Three seconds away.
The bomb exploded maybe eighty yards from us. Not far in front of the advancing men. The shock wave hit our bunker with the force of an off-center strike, a wrecking ball. Not hard enough for damage, but hard enough to shake the walls and kick up dried bat shit off the floor. I couldn’t tell if any of the enemy had been killed. The fire was a roaring hellhole. “Let’s get out of here!” I yelled to Billie. The sound from the jet caught up with its awesome destruction.
We crawled back out the window and ran for the darkest section of the bombing range. I felt the fire and heat penetrate the back of my neck, and smelled the odor of burning flesh and hair. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder. I didn’t want to see if the nightmare could catch me.
EIGHTY-SIX
We slowed to a fast walk, vines slapping our faces, mosquitoes whining in our ears. From the lower position of the moon, I thought it had been at least a half hour since the bombs hit our pursuers. We heard no one following, only the sound of cicadas and frogs in the night. I said, “We’re both going to bleed out. We’ve got to stop. I don’t know if any of those men survived the bombs. But, I doubt we’re being tracked.”
Billie pointed through some trees. “Look, under the moonlight, I can see a spring. If we’re lucky, we might find a plant that grows on the spring’s shoulders. It’s part of what I need to make the medicine to keep us alive.”
“Where’s the other part?”
“In here.” Billie took off his small backpack, rummaged inside it and removed three Ziploc bags. Each one filled with a different shade of what looked like dirt and leaves.
“What’s that?”
“Herbs. Roots. The key is in knowing which one to mix and how much to mix.”
“Mix it with what?”
“Water. Do you still have a water bottle in your bag?”
“It’s almost empty.”
“Okay then, we will sip from the earth.” He started walking toward the reflection of moonlight off the surface of the spring.
“The herbs and stuff… do you always pack that?”
“No.”
“Why’d you do it this time?”
“Well, Sean, sometimes you feel the storm before you see the dark clouds. I felt a storm would overtake us on this little journey through hell.” He turned and walked in the direction of the iridescent water.
Under the clear moonlight, the spring looked alive, its surface waters shimmering in a luminescent greenish-blue boil. From another angle, it resembled a turquoise diamond. Framed with green ferns and old oaks holding hand towels of Spanish moss, the spring drew you in as if it was a watering hole for the soul.
Billie said, “This water flows between the fingers of the Breath-maker. It is a healing spring.”
I sat on a fallen log as Billie hunted through the ferns and water plants. He pulled up two handfuls of a dark green plant. I couldn’t tell if it was a water lily. I didn’t care. He said, “Give me the bottle.”
I reach in the backpack and found the bottle. There was less than a half inch of water in the bottom. Billie poured it out and stepped to the spring. He filled the bottle about two thirds full, holding it up to the moon to see what he was doing. He sat on the log, held the bottle between his knees and squeezed white liquid from the water plants into the mouth of the bottle. Then he carefully poured about a thimble of his mixture from each plastic bag. He replaced the cap on the bottle, shook it and unscrewed the cap. “Drink two mouthfuls of this,” he said, handing the bottle to me.
“What’s it supposed to do?”
“It will help stop the fever, the infection.”
“I don’t have a fever.”
“Trust me here, old friend. Yes, you do. The fire grows in you. You just don’t know how hot it will get.”
He removed the blood soaked bandages from my shoulder. “Drink, Sean, or you will die.”
“Joe, what’s—”
“Drink it! If you don’t, you’ll be dead by morning.”
He walked around the spring, a silhouette against water that looked like it was lit from somewhere deep inside its source. I drank. The mixture tasted like tar, dirt and pine resin. Two mouthfuls down. Fighting back vomit, I set the bottle on the log.
Billie returned with a dark mud cupped in his hands. He said nothing as he smoothed it over and into my open wound. I could feel the drink burning in my gut. My stomach began to constrict, twist, and my head felt light. Billie turned up the bottle and drank the remaining liquid. He walked back to the spring and applied mud to his wound. Then he built a small fire, the pine and oak popping. He placed dried plants on the fire, inhaled smoke and fanned it toward my face. I watched the yellow flames dancing in front of the lavender spring, which caught and held moonlight in its secret rainbow waters.
I felt numb. Not just my arms or hands, my entire body was ectoplasm. Whatever Billie had given me was working, or I was dying. I didn’t care. I knew he’d given me something more powerful than the morphine I’d been administered in the first Gulf War after catching shrapnel in the gut. I saw him take a burning stick from the fire and hold it to my wound, bloody tissue cauterizing in a hiss and puff of white smoke. I smelled my burning, charred flesh, my conscious mind seeming to rise from my body for a moment. Then my mind switched to the men who’d been chasing us, thought I saw them vaporize under the white heat of explosions.
I heard the rotors from the medic choppers coming over the hills. The boom of rocket launchers and small arms fire, fading echoes in the burnt valleys layered with dark stratums of misery. I looked over at Billie. He sat on his haunches, close to the fire, eyes closed, sweat dripping from his face, smoke circling his head in halos.
I thought I heard him chant. Thought I heard an owl join in, too. A chorus of hoots, chants and groans. Maybe I was making the groans. I wasn’t sure of anything, except the pain was gone. I looked across the fire to the spring. I saw a butterfly emerge from the water, its wet wings glistening, inky-blue bordered with liquid blue like a reflection of a cobalt sky off a still pond. Then two elfish men darted from a dark hole at the base of an old oak. They smiled and held their tiny fists tight as they cheered the butterfly rising from the water. Its face was that of a teenage girl. I recognized the face. She was the same girl found buried in the shallow grave, Nicole Davenport, now smiling, her face flush and pink with color, her eyes smiling and catching the moonlight.
I tried to shake my head, shake out the illusions, but I couldn’t move any parts of my body. I felt paralyzed. The butterfly girl flapped her wings, the spray of water cool across my face and forehead. The diminutive men danced for a moment, and then one picked up a burning candle from the water, his hands wrapped around a black wrought iron handle. He approached me, holding the candle close to his cherub face, the light from it a radiant spun gold, rising to fill his lime-green eyes. He grinned and backed away, both of the little men retreating behind the ferns.
From the dark edges of the forest, between the spring and the river, a man rode in on horseback. He was a Spaniard, a conquistador, whose brass armor reflected the moonlight. His eyes were prisms, catching the glow from the spring. He dismounted and stepped to the bubbling water. He dropped to his knees, leaned over and looked at his reflection off the translucent surface. Then he lowered his head and drank from the spring in long, deep sips. He lifted his face, gray beard wet and dripping, the water now radiant pearls falling off his whiskers.
He turned and stared at me. I tried to raise my hand in a slight gesture. Nothing moved. My mind and body were separated. I looked back at the man. His dark eyes were black marbles pushed into a wax figure, a form whose face now melted, cooled and hardened into a youthful mold. He was no longer a Spanish soldier. No longer part of some ancient ghost armada. The face was younger, much younger. It was the face of Molly’s boyfriend Mark, a bullet hole similar to an inverted red flower in the center of his forehead.