Page 99 of Walking Wounded

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Luke stands in front of the full-length mirror in the en suite bathroom in his boxers, grimacing at his reflection. His glasses were broken in the bombing, but he can still see that he looks a mess. A dozen little lacerations – from shrapnel, Hal explained – pepper his face and throat, and along his clavicles. His right side bears a leopard-spot mosaic of bruises, black and blue and deep purple, from where he landed hard up against the side of a building. The blast threw him, apparently. He hit his head and was out cold. He inhaled acrid smoke and his lungs and throat and sinuses are blistered. His voice sounds like something from a strangled frog. And even in just two-and-a-half days, he’s managed to lose weight here in the hospital, his ribs and hipbones stark like white paper corners under his beat-up skin.

“You picked a handsome one,” he deadpans, seeking out Hal’s gaze over his shoulder in the mirror.

Hal still wears the same worried, mother-hen expression he’s worn since Luke first opened his eyes. “Don’t trash-talk my boyfriend,” he says, and it isn’t a joke at all.

Luke sighs. “How many others were hurt?”

“Ten,” Hal says. The corner of his mouth twitches.

“Fatalities?” Luke’s stomach sours, but he has to ask.

Hal’s gaze skips away, toward the door. “One,” he says, quietly. “Too bad it wasn’t the bomber.”

“No, justice never works like that,” Luke says, tone vicious. “Thatevil fucker.”

“Yeah,” Hal agrees, but his expression stays stuck onguilty.

Luke frowns to himself. Leave it to Hal to try and pin this whole disaster on himself.

He turns around the plucks at the hem of Hal’s Virginia Tech hoodie. “Hey.”

Hal won’t look at him.

“Matt’s alive,” Luke says. “Nine other people are alive.”

“You’realive.” And Luke knows down in his bones, without the reassurance of it being put into words, that his is the most important survival in the eyes of his friend – his…hislove.

“I’m alive. Yeah. You aren’t Superman, you know. You can’t keep everyone safe.”

Hal nods, a jerky movement.

“When can I get out of here?”

Hal clears his throat. “I’ll go find your doctor.”

~*~

Duffels fill the cargo compartment of the Jeep, but Luke makes no comment. Hal gets him all settled in the passenger seat and walks around to get behind the wheel. He hums quietly, distractedly, in contrast to the droning voices of talk radio.

“…talking about the explosion on Wednesday…”the host says, and Hal punches the dial, changes it to a pop station.

Luke hurts all over. The bruises, yes, but all the soft bits of flesh and connective tissue inside his body, too. His muscles have whiplash; his organs still reverberate from the impact. An explosion isn’t really about the fire and the smoke. It’s the percussive blast; the relentless waves of force rippling through the atmosphere, hitting bodies like buses, like something solid and massive.

Luke settles his head back against the rest and contents himself with watching the landscape roll past. Hal drives them out of the clogged arteries of DC, through the fringes, and then beyond. Luke figures out where they’re headed a moment before theWelcome to Virginiasign flashes past.

Trees crowd the road, orange maples and yellow pecans, flicking loose leaves to spiral toward the windshield. Driveways marked with painted mailboxes snake through the expanding fields and copses. The landscape comes from a previous time; they could be driving through the colony of Virginia, rather than the state. DC’s bustle seems an age ago, several miles behind them.

Luke cracks his eyes against the dappled shadows that fall across them through the windows. Squints at the quaint, colonial city-center that he reads is Leesburg from a roadside sign.

Hal takes two right turns out of the center of town, venturing into pastoral vistas, and finally turns in at a crushed gravel drive flanked by stone pillars and a split-rail fence, wagon wheels propped up as decoration. The pastures lie brown and dormant, bush-hogged for the season, dotted with ancient oaks. The gravel crunches under the tires, and they travel around a long, smooth bend in the drive to arrive at the house, nestled in a pocket of gardens and oaks, cars parked in front of a detached carriage house.

The house is a red brick colonial, black shutters, white trim. White columns in front. A big, sprawling house that manages to look functional and timeless, rather than pretentious.

Hal parks alongside a low-slung, mean-looking car in front of the carriage house and kills the engine, sits a moment with his hands on the wheel, staring up toward the house.

Luke isn’t loving the idea of getting out – all that movement – so he sits too, waiting. “Did Matt grow up here?” he asks.

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