after him, getting off a few rounds at the insurgents hiding behind a crumbling wall of scorched stone. Firing made me too slow. I had to save my breath and run.

  The most important race of my life, with a weapon in my hands, slowing me down. My gear weighed a thousand pounds. It would flatten me to the track like a giant hand, while everyone I loved raced off and disappeared.

  I’ll never reach him. I’ll never reach him. I’m going to lose…

  The thoughts pounded in my head with my bellowing breath. Connor was in the open without cover, running straight through gunfire. I ran after, bullets whizzing past me from all sides.

  This is it. It’s coming.

  Connor was nearly to the kid. Plumes of dust and smoke fogged the street in a brown haze. Swirls and eddies billowing. Clouds parting to show an insurgent posed like a bowler about to throw a strike. The pendulum swing of his arm and the grenade rigged from a mortar round flew slow-motion in the dirty air. It rolled and jounced across the rocky soil, its course never veering from its target.

  The child.

  And Connor.

  I channeled everything I had into my legs, forcing them to move faster than they’d ever run before. This was a race for life. Connor’s life. I was running the race of his life.

  I was nearly there. I could see Connor’s eyes fixated on the child and determined to do something right. Something heroic and good that would make his parents—and himself proud. Unaware of the incoming danger. He didn’t understand the child was already lost.

  I hunched like a linebacker, lowered my shoulders and ran. I was fast. I was going to win this fucking race. Dad’s car drove away but not this time. This time, I would catch it…

  Connor, still running, reached his left arm out to the boy, shouted at him to Get down! Get down!

  He was almost to the kid, but I was faster. The fastest. Always.

  I won. I fucking won…

  I barreled into Connor, knocked him clear off his feet, both of us flying through the air as the grenade exploded. The concussion blasted a crater of dust, dirt, shrapnel and blood.

  For a single airborne moment, I only heard the air blowing past my ears. My arms gripped Connor hard. We were floating. We were flying.

  Connor landed first, striking the ground hard. Our helmets cracked together as I landed on top of him and all the sounds of the world rushed in. Gunfire, explosions, shouts and screams. The rasp of my own sucking breath. Connor lay beneath me, unmoving. Eyes half-open, mouth ajar, his face streaked with blood and grime. Blood poured from his left arm, a piece of metal shrapnel protruding from the elbow joint.

  “Connor?” I said, my voice torn and ragged, dust-choked.

  He’s dead.

  I reached my hand that was shaking as if we were in subzero temperatures instead of the merciless desert heat, toward his face.

  Fucking God no. Please. Hell no, he can’t be dead. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

  I slapped at his cheek. “Connor, man… Come on…”

  Another hail of gunfire, like stones pelting around us. I covered Connor’s head, shielding him, screaming at him to wake the fuck up and not be dead.

  Pain exploded across my back like a string of firecrackers. It slipped under my body armor and my words choked off in a gurgle. Molten bolts of agony pierced my side, my waist, and hip. Bones ground together in my trembling body. My breath grew ragged as I started to hyperventilate.

  In a mindless panic, I tried to escape. To crawl away and take Connor with me—Christ, he wasn’t breathing—but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t crawl, couldn’t stand, couldn’t run. I craned my head to look at my legs splayed out behind me. Blood poured from a gunshot wound on the back of my thigh.

  But there was no pain.

  Nothing.

  Below the howling agony that wrapped around my waist, nothing was there.

  “Connor… Please.”

  My vision began to gray out. So dark. The agony was subsiding, growing distant, running ahead down the track and leaving me behind.

  I rested my head on Connor’s chest, my eyes drifting closed.

  Stars filtered across the black nothingness. I smiled.

  I’d give them all to you, Autumn. My love. For you…

  For you, I would

  bring down the stars,

  wreath their fire

  around your neck

  like diamonds,

  and watch them

  pulse

  to the beat of your heart

  For you, I would

  capture the candlelight

  in the palm of my hand

  Give my breath

  to give it life

  A whisper,

  ‘My love’

  So that it may grow

  Bright and hot

  And burn me

  For you, I would

  drink the salted oceans

  Until their depths

  Were swallowed

  into the depths of me

  How deep it is, this life

  This love, for you

  I cannot touch bottom

  I never will

  For you, I would

  mine the stony earth

  Until it relinquished

  The secrets of time

  Cracks in the stone

  wrinkles of the Earth

  As she turns her face

  to another new day

  And so I wish to live

  Every one of mine

  With you

  For you, I would

  be myself

  At long last

  I would live in my skin

  And breathe my words

  in my own voice

  Tinged with the accent

  Of a child calling to a car

  that will never stop

  And in the fading echo

  Nothing remains but the truth

  of me

  that is the love

  of you

  I have loved you with both

  Hands tied behind my back

 
; Bound with pen and ink

  Paper and words

  Sealed with someone else’s name

  until this moment

  in which I am nothing

  but a man

  who loves a woman.

  There is nothing left to say

  Except to give

  all of my heart

  For you

  End Book I

  Beautiful Hearts Duet book II, Long Live the Beautiful Hearts

  coming soon…

  Prologue

  Connor

  My lungs sucked in air, bringing consciousness and chaos rushing back to me. And pain. A fuck-ton of pain.

  My vision was blurred as if I were underwater. I couldn’t move, my body pinned down by something heavy on my chest; I could hardly gasp for those first shallow breaths. Gunshots, shouts, and mortar fire sounded distant through the ringing in my ears. My left arm was heavy with a deep, stabbing pain.

  I blinked hard, forced myself to focus, and found the anchor that was pressing me down was Wes.

  He lay facedown on me, his helmet on my chest, unmoving. I couldn’t see his eyes, his helmet obscured him. I didn’t know if he were alive or dead.

  Alive. He has to be alive.

  Terror like I’d never known, whipped through me, carrying adrenaline on its currents.

  “Wes,” I croaked. “Wes!”

  My gaze darted all over, assessing. A pool of blood, seeping into the sand below him, sent another current of dread racing along my veins. I struggled to sit up, and pain ground steel teeth into me. Trembling as if it were freezing instead of pushing 120 degrees, I turned to see a length of jagged shrapnel lodged under the skin of my forearm, up to my elbow.

  “Ah, fuck.”

  The ugly wrongness of it scared the shit out of me, but I brushed it aside.

  Wes.

  I took a quick inventory of our situation. We were at the southern edge of the village, most of the structures behind us. The fight was still happening, but had moved eastward; through blasted shells of homes, I saw figures moving in and out amid the smoke and dust.

  Wes and I were exposed with no cover. A crater smeared with blood and a little kid’s sandal only eight yards away. The memory of running toward the owner of that shoe, to get him behind some cover—to save him—came back to me. I reached for him…and that’s all I remembered, but I knew what had happened next.

  Wes had chased me down, carried me away from the explosive I didn’t see, and saved my ass.

  A sob tried to tear out of me, as the other half of the truth battered me. Wes had shielded me with his own body and been shot multiple times as we lay exposed on the dirt street.

  And now he’s dead.

  “Wes,” I cried. “God, no…”

  Biting back the agony in my arm, I scooted out from under my best friend and gently eased his head to the ground. Wes’s eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open. I put two fingers to his throat, and tears stung my eyes to feel his pulse, faint and too slow, but there.

  “Thank fuck…” I said on a sigh.

  I walked on my knees to inspect his wounds, and a fresh current of fear ripped away the relief. A bullet hole on the back of his thigh had nearly bled him out, dampening his fatigues down to the boot. Around his waist and under his body armor, at least three more gunshot wounds had torn through camo and flesh; a shattered fragment of bone in his hip showing.

  “God, no, come on, Wes. No…”

  I had to force back the nausea and tears of what I was seeing and focus. We were exposed. Ten yards behind me, a pile of rubble was the closest cover. My panic and fear subsided and my training took over.

  I crouched on shaking legs, stood over Wes’s head, and gripped his rucksack with my right hand to drag him to safety. I gritted my teeth and pulled. He scraped across the gritty sand an inch or two. Too slow. Too heavy.

  I sucked in three deep breaths quickly, clenched my jaw and pulled. Gunshots rang out not a dozen yards away, and an explosion showered us with debris. Adrenaline, not strength, got me moving. After a few agonizing moments, I had Wes covered behind the rubble. I fell to my knees beside him.

  “You stay with me, Wes, do you hear?” I told him, as I took off my own rucksack. “You fucking stay with me. Don’t die on me, or I’ll fucking kill you.”

  I thought I’d vomit from pain as my rucksack strap brushed my left elbow.

  “Medic!” I screamed, as I worked to get my aid kit open. “Help me, please, I need a medic!”

  Each platoon had one. I hoped ours—Wilson—wasn’t dead, but we’d each been trained in combat lifesaving. I dug into my rucksack and found my CAT. One handed, I fought to slip the belt-like tourniquet up Wes’s right leg, until it was above the wound. I turned the clip around and around, tightening the belt until the clip wouldn’t turn any more. The bright red blood stopped flowing out of the ragged hole in his leg. I strapped the clip into place.

  “Medic,” I screamed. “For fuck’s sake, help me! I need a medic!”

  I went to my aid kit again, and grabbed my XSTAT. A lifetime ago, we’d laughingly called them the tampon shots. I tore the package off the over-sized syringe with my teeth, and put the nozzle at the gunshot on Wes’s hip. I depressed the plunger and the absorbent sponges filled the gaping wound, and were instantly soaked with blood.

  I winced at the sight of his other wounds—a hole in his lower back, another higher, under his body armor. They needed tending but I didn’t have the training, and I was fighting for consciousness. Dizziness and weakness flooded me. My vision grayed out and then came back again. I could do nothing else for him.

  I sat on my ass, hard, exhausted. I sucked in a deep breath and put everything I had behind it.

  “Medic!” I screamed so loud my voice turned ragged at the end. Tears flooded my eyes again. My words turned small against the noise of war. “Jesus Christ, someone help him.”

  A dull, deep pain throbbed in my arm, as I moved to where Wes’s head lay, his cheek on the sand. I weakly slapped at his ashen skin.

  “Wake up, Wes,” I said hoarsely. “Wake up, right the fuck now. Don’t you die, Wes. Please…”

  I slumped back against the rubble. There were no more gunshots sounding around us; through the tinny ringing in in my ears, I heard shouts, a woman’s cries. I didn’t know if we’d won or lost, only that each ticking second was bringing Wes closer to death.

  I took his slack hand in mine and held it. My head lolled against the wall of rubble.

  “You hold on, okay?” I said. “Listen to me. My voice. Don’t go away, Wes. You stay and listen, okay?”

  I shut my eyes for a moment, tears squeezed out. Then I sucked in a breath, pushed the grief back.

  “Remember the time you and I…we were about…fourteen…We ran into Kayla Murphy at the 7-11 after school? She was with some friends, and she smiled at you…You’d had a crush on her forever. You told our buddies about it in Jason Kingsley’s rec room later that night. We were sitting around…talking about the girls we liked…and trying to be tough.”

  I swallowed hard, my throat felt like I’d swallowed glass and sand.

  “We were all…boasting about whose ass we wanted to tap, and ‘fucking that pussy’…As if we weren’t all virgins.” I chuckled tiredly. “But not you. You were shooting darts, and you…you had a crush on Kayla Murphy. I remember it…you kept shooting while telling us you wanted to kiss her… You said, ‘in the little well of her collarbone, where her heart beats.’”

  In my dimming vision, I saw shapes running toward us. Silhouettes of men. Our men.

  “All the guys just stared at you,” I said, “and you turned around…a dart in your hand, like ‘oh fuck, what did I just say?’ But instead of taking it back or making a joke… you shrugged and said, ‘Yep, that’s what I’d do.’ And kept shooting those damn darts.”

  I chuckled, as Wilson, Jeffries and a couple other guys surrounded us. Wilson, the medic, went to work on Wes immediately while Jeffries—his voice
distant—told me a chopper was inbound.

  I kept talking to Wes and holding his hand.

  “The other guys…they had no idea what to make of that. They stared at you then burst out laughing, remember? They thought… you were kidding. I laughed too, but I knew you weren’t kidding. You weren’t fucking kidding at all, were you, Wes?”

  Time wandered away from me and when it came back, Wilson and his team had bandaged Wes’s midsection, and were now giving a three-count to turn him over and lay him on his back, on the stretcher.

  They’d removed his body armor, and something fell out of the vest pocket. A bent, bloodstained notebook. The chopper arrived; sand and wind and shouts buffeted me, but I reached for the notebook and snatched it just as it flapped on the sand, like a wounded bird about to take off.

  Wilson was trying to tend to my arm while telling me to get ready to get in the chopper. I ignored him. While they loaded Wes, I flipped the pages of the notebook. Through my hazy vision, I read the poem there, scratched in ink, tearstained, and smudged with blood.

  Wes’s words.

  Wes’s tears.

  Wes’s blood.

  At the bottom, his signature. His name, not mine. Like a confession.

  “Yes, Wes,” I said, tears streaming down my own cheeks. “The truth. This is the truth.”

  We climbed into the chopper, and more medics worked frantically over my best friend. Saline drip and an oxygen mask, but I saw one shake his head grimly.

  Someone helped me buckle in, and tried to treat my arm.

  “Leave it,” I barked. “Get me a pen.”

  “A what?” the medic asked over the din of the whirring helicopter blades. “A pen?”

  I looked over to Wes, his eyes closed, his face a ghastly shade of white.

  “Give me a goddamn pen,” I screamed.

  The guy left my field of vision, then came back with a ball point. I snatched it out of his hand. I held the notebook against my leg with my left hand—the arm which felt scarily numb—and scratched with a trembling hand on the back of the notebook.

  Autumn,

  Wes wrote this and everything else. For you.

  -C

  I tried to write her address, but the pen fell from my fingers. I pressed the notebook against the medic’s chest, my eyes falling shut under a wave of dizziness as the chopper lifted off.