by Dana Fraser
“You should sleep,” Sean said when Thomas finished and returned to Becca’s stall.
Thomas ignored the advice. There was no moonlight to illuminate the barn’s shell, just the occasional flash of lightning. Thomas didn’t need light to see the lines of her face. He saw her in his head, as she had been.
Asleep, she couldn’t recoil from him, so he took her hand in his. It was her left hand. When he had departed for Brussels, there had been a wedding ring on her finger. She hadn’t arrived in Evansville wearing it. He rubbed at the line where the ring had been for the last dozen years. He could feel where the metal band had made a slight, permanent depression.
Maybe not permanent. Maybe time would fill the flesh back in.
He rotated the hand and kissed her palm, not caring whether Sean was watching or what he might think.
For the first twenty-four hours, he had wanted to gut the man. It was Thomas’s wife Sean touched, it was Sean’s voice that Becca heeded.
Not that she had ever exactly heeded Thomas. He’d spent his professional life commanding others only to fall hopelessly in love with a woman who never did more than take an order under consideration.
At least she had let Thomas make a proper show of being in charge before the power went out.
Now she wouldn’t even look at him.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Sean whispered in a tight voice.
Thomas closed his eyes as he fought the surge of violence roaring through him. Did the man have any idea how many soldiers and mercenaries Thomas had killed to make it home to this woman?
What was one more body—one more annoying, cloying body of a man who suddenly meant so much to Thomas’s wife?
“You want to punch me,” Sean said and stood up, “Fine, let’s step outside.”
Thomas snorted, they were as outside as they could be and still have a roof over their heads. But he got up and followed after the man, fists clenched and vibrating. Sean hung his rifle on a tack hook outside the barn. Thomas removed the holster holding the Maxim 9 and placed it on the same hook.
He moved slowly toward Sean, but the man didn’t let him step within arm’s reach.
“Trying to wear me down?” Thomas challenged.
Sean shook his head. “I’m not the one sitting in a room the better part of the week eating stew and chili, sleeping out of the rain and cold…”
The kid had challenged him to step outside but didn’t want to fight. Thomas stopped, shoulders sagging as a sigh hollowed out his chest.
“Why the hell did you drag me out here?”
“Dragged you?” Sean laughed but kept his distance. “You have no idea how I found her—”
“How could I? She won’t look at me let alone talk…won’t listen…won’t let me touch her unless she’s unconscious.”
“There were four of them at the cabin where she was held. They were rabid animals, treated her like one,” Sean whispered, the words carried to Thomas on the wind that lashed his cheek.
Flecks of freezing water bit at his skin, but the words sliced deeper. Becca never should have been alone. He should have been there for her. He should have been there for all of his family.
“That’s what she’s sick from, whatever disease those filthy bastards had,” Sean explained. “Some STD or an infection from all the…”
Sean turned away, one hand rubbing at his scarred cheek. “You’re a clever man, Colonel Sand. You need to stop thinking about your pride and figure out how we save your wife.”
“Colonel, eh?” a male voice questioned from deep within the shadows of a massive elm tree.
Moonlight struck the barrel of an old hunting rifle, giving away the stranger’s position.
Thomas and Sean froze. A lull in the wind left a blanket of silence around the barn except for the rhythmic tapping of the man’s finger against his weapon. The sound unlocked their muscles. Thomas reflexively reached for his hip as Sean fumbled for the rifle sling at his side.
With a snort, the man hiding in the shadows pointed the tip of his rifle at the tack hook where Sean and Thomas had disarmed.
“So,” the man repeated and stepped forward. “A colonel, you said. Never saw a use for officers.”
A pure white beard glowed in the darkness. A cowboy hat covered the man’s head, more white tendrils escaping to brush at his shoulders and intertwine with the beard.
Santa Claus was holding them at gunpoint.
“I retired years ago,” Thomas answered, angling his head to see what kind of rifle the stranger held.
“And you?” the old man asked, gesturing at Sean with the weapon.
“Just a part-time staff sergeant up until…” he trailed off, hands flapping uselessly at his sides for a second as he stalled at what to call the events of the last month and a half.
Despite a stranger holding him at gunpoint, Thomas couldn’t contain a surprised laugh. “Gotta hand it to you, sir. That’s more information than I’ve managed to get out of him. Hell, if his ass was as tight as his lips—”
The old man cut through the levity with a simple question. “You put the woman inside?”
Thomas and Sean reacted as one, their bodies puffing up and expanding by the way they held their arms. They stepped further apart in a subconscious effort to ring the old man.
“Don’t get all riled up,” the stranger warned. “I coulda dropped either or both of you already. She might be the only reason I didn’t.”
The old man sounded genuine, but Thomas had faced too much deception in the last six plus weeks. And Gavin’s journal had exposed even older betrayals.
“You’re both beat down,” the old man went on. “But you carried her across that field like she was pure gold. Figured I better not shoot you dead so fast.”
“She’s my wife,” Thomas said.
The stranger laughed. “A Mrs. Colonel, eh?”
Thomas shook his head. “She’s far more important than a battalion of old soldiers like me.”
“Well, depending on what’s wrong, I might have something that can help her.” The old man shouldered his weapon and passed between them. “Could just as easily kill her, though, seeing as all my pills were meant for horses.”
Reaching the threshold to the barn, he turned and looked at Thomas and Sean.
“I’m Isaac Bell, by the way. It’s my land you been trespassing on for the last half hour.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ISAAC WALKED INTO THE BARN, Thomas and Sean following close on his heels. They snatched up their firearms hanging on the hook, a guilty look passing between them over an old guy getting the drop on them.
Isaac didn’t go straight to Becca’s stall. Reaching the first hay covered lump of horse flesh, he stopped. He gestured at the open threshold, his voice choking up.
“Balboa. Got him for my wife when he was a foal. Most expensive horse I ever paid for. Pure black, Arabian. There was a copper plate with his name on it…”
He turned in a slow half circle, looking at the other lumps Thomas had concealed so Becca wouldn’t have to see them when she woke up.
If she woke up.
“Haven’t been out here since the fire. I should have set them loose when I realized things weren’t going back to normal. I thought they’d be safer in their stalls.”
Feeling the man’s pain, Thomas placed a hand on his shoulder. Isaac straightened and wiped angrily at his cheek.
“Let’s check on your missus, if you don’t mind.”
“Thank you,” Thomas answered, the knot in his chest tightening at the thought of allowing yet another stranger near Becca while she was helpless. “She’s been running a fever for weeks, in a lot of pain, can’t stand straight…”
He trailed off as Isaac placed his hand against Becca’s forehead.
Isaac moved on to checking her pulse. “She still have her appendix?”
“No,” Thomas answered, his trigger finger twitching from all the times it had traced
the scar near her bikini line.
“Gall bladder?”
“Wrong abdominal quadrant for the pain’s origin,” Sean butt in.
“She still has it,” Thomas answered.
Isaac peeled away the wool blanket covering Becca and pushed lightly against her stomach. “Vomiting?”
“No,” they both agreed.
“You know much about medicine?” Sean asked.
“Combat medic in ‘Nam.” Sighing, Isaac pulled the blanket up to Becca’s chin. “Folks around here never had much money. What money they had needed to go back into the land if they wanted to feed their kids come winter. When I got home from being…over there… Well, they’d come to me for the little things. Finger splints, stitches and stuff.”
He stood and picked up his rifle from where he’d set it against the stall.
“Afraid there’s not a lot I can do for her except give her a better place to ride this out and some medicine left over from Queen Anne’s pneumonia.”
His gaze drifted to the stall opposite Balboa’s.
“Your wife allergic to sulfa drugs?”
A cold chill wrapped around Thomas like a sheet, clinging tight enough to stop his breathing.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “Not for certain.”
Isaac looked back at Becca’s unconscious form and shook his head.
“Don’t think we have any choice but to find out.”
THEY MOVED across the field in silence, Isaac leading the way and Thomas and Sean toting Becca out of the barn the same way they had carried her in. At the northern border of the field, Isaac signaled a halt then bent down in front of a barbed wire fence and cut the bottom line so they could pass the raft beneath the fencing.
Five minutes later, they came upon a house as badly burned out as the barn. Isaac gestured at the trees that started a quarter mile beyond.
“Got about five acres of evergreen. Was up in one of my tree stands when you came across. Hoping for some fresh meat.”
Bypassing the house, they headed toward the wooded area.
“Don’t make no sense,” Isaac grumbled as he led them over ground covered in pine cones and dry needles. “Burning people out of their fields and homes, burning horses alive in their barns. No doubt if I would have been in the house, they would have shot me when I ran out.”
Thomas thought of Gavin’s journal. He hadn’t mentioned it to Sean or Becca, hadn’t decided when he would mention it to anyone. But the terror tactics Isaac spoke of were part of the playbook. Kill everyone possible while demoralizing the survivors so they would be easier to kill later. Deprive them of shelter, destroy or confiscate their food.
“These were soldiers, mind you,” Isaac went on. “Least they were dressed like ‘em.”
The old man came to a stop and gestured at a thicket of gnarled branches and dead leaves. “There she is!”
Blood drained from Thomas’s face. They had brought Becca back out into the open for…for what?
Was there even any medicine?
“Now, don’t you two look at me like that,” Isaac laughed and slung his rifle over his shoulder. Walking forward, he dug his fingers into the branches and yanked. “She’s a sticky wicket, but I don’t exactly want her falling open all the time.”
Isaac peeled away a roughly rectangular patch of dead foliage to reveal an interior so dark that Thomas didn’t know what he was looking into. Sean took the UV flashlight from his pocket and played its pale purple beam over the space.
“Used to be my wife’s reading nook,” Isaac offered as the beam from Sean’s light glinted off metal and glass. “Helen loved the fantasy stories best, fairies in the garden, elves in the woods, dragons under the mountains.”
His voice starting to choke up, Isaac hid it with a cough. “So I hauled the camper out here and fixed it up like a gypsy lived in it.”
He stepped inside and turned on a lantern filled with green LED lights. “Once we got your missus inside and the door closed, we can turn the regular lights on. But they still got the random patrol out here and those doodads in the air.”
Drones, Thomas thought. He had lost more than a few hours avoiding them on the journey from Louisville to Evansville.
“I’ve got her,” Thomas said as Sean moved to lift Becca from the raft. She was small, shorter even than their daughter. And his muscles hadn’t deteriorated so badly from the frequently low rations that he needed another man to carry his wife.
Sean stepped away, waited for Thomas to remove Becca then followed Isaac’s instructions on where he could hide the raft.
“Get her on the bed in the back,” Isaac prompted as Thomas entered the camper. “To your left.”
The travel trailer was about twelve feet long, its sides and roof curved in a style Thomas remembered his father calling a “canned ham.” The length of the bed ran from side to side, its outer edge flat against a lipped counter that held a small sink. Even with just the glow of the green LEDs, Thomas could see that the back windows were covered with crocheted curtains in a rainbow of colors that presented as shades of gray.
Thomas balanced Becca on the edge of the bed, peeled the blankets back then laid her down, a pillow cushioning her head. Her breathing was clear but shallow.
Isaac came up behind Thomas while Sean took a seat at the front of the trailer. Opening the cupboard, the old man pulled out a bottle full of tablets before remembering to turn on the overhead light.
“Now, Queen Anne was another beauty, Tennessee Walker, chestnut with a thick black mane she loved to have curled with a crinkling iron. Nine hundred pounds of prima donna.”
He placed four tablets on the counter. “That was Queenie’s dose.”
He put three back in the bottle and took a small paring knife from the door and lightly scored the tablet before breaking it in half.
“This could be too much or not enough,” Isaac warned. “And if she’s allergic, any at all might kill her.”
Becca had been unconscious since late afternoon. Thomas felt at her wrist, the pulse too weak to detect. Placing his ear directly over his wife’s heart, he heard a dull, sporadic thump.
He was out of options.
“How are we going to give it to her?”
“Sit her up,” Isaac answered. “Tilt her head back. I’ll crush it up and stir it in some water.”
“That will do it?” Sean asked.
The old man shrugged. “That and a whole lot of prayer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MINUTES TICKED by like hours as Thomas waited for the first sign of a reaction to the medication. He scolding himself with each passing second. He hadn’t done enough to prepare. He knew Becca had her appendix removed when she was sixteen, but he hadn’t drilled her on allergies to medicine.
She had always been healthy for as long as he had known her. He and the kids would get colds, be out for days, in bed and whining. Becca wouldn’t so much as sneeze. It was always the one time he could count on her to ignore the numbers dancing in her head and take care of them all, bells ringing in different rooms as they each competed for her attention.
“How are you for water,” Thomas asked after half an hour had passed with no change in his wife’s condition.
“Got a creek that runs through the trees, couple hundred feet in,” Isaac answered. “Shiners are still alive and swimming around, so I guess those bastards that killed my horses haven’t poisoned the water yet. Just filled the tank up yesterday.”
Thomas looked at the counter by the sink then at his host. “You have a washcloth?”
Isaac fetched one from a drawer. Thomas ran cold water from the tap then wiped gently at Becca’s face, cooling the fevered skin as he wiped away the build-up of dirt since they’d left the house in Evansville.
“It would have happened already, right?” Sean asked from where he had been sitting as still as carved stone since the medicine was eased down Becca’s throat. “If she was going to have a reaction?”
Sean wrapped his hands around the barrel of his rifle, fingers twisting in opposite directions as he looked at Becca. At that moment, it no longer mattered, but Thomas still wondered what the man felt for her. Becca was about two decades older than the “part-time” soldier, but she was a beautiful woman despite the way sickness and recent abuse had ravaged her body.
He ran the wet cloth along the side of her face, his touch drawing some blood to the capillaries to color her cheek.
“You said you were hunting with the rifle?” Sean asked Isaac, hands still strangling the barrel of his own weapon.
The old man chuckled. “Ain’t quite got around to having a death wish, kiddo. Like I said, the patrols aren’t around as much as they were even a few weeks ago, but a rifle shot might change that.”
Seeing Sean’s wrinkled brow, Isaac laughed again. “Left my crossbow at the base of the tree when I climbed down from the blind. You know how to use one?”
“Been a couple years since I shot one, but, sure.”
“You okay to be alone for a few?” Isaac asked Thomas.
He nodded then ran the cloth under the water again before starting on Becca’s hands. He began high on one slender wrist where her pulse still labored to be felt. He could circle his thumb and pinkie finger around the collection of bones and still have room to thread a pencil through. The tendons stood out on the back of her hand and he stroked the cloth over each one in turn, stopping between the lines to look at her face.
The flutter and dance of her eyelids suggested she was dreaming. The twist of her mouth could have been from the pain infecting her or the nature of the dream. Putting the wet cloth aside, he leaned forward and stroked along her temple, his words a soft whisper.
“Hannah is waiting for you, baby. Ellis, too. You need to rest and get better. Someone needs to keep Ellis in line and remind Hannah to get some sleep.”