A Friend in Need

by Bianca D’Arc

  “How did you discover these alleged transmitters? Did you have people infiltrate my home?”

  She didn’t give a damn about rank or protocol at the moment. Her blood was up, and she was angry enough to ask what she most wanted to know. This captain wasn’t in her chain of command. She’d never even met him before. She didn’t owe him anything, even if it was potentially foolhardy to disrespect a superior officer.

  “No, Sergeant. We have other ways to discover such information. Your house wasn’t invaded by us.” Clear in his words was the idea that somebody else had broken into her home and placed bugs and cameras and who knew what else.

  “I already told Carter that I’d put in the security system. I put sensors and cameras facing into a few of the rooms since my disability, so I would be able to monitor the upstairs and the entrances and exits without having to get up.” She didn’t like this at all, but so far, the captain wasn’t accusing her of anything. Maybe this wouldn’t be as bad as she’d feared.

  Haliwell nodded. “A wise precaution. I’d have probably done the same in your situation. The thing is...” He paused and narrowed his gaze on her. She tensed, sensing a change in his mood. “The thing is, the frequency that system is working on is separate and apart from the other frequencies transmitting both audio and video out of your house. You admit to putting in the commercially available system. But, if you put in that one, you also had the ability to put in some of the military-grade hardware that’s currently transmitting from inside your house.”

  She had to take a breath at his assumption, then logic prevailed. “That’s if you assume I had access to such things. I have never been involved with surveillance technology. I bought an off-the-shelf system for my home when I got laid up. That’s the extent of my so-called ability.”

  “So you say,” Haliwell insisted.

  She sensed he was going to say a whole lot more when the door to the room opened, and a clearly civilian woman in a pink T-shirt came in. She looked upset. Sort of like a mini-tornado about to let loose. Hannah recognized her as she walked farther into the room. It was Rose. The woman who’d been shot at in the mall and taken to safety by this military unit.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Rose stomped in, her sneakered feet not making that much noise and somewhat lessening the effect. “Hal, Hannah is not a traitor.”

  “I know you’re new to all this, Rose,” the man she’d called Hal replied, a long-suffering look on his face, “but we have to check things out. You know what’s at stake here.”

  “Pfft.” Rose made a shooing motion with one hand. Hannah might be willing to talk back to the captain, but she would never presume to scoff in his face. Rose had some brass ones, that was for sure. “She’s no danger to you,” Rose went on, seemingly unaware of the captain’s growing annoyance. “In fact, she’s more like you guys than you realize. She’s a warrior. A survivor.” Rose sent Hannah an encouraging smile. “She’s here to help. Trust me. And, if you don’t trust me, ask Jeff.”

  Hannah found herself looking over her shoulder towards the doorway, where the man she’d seen with Rose in the mall was leaning against the doorjamb. He looked amused more than worried about what his girlfriend was getting into with his superior officer.

  “Is this true, Jeeves?” Haliwell asked the man in the doorway.

  Jeff—or Jeeves, as Haliwell called him—straightened from his leaning position and moved into the room. “Sorry, Cap’n. I’m afraid Rosie is correct.”

  The man’s accent was British, but he was part of this strange specialist unit? Hannah just wanted to shake her head at whatever it was she’d gotten into with this group. They weren’t like any military unit she’d ever seen—or even heard of—before.

  “I believe Miss Sullivan poses no danger to us,” Jeff went on. “However, the danger to her has increased. She is most definitely under surveillance by our enemies and probably has been ever since the mall incident.”

  The captain sighed loudly. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to bring any more civilians into this.”

  “With all due respect, Hal,” Rose spoke up, “Hannah is not a civilian.”

  Hal shook his head. “Technically, you’re right, but she’s not one of us.”

  “She needs to be,” Rose insisted, standing up to the growly captain.

  For her part, Hannah was both insulted and fascinated. She, a sergeant in the Army and veteran of a war zone, wasn’t one of them, but Rose—the most civilian a civilian could be in her pink T-shirt and sneakers—was? This group just got more and more bizarre.

  “You’ve seen something?” Hal asked Rose and Jeff, both.

  Jeff nodded, his expression solemn. Rose followed suit, oddly not saying anything, though she’d been very talkative up to this point. Something was very strange about these people, and Hannah wasn’t exactly sure she wanted to know what it was.

  Hal sat back in his chair and sighed. “Well, if you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. We might as well bring Rick in and get on with the original plan for the day—getting her foot examined and fixed up.”

  “That’s it?” Hannah asked, surprised by the sudden change in tone from the previously-menacing captain. “What are you? Some kind of intelligence specialist?” she asked Rose directly.

  Rose chuckled. “No, I’m a fortune teller. In fact, I’ve met your friend, Lulu, a few times, at the shop where I used to work. She came in to pick up some stock that she’d bought in partnership with the shop’s owner. Nice woman.”

  “Wait. You work in a new age store?” Hannah found this hard to take in.

  Rose shrugged. “I did, up until the mall shooting. I was Madam Pythia, one of the fortune tellers working out of the Sacred Way Psychic Shop,” she said, smiling. “I work here now, as a civilian contractor.”

  That didn’t really explain much, as far as Hannah was concerned. What could a self-described fortune teller do for Uncle Sam as a civilian contractor? It seemed farfetched. Rose had to have some other qualification to put her in that position, but she was obviously not going to talk about it, so Hannah didn’t push. She was just glad Rose had somehow been able to call off the dogs. Haliwell still looked a little grumpy and Hannah wasn’t going to test that by asking him anything directly.

  The man called Jeff had left the room momentarily but returned now, with another man in tow. The other man smiled at her and came right over, placing a large bag on the table. This was the doctor, then. The bag was his medical kit. Hannah looked around in confusion as Haliwell got up, and the doctor moved chairs around so he could sit next to her.

  “I’m Rick,” the new man said, still smiling as Haliwell moved to stand next to Jeff and Rose, a short distance away. Carter stood with them, watching all with no comment. “I’ve seen your file from the VA,” Rick began, “but I have to do my own evaluation, if you don’t mind.”

  Hannah’s head was spinning. These folks had turned on a dime—all on the say-so of Rose and Jeff. Hannah wanted to know what those two could possibly know about her that would make the commanding officer back off so fast and so completely.

  She turned the chair so she faced the doctor. He’d placed himself facing her. “Carter, can you roll that over here?” he asked while he opened his bag. He didn’t take out any of the equipment in it, but it was standing ready, in case he needed anything.

  Carter brought over a rolling stool that was just the right height to prop up her foot so the doctor could examine it more easily. After he helped Rick position the stool and her foot on top of it, he didn’t go far. He stood behind her shoulder, out of the way, but ready should she need his help.

  It was so tempting to lean on Carter’s presence. To accept the comfort he offered just by standing there. But, even though she still found him to be the most compelling man she’d ever met, she was really confused by the events of the day, so far.

  His unit was just…odd. Really, really odd. There had to be more to this than met the eye, but she hadn’t a clue what it was. Not yet. Possibl
y, she wouldn’t ever know what this strange group was all about. She was off balance. Things had happened really fast. Strange things. Confusing things. Upsetting things.

  All she really wanted was some time alone to process everything, but that was not meant to be. Rick took off the protective bootie she’d been given at the VA on her last visit, and the sock beneath. Her foot looked like something out of Frankenstein’s lab. It was puffed up and bruised many different colors. It also had a jagged scar and the remainder of surgical staples that had closed the incisions made while they’d tried to put her foot back together.

  Rick put his hand over the joint, lightly touching, and closed his eyes. Hannah wondered what the heck he was doing. Didn’t he need to see it to figure out what was wrong? Shouldn’t he be looking at the x-rays? The scan reports? Instead, he was just touching her ankle with his eyes closed. In a day of weird events, this shouldn’t have surprised her, but when his hand started to give off heat that she could feel—really feel—in her ankle, she freaked out completely.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked, nervous. “That’s hot,” she complained, shocked and scared at something she didn’t understand. She would have pulled her foot away, but Rick’s hands clamped down on her ankle, and Carter’s hand covered her shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” Carter told her in a low voice. “Trust me. This is good.”

  “Good?” She looked up at him over her shoulder. “My ankle is on fire!”

  “Yeah, that’s a side-effect of his process,” Hal piped up from where he stood with the others. “If you feel that, it means he can definitely do something for you.”

  “What is this?” Hannah looked at all of them, wanting to understand and failing utterly.

  Then, the fire really took hold, and she couldn’t think of much else besides her foot and the searing pain of whatever it was Rick was doing. She couldn’t see what was going on with his hands in the way and a particularly searing pain had her clenching everything, including scrunching her eyes shut.

  She’d been a fool to trust these people. Rick wasn’t helping. This hurt as bad as it had when it happened!

  “Son of a…” Hannah was vaguely aware that she was cursing, but she didn’t care.

  Whatever the so-called doctor was doing, it hurt like hell, and she wasn’t shy about using every cuss word she’d ever heard and aiming them at the people who had kidnapped her, interrogated her like some common criminal and were now torturing her under the false pretense of helping her.

  “Impressive vocabulary,” someone muttered, sounding oddly complimentary. She let it wash over her. All she could really think about were the nuclear explosions happening in the nerves of her foot.

  After a particularly wrenching pain, she heard something fall to the floor. A group of somethings, she decided, hearing repeated little tinkling clatters, but the relief that followed made it hard for her to concentrate.

  “They certainly used enough hardware.” Haliwell’s voice came to her out of the fog of pain and relief. Carter grunted in reply and squeezed her hand. When had he taken her hand? Hannah couldn’t recall. “What happened to the slow approach, doc?”

  “Sorry, Captain. Couldn’t do it, after all. Not with all that stuff in there. It had to come out, and there’s no way to hide it.” The doctor didn’t really sound all that sorry.

  “It’s okay, guys. This is the way it’s supposed to be,” Rose put in, her voice calm and collected. Their words came to Hannah through a haze of intense discomfort, but it was starting to ease a bit.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hannah opened her eyes to look down at her ankle and saw a small array of shiny screws and other bits of metal she couldn’t easily identify on the floor, all around the stool on which her leg still rested. It didn’t make sense. Then, she focused more closely on her leg. The discoloration was… It was gone.

  “What the heck?” she whispered. “What did you do?” Her gaze flew to the doctor. He was frowning, his focus still on her foot.

  “Just give me a moment more to get rid of the rest of the swelling,” he said through clenched teeth. She took a good look at him and realized he looked paler than he had. Almost sickly, but determined, his teeth set in a near-grimace. It was as if whatever he was doing came out of his own personal energy.

  She wanted to pull away, but Carter squeezed her shoulder, drawing her attention. “Let the man finish,” he urged.

  This, she realized, was why he’d been so insistent that she see his friend, the doctor. Rick had some kind of…amazing ability…a gift, if such things existed. And, after experiencing what she was experiencing right now, she had to believe it did, in fact, exist. Rick was a healer, like something out of a fairytale. He was healing her with his touch.

  She could feel the pain leave her. The pain that hadn’t quit since the day she’d been injured. It was gone. And her ankle looked almost normal. As she watched, the final traces of swelling went away as if by magic.

  “Now, that’s just weird,” she muttered, watching the latest round of bruising fade from her skin. She looked up at Rick as he removed his hands from her ankle and leaned back as if he’d just run a marathon. “What are you?”

  “These days?” Rick sighed tiredly. “I’m not even sure of the answer to that myself.”

  Captain Haliwell reached down and began picking up the various bits of hardware off the floor. When he had it all, he straightened and placed the small pile on the table next to Hannah.

  “No way to hide this, I guess,” Haliwell said.

  Hannah just stared at the pile of bits. “Did all that come out of my ankle?” Her throat was so dry she could barely get the words out.

  “Your surgeons did a good job, but that stuff was never going to hold your bones together in a way that would actually work,” Rick said. He definitely looked tired. Drained. Whatever he’d done had taken a lot out of him.

  “What did you do?” she asked, unable to articulate all the questions competing for space in her mind.

  “Try to move it,” Rick said in response, the amused curl of his lip daring her to give it a whirl. He shifted his gaze from her face to her foot and just watched.

  Feeling as if she was in a dream, she moved her foot slightly. It didn’t hurt. For the first time in ages, it didn’t hurt! She tried another small movement. And another. She rotated the ankle gently, then pointed and flexed her foot. This was a dream. Had to be.

  “No way,” she whispered, even as she kept moving her foot in ways it hadn’t moved since her injury.

  Tears sprang to her eyes that she didn’t bother to hold back. It was a miracle. An honest-to-goodness miracle.

  She looked up at the doctor, tears streaming down her face, her eyes wide. “I don’t know what you are, or how you did that, but I...” She paused to catch her breath. “I can’t thank you enough. There are no words...”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Let’s see you stand on it,” Rick said, brushing her words aside as if embarrassed.

  Standing? Seriously? He wanted her to stand on her shattered ankle?

  She hadn’t stood—really stood—on her own two feet in months.

  Hannah lowered her foot off the stool. It didn’t hurt when it made contact with the floor. Hope rose higher in her heart. She’d pretty much resigned herself to never running again. Or dancing. Or doing much of anything that required two reasonably working ankles.

  Rick stayed seated opposite her, as if he didn’t have the energy to stand, but also watching her foot carefully. Everybody else seemed to hold their breaths. Carter was right behind her, ready, she had no doubt, to catch her should she fall. He was that kind of guy.

  Gingerly, she put weight on her feet and then pushed to a standing position. Nothing hurt.

  Sweet Lord, nothing hurt!

  Hannah stood on both feet, then tried just the injured foot. It held her weight easily, though her leg muscles felt weird from not being used in this way for a while. Not painful. Just a little weird at first.


  She stood. Then, she walked. Heck, she felt like turning cartwheels!

  “It feels fine,” she said, a bit breathless from the awe that filled her at these developments. “Like nothing ever happened. Like the last few months were just a bad dream. A nightmare from which I’ve suddenly woken up.”

  Yeah, she was crying. She didn’t care. These were happy tears. Nothing to be ashamed of.

  Rick stood, still watching her progress as she turned to face him again. She walked right up to him.

  “I have little doubt you outrank me, but can I hug you, sir?” she asked, unable to keep the tears out of her voice.

  Rick smiled, looked a little surprised, but opened his arms. “Sure. Why not?” He let her hug him and then stepped back with a little red flush on his cheekbones, though he bore it well. “A hug is more than I get from these guys, even after I save their miserable lives.”

  “If I’d known you were so easy to please, Rick, I wouldn’t have bought you that case of scotch,” Hal put in, clearly amused at the doctor’s expense.

  “Or the Army-Navy game tickets,” Carter added.

  That’s when Hannah realized that this amazing doctor had been healing the guys in his unit. “You’re why Carter isn’t still on crutches after having a bullet taken out of his leg,” she blurted the thought as it came to her. “I thought his wound was worse when we were in the hospital, but then he shows up walking as if he’d never been shot.”

  Rick nodded a bit sheepishly. “Guilty as charged, I’m afraid. There’s not much else for me to do around here, now that we’re sidelined,” he said. “When I see something that needs fixing, I fix it.”

  “Like you fixed me,” she thought aloud again, wonder in her voice.

  “Sergeant,” Hal broke into her awestruck silence. “Why don’t you join us in the mess? We can discuss this over coffee.”

  Shaking her head, Hannah followed the captain out of the room and down the hall. The others peeled off, going their separate ways, but Carter remained by her side. She’d wanted to thank Rick again, in case they hustled her away now that she’d been seen and treated, but he slipped away down a side corridor before she could speak.