A terrible hot shower of blood and gobbets spat against my face, and in his bulging amber eyes I saw what looked like disbelief.
106.
I was able to hold out until shortly after the casket came out of the ground.
It took five members of the FBI’s SWAT team two hours of digging by hand, using shovels borrowed from the Pine Ridge police. The casket was almost ten feet down and the earth was sodden and heavy from the recent deluge. They hoisted it out on slings of black nylon webbing, two men on one side, three on the other. It lifted right up. The casket didn’t weigh more than a few hundred pounds.
It was dented in several places and had a half-inch yellow hose coming out of one end. The hose had been trenched into the ground for two hundred feet or so and was connected to the air compressor on the back porch. A much thicker, rigid PVC tube came out of the other end, the pipe sticking out of the ground.
The team didn’t believe my assurances that the casket wasn’t booby-trapped. I didn’t blame them, of course. They hadn’t looked into the monster’s eyes.
If Zhukov had placed a booby trap in the casket, he would not have denied himself the opportunity to taunt me with it.
But he hadn’t. There was none.
Two of their bomb techs inspected the compressor hose and the vent pipe and the exterior of the casket, looking for triggering mechanisms.
Somehow they were able to ignore all the thumping and pounding and muffled screams from within. I wasn’t.
Diana had her arm around me. She was supporting me, and I mean that in a physical sense. My legs had turned to rubber. Everything before my eyes was moving in and out of focus, though I didn’t understand why. The blood loss was minimal. True, the pain in my chest had grown steadily worse. The blunt-force trauma had been bad, but I’d thought the worst had passed.
I was wrong. The escalating pain should have been the first sign. But I was preoccupied with getting Alexa out of her coffin.
“Nico,” she said, “you weren’t wearing trauma plates.”
“Hey, I was lucky I had a plain old vest with me,” I said between sharp gasps. “Trauma plates aren’t exactly standard equipment.” Breathing was getting more difficult. I couldn’t fill my lungs. That should have been the second sign.
“You should have waited for us.”
I looked at her, tried to smile.
“Okay,” she conceded, nuzzling me on the neck. “I’m glad you didn’t wait. But do you always have to be the first one on the battlefield and the last one to leave?”
“No. I’ll leave as soon as I see her.”
The hollow thumps, the remote anguished cries that could have been half a mile away. I couldn’t stand listening to it. Yet the bomb techs continued their methodical inspection.
“There are no explosive devices,” I said. I staggered across the marshy field. “He would have boasted about it.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get her out of there.”
“You don’t know how.”
But I did. I knew something about caskets. The Department of Defense provided standard-issue metal or wooden caskets to the families of soldiers killed in the line of duty, if they were wanted. A few times I’d had the solemn and terrible duty of accompanying the body of a friend on the plane home.
When I got to Alexa’s casket I shoved aside one of the guys in their bulky blast-resistant space suits. He protested, and the other one tried to block me. Someone yelled, “Back away!”
The other guys on the SWAT team stayed back as per standard procedure. I shouted to them, “One of you must have a hex key set, right?”
Someone threw me a folding tool with a bunch of Allen keys on it. I found the right one and inserted it in the hole at the foot of the casket and turned the crank counterclockwise four or five turns to unlock the lid.
The rubber gasket had been mashed in places where the steel casket had begun to cave in under ten feet of dirt, but I managed to pry it up.
A terrible odor escaped, like from an open sewer.
Alexa had been lying in her own excrement, or just a few inches above it. She stared up, but not at me. Her hair was matted, her face chalk white, her eyes sunken in deep pits.
She was wearing blue medical scrubs and was covered in vomit. Her hands were curled in loose fists that kept jerking outward. She couldn’t stop pounding the sides of her coffin. Her bare feet twitched.
She didn’t understand she was free.
I knelt over and kissed her forehead and said, “Hey.”
Her eyes searched the sky. She didn’t see me. Then she did. She looked directly at me, uncomprehendingly.
I smiled at her and she started to cry.
That was about the last thing I remembered for a long while.
107.
I hate hospitals.
Unfortunately I had to spend a few days at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where my FBI friends were kind enough to helicopter me from New Hampshire. The ER doc told me I’d developed a tension pneumothorax as a result of the blunt-force trauma. That my entire chest cavity had filled up with air, my lungs had collapsed, and I’d gone into respiratory distress. That it was a life-threatening condition and if one of the SWAT guys hadn’t done what he did, I’d surely be dead.
I asked him what had been done.
“I don’t think you want to know,” he said.
“Try me.”
“Someone with medic training stuck a large-bore needle in your chest to let the air out,” he said delicately.
“You mean like a Cook kit?”
He looked surprised.
“In the army we called that a needle thoracostomy. Every field medic carries a Cook pneumothorax kit in their aid bag.”
He looked relieved.
He ordered up a lot of X-rays and put a chest tube in me, had the wound in my calf cleaned out and bandaged, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me to another ward to recover. After three days they let me go.
Diana was there to give me a ride home.
EVEN THOUGH I could now walk just fine, the nurse insisted on rolling me to the hospital entrance in a wheelchair while Diana got the car.
She pulled up in my Defender. Nice and shiny and newly washed.
“Look familiar?” she said as I got in.
“Not really. It looks almost new. Someone find it in the woods up in New Hampshire?”
“One of the snipers. He drove it back to Boston and decided he liked it better than his Chevy Malibu. It wasn’t easy to pry it out of his sweaty little hands. But at least he washed it for you.”
“I want to see Alexa. Is she still in the hospital?”
“Actually, she got out a lot faster than you. She was treated for dehydration, they checked her out, and she’s fine.”
“I doubt that.”
“You’re right. I’ve dealt with plenty of kids who’ve gone through traumatic experiences. I know some good therapists. Maybe you can convince her to see one.”
“Is she at home?”
“Yeah. In Manchester. I don’t think she’s happy about it, but it’s home.” As we headed down Comm Ave toward Mass Ave, she said, “How about I cook dinner for you tonight? As a celebration.”
“A celebration of what?”
She gave me a sideways glance and pursed her lips. “I don’t know, maybe the fact you saved that girl’s life?”
“If anything was a team effort-”
“You’re doing that thing again.”
“Thing?”
“Where you give everyone else credit except yourself. You don’t have to do that with me.”
I was too tapped out to argue.
“Let’s make it my place,” she said. “I don’t want to be the first person to turn on your oven. Does it even work?”
“I’m not sure. Let me go home and get changed and take a shower. Or a sponge bath.”
“It’s just dinner, you know.”
“Not a date. Of course.”
“Like the thought never occurred to you.”
“Never,” I said.