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.
The IV went into the little girl’s small arm easily and the medic squeezed plasma into her. She tried to talk, but only bloody bubbles came out. Harry stepped back, reached for his mike and called for a medevac helicopter. Kneeling beside her, his eyes blurry with tears, he prayed to the God of his childhood that the girl would live.
Harry taped the bandage to Brenda and she bit her lower lip and shivered with pain.
“I have to get my truck,” Harry said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
A faint smile creased her features. Harry dashed for his truck. Partway there, he remembered his keys. He found them in his tent and hurried to the truck. Sliding into the driver’s seat, the keys slid from his fingers. He realized that his hands were slick with Brenda’s blood. Maybe even blood from the man from Boston was mixed in. He hoped not; it seemed a desecration to have the blood of a murderer combined with that of an innocent. He wiped his hands on his sweat pants and picked up the keys.
The engine turned over on the first try. Enough of the sun had risen to clearly light the camp, with crisp morning shadows, as if the day had not turned ugly. He drove into the camp and stopped near Brenda’s tent, careful to not spray dust towards her.
He found her unconscious. While alarmed at this, he was also grateful. Talking to her was an awful strain. He thought about putting her in the back of his truck, laying her on the foam pads there, but he worried that she would roll off. He carefully picked her up, as tender as a father with a baby, and carried her to the passenger’s seat. He sat her up, secured her seatbelt, and checked the bandages. Bloody, but not soaked through.
The girl’s mother came running up, holding her dusty burqa up above her sandals so she could move more quickly. She was not screaming. Harry looked at her eyes, outlined by a rectangle of dark cloth. Her glistening eyes were resigned. How many children and relatives had she already seen die in three decades of war? Harry found that fatal acceptance unnerving and infinitely sad.
Harry drove quickly out of the camp, wincing at every bump. When he reached the car that the two would-be murderers had come in, he turned off the road and drove over brush to get around them. He glanced briefly at the car as he passed—a mid-sized sedan that screamed rental.
The medvac chopper landed a couple of hundred yards away, where the boulders dotting the hillside allowed merely a tricky landing, rather than an impossible landing. Harry shielded the medic and the girl from flying grit with a blanket, then they used the blanket to make a sling to carry her to the helicopter. The medic climbed in with her, but the mother hung back and shook her head when the medic motioned for her to come aboard.
Harry heard later that the girl lived. Not the outcome he expected, but he remembered the lessons from catechism from his childhood, and prayed again, thanking God for that child’s life. He regained his faith that day; not a faith that took him to mass or to confession, but a faith that found comfort in reading the Psalms and the Proverbs and praying when in need. He knew little theology, though he recognized that this was because of laziness, not some ecumenical inclination.
That had been eleven years ago, and now he prayed for Brenda. No words, just a yearning for her to live, an incoherent beseeching of the universe. Let there be justice, let the innocent live. Let Brenda live just as the little girl in Afghanistan had lived.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Brenda had never imagined what it felt like to be shot. She had read about such accounts in books—history, journalism, and novels—but the actual experience was unexpected. It hurt, oh God, did it hurt, and she found it best to remain quiet, not move, and keep her eyes closed. She knew that at times she fell asleep, or perhaps fell unconscious. She could not tell the difference.
She felt them come down off the rough road onto the main paved road that ran through the park. The truck accelerated faster.
She didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Harry. Talking took too much energy. Her stomach roiled with nausea and she kept her eyes closed to help calm it. For some reason, probably discernable to a psychologist, she thought about her bedroom as a child. The house in Maine, the walls of her room covered with cedar slats that her father had built with meticulous care. She covered the walls with maps, since she loved maps, and her father gave up after a few attempts to stop her from sticking thumbtacks into his beautiful wood. She also had a mountain of stuffed animals in the corner and only a few dolls. She preferred animals.
The truck slowed, turned, came to a slow stop. She almost smiled. Harry was being so careful.
“Be back in a second,” he said as he opened the door.
She heard him pounding on doors, shouting for help. She wondered where they had gotten to in such a short time. Had they reached town already? No, that didn’t make sense. Oh, the ranger village. Every national park had one; some were just prefab houses, others had quite nice houses made of local rock, but there was always a place for the rangers and other employees to call home. The rangers at Chaco Canyon lived in a dozen dun-colored homes and duplexes located between the visitor center and campground.
Her door opened and she felt hands lifting her out and laying her on the ground. It felt like a blanket under her.
“She’s been shot.” Harry’s voice quivered. “Two wounds. Her arm and her chest. The arm was squirting blood from an artery—I think that round passed through. There is no exit wound for the chest, so that bullet must be in there.”
“Let’s take a look.” A woman’s voice.
Brenda felt probing fingers and moaned at the sharp jabs of pain in her arm and chest. A needle pricked the back of her left hand and she felt it enter her vein.
Another voice. A man’s, gravelly from sleep, and speaking with authority. He was used to being in charge. “LifeFlight is on the way. ETA is twenty-five minutes.”
“Good, that’s good. You got the right blood for her?”
The woman. “Yes, we’ll get her volume back up. I’ve got to check her pressure.”
Brenda felt the