Brotherhood Protectors: Soldier's Heart Part 2 (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Ilsa J. Blick

  “If you wouldn’t mind.” Stop being stupid. Digging past a stack of nearly folded pullovers and tops, she pulled out a pair of man’s camo pants and then an olive T-shirt. Held both to her nose and inhaled. They smelled of laundry soap and—something that had taken a long time for her to parse—chalk, which she thought must be the scent of the Afghan desert. In neither was there a trace of Pete himself, though.

  Hank was broader in the chest and a little taller, but these should do. She searched for a sweatshirt but came up empty. Well, hell. She tugged out Pete’s old denim chambray shirt, the one he’d worn the last day she ever saw him in the flesh. Had it been only last night she’d curled up in this shirt and cried herself to sleep?

  “Hey, Sarah?”

  “Coming.” Get a grip. Hauling in a deep breath, she laid the clothes on her bed then headed for the front room. “You need some help with the tub? Say, I found a couple things . . .” Her voice trailed off as she caught sight first of Hank, hands on his hips, and then the dogs sitting side by side. When they saw her, the dogs stood, tails twitching hopefully.

  “No,” Hank said, firmly. “Sit.”

  Mouth agape, she watched both dogs plop back onto their haunches and lower their heads. Talk about a hangdog expression. Daisy’s head was so low the tips of her long ears—Sarah had decided the dog, a Heinz 57, had a healthy dose of beagle with a dash of terrier and maybe some Labrador mixed in—actually touched the wood floor. Soldier kept rolling his chocolate-brown eyes up as if to catch hers.

  “What in the world? What’s wrong?” Then she spotted a purple splotch staining Daisy’s white ruff and more dabbled on under her chin. Oh, no. Her gaze jumped to the small dog’s paws and a purplish spatter of matted blotches, dark as blood clots. I must’ve missed some glass.

  “Blood?” Her eyes skipped to Soldier, but if the big shepherd was also cut, his ebony coat made that impossible to tell. Although—her gaze sharpened on a patch of matted fur under Soldier’s snout—was that blood? “This is my fault. How bad is it, Hank?”

  “Well, you tell me.” Reaching for the table, Hank fished an aluminum tin from a rumpled towel. “Looks pretty damn bad, you ask me.”

  What? Puzzled, brow furrowing, she took the tin. Only after another moment did she realize she was looking at a disposable pie pan.

  “Oh, my God.” She turned the pan over in her hand. Not a crumb, not so much as a drop of huckleberry filling remained. Crossing to the table, she spotted a stencil of faint purple paw prints. Soldier was tall enough not to need to jump, but Daisy wasn’t. She rounded on the dogs. “You guys ate the entire pie?”

  In reply, the dogs looked up in unison, their expressions clear: Who, me?

  “You know, if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow?” Hank’s head moved in a mournful shake. “The dogs are toast.”

  4

  Shit shit shit! Ducking back into her tent, the distinctive pops of distant gunfire still fresh in her ears, Kate moved fast, dragging on her shorties and then fresh flannel, rolling over to grab a spare pair of waterproof snow pants draped over her pack.

  “What are you doing?” Jack demanded.

  “What does it look like?” As she quickly bunched the pants’ long empty legs, she was already thinking ahead, jumping over the steps. He started out in the snow. Angling up on her back and lifting her butt until she balanced on her tailbones, she jammed her hips and thighs into her wadded-up pants in a single, hard thrust. So, there should be a trail I can follow.

  “You’re not seriously considering going after him now. I won’t mention things like it’s dark, it’s snowing, it’s cold.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” How far could Gabriel have gotten? Depends on when he started out. Given the depth of the snow and his prints, he probably had a couple hours’ start. But he’ll be slow. Rocking back to a sit, she pulled her pants up around her waist. He doesn’t have crampons or microspikes, and he’s weak, malnourished, sick. If he went off to die, he’d want to be far away from her camp, someplace no one would ever find him.

  “I could also point out that he’s an adult.”

  “Who may not be thinking straight.” Lifting her thighs straight up, she reached for her limp right pant leg.

  “Oh, and you are? Charging off because you heard gunshots is smart?”

  “I can’t just do nothing.”

  “As you’ve said several times before, and in Afghanistan, as I recall. How’d that work out for you, Kate?”

  Anger blazed. Tipping back to a splay, her thighs straight out, she rounded on Jack, but she’d have better luck catching a moonbeam. “Why are you laying this on me, now?”

  “Because I need you to take a breath. You couldn’t save the world then, and you can’t save Gabriel from himself now. Whether he left because of something we did—”

  “Of course, he did. You saw the prints same as me! He was there, but we were fucking, we were screwing, we were—”

  “Making love.” A beat passed. “I wasn’t fucking. I wasn’t having sex. I was making love to the woman I love. That’s why I’m still here, why you’ve let me get stronger.”

  I’m insane, that’s what. She was having sex with a guy who wasn’t there. Yeah, and in my land, we call that playing with yourself, sweetheart. Or diddlin’ Miss Daisy, finger-painting, getting all Meg Ryan on your bad self. Bitter thoughts that were, nonetheless, accurate and true.

  “Has it occurred to you that even if you do find him, he may not want to come back?”

  That stopped her for a second. “No, it hasn’t.” Then: “Goddamn it, Jack, you’re in my head. You know what I think, so you already know that didn’t occur to me. And so? Why are we arguing about this?”

  “First off, because I don’t know everything. Believe it or not, Kate, I’m compartmentalized. I’m like anything else in your brain. You can’t smell with your optic nerves, and you can’t remember things with the parts of your brain that tell you when to move your arm. So, yeah, I’m in your head, but I’ve only got access to certain areas.”

  Whoa. She’d never thought of this before, though she’d seen plenty of pictures of her brain. On scans, for example, the biobots showed up as bright red blotches. A sign of high metabolic activity, the doctors said and pointed out regions along the surface of her left parietal lobe where the biobots had rebuilt the connections that made her right arm work so well. They’d been as excited as little kids when more color had shown up in the deep structures of her brain—the amygdala and hippocampus, which were, among other things, important for consolidating memory. And that was right around the time I started hearing Jack. So, which blotch was he? Had he changed over time, too? She’d bet he had, the area of his influence and where he resided growing bigger or, at the very least, stronger.

  “No.” Tipping back until she balanced on her sit-bones, Kate reached and began rolling her pant legs over her thighs. “I haven’t thought about whether Gabriel will come back with me or not. I guess I’m betting that he will.”

  “Why? Because he’s a soldier, a brother? Because you guys shared a dinner of macaroni and cheese, and he confessed to his sad story of woe?”

  “Oh, my God.” She halted, still balanced, thighs angled at forty-five degrees. “You’re jealous, and don’t tell me you can’t be.” If Jack was only a hallucination, she might inject that, too, to make him as real as she possibly could. “If I want that, maybe you are.”

  “As flattering as you might find that, I’m only suggesting no matter what he heard, Gabriel could’ve sucked it up and stayed. But, no, he runs off.”

  “He was ashamed, Jack.”

  “Are you sure you’re not?”

  She opened her mouth to say that of course she wasn’t—but nothing came out. She couldn’t tell if the barb in her heart was shame, embarrassment, or only defeat. Because who was she kidding? No man alive would want any part of what she was becoming, and very few, if any, would’ve been able to see past what she’d been before Vance came into what was left of her
life. Some badass woman she was.

  When she didn’t reply, he continued, “Kate, do you even know where to start?”

  “Follow his tracks, I guess. I don’t think he headed back the way he came.”

  “So, what would you do? If you had suicide on your mind, that is.”

  “Find someplace high. A ledge, a cliff.” Someplace where a body had a long way to fall and no chance in hell of being found. “Anywhere off a main trail would be good.” She should check her maps. I heard those shots, and if that’s Gabriel, I’ll bet he’s within a couple miles. Stretching, she groped, felt an ankle and then a right boot. Boot in hand, she bent over her leg—and paused.

  What? She stared, slack-jawed, at her hands. What the hell?

  5

  There are places on earth where darkness is complete: a cave, a deep mine. After a mile, the ocean grows black as ink.

  By contrast, a room or tent at night—even one in a snowstorm—is never completely pitch black. Kit a room out with blackout curtains, and stray light still seeps in through chinks and seams or between slats. The human eye adjusts to shapes and variations in density. There are gradations, subtleties between hues of gray and white and silver and black. It is possible to travel at night through the forest by the silver light of a full moon. Although detail is lost, almost everyone can, in a mostly darkened room, tell the difference between a chest of drawers and a stack of books, though that shape in the corner might be a man watching or a coat draped over the back of an upholstered chair. The mind fills in what the eyes can’t quite see. Creep along in an attic, and there are those who can sense the greater bulk of a box suddenly looming. The blind can locate objects by changes in pitch and sound.

  So, there were precedents. The thing is, she shouldn’t be able to see well.

  But I see this. I see my hands. The outlines of her fingers were visible but faint and pale as grubs. Yet she could pick out some details. The left hand, still her flesh and blood, was bulkier and more muscular, the palm roughed with callous and the nails cracked and ragged from days in the backcountry. By contrast, the right was smooth, perfect, unblemished, courtesy of Vance and his DARPA boys—and strong enough to break a tree limb or a man’s neck.

  She saw her hands, nearly as plain as day. How? She hadn’t flipped on a lamp or flashlight, or cracked a light stick. In her haste, she’d been going by feel alone. Boggled, she brought her left hand within inches of her face, her gaze fixing on a small crescent over the first knuckle where she’d scraped against a rock yesterday.

  Then she remembered something. I woke up; I looked up and . . . Her head jerked back, her eyes zeroing in on that shimmer of metal at the peak. Shifting her weight, she held herself up on her hands, got her thighs planted, and then stretched for the roof of her tent, but she wasn’t quite tall enough. Not that it mattered.

  I see the spigot.

  “Yes, and you told yourself to remember to check the seam in the morning. When you were in such a hurry to get out of the tent and the zipper snarled, you saw that, too. Kate, your head’s crammed with hardware and software, nanocircuits and silica and ion chips and biobots rewriting neural pathways and creating new ones. Even Vance and his DARPA boys don’t quite understand what they can do or when the biobots might stop.”

  Or if they ever will. A cramp of fear grabbed her chest. My God, maybe they’ll rewrite me completely. She imagined an army of submicroscopic machines spidering over her brain, creeping into the wrinkles and moist deep folds, burrowing into the meat of her mind, spinning an intricate web of connections that had never existed. And turning me into what?

  “Maybe only making you better than you were. Remember, the biobots are programmed to repair.”

  She dragged her voice up from the pit of her stomach. “Yeah, but to repair damage, Jack. My eyes weren’t damaged. They weren’t blown up.” The rest of me, yeah, but not my eyes or my head or . . . She squeezed her eyes tight tight tight until sparks danced in the darkness before her lids. This is insane. I didn’t lose my sight. She’d lost a lot but not that and now—opening her eyes again, blinking past tiny flashes of light that weren’t there either because it was all reflex or physiology or something stupid—

  “Kate, calm down.”

  “Huh!” Her breath left her lungs in an explosive gust, something short of laugh and closer to a bark. “Easy f-for you to s-s-say.” She heard the stammer, the wobble, and her lips numbed, but to hell with that. She was entitled to a little freak-out. “You don’t have tiny machines chewing up your brain, rewriting your programming. They were supposed to repair the part of my brain that led to my right arm, Jack.” She held both hands out, fingers splayed. “But now I can see in the dark. I didn’t lose my sense of smell, but I get what people are feeling because of their scents. And don’t take this the wrong way, okay, but you weren’t supposed to be part of the package, either.” She heard her tone start to rise, a swirl of hysteria. “Not that I want you to go away or anything—”

  “Take a breath, Kate.”

  “No!” She bunched her fists. “Don’t tell me to calm down. This isn’t happening to you!”

  “You can’t know that. You have no idea what it’s like being me.”

  That stopped her. “What?” Jack was a construction, nothing but memory and wishful thinking. He had no feelings or even an independent existence without her. My God, I’m going to argue metaphysics with a hallucination.

  Or was there a morsel of truth in what he said?

  I was making love. That’s what he’d said. A shiver rippled through her body. Hugging herself, she felt goose bumps sandpapering her flesh, though only her left palm really registered this. Her right might as well have cupped wood. I was making love to the woman I love.

  Wait, hadn’t he said that because that’s what she wanted to hear? He was her construction, after all.

  Except for the fact that Jack, whatever he was, had strengthened and bloomed and become. Before he’d been only a suggestion and then a voice and then a shadow, a phantom . . . And then, hands and lips, a scent. Swallowing, the sound like thunder, she closed her eyes. A lover. Jack had . . . what was the right word? Expanded? Filled out? That seemed right. Jack was like a hand slowly working its way into and plumping a limp glove: first flat, barely two-dimensional, and then rounding to show contours and form and texture.

  But hadn’t she done that? Wasn’t she responsible for making him into more than memory, coloring in details? How could she even test that?

  My God, if this is true, where does Jack stop? Her heart twisted. Should I try to stop him?

  “Well,” he said, “you can try.”

  6

  Twenty minutes later, she’d broken camp and geared up.

  Hard-edged and keen and smelling of cold aluminum, the wind came in gusts, a northerly gale sweeping along the spine of the Black Wolf. Icy fingers plucked at stray strands of hair that had escaped her watch cap. She’d dithered over whether to bring only an emergency popup, a tiny tent used in mountain rescues that could fit two in a crunch, and a medic’s bag she’d kitted out herself with equipment, bandages, splints, IV bags, the works. Then she decided it was better just to bring the whole kit and caboodle. Gabriel might not be in any shape to go anywhere for a while, and they would need all her gear and supplies.

  “If he’s even still alive,” Jack observed.

  Optimistic much? If she found Gabriel, she wasn’t leaving him behind, no matter what.

  But what if he was hurt badly enough they had to stay put, even for a short time? Keeping warm would be the challenge, and depending on where Gabriel was, there might not be any usable wood right at hand. Then it might come down to getting him to a lower elevation. An only slightly less attractive option was bringing wood up to him. She knew how to find enough dry wood for a fire, even one she might have to build in a snowstorm, but she’d really prefer to do neither.

  “Hope for the best,” Jack said.

  But prepare for the worst. Crossing to her fire
ring, she hunkered down then unhooked a slightly battered, scorched tin can from a carabiner on her left hip. The can had once contained baked beans. The beans, which she’d cooked in the tin over an open fire, were long gone, but she’d saved the can. Punching ventilation holes with an awl, she used a drill to core two additional holes near the top on either side of the rim, slid in two small bolts, looped wire around the ends for a handle, and then tightened down the nuts.

  Now, flipping back the mitten-portion of her pop-tops, she opened a second, smaller combat drop leg pouch she’d strapped to her left thigh because a girl just never knew what she was walking into, and a good combat medic never forgot she was a soldier, which meant keeping her hands free. Fishing out a packet of cotton gauze, she tore off a good-sized handful which she layered on the bottom of her tin can. Then, using the side of a gloved hand, she skimmed away snow to expose the remnants of their fire and quickly sifted through char for punk wood which she dropped into the can over the wad of cotton. Finally, carefully, she fished out the few, faint orange embers that remained and nestled them atop the char. After covering that with more cotton and char, she blew a few gentle puffs of air into the can. In a few seconds, thin wisps of smoke rose from the can.

  And. voila. Fitting on a lid into which she’d punched more holes, she clipped the can back onto her carabiner. Curling her left hand around the can, she grinned as warmth leached into her chilled fingers. Now we can carry fire.

  Pushing to her feet, she made a mental note to keep an eye out for jack pine, a tree whose cones were crammed with resin which was excellent for keeping a fire going. Might not be a bad idea to grab more than a few pine cones. So, spare the time to look for them now?

  “I think you’d better get going,” Jack said. “Pine cones are the least of your worries. Don’t forget the Mossberg.”

  “Already ahead of you.” Cinching a scabbard to her pack, she slotted in the shotgun, already loaded with one in the chamber, barrel first. Easy to reach back, grab, pull, and shoot. From the brick of shells, she selected another twelve and divided them up, six in a left vest pocket, six in a right. Pulling her Glock 19 from a hip holster, she jacked out the magazine then popped the one remaining bullet already chambered into a palm.