Free Bully by A. J. Kirby

the door… Or peered through the window more like,’ I snapped. I wasn’t getting sucked in by his doctor’s smooth-talk. I’d seen it every week on Casualty when I was growing up. Smarmy, lying, untrustworthy sneaks, they are.
    ‘Well, uh, Gary; they’ve actually been instructed that they are not to set foot in this room,’ he said, quietly. Then, leaning over me so close that I could smell the onion on his breath, he added: ‘Uh, military police instruction.’
    ‘Military police?’ I yelled.
    Montaffian placed a remarkably small hand on my shoulder. I felt the warmth from it. Real human touch for the first time since… Nurse Thomas, back there. ‘Uh, did you really think that you could just show up on a military base from outta nowhere, smash through our security gates and just get away with a stern ticking-off?’
    I shook my head, like a good little boy.
    ‘Well, uh, don’t worry about it anyway, son. Not for now. While you are under my care, they have been instructed that they are not setting foot in this room either. You’re safe here, son.’
    I longed for him to say those words again: you’re safe. In fact, I longed for Montaffian to simply keep talking. Once he got into the flow, his voice had a real soothing quality to them, like the kind of voice that you could listen to on one of them stupid relaxation tapes or something.
    ‘Where’s here though?’ I asked.
    ‘Well, let me see now, uh; how well up are you on the geography of Afghanistan?’
    I wanted to laugh at the irony of it all; here was me that had a fucking near-geography teacher no less talking-talking in my ear all day long about Afghanistan in Sergeant Davis and yet I knew nothing really. I knew where we’d been one day, where we were going the next and that was it. But explaining that to an American –even one of Montaffian’s obvious intelligence - would have been a difficult task. They don’t get irony, do they?
    ‘Fuck all,’ I said.
    ‘I’ll make it simple then. Uh, we’re in an American base close to the eastern edge of the Helmand province. To get here from virtually any direction you would have had to pass through hundreds of miles of unforgiving countryside, assuming that you are who you say you are; a soldier from the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. We’ve looked at the briefings, and from what we can tell, your boys were last stationed way out west… If you’d got your bearing wrong by even a single degree, you would probably have ended up baked by the sun, dehydrated, run out of diesel, or stalked by some animal…’
    ‘Shit,’ I whistled, not sure whether I would have been more pleased to have simply died out there in the desert, sparing me the terrible knowledge of what was to come.
    ‘You’re very lucky, son,’ continued Montaffian. ‘Just remember how lucky you are…’
    It was the second time in a matter of days that I’d been told I was lucky, or charmed. It didn’t feel like it, not after everything I’d been through. In fact, if this was luck, give me anything else. I closed my eyes. The light was becoming too harsh. I needed to go to sleep. But Dr. Montaffian’s hand started to shake my shoulder. There was something else he had to say. And suddenly I knew that it would be bad.
    ‘Son, uh, I hate having to do this to young men like you, but it seems to be my lot in life to have to do it,’ he said. Then he let out this long sigh, and I swear that right in the middle of it, his breath seemed to catch, like there was actual emotion in there somewhere and not just smarmy doctor-emotion. ‘What I was saying earlier about you being lucky. I suppose you could say I did that in order to sweeten the pill. Because the next thing I’m going to have to tell you is that we can’t save your foot. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do.’
    For a moment I didn’t say anything. All I could think of was poor Do-Nowt and his amputated leg. They were going to amputate my foot. They were going to