Free Weapons of Mass Destruction by Margaret Vandenburg Page B

said.
    “I’m coming with you,” Sinclair said.
    “There’s no need,” Wolf said. “A medevac team is on its way.”
    “It’s Evans.”
    Wolf started to say something, then thought better of it. He stared at the building rising out of the rubble.
    “You’re right,” Wolf finally said. “It’s Evans.”
    Unstable wreckage kept collapsing under them, impeding their progress back to the bunker. The stretcher bearers were ill equipped to traverse the wasteland. They borrowed combat gloves to avoid cutting their hands on shattered glass. Eventually Sinclair and Wolf offered to carry the stretcher. At least their knee guards and body armor broke their falls. When they finally crossed the threshold of Evans’s stronghold, Trapp asked the medics to wait while he and Sinclair retrieved the body. This request deviated from standard operating procedure, but they complied without question. Surely Evans deserved a moment alone with his buddies before beginning his long lonely journey back home.
    Evans was right where they had left him, miraculously preserved. Gently, with deference to his undiminished right to privacy, Trapp started going through his personal effects. Official regulations assigned this task to medevac units, who were charged with bagging up belongings for bereaved families. But platoons had their own unofficial rites. Trapp knew exactly what Evans would have wanted his buddies to have and to hold. They had fought together for almost a year. They shared knowledge of what was truly important. He took a good luck charm from Evans’s breast pocket, a fossil he had found in the al-Hajarah Desert. More than anything else, this talisman belonged to the platoon.
    “If this bug can survive fifty million years,” Evans always said, “we can survive this goddamn war.”
    Trapp turned to show Sinclair the fossil, to acknowledge their friend’s thwarted will to live. He wasn’t there. Still shaken from the squad’s brush with death, Trapp thought Sinclair had been snatched from him by unseen enemies. The idea that insurgents could have survived the bombardment was irrational, and he knew it. Twelve straight hours of combat had taken its toll on his nerves. He started reciting the serenity prayer, a vestige of his brief encounter with twelve-step programs before the armed forces sobered him up. By the time he got to the part about accepting the things he couldn’t change, he caught sight of Sinclair. His head was barely peeking out of the stairwell, staring wild-eyed at Evans.
    Sinclair had witnessed untold numbers of enemy corpses. He had gathered up the severed limbs of fellow marines, piecing them back together in body bags. Nothing could have prepared him for the sight of Evans’s fatal wound. All it took was a single bullet to the head. Another casualty on another continent besieged Sinclair, a flashback to something he’d never witnessed in the first place. The shot must have echoed through the forest, though no one was there to hear it. A single bullet through the roof of the mouth, angled just right. To do it to yourself, you have to pull the trigger with your toe. Jesus fucking Christ.
    “Sinclair,” Trapp said. “What’s wrong, man?”
    They heard the medevac unit on the stairs, ascending with the stretcher. At least Trapp did. Sinclair seemed deaf, dumb, everything but blind. He was obviously seeing far more than met the eye. Trapp intercepted the medics, drawing them to one side.
    “We’re going to need another minute here, boys,” Trapp said.
    “What’s up?”
    “Postmortem debriefing, if you know what I mean.”
    “Five more minutes is the best we can do.”
    Sinclair was usually a rock, a dogged fighter with just enough heart to be truly brave. The tougher the soldier, the harder he falls when he cracks up. The platoon would be swinging their battle axes again within the hour. They couldn’t afford to leave a part of Sinclair frozen on that rooftop, staring at something no one else