I did too. The waiting before a mission ate away at my sanity. Once I was in the thick of it, I was too busy for anxiety, but standing there knowing that people were about to die and nothing I did could stop it grated on my soul. Sometimes, I felt my humanity had whittled to nothing, but at times like this, I remembered I still possessed a heart.
The four of us settled into a tense silence broken several minutes later by a shout in the distance. The air grew taut.
Two gunshots cracked like bones breaking. Boots pounded on concrete. Outside the relative safety of our makeshift medical space, shouts and the clangs of metal shredded our nerves. We tried to see through the dark, but the chaos was faceless. The succinct voices disappeared as the fight vanished inside the apartment building. From there, we winced at the occasional gunshot and muffled yell.
Glass shattered. A shrill scream. A sickening thud.
“Christ,” Michael muttered. “Hope that wasn’t ours.”
After belabored minutes, the first soldier burst into our medical unit through the swinging delivery door. A deep gash in his leg spat blood all over the floor.
“Over here!” Shari helped him onto the metal table. I tied a tourniquet around his thigh before he had a second to cry out. With a quick snip of the scissors, his pant leg was gone. I surveyed the injury in his mid-thigh, now only trickling blood.
Combat gauze was a scarcity, but this wound required it. I ripped open a packet and stuffed it into the gash, ignoring the agonized scream he restrained with sheer willpower. Liliana gave him a leather to bite. Breathing hard, he fell back onto the table when I finished.
The door slammed open, and two more soldiers stumbled inside. As the gap swung shut, a sharp, “Fall back!” echoed through the night.
Which side was retreating?
One soldier had the arm of another around her neck. I took the other arm, and we helped him to a second table.
The man’s body convulsed with shivers.
“Where’s he injured?” I asked, patting his body.
“There!” The soldier pointed to the man’s chest.
I lifted his shirt to find a bullet hole. Fourth intercostal space. Mid-chest. Nodding, I slid his shirt back down.
“Make him comfortable,” I told her.
He wouldn’t make it.
Again, the door opened and more soldiers poured through, some with serious injuries and others with none at all.
“They’re running,” one told us. “Weren’t expecting us. We slaughtered ’em.”
Yeah. They kind of slaughtered us, too, I thought as Shari and I worked on pulling shrapnel from the neck of his comrade-in-arms.
The door swung again. “Help!” a soldier yelled. “He needs a medic!”
I left my patient in the care of Shari and joined Liliana to follow the soldier into the night. We ran toward the apartment building. My gaze darted left and right, searching for movement.
“Don’t worry. They’re all gone,” the soldier said.
Sure. Trust but verify.
Near the back of the building, where an alleyway formed a divider between the apartment complex and a strip of stores, one of our soldiers lay writhing on the concrete, the entire left side of his body macerated.
“It was a grenade,” his friend said, choking over the words. “Please help him.”
I squared my shoulders. “Right. Help me get him up.”
Liliana rushed to the man’s side, as did his friend. The soldier groaned, the guttural, exhausted sound of a man too tired for agony.
A sharp pop echoed through the alley. The man went limp, a new hole in his head.
I spun and froze at the sight before me. Four Hunters stood at the mouth of the alley.
