Hard Cold Winter by Glen Erik Hamilton

up like it was noon. Bullets and rock pieces off the walls and I was sure the whole damn cave was coming down around us. We took them all out in thirty seconds, but—”
    I stopped.
    “You thought you were done,” Leo said.
    I’d had close calls before that day, wounded and knocked unconscious, shocked when I woke up alive. This firefight hadn’t been like that. It had its own surprises, especially when our team checked ourselves for casualties after, and were astounded to find only a few deep cuts and one guy with rock fragments in his leg.
    During the fight, I had felt aware of everything. The way the dirt crunched underfoot. The blurred ghost of my rifle’s reticule dot in the green night vision, as I moved it across targets. The thud of a ricochet hit on the armor plating of the guy next to me.
    I hadn’t believed I was dead in those moments, like Leo assumed. I had felt more alive than I ever had before.
    It was what came after that night which had seemed so unreal.
    My phone buzzed with a message. It was an automated text from Faregame, telling me that Selbey would be at the top of the block to pick me up in five minutes.
    “Look,” I said, “my offer still stands. Hang with me for a while.”
    “I don’t need watching.”
    “Okay.”
    “I just like it better outside.”
    “So camp in the backyard if you want. I gotta go. There’s a ladydown the street named Addy. Tougher than stale jerky. I’ll write down her number. If you need to find something and I’m not around, you call her. Understood?”
    It was my command voice, back again. Leo grinned for the first time I’d seen since Kandahar.
    “Roger that,” he said.
    I jogged up the street to the corner, wishing Selbey had been a little slower to reply to my ride request. Leo had been ready to talk. Maybe not about everything that was weighing him down, but it was a start.
    Then again, I hadn’t been completely truthful with the former Specialist Pak myself.
    It wasn’t really the gunfight in the cave that still lurked in the back of my brain, after so many years. It was how I had felt in the days after the fight.
    Separate. Insensate. Going through all the motions of walking and talking and even thinking as an outside observer.
    The feeling of distance had faded eventually, buried under the constant pressure of new missions, new dangers. Then one night in a dream, months later and back stateside, I saw the three muzzle flashes at the right edge of my peripheral vision, and somehow all the fear I hadn’t felt on that day came in like a howling banshee. I woke in a panic. And for the rest of the next day, I felt that same disconnection again, shrouded from reality.
    Like I wasn’t meant to be on the Earth anymore.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    I WALKED UP THE HILL to catch my ride. The rain had finally abated after a long final drizzle, but the tree leaves and gutters were still dripping.
    A metallic blue Forester wagon pulled up to the curb, so new that the chrome trim gleamed even under the gray sky. The driver rolled down his window halfway. He was a college-age white guy, with a long face and even longer neck with a pointed Adam’s apple. Tufts of dirty-blond hair poked out from under his bright red wool cap.
    “Selbey?” I said.
    “And you’re Mr. Varrick. Cool,” he nodded. “Pike Place, yeah?”
    I climbed into the backseat. The Forester had that leather-cleaner smell of showroom cars, along with just a hint of sativa smoke.
    “If you need a ride back from the Market, I can hang,” Selbey said. He banged the gas and the Forester lurched into a gap in the traffic. Selbey didn’t match his pristine suburbanite ride. He wore a dull gray wool sweater over a T-shirt I could tell was paper-thin just by the collar. His jeans were frayed at the knees and a two-inch split showed at the thigh seam.
    “Nice car, man,” I said.
    “Bought it for this gig. Gotta spend to make, you know?” His head nodded along with unheard music.
    “I know,” I said.