Nadine and Azime both looked pretty seriously wounded. Bigsby was helping to carry them both back to the APC while Will handled overwatch with his grenade launcher. Roland caught up with them and fell into step. Bigsby looked over at him and grunted, “You gonna try to take my nipple now?”

Roland shrugged. He wasn’t in the mood. His brain was in the dark ugly place it always went after a bloody fight, when the raw data about all the men he’d killed or battered lingered in his brain like a fart in the back of a humvee.

They reached the APC. Sardar gasped when he saw them. Pedro vomited. Roland was confused until he realized Bigsby and Will had also started to stare. Roland looked down at himself and saw that he looked like a literal dead man walking. He’d been shot forty-seven times, by his hindbrain’s best count, and peppered with shrapnel on top of that. He had ribs showing through, holes blasted in his biceps and his belly, and the bone on his left thigh was completely exposed.

“It looks worse than it is,” Roland said.

“It looks like you should be dead about five times over,” Sardar replied.

Roland looked Sardar up and down. His hindbrain did the math.

“Eleven times, if I were you.”

“Jesus–”

He handed Sardar the wrench, now dented and bloodstained. A large clump of hair and scalp was still stuck to the heel jaw. The mechanic took his tool with one hesitant hand. He stared at the gore on it until Bigsby started to yell again.

“Oi, fuckos. In case you’ve forgotten there’s an army breathing up our asses. Sar’, you good to drive man?”

Sardar nodded.

“Then let’s get the wounded in the cab and power the fuck out of here. Will, stay on watch.”

Will grunted and jerked his head at Roland. “This fucker oughta cover us. He just took out half a company on his lonesome.”

“You trust him to watch your six?” Bigsby asked.

Roland only half-heard them. He stared off into the distance, worked his jaw, and clenched his left fist so hard his fingernails drew blood. He was lost in his head, scanning scent-memories and analyzing the men he’d just beaten. He was drawn, again and again, to the memory of one man in particular. He’d worn a tattered U.S. Army issue vest and an M16 that posed as much of a threat to Roland as a drunken hornet. He’d had the scent of a woman on him. He wasn’t alone in that, but the rich wave of oxytocin that had poured off him was intense and real. In his memory, the man’s face kept twisting and morphing into the face of Randall Wallace.

Roland started to cry.