“You took advantage of my delicate state.”
“Damn right I did.” I did a quick check of a stomach wound and then covered it again before standing aside for the patient to be taken.
After all the men were unloaded, I grabbed my bag and limped beside Mac across the dusty, pit-riddled runway.
“I don’t know how you do all that,” he said, nodding toward the makeshift hospital the patients were being loaded into. “Some of those wounds make my stomach turn.”
“Not all of us can be as delicate as you, Mac.”
He elbowed me and I smacked him on the arm.
“Lover’s quarrel?” a female voice asked.
A pretty brunette leaned against the hood of a truck, dressed in a pair of military issued trousers and a button-down top with the top few buttons undone. And not because of the heat. I glanced at Mac who was also taking in the scenery.
“Hey, Char,” he said.
Charlene Newcomb was one of the women I bunked with on the little island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, and one of my best friends. There were four of us who hung out regularly together, sharing two sets of bunk beds at one end of a cramped, dusty, canvas barracks named Burlap Flats, where the air inside was so thick and stagnant, we often worried we’d suffocate in our sleep.
Charlene hailed from San Diego. Tilly from Savannah. And Paulette and I were from the East Coast. Manhattan for me, Boston for her. The four of us couldn’t be more different if we’d been born in different countries, in different eras, and in separate universes. Yet somehow we got on like we’d known each other for years, rather than only months.
“You playing cards tonight with us, Kate?” Char asked, her gaze straying to Mac, whose shirt was damp and sticking to his chest, before taking in the state of me. “Shoot. What happened to your knee?”
“Mac’s flying.”
“Hey!” he said, his face turning red as he looked to Char.
I shrugged. “It got a little precarious up there. Mac kept us safe though.” I patted his arm. “No cards for me tonight. I’m tired.”
“Mac?” she said, taking in a long breath, the action pushing her breasts forward.
“I could probably be persuaded,” he said.
I shifted my bag on my shoulder, trying not to smirk. The two of them were ridiculously obvious. They’d been playing a game of cat-and-mouse for weeks now, but so far Char had held off on going all the way.
“I like to make a guy work a little to get all this,” she’d said one day, giving her ample breasts a squeeze and causing the rest of us to erupt in laughter.
“You two have fun,” I said, giving them a wave as I hobbled off in the direction of the barracks.
Exhaustion set in as I walked, the heat weighing on me, pressing down around me, making my body feel heavy as sweat trickled down my spine. Spring on Espiritu Santo had been almost unbearable. Summer was indescribable.
“Hiya, Kate,” a soldier called out as I passed by the make-shift hospital.
I glanced at the familiar face and clean medical scrubs. At this time of day, the only reason he was wearing clean clothes was because the last ones had been bled on. A lot.
“Hi, Chuck.”
“You look like you could use a little tending to yourself for once.” He pointed to my leg and I stopped, realizing my wound probably did need to be cleaned and I had nothing to do the job in our barracks.
I nodded, hitched my bag higher on my shoulder, and limped toward him.
“How was the flight in?” he asked as I followed him inside, took a seat, and carefully pulled up my ripped pant leg to reveal my skinned knee. I was more worried about the pants than the injury. We only had so much room for clothing, which meant I didn’t have much in the way of backup options. I’d have to sew these up as best I could, or find a patch to cover the hole. Most of the patches around these parts were for patching people though, not clothing.
“It wasn’t bad,” I said, sucking in a breath as he cleaned some grit from the delicate pink skin that was seeping tiny pinpricks of blood.
Good flight. Bad flight. Not bad. Coulda been better. It was how we asked without asking, answered without answering. It was an unwritten rule among those of us who tended to the wounded. We did the job when on the job, but we left it behind us as soon as we left the tent or stepped off the plane. Doing it any other way could make one unfit for the job, and no one wanted to be the one who quit on the wounded.
“Well, the good news is,” Chuck said, taping a small square piece of gauze onto my knee, “I think you’re gonna make it.”
