I feel compelled to start with a warning. If you've read my stuff before, you've probably noticed the frequent apologies for long wait times between chapters due to medical school. I haven't actually used much of that experience in my writing up until this story. It is also based on my time volunteering in a field hospital (though not one as extreme as this one). As such please be aware that this story will touch on some pretty tragic and traumatic topics that will not be comfortable for all readers. The setting and the events that take place are extreme outside of the erotic content.
That being said, I hope you enjoy it if you choose to continue reading.
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"They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity."
― Tim O'Brien,
The Things They Carried
*****
The floodlights around the hospital lit most of the pebbled rise at its back, making the ascent easier, at least initially. Above the line of glare, Ed could make out a single black figure silhouetted against the night sky. He scrambled up, bottle in hand, to the top of the rise. Diyaa turned towards him, the ever present rifle resting across his chest. In the dark Ed couldn't see the disapproving look as the whisky sloshed in the bottle but he knew it was there.
Diyaa nodded down the slope and it took Ed a moment to make out the woman sitting by herself, slumped against an outcrop. He took a step towards her before Diyaa stopped him with a hand.
"This time is no good." A week of hearing his accent had made the man more comprehensible, but only just. "Doctor to go home."
"Yeah," Ed said. Diyaa removed his hand and Ed made his way down, stumbling on the rocky terrain.
He settled next to the woman. Arms folded against the chill, he turned his face up to the impossible sky above them. Moonless, the sky revealed too many stars to make them out individually until the bright pinpricks amassed into an explosion of light splattered across the night.
But the wonder was dimmed, the dark figure at his side pulling him into the palpable sadness around her. He opened his mouth and closed it. Why had he come here? What could he say?
You did everything you could. It's not your fault.
Some trite shit that had never worked for him.
Don't be so hard on yourself.
What could he really do for her? What made him think he could be of any comfort? He'd known her a week after all. If Diyaa hadn't said something he could have assumed this was normal for her after a day like she'd had.
His breath slipped out, wordless and silent into the cold. Here the chill was more than just the fall in temperature, it was the absence of the heat that permeated the day. That lack left the same void with every sunset, with only the frigid sky to fill it.
The back of her hand touched his arm and he looked to see it open and expectant. He pressed the neck of the bottle into her hand and let her pull it towards her. The lid whisked in the threads and the liquid lapped against the glass as she tipped it into her mouth. Even with only the stars to light the night he could see the glint of at least one other empty bottle at her feet.
"We have leave starting when we get back," he began, tone hushed but the sound felt intrusive in the quiet. "My friend's loaning me an apartment on the beach." He turned towards the shadow next to him, the bottle in hand glinting as she lifted it again. "You could come with me."
Desert nights had a particular stillness to them. The expanse just beyond the capacities of human sight loomed large and bleak with possibilities most wouldn't want to consider. But it was the possibility next to him he hadn't thought through, that he didn't really know this woman, and she might not want him there.
He sat for a while, until it was clear she didn't mean to break the silence with anything more than the sound of her burning through the bottle he'd brought. Muscles tensed to begin the act of standing when the back of her hand came back to his arm, the tinkling sounds of liquid on glass confirmed she was offering back the bottle.
"Yeah." Oriel's voice was a rasp in the dry air, her tone brought lower by the weight of the day and so many days like it. "Sounds good."
***
A week before, Ed had arrived with the rest of his team on his first observation trip to Jordan. It had been a tough few weeks, working their way in and out of the various refugee camps they'd been assigned. This was the last, and arguably the worst. Technically in the no-man's-land between Syria and Jordan, tens of thousands of asylum seekers were held in limbo by bureaucrats and safety checks deep in northern deserts.
The field hospital appeared on the horizon long before they reached it. The two large tents were no more than beige humps surrounded by layers of spidery fencing that became more formidable as their convoy approached. Beyond it several satellite tents became clear. Their camouflaged colors were unintentional, covered as they were by layers of the same dust that swirled around their vehicles.
"We have one week scheduled here, which I had to wrangle from the boys upstairs." The head of the UN team spoke to them as they bumped along the dirt road for hours. "We have to be efficient and quiet about it. The Jordanians aren't happy we are here and ISIS has hit this place twice in the last year. Be efficient and be quick, there's a lot of ground to cover."
The guards led them first to the largest tent where beds lined the walls; a few cots lengthwise down the middle creating corridors of patients the nurses moved up and down with hasty precision. The air hung heavily, undisturbed by the creeping winds of the desert, and warmed as it was by the blazing sun through the tarps. The smell of field hospitals lacked the sharp, acrid smell of western hospitals, but beneath the sweat and illness Ed could still make out the powdery, rubber smell of latex.
His boss stopped one of the nurses and spoke in better Arabic than Ed could dream of achieving, and was directed through the flaps at the far end of the tent. Their boots trampled over the sheets of plywood connecting the main tent to a smaller one. His boss reached for the flap when a scream pierced the air from inside the tent.
"Any of you assholes with medical training?" the doctor shouted, upon seeing them rush towards her. This tent resembled an operation theater the same way a child's drawing looked like a house. The intention was clear, but the ramshackle floors, stacked supplies and dirty equipment were only the beginning. Five men lay in various positions, moaning, screaming, or deathly still. Two had made it up on cots, two more were on tarps on the floor. The man on the operating table bucked against the small nurse, who had to fling herself over him to hold him down. The doctor's bloody hands flew through sutures as the man screamed and blood spurted as he jerked away from her.
"Dr. Evans?" Ed's supervisor began.
"Yeah, listen," she cut him off, "I've got a car full of people who decided to play chicken with a border patrol and spent most of their valuable time arguing to get them here, so unless you are helping, you are leaving." She must have been seven feet tall to make all of them feel that small. "You," she pointed a bloody, gloved finger at Ed's friend Joe, "Come here and hold him down before he breaks more bones."
Joe leapt to obey without a glance back at their supervisor. Ed took it as a sign when the man didn't protest. "I've got medic training from the Marines," Ed volunteered.
Dr. Evans whooped, "Now he decides to tell us!" She jerked her chin towards the man's leg. "Think you can set that?" Her slippery fingers tore open another suturing kit and she set about trying to close the bleeding vessels in the man's destroyed upper arm. Joe was staring at her wide-eyed as he held the man down as best he could.
Ed took a look at the leg, slipping into the too-small latex gloves, familiar smoothness closing on his fingers in a vice grip. "Not as well as you could but I can give it a whirl." Ed attempted something close to confidence in long-unused skills.
"Don't get cute, cowboy," she said, eyes fixed on her work as her fingers flew through the stitches.
Ed pressed slightly to get a feel for the break and the man screamed, bucking against Joe and disturbing Dr. Evans as she worked. She didn't spare him a glance. Ed took the man's foot and held it steady before pulling it down and into alignment. The man passed out instantly. Dr. Evans finished her stitches and shouted something in Arabic to the nurse, who came over to bandage the man's wounds.
She moved down towards the injured man's feet, stripping and replacing her gloves as she went. A quick glance and a nod was all the feedback Ed got for the best job he thought he'd ever done. "Splint it soldier, when you're done we got more."
For six hours he followed her from person to person, stumbling through the Arabic and trying to remember training he'd left behind six years ago. Standing next to her over a girl with a shattered orbit and four broken fingers, Ed realized he was looking down at the top of Dr. Evans' black hair. Impossible. Her arm brushed against his and he couldn't help but realize how slim she was, and yet she had just performed a hip reduction on a man who was almost as big as he was. When he missed her instructions she turned and fixed him with warm brown eyes fringed with thick lashes.
"Soldier, I know you expected to be cruising around taking notes today but you gotta focus here if this girl's going to be able to see out of that eye tomorrow."
Ed nodded, trying to ignore the gentle slope of her cheek as it ran into the line of her chin and down her neck, disappearing beneath the large scrubs she wore.
