Reckless Creed (12 page)

NEW YORK CITY

C
hristina reluctantly trudged back to her hotel room at the Grand Hyatt. Although she had been taking a steady regimen of Tylenol, protein, water, and vitamin C, her body was struggling to fight off the muscle fatigue. She had developed a cough and her chest already ached. On her way back she had stopped at the little shop and picked up cough medicine and more orange juice. But she was too exhausted to think. And after getting a look at what was on the illicit flash drive, she was now afraid.

She had forgotten to put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on her door as the watchers had instructed, and now she was grateful for her mistake. Housekeeping had changed her sweat-drenched sheets for clean ones and had even replaced the fluffy robe with a fresh one wrapped in a plastic bag.

She guzzled down the complimentary bottle of water as she put away her stash of supplies. Carefully she took off all her clothes, putting them on a nightstand and keeping the layers of cash in between. She'd put them all back on again tomorrow and try to come up with a plan.

She turned on the television, not wanting to be surrounded by silence. All day she'd had the noise of traffic and voices, whistles and honks, music and shouting. In the silence she could hear her heart pounding and tonight a new wheezing sound in her chest. She needed to drown out the sounds of her sick body.

She was still trying to decipher what she had seen on the flash drive. Earlier she had gone into a luxury hotel off Broadway. It was one she had been in before when she wanted the doorman to hail a cab for her. So when she walked in this time, she confidently marched to the elevators like she was a guest.

No one rode with her. No one saw what floor she exited, but just in case, she got off two floors above the business center and took the stairs back down. No one else was in the room.

When she viewed the flash drive, Christina had realized there were way too many documents for her to sort through. She knew she couldn't sit there all afternoon. Eventually other people would be coming in and out of the room. One of them could be a watcher and she wouldn't have any idea. And if her watcher saw her go into this hotel he'd be waiting for her to leave. How much time before he came looking for her?

With quivering fingers, she had jotted down things that drew her attention. The Tylenol had helped relieve her fever, but she still felt the muddled effects. She had tried to concentrate and even commit some of the information to memory.

There were flight manifests, statistical data, and summaries of experiments. And then there was a file called
TEST SUBJECTS
. Curious, she had clicked on it, and when she saw her name on one of the lists a chill washed over her body as if someone had opened the door behind her and let in a cold draft.

Now back in her hotel room at the Grand Hyatt, she busied herself with trying to take care of her body. She took her evening dosages of the medicines she had bought. She ran a hot bath and let the steam soothe her aching muscles. She tried not to focus on the words she had read in the file with her name. Phrases like “expire on their own” or “assisted suicide if necessary.”

She was pulling out a map of the city from the desk drawer when something on television caught her eye. Christina hadn't seen anything like it before. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. A woman was explaining while the camera showed a highway and a field covered with hundreds of dead birds. Christina grabbed for the notepad from the desk and frantically jotted down the woman's name and all the information she could gather.

Then she sat down with fingers still shivering. One of the documents she had looked at on the flash drive described future experiments that would infect flocks of birds. She never imagined that it was already happening.

FLORIDA PANHANDLE

J
ason had seen it before. How a man he looked up to and admired like Ryder Creed could be rendered speechless by death. Not just any death, but suicide. Somehow it made them feel vulnerable, helpless, like they could have caught it and stopped it if only they had been there earlier. If only they had seen it coming. He figured that might be how Ryder was feeling.

Jason saw it a bit differently. He considered suicide a relief, an escape, a promise that you didn't have to put up with feeling vulnerable and helpless and half a man.

He had brought Creed home and taken Colfax back to Segway House. Now he was back in his double-wide trailer, staring at the box from Tony. Earlier he and Colfax had picked it up from Tony's mom. She said it had Jason's name on it and explained that Tony had dropped it off with the instructions that if anything should ever happen to him, this box was to go to Jason. She said he was adamant about it even though he joked that of course nothing was going to happen to him. In tears she told Jason and Colfax that she should have seen it as a sign.

Everybody thought they should have seen it coming.

Jason had pulled up the tape and peeked inside. He recognized the assortment of Tony's belongings. He closed the lid and set the box in the corner.

Did this mean Tony knew he wouldn't be returning?

Colfax seemed convinced it was proof that Tony had killed himself. But why travel all the way to Chicago to do it? Was it just as possible that Tony feared he wouldn't be coming home because of whom he'd gotten involved with?

Jason shared his suspicions with Colfax. He told him about the text message that Tony had sent, and what he'd said about getting himself into “a fine mess.”

“What if someone pushed Tony?” Jason had asked Colfax.

His friend shook his head at the idea and said, “Seems like a lot of trouble to go through. Any of the guys who wanted Tony dead wouldn't have cared about making it look like suicide.”

And maybe Colfax was right. Maybe Jason just didn't want to believe that his longtime friend—his best friend—wouldn't have confided in him one last time. Wouldn't have given him a chance to talk him out of it.

Jason looked around his trailer. This was the first place that felt like home since he came back from Afghanistan. Hannah and Creed had provided it for him along with a job and a dog and most importantly, a purpose. Yet tonight he couldn't stop thinking about Tony. Everyone seemed willing to believe that he had killed himself.

Maybe it was that simple. After all, Jason knew exactly how Tony must have felt. He knew how tempting, how comforting the lure of suicide was.

It was usually after dark—mostly late at night—when the black thoughts came to him. Sometimes they came in a whisper. Sometimes in a roar. He sensed the pressure building now and knew it could grow so intense that it threatened to explode inside his head.

Closing his eyes didn't help. It brought images of body parts and splattered blood. Pools gathered on the top of crusted rock, otherwise so dry and dusty that the blood reminded him of liquid mercury sliding around.

Jason hadn't felt the IED that had taken his lower arm. He had no idea his arm was missing the whole time he lay with his cheek against the hard dusty rock. He watched his sergeant flailing before him, limbs twisting and jerking. Half the man's face was gone. His mouth was an open scream, though Jason couldn't hear it. The blast had replaced all sound with a hurricane wind tunnel.

In Afghanistan, Jason and his fellow soldiers—including Tony—had talked obsessively about home. How much they missed it. They longed for the simplest of thing, like ice-cold beer and the smell of fresh-cut grass . . . or just grass, period.

So much of their conversation began with “When I get back home . . .” It was all they talked about. Dreaming about home helped them sleep despite the sounds of IEDs being tripped in the distance—beyond the wire. Getting back home kept them going. It was the secret treasure they held deep inside them that they would not allow the Taliban to take away. It was a rallying cry, a promise, and their one true inspiration to get up every morning.

The only problem was that none of them realized when they returned home they would be different men. They'd be taking back with them nightmares filled with images they couldn't share with their families. Some would bring back with them brain
fevers, paranoia, tremors, and an aversion to loud noises. Nor did they ever anticipate what they might be going home without—limbs, fingers, an eye, half a soul.

They weren't prepared for the struggles that met them stateside. Many of them hadn't learned a trade. Tanks, assault weapons, how to detect roadside bombs—these were skills no longer needed. But they had become ingrained into the fiber of their being.

How do you shut off your survival instinct? How do you not flinch and dive for cover at the metallic crash behind you, even if it's shopping carts being racked against each other in a supermarket parking lot? And forget about the Fourth of July. Jason's first was spent curled into a ball deep inside his closet's corner at the Segway House, waiting, praying for the explosions to please stop.

Maybe it simply was impossible to go home again after you'd been to hell.

Jason hadn't experienced his black thoughts and gone through the ritual for a while. It'd been long enough ago that he couldn't remember the last time. You'd think that'd be a sign of improvement, some measure that perhaps he wasn't quite so screwed up.

But tonight he was thinking about Tony, and he couldn't believe his best friend had left him behind.

J
ason kept the pill containers in his shaving kit. He used to keep the case hidden, but it wasn't necessary now that he had a place of his own.

All the tablets and capsules could fit into two or three containers, but he left them separated, each in its original bottle. It had become part of the ritual to spill them out, one container at a time. Each had its own separate pile, too. The assortment was his personal collection amassed over the months of hospitalization and rehab.

The doctors had kept prescribing—in fact, they still kept prescribing. First was one painkiller, then another. When Jason mentioned trouble sleeping, they threw in a variety of sleeping pills.

One doctor had asked him about depression. Jason had only shrugged at the time instead of saying,
You think? Son of a bitch, I lost half my arm. Am I depressed? Hell yes.

“Depression” didn't seem like a strong enough term to even scratch the surface of what he was feeling. So another prescription was written.

Post-traumatic stress was diagnosed next, along with an additional med.

He and his buddies laughed about Jason's “collection.” Because unlike his buddies, he refused to take any of the drugs. More times than not, they made him feel fuzzy-headed and nauseated. He couldn't imagine all these pills being a remedy. But he could see them being a helpful alternative if and when he decided he was tired of living.

So Jason stockpiled the pills.

In the beginning their presence comforted him. When that wasn't enough he started the ritual of bringing them out, spilling them into their individual piles as if he were assessing his arsenal.

He had devised a cocktail of which ones to take and in what order to guarantee the most success. He figured out how many sleeping pills to take first before he took the most potent ones to ensure that he'd be too sleepy to change his mind and throw them up. Once when he was still living at Segway House, he was interrupted by someone knocking on his room's door. He had just taken the sleeping pills and had to stash the rest away. By the time the person left, Jason was too sleepy to continue. He ended up sleeping for eighteen hours straight.

He wouldn't make that mistake again.

Jason glanced at the box with Tony's belongings. Scout, his eight-month-old Lab, was stretched out on the floor beside it. Tony had taught the puppy to play fetch. Scout was destined to become an awesome scent detection dog, and the fact that he was treating the cardboard box like it was something he needed to guard and watch over made this harder.

Jason felt like a fist was pressed against his chest, the pressure so
real it was almost difficult to breathe. The puppy could smell his fetching partner. Jason had caught him glancing toward the sounds outside their trailer's door as if he expected Tony to come knocking at any minute now.

All of it only seemed to justify Jason's ritual even more.

“I can't believe you left me behind, buddy.” Jason said it out loud, and Scout cocked his head. Sometimes he called the dog “buddy.” Jason was only adding to his confusion.

Jason began opening the containers and spilling the pills onto this makeshift coffee table. One pile, then two. He had lined up the containers in order, following his self-devised cocktail recipe. This time he'd get it right.

There was rhythm to Jason's ritual. Blue pills, then yellow. He focused on their texture and shape and color. The rest of the world went away so that the only sound in his head was the constant counting. No more explosions. No more waking in the middle of the night and discovering that the nightmare of his arm being blown off was no dream but his new reality.

He was so tuned in to what he was doing that he didn't notice Scout had gotten up. The dog had come over to watch, mesmerized by this new game.

Jason spilled another container onto the tabletop, and this time the round tablets rolled to the edge. Scout went to catch them.

“No, stop it!”

Jason shoved the dog away, surprised by his presence. Then he realized Scout might have gotten some of the pills and his stomach clinched.

“Son of a bitch! Did you get one?”

He grabbed the dog and pulled at his mouth.

“Spit it out, goddammit.”

He was frantic. Panic sent his fingers digging into Scout's cheeks, desperately trying to hold the dog down with only half an arm.

Jason's breath chugged. His heart pounded in his ears. Then he heard the low whine, the soft cry of a frightened animal.

He stopped. Saw the dog's wide eyes. He pulled his fingers out of the dog's mouth, and gently he pulled the frightened dog against his chest.

“I'm so sorry, buddy. Dear God, I'm sorry, Scout. What the hell was I thinking?”

He held him tight, petted him, and apologized over and over again as his eyes darted back across the table. Had the dog swallowed any of them?

He counted the scattered tablets. He knew by heart how many he had of every pill. Two had fallen to the floor, and he added those to the total. Then he counted them again, all the while his mind reeling over how few could kill a puppy this size.

What the hell was he doing? What the hell was he thinking?

He scratched Scout's ear and continued to hold him, telling him what a good boy he was.

Jason counted the pills a third time. He had to be certain. There was no second-guessing.

They were all there. Scout would be okay.