Page 52 of Break For Me
"Three."
I fire the flare.
The bright cartridge crosses the room in a streak of red phosphorus. It hits the propane cloud at knee height.
The world becomes white.
The explosion is a physical wall. A wave of intense heat and crushing pressure that picks me up and throws me backward.The back wall of the shack disintegrates. Plywood, nails, insulation—all of it becomes shrapnel. The corrugated metal roof peels back like the lid on a sardine can.
The sound isn't a boom; it’s a sudden compression. A vacuum collapse. A single percussive event that empties my lungs and fills my skull with a ringing so pure it sounds like a tuning fork struck inside my brain.
I’m in the air. Then I’m not.
The steep slope catches me. Snow and frozen earth and the sickening lurch of gravity pulling me downhill. I tumble. My shoulder hits a rock. My hip catches on a thick root. The snow fills my mouth, my eyes, my ears. I roll, accelerate, and slam sideways into a thick tree trunk that stops my descent with a sharp crack that I feel in my ribs.
I lie in the snow.
The sky is grey above the bare branches. The ringing in my ears is so loud it has become the only sound in the world.
Smoke rolls uphill—black, chemical smoke, carrying the stink of burning propane and splintered wood. The shack is gone. Where it stood, a column of angry orange fire climbs into the grey sky.
I try to move. My left arm doesn't respond. My right hand pushes against the snow and my body rotates.
I see the slope below me. Churned snow. Broken branches. The chaotic debris field of an explosion that scattered everything within twenty feet of the blast.
I don't see Adrian. I don't see Killian.
I try to stand. My legs fold under me. The concussion has scrambled my vestibular system—the ground tilts, the trees double, my balance is a distant memory. I push myself up to my knees.
A heavy boot lands on my chest.
The force drives me flat onto my back. The boot is black, military-grade, the tread packed with snow. The man attached to it is standing over me—compact, blond, wearing a tactical vest and a balaclava rolled up to his forehead.
His rifle is slung across his back. The pistol in his hand is aimed directly at my face. A Stechkin. Russian.
A second man appears behind him. Taller. Heavier. His rifle is up, scanning the slope below for additional targets.
The blond presses the boot harder into my sternum. My ribs scream. My vision narrows to the muzzle of the Stechkin, which fills my world—a black circle, a period at the end of a sentence I’ve been writing my entire life.
"??? ???????"
Where is the doctor?
The question tells me two things. Adrian is alive. And they don't have him.
The relief is so vast and so immediate that it does something to my face—a twitch, a shift, something the blond reads as defiance. He drives the boot down hard. My vision flashes white. A rib gives—I feel the snap, a discrete structural failure in my left lateral chest wall. The pain is a cold, bright blade that slides between my lungs.
"?de doktor?" he shouts. Louder this time.
I look up at the grey sky. The smoke from the shack drifts across it in a black column. My mouth is full of blood. My rib is broken. My hand is ruined. My body is a catalogue of damage so comprehensive that one more entry barely registers.
I don't know where Adrian is. Even if I did, the words wouldn't leave my mouth.
Because somewhere in the last two weeks—somewhere between the loading dock in Red Hook and the plywood wall of a hunting shack where I put myself inside a man who fixed me with his hands—the arrangement changed.
I’m not the dog anymore. I’m not the hammer. I’m not the blunt instrument my brother points at whatever needs biting.
I’m the man who takes the boot so the doctor can run.
