Otherwise Unharmed

Chapter 1—Lost Soul

It’s fucking bright.

Even though the lights had just been turned on, I was already sitting up in the rough, uncomfortable bed that was one of many in the Metropolitan Correctional Center of Chicago’s medical unit. It had been quiet up until a moment ago when the daytime workers arrived and the day guard took the place of the one on the night shift. I could hear words being spoken as shifts changed, but I didn’t pay attention to their meaning. Everything happening outside of me was too much to take. There was enough going on inside my head at that moment.

Shots, explosions, the recoil of my Barrett M82 sniper rifle against my shoulder, and blood.

I shifted my arm, and the chain to the handcuff around my wrist rattled against the railing on the side of the bed. The feeling made me tense a little, like it did every time I moved, and I began to feel a little dizzy and lightheaded. I hadn’t slept more than an hour or two since I’d been brought here.

Two days ago? Three?

Initially, the doctor at the prison insisted on sedating me. The forced sleep and the accompanying dreams were the worst I had ever had, and I refused all other medication after that first time. I knew at some point my captors could get a court order to force me to take them, but as long as I was reasonably cooperative, that would take some time. I was certainly all right with waiting as long as possible. I had never liked taking drugs of any sort.

Maybe by then I would be able to control the memories again. I had learned how before—even without having someone sleeping beside me or having drugs in my system. Not long after I left Virginia and moved back to Ohio, I had managed to control the dreams. How had I done that?

“You’re damn good with that thing,” Jonathan says.

“Lots of practice,” I respond. “It’s about the only thing that keeps me calm, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s what you’ve said.” He crushes his cigarette into the ground before crouching down next to me. “Do you ever think about…you know…shooting people?”

“All the fucking time,” I mutter as I pull back on the trigger and send another shot into the makeshift target at the far end of the open field behind Jonathan’s house.

“Could you?” Jonathan presses. “Could you really shoot a person like that?”

“I have,” I remind him. “Many times.”

“But you were deployed then. What about now and with a different sort of enemy?”

I think for a moment, and the woman with the dull gray eyes that sparkled as she talked about opening up a fucking flower shop poked out from behind the other memories.

“Yeah, I could still do it,” I say.

Jonathan seems to contemplate for a moment, and as I am about to fire again, he speaks up.

“I got someone who wants to meet you.”

It seemed liked a hundred years ago when Jonathan first brought me to Rinaldo Moretti’s office. In reality, I had only been doing hits for the crime lord for a couple of years. I wondered how many people I had killed for him and decided the exact number was best left to ambiguity.

A muscle spasm in my back caused me to pull from my thoughts long enough to move a little to the left for some relief. I refused to think about the cold metal connecting me to the bed and preventing a lot of movement. I tried not to let it remind me of being in a hot, reeking hole somewhere in the vast deserts of the Middle East. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t the same at all. If I had been turned on my front instead of on my back, or if I had been kneeling, keeping the memories from my mind would have been impossible. As it was, the thoughts still lingered, pounded at the front of my skull, and demanded access into my brain continuously.

It was hard to fight it, and sometimes I gave in out of sheer exhaustion.

There was a part of me inside—probably the one part that still remained of whoever I may have once been—that knew I had cracked. I was mentally shut down and physically non-responsive, but I still knew the meaning of the words “comatose” and “possibly suicidal” when I heard them spoken. None of it mattered, but I still understood. I was just too locked inside the continuous cascade of memories to care about what was going on anywhere outside of myself.

The door slid open with a clang, and I glanced toward the sound, but I couldn’t say that I actually saw anything going on in my vicinity. At least, I didn’t see or hear enough to actually pay attention to it. All my thoughts and my focus were internal.

How did I get here?

I wasn’t stupid. I also wasn’t so far gone to not remember the basics of what happened. After serving my tour of duty as a Marine sniper in the Middle East coupled with eighteen months as a prisoner of war, being exiled to Arizona for screwing up a hit for my mob-boss, spending too much time thinking about the girl I met there, and killing my favorite hooker for betraying me, I’d finally lost it and started shooting up the neighborhood.

It hadn’t been my very best plan, but then again, I hadn’t been in the best frame of mind. Without Bridgett the hooker lying next to me, I couldn’t sleep. It had already been more than a week since I had managed a decent night’s rest when I found out Bridgett had been telling my nemesis, Terry Kramer, privileged information I had babbled in my sleep. After I killed them both, I hadn’t slept at all.

“I didn’t mean to…didn’t fucking mean to…”

I did, though.

My chest seized up, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I could see the terror in her eyes as I dragged her from my car to the storeroom in the basement of Moretti’s office. I heard her pleading with me to let her go and felt her blood splatter against my shoulder as I shot her.

She had trusted me, depended on me, and in the back of my head, I knew she had feelings for me neither one of us was willing to acknowledge. And in return, I put a bullet in her head.

Why did I do it?

There was no answer.

What brought me to that point, that moment?

The question was more metaphorical. I hadn’t started off so bad, so how did I end up where I was today? Raised in a convent by a bunch of nuns, emancipated at seventeen, and left to my own devices, I had joined the Marines so I could serve my country as one of the best snipers ever trained. I was field promoted to Lieutenant in the middle of a firefight. All in all, not the worst start in life. But then I had lost my entire unit to insurgents, was taken prisoner, and tortured for a year and a half.

After I had been rescued, I came back with bruises, muscle atrophy to the point where I needed help walking at first, and a dislocated shoulder. Aside from those minor injuries, I was perfectly fine when they brought me back from the Middle East via a German military hospital outside of Munich. I remembered hearing the words on the television when my little soldier story was getting a lot of media play.

“Lieutenant Evan Nathanial Arden, Marine sniping expert, brought home with minor injuries and muscle atrophy, but otherwise unharmed.”

It wasn’t until after I came home that everything went wrong on the inside: kicked out of the Marines, based on a diagnosis from a doctor who mostly wanted to write a bestselling book, and eventually hooking up with a guy who led me into my current line of work—sniping for the Chicago mafia.

Catholic schoolboy gone bad.

My caseworker was nearby, talking to the unit manager of my cellblock about when I might be moved to the general prison population. I heard her say Mark Duncan, the name of the military shrink who was assigned to my case after my discharge. He had apparently been calling about me and was likely going ballistic because he didn’t see any of this coming. He took pride in his work, and he thought he had been helping me.

Maybe he had been helping; it just wasn’t enough.

Traci, my caseworker, was a chunky, blonde woman in her mid-thirties. She leaned over to look in my face as she spoke, but her words weren’t interesting enough for me to pay attention to them. Her hand touched my arm, and even though part of my psyche wanted to scream and flinch from the touch, I didn’t move.

I didn’t see the point.

How many hours or days had passed since I had been taken down and dragged from my apartment didn’t really register. I didn’t think it had been all that long, but time didn’t have a lot of meaning for me. My actions during that day replayed in my mind a lot—the look in Bridgett’s eyes as I fired my gun into her face, the desire to shoot everyone on a bus going up Michigan Avenue, and then eventually blowing the shit out of a noisy parking garage door; the terror of being shoved to the ground as the SWAT team took me into custody, begging someone to just kill me, followed by the relief I felt when I realized Odin, my Great Pyrenees, was all right; the ambivalence of seeing Lia in the hallway and knowing she was watching me as I was dragged off in handcuffs was enough to turn my brain inside out.

Lia Antonio.

She was the beautiful, dark-haired woman who found herself at my cabin in Arizona during my exile. She ended up in my bed and in my head far more than I expected or even wanted. Now, I clung to thoughts of her as much as I could—everything else I thought about was too full of gunshots, sirens, and blood.

I didn’t know how she managed to find me, and the serendipity of finding me at that place at that moment was fantastic.

As my thoughts raced around in my head, I heard the heavy footsteps of other inmates and prison staff as they moved around the infirmary, around beds and desks, and eventually out into the hallway. The things going on around me registered as they happened; they just didn’t have any meaning for me. I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be a part of any of that.

I still regretted not taking a life—if I had done that, they would have killed me. If they had killed me, I wouldn’t be here now, wondering how the fuck I got myself into such a mess. I was supposed to go far—be smarter than this. I was supposed to have my whole life ahead of me.

“You’re a bright boy, Evan,” Mother Superior says.

I know she’s right. I’ve learned more in the past couple of years than she even realizes.

“You’re going to go far.”

“Just sign the papers,” I say as I push them across the desk and closer to her. As soon as her scrawl is over the bottom line, I bring them back toward me and slide them into a brown envelope. “Have fun with the next one.”

“Evan, you know-”

“Don’t,” I interrupt. “Just don’t do that. You know it’s crap as much as I do. You got what you wanted, and now I have what I want. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

She sighs as she looks at her hands on the desk. I half expect her to start rubbing at the rosary around her neck, but she doesn’t.

“What are you going to do now?” she asks.

“It’s pretty straightforward for an educated guy with no money,” I say with a shrug. “I’m going into the military.”

If they had killed me, I wouldn’t have seen Lia again.

Though the memories seemed ancient considering everything that had happened since my time in Arizona, I could still clearly see the look of desire in her eyes as her hand caressed my abs. The sound of her soft moans as I filled her ran through my head, and the feeling of her flesh against mine made everything else bearable.

Almost.

Then I would remember the bodies of my unit sprawled on the ground, the realization that one of my own had given up our location to the enemy, and the taste of sand filled my mouth again. My stomach tightened involuntarily, and I sat up slightly as my body tried to double itself over. I squeezed my eyes shut and didn’t even try to stop the memories. It didn’t work anymore, anyway, and it was too much effort to try to control it any longer.

Up on the roof of the base, rifle at my shoulder, I can see a figure walking in the distance, and I set my sights on him. As the crosshairs focus on his head, I can tell he is nothing more than a kid—maybe fourteen or fifteen. Through the scope, my view of him is crystal clear. His clothing is dirty and torn, there are smudges on his face, and a bruise over his left cheek. His eyes hold resolved terror.

He doesn't want this. He's going to do it, but he doesn't want it. He’s holding his arms out at his sides at an awkward angle, and it’s obvious he has something strapped under his arms and around his waist. When I refocus between his eyes, I can see tears in them.

I lower my eyelids for a moment before I secure my aim and fire.

One memory followed another as I remembered running through a hailstorm of bullets to pull my unit’s communication officer out of the line of fire. The captain of the unit was hit and unconscious, and I became the first Marine in years to earn a field promotion from staff sergeant to second lieutenant right there on the dunes. Carrying my captain over my shoulder, I led my unit out of the firefight and back to base.

With exactly seven weeks under my belt as a lieutenant, I’m staring at the bodies of all my comrades as they lie there in the sand. I feel slightly dizzy, and my stomach churns as I realize it’s not a dream, a hallucination, or a trick of the light. A slight sound behind me registers but not before I feel a sharp pain in the back of my head.

I gripped my hands into fists, tightening the muscles in my arms as I tried to pull them across my chest. All I got in response was the constriction of the cuffs around my wrists and the clanging sound of the chains against the bedrails.

My wrists are tied so tightly I can’t feel my hands. I’m sure if I could see them, they would be blue or black or some other unnatural color. I’m glad they’re behind my back so I can’t watch. As my hands go numb, the pain in my shoulders from my arms tied together increases a thousand fold. I wish I could pretend it’s all a nightmare, but I know it’s real. There’s no getting out of this.

The very concept of “pride” is completely foreign to me now, and I no longer care how it looks or sounds. I scream and beg as they throw me back into the hole.

I didn’t open my eyes but squeezed them shut so tightly my head was beginning to pound. I flexed my hands once to prove to myself I could still move them, but it made the cuffs tighten a bit more. I could feel a scream building in my throat, but I swallowed it down.

I guessed I had managed to pull a little pride back inside of myself at some point. I wondered when that was and figured it was probably around the same time Rinaldo took me in and gave me a reason to be. Regardless, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself—not here.

Really, I just didn’t care to have anyone coming over and fussing at me about it.

I spit to try to get the grains of sand off my lips, but it doesn’t work. It never does, but it gives me something to do—something to strive for to stop the mind-numbing lack of interaction with anyone or anything. Time is meaningless, and the only connection I have had with anyone in what feels like days is the sound of footsteps in the compound where I’m kept in a deep, sand-filled hole.

I’m convinced it’s for the sake of convenience. When I die, they only have to fill it back up again.

Unfamiliar sounds, then gunshots and the whirring blades of a helicopter fill my ears. I assume my mind is playing tricks on me as I think I hear voices in English, but then a few minutes later there is a voice close to me.

“Lieutenant? Sir? Are you a Marine Corps Lieutenant?”

“What do you have there, Smith?”

“I dunno, sir, but he’s wearing fatigues, or at least what’s left of them.”

“He’s got tags. You’re right—he’s USMC.”

I feel a hand on the skin of my neck. Shuffling sounds above me become louder, and I try to turn my head enough to see. I want to call out, even if I’m calling out to my own imagination. It sounds real enough, and I don’t mind the fantasy. It beats eating sand. I don’t have enough of a voice to respond, though.

“Lieutenant? Lieutenant?”

“Lieutenant?”

My eyes flickered to the sound out of reflex, and I found Mark Duncan staring into them.

“Can you talk to me?”

I swallowed and wet my lips before I looked back down to the cuff around my wrist. The metal had warmed against my skin but didn’t feel quite right. It should have been those plastic zip-ties or maybe rope, not handcuffs. There was still the feel of sand in the back of my throat, and I coughed to try to get rid of it. It didn’t help. It never did.

“Can we get him out of the restraints?”

“No, sir. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all.”

“I’ll take the risk.”

There was an unfriendly guffaw from the guard as he mumbled under his breath.

“You got no idea who you’re dealing with, do ya?”

“What does that mean?”

My eyes traveled from Mark to the guard at the end of the bed. He was the unit supervisor, and though I didn’t remember his name, I did remember him making sure the cuffs were nice and tight as he restrained me. We locked gazes for a moment, and I stared at him with an intense, silent warning until he looked away.

Even if I didn’t give a shit about what happened to me now, I wasn’t going to let Rinaldo’s name into the conversation. There was some pride in me and also some loyalty, even if it was a fucked up version of allegiance.

“Sorry, sir,” the supervisor said to Mark, “but I can’t release him without orders from the warden.”

A deep sigh came from Mark as he pulled up a rolling chair close to the edge of the bed.

“Evan?”

I closed my eyes and tried to cross my arms in front of my chest, but of course, the handcuffs stopped me. A shudder passed through my body, and my breathing increased along with the pounding of my heart. I could taste and feel sand in my throat.

It’s not real.

Real or not, it sent me back into the desert.

“Lieutenant Evan Nathanial Arden, service number zero-four-seven-two-”

My teeth clench together to keep myself from screaming. I can’t see what the bearded man is using to whip the back of my neck down to my ass, but it stings like a motherfucker. I’m surprisingly glad I went through all the torture resistance training back in the spring.

“Did I ask you for your numbers?” The man in front of me—the leader of the group—kicks sand into my face, and I don’t manage to close my eyes in time.

I try to shake my head to get rid of some of the grains, but it doesn’t work. My eyes burn, and I can’t stop the desperate grunt that escapes my throat.

“You don’t like the sand here?” the leader asks. “You should get used to it!”

I still can’t open my eyes enough to see, but I feel rough hands on the back of my neck, and my face is shoved into the grains of sand in front of my knees. He twists and turns my head as I try to hold my breath.

With my hands balled into fists, I opened my eyes and looked to Mark in desperation. I couldn’t seem to actually say anything as my lungs screamed for oxygen. I was practically panting, but it wasn’t enough air. All I could feel going into my chest were grains of sand.

He put his hand on my forearm, but I jumped back away. The handcuffs bit into the skin of my wrist, and I gasped out loud. My body tensed—frozen in one spot as additional memories flooded through my brain.

“I’m going to get those off of you,” Mark said. “Just hang in there a little while longer, okay?”

I tried to nod but had no idea if I was successful or not.

Mark went on to argue with the unit leader about the handcuffs and to ask why I hadn’t been moved to a cell yet. I only half paid attention to the conversation. I certainly wanted to be out of the cuffs, but I wasn’t so sure moving from one part of the prison to another was going to make any kind of significant difference. It wasn’t like I was going to be able to sleep any better on a different cot.

“He’s still supposed to be on suicide watch.”

“I don’t think he’s a threat to himself.”

“You didn’t think he’d blow up a park either.”

“I can’t treat him if he’s nonresponsive, and he’s going to be that way as long as you have him restrained. Didn’t you read my notes?”

“Yeah, yeah, I saw them. Shell-shocked.”

“A little outdated on your terminology but essentially correct.”

Sometimes all you really needed was a little happy coincidence, and right at that time, about a dozen people entered the medical center—four guards and a bunch of inmates all holding their stomachs. It didn’t take long for the nurses to assess the situation and start moving the food-poisoned prisoners to the various cots around me. A few minutes later, as Mark continued to argue, another batch was brought in.

“We’re going to need all the beds we can get,” the nurse told him.

He let out a long sigh, glared at Mark and then at me.

“Solitary.”

“I’ll take it.” Mark nodded vigorously.

Hands grabbed my arms, and I was hauled out of the medical unit and into a hallway. An elevator door opened, and my pair of escorts shoved me inside with Mark following. When the doors opened again, we walked out into the common area of one of the cell units.

The area was carpeted and painted with warm earth tones. Several inmates sat around small, round tables in cheap plastic chairs and played cards while a few others stood around a bumper pool table. A couple of them looked up as I was led up a short flight of stairs and paraded along the curved railing that overlooked the recreation room.

Along the walkway were several numbered doors without windows in them. I was brought to the last door which contained a small window at eye level and a slotted opening in the center. The guard unlocked the door to take me inside.

The narrow cell was obviously designed for single occupancy. I could have walked the length between the door and the tall, narrow window overlooking downtown Chicago in about four steps. A metal-framed bed in the center took up most of the floor space. The legs of the bed were bolted to the floor, and I could see four loops that could be used for restraining straps on the sides. Aside from the obligatory toilet and sink, there was only a small writing desk with a single, thin drawer under the tabletop, a stool, and a locker shoved up against the foot of the bed to complete the room.

As soon as I was inside, the guard removed the cuffs, and I felt nearly dizzy with relief as the weight left me. I squeezed my hands into fists a couple of times to restore the feeling of blood running freely through my veins and tried to take a few long breaths.

“I’d like to have my session with Mr. Arden now,” Mark said with conviction.

Another long sigh from the guard, but he didn’t protest. He moved outside the cell, locked the door, and peered at us through the window as Mark ran his hand through his hair and watched me.

Without any other direction, I sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed my wrists. Once I had myself convinced that the restraints were really gone, I let out a long sigh and closed my eyes. Now I could wrap my arms around my gut and try to force myself to think of anything but sand.

Mark pulled the stool next to the bed and sat on it.

Glancing back to his face, I could see how distressed he was and felt a little bad about it. I knew he’d tried to help on more than one occasion; it just wasn’t the kind of help I was seeking. I needed to be able to sleep—that’s all I had wanted. He couldn’t do that, though, because he wasn’t going to break that patient-counselor code long enough to lie down in bed with me.

Without the cuffs around my wrists, I managed to find my voice.

“Sorry to disappoint you, sir,” I said.

Another sigh.

“I’m not disappointed,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow at him. I didn’t believe a word of it—he was a proud guy and considered himself good at what he did. It wasn’t his fault I wouldn’t tell him everything that was going on in my head. It wouldn’t have helped anyway.

“I’m angrier with myself,” Mark claimed, “because I didn’t see this coming. Not at all. It’s rare I’m caught so off-guard.”

My chest tightened as memories flooded over my brain like an ice-cold shower. There was a time I thought I understood people when I really didn’t—not at all. A single conversation changed everything.

“Do you know what she said to me?” I asked Mark.

“Who?”

I turned my head toward him, but my vision was focused entirely inward.

“The wife of the journalist guy who was killed in the video. You remember that guy?”

“Yeah, I do. You told them to kill you instead of him.”

“Yeah, that guy.” I nodded, remembering. “His wife came to the hospital in Virginia, and they told me who she was before I ever talked to her. My stomach was all tied up before she even walked into the room. I mean, I’d watched her husband die, ya know? I couldn’t do anything about it. Even though I told them to kill me, it didn’t make any difference—they wouldn’t listen. I think they wanted it to be him because he wasn’t military and because he did have a family.”

I shifted and bumped the edge of the metal bed with my shoe. The clang from the springs reverberated and caught my attention. I stared down at the base of the bed, saw the loops meant for restraints again, and could nearly feel the sandy walls of the hole around my shoulders.

“What did she say to you, Evan?”

I shook my head a bit to clear it.

“She came up and sat down next to me,” I said as the detail of the memory returned. “For the longest time we just looked at each other, and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I started blathering about how sorry I was and about how I tried to get them to take me instead, but they wouldn’t listen. I probably would have dropped down to my knees and started crying, but she stopped me.”

I turned my head to Mark and looked him straight in the eye.

“That’s when she said it was all okay,” I told him. “I figured she was going to start telling me how it wasn’t my fault and there was nothing I could do—the shrinks in the hospital in Germany had said that—but she didn’t. She told me it was okay because she was glad. She was glad he was gone, and now she and her girls could move on with their lives without constantly being in his shadow. She said he was never there for them, and now that he was dead, she could use the insurance money to start up the flower shop she always wanted and he wouldn’t support.”

Mark’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“She didn’t fucking care,” I told him. I could feel the tension in my voice as much as I could hear it. “She was happy he was dead. I was willing to die for him—a guy whose name I didn’t even know—and the person who should have cared about him the most didn’t give a shit.”

My sides and stomach tightened up as I remembered the look of…of elation in her eyes as she told me about her business venture and how excited she was to be her own boss and run her own company. I had watched her and waited for her to tell me he was smacking her around or doing things to their daughters that he shouldn’t, but she said none of that. He just hadn’t liked the idea of her going into business on her own instead of working her steady, corporate job.

My throat seized up, and I forced myself to swallow. It hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to what was happening in my head. I needed to crawl back inside again. I needed to stop thinking and stop remembering.

But I couldn’t.

“That’s when I figured it out,” I said quietly. “People live and they die, and it doesn’t fucking matter to anyone around them. Whatever happens, happens. People move on, and they’re probably better off because of it.”

“That’s what changed you,” he whispered. “I knew there was something that made you different from how all the reports from your rescue described you. I should have pressed you before when I first thought there was something about that video you weren’t telling me. I assumed it was something they did off camera—something classified.”

I shook my head.

“I’m very good at being who I am,” I told him. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“Who are you, Evan?”

I shook my head.

“Doesn’t matter. Not now.” I’d fucked up far too publicly, and I couldn’t hide it. It occurred to me that Rinaldo might never refer to me as “son” again, and I leaned back against the head of the medical center cot and closed my eyes. My heart was starting to race, and I feared losing the handcuffs and a bit of privacy weren’t going to be enough to allow me to sleep.

“It matters to me.” Mark’s voice was quiet but earnest.

I shook my head.

Nothing about the conversation was going to go anywhere, so I ended it with my silence.