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The Labrador’s propellers labored heavily and the helicopter began to rise again. Then the back end jerked down alarmingly, like a bobber that’d been hit by a big fish, and canted upwards again. Oddy imagined an accumulation of monstrous limbs wrapped around the landing gear, bearing the helicopter down.

This is it
, he thought.
Moment of truth
…

The engines whined. The tachometer redlined.

A point of perfect tension was achieved: the moment when, during a tug-of-war, one team’s resolve slips and they tumble, headlong, into the dirt…

Please please oh please God…

…and then the Labrador was hurtling into the sky as if shot from a sling. Oddy and the pilot were thrown violently forward. The pilot’s head hit the console and for a gut-churning moment Oddy felt them lurch downwards again. Then the pilot shook away the cobwebs and steered the chopper into a stable ascent. Wind whistled through the hole in the windshield. It was sharp and stinging but also pure and cool and wonderful.

Oddy slumped into the co-pilot’s jumpseat. Beneath him, in the rapidly-darkening forest, he saw, or believed he saw, Answer.

He was standing at the bottom of the hill. Behind him, creatures hunched around Tripwire’s corpse. Oddy could not tell if they were eating him, or simply tearing him to shreds and scattering the pieces for what savage pleasure the act afforded.

Answer was smiling. Half his face was destroyed, a mess of bone and red muscle tissue that resembled prime beef, but his mouth was intact and smiling. He raised his arm, casually, chummily, and waved goodbye. All around him were milling and massing and shambling atrocities that made many of the things Oddy had seen during the past few days, the werewolves and vampires and zombies, seem like pleasant daydreams. And there was Answer standing amongst them, perfectly in his element, arm upraised, waving, waving goodbye.

Farewell—for now?

Oddy leaned back in the jumpseat. He didn’t say anything. The pilot didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Cold air whipped through the cockpit and Oddy sucked shallow lungfuls. He was aware, vaguely, of an inability to feel any of his extremities: not a single finger or toe. The seatback and armrests were sticky with blood. He wondered if he was dying, and if it would hurt very much. On the heels of this came the realization that perhaps death wouldn’t be such a terrible thing—after all he had seen and done, what horrors could death possibly hold in store?

Thousands of miles from home and hovering on the brink of death, Oddy closed his eyes. Warmth suffused his body. He recognized it as false warmth, shock warmth, but he didn’t care. He simply relished it, the elemental comfort of it.

He drifted down through black levels of unconsciousness and, as he approached that final black river, he had a dream. A dream so real that he smiled as he sat in the middle of that blackness with the forest unfurling below him like a dark green sea.

They lay on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific. Tripwire, Crosshairs, Gunner, Zippo, Slash, him. They wore cutoff camos and their young skin was bronzed from the sun. There was a bucket of cold Singha beer. Zippo grabbed a handful of ice and rubbed it on his chest and, playfully, tossed it at Crosshairs, whose face was whole and undamaged and smiling broadly. Tripwire was saying something, telling a story, his hands describing animated shapes in the air. Gunner and Slash watched him, pointing, laughing. He sat somewhere to the side, facing a setting sun, its fleeting warmth tingling his smooth dark skin. Although he could not see his face, he knew he too was smiling. Smiling because it was good to be with your friends, good to know that times of conflict are followed by times of serenity, good to know that the storm shall surely pass and the sky shall surely clear…good to find that safe warm place in the sun.

Sitting in the jumpseat of a laboring helicopter, far from everything he knew or ever cared for, Jerome Grant sat in a widening pool of his own blood…smiling.

— | — | —

VI.

one tin soldier

Somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea

November 12th, 1988. 7:54 p.m.

It was once only the noble qualities of Odysseus I saw reflected in myself.

Courage. Self-sacrifice. Leadership.

Now only one similarity remains:

We’re both the only member of our crew to return home alive.

The frigate is a 120-footer,
Monkey Sea
, based out of Key Largo. Its hold is laden with eighty tons of rock salt for delivery to Syria. The captain tells me we are close to the southern coast of Albania, but as to exact longitudes and latitudes I cannot say. The waters of the Mediterranean are of the deepest and clearest blue; so perfectly blue it is impossible to chart the horizon’s curve, tell where water ends and sky begins.

I am sitting on deck with my back against the bulkhead, watching the prow cleave the water before it. A deckhand brings me a cup of Turkish coffee. It is hot and sweet and its spiciness tingles my tongue. Warm crosswinds blow off the Albanian coast, carrying with them the scent of seaside commerce.

As the ship carries my body forward, the slow rolling motion of the waves carries my mind back…

The pilot dropped me on the helipad of the Yellowknife general hospital. Just rolled me down the gangway like a sack of dirty laundry and hit the friendly skies. I was unconscious at the time, though I do recall a sensation of tumbling over and over, shirts in a dryer. Imagine the E.R.’s surprise to see the big bloody black fellow lying in the middle of a painted white “H” while his mysterious good Samaritan dwindled into a tiny dot in the sky. Thinking about that scene, it always makes me laugh!

They hustled me to the O.R.. I was intubated, ventilated, aspirated, ablated, even inoculated—some doc thought I’d been attacked by wild animals and contracted rabies. They sucked the bad blood out and pumped good blood in; I drained the blood bank of O-positive. I was EKG’d and EEG’d, transfused, stitched, and cauterized. I had machines breathing for me and purifying toxins for me and for all I know moving the mail for me. Every so often I’d swim up through the haze to see doctors and nurses clustered around, the light harsh on my eyes and their tools glittering wickedly. I distinctly remember a blue-masked doctor saying to a nurse standing beside him: “He pulls through this, I owe you dinner.”

I want to believe she ordered the Lobster Newburg and a bottle of Dom.

Other times I spiraled down into a deep, deep darkness that pressed upon my body with a profound weight and I knew I was very close to death. There were no bright lights or harp-strumming angels; thankfully I didn’t smell any brimstone, either. Just this solid blackness. And it’s my best guess that’s all death really is: this blackened consciousness where, for a while at least, you retain some awareness of who you were and the life you lived…then nothing.
Zzzzap
: a light bulb fizzling out.

Tell you this much: it compels you to live for the moment.

I mean, Carpe-
fucking
-Diem, you know?

When the fog lifted I found myself in a white bed in a white room with a window that overlooked a snow-covered field beneath a cloud-swept sky. For a minute all that whiteness had me thinking I’d gone blind. Then I saw my hand and the contrast assured me that my sight, at least, was undamaged.

My other hand was covered under layers of bandages but I could tell, just by looking, that it was useless to me. My feet, also heavily-bandaged, had a squared-off look confirming the fact that each and every one of my toes resided at the bottom of a medical waste bin. My face felt like it’d been submerged in an acid bath. I remembered, faintly, a struggling blackness bursting all over it. My right leg was set in an air-cast and elevated in a complex pulley system. My body—and I’m talking every square
inch
—ached like an abscessed tooth.

A nurse came in. She had a cup of ice chips for me to suck on. I wondered if they’d taken my tonsils out, too. She conducted herself in that efficient manner nurses have, as if she’d woken that morning knowing in advance every move she’d make during the remainder of the day. She tapped the IV bag hung above my head and unkinked the tube feeding milky solution into my left forearm and examined my raggedy fingernails and clucked her tongue and she smelled, pleasantly, of fabric softener.

“Do you know your name?” she’d asked.

I told her I did. She nodded her head expectantly.

“Jerome Grant, nurse.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No, nurse.”

“My name is Vera. You are at the Yellowknife general hospital. Do you know how you got here?”

“No, Vera,” I lied.

She told me a helicopter had dropped me and taken off without a backwards glance. She told me I’d been operated on for nearly twelve hours, and that one of the doctors was forced to cancel his trip to Fort Simpson for the Iditarod.

“You had us up around the clock, Mr. Grant. You’re lucky to be alive.”

I wondered if she’d said it so I’d feel obligated to thank her…for doing her job?

“Thank you, Vera.”

“Oh, now.” She waved her hand around her head, as if trying to shoo away a fly. “It’s just….oh, you’re welcome, then.”

She gave my pillow a brisk fluffing and asked if I needed to use the little boy’s room. A bedside machine beeped in time with my heartbeat and I wished Vera would turn it off.

She said, “Were you up north somewhere?”

I nodded.

“Doing…?”

“Hunting.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And you got lost?”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t the first. Treacherous woods up there.”

Vera, you have no idea
.

“Who dropped you off?”

I shrugged. “A kind soul who took pity on a wayward traveler.”

“And he left you in a heap
why
…?”

“He didn’t want his secret identity revealed?”

“Seriously, Mr. Grant, why—?”

“Vera? It’s Jerome. And I think I’ll use the bathroom now.”

I didn’t have to go but I didn’t want to answer any more questions. Questions are dangerous things: sometimes blindly, sometimes falteringly, but somehow instinctively, they have a way of leading you back to the truth. And the truth was something I didn’t want to face.

They kept me for two weeks. Call it a re-education period. I had to learn to walk again, for starters. My leg was fractured, not broken, so I was able to put weight on it within a few days. But my toes, one-quarter of the space I’d grown accustomed to balancing on, were gone. It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to walk without your toes. The closest comparison I can draw is this: imagine standing on the ledge of a building with your toes dangling over the edge and a strong headwind kicking up. Can you feel it—the loss of equilibrium and that involuntary urge to rock back on your heels, the constant sense you’ll overbalance and fall face-first into empty space? That’s how every step felt for me. And when they took the bandages off my injured hand and I saw those three sorry-ass fingers…Christ, it reminded me of those shiny metal pincers kids use to pick up stuffed animals at the arcade.

Still, plenty of folks have had it worse than me—Helen Keller would’ve slammed me as a pussy.