We were shaving miles with our soles. That’s how you made the heat bearable; break the day into feet and yards and the next patch of shade that never showed up. Dust climbed our legs and became second skin that you couldn’t scrub off. Rifles rode that groove in the shoulder the Corps had carved into us. Radios hissed. No one wasted breath.
Back through the wire, sun sliding down, the only things that kept me going were water and ten minutes alone with the postcard I kept in my sleeve pocket. The Arch, her handwriting on the back:Hurry home, handsome. We’ve got work to do.Her last letter had been full of the work she was doing with Willow’s Harbor. My girl was doing so good. She was making a difference. Like I always knew she would. Her letters were my lifeline.
“Bird inbound,” Johnson yelled. “Saddle up!” He was a couple years older than I was and took a lot of the guys under his wing. He was the one our sergeant relied on to get shit done.
Orders came like a hammer strike—clean, unavoidable. Quick brief off the hood of a Humvee followed by kit checks because systems keep you alive. I slapped plates, tugged straps, got the same in return. Johnson smacked me on the shoulder. “Let’s go, Morgan.” The squad jogged for the LZ as we had done so many times before.
The helo dropped in hard, rotors chewing the sky, hot wash slapping grit into our eyes. JP-8 burned in my nose, sweet androtten. Brownout turned the world to a moving wall. The crew chief was a shape in the storm, headset on, glove chopping:move, move, move.
We moved. Knees to knees on the bench, helmets knocking, gear scraping. I slid in, boots planted, clipped the strap for the guy beside me because his hands were shaking. Patterson, I think—he joined a few months after I did. He nodded, thanks swallowed by turbine scream. I tugged my Kevlar lower out of habit; the photo under the band was there, edge curling—Holly barefoot on Sally, sun in her hair. My chest loosened a notch. Johnson shouted a barely heard joke but we all smiled. The camaraderie was what kept us alive.
Lift. Bank. The crew chief walked the line, slapping shoulders—one, two, three—bracing on the bulkhead like he could hold the whole bird steady with a palm.
We were maybe two minutes off the deck when the call hit the headset. One word, ripped and flat: “Rocket!”
I barely had time to process the word. The look Johnson and Sarge shared. Then the world turned a searing, blinding white.
A streak—there and gone—like someone had drawn a line across the sky. Impact punched the air out of my lungs and then stole my soul itself. Light went to shard and heat; metal screamed like an animal. We weren’t flying anymore; we were a can full of men getting shaken by a fist we couldn’t see.
Weight tripled. Then it vanished. Then it came back mean.
The bird rolled. The floor became a wall. Something pitched across the cabin and slammed into Patterson who went completely limp. Straps tore. A boot came down on my hand; I didn’t feel it until later. We hit once, bounced, hit harder. Rotors bit dirt and shredded themselves to knives. Some of us managed to stay strapped in; the rest got tossed like rag dolls in a game we hadn’t realized we were playing.
Silence didn’t come. It was replaced by a higher noise—tinnitus, the kind that eats your head from the inside. I moaned, tried to move, surprised myself when that moan turned into a scream of pain. Fuck. Fuck, I couldn’t breathe. Smoke crawled down my throat. Hydraulics bled that sick-sweet smell. Somehow I had ended up behind the tail, or the tail had ended up in front of me. I wasn’t sure which. I tried to move again and swore vehemently when my body failed me.
Somewhere, someone was screaming “Doc!” in a voice that had already given up on help getting there in time. I glanced over and wished I hadn’t. Johnson had crawled to the mic, his leg mangled. His face was set to grim determination as he reached for the little box that was our lifeline now.
“We’re hit! We’re down. This is Eagle Two, repeat, Eagle Two down. Need medevac, coordinates—fuck, we’re—”
Gunfire snapped outside. Not warning shots. Not at distance. Close. Clean. Finishing. Johnson’s body jerked and then went still. A voice on the radio demanded answers, a location, anything but…Johnson wasn’t going to be answering anytime soon.
A seat frame had my thigh pinned. I tried to move and got a hard answer back from pain. My fingers found the edge of my sleeve pocket and the corner of the postcard—paper soft with her touch and mine, and now soaked in red—and then they went numb.
Another burst tore through the skin of the hull and stitched the air over our heads. Shouts—ours, then not ours. Boots on gravel. A language I couldn’t make out through the ringing. Somebody across from me tried to stand and a second burst made sure he didn’t try again.
“Stay down,” a voice rasped near my ear, calm in a way that made me listen because it had been calm other times that mattered. Sergeant Hale. He crawled into my view like the wreckitself had birthed him—sooty, bleeding from the scalp, eyes bright and pissed. He took one look at me, at the seat frame across my leg, at the bloody photo curled under my helmet band, and then he took in the wreckage around him. Most of the guys were…fuck. I didn’t want to think about it. My eyes flicked to Johnson and Hale’s gaze followed mine. When he looked back at me, he had this look in his eyes that I knew would haunt my nightmares.
His glove tapped the edge of the picture I clutched. Just once. Not soft. Not hard. Like a knock to a door I’d better answer. “Get back home, kid,” he said. Voice low. No time for anything else.
He got a shoulder under a torn panel and hauled. Metal shrieked. The weight on my thigh shifted enough for me to suck in a new kind of pain. He didn’t try to drag me—smart. Wrong move and I’d bleed out here without anyone able to help. Instead, he yanked it and flipped it over me, shoved a duffel and a box of God-knows-what against it until the shape read as wreckage and not a man. His hand landed on my chest, flat, pinning me a little harder than I could pin myself.Don’t movewithout saying it. I couldn’t if I tried.
Footsteps—three, then more. A shadow paused inches from the slit of daylight at my cheek. I tasted dust and metal and swallowed them both.
Hale slid away like smoke. He didn’t look back. “Over here!” I heard him shout, and I assumed it was him that fired two rounds that cracked so close the report slapped my face. Screaming now. Then angry noise. Then the kind of quiet that’s just between volleys.
They worked down the wreck. You could hear what they were doing if you let yourself. Checking. Deciding. Finishing. A body thumped the dirt and didn’t complain. I could hear Hale leading them away, his thick New York accent unmistakable as he taunted them. Whoever they were answered in a language Ididn’t know but took the bait. I strained to hear anything but eventually, a round of gunfire interrupted Hale in one of his rants. And I didn’t hear him again.
I pressed my tongue against the iron taste and tried to make my breath smaller than my ribs. The postcard in my pocket burned like a coal. The panel over me lurched—someone’s boot on it, testing. A pause. My entire body screamed in protest and I went rigid as a white hot pain consumed me. The weight shifted off, but the pain never did. The boot moved on.
Something hot splashed my cheek through the seam and I didn’t think about what it was. I didn’t think at all. I counted. Because counting was the only math I had left. One, two, three—like steps—four, five, six—heel, toe, heel, toe—until numbers weren’t numbers anymore and were just a rope I held in my teeth.
The ringing got louder. The world narrowed to burnt plastic and fuel and the weight across my leg and the thud of boots getting bored.
Then boots left. Voices bled away. The wreck creaked to itself, metal cooling. Somewhere a piece of rotor ticked as it spun down to a stop.
I tried to move again. My body said no. I curled my fist around that picture like it might keep me alive.
Darkness opened like a door again, patient this time.
