Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) (9 page)

‘Make sure to shake the strainer so you get all the water out,’ she said.

I turned to see her grinning evilly over the rim of her glass. I felt that tightness again.

I dropped the pasta into the sauce to finish, fished the chicken out of the pan, laid it on the plates, then added the pasta.

‘
Bon appetit,
’ I said. ‘Let me know if you like it. Please, be honest.’

She took a bite, closed her eyes reverently as she chewed, then swallowed and said ‘That’s delicious.’

‘My thanks.’

‘I’ll have to have you over for dinner sometime.’ She took another bite. ‘I have a wide variety of take-out menus, and all the best places on speed dial.’

We finished dinner and retired to the living room. We talked for hours. It was an interesting contrast of worlds. I told stories about my colleagues, the ragtag band of misfit adrenaline junkies who worked the ambulance because they were unfit for normal employment, and the spectrum of patients from the homeless, the drug-addicted and the shot-up gang members to the pushy home health aides from the Visiting Nurses Association and bosses who thought a fly-by-night ambulance company could be run like the Gambino crime family. She laughed in all the right places and responded with observations on working in a detached little world filled with young idealists and jaded professors, a place where people really could read Karl Marx and Lord Byron and actually think they were on to something.

She was very funny, and had a dry, quick, cutting sense of humor. She’d learned to look at stupidity and naiveté and arrogance and find humor in them rather than screaming and tearing her hair out. She was smiling over her drink, those big green eyes shining over the top of her glasses. We were sitting close, and I figured the chemistry was there. I set my own glass on the coffee table.

I leaned in and kissed her. Lightly, just by way of reconnaissance. She tilted her head as I came in.

I felt a tiny spark as our lips met, which roared into blazing life as her lips parted under mine and I tasted her tongue. She grasped the back of my head and moved in close, pressing her body against me. She made an attempt to put her half-empty glass on the table, missed by a foot, and wrapped her arm around me, holding tight.

Feeling her nails through my shirt, I kissed her along the jaw from her ear down the side of her neck, then swept her up with a growl and carried her to the bedroom.

My head was spinning with desire, blood pounding in my temples. Sarah moaned in my ear, then bit the side of my neck. I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of her hair.

We landed on the bed, and managed to undress almost without letting go.

It was intense. I was more turned on than I had been in a long time, and she reacted with an urgency that surprised me. I put forth my best effort, and she seemed to appreciate it.

Being a good lover is all about being able to read a woman and respond. Being able to read a body’s rhythms below the surface is helpful.

Cheating? Maybe. But nobody’s complained yet.

We fell asleep tangled together, her head resting on my chest, a lazy smile on her lips. I drifted off with a warm glow in the pit of my stomach.

Chapter 9

THE AIR WAS STILL BITTERLY COLD. I hunched my shoulders in my parka and wiggled my toes to keep the blood moving. I’d thrown away my Shoepak boots, which trapped the sweat when you moved and let it freeze when you stopped, and just wore a pair of regular leather boots a size too large with an extra pair of wool socks. I was cold, but not frostbitten.

The fighting hole was too shallow, but it was deeper than most on this inhospitable hillside. I had worked long and hard scraping and chipping at the frozen ground, and pushed the rest of my squad to do the same. Work kept you warm, and a deep enough hole kept you alive.

Private Hackett snored quietly in the bottom of the hole, his legs in his sleeping bag, sitting up against one wall of the pit. Ever since a team got overrun and bayoneted in their bags, we were ordered not to climb in and zip up. We were ordered to keep our boots on as well, but that must have come from some rear echelon idiot who’d never been north of Virginia. You need to take your boots off and dry out your socks. Wet socks will cost you toes.

It was my watch, but since it was too dark to watch, I was listening. Other companies had been hit, and we assumed we would be sooner or later.

I heard something at the base of the hill. I couldn’t make out anything in the darkness, but only humans were dumb enough to be out on a night this cold, and only the Chinese were motivated enough to be out probing instead of hunkered down in their blankets.

I dug out a grenade, squeezed the handle to loosen it, since they’d been freezing up. Didn’t pull the pin yet, but made sure the spoon would release when I threw it.

Silence.

Had I just imagined the sound? I flexed my fingers in my gloves, wiggled my toes, waited. Listened and waited as the chill seeped through my parka.

Suddenly I heard the blast of a whistle and the shuffle of feet and the enemy made a plodding charge up the hill through deep snow on frozen feet.

I prodded Hackett with my boot, then hurled the grenade and ducked back down. Hackett came blearily awake, reaching for his Thompson.

‘Grenades,’ I told him. Muzzle flashes would give us away. Until the artillery got some flares up, we couldn’t see anything to shoot at anyway.

We each grabbed one, pulled the pins, knocked the spoons against the frozen walls of the pit to loosen them and threw them, together.

We ducked back down and heard the explosions. Now there was gunfire and screams in English and Chinese. I took a third grenade and stood to throw when the first of the flares popped overhead, bathing the hill in harsh white light.

Chinese soldiers swarmed up at us, their legs churning as they tried to run through the deep snow, shoulders hunched in the unconscious crouch every infantryman adopts in the face of fire. Most carried submachine guns, but only a few were firing. Our holes were hard to see, most of us showing as little of ourselves as possible and the flare had just spoiled everyone’s night vision.

I quickly estimated their number at around a billion.

The nearest were only about twenty yards away. I threw my grenade, saw it land among the closest enemy, dropped down into the hole and grabbed my rifle. When the explosion sounded, I got just high enough to aim over the lip of the hole and started shooting.

This close, I didn’t have to really aim. Squinting through the rear sight actually kills your peripheral vision. Under fifty yards, I just had to look over the sights, take a second to line up and squeeze. They were headed straight at me, no need to lead them. Just don’t rush the shot.

I fired at a tall guy hunched over a burp gun, running directly at me. He spun around and fell, his limbs flopping loosely, his weapon pinwheeling away. I lined up and dropped another man, then fired at a third, whom I couldn’t have missed, but who kept right on running, his weapon chattering full auto. I fired again. Nothing. My third shot hit him in the forehead. His hat flew off, he jerked straight up and toppled over. I shifted my aim to another man, but I saw tracers from a machine gun further up the hill scythe him down. To my left, Hackett’s Tommy gun stuttered in short bursts.

I fired a few more shots, then swore as my M1 ejected the spent magazine with a metallic
pang!
As I grabbed another clip from my bandolier, Hackett made a noise between a grunt and a wet cough and fell against the back wall of the pit.

I put a hand out toward him and the world exploded.

A club of light and noise hit me, sending my helmet spinning off into the darkness. I felt hot, stabbing pain in my right shoulder and fell into the pit, dazed.

Disoriented, I groped blindly, my hand coming down on a bloody parka. Hackett was unconscious, his breathing slow and snoring. I stayed down, sending energy to explore his wounds, stop his bleeding. I heard the enemy attack pass around the hole, running and shooting and screaming. A soft, heavy weight landed on my legs, then remained horribly still.

I tried to control my fear, with Hackett’s rasping breath in my ears, an icy cold settling on my right side where my parka was torn by fragments and my blood had frozen on my skin, and the heavy, still warmth of a dead Chinese soldier lying across my legs.

I woke with a start, my heart racing, and looked around. I was in my bed in my second floor walkup in Philips Mills.

Sarah was on her side, wrapped up in my blankets, which she’d managed to pull half off me, exposing my right side from shoulder to hip. She was snoring quietly. The cat lay draped across my knees.

I took a deep breath, slid out from under what she’d left me of the covers and threw on a robe. I took my longest t-shirt out of my bureau, laid it on a chair near the bed, and made my way to the kitchen. I walked softly, making sure not to wake her.

The dream had been vivid. Nothing so vivid in a long time. Maybe talking to that Korean vet brought it out.

Or maybe being hunted and helpless, waiting in the dark for a knife between my shoulder blades reminded me of that night.

This couldn’t be as bad as that night above the Toktong Pass, could it? And I’d survived that. Except that I didn’t have any hand grenades now. Even if I did, chances are the neighbors would object to me throwing them at strange noises in the dark.

That night had been bad. I’d patched Hackett up and we kept our heads down as the assault raged on past us. Someone called in an artillery strike all around us which stopped the second wave of Chinese, and the rest of the company threw the survivors off the hill. We limped up after dawn and rejoined the platoon.

It might sound cowardly, playing dead in the bottom of a hole while the enemy swarmed up after your buddies. Hell, it might be cowardly, but if we’d gotten up and started shooting, dazed, wounded, and half-blind from a grenade explosion in the middle of a Chinese company and started shooting, they’d have killed us in seconds. If we’d tried to retreat up the hill to the rest of the unit, either the Chinese or some panicked Marine would have shot us. There’s a time to fight and a time to hug the ground.

Enough thinking about that. Now it was time to concentrate on the fact that there was a beautiful woman in my bed. The hunters in the cold dark night would keep.

I made a pot of coffee, picked up the beer glasses left by the couch, and started hunting around for breakfast for two. Maybe after breakfast I would think of something to do about the man with the ankle. I needed a name for him. Gimpy? Von Gimpy? Gimpsky! Maybe Sarah would have an idea on how to pursue that inscription.

In addition to survival, one thing soldiering had taught me was not to worry about things you couldn’t control, but about what you could. I opened the fridge.

Two eggs. Well that wouldn’t work. Three slices of bread for toast... not promising. Plenty of milk at least. Well, it could be cold cereal.

Aha, I did have the makings for pancakes. Who doesn’t love pancakes? But no syrup... OK, blackberries. Not in season, but I could make that work, and whipped cream. I was in business.

A little water in a pan on low, add some butter, dump in some blackberries, spoon some sugar over them, cover and let simmer.

I heard footsteps coming from the bedroom. I turned to see Sarah come into the kitchen. She looked good in an oversized Boston Celtics t-shirt, give her that much. The tattered remnants of the nightmare melted away.

‘Hi gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Sleep OK?’

‘Like a baby. What smells good?’

‘Homemade blackberry syrup,’ I replied. ‘In the mood for pancakes?’

‘I could be persuaded.’ She kissed me lightly. ‘I’m gonna go freshen up.’

‘I have a new toothbrush in my work bag. Stole it from the hospital in case I needed it but I haven’t used it. It’s still wrapped up.’

‘Thanks,’ she said, retrieving her purse from the couch, ‘but I brought my own.’ She must have caught something in my expression; she flashed her trademark twisted smile. ‘Because I’m just that slutty.’

I laughed.

‘I’m not naive. When I accepted your dinner offer, I thought this might happen. We’re both adults, we had some chemistry.’ She shrugged. ‘Although, you had me worried for a sec.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked as I cracked an egg into the mixing bowl.

She shrugged again. ‘Well, I felt a connection but after the literature, the cooking, and the fact that you’re good-looking, well... When you complimented my manicure, I thought “Oh God no, he’s gay”.’

I burst out laughing. ‘Oh, man. I hope I reassured you.’

‘Definitely. But for a second, I wondered if I’d waxed for nothing.’

‘If I’d complimented you on a nice job with that, would that have pushed your suspicion further toward or away from gay?’

‘That’s a good question.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll think about it while I clean up. You keep cooking for me, you’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of me.’ She gave me a quick kiss and walked into the bathroom. I heard the shower running.

I finished cooking, plated the pancakes, drizzled the syrup over them, dropped a few uncooked berries on top and finished with a spritz of whipped cream.