They found us.
“Inside!” I shout. “Take the children inside now!”
People start moving.
Not fast enough.
Never fast enough.
One of the gunmen raises his weapon and fires into the air.
Screams rip through the yard.
I grab the nearest child—a little girl with a bandaged foot—and shove her toward Hannah. “Go!”
Stephen is hauling boxes across the doorway, trying to create some pathetic illusion of a barricade. Father Nabil is shouting for the older boys to help the mothers.
And me?
I’m frozen for half a heartbeat, staring at the men advancing through the dust and thinking with terrifying clarity:
This is it.
This is how it ends.
Then a shot cracks from somewhere above the road.
Not from the soldiers.
One of the men jerks sideways and hits the dirt.
Another shot.
A second man goes down before he can even turn.
Everything explodes after that.
Gunfire from the ridge.
Fast. Controlled. Precise.
The kind of shooting that belongs to men who know exactly where every bullet is going before they pull the trigger.
The soldiers scatter, shouting.
More shots tear through the chaos.
The women scream and drop to the ground over the children.
I stand there like an idiot, clutching a medical bag to my chest while death rains down from two directions.
Then a voice cuts through the noise behind me.
Low. Hard. Furious.
“Doctor, are you trying to get yourself killed?”
I spin around.
