There was still the mess at his house, unless they cleaned it up. They probably would. And since they had avoided the sheriffs, they didn’t want involvement with local law enforcement. They would want to keep looking for him themselves, he figured.
Well, he’d do his best not to be found.
After finishing off the food his belly felt comfortably distended, so he looked idly at his left hand and the human bite Elise had bestowed on him. Had she lost her mind? She didn’t seem out of her head. What had she meant, “You’ll understand”? The wound wasn’t severe, just a few blood spots where her canines had cut, and some generalized bruising that was fading already.
Pulling out his aid bag, he unrolled it to access the equipment. He poured some disinfectant on his hand, wrapped it in some gauze, tied it off awkwardly with his teeth and forgot about it.
His watch beeped twenty hundred, eight p.m. The Marine Corps Exchange was still open and it was right over his shoulder, a hundred yards across the parking lot. All right, time to improve my supply situation.
He drove over and parked just on the side of the enormous building, then grabbed a cart and went shopping. An ice chest, always useful. A two-gallon water jug. Some MREs, meals ready-to-eat. Field gear. A few other odds and ends, another two prepaid disposable phones and a pack of batteries for them. He’d have to make some calls sometime. Paying cash again, he loaded his purchases in the van, then drove off down a side-street and parked next to a pair of battered white base engineer work vans, blending right in.
Then Daniel and the serpent turned in, exhausted.
-6-
Elise sat crunched between two big men, Karl and Miguel, and kept her mouth shut. They weren’t the type of guys to fall for feminine wiles or pleas for sympathy. Knowing what she was, they viewed her with unbridled ruthlessness. Short of killing her or maybe amputating something, they knew they could damage the goods any way they wanted and get away with it. And she didn’t like the way Miguel always looked at her, as if he’d like to handcuff her to her lab bench and give his lusts free rein. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t, not really, for fear of contracting the virus and giving up his love of cruelty.
Shivering, she remembered just how vulnerable she was. Super-healing should give me an advantage, but all I can think about is being trapped as a combination researcher and laboratory subject. Studying myself. That’s irony for you. She’d rolled the dice and lost, this time, but she’d given what she could to Daniel and she had to hope that would be enough.
Sinking down into the seat as the Suburban shot southward to the next interstate feeder, she concentrated on not feeling the despair, or hunger. Looking at her skeletal hand in the flickering light, she felt the cramping in her guts. Maybe… “Hey, Karl,” she said softly. “Do we have any food in here?”
The minder ignored her. She could tell he felt personally betrayed by her attempt to escape, since he’d always been respectful of her. Or perhaps it was because they’d lost the younger Jenkins. Yes, that must have been it. He must feel like he’d failed in his duty.
“Look,” she reminded them, “you know my caloric needs. You know how valuable I am to the program. My body weight is under a hundred pounds and falling right now.” She held up her papery-skinned hand for his inspection. “By the time we get back to the lab there might be irreversible damage.”
“Should have thought about that before you tried to run, puta,” snarled Miguel.
“She’s right, though,” responded Karl, resigned. “If we bring her in damaged it will just be worse. There’s some kind of burger drive-through up there; pull in.”
“You buy the food, then,” grumbled Miguel. “I gotta take a piss.” He hopped out as they pulled up to the microphone.
“Thanks,” Elise said.
“Shut up,” Karl said flatly. “I’m not your buddy, and even if I was, buddy’s only half a word.”
She wondered what he meant. Some kind of military thing.
Occupying herself, she thought about Daniel, about his tortured eyes, eyes she had to run from out of necessity, but eyes that perhaps could be part of someone that would – what? Save her? If she’d read his file right, he would. That’s why she had tricked Jenkins into choosing him.
At least it was a chance.
***
Sleep was a big black scary thing inhabited by dreams where Daniel pumped round after round into Men In Black. They either wouldn’t go down, or the bullets would exit the gun with a little pop and bounce off their chests, and he would end up in a fistfight where he’d punch and punch and couldn’t hurt them and they would laugh. Then it would turn into something else, something from his past, like dragging his dead best buddy Hector Koltunczyk into a hollow in the dirt, trying to plug the leaks in him with his fingers, but Hector sprouted fountains of blood like one of those flexible hose sprinklers where the water came out the holes.
Long ago he had come to the realization that not even his new, Pararescue-trained self of several years later could have saved his friend, but if there was any one thing that drove him to leave the Army Airborne and try out for PJ, it was that incident where Hector died in his hands in Mogadishu.
It had taken a boatload of pushing, a break in service, giving up his stripes and starting over to make the move to the Air Force Pararescue program. The Army hated it when people didn’t re-up, and they dangled goodies, choice assignments and choice jobs, in front of him. He’d wanted to learn to save lives as well as take them, though, and they couldn’t guarantee him Special Forces Medic, which was the only other possibility he’d considered.
So he went PJ. That was the nickname for “parajumper,” Pararescueman. Despite the ninety percent odds of washout, he had not only qualified, but had excelled at it all the way through the Pipeline. Seventeen months of training just to graduate, “That Others May Live.” That was the Pararescue motto.
At the end of it Daniel Markis was one of fewer than three hundred of the very best combat lifesavers in the world, cross-trained with a variety of special ops expertise. Small arms, water operations, light aircraft, survival, mountaineering, demolitions, you name it, he’d done it in sixteen years in the PJs. Some of his Army buddies had thought he was a pogue or some kind of traitor for going green to blue, but none of his real friends did. Nobody that met an Air Force PJ at work ever thought so either.
That Others May Live. That’s why he did it.
He was elite of the elite, back then, a sky-god in a blood-red beret, before that IED took it all away from him, leaving him with a bum knee and a bad back and a serpent in his brain.
Daniel realized he’d gone from dreaming to drowsy reminiscing somewhere along the line, as dawn was breaking over Quantico. The sounds of Marines at morning PT came from off in the distance, and a five-ton truck drove by his parking place with a rattle.
Sitting up, he sucked down a half-liter bottle of water, then slipped out the side door and took a leak between the vans. He was hungry again, really hungry, so he went to the Mickey Dee’s one more time and ate his fill. Nobody seemed to be looking for him, and with hair cut high and tight he blended in pretty well here, though his shave was a day old.
Halfway through his third McMuffin it hit him: no headaches this morning, and the serpent was hiding.
Usually he woke up with a near-migraine that took four ibuprofen, a vicodin and a triple espresso to tamp it all down to a manageable level. His knee should’ve been locked up stiff too, and his back hurting, but right now he was pain-free for the first time in a long while. Since Afghanistan. And jones-free too, for that matter.