We ran—down the uneven rear stairs and out the back door, through the packed-dirt alley by the market, and out into the wheat fields. The stalks bowed with rotting, grain-laden heads abandoned by farmers when the bombing started, but even in their hunched posture they were taller than I was, and I could see nothing but wheat in all directions. I wondered where Stallone had gone. Then, from a side row, I saw Damir darting toward me.
“You’ve got speed, girl,” he said when he caught up. He grabbed me by the hood of my sweatshirt and yanked me to the left, hard. “No sense of direction, though.” The butt of my rifle banged a bruise into the back of my leg as we ran.
A pack of JNA foot soldiers were coming from the other side of the field now; there were at least twenty of them, running in a clean, arrowlike formation. I froze, gaping as they closed the meters between us—one hundred, seventy-five, fifty—but Damir pushed me ahead of him and released a spray of gunfire on them. In the corner of my vision I saw him go down, but he yelled “Don’t stop!” so I kept running, made a sharp turn into the field’s middle strip. The wind hit my face fresh and hard—my nose dripped and my eyes watered. Dragging my sleeve across my face, I pumped my legs faster until I could no longer feel the ground, until gravity slithered off the treads of my sneakers.
At the center of the field I threw myself beneath a tractor and curled into a compact ball, covering my face with my hands. There was gunfire and yelling from every angle, and I tried to listen for voices I knew. I thought of Damir and waited for the familiar sadness to set in, but found only anger in its place. With one hand I felt the ground for my AK and was relieved to find it there beside me.
—
“Vi?i ako mo?e?!” Yell out if you can. The cry reverberated through the village as the remaining Safe Housers combed the fields for survivors.
“Vi?i ako mo?e?!” Other than the rescue call it was eerily quiet, that odd part of evening when the sun had set but it was still more light than dark. I ran my hands over my face and body, taking inventory, impossibly unharmed save for the blood on my wrists, where the last of the barbed-wire scabs had reopened when I hit the ground. I waited, listening for any definitive JNA sounds, watched for passing boots. But there was nothing, so I pulled myself on my elbows out from beneath the tractor. It occurred to me that I’d never seen a tractor up close before, and I marveled momentarily at its size, the tire alone taller than I was, before a resurgence of the rescue call returned me to soldier mode.
I jogged back the way I’d come, looking for Damir, and found a group of Safe Housers squatting around a body I knew must be his.
“Indy!” Bruce Willis said, noticing me. “Don’t—don’t look. Go home and tell Drenka to make a bed for him.”
“She doesn’t talk,” said Snake.
“Well then she’ll do a goddamn charade. Just go!”
I pressed myself on tiptoe, trying to catch a glimpse of Damir’s face, to see if Bruce had meant a sickbed or a dead-person one. But Damir was obscured by the men around him.
“Hey!” Bruce said, and I spun back toward them. “Hold the gun out in front of you, at least till you get out of the field.” I nodded and pulled the AK up over my head, adjusting the twisted strap around my shoulder.
Damir was right—my sense of direction was terrible, and now that the men had turned me away from the path toward the Safe House, I’d lost my reference point. I walked down a row of wheat, but that only seemed to take me deeper into the field. Ahead, I thought I heard a rustling. I had practiced the fieldstrip so many times that cocking the gun was more an act of muscle memory than conscious thought. I pulled the handle back along the bolt carrier, then released it, heard a round click into the chamber. Whoever was nearby must have heard it, too, because there was rustling again, then the unmistakable sound of running in boots. I tried to call for Stallone, but nothing came out.
When he came around the corner, I froze. It was not Stallone. The man was looking over his shoulder but was headed straight for me. He wore a patchy beard and a green jacket, no JNA insignia. By the time he turned and saw me, we were so close we could have touched. He was visibly shocked by my size and my gun. I felt him look me over, trying to decide what to do, and for a moment I glimpsed his hesitation. Then it passed. He reached around for his gun, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.
On the ground, the man was writhing and making a choking noise. I had hit him in the upper stomach, or maybe the ribs. He was probably only a few years older than Damir, acne pockmarks still visible along his cheekbones.
The blood was passing through his shirt and pooling beside him. But he was still awake, wide-eyed and angry and confused. He was trying to talk but his speech was slurred, and I couldn’t understand until he stopped whatever he had been saying and just repeated “Please,” over and over again.