Keeping Promise Rock (19 page)

The next care package—and the next letter—will come a lot sooner, I promise. I can’t promise to not let you down Keeping Promise Rock

again, but I promise to try my hardest not to. Take care of yourself, Carrick James.

Deacon

It didn’t say enough. It didn’t say that Deacon’s body felt dead and senseless without Crick beside him. It didn’t say that he dreamt of the taste of Crick’s skin and woke up breathless because Crick’s breathing wasn’t in the house. It didn’t say that one night, after he got Crick’s next letter, he woke up in the darkness, scared awake in his own bed, with his own come splashed across his belly and tears he didn’t know he’d shed stinging the creases in his eyes.

Because that was just about too real, even for Crick.

Lessons From Walkabout

CRICK didn’t know that the package was a week late at first because he was busy getting lost in the middle of the fucking Iraqi desert.

He swore it wasn’t his fault.

A convoy had broken down ten miles from camp and been ambushed. Crick was flown in to help triage, and Jimmy met him with transpo to get the least wounded back if the choppers couldn’t hold them.

The chaos on the chopper had been replaced by chaos on the ground, and all Crick knew was that when he got to the ground, the whole fucking world seemed to be eighteen-year-olds calling him Second-goddamned-Lieutenant.

Crick managed. He’d done large-scale trauma before when a Greyhound bus carrying elderly casino patrons had gotten rammed by a semi on Blood Alley back home. There was considerably less panic and screaming here on the ground, even if the background noise was bullets and could kill you.

Crick himself felt safe—a bunch of those eighteen-year-olds surrounded him with flak-shields, and he managed to triage and treat, and together they got the most critically wounded on the Black Hawk and sent it back to camp, where a doctor with more bars than Crick would try to put them back together again.

This left Crick and the kid with a bullet in his leg hunkering down in the shade of a tank and wishing the M-16s would shut the fuck up. He was beginning to think getting shot was a serious possi-fucking-bility.

It was maybe the first time he’d been happy to see Jimmy since the two of them had been assigned together. Of course, the minute they got out of sight of the convoy, the armored van—which had apparently taken a bullet in the oil pan—gave up the fucking ghost and went tits-up.

Jimmy had done a considerable amount of bitching then—he wanted to sit tight with the van and hope for a rescue. Crick was not particularly sure that Jimmy had caught on to the general urgency of the combat site.

Those boys had been settling down for the long haul, waiting to fight out the rest of the afternoon and hoping that the Black Hawks would be back in time to bail
them
out. Crick didn’t like their chances of living bullet-hole free if they stayed there, broiling in the sun.

Finally, it came down to stars and bars. As a medic, Crick had one, and as driver, Jimmy had squat. Crick rigged a travois out of a sheet, gave the poor bleeding private a backpack full of ice packs and medical supplies, grabbed his own backpack full of water with some of those freeze-dried food packets, and made whining-like-a-girl Jimmy grab some more water and the guns.

“Why can’t you carry the guns?”

“Because I’m dragging the fucking patient, asshole!” Crick declined to mention that his luck with the M-16 had gotten no better in the past five months. The M-4 he could handle just fine—but the M-16 was still giving him no goddamned joy at all. He was the only person in the unit to have one jam during a firing session. Twice.

They had just managed to haul Private Blood-loss up the nearest rise when Crick saw them—what appeared to be a squad of the bad guys, marching down the middle of the road like they either a) were heading to go wipe out the unit Crick and Jimmy had just left, or b) owned the country (and Crick was still trying to figure out whether that was true).

Either way, he and Jimmy managed to haul ass off the road before they were spotted. It was a minor miracle.

And it got them lost.

Not too lost, though. Because of Deacon and his goddamned maps and CNN reports, Crick actually had a working knowledge of his immediate geographical area, thank you very much. But they still had to travel rough terrain, on foot, dragging a wounded man behind them.

Their first night out, Private Blood-loss (also known as Andrew Carpenter, a polite young man from Georgia with skin the color of an Egyptian sky at night) almost got bitten by one of the nasty little sand-128

colored vipers that came out in the dark to hunt. Crick had seen the thing crawling up on Carpenter’s travois and had thrown one of the used ice packs behind it. The snake turned to strike, and Crick threw another ice pack, and the nasty two-foot slither of death might have gone on his own way, but Jimmy lost his tiny fucking mind.

Grabbing his rifle
by the barrel,
he threw the butt end at the snake as it was escaping, once, twice, three….

“God-fucking-dammit, Jimmy, you asshole—
you haven’t even put
the safety on!
”

“Wha?” Jimmy looked up, completely lost in his kill-the-snake insanity, and Crick, who had been sitting in front of Private Carpenter with his hands over Andrew’s head in sheer instinct, stood up slowly, like Jimmy was the snake, and put out his hands.

“Private Davidovic, before you use that lethal fucking weapon like a club from the barrel, would you please be so considerate as to
put the
fucking safety on
?”

Jimmy looked down at his weapon and smiled greenly. “Holy shit, Lieutenant. It’s a good thing you weren’t doing that—it would have blown your goddamned head off!”

Crick looked at Jimmy and then looked at Andrew, who was looking at Jimmy, and then he just shook his head and sat back down, looking gingerly for another goddamned snake.
Dear Deacon,
he thought in his head, planning the letter already,
I’m finally starting to believe you when
you say I’m not a fuck-up. I have met a real fuck-up, and if I was him, I’d
be dead.

The next day, they saw a camel spider, and it took some fancy talking from Crick to keep Jimmy from shooting the damned thing as it skittered under the brush. No amount of screaming, “Goddammit, they’re not fucking poisonous!” worked, and Crick finally had to resort to,

“Private, I order you to stand down!”

Wow. It was like turning off a switch. As Jimmy stood there, rifle lowered and looking at him expectantly, Crick said with exaggerated patience, “Jimmy, where are we?”

Jimmy blinked. “I have no idea, sir.”

Crick nodded. “I have a little idea. Enough to get us to camp. Not enough, however, to keep us alive should you bring every insurgent hiding in the fucking hills down on our heads with rifle fire for a thing that is Keeping Promise Rock

ugly and yet not deadly. Now, I want you to put the safety on that thing and give it to Private Carpenter until I say so.” He pitched his voice to the soldier on the travois, who had stopped bleeding and started shivering with fever, but who was still hanging in there. “Private Blood-loss, how you doing back there?”

“I’m conscious, sir.”

“Do you think you could do better with this fucking gun than Jimmy here?”

“Fuck yes, sir.”

“Excellent.” And away they went.

They rationed the water and used the ice packs to line their flak jackets and helmets until they lost their cool, but after three days of rough terrain, they were flat-the-fuck out of anything wet and anything cool and of patience in general, but that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part was that their MREs, the magical little foil packets of tasty stew that were supposed to sustain them and to remain good in temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, had apparently gotten hotter than that in their trek. Day three had been taken up by mad scrambles to crap behind the nearest stray boulder (after checking for snakes, of course), and their dehydration was getting to be a serious thing. Poor Andrew hadn’t been able to make it to the nearest boulder, given his wound and all, and spent a good twelve hours being dragged through the desert in his own defecation.

But finally—before Jimmy could say “Good Christ, it’s hot!” or

“Where the fuck is camp?” or, Crick’s personal favorite, “I’m thirsty, Lieu,” one more time and make Crick have to shoot the guy himself, there was camp, visible in a space between two boulders. They could make out the helicopter pad, the big-assed medical tents, and their own barracks.

Crick’s favorite landmarks were the shower and the chow tent, but he wasn’t picky—after the last three days, it all looked like the pinnacle of civilization to him.

Except for the fifteen-foot-long fucking cobra, staring at them from the middle of the two boulders.

“What is it with this place and snakes?” Crick wondered aloud. “I mean, for fucking real… I’ve dealt with rattlesnakes all my life, and they’re not pretty, but… but these things… it’s like they think they own the fucking place.”

Poor Private Carpenter gave a shivery little sigh from behind him.

“Yeah… give me a cottonmouth any day.”

Private Jimmy dropped his end of Carpenter’s sling so he could grab the M-16, and as Crick stumbled from the weight shift and saw where Jimmy was going, he threw out a foot and tripped the guy.

Jimmy went sprawling, landing about ten feet from the snake, which was rising slowly, in that creepy, sci-fi way that cobras had, so that his hooded head was about six feet off the ground and the rest of his fifteen-foot body was coiled around him.

“What in the fuck!”

“Back up slowly, asshole. Very. Very. Fucking. Slowly.” For once, Jimmy did as ordered, and when he got back to where Crick was, he glared at his commanding officer—who, Crick thought irritably, had been hauling his ass out of shit left and right in the last three days—and snarled, “Why in the hell did you do that?”

“Jimmy, where’s the snake?”

Jimmy looked over to the creepy six-foot tower of death making threatening noises. “Right there, sir.”

“And what’s beyond ‘there’, darlin’?”

Jimmy blinked and said, “Camp, sir,” with no real comprehension.

“About how far is camp, Private?”

Jimmy shrugged, completely non-plussed. “I don’t know, Lieutenant—about half a mile?”

“And what is the range of an M-16 rifle?”

This took a while. It was painful. Finally Private Carpenter rasped,

“It’s over three thousand feet, asshole. If it wasn’t for the fact that you’d probably kill someone, I’d ask Lieu to let you fire at the fucking snake so we could attend your court marshal with popcorn!” Crick laughed throatily, snake or no snake. That there was a really appealing thought. “Private, you make it with us back to camp, and I swear to God, we’ll go someplace where popcorn is served.”

“I’d settle for any movie with Beyonce in it, sir.”

“Austin Powers it is, Private.”

“That’s sweet and all,” Jimmy snapped sullenly, “but first we’ve got to get past the fucking snake.”

“Carpenter, we still got those hard plastic ice packs?” It was a matter of throwing the ice packs at the snake and distracting him—and then making Jimmy serve as bait. Once the snake’s attention was on Jimmy, and he was backing away slowly, Crick circled around and grabbed a mid-sized boulder—it weighed about thirty pounds—and dropped it solidly on the stretch of snake between the coiled body and that slinky, wily head that was thinking very seriously about going after Jimmy.

And then jumping away before that furious, flailing head could sink some of the world’s deadliest venom into Crick.

Jimmy ran and grabbed another rock, and then (carefully, thank God) dropped his boulder on the snake’s head. When they were sure that it was pinned, they pulled out Crick’s Army-issue serrated blade and cut through the stretch of snake trying to writhe between the two boulders and left the damned thing in the sand so they could stagger their way home.

An hour later, Private Carpenter was in surgery, getting blood, fluids, and antibiotics injected into him while he got the shrapnel yanked out, and Crick was freshly bathed, lying on a unit bed next to Jimmy as they got pretty much the same treatment, minus the blood and the surgery.

Their CO wandered by to congratulate them on living, and Jimmy said, “Hey—I wanted to stay with the transpo—don’t blame me for that fucking nightmare!”

The CO eyed him with a sincere dislike. “That fucking nightmare saved your ass, soldier. We found your transpo—what was left of it after it had been hit by a ground missile. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to pull the curtain here and give Crick a field promotion.”

“Oh Christ!” Crick swore. “The last fucking thing I want to be is promoted.”

His CO smiled a little. “This one just comes with some extra cash, Crick—you’re not quite ready for an extra bar yet.”

“Thank God.”

The Captain nodded and set down the burden he’d carried into Crick’s curtain-shrouded “room.” “Something like that—here, I brought your lock box with your stuff, and you got another care package while you were gone. I’m afraid the cookies are about pilfered, but your letters and books have remained unmolested.”