Page 6

Chapter Six

Mark Eisele had slipped in and out of consciousness so many times that he wasn’t sure where he was, how long he’d been there, and what was or wasn’t real. His dreams had been turbulent and elaborate and vivid, and several times he’d awakened with his sheets soaked through with sweat from fever dreams.

In one of them, he had chased his father-in-law down a long hallway of a creepy old resort hotel in the mountains, à la the Overlook Hotel in The Shining . While he trundled away from Eisele, Rulon kept glancing over his shoulder, imploring his son-in-law to stop pursuing him. The man was winded and flushed. But when Eisele finally cornered Rulon near the elevator and tackled him to the carpet, he was pulled off his father-in-law by massive bodyguards as well as his wife, Megan— and his mother-in-law. For the purposes of his dream, they were heavily muscled and extremely strong. And he was easy to subdue.

In another, he slowly came to in a gleaming white hospital room. In it, Eisele was propped up slightly in bed and covered with clean sheets. An empty tray of hospital food was moved to the side of the bed. There was a football game on the overhead television and he could see the gold dome of the state capitol though the window. Snow fell, even though the sun was out. He felt no pain, even though he was heavily bandaged and he couldn’t move his legs or arms. He didn’t know how he’d managed to eat his meal.

Two nurses entered the room and he greeted them. One had Megan’s face and the other his mother-in-law’s, but neither woman was his wife or mother-in-law, and they were clearly puzzled when he insisted they were.

The nurse with Megan’s face said they had come to check up on him, as they did every couple of hours. When he asked why, the two women shared a glance between them that was ominous and it filled Eisele with dread.

“You really don’t know why?” the Megan-faced nurse asked him.

He looked back at her blankly.

“Should we tell him?” she asked the mother-in-law-faced nurse.

“Show him.”

Which was followed by another ominous glance.

Then the Megan-faced nurse reached out and peeled the top sheets off of Eisele. He felt cool air on his bare legs, and when he looked down there was a mass of bloody bandages covering his genitals, and he let out a shriek.

“They got shot off,” the Megan-faced nurse explained. “We’re hoping to find you some new ones.”

“Which might be tough,” the mother-in-law-faced nurse said. “We might have to use some skin from your thigh to rebuild a penis and install an air pump in case you ever want to try to be, you know, intimate again…”

—

But when he woke up this time the room he was in was dark and there was no view of the capitol, and no nurses with familiar faces. The room smelled slightly of old smoke. His fever had abated and he wasn’t covered in sweat. His sheets were dry.

He tried to sit up, but couldn’t, and he realized he was restrained. A one-inch-wide nylon strap, like the kind used to keep a tarp secure over a trailer bed filled with garbage on the way to the dump, stretched tightly across his chest and held him down. He could see no release on it, and he assumed the ratchet mechanism was located under his cot, where he was unable to reach for it.

Despite the strap, Eisele was able to pull down the top blanket inch by inch with his hands by grasping the folds of the material and tugging it toward his feet. Eventually, the top of it slipped under the strap and the blanket gathered around his waist.

By pinching the sheets between his knees and then kicking his feet, he managed to work the blanket down the length of his body, where it piled over his ankles. Then, after closing his eyes for a moment and whispering a prayer to a God he’d never spoken to before, he raised his head and looked down at his groin.

It was fine. There was no mass of bloody bandages. Only a pair of light blue, urine-stained scrub pants.

His head flopped back and he blew out his breath with relief. As he did so, he realized that his activity had set off sharp bolts of pain in his right shoulder and left buttocks.

That’s right , he thought. They shot me .

—

Eisele could only recall snippets of what had happened after he went down. He remembered the two painted faces above him, and the jet airplane that screamed through the icy blue sky as it descended. Then being strapped face up on the back of an ATV as it bounced along a rough trail, the impact of each pothole or rock sending sharp stabs of pain through him that plummeted him back into darkness.

Then there was the sight of a dowdy Old West town with a wide street, a smattering of buildings in different stages of disrepair, close dark pine trees hemming in the village framed by snowy mountains, and the rough handling of several people carrying him through the lobby of one of the structures as if he were a sack of potatoes. They swung him from side to side as they carried him, and he got a good look at the tin-stamped ceiling. The people carrying him wore camo clothing.

Was there really an Old West town, he wondered, or was that something that had come from a movie or television series? He couldn’t be certain whether he’d seen it or if it had been in one of his dreams.

—

Eisele came to the realization that he wasn’t alone in the dark room. Ragged breathing punctuated the silence to his right and he turned his head in that direction.

In the dull orange light of a portable heater plugged in between their cots, he could see a blanketed form. The heater rattled and hummed as it cranked out warmth in the dark. An aluminum IV stand was above the other cot and a plastic tube extended from a bag of clear liquid to within the sheets. He couldn’t see the face of the person in the cot, but he assumed it was Rankin. He hoped it was Rankin.

“Spike, is that you?” Eisele asked. His voice was hoarse and phlegmy.

“Spike, can you hear me?”

No response.

“Spike, if it’s you, I need you to be strong, because I’m not much help to you. In fact, I don’t know what in the hell is going on.”

Again, there was no response.

—

A few minutes later, Eisele heard muffled voices on the other side of the closed door. Several of them, at least two men and a woman. They seemed to be casually conversing. There was a band of light under the door, and someone walked close enough to it to cast shadows.

“Hey!” he shouted.

The voices stopped.

“Hey, I need some help in here. There’s two of us.”

There was the sound of a squeaky doorknob being turned, and for a quick moment Eisele was blinded by light from the other room. He involuntarily closed his eyes and turned away.

Someone entered and closed the door behind them. When he opened his eyes he saw that the beam of a headlamp was illuminating his torso. The beam moved down from his chest to his groin.

“You pissed yourself again,” a female said sourly. He recognized the voice as the woman who had bent over him after he was shot. The woman with camo paint and a full mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Eisele said. “I wasn’t awake to know what I was doing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the woman said.

“I’m strapped down. I can’t move.”

“Like I didn’t know that.”

“Untie me so I can use the bathroom.”

She ignored him. The beam on her headlamp was now on the form in the next cot.

“Is that Spike?” Eisele asked. “Is he okay? Because he doesn’t respond, and it doesn’t seem like he’s okay.”

The beam contracted as she leaned over the person. She pulled the top cover of the blanket up and the light probed beneath it. She held up the corner of the material so it blocked Eisele’s view.

After a few seconds, she draped the blanket back over the form.

“Is that my hunting companion?” Eisele asked.

“I guess so,” she said. “He’s the older guy you were with. He doesn’t seem to be doing so hot,” she said matter-of-factly.

“We need a doctor,” Eisele said.

She scoffed at that. “We’re doing what we can do. This is field medicine at its best. It saved the lives of a lot of good soldiers.”

“We need to get to a hospital. Spike sounds really bad, and I’m in a lot of pain.”

As he spoke to her and became more lucid, he was filled with more and more questions.

“Are you here to rescue us, or are you holding us captive?”

“What do you think?” she asked with a harsh laugh.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “I’m Mark Eisele, and the other guy is Spike Rankin.”

“We know that.”

“So what’s your name?”

“We don’t use our real names here. Only our call signs. I’m known as Double-A,” she said. It came out reluctantly, and Eisele wasn’t sure that she hadn’t just made it up on the spot.

“Where in the hell are we?” he asked.

She turned to him and doused her headlamp while she did it. He couldn’t see her clearly, but he could feel her presence just a few feet away.

“This old town used to be called Summit,” she said. “Now we call it Soledad City.”