The Valley (33 page)

B
ootfalls echoing on tile. He lay on his back in darkness, on a jouncing, traveling litter.

He cracked his eyelids and saw stone above him. Stone to his left. Light and air to his right. Too bright.

Cold.

The dark of a stone column passed through his vision. The courtyard.

Before losing consciousness again, he noted with mild and detached interest the great tumult and shouting all about him, the whumping force of concussion waves pressing down upon his chest, and the tremendous volume of rocket and automatic weapons fire that rained down on Vega from every direction above.

—

When he came awake next it was with a start.

His right hand, moving like a rubber fish, fumbled uselessly about his pistol holster. There was no pistol there anyway.

He opened his eyes and lurched upward onto his elbows, his head punishing him mercilessly for it. He twisted left and right, panicked. Bright lights spun and stabbed at him. Somewhere nearby was a powerful, muffled rumbling.

“Whoa, there, L.T.,” said a voice. “Easy.”

He flinched away from a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down.

“Easy, sir. Easy.”

Two hands now, firmer, pressing harder.

“Lay back, sir. You're okay.”

A shape close in his squinted vision. Other shapes farther throughout the room. Some standing, some horizontal. The whole room seemed to vibrate every few seconds.

Explosions. Outside. He was indoors.

“Where's Sergeant Caine?” he demanded, trying to crane his head to look behind him.

“You're at the aid station, sir,” came the reply, in the cool tones of an Army medic. “You're good.”

A single, searing explosion of light, inches from his face, washed out his vision. He wrenched away from it, grunting, squeezing his eyes as tight as they would go.

“Whoops,” said the voice. “Sorry, sir. Penlight. Here, try this.”

He opened his eyes reluctantly and followed the young medic's index finger left, right, up and down. The effort of doing so made the cot shift beneath him. He grasped its sides queasily.

The kid pulled his eyelids wide and examined his pupils, nodding to himself.

“Dizzy, sir?”

He lay on a cot in a corner of the stone-walled room. Several casualties occupied other cots and litters. The nearest was awake, staring at Black silently as he held a soaked bandage to his upper arm.

Two medics stood crowded close around another, lying motionless and making weak wheezing sounds. A third medic lay on an exam table nearby, a red tube running from his arm to a transfusion bag slowly filling with blood.

Beyond that, a door, through which he thought he could see a portion of the courtyard. It was very, very noisy outside.

“Yeah, I'm dizzy,” Black answered impatiently. “Where's Sergeant Caine?”

The young medic, coming into focus now, shook his head.

“Don't know, sir. How dizzy would you say you're feeling right n—”

“He hasn't been through here to check on your casualties?”

“No, sir, haven't seen him,” the kid answered in clipped tones. “But it's pretty crazy outside right now, so everyone's a little bit busy. Now, how—”

“What about Sergeant Merrick? Where's he?”

“Sir,” the kid answered impatiently, “I don't know where anybody is at except who's in here right now in front of me. Now stop trying to sit up and lay back so I can check you out.”

He pressed Black firmly back to the cot and completed his exam in about thirty seconds, satisfying himself that Black was lucid and cogent, then rolling him gingerly to peek under the bandage on the back side of his shoulder. Black felt like he was going to keep rolling right off the cot.

The medic rolled him back again.

“What day is it?” Black asked, closing his eyes while the dizziness cleared.

“Sunday.”

“What time?”

The medic checked his watch.

“About fifteen thirty.”

He stood and turned to go.

It occurred to Black that he had no idea what time he'd arrived at the aid station. Nor for that matter what time it had been when Merrick and Shannon had found him.

“Hey, how long have I . . .”

But the medic was gone, back to his other casualties.

Black stared up at the stone ceiling, his mind racing. His head throbbed from his earlier effort at lifting himself, though his shoulder, and much of the rest of him, was now happily numb.

He turned his head gingerly and looked around at the other casualties.

No one had seen Merrick. No one had seen Caine.

They don't know.

An enormous crash outdoors sent another wave of vibrations through the aid station. Guys cursed.

“That one was fucking close,” one of the medics spat, annoyed.

Get with it.

Grasping the cot rails with both hands, Black pushed himself fully upright. Angry sparkles filled his vision and his head felt as though all the liters of blood in his body were filling it. He put his boots on the hard floor and stood, knowing it was a mistake. The room careened wildly.

Willing the floor to right itself, his legs stiff as planks, he began to walk toward the door. He heard his soles scraping the tile but couldn't feel his feet. He figured he must have looked like the Frankenstein monster.

His right arm was trailing behind him. Someone was tugging on his wrist, squeezing it hard with their fingernails. He yanked it away roughly and scuffed onward.

The metallic crash behind him made him turn. He looked dumbly down at the intravenous line running from where it was taped to his wrist in a taut diagonal back to where it was now dragging the bag stand across the floor.

He had only an instant to register blurry annoyance before realizing, as the room went sideways entirely and he saw the wall rising up to meet him, that turning around had been a mistake.

It smacked him, hard and cold. His cheek scraped along its surface.

“What the fuck, L.T.?”

The same medic, easing him sideways toward another wall. No, the floor. Floor was good.

“What're you doing, sir?”

“Take me to the C.P.”

Why did his own voice sound so slurry?

“What?”

“I need to go the C.P.”

“C'mon, sir, let me help you up.”

The kid squatted next to him, trying to figure out how best to haul him up without injuring him.

“I need to go now.”

“C'mon, sir, we got other hurt guys here. Come get back in the cot.”

“I need to talk on the radio.”

The kid paused a half second.

“Right, sir,” he said, adopting the placating tones medics used on casualties who weren't in their right minds. “The radio. Come back to the cot first.”

Black, slumped along the bottom of the wall, grabbed him roughly by the forearm.

“I need to talk on the radio
now.
”

The kid startled, wrenching his arm free.

“No, sir, you don't,” he answered, urgency and annoyance in his voice. “You need to get back in your cot and stop fucking up my triage.”

His voice went cool again.

“Now, c'mon.”

He attempted to sit Black fully upright. Black pushed back against his efforts.

“It's important,” he pressed.

The kid was agitated now, looking over his shoulder at the rest of the room.

“Shit,” he said, throwing his hands up. “Fine, sir, if you get back in your cot you can use my radio, okay?”

He reached into a little holster on the back of his equipment belt and produced his walkie-talkie, holding it up before Black's face.

“Now let's go.”

Black shook his head, regretting it immediately.

“Not that one,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “The
radio.
The battalion net in the C.P.”

The kid shook his head.

“Let the dudes in the C.P. take care of that shit, sir.”

“There's no one there.”

The kid's brow furrowed in confusion.

“Negative, sir, there's dudes in the C.P. right n—”

“They don't know what I know.”

“What?”

“I need to tell them.”

“Tell them what, sir?”

“Take me there.”

“What?”

“I can't walk.”

The medic looked at him like he was crazy.

“No
way,
sir! It's off the
chain
out there.”

He sent a thumb over his shoulder toward the direction of the noise.

“And you're concussed as fuck and you lost a shit-ton of blood,” he finished. “I can't take you outside.”

Taking too long.

Black grabbed the young soldier by both arms this time, tugging the kid's body down toward his own until they were face-to-face.

“Do you wanna die here today?” he nearly shouted.

The medic looked at him blankly.

“Am I altered?” he demanded. “I'm talking to you, right? I can talk on a damned radio!”

He saw that he finally had the kid's attention.

“I
need
to talk to Battalion!”

Had finally tapped the black reservoir of fear capped off below the surface.

“I'll lie down on the cot in the C.P., but I need you to
take
me there,
now!
”

The wide-eyed medic searched his face. Something in him clicked over, or broke.

“Fuck,” he said.

Black released his arms and slumped back to the floor, exhausted.

The medic looked back over his shoulder at the room full of medics and soldiers. The wheezing casualty was now bellowing incoherently at someone or something imaginary, and no one was paying them any attention.

“Don't tell,” Black muttered at the ceiling. “Just go.”

The kid turned back and squatted, muttering curses to himself. He worked Black into a sitting position, casting glances toward the chaos in the rest of the aid station.

Black assisted as best he could, which was hardly at all, and allowed himself to be slumped across the medic's shoulders. He watched his view of the aid station go upside down, sending a wave of dizzy nausea through him. He groaned.

“You gonna hurl, sir?”

“No,” he said, thinking he just might.

The medic struggled to his feet. It was the same fireman's carry Shannon had used, but this guy was about half Shannon's size.

“Gonna be loud out there, sir.”

It was loud inside already.

“Got it.”

The kid did a little hop in place to shuck Black's limp form higher on his shoulders, then he leaned forward and bounded through the doorway in a stomping half run.

“God-daaaaaammmmnniiiit!” he bellowed as the sound and light hit them.

—

Goddamn lieutenant.

He crashed upward through the dry leaves, gloving narrow tree trunks hand over hand in the steep parts, hauling himself forward, higher, closer.

Yawning mountaintops hung above him silently, the scatterfall of dried brush and cast-off tree limbs slanting away below and behind, hearing no sound but his feet and his breathing.

This ridge, then down the far side—no way around that draw—through the creek, then up one more and cut across the front. Good cover there, and fastest.

Too far.

One stomping foot in front of the other, legs pumping. Skinny branches snapping as he pushed through them. Brittle ground cover cracking. So much sound.

“Never catch a damn thing making all that noise, Rodney.”

It was like home, really. The dim mornings hunting with his dad and his brothers. He couldn't get enough of it, the woods and the mountains. It was half the reason he joined the infantry. Truth was, this was damned beautiful country when you got down to it.

Damn Corelli. Damn dumb kid.

His heaving breaths made fog before his eyes. The other sound returned to him.

It came from behind, past descending ridges, the thump and thud, the unending cacophony echoing dull off mountainsides, chasing him all the way from where he was supposed to be, where he needed to be right now, over the peaks to find him and torment him here where he actually was.

Told him, told all of them, don't listen to a stupid officer who thinks he knows something.

He couldn't say whether it burned him more that he was going to die amidst this beauty, or that the stupid officer had thought right.

All this on me.

Panting and swearing, Merrick drove higher into the mountains.

H
e felt as though he'd been hurled naked and flailing into a heaving ocean made of sound. The medic wasn't kidding.

The fire was so thick and continuous that Black could hardly tell one sound from the other, incoming or outgoing, rocket, mortar, or machine gun. It all just ran together in a shrieking continuum.

“OURS OR THEIRS?” he shouted as the medic pounded up the breezeway that skirted the courtyard.

“EVERYONE'S,” the kid shouted back.

Soldiers stomped past them the other way, slugging heavy ammo cans. Everyone they passed was yelling something at everyone else, or at them.

An impacting mortar round in the far corner of the courtyard heaved a truckbed's worth of earth into the sky. Black's hearing momentarily washed out. The medic staggered from the shock but didn't drop him.

“Hold on, sir!” he cried.

It's cold out here, Black thought as the kid reached the entry he'd been headed for.

They stumped along through a corridor of blast walls and beneath a heavily sandbagged opening.

“Make a hole!” the medic shouted at the gaggle of people in front of them. “Look out!”

They were in a narrow barracks bay that Black hadn't been to before. Several soldiers were in there, sweating and pointing and shouting at one another, clutching overheated weapons and jabbing fingers in every direction and unsuccessfully carrying on seven urgent, high-volume conversations at once.

“—wer Two needs fifty-cal ammo NOW.”

“—at the mortar pit, but I don't kn—”

“No, fuck that! We need to—”

“—get there from here. You gotta go around!”

The medic pushed his way through, soldiers turning in the midst of their shouting to see who was being carried past.

An upside-down sergeant who Black recognized entered the far door ahead of them. One of Merrick's junior guys. Thick built, low to the ground, commanding. An afro that was way out of regulation.

He surveyed the ineffective scene before him.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” he bellowed hoarsely, bringing the room to silence.

The soldiers all turned as he stomped toward them, sniffing their panic with contempt.

“We're gonna figure out who needs wh—”

He saw Black and his chauffeur approaching.

“Where's he going?” he demanded.

“Says he's gotta get to the C.P. to use the radio,” the medic panted.

“Hell,” the sergeant grunted, “he can't fuck it up any worse than it already is.”

He stomped past toward the group of soldiers, looking dubiously over his shoulder at Black. Black gave a downward thumbs-up as the medic carried him out the door and down the corridor.

“How you doing, sir?” the medic puffed.

They were passing through a stone passageway now, the thunder outside momentarily dulled to a heavy rumble.

“Goopy.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“What'd you give me?”

“Ain't the drugs, sir. It's the concussion.”

“Oh.”

They turned a corner. The noise was building again ahead of them.

“But I gave you a shitload of morphine.”

“Oh.”

The medic turned again and a square of light appeared in front of them.

“Gonna be loud again, sir.”

Cold air hit them as they burst into a narrow outdoor channel between two buildings. Hessco baskets lined each side of the passage, but they were barely head high. Noise filled the universe.

“WAIT,” Black shouted. “STOP.”

The medic complied. With nothing else obstructing the sightlines, Black momentarily had an upside-down, nearly three-hundred-sixty-degree view of Vega's surroundings.

“GOTTA MOVE, SIR.”

He looked up. Or down. Down past the medic, and saw.

They clung to the vertex of a great cavern, its walls studded with inverted trees, its floor a gray roil of clouds, all the air within it echoing with awful sound.

He saw what lay in every mountainslope sliding away beneath them in every direction. Saw what was brought upon Vega, and understood what was intended. He'd never seen or heard anything like it in his life.

Not even that day.

He felt certain in that moment that if he let go he would fall past those slopes and tumble among those clouds.

Not even on that mountain.

“SIR!” the medic urged.

“KEEP GOING,” Black yelled.

They pushed on through the next entrance, cutting left at the first intersection. They were on the same route Caine had taken with him his first night at Vega.

“They don't know what, sir?” the medic panted.

“What?”

“What was it you said you know . . .”

He gasped and ran.

“. . . that the C.P. guys don't know?”

Slung across the kid's shoulders, Black considered how to answer that question succinctly.

That you're facing more fighters than you or your headquarters ever imagined because your lieutenant murdered a kid and the Army built a wall and I thought I knew what I was doing and all of us together managed to accomplish what no one has accomplished in thousands of years, which is unite everyone in this valley in a single purpose.

They were close to the CP.

And we don't have a chance of holding this post unless everyone they've got in the province comes to help us.

“Just keep going.”

The medic stomped around the final corner. The CP was just up the corridor.

“Thank you,” Black muttered woozily.

“Right.”

They'd arrived at the little door to the radio room.

“If it helps,” Black said, “I ordered you to take me here.”

“Aw, fuck your orders, sir.”

The medic kicked the door open with a boot and squatted sideways through the low frame, barely managing to squeeze himself and Black through it.

He stopped short. Black turned his head upward at the upended scene before them.

Despite the outpost being under what the tactics manual would call a complex attack from a superior and determined force preparing the battlefield for ground assault, there was only one frantic, red-faced person on duty in the command post to direct its defenses.

Standing among the racks of radios, a taut telephone-style cord circling his body and stretching to a handset tucked under his chin, another handset in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other hand, and a raft of maps sprawled across one another and spilling from the desktop, stood the cool kid. The freckled, T-shirted punk who'd been at the desk every time Black had been to the CP before. There was nothing cool about him right now.

“
Where the fuck is everybody?
” he screamed at them hysterically.