Chapter Eighteen: Goodbye, my friend
Margo coughed furiously after she was winded upon impact. She mustered the courage to lift herself off the gravel but the intensity of the ringing in her ears never ceased and the black dots that riddled her vision made her think she was going blind.
"Tom!" Margo yelled through her dry, bloody throat. "Tom, buddy! Are you hurt? Are you okay?"
Unease crept into Margo's chest and suffocated her more than the blood could. Gurgling on the blood, she spat it up and it covered her face and with the only movement her body could produce, her shaky palms tapped the ground in a pointless attempt to gain Tom's attention.
"Tom, answer me!" She fought the urge to cry as the man remained unresponsive.
Energy shocked Margo and with the newfound adrenaline after hearing another damned bullet whizz in the cool air, she gasped in preparation and she rolled over and hit a bright orange jacket with a thud.
Dread drowned Margo below its mournful seas, the feeling itself already sorry for her before she could come to terms with such a horrific and tragic loss. At first, she blinked slowly and adjusted to the bright colour of the jacket that lay beside her and when her eyes pathetically trailed upwards, she noticed blood trickling down the dead eyes which belonged to Tom.
If he was severely disorientated the same way Margo had been, he should've woken up by now. When Margo's hand found his, squeezing his cold palm in efforts to wake the man up, she wasn't able to tell that his blood stopped pumping oxygen round his body, since the pigment on his cheeks had never been there, given the freezing temperature.
"Tom, why won't you wake up? Talk to me!" Margo croaked.
When a thought hit her like a ton of bricks, she began to squeal in utter terror and panic. With every little bit of energy she had left, gnawing on the inside of her skin to pressure her into moving her body, by the grace of god, she found the will to struggle to get on her knees.
Looking down to Tom's face, a hole had made residence as an exit wound on his skin and the crimson red liquid trickled from the permanent injury that had been lodged right between his eyes.
"No." Margo muttered in sheer disbelief.
She couldn't believe it, nor did she want to accept the loss of someone she'd grown to love through the bickering, narrow side eyes in judgement and the existential lengths he went to to protect her as though she were his own young and how he built her eighteen year old, broken girl character to a powerful, ruthless woman who showed no mercy.
Only this time, she showed all the mercy she could in a hellish cry in defeat. Just as she lifted her head from Tom's chest, over his breast to where his heart lay in his rib cage, resting in its eternal slumber, she pounded on the padding of his orange jacket and yelled in sorrow to the heavens above.
"Margo! Tom!"
Ben's voice mirrored Margo's heart-broken cries in the echoing gloom. He fell to his knees beside the man and turned his body, a sliver of hope being that he was alive and just injured crumbled beneath him as a pool of blood had formed under Tom's head alongside the bullet that imprinted on the ground.
Margo's mouth fell agape and she could only cry into Ben's shoulder as he wept over Tom, grabbing onto his body and begging for revival. When she finally rose to her feet, she was only brought back down on her knees at the hands of mercy. She howled into the air, sobbing and praying for a miracle to repay her sins by offering her life in return for Tom's.
"Let's get him wrapped up." William sighed. "We need to keep moving."
With blood running down her temple and the crimson stains round the edges of her mouth, she turned, ferociously with terror ablaze in her bloodshot eyes. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
"You're a heartless son of a bitch!" Ben sharply cried to his brother whilst still hugging the corpse of his dead best friend.
Anger rose in William's being and with sudden exasperation, he yelled with a point down to Ben. "Well it was your little fire that got him fucking killed!"
With a loud roar, Ben sprung to his feet and charged at William. He knocked him into the side of a nearby boulder and punched him in the face. In a battle of grief, the brothers landed punches on each other's face whilst attempting to retrain the other from doing so.
Margo trembled momentarily, unsure of what to do before she lunged forward and with the help of Catfish and Pope who copied her, she pulled Ben off William, shouting for the pair to stop and when she managed to grip onto the back of Ben's bulletproof vest, she and the other men used their combined strength to pull him back and make him fly onto another pile of rubble.
"Fuck you!" Ben yelled to William with tear-stricken features.
"Fuck you, Benny. Fuck you!"
Santiago stood between the pair whereas Catfish made his way beside Margo who looked as though she was about to keel over from heart failure. She couldn't believe what was happening. The blood in her system kept pumping and yet, she should've been the one who lay dead. It was all her fault.
"It wasn't the fire that gave us away!" Pope yelled to the men on either side of him. "That kid was from the village. He's been tracking us for days. He obviously wanted a clear shot at Tom. He wanted him."
Margo released yet another cry that nearly brought her down to the ground. With her hands grasping out for Tom, Catfish pulled the woman into his arms and tightly held her in place with his hand over her head to bury her face into his chest.
"No!" She cried aloud, her screams coming from the pits of hell. "It should have been me! That bastard was aiming for Tom and I was supposed to be covering him but I thought-I thought that last-that other guy was the only one and he-he wasn't! Tom's dead because of me!"
Catfish rocked the girl back and forth, mimicking the actions he done just weeks prior to his newborn child. Tears sprung in his vision upon feeling the exhausted thrashing in his arms but with her efforts being minimal given her intense injuries, she didn't make much of impact, so she was easy to restrain but having to do so made he and the other men suppress cries.
"We have to get the fuck out of here." Santiago's tone dripped with suffer. "And we're taking all of that money with us. Tom's family deserves it and so do we."
After a brief pause, Pope looked to William who still panted in both disbelief at the loss of the friend and that his own brother had turned on him in an instant and so harshly.
"Alright, let's wrap him up. We carry him down."
After they gathered the remaining pieces of their shattered hearts that lay in daggers across the forsaken grave of which Tom's body had rested in a pool of his own blood, William, Santiago and Ben had lifted a section of him each and lowered him down to the rocks to where they began to wrap his body up in some sort of fabric. While they continued on with business, Frankie practically trailed a frail Margo away from the crime scene, the place where her body should have been taken instead.
"You have to stay strong, Margo." Catfish placed his hands on either side of her head and spoke to her, watching as her tearful eyes read his lips as her hearing was impaired through grief and physical trauma. "You will not survive if you do not keep your head in the game."
"How can you say that?" She whimpered, her hands ready to push him.
Frankie barely retrained them and kept them lowered at her sides. "Hey, hey, easy! He was my friend too!" The struggling carried and the men looked back to see Margo trying to fight him off, but nobody had the nerve nor courage to step in during such a sensitive and raw moment. "You listen to me and you listen damn well good. You have a brother back home you need to get to. He needs you!"
"No he doesn't." Margo spat. "He's better off without me."
"Don't say that!" Frankie hissed. "Do you really think Tom would want you to be this way?"
Margo only cried harder and managed to shove Frankie back with her blood-stained knuckles. "What does it matter anyway? He's dead!"
Noticing the men had started to string the money bags onto the line, Frankie's voice no longer held a soft spot for his surrogate daughter. "We have to keep going, alright? Please. If you're not going to do it for yourself then do it for the rest of us. We all love you and need you back home, safe and in one piece."
"Tom's girls expected their dad to come home in one piece." Margo's lips trembled as did her body.
"I know, Margo, I know." Frankie pulled the woman into his arms and let her cry it out. "And they'll need you to tell the tale. They'll need you to tell them how brave he was and how he helped you and kicked your stubborn ass back into line."
Margo's sobs wracked her body. "I-I can't!"
"Maybe you can't but you will. You know those girls meant everything to Tom and to repay him, you're going to be there for them. Use your own experiences of losing your father help those girls who won't stand a chance without a strong-willed woman like you."
Margo couldn't disagree further because he was right. If anything, she wanted the girls to end up with a lump sum of cash to provide for their college education and their living expenses, but not only that, she wanted them to know the absolute truth about their father because it's what they deserved.
She had to persevere. It's not what she wanted but it's what she had to do. And so, she nodded to Fish and followed behind him in the direction of bags on separate lines that were waiting for her hand to pull them on yet another journey, but this one would be different. It would be without their leader who'd led their complete pack not only here, but in other parts of the world. It wouldn't be the same without him. And as she carried on his memory, Ben's harrowing, husky, sad-riddled yet exquisite voice rang out in a sad song to commemorate Tom's legacy.
"Somewhere there's a mother, crying for her boy. He is an airborne ranger with orders to deploy. Somewhere there's a father, crying for his son. His son was an airborne ranger with a war to be won. Somewhere there's a daughter, crying for her dad. He was an airborne ranger. Now he's just a folded flag. Don't you cry for him. He don't need your sympathy. He was an airborne ranger. It's the best that be can be. It's the best that he can be."