Waves lap along the rigid hull. He hears a bump from below.
He rushes to Nay and cups her face.
“Naomi, hold your breath!”
Nos hurls her into the water. He floors the pedals and speeds away. He dives in the water as the boat careens toward land and explodes—the hull blows into pieces and massive waves concuss, driving him below.
A beam of light from an amphibious rifle searches for Nos underwater. He unlaces his boots, kicks them off, and shoots upward as the light finds his feet and bullets punch though his falling boots. Nos tunnels after him as the gunman jabs a bayonet knife. Nos evades and swims overtop. Nos grabs his mask, tears it off, and cranks a choke under his chin. Nos crushes him breathless. Nos puts the mask to his own face, breathing the air from his enemy’s tank.
Nos removes the tank straps from the corpse and slides them onto his back. He takes the ASM-DT and the flippers from the frogman’s feet and is quickly flying back up to Naomi.
She drifts shore side in her life vest. A solid piece of the scattered boat hull floats nearby and Nos swims it over to her.
“Here Nay, hold this.”
He swims her to shore as she shivers. He helps her onto the grassy bank. Nothing dry to cover her. She makes a turtle shell, hugging her knees as Nos rubs her dry. Only he can’t stay.
“Be right back.”
More pressing business. He dives and comes up at the river’s center. He hovers afloat and looks past the floating corpses to the fallen helicopter.
Nos swims along the river floor and points the ASM-DT light up toward a corpse floating in the skyward light. He swims up to him and removes the C4 from his pack and dives back down to the floor. He cuts the light and swims through the murky brown-green until he is beneath the Apache. He flies up to the surface and hooks the explosive to the bottom of the helo. He swims back upstream and waits.
The explosion blows, sending the chopper scraps in the air. A wave through the underwater current shoots him back with a rush of water.
Nos emerges to the surface and looks about. Sharp chunks of the helo are everywhere. Naomi’s hovers over by the shore where he’s left her. His ears ring. Didn’t die.
As he swims back toward Nay he spots a camo figure in the green, and Nos quickly draws the ASM above the surface and holds it to the figure.
“Don’t fucking move!” he shouts. Nos kicks until his feet find the bottom of the river, and he stands with the soldier in his sights.
Dirty blond hair. Heavily muscled. Ray-Bans. Chewing hard. Smile cocky as all hell.
He holds a rifle pointed downstream at Naomi.
“The Greenes,” he says. “My favorite family.”
Lawlor.
Nos should be surprised. Somehow he isn’t.
“What do you want?” Nos demands.
“To hunt.”
“Advise you find easier prey.”
“I heard about that amusement park stunt, and I knew it was you. I’m tired of easy prey, Greene,” says Lawlor.
“Then why are you pointing your gun at a six-year-old girl?”
“Just keeping you honest. What would happen if I turned and tried to shoot you right now?”
“You seem the curious type. Why don’t you find out?”
“Humor me.”
“I’d put a bullet through your sunglasses.”
“Right. And that’s not how this is going to end.”
“Maybe not the glasses. But one way or another, my rounds will find your head.”
“Try and your girl is dead. She’s so cute, and I love killing cute.”
Nos sees the flaming chalice bandana around Lawlor’s arm. “Why did you sign up with those lunatics?”
“I love a winner.”
“You’re sick—they see that and they’ll kill you.”
“I aint sick, Greene. Why you think that?”
“You tried to take my medicine. Naomi’s necklace,” says Nos.
Lawlor just chuckles.
He backtracks slowly into the green brush, holding Naomi at the tip of his rifle. He vanishes without a sound.
Nos aims at his vacant footprints until the quiet becomes a ringing noise.
And then his voice calls out, from everywhere and nowhere.
“I didn’t want your medicine,” Lawlor bellows. “I took back that necklace because it’s mine.”
Chapter 13
Kindred Spirits
They walk the shore of the river. The waters calm and spread into the open mouth of a lake. The rains begin, hard and fast, puncturing the glasslike reflection of the water. Naomi is moaning, covered in his overcoat.
Doesn’t make sense. What did he mean, ‘mine?’ That necklace was in my basement when Naomi found it. Truth was, Nos never actually knew where it came from. He figured one of his boys left it there by accident. Lawlor said he’d been to my house. The image of Lawlor with his puffed up chest and chewing grin in Nos’ brownstone makes him shudder.
Nos shakes the thought away. The guy is crazy anyway. Naomi’s condition is critical. Her skin has turned blue and she shivers. Her forehead is hot to the touch. She is so wet it’s impossible to know where the sweat ends and the rain begins. He has to find someplace dry where her fever can break. And the wound on her thigh can heal. Nos has a thought of Naomi having to lose her right leg. She has already been through way too much. More than a lifetime’s share.
A settlement is perched at the north end of the lake. The river then funnels into the long and treacherous mountain whitewater. This is their last chance.
Nos carries Naomi in the pack along a paved road leading through a small town. A blue pickup sits pelted by rain. All the homes have the flaming chalice painted on their doors but one—a cabin sitting at the edge of town, dimly lit. Nos knocks on the door.
An eyehole clicks open in the door, and a voice speaks from the other side.
“What is it?” asks a woman.
“A traveler in need of a dry night. I have food, supplies, and money for payment.”
Nos holds soggy cash up to the eyehole. It closes.
“I have a daughter sick with a fever,” he calls. We must get out of the rain.
“One moment.”
Nos flattens away from the door and hears rustling and a metallic cocking inside. He draws his Sig.
The door opens.
“Come, stranger.”
Nos finds a man inside crouched with a rifle pointed at him.
“Disarm, if you please,” the man says with a collected authority.
Nos lowers his pistol, and the man lowers his rifle.
“Just lay the gun on the table there.”
Nos complies.
The man is gray, square-faced, and clean-shaven, holding the gun barrel down, close to safety and close to engagement. The woman has blue eyes so pale that they blend with her white skin, with thin blonde hair cleanly showing the white part of her scalp. A silk scarf curls around her neck.
“Can we see the girl?” she asks with concern.
Nay is on the brink of consciousness, eyes thin, woozy slits.
“Oh, over here,” she leads them to a couch and Nos lays her down.
“She has a cut that’s infected,” Nos explains. “I have to wash it. Do you have alcohol or hydrogen peroxide?”
“I do,” the woman answers.
Nos unwraps his shirt from her leg. Her reddish scab bubbles white with a moist yellow-green outline. The woman shudders.
She opens a drawer and lays out a needle, suture, and a bottle of antiseptic.
“Lets get a look at you,” she tells Nay. “Might have to drain the puss,” she says, dabbing the wound with the antiseptic.
“Might have to cut around it. If you can give me something sterile to cut with,” says Nos.
“I’m happy to do it,” says the woman.
“Not necessary. We appreciate the offer.”
“Please—I’m—I was a registered nurse.”
Nos is quiet. He looks away from
the woman. Nos is not confident in his own rudimentary medical skill. He has sutured himself many times, but never a wound that is so far gone. Yet he is viscerally uncomfortable with the thought of another handling Nay. Even a nurse.
The woman opens Naomi’s sweatshirt. She exposes Naomi’s rash. The pink bumps crawl along Naomi’s neck.
The woman gasps.
Shit. All the concern about Naomi’s cut, now the rash.
Nos tenses and steps back, putting his hand on his gun at the table.
The man aims his gun at Nos.
Clair raises a gentle hand. “You are among friends,” she says. “I love my God as much as anyone. But I was a nurse, and I don’t persecute the sick. I help them.”
Nos steps away from his gun.
The man lowers his.
The woman turns to Naomi. “Oh my, you darling, you’re soaked. Steve, get some blankets, babe.”
Steve disappears to the back and brings out blankets. The woman peels the wet clothes off the girl.
“What are you doing so sick out in this rain?”
Steve offers Nos his hand.
“Steve.”
“Eddy.”
“This is Clair.”
Clair removes the wet hood covering Nay’s scabbing head.
“Careful,” Nos says, “Her head is also injured.”
Clair throws a harsh glance at Nos. She thinks this is my fault.
“This is Sarah. She fell in the river a few miles down. The current dragged her a ways before I could reach her.”
It seems like hours that Nos watches Clair. She gives Nay something for the pain, and she passes out. Naomi’s cadaverous body stirs and shakes from the push and pull of the draining, the cutting, and sewing. When the job is finished Nos lifts a stiff neck and unfolds his arms, realizing he has been still the whole time. Naomi’s wound is now a thin-lipped red line grinning from her thigh to just above her knee, with suture running evenly along.
Her rash is getting worse. The pink froth climbs over her shoulder toward her chest.
Clair wraps the girl in blankets.
“Come, there’s a fire inside.”
Clair sits with Naomi on her lap by the gray stone hearth. It’s quiet as Nos surveys the room, and Steve watches his wife with a wistful smile. A twelve-point deer head is mounted above the fireplace and the tusks of a wild boar are window-side. A brown hound sniffs Nos’ leg. Nos scratches her ear, and her tail wags. Clair brings water from the kitchen without offering anything to Nos.
“Something to drink?” asks Steve.
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Military?” asks Steve.
“Navy,” says Nos. “Special Warfare.”
“A SEAL, huh?” says Steve.
Nos nods. It’s a good lie. Unlikely that Steve would’ve made that cut. Few do. “You?”
“Army Rangers,” says Steve. “Seen much of the world?”
“Too much.”
“Yeah. Been up and down the Middle East. In Iran before the evac. Some massacre.”
“Yeah,” says Nos, collective thoughts trailing to battlefields and bloodshed.
“Gave it up?” asks Steve.
“Not much choice. You?”
“Didn’t pass the born again test, and I can’t stand contractors.”
Nos nods.
“How’s the living here?”
“Precarious, but where isn’t?”
“Looking for it,” says Nos. “Was driving through when my pickup broke down. Ran out of motor oil and fried the engine for good.” Steve must know he’s lying. Likely he heard the fight on the river. Who didn’t?
“The little things kill you these days,” he says.
Clair pats Naomi down with a damp towel, shielding her face from the men. Nos thinks he hears her cry, like pipes squeaking behind distant walls.
“She’s burning up,” she sighs. “She has a fever.”
“Why’d you give it up?” Steve asks.
“It was Iraq that did it. Big suicide bombing in Falluja. My team rushes in, and I see a kid in a truck sweating. Couldn’t be more than eleven. Every civilian clearing way out and here’s this kid sitting in a truck, sweating. I put two bullets in his shoulder. Go to the truck and he’s strapped with enough dynamite to kill every last one of us. The whole explosion was a set up, only I shot the kid before he could pull the trigger.
“The kid lived, and we interrogated him. Turned out he had been with Al-Qaeda for three weeks before they convinced him to die for them. He was ten years old.”
Clair is turned to Nos, hanging on his words, clear-eyed in the firelight.
“I decided I couldn’t kill another child.”
Nos had picked one of many overseas stories that might sound like plausible reasons to quit the military. None of it is true.
Steve nods and turns to the orange firelight. Both have lived the decades-long nightmare of men in turbans, robes, and body armor with automatics and RPGs and no fear of death bent on their lives—then to come home to the barren nightmare of the Black Sun. First Fallujah and then Brooklyn.
“There were three Arab kids once,” Steve began. “All three had pistols. They giggled and pointed them at each other’s heads. It was me and another Ranger. Craig Evans was his name. He gunned down one of the kids with five shots. The kids dropped and ran. Guns weren’t even loaded.”
Clair comes over to Steve and holds his hand.
“Then I lost this,” Steve says and rolls up his pant-leg and reveals a metal exoskeleton wearing a sock and shoved into his sneaker. “Twenty some-odd tours in major conflict areas. Last tour did me in.”
Clair puts an old-fashioned mercury thermometer under Naomi’s tongue, wiping her forehead as she sweats. She takes it out and reads.
“Christ,” she says. “A hundred and three.”
***
They offer Nos a night in the spare bed. He opts to sleep on the floor. Clair takes Naomi to their bedroom and Steve follows, only to hop back out one-legged in sweats and a tank top with a pillow under his arm.
He lays on the couch above Nos. He has a Rangers tattoo on his forearm.
“The girls kicked me out,” he tells Nos. “Children make Clair very emotional, bless her. Had a miscarriage about five years ago. Another three years ago. Another two. Doctors don’t know why. Then the disease…”
Nos thinks of Yvette’s bad dreams. He thinks of Leila and wishes he could protect her now. He thinks of Lawlor and the shrapnel in the vial of Naomi’s necklace. His necklace.
As far as New York and the Army were concerned, Nos had died in those Afghan mountains. A month with no word. A month I was in those hills, lost in that opium dream. Sometimes it felt like a week. Sometimes a year.
Maybe it felt like a year to Yvette, too. It had been a good year that their marriage felt like anything but. She might have been done with him long before she’d even thought that he’d died. She must have thought I was dead. Even if the Navy brass had told her to hold out hope, that they hadn’t found a body, she wouldn’t have believed them. She said she didn’t. If he’d been taken hostage, the U.S. would’ve known. No one truly believed that anyone but a goat-herder could survive those mountains. Men who looked and acted like me came through her doors every day. Maybe she didn’t think I was dead. Maybe she knew I chose the End of the World over her. I’d given up, so she gave up.
Once Nos did get home, it was a shock. Then it was sweet. They made passionate love that first week, like when they’d first met. That made him regret staying away so long. That was what she’d been waiting for. That was home.
The fire dims to a bed of ashen coal as Steve drifts off. Nos lays awake watching the ceiling fan hum around and around like chopper blades in slow motion. He doesn’t want to fall asleep. If he sleeps he will dream.
Chapter 14
The Unborn
When the footsteps come from outside they are only a whisper. Nos is watching the window by the shore when he sees shadows within the shadow
s.
A team of four or six. Nos wonders if Lawlor is with them. It’d be tough to take him out like this, having to protect three civilians. Still, better to get him over with.
Nos isn’t sure how the guard found him. Lawlor must have linked back up with his command somewhere, turned right around and launched another mission. I wonder what’s my tier? My target name?
Nos considers how he’d take the house. Suppressed sidearms and night vision goggles. Thermal scopes on suppressed snipers for the boys outside. They would be able to see Nos in a white silhouette if he so much as passed by a window.
Nos crouches with his back to the wall along the door. He hears the soldiers of the Revelation Guard shuffle to the entrance. He has been on the other side of this routine so many times, he knows exactly where the guards are stacked up without having to see. Nos waits with his knife in his hand and his Sig holstered. Would rather shoot them now. But Nos only hears two. Better do them stealthy. Don’t let the others hear.
A hiss of aerosol seeps into the series of locks, and one by one the bolts are frozen through and broken cleanly apart. The door eases open. As they step inside, Nos springs and backhands his knife into the neck on his right and flies at an angle to his partner. A rifle point swings after him, but Nos gets just behind it and clamps on the guard’s back. One arm cranks under his throat as his other hand forces the guard’s helmet toward his chest. Nos hooks his legs inside, buckling him to the floor. Nos rolls to his back. The guard is tough, but Nos has it cinched. Matter of time.
The guard goes limp as a doll. Nos plunges his knife above the man’s ribcage at an angle to his heart. Nos takes his vest, his night vision goggles, and his suppressed firearms—an M4 assault rifle with a thermal scope and a silenced Glock 19. Crazy high tech. Expensive.
He finds a small explosive doughnut charge in the Omnicorp interceptor vest, paired with a remote trigger. Likely they would have hooked the explosive to the door if the molecular freeze didn’t work. Nos covers his eyes in the night vision goggles and the room goes pale and burns with electric green silhouettes.
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