Battlescars (3 page)

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said in greeting. “I can’t make heads or tails of this crap.”

“Let me.” She reached out and took the invoices from him, and soon she frowned too. What the hell was this? It seemed some were duplicates, and some were for equipment she didn’t understand a thing about. Clearly, Kayla had some serious research ahead of her, and she hoped that George would be willing to hang around and answer questions.

She took a deep breath. It was going to be a long night.

“I saw you talking to our resident Marine,” the owner said, and Kayla looked up, the invoices suddenly forgotten.

“Marine?”

“You could do so much worse, honey.” The owner put his arms above his head and stretched, punctuating the action with a huge yawn. His shirt came up over his belly when he moved, and she caught a glimpse of a flat stomach in sore need of a tan. He was old enough to be her grandfather and tough enough that he looked like an old Marine himself. Kayla had been surprised to find that she actually liked it when he called her ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie.’ No other man would be able to get away with it, but coming from George, it was actually endearing.

“Dyson is a Marine?”

“And how! He’s been out of the corps for two years now but he still has that swagger. He’s got that quiet way about him, too. Kind of a contradiction there, but he’s always full of surprises. Hell, I was surprised to see him actually approach you out there.”

Kayla was definitely intrigued. “Why is that?”

George shrugged. “He’s…well, he’s distant. He’s not trusting. Sometimes I really think he doesn’t like people, but then he’s so kind to the younger guys in here that I know that’s not true, he
does
like people. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to relate to them after what happened.”

“What happened?”

George paused, as though he had just revealed something that he shouldn’t have said, and he was trying to think of a way to backtrack. Kayla sat quietly, watching him, letting him try to figure out if he should go forward with the conversation he started. Finally he shook his head. “It was a discharge under less than honorable circumstances.”

An inexplicable shiver ran through Kayla. It was an odd mixture of excitement and fear, and she wondered what in the world would bring a man who seemed so decent to do something that warranted a dishonorable discharge. Was the honorable side of Dyson just an illusion? Was he really someone else when the chips were down? Completely distracted from her work, Kayla’s mind filled with all sorts of questions that had nothing at all to do with invoices.

“What did he do?”

George shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure. Some bad shit went down and he was in the thick of it. He was discharged for assaulting his commanding officer, but honestly, I think that if Dyson actually assaulted someone, the bastard had it coming – excuse my language.”

“Assault?” The word felt electric to Kayla, shocking her out of her thoughts of Dyson’s smile and muscled physique.

“Apparently the commanding officer was up to no good. Dyson knew it, and he wouldn’t stand for it. I’m not sure exactly what went on beyond that, and all of this is secondhand gossip anyway, you know? But the fact is that he was discharged. He and the military came to some kind of understanding and he was let go. From what I gather, he wasn’t happy at all about it.”

“Oh, I can imagine,” Kayla said, looking at the invoices in front of her. The word
assault
kept going around and around in her head.

“He tried to get his record cleared, but trust me, these military things…they don’t go away. No matter if you were in the right and someone else was in the wrong, once your record is tainted, it’s for good.”

Kayla knew all about things that could go wrong in an instant and haunt you forever. A sudden stab of sympathy, hot and messy, cut through the chill that Kayla worked hard to cultivate. Keeping people at arm’s length let her get through her days without the distractions of emotional entanglements, but knowing that Dyson had difficult struggles in his past made it harder to think of him objectively. She stared down at the numbers on the invoice and watched them blur together into something that she didn’t quite understand. She shook her head to clear it.

“He doesn’t seem like the assaulting type,” she said, knowing George was waiting for a response. “He seems so honorable.”

“I believe he is.” George shrugged. “I mean, he’s great around here. Everybody loves him. But…well, you just never know about someone’s history, you know?

Kayla knew very well. She smiled automatically – the kind of smile that concealed true emotion – and set her notebook on the desk. “Let’s go over the invoices for this month,” she said, and thankfully, George let her change the subject.

I
t was hot. The kind of hot that you don’t think really exists until you are in the middle of it, so parched that you feel like you’ll never be able to swallow or sweat again. You wonder how anyone could survive the heat for an hour, much less live in it, day in and day out. Merciless, pitiless heat.

That’s what Iraq was like. Sand everywhere, punctuated by sudden green space so vibrant it made your head spin, and then more grey. Grey buildings that had been bombed out, grey streets that were crumbling, grey skies that looked down on men in grey uniforms. Women who were dressed in grey from head to toe, turning their dark and suspicious eyes to grey military vehicles that drove past, spitting up grey dust.

It was no wonder that Dyson absolutely hated the color grey. Grey meant heat and despair, and bad memories.

Dyson was in that grey world. He was riding in a Bradley, down a grey road that ran right beside a grassy strip. It was like a living curb, an odd place for such greenery to grow, but there it was. He found himself staring at it, his eyes pinned to the only sign of life, as though he had to soak up as much of the color as he possibly could in order to survive yet another day of endless grey.

They took an abrupt turn and the green was gone. Dyson looked over at the men in the vehicle with him, guys who were locked and loaded and bored out of their minds. They were dressed in combat gear and ready for anything, but they knew that they would encounter nothing – until they did, and when that happened, it would be a blurring flood of terror washing over an otherwise boring day.

During the long nights, Dyson thought about why so many mistakes happened over here and why so many men wound up going home in boxes. Boredom annihilated their ability to be alert, and the moment they let their guard down, they got themselves shot or blown up.

“We need something to do,” Cooper said, and the general hum of agreement that rose up from the rest of them sounded just as bland as everything else in this god-forsaken country.

“I’ve got an idea,” Boyd said.

That was where it began. The ranking officer pointed toward a side street. The vehicle turned smoothly onto it and increased in speed until the houses were flying by. Kids who were playing in the street took off, scrambling to get out of the way of the immense vehicle. Women along the sides of the narrow road pointedly ignored them, and men glared disapproving looks. Out of town in no time, the American soldiers were officially in the middle of nowhere, the wasteland where tiny villages held war-scarred natives so damaged that they barely bothered to move out of the street when a vehicle of a couple tons came roaring past them. They would eventually get run down anyway, or shot, or bombed, so why not today?

One of the men thought aloud. “This place is so fucked up.”

The Bradley slowed and finally stopped in front of a tiny hut, a ramshackle structure whose four walls and a roof were quite a luxury compared to the squalor of the rest of the village. Outside, a woman moved slowly, hanging clothes on a line that sagged between an old wooden pole and the edge of the hut. The moment the vehicle stopped, she dropped her washing and ran toward the house, calling in her native language to someone indoors. Her long dark abaya trailed behind her like the flag of the oppressed. Clearly frightened, both for herself and for the other occupants of the house, she turned to face the soldiers in the tank.

A young woman clad in an abaya dashed out of the back of the house. Running as if her very life depended on it, she didn’t notice that two of the soldiers had jumped down from the Bradley and were waiting for her to attempt to flee. She went away at a dead run for only a few steps before she tried to stop short, her sandals slipping in the dust, the girl landing on the ground, cowering before the two soldiers with drawn guns. They loomed over her and waited for a command from their superior.

Dyson felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. “What’s going on?”

Nobody answered. The other men got out of the Bradley and walked toward the hut, their guns slung in front of them, their hands near the triggers. They swaggered in the way that men do when they wield absolute power. They wore wide, cheerless smiles that clearly terrified the woman who tried to bar the way into the house and the girl who was being herded at gunpoint back toward the structure.

“Come on, Dyson,” one of them called, turning around and waving him forward with a lazy, relaxed gesture. “You’ve never done this before?”

“Done what before?”

The laughter from his fellow Marines chilled him. He watched as the first man to reach the hut paused, as if he were going to respect the woman whose dark eyes shone with both fear and fury. Without a word, the soldier roughly grabbed her arm and forced her inside.

Dyson slowly walked toward the hut and watched the other men as they ducked their heads to get through the low door. He was still not sure what was going on, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach was getting worse. He reached the doorway just as a woman’s scream shattered every hope that what was about to happen was anything other than pure evil, a scream that grew and grew until it filled the world. Dyson knelt on what passed for a threshold and put his hands against his helmet, trying to stop that scream, that constant, bloodcurdling sound –

“Jesus Christ!”

Dyson sat bolt upright in bed. He was covered in sweat. The sound of the women’s screams still rang in his ears, even though he was in his own bed in a place so far removed from Iraq that it might as well be another planet. He was alone and the room was dead silent but for the sound of his rapid shallow breathing. He bit his lip hard to keep from crying out. All the Marine bravado was gone, and it was replaced with a terrible sense of fear and foreboding and loss.

“Jesus,” he muttered again, pressing his hands hard against his head. He could still hear the echoes in the back of his mind.

Dyson pushed away the covers and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His bare feet hit the cold floor and he normally would have winced, but this time he welcomed the shock of it. He needed something to bring him back to the here and now, something to root him hard in today’s reality and save him from the terrors of his past.

The room was almost completely dark, save for the streetlight that shone dully through the blinds. It must be the middle of the night. Dyson stood up and didn’t move for a long moment, looking around the room. He recognized every shadow, every curve and angle of the things in the room. He lived by the adage that he learned in the military, that there was a place for everything, and everything had its place. In combat, a soldier needed to be able to reach out and grab his boots or gun at a moment’s notice. He had to be able to do it without thought, because you never knew when there would be incoming fire, or nighttime raids, or clever bombers, or…

“Or something worse,” he whispered, and then dropped back onto the bed with a sigh. It was only the middle of the night, but he knew he would be up for the duration. This always happened when the nightmares came.

The nightmares had started even before he came back from Iraq, when he was still over there – out of the fighting, but in the brig. He would lie on the hard bunk in the lonely cell, trying not to listen to the strained laughter and solemn discussions that took place just outside his barred window. He would lie – perfectly still, but wide awake, trying to understand why he was the one locked up, why the man who had stood up for the defenseless would find himself forced to defend himself against serious legal accusations. How was it possible that Dyson was in a cell while every other man who’d been there that night still walked around free?

And when he finally drifted off to sleep, he would remember the things he had seen that day, the things he had tried to stop. He would dream of the screams, and sometimes he would see the eyes of the young woman, the one who seemed to wilt the moment the dark coverings were pulled from her, so that her hair and her lips and everything else was exposed. Though she was distraught about her physical exposure, she knew that the worst was yet to come.

Dyson sat on the edge of the bed and tried not to think about her. Instead, he tried to think about the satisfying feeling of the butt of his gun on the head of the man in front of him, the relief when his former friend slumped to the ground, unconscious and no longer a threat. He tried to remember how it felt to slam the other soldier against the wall of the hut, how the building shook as though it would come down, the dust and sand sifting down over them all in a fine powder. He tried to remember the rage, the fury, the disbelief turning to a need for revenge.