Ex-Isle, Peter Clines [ebook smartphone .TXT] 📗

close to the skeletal structure of a human foot. You’re just not used to seeing it without skin.”

“I still think it looks like a dinosaur.”

“A big T. rex fan?”

Kennedy shrugged.

The sound of teeth seemed louder, somehow. Danielle’s fingers curled into fists, and she forced them flat against her sides again. “Was there something I could do for you, First Sergeant?”

Cerberus and Gibbs reached the far access road and headed for the southern fence line. Johnson and Truman traded positions and went back to pumping iron. Johnson muttered encouragement while he spotted.

Kennedy put her hands behind the small of her back and turned away from the soldiers. “I was wondering if we needed to talk about what happened this morning?”

“What about it?”

“Is there anything…I should know?”

Danielle looked past the first sergeant, at the crates, at the exercising soldiers, at the garden plots on the far side of the main building. A half dozen people plucked small shapes off plants and tossed them in buckets. Another trio crouched and tugged at weeds. One of the weeders reached back to throw a clump of dirt and grass into a wheelbarrow, and she recognized Javi the loudmouth.

She glanced up at Kennedy, then toward the corner of the building that blocked her view of the fence line. “It was nothing,” she said. “Just a little panic attack. It’s been a while since I was outside in an area this big, you know?”

Kennedy’s mouth pulled to one side, as if words had tried to pass her lips and she’d yanked them back. “It seemed like a little more,” she said after a moment.

“It wasn’t.”

Kennedy let her own gaze drift. Truman puffed out his fifteenth rep and let the barbell clang back onto the holders. He hung his arms at the sides while Johnson added two more Frisbee-sized plates to the bar.

“My second tour in Iraq,” said the first sergeant, “I set off a booby trap. We were clearing a building, I opened a door, and it pulled the pin on a grenade.”

Danielle’s brows went up. She glanced at the first sergeant’s face, then down her body.

Kennedy shook her head. “I was lucky. Not all the Al Qaeda guys over there were tactical masterminds. We all heard the pin drop, realized what it was, and had a three-count to scatter. They hadn’t planned for that. I wasn’t on top of it when it went off, but I still got thrown and caught some shrapnel in the side.” She ran her hand down her body. “Thirteen scars. Two that look like spider bites up to one on my hip about as long as a pen. That was the serious one. Chipped the bone. Took twenty stitches to close it up.”

“You’re lucky,” Danielle said. Her fingers started to curl and she forced them flat again.

Kennedy’s mouth tugged into a tight, brief smile. “I ended up in the hospital for a week. But as soon as I was up and moving around, I realized I couldn’t get near a closed door without the hair going up on the back of my neck. And if I had to open one…” She shook her head. “I’d get cold sweats and my heart would start pounding. I knew it was stupid. I knew nobody’d booby-trapped the bathrooms. But there were so many times I came close to pissing my pants because I couldn’t open the door.”

Truman puffed away under the barbell again.

“Anyway,” said Kennedy, “one of the doctors noticed and they signed me up for ten sessions with a shrink. We just sat in his office and talked for fifty minutes a day. About my dad and why I signed up and movies I liked. All sorts of random crap. And on the second-to-last day we ended up talking about baseball and I said something about three strikes and you’re out. And then he mentioned the old story about not lighting three people on the same match.”

“Snipers,” nodded Danielle. “Ready, aim, fire.”

“Right. Anyway, we’re going on about trouble always coming in threes, and then it hit me. That was the second time I’d walked away from an explosion, a really bad one this time. Part of me was convinced that I’d used up all my luck.”

“Kind of makes sense.”

“Yeah. And realizing that…I mean, the only thing I ever wanted was to be a soldier. It’s a family thing. And now it took me an hour to get out of the cafeteria if someone let the door close. I just saw my whole future collapsing. I figured I was going to get drummed out with PTSD or something.

“I told the shrink and he smiled. Said it was a common thing. Happened to a lot of soldiers after a near-miss. He was impressed I’d made it through two before needing to talk to someone.”

Danielle leaned in a little. “So what did he do?”

Kennedy looked her in the eyes. “Nothing. He could give me some guidelines, some exercises, but it was all up to me. He couldn’t make me better, only I could. And just knowing that…it was just what I needed to hear, the way I needed to hear it.”

The air slipped out of Danielle’s lungs. “And it worked?”

Kennedy shrugged. “I’m still in the Army,” she said, “and I’m not wearing a diaper.”

“Good for you.”

Kennedy looked over at the soldiers on the weight bench. “My point is, you can get past things like this. I don’t know what happened to you—I don’t know how bad it was—but from what I’ve seen I think you’re tough enough to get past just about anything. So if it’ll help you out, if you ever just need to…to talk to someone about it, or about anything…well, I know what it’s like.”

Danielle pursed her lips and nodded twice. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Good.”

Truman and Johnson had traded positions again. Something about his form—about both of their forms—nagged at Danielle, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. She watched Johnson’s arms flex for a moment.

Then she took