definitely vice versa’d it a time or two in the recent past.
Izzy had to spit out the yak piss before he could do more than nod, but then he remembered that it wasn’t too long ago that Dan had had the unnerving experience of witnessing a Marine who’d been standing a few scant inches away from him get hit by shrapnel from a similar explosion.
The kid had bled out in a matter of minutes, despite Dan’s frantic attempts at first aid.
“I’m fine,” Izzy reassured him. Their SEAL teammates—Jenkins, Tony V., and Lopez—were all fine, too, thank God.
In fact, Lopez was so fine, he was already running toward the smoke and flames. Izzy scrambled to his feet and followed, with Jenk, Tony, and Gillman hot on his heels.
They’d been a mere four blocks away from the former marketplace that was the bomb’s ground zero, and as they approached, the chaos increased.
More than one bus was on its side. Other cars were flipped upside down, one of them burning.
Civilians were everywhere. Crying. Bleeding. Some of them were running away, some not doing much of anything but lying, dazed, where they’d fallen, slapped down by the blast’s giant invisible hand.
The United States Marines, God bless ’em, were already on the scene, a female officer coolly and efficiently taking command of the rescue effort—getting the injured people out of the vehicles, evacuating the surrounding buildings, putting out the fires.
Izzy’s ears were still ringing, but he saw what Lopez was doing with the hot Marine lieutenant’s blessing. He was creating a first-aid station for the injured, right there on the sidewalk.
Sirens were wailing in the distance, emergency vehicles coming from every direction. But the streets were filled not just with people but with rubble and smoke, and holy shit, the front of an entire row of buildings, including his favorite shawarma stand, had been blown to hell. And the crater from the bomb had made the street here beyond the marketplace impassable every way but from the north.
Help was coming, but it wasn’t going to arrive soon enough.
But Lopez was a hospital corpsman—the Navy equivalent of an Army medic—and he was focused on saving the lives that he could. Normally soft-spoken, he was using his outdoor voice to inform any other medical personnel on the scene about his makeshift triage area.
It was then, as Izzy was pointing out Lopez to an ancient woman who was half carrying her bloody and dazed nearly-elderly-himself son, that he noticed Mark Jenkins was looking a little pale. The height-challenged SEAL was holding his right wrist tight against his side, as if he’d jammed it bad when he’d forcefully come into close personal contact with the street.
“Y’okay?” Izzy stepped closer to ask, exactly as Dan, too, came over and inquired, “Jenkins, are you hurt?”
Jenk shook his head in a mix of both yes and no. “Help me find a piece of wood for a splint.”
“Shit,” Izzy said as he helped Danny sift through the rubble of what used to be that restaurant. “Is it broken?”
The owner had survived, thank God, but he was sitting now among the debris, stunned. “Hang on, Mr. Wahidi,” Izzy called to the man. “I’ll be right over to help you.”
Everything was either too big or too splintered or too full of nasty-ass nails.
“A brace,” Jenkins corrected himself as he bent to pick up a piece of what had once been a sign for tea. “I meant a brace. Son of a bitch.”
His wrist was definitely broken.
He turned another more greenish shade of pale, his golly-gee freckles standing out on his nose, because he’d jarred his arm trying to measure it against that piece of wood.
“Maybe you should sit down, bro,” Gillman suggested, which was stupid. No way was Jenkins going to sit down and surrender to a relatively mild injury when there were so many more severely wounded people to assist.
Of course, maybe Dan only meant it, like, Maybe you should sit down for a sec, bro, because it is going to hurt like a screaming bitch when we belt your arm to that splint.
But any mention of giving in to the pain would have pissed Izzy off royally were he in Jenk’s tiny boots, so he took charge. “He’s fine where he is,” he told Dan, told Jenkins, too, because the man looked like he needed encouragement, and adding to Dan, “Don’t bother with your belt.”
Izzy found his spare bungee cords in his vest pocket and pulled out a couple. Those little suckers were