Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

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СКАЧАТЬ man thrashed wildly, banging Harry’s outstretched left elbow against a small rock protruding from the ground. Pain shot up Harry’s arm and down his side to his groin and he gasped. Why did they call that the funny bone? What a ridiculous name. Harry fell back, clenching his right fist as he did so, feeling the eye of the man come loose in his hand. His left arm was useless for the moment, and he heard the man inhale. Silence was absolutely necessary. Harry dropped the eye, grabbed a rock, no bigger than a small book, and brought it down.

      He could not see well enough in the darkness to deliver more than a glancing blow and was not sure if he landed it on the man’s head or neck. He struck again and heard the crunch of skull. Sure now of his aim, he struck again with all the force that he could muster and this time he was sure that the man with the Boston accent would move no more.

      Harry held his breath, listening intently. He could not hear the other man returning. Running his hands over the dead man, he found a pistol jammed in the man’s belt. The man from Boston had never gone for his weapon, instinctively protecting his eyes instead. Even though the sun had not yet peeked over the western ridge, the sky was getting lighter; only Venus, the morning star, was still visible.

      Harry ran his hands over the gun. A small semi-automatic, with a silencer on the end. He rubbed his finger on the end of the silencer, gauging the opening to belong to a .22 or .25 caliber.

      He hurried back to the camp, feeling more terrified than he ever had at any time in his life.

      * * * *

      Brenda came awake with a start. Wisps of a dream, of a desert tomb and a handsome stranger, jostled in her head. Why had she awakened?

      She heard a rustling outside her tent.

      “Harry, is that you?”

      * * * *

      Harry reached the camp, coming up the draw just in time to see the other man, standing only five or six feet from the front of Brenda’s tent, point his pistol down. Harry didn’t hear the shots, but saw the pistol jerk twice. Harry screamed, all his terror at the prospect of that young angel dying ripped from his throat. He dropped to one knee, braced his arm, aimed, and fired three quick shots, then burst to his feet and ran to his left, moving closer.

      The assassin staggered back and dropped to the ground. Harry fired three more times as he rushed forward, cursing his unfamiliarity with the weapon, knowing that if somehow he had been given time to practice, he would have hit with every shot.

      The assassin was twisting away, having lost his pistol, when Harry reached him. The archaeologist finished the bastard with a shot to the head, an unthinking act ingrained in him from hundreds of hours of hostage rescue drills. Always do the head in case the bad guy was a suicide bomber.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Harry ripped at the tent zipper, cursing his shaking fingers. Pulling the flap aside, he reached in to touch her. It was dark in the tent; all could see was a shape in a sleeping bag.

      “Brenda?” he asked ever so tentatively.

      His fingers touched wetness and she gasped, words quickly spilling from her. “Harry, is that you? What happened? It hurts so much....”

      “One minute—I’ll be right back.”

      He ran for a battery-powered lantern and the first-aid kit that they kept in the big canvas tent. His mind raced as if filled with amphetamines, random thoughts and memories flitting about the stage of his mind, at the same time that the task at hand received focused attention. He knew the effects of those drugs, having popped the pills the Army gave him on long missions and in surveillance jobs that required a soldier to stay awake and alert. Seedy drug pushers who pushed speed and uppers on the street went to prison, but not the Army.

      As he grabbed the first-aid kit, he felt an awful sense of déjà-vu from a time over a decade past, though that other first-aid kit had been wrapped in brown, desert camouflage, with a red cross on it. One of the men of his team, a sergeant from Michigan, had sprayed too widely with his SAW and the bullets hit a little girl as well as a Taliban fighter. The fighter’s AK-47 assault rifle had slipped from lifeless fingers as the girl dropped beside him, her long dark hair sweeping across her face.

      Harry pounded back to Brenda’s tent. Dawn was only minutes away. Setting up the lantern, he pointed it inside. Blood stained her right forearm. The tissue around the wound looked torn and he was alarmed to see blood pumping out. An artery had been nicked. Harry popped the kit open. It was a complete kit, with bandages, scissors, two splints, a variety of small tubes of medicine, and a manual that he had no time to read.

      He ripped open a bandage with his teeth, pressed it down on her wound, then wrapped the bandage around her arm and pushed the tape together. His hands were slippery with blood; it had already saturated the bandage. He needed to make a pressure bandage. Rooting through the kit, he found two more bandages. Leaving one bandage rolled up, he pressed it over the wound and wrapped it tightly in place with the second bandage. If the artery did not stop flowing, he would have to resort to a tourniquet, and Brenda would probably lose her forearm.

      “Harry, what are you doing?”

      For a moment he considered lying—for her own good, of course. But she was too smart; even in shock she would realize what had happened, so he went for honesty. Mostly. “You’ve been shot, honey. I just need to stop the bleeding. You’ll be okay. It’s only flesh wounds.”

      “Shot? Who would shoot me?” Her voice sounded distant to him, as if she was calling from another country.

      The little girl, perhaps only ten or eleven years old, had blood on her lips and an ugly hole in her upper chest. The team’s medic ripped open the medical kit and grabbed a bandage that he handed to Harry and ordered him to press down on the wound. Harry obeyed and watched the medic prepare an IV.

      Harry searched Brenda for more wounds as he talked to her. “I don’t know who they were, some guys from back east.”

      He tugged at the zipper of her sleeping bag. It was soggy with blood and he had to jerk at it to force the zipper to move. She moaned. “That hurt.”

      “Sorry, honey. I’ll be more careful.” He partially crawled into the small tent and unzipped the bag all the way to her feet, then withdrew so that he could see what he was doing.

      “Where’s the person who shot me?”

      He pulled the sleeping bag open and found her wearing pajamas. Dancing bears and flying birds decorated them. He had seen them before, when she had gotten up early to relieve herself without bothering to change her clothes. He did not find the motif incongruous at all—a perfect match for her personality.

      “I killed him. Killed both of them.” Those words cut the chatter from her.

      He found more blood under her left breast. He pulled up her top far enough to see the neat small hole from a .22 near the bottom of her ribs. Little blood was coming out. “I have to roll you over onto your side for a moment, honey. It may hurt, so I’m just warning you.” He pulled her over and was gratified to find no exit wound. He didn’t like the idea of a bullet inside her, near her lung or in her guts, but at least he didn’t have the jagged hole made by a tumbling bullet leaving the body. There could be internal bleeding. Probably was, but he couldn’t do anything about that.

      Rolling Brenda back, he reached for another bandage.

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