Salvation (The Protectors 2)

A man was on his knees on the sand, his hands bound behind his back and a sack of some kind over his head. There were a few small blood stains on his blue button down shirt and he was wearing a pair of blue jeans that were covered in mud. His feet were bare, but it was the sheet of plastic beneath him that had me swallowing hard.

What the fuck?

My instinct was to check on the man but as I got closer to him, I took in the stranger from the motel, the stranger who’d brought me here, and noticed the gun he was holding in his hand. Panic went through me but I managed to remain absolutely still. I couldn’t make out his face but I could see his profile and what stood out more than anything was the obvious burn scar that covered his right cheek, jaw and neck. The mottled flesh disappeared beneath his shirt collar and I perversely wondered if it continued down the rest of his body. And then a chill went through me as I took in the rest of his suddenly familiar profile. And then I knew the scar did indeed continue beneath his shirt.

“Brooke Army Medical Center,” the stranger said. “2005.”

“House…house fire,” I managed to say. “I was an intern and you and your girlfriend-”

“Wife,” the man interjected with little emotion.

“Wife,” I whispered. “You and your wife came into the ER.”

The case was one I would remember for the rest of my life and had been one of the reasons I’d decided to pursue surgery as a specialty. The ER had been overrun with cases that night due to a terrible car accident that had caused a chain reaction pile up. I’d jumped in to help where I could, but by the time the man and his wife had been brought in, the attending doctor and all the residents were performing lifesaving procedures on other patients. The man had been badly burned, but it was his wife who’d been the more critical case because in addition to being burned, she’d been stabbed multiple times and had been bleeding internally. With no other doctors available, I’d been forced to open her up to try and stop the internal bleeding while my attending told me what to do a few beds over as he tried to save a six-year-old kid’s life. I’d managed to save the woman’s life, but she’d died a few days later from the burns.

“Revay,” I said softly. “That was her name, right?”

The man nodded.

“And you’re Michael,” I added.

“Hawke,” the man corrected. “She was the only one who called me Michael.”

“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “I wish I could have done more.”

“You gave me three days with her. Three days I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

I glanced at the man kneeling on the sheet. I could hear him crying, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening. If this man was blaming me for his wife’s death, who was the other guy?

“I can’t give you three more days with Trace but I can give you this,” Hawke said as he nodded at the man.

I was stunned to hear him refer to Trace. “How…how did you know about that?” I asked. The circumstances of Trace’s death had been carefully covered up by the military and I’d been too out of it to even process what had happened to him…to us.

Hawke finally looked at me full on before nodding at the man on the plastic again. “Go on, take it off,” he said.

I knew he meant the sack covering the guy’s head. My fingers shook as I gave Hawke another glance and then I made my way down the slight incline. Stepping on the plastic freaked me out and I half expected to feel a bullet pierce my back as soon as I did, but there was only the man’s muted crying so I reached for the bag and pulled it off his head. His wide, terrified eyes met mine and he tried to say something around the fabric tied around his head, gagging his mouth. But I didn’t care about that because all I saw were the piercing blue eyes…the ones that had been filled with bloodlust the last time I’d seen them.

I stepped back several steps as the memories washed over me and the man stopped trying to scream because he recognized me a moment later. Images of Trace’s body jerking as the man before me brutalized him began playing on a loop in my head. I couldn’t see his hands since they were tied behind his back, but I remembered their punishing strength because after he’d finished with Trace, he’d held me down while one of his buddies had done to me what he’d done to Trace. In my memory, the cruel lips that were pressed around the gag were open, and I could hear the heavy timbre of his voice as he kept asking Trace if he liked it.