Chapter Three
Lucas
I am standing beside Lieutenant Mark. We both moved to check the perimeters of the building where the sound came from. The sky was a mixture of ash, white and blue. Bright and dim as if it did not know what to do.
Next, I crouched beside a silver Lexus car near the front door. Mark pointed at me and made a command for me to go forward into the building and I did.
I heard a gunshot.
And then a pained groan followed by a fall that made the ground shake behind me. Mark was down.
The next gunshots came faster, aimed at me. One minute I was shooting and the next I saw nothing. Not black.
Just Nothing.
Funny how I was standing in nothing. I walked forward, backwards, sideways but there was no end. Nothing stretched.
I kept running determined to meet the end of nothing but there was no end. I kept going until I saw the dead body of Mark. I saw that of Collins, Gabriel, Black and Tom.
I continued forward but I never got to the end. I screamed while I ran. I was sweating profusely and tugging at my shirt. I threw my cap and my shirt. There was no end. "Help, " I screamed
"I am in here"
"There are dead bodies here"
I was tired of running but instead of being at a whole new point, I was at the same place where I started. How did I know? I was in my shirt and cap again. The complete uniform.
The bodies of my friends and brothers, just some distance away. The trench was choking. I needed water. I waited. No water, no light, no food. Smell, thirst and weakness.
And then, I saw light. It was so bright that it forced me to close my eyes. I debated for a second. And then another second before forcing my eyes to adjust before I ran towards it.
Instead of salvation, I wake up in my room. In California, with my curtains drawn. I don't need to look down to see that I am fisting my bedsheets, my blankets had been thrown off and I was sweating profusely despite the air condition.
The nightmares had gotten worse since I got home almost six months ago. When you spend seven hundred and thirty days in darkness and survive on one cup of water and a tiny plate of food a day, your mind and body just don't go back to full functioning. Of course, the Marines Institute Hospital clarified that I was good enough to be on my feet after three months of intensive care but deemed me unfit to go back into service.
Hypocrisy at its best.
I rose to close the blinds and stripped while heading straight to my bathroom. To the list of hundreds of tasks that Daddy dearest wanted me to do today, I added a new task: "Fire my housekeeper and hire a new one."
Under the shower, I scrubbed my body vigorously. Sometimes, I felt stings of pain from scrubbing too hard but on days like this, when I am reminded of how much a person can smell when they don't bathe for two years, I scrub harder. I increased the hotness of the water and only stopped scrubbing when the bottle of body wash was empty. Guess, I would need a new one.
My therapist had said that it was normal to have flashbacks and nightmares but she didn't say if it was normal to use one bottle of body wash at once. "You need to be conscious of your reactions to the nightmare and flashbacks," she had said.
My thoughts paused as I took the short walk from the bathroom to my walk-in closet while drying up with a towel. How can I be conscious of my reactions when these nightmares sneak up on me? It is extremely hard to control my need to get more light everywhere I am.
It shouldn't matter that I always finish one bottle of water at a go, right? I mean, why would anyone be bothered that the sight of blood brings back the memory of men that I've tried to bury in my mind?
I decided on a black suit, knotted my tie and applied perfume. I sprayed on my body, inside my wrist, at the back of my neck and used perfume oil just under my nose and close to my moustache. I could not bear the smell of dead bodies.
One time in nothing, they had removed the bodies of my friends and cleaned up the place but the smell never left. Even before my therapists pointed it out, I knew that the smell was not real, it was just stored inside my head. Three months in the Marine's hospital did not erase the smell.
Six painful months of enduring my father's demands did not eradicate it. I knew nothing could totally remove the smell.
Do not assume that I went around sniffing out the decay of people. I don't. In fact, I don't usually feel the need to rinse myself in scents unless I have a nightmare which I did that morning. I walked out of my room, and down to the kitchen to eat.
Kate, my cook, was slicing an apple when I entered the kitchen. "Morning, Kate," I said in respect.
She raised her head to smile at me before giving a little nod "Good Morning, Luca. How was your night?"
"Night was good. Think you can hire another housekeeper today?"
Kate smiled but didn't answer. At almost fifty-five with an agile body and beautiful face, Kate could pass as my mother. Seeing as my mother died while giving birth to me, Kate could not be my mother.
Also, she was small but she could cook several continental dishes for hundreds courtesy of her years as a chef in military bases. She was also one of the few people who knew about my PTSD. How could she not know when I had an episode barely two weeks after she started working?
Just like today, she was slicing ingredients that fateful morning. Red pepper if I remember correctly. She then mistakenly cut herself. It was a small cut but it drew blood.
And I froze.
Physically I was there, watching her rush to the sink to wash her hands. She called me to pass the kitchen first aid kit but I could not move. It was one of my crazy moments since I got back to this forsaken city.
While she was taking care of herself, I was transported to darkness. In that darkness, I was surrounded by the blood of my dead friends. I remember touching the ground and bringing my wet hand to my nose.
It smelled like blood. Like rot. Like loss. Like Kate's blood.
I remember that I was frozen until Kate nudged me. She made me recount the ordeal of my last two years in the Marines.
Her response is a mantra that she had been repeating since that day "Schedule a meeting with your therapist."
While I hired and fired housekeepers for not cleaning enough or forgetting to turn on all the lights even in my absence or forgetting to draw the blinds, she reiterated the same thing. Her words brought me back from memory lane.