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“Yeah, it’s a shitty way to grow up. Sounds like your brothers were lucky to find your family.” He took another drink, while anxiously pushing his hand through his hair. “Anyway, when I turned eighteen the group home I was in at the time gave me my bag full of shit, a few dollars and sent me on my way. I worked shitty jobs for a few years and lived in a dive that was pretty much falling down around me. I had a job at the local high school, cleaning, and maintenance. One day I’m in the cafeteria fixing a light and there was something going on – some guys from army recruitment giving a talk. I wasn’t really listening, but I heard all the bullshit they were saying about making your life mean something. They talked about the military being a family and I had always wanted that. I’d never really been a part of anything. So the next week I enlisted. Navy.”
“You were a marine?”
“Yeah. Served two tours before it all went to shit in Nigeria,” he told me.
“Was Aleks on your team? Kailan mentioned something.”
“Yeah. It was a ten-man team. We were working in Nigeria, mainly just protection detail and peace keeping missions. That day there was four of us, escorting a team of doctors to a camp near the border. Aleks was with me, along with two other guys I went through BUD/s training with. They were my brothers. That part of the recruitment bullshit had been true – I did find family. My team were my brothers.” He took another drink. I could feel the pain pouring from him in waves and I longed to wrap my arms around him in a weak attempt to make it hurt just a fraction less. “We were ambushed. Boko Harem. They wanted the doctors so they could ransom them. Judd and Pope – the other two guys on our team that day - were killed in the first couple of minutes. We were seriously fucking outnumbered. We never stood a chance. A grenade took Aleks and I down. When I woke up we were both strung up by our hands. Both of us had severe burns and Aleks’s left eye was fucked up by shrapnel.”
“You were taken prisoner?” I gasped as it suddenly made sense to me.
“We were there for a few days before Kailan and Harris were dragged in. They were caught after their team was ambushed in a similar way. We were all already messed up from the initial hits, but the weeks we spent in that hell fucked us up a shit load more.”
“Weeks?” I whispered as tears filled my eyes.
“We waited for the rescue, sure it would happen, but no one ever fucking came for us. We were no one. Why would they?” he spat angrily.
“How did you get away?”
“We escaped. Got really fucking lucky,” he replied. “One day, after they’d beaten the shit out of Harris they left him in the room, thinking he was unconscious. He wasn’t. He managed to get to us and release us. The place we were held wasn’t heavily guarded by that point. They presumed we were too fucked up to try and get away. They were fucking wrong.”
I couldn’t hold back any longer. I reached out and put my hand on top of his on the counter. I expected him to flinch away, but he didn’t. He looked into my eyes as he turned his hand and intertwined his fingers with mine, clutching my hand tightly, as if it were grounding him.
“Were you all badly injured?” I asked.
“Yeah. We were fucked up. Aleks lost the sight in that eye. He, Harris, and I all had severe burns, which were badly infected. My left ear was screwed up from the explosion, and I’m deaf in it now. The ear had to be reconstructed. Kailan had taken shrapnel from the IED, so he was in a bad way with infection too. Those terrorist bastards had beaten the shit out of us, broken bones, and tortured us all for weeks. We spent months in rehab, and I think all four of us have more metal than bone in our bodies now.”
“That’s how you all ended up here together.”
“We were a mess, and the only way we could see forward was by sticking together, just like we had in that shit hole, so we did. Now we’re all so fucked up I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to leave each other. How messed up is that? Four grown men who can’t survive alone?” he scoffed. He tried to release my hand, but I wouldn’t let him.
“It’s what happened to you all that’s messed up, Nick. Not the way you all found to survive and get through it. So what if you guys need each other? Trust me, I know from the last few months just how soul destroying it is to try and survive alone. I sucked at it.”
“Well now you know, anyway. That’s the whole story. That’s why we’re all fucked up and hiding out here in the mountains.”
“Did you guys get help? Like counselling? My brother….he was an army ranger. He lost his entire team in an I.E.D explosion and for a long time he was a mess. He started seeing this counsellor because of his new job though, and it helped him a lot.”
“We saw someone while we were rehabbing. Harris and Kailan still go to therapy every week, but Aleks and I were over the whole thing. I’m not big on discussing my feelings and all that bullshit.”
“You just drown them out with scotch, huh?” I pushed with a raise of my eyebrows.
“Everyone needs a way to cope. Kailan is incessantly fucking happy. Harris works out until he can barely move, and Aleks obsessively cleans night and fucking day. I drink. It works for us,” he shrugged before downing another glass of scotch. He moved for the bottle to pour another, but I grabbed his hand to stop him.
“You need to sleep. You look exhausted. You were working all day,” I pointed out.
“I will. A few more glasses and I’ll pass out,” he told me with a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Come and lie with me. I can’t sleep either. I know what’s waiting for me in my nightmares,” I sighed.
“Lie with you?” he repeated, looking to me with raised eyebrows.
“Just sleep. I…I don’t feel safe alone, and you can’t sleep. Maybe together we’ll feel safer?”
“What about what you wanted to tell me?” he asked.
“You won’t remember half of what I tell you right now. You’ve had too much to drink. We’ll do it in the morning. Probably better that the others hear it too, right?” I stood, not giving him the chance to argue further, and pulled him behind me by our still joined hands.
Maybe it was the scotch making me feel brave, or maybe I was just too terrified to go back to that room alone and face the nightmares that awaited me. All I did know was that I didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t want to leave Nick by himself either. Not when he was clearly hurting so damned much.
