Four
Isobel hugged Snuggles inside her coat, blinking back tears as she shivered in the stark silence broken only by the snap of cedar catching fire in the woodstove. She wasn’t in the twilight zone anymore, she decided; she was in hell. And hell was cold and dark and smelled of decay, and was so damned isolated that she doubted even God would hear her scream.
“You don’t have to worry about my bringing home any more losers,” she told Snuggles, rubbing her quivering chin against the rabbit’s fur. “Because as of today, I am swearing off all men. If Prince Charming himself walked in here right now and asked me for a date, I’d turn him down flat. I would,” she muttered, tilting Snuggles so her pet could see how serious she was. “Men are pigs. No, I take that back; pigs are more civilized. You never see a pig reassuring you everything’s going to be okay one minute, then threatening to kill someone you love the next.”
She hugged her pet to her chest again. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have let those mean men hurt you. I made them let me bring you with me, didn’t I? Threatening not to give Daniel any pain medication certainly made Chase change his tune.”
“Then how about keeping your word.”
Isobel yelped in surprise, spinning to look at the bed in the corner.
“Christ, woman, what in hell did you do to me?” Daniel growled. He tried to move, then stilled on a sharp groan. “It feels as if you cut me clean in half. And why is my left arm bound to my chest?”
“Because your collarbone is broken.”
“My side is on fire. I swear the branch didn’t cause this much pain.”
“I can shove it back in you, if you want,” she offered sweetly.
There was a heartbeat of silence, and then she heard him sigh. “Isobel, I’m sorry you were brought here against your will.”
“I’m sure you are.” She stood up and walked to the bed, just so she could glare down at him. “Now that you realize your pal Chase has left you at my mercy for the next five days. Which means that I’m in charge. You got that, big man?”
The kerosene lamp on the bedside table gave off enough light for her to see one corner of his mouth lift in a grimace. “Yes, ma’am.”
Isobel walked over to the supplies the men had carried up from the boat and unceremoniously piled in the corner. She set Snuggles on the floor and opened the box of food. Good Lord, it appeared as if Noah had thrown everything from her fridge into the box—including some four-day-old pizza, the bag of beef bones she kept for recuperating dogs, and the baking soda!
She turned at the sound of the bed creaking, then jumped to her feet and ran across the room. “What do you think you’re doing?” She took hold of Daniel’s good shoulder and pushed him back down. “You can’t move; you’re going to pull out your stitches and start bleeding inside again.”
“I need to get up,” he growled in a winded whisper. “I have to use the latrine.”
Isobel straightened and closed her eyes. Damn. She hadn’t thought about that particular aspect of caring for him. She rarely put catheters in her patients; they just wet on their bedding, which she would simply crumple up and toss away.
But she doubted Daniel was into piddling on newspaper.
“You can’t get out of bed yet,” she said, walking to the counter on the side wall of the cabin. She found a dusty old gallon jar and carried it back to him. “So you’re going to have to settle for peeing in a jug.”
His cheeks darkened as he eyed the jar.
“Look, being shy about this isn’t an option. I just spent five hours getting personal with your internal organs, and you’re going to burst that kidney wide open if you don’t . . . go.” She set the jar on the bed beside him, then headed back to the supplies.
“Remind me again what planet you guys are from?” she muttered. “Because I gotta tell you, your pal Noah doesn’t seem to know that eggs don’t go in the bottom of the box, or that the Geneva Convention outlawed feeding moldy pizza to prisoners.”
She stared out the dusty window at the breaking dawn. “And Micah acted like he’d never seen a horse before. When I asked him to hold Clyde while I gave him an injection, you’d have thought I was asking him to hold a lion by the whiskers. And he nearly came unglued when one of the barn cats rubbed up against his leg.”
“I’m done,” Daniel said, a distinct growl still in his voice.
Isobel carried the carton of broken eggs to the counter, then wiped her fingers on her coat as she walked over to the bed. “So what’s up with you guys, anyway? Aren’t there any horses on Mars? Or ice cream? Or refrigeration? Or books?”
“Everyone knows Mars is uninhabitable. And refrigeration is a waste of energy.”
“Only if you like fungi growing on your food. Where’s the jug?”
“I slid it under the bed on the other side. So how about some of that pain medication you bargained for? Chase kept his word; are you going to keep yours?”
The only reason she didn’t demand he hand over the jug was because she could see beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. And considering he probably had the pain threshold of a rhinoceros, and that he’d rather die than ask her for anything, Isobel guessed he must truly be hurting.
And there was always the added bonus that a drugged patient would be much easier to deal with than a growling one. She headed back to the pile of boxes and started searching through her medical supplies. “So if Mars is uninhabitable, which planet did you fly in from?” she continued conversationally. She filled a syringe with pain medication and returned to the bed to find Daniel glowering at her.
Apparently extraterrestrials didn’t have senses of humor, either.
He captured her hand when she tried to slide the needle in his arm. “What is that you’re giving me? I don’t want to be knocked out again.”
“You don’t have to worry that I’ll take advantage of you in your sleep. You’re not my type. Ohmigod, look at that giant spider!” she cried, pointing at the wall beside him.
The moment he turned to look, she jabbed the needle in his arm and pushed the plunger, then skittered away when he tried to grab her again.
“Dammit, woman! That was dishonorable!” he hissed, rubbing his arm.
“But effective.” She shot him a smug smile. “It works every time—at least on dogs. Cats just look at my finger.” She shrugged. “You’re welcome to sue me for malpractice, if you’d like.”
“I need to stay awake.”
“Will you chill out? Since it appears we’re stuck with each other for the next five days, how about you stop growling at me like a wounded dog, and I’ll stop treating you like one.” She stepped closer so he could see her smile was perfectly sincere. “And to pass the time, you can tell me all about life on whatever planet it is you flew in from, and I’ll explain how things work here on Earth.”
“I’m not from a planet; I’m from the moon,” he said, only to snap his mouth shut with a scowl. “Dammit, you can’t give me any more drugs! I need to remain lucid.”
Isobel patted his arm. “Don’t worry, I have no intention of telling anyone you’re the man on the moon.” She frowned. “And I’ll lower the dose next time. It’s obvious your metabolism is abnormally fast. That injection already seems to be working, despite my not even hitting a vein.
“So,” she said, walking back to the supplies. “What brought you four moon men to Earth? Are you on vacation, or is this a business trip?” she asked, carrying more of the food over to the counter. Hell, maybe she could boil the bones and make soup. She glanced toward the bed when he didn’t answer. “Five days is a long time to stare up at the rafters in silence.”
Not to mention how long it would seem for her. She really would have to lower his doses, because even a growling patient was better than stark silence. “Hey, wait. Isn’t the moon’s gravity a lot less than Earth’s? Like half or something? So if you live up there, how come you can even walk down here?”
“Our gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s,” he growled. But then
she heard him sigh. “And if we hadn’t worn weight suits all our lives, our bones would have snapped the moment we landed.”
Isobel stilled. Was he serious?
He sure as hell sounded serious. And rather knowledgeable.
“Um . . . how did the four of you get here?” she asked.
“We used one of our old cargo transports,” he said, still staring up at the rafters, his voice slightly slurred. He touched the collar around his neck and looked over at her. “But once we got to Earth, we came back to this century via our time links. That’s why we couldn’t let you remove mine; it’s my only means of returning.”
“R-returning to when?” she whispered.
“To the year 2243.”
Ohh-kay. This was getting really weird. “So you’re not only from the moon, but from the future as well?”
He looked back up at the rafters with a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. “Yes, from the future,” he murmured. “Only we’ll not survive another decade if our mission isn’t successful. The four of us are our colony’s only hope.”
Utterly intrigued despite herself, Isobel walked to the bed and gently shook him. “What colony?” she asked. “Are there people living on the moon in 2243?” His eyes opened slightly, but she could see he was quickly fading. “What about Earth? It’s still full of people in 2243, isn’t it?”
“No,” he murmured. “Humanity got wiped out in the middle of the last century. And it’s taken Earth almost a hundred years to be habitable again.”
She gave him another gentle shake. “What happened to all the people?”
“Plague.”
Isobel stepped back and rubbed her hand on her coat.
“Which is why we must find the . . . animal,” he said, his eyes closing again.
“What animal?” She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and shook him again. “What animal?”
“We don’t know, exactly. One of your small mammals, we believe.”
“Daniel!” she cried, shaking him again. “What do you need this mammal for?”
He swatted at her arm, missing by a mile. “Go away, woman. I’m not supposed to engage any of the locals.”
She gave a slightly hysterical laugh. “Don’t I wish,” she muttered, walking over to the door. She opened it to stare at the ocean surrounding the small coastal island they’d brought her to, and let out a shuddering sigh.
She’d been kidnapped by aliens?
No, by moon men from two hundred and thirty or so years into future.
Either that, or horse tranquillizers made people creatively delusional.
She rubbed her hand on her coat again. But what if it were true?
It could be true, she supposed. Man could be living on the moon two hundred and thirty years from now.
And have learned how to travel back in time.
But Daniel said humanity got wiped out in the middle of the twenty-second century.
Except for the people living on the moon, apparently, who had then been forced to wait almost a hundred years to return home.
But that would mean generations would have been born there.
She looked back at the bed. Including Daniel? And Chase and Noah and Micah?
They couldn’t really be from the moon—could they? Isobel snorted and stepped out into the slowly warming October morning, deciding to explore the tiny island that would be her prison for the next five days. This is what she got for dating Paul Stanford for almost a year, who had been a certifiable Star Trek groupie. And she really had to stop watching the Syfy channel, as she was damn close to believing Daniel’s drug-induced delusion.
It certainly explained a lot of the men’s strange behavior.
Five
Daniel fought his way through the shroud of fog imprisoning him, alarmed to realize that his muscles were even less responsive than his mind as he tried to remember where he was and why he felt drunk. He stilled at the sound of movement to his left, the spike of adrenaline sharpening his senses.
He cracked his eyelids, then relaxed when he saw Isobel crouched in front of the woodstove, feeding it fuel. Her pet rabbit, that he’d caught only a glimpse of peeking out of her coat earlier, was on the floor beside her, and the two of them seemed to be having a whispered conversation.
Which surprised him, as he hadn’t realized people talked to animals.
Could the creature talk back?
While he listened to see if the rabbit responded, Daniel silently flexed his muscles. His shoulder seemed back to normal despite the binding immobilizing his left arm, but his side still felt as if it were on fire—though the flame had dulled appreciably since he’d last been awake.
He wracked his mind trying to remember his conversation with Isobel, and feared he had revealed the reason the four of them were here. He winced, remembering that he’d told her what year they were from, too, as well as from where.
He’d have to be more guarded; for hadn’t it been drilled into them over a lifetime of preparing to come here that people of this century would be unable to comprehend their ability to breach time? And that if they did expose their presence, not only could it put their mission in jeopardy, but the future of mankind as well.
Daniel smiled faintly. He would also have to keep guard against Isobel’s trickery. Her smugness hadn’t been lost on him after she’d turned his attention away from her crude method of administering medicine by pretending to see a spider.
Not that he could remember what a spider was, exactly. An insect, he thought.
Daniel concluded the conversation taking place across the room was one-sided, as the rabbit had yet to respond to Isobel’s long-winded monologue disparaging men in general and several ex-boyfriends in particular.
His smile widened as he began freeing his left arm from its binding. Was that why she’d chosen a pet with such long ears? His history lessons had included what role animals had played in people’s lives before the Cataclysm, though cats and dogs were thought to have been the most common household pets. Maybe the fact that Isobel was an animal doctor had led her to choose a more unique companion. Then again, maybe she simply needed a pet with long ears that would quietly listen without comment.
The woman did like to talk.
She was quite pleasant on the eyes, as well; much plumper than Moonlander women, and far healthier looking than the Earth women he’d seen pictures of from a hundred years ago. Daniel guessed that if Isobel had been alive at the time, she might have survived the plague. For they knew now that society’s obsession with thinness had been its ultimate demise, everyone having grown so gaunt that they hadn’t been able to fight the super-germ that had spread around the world like wildfire. Only by the time the scientists had realized their irrevocably weakened immune systems were to blame, the entire human race had disappeared in one generation.
Having witnessed the Cataclysm from afar, the colony that had at first been quarantined and then eventually stranded on the moon had spent the next four generations trying to fatten itself up in preparation of returning to their homeland—though limited resources had made it difficult. And if the four of them were unsuccessful this week, the last humans in the universe could be gone within the decade. Which was why it was imperative they find at least one species of animal that could provide a vaccine to make Earth safe again, so they could transport all the Moonlanders home before their aging infrastructure finally collapsed.
“I’m serious, Snugs. If a date ever darkens my doorstep again, you have my permission to trip him flat on his face,” he heard Isobel say, her voice rising at the prospect. “And just to save you boyfriend troubles of your own, I’m not going to put off neutering you any longer. That way we can grow old and fat and happy together, and eat ice cream until it’s coming out our ears.” She gave a musical laugh, lifting the rabbit’s ears playfully. “Which would take at least a pint for you, Snug-a-bug.”
She suddenly looked toward the bed, and Daniel closed his eyes to slits, to pretend he was still sleeping. Apparen
tly satisfied that he was, she scooped the rabbit into her arms and stood up.
“But you can’t trip Daniel,” she said, her voice lowered back to a whisper. “I’m going to have to get him walking by tomorrow at the latest, and I don’t need him falling and bursting open his side. You stay well clear of that growling bear, you hear?” she said, holding her pet at eye level, facing her. “For all we know, they eat bunny rabbits for breakfast on the moon.”
“We don’t have bunny rabbits on the moon,” Daniel said.
She turned toward the bed with a gasp. “How long have you been awake?”
Daniel sighed. Since she already knew more than she should, maybe she could help them discover exactly which small mammal they were looking for.
“In fact,” he continued, “we don’t have any animals on the moon.”
“None?” she asked, her expression turning appalled. “That is really, really sad.”
“Sad? How so?”
She approached the bed, cradling the rabbit to her chest. “Well, because it’s a proven fact that animals play an integral role in human health. We need to love something that will love us back unconditionally.” She snorted. “Because men sure as hell don’t know how to love a woman just for herself.”
“So are you saying Micah misinterpreted the conversation between you and the young girl in the store?” he asked, watching her expressive face turn a lovely pink. “You don’t dump your boyfriends just as soon as they become enamored with you, then get over them by getting . . . under another one?”
She gasped so hard the rabbit flinched. “Micah told you what that little twit said? But when? I’ve been with you almost the whole time.”
“In your truck after you ran for your surgery, when I asked him what he knew about you.”
She set the squirming rabbit on the floor in order to cross her arms under her breasts, and stepped closer to the bed—presumably so he could better see her glare. “For your information, I do not sleep with every man I date. And not one of them was ever enamored with me; they were only interested in the DVM at the end of my name.”
Ladies Prefer Rogues: Four Novellas of Time-Travel Passion Page 3