“Tanner!” Sarge’s voice booms into the empty space, and the relief in his voice and concern in his eyes are a dead giveaway of how serious the situation is. “Doc told me you were coming around, so —”
“Where’s Beaux?” I demand, not caring or wanting to talk about myself. The fact that his steps falter gives me enough of an answer.
“She took a big hit,” he says softly. The man I’ve always known to have a stiff upper lip doesn’t have one right now. That doesn’t sit well with me.
“Where is she?” I grit out, wanting to shake him and tell him to tell me something I don’t already know. I may feel like I’ve been knocked around by a baseball bat to the back of the head, but I’m not stupid, I know stalling when I see it, and I don’t think he gets that internally I’ve been shredded to pieces waiting for an answer.
“She’s on her way to Landstuhl,” he says, voice quiet, tone grave.
I hang my head for a moment and close my eyes as I absorb his answer. The single comment brings me unfathomable relief because God, yes, she’s alive and then uncontrollable fear, because if she’s on her way to the largest military medical center outside of the United States, then she’s most likely critical. The U.S. military doesn’t just fly people there for scrapes and bruises. Let alone nonmilitary personnel.
The air whooshes from my lungs from the elephant-sized amount of pressure sitting on it. I try to process the situation, come to terms with possibilities I don’t want to face again.
“Get me on a plane to Germany.” As I make the demand, I start to rip leads off from under my hospital gown, making the machines around me beep with obnoxious warnings. The doctor whose name I don’t even know yet steps forward and tries to stop me. Despite the pounding in my head and how my muscles feel like I just went a hundred rounds in the gym, I grip his biceps and hold him at arm’s length. By now I’m running on pure adrenaline.
“We need to monitor you, sir. You —”
“I’m alive, right? That’s all you need to know.” I dismiss the doctor without a further thought, loosening my grip on him before I turn my eyes back to Sarge. “How is she?”
He visibly works a swallow down his throat. “You guys are lucky you were wearing armor.”
“That’s not telling me shit, Sarge.” No one can mistake the warning tone in my voice.
“She’s critical. Unconscious. A few broken bones. They were mostly concerned about brain injuries at first, but after a few scary moments, they got her stabilized here before putting her on a transport to LRMC.”
I hang on to the few positive words I can, hold them close to my vest, and don’t let go. “You said stable.”
“No, I said she was critical but stable,” he says as I stare at him, my jaw clenched and heart racing as I try to figure out what exactly that means.
“We were concerned about the possibility of a traumatic brain injury at first. Her brain was swelling from taking the brunt of the blast. We got her broken arm taken care of, wrapped up her ribs, took some scans of her head, and once we saw the pressure inside was ebbing off, we opted to transport her to Landstuhl where they can give her the treatment she might need since we’re limited in our capacity here.”
I try to wrap my head around the one term that scares the fuck out of me. “Brain injury?” I swear my voice sounds like I’m scraping it from the back of my throat; it’s that difficult to find the words.
“Yes, but that can refer to many things, so let’s hold off on jumping to conclusions. She was responsive to stimuli, which is huge, and the swelling stopped, so that’s the biggest positive. We were just concerned about a few things and thought we’d better be safe than sorry, put in a request to send her off, and got the okay, so we did.”