A Private Little War(133)

Vic hadn’t heard Lefty Berthold die. She’d been spared that peculiar window onto death. She’d seen the fireball of him going down. The brief, bright comet of his passing. But that was distant. She’d loaded planes with death, but that was remote, too.

She’d walked Raoul to the mess tent, though. Had half carried him as he shuffled and swore and began to shake; had borne his weight until her leathers smelled of his meat and blood and bits of his flaking, wet, charred skin clung to her hands and her face. That was close. Intimate. She’d held dying close to her. She’d carried it. And when, after setting Raoul down on a bench and backing away from him, she’d absently dragged the back of her hand across her mouth and tasted the salty, smoky, oily wounds of the fire and flesh on her lips? Well, that was close, too. She’d walked purposefully back to the longhouse. She’d vomited in the short grass. With a hand pump and water, she’d sluiced the worst of Raoul off herself. And then she’d gone back to work—patching planes, throwing herself at wounded machines to stop their leaks and mend their tears and get them up and fighting once more.

Now, later, she could still smell Raoul on her. In the darkness, she seemed to move in a cloud of it. And when she came close to Carter, she found that he, too, stank of fuel and oil and cordite and sweat and smoke and fear, so she took him by the hand and led him down to the shower tent. She turned on the blast heaters that she’d designed and built out of spare parts, and helped Carter out of his clothes while the water warmed. When there was enough heat, she stripped off her own gear and pulled Carter to her under the dribbling water, letting it run down over them and wash away the day, the bloody, awful day.

Carter did not speak much. He seemed not entirely sure where he was. When Vic reached up to rub a bar of soap into the tangles of his hair, he tilted his head up into the falling water and let it run in rivers across his face. When she bent, then kneeled, to wash his feet, he at first shuffled away, grunting from somewhere in the back of his throat.

“Shut up,” she said. “Let me.” And he acquiesced, standing still as stone and staring out at nothing as though embarassed by the intimacy of it, which was ridiculous. The boy had learned nothing, Vic thought. There was no kindness, no acceptance in him. Until she looked up and saw that he was crying.

Vic dried Carter. She dried herself. She helped him to dress and, by the hand, led him back to his tent. Together, they lay in his bed, fully dressed, clinging to each other like survivors to wreckage bobbing in a dark sea. Carter lost his mind for a time, then found it again, then lost it. The fear and the sadness seemed to come over him in waves. The rage. He cursed Lefty and he cursed the company and he cursed Iaxo over and over and over again. He lay, curled up, and held on to her legs, crashing his head into her in frustration until it started to hurt and she’d driven hard, knuckled punches into his neck and back that he seemed not to feel at all. He grew calm and she stroked his head. He talked like she wasn’t there, and she listened in silence.

Eventually, Carter faded into sleep. Vic wormed her way free of him. She covered him with a blanket and walked away. Outside the door, she saw Cat sitting, watching her from the dark with its big eyes.

“He was looking for you,” she said to the little monster. “Just thought you should know.” And then she went back to her tent to mourn her own friend, Raoul, who’d died while she was washing the memory of him off her skin, tracing her fingertips over Carter’s hot, wet flesh. He’d breathed in too much fire when the flames had climbed him, thrashing around his face. In panic and shouting, he’d sucked the licking tongues into his own body and, later, he’d strangled in a white bed with his blind eyes bandaged and Doc Edison sitting beside him, waiting to record the precise time of death.

Vic added Raoul to the long list of known dead in her head, but she crossed Carter’s name off. She’d thought for sure she was going to lose him today, but she had brought him back somehow. Rationally, she knew it had nothing to do with her. She’d done nothing to allow him to survive this. But she knew what the men called her, how they thought of her. She was the Angel of Death. To gain her attentions was to wear an invisible bull’s-eye forever and to have one’s forever reduced to a short, finite, but unknowable number of hours. None of that was true. She knew that. She repaired machines. That was all she did. She gave her tenderest affections to those most in need. And if those who were already damaged almost to the point of death failed while under her care? Well, again, that was just math. It was bound to happen. But she gave them time, didn’t take it away. Sometimes, rarely, she was even able to make them new again.