Blinded by blood pouring into her left eye, animal-like sounds erupted from her. Swinging her fists, she went after the brown-eyed Latino who lunged at her, unable to move quickly enough, Lia fell.
She landed on her back, screaming as he pounced. As he did, she shot both her boots upward and connected with the man’s chest. The collision jarred every joint in her body, making her cry out in pain.
Her assailant cursed as he was thrown off to one side, his knife falling from his hand.
Rolling, scrambling blindly to her hands and knees, she staggered to her feet. It was nearly dark in the motor pool garage and all she could see was the red exit door light a hundred feet away.
Lia’s boots struck the concrete, echoing hollowly. Her heart was beating hard and loud, she couldn’t hear anything else. Terror and adrenaline pushed her forward towards the door. She had to get help!
It had all begun when she was assigned to close up the motor pool for the night. Why would these men she’d spent years with suddenly, and unaccountably, threaten her with knives and attempt to rape her.
Why? Why? Lia sobbed as she hit the door at a full run, her hands out, striking the bar so that it opened. The door was flung back, banging loudly against the building.
In the cool night air, Lia felt her head clear. She knew where to run—there was a highway nearby, and she could see headlights from the many military vehicles leaving the Army base. Weak from blood loss, she swayed but adrenaline kept her running. She pushed herself forward to the highway.
Almost blinded by the blood coursing down the left side of her face, she threw up her hands and nearly fell onto the two-lane highway. She reached the yellow line and waved frantically at an approaching Humvee.
“STOP! For God’s sakes, STOP! She screamed.”
Lia felt all the blood leave her head as she began falling to the ground. Shocked over the unexpected assault by the men she thought were her friends, the world exploded around her as she fainted from loss of blood and shock.
Lia jack-knifed into a sitting position. She was in bed in her small, one story white stucco house near La Fortuna, Costa Rica. Lia pressed her hands to her perspiring face, sobbing, gasping for air. Her chest heaved and hurt. Heart pounding, she shook with terror. She heard desperate sounds coming from a wounded animal, and realized they were coming from her.
Her hair, once long and curly, was now short, but it still curled a little in the dampness. No matter what she did, that nightmare, the night she was attacked, stalked her relentlessly.
And no matter how often she dreamed, beautiful, colorful dreams from her idyllic rural childhood in Oregon, they always changed. First came the hint of pink in the sky, and then darker pink, changing and congealing into blood as it began to fall across her eyes until all she saw was dark, crimson blood. Her blood.
Lia could still feel every one of the knife slashes. Her only consolation was she had fought back and escaped her attackers. Her ferocity had stunned them.
She sat there her knees drawn up against her body as she pressed her back into the headboard. The past haunted her even though she desperately tried to forget the men who attacked her and the Army hospital where’d she recuperated.
They had known that the motor pool was shut down for the night and it would be hours before anyone else would show up. Lia could never figure out why they had chosen her to rape. There were other Army women who worked in motor pool, as well. In all the years she had been deployed at the base, nothing like this had ever happened to her. Sometimes, Taliban mortared the base outside the fence, but that was all. Why her? It ate at her, and she had no answer.
Later, as she lay recovering in a bed at Landstuhl Medical Center, she gave thanks that her father, a former Army instructor, had taught her Krav Maga an Israeli form of street fighting. He had taught her how to survive an attack. She had instinctively used what she knew when her life was on the line, and it had been enough to get her out alive.
Automatically, her damp, trembling fingertips brushed the left side of her neck. She felt the scar across her throat, the one that had partially nicked her carotid artery. She had been bleeding to death from that one cut, which was why she’d fainted in the middle of the highway. It was a miracle she’d gotten that far.
Luckily, the driver of the Humvee was a physician. She was just leaving the base hospital for the night and thanks to her speedy intervention, Lia’s life had been saved.
Lia had little memory of being taken to the Bagram hospital on the base. She did wake once in a fabric-draped cubicle in the emergency room. A half-dozen doctors and nurses were feverishly working on her, and she remembered the oxygen mask over her face and how the bright overhead lights had hurt her eyes.