Extinction (52 page)

The man had been released after
an emotional plea from his lawyer, psychiatric physician and his wife and kids.
Everyone assured the judge that he was better now, the medication was helping
tremendously and it was a one-time mental break. He and his lawyer promised
that he would stay in an apartment and only visit his family with their
permission and with law-enforcement supervision at the local precinct. The
judge agreed and added several other stipulations of his own and set a trial
date. The man thanked the judge and said that he was ready and eager to take
responsibility for his actions so he and his family could start rebuilding their
relationships.

The news channel was playing a
slide show of pictures while they discussed the latest event that took place
just moments ago at the family’s house, not too far from Bryce’s home. The picture
on the TV now was the whole family in the courtroom, hugging each other and
crying at the man’s release from custody. Bryce heard the news anchor say that
the upcoming images were gruesome and not suitable for all audiences.

Bryce watched as the photo
dissolved and was replaced with a crime scene photo of a sheet-covered body on
the lawn of a house. The sheet was soaked with blood and the size indicated
that it was covering a small child, probably two or three years old. Bryce
guessed it was the man’s youngest son from the previous picture. The scene
changed again and there were more covered bodies in the living room. Bryce
could easily make out two kids, one draped over a couch, probably trying to get
away, and another one face down crawling away from the doorway. The mother, he
guessed, was at the doorway, half in and half out, probably trying to protect
her children as the man came into the house. He knew it was the mother because
the one body that wasn’t covered was the man from the trauma room. His body
bullet-ridden and torn to shreds, unrecognizable as the man from the previous
photos, his identity known only because the news said it was so.

Bryce knew why his father was
crying. He felt responsible or at least somewhat connected to this tragedy even
if in only some small remote way. He didn’t know what to do. How does a child
console an adult at a time like this? Bryce decided that words were too
cumbersome and useless right now so he just rubbed his hand back and forth
across his father’s shoulders and back to let him know that Bryce was there for
him.

The news camera moved to a police
officer who was about to be interviewed. Bryce recognized him as the sergeant
from the emergency room. The reporter stood next to the sergeant and held a
microphone between them. “Sergeant Ramsey, I understand that you were involved
in the shooting. I know there are obviously things you can’t say at this point,
but is there anything you can tell us?”

The sergeant looked off camera to
someone in the background, apparently receiving some sort of permission from
some unseen person. The sergeant gave a slight nod in return before he began
speaking. “I can’t go into details right now, but we arrived on scene to find a
suspect actively trying to kill another person. Several commands were given to
him to stop as we were running to the front door from our patrol vehicles. Once
we were close enough to open fire, he still had not complied with our orders so
we fired on him to end the threat.”

“Were you aware of who the
suspect was when you arrived?”

“I did. I can’t speak for the
other officers involved, but I did. I responded to the incident with this
family where the suspect had stabbed them all in the bank parking lot, just
down the road. I knew their address from my previous report. I had a pretty
good idea that it was them.”

“Did that make you feel any
different while you were responding? Knowing the history and seeing what the
family looked like during the first stabbing incident?”

The sergeant looked off camera
again and gave a slight nod in return to whoever was playing the part of the
shadow puppeteer. “It didn’t make me ‘feel’ different. We have a job to do and
we try to keep feelings out of it. All we knew was that a stabbing was taking
place. What if someone else was attacking the family? Some fanatic or someone coming
after the father for what he had done before? We didn’t know anything else when
we arrived. I honestly didn’t know it was him until I pulled the trigger. His
back was to me until after my first rounds hit him and he turned to face me.
That’s when I knew it was him, that’s when I had feelings, not before.”

“Can you explain that, Sergeant?
What feelings did you have then?”

“Sadness. Sadness that the family
was going through the same thing again. Anger. Anger that our judicial system
is horrible and let this man out just to kill his family.”

The sergeant paused and the
reporter took advantage of that moment to interject her own adjective, “Triumph?
Triumph at ending this man’s killing?”

The sergeant’s previously placid
face morphed into one of anger. “Triumph? We weren’t triumphant in anything
here tonight. We didn’t stop anything. We tried, but we didn’t. Can’t you see
the bodies lying around us? Where is the triumph in that?

“Even if we had saved the family,
I don’t know that ‘triumph’ would be the word to use. Maybe”, the sergeant
looked at the ground as he tried to find the right word, “success? Success at
saving the family and ending the threat.

“My job isn’t to be the judge,
jury, or executioner. But sometimes, we have to be the Reaper. We have to
collect the souls of those who are broken, who can’t be a part of society no
matter how much we want them to be. Sometimes we have to practice a bit of
preventive medicine to make sure others won’t be hurt in the future.”

Bryce knew that last part was
directed at his father, and maybe him as well. Bryce suddenly realized that his
father wasn’t sitting there anymore; he had gone to bed. Bryce watched the news
for another twenty minutes or so, taking over his father’s chair, before he
also went to bed. In the morning, it was as though nothing had changed. His father
was doing a good job of compartmentalizing his emotions and making everything
as normal as he could for his family. It took a few months before Bryce felt like
his father was truly back to being himself, and a couple more months after that
before Bryce was allowed to again visit his dad at work.

It wasn’t too long before Bryce
started high school and joined the ROTC program. He planned to be a doctor and
follow in most of his father’s footsteps. He was still more interested in
internal medicine and diagnostic medicine but he couldn’t wait to make his
father proud of his trauma rotations once he got to medical school.

Part of his ROTC training allowed
him to go to the Navy’s Hospital Corpsman School when he was fifteen. The
program was the exact same training as the adults got but the class was full of
high school students in the delayed entry program. The idea was to get them
excited about service so they would enlist right out of high school. With their
technical school already done, it put them in the field that much quicker after
boot camp.

When he was sixteen, he went to
the Corpsman Field Medical Services School, where corpsman go to learn how to
be field medics with the marines. Bryce was involved in a lot of extra-curricular
sports activities with school so he was fit and enjoyed the hard work they put
in during training. He loved being outdoors and working as a team. He was no
stranger to teamwork with his involvement in sports and working alongside his
father in the emergency room, but this kind of teamwork was different, better
somehow on an emotional level.

He also enjoyed learning about
firearms. He was pretty good with the weapons and was a little sad to find out
that corpsman usually only carried a defensive sidearm in combat, or at least
that’s all they were supposed to carry. One of the gunnery sergeants told Bryce
that he should think about Special Forces if he was so interested in the
firearms portion of training. The SpecOps Corpsman carried a full loadout of
weapons in addition to their medical gear.

Bryce told the gunny that he was
planning to become an officer and going to medical school on the Navy’s dime.
The gunny just rolled his eyes and made a comment about Bryce wasting his
talents in order to go get an officer lobotomy. Bryce reminded the gunny that a
lobotomy didn’t actually decrease a person’s intelligence; it actually affected
the emotional center in the patient’s brain. This earned Bryce and his company
a five-mile run.

The next day, Bryce found himself
riding in an armored personnel carrier, shoulder to shoulder with actual marines.
Bryce always felt like an adult when he was in school; his size and maturity
level made him feel as if he was standing with a bunch of kids. But now,
sitting next to combat veterans, he realized just how small he really was and
that he was several years away from being a real adult.

The unit was transported to the
forward area of the training exercise, the last test for Bryce’s class and a
group of marines trying to graduate from boot camp. The battle exercises
included veteran marines intermixed into the units of marine recruits and the corpsman
from Bryce’s FMF school were also put in to companies as they would be if this
were a real situation.

Bryce had been had assigned to an
eight-man fire team that was made up of all real marines, no recruits in the
bunch. Their team call sign was “Echo Blue” and they were on the side of the
good guys in this scenario. They were being deployed to an area that required
some cleanup of enemy forces that had been bypassed or missed when the company
made its push through the area. The bad guys couldn’t be left to the rear of
the advancing force; that was just poor tactics.

When the team first loaded up,
they were all joking around and giving one another shit; they seemed to be a
tight unit and probably worked together at their real duty stations. When the
driver announced over the PA that they were two minutes from their drop-off,
all of the chatter stopped and each marine took up deployment positions at the
two doors in the vehicles. Bryce was caught off guard at their sudden intensity.
This was only training; he wondered how they were on real missions.

As the vehicle came to a stop,
the first marine at each door was already on the ground and moving to a firing position
that gave the rest of the men cover as they disembarked the vehicle. Bryce was
close to being the last man out and as he was moving forward, he saw that there
were still three rifles in the vehicle’s weapons closet. Bryce instinctively
grabbed one, along with a shoulder-slung bandolier of ammunition that held six
magazines.

Bryce took up a firing position
near one of the marines who looked down and saw the weapon Bryce held. “Hey,
kid, you’re a corpsman. You’re not supposed to be carrying a rifle.”

Bryce didn’t take his eyes off
his field of fire as he spoke. “Do you think that when the shooting starts the
other guys won’t aim at me? Or their bullets will magically miss the medic?” No
response. “I didn’t think so.”

The team leader walked up to
Bryce. “I like you, kid, but if you’re going to carry a rifle, at least load
it. Okay?”

The rest of the team snickered as
Bryce realized that his weapon was indeed empty. He knew from training that no
loaded weapon was ever stored in a vehicle. He reached into his bandolier and
pulled out a magazine of training ammunition and put it into the weapon. Bryce
cycled the bolt and checked to make sure the safety was engaged. The team was
already moving out so Bryce took up a position towards the rear of the element.

After about an hour of working
through the area of dense buildings, they had their first contact. Echo Blue was
victorious and no one in the unit was taken out. When a training round hit a
person, the training uniform sensed the hit and delivered a momentarily
paralyzing shock to the soldier. If you were hit, regardless of where, you were
out of the scenario. Bryce emptied a whole magazine during their first
engagement but hadn’t hit any targets, much to his dismay. Maybe there was a
reason corpsman shouldn’t carry guns?

Echo Blue had several more
engagements over the next few miles. Bryce actually scored a couple of hits,
though it took him another four magazines to do so. The rest of the fire team
was razing him in a good-natured sort of way, a way that made him feel as
though they were actually starting to like him.

As the team entered a small
courtyard, Bryce heard a round being fired and then felt the light breeze of a training
bullet passing by his head. The round struck the marine in front of Bryce, dead
center of his back and the marine went down. In that moment of the adrenaline dump
that Bryce was experiencing, he saw the time-dilation effect of the
flight-fight-or-freeze mechanism kicking in. Everyone was moving in slow motion
as the next two rounds passed by his head and two more marines were instantly
locked up on the invisible electric leash that now held them in place and
dropped them to the ground.

Bryce slid to his right, unsure
of where the attack was coming from. He could be moving towards it but his
training and instinct together told him that moving in any direction was better
than not moving at all. As he slid, he turned his body around and brought his
weapon to bear towards where he thought the attack was coming from.

Bryce saw the marine on rear
security was facing the rest of the team with his weapon pointed at them,
firing. His brain couldn’t figure out what was going on. He looked in the
direction the marine was firing, thinking that the enemy must be ahead of them
as well and that’s what he was shooting at. But as the marine fired again, Bryce
followed the shot and saw that it was heading directly towards another one of
the marines on his team.