If she ran, it proved he was right, that nobody could handle him, that he was too broken for this world. “Why are you still here?” Graves whispered his voice, trembling with exhaustion. Because your leg is rotting, Colonel. And if we don’t clean it now, you’re going to lose it. And a man like you doesn’t deserve to lose a leg in a hospital bed.
You deserve to walk out of here. She approached him again. This time he didn’t yell. He just watched her. She moved with a strange, heavy confidence. She didn’t walk like a nurse. She walked with a low center of gravity, planting her feet firmly. “I’m going to cut the bandage,” she said. “It’s going to hurt. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you a little pinch. It’s going to feel like fire.
” “I know what fire feels like.” Graves gritted out. Sarah reached for the saline bottle. She began to soak the dried, crusty gores that had adhered to the wound. Graves gripped the side rails of the bed, his knuckles turning white. He stared at the ceiling, refusing to make a sound. Sarah worked quickly. Her hands were steady.
She didn’t flinch at the smell of the infection, which was pungent and sweet in a sickening way. She peeled back the layers. “Talk to me,” Sarah said suddenly. “What?” Graves gasped through gritted teeth. Distract yourself. Talk to me. You mentioned Private Miller. Tell me about him. Graves shut his eyes tight. Miller? He was my RTO radio operator.
Good kid. We were in We were in the Arandab River Valley 2010, not 2009. My mistake, Sarah said, peeling the final layer. We took fire from a treeine. Miller took a round to the neck. I tried. I tried to pack it, but the blood, it was too slippery. A single tear leaked out of the colonel’s eye, tracking through the deep lines of his face. I couldn’t get a grip.
He bled out on me. He was 19. He had a girlfriend named Becky back in Columbus. Sarah paused. Her hands hovered over the open wound. For a second, her professional mask slipped. A look of profound sorrow crossed her face, but she shook it off instantly. He didn’t die because of you, Colonel, she said softly.
You don’t know that, he spat. I do. A neck wound like that usually the corroted. You have 3 minutes. If the chopper isn’t there in 3 minutes, God himself couldn’t save him. She grabbed the forceps. “Okay, deep breath. I have to debride the dead tissue.” Graves howled. It was a guttural low sound. He thrashed his arm out, blindly, grabbing onto Sarah’s forearm to brace himself against the agony.
His grip was iron tight, his fingernails digging into her skin. Sarah didn’t pull away. She let him crush her arm while she worked on his leg with her other hand. She cleaned the wound, flushed it, and packed it with fresh algenate. “Almost done. Almost done, Silus. Breathe.” She called him by his first name. He didn’t correct her.
Finally, she taped the new dressing down. “It’s over. You did good.” Graves fell back against the pillows, gasping for air. He released his grip on her arm. “Sorry,” he wheezed. “I I grabbed you hard.” “It’s okay,” Sarah said. She stood up and began to tidy the tray. She reached for the blood pressure cuff to check his vitals.
As she reached across him, her scrub top shifted. The sleeve of her undershirt, which had been pushed up during the struggle, rode high on her bicep. Graves’s eyes, groggy with pain, drifted to her arm. He saw the red marks where his fingers had dug in. But then he looked lower to the inside of her forearm. There was a tattoo there.
It was old, the black ink slightly faded to blue, sitting stark against her pale skin. It wasn’t a butterfly. It wasn’t a flower. It was a skull. a skull wearing a shredded helmet superimposed over a pair of crossed ka bar knives and underneath in jagged gothic script was a set of numbers and a motto 27ths war pigs.
Valkyrie graves stopped breathing. The room seemed to sworn he knew that logo. He didn’t just know it. He had designed it 20 years ago for the second battalion, seventh marines, the war pigs. The unit he commanded during the bloodiest push into the city. But it was the word underneath that stopped his heart.
Valkyrie. Nurse. Graves whispered his voice trembling in a way the pain hadn’t caused. Sarah was busy writing on the whiteboard. Yes, Colonel. Where? Where did you get that ink? Sarah froze. Her back was to him. She stood perfectly still for a count of three. She slowly pulled her sleeve down, covering the skull.
She turned around. Her eyes were no longer just tired. They were fierce. “I got it in a shop in San Diego,” she said dismissively, before I realized tattoos were a mistake. You’re a liar, Graves rasped. He tried to sit up. That’s a unit tattoo. 27ths, my unit. And Valkyrie, that was the call sign for the forward surgical team attached to us in sector 4.
The ones who came in when the medevacs couldn’t land. He looked at her face. Really looked at her. He stripped away the wrinkles of the last 10 years, the lack of sleep, the hospital lighting. He tried to picture her covered in dust, wearing a helmet, screaming over the sound of rotor blades. You’re not Sarah, he whispered. I mean, you’re not just Sarah.
Sarah sighed. It was a sound of defeat. She walked to the door and clicked the lock shut. You need to rest, Colonel. Tell me, Graves shouted, finding his command voice. Who are you? She walked back to the bed. She rolled up her sleeve, exposing the ink again. She pointed to a small jagged scar running through the skull’s eye socket.
You don’t remember me, sir, and I didn’t expect you to. I was wearing a balaclava and goggles most of the time, and you were usually unconscious. She leaned in close. I’m not the one who held Miller’s intestines, Colonel. I’m the one who reached in and clamped your femoral artery when you took that shrapnel in Mar. I’m the one who sat on your chest in the back of the Humvee and punched you in the face to keep you awake because you were trying to die on me.
Graves stared at her, his mouth slightly open. Doc, he whispered. Doc Mitchell. They called me Stitch back then, she said with a sad smile. But yes, I was the Navy corsman attached to your detail for Operation Phantom Fury. The realization hit Graves like a physical blow, the woman he had just verbally abused, the woman he had thrown a picture at the woman he had dismissed as a weak civilian.
She was Stitch, the legendary coreman who had become a myth in his battalion. The one who had supposedly dragged three Marines out of a burning APC. He had spent 10 years thinking she was a ghost. I thought you died, Graves said. The convoy hit the IED on Route Michigan. They told me everyone in the lead vehicle was KIA.
Everyone else was, Sarah said, her voice dropping to a whisper. I was the only one who crawled out. The silence in room 402 was heavier than the lead vests used in X-ray. It was the silence of a graveyard. Colonel Silas Graves, a man who had stared down warlords and politicians alike, looked at the nurse standing by his bed and felt a crushing wave of shame. He had thrown water at her.
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