Page 42 of The Darkness Within

“Thank you.” My voice still doesn’t sound solid.

“For what? Soup?”

“For everything. I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Yes, you can, Nash. You have no idea what you can do on your own. You’re…”

“I’m what?”

He clears his throat. “You inspire me. Your strength and determination.”

Bullshit. “Brewer, I can’t even get out of bed. I’m a fucking mess. I didn’t even ask for help when I needed it most. You and Mandy made me do it.”

He chuckles. “We can’t make you do anything. Nobody can. Addiction is a disease, it ravages your mind, like a rash. It takes control of your willpower, steals your reasoning and compassion, and turns you into a heartless, hollow husk. That’s why, when an addict hits rock bottom, they call it ‘a moment of clarity’. The fog lifts long enough, whether for a minute, an hour, or a day, but long enough for us to get a glimpse of what we’ve done to ourselves. We see what we’ve become. It’s at that moment that some addicts take their lives, and others are able to ask for help.”

“What was your moment of clarity?”

Brewer scoffs. “You don’t want to hear that sad shit. You have enough of your own to deal with.”

“Please? I’m tired of feeling like the only one who suffers. Tell me?”

He sighs, deep and loud, and settles deeper into his pillow.

“I spent eighteen months at FOB Volturno. They called it Dreamland.” He snorts.

I’ve read about Camp Baharia, stationed right outside Fallujah, Iraq. That place was no joke.

“We were the first deployment. Responsible for getting the base up and running. We had our hands full. Mind you, this was way back in ‘03, when all this shit started. The desert was a fucking mess. They didn’t know the sheriffs were moving into town, and they were pissed,” he recalls with a smirk.

“They tested us constantly, firing on us randomly, lighting up the sky above us, just to see what we’d do. We were en route from a village back to the FOB, exhausted from kicking down doors and following up leads, collecting intel for some missions the higher ups were planning. About halfway back, we fell under heavy fire. Completely surrounded out of nowhere.”

A lump forms in my throat. It’s about to get bad, for Brewer. I almost don’t want to hear it. I move my head to his stomach, my cheek pressing against his warm, bare skin. He’s so lost in his story he doesn’t seem to notice.

“Everything was connected underground by tunnels, but we didn’t know that yet.” Underground tunnels. A shiver runs through me. “Anyway, my buddy and I returned fire. He was yelling something to me, but I couldn’t hear him over the gunfire. He was telling me to retreat. That one second that he took his eyes off the fight to focus on me cost him his life. One minute I was staring at him, listening to him shout at me, and the next, he took a bullet through his head. Right through the side of his face.”

His voice is in my ear, but he sounds far away, lost in another decade. Absently, he runs his fingers through my short hair, scratching softly at my scalp, and I close my eyes and just listen, absorbing his words and his pain.

“You can’t imagine what that looks like. I froze. I was wearing his fucking face, covered in his blood. My buddy, the guy I trained with, the guy I bunked with, his brains were on my fucking face. In my goddamn mouth. He was just…gone. There one minute and gone the next.” His voice cracks and Brewer swallows so loud I can hear it. “At least he died instantly. He didn’t suffer.”

“But you did.” Still are.

“I’ve been suffering every day since.”

A fat tear rolls down my cheek, dripping onto his stomach.

“Anyway, my brain stopped working after that. And just like with him, a second lost was all it took to change my life forever.” His body tenses beneath me. “I took a bullet in my shoulder. It hit my artery, and I began to bleed out. Thank God, the guy closest to me was a medic. I could feel myself slipping away, getting weaker, my vision becoming darker, and he reached into the wound and pinched my artery closed with his fingers. Can you imagine? The pain brought me back. I threw up all over myself,” he recalls with a humorless laugh.

My stomach roils, and I have to fight back a wave of nausea.

“He held my life in his hands for eighteen long minutes until air support came and cleared out the scene. On the chopper, my heart stopped beating from the loss of blood, and they gave me an emergency transfusion and brought me back. But at the hospital, they lost me again.”

Thank fuck he’s still alive. I can’t imagine a world where he doesn’t exist. Without him, maybe I wouldn’t exist either.

“They brought me back again. But I was done after that. I kept getting lost inside my head, losing time.” Sounds familiar. “My short-term memory was shit. I would freeze up and have panic attacks, and I was no good to anyone like that. I was broken. Damaged goods. I finished out my contract stateside. In the meantime, I put my G.I. Bill to good use and went back to school to receive my certification as a licensed therapist and addiction counselor. As you can imagine, it cost me a lot to get up and function every day like nothing was wrong.”

I can imagine.

“I relied heavily on pills to get me through school, to help with my focus and my memory and the panic attacks. The anxiety was crippling most days. It’s a wonder I even made it through. After I was discharged, I continued with school and received my bachelor’s degree in social work and mental health.”

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