.

in behind me, drowning out the laughter.

      I was still thirty metres from the pillbox when it slammed into the small of my back. I hit the ground and the lights went out. I thought I’d been split in two.

      I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t. I heard people talking, but they made no sense. Where were Mainwaring and my mates? Where was I?

      ‘You okay, mate?’ a bloke said.

      ‘I think he’s dead…’ A woman’s voice.

      ‘He fell off his bike in front of that man’s car. He was in the air, upside down, when the car hit him.’

      I wanted to tell them that wasn’t what had happened at all. I wanted to tell them I’d been on Salisbury Plain in a live firing exercise against a target drone when the bloody thing decided to go rogue and everything turned to ratshit.

       Fuck! The pain…

      Someone was trying to move me. I felt like I was being pulled, pushed and prodded. Every time they touched me I wanted to open my mouth and scream, but I couldn’t even whimper.

      ‘I thought it had taken his head off. It hit him in the back and he was upside down, mate. His head went under the bumper and his feet went through the windscreen. His back must be broken.’

       If my back’s broken, why the fuck are you trying to move me? If my back’s broken, how am I going to do SAS Selection?

      They’ll pay for this, I thought. A drone goes rogue, hits me in the back and kills all my dreams. My God, I’ll have them…

      ‘Get the boards. Quick.’ Another woman. Stern, authoritarian.

      ‘I tell you, he flew off the bonnet and then the guy drove over him…’

      ‘Drove over his head,’ the first woman said.

      ‘No, it drove over his shoulder…’

      Whatever, I thought. The pain that had threatened to overwhelm me was replaced by a feeling of immeasurable tiredness. I felt myself sliding and falling.

      ‘Sir, wake up. Can you open your eyes for me?’

      I opened my eyes and my confusion deepened as I slowly saw a black woman backlit by a bright orange halo. I thought for a moment that Diana Ross had come to take me away…

      ‘Can you feel my hand?’

      I couldn’t, but all was not lost: I felt something on my face-the rain I could see sparkling in the glow of the street lamp.

      ‘Can you feel me touching your fingers?’

      I was aware of having hands and feet, but I couldn’t feel her touching them.

      ‘Can you grip my fingers?’

      I couldn’t. I couldn’t move a muscle. I tried to shift my head, but it wouldn’t respond. Nothing responded. I couldn’t even speak. I was totally fucked.

      The woman unzipped my Barbour jacket. ‘Sweet Jesus, he’s wearing a bin-bag under his coat.’ At best she must be thinking I’m mad and at worst a weirdo pervert.

      Leave me alone, I wanted to tell her, because all I want to do is sleep.

      Suddenly and with no warning I felt like I was being hit on the back of the head with a road worker’s mallet every time my heart beat.

      ‘Yeah, he arrested,’ a paramedic yelled. ‘He’s military. Suspected spinal and internal injuries…’

      I couldn’t open my eyes but at least the pain was telling me I wasn’t dead.

      I wanted to go to sleep again, but a voice in the back of my head told me I needed to stay awake.

      And someone seemed to be shoving the end of a broom shank deep into me, just below my rib cage, next to my spine. Every time the ambulance hit the tiniest bump it felt like it was going to burst through my chest. I was John Hurt in my own nightmare version of Alien.

      We hit a pothole and I suddenly found my voice. I screamed-full throat, full belly. It filled the ambulance and blotted out the sound of the siren.

      ‘Fuck me!’ the paramedic said.

      I passed out again.

      ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

       Of course I can hear you; just give me some bloody morphine…

      Then: closed abdominal injury, mate, the voice at the back of my head said. Fat chance of the love-drug.

      The pain had got worse.

       If I couldn’t put up with this, how would I ever be able to pass Selection? Fuck Selection, I’m tired…

      ‘Corporal Macy, can you hear me?’

      I opened my eyes a crack and found myself blinking against bright, brilliant white. No wonder people said they saw angels in places like this. They were delusional; just like I was now.

      A guy in a green smock leaned over and shone something into my eyes. ‘You’ve been in an accident, mate.’

      Now there’s a surprise.

      My head and back were on fire. I tried to move my feet and legs, but couldn’t. With a supreme effort, I managed to raise my head and shoot a glance down my body.

      I was on a bed wearing a green gown, in an operating theatre with a lamp suspended over me. It was pushed up and switched off. Maybe they’d already given up on me…

      A six-inch square rubber block was strapped tightly to my belly. The strap had some kind of winch attached to it. It was fucking killing me.

      At least I now knew why I was paralysed. My wrists and ankles were cuffed to the bed with more straps.

      ‘Can you tell me where the pain is?’ the guy in green asked.

      ‘Everywhere,’ I said. ‘Please, morphine…’

      Someone else approached the bed, a stethoscope around his neck. They looked at each other, then at me. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Can you tell us where it hurts most?’

      He injected my right arm with a clear liquid from a big syringe. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pain relief.

      I screamed.

      ‘My back is killing me.’

      ‘Where specifically?’

      ‘The small of my back. Please. You’ve got to give me something for the pain. I’m begging you—’

      He cranked the handle several notches. The clicks were like machine-gun fire. I screamed again.

      ‘I’m sorry, Corporal Macy, really I am.’

      Like fuck, I thought, as another wave of pain crashed through me.

      The lights went out again.

      My torso sprang upwards as soon as they took the tension off the strap. They lifted me onto another bed and finally relieved some of the pain.

      They’d had to pump X-ray dye into my arm to identify the source of my internal bleeding. Then they’d squeezed the blood out of my kidneys. When they released the pressure, the blood had seeped back into them, the rupture clotted and my life had been saved.

      ‘Think of your internal organs as being connected together by pipes.’ The junior doctor’s bloodshot blue eyes were set in a broad, unsmiling face. ‘When you get hit as hard as you did, all your organs get thrown around and the pipes connecting them detach. Then you bleed internally and the bleeding can’t be stemmed. You die from a loss of circulating body fluid. We think you were hit at about 50 mph, a lot faster than is considered survivable. Fortunately, your stomach muscles are so strong and your body so fit that the impact did not rearrange your internal organs as it would have for most