One was a response to an e-mail he’d sent to a big drug company that’d run an online ad looking for new hires. Adam had a BS degree, with some chemistry classes. For someone with his education, though, all they could offer was entry-level sales. And that meant desk, pushing paper and talking to people. Fuck.
Delete.
One was from his mother, no subject line.
Delete.
Another:
Dear Adam:
Thanks for your e-mail. I of course remember you. I appreciate your candor. I wasn’t aware that you were having some personal difficulties back then. No worries not getting back to me. We sometimes have openings for someone with your skills. Please contact Helen in our HR department. And thank you, too, for your service to our country.
Adam was handy. When he was ten, he and his father had framed and drywalled a couple of rooms in their and his grandparents’ houses. He had a talent for it. After the service, he’d worked for a couple of contractors. But then he’d started not showing up. Fired. He’d gone to day labor, cash. That was better. For a while.
Delete.
He pulled on his gray slacks, a T-shirt and a plaid short-sleeved shirt, which he left untucked. As he dressed, he looked out the window. A typical March day, overcast and dim. He could feel the chill coming off the grimy glass. The weather cheered him. He hated the sun, hated heat.
For such obvious reasons that it pissed him off. That made him feel predictable, made him a slave to the past in all the worst, clichéd ways. Almost funny.
Then the wasp started. No, two of them.
Two wasps. Little fuckers.
Adam reached between the box springs and mattress and took out a Colt.45 semiautomatic pistol. It was an old military sidearm, though not the one he was issued in Afghanistan. The army made you give your weapons back. Anyway, he’d flown home commercial, so there was that. He’d bought this one on the street. For protection. And just in case.
He pulled the slide back to put a round in the chamber and put the muzzle in his mouth. He tasted metal and oil and smelled gunpowder from the last time he’d fired it, at a range, a year ago. He’d never bothered to clean it.
He turned slightly so that when the bullet exited the back of his skull, if it exited, it would slam into a thick, structural riser of the apartment and stop there, so no one else would be hit.
Five... four... three... two...
Then, aiming the weapon elsewhere, he looked at it, admiring the shape, the feel, the weight. He pushed a button to drop the magazine out the bottom of the grip and pulled the slide to send the bullet that was in the chamber cartwheeling to the bed. He picked the slug up, slipped it back into the mag and reloaded the Colt. Set it on the unsteady table.
Adam walked into the kitchen — that is, the five-by-ten-foot area divided from the rest of the single-room apartment by a half-high wall. He hadn’t changed the ceiling bulb, so he used a flashlight to see if the pizza from last night was untouched by anything with six legs. It was. He felt a thrill.
And to drink...
Oh, shit. Disaster.
When he’d gone to bed last night around eleven he’d left the bottle of cabernet on the counter. His second of the evening. He’d poured only one glass from it, he was proud to say, and he was looking forward to the rest to have with the pizza for breakfast. But Adam’s hearing had been damaged during the war and he must have bumped the bottle, not hearing it fall, as he staggered to bed. Almost all had spilled onto the floor; only a mouthful of the cheap, tangy red wine remained.
Fuck.
He lifted the bottle and with what was left took his morning meds. He was about to fling the bottle across the room but controlled himself. There’d been enough complaints.
Sitting on the bed, he massaged the scar on his calf again.
And, naturally, here it came... What replayed a couple of times a day in his thoughts: He’s hunkered by himself behind a low wall, rising sometimes to look for a target. Others in the platoon behind their walls, or flat on a crumbling driveway or in the sand.
Rising, squeezing off rounds, then low once more.
And when that happens, utter fucking hell. The incoming, thunk, snap, snap... the bullets everywhere. From thirty or forty guns. Hitting the front of the wall, skimming over it, slamming into the old building behind. Stone cascading, fragments zipping. So fast, so fast, snappy and stinging and loud.
They’re scattered throughout hills, the enemy. His platoon is in a vast open space, with only two goatherds’ shacks and three or four stone walls, a few feet high at the most, for cover.
Adam rises and fires some bursts.
“Where’s the fucking air?” somebody shouts.
“En route. Medevac too.”
One of the guys in the patrol’d been hit, bad. He rose at the wrong time. Face and shoulder.
Bad.
More bullets. They zip like steel wasps, they fall like red-hot fragments of meteorites.
Adam is thinking:
If it weren’t the fourth day of the relentless snap, snap, snap...
If he didn’t wake up every morning trying to keep a big breakfast down, just so everybody thinks he’s just one them...
If they could just take a few klicks of land in this god-awful outpost and hold it...
If he hadn’t signed up solely for the sake of his father...
If not for all those, then he might not do the unimaginable thing he’s about to do.
But he has arrived at the end of the line.
Adam has never been shot or hit by shrapnel moving fast enough to break the skin. But today he knows he’s going to be wounded. Because he’s going to do the wounding himself.
He’s not stupid about this. He knows he’ll be suspect because it will be a nonlethal puncture of his flesh exactly in the place where one wishing to shoot himself to escape duty would shoot himself. (The calf is number one.) This is one of the most serious offenses in the military. The crime is malingering, which sounds as tame as loitering but it’s not. If you self-inflict an injury in combat you’ll face ten years of military prison and a dishonorable discharge.
So Adam looks around to make sure no one can see him. His weapon has three modes: single semiautomatic, three-round bursts and fully auto. He clicks his rifle to single — one trigger pull, one bullet — because he doesn’t want his flesh turned to gravy. Adam pulls a large bandage from his MOLLE backpack; he presses this against his calf, so that if CID is in the mood to play forensics, they won’t find gunshot residue on his uniform or skin and will think the slug must’ve come from a distance. He’ll discard the bandage later.
With no further prep, he shoots himself in the leg. The rifle he’s been issued fires a small bullet, a little under a quarter of an inch in diameter. But it moves fast as the dickens, two thousand mph, far faster than the jets that are coming to pound the enemy and drive them, temporarily, to cover.
There’s a sting but no terrible rush of pain. The nerves are traumatized. Still he cries out, “I’m hit!” And he hides the bandage in a pocket.
“Ahhh, ahhhh...”
Adam freezes.
And looks behind him.
There was a gap in time from when he looked to see that he was alone and when he fired his weapon.
And in that briefest of moments, a fellow soldier crawled up behind him.
His best friend in the unit, Todd Wilshire. They joked, they played cards, they shared books and stories about women, snuck illegal hooch.
The bullet slowed somewhat as it passed through Adam’s leg. But it still traveled fast enough to zip into Todd’s throat and neck and tidily open a vein.
His eyes lock on Adam’s as he grips his neck, pointlessly, the red cascading, cascading.