Page 35 of Exit Strategy

As much as I didn’t want to die, the thought of getting Kurt killed just for helping me?

Well, I had a whole lot to cry about that night, but by the same token, I couldn’t cry forever.

13

Kurt…

The nightmares weren’t a surprise, just the force of them. Dealing with them was more difficult because it brought up the issue of personal boundaries. I was no therapist. I had no understanding of the treatment process for the various flavors of PTSD, but I remembered what helped me when I was at this point – just not being alone.

Being alone was the worst part.

During my reintroduction to society, the counselor suggested I find a support group and to get a pet. The support group ended up being a veteran’s support group at a pub, owned by an ex-pat living in Maryland, and I had run into my old captain. It was incredibly reassuring to find I wasn’t alone, and the place could finally make a fucking proper English breakfast down to having the right bangers and real bacon, not the sad stuff Americans seemed obsessed with. I wasn’t much for taking care of a pet like they should be taken care of, but for the short amount of time I had owned a cat, an old stray. It had made a difference for the both of us, at least I’d like to think so.

Casual dating seemed to provide that sliver of human contact I needed, especially the ones that would stay the night.

After her first round of nightmares, I scooted closer to Callie in the bed, with my back turned to her. She was thin, and there was something I had those skinny women had loved – body warmth.

In her sleep, she moved closer until we were lying back-to-back. I felt her sigh and then for lack of a better term, subside. I had no idea how Rex and she shared a bed, and that felt strange, but once she pulled in, it felt more natural.

I didn’t face her, wasn’t going to make her the little spoon. Putting my arms around her was as likely to come across as constricting or threatening. I also didn’t need to wake her up halfway through the night with something rude poking her in the bottom.

I definitely tried to not think about that. Her penchant for sleeping in nothing more than one of my shirts and a pair of panties made my blood stir. I chastised myself. I didn’t need to think about her like that. She had been abused and beaten and the last thing on her mind was having a toss with a madman who choked out her husband and was dragging her across the continent.

Continent, that was something to focus on.

Thinking about the U.S. as a country messed with my sense of perspective. Some of the states seemed like countries to themselves, and in my mind, that’s how big countries were. This was a continent, a great landmass bracketed by oceans.

I let myself ease back to sleep.

* * *

I had seenmany places in the world that I had considered empty and desolate. Stretches of the Maghreb were vacant of any vestiges of humanity. The Afghan highlands were likewise a wasteland of rock formations and the wreckage of decades of war. There were places where we drove the shells of cities that had once been thriving and cosmopolitan, before the Soviets invaded, before radicalized Islam, before twenty years of American occupation.

This didn’t prepare me for the desolation of Oklahoma.

The land was flat, and I could see the signs of ranching and agriculture, but that was all there was. The only concession to the existence of America was that sometimes we would see the stillborn corpses of towns, collections of static caravans, American mobile homes. My parents had one of those, up on a hill near the sea, and they leased it out to tourists who didn’t have the money to own one themselves. But that was a vacation destination, not a place they ever lived full time. These things, they were long and narrow, almost mean with their cheapness and the way they were packed into parks.

We had been driving through a light welter of rain, watching storms race ahead of us when we came to the first disaster.

It looked like the roadside park had been hit by a Coalition strike package. The trailers were torn to pieces, some rolled on their sides. One particularly struck me because it looked like it had been opened like a tin, the roof curled up and missing. There were a handful of emergency vehicles, their lights strobing against the destruction. I felt an intense wrongness, because the air was clean, and all I could smell was the dampness of the rain and the ozone scent of thunderstorms. This sort of carnage usually came with the stink of fire, burned metal, and the particular chemical tang of detonated explosives.

After the first year in-country, you could start telling what was used in the strike by the way it smelled.

But there was no chemical smell, just wet.

We drove on, and had our sights set on making it to a town in Arkansas, where we would stop for the night. It was a longer day’s drive than what we had been making, but there was something about the state that screamed at me to get out. When my gut agreed with the almost passive hostility of the environment, I listened.

“It’s behind us,” Callie said, looking over her shoulder.

“What?” I asked and looked in the side mirror. There was nothing behind us other than a few vehicles.

“The storm,” she said softly.

I adjusted the rearview mirror and behind us the sky was so dark gray it was almost black. “Well, fuck me sideways, that is going to be a hell of a storm. No worries though.” I put my foot down and trusted in the V8 under the hood to get us out of the inconvenience of the storm. I pushed to eighty. After a few minutes, the storm was larger, growing closer.

I pushed harder and the speedo ticked up to ninety, and then I noticed that Callie was sitting white knuckled and grim in the passenger seat, almost turned to pale stone by fear. I eased off the accelerator, and the speed dropped back down to match the posted signs. She relaxed, but only slightly.

The storm threw an awning of clouds over us, and then the sunlight started to fade. How bloody fast could these things move?

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