Page 94 of Havoc

She already paid for these people.

I ain't got the right to spend it.

I put the iron down on the concrete beside his head.

"She bought you," I say.

Then I get off him.

Warden's got a fist in the back of my shirt haulin' me up and Deacon's got Lennox by the arm and we're movin', and there's still noise at the front of the building.

Comin' back across that floor, I go past a man on the ground between two columns.

He's on his side and he's alive and he's got both hands up around his head and he's sayin' somethin' over and over.

Mercy is kneeling down beside him.

Just kneeling, on one knee, with his forearm across his thigh, close, the way a man kneels down to talk to a child in a store.

He's sayin' somethin' back. Low. I can't hear one word of it.

Warden looks and turns his head.

Deacon looks and turns his head, and he moves so he's between Lennox and that column, and he does it in a way she doesn't notice.

I look.

And I keep walking, and I do not turn around, and I could not tell you to this day what Mercy did in that building because I did not look back and neither did any other man in there.

The yard's full of white sunlight after all that fluorescent and it takes my eyes about four seconds.

Raider's comin' around the corner of the building fast.

He's got his hand out. Not up. Out, flat, like a man tellin' traffic to stop, and he is comin' straight at me and he's already sayin' my name, and I have known that man fifteen years and I have never once heard his voice do the thing it is doing.

"Havoc. Havoc, don't⁠—"

There's a gap in the fence where the panel's down.

There's a boy layin' in it.

He's on his back with one arm out and one knee up and his helmet's about six feet away in the weeds.

The bandage on his left forearm is the whitest thing in that whole lot.

He's been gone a while. That's the thing I can't — he's been gone since about nine seconds into it, since the very front of it, since before I ever got through that dock door, and I heard it happen. I heard it and I put my head down and I ran the other way.

His face ain't got anything on it.

That's what nobody tells you either. There's no expression. There ain't a last thought sittin' there for anybody to read and there ain't one single thing his face is trying to say to me. He's twenty-one years old and he's layin' in weeds in a hurricane fence gap in Baton Rouge, and he doesn't look scared and he doesn't look brave and he doesn't look like anything at all.

I get down in it.

Somebody's sayin' my name. Might be Warden.

He carried a sixty-one-year-old woman out of a fire eighteen hours ago and he showed the burn to every single person in a hospital waiting room and he told a nurse he was with me, and he stood in a parking lot this afternoon with a helmet in both hands and said the one true thing nobody else in that lot had the guts to say out loud.

You ain't a patch this week.