Eric led him to a rusted jeep, and Walt hopped in, turning to see that one of the doctors—a young French woman—had opened the door. She raised her hand to wave at him as Eric started the vehicle. She was the most experienced of the lot and, though still slow in the way of new doctors, she was competent and confident.
There was no opportunity to talk on the drive, given the speed and open top. Walt was sorry he hadn’t grabbed a jacket. While the weather in December was fairly mild, it was chillier tonight than normal. They drove too quickly over rutted dirt roads here on the very furthest outskirts of the Bani Walid area. His clinic was in a densely populated, underserved area, but the direction they were headed…
Walt tensed because he was fairly sure they were now in an undeveloped area that was considered so dangerous, the local health authority had made it off-limits for him. For any foreigner. Even locals avoided it.
They came around a corner, the narrow road—which was more of a dirt path—opening up into a clearing with a few buildings.
Eric stepped on the brakes and dust spat up from under the tires as he stopped. When he turned the headlights off, Walt couldn’t see anything for a moment—the only light here was a very faint orange glow coming through an open doorway in one of the three white buildings surrounding a small dirt courtyard.
Eric grabbed Walt’s shoulder, guiding him toward the open door.
The long, low building seemed to be a storehouse and had probably started out as a barn. There were stall areas now full of army-green trunks. A table with four chairs near the door boasted a lantern.
He took all that in without actually acknowledging it because his focus was on the people in the room. Six men in mismatched camouflage were either kneeling or lying on the floor, their hands behind their backs.
Standing over them, holding very large guns, were a dozen girls, ranging in ages from what looked like ten to fourteen. The smallest girl turned to point her gun at them, teeth bared in a snarl that was no less terrifying coming from a little girl.
Eric gestured to the men. “I need you to patch them up.”
“I won’t work with someone holding a gun on me.” Sadly, it was not the first time in his life Walt had used those words.
Eric looked at the girls. “Up to you.”
“If I want to shoot them?” one of the older girls asked in soft, lovely accented English.
“Your call.” Eric shrugged.
“What…” Walt wanted to channel his brother Oscar and say, “What the actual fuck is going on?” but he refrained because, despite the guns, the girls were still just children and his mama had raised him better than that.
“I need you to patch them up so we can finish questioning them.”
Walt closed his eyes. “It’s their blood. You’re torturing them.”
“Yep.” Eric’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. “They’re the bad guys.”
Walt glanced sideways at Eric. “If you’re torturing them, you’re a bad guy.”
“But they deserve it.”
“No one deserves—”
“They do.” The same girl’s voice cut through the room. “They deserve death.”
Walt blew out a long breath. He’d been avoiding thinking about what the presence of the girls meant because even he had his limits to what his heart could handle. He’d seen far too much in his years as a doctor, on battlefields, traveling to ravaged, desperate places most people wouldn’t dream of stepping foot in. But this… Walt fought hard to distance himself from what he was seeing. It was either that or walk back outside to throw up.
Walt set down his kit and dropped to a squat next to one of the girls. He was a big guy, though not as big as Eric, and could be intimidating for kids. “Are any of you hurt?”
What a stupid fucking thing to say. Of course they were hurt.
The reason he never came to this part of the region was because cells of extremist groups, with ideologies and fanaticism imported from other parts of the world, had started popping up here. The kind of extremists who thought they had the right to kidnap young girls.
She looked at him and spoke in Arabic. Walt shook his head, responding with one of the handful of phrases he knew in Arabic. “Sorry. La atakallam arabi.” I don’t speak Arabic.
He should have been doing his Arabic language lessons instead of blood slides.
Many locals assumed he spoke their languages, that he was local. It was a common enough mistake since he was black, though lighter skinned than many of the people here.
Walt asked the question again, this time in Nafusi. It was one of the first phrases he’d learned.
The little girl brightened for a moment when he spoke what was probably her native language, then shook her head. Walt glanced around, from the other girls to the captive men. It was stupid of him to ask in front of all these people. He’d have to make sure the girls either saw doctors in their home villages or came to his clinic.
Walt stood and stepped back, not wanting to loom over the kids. The girls would need to be looked at in more private and comfortable settings, which left the men. “I won’t treat them just so you can go back to torturing them.” He glanced at Eric.
“Sure it won’t change your mind if I said they deserve it?” Eric sounded only mildly interested.
“No.”
“Stupid Hippocratic Oath.”
“You don’t need a doctor. You need the authorities. And…and these girls’ parents.”
The littlest huddled against the girl beside her and started speaking rapidly. The bigger girl nodded. “We want to go home, but not until Eric has the names of all their co-conspirators.”
Co-conspirators? Walt looked at Eric, widening his eyes a little. No way the girl had known that word. Eric had taught it to them.
Eric grinned. “You don’t cut the head off a hydra. You stab it in the fucking heart then rip out its guts.”
The girls nodded.
“I will patch them up so they can be handed over to the authorities.” Walt enunciated each word. He glanced at Eric and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Please tell me you didn’t teach these children torture techniques.”
“Of course not. I just made sure the fuckers couldn’t move while the girls hit them. They went for the face. Most of the blood on my shirt was from broken noses.”
“There are so many things wrong with this situation.”
“And letting kidnapping victims beat the shit out of their abusers isn’t one of them,” Eric growled.
Walt wanted to argue with that—wanted to point out the psychological damage that could have been done—but honestly it was hard not to see his point.
The sound of a vehicle’s engine charged the air in the room. One of the girls leapt for the table, dousing the light. The men on the floor started to make noise and were met with a flurry of kicks.
Eric pointed at two of the girls, who went to the door, dropping onto the floor, their guns at the ready. Walt flattened his back against the wall where he could keep an eye on the men and the girls.
Eric crouched near the door. “Don’t shoot me,” he stage-whispered. “Just shoot the bad guys.”
The girls giggled. It was such an innocent, sweet sound that Walt had to swallow hard to dislodge the lump in his throat. The fact that they could giggle after the horrors they’d experienced, the nightmare they were all still swimming around in, actually gave him hope for their futures.