Chapter 3 Cade
CADE
It was weird seeing Walker after all this time, almost as weird as calling him by his first name, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to get used to that.
Not that I wouldn’t have time since we were both here for the next few weeks, so I wasn’t going to rush anything.
It was probably selfish, but it was nice to have someone I could consider a friend again and not just on the other end of a phone.
Not that I could say we were friends like we had been before; it had been years, after all, and things change.
Walker was different from what I remembered.
“I have to admit,” he said as we walked away from one of the coffee stations. He had taken a sip of the coffee and made a surprised face. “They do a surprisingly high-quality job around here.”
It was the sort of comment I’d been hearing since he’d shown up a few days ago.
He was constantly surprised by the effort the resort put into things.
He was surprised, but I had never detected that he was pleased by any of it.
If anything, the more he was surprised by something good, the more it somehow fueled a foreboding sense of anticipation inside him.
As if for every good thing that happened, he had to keep an eye out for when things would inevitably take a sudden downturn.
Which wasn’t the first time I’d been surprised by a pessimism he’d lacked years ago, and in fact, the sort of pessimism he had always been quick to fight.
He’d always been good at turning it into something positive, or at least making something sound less bad.
That apparently had gone the way of my right leg, but sadly, life didn’t provide much in the way of mental or emotional prosthetics, so he was just… more negative than I remembered.
“So, what’re ya thinkin’ of doin’ today?” I asked as we walked.
It wasn’t as if he was expected to do anything, especially during the first week here.
There were plenty of things to do, and some guys could be overwhelmed when they first arrived.
It wasn’t just the daily activities, but the freedom and lack of pushing could be odd.
Combined with the fact that all responsibility disappeared when you came here and guys just… hung out.
“I’m not really sure,” he said, looking out of one of the windows onto the mountains. That was also something a lot of new people did, especially if they were from somewhere without mountains. “Jesus, do you ever get used to seeing this?”
I smiled. “I dunno, if ya do, it hasn’t happened to me yet. I guess some guys have, especially if they’re used to it.”
“Or just dead inside,” he snorted, taking a sip of coffee. “You’d have to be one of the two not to find it distracting.”
“I’ve got used to it. At least I don’t get distracted anymore,” I said with a snort. “But lemme tell ya, when I first got here? I got distracted all the time. I would stand at these windows and just…stare.”
“Well,” he said, casting a sidelong glance at me and smiling. “Makes sense. Not a lot of snow and mountains where you came from…or where you were stationed most of the time.”
“True,” I chuckled. “I took pictures all the time to send to my parents. Ended up promisin’ my mom I would bring her to the mountains one of these days.”
“Have you?”
“Naw.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” I said, feeling uncomfortable now that we’d hit the topic. “Probably ’cause I told her I’d do it when I finally got my head together, but that, uh…that ain’t happened yet.”
“I mean, you’re the one who said everyone’s allowed to go at their own pace,” he said gently. “Isn’t that the whole point of this place? No point in kicking yourself when you’re not making the progress another place might not be so understanding about.”
It almost sounded like the old him, and I wondered what had happened since I’d seen him taken away on the Medicopter.
He looked like the Walker I’d known back then, but more than just his attitude had changed.
I could see the difference as I stood there, letting him bask in the peace and quiet of the mountains.
There was something gone from his eyes that had once been there constantly.
It wasn’t as cheesy as saying the light in his eyes had been extinguished, because there was still plenty of light there.
Though sometimes when I watched him, that light looked more like a fire that threatened to burn anyone who got too close, but even then, that wasn’t quite it.
Maybe I was thinking too hard about it. I was seeing someone who no longer acted like the same person I had known.
It wasn’t like I was the same person either, even if he thought not a lot had changed about me.
Maybe the only difference between him and me was that he was more obvious about not being the same person, where I just felt different.
I could still be the Cade most people would recognize from the past, but deep in my heart, I knew I was far from that person.
“I didn’t get the details,” he said suddenly, bringing me back from my thoughts. He turned to look at me, a troubled expression on his face. “But I heard what happened with the team.”
“Oh,” I said, fighting the urge to look away.
It was one thing to tell people about it on my own terms, but it was weird to have it done for me, and bad that I had to remember I was talking to someone who had known them.
“I, uh…God, I probably should’ve let you know, huh?
You were there with us for almost two years and I didn’t—”
He snorted. “You were dealing with losing your second family. You don’t have to be sorry because you didn’t call me.”
“I should have, though,” I insisted.
He shrugged, taking another sip of his coffee. “Well, I don’t think you should worry about it.”
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“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.”