Chapter 34
SCOTTIE
Dom was right. Reyes had gone AWOL before we’d even been ambushed, and Karim al-Jabari never showed up to the location the fake coordinates would’ve led him. Which made me hate the situation even more.
No one spoke as we dragged ourselves back to the tent, minus Dom, who remained behind with the colonel. I wasn’t even sure what had happened during the debrief; my mind and heart were occupied elsewhere. Part of me wished Bernie would say some stupid shit, but I was mostly grateful that even he remained silent.
Ducking beneath the tent flap, I nearly ran into a frozen Duncan. His eyes stared at Mikey’s bed.
His stuff. His pillow. The perfectly folded blankets. Everything he’d left expecting to return to. Violence was too much of a reality. Even the devil had to have shed a tear as the bullet ripped through Mikey’s body.
Uncontrollable tears slipped down my cheeks, hot and wet. I closed my eyes, almost expecting Mikey to appear in front of me and wipe them away.
But he never did.
Slowly prying them open, I found the rest of the team sitting on their own bedrolls. Nobody was doing anything. Nobody was moving.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip through the seams of the Earth and tear my way to the underworld where I could retrieve Mikey and have him hold me just one more time.
“He’s…” I muttered, choking on my tongue.
Bernie nodded once, but that was it. Nobody else moved. Mindlessly, I wandered to my bedroll and dropped my gear haphazardly on top of it. Slowly turning, I stared at Mikey’s bed, that awkward distance from mine.
Fuck this, he’d said the moment he saw me.
Oh, how I wished I could rewind time and go back to that day. To hear those two words again. Only in order to relive everything else, and for a chance to do things differently before the end.
I inhaled deeply, swallowing the exhaustive tears crashing down my cheeks. I should have simply laid down on my own bed. I knew I shouldn’t have done what I was about to do, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Stumbling forward, I collapsed on top of Mikey’s bed and curled up in a ball. Burying my nose into his pillow, I wailed into the darkened abyss. It still smelled like him. That familiar sweet scent I’d never been able to quite place. Wrapping my arms around his pillow, I scrunched up as tightly as I could and sobbed.
Something brushed against my back, and I pulled my face away, briefly breaking the pain tattooed upon my heart. Ford tipped his head and then laid down beside me. Suddenly, three warm bodies wrapped themselves around me.
There we laid. No one spoke. No one moved.
Even when at some point, I could’ve sworn I heard the bristling of plastic being moved.
Time wore on.
Day and night blended together.
Hunger didn’t exist.
Eventually, the three of them left, but not one of them asked me to get up. I cradled in tighter to Mikey’s pillow, closing my eyes. Maybe if I laid here long enough, I’d wake up from this nightmare.
Maybe things would be different.
Mikey…
Bright sunlight beat down on my skin as I emerged from my first shower in days. No sign of Reyes, and Dom was in no rush to send us out to retrieve the Black Box considering everything that had happened. I was grateful—and surprised, I mean this was the military we were talking about.
Holding my dirty clothes and toiletries to my chest, I kept my eyes trained to the ground as I meandered back to the tent. A place that held both consolation and devastation.
“Hey, Scottie,” Bernie’s voice pulled my gaze up from the ground. “Did you hear the news?”
“Hmmm?” I mumbled, stopping to look at him.
“Karim al-Jabari is even more desperate than before. He sent a few groups of followers to ransack a couple villages.”
“Are the people fine?”
Bernie gave me a tight smile.
“Right,” I muttered, even more disheartened than before.
“Come over to the gym. We’re just hanging out right now while the colonel finishes setting up new security protocols and what not,” Bernie said.
“Hanging out? Code for wallowing in self-misery more like it,” I attempted a half-hearted joke.
A pity chuckle was my answer. “Just come on.”
Inhaling deeply, I nodded. “Let me just drop my stuff off at the tent.”
“Scottie.” Bernie’s hand gently wrapped around my arm. But he didn’t need to say anything for me to know what he was trying to express. I was grateful for him. For the entire team. They were hurting as well, yet he still offered his comfort and support.
His eyes burned, green eyes I’d never bothered to study too closely. His facial hair, much like the rest of the team, was in full bloom, a disheveled mess upon a face spending too much time in the sun. Beneath the pain, beneath the violent burden waited a man who, just like Mikey, sought some sort of control in this world.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” I whispered.
He inhaled deeply and pulled his hand away, glancing one last time at me before walking off.
A few minutes later, I found myself wandering toward the bench where the entire team sat. The usual chipper banter I’d come to love, come to find peace in, was absent. Heavy in the air was the melancholy burden of the moment. Despite the loud chatter of the surrounding soldiers enjoying time lifting, or each other’s company, my soul sought the fractured team quietly sitting. Doing nothing.
Even Dom.
Part of me was still so angry with him. The other part was even angrier that no one else seemed upset with his decision.
Aggressively plunking myself down on the bench beside Bernie, I stared across at Dom. His eyes remained downcast at the table despite my presence drawing the attention of Ford beside him and Duncan sitting at the head of the table.
“Why?” I asked. A question I’d asked before to him. Yet his answer then still did nothing to stop the bleeding in my heart.
Dom knotted his jaw. “There was no other choice.”
“Wasn’t there?” I snapped. Bernie placed a hand on my arm, but I shrugged him off. “You could’ve shot Karim’s buddy, whatever the hell his name is. In fact, you did. You could have done anything besides shoot your own fucking SEAL first.”
“Mikey was aware—”
“Like hell he was aware. Did you explicitly tell him you’d be shooting him? That he could fucking die?”
“Scottie,” Ford cautioned but I shook my head.
“And how are none of you as pissed as I am?” I glared at the rest of the team. “You’re just sitting here like we had no other options. Dom shot at Karim and Rashid later. Why not take that shot first? Or try and give me a chance to get to my rifle to take the shot? So, Rashid is dead, but so is Mikey. That trade off isn’t worth it to me.”
Dom sighed and kept his eyes trained to the table as Duncan stepped in. “Scottie, we’re all pissed and hurt too. Mikey was more than just a teammate, he was family. But if Dom thought that was the best option, then it was the best option.”
I shot out of my seat, ignoring the quick glances coming our way from surrounding soldiers. “How can you just blindly trust him like that?”
“Because he’s never led us wrong before,” Duncan said.
“Until now! He killed Mikey. How is that the right decision? How?!” I knew I was overreacting. I knew it was out of pain and grief. I knew why I was blowing up like this. I knew it all, but I couldn’t stop it.
The only way I felt Mikey was when hiding inside the ghost of his memories. Every time I wanted to experience something more than this anguish, I had to turn to thoughts in my own head. I couldn’t accept that this was how the real story ended. How his story ended. We were all supposed to have made it out alive.
Collapsing back onto the bench, I swallowed the tears brimming in my eyes. Nothing but the drowning sounds of chatter around me came as my answer. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I know I haven’t been with you guys as long and…” I wasn’t even sure how to end my sentence, or where it was going. I honestly didn’t quite understand what was going through my head at this moment other than a jumbled ball of anger and grief.
“We get it. I get it,” Dom quietly replied.
Picking at a cuticle, I stared at my hands. Hands that were once tangled in Mikey’s hair. Fingers that once danced across scars on his body. A touch that once made him shiver with pleasure.
Part of it was my fault. I knew that. I’d let myself get ambushed. Okay, so I didn’t let myself, but it certainly felt that way. I’d been captured. They’d been waiting for me when I’d tried to climb the side of the canyon for a good viewpoint.
So yeah, maybe I was projecting some of my guilt onto Dom, which was unfair. But I couldn’t help feeling like there was something else that could’ve happened which wouldn’t have resulted in Mikey’s death. In the death of someone I was certainly way too attached to.
But why was my heart’s desire such a crime?
And why did it have to hurt this badly?
“I kinda have to wonder, though, too,” Bernie mumbled, pulling me from deprecating thoughts, and I glanced at him. He gave Dom a tight smile. “Why didn’t you shoot Rashid al-Farouk before Mikey?”
I hadn’t wanted to cause a rift between the guys, so before Dom could reply, I quickly interjected. “I’m not trying to create problems or make anyone choose sides.”
Dom inhaled deeply and leaned back, finally looking at the rest of us. “I know, Scottie. But I did what I thought was best to save the most lives at the time.”
By shooting someone in his command?
Rage surged through my veins, and I opened my mouth, ready to argue when the silence surrounding us hit me like a grenade to the gut. How long it had been quiet was lost on me, and mirrored confusion reflected on the team’s faces as we all glanced around at one another, recognizing the unusual stillness.
Then slowly, one by one, my team followed the stares of every silent and frozen soldier over to my right.
To a ghost.
The body of someone who haunted my dreams stood a few yards away from our table.
Disbelief shattered the very marrow in my bones.
Burning with absolute uncertainty, I couldn’t look away from the bluest of blue eyes I’d ever had the pleasure of gazing upon. This wasn’t possible. Blood splattered a uniform coated in dust and sand. A helmet covered hair that I just knew would be a dirty, disheveled blond, and a balaclava covered the rest of his face. But those broad shoulders, those ocean irises I’d stared in too often, were undeniable.
My heart hammered in my chest. With quickened breaths, I slowly rose from the bench in sync with the rest of my team.
This wasn’t possible.
But as Dom strode forward and met him with an aggressive one-armed hug, there was no denying that he was a real, solid human being.
Mikey.