Page 77 of Whisper

Two young Pakistani men in white doctor’s coats poked their head out from a dingy office. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered. Kris skidded on the floor, almost slipping. He looked down. Grease, oil, and blood smeared on the cracked linoleum. As they jogged farther into the hospital, the stench of rotten meat, of putrid, festering wounds, slammed into them. Ryan gagged, fell to the side. Kris heard him puke into the wall.

The Pakistani doctors’ eyes were as wide as the moon. Twenty men were barreling into their ratty emergency department, all armed to the teeth and wearing bulletproof vests and helmets with tactical backpacks and gear hanging from them. Kris’s rifle banged against his thighs as he ran. “We need you to save this man!”

Blood dropped from Zahawi, a long trail leading back to the dirt parking lot and the truck they’d screamed across Faisalabad in.

One of the doctors finally unfroze, grabbing a filthy gurney from along the wall and running it toward them. The sheets were stained, a mottled mess of old-blood brown and pus yellow. Kris and David dropped Zahawi on the gurney. His head lolled to the side, limp. His skin was gray as ash.

“Two gunshot wounds. He’s lost a lot of blood.” Kris jogged with the doctors as they frantically ran the gurney toward surgery. “You have to save him. You have to keep him alive!”

“He’s already dead,” one of the doctors said, shaking his head. “You want us to cut into a dead man!”

“Stop the bleeding! Keep him breathing!”

They waited in the emergency department, pacing between the beds. A third were full, one man in a leg cast and three elderly people who looked like they were disintegrating into their beds. Grime was slick beneath their feet. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed in from the open windows, hovering around the fluorescent lights and feasting on raw wounds. The hospital had an “end of the world” aesthetic. If a hospital from the 1950s had been catapulted to zombie land, it would look like this place.

A bar of soap rested on the bedside table of each patient. Syringes were jammed into it, sticking up at crazy angles. It came to Kris after a moment. That was how they sterilized their needles.

David found chairs scattered around the hospital, and he brought them back for everyone. Dan and Jackson collapsed, both falling asleep sitting up. David wrapped his arm around Kris, trying to hold on to him and look like he wasn’t.

Ryan refused to sit, pacing as he growled into his phone on fifteen different calls. “What do you mean you put his cell phone in evidence?” he shouted at one point. “His cell phone is acommunication device! That belongs with us!” He apparently didn’t like the answer he received. He flung his phone down the hallway, watching it skitter and glide through the grime and dirt.

“Fucking FBI put Zahawi’s phone in an evidence bag. They’re refusing to open it up. Damn thing’s been ringing off the hook since the raid.” Ryan seethed in front of Kris.

Kris scrubbed his hands over his face. David’s hand was on his back, out of Ryan’s sight. “Damn it. That means they know we have him.”

“And they’re going to be coming for him.”

The gunshots started two hours later.

A truck screamed by the front of the hospital, kicking up dirt and swerving through the near-empty parking lot. Bullets popped. Glass at the front of the hospital exploded, raining shards into the hallway and the lobby.

Kris and David hit the floor. Dan landed beside them, eyes wide. Ryan and the Pakistani police officers drew their weapons and took cover, aiming for the dark parking lot. The truck peeled away.

“We have to get him out of here.” Kris staggered to his feet. “They’re going to keep coming. They’ll try and get him back. And kill us.”

He got on the phone with Islamabad. “We have to get out of here. They’re coming for Zahawi, and if they realize there’s only a handful of us, we’re done for.”

“I’ll make some calls,” George said. “We’ll get you out, Kris.”

Five minutes later, another truck came barreling toward the hospital. Bullets spat from the passenger window.

Ryan and the police fired back, again.

The truck veered off, swerving wildly.

Ryan shouted that he’d seen the shape of an RPG as it passed by the light of a streetlamp. “They’ll come at us with technicals, next!” he hollered. Pickup trucks, usually Toyotas, outfitted with heavy machine guns in the beds. There was no way they could stand up to a force of technicals. Or even just one.

Finally, eight minutes after Kris called George, his sat phone rang. “Kris, the Pakistani military is on the way. They’re going to pick you guys up and bring you to Pakistani Air Base Chaklala, in Rawalpindi. The base’s medical team is waiting for you.”

“They’d better be fucking fast. Al-Qaeda is coming.Now.”

“Get out of there!”

David and Kris jogged together to the surgery suite and burst in. “Wrap it up, doc! We’ve got to move!”

“He is still bleeding internally. We have not given him enough blood!”

“Make him stable for transport. We’re leaving, now!”