The Last Hour Read Free Page A

intracranial bleeding. You understand what I’m saying?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Hang in there. We’ll do our best for your husband.”
    I nodded, trying to keep myself sane, and whispered, “Thank you.”
A dream? (Ray)
    I watched Carrie as she talked to the surgeon, as the other doctors labored over my wasted body, and I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.
    That’s not true. There were other times.
    I felt this helpless the day Carrie walked out of the National Institute of Health, rage and shock and grief mixed on her face because of the accusations which had been laid against her, accusations which threatened everything she’d worked for. The rage had won out, her knuckles white against the steering wheel as she drove us home, her entire body shaking.
    I felt that way about a year and a half ago, February of 2012. We’d been out on patrol all night, a nightmare patrol. Not because the insurgents were shooting at us, but because they weren’t. Is that crazy? Yeah, it’s crazy. But it was scary, too. Because the rule, in our little corner of hell, was that if you went outside the wire, the bad guys were going to hit us. Every time. Sometimes it was just a single sniper shot, or a roadside bomb. Sometimes it was hideous, like the grenade that killed Kowalski. But I couldn’t remember a single night we’d gone on patrol when we didn’t get hit. Not once.
    But that night, we’d gone unnoticed, unchallenged, unrested. We were on our way back to the forward operating base when it happened. The irony is, we were only a quarter of a mile from the base, which meant someone hadn’t been paying attention, because the hajis were able to bury a big ass bomb in the dirt road without interference or observation. We didn’t even realize it, because the first three hummers rolled right over the bomb. Then the fourth hummer, with Dylan and Roberts ... that was the one that got hit.
    The explosion hit under the driver’s side. We were right behind them, and I saw the hummer bounce into the air. Voices exploded over the radio, calling in the contact, and then I heard a loud crack, then another. Bullets hitting the side of my hummer, on the driver’s side.
    This was normal routine. We all piled out of the hummers, took cover, and shot back. Once the heavy machine guns got trained on the bad guys, the fire was suppressed, the bad guys tried to move out, and our air assets went after them. I don’t know what happened after that with the insurgents, because I saw Dylan then, next to what was left of Roberts’ body, and his leg was ... destroyed. Blood leaking out everywhere. I yelled for a medic and started to wrap his leg with bandages, which were inadequate for the job, so I broke out the tourniquet and tied it off at his thigh. Dylan wasn’t screaming, but he was awake, staring at the sky.  
    “You’re gonna be all right,” I said, over and over again. He didn’t respond. And there we were, stuck, waiting for the medevac, which took forever. There was nothing I could do to help him other than stick him with morphine and hope the damn chopper got there.  
    It was weeks before I heard from him again. We got word that he lived, but that was it ... everybody knew he was likely to lose the leg, if he even survived. So it was kind of a minor miracle when I got an email out of the blue from Dylan later that spring.
    Dylan didn’t know it, but his emails had been a lifeline for me. I guess nobody knew it. I’d isolated myself, intentionally, after losing friends to injuries and death, and then losing even more friends to pure savagery. By that time I was taking notes, and keeping pictures, and documenting. Just in case.
    I was grateful he was able to leave before things got bad.
    Before that, I’d never felt so helpless, but since then, I’d had it in spades. When I got called back into the Army, during the trial, and especially now, I hated it that I was helpless to do anything for Carrie.
    I wanted to reach out, I