Part Three: The Road to Better Things.

Part Three: The Road to Better Things.

      The two T55-L-712 turbo shafts aboard the American ‘Chinook’ wake me from my sleep. I peer up into the night sky and see the black outline of it against the blue of the night.  It draws closer to my position and rocks back to its rear to slow down. I get hit by the massive downward blast of the aircraft’s rotor-wash and shiver in my warm ghillie. I secure my rifle on my back and wait for the beast of a helicopter to land.

      The Boeing CH-47 utility helicopter is of a twin-rotor configuration that affords better lifting capabilities than similar single rotor helicopters. It has many roles that it fills with relative ease including basic transport, shuttling troops around, and carrying large out-sized cargos like field guns. Like a grand majority of aircraft it comes in about a dozen different configurations each one suited to a different role.

      The beast lands thirty metres in front of me with its inward-folding clamshell doors open and four men step out under the wicked winds caused by the rotors. They are in prototype heavy-infantry armor used by the Athenian Wolf-packs, which are like U.S. Navy SEALs, that are dark-grey and black over light grey and white, each one with a pair of DWR Mk-15WP heavy sub-machine guns. Three more men emerge from the doors with a stretcher and a light machine-gun, and hustle over to my place amongst the hedges.

      Two of these men are in Mk-2U-X medical harnesses that are in their experimental stages of development, but are very effective at defeating multiple standard types of rifle cartridges. The man with the machine-gun turns out to be Miller in Mk-7X powered body-armor, another prototype system, and he sets up in front of me facing out. The two other men lay the stretcher down and open the Velcro and button straps. They have some difficulty moving my three-hundred pound bulk but they manage to secure me to the stretcher with little difficulty after getting me to it. They button the straps around my chest and mid-section to keep me from rolling off and secure my head and neck in a brace even though my neck is perfectly fine.      The two men run around to opposite ends of the stretcher and kneel down. Simultaneously, they reach down with their right hands and tap two buttons that turn on the powered arm and leg-joints and they grab the arms of the stretcher and lift me up. All of this happens without a single word being exchanged by any member of the team. They hustle me over to the helicopter, ducking under the rotor-wash and secure me to a stretcher rack inside.

      Miller and the Wolf-pack return to the belly of the beast and take seats along the sides, Miller securing his weapon to a rack on the wall. Turning my head a fraction of an inch I can see Cherrie on a similar stretcher rack. She is looking over at me with her big green eyes full of fear and bewilderment and just a little bit of hope. I work my arm out of one of my Velcro straps and try reaching across the aisle to her but even then I come up a few foot or more short of her hand. Cherrie struggles against her own strap, but it won’t budge and she begins to cry out at it.

      At my feet, Miller stands and steadies himself against the motion of the helicopter. He makes his way over to us with the slow, unsteady pace of a drunk because of the helicopter rocking from side to side. He reaches us in his own time and un-does Cherrie’s arm which immediately shoots out and seizes my hand. Miller already knows what is about to happen and he opens my right thigh pocket and pulls out my lucky charm, an ivory colored cigarette lighter with small bands of gold around the lid. He puts it in my free hand, nodding his approval at me.

      Miller takes his seat by the clamshell doors and nods off for the journey. I look over at Cherrie and shake my hand free from hers; handing the lighter from my left hand to my right and holding it back out to her. She takes the lighter, flips it open and flicks it on. The small butane flame danced in front of her sparkling green eyes for a few minutes before she put it out but her eyes never lost the shimmer of the fire in all of the years that I would know her. She looked back over at me, puzzlement in her expression.

      “It belonged to someone I knew,” I say in my best Russian,” they died a long time ago. The name is on the bottom of the base.”

      Cherrie flipped the lighter over in minimal movement, the Velcro straps making the movement a little awkward. On the bottom of the lighter was the name Holly, emblazoned in white gold with gold trim and a small, pink heart. The name was beautifully rendered in some spectacular calligraphy that I had never thought possible with metals.

      “Who was she?” asked Cherrie in her soft barely audible voice.

      “Holly was the girl in the fire,” I say,” I was in the hospital after I had a minor hunting accident when I was sixteen and then I worked in the cafeteria for a time. Holly was my nurse when I was hurt. She was nineteen, the cutest little brown boarder-collie I had ever seen; with bright burgundy eyes that were full of life.”

      I trailed off; trying to remember all the great things Holly was for me.

      “What happened to her?” Cherrie asks.

      I begin,” Holly was born from parents who were big in the swinger scene in the sixties… real big. As you can imagine that’s how a lot of the diseases we have today surfaced. She was born in late 68’ with a whole mess of diseases already in her body, including the AIDS virus that killed her.”

      Cherrie looked at me inquisitively.

      “I had to make sure you didn’t get the wrong impression of her,” I say,” Holly abstained from sex her entire life because she thought it wasn’t decent to have pre-marital. I didn’t want you to think that she slept around a lot.”

      She nods her head, understanding and heeding my words.

      “Anyways,” I say,” Holly’s AIDS became active during my last week in the hospital and she and I had sort of hit it off as good friends so I decided that I wasn’t just going to abandon her. I got a temporary job in the cafeteria preparing meals for the patients and some of the staff and then bringing them upstairs. After I had made my rounds delivering the meals I’d come to Holly’s room last and stay there with her until the next meal needed to be made. I only did breakfast and lunch, so I’d go back up to see her after I was off so she had someone to talk to. She didn’t like to be alone.”

      I thought about how Holly never had any visitors because of the stigma that surrounded AIDS. Not many people understood how it was transferred between people. Some of the most open minded Furs I knew stopped coming around me because they thought I could give them the virus after I had spent the day with Holly. The doctors and nurses that had been Holly’s friends just days before now pretended that she didn’t even exist. Her deadbeat parents didn’t even show up to her funeral or visit her once

.      “She didn’t die alone,” I say,” under no circumstances would I let her die alone. I didn’t go home for a few weeks at a time, staying up all night with her in her room on the fourth floor. Thankfully they had the special EKG machines for her that didn’t beep constantly or I would have gone crazy; the sound only turned on when the RFID tag that doctors and nurses wore were swiped over a little pad.”

      I remembered sex with Holly. Someone called me a damned fool, I called them an asshole, they pushed me, and I broke their nose. Holly was special. Holly was different. Holly needed it. I kind of needed it. So it was done. We were young. I didn’t care if I was going to contract the disease doing it; just as long as Holly was happy and felt good about it.

      “I slept with her in her bed a few times,” I continued,” The head nurse, Samantha B. Holtt, and Holly’s doctor, a guy named Farwells, tried to keep me from her. They never could do it, keep me away. I was too damned crafty for them to ever stop, and my heart was- is just too big to stay away. So after them finding me in her room in the mornings even though they had bolted the door a few times, they let me see her unconditionally.”

      “Holly knew she was going to die,” Cherrie says, a statement not a question.

      “Holly knew she was going to die before anyone told her,” I remember this vividly,” She didn’t like just sitting in the hospital bed all day wasting what little life she had left. I took her out one day to a dance club, back when I still danced that is, and she was the happiest girl out there. She couldn’t dance around that much because it hurt, but damn if she didn’t out-dance a whole slough of the kids out on the floor. She had this way of bouncing around with the bass drum, slipping her feet around with the bass track, and moving her arms and hands with the treble section. She sang sometimes too.”

      Holly loved life. She really lived life, spending her time outside; she rode horses, went shooting with her grandfather, fished, hunted, swam, and even skydived. When she was inside she read her books, mostly romance novels and classics, talked with people about things that mattered, economics mostly, which, it turns out, she was an expert on, or she played her acoustic guitar with her friend Janice, who visited her at least twice in the hospital. Holly absolutely loved everything and everyone everywhere. She had the world in her hands, or so it seemed to me, a bitter, self-loathing wolf from Steinherring, Germany.

      Holly gave me reason to start living my own life, if not for myself, than at least for others, and not God. Holly and I shared skepticism regarding people of faith. If everything is some God’s will… God can go fuck himself with a crowbar. If men like Stalin can come into power and kill fifty-four-million people and men like Mao Zedong can come into power and murder millions of his people and be seen as a hero and live for close to eighty years, but a sweet girl like Holly, who wants to help people who are hurt for a living, has to die at nineteen… fuck you God.

      “Holly died on the eve of her twentieth birthday, in my arms, in a hospital bed in Cologne, Germany. I felt her getting cold. I felt the last breath she would ever take expelled against my cheek. I pressed the call button for the nurse on night duty and they came and took her away. The funeral was held a few days later. I was there. Her friends Janice, Rachal, and Sarah were there with a few other people. I brought my old hunting rifle and gave her a salute even though she didn’t serve in any branch of the military. She had courage, bravery. That was enough for me.”

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