Good. Rex dropped the phone to the floor, not bothering to hang up. He needed both hands to apply pressure and hold the sweatshirt to Ahmed’s gut. He talked to the man, falling into an easy one-sided conversation to fill the silence. Ahmed’s color got worse and worse, and his pulse began to fade. Just when he thought all was about to be lost, he heard a siren approaching. Within less than a minute, a police car screeched to a stop outside the door, followed quickly by an ambulance. Two cops came in through the front door, a man and a woman, and they cleared the store, weapons out. Then they waved in the ambulance personnel.
Rex related the details of what he’d done and Ahmed’s waning stats. The paramedics worked quickly, starting an IV to push fluids.
“I’ve got this, sir,” the second paramedic said, moving in beside Rex. He was holding wound dressings to pack into the injury and slow the flow of blood. Rex backed out of the way, letting the man work, and he sagged back against the cupboard. His vision hazed out, and for a moment he forgot where he was. The past surged back, rolling over him without mercy. He stared at the men trying to save a life and saw other people, female nurses mostly, working over wounded servicemen. His team had been in the thick of the action in Afghanistan, and they’d lost more men than he could even remember.
He blinked, and when he opened his eyes, there was a woman kneeling in front of him. For a moment, the past and present merged, and she kind of looked like Olivia, then other details sharpened. Her dark uniform, and the badge on her chest. The gold-colored nametag said L. Collins.
“Sir, what can you tell me about what happened?”
Rex blinked, glancing around, getting his bearings. “Two kids. One black, one white. They had ski masks on. AR 15 and a handgun. Didn’t see the vehicle.”
The woman nodded at him encouragingly, her eyes kind as she smiled slightly. “What else?”
Rex racked his sluggish brain. His head throbbed, and he breathed through the pain. “I think the shooter’s name was Chew, or something like that.”
“Did you see who shot the owner?”
“Chew, the white kid.”
The woman was jotting things down in a little notebook. Rex looked down at her head. She had pretty, honey blond hair, though it was scraped severely back into a bun at the base of her head.
A wave of pain rolled through him, and he clenched his teeth. The woman was looking at him oddly. “Are you okay?” She glanced at the bandage around his head, and it must have been dripping again. “Medics!”
A third paramedic kneeled down beside them. He grinned at Rex, moving carefully as he unpacked supplies from a bag. “I think I need to look under that bandage, sir.”
Rex snorted. It had been a while since he’d been called sir. “It’s just a graze.”
The medic snipped the scraps of t-shirt away from Rex’s forehead. Almost immediately, he felt blood begin to trickle from the wound.
“Maybe a little more than a graze,” the medic corrected. He set a pad against the wound and began re-wrapping the injury. “You’re going to need stitches for that.”
Rex grimaced, but that made his head hurt more. “Damn it.”
He tried to remember who was in the ED tonight, but it escaped him. It didn’t matter.
The female cop leaned in. “Is there anything else you can remember about what happened? Where were you when you were shot at?”
Rex blinked, feeling sluggish. His eyelids felt heavy. The adrenalin was wearing off and the blood loss kicking in. “I was, uh, over at the drinks area. Saw them come in and I took cover. Watched him in the mirror.” He waved a hand vaguely in the direction. “But the one kid left. He didn’t like what Chew was doing. Then the shooter looked up and saw me watching him. He jumped the counter and came after me. He snapped off a couple of rounds. Got my stomach first. Then my head. I smacked him with the mop,” he gestured vaguely behind him. “Got him in the head, which knocked his mask crooked. I kicked the AR away, and he took off. I could see blond hair, blue eyes, and a tattoo on the right side of his neck.”
The female cop jotted notes on her little pad, but she kept good eye contact, too. He liked looking at her eyes. They were big and calm in the midst of the chaos boiling around them, a pretty blue-gray. She listened to everything he said and didn’t argue or suggest. She just listened completely to his details.
Beside them, the team worked the gurney into the narrow space, and Rex knew he was in the way. He rolled to the side and put a hand down to lift himself up.
“Sir, wait! Let me help you.”
The world spun and Rex was helped to a standing position by the female cop. He towered over her, but damn, she was strong. She guided him out from behind the counter and to the far end, where there was a desk and a computer. This was obviously where Ahmed did his books and ordering and the like. The cop guided him into an office chair and stepped back. The medic that had been working on him tsked as he saw fresh blood on the head wound. “We need to get you rolling. You could have a concussion as well.”
He disappeared, and Rex watched him go. His mind was moving sluggishly, and he wasn’t sure if it was from blood loss or something else. Maybe he needed to go in.
A gurney parked in front of him, and the medic collapsed it into the base, snapping it into position. Rex jumped at the sound, his emotions going into fight or flight again. He must have tensed, because the female cop leaned down to look into his eyes. “You’re okay,” she murmured. Then she gave him a considering look. “What branch were you in?”
“Army,” he said shortly.
She nodded, as if it answered a lot of questions. And maybe it did. Maybe she’d dealt with a lot of guys struggling with PTS. In her line of work, she probably dealt with some serious shit.
Rex didn’t like that his nerves and emotions were going so haywire. He used to have flashbacks all the time, but they’d eventually faded away. He hadn’t had an honest to goodness flashback in about two years. This wasn’t an average night, though.
The first ambulance team was loading Ahmed onto the stretcher. The older man didn’t look good. His olive skin had paled out from blood loss, and he was unconscious. Rex liked the man. He always had a smile at the ready and was very appreciative of being in the country after being accepted as a refugee. “He has a son somewhere,” Rex murmured. “You should let him know.”
The woman nodded. “We already have someone tracking him down.”
A second gurney stopped beside them, and Rex slid his gaze that way. He could feel his anxiety ratchet up, and he knew he didn’t want to lay down there. “I’m fine,” he said, struggling to straighten in the chair.
The cop put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been shot, sir. You have to go to the hospital.”
Rex didn’t mind her touch on him, which was surprising. Most people’s hands on him made him cringe, but he knew that the female cop had his best interests at heart. So, Rex let them move him to the gurney. The problem came when they tried to strap him down.
A gray haze settled over his vision, and he felt like he was looking through smoke. It looked like the day his FOB had been attacked, ten years ago. The Taliban had conducted an organized attack of FOBs all across the country, and Nightshade had been one of the worst. Over forty Marines and Army servicemen were killed, many strapped to gurneys, on their base. His base.