A minute passed. I worked the chest compressions while Mike breathed into Dad’s lungs. “Come on, come on, come on,” I repeated over and over again.

Sweat poured down my face, soaked my shirt, crimson droplets fell onto my father’s bloody torso. Five minutes went by. I felt Dad’s ribs crack, but kept working anyway. My breathing became labored, heart pounding in my chest. Several times Mike became light-headed and had to put his head between his knees to recover.

Several more minutes went by. The grinding in my father’s chest sounded like sticks rattling under a rubber mat. Finally, strong hands gripped me by the arms and pulled me away.

“Stop, Caleb,” Mike said, his voice hitching. “It’s over, son. He’s gone.”

I struggled against him for a moment, but it was no use. He was more than twice as strong as I was. He sat on the ground and held me in a bear hug until the kicking and screaming subsided into choking, racking sobs.

When he finally let me go, I pulled my father’s head to my chest and cried for him under the harsh, impartial glare of the Oklahoma sun.

FORTY-TWO

After an indeterminate period of wailing and cursing God for taking Lauren, Dad, and Blake away from me, when I finally gathered myself enough to assess our situation, I kissed my father on his cooling forehead and asked Mike to help me search the property for a shovel. He told me I needed to sit down and let him look me over.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

He took me to the driver’s side of the Humvee and turned the mirror so I could see my face. The left side was a bloody mess, the eye swollen, my cheek and forehead lacerated in dozens of places, several pieces of shrapnel embedded in the skin. I touched one of them and felt it grind against my upper gum line. It was a miracle I had not lost an eye. Oddly, there was no pain.

“Now look here,” Mike said, pointing at my torso and left arm. They hadn’t fared much better than my face. My shirt was soaked with so much blood I couldn’t tell its original color had been desert tan.

I sat on the front porch and let Mike and Sophia cut away my clothes and tend to my wounds. They extracted the shrapnel with tweezers, and in the case of one big shard stuck in my hip, a pair of needle-nose pliers. The pain gradually began to penetrate the haze of grief and adrenaline, but I simply gritted my teeth and took it. An hour later, the metal was out of me, the wounds were cleaned, stitched, and irrigated, and I had fifteen milligrams of OxyContin in my system. The multitude of bandages on the left side of my body reminded me of a confetti-covered street after a parade. I put on fresh clothes and the three of us searched the house.

The inside was ransacked, as though whoever once lived there had packed up and left in a hurry. There were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a wide, spacious kitchen. The pantry was empty except for a few cans of vegetables on the floor and a burst-open sack of ant-ridden sugar. Most of the pots and pans were gone, and there were color-mismatched squares on the walls where pictures had been taken down. Others, mostly old-fashioned artist’s prints, remained. I could only assume the missing frames had contained family photos.

Funny, the things people take when they evacuate.

There was a gun cabinet in the master bedroom, but it was empty. The three beds still had sheets on them, clean except for a little dust. One of the bedrooms looked as if it belonged to a teenage boy, while the third was clearly the domain of a pre-teen girl. Lots of pink, and unicorns, and rainbows, and racks of stuffed animals.

The only part of the property that seemed undisturbed was the tool shed. It had a padlock on it, but a few swings of a crowbar solved that problem. Inside the shed, we found the usual collection of yard implements—lawn mower, weed trimmer, hedge clippers, tree pruner, etc.—and a couple of digging spades.

It took the two of us most of the afternoon to dig a grave. I used the mental exercises Mike taught me about keeping my mind clear to focus on the task at hand, losing myself in the rhythmic stab of the shovel, stomp of foot, levering of dirt, and shoulder-swing throw into an ever-growing pile. The sound of rocks and earth rasping over metal filled my existence, drowning out all other voices. When the grave was deep enough, we wrapped my father in a sheet and lowered him into it. Then we filled it in again and stood for a while mopping sweat from our faces. Dad was not a religious man, so we didn’t bother with a cross. He would not have wanted one.

During the process, Sophia expressed concern the people who attacked us in Boise City might come looking for us and maybe we should hurry up and get going. I told her to grab a pair of binoculars from the Humvee, climb to the balcony above the farmhouse’s second floor, and keep a lookout. If anyone showed up, I would shoot them, cut out their heart, and eat the fucking thing in front of them while they died.

She paled, nodded, and backed away.

*****

Night fell.

We stayed at the farmhouse. I sat on the front porch, outfitted for battle, grenade-launcher equipped carbine between my knees. Mike and Sophia went inside to eat dinner, but I declined. I had no appetite.

There was a pair of NVGs next to me. When full dark came, and the half-moon and stars were the only light to be seen, I donned them and conducted a wide patrol, circling the property, praying I saw signs of pursuers. I wanted them to come for us. I wanted to see the outline of the suppressor through my rifle’s optics, feel the stock buck against my shoulder, hear the clack of the chamber, the muted crack. I wanted to hear screams of pain as people died in the darkness. I wanted them to know they were being punished.

But no one came.

Maybe they got what they wanted from the vehicles we left behind, or maybe we killed enough of them they decided it wasn’t worth coming after us, or both. Maybe they tried, but simply could not find us. Mike had done a good job of leaving a meandering, double-backed, circuitous trail for any tracker to follow. Even with a good horse and a flashlight, I would have been hard pressed to figure it out myself. Whatever the case, as dawn crept red and gold over the eastern sky, I switched off my NVGs and headed back to the farmhouse, disappointed.

Mike and Sophia greeted me from the kitchen table and offered me breakfast. I took off my gear, sat down, and shoveled food down wordlessly. I do not remember what I ate. Minutes later, I went upstairs to one of the bedrooms, took off my boots and combat gear, and fell into a dreamless slumber.

*****

Five weeks passed.

My wounds, carefully tended to by Sophia, healed quickly. Soon, all that remained of them were fresh pink scars and a few persistent aches where the shrapnel had scraped bone. I was still sore most of the time, but did not let it slow me down.

Mike spent most of his time scouting the area and hunting wild game. Sometimes I went with him, but most of the time I made some excuse to stay at the farmhouse with Sophia. I know he knew why, but he didn’t make an issue of it. Not that it would have done him any good.

Sophia and I made love often, taking comfort in each other’s embrace, reveling in the heated, gasping, kissing, thrusting passion of new lovers. We explored each other, teased each other, took turns reducing one another to clutching, moaning incoherence. Then we would rest for a while, talk and laugh in exhausted, throaty voices, and start all over again.

I often wondered in the months after why my sexual appetite, which had never been much of a distraction before, suddenly had so much power over me. It was not until after I joined the Army, and the battle of Singletary Lake, that I learned of the strange urges that possess a man after combat. I remember sitting with my back against a cinder-block wall, and a Navy medic coming around to check the guys in my platoon for injuries, and how pretty her green eyes were, and the roaring, burning urge to pull her clothes off and take her right then and there.