Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

“What about you?”

“You know what I have to do.”

“Well, that’s just crazy. It’s suicide. You don’t even know if she’s still alive.” He saw the change in the boy’s face: a streak of pain, there and gone as swiftly as a comet. “What?”

“You know that tight feeling you get waiting for a firefight? Well, that’s how I feel now, and it’s only getting stronger. She’s alive and in trouble, Jed. I’ve got to leave, soon, or I’m going to explode.”

He did know the feeling. Waiting around for an attack you knew was coming was an exercise in slowly losing your mind. Some of the worst knock-down, drag-out brawls he’d gotten into had been in that lull. Jed let go of a long sigh because there was no use arguing, and he understood how the boy felt about the girl. Hell, Jed would’ve done the same for Grace.

“Can you wait?” When the boy hesitated, he added, “A week, ten days at the most; that’s all I’m asking.”

“Can I ask why?”

All of a sudden, it was very hard to swallow. “Michael’s birthday. I know Grace has held back enough flour and sugar to bake a cake. It would mean a lot to her.” He paused, then added, roughly, “Me, too.”

“Then, of course, I’ll stay,” Tom Eden said. “No problem.”

He’d lied. Tom watched as Jed trudged back up the trail and disappeared into a thick screen of tamarack and hemlock. Now that he was better, Tom came up to the cabin only for meals, which was safer all the way around. Just no telling who might show up, and Jed and Grace were already in danger for sheltering him. He owed them his life. If they’d chosen another route west or hadn’t gotten curious about those three dead kids sprawled in that convenience store lot, he would have died. As it was, by the time the fever broke and his delirium passed, four days were gone, and he was in Wisconsin.

God, poor Alex. Despite the deep cold, a hot-white burn flared in his chest, and he had to clamp back on a moan. She must’ve been frantic when she returned and found him gone. That’s how he would’ve felt. And she had come back; he knew it. She was stubborn, a fighter. He would never have given up on her—

All of a sudden and out of thin air, there came a tiny, frightened whimper.

No. His breath thinned and died. Tom went absolutely still. Had he been a different person in any other place and time, he might have glanced at the dog or thought there must be a small animal, like a chipmunk or maybe even a squirrel, scuttling by. But Tom was not someone else. After Afghanistan, he could never be anyone else—and, maybe, not even himself.

The whimper—really, a choked sob—came again.

Ignore it, just like the doctors said. Come on, breathe. He dug the heels of his hands into his temples as he pulled in a long, cold draw, let it out, sucked in again. Just breathe, this isn’t real, this isn’t—

“Puh-puh-plee.” Other than candee and meester, this probably had been the only English the little girl knew, and oh Jesus, he would know that voice anywhere. She rattled off something in rapid-fire Pashto he didn’t understand and then said again, “Plee, plee . . .”

“No,” he whispered. “You’re not there. Go away, go—” He squeezed his eyes tight, as if doing that would block out the rest, but it was already much too late. He could feel the flashback biting into his brain, digging in with its claws. His head swam, and a thick layer of dust suddenly clogged his throat. That’s not real. There’s no dust. I’m in Wisconsin; it’s winter. I am not hearing this. He tried clamping down on his thoughts and muscling himself back under control, but now the Afghan sun was baking him alive; he was hot, so hot, and there was grit between his teeth and on his tongue, and he could hear the hollow boom-boom-boom of distant weapons fire. The blast suit was suddenly there, too: a seventy-pound cocoon of hard armor and polyurethane padding that weighed him down just as heavily as these chains of memory.

A crackle of static. “For God’s sake, Tom!” A sputter and then Jim—his best friend, a person he trusted with his life—said through the headphone over Tom’s right ear, “Jesus, Tom, come on, man, get out, just cut—”

No, Jim, you’re dead. Tom was panting now. He couldn’t help it. You’re dead, Jim, I shot you—

“Amereekan.” Not a girl now, but a boy: no less frightened and just as young, his trembling voice dribbling in through the ambient mike by Tom’s left ear: “Amereekan, please, Amereekan, please, please . . .”

“Leave me alone,” Tom ground out. He’d once told a shrink that being caught in a flashback was like having your mind sucked down the throat of an inky whirlpool. You were just there, in a nightmare swirl of images that became more and more like real things and not only shadows of memory. “Get out of my head. I can’t save you. I can’t save anybody, I can’t—”

“Tom.” Another girl, but a much older voice—and someone he also knew, oh, so well. “Tom, help me, please.”

Alex. Everything, all of him, went dead inside. He couldn’t feel his heart at all. She wasn’t there; he knew that. But he would give his life to see her again, and if he turned around—if he opened his eyes and peered into that awful past—she would be there, on her knees, in the rubble, beneath a merciless sun. That, he thought, he couldn’t bear. No, God, don’t do this, please, don’t—

“Tom,” Alex said again, and her voice was shaking; she was pleading and she sounded so much like that little girl! “Tom, don’t do this. Don’t leave me here to—”

“Alex, I can’t. Oh, God, please,” Tom rasped. He was not going to look. This was not real and Alex was not there; she was never part of that horror. “God, please stop this, pl—”

“Tom, come on.” Jim was back. His friend’s voice crackled with urgency. “Forget it, man, you got to get out. Cut the wire, come on, grab the kid and get out! Leave her, Tom, leave the girl, you’ve got to get—”

“STOP!” he roared. The shrinks always said he ought to calmly talk himself down, but then again, they weren’t trapped in this endless loop. “Stop, please, just stop!”

That worked. In the next instant, Tom felt his brain abruptly disengage as the flashback finally let go. That was always the same, too, and if he had to put words to it, the sensation was like bulleting through a brittle pane of window glass, his body shattering from one world to the next.