Miles followed him. ‘We’re fine, I promise.’
‘Is this your house? How many doors? How many windows?’ Nathan went into the hallway bathroom and a few seconds later Miles heard a sudden, sharp crack.
He pushed past Nathan. ‘What the hell?’
The mirror stood broken, a vicious crater in its center, cracks radiating outward. Nathan dropped a heavy soap dish to the floor.
‘I hate mirrors.’ Nathan retreated from the shattered glass.
‘Why?’ Miles took him by the shoulders, kept his voice calm. ‘You can tell me.’
His jaw trembled; his eyes held a haunting fear. ‘They – they look at me. From the mirrors. My friends.’
‘Your friends that died in Iraq.’
‘How do you know?’ Nathan lurched away from him, running down the hall. ‘I don’t want them to see that I’m here…’
Miles caught him at the bedroom entrance, staring at a mirror atop a bureau. ‘They can’t see you. They can’t.’
‘But I see them. They went away for a while. But they’re coming back, they live in the mirror and it’s not my fault, it wasn’t my fault…’
Miles steered him away from the mirror. ‘We’ll cover the mirrors, okay? Celeste, help me.’ Miles took Nathan into the messy kitchen. Dirty dishes piled the sink, a sour odor rising from the trash. Nathan sank to the floor.
‘Find towels, or blankets… cover every mirror you can find, please,’ Miles said to Celeste. She seemed much steadier with four walls around her, and she nodded and left the room.
‘Nathan. Pull it together, man, you’ve come so far tonight, you can’t lose it. Stay steady.’
‘It’s like – withdrawal. I was better, now I’m worse.’ Nathan startled with a jerk as a car rumbled in the street.
Frost. They’d been feeding him Frost, and probably he’d gotten his last dose on Tuesday. Maybe the drug’s effects started fading without a daily dose.
Nathan shrugged Miles’s hands off his shoulders, closed his eyes, steadied his breathing. Celeste ran back into the kitchen. ‘I covered all the mirrors.’ She knelt by them. ‘You’re bleeding. Your legs.’ And Miles saw spatters of blood, dried and fresh, on the scrubs he wore.
Nathan ignored her. He reached a finger out toward her face and she flinched back. ‘You were on Castaway. Holy smoke.’
She nodded.
‘So you killed Hurley. He was a bad guy – bad doctor, bad breath, bad hair.’ Nathan laughed, a broken giggle. ‘You did a good deed, ma’am. Now if someone would kill Groote for me… if I don’t get to do it myself.’
‘No one’s killing anybody,’ Miles said.
Celeste reached for Nathan’s face.
‘No.’ Nathan backed away from her. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Just let me check.’ Celeste spoke in a soft voice, quiet and reassuring.
He stopped his retreat across the kitchen. Nathan tensed while Celeste touched his jawline, inspected his face. A swollen lip, a slight cut on the cheek with a bruise rising underneath it. ‘They punched you.’
‘Just once or twice.’ His voice shook. ‘Then hoses on my back.’
‘Let me see.’ Celeste eased up the back of Nathan’s shirt: a quilt of vicious bruises covered his spine.
‘Groote stuck a screwdriver against my bones. It hurt.’ Tears came into his eyes and he shuddered. He shoved up his sleeves, pulled bandages off his arm, and showed them the constellation of welts; deep bloodied punctures. ‘Cut down to the bone, jam the screwdriver against the bone. Then… turn. They did it on my legs too. Patch me up, then do it again.’ He gritted his teeth.
‘Oh, my God,’ Celeste said. ‘I’ll see if there’s a first-aid kit.’ She ran from the kitchen.
‘I can’t go crazy again,’ Nathan said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I can’t.’
‘I won’t let that happen,’ Miles said, and Nathan laughed, a short broken giggle.
‘You got spare sanity in your pocket?’ Nathan asked.
‘I know what you survived, Nathan,’ Miles said in a low voice.
‘You don’t know anything, man, not a thing about me… you don’t want to.’
Celeste ran back into the room, carrying gauze and Band-Aids and an antiseptic gel. ‘Get the scrubs off.’
Miles helped Nathan stand. Grimacing from the pain, Nathan shucked the scrubs down to his knees. Purple dominated the back of his legs where Groote had whipped the hoses. Four brutal gouges marred his leg. Celeste medicated and bandaged the wounds. ‘These wounds are deep. He needs a doctor.’
‘No,’ Nathan said.
‘You’re risking infection,’ Celeste said.
‘No,’ Nathan said again. ‘No doctors. We can’t let Groote find us.’
Miles rummaged in the cabinet, found aspirin, poured a palmful into Nathan’s hand, got him a glass of water. Nathan ate the aspirin like candy, a few at a time. He wiped the white dust from the tablets onto his shirt, finished the water. ‘Thank you.’ His eyes went glassy with exhaustion.
‘When was the last time you ate?’ Miles asked him.
‘Tuesday.’
Miles rummaged in Blaine’s nearly bare refrigerator, found a fancy-seeded bread and jam, cracked open a new jar of peanut butter, and made them all sandwiches. Nathan devoured his dinner in seconds, shivering with hunger.
Miles sat on the floor across from Nathan. ‘You know what Frost is.’
‘Yes. Allison told me it’s medicine to cure your trauma. She told me when she got me the passkey, said I had to run.’ Nathan wiped a hand across his mouth. ‘At first I thought Frost was the code name for the virtual- reality treatments they give us.’ He explained how the VR treatments worked – confirming what Miles had seen in the tech room.
‘They made you relive the bombing,’ Miles said.
‘Bombing?’ Celeste asked.
‘I’m a war hero.’ Nathan sat up straighter. ‘Iraq. I volunteered after 9/11. I wanted to fight the good fight, protect the country I love.’
‘Brave of you,’ Celeste said softly.
He ducked his head in embarrassment. ‘During the invasion, I was with a battery company, thirty miles out of Baghdad. We launched our missiles, right after midnight, on target for a palace of Saddam’s, but a U.S. jet pilot got confused, got bad info, he believed we were Republican Guard, he fired a heat-seeker’ – he paused, swallowed, kept his gaze on his feet – ‘killed four of my buddies. Nearly killed the rest of us.’
‘I’m sorry, man,’ Miles said.
‘Parts of my friends hit me. I got a broken nose from a leg flying into my face.’
Miles and Celeste said nothing, because words had no power now.
‘I got hurt in the blast, just burns’ – he pointed to the peppering of scars on his cheek and nose – ‘but it messed me up inside. I couldn’t – I couldn’t do my duty anymore.’
‘PTSD,’ Celeste said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Pathetic Terrible Stupid Disorder,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s what I call it. I got freaky. I’d go nuclear in two seconds flat. Beat up an orderly at the psych ward in Germany they sent me to. But I got the honorable discharge, got the medal for standing ten feet further away from the battery than my friends.’
‘And then you ended up at Sangriaville,’ Miles said.
‘When I didn’t get any better. My folks were good to me, but after a couple of years, they’re saying, Nathan, get over the sadness now. Stop whining. Stop seeing dead people in the mirrors. Stop being this freak, be our son again. Tried selling furniture at their place in Albuquerque; went from supporting missile systems to futons.’ He tried to laugh. ‘I wasn’t good at moving the merchandise off the floor. I punched a guy when he couldn’t decide between two recliners. Jesus, it’s not a life-or-death decision. Pick after thirty minutes of shopping and sitting and fricking reclining. So the folks found a vets’ program in Phoenix that got me free treatment – then my folks found
