Lives Lived and Lives Lost

Life #90: Zombie Apocalypse

Naval Medical Centre Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, 2014

Harry woke up in a Marines military hospital in North Carolina, missing a spleen, a uterus and two lower legs, but having gained 90 lifetimes worth of memories without even meeting her soulmate.

“Sergeant Broussard,” Lieutenant General Jacobs said as he stood solemnly beside Harry’s bed, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders ramrod straight. “I have received nothing but reports of your excellence and unparalleled bravery in the field as you saved Captain Williams’ life. I want you to know I am recommending you for a medal of honour.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Harry managed to say before promptly passing out again. The next time she awoke, ten hours later, she asked after her partner.

“What happened to Vinnie?” Harry looked at Major Crenshaw, who was briefing her on the happenings of the past two weeks, ever since Harry got shot up saving her Captain’s life in Afghanistan.

Major Crenshaw pursed his lips for a moment. “I’m sorry to tell you your partner didn’t make it, but he died shielding your body from even more direct hits.”

Harry nodded, eyes welling up. “Yeah, that was something he’d do. Loyal to a fault.”

“And brave,” Major Crenshaw added with a warm smile. “Just like his handler.”

After Major Crenshaw left, leaving a huge pile of paperwork for Harry to go through, Harry shed a few tears for her feisty Malinois Vinnie, a k9 Marine trained to find roadside I.E.D.s, to protect the troops patrolling Afghanistan, and Harry’s best friend for the years she operated as a k9 handler in the Marines, working her way up to the rank of Staff Sergeant. Their last mission, accompanying Captain Williams and his team as he tried to instruct the newly appointed local police officers, had ended in an ambush. Shots were fired from both sides, with Captain Williams pinned down and the two Marines with him killed almost instantly.

And Harry was a Gryffindor through and through, even when she didn’t remember it yet, and she figured between the two of them, Captain Williams, a decent and honest guy with a wife and three kids, had more reasons to go home than she did, since she had no immediate family left, nor a spouse or kids waiting for her.

So Harry, with brave Vinnie in tow, made a move, saving the good Captain and getting mowed down in a spray of bullets from all directions in the process. She’d felt her lower legs give out, the bones shattering and the flesh tearing, but she’d passed out moments later so the pain had been minimal.

But that was then and this was now, and Harry sat up in her hospital bed and sipped a glass of orange juice as she took stock of her life thus far. Born Jasmine Broussard in New Orleans, to an African American mother and a creole father, who’d been unhappily married for about half a minute before divorcing because her useless father liked beating on her mother and she was having none of that, after which her father took off to parts unknown and leaving her mom to work two and a half jobs to raise her child by herself. And because none of her minimum wage jobs offered healthcare, when her mom got a nasty cut on her leg during her waitressing job from an irate customer throwing a glass at her, she didn’t go to the emergency room for stitches, but dressed the wound herself at home, which resulted in a nasty infection that turned septic, killing her mother within hours.

And six-year-old Harry moved in with her maternal grandparents, loving, hard-working people who did their best raising her. Harry’s grandfather, a kind man full of wisdom beyond his age, and a bus driver for the city, died ten years later from a sudden heart attack, with Harry’s grandmother following him a year later from complications of diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.