No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Better than weaving more lies. Accepting credit for a battlefield on which he hadn’t served. He should be there now, maybe. Through five wars, he’d made a first-rate soldier. If he were stronger—but he pushed away the self-recrimination. He was strong, not impervious.

  He turned the key in the ignition, and the flare of pain in his wrist made him wince.

  No.

  Too soon. He was supposed to have another week—a week to catalog that stock of books, buy enough canned soup to last him a month and enough night crawlers to last the turtle.

  All right, calm down. He started driving. He’d rest at the hotel and be ready for a drink and a conversation with Zachary Wilson. He’d fly home tomorrow and order groceries online if he had to. He’d make it back in time.

  He maintained a speed of 70 mph all the way back to the Hilton. He might be an old man, but he’d be hanged before he drove like one. Cruise control kept the car going more reliably than his foot on the accelerator. His ankles were aching like his wrists. Like his thumbs and knees and elbows—his first red flag. Forgetting that customer had been a yellow flag, and he’d ignored it. Been careless, preoccupied with the surviving daredevil and blind to anything but possible answers. So he might get his answers now. The cost might not be worth it.

  No, that was anxiety talking. Not logic.

  He pulled into the hotel lot and parked. If Zac Wilson provided answers, the trip was worth it.

  He eased out of the car and almost dropped the keys. He curled stiff fingers around them. On the softest flesh of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger, an age spot had appeared in the last three hours. This wasn’t a red flag. This was a BRIDGE OUT sign. He had to get to his room.

  No one looked at him twice as he strode across the hotel lobby to the elevators, backpack and carry-on in tow. His knees tried to lock up, but he forced his feet not to shuffle. He stepped onto the elevator alone. Small favors. He stood in the middle and braced his feet as it rose to the fifth floor and opened. He stepped out and hauled his bags down the carpeted corridor to room 211. Swiped the card. Turned the handle. Went inside and hung the Do NOT DISTURB tag.

  He kept up the firm strides all the way to the bed, but willpower would take him no farther. He lay down, flat on his back, and shut his eyes.

  He was in trouble.

  He wouldn’t rise from this bed for days. When he could, he’d be weak from hunger and thirst, able to manage nothing more strenuous than feeding himself. He would pause to catch his breath after crossing to the bathroom. He would fight to hold on to memories he made in the next month, though all the others would remain sharp and bright as a cinema picture.

  He set a hand on his chest, measuring the difficulty in each breath. Always, this was the hardest thing to bear. The thing that would probably kill him at last, some October. He’d discover his lungs weren’t filling anymore and he’d suffocate in bed. Alone. The thought shouldn’t scare him so much, but his heart raced even now.

  Enough. Stop. Shut it down.

  He didn’t sleep. Couldn’t. Hours ticked down. A maddening fog seeped into his mind. He was supposed to do something tonight. Go somewhere. He was going to find answers. To some question that mattered a great deal but now evaded him. Oh well. If he was finally to die, the question didn’t matter so much after all.

  Solitude throbbed in the room. David opened his eyes. The ceiling was a predictable eggshell color. The painting on the wall across from the bed consisted of only a few brushstrokes—an impression of red flowers in a white vase, set in the center of a green table.

  He lifted his hand. Looked at it, fingers splayed against the ceiling. It trembled, a new age spot now marking the back of his hand, but no wrinkles. Never wrinkles nor gray hair. It didn’t make much sense, but it was consistent every year. He curled his fingers, and the pain of movement crinkled his forehead. He let the hand fall back to his chest.

  “Are You here?”

  His voice rasped. Ancient and brittle, gruff and lilting with the Scottish brogue of his father. He couldn’t remember at the moment how to speak like a modern American.

  “If Thou hast cursed me, stay and speak Thy reasons. I’ll not deny I deserve cursing as much as the next man.”

  He pressed his palm to his chest. Heart rate slowing. To be expected in the first few hours of this process.

  He drew a boggy breath and closed his eyes. “Please, Lord, if it’s something I’ve done, be merciful and show me. Let me strive to right the wrong before Thee. Let me be Thy servant again. Or take me to Thy rest. Only …” A tear seeped from his eye and trickled down his temple into his ear. “Dear Lord, I pray don’t make me bear agelessness forever.”

  He lay still as pains built in his body.

  “Is Thy grace sufficient for me? Or is Thy grace withheld, therefore I linger here?”

  He was silent an hour, perhaps two, perhaps longer. His mind drifted, yet he knew he was drifting. A white mist. A memory. His bonny dark-haired Sarah dancing in the wheat field while rain poured from a beautiful black sky and soaked the earth. John danced beside her, laughing, sweeping her into his arms and spinning her around, her boots off the ground and her green muslin skirt twirling above her ankles. He kissed her mouth and tasted honey. He set her down, pushed the bonnet off her head, and kissed her hair. Had to lean to do it, she so small and he towering over her.

  He drifted again. He was standing outside their tiny bedroom, waiting alone. Widow Kerrigan’s voice was not muffled by the quilt hung for privacy.

  “There, there, Sarah, that’s it. Sure and you’re doing well, so you are.”

  But Sarah wailed. She had to be dying. The babe they’d longed for, prayed for—the babe was killing her, surely it was. John knelt at the stove and bowed his head, gripped his thighs and rocked when she wailed again.

  “Lord Almighty, I pray Thy mercy on her,” he whispered. “On her and on the bairn. And on me—only don’t take them from me, Lord, and I’ll ask nothing else all my days.”

  So many days since that one. His Sarah. And Michael James Russell, their firstborn son. Gone now. Gone so many years.

  “Lord,” the voice of the old man whispered—his voice, so strange to hear it. “Forsake me not.”

  He drifted.

  The buzzing sound was not a memory. He opened his eyes. That vibration near his head—on the nightstand, a phone, his phone—it was happening. Here. Now. Where and when were muddled, but he wasn’t John, and Sarah was not here with him. Nor was Michael—not the infant Michael, nor the boy, nor the man.

  Too tired to raise his arm that high, but someone was on the other end of that line. Even a wrong number would be a human voice. He dragged his hand over the phone, and it nearly fell between the nightstand and the bed. He dropped it onto his chest. It would go to voice mail any second. He swiped his finger over the screen.

  Silence, then, “David?”

  Ah, his name. He closed his eyes.

  “You there or what?”

  “Aye,” he said.

  “I’m in the lobby. Are you coming down?”

  “No.”

  More silence. How to get the voice to continue? He blinked. He had to clear his head. “Are you okay, man?” the voice said. Zachary Wilson’s voice.

  “No,” David said and then huffed. He deserved a kick for that. Not that he’d be kicking himself or anyone else today.

  “Room number?”

  “Two eleven.” He shouldn’t have said that either. But the room was too quiet, and Zachary Wilson knew John Russell.

  A minute later, a knock came. Then a shaking of the door, and then Zac’s voice from the phone. He hadn’t hung up.

  “Let me in.”

  The mist was falling too fast.

  Something cracked. The lock? David opened his eyes as footsteps entered the room. Training, adrenaline, experience flooded in and pushed him up until he was sitting on the bed, legs lowered, feet on the floor, trying to stand.

  Every joint, every muscle, every bo
ne refused the orders of his mind. He fell back.

  A face loomed over him. “You’re rejuvenating now? Crap timing.”

  Did he look rejuvenated? He growled.

  “There’s an age spot in the middle of your forehead, and I’m not an idiot.” Zac paced away from the bed and cracked his knuckles against his other hand. “Great. Now what?”

  David tried to think. Tried to move.

  “I have to move you, and you can’t fight me. Because that will get us noticed, which could get me recognized. I don’t want to think about the possible scandals.” As he spoke, Zac pulled up a contact in his phone and raised it to his ear. “Wrinkle in the plan. Rejuvenation. Unexpected, given he got on a plane to find me.”

  Someone else knew. David rolled onto his side and sat up, all his muscles resisting the movement. He had to fight back. He couldn’t allow himself to be taken. He couldn’t fail the mission. He had to escape, get back to his troops.

  No, that wasn’t right. So much fog in his brain, he seemed to be feeling his way, hands outstretched, through his own thoughts. What was he trying to do? Why was his body so weakened, and why was that voice still speaking?

  “He’s John freaking Russell. I’m not leaving him here. And it’s bad. That theory we had about stale blood? He can’t move.”

  John Russell. Yes. He was. First Sergeant Russell of the United States Army, and if the enemy was going to try to kill him, he had to get away before they discovered they couldn’t.

  “Well, I guess it’s a good thing you came to town for an intervention, isn’t it? Meet at the RV as soon as you can get there.”

  The voice stopped. John braced up on his elbows and got no farther. It was true; he couldn’t move. The Germans had done something to him. But this man spoke English. His face came into view above the bed, familiar. Zac. If they knew each other, he ought to feel safe.

  “Okay, man, I think I can help you, but I need you to cooperate. Will you?”

  No. Yes. “Am I … wounded?”

  Something flickered in Zac’s eyes. He nodded. “Yeah. I’m getting you to a medic. Okay?”

  “You aren’t German.”

  “No, soldier. I’m an American like you.”

  Zac hefted him over his shoulders and carried him out of the … hotel room. A hallway, carpet, housekeeping cart draped in white towels. This wasn’t 1917. His name was David Galloway, and he had hung the Do NOT DISTURB sign but not remembered to flip the bolt on the door. He was being hauled on the shoulders of a celebrity—down a stairwell, out a discreet exit into heat that parched his skin. Zac shuffled jingling keys and shifted David’s weight, then lowered him across the back seat of the car.

  “If you die before we can have a proper conversation, I’m going to be pissed.”

  “I won’t,” David whispered.

  “I’m not convinced right now.” He pushed David’s feet out of the way and shut the door.

  David never should have come to Arizona.

  FIVE

  He resolved not to close his eyes as the vehicle sped along, though staring at the ceiling helped him not a whit. It was beige. He was destined to stare at ceilings today. A car’s ceiling might be called something else, though…. He battled away the fog. Zac had told someone about him.

  The man might lie, but asking risked nothing. “Where are we going?”

  “Hey back there,” Zac said. “Name, rank, serial number?”

  “David. Twenty-first century.”

  “Good. Keep that up.”

  Silence settled for a minute, lulling, tempting David to give in to the mist and the memories. No.

  “We’re en route to my RV,” Zac said. “It’s parked off the beaten path for some privacy. Probably another twenty minutes. Can you sit up?”

  David tried, just for the sport of it. His hand lifted an inch higher than he expected before dropping back to his side. “Not now.”

  “Is it this bad for you every year?”

  “The last thirty or so.”

  Zac didn’t answer.

  He couldn’t track the time. He lay still, weakness and aches weighing him down. If Zac and his cohort planned to eviscerate David for science, if they planned to sell him to a lab somewhere and let them do the eviscerating—whatever their plan was, they would go through with it. Perhaps they knew how to kill him. If all else failed, decapitation would do the trick, or so he’d always figured. His heartbeat stuttered, and his breath caught. Death might find him today. He would try to be ready.

  Prayer would be prudent. A petition for mercy. If God had rejected him, yet these people forced David into His presence…. He stalled the thoughts. They made no sense and helped by no means.

  After what felt like a long while, the vehicle slowed and stopped. He was jarred a bit as Zac shifted into park.

  “Still here?” Zac said.

  “Aye.”

  The driver’s door opened, shut. Then the door behind David’s head opened and Zac stood over him. His eyes seemed to hold concern, but that wasn’t a difficult sentiment to feign. Attempting to get up would result in more collapsing and humiliation. David lay still, but adrenaline jolted his body when Zac picked him up under his arms and dragged him out of the car.

  Footsteps over the gravel.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” A new voice.

  David’s heart pounded. They team-lifted him, and he turned his head as they passed desert-stunted brush and the car, a staid sedan in salsa red. At least the color fit the man.

  “Not much of a car,” David said.

  “That’s the point, man.” Zac grinned down at him. “Nobody expects me to be driving it.”

  The mist was thickening in his mind again. Tugging at him with chilled tendrils. When he came back to himself, Zac and the stranger had lugged him through the door of an RV furnished in gleaming oak and granite. David’s head drooped to one side, and linoleum the color of sandstone filled his vision. He lifted his head. He would not look the invalid in the midst of possible enemies.

  Aye, he was doing a fine job at that as they carried him to the couch.

  They laid him down. The gray leather upholstery was chilled by the air-conditioning. Cold caught him, contrasting the heat he’d been carried through. His body gave a shiver.

  The other man stood back, staring. He looked a little younger than Zac did, maybe twenty-five, his floppy hair a shade of red not much deeper than blond. Green eyes, a long mouth that pressed itself thin as he studied David.

  “It is him.”

  “You don’t say.” Zac folded his arms.

  To the left, outside David’s vision, the door shut. Was locked. Another set of footsteps plodded nearer.

  Three of them. David’s eyes darted to Zac, who was watching him as astutely as he had at Marble Canyon.

  Zac lifted his hands. “I can’t say anything to persuade you right now. In your position, any one of us would be freaking out.”

  He didn’t freak out, as a rule. This situation didn’t follow the rules.

  He shut his eyes, then opened them as the third pair of feet tromped closer. The third man, later thirties and not much taller than Zac, stood to one side. His hair was a flat brown, his face forgettable but for the ice-gray eyes.

  Those eyes shot darts at the back of Zac’s head, but his words were for David. “Can you prove you’re John Russell?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “But you can.” He stepped around Zac to pin his glower on David.

  “If I choose to, yes.”

  Zac gave a measured sigh. He jabbed a thumb at the gray-eyed man. “Simon.” Then at the quieter one. “Colm.”

  “David,” he said, though Zac might already have told them.

  Zac glanced between his companions and then edged closer to the couch. “How educated are you about our physiology at the microscopic level?”

  Too many syllables in those words. He gritted his teeth and shook his head, trying to make sense of the sentence, but one word stuck to his mind wh
en the rest of them slipped away.

  “Our.”

  Zac nodded at Simon and Colm. “They’re like us.”

  He curled his hand, and the pain in each joint sharpened his thoughts. “How?”

  “Great. We’ve gone to all this trouble for an imbecile,” Simon said.

  Colm watched them all, hands in the pockets of dark khakis, head tilted slightly, no judgment, merely curiosity. One of the track lights above the kitchen sink brightened the red tints in his hair.

  Agelessness didn’t perfect one’s physique, but for David, it helped intentional fitness along. These three seemed to share that with him, though each had a different body type—Simon tough and compact, Colm stocky, Zac lean and nimble. On his feet, David’s six-foot-two frame would be the tallest in the room. Instead, he stretched the full length of the couch, feet against the far armrest.

  Zac turned to the others. “I vote we fix him first, explain later.”

  Colm nodded.

  “If that’s what you called me here for …” Simon took a step back.

  “Well, I figured even you would want to meet him.”

  “We have no proof right now. We have nothing but a physical resemblance.”

  “He came to us.”

  “To you.”

  “He asked if I hit the ground. His skin was young this morning, and now look at him. I’m telling you, it’s him.”

  Simon eyed David as if he were part of the furniture. Not an unfair assessment at the moment. An old fury rose in him, untouched since his final jungle skirmish, rain and blood and bodies and the knowledge he’d live no matter which of the men beside him did not. He’d live now too, whatever they did to him. Simon glared at him, and he glared back.

  “Even if he is Russell, we don’t know him.” Simon turned to Zac. “I won’t do it.”

  Zac paced the floor in front of the couch, his eyes not breaking from Simon’s. His was the walk of an athlete, not brute strength but controlled agility. No doubt he could perform a gymnastic routine as easily as a tightrope walk. Not that he’d succeeded at his last one of those.

  If he was giving Simon a minute to reconsider whatever “it” was, he might be succeeding. Simon looked from Zac to David and back again.