The Saved

by Cole McCade

  That was a human thing, he’d realized long ago. To leave impressions everywhere they tread, small pieces of themselves to say I was here. A hair on the pillow. A receipt swept under the nightstand, missed by the housekeeper. The pervasive scent of leftover Chinese food. A scratch on the headboard. A scar on the wallpaper. A woman’s gold beaded bracelet, forgotten in a dresser drawer. People were so busy being in the space they were in that they left pieces of their lives all over that space, filling it with themselves as if they’d never have to empty it again and move on.

  Vin had filled a space with himself, once. That bright room, that charnel house, where Gabriel’s jaw had ticked a metronome of pain and Serafina had clenched her fists until her palms bloomed crescents of red and ran with blood so she wouldn’t scream, while Richard couldn’t stop screaming and Caroline was nothing but whimpers. And Vin—Vin had gone somewhere else, leaving that space behind and yet still filled with all the pieces of himself, his body and blood and life left there like a sacrificial offering while his soul moved on, floating through the remnants of a life, detached from his senses and feeling nothing but the echoes of what he’d left on that table.

  “Priest.” Gabriel’s voice came down a deep tunnel, a glimmer of sound in the darkness. “Vin.”

  A grip on his arm. He almost jerked away, until he realized it was Gabriel’s hand. He made himself focus, looking down at Gabriel’s darkly olive-toned face. “What?”

  “You left me for a minute there.”

  “I…” Vin shook his head.

  “I know.” Soft, heavy with understanding, and Gabriel looked down, silver eyes shuttering. Shutting out the world. “I keep falling through, too. Like I’m walking the wrong way up a down escalator, and if I stop moving for a second it sucks me back down.”

  Vin couldn’t stand to look at him. Not when it was like looking at himself, and seeing his own scars on someone else’s face. He tilted his head back, lingering on the ceiling. “You are never such a poet when sober.”

  Gabriel snorted: brief, bitter. “I should vodka more often.”

  “Vodka is not a verb.”

  “It is when I’ve had this much of it.”

  With a sigh, Vin pushed himself off the bar. Gary was giving them the evil eye, and even the barflies were clearing out with a few nudges from the bouncer. One nudge might be all it took to send either Vin or Gabriel over the edge, and he didn’t want to end his night in a prison cell only slightly less welcoming than his hotel room. “It is time to leave. Give me your keys.”

  “No.”

  “Gabriel.”

  Gabriel curled his upper lip and pushed away from the bar, only to hiss under his breath as his leg buckled; he caught himself hard with his elbows thumping down on the wooden bar top, his brows drawing together, teeth bared and clenched. “Fuck you.”

  “You are drunk.”

  “So are you,” Gabriel flung back.

  “Not so much.”

  Yet Vin knew it wasn’t the liquor that was poisoning Gabriel. It was pain, pain and guilt and memories that came unguarded and unfiltered the moment either of them gave an inch of ground in a constant battle against themselves. But in this battle Gabriel was still his brother, as much blood as the brother he had left behind in Venice, and he would not leave his brother to face this fight alone. He slipped his arm underneath Gabriel’s shoulders, and coaxed him to lean his weight against Vin, his entire body a strange mix of drunk laxness and painful, vibrating tension.

  “Come,” he said. “I am taking you home.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT TOOK LESS MANEUVERING THAN he’d expected to get Gabriel into the flashy Pontiac Firebird—the last choice Vin would have thought for the car Gabriel bought the second he was out of his wheelchair. It took more maneuvering than he’d liked to work the clutch and the stick, especially with Gabriel snarling from the passenger seat every five minutes: stop grinding her and where did you learn how to drive stick and fuck please shoot me you’re killing my car.

  “I am not above gagging you,” Vin muttered.

  “I’m too drunk for foreplay.”

  With a snort, Vin eased the Firebird into the streets of Crow City. There was a smoothness to the moonless, starless night that calmed him; his memories were all jagged edges, and one of the clearest things stamped in his mind’s eye was the image of a city skyline along the edges of Kabul: chewed, ragged, not one building whole and standing, nothing left but pointless solitary walls in eroded black cutouts against the rising swell of a silver moon. Even through the smoke and the fire, the moon had refused to be eclipsed, glowing large and ominous and strange. Most saw the moon as a symbol of peace, calm, serenity—but for Vin that moon had been a baleful white eye, blinded and milky and glowering down with unseeing indifference on the paltry carnage of human lives, soaking in the haze of blood that had filled the air in a choking, pervasive mist.

  No one had told Vin about that, when he’d enlisted. No one had told him that when the shelling started and those little orange and gray and black mushrooms started erupting in civilian areas, the force of the blasts could rip a body apart limb from limb, each one spurting its liquid contents in a fine spray. The blood would catch on the dust hanging in the air, so thick it couldn’t settle, and then hover there: fine crimson particulates, like a mist called from hell on some accursed night to answer the Devil’s creed.

  That had been the night Vin had wondered, for the first time since seminary school, if there truly was a God.

  Gabriel thunked his head against the passenger’s side window, his eyes half-closed and hazy, and stretched his leg out, kneading at his thigh with a clenched fist. Vin didn’t have to see under the denim to know the familiar scar was likely an inflamed and angry red from carrying his weight all night.

  “The VA is trying to send me back to that doctor,” Gabriel growled, low and grating. “Dr. Mumbo-Jumbo.”

  “Dr. Siebel,” Vin said.

  “Him. He’s a spook.” Gabriel’s eyes closed. “He’s niatha. Webs and webs everywhere you turn.”

  “I have an appointment tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Gabriel clenched his fist in the denim over his thigh, knuckles jumping into stark ridges. “Why do you go along with it? We’re not Marines anymore. We don’t have to fall in line and obey. Just because they say jump doesn’t mean we have to lie on the couch.” Gabriel’s head fell back against the car seat. “Whatever you’re looking for, you won’t find it in his psychobabble.”

  That would require me to actually know what I’m looking for.

  He didn’t have an answer. Not for Gabriel; not for himself. He only knew that he was tired of feeling numb. Tired of feeling nothing.

  And afraid of the moments when flashes of emotion came, and they were nothing but memories of rage and blood and that final glorious moment when he’d taken his chance and torn his captor from navel to nose, and showered himself in the baptismal crimson of his blood.

  Every time he was reborn, it was in blood.

  But if he told Gabriel that, Gabriel would protest. Gabriel who still had a noble heart underneath his pain and bitterness and ennui, even if he’d deny it to his last breath. Gabriel who called him brother; Gabriel who would say no, you saved us, you aren’t like that, it wasn’t about the killing at all, it wasn’t even about revenge. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. You did the right thing. You were a hero.

  Perhaps I did the right thing, Vin thought. But I’m no hero. The right thing felt good for all the wrong reasons, and that burst of sensation—the thrill in the pit of my stomach, the wild burn in my veins, the taste of copper on my lips and the salt of sweat and vengeance—is the last time I remember feeling anything at all.

  He could say none of that to Gabriel. He could give none of his blood thoughts to his blood brother, and so he only shrugged, his hands tight on the steering wheel, and said, “It fills the time.”

  “Yeah,” Gabriel said, and looked out at the endless flashing rows of str
eet lights that seemed to count the hours of endless nothingness their lives had become. “Yeah, that’s something.”

  * * *

  BY THE TIME VIN PULLED the Firebird in at the gutted shack Gabriel called a garage, Hart was almost asleep against the passenger side door, a tired sprawled heap of wild animal who, in his slumber, relaxed into something like innocence, that honor and noblesse he clung to so desperately softening his features when he wasn’t awake to close them away. Vin let him sleep for as long as the vodka would let him; waking Gabriel meant waking him into pain, and being helpless to do anything to ease it. They’d both come away from Sangin with scars, but when Vin closed his eyes he could pretend his weren’t there.

  He’d done a poor job of saving Gabriel, that he couldn’t even save him from that.

  Done a poor job of saving anyone, when the rest of their unit had shipped home in pieces inside bagged and tagged sacks.

  If he’d just found his moment a few hours sooner. If he’d just found that rage…

  Vin pushed the thought away and sifted through Gabriel’s key ring. The button on the key fob opened the garage door, grinding it up on an oil-stained floor dotted with absorbent heaps of sawdust and sand, half of it scrubbed flawless, the other half cut off by a demarcating line that practically announced the moment when Gabriel had halted work for the day. The cot and small comforts tucked in one corner reminded Vin too much of the old bivouac days.

  On the wall over the cot, a large piece of poster board had been plastered to the wall, BLACKBIRD POND writ large in Gabriel’s scratchy, jagged handwriting. As he eased the Firebird into the garage, over one of the rusted lifts, Vin glanced at Gabriel.

  “Blackbird Pond?” he asked. Gabriel stirred drowsily.

  “Alani,” he mumbled, and that told Vin all he needed to know, when every day on their deployments her name had been on Gabriel’s lips, his twin sister his reason to fight, to make it home.

  Even then, Vin had felt the absence. The void in his life, of anything and anyone to fight for. He had only his brother in Venice, and Vaughn had a life of his own, one that only rarely intersected Vin’s. There was no animosity between them, but the kind of blood bond they had was weaker than one forged in the hail of live fire and the fear born behind enemy lines with his life in the hands of the only people he could trust.

  What could it be like, to love someone that much? He’d thought he’d loved Serafina that much, but looking back…the void she left was the same shape as the one left by Richard, by Caroline, by Matthew, by Alex. He wondered now if he’d only loved her because he was desperate for something and someone to love, and his tired and aching heart had confused the bond they’d built over countless missions with something else.

  Does it matter? He ground the Firebird into park with a wince for screeching gears, then cut the engine. Do you need to tarnish the memory of the past in your desperate need to fill the now?

  Where are your prayers now, Vincent?

  Where are your prayers, fallen priest?

  He once more touched the rosary against his chest, tracing over the beads. They smelled faintly of pine and sandalwood, and he breathed that scent in and tried to remember the days in seminary: the quiet peace of them, the way he could lose himself for hours without thinking, lost in silent contemplation and meditative peace. He’d thought, in those moments, that he’d been feeling the light and love of God, easing the weariness from his troubled soul.

  But he wondered, now, if he’d only been clinging to that as an excuse to hide from the pointless emptiness of his life, even before the war.

  Everyone around him had always seemed to want things. His brother had wanted to open a restaurant; his grandmother had thrown herself into lovingly restoring their fifteenth-century Venetian home. Grade-school classmates back in Venice and then university in Rome had been filled with hopes and dreams and desires for something that would give their life meaning. Even if it was meaningless, it was that human need to feel as if they were doing something that would leave a lasting imprint even after they were gone; that desperate fear of death masked behind the passion and determination of living.

  That was what it was all about in the end, wasn’t it? Fear of death.

  Humanity had built a legacy on its fear of dying and being forgotten, leaving nothing behind to mark each life that had lived for but a brief spark in an endless universe. Everything mankind made was born out of that fear; a co-supportive society, culture, religion, technology. Humans spent every day of their lives fighting not to die until they’d found a reason for their inevitable deaths to mean something.

  Vin hadn’t been able to find a reason. Even during long nights gliding along the canals of Venice, looking up at the sky while the sky looked back…he’d found nothing. And so he’d turned to God, to the seminary, hoping to dedicate his life to the priesthood. If he would search for meaning for the rest of his life, he could do so in service to others seeking answers to the same questions.

  Until he’d found a momentary distraction from that question in the warmth of a writhing body, the heat of contracting flesh wrapping around him and the clutch of fingers against his flesh. Once had been enough for a reprimand, and penance on his knees. Twice, then three times, then four…and there had been nothing left for him but a door closing at his back, nothing left but to find his way in a secular world that had changed very little during his years in seminary. The world still hovered on the trembling cusp of chaos, a spool of tangled thread only holding together by the hopeless knots mankind had tied itself into.

  “Priest?” Gabriel mumbled, his head lolling against the window.

  Vin sucked in a soft breath. He’d lost himself again. It was happening more and more lately, slipping into hours of pensive, circling thoughts that didn’t feel like they belonged to him, these floating things no more moored to earth than Vin himself, distant and never quite coming clear. Siebel would have something to say about that. Siebel always had something to say about it, and yet it was just more words that didn’t matter any more than anything else.

  “Scuzi,” he murmured, and leaned over to unbuckle Gabriel’s seatbelt. “Let me get you inside.”

  He slipped from the driver’s seat and rounded the car to heft Gabriel out of the passenger’s seat. Gabriel was almost dead weight, but still tried to stand on his own—only to hiss and buckle against Vin as his bad leg collapsed from under him. Vin said nothing, only sliding his arm around Gabriel’s waist and taking most of his weight. Gabriel had his pride, fierce and snarling and chafing against cage bars made of pain, and Vin wouldn’t prick that pride by forcing him to look at this moment of weakness head on.

  Yet as he guided him inside, one limping step at a time, he wondered where the medals and applause were now; where the so-called gratitude for their service was when there was no longer a show to put on and they were just broken toy soldiers no one had a use for anymore, limping along one day at a time with no end in sight but the final curtain call.

  “Do you know what the worst part of this is?” he asked softly.

  Gabriel’s eyes opened to thin slits; his head rolled against Vin’s shoulder. “What?”

  “They tell us that we won.”

  Gabriel’s only answer was a harsh bark of laughter, before trailing into something soft and vicious and bitter in the fluid, husky language of the hinóno’éí.

  Vin guided him to his cot and laid him down on his back, before sinking down to one knee and slipping a pillow behind Gabriel’s head. Gabriel looked up at the ceiling with glassy, unseeing eyes, glazed over and wet behind the dark hair falling across his face, unresponsive while Vin unlaced and removed Gabriel’s boots, then covered him over with a blanket. But then:

  “See that?” Gabriel rasped, his gaze darting back and forth. “That spider has been here since I bought this place. I call her Ekta.”

  Vin looked up, following Gabriel’s line of sight. A spider perched in the far corner, its body no longer than his thumbnail, gray and o
ddly soft-looking with long, spindly legs and a web woven almost like a hammock, a complex arc of spider’s silk stitching one wall to the next.

  “I don’t want to move her,” Gabriel murmured. “Spiders are luck and foolishness all in one.” He closed his eyes, exhaling, seeming to deflate with the breath taken from him. “Maybe all luck really is just foolishness anyway.”

  Vin smiled faintly and brushed Gabriel’s hair back. His brow was warm, almost hot, burning with the fever of pain, of a body overtaxing itself struggling to function on some normal level. “I believe that is the vodka talking.”

  “Is it?” Gabriel barked out a laugh that sounded more like a sob, his chest jerking and heaving on each breath, and turned his head away from Vin’s touch. He tried to sit up, then fell back, a growl muffled behind clenched, bared teeth. “It hurts, Vin. It fucking hurts and I fucked myself. I could have the vodka or the Vicodin, and I chose the vodka.” His breaths came harsh, his cheeks sucking in and out with each rasp. “I think I wanted the pain. I feel like I deserve it.”

  “You do not.” Vin caught Gabriel’s reaching hand and clasped it to his chest, gripping the other man’s fingers until they no longer shook so deeply. “You are not the one who deserves this pain, Gabriel. You are only the one who must carry it.”

  But Gabriel was beyond hearing him—and it killed Vin to watch him sink away, like watching Gabriel fall overboard and into a deep and drowning sea made up of withdrawal tremors and pain, far out of Vin’s reach. He could only hold steady while Gabriel’s fingers dug into his, carving deep red furrows against the back of his hand. The pain was nothing. It was his penance, he thought, for not being able to save Gabriel from this.

  He closed his eyes, bowing his head to rest his brow to Gabriel’s starkly ridged knuckles. “I am sorry, my friend,” he whispered. “My brother. I am sorry that I failed you. I am sorry that you must live with my failure, carved into your body.”

  Gabriel responded with a husky, deep rasp, inarticulate, before trailing into, “…is this…is this hell?”