Page 24 of Brody
“I got a call from some military official. You know the type. Sounds all official, but probably never leaves the safety of their desk. They said that Creed’s unit was sent out on a mission, and he never came back. The rest of his unit is unharmed and were able to give a report. It seems like he was captured by someone.”
“Who?”
I knew the answer just from the look on Magnus’s face.
“Come on, Brody,” he sighed. “You know how this works. Information like that is classified. If we were still enlisted, we might have been able to pry some more information out of them, but a couple of retired veterans…” He shook his head, and the last remains of his braid gave up. His hair tie fell to the ground and his hair was left hanging free. “We’re lucky they at least respected Creed’s emergency contact list and called us ratherthan Creed’s family. If that happened, we’d probably never know anything was even wrong.”
Magnus and I didn’t have much family. I had a few relatives floating around the country, but none I was close with. Creed, however, did still have family. Creed never talked about them much, but what little he had shared made it obvious that things weren’t great between them.
His family had expected him to move back home after he retired. We never did figure out how they learned that he planned to move to the mountain with us after his service was done, but they had been very unhappy about it. All three of us had been bombarded with calls for a week straight until we managed to block enough phone numbers to keep them at bay.
Magnus was right. If Creed’s family had been the ones to learn of his disappearance, they never would have told us a thing about it. We would have continued our lives in ignorance until one day we tried to call him and couldn’t get through.
“Fuck!”
I nearly kicked my truck in frustration. My foot even came off the ground, but I quickly put it back down after remembering all the work I’d put into restoring the old junker.
“Is there anything we can do?”
Magnus’s only answer was to hold his hands out helplessly.
“Right. Of course not.”
My legs were as supportive as overcooked spaghetti as I made my way over to my porch and sat down heavily on the front step.
Almost immediately, Indigo and Onyx wormed their way under my arms, offering comfort in the only way a dog could.
Dust kicked up around me as Magnus’s familiar boots stepped into view. “There must be something else.”
I patted the dogs a few more times and looked up at him. “What’re you mumbling about?”
The floorboards of the porch rattled under Magnus’s weight as he sat down next to me. “There must be something else going on. Creed couldn’t just get captured like that. How many missions have we been on? How many times have we escaped death without a scratch? Creed was always the most capable of us. He wouldn’t just suddenly get captured.”
Ordinarily, this would be the moment where I offered some form of comfort, or at least said something to snap Magnus out of his panic, but this time I had nothing positive to say.
It all felt so inevitable, like I’d just been waiting for this moment, but now that it was here, I didn’t know what to do.
“You’re right. We have been on a lot of missions together. But maybe that’s the problem. We’ve escaped death too many times. Sooner or later, it was going to catch up to us. Creed is the most capable, but even he isn’t perfect. You know how it is. Mistakes are inevitable, and it only takes one for a mission to go off the rails. It sucks, but it’s not our fault. All we can do now is hope that Creed manages to pull through whatever mess he’s found himself in.”
Before I even finished speaking, Magnus was already shaking his head, mumbling to himself. “No. No. No. Itisour fault. We should’ve stayed.”
He wasn’t talking to anyone specifically, just putting words into the air. It wasn’t even clear if he’d realized that he’d spoken aloud.
“We should’ve stayed with him. We could have found a way to extend our service for a few more months rather than retiring right away. Even if we couldn’t go on active missions anymore, we could’ve at least helped him when he got in trouble instead of sitting here on our useless asses.”
I sighed heavily, which caused Indigo to instinctively lick my face. “Maybe we could have, but that doesn’t matter now. We’re here, and Creed is God knows where.”
Both dogs were startled and backed away when Magnus abruptly shot to his feet. “How can you be so calm?” Magnus shouted, pacing back and forth. It was a good thing Pip had decided to stay over by Trent and Ellis, or else the little dog would have been in danger of being stepped on. “Creed could be dead for all we know, and you’re saying it doesn’t matter. Fuck! Do you care at all?”
He lashed out and kicked the railing surrounding my porch. I heard the sound of splintering wood but refused to take my gaze away from Magnus long enough to look at the damage.
His accusation hurt more than I was willing to admit. Taking advantage of the fact that I was a slight bit taller than Magnus, I raised myself to my full height, crossed my arms, and stared him down. “Is that really what you think of me? That I don’t care? It was Creed’s idea that we come here and start getting things set up first, and we agreed with him. There’s no use regretting that decision now. So, stop freaking out. It’s not helping anything.”
Some of the poles from my porch railing must have fallen out, because Magnus kicked at something on the ground and there were more sounds of breaking wood.
“Well, one of us needs to have some reaction. It’s better than your dismissal shrug. Fuck. Whatever. Do whatever you want. I’m gonna… I’m gonna… Agh!”
He stormed off, never finishing his sentence. Not that he could. There wasn’t anything either of us could do and we both knew it.
