was better than his.
He’d fired too many shots with his M4 rifle without ear protection over in Afghanistan. So he followed the direction of Erin’s attention and, a moment later, made out the familiar thumping drone of the blades of a helicopter.
“That’s funny,” Erin said.
The chopper broke the ridgeline across the river, wobbling dangerously and issuing black smoke from the tail section.
Dalton judged the angle of descent and the length of the meadow. The pilot was aiming for this flat stretch of ground beyond the tents that ringed the clearing. Dalton knew it would be a hard landing.
He grabbed Erin, capturing her hand, and yanked her toward the trees. In the meadow, standing like startled deer amid their colorful tents, her charges watched the approaching disaster in petrified stillness.
“Take cover!” he shouted, still running with his wife. “Get down!”
Erin cried out in horror as the rails below the chopper snapped the treetops above them. Branches rained down from the sky, and Dalton dragged her against him as the roar of the engine seemed to pass directly over her head. She squeezed her eyes shut as her rib cage shuddered with the terrible vibrations of the whirling blades.
She opened her eyes as the chopper tipped in the air, the blades now on their side rotating toward her and churning upright like a window fan gone mad. It was going to hit the ground, blades first, right there before her.
In the meadow, Brian Peters, the skinny seventeen-year-old who was here because his father wanted him away from his computers for a week, was now running for his life. She judged he’d clear the descending blade but feared the fuselage would crush him. Brian’s acne-scarred cheeks puffed as he bolted, lanky and loose limbed. Behind him Merle Levine, the oldest of her group, a square and solidly built woman in her late fifties, lay prone beside her cheery red tent with her arms folded over her head. Merle was a single biology teacher on summer vacation and directly in the path Erin feared the chopper would take as it hit the ground.
Erin squeezed her face between open palms as the propeller caught. Instead of plowing into the earth, the helicopter cartwheeled as the blades sheered and folded under the momentum of the crash.
Erin saw Carol Walton lift her arms and then fall as debris swept her off her feet. The timid woman had reminded Erin of a porcupine, with small close-set eyes and spiky bleached hair tufted with black. Erin’s scream mingled with Carol’s as the woman vanished from sight.
The chopper careened toward the escarpment, some twenty feet above the river just beyond the meadow. The entire craft slowed and then tipped before scraping across the rock with exquisite slowness.
Richard Franklin, a twentysomething craft beer brewer from Oklahoma, was already close to the edge and he stood, watching the chopper as it teetered. He reached out toward the ruined aircraft and Erin realized he could see whoever was aboard. Then he ran as if to catch the two-ton machine in his pale outstretched arms. The chopper fell over the cliff and Richard dropped to his posterior.
Erin scanned the ground for the flash of a pink bathing suit. “Where’s Alice?”
Not a bird chirped or squirrel scuttled. The wind had ceased and all insects stilled. The group rose, as one, staring and bug-eyed. The sudden quiet was deafening. They began to walk in slow zombie-like synchronicity toward the spot where the helicopter had vanished. All except for Dalton.
Dalton released Erin and charged toward the spot where Carol Walton knelt, folded in the middle and clutching her belly like an opera soprano in the final act. Only Erin knew the blood was real.
Alice Afton appeared beside her, having obviously been hiding in the woods.
“Alice, get my pack. There’s a med kit in there,” Erin said.
Alice trotted off and Erin moved on wooden legs toward Carol Walton, knowing from the amount of blood spilling from her wounds that she could not survive.
Dalton cradled Carol in his lap, and her head lay in the crook of his elbow. In different circumstances the hold would seem that of a lover. His short, dark brown hair, longer on top, fell forward over his broad forehead, covering his heavy brows and shielding the green eyes that she knew turned amber near the iris. She could see the nostrils of his broad nose flare as he spoke.
“I got you,” said Dalton. “Don’t you worry.”
“Tell my mom, I love her,” said Carol.
Erin realized then that Carol knew she was dying. But there was none of the wild panic she had expected. Carol stared up at Dalton as if knowing he would guide her to where she needed to go. The confidence he projected, the experience. How many of his fellow marines had he held just like this?
Army never leaves their wounded. Marines never leave their dead.
“Can I do anything?” asked Erin. She couldn’t. Nothing that would keep Carol with them.
“Take her hand,” he said in a voice that was part exasperation, part anguish. She knew he’d lost comrades in war and it bothered him deeply.
Erin did, and warm blood coated her palm.
Alice arrived, panting, and extended the pack.
“Just put it down for now,” said Dalton, his voice calm.
“Why doesn’t it hurt?” asked Carol, lowering her chin as if to look at the slicing belly wound. Something had torn her from one side to the other and the smell of her compromised bowels made Erin gag.
But not Dalton. He lifted Carol’s chin with two fingers and said. “Hey, look at me. Okay?”
Carol blinked up at him. “She’s a lucky woman, your wife. Does she know that?”
Dalton smiled, stroking her head. “Sometimes.”
Carol’s color changed from ashen to blue. She shivered and her eyes went out of focus. Then her breathing changed. She gasped and her body went slack.
Dalton checked the pulse at her throat as Erin’s vision blurred. He shook his head and whispered, “Gone.”
From the lip of the cliff, Brian Peters called. “I can see someone moving down there.”
Dalton slipped out from under Carol’s slack body and rose. He glanced down at Erin, and she pressed her lips together to keep from crying.
“Come on,” he said, and headed toward the rocky outcropping.
He tugged her to her feet and she hesitated, eyes still pinned on the savaged corpse that was Carol Walton just a few minutes ago.
“Erin. We have to see about the crew.” His voice held authority.
How was he so calm? she wondered, but merely nodded her head and allowed him to hurry her along, like an unwilling dog on a leash.
And then, there they were on the lip
