Heart's False Start (4b/5)
Pairing: Quinntana
Rating: NC-17
Description: It begins as most things do: with a kiss.
Word Count: 35,328 / 14,604 (this part)
Spoilers: None
Notes: For my wife, her long-awaited Quinntana army fic. Merry Christmas, Faye.
Brittany is still in the same spot on the sofa she’d been sitting in when Quinn left that morning, staring blankly at CNN coverage of roadside bombings and troop deployments. There aren’t any specifics about which unit is where, so she just assumes that every dead soldier is Santana until one of the anchors tells her otherwise.
Quinn drops her bag on the table near the door and leans over the back of the couch to assess the situation. Brittany is still in pajamas (the same shorts and tank top she’s worn all week), and her hair is a three-day rat’s next of tangles thrown into a messy bun on top of her head. She’s been chewing her lip so much that’s it’s begun to chap, and her face is drawn.
“Did you eat today?” Quinn asks, and Brittany jumps, surprised to find a face so close to her own.
“I had cereal,” she says, returning her eyes to the television.
“When?”
“This morning.”
Quinn sighs heavily. It’s after six, and she’s tired from a very long day at the firm. She’d thought that being a paralegal would be easy, given her background. She’d thought that she would be able to come home and relax, but the stress of each deposition and all the filing and faxing and coordination of a hundred different cases at once has left her brain both tired and wired. She supposes she should just be grateful to have a job at all, and someone to sit with when the sun sets and the silence feels overwhelming. But she can’t settle when she comes home. Not when this is what she comes home to.
“You can’t keep doing this, Britt,” she says.
“Doing what?”
“You know what.”
Brittany says nothing and changes the channel from CNN to MSNBC when it cuts to commercial. That’s on commercial, too, so she switches to Fox News, even though she knows she doesn’t like the way they talk about gay people. Quinn watches her grimace before she flips back to CNN and watches previews for Anderson Cooper’s eighth season premiere in September. She throws the remote down on the couch next to her and pulls her knees up to her chin.
It’s been a month, since Brittany had shown up on her stoop. It had started out fine, the two of them leaning on one another while they mourned for someone that wasn’t even dead. But Brittany never pulled herself out of it, while Quinn had been forced to start living her life again when Waters, Young & Associates offered her a job three days later. Now she works 30 hours a week while Brittany sits in her apartment and watches news coverage of a civil war that she doesn’t even understand. She doesn’t have a job, despite the many contacts she has around the city after all her touring. And none of Quinn’s encouragements to the effect will make her move from that couch.
“What if something happens while I’m out?” she asks when Quinn suggests a teaching gig in midtown, and for just a moment Quinn forgets that Brittany is twenty-six years old. They’re sixteen again, and Quinn is explaining how the world works the way she might explain to a child. “What happens if she tries to call me again and I’m not there to answer?”
“She’s in Syria, honey,” Quinn says as evenly as she can, tempering her frustration. “The cell service isn’t that great there. And CNN isn’t going to tell you anything before the army informs her parents, and you know we’ll be their first phone call.”
The reassurances don’t seem to help, because here she sits, unwashed and starving herself with worry over something neither of them know will actually happen. And Quinn doesn’t want to think about it, so she grabs an apple from the fridge and sits at the small table in the open space between the couch and the kitchen. She cracks open one of her many Bar exam study guides piled there, and immerses herself in the only distraction she has from what feels like a constant and insuppressible battery of regret.
The Bar is in exactly one week and she can’t afford to keep wallowing like Brittany is, even if she wants to. Worry cost her too much the last time, and she isn’t prepared to deal with what might happen if she fails again. She doesn’t have the resources to keep trying, to spend six more months on top of the year she’s already dedicated to studying. This is it; one more shot at everything she’s been preparing for for eight years. Now is not the time to fuck it up.
But the television is loud and she can hear the newscasters discussing the length of the war and troop deployments at record numbers, and it’s all punctuated with sound bytes of machine gun fire and explosions. Quinn looks over at Brittany, who is watching and wincing and grinding her teeth, and she realizes that neither of them are going to be able to function properly if this keeps up. She gets to her feet and snatches the remote from the couch. The television goes blank and Brittany’s head snaps to attention.
“Turn it back on!” she squeals, sounding more like a child having a tantrum than a grown woman.
“No,” Quinn says, crossing her arms. “We can’t live like this, Brittany. I won’t live like this. There is absolutely nothing we can do for her, and what would she say if she saw you like this?”
Brittany’s mouth hangs open in horror, her eyes flicking back and forth between Quinn and the television as though she could will it back to life with her mind. Quinn waits patiently, tapping her toe.
“Well?” she prompts, and Brittany seems to have forgotten the question. “What would she say, Britt? You haven’t showered in days. You don’t move from that couch for anything other than food and the bathroom. You quit your job and stopped dancing completely. It’s been a month, Brittany. Get up. Get off the couch, and go take a shower.”
Brittany sits stubbornly on the couch, her legs crossed beneath and her and her arms folded over her chest. She’s gone from inconsolable to petulant so quickly that Quinn has to remind herself that Brittany is an adult, and not a child in need of a time out. She looks for a way to change the subject, to refocus Brittany on forward motion, instead of the black television screen. She spots Brittany’s phone on the coffee table and snatches it up, hearing a tiny squeak of disapproval. She brings the touch screen to life and purses her lips.
“Another new voicemail from Alex. Looks like a couple texts, too. Are you ever going to call him back?”
It’s enough to get Brittany up off the couch, and that’s a start. She swipes the phone from Quinn’s hand and glares, flipping through the history and deleting text and voicemail alike. “It’s none of your business,” she says, shoving past Quinn to the kitchen, busying herself by throwing three days’ worth of dishes around in the sink.
“If it’s going on in my apartment, it’s my business.” Quinn follows her and watches the violent attack of sponge on dish, fearing that she might be headed to IKEA to buy a new set soon. “You didn’t even look at what he had to say.”
“I know what he had to say,” Brittany sneers. “‘Baby, I’m so sorry. Baby, please forgive me. Baby, baby, baby.’ I don’t need his apologies. I need that phone call back. I need to hear her voice and to tell her it’s going to be okay. I need her to be here, where it’s safe. I need her to never have joined the army in the first place. I need her to have chosen me, instead of guns and war and... you.”
She’s crying into the sink, her hands working the sponge over the same clean plate again and again, and Quinn doesn’t know what to do. She stands there, arms limp at her sides, mouth open but silent. She puts her back against the wall, thinking it might protect her somehow, but she has nothing to hold onto to keep her up, so she just leans. Brittany doesn’t look up from her dish, just keeps scrubbing while the tears for tracks through the blush of her cheeks.
“I spent half my life loving her,” she says, and some of the anger has gone, worked into the plate she still cleans. “I loved her so much I thought my chest would burst. But she didn’t think that was enough, so she left me. And ran right to you, who treated her so horribly and made her question herself and then just when she thought maybe she had a real shot with you, you threw it in her face. I don’t get it, Quinn. I don’t get how you could love her so much and be so cruel.”
“I don’t--”
“Don’t you dare lie to me.” Brittany turns on her, her eyes red-ringed and tired, spitting venom again. “You love her like I love her and you ruined it. And now you’re going to tell me why, because just looking at you hurts me, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. I need you to explain it, because it’s driving me crazy and I deserve the truth.”
There’s nothing she can say. No excuse will do, and no truth will ever be enough to soothe the wound she’s reopened. She knows how Brittany had tried to move on, how Santana called her and told her everything about them, rubbed salt in it and made any sort of closure impossible. That part wasn’t her fault. But she’d just made things worse by being the one that Santana had leaned on, in the aftermath. By being the one Santana wanted, even for a little while. But she has to say something, because Brittany is right. She deserves the truth.
“I’m not strong,” she says, and her hands start to shake. “I never have been. I put on a good show, you know that. But at the end of the day I’m just treading water, and I can’t take anyone with me. We’d both drown if I tried. It was better that she let me go than go down like that. I pushed her away because I wasn’t strong enough for her. Not like you.”
She doesn’t notice she’s slipped to the ground until she realizes that Brittany is looking down at her, plate in hand, dripping water on the linoleum. She lowers herself down, legs folding beneath her to sit against the opposite wall, water and suds up to her elbows. She’s not crying anymore, which is something. But she shakes her head and sighs.
“You were strong enough to carry her when I couldn’t. Maybe I should thank you for that.” She stops, looks at the plate she’s cradling like an infant, perfectly clean and reflecting her own face back at her, then shatters it on the floor next to her.
“But I’m still pissed at you for fucking my girl.”
//
Williams throws down a full house and chomps on the soggy end of an Israeli cigar like he’s just won the jackpot at Caesar’s Palace, and not twenty bucks and a carton of Marlboros off a specialist from the 3rd. The specialist reacts in kind, as if he’s lost his life savings to a card counter at the tables. To be fair, twenty bucks and the carton of cigarettes are precious commodities out here, when cash and cigarettes are two different and equally valuable forms of currency. It’s a little like prison in that way, but Santana wouldn’t say that out loud.
Bobby immediately steals one of the packs out of Williams’ carton and takes a step outside the flap of the rec tent. He puts a finger across his lips to shush her when she follows him and gives him a sidelong glance.
“Don’t tell Georgia,” he says, as though Santana had any way of squealing on him to his wife. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
She doesn’t blame him for taking up the habit. She’d done it too, after four months of sweating her ass off, constantly covered in sand with nothing to do but schlep uptight officers and lead convoys of new recruits over the Jordanian border. The entire unit had been sitting on its hands since it got to this godforsaken hellhole, listening for whispers of troop movements across the country but hearing nothing the winds blowing sand and rocks to pelt the panels of their rec tents. She in turn steals a cigarette from the stolen pack and grins at him.
“You just make sure you don’t take this habit home to The Kid, Bobby,” she says, lighting up with a flick of Williams’ Zippo and inhaling a long drag of the tobacco. “The last thing that girl needs is a gorilla for a dad and lung cancer from second-hand smoke.”
He smacks at her arm and she dodges, putting up her fists and bouncing on the balls of her feet like a prizefighter. He matches stance inside the already crowded rec tent, knocking a few people out of the way in the process. A circle clears around them, thinking this playact is a real fight, and they grin at one another before Santana dives headfirst into Bobby’s stomach and takes him to the ground. He falls, landing under her and screaming, “Medic! Medic! She broke me, the cow! I’m broken!”
No medic actually comes, but the crowd rolls their eyes and disperses quickly enough, not getting the excitement they were hoping for out of Santana and Bobby.
“You’d think they wouldn’t be so eager to see a fight,” she says, standing and pulling Bobby up behind her. Williams has already started another game, sharking a private from the 189th and the same mottle-faced corporal Santana had driven into camp a few months before. “Everyone’s restless, but no one actually wants to see bloodshed, do they?”
Bobby shrugs and goes to light his cigarette, only to realize it’s snapped in their playfight. He lights what’s left with a metallic flick of the Zippo before tucking it into his pocket. She knows Williams will probably never see it again. “I think they’d like to see anything, if it means we get to stop sitting on our asses in a godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere. Everyone had a lot of expectations when we shipped out, y’know? Like... adrenaline rushes and patrols and getting shot at by Syrians. Instead all we’ve gotten is a late-night raid and one very poor attempt at a kidnapping. Still can’t believe they promoted you for that.”
It wasn’t like she did anything special. She’d been called out to make a late-night run to the Jordanian border to pick up some journalists and their military escort. About halfway between the international checkpoint and As Sweimreh their convoy had been attacked on both sides of the road by insurgents waiting in the in ditches. Her vehicle wasn’t equipped for combat. It had bullet-proof windows and exterior panels, but the gun mounts were on the front and rear humvees, and she had civilians on board. She panicked and drove off, leaving behind the rest of her convoy in favor of saving her own life and the lives of the people in her humvee. She can still see the blood that painted her windshield after she’d run down one of the roadside shooters, and how it streaked when she tried to clear it with her wipers. She’d gotten back to base to reports of three wounded, but no one dead. The humvees had even taken two prisoners, who would be held and questioned before being transported to a prison facility in Jordan. By getting her unmanned vehicle out of the way, the rest of the convoy had been able to blockade the road and trap the insurgents. They’d given her a commendation and a promotion, but it felt like a coward’s reward. She’d fled the attack. How does that earn medals?
“I didn’t ask for it,” she says, stubbing out her own cigarette in the sand and casting a quick glance around the camp, glowing bright red and orange in the heat of the desert sunset. She checks her watch and sighs. “We have patrol in an hour. I’m gonna catch a quick nap before hand. Wake me forty, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Specialist.” Bobby lights another cigarette and slips back into the rec tent, for what she assumes is another hand of poker before they share a long night’s watch around the perimeter of the base.
She gets back to the barracks--crudely constructed wooden buildings in a barren plot of land on the edge of the small town--and kicked off her boots before crawling into her cot. She doesn’t really have any intention of sleeping, but it’s better that Bobby think she’s taking a nap than find out what she’s actually doing. She pulls a notebook and pen from the small foot trunk beneath her cot, and begins to write, her back pressed against the wall and her legs stretched out in front of her.
Dear Quinn...
//
There’s another letter in the mailbox when she gets home from work, covered in enough postage to tell her that it’s traveled a very long way to reach her. The envelope is dirty and torn at the edges, but unopened, as far as she can tell. Which means that Brittany hasn’t been home to see it first, and she has the pleasure of reading her own mail for once. She snatches it and darts up the narrow, creaking stairs and pushes her door open in a flurry. She takes it immediately into her room, clicking the lock behind her, just in case her live-in couch-surfer gets home from the studio early. She’ll want to read this as well, even though the letters are always addressed to Quinn.
She pulls the previous four from the drawer in her bedside table and stacks them chronologically. It’s a ritual she’s started, to prepare herself for whatever is in the newest letter. She takes a few minutes to reread each of them before opening the new one, just so she can be mentally balanced enough to handle the contents inside.
I killed a man today, the first one had said. It had arrived three months before, in September, when the leaves were just beginning to turn as autumn in New York settled over the city. At least I think I killed him. I ran him over with a humvee, got blood all over the windshield. I drive a humvee here. I’m a driver. I’m a chauffeur, Quinn. A fucking chauffeur. This is my big epiphany, my life’s purpose. To cart people around the fucking desert dressed in body armor and running people over. Maybe you and Brittany were right.
It was dated at the top. August, over a month before she actually received it, and some of the sentences of Santana’s curling penmanship had been covered in thick black lines, redacted by a military that still feared mail being intercepted by the enemy. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what was blacked out. The stuff that wasn’t was terrifying enough. The first letter rambled for a page about the way the man had died, and how Santana had been forced clean his blood from the windshield herself once she’d gotten back to base. About how they’d been attacked and she panicked. How she was always scared and that Bobby was trying really hard to make her laugh but it didn’t work a lot of the time.
I was thinking about that the other day, she wrote. About how you and I didn’t laugh a lot while we were together. Is that okay? To miss someone so much who rarely made you laugh? If get out of this place, I promise I’ll make you laugh more. You deserve that.
Brittany had gotten to the letter before she’d arrived home from work. The envelope had been carefully cut across the opening, so as not to damage the precious words inside. But the letter, once she had it in her hands, had been crumpled and cried on and nearly torn in two in the rage Brittany had been forced to endure while reading it alone. She had it in her lap when Quinn walked in, still wrinkled from the anger but Brittany had done her best to smooth it.
“This is yours,” she’d said, and avoided eye contact as she left the apartment, probably to get some air, and some space away from Quinn. “It’s from Santana.”
Two more letters arrived a week later, written almost consecutively in the days after the first one was sent, dated at the tops and written more elegantly, with less desperation and fear. The second is an apology for the first, taking back all the things she’d said.
I didn’t mean to dump all that on you. It’s not fair. I’m sorry. It’s not so bad out here. Three squares and I’ve got a killer tan. Granted, it’s a farmer’s tan and the body armor makes it really hard to rock a bikini, but the parts of me that ARE tan are like... REALLY tan.
She tries to joke and brush it off, but there’s tension in Santana’s handwriting. Her letters are bunched together, messy and tight and not at all characteristic of Santana’s usually flowing cursive. She prided herself on it. She could barely spell when they were kids. She had trouble with phonetics, thinking that whole “sound it out” thing actually meant she was spelling shit right. So even though she usually failed her spelling tests, she made damn sure she did it with style. This, though, was not the Santana she’d grown accustomed to. She made small talk in a letter, mentioning her two friends from Fort Dix and how she’d been promoted before ending the letter abruptly.
The third letter was a withdrawal of the apology in the second, the letters still tight and frustrated. Nothing had been redacted from this one. At least the army took no issue with professions of love.
No, on second thought, fuck that. I’m not sorry. I should have said it before. I should have made you listen. I should have tied you to a chair until you listened to every goddamn word I had to say because you NEVER FUCKING LISTENED TO ME, QUINN. I should have been stronger and told you all this sooner, but everything was always about you, you, you. And that’s half my fault. I let it happen. But this is my life, too, Quinn. And if I want to tell you that I love you, then I’m damn well gonna say it. And you’ll respect me enough to respond.
Brittany had read that one first, too. It was laid out neatly on the table for her when she’d arrived home from work, with a post-it note stuck to the corner saying she’d gone for a walk, that she’d be back late. Quinn read the letter and understood, giving her the space she needed. It didn’t stop her from taking the letter to bed with her, tucked safely beneath her pillow on the left side, pretending maybe if she went to sleep she’d wake up and Santana would be there to say it herself. And then, she thought, she could finally say it back.
She had no idea what she could put in a letter that would make any difference to Santana. If she couldn’t even say what she felt out loud without Santana there, how she could put it in an envelope and send it thousands of miles? She couldn’t. She couldn’t let Santana experience her saying it the first time through a letter, through a phone call. Nothing but face to face would be acceptable, after everything she’d done.
But after the third letter came, so close to the first two, she knew she had to send something. Something to let Santana know that she’d gotten them, that she was waiting for her. That she had a chance. More than a chance, really. So she’d gotten an Empire State postcard from the souvenir shop around the corner from Waters, Young & Associates and written, “Come back to me.” Nothing else. Not even her name. Just the plea, in her practiced cursive, written with all the emotions she wanted to convey but couldn’t just yet. She hoped it would be enough for Santana. She addressed it to the base in Germany that Santana had been deployed from, which would in turn find her in the field. She put a dozen stamps on it and stuck it in the mailbox, all before Brittany wandered in several hours later, smelling of booze and sweat, but smiling.
“I went to a club,” she’d slurred. “I went dancing. It felt so good, Quinn. It made everything not hurt so much.”
Quinn hugged her tightly, rubbing her back and hoping it was enough of an apology. She couldn’t make Brittany stop hurting, but she could try.
“You’re better than me,” she says, kissing the side of Brittany’s head. “Better for her.”
“Maybe. Probably,” Brittany agrees, yawning sleepily and slipping down to the couch and curling into a ball. “But I’m not who she wants.”
Brittany got a job the week after, teaching contemporary dance to kids in Hell’s Kitchen. Quinn watched her get ready her first morning, like a proud parent sending their child off to school. She’d been so excited that she’d forgotten about the letter, until the next one came, a month and a half after Quinn had sent the postcard.
Okay, Quinn. Okay. I’m coming home, and I expect you to be there when I do. I love you.
Quinn went out and got another postcard, wrote “Come back to me” on it, and put it in the mail.
It’s nearly December now, and this fifth letter is dated from late October. She runs her fingers over the deep grooves of the handwriting, pressed in so deep on the paper that they feel like Braille.
I miss you, Santana writes. I miss the way you’d smoke when I was asleep and thought I didn’t notice. I miss how you tuck your hair behind your ears. I miss you yelling at me to take the garbage out because I forgot AGAIN. I miss our apartment and our bed and most of all I miss being in with you and just laying there. It’s so quiet here at night, Quinn. There’s no sound for miles, and that scares me because I can’t die in silence, I can’t die without the sound of your voice in my ear. I can’t die here, Quinn. And I’m scared that I will. I can’t die without seeing you again, even just one more time.
Quinn presses her lips to Santana’s signature, and pulls a blank postcard from her nightstand. She finds a pen, and writes so cleanly across the back.
Come back to me.
She walks down two flights of stairs to the mailbox and presses another kiss to the postcard before sending it on its way, to say all the things she can’t.
//
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Williams says, taking a puff of his cigar. The embers glow brilliant in the pitch dark around them. “It’s too fuckin’ hot for it to be Christmas. It ain’t right.”
“Nothing about this is right,” Bobby says, ducked down in the ditch beside his friend, his rifle cocked at his shoulder.
“Both of you, shut the fuck up.”
Santana is on her stomach in the sand, watching through the scope on her gun as a small camp of insurgents four hundred yards off the road move their stolen cargo from military-grade trucks into a thick-walled bunker built deep into the ground. They’re eighty miles east of As Sweimreh, on a reconnaissance mission. That’s it. No gunfire, no engaging the enemy, nothing. Get in, get out. So why are her hands shaking?
“And put that fucking cigar out. They’re going to fucking see us.”
“Will not,” Williams hisses, but stubs it out begrudgingly anyway. “Can’t see shit in this darkness. Bet you can’t even see you hand in front of your face, let alone a puny cigar from two hundred yards away.”
Bobby shoves the heel of his boot into Williams’ shin, which shuts him up quick enough. The three of them lay side by side on the ground, their armored humvee another two hundred yards away, back on the road behind them. On the other side of Williams, Corporal Digger picks his nose and stares straight ahead, doing what he was told to do, and nothing more.
All around the insurgent camp are rocky hills made of rough sandstone, creating a natural fortress against enemies. It also creates incredible acoustics, and Santana can hear them talking clearly enough as they unload what looks like wooden crates. They’re covered in Arabic script, and she regrets never trying to learn the language. They all carry semi-automatics or Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. Three guards are posted on the opening into the valley, far enough apart that they’d have to shout to be heard. They don’t see them, hunched down so low to the ground and so far away.
“I make a dozen in the compound, another three guarding the perimeter,” the corporal says, a little too loud for comfort, and Williams claps a hand over his mouth.
“If they hear us I will shoot you in the knee and leave you for them,” he hisses, watching the guards instead of the corporal. They don’t move, and he relaxes. “Fuckin’ kids. Who let you hold a gun, huh?”
The corporal sneers, the light of the brightest stars Santana has ever seen glinting off his yellow teeth. “Better a real army man than a Weekend Warrior. Fuckin’ kids? Fuckin’ lazy reservists. They sent me to babysit you. Now let’s move out, babies. We got what we came for.”
Santana wants to stay a little longer, figure out what’s in the crates, but the corporal is already low-crawling up out of the ditch on his belly with his rifle in his hands. Williams grabs at his ankle, trying to get him to come back, but he’s out of reach in a matter of seconds.
Things happen quickly. They’re trained, on these kinds of missions where they have little cover or protection, to stay low until they reach high ground or a safety point. They’re supposed to make themselves as small a target as possible. But Digger gets to his feet once he’s out of the ditch, making himself a tall, lanky target with his pale-white skin reflecting the light from those stars. Williams grabs as him again, hissing, “Get down you fuckin’ moron!” but it’s too late. Santana watches through her scope as the shout goes up among the guards. They see movement, they point fingers, and suddenly they’re running, and Santana is running, pulling Bobby by the arm behind.
“Move, move, move! Back to the humvee!”
Her heart races, blood pounding in her ears and she hears nothing but the rush of it. Not her boots pounding through the sand, or the shouts of the insurgents as they chase them, or the bullets that whiz past her. She prays they don’t have storm lights, and just runs.
The truck is a hundred yards off, and she has the keys. She’s fumbling for them, deep in the interior pocket of her flak jacket, the safest place for them. She feels them scrape against her chest, next to the note cards in their plastic bag and the postcards from Quinn. Her fingers wrap tight around them as the moon overhead lights their way, just fifty yards to go.
She chokes on the dust from Digger running in front of her, wishing so many evil things on him for getting them noticed. She swears that if they make it back to base she’s going to have him court martialed, right after she beats the living shit out of him. His long legs carry him fast and far, about twenty yards ahead. She watches his back, following him, until suddenly his back isn’t there anymore and she’s flying past his limp body. She finds herself admiring the beauty of the blood spray that erupts as she passes, from the wound in his neck where the bullet tore through his spine and exited out his throat.
She’s whirling and falling to her knees just ten yards from the truck. Her rifle comes up to her shoulder and she fires off a dozen rounds before she even aims at anything. A shadowy body rushing at her falls, the same blood spray that had erupted from Digger creating a red rain in the moonlight. Bobby is screaming her name, but she’s firing blindly, the keys digging into the palm of her hand as the rifle kicks back into her clavicle. Another body falls, and she sees Williams fall in at her side, firing off as many rounds as he can before Bobby is on her, yanking her to her feet.
“Get the fucking truck started, Lopez!”
“But Digger--”
“He’s dead! Move!”
She’s at the door in seconds, yanking it open and fumbling with her shaking hands trying to get the key into the ignition. Bobby has pulled Digger’s lanky body into the back and Williams is backing up slowly, still firing off round after round at the last approaching guard. The compound behind them is lit up with panic, and cargo trucks have begun to move, making way for the little jeeps with machine guns mounted on the back. They all see it, see how quickly it’s moving toward them. Williams finally takes out the guard as he tries to get in close for a better shot and she guns it away while he’s still half in the truck.
The road is still far enough off that the sand is thick beneath their wheels, making progress slow. Her fingers dig deep into the steering wheel and her eyes sting against the sweat that’s falling from her forehead, beneath her helmet. A hundred yards feels like a hundred miles, with the machine gun jeep crawling up behind them. There’s a heavy, quick pop pop pop and their rear window cracks in spiderwebs from the gunfire.
Fifty yards. They just need to get to the road.
More popping, but each round misses the truck. Williams is hanging out the window and returning fire with his rifle, aiming at the headlights of their pursuers. Santana is just aiming to get them to safety. Another pop pop pop and the window breaks and falls away. She ducks instinctively and the car swerves. Williams lets out a very unmanly shriek, and she hears Bobby begin to pray in the back seat.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name...”
Twenty yards.
“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...”
pop pop pop
Ten yards.
“Give us this day our daily bread...”
The tires hit the hard-packed dirt of the main road and she lets out a whoop of joy. Williams pulls himself back in the truck. Bobby still lies low in the back of the truck, Digger’s head in his lap.
“And forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...”
“They’re pulling off!” he shouts with a laugh over the roar of the engine and tearing of tires against rock. “I think we’re clear! Merry fuckin’ Christma-”
The world lights up and they’re flying. Santana puts her hand over her heart, over the postcards, as the truck explodes beneath them, and the fire licks at her heels. There’s a moment, one brief moment, when she’s suspended in air and the flames billow around her, and she’s facing the sky, and in the stars she can see Quinn’s eyes, Quinn’s command.
Come back to me, she’d written. Come back to me.
And then the sky goes black.
Now, and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
Rating: NC-17
Description: It begins as most things do: with a kiss.
Word Count: 35,328 / 14,604 (this part)
Spoilers: None
Notes: For my wife, her long-awaited Quinntana army fic. Merry Christmas, Faye.
Brittany is still in the same spot on the sofa she’d been sitting in when Quinn left that morning, staring blankly at CNN coverage of roadside bombings and troop deployments. There aren’t any specifics about which unit is where, so she just assumes that every dead soldier is Santana until one of the anchors tells her otherwise.
Quinn drops her bag on the table near the door and leans over the back of the couch to assess the situation. Brittany is still in pajamas (the same shorts and tank top she’s worn all week), and her hair is a three-day rat’s next of tangles thrown into a messy bun on top of her head. She’s been chewing her lip so much that’s it’s begun to chap, and her face is drawn.
“Did you eat today?” Quinn asks, and Brittany jumps, surprised to find a face so close to her own.
“I had cereal,” she says, returning her eyes to the television.
“When?”
“This morning.”
Quinn sighs heavily. It’s after six, and she’s tired from a very long day at the firm. She’d thought that being a paralegal would be easy, given her background. She’d thought that she would be able to come home and relax, but the stress of each deposition and all the filing and faxing and coordination of a hundred different cases at once has left her brain both tired and wired. She supposes she should just be grateful to have a job at all, and someone to sit with when the sun sets and the silence feels overwhelming. But she can’t settle when she comes home. Not when this is what she comes home to.
“You can’t keep doing this, Britt,” she says.
“Doing what?”
“You know what.”
Brittany says nothing and changes the channel from CNN to MSNBC when it cuts to commercial. That’s on commercial, too, so she switches to Fox News, even though she knows she doesn’t like the way they talk about gay people. Quinn watches her grimace before she flips back to CNN and watches previews for Anderson Cooper’s eighth season premiere in September. She throws the remote down on the couch next to her and pulls her knees up to her chin.
It’s been a month, since Brittany had shown up on her stoop. It had started out fine, the two of them leaning on one another while they mourned for someone that wasn’t even dead. But Brittany never pulled herself out of it, while Quinn had been forced to start living her life again when Waters, Young & Associates offered her a job three days later. Now she works 30 hours a week while Brittany sits in her apartment and watches news coverage of a civil war that she doesn’t even understand. She doesn’t have a job, despite the many contacts she has around the city after all her touring. And none of Quinn’s encouragements to the effect will make her move from that couch.
“What if something happens while I’m out?” she asks when Quinn suggests a teaching gig in midtown, and for just a moment Quinn forgets that Brittany is twenty-six years old. They’re sixteen again, and Quinn is explaining how the world works the way she might explain to a child. “What happens if she tries to call me again and I’m not there to answer?”
“She’s in Syria, honey,” Quinn says as evenly as she can, tempering her frustration. “The cell service isn’t that great there. And CNN isn’t going to tell you anything before the army informs her parents, and you know we’ll be their first phone call.”
The reassurances don’t seem to help, because here she sits, unwashed and starving herself with worry over something neither of them know will actually happen. And Quinn doesn’t want to think about it, so she grabs an apple from the fridge and sits at the small table in the open space between the couch and the kitchen. She cracks open one of her many Bar exam study guides piled there, and immerses herself in the only distraction she has from what feels like a constant and insuppressible battery of regret.
The Bar is in exactly one week and she can’t afford to keep wallowing like Brittany is, even if she wants to. Worry cost her too much the last time, and she isn’t prepared to deal with what might happen if she fails again. She doesn’t have the resources to keep trying, to spend six more months on top of the year she’s already dedicated to studying. This is it; one more shot at everything she’s been preparing for for eight years. Now is not the time to fuck it up.
But the television is loud and she can hear the newscasters discussing the length of the war and troop deployments at record numbers, and it’s all punctuated with sound bytes of machine gun fire and explosions. Quinn looks over at Brittany, who is watching and wincing and grinding her teeth, and she realizes that neither of them are going to be able to function properly if this keeps up. She gets to her feet and snatches the remote from the couch. The television goes blank and Brittany’s head snaps to attention.
“Turn it back on!” she squeals, sounding more like a child having a tantrum than a grown woman.
“No,” Quinn says, crossing her arms. “We can’t live like this, Brittany. I won’t live like this. There is absolutely nothing we can do for her, and what would she say if she saw you like this?”
Brittany’s mouth hangs open in horror, her eyes flicking back and forth between Quinn and the television as though she could will it back to life with her mind. Quinn waits patiently, tapping her toe.
“Well?” she prompts, and Brittany seems to have forgotten the question. “What would she say, Britt? You haven’t showered in days. You don’t move from that couch for anything other than food and the bathroom. You quit your job and stopped dancing completely. It’s been a month, Brittany. Get up. Get off the couch, and go take a shower.”
Brittany sits stubbornly on the couch, her legs crossed beneath and her and her arms folded over her chest. She’s gone from inconsolable to petulant so quickly that Quinn has to remind herself that Brittany is an adult, and not a child in need of a time out. She looks for a way to change the subject, to refocus Brittany on forward motion, instead of the black television screen. She spots Brittany’s phone on the coffee table and snatches it up, hearing a tiny squeak of disapproval. She brings the touch screen to life and purses her lips.
“Another new voicemail from Alex. Looks like a couple texts, too. Are you ever going to call him back?”
It’s enough to get Brittany up off the couch, and that’s a start. She swipes the phone from Quinn’s hand and glares, flipping through the history and deleting text and voicemail alike. “It’s none of your business,” she says, shoving past Quinn to the kitchen, busying herself by throwing three days’ worth of dishes around in the sink.
“If it’s going on in my apartment, it’s my business.” Quinn follows her and watches the violent attack of sponge on dish, fearing that she might be headed to IKEA to buy a new set soon. “You didn’t even look at what he had to say.”
“I know what he had to say,” Brittany sneers. “‘Baby, I’m so sorry. Baby, please forgive me. Baby, baby, baby.’ I don’t need his apologies. I need that phone call back. I need to hear her voice and to tell her it’s going to be okay. I need her to be here, where it’s safe. I need her to never have joined the army in the first place. I need her to have chosen me, instead of guns and war and... you.”
She’s crying into the sink, her hands working the sponge over the same clean plate again and again, and Quinn doesn’t know what to do. She stands there, arms limp at her sides, mouth open but silent. She puts her back against the wall, thinking it might protect her somehow, but she has nothing to hold onto to keep her up, so she just leans. Brittany doesn’t look up from her dish, just keeps scrubbing while the tears for tracks through the blush of her cheeks.
“I spent half my life loving her,” she says, and some of the anger has gone, worked into the plate she still cleans. “I loved her so much I thought my chest would burst. But she didn’t think that was enough, so she left me. And ran right to you, who treated her so horribly and made her question herself and then just when she thought maybe she had a real shot with you, you threw it in her face. I don’t get it, Quinn. I don’t get how you could love her so much and be so cruel.”
“I don’t--”
“Don’t you dare lie to me.” Brittany turns on her, her eyes red-ringed and tired, spitting venom again. “You love her like I love her and you ruined it. And now you’re going to tell me why, because just looking at you hurts me, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. I need you to explain it, because it’s driving me crazy and I deserve the truth.”
There’s nothing she can say. No excuse will do, and no truth will ever be enough to soothe the wound she’s reopened. She knows how Brittany had tried to move on, how Santana called her and told her everything about them, rubbed salt in it and made any sort of closure impossible. That part wasn’t her fault. But she’d just made things worse by being the one that Santana had leaned on, in the aftermath. By being the one Santana wanted, even for a little while. But she has to say something, because Brittany is right. She deserves the truth.
“I’m not strong,” she says, and her hands start to shake. “I never have been. I put on a good show, you know that. But at the end of the day I’m just treading water, and I can’t take anyone with me. We’d both drown if I tried. It was better that she let me go than go down like that. I pushed her away because I wasn’t strong enough for her. Not like you.”
She doesn’t notice she’s slipped to the ground until she realizes that Brittany is looking down at her, plate in hand, dripping water on the linoleum. She lowers herself down, legs folding beneath her to sit against the opposite wall, water and suds up to her elbows. She’s not crying anymore, which is something. But she shakes her head and sighs.
“You were strong enough to carry her when I couldn’t. Maybe I should thank you for that.” She stops, looks at the plate she’s cradling like an infant, perfectly clean and reflecting her own face back at her, then shatters it on the floor next to her.
“But I’m still pissed at you for fucking my girl.”
//
Williams throws down a full house and chomps on the soggy end of an Israeli cigar like he’s just won the jackpot at Caesar’s Palace, and not twenty bucks and a carton of Marlboros off a specialist from the 3rd. The specialist reacts in kind, as if he’s lost his life savings to a card counter at the tables. To be fair, twenty bucks and the carton of cigarettes are precious commodities out here, when cash and cigarettes are two different and equally valuable forms of currency. It’s a little like prison in that way, but Santana wouldn’t say that out loud.
Bobby immediately steals one of the packs out of Williams’ carton and takes a step outside the flap of the rec tent. He puts a finger across his lips to shush her when she follows him and gives him a sidelong glance.
“Don’t tell Georgia,” he says, as though Santana had any way of squealing on him to his wife. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
She doesn’t blame him for taking up the habit. She’d done it too, after four months of sweating her ass off, constantly covered in sand with nothing to do but schlep uptight officers and lead convoys of new recruits over the Jordanian border. The entire unit had been sitting on its hands since it got to this godforsaken hellhole, listening for whispers of troop movements across the country but hearing nothing the winds blowing sand and rocks to pelt the panels of their rec tents. She in turn steals a cigarette from the stolen pack and grins at him.
“You just make sure you don’t take this habit home to The Kid, Bobby,” she says, lighting up with a flick of Williams’ Zippo and inhaling a long drag of the tobacco. “The last thing that girl needs is a gorilla for a dad and lung cancer from second-hand smoke.”
He smacks at her arm and she dodges, putting up her fists and bouncing on the balls of her feet like a prizefighter. He matches stance inside the already crowded rec tent, knocking a few people out of the way in the process. A circle clears around them, thinking this playact is a real fight, and they grin at one another before Santana dives headfirst into Bobby’s stomach and takes him to the ground. He falls, landing under her and screaming, “Medic! Medic! She broke me, the cow! I’m broken!”
No medic actually comes, but the crowd rolls their eyes and disperses quickly enough, not getting the excitement they were hoping for out of Santana and Bobby.
“You’d think they wouldn’t be so eager to see a fight,” she says, standing and pulling Bobby up behind her. Williams has already started another game, sharking a private from the 189th and the same mottle-faced corporal Santana had driven into camp a few months before. “Everyone’s restless, but no one actually wants to see bloodshed, do they?”
Bobby shrugs and goes to light his cigarette, only to realize it’s snapped in their playfight. He lights what’s left with a metallic flick of the Zippo before tucking it into his pocket. She knows Williams will probably never see it again. “I think they’d like to see anything, if it means we get to stop sitting on our asses in a godforsaken desert in the middle of nowhere. Everyone had a lot of expectations when we shipped out, y’know? Like... adrenaline rushes and patrols and getting shot at by Syrians. Instead all we’ve gotten is a late-night raid and one very poor attempt at a kidnapping. Still can’t believe they promoted you for that.”
It wasn’t like she did anything special. She’d been called out to make a late-night run to the Jordanian border to pick up some journalists and their military escort. About halfway between the international checkpoint and As Sweimreh their convoy had been attacked on both sides of the road by insurgents waiting in the in ditches. Her vehicle wasn’t equipped for combat. It had bullet-proof windows and exterior panels, but the gun mounts were on the front and rear humvees, and she had civilians on board. She panicked and drove off, leaving behind the rest of her convoy in favor of saving her own life and the lives of the people in her humvee. She can still see the blood that painted her windshield after she’d run down one of the roadside shooters, and how it streaked when she tried to clear it with her wipers. She’d gotten back to base to reports of three wounded, but no one dead. The humvees had even taken two prisoners, who would be held and questioned before being transported to a prison facility in Jordan. By getting her unmanned vehicle out of the way, the rest of the convoy had been able to blockade the road and trap the insurgents. They’d given her a commendation and a promotion, but it felt like a coward’s reward. She’d fled the attack. How does that earn medals?
“I didn’t ask for it,” she says, stubbing out her own cigarette in the sand and casting a quick glance around the camp, glowing bright red and orange in the heat of the desert sunset. She checks her watch and sighs. “We have patrol in an hour. I’m gonna catch a quick nap before hand. Wake me forty, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Specialist.” Bobby lights another cigarette and slips back into the rec tent, for what she assumes is another hand of poker before they share a long night’s watch around the perimeter of the base.
She gets back to the barracks--crudely constructed wooden buildings in a barren plot of land on the edge of the small town--and kicked off her boots before crawling into her cot. She doesn’t really have any intention of sleeping, but it’s better that Bobby think she’s taking a nap than find out what she’s actually doing. She pulls a notebook and pen from the small foot trunk beneath her cot, and begins to write, her back pressed against the wall and her legs stretched out in front of her.
Dear Quinn...
//
There’s another letter in the mailbox when she gets home from work, covered in enough postage to tell her that it’s traveled a very long way to reach her. The envelope is dirty and torn at the edges, but unopened, as far as she can tell. Which means that Brittany hasn’t been home to see it first, and she has the pleasure of reading her own mail for once. She snatches it and darts up the narrow, creaking stairs and pushes her door open in a flurry. She takes it immediately into her room, clicking the lock behind her, just in case her live-in couch-surfer gets home from the studio early. She’ll want to read this as well, even though the letters are always addressed to Quinn.
She pulls the previous four from the drawer in her bedside table and stacks them chronologically. It’s a ritual she’s started, to prepare herself for whatever is in the newest letter. She takes a few minutes to reread each of them before opening the new one, just so she can be mentally balanced enough to handle the contents inside.
I killed a man today, the first one had said. It had arrived three months before, in September, when the leaves were just beginning to turn as autumn in New York settled over the city. At least I think I killed him. I ran him over with a humvee, got blood all over the windshield. I drive a humvee here. I’m a driver. I’m a chauffeur, Quinn. A fucking chauffeur. This is my big epiphany, my life’s purpose. To cart people around the fucking desert dressed in body armor and running people over. Maybe you and Brittany were right.
It was dated at the top. August, over a month before she actually received it, and some of the sentences of Santana’s curling penmanship had been covered in thick black lines, redacted by a military that still feared mail being intercepted by the enemy. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what was blacked out. The stuff that wasn’t was terrifying enough. The first letter rambled for a page about the way the man had died, and how Santana had been forced clean his blood from the windshield herself once she’d gotten back to base. About how they’d been attacked and she panicked. How she was always scared and that Bobby was trying really hard to make her laugh but it didn’t work a lot of the time.
I was thinking about that the other day, she wrote. About how you and I didn’t laugh a lot while we were together. Is that okay? To miss someone so much who rarely made you laugh? If get out of this place, I promise I’ll make you laugh more. You deserve that.
Brittany had gotten to the letter before she’d arrived home from work. The envelope had been carefully cut across the opening, so as not to damage the precious words inside. But the letter, once she had it in her hands, had been crumpled and cried on and nearly torn in two in the rage Brittany had been forced to endure while reading it alone. She had it in her lap when Quinn walked in, still wrinkled from the anger but Brittany had done her best to smooth it.
“This is yours,” she’d said, and avoided eye contact as she left the apartment, probably to get some air, and some space away from Quinn. “It’s from Santana.”
Two more letters arrived a week later, written almost consecutively in the days after the first one was sent, dated at the tops and written more elegantly, with less desperation and fear. The second is an apology for the first, taking back all the things she’d said.
I didn’t mean to dump all that on you. It’s not fair. I’m sorry. It’s not so bad out here. Three squares and I’ve got a killer tan. Granted, it’s a farmer’s tan and the body armor makes it really hard to rock a bikini, but the parts of me that ARE tan are like... REALLY tan.
She tries to joke and brush it off, but there’s tension in Santana’s handwriting. Her letters are bunched together, messy and tight and not at all characteristic of Santana’s usually flowing cursive. She prided herself on it. She could barely spell when they were kids. She had trouble with phonetics, thinking that whole “sound it out” thing actually meant she was spelling shit right. So even though she usually failed her spelling tests, she made damn sure she did it with style. This, though, was not the Santana she’d grown accustomed to. She made small talk in a letter, mentioning her two friends from Fort Dix and how she’d been promoted before ending the letter abruptly.
The third letter was a withdrawal of the apology in the second, the letters still tight and frustrated. Nothing had been redacted from this one. At least the army took no issue with professions of love.
No, on second thought, fuck that. I’m not sorry. I should have said it before. I should have made you listen. I should have tied you to a chair until you listened to every goddamn word I had to say because you NEVER FUCKING LISTENED TO ME, QUINN. I should have been stronger and told you all this sooner, but everything was always about you, you, you. And that’s half my fault. I let it happen. But this is my life, too, Quinn. And if I want to tell you that I love you, then I’m damn well gonna say it. And you’ll respect me enough to respond.
Brittany had read that one first, too. It was laid out neatly on the table for her when she’d arrived home from work, with a post-it note stuck to the corner saying she’d gone for a walk, that she’d be back late. Quinn read the letter and understood, giving her the space she needed. It didn’t stop her from taking the letter to bed with her, tucked safely beneath her pillow on the left side, pretending maybe if she went to sleep she’d wake up and Santana would be there to say it herself. And then, she thought, she could finally say it back.
She had no idea what she could put in a letter that would make any difference to Santana. If she couldn’t even say what she felt out loud without Santana there, how she could put it in an envelope and send it thousands of miles? She couldn’t. She couldn’t let Santana experience her saying it the first time through a letter, through a phone call. Nothing but face to face would be acceptable, after everything she’d done.
But after the third letter came, so close to the first two, she knew she had to send something. Something to let Santana know that she’d gotten them, that she was waiting for her. That she had a chance. More than a chance, really. So she’d gotten an Empire State postcard from the souvenir shop around the corner from Waters, Young & Associates and written, “Come back to me.” Nothing else. Not even her name. Just the plea, in her practiced cursive, written with all the emotions she wanted to convey but couldn’t just yet. She hoped it would be enough for Santana. She addressed it to the base in Germany that Santana had been deployed from, which would in turn find her in the field. She put a dozen stamps on it and stuck it in the mailbox, all before Brittany wandered in several hours later, smelling of booze and sweat, but smiling.
“I went to a club,” she’d slurred. “I went dancing. It felt so good, Quinn. It made everything not hurt so much.”
Quinn hugged her tightly, rubbing her back and hoping it was enough of an apology. She couldn’t make Brittany stop hurting, but she could try.
“You’re better than me,” she says, kissing the side of Brittany’s head. “Better for her.”
“Maybe. Probably,” Brittany agrees, yawning sleepily and slipping down to the couch and curling into a ball. “But I’m not who she wants.”
Brittany got a job the week after, teaching contemporary dance to kids in Hell’s Kitchen. Quinn watched her get ready her first morning, like a proud parent sending their child off to school. She’d been so excited that she’d forgotten about the letter, until the next one came, a month and a half after Quinn had sent the postcard.
Okay, Quinn. Okay. I’m coming home, and I expect you to be there when I do. I love you.
Quinn went out and got another postcard, wrote “Come back to me” on it, and put it in the mail.
It’s nearly December now, and this fifth letter is dated from late October. She runs her fingers over the deep grooves of the handwriting, pressed in so deep on the paper that they feel like Braille.
I miss you, Santana writes. I miss the way you’d smoke when I was asleep and thought I didn’t notice. I miss how you tuck your hair behind your ears. I miss you yelling at me to take the garbage out because I forgot AGAIN. I miss our apartment and our bed and most of all I miss being in with you and just laying there. It’s so quiet here at night, Quinn. There’s no sound for miles, and that scares me because I can’t die in silence, I can’t die without the sound of your voice in my ear. I can’t die here, Quinn. And I’m scared that I will. I can’t die without seeing you again, even just one more time.
Quinn presses her lips to Santana’s signature, and pulls a blank postcard from her nightstand. She finds a pen, and writes so cleanly across the back.
Come back to me.
She walks down two flights of stairs to the mailbox and presses another kiss to the postcard before sending it on its way, to say all the things she can’t.
//
“It’s Christmas Eve,” Williams says, taking a puff of his cigar. The embers glow brilliant in the pitch dark around them. “It’s too fuckin’ hot for it to be Christmas. It ain’t right.”
“Nothing about this is right,” Bobby says, ducked down in the ditch beside his friend, his rifle cocked at his shoulder.
“Both of you, shut the fuck up.”
Santana is on her stomach in the sand, watching through the scope on her gun as a small camp of insurgents four hundred yards off the road move their stolen cargo from military-grade trucks into a thick-walled bunker built deep into the ground. They’re eighty miles east of As Sweimreh, on a reconnaissance mission. That’s it. No gunfire, no engaging the enemy, nothing. Get in, get out. So why are her hands shaking?
“And put that fucking cigar out. They’re going to fucking see us.”
“Will not,” Williams hisses, but stubs it out begrudgingly anyway. “Can’t see shit in this darkness. Bet you can’t even see you hand in front of your face, let alone a puny cigar from two hundred yards away.”
Bobby shoves the heel of his boot into Williams’ shin, which shuts him up quick enough. The three of them lay side by side on the ground, their armored humvee another two hundred yards away, back on the road behind them. On the other side of Williams, Corporal Digger picks his nose and stares straight ahead, doing what he was told to do, and nothing more.
All around the insurgent camp are rocky hills made of rough sandstone, creating a natural fortress against enemies. It also creates incredible acoustics, and Santana can hear them talking clearly enough as they unload what looks like wooden crates. They’re covered in Arabic script, and she regrets never trying to learn the language. They all carry semi-automatics or Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders. Three guards are posted on the opening into the valley, far enough apart that they’d have to shout to be heard. They don’t see them, hunched down so low to the ground and so far away.
“I make a dozen in the compound, another three guarding the perimeter,” the corporal says, a little too loud for comfort, and Williams claps a hand over his mouth.
“If they hear us I will shoot you in the knee and leave you for them,” he hisses, watching the guards instead of the corporal. They don’t move, and he relaxes. “Fuckin’ kids. Who let you hold a gun, huh?”
The corporal sneers, the light of the brightest stars Santana has ever seen glinting off his yellow teeth. “Better a real army man than a Weekend Warrior. Fuckin’ kids? Fuckin’ lazy reservists. They sent me to babysit you. Now let’s move out, babies. We got what we came for.”
Santana wants to stay a little longer, figure out what’s in the crates, but the corporal is already low-crawling up out of the ditch on his belly with his rifle in his hands. Williams grabs at his ankle, trying to get him to come back, but he’s out of reach in a matter of seconds.
Things happen quickly. They’re trained, on these kinds of missions where they have little cover or protection, to stay low until they reach high ground or a safety point. They’re supposed to make themselves as small a target as possible. But Digger gets to his feet once he’s out of the ditch, making himself a tall, lanky target with his pale-white skin reflecting the light from those stars. Williams grabs as him again, hissing, “Get down you fuckin’ moron!” but it’s too late. Santana watches through her scope as the shout goes up among the guards. They see movement, they point fingers, and suddenly they’re running, and Santana is running, pulling Bobby by the arm behind.
“Move, move, move! Back to the humvee!”
Her heart races, blood pounding in her ears and she hears nothing but the rush of it. Not her boots pounding through the sand, or the shouts of the insurgents as they chase them, or the bullets that whiz past her. She prays they don’t have storm lights, and just runs.
The truck is a hundred yards off, and she has the keys. She’s fumbling for them, deep in the interior pocket of her flak jacket, the safest place for them. She feels them scrape against her chest, next to the note cards in their plastic bag and the postcards from Quinn. Her fingers wrap tight around them as the moon overhead lights their way, just fifty yards to go.
She chokes on the dust from Digger running in front of her, wishing so many evil things on him for getting them noticed. She swears that if they make it back to base she’s going to have him court martialed, right after she beats the living shit out of him. His long legs carry him fast and far, about twenty yards ahead. She watches his back, following him, until suddenly his back isn’t there anymore and she’s flying past his limp body. She finds herself admiring the beauty of the blood spray that erupts as she passes, from the wound in his neck where the bullet tore through his spine and exited out his throat.
She’s whirling and falling to her knees just ten yards from the truck. Her rifle comes up to her shoulder and she fires off a dozen rounds before she even aims at anything. A shadowy body rushing at her falls, the same blood spray that had erupted from Digger creating a red rain in the moonlight. Bobby is screaming her name, but she’s firing blindly, the keys digging into the palm of her hand as the rifle kicks back into her clavicle. Another body falls, and she sees Williams fall in at her side, firing off as many rounds as he can before Bobby is on her, yanking her to her feet.
“Get the fucking truck started, Lopez!”
“But Digger--”
“He’s dead! Move!”
She’s at the door in seconds, yanking it open and fumbling with her shaking hands trying to get the key into the ignition. Bobby has pulled Digger’s lanky body into the back and Williams is backing up slowly, still firing off round after round at the last approaching guard. The compound behind them is lit up with panic, and cargo trucks have begun to move, making way for the little jeeps with machine guns mounted on the back. They all see it, see how quickly it’s moving toward them. Williams finally takes out the guard as he tries to get in close for a better shot and she guns it away while he’s still half in the truck.
The road is still far enough off that the sand is thick beneath their wheels, making progress slow. Her fingers dig deep into the steering wheel and her eyes sting against the sweat that’s falling from her forehead, beneath her helmet. A hundred yards feels like a hundred miles, with the machine gun jeep crawling up behind them. There’s a heavy, quick pop pop pop and their rear window cracks in spiderwebs from the gunfire.
Fifty yards. They just need to get to the road.
More popping, but each round misses the truck. Williams is hanging out the window and returning fire with his rifle, aiming at the headlights of their pursuers. Santana is just aiming to get them to safety. Another pop pop pop and the window breaks and falls away. She ducks instinctively and the car swerves. Williams lets out a very unmanly shriek, and she hears Bobby begin to pray in the back seat.
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name...”
Twenty yards.
“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...”
pop pop pop
Ten yards.
“Give us this day our daily bread...”
The tires hit the hard-packed dirt of the main road and she lets out a whoop of joy. Williams pulls himself back in the truck. Bobby still lies low in the back of the truck, Digger’s head in his lap.
“And forgive us our tresspasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us...”
“They’re pulling off!” he shouts with a laugh over the roar of the engine and tearing of tires against rock. “I think we’re clear! Merry fuckin’ Christma-”
The world lights up and they’re flying. Santana puts her hand over her heart, over the postcards, as the truck explodes beneath them, and the fire licks at her heels. There’s a moment, one brief moment, when she’s suspended in air and the flames billow around her, and she’s facing the sky, and in the stars she can see Quinn’s eyes, Quinn’s command.
Come back to me, she’d written. Come back to me.
And then the sky goes black.
Now, and at the hour of our death.
Amen.