The Haven Hotel

The Storm

Nadia sings while we walk. She started when we had been on the move for ten minutes and she's been singing for nearly thirty. Several times I've wanted to tell her to shut up, but she has a voice like a kitten. That, together with her fragile build, makes me leave her alone when she sings the same song over and over again.

"Summer time." She wails into the sky and fails to hold the note for long enough. "When the living is easy. Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high."

The man does better with his two bags than I thought he would. Aside from a few grunts and sighs I hear nothing from him; no complaints and no further questions. Every few minutes I see him glancing at Nadia out of the corner of his eye, as if she'll disappear if he doesn't watch her. 

As we walk I get to speculating about who these people are. I don't believe that Nadia is the man's daughter. She doesn't look much like him, and he's well fed whereas she looks half starved. It seems to me that he picked her up somewhere along the road. It wouldn't be the first time I've come across a situation like that. 

If he's picked her up, either when she was abandoned or because her parents offloaded her, he must be the reason this is a special charge. On the other hand, he could be another officer like myself, tasked with bringing the child to safety. He doesn't look like an officer, but at my height, neither do I. I keep shifting my rifle and the pack on my shoulders and eventually I'm flicking the safety without noticing.

It's just past midday when Nadia stops singing and taps me on the shoulder. 

"Huh?"

"Do you think it's gonna rain?" She asks. 

"It probably won't." I don't know what I'll gain from continuing the man's lie, but somehow it feels preferable to telling the truth.

"How do you know?" Before I can answer she grabs my shoulder and pulls me closer to her level. I resist slightly but I wasn't expecting anything so I'm forced to yield to her yanking. "I think it will."

I don't say anything. As I'm straightening up my left shoulder snaps backwards and the rest of me follows. I land on my ass with my rifle in between my legs. The bang comes half a second later and some animal part of my brain understands what's going on. The gun bounces around on my right arm until it's aimed at the sky and I'm clicking the trigger repeatedly.

"Fuck!" I scream as a puff of steam rises out of the ground next to me and tiny chunks of road fly into the air. Another bang follows. I realize that I'm being dragged sideways. My left arm won't move. My fingers fumble against all the mechanisms in front of me and then finally my rifle fires. The barrel stutters hard and bullets slam into the ground in front of me. I raise the gun at the air with my single working arm and keep squeezing. 

The recoil mercilessly pounds my shoulder and I know I'm shooting at nothing, but it feels good to fire back. Another bullet hits the road, this time behind me. It left a streak through the fog so I aim at where the streak started. Whoever was firing at us lays off for the remainder of my being dragged to the side of the road. 

I take my stiff index finger off the trigger and crawl to my feet so I can walk on my own. I follow the man into a house where Nadia has already taken cover. She's sitting on the cracked and dusty white tiles, oddly calm. Maybe she's in shock but she's not dazed or listless. I, on the other hand, can barely see anything but the two people directly in front of me. My brain is still sloshing around inside my skull and my shoulder has started stinging through the adrenaline.

"What the fuck. What the fuck what the fuck." My lips and tongue are moving and my breath is making noise but I'm not actually saying anything.

"That was a sniper." The man checks the windows and nudges Nadia closer to the wall where she leans against the moldy wallpaper. Like his daughter, he's remarkably cool about this. Maybe he is an officer.