A Battle Raging (19 page)

Inside the room, everyone including Delia was quiet.
Everybody in the room except the doctor was military. And all had seen many gun fires with salvos that had ripped through fellow Marines or soldiers.

And all of them had been emotionally damaged because of those incidents.

It was one thing to see someone cut down on the battlefield and another to have the battle happen in a plush office that had up to that moment been considered a safe space.

But as military
people their instincts transported them back to an Afghanistan or Iraqi desert and they reacted as though they were still on those fields.

You never try to engage the enemy. Not an enemy combatant. This the doctor wouldn't know given his propensity to try to reason through a situation.

Standing with his hands held up to his chest, Dr. Madison tried to reason with his armed, unhinged patient.

"Jerry, you need to stop this," he said a bit too calmly. "This is not you."

Jerry said nothing as he mowed the doctor down with multiple bullets.

No one
yelled out as the doctor fell to the floor. During the time that the doctor had tried to engage Jerry, the rest of the patients, three in all, had quickly taken shelter behind the doctor's large cherry wood desk. Jerry had ignored them but they were basically sitting ducks, ready to be plucked at Jerry's whim. But that would obviously come later.

Instead Jerry turned to Zach, who was
a prisoner in his chair with no hope to escape.

Zach
had no choice but to violate the rules and engage the enemy or they would all be dead.

But how? Look what trying to talk to him had gotten the doctor. And Arnie.

Jerry held the gun upright, aimed at the ceiling. At least he wasn't pointing it at Zach. Some hope then. Maybe there was a way to go with this. Some words Jerry would listen to and understand. Zach took a deep breath before he spoke.

"Jerry, the government is
tricking you into doing this, man," Zach said as nonchalantly as though they were discussing the latest sports news and he'd just said, "The Seahawks are going to make a comeback next season."

No fear, just fact…at least the fact that existed in Jerry's fervid dementia. To
the wounded Jerry, there were nothing but government conspiracies and medical disappointments. He'd needed help only to find that there was none they would give him.

"Jerry, if you kill
all of us, the government pricks will have won. Don't give them that victory, man. Just don't. You're smarter than them. You were smarter than the doctor. You knew you needed more help and he just wouldn't give it to you."

Jerry was distracted by
Zach's words and hesitated. In that moment, Zach spied one of the patients, Melvin, lifting up his head from behind the desk. The man, transformed into his soldier stance, was throwing a signal to Zach with his eyes and hand. Zach knew the man was asking whether to try to rush Jerry. Zach gave him a barely imperceptible head shake. No.

He s
aw Jerry's confusion. The one thing the man hated was the thought that others were manipulating him. From their past sessions, Jerry had divulged how he'd hated killing. That in Iraq, he'd even had to kill a young girl to whom a homemade bomb had been strapped.

To Jerry, the military, and thus the government, had irre
vocably changed him for the worse. When he had signed up, he had done so with the blinders of patriotic glory and the belief that in some small but meaningful way, he could right the ills that had led to 9/11. But he'd been quickly disillusioned, and all he had as a reminder of his miscalculation were the ever-present complications of his post traumatic stress disorder.

Those were the demons none of them seemed able to exorcise.

That they had seen, and in some cases been made to participate in, acts against humanity in the name of war, under the cover of war…these were things that no man or woman could come back from and be whole.

Jer
ry was only a shred of a man with only a particle of humanity still left. Zach had to find that infinitesimal atom and somehow appeal to it.

"Jerry, do you remember, man?  That first day. I don't know if it was the same in Iraq. But when I first stepped foot in Afghanistan, I thought I'd be doing the world some good. I think it was like that for all of us. I mean, yeah, we all come with some naïve notions, and we know this from the get go. But we still believe
d the rhetoric. We're Marines, we're pilots, we're soldiers and we're going to show them – the insurgents, the terrorists, the Taliban – what it is to be America strong. I don't know if that was how it was for you, man, but that's how it was for me."

It was hardly no
ticeable, but Zach detected a small nod.

Three
heads peered up from the desk, all of them waiting for any signal, trained to react at the merest sign. Still, Zach shook his head. Not yet.

"Maaannnn!
" A moan torn from Jerry's soul. "They got me, man!" he cried out. "They got me!"

Zach shook his head. "No,
Jerry they haven't gotten you yet. Not all of you, anyway. You just got to not play their game. See they want you to do this. They want all of us to go out of our minds. But we can't let them 'cause that's when they've really gotten us."

"They don't know, man…they just don't know," Jerry said mournfully.

"But we know, don't we. All of us here, we know."

"That little girl
, she couldn't have been more than seven. And I took her down with just one bullet to the head. Her face man, when I finally looked…it was gone. It was just gone. Nothing but a hole filled with brains, blood and shit."

The words
jarred something in the back of Zach's mind, in his memory.
Joseph standing over him, the M27 in his hand…

"I dream about her every night and she reaches for me, man…like she's trying to drag me with her to wherever she is. How can a man live with that? They tried to give me a medal, said I was a hero. I'm no fucking hero
! Heroes don't kill kids! They don't kill the innocents!"

Zach on his back, shot. And
Joseph standing over him with his gun…

"When they put that gun in your hand, it changes you, man. You become someone – something – else. Something not quite human. Someone who could do this." Jerry nodded his head at Dr. Madison's body.

Zach nodded mindlessly, his soul in two places now. A dangerous place to be. There was a man in front of him with a gun.
And a man standing over him with a gun, ready to shoot. There had been pain, just a moment of it and it had just that quickly ebbed out with his blood. In that manic moment between shock, pain and numbness, he'd struck out, aiming to kill, to save his men.

And Joseph's face had exploded all over him even before the other guns
rang out – Marty and the insurgents started shooting at one another. Then suddenly there was Lex and the rest of the unit, giving the motherfuckers all they had.

And Joseph laid there without a face, all of it torn away by a bullet. From Zach's gun.

There was a term for it, an oxymoron – friendly fire.

When he looked up at Jerry, the past and present merged.

"Give me the gun, Jerry. Now!" The request was said firmly. "Don't lose any more of your soul, man. Not to them."

Jerry hesitated for a few seconds, interminable eons it seemed to Zach, before he moved his arm. In that moment, Zach wasn't sure if the man would hand him the gun…or a bullet.

Several things happened at once. Zach reached to take the gun just as the first sounds of police vehicles made its way up the several floors through the slightly opened office window. The group sprung from behind the desk, ready to tackle Jerry. And the office door burst open as a security officer kicked it in. Obviously the glory hound had decided not to wait for the actual police.

In the ensuing
gunfire, Jerry was struck down with one shot before any of the group members could reach him. His AK47 fell next to him.

His demon was finally exorcised, in the same way that it had first penetrated his soul. A bullet to the face.

Delia was bent over Dr. Madison, futilely searching for a pulse. Not finding one, she bent her head in sorrow.

The same scenario was taking place over Arnie's body.
Melvin and the other patient, Roger (who shared a first name with the deceased doctor), were attempting to do CPR. Maybe there was some hope there.

Zach looked at the Barney
Fife-wannabe who was looking around for someone else to shoot.

"Y
ou fucking moron! He was handing his weapon over!" Zach growled.

The befuddled man, sweat running from his balding head down to his shit-taupe colored uniform, simply shook his head.

"But I got him, didn't I?"

Zach's first instinct was to ram the idiot with his chair,
a desire fueled by anger, grief…and guilt.

He had barely formed a memory that was going to destroy him. And now
there were two or three dead bodies to add to that mix.

He'd finally had that breakthrough he and Dr. Madison had been trying to achieve for
years now.

Zach
looked over at the doctor's body just as a SWAT team and an emergency crew hustled through the door. Zach turned to them. Most of them wore body armor and entered with guns drawn as they cursorily surveilled the scene, taking note of the casualties and survivors. Barney Fife eagerly started giving a rundown of his "heroics" to two SWAT members while the EMTs headed to check on the fallen men.

"Can you tell me what happened?" one of the officers asked as he stood over Zach, his assault rifle
pointed downward.

"A
soldier died today," was all Zach could answer at the moment.

While in his mind, Jerry's voice rang out,
Bullshit!

Jada was rubbing sage
, black pepper and salt into the defrosted pork chops while Maya prepared the potatoes for baking and pulled out the makings for the broccoli salad.

It was strange having Jada here on a Monday night instead of
their regular Sunday breakfast or dinner, but she hadn't been able to make it yesterday. Anyway, she was glad her sister had at least made it tonight despite the case load that had been wearing her down for months. All she seemed to talk about (outside of sex) was briefs and depositions. Things that Maya couldn't even feign a marginal interest in.

They had been going about their tasks in basic silence, interspersed with
an occasional question from Jada regarding the availability of certain spices she was adding to the mix. Soft jazz played throughout the room from the portable radio sitting on the counter that Maya had brought in from the art room.

"So, what's been happening with you?" Jada asked.

Maya chopped the stems from the broccoli heads.

"Nothing much."

"Yeah? How's the thing with Mr. Tortured Soul going?"

Maya retrieved the container of butter (no margarine for this recipe) from the refrigerator before answering.

"That's over."

Jada stopped in mid-rub to look at her older sister.

"Oh yeah? That was quick."

"It's like you said. You shouldn't shit where you eat."

"OK, I will thank you to keep the shit talk to a minimum while we're preparing food."

Maya didn't know how her sister could make her smile with just a bit of her sardonic wit, but some of the sadness
had eased with her sister's words. Jada had been a shoulder to lean on after Bryan, but Maya had never had to return the favor. Jada seemed to never have suffered heartbreak…at least not the romantic kind. Not that she had ever let on.

"Jada I don't recall you ever
talking about being in love," Maya said as she mixed into the bowl of broccoli several strips of bacon that she'd fried up and crumbled. She had a cup of toasted almonds ready to throw in, to be followed by another cup of grapes and a salad dressing she had put together the previous night.

Maya
looked over at her sister who'd finished seasoning the thick center chops and was now placing them in the pan. She had a cup of boiled beef bouillon ready to pour over the meat.

"Oh?" Jada said with a small voice, smaller than suited her broad personality. The tone itself spoke volumes.

"So, who was he, and why haven't you ever told me about him?"

Jada shrugged as she placed the pan in the oven.

"Just some dude named Tony, Tony Clarkson. Law school. Nothing really to tell. It ended when we graduated and went our separate ways. He married about a month later…after telling me for a year that he wasn't into marriage."

"And you never told anybody you were talking marriage with a guy?"

"Well, I sorta told Mama."

Maya paused peeling the potatoes. "Oh? So…you didn't want to tell me for some reason?" Maya felt a pang of hurt that nipped at the good feeling she was trying to grab hold of.