Head hanging at an odd angle and one leg dragging behind it, the corpse reached for her again.
Gabrielle kicked out again, striking the corpse square in the face and sending it over backward.
Behind her, the rustling of sheets let her know the other corpses were headed in her direction.
Time to get the hell out!
Not wanting to risk leaping over the still-twitching corpse, Gabrielle vaulted over the now-empty autopsy table and ran for the door. She hit it on the run, no longer caring about making noise, and sent it crashing against the wall as she raced through the doorway.
She found herself standing outside the hospital, the streets of Jaurez stretching out before her.
Without glancing back, she headed off into the night.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gabrielle ran down several streets, not caring so much where she was going as simply wanting to put as much distance between herself and the hospital as she could. She had no idea if they would come after her, but if they did, she didn’t want to make it easy for them.
It was only when she finally stopped to catch her breath in the shadow of a building some distance from the hospital that the reality of her situation finally caught up with her. Animating corpses aside, she was in a foreign country with no money, no identification, and no idea how she was going to get across the border, never mind travel halfway across the country in order to find her husband, Cade. All she had were the scrubs on her back and a pair of stolen shoes on her feet, plus the information she was carrying in her head about what the Adversary had done. While the later was potentially earth-shattering news, it wouldn’t buy her a ham sandwich, never mind get her across the border.
Juarez wasn’t exactly the safest place in Mexico, she knew. She’d been in the city long enough to understand that it was a hotbed of violence, with multiple drug cartels battling it out across the city streets. The number of people dying on the streets of Juarez was second only to the number of people who vanished without a trace, casualties of the same war.
Americans could be targets here, she knew, particularly to protest the continuing aid being sent to Mexico by the American government, aid that helped fuel the drug war. For the first time since waking up in Anna Rodriquez’s body, Gabriel was thankful for her decidedly Hispanic appearance. It would let her move through the city streets without being immediately picked out as a foreigner. Her newfound affinity for the Spanish language would no doubt help as well.
Now she just needed a plan.
For a moment she toyed with the idea of presenting herself to the Border patrol at the checkpoint and identifying herself as a U.S. citizen in trouble, hoping they’d at least listen to her story, but that would no doubt bring her situation to the attention of the US military once they scanned her prints into the system. The Marine Corps might have honorably discharged her after her accident, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t want to talk to her again when they found out she’d not only miraculously recovered from her coma but walked out of the hospital under her own power just a few weeks later. She could see herself disappearing down some government rabbit hole for further testing and never being heard from again. Thanks but no thanks to that one.
Same went for the U.S. embassy.
Without the help of either of those agencies, she didn’t see a way of getting across the border legally, which meant she was going to have to choose a less respectable means of entering the country.
Like crossing illegally on foot.
She glanced around, trying to get her bearings, but the only parts of Juarez she’d seen had been from the window of her hospital room and down here at street level everything looked the same.
Gabrielle looked up instead, searching the night sky until she found the North Star. Regardless of where she was in Juarez, it was a simple fact of geometry that the United States was north of her position. By following the star, she would at least be heading in the right direction.
She began making her way through the winding streets, heading north where and whenever possible. It was late and there were only a few people out on the streets at this hour. Gabrielle avoided them, hiding in the shadows until they passed by or taking an alternate route around them if she spotted them in time to do so. She kept to the side streets, not liking the lights or the vehicular traffic on the main thoroughfares, slipping from one to the next like a ghost in the night.
Occasionally a car would come in her direction. Each time she would quickly find a doorway or an alley to hide in and wait for it to pass, worried not just about being a woman alone at night in a deserted, and if appearances were any indication, dangerous area, but also about pursuit. She hoped Vargas would just let her go once he discovered that she was missing, but something told her it wouldn’t be that easy. She didn’t want to take the chance of flagging down an approaching vehicle only to discover it was someone he’d sent out after her from the hospital staff with orders to bring her in.
Eventually she found herself in a more commercial district, with signs leading to Highway 45, and her eyes lit up at the sight. Once it crossed the border, Highway 45 became US Route 54, leading into the heart of El Paso.
Getting there, she thought.
Another half hour of walking brought her to the access road, but it was what stood on the other side of it that caught her attention.
A truck stop.
The lights drew her like a moth to a flame.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The truck stop was one of those chains that served the long hauler routes running across the southwestern United States and into Mexico. It was part convenience store, part restaurant, and part locker room, with showers, toilets, and hot food available twenty-four-seven. A wide selection of items were available for purchase in the store, everything from ready-made sandwiches and snacks to motor oil and antifreeze.
The place was brilliantly lit even at this late hour thanks to a dozen overhead fluorescent lamps hanging from the ceiling and the light made her feel exposed as she came in the door, like everyone in the place was watching her.
In truth, only a few of the customers even glanced in her direction and those that did quickly dismissed her as insignificant and went back to what they were doing.
Gabrielle walked deeper into the store, doing what she could to get out of the view of the clerk behind the counter. She didn’t want anyone to put two and two together from the news reports being broadcast from the hospital lobby and possibly recognize her.
She wandered over to a rack of long-sleeved shirts and began looking through them, knowing she was going to need something more substantial than the surgical scrubs she was wearing if she hoped to remain inconspicuous while traveling. She found a dark-colored shirt that looked like it would help keep her warm and held it up, measuring it against her body, while at the same time looking around to see if anyone was paying attention.
She was thinking about stealing the shirt, just stuffing it inside the waistband of her scrubs and walking out the front door with no one the wiser since she didn’t have any money with her, when a voice spoke up quietly from her right.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She turned to find a heavyset man dressed in a cowboy hat, jeans, and a pale blue chambrois shirt looking through the rack of clothes next to her. He must have just stepped up, for she hadn’t seen him when she’d looked around. He didn’t even so much as glance at her, but she knew it had to have been him that had spoken. She also noticed his decidedly American accent.
“Excuse me?” she said.
He kept looking through the rack of clothing, speaking again in the same soft tones. “There’s a camera over your shoulder and a large Mexican at the front door with orders to stop any would-be shoplifters. So I’d forget about stashin’ that shirt, if I was you.”
Gabrielle felt a chill run up her spine. Who was this guy? How had he known what she was going to do? Had the authorities caught up with her already?
She glan
ced around nervously, but didn’t see anyone else paying the two of them any attention. She might still be able to get out of here if…
He turned to face her for the first time, his hands held out in a non-threatening way.
“Look, relax, okay? I’m not going to turn you in or nothin’. You look like a woman in trouble,” – this last bit said with a sad smile – “and I wouldn’t be the man I like to think I am if I didn’t offer you some help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help,” Gabrielle said quickly.
“No, you didn’t, that’s true. But I’m going to offer it anyway. Cuz you look like you could use it. How about you let me buy you a cup of coffee or something in the café over there and you can decide what you want to do after that, alright? At least then I’ll have done something and my conscience will give me a break.”
She looked over at the cafeteria-like coffee shop he was referring to, where a tired-looking waitress was waiting on a handful of customers who didn’t look all that different from the man next to her. All long-haul truckers, it seemed, on their way out or headed back home.
Home…
Just like that she realized she might have found a way of getting across the border. If she played her cards right.
The café, if you could call it that, was well-lit and there were plenty of others around if this guy turned out to be something other than what he purported to be. Besides, she hadn’t eaten in hours.
Gabrielle let go of the t-shirt she’d been fingering and found herself nodding in agreement. “All right,” she said, with a shy smile, “a cup of coffee sounds good.”
# # #
The man’s name turned out to be Stan - Stan Greenville - and he was exactly what Gabrielle had hoped; a long-haul trucker headed back to the States with a fresh load of produce in the back of his semi-trailer. He and Gabrielle were seated in a corner booth in the back of the coffee shop where there was little chance of them being overheard by the other patrons, few though there were. They’d ordered breakfast and he’d waited until she was three-quarters of the way finished before speaking up.
“Boyfriend or husband?”
Gabrielle looked up at him in confusion. “I’m sorry?”
“You have some significant bruises around your neck, the kind you don’t get by accident,” Stan said gently. “You’re wearing scrubs, which suggest that you’ve recently been hospitalized. You don’t appear to have any money, otherwise you’ve wouldn’t have tried to steal that shirt, and you’re obviously running from someone or something. That suggests an abusive man in your life. So, boyfriend or husband?”
“Boyfriend,” Gabrielle said, picking up the thread he was laying down before her and running with it, hoping it might be her ticket to getting out of here before Vargas, the FBI, or whatever that thing back at the hospital had been, caught up with her.
“And?”
Gabrielle spun a yarn about crossing the border with her boyfriend on a lark, just a stupid night out on the town in Mexico, until he’d gotten drunk and accused her of flirting with another man. Last thing she remembered was him beating and choking her into unconsciousness. She’d woken up in the hospital the next day without any money or identification to prove who she was and deathly afraid that her boyfriend might find her and finish the job he’d started the night before.
“So I snuck out the first chance I got,” she said, “and here I am.”
Stan nodded, as if that was exactly what he expected to hear. “You got family, someone you can call to help you out?”
She shook her head. “No. Mom died years ago and I never knew my father.”
Stan watched her put down a few more bites of her meal without saying anything. Gabrielle could tell that he was on the verge of making some kind of decision, so she kept her mouth shut, waiting to see what would happen, not wanting to say the wrong thing and blow it.
“Look,” Stan began, “You’re clearly in trouble and I’d like to help you out. Really I would. But how do I know you aren’t just feeding me a line of bullshit? That you’re not one of them, you know, illegals, trying to sneak into the country and using me to do it?”
For a moment, Gabrielle couldn’t believe he was serious. Given everything she had been through, his concern seemed so trivial that it took all her effort not to laugh in his face. Here she was, in someone else’s body running from animated corpses and corrupt doctor’s who wanted to sell her to the FBI for heaven’s sake, and her Good Samaritan was worried she might be an illegal immigrant!
If she laughed, though, she knew she’d lose him for sure, so she quashed the desire to do so, her thoughts whirling as she tried to come up with an answer that would satisfy him. Her gaze drifted over him, taking in the worn by serviceable work-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to mid-forearm, the hint of an old tattoo that peaked out from beneath the cuff…
That was it!
Gabrielle reached up and pulled the collar of her scrubs away from her neck, revealing the tattoo of the eagle, globe and anchor that snaked up the side of her neck from her shoulder.
“I don’t know too many illegals who have one of these, do you?”
Stan leaned forward and examined the tattoo for a moment. “What was your unit?” he asked.
Gabrielle had absolutely no idea but the answer popped out of her mouth anyway. “Two tours in Iraq with Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines.”
Where the hell had that come from? she wondered.
Stan nodded, but apparently wasn’t yet convinced. “So you saw some heavy action in Rawah, huh?”
“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “Fallujah and Ramadi, but not Rawah.”
Truth was Gabrielle wouldn’t have been able to tell one from the other, hell, she couldn’t even locate either of them on a map, but she must have said something right for Stan suddenly relaxed, leaning back in his seat with a smile on his face.
He pushed the rolled-up cuff of his right sleeve higher, revealing a similar, though much more faded, tattoo on his own arm. He caught and held her gaze.
“Semper Fi,” he said, with a solemn nod.
Gabrielle nodded back.
“Semper Fi.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Once a Marine, always a Marine, or so the saying goes, and Stan took that saying very seriously indeed, it seemed. The minute he was convinced that Gabrielle was who she said she was – a fellow Marine stranded far from home – there was no further question about whether or not he would help her, just a focus on how to get it done.
Stan had seen door-to-door fighting in the city of Hue in a little country called Vietnam, oh so many years ago, and he’d never forgotten the experience. He’d been assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, he told her, and while their experiences were several decades apart, he knew exactly what she’d been through.
He promised he’d see her across the border and on her way home. After all, Marines never left one of their own behind.
“Come on,” he said. “I think I’ve got some clothes that might fit you out in the truck.”
He paid the check, then led her out of the café and across the parking lot to where his rig was parked. He was driving a red Peterbilt sleeper cab and trailer that had clearly been lovingly maintained over the years despite seeing its fair share of long hard hauls. A World War II style pin-up logo showing a big-busted woman in a short skirt sitting atop a bomb with a burning fuse decorated the door, with the words “Mighty Bertha” painted underneath in bright yellow letters.
“This here’s my girl,” Stan said proudly, patting the side of the cab with obvious affection. “We’ve seen and done a lot of things together over the years; nowadays, I don’t go anywhere without her.”
He unlocked the cab and climbed inside, disappearing into the back for a few minutes before returning with some clothes in hand.
“My nephew ran a couple of hauls with me last fall and left these behind,” he told her. “Lucky for you, I never got around to sending them back.”
&nbs
p; He handed her a pair of jeans, a couple of dark-colored t-shirts, and a long-sleeved flannel over-shirt. Pointing to the cab, he said, “Climb up inside Bertha there and see if they fit.”
Anything was better than the thin medical scrubs she was wearing, so she did as he suggested. The sleeper section of the cab was roomier than she imagined, with a full-size bed, a small closet, and a shelving unit with a built-in wide screen television. Drapes covered the windows, ensuring privacy for the driver when resting for the night.
Gabrielle stripped off her scrubs and pulled on the clothing she’d been given. The pants were a bit too long, but nothing that couldn’t be cured by rolling the cuffs a time or two. The t-shirt fit fairly well, as did the flannel over-shirt, and Gabrielle felt her spirits rise thanks to the fresh clothing and her new ally. After a long hard night, things were finally looking up.
Stan gave her a once-over when she climbed back out of the truck and then nodded with approval. “Yep, that’ll do.”
“Now what?” Gabrielle asked.
“Now we get you across the border. Climb on up there,” he said, pointing at the passenger seat, “and I’ll explain on the way.”
Despite its age, the truck was quieter and more comfortable than she expected. Gabrielle watched as Stan deftly maneuvered the big vehicle out of the truck stop parking lot and drove up the ramp onto Highway 54.
“I’ve been driving this route for almost a decade now and know most of the guys working the border entry. Nine times out of ten they check my paperwork and wave me through without a second glance.
“So when the time comes, you’re going to climb into the back of the cab and I’m going to shut these drapes right here,” he said, pointing to the heavy curtains hanging to the right of the passenger seat she was sitting in, “and roll on through with them none the wiser.”
Gabrielle frowned. “Won’t having the curtain closed look suspicious when we get to the checkpoint? What if they want to search the cab?”
Fall of Night: A Templar Chronicles Novel Page 9