After what seemed an eternity; he reached his goal.
Panting heavily, Valdez leaned his face over the water, squinting to make sense of his own puffy reflection.
A coolness rose off of the pool, reaffirming the desire to submerge his flaming nerves. Drops of sweat and blood from his nose preceded him as he flopped his body into the crystalline waters with an awkward splash.
The shallow pool swallowed Hunter Valdez smoothly. Its gentle flow carried his splash and ensuing ripples away into the waning sunlight.
His limp form settled heavily to the pool’s bottom.
The scene -had anyone been present to witness it- was momentarily tranquil.
Small bubbles rose from his hair and face, fizzing upward and popping silently. Infinitesimal white and dark traces of saliva and blood sluggishly separated themselves from the still man and followed the underwater march toward the tower’s edge.
The shock of submersion brought relief as his already ravaged system finally, finally surrendered to unconsciousness.
Brief, blessed unconsciousness.
Reprieve could only be temporary.
Even in its damaged state, his body was already begging for oxygen, cells clamoring to return to homeostatic function.
His slack mouth wheezed out a final string of bubbles and for another blessed heartbeat, he was still.
Then alarm centers in the brain and spinal cord thundered a message to his muscles; demanding action. Dark, bloodshot eyes flew open as his disoriented respiratory system gulped for oxygen, finding only water.
Valdez jerked violently out of the fountain, gagging and spitting, vomiting into the clear, slow, stream. His momentary slumber, fleeting in its blessed sensory deprivation, had not lasted near long enough.
The burn returned.
Rather than calming his screaming nerves, the cold water now added to Valdez’s misery.
A contrast of sensory information confused his receptors and caused a fierce battle between a sub-dermal fever and the rushing coolness of the fountain. The violence of this new sensation was too much for a man like Hunter Valdez – for any man- to bear.
Make it stop.
Wide awake again, and back in his own personal Hell, he searched for another way out.
Any respite promised by the pool proved now to be a damnable lie.
Each rivulet coursing down his face was a punishment. Every tiny sphere of water beaded on his perfect skin like a blister. Desperately, he cast about for something, anything, to rid himself of his awful pain.
Finally, parched eyeballs settled on something his fevered brain could commit to.
With another immense effort, he raised up onto soggy knees, then again to his feet. Ignoring the protests from his own skeleton, feet lurched forward with heavy steps. One agonizing foot at a time, Valdez gritted his teeth and gained speed, tearing at hot spots under his flesh as he ran. Eyes opened wide, mouth twisted into a maniacal grimace. Scrambled thoughts turned toward some semblance of happiness at the certainty that it would indeed, finally, stop.
Rapid, uncoordinated steps finally brought him to his goal. Without hesitating, Valdez loosed another scream of defiant agony into the reddish twilight and hurtled himself through the opening in the balcony wall.
Following the infernal stream over its infinity edge, he leapt from the tower.
The whistling wind brought on by his descent set tissues aflame to yet another degree, opening his mind to worlds of pain he imagined existed only in Hell.
Lungs emptied of the breath required to scream; Hunter Valdez fell silently into the Las Vegas night.
Head flipped over heels in the empty air, buffeted by thermals, skimming mere feet from side of the tower that represented his life’s work. A sort of hideous and tortured smile spread across his once-handsome face as singular thought promised him that in only a few seconds, it would all be over.
Lai’e, Hawaii
“Kefe!”
Peni cursed to nobody in particular. He was standing in the smallish plot of sugar cane behind his house, having somehow managed to stub one of his wide brown toes on a rock that he could swear hadn’t been there the day before. His hair, prematurely silver-flecked, was pulled back in a thick pony tail. Dark soil clung to the sweat on his ankles and calves. Broad shoulders brushed against the cane stalks as he made his way slowly and quietly down the rows, peering intently at the ground for any sign of rat holes or other traces of vermin infestation.
Something had been driving the neighborhood dogs wild lately. Nine times out of ten it was just a bump in the pest population.
Maybe it was time to get a snake.
Peni’s mind wandered away from his work, down to the little garden stand he kept on the shoulder of the highway in front of the house. Last time he had checked, a few of the fat neighborhood kids had taken it over and were trying to sell fruit punch so over-sweetened he could see sugar sediment at the bottom of each paper cup.
The loneliness of that fateful day in the ocean had been tempered by the presence of these children.
After the funeral had come and gone, his duties as interim patriarch fulfilled, he redoubled his focus on the modest farm. The fat pineapples and sweet cane were something he could take a bit of simple pride in, and the community, sensing his melancholy, had turned out to his roadside shop for short visits. He was a wealthy man of simple tastes, and refused to take their money, giving each visitor a bundle of fresh produce, along with a smile, and sometimes a word of advice if it was solicited. A small favor for the new palangi family that had moved into town had somehow become a reputation for benevolence, and in a very short span, Peni had once again found himself a pillar of the community. This time though, the unofficial authority was strictly grassroots.
He had even taken up poetry as a hobby, writing mournful sonnets about the specter of his own past. Now his days were spent hacking back brush to make more room for mango trees. Frustrated mothers and struggling kids suddenly had a place to turn that they could trust. The local pastor even stopped by to ask Peni what he thought about addressing the rampant drug problems in a church setting.
“Do it.” He had told the preacher. “God already knows what is going on, and your people know that He knows. So it’s okay to talk about it in his house.”
Such words, profound in their simplistic wisdom, were characteristic of the big man, even in his rougher days.
Former criminal, reformed thug, ex-convict. These -and worse titles- refused to stick to him. Rolled off like seawater off a waxed surfboard.
Quiet and gentle as he was, Peni was becoming a sort of tropical Jean Valjean, a pidgin-speaking philanthropist for the families that still wanted to squeeze a decent living out of the ravaged Hawaiian landscape.
Peni smiled at his reflections. A sad smile that almost cracked as he thought about how close he was to depriving himself of these happinesses.
Amazing how much could change in only a few weeks’ time.
“Damn.” He crouched down to examine his still-throbbing toe. Such a trivial injury rarely drew a first thought, much less a second one, from the hardened man.
His throbbing toe -and the nine others lined up next to it- appeared as they always did, thick, worn, ashy.
Peni straightened and continued on his way down the row, wincing at the pain that shot into his metatarsals and all way up to the knee.
“Must have broke something..” he muttered to himself.
The ache radiated further and further with each step. Maybe there was a spider under that rock he had kicked. He had seen some nasty hobo and violin spiders in his many years on the island, but never had he been bitten by one. It seemed almost comical the way the thought of such a miniscule menace made every inch of his considerable surface area crawl.
Whatever was causing the tissues in his leg to scream had to be more serious than a jammed toe. White-hot electric jolts blasted upward from right foot to left shoulder.
I am having a heart attack.
> Peni dropped again to his knees, not from the mounting anguish, but in an attitude of prayer. He had hurt worse than this many times before, but only recently had he learned where to look for comfort.
His stout knees sunk into the black, loamy soil. The sweet rot smell of manure and sugar stalks was stronger here, near the earth.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been moments from death.
As the pain spread, Peni found some relief in the fact that this time it was on God’s terms, rather than his own.
Bittersweet irony sang in the seconds that passed. It tasted like copper on the back of his tongue. He had steeled himself against the loneliness that loomed in a life without family, but had adopted yet another tribe to live for in the neighborhood.
The fat, juice stained faces of the children on his front lawn danced a slide show across his closed eyelids.
The thundering of physical anguish that threatened to take him under became an afterthought. Sweaty grimace metamorphosed into a genuine smile as his body began to seize and tremble. He rolled his jaundiced eyeballs heavenward and tried to laugh. It came out as only a strained cough, but his mind and heart told him that he was happy, even as his body began to destroy itself.
Finally, all thoughts were erased by a lightning bolt from his spinal cord.
Peni’s regal and powerful body slumped into the moist Hawaiian dirt and began a hellish dance. The small field reverberated with his convulsions, cane leaves rustling their disapproval softly into the muggy air. The casual passerby would never notice the internal struggle, insulated as it was by the concentric rows of cane. The man in the middle wore a peacefully lax expression as his hard body bucked in the Hawaiian dirt.
Argentina
Aaron Dayne only ever felt shame because he had been so good at soldiering.
Doling out death to the enemy was something made difficult by memory. After the fact...
He had never let the blood roaring in his ears or the heat of the pampas cloud his judgment. Where other men gleefully demolished whole buildings or blindly executed anybody not bearing the Stars and Stripes, Aaron had always made it a point to excuse the unarmed.
He’d done his best to look directly through the women and children that huddled in schoolhouses and hospitals.
He had insulated himself from their utterly lost expressions, knowing that the U.S. invasion was only the final nail in their proverbial coffins.
Years of revolution had shattered the already-weak Argentine infrastructure. It had shaken the whole continent, really.
Mercenary forces from Brazil and Paraguay unleashed crude biological weapons on major industrial and economic centers. Dirty bombs and exotic diseases ran rampant through the population.
The only piece of the puzzle not yet crippled was the massive agricultural wealth of the prairie nation. Cows.
Stinking, eating, farting, precious, cows.
So the President, on the advice of her advisors, had sent in the cavalry.
Aaron’s unit -and other elite cadres of advance troop- were sent in to clear guerilla forces out of high-occupancy tactical positions.
Equipped with the latest and greatest, trained meticulously for every contingency, hand-selected to be the best America had to offer, his crew and all the others had been dispatched across the countryside to secure one of the world’s largest sources of protein.
The U.S. had literally taken military action for beef.
In his quieter moments, Aaron could hardly believe he’d been a part of it.
These point units were sent in hard, fast, quiet, and utterly unprepared for what really faced them.
Unprepared, at least, for the horror that they themselves would be responsible for.
Operations went smoothly enough. Crack teams did exactly what they were designed and trained to do, overwhelming the greater numbers of the enemy with superior technology, intelligence, and tactics. It was the new American way of warfare.
Somewhere along the way, Aaron’s unit had dubbed themselves the Redmen, in homage to the amount of blood on their hands.
Striking at dawn or sunset, in the red light, they painted a swath of destruction in their wake.
Red fire, red blood, red men.
Redmen.
Young as he was back then, Aaron had felt invincible in the heat of battle. He nearly was in a physical sense, at least. He would charge headlong into a nest of under-trained enemy soldiers and dole out hot lead or hand grenades like a priest giving alms. At the end of an assault he would come out on the other side, streaked with mud and ash and blood just as his comrades were, but a bath would reveal that his hardened form was largely unblemished. Puncture free, devoid of the holes and burns that were virtually requisite in this line of work.
His fellow soldiers marveled and hooted, calling him Superman, Achilles, Wolverine.
Their names and praise meant nothing, because he also heard the other names, whispered by the starving mothers and deprived children. The ones who would be hurt by the invasion saw him in a much different light. They would be forced to dispose of the corpses he created. They would be left to rebuild the houses, schools, hospitals, and farmsteads that the rebels burned along the way as they fled from the Redmen and the military machine that they represented.
Without fail, the children would cry, the women would beg in Spanish not to be raped, and as he stalked silently past -eyes locked on nothing in particular- they would whisper in raspy, frightened gasps the names that his fellow soldiers never thought up for him.
Diablo.
Fantasma.
Chupacabra.
Devil.
Ghost.
Taken in context, the last of the three meant he resembled the very monsters of their childhood fairytales. His success as a soldier had somehow also made him a Boogeyman. If he was indeed Achilles, his proverbial heel was the prideful guilt that even military shrinks couldn’t break him of.
Salt Lake City
Memories of combat faded with time, thanks mostly to the love of his own son and the strong women in his life. On rare occasions something small could take him back to that place he never should have been. It was often a mundane detail. A tiny coincidence. Today, something huge threatened to tear down the healing walls.
Aaron carried the limp form of Bluejean in his shaking arms. The emergency room was in a state of absolute bedlam.
A long line of battered and bleeding people waited to talk to the administration desk. Men, women, and children clutched one another desperately, shouting the odd question or protest over the wait, but mostly looking miserable.
The stink of human panic flooded the air.
Aaron avoided the looks of those waiting to be told that there was not enough time to fix their minor injuries. Today the emergency room would be reserved for just that, emergencies.
“Hey buddy, you need to get in line..”
Aaron Dayne didn’t even waste the time it would take to identify the speaker. He slipped carefully between the fretting halves of an elderly couple. The old man nursed a cut on his liver-spotted forehead.
“Edward… Edward… I can stitch it up at home. You’re going to get sick in here.”
Their private little drama was only one of a hundred or so being played out in the waiting area. Voices rose and fell in desperation, anger, worry, and in the case of hospital employees, forced patience. He tuned it all out, keeping his mind focused once again on a singular goal and purpose.
He had to get Bluejean some help.
Scott was nowhere to be seen, wheeled away into the maze of medical equipment that constituted the trauma unit. Aaron’s worry for the large man had been assuaged some by the professionalism of the team that met him in the ambulance bay. One thing was certain at least. This was a well-staffed and well-equipped hospital.
He felt fortunate to be so nearby when tragedy struck.
“Hey! What are you doing? Get your ass back in line!”
The protesting man stepped out in front
of Aaron, bumping him and his precious load backward slightly.
Dayne took immediate stock.
Big guy, shaved head, broad shoulders, and a stupid stupid piggish squint. The corners of his mouth were turned down in what was almost certainly intended to be an intimidating scowl. Leathery furrows on the man’s brow bunched uncertainly as he appraised the smaller, but clearly more fit man he was trying to scare back into the queue.
Aaron Dayne was not impressed.
“Back up.” Aaron stared straight into the freckled face and said it calmly, without menace.
“No, you back up, we’ve been here twenty minutes already and my daughter has a broken wrist.” Indeed, a chubby redheaded girl with a tearstained face and a swollen forearm was hiding behind another chubby redhead. No doubt the mother.
The ham-fisted man was clearly worried and frustrated that he couldn’t help his daughter and had picked this moment to do the only thing he knew how to do; bang heads.
“I’m sorry to hear that, but my friend here is barely breathing, and I need to know what is wrong with him now.”
“You need to get back in line!” Pig-face leaned forward to growl it, his foul breath serving as punctuation.
There was no time for this.
“If you don’t get out of my way, right away, I’m going to put him down and break all of the bones in your face.” Aaron said. “Then your daughter will have a broken wrist and a broken daddy, and your insurance agent will wonder how in the hell you managed to land in the emergency room while you were already in the emergency room.”
Aaron didn’t raise his voice, didn’t blink, and didn’t hesitate. He spoke his words matter-of-factly.
More importantly, he meant what he said.
Something in his face or his voice must have been sufficient to warn the man’s wife, because she put a restraining hand on the thick, pasty arm of her husband.
“Don, don’t. Let them go, we’re almost to the front of the line anyway.” She looked down at Bluejean, who was pale and limp in Aaron’s arms. She gestured to her husband.
To Light Us, To Guard Us (The Angel War Book 1) Page 11