by Ricky Sides
He looked abruptly to the woman and said, “In the saddlebag of my bike is a medical kit. Bring it to me please.”
He continued to treat the man’s wounds as gently as he could. He was cleaning a particularly deep cut when the woman knelt beside him with the medical kit that he had taken from the Cessna. “Thank you,” he said and opened the kit. He removed an ampule of morphine and said, “I have morphine to ease the pain.”
The old man stubbornly shook his head and said, “Save it for yourself or my daughter. I can stand the pain.”
Tim shook his head and stubbornly said, “I can’t.” As gently as he could, despite the old man’s protest he administered the medicine.
The old man sighed as the narcotic took effect. “Thank you, son, but you should have saved it for a more important use.”
“You are important to me, Dad,” the woman said sniffing back tears. She looked at Tim and said, “Thank you, Sir.”
The man looked deeply into Tim’s eyes then and said, “I know I’m dying. Before I die, I want you to promise me that you’ll take care of my daughter for me.”
Tim had to lean closer to hear the man because his voice was so low. Rising back up, he looked the man squarely in the eyes and said, “”I’ll do what I can for her. You have my word on that.”
The old man nodded gratefully as Tim hastily bandaged another knife wound. “I believe you and I trust you. In my right boot, you’ll find a small book. It will be of great value to you. I want you to have it.”
“Sure, Mister. Thanks for the book. I’ll get it later. For now just lie still so I can bandage these wounds,” Tim responded.
The old man smiled gratefully at Tim then and said, “I’d like to speak to my daughter for a few minutes now.” Tim started to argue that the bandaging was more important but the man said, “You know as well as I do that I can’t last much longer. There are things I wish to reveal to my daughter. This information may mean the difference between life and death for her. Now please leave us alone for a few minutes so I can talk to her.”
Tim could do nothing but yield to the old man’s wishes in the matter. He admitted to himself that nothing could save the old man now. He walked to his motorcycle and sat down on the ground near it with his back to the people. From there he could barely hear the murmur of their voices but was close enough to help them should they need him.
Sometime later, he heard the woman crying and turned to the pair of people across the clearing from him. He walked back to the woman who held a small book in her hand. Looking up, she wiped her eyes on the back of her hand and said, “My dad is dead. He asked me to give you this.” She held the book out to Tim.
Reaching out his hand he said, “I’m sorry about your father and about what happened to you. I wish I’d arrived earlier. Maybe I could have prevented this.”
The woman turned her gaze to her father’s body lying on the grass beneath the tree and said no more. Tim left her with her grief for a little while. He returned about thirty minutes later and said, “We need to bury your dad now, Ma’am.” The woman turned on him in anger but before she could reply he continued, “We have to, Ma’am, or else the scavengers will get to him the moment we turn our backs.”
The woman stared down at her father’s lifeless body and said, “I suppose you’re right, Mr.…”
“The name’s Tim Wilison, Ma’am.”
“I want to thank you for your help, Mr. Wilison. I especially thank you for the morphine that you gave dad. I know how valuable morphine would be these days and it was your only ampule. I think that eased his pain enough so that we could have one last conversation together.” Looking reflective for a moment she continued, “How does one put a value on something like that?”
Shaking her head as if to wake herself from sleep she said, “As soon as dad is buried, I’ll be leaving and I intend to leave on my own.”
Tim said, “Ma’am, I promised your dad I’d look after you. At least let me get you safely to your relatives.”
“My father shouldn’t have asked that of you. He was asking too much. Besides I don’t have any relatives.” Then she got a stubborn set to her face and said, “I can take care of myself you know.”
Shrugging, Tim was brutally honest with her at that point when he said, “You needed help an hour ago, Ma’am. You may need my help again.”
The woman’s face turned red in embarrassment, but she repeated, “As soon as my father is buried, I’m going to leave here alone.”
Tim nodded his head and said, “Yes, Ma’am. I see that you have that firmly in mind.” He handed the book back to her and said, “Your dad’s book. You really should have it.”
The woman took the book and said, “I’m sorry if I offended you, Mr. Wilison. You seem to be a decent man, but I don’t want a keeper.”
“Yes, Ma’am, I understand that.” Grinning to show her that he had no hard feelings he added, “I think you’ve made that pretty clear.”
An hour later the woman left on a small motorcycle that she’d ridden into the forest. When she left, she didn’t look back.
Tim retrieved the canteens that she had left hanging on her father’s bike. That had been her only mistake. She’d taken everything else of value. The ones she’d left had been empty, but he took them to fill at the first opportunity. He gave her time to get a little ahead of him and then he followed her. He stayed far enough behind so that she didn’t know he was following her.
He’d made up his mind to follow the woman until she made it to some form of civilization. He took his promise to the old man seriously.
All that day he followed her. Sometimes he could see her trail and sometimes he couldn’t, but he was also relying on a map of the forest he had and he quickly realized that she was heading for a specific spot in the forest. Once he’d determined her most probable destination, he just stuck to the trail heading in that direction. He was glad to see that his hunch was correct when he actually spotted her after she turned off the trail they had ridden for better than two hours. She stopped once to refuel the bike from a small gas container that she had secured inside a saddlebag. Tim took the opportunity to do the same. Then the woman mounted up and continued the ride. She seldom exceeded twenty miles per hour. Tim suspected that this was to minimize the sound of her passage through the forest trails.
He’d been trailing the woman for some six hours when she ran into trouble. A group of five Marauders cornered her and forced her to stop, and then they dragged her off the bike. Tim thundered down upon the men on his bike. He shot three of the men as he passed by them and then he slammed on the brakes and laid the bike down. He used it for cover as he shot it out with the two remaining Marauders. He shot one of the men in the chest then turned the Berretta on the remaining man. He squeezed the trigger but nothing happened. The Berretta had jammed.
The remaining Marauder must have thought that he was out of bullets because he jumped up and charged Tim. Just as the Marauder jumped over his bike, Tim cleared the malfunction and sent two bullets into the Marauder, but the man managed to shoot him in the upper right shoulder.
Tim felt the bullet as it slammed into his shoulder. A wave of pain made him black out. When he came to, he saw the woman standing beside him with a concerned expression on her face.
He was only conscious for a brief period, but he managed to tell the woman how to dress the wound. He gritted his teeth in pain as they worked together to remove his shirt but when she began to clean the wound, he passed out again.
The next time he woke up was the next morning. When he woke, he found the beautiful red haired woman sitting beside him washing his face with a damp cloth. “How long was I out?” he asked.
She replied, “You slept through the night, Mr. Wilison.” Then as he tried to sit up she cautioned, “Don’t try to move.”
He quickly found that any movement on his part made his shoulder throb with severe pain. He laid his head back down on the makeshift pillow that the woman had made for him and said,
“Well it looks as if I need you to look after me for a few days.”
The woman smiled at him and said, “I guess we need each other, Mr. Wilison. Thank you for following me and saving me again.”
She leaned closer to him and smiled with a touch of good humor as she said, “We’ve got to stop meeting this way.”
Smiling gamely at the beauty above him, he responded, “Our relationship does sort of remind me of the Perils of Pauline.”
The woman laughed and extended her hand to Tim. “Let’s start all over, Mr. Wilison. My name is Patricia Huxley.”
Tim shook hands with the woman with his left hand to keep from hurting the injured shoulder. “Call me Tim. I’m not comfortable with Mr. Wilison. Every time I hear you say that I want to look around to see if my grandfather is here or something.”
“Tim it is then, but you’ve got to call me Patricia. Miss Huxley sounds like an old spinster.”
“No one with even half their eyesight could possibly confuse you with an old spinster,” Tim replied honestly.
Patricia blushed at the compliment and stared at him with an appraising look in her eyes. “That was sweet of you, Tim.” She got up and walked to the campfire, which was situated a few feet away. A moment later, she returned with a bowl of soup.
Tim was touched at the care the woman demonstrated as he ate the soup. He finished it, even though he didn’t really feel like eating.
Chapter 27
Late that afternoon, Tim caught a fever. By nightfall, he was burning up. He knew that infection had set in and that if he couldn’t kill it with the penicillin he had in his medical kit he would be a dead man soon.
He told Patricia about the medicine and she got it for him. After he took the medicine, she sat beside him washing his face with a damp cloth.
During the night, Tim’s fever raged higher. Patricia grew alarmed as his body jerked uncontrollably. She was fearful that the spasms would reopen the wound. She added her blanket to the cover and in desperation built several small fires around him in an all out effort to warm the area he occupied. She was trying her best to keep him warm.
All that night the woman sat vigil and tried to hold him down during the worst of the spasms. Around midnight he stopped shaking and she was able to give him more of the medicine. She fell asleep then and slept for about two hours until the sound of Tim thrashing under the blankets woke her.
Patricia was concerned. She had already used all of the wood in the vicinity as she had cared for Tim. She didn’t dare venture too far from him for fear that some predator would find him in his weakened state while he was alone. The five dead bodies in the area didn’t help much. She’d taken the precaution of dragging them away from the campsite the afternoon of the first day. During one of her trips to gather wood, she’d seen that something had been gnawing at the bodies. After that, she avoided that area completely.
No, she couldn’t go seeking more wood and leave him alone, especially not at night. By 3:00 A.M., she ran out of wood to feed the fire. She could hear coyotes howling and yipping all around the camp. Taking Tim’s pistol, she walked to the edge of the light and stared into the darkness with her back to the fire. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the shapes of coyotes milling about just beyond the edge of the light.
Remembering Tim’s instructions concerning what she should do if predators came while he was incapacitated, she raised the pistol in her right hand and fired once in the air in the hopes that this would frighten the animals away. He’d been counting on their fear of gunfire. It worked well. They yipped and vanished into the night. Soon their howls were growing distant. He’d warned her not to fire more than once, saying, “Once is a risk, but it is hard to figure out exactly where a single shot came from. Several shots strung out over a period of time pinpoint locations in the minds of some men.”
She returned to Tim after she frightened the coyotes away. He was shivering and she was very concerned. She was already using all of the available sleeping gear to cover him, yet, he was still shivering and tossing his head from side to side.
Patricia made a decision. She took off her coat and laid it across Tim for its added insulation, and then she crawled under the covers with him. She lay facing him and rubbed her hand and one leg against his body in an effort to share her body heat with him.
Even as she did this, she was amazed at her actions. Here she was lying beside a man she barely knew at a small camp in the middle of the forest. She prayed that she wouldn’t fall asleep and let him wake up to find her in this compromising position.
Yet another part of her mind argued that it wasn’t really true that she didn’t know the man. She already knew quite a bit about him. She knew that he’d saved her life on two separate occasions. Once, after she’d made it clear that she didn’t want his help. She knew that he’d insisted on using the only ampule of morphine he had to ease her father’s pain before he died. She knew that he’d kill any man that he caught committing atrocities without hesitation and with no expectations of receiving anything at all from the victims in return. Summing up everything she knew about him, she concluded that her father had been right in his assessment when he’d told her that Tim was a very good man. He was a man worthy of possessing that which she sought.
As Patricia, lay beside the feverish sergeant, now sleeping peacefully beside her, she made up her mind. If the man lived, she intended to follow her father’s wishes and tell him why she was here in the forest and seek his aid in recovering the prototype vehicle that her father had poured ten years of his life into seeing made a reality.
The night seemed to last an eternity for Patricia, but by 5:00 A.M. Tim’s fever had broken. She lay beside him a few moments longer feeling exhausted but elated that he now seemed to be past the worst of his illness.
Tim turned his head in her direction and she thought he was waking up, but his eyes remained closed and his breathing remained steady. She lay perfectly still for many long minutes. Slowly she eased her body away from Tim until she was no longer touching him with any part of her body. She waited a few moments to give him time to adjust to that change in his surroundings, and then she quietly slipped from beneath the covers and retrieved her coat, which had slid off the covers during the night.
She never saw Tim’s eyes open slightly. He’d been awake the last several minutes. He immediately figured out what she was doing and why she was doing it. He’d decided to feign sleep until she got up in order to save her any embarrassment.
Tim waited until Patricia was going through the meager remains of her supplies that she had left on her bike before making a show of yawning and stirring beneath the covers.
The beautiful redhead was at his side in moments. She said, “So you’re finally awake. I hope you slept well.”
He frowned and said, “I had the fever bad last night, didn’t I?”
She nodded her head and said, “You had me pretty worried for a while.”
“I thought so,” he replied. “I had the strangest dream last night.”
Patricia’s face went pale and she asked, “Would you like to tell me about it?”
For just a second, Tim was tempted to tell her he had dreamed that she was sleeping with him. Then he noticed how pale the woman had become, and he remembered how exhausted and worried she’d looked as she went through her supplies and he couldn’t bring himself to tease her. He responded, “To tell you the truth, I can’t remember it now. Sorry, I was never one for remembering my dreams that well.”
Relief flooded the girl’s face and he was instantly glad that he had let her off the hook.
***
That day Patricia insisted that Tim take the book her father had given him and suggested that he read it while she went looking for firewood. He’d promised to do it if she took along one of the pistols that had belonged to the men who had attacked her. While she was gone, he gave the book a quick look through. As he read it, he was amazed at what he discovered and when she got back from her first
trip gathering firewood he asked her about it. She confirmed that the information contained in the book was true.
Tim said, “Then we’ve got to find the vehicle. If it fell into the wrong hands, it would be devastating to the decent people of America.”
Patricia nodded her head in agreement and said, “I’m glad to hear you say that Tim, because I know now that I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”
Patricia was sitting next to Tim when she said that. He said, “I’ll do anything I can to help you. I hope you know that.”
“So it would seem,” Patricia said with a smile. He thanked her for being his angel of mercy and nursing him back to health.
Patricia made more soup and got Tim to eat. They talked for about an hour. She explained that her father was the chief engineer who’d worked on a project to create and develop a new prototype vehicle for the military. It is a vehicle that is so advanced that it would revolutionize Special Forces operations for decades to come. It was designed for deployment near war zones to be used by special ops forces as a working platform to accomplish a multitude of mission goals.
It had advanced energy weapons, communications, propulsion systems and the outer hull was composed of a special metal alloy of her father’s own design. The alloy was nearly indestructible once it had been cast and as long as a minimal current was passing through it, the metal would become molten upon impact by projectiles thus absorbing the impact and then it would rapidly cool to its former shape because the metal had what she called memory qualities. “Sort of like liquid metal you may have seen portrayed in the movies like ‘The Terminator.’”
She had worked on the communications for the project because of her expertise in communications equipment and computers. The communications array was designed for ultimate customization to specific mission needs, and could be set up to cover any number of functions that the special ops teams might need by using the computer keyboard interface to designate mission perimeters. “It’s more than just a system to call headquarters and check in. The array, when properly utilized, can be set up to gather intelligence for the team by monitoring all communications taking place via standard radio communications.”