CHAPTER 23
The VW Golf’s headlights panned across the garage. It looked like a parking lot for a demolition derby.
Grace clung to the Jesus strap in the back seat of the battered green car as Jasha roared up the parking lot ramp into a gray and drizzly day.
The front seat of the car was loaded with boxes, so Brenna was sitting in the back with her, leaning against the opposite door.
Her face was taut with apprehension, her grasp on her camera so fierce her knuckles looked like white knobs.
As soon as they hit daylight, Grace heard the city’s unrelenting heartbeat.
Poom, poom, poom—visually accompanied by billows of smoke erupting from the mountainside across the river.
“Hold on!” Jasha shouted. He floored the gas and accelerated savagely across two hundred yards of open parking surface. The car fishtailed wildly on the rain-slick pavement. Jasha hit the brakes and spun the wheel hard left. The wheels screeched and the VW started sliding sideways.
Grace shuddered. We’re going to flip.
But Jasha maintained control and the car sped neatly out onto the boulevard that ran through the center of the city.
Leaning forward over the steering wheel, Jasha zoomed ahead.
His eyes darted everywhere, even upward, assessing danger.
Driving one-handed he sped through the downtown business section with the speedometer needle vibrating at the hundred kilometer mark.
Images flashed past the car like a tail of film spitting wildly out of a projector: gutted buildings, a man with an attaché case running from sniper fire, a burned-out car that looked like rusted lace, truck trailers stacked two-high to give cover from snipers,
rubble plowed into berms that stretched for blocks, traffic medians crowded with grave markers.
It was so wrong, Grace thought. The streets should be swept, the buildings intact. People should be shopping, taking their kids to school, greeting their neighbors on the way to work.
Jasha leaned on the horn at an open intersection with an angular branch to the left that led up a mountain, and an acute angle to the right that led to the river.
He shouted a warning to them, then jammed the brakes and turned the wheel hard left.
The VW veered, fishtailing off the main boulevard and bouncing into the two ruts that snaked up a steep road.
The bombed-out houses along it looked like a lineup of executed civilians crumpled to the ground.
The car began the ascent, picking through the carcasses.
Out the back window, Grace’s eye caught something rare. Open space. An unobstructed view down a wide boulevard to the river—and a thicket of tanks, mortars, and rocket launchers bristling on the mountain ridge across the river. All aimed this way.
Smoke puffed in the gray haze hanging over the mountain. Shells. Headed right for them. She looked at Brenna in terrible realization.
All the color had deserted her face.
Jasha punched the gas and the Golf’s engine shrieked. Brenna curled over her camera and covered her head with her hands. Grace laid her arm across her back and cupped her head. God. Oh, God. She ducked, her heart banging wildly. They were totally exposed.
Poom-poom-poom.
Mortar burst behind the car and buffeted them forward. More fired off the mountainside. Gunners were tracking their path, firing, reloading, and firing again. Explosions chased the car.
Jasha squealed around an S-shaped bend. A shell detonated to their left.
The concussion pawed the car like a giant grizzly, sweeping it sideways.
The rear window burst and tempered glass, dirt, and thick smoke billowed into the car.
Debris banged the roof, the hood, the trunk.
Jasha cursed fluently and fought the wheel.
The Golf caromed from side to side, up and over the ruts and onto piled refuse.
Chunks of rubble and loose garbage thumped the undercarriage.
Sweat ran down Jasha’s dirt-encrusted face in filthy streams.
Dirt and tempered glass littered Grace’s lap. She coughed hard and sent dust cascading off her hair. Wiping the earth from her face with the sleeve of her jacket, she spat the grit from her mouth.
Brenna, hunched over her camera, didn’t move.
Alarm shot through Grace. “Brenna?” She shook her shoulder. Dirt and cubes of tempered glass slid off her back. “Brenna.” She pulled her shoulder, sitting her up. “Brenna, look at me.”
She stared blankly.
“Jasha! There’s something wrong with her!”
Jasha glanced in the rear view mirror.
Grace knelt on the seat beside her. Was she even breathing? She tipped her head back and watched. Her chest rose. Air intake sounded clear. Taking the camera off her lap, she set it on the boxes in the front seat, and quickly checked her. No bleeding, no limbs akimbo, no visible injuries.
What the hell was wrong? She took her face in her hands. “Brenna. Brenna. Talk to me.”
She cocked her head slightly in her direction, like someone trying to pinpoint a distant sound.
Jasha frowned. “Two minutes to hospital,” he said. He shoved the gearshift upward, cleared the curve to the straightaway, and sped onward with the blown-out right front tire flapping against the pavement.
Poom, poom-poom. Shells started coming off the ridge east of the hospital now, closer and louder than the mortars from the river.
“We are almost at hospital,” Jasha shouted. The complex lay ahead. “I will stop fifteen seconds. No more. Nationalists shell hospital. Get Brenna inside. Fifteen seconds only.”
“Brenna,” Grace said to her. “When we get to the hospital we’re going to get out on my side of the car, okay?” Speaking with a calm she didn’t feel, she lifted Brenna’s feet to the exit side of the floor-well and dragged her hips closer, readying them to get out.
Jasha banged his fist into the horn and blew a series of frenzied warnings. Brenna startled. Under a mortar-ravaged portico a nurse opened a wood-covered door to receive them.
“We’re here,” Grace told Brenna. “We’re getting out of the car as fast as we can, okay?”
Jasha screeched to a halt. Grace pulled the handle and flung the door open. She got her feet onto the pavement then ducked inside to guide Brenna out. “Come on, honey.” She reached across her lap, slid her nearer the door, and swung her legs out.
“Hurry,” Jasha warned. “Hurry.”
Brenna stumbled awkwardly to her feet.
“Go, go, go!” Jasha shouted, clunking the car into gear.
Brenna swayed. Jasha screeched away, rear door swinging. At the entrance, the nurse called and waved frantically. Grace grabbed Brenna’s waist and dragged her toward the entrance.
The Nationalists fired from the ridge.
Two shells landed in quick succession, shuddering the ground, spattering the receiving area with debris.
The nurse yanked Grace and Brenna through the door, and slammed it shut.
Panic gurgled in Brenna’s throat.
“Shh,” Grace said—as if that negated the power of artillery over a fragile human body.
“It’s okay. We’re inside now.” She followed the nurse past boiling knots of wounded civilians to an ankle-high canvas litter that scarcely cleared the filthy floor.
She lowered Brenna onto it guarding her head as she buckled.
The nurse pulled a stethoscope out of her pocket, crouched before her and saw her clearly for the first time. “Oh! Brenna.” She asked her a question in Kav?ak.
Grace didn’t know what it translated as, but it scarcely mattered. Brenna was too dazed to answer. The nurse turned to her and rapid-fired questions. What happened? That would be the logical question, so she answered: “Explosions,” illustrating with hand gestures and sound effects.
The nurse assessed her rapidly, signaled Grace to wait, and threaded her way through the teeming triage area to a treatment area behind the nurse’s station. She stopped beside a woman in a once-white lab coat who was wrapping gauze around a black-haired boy’s eyes.
Grace made out the words Brenna Rease. The doctor lifted her head with sudden interest. Here? she seemed to say. Where? The nurse pointed. The doctor leaned in and conferred with her, eyes never leaving Brenna. Handing the roll of gauze to an assistant, she strode toward them.
The woman looked fifty-ish, with straight black collar-length hair that had a broad swath of white in the forelock.
She exuded an air of weary competence that inspired confidence at first glance.
She sat on her heels in front of Brenna, cocked her head, and silently scrutinized her.
The doctor possessed a remarkable air of focus.
Grace suspected that only Brenna existed for her at that moment.
Suddenly, a noisy band of civilians burst inside the emergency area, shouting, carrying a man with blood running down his face. Mortar rounds followed their arrival, setting off a new round of curses and cries in the room.
Brenna shuddered violently.
The doctor stood. “Come on,” she told Grace in English. “We have to get her out of this.”
“Bren,” Grace said. “Can you stand up?”
Brenna uncomprehendingly lifted her face.
Grace held out her hands.
Slowly, and with great concentration, Brenna took them.
Pulling her to her feet, Grace circled her waist, guiding her. “Here we go,” she said, and followed the doctor down the hallway into a storeroom stacked with boxes. The doctor indicated the small bed nestled among the stacks. She eased Brenna onto the mattress.
She jerked, dug her hands in, gripping it, and began to shake uncontrollably.
Grace sat beside her, chafing her back.
Oh, she groaned. Oh.
A shaft of light split the room. The nurse entered with a syringe. Pulling Brenna’s shirt from the back of her pants, she grasped a fold of skin, and smoothly injected a clear fluid. Brenna leaned heavily into Grace’s shoulder.
“What now?” Grace asked the doctor.
“She’ll sleep for a while.”
“Then?”
“We’ll see.” The doctor shrugged. “I’m Mariana, by the way. Mariana Lazarov.” Her English was American. Maybe she’d studied in the US.
“I’m Grace Alcott,” she said quietly. “Can you tell me what’s going on with her?”
“A psychological break. It is a common reaction, a detachment of oneself when the stimulus becomes overwhelming.”
“Is it permanent?”
“No one can endure this city forever. Even Brenna, who’s so adept at crushing her emotions. Of course, that control is also her undoing.”
“How do you mean?”
“The best treatment is for her to process what’s happened, not to lock it inside as she does.”
“I see,” she said. “What was the injection?”
“A light tranquilizer. I want to give her body a break,” she said. “Tell me. Did something in particular happen on the drive up here?”
“Other than being bombed, you mean?” Had artillery become so commonplace to these people that her doctor had to look for another cause? She shook her head in disbelief. She cupped the back of Brenna’s head, heartsore for her. “Why am I alright and she isn’t?”
“With her, it’s likely an exacerbation of long-standing PTSD, dating back to the events in Tel Aviv—”
“Tel Aviv?”
There was a tap on the door. A nurse leaned in, spoke to Mariana, and closed the door again.
“I’m sorry. I have to go. I’ll check in on you later.”
“Mariana? Quick question: Do you know Brenna well?”
Mariana lifted a shoulder. “To the extent that she allows.” She paused, hand on the doorknob, and looked at Brenna, resting against Grace. “She trusts you,” she noted. “That’s rare.”
“Soon as she wakes, she’ll start growling again.”
“If we’re lucky.” Mariana hesitated. “Question of my own?”
“Sure.”
“How much do you care about her?”
Grace stiffened, wondering if she was walking on tricky ground. Maybe Mariana was attracted to her, too, like everybody else. “I’m drawn to her, but—” She trailed off.
“But—?” she prompted.
“Kav?ak is intense. Brenna is a striking woman.” She quirked a corner of her mouth. “And I’ve been celibate for five years.”
“It is difficult to distinguish what is authentic.”
“Yes.” Grace paused. “I see glimpses of great spirit, you know? Of kindness and generosity. Her fragility—life has touched her. It implies emotional depth. But, still. Trying to see the real her? Smoke and mirrors. Reflections on glass. And so much deflection.”
“She has shields,” Mariana agreed. “I am not convinced Brenna was ever truly domesticated. She was young when she lost her mother. And her father, well... Whatever taming may have occurred, the war has undone. But she has heart—more than most people imagine.”
She opened the door. “If you care about her, get her out of this city. She has been clinging to Kav?ak so long she doesn’t know how to let go.”
Brenna curled tighter in the bed.
Looking down at her, Grace’s throat closed over a hard lump. Brenna was a mystery, a mercurial pain in the ass, a bundle of contradictions—irascible and intransigent one moment, exquisitely tender the next. Collaborating with her was like clinging to the tip of a whip.
What a nightmare, Grace thought, listening to the muffled poom, poom, poom. She’d been dropped into a surreal world—a fantastic illusion that she couldn’t reconcile with anything she’d ever experienced before. She felt sick, polluted, estranged from the woman she had been a day-and-a-half ago.
She feathered her fingers through Brenna’s hair. She’d been living here for so long, it was no wonder she was breaking.