A shower and a walk down to the Main Street Café were all Trak could think
about. His stomach rumbled, and he reached to the seat beside him to grab a
handful of the peanut butter pretzels he always kept for the times he went too
long between meals.
When Trak looked up, he gripped the steering wheel. There was something in
the road, off to the side. Maybe a cow had broken through the wire fencing and
been hit, but Trak saw no damaged cars. A cow strike at high speed would
certainly disable or even total a car. He considered the possibility that a big
truck might have hit the animal and just continued on, but then he saw that the
lump in the road was not a cow. A bright orange line bisecting what appeared
to be a backpack made him realize this was no animal.
Trak slowed to a stop by the prostrate form and jumped from the pickup, jolted
by a sudden flash of memory. He was tending a soldier, unconscious and face
down following an IED explosion, a young man who, when Trak turned him
over, was so mutilated that only his dog tags could identify who he was.
But Trak put that memory aside and went into Army medic mode, quickly
checking for a pulse and obvious signs of trauma. He noted the dirty clothes
and empty water bottle still clutched in the boy’s hand, and, ominously, no
obvious signs of sweating. What appeared to be a new Diamondback’s
baseball cap had rolled away, exposing a thick shock of dark hair, darker even
than Trak’s. But this boy did not appear to be of Native American descent, a
heritage Trak claimed on his Navajo father’s side. Trak was sure the kid was
Hispanic; a rarity in the towns of Colorado City and Hurricane, where most
everyone was blond headed and blue eyed.
The boy was suffering from heat sickness, a dangerous situation that could
quickly lead to death, so Trak gathered him in his arms and situated him on the
front passenger seat. Then he grabbed the baseball cap from the dirt and
pulled out his cellphone, hoping he could get a signal.