“Hey, Cal,” I hollered down into the cab of the Humvee as our convoy crawled to a halt. “Pass me one of those Rip Its.” I swept my free hand toward the dust-covered red cooler below.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I got your Rip It right here, Boyd.” He lifted one ass cheek and cut the mother of all farts. An eye-watering stench drifted up, potent even over the smells of fires and smoke that always lingered in the air.

“Gas, gas, gas,” Private First Class Sanchez, Cal’s A-Driver, called out while visibly recoiling from the noxious fumes.

“Sweet baby Jesus,” I said, eyes watering, “you need to see a Corpsman about that, dude. I think something died inside of you.”

“Naw,” Cal replied with a grin, “I have it on good authority that the Veggie Omelet MRE is supposed to smell like that on the back end.” He laughed before cracking the cooler lid and fishing out a chrome can of the most potent off-brand energy drink the Marine Corps could afford. The ever-coveted Rip It. He tossed it up with practiced ease—we’d done this same maneuver a hundred times or more—and I caught it in a dusty hand. The can was slick with water from ice that had melted days ago, and it was just this side of hot. Didn’t matter to me, though.

I hadn’t slept in the better part of two days, and I needed something to keep me going.

The endless cigarettes and PX caffeine pills would only take me so far.

“You’re a lifesaver, bud,” I replied, cracking the top with a hiss and taking a long pull. It tasted like cherry flavored acid, and I couldn’t have been happier. “What’s the holdup anyway?”

“Eh, nothing exciting. Chatfield radioed in that there’s debris in the road…” He paused, drumming his fingers impatiently against the steering wheel. “Dixon probably just needed to drop a deuce, though. You ever share a tent with him? I think he might have IBS. He also screams in his sleep, which is not as much fun as you’d think it would be.”

I set the Rip It down beside me and directed my gaze back to the buildings all around us, searching the windows, doorways, and rooftops for any sign of movement. Of life. But the street was quiet.

Most of the buildings were plain brown stone and improvised mud—except for the one right in front of me. I’d seen plenty of mosques since coming to Iraq, and this wasn’t that, but it was definitely a temple of some sort. A ziggurat-like structure three stories tall, it was made from red-brown sandstone blocks. Gray stone pillars framed in a wooden door festooned with black rivets; above the door was a finely carved relief depicting complicated geometric patterns and a man with five faces, sitting crossed-legged—a sword balanced in one hand, a scale in the other.

The temple was old.

Older than the rest of the houses and shops that pressed in around it. Weird, but not weirder than some of the other stuff I’d seen since coming here. That was the thing about fighting in a place like Iraq. Every city was steeped in history. Stained red with it. Old and new lived side by side, snuggled up like lovers on a cold night, no distinction between where one ended and the other began. Honestly, I didn’t care whether it was a temple or a gas station, so long as there weren’t insurgents hiding inside, hell-bent on murdering me and my Marines.

I paused. Squinted. For a brief moment I thought I’d caught a glimpse of motion above.

“Hey, head on a swivel,” I called down. “Something about this feels—”

The world erupted with light and sound and heat and fury.

A plume of sand and smoke billowed up and washed over the Humvee, obscuring the world. The vehicle violently rocked and kicked me from the turret. I fell backward, head slamming into the side mirror before I spiraled onto the dirt-caked ground. A deafening ring howled in my ears, and white spots swam across my field of vision.

What the fuck just happened? I thought, trying to get my bearings.

Enemy contact. That’s what the fuck happened.

We’d been hit. The ringing slowly subsided, replaced by the sound of frantic voices and the clatter of gunfire. The lead Humvee was a smoldering wreck. From my angle I could see the engine block utterly mangled—probably a remotely detonated IED planted in the road. Chatfield and Dixon were scrambling toward me, though there was no sign of Aguilar, their turret gunner. The pair moved with speed and purpose, while maintaining good cover and returning fire whenever there was a break in the volley of rounds raining down from above.

Shit. They’d hit the last Humvee in our convoy as well. It was a smoldering wreck, but at least one Marine had survived. Lance Corporal McInnes was scrambling toward us. Unlike Chatfield and Dixon—both old hands who had seen some shit—he was hauling ass, his rifle forgotten, terror brimming in his eyes. A guy could train and train and train, but the first real firefight was a proving ground, and you never knew how someone was going to react until the pressure was on.

I shook my head, wiped some dust from my eyes, then checked the rifle strapped to my chest. Safety was on, but the mag was still in place and there was a round in the chamber.

I’d been in plenty of firefights. Game time, motherfuckers.

I moved onto a knee, keeping a low profile, and stole a quick peek into the Humvee—had to check on Cal and Sanchez. My stomach lurched and I couldn’t breathe for a second.

The Humvee burned with Cal still stuck inside, slumped over the wheel. We’d gone to high school together. Endured Recruit Training on Paris Island together. Deployed to the Fleet together. Now, my best friend in the world was dead and there wasn’t a single thing I could do for him. He was crisped and seared, front and back, his flight suit mostly melted at this point. At a glance, it was obvious what had happened. We’d suffered a direct hit on the driver side from a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG.

The blast had thrown me clear, but Cal hadn’t been so lucky.

Sanchez was propped up in the seat beside my best friend, groaning. I didn’t know him well—he was a Boot, fresh out of 3/1, Company K. He’d been with our command for less than a week. What I did know was that he was hurt but alive and that I wasn’t going to leave him there. Damned if I was going to let some insurgent dickbag barbeque another one of my Marines. If his number was up, they could decide that back in the medical tent after they’d found him some nice clean sheets, pumped him full of morphine, and gotten the company chaplain to say a few words over him.

“Chatfield, Dixon,” I barked as the two men ducked behind the front end of my Humvee. “I need overlapping fields of suppressive fire. Strafe the building. Keep me clear for thirty seconds. McInnes,” I hollered as the kid slid to a halt, panting from his sprint. “Stand by for injured!”

“Get some!” Chatfield called as he poked his head out and laid down blanket of heavy fire. His M-16 rattled, rapt-tap-tap, the muzzle vomiting flame and hot lead. Bullets chewed up the mud and stone, sending debris raining down onto the narrow street below.

I jerked the Humvee door open and pulled the wounded Marine away from Cal.

Poor kid was slick with his own blood and still leaking fluid, but the wheezing hitch in his chest told me he was alive, at least for a little longer. With a hand under one arm and the other on the back of his jacket, I dragged him free of the vehicle and passed him off to Lance Corporal McInnes. What Sanchez really needed was a Corpsman, but what I had was a green around the gills lance who’d been in country for less than a month. It would have to be enough, because we didn’t have any other resources available.

Screw Semper Fidelis. Improvise, adapt, overcome­ was the real Marine Corps motto, as far as I was concerned.

McInnes pulled the IFAK from Sanchez’s flak jacket and set to work, spooling out gauze, applying pressure, treating wounds as best he was able. My own limited first-aid training ran through the back of my head. Start the breathing, stop the bleeding, protect the wound, treat for shock. I doubted any of that would be enough.

Sanchez rasped and wheezed, blood on his lips, eyes rolling wildly in his head.

Despite the chaos around us, McInnes managed to do a decent job. He was efficient, tamping down the bleeding, then applying the gauze. That gauze was specialty stuff, designed to soak up three hundred times its own weight in blood, but it wasn’t doing much for Sanchez. As soon as McInnes had one leak patched, another one made itself known. I didn’t like the kid’s chances.

But then, I didn’t like any of our chances.

I peeked up to get a better look at what we were dealing with.

We were hemmed in, and they’d taken out all three of our vehicles. Cal was dead and so was Aguilar. Since McInnes was all by his lonesome, that probably meant Willmarth and Goodrich were gone too. There were only four of us in fighting condition, and McInnes didn’t have a rifle. There were enemy combatants positioned on top of the buildings to my left and right and more hunkered down on the temple, using the stony crenellations jutting up for cover. It wasn’t going to take them long to gun us down if we didn’t change positions.

We had to move. It was that or die.

As though to emphasize the point, a bullet whizzed by, barely missing my helmet. That was all I needed. Lead bouncing off the vehicle and tearing a hole in my jaw.

If we were going to get clear of this position, we needed more power. More muscle.

I signaled to Chatfield. Two fingers pointed at me, then back at the Humvee. He got it. He’d been out here even longer than I had. The “more” we needed was sitting right in front of us, nestled in the gunner’s turret. All I had to do was get ahold of it without ending up like Sanchez.

“Reloading!” Chatfield called, dropping down and swapping out magazines while Dixon popped up, resuming suppressive fire.

I took a deep breath and slipped back up into the steel-ringed turret. There was a 240G, medium machine gun sitting in the cradle, loaded with .762 and ready to rock and roll. Only problem was, with the gun locked into the cradle, there was no way I could get the range of motion I needed to lay down fire at the roofline.

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Harder, faster, more.

“You’ve got this, Boyd,” I reassured myself. Not great when you start talking to yourself, but who was going to rat me out? Cal?

On instinct, I grabbed his tags and shoved them into my pocket. Then, working as fast as I could, I popped the cradle pin and pulled the bulky weapon free. I jammed the big ol’ buttstock into my shoulder pocket and angled the barrel toward the last place I’d seen muzzle flashes.

There was a brief break in fire.

“Get ready! We’re going to stack on the temple door,” I yelled, heart thumping like a jackhammer as I nodded toward the ancient building across from us.

Chatfield answered but whatever he said was whipped away on a blistering breeze and lost to the wind. I had to hope we were on the same page.

“Move on my mark!” I hollered.

Chatfield let loose with a round of sporadic fire.

“Mark!” I yelled. Then I pulled the trigger and the machine gun chewed through the muddy walls of the temple, sending more dust swirling and dancing through the air.

I was shooting low. Too low. I wasn’t here to remodel Fallujah or try my hand at interior decorating. I crouched in the belly of the Humvee, angled my weapon as high as I could, and let it rip again. The 240 wasn’t meant to be fired like a shoulder-mounted weapon, not unless you were Rambo. It kicked like an angry horse and my aim was shit as a result. I had volume but lacked precision. But that’s the thing about machine guns. Accuracy isn’t as important when you can lay down two hundred rounds per minute.

That kind of quantity has its own quality.

I don’t know how, but I heard the man die. It was fast.

He pirouetted from the roof of the temple and thwacked onto the hood of a rusted-out car across the street. His arm cracked and split, bending over the side of the vehicle like a disarticulated marionette. His eyes were open and vacant. He was dead and gone, which was fine by me. He’d been willing to take me and my buddies down. For all I knew, he was the asshole who’d killed Cal. Far as I was concerned, he got what was coming to him.

I aimed the 240 back at the position where he’d died and made a calculated guess. If I was camped out on top of a building and hoping to take out some United States Marines, I wouldn’t organize my men in clumps. I’d spread them out over as wide an area as possible and come at ’em from all angles. I adjusted my field of fire and squeezed the trigger again. I heard another gurgling squeal from above. Bingo.

Two down, no telling how many more to go.

Chatfield was still at it, screaming at the top of his lungs, yelling obscenities whenever one of their guys snuffed it. I joined in and riddled the top of that building until I couldn’t hear a single round of return fire. Then I waited.

Silence. Nothing.

Just the goddammed wind and a cat mewling in the distance.

Poor little guy, I could practically hear Cal whisper, his voice a distant echo of the past.

Cal would have gone looking for that cat. That was the kind of guy he was. A stupid son of a bitch with his head on backwards, but his heart in the right place. Something hurt deep down inside my chest as I thought about my idiot friend, but I pushed those intrusive memories away. I couldn’t help him, and now wasn’t the time for grief. Now was the time for survival, and my duty was to the living.

“We did good, Cal.” I touched the back of his jacket by way of farewell, ditched the 240—out of rounds—scooted out of the Humvee, and rushed across the street with my head ducked low, offering a silent prayer that I didn’t catch a bullet to the back. I slammed into the wall beside Chatfield, breathing hard from the effort, hands shaky from the adrenaline.

There was no sign of McInnes. I scooted right and spotted the lance corporal by the ruined Humvee. His body was hunched over Sanchez. Half his face was missing, even though his hands were still pressed up against Sanchez’s wounds. The only thing I knew about McInnes was that he smoked Camels, but I’d remember his name. I always did. He would go on the list with all the other friends I’d lost to this war. I’d also remember that he died trying to help one of his own.

Chatfield and Dixon were in position, their backs pressed up against the sandstone blocks of the temple, weapons locked and loaded. The place was silent at the moment, but that didn’t mean those sneaky bastards weren’t in there waiting for us to let our guard down. We couldn’t leave anything to chance.

Chatfield, on point, slammed his heel into the sturdy door barring our way into the temple interior. The wood cracked and swung inward as though in invitation. Dixon reached around and lobbed a grenade in. “Frag out!” Both men ducked back, waiting for the five count and the rattling boom that followed.

Choking smoke billowed out from the entryway as they moved.

Chatfield turkey-peeked the corner and hooked hard right, pieing his section of the room, while Dixon pivoted left, clearing his section. I came in hard on their heels, sweeping the top and back, searching for any combatants. All clear.

All clear of enemies, at least. The room was a shitshow.

There was debris everywhere—tables and chairs in splinters, pictures smashed in their frames, bedrolls shredded. A quick scan revealed AKs lined up against a wall covered with runes and pictographs in a language older than Arabic. More of the markings were carved into the stones underfoot—deep channels zigzagging and swirling their way across the floor. Stacked in the corner were wooden crates that held Russian made rocket-propelled grenades. The same type of RPGs that had killed Cal.

No bodies, though.

Didn’t mean there weren’t bad guys in the building somewhere. This was a weapons cache—the mujahideen wouldn’t just leave all this equipment sitting around, unprotected. They were probably tucked away upstairs, rigged with booby traps for the uninitiated and sentimental.

We’d have to take this place room by room.

There was a staircase toward the back that doglegged sharply left after the first two steps, making it the perfect spot for someone to lie in wait.

“Moving,” I called, assuming point as I glided for the stone steps.

Everything slowed to a crawl, time doubling back on itself as a barely audible plink drifted to my ears. That was a sound I knew well. It was death. I screamed at Chatfield and Dixon to take cover. I knew what was coming. I felt it in my bones even before I could see it with my eyes. The sound was followed by the appearance of a green sphere, no bigger than a tennis ball, rolling down the stairs like it was nothing at all.

An M-67 frag grenade.

“Back,” I screamed, eyes wide, face beet red. My legs moved like pistons, driven by adrenaline and the need to protect my friends better than I’d protected Cal.

That little green ball, packed full of hell and vengeance, thudded down the last two steps and came rolling to a stop.

I knew what I needed to do. It was stupid. Moronic. And the only way to save Dixon and Chatfield.

I leapt, smothering the grenade with my body, curling into a ball and muttering a silent prayer under my breath. I positioned my flak jacket over the top, hoping it would offer me some scant protection from the imminent blast. A part of me knew that was a pipe dream. There was no coming back from this. But I was dead anyway. This way, my friends might have a chance to live. I tensed a second before the explosion ripped into me, hot and crazed and metallic, turning my world upside down. I cartwheeled through the air and landed on my back with a resounding snap.

Resounding snaps were never good.

My legs weren’t my legs, and my arms weren’t following my orders, but worst of all, my guts were outside when they were supposed to be inside.

There should’ve been stabbing pains, the smell of burned flesh, and a shit ton of screaming, shouting, and swearing while my buddies dragged me out, patched me up, and lied about my chances. None of that was happening.

The pain was amped up to an eleven out of ten, but that score was intellectual, rather than physical. I floated outside my body, detached and distant, waiting for reality to sink in. But it seemed reality didn’t have time for me or my bullshit. Reality had left me to my fate, and I had the weirdest sense this was all happening to someone else. Start the breathing, stop the bleeding, protect the wound, treat for shock, I repeated inside my head.

Except, it was going to be damned tough to stop the bleeding, because my blood was actively crawling up the goddamned walls. The strange grooves gouged into the floor were rivers of crimson. I could feel my body growing cold as the room siphoned out the life force flowing through my veins—funneling it away from my body and directing it into the runes and shapes decorating the walls. What I was seeing was impossible since, as far as I knew, gravity only worked in one direction.

I chalked it up to shock. Some people saw tunnels made of light when dying, others saw friends and family members welcoming them with open arms. I saw my blood crawling up the walls. What does that say about me? I wondered idly.

“They get you when your guard’s down,” Cal said. I could hear his voice even over the ringing in my ears, courtesy of the frag grenade. “Come on, Boyd, if you don’t get your shit together, you’re gonna die here. We both can’t die here, man. I don’t want First Sergeant Cortez breaking the news to my mom—that guy was such a colossal douche. You gotta be the one to do it. I’m counting on you. So move your ass and get into a better fighting position.”

“That’s easier said than done,” I muttered under my breath, frothy blood coating my lips.

Hallucinatory Cal was right—obviously it would be better if I could sit up and find some cover—but with a stomach full of shrapnel, it was going to take more than sheer willpower to get me off my back. With a grimace, I groped at my midriff with a trembling hand. Soft to the touch, meaty yet pliable, my intestines were kind enough to slide back inside without too much hassle. I held my hand over the gaping wound, still waiting for the sensations to kick in, but damned if I wasn’t immune to the whole experience.

God bless adrenaline. It had spared me the worst.

Better yet, I was alive. Maybe not for long, but alive was still alive. My heart and lungs hadn’t been shredded or nicked. My ticker was ticking and my wheezybags were filling and emptying the way they were supposed to. Turned out, I’d been saved in part by the ceramic SAPI plates in my vest, but there was something wet soaking through my cammie bottoms. Likely another injury I couldn’t feel.

“You got this,” I told myself. “Just get up. Get up, you miserable son of a bitch. I am not going to join Cal in Hell. Not today. I am not gonna give these insurgent assholes the satisfaction of killing me.”

As soon as I turned my attention to my legs, the nerves fired up, sending jolts of energy surging down my thighs and into my feet, which twitched and flapped, ready to move. With a groan, I slowly stood. I wobbled on numb, unsteady legs. But I didn’t fall right back onto my ass. So far, so good. Next, I drew my service pistol—a matte black Colt 1911 that fired .45 ACP rounds—from its holster with one hand and my service issued K-Bar with the other. Chances are I wasn’t walking out of here, but at least I would die on my feet with a weapon in my hand.

Couldn’t ask for much more than that.