What a stupid fucking thing to say. Of course they were hurt.
The reason he never came to this part of the region was because cells of extremist groups, with ideologies and fanaticism imported from other parts of the world, had started popping up here. The kind of extremists who thought they had the right to kidnap young girls.
She looked at him and spoke in Arabic. Walt shook his head, responding with one of the handful of phrases he knew in Arabic. “Sorry. La atakallam arabi.” I don’t speak Arabic.
He should have been doing his Arabic language lessons instead of blood slides.
Many locals assumed he spoke their languages, that he was local. It was a common enough mistake since he was black, though lighter skinned than many of the people here.
Walt asked the question again, this time in Nafusi. It was one of the first phrases he’d learned.
The little girl brightened for a moment when he spoke what was probably her native language, then shook her head. Walt glanced around, from the other girls to the captive men. It was stupid of him to ask in front of all these people. He’d have to make sure the girls either saw doctors in their home villages or came to his clinic.
Walt stood and stepped back, not wanting to loom over the kids. The girls would need to be looked at in more private and comfortable settings, which left the men. “I won’t treat them just so you can go back to torturing them.” He glanced at Eric.
“Sure it won’t change your mind if I said they deserve it?” Eric sounded only mildly interested.
“No.”
“Stupid Hippocratic Oath.”
“You don’t need a doctor. You need the authorities. And…and these girls’ parents.”
The littlest huddled against the girl beside her and started speaking rapidly. The bigger girl nodded. “We want to go home, but not until Eric has the names of all their co-conspirators.”
Co-conspirators? Walt looked at Eric, widening his eyes a little. No way the girl had known that word. Eric had taught it to them.
Eric grinned. “You don’t cut the head off a hydra. You stab it in the fucking heart then rip out its guts.”
The girls nodded.
“I will patch them up so they can be handed over to the authorities.” Walt enunciated each word. He glanced at Eric and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Please tell me you didn’t teach these children torture techniques.”
“Of course not. I just made sure the fuckers couldn’t move while the girls hit them. They went for the face. Most of the blood on my shirt was from broken noses.”
“There are so many things wrong with this situation.”
“And letting kidnapping victims beat the shit out of their abusers isn’t one of them,” Eric growled.
Walt wanted to argue with that—wanted to point out the psychological damage that could have been done—but honestly it was hard not to see his point.
The sound of a vehicle’s engine charged the air in the room. One of the girls leapt for the table, dousing the light. The men on the floor started to make noise and were met with a flurry of kicks.
Eric pointed at two of the girls, who went to the door, dropping onto the floor, their guns at the ready. Walt flattened his back against the wall where he could keep an eye on the men and the girls.
Eric crouched near the door. “Don’t shoot me,” he stage-whispered. “Just shoot the bad guys.”
The girls giggled. It was such an innocent, sweet sound that Walt had to swallow hard to dislodge the lump in his throat. The fact that they could giggle after the horrors they’d experienced, the nightmare they were all still swimming around in, actually gave him hope for their futures.
Eric slipped out the door and disappeared into the shadows. There was enough moonlight to just faintly see what was happening as a jeep matching the one he’d arrived in pulled into the courtyard. Four men jumped out, two of them pausing to light cigarettes. The flame from the lighters illuminated their faces—they were barely older than the oldest girls. Not quite children but not yet adults who could think and reason through the bullshit the extremists fed them.
They got within ten feet of the door—Walt saw the girls with guns tense, and he really, really hoped he wasn’t about to see children committing cold-blooded murder—when Eric slid out of the darkness behind the men. He was easy to see, the pale skin of his bare chest silvery in the moonlight.
The Viking grabbed the guns slung over the rearmost guards’ backs, using them as handles to hold them still as he stomped his heel into the sides of their knees. Walt was too far to hear the crack and pop, but the way the men dropped told him Eric knew what he was doing and had just broken and/or dislocated the knee joints.
The two who’d been in front whirled, fumbling to get their rifles off their shoulders. Eric grabbed one man’s gun by the barrel, yanked it off him, then swung it like a baseball bat, hitting him in the ribs. This time Walt could hear the crack. Then Eric jabbed the butt of the other gun into the last man’s stomach and kneed him in the face as he fell.
Eric stepped back, looking at the men on the ground, then called out, “You want to tie them up?”
One girl turned on the lantern again. Several others picked up pieces of what looked like well-used rope before running out to bind the new captives. As they passed him, Walt saw the raw red skin around their wrists.
And for a moment, Walt wanted to pick up a gun and shoot the men himself.
Instead, he hauled his kit to the table and got ready to do his job. He was going to patch them up—all of them. The girls first, even if all he did was give them aspirin and Band-Aids. Then he’d stabilize the men, particularly splint the
