Page 5 of Brody
Or worse.
I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen the bodies of people I’d killed with my own hands, but it never got easier.
I never let it get easier.
While in the military, I’d come across people who’d been fighting so long that death no longer bothered them. They could pull a trigger and take a life without blinking an eye. They treated the act of killing with the same casual indifference as sharpening a pencil.
I would never be the same.
Even as I specialized as a sniper and racked up a kill counter higher than most, I remembered every face and regularly recited every name I knew.
That was all supposed to be done. I wasn’t supposed to add any more names to that list.
I managed to clear away enough of the branches to get a proper look at the victim. The man was lying on his front, so I couldn’t see his face, but his chest was moving.
He was breathing.
He was alive.
My first instinct was to immediately roll him over and pull him away from danger, but I stopped myself. The person had dodgedout of the way in time to avoid the trunk of the tree, but he’d still been hit with the branches. He was probably injured, and suddenly moving him would just hurt him more.
Still, I couldn’t leave him face down in the mud.
I’d received some basic first-aid training during my time of service, and it came in handy now as I delicately rolled him over in a way that kept his head and spine supported. There were no obvious signs of injury other than a cut on his scalp and even that wound didn’t bleed much. Someone could easily be tricked into thinking that he was fine, and the sluggishly bleeding cut was harmless, but I knew from experience that unseen injuries could be the worst. The man had been hit by a falling tree. There was no way he was fine.
Shouting from above caught my attention. The others had managed to find some climbing gear and were making their way down the cliff. Emergency services had been called, and a rescue crew was being sent out to retrieve the injured man.
He was a complete stranger to me, but as I wiped the mud off his face and checked his breathing again, I was overwhelmed by a wave of protectiveness that I typically only felt for Magnus and Creed.
“You’re not alone,” I assured him. He was unconscious and probably couldn’t hear me, but I couldn’t help offering him comfort anyway. “Help is on its way. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Everything was not all right.
Emergency services had taken the man away in a rescue helicopter and transported him to the nearest hospital. Emberwood wasn’t large enough to have a hospital, only a local clinic, but luckily our work site was relatively close to the town of Rynkirk, which did have a hospital. To most of the world Rynkirk would probably seem like a small town, but compared to Emberwood, which only had a single stoplight, it was practically a city.
Once the unconscious man was taken away, the rest of my coworkers considered their role in the incident over, and everyone went back to work. The area where the tree had crushed the man’s tent had been roped off to be investigated later, but otherwise everyone was happy to forget that the whole disaster ever happened.
I returned to work as well, but I couldn’t get thoughts of the injured man out of my mind. So, when my shift ended, I drove out to Rynkirk to visit the man in the hospital.
I didn’t even know who to ask for, since I didn’t know the man’s name, but as soon as I explained the situation to the nurse at the front desk, I was ushered through the doors with surprising urgency.
The man had been given a private room, and a doctor was standing over the bed scowling down at a clipboard. She greeted me when I stepped through the door, barely listening to my explanation about who I was before grilling me about the man in the bed.
“Anything you can tell us will be helpful. We’re having trouble identifying our John Doe here, which makes treating him harder.”
“Oh.” I twisted my hands together. Usually, I felt like the largest person in the room, but under the unforgiving florescent lights and the doctor’s scrutinizing eye, I felt unnaturally small. “I was the one who reached him first, but I don’t know much more than that. He had a tent set up, so he’d probably been out in the forest for a while, but there wasn’t anything indicating his identity. Is there a problem with his injuries?”
The doctor sighed, pushing her glasses up out of the way to rub at the bridge of her nose. “No. He’s in surprisingly good condition after having a tree fall on him. He must have dived out of the way in time to avoid a serious blow. I want to say that he’ll be fine once he wakes up, but without knowing his medical history, we have no way to know for sure. I’m hesitant to even prescribe basic painkillers. For all we know, he could be allergic, or taking other medications that might have an adverse effect.”
“I see.” My voice trailed off quietly as I glanced at the man in the bed. He’d been cleaned up since I saw him last, so his features were easier to discern. He seemed to be about my age, maybe a little younger, with curly brown hair and olive toned skin. The structure of his face implied some Greek heritage, and at least a few days’ worth of dark stubble shaded his jaw.
The white bandage wrapped around his head stood out starkly against his hair and skin, but other than that, he looked like he was merely sleeping.
Looking at him, my mind raced at a million miles an hour. Nearly half a day had passed since I found him. If authorities still couldn’t identify him, it meant that no “Missing Persons” report had been filed. Even if he had people in his life who cared about him, they weren’t looking for him yet.
If I went missing for half a day, Magnus would be tearing the mountainside apart by now looking for me, and Creed would probably abandon his latest mission overseas to join the search. I didn’t have a lot in life, but I had people to miss me. It was easy to forget how precious it was to be missed.
I wanted to ask if I could stay with the man for a while, even though I wasn’t family. The idea of him lying in a hospital bed completely alone didn’t sit right with me, and I figured my presence couldn’t hurt anything. However, before I got the chance to ask, the machines around the room started to beep and the man on the bed woke up.
