45. Ryan
Ryan
The air was so damn still it felt like the world was holding its breath.
We were deep in the valley, just Brody and me, running point, the patrol just ahead of us.
The heat was a physical weight, baking the scent of dust and hot metal into our uniforms. I wiped a bead of sweat from my eyes, my thumb tracing the worn edge of Jackson’s latest letter tucked into my breast pocket—the only tether to a world beyond the ridge’s harsh reality.
Brody nudged me with his rifle, his face set in that professional mask of calm, but I could see the slight tension in his jaw.
“We’re almost there, Ry. Head on a swivel.
” I nodded, scanning the jagged rocks for any movement, my heart rhythmically thudding against the armor plating of my vest.
The silence wasn’t peaceful; it was heavy, vibrating with an unspoken threat that made every nerve ending fire.
I focused on the crunch of my boots on the loose gravel, counting the steps to keep the anxiety at bay, unaware that the world was about to simply cease to exist. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a physical obliteration of reality.
A massive IED detonated twenty yards to our left, and the concussion hit me like a freight train, a wall of superheated air and grit that slammed into my chest and lifted me off my boots.
My head whipped back, my skull vibrating against the inside of my helmet with a sickening jar.
I hit the ground hard, the air driven from my lungs in a silent, agonizing rush.
My ears weren’t just ringing, they were screaming a high-pitched, jagged whine that felt like a hot needle driven through my brain, drowning out the sudden, frantic chatter of small arms fire.
I scrambled up, the world tilting on a nauseating axis as I spat out a mouthful of blood and sand. My limbs felt heavy, disconnected, as if I were moving through deep water. “Brody! Status!” I tried to scream, but my voice was a broken rasp, lost in the chaotic white noise in my head.
He was down, slumped in the shadow of a jagged boulder.
His gear was shredded, the armor plates cracked, and a sickening, dark stain was already blooming across the side of his vest. I dropped next to him, my knees hitting the gravel with a jar I didn’t feel.
The fear was no longer a weight; it was a cold, paralyzing poison in my veins.
“I’m hit, Ry,” he gasped. It wasn’t the shout of a soldier calling for a medic; it was a soft, wet sound. His eyes, usually dancing with some wicked joke, were clear and terrifyingly calm, fixed on a point far beyond the dusty ridge. “It’s bad. I can feel the cold.”
“No. No, you’re fine!” I snarled, a frantic, desperate denial ripping through me.
I tore open my medical kit, my hands shaking so violently I nearly dropped the scissors.
I ripped back his top, and the sight nearly broke me.
The trauma was massive, a relentless, crimson flood that pulsed with every slowing beat of his heart.
I slammed a pressure bandage onto the wound, leaning my entire body weight into it, my teeth gritted until they felt ready to shatter.
“Hold on, Brody! Don’t you dare close your eyes!
I’ve got you! Just hold the fucking line!
” But the blood was everywhere, hot and slick, soaking through my gloves and staining my sleeves, mocking my every effort to keep his life inside him.
He grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into my bicep with a final, surprising strength, pulling me down until our foreheads touched.
The world, the gunfire, the dust, and the unit all vanished.
We were alone in a small, terrible bubble of blood-scented air.
He looked at me, and I saw it then, the final, absolute acceptance in his gaze.
He wasn’t fighting anymore. He was letting go.
“Ry… listen,” he whispered, a thin trail of blood tracing the corner of his mouth.
“It’s over. I’m going home.” He choked, a wet sound that made my heart fracture.
“Look after Anna and Cory. Tell him… tell him his old man loves him more than the stars.” He squeezed my arm once, a desperate, fading connection.
“He needs a man like you, Ry. Promise me. Promise me you’ll watch their six. ”
“I promise! I swear to god, I promise, Brody!” I sobbed, the tears carving clean tracks through the grime on my face. “Just don’t leave me! I can’t do this without you!”
His eyes clouded over, the light retreating into the gray, and his grip went instantly, devastatingly slack. He was gone. The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
My best friend. My brother. The only person who truly saw me was now just a heavy, still weight against my chest. I sat there in the dirt, pressing down on a heart that had stopped beating, my gloves saturated with so much blood, screaming his name into the empty valley until my throat was raw.
The explosion had isolated us; the rest of the patrol was a mile out, their radios lost to the interference of the ridge.
I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t leave him to be reclaimed by the sand.
I wrestled his body onto my shoulders, the dead weight of my world nearly buckling my knees.
Every stumbling step back toward the base was torture.
My muscles burned, my lungs felt like they were full of glass, and my mind was fracturing with every jolt of his head against my shoulder.
I didn’t carry him back as a fallen comrade; I carried him as the final, precious piece of my own soul that I refused to let go of.
I wouldn’t let the desert have him. I wouldn’t let him go.