As it did every time something like this happened, his brain split in two. A clean, metaphorical cleaving that left him of two minds.
Part of him – the half that had been pierced and pitted by shrapnel, burned and beat up, fractured and pinned back together again – wanted to curl and cower. But the other part of him, the dutiful Marine, the well-trained military killer, picked up the limp, frightened half of his psyche and kicked into action.
He turned back to the lobby, was in the process of tugging open the door when a uniformed security guard loomed on the other side of the glass, waving him away.
Rooster opened the door anyway, and the alarm was louder then. Not an air raid siren, not the fire alarm wailing he remembered from drills at school, but something softer and politer. An unobtrusive sort of siren, meant to catch your attention, but not to send you into a panic.
The guard, face set in a scowl, held up a flat palm. “You can’t come back in here, sir. Please make your way out of the building.”
Behind him, two other guards were herding the waiting patients up out of their chairs and toward the door. The door that Rooster was blocking.
“Sir,” the guard said, firmly.
“What’s going on?” Rooster asked. He felt a hard tug in his gut, that sense of responsibility he couldn’t shake off or drink away. There was no such thing as an ex-Marine, and all his training and instinct was kicking in now. Something was wrong, therefore he needed to act.
But the guard was having none of it. “Sir,” he said, edging forward, openly hostile now. “You need to leave. Now.”
The other potentials were closing in, peering at him curiously…and suspiciously. They were all vets, they would assume a man blocking the door was up to no good.
The alarm continued to ring, on and on. Something wrong, something amiss. A fire? A gas leak?
Not his business, really.
Rooster nodded and turned away.
The hopefuls followed him out onto the sidewalk, murmuring questions to one another, wondering aloud what might be happening. Evening was fast approaching, bringing a cold breeze with it, fat gray clouds piling up on the horizon.
Rooster zipped his jacket with stiff fingers, shoved his hands – one smooth, one ruined – into his pockets and walked to the bus station.
*
He’d just brought his third glass of bourbon to his lips when he heard the front door open and then shut above him. He was in that good space, where the buzz was fresh, floating but not flying, deliciously warm, his pain fuzzed at the edges so he felt almost human. His muscles, the ones that hadn’t been shredded and harvested to try to repair his broken body, had relaxed, and he was melting slowly down into his secondhand sofa.
Drinking helped with the anxiety, too. When he was buzzed, he stopped listening for footfalls, waiting for disaster. When he was buzzed, he didn’t worry about the rest of his life, the disaster it was becoming. Sure, he’d wake up sweating and nauseas at two a.m., heart pounding out of his chest, blood in his mouth because he’d bitten his tongue in the midst of a nightmare.
But for now, he drank.
Overhead, high heels rapped across the hardwood floors. From the foyer to the kitchen, followed by the hurried thumps of a child’s sneakers. Two voices – one young and high, one grown and patient – conversed. Slap of the fridge door. Scrape of a chair’s legs.
He was sitting forward to pour his fourth drink when the door at the top of the basement steps opened and the high heels clicked down into his lair.
Ashley stepped around the corner wearing what had become her patented you-can-do-better expression. She folded her arms and propped a shoulder against the wall, fixing him with a look. “Number three?” she asked, nodding toward the glass in his hand.
“Four.”
She nodded, because she’d expected to find him like this, but her jaw tightened, because she hated it. “How’d your appointment go?”
He shrugged. “It was a waste. I didn’t make the cut.”
She sighed deeply. It was the same sound that followed her six-year-old daughter’s worst transgressions: jumping off the back of the sofa, and playing with the makeup. Serious stuff. “Rooster,” she said, in that voice that made grown men – her husband among them – run for cover. “You’re fucking up.”
He let his head flop back so he didn’t have to look at her anymore. “I know, I know.”
“So do better,” she said, like it was simple as that.
She knew it wasn’t, though, and so Rooster heard the note of sadness in her voice.
He recalled something her husband, Deshawn, had said to him once, reaching up to tap the photo of Ashley he’d taped above his bed. “She’ll chew your ass out,” he’d said, his smile broad, “but it’s only ‘cause she loves you. When she stops fussing, that’s when it’s time to get scared – that’s when she’s decided she’s done with you.”
She clearly hadn’t given up on Rooster yet, so that was something.
She pushed off the wall and came into the central room of the basement, going to the coffee table and collecting empty glasses and greasy paper plates, consolidating everything so she could take it to the kitchenette in one trip.
“Ash, you don’t,” he started, half-rising. His knee, and his back, and his neck grabbed, lightning flashes of pain that forced the air out of his lungs in a low hiss.
“Sit your ass back down,” she said, her sigh fond and worried now. “Have you eaten anything? You can’t drink like that on an empty stomach.”
Slowly, sweat popping out on his temples as he fought the pain, he eased back down to the couch. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look fine.” She carried the plates to the trash and dropped the glasses into the little shallow sink that he only used once he’d dirtied all his glasses and was forced to at least rinse them out before he filled them again. “I’m making spaghetti for Desiree. Come upstairs and have dinner with is.” It wasn’t a suggestion.
“Ash–”
“Twenty minutes,” she said, firmly, leaving no room for argument, and shot him her best drill sergeant glare on her way out.
Rooster listened to the gunshot sounds of her high heels going back up the stairs and knew that, somehow in the next twenty minutes, he’d get himself upright and drag his carcass upstairs for spaghetti and Desiree’s exuberant eight-year-old brand of conversation. He might drink himself to sleep every night, take too many painkillers, and be a walking disaster in general, but there were some lines he wasn’t willing to cross, and displeasing Ashley Spencer was one of them.
A year ago, Deshawn had been taking point when they infiltrated the house where they’d finally pinned down the al-Qaeda boss they’d been hunting for weeks. Rooster had heard the faint click echo off the stone walls. Had thought of the photos of Ashley and Desiree taped over his friend’s bed. And he’d grabbed Deshawn by his pack and dragged him back, thrown him around the corner, behind the wall. Had shielded him with his own body.
Deshawn had walked away with minimal scrapes and bruises.
Even now, Rooster could only remember the pain burning through his body like fire, the blurred view of faces crowding over him, shouts and curses. The thump of the rotors and the wind on his face as he was strapped down and loaded on the helo.
He’d known he was dying, and really, he was glad. He was tired of the sand box, of the death, and the blood, and the gore, and being terrified all the time. He was getting out, finally, and he’d saved his friend, had kept a good man alive to go home to his wife and daughter, and that was a sacrifice he was happy to have made.
But then he’d woken up in a hospital in Germany, the pain a restless, living thing inside him, tubes in his nose and his elbows, machines beeping all around him.