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42
As Maxie came to, she tried hard to remember where she was and what was going on. Confused, she struggled onto one elbow. She was in her flight suit amid rubble, and it was drizzling—lightly and newly, for she was still dry underneath. She remembered the fire in the chopper. That had been night time. The flaming machine ahead of hers had plunged toward the earth. She only remembered Tom Dash fighting the controls of her crippled chopper as it leaned to the side coughing smoke.
Now she was on her back and it was daylight. It was raining on her face and she wiggled her arms and legs. No major pain anywhere. She turned her head to one side and screamed. There, in the rubble, sat the decapitated head of Senior Flight Nurse Major Lillian Ilitch. It was wrapped in a towel, still in its helmet, and sat upright on a flat stone. The eyes were closed, peaceful, and she looked very sweet, almost asleep. The red lipstick gave its alabaster paleness a humane color. “Oh my God,” Maxie cried, sitting up.
“Hush,” said Irma Dagdagan.
Tom Dash leaned close offering a cup of cold water. “We were hit by the same rocket that knocked Flight 3 down,” Tom told her as she sipped. “They went down hard. We had secondary damage to the tail rotor and I managed to get us down in one piece a couple miles away. The ship’s a complete wreck, though.” He pointed across the piles of rubble that might once have been a city block—now resembling Berlin in 1945 or Atlanta in 1865—and there sprawled the broken, blackened wreckage of Flight 1. Fire had turned its big white squares shades of brown, and the red crosses black.
Something whined past over her head, and Irma hugged Maxie to the ground. Tom ducked also, saying: “We’re under fire from some strange guys in blue and yellow gear over in that hotel. They seem to be working their way over here, and I guess—”
Maxie gripped his hand. “You’re the flight officer in charge now, Tom. Why don’t we get the hell away from here? Lead us! Where is everybody?”
He nudged his chin in a direction. She saw several dispirited men and women in torn flight suits. One or two were lying down. One sat up. A fourth sat with his head over his knees, hands clasped above his head in prayer. “That’s all that’s left?” Maxie said.
Tom had tears in his eyes. “I can’t leave them. They’re hurt.” He swallowed. “I’m going to wait here.”
Maxie shook him. “Wait for what? Those maniacs to kill us all? Can the two on the ground be moved?”
Irma spoke up: “They can be moved, if we have stretchers.”
Tom nodded. “You’re right, I guess.” His eyes mirrored disbelief. “But this is America. We’re supposed to be rescued.”
Maxie pointed at the armed figures scrambling over rubble toward them, 500 yards away if that. “This may be America, but those are idiots.”
“Here is a stretcher,” Irma called faintly from the hollow in which the wreckage lay.
“Keep your head down!” Tom yelled, taking command. “You people over there, let’s go, we’re moving out!”
“Anywhere,” Maxie said, “just away from this part of town.”
The sight of commandos moving in on them was enough to mobilize the survivors of Flight 1. As they moved away in a group, carrying the two wounded (a nurse and a tech), Maxie could hear the commandos looting the burned helicopter, looking for supplies and medicines.
Maxie and her small group emerged from the bombed-out block onto more recognizable city streets. In the middle of an intersection they found several city buses, one of them on its side, and a red fire engine whose tires all were flat. The vehicles formed a rough square, and in the middle hunkered a mixed group of emergency workers. On the ground were more wounded. “What’s going on?” Tom asked.
“You can’t go any further,” a fire captain said. “There’s a civil war or something going on. These Hitlers from Hell are trying to take over, I guess, and the roads are all blocked ahead. These people”—he pointed to the wounded on the ground—”were shot trying to get through. I hear there are more people cut off and just trying to get this far.”
“We have to set up a triage station,” Maxie said. “Do you have a radio?”
“Negative, Ma’am,” said a policeman. “We have a few com buttons among us, but none of them are working. We’re totally out of touch.”
“We have some small arms,” Tom said, “maybe we can break out of here. Bring back help. There must be friendly lines somewhere in the city.”
“We’ve got shotguns and small arms,” another cop said.
The fire captain shook his head slowly. “I still have a bullet in me from Gulf II. I never thought I’d be in battle again fighting for my country, least of all in Washington.”
A policeman in torn uniform hobbled up on a crutch, one leg wrapped in bloody bandages. “I just took a flesh wound, it’s nothing. Keep it wrapped and hope to find some antibiotics. I was a Navy corpsman, Captain. I can help.”
“Great,” Maxie said. “Do you smoke?”
“No, Ma’am.” He looked puzzled.
“Here.” She handed him the $50 cigarettes, which she hadn’t opened yet. “You hold on to these. If anyone needs one, you give ‘em one, okay?”
“Yes Ma’am!”
Maxie closed her eyes for a moment. Religion wasn’t something she ever consciously thought about; it was just there, all around. Her family had funded a pew at the chapel at West Point a century ago. Bodleys married, were baptized, and had funerals in the Episcopal church. Bodleys went to religious schools, although some, like Maxie, were expelled for things like experimenting with pot, and went on to other places, but the fact of religion was always there under the surface. Maxie had even as a child known that people forgot about God until they were in severe danger, and she’d considered that hypocritical; so she’d always kept a little reserve back channel available just in case she were on a sinking ocean liner or a plane about to go nose-first into the Himalayas. Now she prayed intently to this old family friend, this old uncle who was just the most powerful and noteworthy of so many Lee and Bodley uncles. After all, with colonels on both sides— “Oh Lord, now I know why you’ve kept me in luck all this time. There is something you want me to do here, I can feel it in my little old Virginia bones. I guess a person’s never ready to stop playin’, but everyone’s got to go out sooner or later and put some quarters in the meter. This must be it for me. Please, I just met this nice guy here, and—” Her thoughts were cut short as she heard gunfire and shouting.
A fog of gray smoke drifted constantly among the disabled buses and the fire truck. She caught the acrid, distasteful pungency of expended gun propellant. People were running everywhere. Tom took her by the arm. “Maxie—”
Instinctively, she smiled and turned so that she fit neatly between his arm and his side. She felt almost as though she wished he would take her away and lay her down to sleep, as if she were a small child. Then she felt how he was trembling, and she realized that she did not have time to be helpless. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed. “We’re going to be brave, y’hear me?”
He ran his hand up and down her back. The warmth, the pressure, the friction calmed her. “We’re going to get through this, Maxie.”
She hugged. “We made it through a chopper crash.” She looked up, dazzled that he was there in her arms. “Do you like me, Tom Dash?”
He swallowed. “Well, um, like is not the word. I—”
Her lightness was suddenly replaced by a deadly seriousness, a sickening, toxic stew of fear and loss and imminent death. She tugged. “Say it, man. There isn’t time.”
“I think I am falling in love with you, Maxie.”
“So am I. I want you to give me one big old french kiss so bad, but then if I lose you or you lose me, I don’t want us to spend the rest of our life remembering how nice that—”
Tom bent over and placed his mouth on hers. His tongue touched hers, stifling the words that did not need to be said in any case. She felt his body with her hands, heaping touches of him toward herself as if gathering in what she could, as if she were a crazy lady with a large bag billowing in autumn wind, to gather petals, to store what she could before a long hard winter. She trembled with passion, just for a moment, because then someone with a voice like a drill sergeant bellowed to nobody and everyone who would listen: “I’ve got casualties here!”
They stepped in out of the mist, a battered, dirtied, scared looking bunch of kids in camo uniforms. They carried stretchers with figures on them, and the figures seemed mingled with white sheets and great splotches of claret colored blood, almost happy looking in its brightness. And the wounded, how they cried. Screams came from the fog, from voices grown hoarse but unable to stop. She could clearly hear the mixture of fear and pain.
“Who are you?” she said stepping in their path.
A young sergeant said sullenly: “Motor pool unit, Ma’am, active Army. We’re just a supply outfit for staff cars over in Foggy Bottom. Didn’t even have time to draw our own weapons. They trucked us up here and our truck got blown over before we could get where we was goin’.”
“Fine,” she told him, “bring your wounded in here and lay them in a row over there.” She pointed to a small group of casualties who were already laid out along the fire truck. Irma and another nurse were frantically working on one of them. “Hey, Irma, do you need help?”
“I.V., stat,” came the reply. “Need units of blood.”
Tom stepped forth. “I’m useless here, Maxie. I’m going to take a few hale and hardy boys with guns and we’re gonna try and break through. We’ll bring back help.”
She nodded. “I love you Tom. For that. And for yourself.” She sniffed, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Let’s do what’s got to be done. Bring back supplies, blood, ambulances.”
He shook his head. “I love you too, Maxie. I don’t think you can get an ambulance in here just now. More like they need to bring in paratroopers and infantry to stop these guys. Right now they’re just throwing cooks, clerks, drivers at them. Kinda like at the Battle of the Bulge.”
“Go, Tom. God bless.” She hugged him, then pushed away. She watched as he trudged away with one starved afterglance that matched her hunger, and it was as though he were pulling something out of her heart.
Unnoticed, there’d been a whistling sound, accompanied by a rumbling feeling, kind of like a train going by. Suddenly, an explosion tore through the air a block away, rattling the ground. Maxie felt a mild deafness that would not go away. She could hardly hear her own voice as she stepped around, directing people here and there.
Soon she found herself in an argument with a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel in dress uniform, whose nameplate read Myers. Myers had been in a staff car, headed to a briefing at the Pentagon, when he and his driver had been cut off in a guerrilla ambush and forced to run for their lives. He was a lean, well-exercised man of about 35. He wanted to round up all the intact Army personnel and form a perimeter.
“What do you normally do, Colonel?”
“I run a computer lab.”
“Well, I work in the medical field, sir, and if you try to form up a unit here, you’re going to draw fire down on us. I don’t want that.”
“Captain, there’s no time to argue!”
“Just my point.” She waved up the littered street, toward a destination unknown. She shook her head. Looked the other way, toward the foggy oblivion from which the wounded had staggered, and where she could hear light gunfire. “Leave me a few people with side arms and take the rest back there.”
Myers furiously looked around at the cover afforded by the vehicles. “Captain, goddammit, just this whole setup is going to draw fire.”
It was a circular argument, they both knew. There was no time.
“Do what you want,” she said. “This is a field hospital right now, and I’m running it. Now either help carry bodies or get the hell out of my way.” She left him standing there and moved on to direct the work of two civilian paramedics who had found a box of I.V. supplies in the fire truck. Myers’ words drifted after her: “I’m sorry, Captain, just sorry. If I can help...”
She snapped back: “Do what I told you. Leave me about four or five men with rifles or side arms and collect who you can. You can form up a perimeter line about a thousand feet away. If you get hit, hold out as long as you can. Retreat slowly if you are overwhelmed. That will buy time and I may be able to get the patients out before the devils overrun this position.”
“Yes Ma’am!” the colonel said, saluting the captain. He turned and briskly, with new purpose, waved his arms and directed men to form around him. Bewildered, and somewhat sullenly, some did; others had to be coaxed.
Maxie forgot to return the colonel’s salute, because she was surprised at how easy it was to direct people once you had their attention. She barely had time to wonder if the thing she’d told him to do would be a good one. She’d made it up in her head, mainly so he’d go do something and not be a pest. Then again, maybe he was the type of man who, once he’d been given direction, knew exactly what to do.
Within an hour, the situation changed again. They were still stuck, out of communication, with men and women dying for lack of replacement blood. But now the first doctors appeared. Navy people. One was a young woman, a lieutenant commander, the other an older Afro-American admiral who specialized in urology at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Both were in civilian clothing; they’d been on their way back from a Bible club prayer breakfast in Maryland, had gotten lost because some of the streets were closed, and wound up running for their lives as Colonel Myers had. The gray-haired black gentleman approached, directed to her by various persons, and trailed by the woman. “Hello, I’m Rear Admiral Stintonburger”(so she understood the name through a bunch of shouting and gunfire)”and I wonder if I can help.”
“Me too, I’m a resident in dermatology.”
The admiral said: “We’re told there is some fireball nurse in charge up here. We’d like to report in for duty.” He was looking over her head, barely seeming to notice her.
“That would be me,” Maxie said. “Hell, I’m just a captain. You want to be in charge?”
“No way,” Stintonburger said with a twinkle. “You seem to have things well organized.”
“We’re short on everything except casualties,” she told them. “Commander, you organize a triage function. I’ve got to get some more organizin’ accomplished. Admiral, you’re the chief medical officer here.” She saluted, and he tossed one back. She told him: “Anyone gets out of line, you shoot ‘em, y’hear?”
He saluted again, laughing. “Aye aye, Ma’am.” He and what-was-her-name hurried off to do as she’d told them. Her worst blinding worry right now was the lack of supplies. She called Irma over. It was late afternoon now, and the light was beginning to fade quickly. “Irma, can you get some of these people who are just lightly wounded, and train them? You know, the basics. Stop the bleeding, clear the air passage, do CPR, treat for shock, wrap ‘em and hold ‘em until more can be done?”
“Sure, Max. You’re doing a great job here.” Irma briefly clasped Maxie’s shoulders with her hands. Irma was no bigger than Maxie, and had a beautiful Filipina face with exotic eyes and smooth butterscotch skin, and thick rich black hair. “You know what it is, Max?”
“What’s what? I’m hungry.”
“That too. What’s what is why you’re so intimidating. It’s the flight suit.”
Maxie looked down at herself. “Yeah, now that you mention it. I always thought this thing was kind of really cool. All these pockets. But then you—”
“I don’t have the commanding manner,” Irma said grinning. She turned and headed toward a group of wounded men sitting indolently, in shock, around a steaming coffee pot. They’d lit a small fire between some stones. Wouldn’t hurt any, Maxie thought, after briefly considering. Then her attention turned elsewhere. “Food. Where are the cooks here?” Two young men stepped forth. “You guys. I know there is something to eat somewhere nearby. You guys find it and serve it to the rest of us.”
They looked at each other.
“It’s better than hanging around. And it’s a direct order. Now march!”
Time was flying by in the constant hubbub. They were a growing concern, with at least a hundred people of all ages and sizes and in all kinds of uniforms or the lack thereof. After dark, they received a small group of tourists from Japan. Six men and their wives, she figured. Three of the men and one of the women were medical doctors. Maxie made the Sign of the Cross. Their English was reasonable—they were on vacation from Kyoto, they said, and under the circumstances would be glad to help. They were hopelessly lost and cut off from the hotel rooms, one of them said.
“Honey, that describes just about everyone in Washington today except our friends from hell, who are hopelessly lost and cut off from their minds.” She pointed at new casualties staggering in from the night. “Just grab them as they come. Stop the bleeding, clear the airways, do what you have to do.”
About mid-evening, four young Navy corpsmen carried in a stretcher. Maxie looked at the man on it and realized it was Colonel Myers. Horrified, she held her hands to her face. She’d sent him out there. She turned to the closest corpsman. “Is he—?”
“He’s dead, Ma’am. Took shrapnel in the stomach and chest. The other side’s been firing those Long Toms over the city. They’re mostly firing at Rock Creek Park, but every once in a while a round goes astray. Are you Captain Bodley?”
“Yes.”
“He did tell me before he went, to warn you, that the hotel soldiers are sending out snipers throughout the city, to harrass and interdict.”
“Thank you.”
The body of Myers, and his bearers, disappeared into the night as blur after blur of activity surrounded Maxie. The two cooks she’d sent out had returned with two cooler cases full of freshly made hamburgers and french fries from a fast food restaurant. The place had been closed, the power off, the doors locked, the help run away, but the two cooks had known exactly what do to. She clapped them on the shoulders: “You men have saved the day!”
One hamburger was about all she could handle right now, and she ate it while directing surgery by lamp light over a young man who had lost most of his left arm. He was in shock, and the wound had to be washed out, the arteries sewn up by the admiral, and the stump wrapped in gauze.
All through the night, Maxie kept thinking of Tom Dash, each time she had a moment to breathe, to think, to be herself. She ached inside, thinking that something might have happened to him.
The Japanese decided to try their way out. Another Japanese tourist had come along, a senior honcho with a big car manufacturing company. He’d spoken authoritatively about getting to the Japanese embassy and that it was not too far away.
As the night grew late, there seemed to be a lull. Occasional rounds still poured in over their heads, in the direction of the Composite at Rock Creek Park. Small arms fire rattled irregularly in the city, but the intervals were longer. Maxie sat with Irma, sharing coffee that the two cooks had made especially for them. An Army Infantry sergeant had just arrived to have a bullet removed from his side. He sat with them, a sandy-haired man of indeterminate age. Battle, Maxie figured, seemed to put a patina on everyone, especially the men, so they all looked dirty and tired and unshaven. Their hair was short and mussy and ranged from dirty brown to dirty black, with the occasional dirty blond thrown in. “Do you ladies know if we’re gonna get rescued here?” he asked softly, looking strained in his bandages. He had a field jacket draped loosely over his otherwise bare upper torso, while his lower half wore boots and fatigue pants.
Maxie shook her head, looking at the sky. While it remained foggy on the ground, the sky was clear in patches, but mostly it was filled with big bruised billowing clouds the color of ashes. “I keep thinking a whole bunch of parachutes will suddenly float down. Paratroopers, to save us.”
The sergeant smiled as he accepted a bit of coffee from Irma. “Well, Ma’am, I think in these desperate times those fat old generals don’t want to lose their best aces in the hole, if you see what I mean. First place, how’d they know if they send in a battalion of guys, that they won’t turn and go over to the other side? Second, if you got troops you know is loyal, you wait, you don’t just throw them at the problem, you wait until daylight and check it out from the air and plan your next chess move. I’ll bet them boys in the park is all pulled out right now. Them a-holes, if you pardon my French, they’s lobbing artillery at a bunch of empty tents. All them good reserve troops is just holding the line until they can bring in some fresh regulars from places like Fort Riley and Fort Campbell, not to mention Fort Hood and Fort Polk, places like that. And Marines from Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton. That’s gonna take a few days, and meanwhile we’s out here swingin’ in the breeze.”
“So what’s your plan?” Irma asked. “You’re wounded. You can bag out if you want.”
The sergeant nodded with a wry grin. “Can’t win for stayin’, can’t win for leavin’. I done made up my mind. I’m gonna pull out with the next little batch o’ boys that’s going. We got hit pretty hard up there, you seen Colonel Myers take it up front real bad. I think you ought to pull outta here with us, Ma’am,” he said, addressing Maxie.
“That would be impossible. Half these people can’t be moved, much less walk. If we move, they die.”
The sergeant’s grin evaporated. “Ma’am, what’s you gonna do if them lucifers comes through the rubble at you?’
“We’re no threat to them. We’ll negotiate. We’ll fix their wounded too.”
The sergeant rose, shaking his head. He seemed to have inner thoughts that he felt were best kept close to his heart. “Next time I got a holy moment, I’m gonna say a prayer for you ladies.”
“If you get out,” Irma said, “send back blood. Lots of it. And antibiotics. Tell them we have people who need medevac. Couple dozen MAES units would be in order.”
“I promise I will, Ma’am.”
“Good luck,” Maxie said.
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
Maxie watched as the sergeant and a tall black man, very dark-skinned, with long bare muscular arms, gathered a small group about them. There were maybe a dozen, Maxie figured, all with minor wounds, but all with rifles and able to walk. They looked like a painting of cossacks in their torn, baggy, and ill-assorted uniforms. A few had helmets; the rest wore a wild assortment of hats, including one or two with russian-style fur caps with dangling furry earmuffs.
A light drizzle began to fall. Maxie forgot about the sergeant and his men. She jumped up and organized a group to spread tarps between the fire engine and a school bus. About 25 men actually managed to right one of the busses. They got the lights to work inside, and busily swept glass out the doors.
Maxie was just helping a woman with a leg wound to hobble toward the newly promised sanctuary of the bus, when shots rang out, then screams, and then there was silence. Someone bellowed with outrage. The lights on the bus went out. Someone ran past Maxie, and she asked: “What’s going on?”
“Snipers, Ma’am. They just killed the two men cleaning up the bus.”
Maxie’s heart sank. She let the woman at her side hobble off to a crowded group sheltering under the tarp. As drizzle gathered in her hair and started to run down her face, she thought about crying. But nothing came out. This was far from over, and she couldn’t let herself cry until it was over. “Everybody! Listen up!” she cried in her loudest voice. “Spread the word. Keep a low profile. There are snipers all around us out there. No lights, you understand? Not even a cigarette.” She thought she was being ignored, but then she saw men whispering to each other, gesticulating, looking over the protective vehicles with wide, scared eyes. No lights, she thought; they’d have to operate while one person held a poncho to ward off the drizzle and to keep the glow of their battery lights from attracting more shots. Thank God for the fire engine. She hoped its batteries would sustain her lights until dawn.
Casualties kept straggling in. Stretcher cases, who were usually far worse, came in intermittently. As she was working on a man with a gaping stomach wound, trying to stop his bleeding and pack his intestines, and knowing he would probably die soon, she noticed a very tall black man with glistening skin and long muscular arms. He caught her eye and wandered over dully. “All dead, Ma’am.”
“The sergeant?” she asked without ceasing to work.
“All dead. And the Japanese. Slaughtered. It’s sniper alley out there, Ma’am. I’m the only one of the boys that got back here.” Tears ran down his face.
“Go get some coffee, and then come see me. I have work for you,” she said firmly.
He began to cry even as he answered: “Thank you, Ma’am. Thank you.” He covered his face with his palms and turned away, doubling over. She noticed he had a wound in the side, but was too preoccupied to check on it.
Thinking of Tom, probably buried in the same pile of bodies somewhere in a lake of muddy water and smashed concrete, she knew why she wasn’t crying. She was saving it all for when they brought her the news. She could handle anything until then, anything!
A while later, the man with the stomach wound expired. Maxie had stayed with him, and she held his hand until it began to grow cool in the clasp of hers.
Someone brought her a cold hamburger, and she ate it without wondering where it had been or if it was still safe to eat. She cleaned out a shallow grazing wound on a man’s forehead and was stitching it up, when she looked up. It was just in the first light of dawn—where had the time gone?—when she looked up because Admiral Stintonburger was calling out to her. He was leaning over a patient and held his hands up in their bloodied surgical gloves. When she looked more closely, in slow motion, she noticed that he had a hole in the middle of his forehead; he collapsed before her eyes. She cringed inwardly, but kept working. Several people ran to help the doctor, but she could tell from here he’d died almost instantly. The young dermatologist threw her scalpel down and began to scream hysterically. In and out, her wailing, like some sort of crazed calliope, until two other young military women embraced her and comforted her. Maxie finished her procedure and left it for a corpsman to clean up and bandage the patient. She walked over and put her arms on the doctor’s shoulders. The doctor was pale, and trembling; her eyes looked away and she seemed to be unable to focus. “Doctor.”
She looked at Maxie. “I’m sorry, I—what?”
“You’re going to have to pull yourself together. You are now the only remaining medical officer. There is a lot of work to do, and no time to waste, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Maxie motioned for the two other women, lightly wounded, one a driver, the other with a Navy commel detachment, to stay with the doctor and keep her together.
Then someone else motioned for Maxie to come quickly.
The shot that killed Irma had arrived stealthily, sometime during the night. As a dingy light filtered down through a pearly sky, someone had found her flight-suited body sprawled face down in a muddy puddle. She’d been hit by a high velocity, high caliber slug of some kind, right through the center of her torso. “Oh no,” Maxie said feeling hysteria pressing at the trapdoor, “oh no.” She singsonged, rolling the body over. “Irma, oh no, please no...” Irma had long grown cold. Maxie kissed herself on the hand and then touched her fingertips to Irma’s closed eyes. “Put her with the others,” she told the onlookers as she rose blindly and staggered back toward the center of the encampment.
She walked in among the wounded and slumped down with her back to the roof of a fallen bus. Several of the patients touched her, having nothing else to give but their thanks and affection. Then she noticed, next to her, a very handsome young man. He lay on his back, covered by a blanket, and he was looking at her with alert eyes. “You okay, lady?”
Maxie nodded, wiped something away from her nose. That seemed to make her able to talk again. “Yeah. How are you?”
The boy looked into the sky. “I can’t move my legs. I was able to move my arms until a little while ago. I have a bullet somewhere near my spine. Am I going to die?”
“No.”
“I have a wife. She’s real pretty. We have a baby on the way. I want to see that baby.”
“You will.” Maxie slid her leg under his neck and gently lifted him toward her, so that his head was supported by her knee, and his back lay in the V of her folded left leg. She put her left arm around him and held him close to her. With her right hand, she reached under the blanket and found his hands. They were dry and chilly. “Can you feel that?”
He smiled broadly. “I feel something warming my hands.”
She grinned joyfully. “That’s wonderful. There is hope, you see. Okay, I’m going to take a little rest for a while. We’ll keep each other warm.”
“You can have a corner of this blanket.”
“Thanks, but I’m warmly dressed. What’s your wife’s name?”
“Yvette.” He spelled it out. “We were thinking if the baby is a girl, we’d call her Yvette Junior. And if it’s a boy, Yves.”
“Sounds good to me. What’s your name?”
“Tom.”
She closed her eyes and felt a dullness, like wet concrete, sliding down her brief glimmer of happiness. “Tom who?”
“Tom O’Leary. I’m from Bristol, Virginia.”
“I thought I heard a little Virginia drawl in them thar words, my friend.”
“You got a good ear, Ma’am. You must be from around there.”
“I am.”
“Say, are you still holding my hands?”
“Yup. Got a firm grip on ‘em, right here.” She pulled tightly on them.
“I can’t feel them anymore. I wonder if that’s ‘cause you let go.”
“I’m not letting go of you, Tom O’Leary. We’re in this together.”
As dawn grew fully around them, there was a long silence as though the world had died and must be resurrected. Someone was rumoring that a cell phone had been found in a ruined civilian automobile. A call for help had been made to a civilian operator in Delaware using a credit card. The phone was being brought to the encampment and given to Maxie. The shooting grew distant, or was that because she was nodding out, her head against Tom O’Leary’s. She could hear rain dripping someplace, but it was almost dry in the lee of the bus.
Just as she was falling asleep, something terrible tore at her ears and pressed her against the bus. Dully, she opened her eyes and looked around. “What was that?”
“Wow.” Several men rose and stood pointing toward the northwest. “Damn. Look at that.”
She still held Tom O’Leary in her lap, and she shifted slightly to change positions. Her leg threatened to go to sleep. “You okay, Tom O’Leary?”
“I’m fine, Ma’am. You’re keeping me nice and warm. What was that noise?”
One of the men answered: “Huge explosion over there by the convention center. Maybe them crazy bastards blew themselves up in the hotel.”
“And the whole friggin’ CON2 with it,” another said.
“Good riddance,” another said.
“It’s going to be over soon,” Tom O’Leary told Maxie with utter assurance.
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