“All of them, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He scoffed. “Sounds about right. God, what a fuckup.”
“What?” I asked, startled.
He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have been there, none of us. It was all just pointless power plays and the ambition of out of shape, pasty men in suits sending men half their age off to die in some… It’s all just stupid. Stupid, pointless, and absolutely wasteful.”
I couldn’t disagree, but now I had a better understanding of what had changed him, or at least a better suspicion of why. “I guess I never really thought about it. Didn’t seem much point; we knew what we were in for, and had for years, ya know? Didn’t matter if it was because some assholes thought we should be there while they were safe, or if we thought we were doin’ good for someone. We knew, even if we might not’ve known when we signed up, but we knew.”
His mouth twisted as he turned to look back out the window, heaving a heavy sigh. “Bassey, Clark, Kines, Morrow…Jesus.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, at the heartache in his voice.
He looked at me, surprised, and then grimaced. “Sorry, you don’t need me telling you, do you?”
“Don’t,” I told him quickly because I did not need him feeling bad because I felt like shit. “I’m still pretty sure Kines had a crush on you; he was askin’ about you for weeks after they took off with ya.”
Fucking Kines. He had realized it was all going to shit even before I did, and he had been desperate to get everyone to the copter. I could still hear his screams when the fire caught him, turning him into a living torch.
Walker glanced at me, the corner of his lips twitching. “I told him he wasn’t my type…that and that girlfriend of his would probably be pretty pissed.”
“They got married after you, uh…they had to take ya back,” I told him. “She’s got a kid.”
He winced. “His?”
“Yeah,” I said sadly. “I try to remember to call her, but ya know, it’s been three years, and she’s been tryin’ to move on, tryin’ not to be the woman who lost her husband. Heard she started dating again last year, but she was takin’ it slow.”
“Good for her,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. “Sometimes the best thing you can do is try to move on. Hopefully, she finds someone who will treat her right.”
“Yeah.”
“How, uh…how were the others before?—”
“Bassey was Bassey; if he could make some stupid joke, he would. He was ready to get out. He’d started hittin’ the bottle kinda hard,” I said, frowning. “Had to talk to him about it a few times, but ya know how he was.”
“Quick to tell you not to worry and to go babysit someone else who was actually going to start trouble,” Walker said, the old him emerging again now he was remembering them. “Didn’t matter that trouble used to follow him around like a lost puppy; he was always quick to tell us not to worry about him.”
Bassey had been the first to hop out of our copter to help get everyone in, even though I was bellowing at him to get his ass back so we could get out of there. I’d barely had time to register the horror of seeing the side of his throat open up from a bullet before everything else went to hell. The last I’d seen before everything descended into complete chaos, he was holding his neck with one hand and trying to drag someone to the copter.
Walker smiled as he stared into the distance. “Clark and all those damn puzzle books I could never wrap my head around. That guy never smiled, but the day he received that care package from his folks, filled with like fifty of them, I thought his face was going to split open.”
I snorted. “I remember when you got him what you thought was a gag gift, that weird puzzle box.”
“They swore up and down it would take days to solve,” Walker said with a weary shake of his head. “It took him, what, three hours?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
“He just sat there, fiddling with that goddamn thing, ignoring everyone else actually trying to have a good time without worrying for once, and he just…fucked with it and the next thing I know the bastard had it open and didn’t even care that I’d put one whole dollar in there to mess with him. All that mattered was that he’d solved that stupid box.”
Clark was the only one I’d trusted to take over flying the bird so we could get out of there. He was always the coolest under pressure and hadn’t hesitated when I’d told him to take over after the pilot had caught… I never found out if it was adirect shot or a ricochet. It didn’t matter when the fire overtook everything; it was only a matter of time until something exploded, taking half the bird, Clark, and my leg with it.
“Morrow,” Walker said slowly, and for a moment I thought he was having a hard time remembering him, but when he slowly grinned, I realized he had been savoring a memory instead. “I never met anyone who could go through an entire fight without batting an eye, but the minute anyone needed medical attention, he was running for the hills. I used to give him so much shit for it, because it didn’t matter if it was a bandage, stitching someone up, or trying to keep their innards where they belonged, he’d turn pale which was impressive since he looked like a Coppertone ad. I always said when it came time for him to have a kid, he better hope he was deployed or with someone who understood, because there was no way he was going to be there without passing out.”
“It was a miracle he didn’t pass out when ya had to work on ’em,” I said with a chuckle. “And he was always the first to complain when he was hurtin’, even if it was a paper cut.”
“He was the reason I kept ibuprofen in my bag all the time,” Walker said with a shake of his head. “If he hurt even a little, that was the only way to shut him up. Otherwise, we were all going to need that bottle for the headache he gave us.”
