Elvis dragged Bower across the road behind Bosco. It wasn’t that Bower was resisting Elvis, she simply couldn’t keep up with his pace. Her feet felt like lead. Her legs were clumsy, flaying as she ran.
The intersection was covered by rebels on the flat rooftops. Bower could see one of the rebels opposite Jameson lining her and Elvis up with a rocket launcher mounted over his shoulder.
“Won’t feel anything,” she mumbled under her breath. “We won’t feel a thing.”
There was no comfort in that thought, but it was all she could hold to in the moment.
Elvis must have seen the rebel as well as he quickened his pace and threw Bower against the wall on the far side of the intersection. He threw his right arm across her chest, flattening her against the crumbling brickwork just as the RPG struck the corner.
Bower never heard the blast.
The sudden compression of air shook her frame and she found her ears ringing with an eerie high-pitched whine. Clouds of dust enveloped her. She was confused, disoriented. Her ears rang but there was silence at all other frequencies as though someone had pulled the plug on the stereo.
Dirt, dust, rocks and bricks billowed across the street, hurled outward by the explosion. Elvis staggered forward away from what was left of the crumbling wall. She’d felt the blast travel through the air, through the wall, even through him as his arm held her prone against the bricks. Elvis faltered, his boots catching on the debris in the road. His glasses were gone. His helmet had been blown off his head. Blood marred his face and neck.
He staggered forward oblivious to all around him. Bullets kicked up the dust around his feet. Elvis fell to his knees. His back was straight but his head was bowed as though he were kneeling in prayer. It was only then Bower noticed the dismembered, bloodied arm lying some fifteen feet away in the middle of the road. Splatters of blood marred the ground, turning the dust black rather than crimson.
Bower felt a hand on her shoulder.
“We’ve got to go.”
Bosco’s words were muted even though he was shouting, just a vague semblance of sound slowly leaking back into her silent world.
“Nooooo.”
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” Bosco cried above the crackle of battle. “If you die then his death has been in vain.”
Bower looked at Bosco through tear-stained eyes. She was already pulling the belt from her waist. The sound of explosions, bullets flying and men screaming rose in a crescendo, but none of that mattered. She couldn’t leave Elvis.
“He’s not dead,” she cried aloud.
Bower pulled away from Bosco, surprising herself with the vigor of her own movement.
Bower shut out her own fears and changed gears mentally, moving into overdrive. She grabbed Elvis by the shoulder and wrapped her belt around the shattered remains of his upper arm, pulling it tight and stemming the flow of blood. The blast had left his bicep in tatters, with the ruddy white humerus bone protruding to just above where the elbow should have been. By strapping her belt across his deltoid, leading from his shoulder, she hoped to contain the arterial bleeding.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Bosco cried. He was manic, she could see that by the way he was moving. He fired erratically, turning rapidly one way and then the other. He dropped an empty magazine out of his M4 and slid another in seamlessly. “What a way to fucking die. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this is a complete clusterfuck.”
Bower ignored him. She slapped Elvis on the side of his face, staring deep into his eyes as she spoke.
“Elvis, look at me. Come on, I need you to be here, now. Look at me. Remember me, Doctor Elizabeth Bower. You’re in Malawi. You’re in a fire-fight. I need you to focus. I need you to come with me. Do you understand?”
The distant glassy look in his eyes gave way to a lethargic nod. Bower helped the big man to his feet, struggling to support his weight. Two sharp stabs of pain cut into her back and she knew she’d been hit. Her bulletproof vest took the brunt of the impact, but the pain surging through her back felt as though she’d been struck by a baseball bat. Bower staggered, almost dropping Elvis.
“We’re fucked,” Bosco cried. “We are so fucked.”
Looking around, Bower could see Jameson and his team were gone. She remembered how he’d described the different sounds of gunfire back in the village, the violent snap of the M4 compared to the throaty thump of the rebel AK-47s. There was only one M4 firing, Bosco’s.
Bosco had moved behind the cover of a storefront further down the road, moving as though he could will Bower and Elvis to move faster. Elvis was heavy. Although there was nothing wrong with his legs he was leaning heavily upon her, making it hard for her to push on.
To her surprise, the AK-47s stopped shooting, and for a moment she held out hope they’d escaped, but mentally she knew they were barely twenty feet from the intersection. Something else had happened, but what? The lonely crack of the M4 continued, but something was wrong.
Looking up from beneath the weight of Elvis bearing down on her, Bower watched as Bosco was hit first in the leg and then the arm by two precise shots. He staggered forward but couldn’t bring his M4 to bear.
Ahead, a crowd of African rebels ran in toward them yelling and screaming, but they weren’t shooting, they wanted to take them alive. They reached Bosco and began clubbing him with the butt of their AK-47s. They knocked Elvis to the ground as well, but they left Bower standing there covered in his blood.
Bower watched in horror as one of the rebels slipped a black sack over Bosco’s head, pulling a drawstring tight around his throat. She cried out as her hands were pulled behind her back and bound tightly together with rope. Her world went black as coarse sacking was jerked over her head. The pull-rope around her throat restricted her breathing, causing her to panic. Bower was pushed forward and fell awkwardly to the ground, unable to break her fall with her arms.
They want us alive, was all she could think as the butt of a rifle struck her head and she fell unconscious.
Chapter 09: Colosseum
“Wake up,” a gruff voice demanded. The steel cap of a boot kicked at Bower’s arm as she lay on the rough concrete floor.
Bower was groggy. Her eyes struggled to focus. The back of her head throbbed. Her hands were unbound so she reached up, gingerly touching the bloodied, matted hair on her head. A severe bruise and the sunlight streaming in at a low angle told her several hours had passed. Slowly, she sat up, her back pressed against a brick wall.
Bower looked around, expecting to be in a prison cell, but they were on the upper floor of an abandoned factory. The rooftops of the surrounding buildings were either at the same height or one story higher. Broken skylights dotted the ceiling some twenty feet above. A section of the roof had collapsed further along within the vast, desolate factory. Bower could see a gaping hole in the floor directly below the shattered roof. Whether the damage was caused by an artillery shell or a bomb dropped from an airplane, she didn’t know, but reinforced steel bars protruded from the shattered concrete. Whatever caused the damage, it had happened long ago. Rather than a factory, this must have been a warehouse, a staging area, because she couldn’t see any manufacturing equipment.
Elvis was leaning up against the wall beside her. His head hung low, but he was conscious. He must have been in an excruciating amount of pain, but he didn’t show it. He was mumbling under his breath. Fluids oozed from the bloody stump that had once been his arm. His head rolled softly to one side and Bower doubted his state of consciousness was anything that could be described as coherent. The physical and mental shock he had suffered would have killed most men. Beyond him, Bosco sat with his legs sprawled out in front of him. A bandage had been wrapped around one of his legs, stemming the flow of blood from a bullet wound. From the rushed, careless manner in which it was bound she figured he’d tended to his own injuries using his combat trauma kit.