Page 52 of Casualties of War
He slumped. Hishands dropped away from his thigh and the wound immediately flooded and spilled fresh blood. It dripped onto the tarmac.
For a heartbeat of time that seemed to last forever, Téra could feel the terror reaching for her, trying to drag her down into the endless cycle of memories. Her heart lurched sickly.
No, she whispered to herself. She yanked on the belt with all her strength.
The police sedansarrived, with their lights flashing. Police streamed out of the vehicles, their guns drawn. One rushed toward her. “Hands up!”
“I can’t,” Téra told him. “If I let go, he’ll bleed out.”
“Hands up, I said!”
“Do Ilooklike an Insurrecto?”
Far away, but coming closer, were more sirens. Ambulance, this time.
“When the ambulance gets here and my friend is in their care, you can arrest me and stripsearch me for all I care,” Téra told the chubby officer. “Until then, I’m not letting go of this belt. Get it?”
His gaze flicked from her to Rubén’s sagging body and the open wound on his leg. “You need to twist it,” the police officer said, lowering his gun.
Another cop ran up to them. The first jerked his chin at her. “She says it was Vistarian rebels.”
The second spat. “So did the otherwoman, over there. They took two others.”
“This is a ransom snatch, then?” the first replied, sounding tired and disgusted.
Téra closed her mind to their speculation and focused on Rubén instead. She realized her bare feet were resting in a puddle of his blood, that spread across the tarmac in a widening circle.
Her heart hardened. There would be a reckoning, she told herself. First, they woulddeal with the Mexican authorities. Then, they would settle the score. She didn’t know how thirty civilian women and a dozen walking wounded soldiers would manage that, when the one woman in the house who had held them together had been taken. She just knew she was tired of being a victim.
Fuck the Insurrectos. Enough was enough.
