Do They Know I'm Running? by David Corbett Page A

nudging his ass crack, then stepped out onto the doorstep. “Follow me.”
    McBee blanched, stepping back to make way. “You sure?”
    “I’m positive. Get the blood moving. You coming?”
    He shortly regretted not donning a jacket but then shook off the cold, faulting himself for wanting snivel gear. During the invasion he’d slept shivering in shallow ranger graves, wet from rain or choking from windblown dust, hoping not to get run over by a tank in the night, clutching his weapon, happy as a drunk come payday. Jesus, he thought, how soft you get and so fast. He fought against the hobbling pain breaking through the Percocet, willing himself forward. McBee kept pace behind, patient despite the crippled speed and mercifully short on conversation.
    Near the trailer-park gate Godo spotted Tío Faustino’s Freightliner cab and felt a misty want, picturing his uncle, wondering when he might see him again. Strange, how girlish the moods sometimes. The truck’s engine was ticking from its cool-down and he caught a whiff of diesel, the scent sending him back instantly to the cramped confines of his Humvee, packed into the backseat with the rations and water cans, the ammo and thermite grenades, C-4, claymore mines, the bale of concertina wire and cammie nets, bolt cutters, map books, chemlites, a pickax and sledgehammer—Chavous in the opposite seat; Mobley in the turret manning the Mark 19, his ass a fart’s breadth away from Godo’s face; Gunny Benedict in front with his maps; Pimentel at the wheel, bitch-slapping the radio, screaming at the static. They were pealing toward Al Gharraf, preparing to take fire.
    “You all right?”
    Godo snapped his head toward the sound.
    “You stopped walking,” the man said. McBee. He sounded concerned. Maybe frightened.
    Godo said, “Sorry.”
    “Listen, if this is too much, I’m serious, just point me in the right—”
    “I’m fine. Come on.”
    At the gate Godo swung south and they marched along the gravel roadbed toward the center of town where the transit center was located. The wind was sharper here, keening off the mudflats and the grass-lined river, but now Godo embraced it, letting the cold meld with the throbbing ache in his leg. His gooseflesh cheered him and his pitted skin blushed from the stinging air. Beyond the wetlands the Mayacamas range lurked in the drizzle. Stunning, he thought, miraculous, resisting an urge to cry out: Get some!
    With the engaging monotony of one step begging the next, time fell into its crazy hole again. He lost all track. Ten minutes? Twenty? Maybe this means I’m finally in the moment, he thought merrily, buoyed on pheromones, but then he noticed, just up the roadbed, near the edge of the commercial district, an arch-backed dog rummaging in some Dumpster overfill. He stopped, feeling his lungs constrict. Shortly, the frame confused him, a line of towering dusty palms, a sagging concrete wall, a roadside bag of trash, then impulse threw him to the ground, locked up in a fetal curl, burying his head in his arms. Seconds warped around his brain as he waited out the blast. Rather than the dust-scattering concussion he was expecting, though, he felt instead a gentle prodding kick to the sole of his shoe.
    “Listen, I don’t mean to keep bringing this up—”
    Godo’s eyes shot open. The light was gray, not ocher, the air wet and cold, not parched.
    “—but if you need help, or I should get you to a doctor—”
    Godo scrambled to his knees in a panic, combed the grasswith his hands, searching out the spider device—two batteries, the curving wires, the unspent shell.
    “—you gotta let me know, okay? Otherwise I’d just as soon—”
    Jerking his head up, Godo fixed the man in his eye. McBee. Hillbilly stock, grip like a pipe wrench.
    “—not impose on you. I’ll just head on downtown here, if this is the way.”
    A station wagon had pulled to the curb a little ways on. A broad-faced man in a ball cap stared back over his