Page 25 of Battle Mountain

“Hey!” he shouted.

The voices stopped.

“Hey, I need some help in here. There’s two of us.”

There was the sound of a squeaky doorknob being turned, and for a quick moment Eisele was blinded by light from the other room. He involuntarily closed his eyes and turned away.

Someone entered and closed the door behind them. When he opened his eyes he saw that the beam of a headlamp was illuminating his torso. The beam moved down from his chest to his groin.

“You pissed yourself again,” a female said sourly. He recognized the voice as the woman who had bent over him after he was shot. The woman with camo paint and a full mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Eisele said. “I wasn’t awake to know what I was doing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the woman said.

“I’m strapped down. I can’t move.”

“Like I didn’t know that.”

“Untie me so I can use the bathroom.”

She ignored him. The beam on her headlamp was now on the form in the next cot.

“Is that Spike?” Eisele asked. “Is he okay? Because he doesn’t respond, and it doesn’t seem like he’s okay.”

The beam contracted as she leaned over the person. She pulled the top cover of the blanket up and the light probed beneath it. She held up the corner of the material so it blocked Eisele’s view.

After a few seconds, she draped the blanket back over the form.

“Is that my hunting companion?” Eisele asked.

“I guess so,” she said. “He’s the older guy you were with. He doesn’t seem to be doing so hot,” she said matter-of-factly.

“We need a doctor,” Eisele said.

She scoffed at that. “We’re doing what we can do. This is field medicine at its best. It saved the lives of a lot of good soldiers.”

“We need to get to a hospital. Spike sounds really bad, and I’m in a lot of pain.”

As he spoke to her and became more lucid, he was filled with more and more questions.

“Are you here to rescue us, or are you holding us captive?”

“What do you think?” she asked with a harsh laugh.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “I’m Mark Eisele, and the other guy is Spike Rankin.”

“We know that.”

“So what’s your name?”

“We don’t use our real names here. Only our call signs. I’m known as Double-A,” she said. It came out reluctantly, and Eisele wasn’t sure that she hadn’t just made it up on the spot.

“Where in the hell are we?” he asked.

She turned to him and doused her headlamp while she did it. He couldn’t see her clearly, but he could feel her presence just a few feet away.

“This old town used to be called Summit,” she said. “Now we call it Soledad City.”