Time Out (6 page)

“I don’t know, but a terrorist’s group has already taken credit for the bombing.”

“Good morning.” I strolled forward as Hawkins turned to smile up at me. When I practically came to a standstill, as if waiting for an explanation from Gwyneth about a number of things, like for starters, what was she doing here; Hawkins reached up and grabbed my arm so he could pull me down into his lap like he would have done any other day. Glaring at Gwyneth, I let Hawkins kiss me on the cheek. When she looked uncomfortable with all the attention I was getting, I decided to lay it on thick by letting my bare legs curl up in his lap as I nonchalantly ran my fingers through his hair.

“So I had an interesting night,” I continued to glare at Gwyneth.   

             
For a second, I savored the guilty look on her face. Though I still hadn’t told Hawkins about what
really
happened because I didn’t want Gwyneth to think she had any part to play in the miserable experience I had.

“What happened?” Riley asked as he came to sit down next to Lizzie on the leather lounge couch across from us. 

“I managed to get stranded at Alpine,” I explained. “I lost my cell and couldn’t get ahold of
anyone
.” I shot Gwyneth a look to see if this changed how she felt about the way things unfolded last night, but I realized I was dealing with one cold hearted bitch when she joined in with everyone else by saying, “Oh—that sounds awful.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” I pretended to play along.

“But, you’re here with us now,” she said, and I couldn’t help but notice the underlying note of disappointment in her tone.

“Yep—
for good
,” I smiled back at her; thinking two could play this game.  

“And we’re back from the commercials,” Riley, who I think could sense a cat fight coming on, announced overtop of us as he turned the volume up on the remote.

“Good evening, if you’re just tuning in, we have breaking news on the bombing of the 02 Arena in London that took place here, last night.” The CNN announcer, a woman in her mid-forties with blonde hair and dressed in a red power suit, explained as she stood among a crowded group of people. In the distance, I could see the collapsed circular white domed arena which was scorched in black ash.

“According to reports, security was alerted of a man acting strangely minutes before the explosion.”

Footage of a male teenager covered in a dark residue with blood shot eyes, sniffed, “I just thought that he was on something by the way he was rocking back and forth, but when I accidentally bumped into him on my way to the john, he went spastic on me. I shoved him out of the way thinking he was just being a jerk. If only I would have known—

He couldn’t finish his thought as he suddenly covered his face in shame and the video cut back to the CNN announcer again.

“Establish a connection.” Gwyneth murmured to herself like she was engrossed with some distant memory. “Make them see you as a person. Help them remember that
they
are a person. Talk them down. Give them a reason out. Fight for your life.”

“What’s this?” Warren asked as he settled in next to Riley and Lizzie.

“Nothing—just something I was taught while working in
Paoua
, in the Central African Republic.”

             
“Do you mean the time where you almost got killed by a terrorist?” Warren fixed her with a parental glare.

“He wasn’t a
terrorist
—he was just a kid,” she insisted. 

“Anyone who holds my baby sister at gun point, is a terrorist in my book, okay?” Warren rolled his eyes before looking back up at the television set.

“Warren, you should know by now better than anyone that your sister is fearless,” Hawkins came to her defense, and I couldn’t help but feel a wee bit jealous.

“I’m not fearless—I just found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She shrugged innocently enough.

“Yeah—that’s not how I remember the story,” Warren emphasized. “And if I had my way, you’d be working as a secretary or for a daycare.”

“I couldn’t do it,” she insisted. “It would literally drive me nuts to know that I could be doing something meaningful with my life, and I choose not to.”

She shot me a look as I continued to sit there with my head resting against Hawkins’ shoulder. Normally, I would have just rolled my eyes, but I decided to let it go because I knew I had what she
really
wanted.     

“Anyway, I was just saying this guy reminded me of a time when I worked in
Paoua
,” she pointed up at the flat screen. “The first thing they taught me when I first arrived was how to use simple symbols when communicating with the villagers, like drawing a moon to represent nighttime and a sun to represent the daytime, on the palm of my hand. So if I needed a patient to take a certain medication twice a day, I would hold up one finger and then point to the sun symbol and then hold up another finger and point to the moon. Its elementary communication at its best, but it works. And after being in the small village for so long, you start to pick up certain words and bits and pieces of phrases.

“With that said, I’ll never forget the day this sixteen year old patient was brought into the infirmary. He had been caught in crossfire between our guys and hostile insurgents. No one could understand him because both of our interpreters had been sent out to help the other victims at the battle sight.

“For only weighing about a hundred and fifteen pounds, it took two guys
and
me to hold him down and keep him from escaping the clinic or at least that’s what we had originally thought, but I kept hearing him repeat the words, ‘Min
fadlik
’ which means ‘please’ in Arabic, ‘
Tawa-qaf
’ which means ‘stop,’ ‘
Ahk
’ which means ‘brother’ and then ‘
Quatl
’ which means ‘kill.’”

“So I asked, ‘Is your brother also hurt?’ But I could tell that he didn’t speak or understand English any more than I did Arabic, but I knew we would have found his brother if he was still alive so there wasn’t anything I could do.

“I was in the middle of checking his stats when he suddenly grabbed my arm, Aussie, another doctor went to intercede, but I held up my other hand to let him know that I was okay. 

“And I told the kid, ‘It’s okay, your brother’s going to be fine.’ I tried to find any way I could to console him because I knew the wounds he had sustained were beyond our help.

“But that’s when he did something strange. He turned my hand over where I had the drawing of the sun and the moon on my palm and he began to draw the letter X overtop of both of them.

“Then he started
mumbling
,‘Min
fadlik
…
tawa-qaf
…
ahk
…
ma’as-salama
,’ in between gasps as he drew the X over the sun and the moon again. ‘
Min
fadlik
…
tawa-qaf
…
ahk
…
ma’as-salama
.’”

“Finally I figured it out, ‘Please…stop…brother…kill. Please…stop…brother…kill.’ I remembered muttering the words to myself when I finally understood that the kid was trying to protect us. They call those clear moments of clarity right before something tragic is about to happen ‘slow motion perception’ but I call it
really
damn good instincts.

“Fortunately for my crew and me, we only had to evacuate ourselves because this sixteen year old boy had been the only survivor they had brought in. Still, I knew
someone
was going to get hurt even if it wasn’t us and as a doctor that just wasn’t something I could live with.

“Once I was out on the street, I remember scanning the crowd outside the clinic looking for anyone who didn’t seem to belong, even among the rest of the other villagers. I knew I was looking for someone who didn’t really want to die; someone who just wanted to avenge his brother’s death - or possibly the rest of his family’s death too.

“I knew he’d probably be emotional, given the time frame, and I searched among the faces at the nearby market. That’s when I saw him. He was a guy in his early twenties standing at the open of an ally way not far from our clinic. There was this blank expression on his face like he couldn’t see the crowd of people around him. His cheeks were strained with tears and his fists were clenched so tight.” She made fist to show us. “You could almost see it on his face that he was building himself up to go through whatever he had planned.

“I hadn’t exactly thought out what I was going to do. I guess you could say it was a rookie mistake—”

“Ha! You can say that alright,” Warren interjected with a shake of his head.

“That it was a
rookie
mistake—because when I stepped forward his eyes snapped up to mine and I found myself staring down the barrel an AK-47.”

“I went to say, ‘brother’ in Arabic when he sputtered, ‘Don’t you dare mention my brother to me!”

“For a second, I couldn’t say anything because everything I was taught in the field had suddenly come back to me now that I knew he could speak English.

“Establish a connection. Make them see you as a person. Help them remember that
they
are a person. Talk them down. Give them a reason out. Fight for your life.

“I’m Guinevere Warren,” I told him. “I work at the medical clinic over there. We treated your brother—”  

“What did I say?” He rammed the gun closer to my face. “Don’t mention my brother to me.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do that, sir, I told him.”

“What?”

“I
can’t
stop mentioning your brother,” I insisted as he tensed his grip on the AK. “I
can’t
stop because I just watched him die, and I don’t imagine that it gets any worse than knowing that
no
one can understand what you’re trying to say—when you need someone to desperately understand you—in the last few, precious seconds you have on this earth.

“So
no
, you don’t get to tell me to stop talking about your brother. He left
me
the message. I’m doing this for
him
.

“It took all of my staff to keep him restrained, I continued to tell him. And that is saying something for a kid who sustained such serious damage to his liver and kidneys which I’m guessing he did because he knew you were outside ready to ambush the only clinic run by Americans for miles.”  

“What…was the message, he had asked me.”

“Min
fadlik
…
tawa-qaf
…
ahk
…
ma’as-salama
.
Please…stop…brother…kill,” I remember gasping because once I had finally said the words, I knew in my heart that I had done all I could do for that dying kid.”

“‘But I have to shoot you now.’ He trembled with fear. ‘You’ve seen my face.’”

“And I said, ‘The only face I’ll remember for the rest of my life isn’t yours,
it’s your brother’s.
’ He then took off and I never saw him again.”

Even I got chills from hearing the story as we all sat there for a moment in silence.

“Do you think they were really trying to target us?” Warren finally asked in a small voice. “We would have been there last night if wasn’t for all the cancelations of the international tour dates.”

“Do you mean were we the terrorists’ original targets before we canceled the date and they decided to go through with it anyway?” Hawkins murmured against the top of my shoulder with his head bent down in thought.

“There’s no way of knowing for sure.” Hawkins lifted his eyes to level with Warren’s. “But we are getting a lot of press and exposure because of what happened with Cyrus and the stage.”

“And the girls too,” Gwyneth added like it was
really
necessary. Though I knew she blamed me for what happened to Hawkins that night. After all, ‘I was the reason his reputation has been dragged through the mud’.

“And with all the changes in staff,” Hawkins tried to rationalize the situation. “We make for an easy target, or easy enough if you’re planning to bomb
some
kind of entertainment venue, especially when
I
don’t even know half of the crew’s names. Plus you know it’s bad when I start calling them Woodley and Hampton,” Hawkins added with a snicker in my ear.

“Hey! Don’t knock the naming system.” I grinned. 

“I’m not knocking it. I’m saying it’s helpful.” He smiled with obvious amusement when Gwyneth’s phone suddenly went off. She looked down at the incoming call before she got up and announced, “I have to take this.”

I took the opportunity to fix Hawkins with a look like: what’s she doing on the bus? But he just shrugged.

“We’re going to talk about this later.” I let him know he was in deep shit. I wouldn’t normally have been so direct in my past relationships, but I knew Hawkins was more than capable of keeping up with me in a ‘disagreement.’