He’d known he was dying, and really, he was glad. He was tired of the sand box, of the death, and the blood, and the gore, and being terrified all the time. He was getting out, finally, and he’d saved his friend, had kept a good man alive to go home to his wife and daughter, and that was a sacrifice he was happy to have made.
But then he’d woken up in a hospital in Germany, the pain a restless, living thing inside him, tubes in his nose and his elbows, machines beeping all around him.
“At least your face still looks handsome,” a kindly older nurse who reminded him of his mother had said, and patted his scarred arm. Like being pretty was his biggest worry.
His home, before the Marines, had been Virginia, but his folks were both dead, and he had no other family to return to. He’d wished, for a little while, that he hadn’t survived, because he walked with a limp, was covered in scar tissue, had no support system, and no idea what to do with himself now. Deshawn had stepped in, had insisted he could live with them in Queens, in their finished basement.
“It’s not much,” he’d said, “but it’s comfy.”
It had been offered as a gift, but Rooster had insisted on paying rent. “Just ‘til I get on my feet,” he’d said, and meant it literally and figuratively.
And now here he was, dreading the effort it would take to get upright again. Deshawn was on another deployment, and Rooster was cluttering up the poor man’s basement.
Something had to change, but he didn’t know what, or how.
He leaned forward and gritted his teeth, pulled himself along by the coffee table, and got to his feet with minimal cursing and only a little swaying; Ashley was right that he needed to eat, unfortunately.
His knee got looser as he moved, and so by the time he got to the top of the basement stairs he was only puffing a little, and he forced a smile across his face when Desiree spotted him and shouted with delight.
Ashley stood at the stove and shot him a smile over her shoulder.
He definitely didn’t deserve these people, but he was glad he had them.
~*~
He woke with the phantom tastes of blood and sand in his mouth, choking on them, gasping into his pillow. He propped himself up on his good elbow and scanned what little he could of the dark room, trying to get his breath back.
The nightmares were always shapeless, an indistinct collage of light, and sound, and sensation. He woke aching all over, sore thanks to the clenching of all his ruined muscles as panic worked on him while he was defenseless. He was getting better at coming back from them. Bourbon helped.
He sat up with a groan and swung his legs over the side of the bed, wriggled his toes against the smooth, industrial carpet squares underfoot. The digital clock on his nightstand said it was just after two in the morning.
He was raking his fingers through his too-long hair, gathering the strength to stand, when he heard it: a faint tapping. Four soft raps, and then it stopped.
“What?” he asked the dark room around him.
Probably he’d just imagined it. His brain didn’t work quite right anymore. Probably–
There it was again. And it wasn’t coming from the stairs, which would have been the most logical place, but from the narrow window set just beneath the ceiling. Technically, it was a legal point of egress, one which let out onto the front yard, but you had to stand on a chair to access it. Sometimes, Ashley came down when he was out and cranked it open to let in some much-needed fresh air, but Rooster always closed it again, unable to sleep with the rumble of traffic wafting in.
It was shut tonight, and when he glanced toward it, he nearly leapt out of his skin. There was a face peering in at him, pale in the wash of the porch light, eyes huge and bright and flashing.
“What the fuck?”
The tap repeated, and a small hand waved at him from the other side of the glass.
It was a girl. Staring in the window at him.
“Okay,” he said, panic washing through him in familiar waves. “Sure. Why not.”
For a moment, Rooster convinced himself that it was Desiree, that she’d snuck out of bed, somehow gotten out the front door, and…
But no, she wouldn’t do that. She was a freakishly obedient child, the kind that made single people want children of their own someday. And besides, this kid’s skin was too pale to belong to his goddaughter.
“Hello?” her voice called, muffled by the window. “Sir?”
He heaved himself upright with a groan and a crackle of protesting joints, tugged on the t-shirt that lay across the foot of his bed, and made his way to the window.
He did the maintenance work around the house – when he was mostly sober and when Ashley would let his half-crippled ass do it – so the window was well-oiled and opened easily. The girl moved back out of the way as he did so, and then popped her face into the opening. There was a cool breeze coming in off the street, bringing with it the scents of early autumn…and of a hospital: industrial strength cleaner, the harsh detergent they used to wash the sheets and gowns.
She had a cherub face, rosy-cheeked and sweet, and her hair, when the porch light hit it, sparkled like a tumble of flames. It was red. Not carrot-orange, but the deep russet of an Irish Setter, shot through with the copper of new pennies.
“What are you doing out there?” he asked, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
Her eyes – pale green – widened. “I followed you,” she said, without beating around the bush. Her expression was guileless as a baby deer. “From the Institute.”
He stared at her a moment, stupefied. He would have loved to blame this on a bourbon hallucination, but his head was pounding and his joints were throbbing, and he knew he was sober.
“You mean…the Ingraham Institute?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I ran away.”
“Oh.” Like that was a normal thing to hear.
“You looked like you were running away, too.”
“I…wait. You ran away from the hospital? Why?” She didn’t look like a wounded vet to him, not at all. No way was she old enough, for starters. And she was too perky to be someone who’d been turned away from an experimental study that was attempting to correct significant battle injuries.
No, not turned away. She’d run away, she said.
“Look, kid,” he said, willing himself to be patient. She was just a little thing, and Ashley had been on his case about being kinder to the people around him. “I dunno why you ran away, but your mom’s probably real worried.”
If it was possible, her eyes got even wider. “Oh. I don’t have a mom.”
Shit. “Your dad, then. Your grandma. Whoever took you to that place.”
She shook her head. “Nobody took me. I was born there.”
“Born?”
“At the Institute.”
“You were…born at the Institute.”
“Yes. I’m one of the LCs.”
Something ugly was churning in his belly, the same dark premonition that had accompanied him into that room on his last deployment, on the day he’d saved Deshawn’s life and lost most of his own.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “I can call somebody. Or you can use my phone.”
Her expression grew almost comically solemn. “I don’t want to go back.”
He had no idea what so say. So he said, “Okay.” Like an idiot.
They stared at one another. At another point in his life, when he’d actually had his shit together, he might have done the right thing. Or, at least, the Responsible Thing. Called some sort of authority; offered to take her somewhere.
But he was tired, and confused. So fuck it.
“Uh,” he said. “You wanna come in?” He pointed toward the stairs, intending to go up to the front door and let her in.
But, quick as a little mouse, she chirped, “Yes, please,” and dropped down through the window to land on the floor.
Rooster reacted badly.
That was a nice way of putting it.
He startled back, tripped over his own feet, and landed on his ass on the thin, industrial carpet of the basement floor.
As quickly as it happened, he berated himself, which sent him into one of his now-normal shame spirals. He’d been strong once. Physically; mentally. Fit, tan, hardened, deadly. He’d been a model Marine – for so long that he no longer knew how to be anything else.
But then he’d gotten blown up, and he was a ghost of his former self. Weak, stiff, staggering. Vulnerable. And so he flinched, when he’d never flinched before, and he drank, and he worried, and was a piece of shit in general.
Oh. He’d gotten stuck in his head again. The girl stood over him now, her lips moving. She was talking to him.
“What?” he asked, and his voice faded from a strange echo to something that sounded halfway normal – given his situation on the floor.
Now that she was standing, he could see that the girl did indeed wear hospital scrubs, white and too thin for the weather outside. She held her hands clasped together in front of her; her hair fell in two thick curtains on either side of her narrow, freckled face.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah. Um. Yeah.” He got laboriously to his feet, wincing, cursing internally. He grabbed for a handhold that wasn’t there, felt his core muscles crunch and strain.
The girl stepped in close, too close. “Oh,” she said. “You’re hurt.” And before he could react, she reached out and laid a hand on his bad arm.
In Iraq, when the IED went off, he hadn’t felt any pain. That was one of the things that had always struck him as odd: he hadn’t felt his body break. Instead, he’d felt the rush of heat, and he’d felt the force of the blast, a surge of energy. He imagined that was what it felt like to be hit by a truck: that tremendous shove moving through his skin and bones.
When the girl touched his arm, he first felt the heat, and then the force. A whip-crack of electricity that shot up his arm, burst like ordnance in the depths of his shoulder, and showered through his nervous system, bright chasing sparks.
He knew that he pitched forward, that he gasped, but these were helpless physical reactions, and nothing conscious. The sparks bloomed inside his head, in his eyes, clouding all thought and vision and fear. It must have been only moments, but it seemed to take hours for the starbursts to unfold. In their wake, a pleasant heat stole through him; filled him head to toe, even all the numb parts of him where doctors had harvested tissue and left him disfigured.
For the first time since the explosion, he felt present in the left side of his body. Like a whole man, and not a partial one dragging around a dead half.
The acute sensations faded, leaving him warm and in less pain than he could remember. His vision cleared, and when he blinked away the last flashes, he saw that the girl stood in front of him, her hand still on his arm, her pupils wide black pools, no sign of the bright green irises he’d seen before. Her skin shone, pale like the moon.
Rooster shuddered. “Hey.” He reached to cover her small hand with his own.
She gasped and jerked away from him, staggering back, swaying like she might fall.
Rooster stood up and caught her by the elbows. “You okay? Hey, don’t pass out.”
And then it hit him: he’d stood up from the floor without any of his usual grunting, swearing, and grabbing for handholds. His bum knee had held; his muscles had worked; his re-stitched tendons and ligaments hadn’t brought tears to his eyes.
A different kind of panic flooded his system. “What was that?” he asked. “What did you do?”
She tipped her head back, exposing her throat, the movement slow, almost like she was drugged. She blinked, and her pupils began to recede. “I…I…” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp in his arms.
Rooster caught her, and marveled that he had the strength to do so.
~*~
Ashley stood in her pajamas and silk robe, one hand propped on her hip, the fingertips of the other massaging a spot of tension between her brows. She breathed a sigh that Rooster knew well. “Explain it to me again, but make it make sense this time. Why is there a little girl on my couch?”
Rooster could deliver a sitrep that would make any gunny proud, so he knew Ashley – like him – wasn’t so much misunderstanding him as she was dumbfounded. The whole thing sounded ludicrous.
“She knocked on the window,” he said. “Woke me up. Said she ran away from the Institute – you know, where I went today? And that she didn’t want to go back. She touched my arm…” He curled his left hand into a fist and felt it flex almost normally, the pain a faint echo in the joints. His breath hitched in his chest, and for once it had nothing to do with discomfort. “Something happened.”
For the first time since he’d carried the girl up here – he’d carried her, holy shit – Ashley looked away from her unconscious form and turned a sharp look on Rooster. “What do you mean ‘something happened’?” Her gaze moved down his body, sharp and assessing, down to where his weight was distributed evenly between both feet. Her eyes widened. “Shit. You’re–”
“Yeah. Something happened.”
She cocked a single brow. “Did this chick pop you with a steroid shot or something?”
“What? No. Come on, she’s just a kid.” A very small one, who breathed shallowly, like a little unconscious rabbit. She was probably cold. Ashely kept extra blankets in the closet down the hall–
“Roger.” Oh, she’d been trying to get his attention.
“What?”
“We need to call the police.”
“Yeah.”
But she’d touched him, and the pain had gone away. She had run away from that awful, brightly-lit place with the smiling staff who’d been too cowardly to outright reject him to his face when they had no intention of helping him.
The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood up on end because something was wrong. Just as he had the day of the IED, he felt the low vibrations of danger.
“Ash, something’s not right.”
“No shit,” she said with a snort, but then sighed. Shook her head. “Yeah. Okay. I know what you mean.” She contemplated the girl, lips pursed, arms folded. “Who is she?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Well.” She squared her shoulders, and again Rooster felt like the Corps has missed out on the perfect recruit when she’d decided to go for her law degree instead of joining her then-boyfriend, now-husband in the Marines. “Let’s find out.”
She leaned in and laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. Frowned.
“What?”
“She’s cold.”
“Well, yeah, she was outside in nothing but those.” He gestured toward her thin, short-sleeved scrubs.
“No, she–” Ashley started, and the rest of her sentence turned into a bitten-off curse when the girl’s eyes flipped open. No slow fluttering back to awareness; no, they snapped wide like one of those dolls you tipped back and forth.
Ashley stepped back and took a deep breath. “Okay. Um. Okay. Hi,” she said to the girl, who was currently sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the couch, red hair falling around her face. “Can you hear me?”
The girl looked up, and Rooster watched the awareness return to her eyes, the blankness fading to confusion, to fear, to panic. Her mouth opened and she sucked in a breath through it, rattling on the exhale. A shiver stole over her, jacking her thin shoulders up around her ears.
Ashley softened. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, sinking to her haunches in front of the couch. “You’re safe here.” She lifted both hands and then froze, palms suspended over the girl’s knees. Something happened, Rooster had said, and he saw now that Ash was afraid to touch the girl. She did, though, after a moment’s hesitation, resting her hands on the small, bony kneecaps. “My name’s Ashley.” Even softer now, the maternal voice she used with Desiree. “And that’s Rooster. Can you tell us your
name?”
“I…” She breathed rapidly through her mouth, quick breaths that ruffled her hair. Like a frightened animal. “I don’t…”
“It’s okay,” Ashley said. “Take your time.”
The girl swallowed with an audible gulp. “I don’t have a name. They call me LC-5.”
Ashley sat back, brows scaling her forehead, but didn’t break contact with the girl. “Who is ‘they’?”
Something cold and ugly turned over in Rooster’s gut. He crouched down beside Ashley, and the girl glanced at him; he suppressed a sudden, protective urge to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ears. “Hey, kid. Who called you that?” He felt Ashley staring at him, but he stayed fixed on the girl, noting the way her lower lip trembled.
She said, “Doctor Talbot. And Doctor Fowler. And all the nurses. Everyone.”
He and Ashley traded a look.
“Are they doctors at the Institute?” Ashley asked, voice going careful.
The girl nodded.
Ashley said, “Honey, where are your parents?”
“I don’t know. I never met them.” She took another unsteady breath, blinking against the gathering tears in her eyes. “Please don’t make me go back.”
Ashley patted her leg. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We won’t.”
~*~
“Either this kid is yanking our chain and happens to be a really good actress,” Ashley started.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Neither do I. Which means some weird shit is going on.”
Ashley had found some clothes for the poor girl, some sweats of her own that swallowed the little redhead whole, but were warmer than the scrubs. She already wore a pair of white, soft-soled shoes without laces, the kind prisoners might wear. That was the dark conclusion Rooster was beginning to come to: she was a prisoner of some sort. Someone who, without a name or parents, had been held captive at the very place that was offering assistance to wounded vets. The idea made him sick.
They stood in the kitchen, both of them taking turns to peek into the living room where they’d set the girl up with a blanket and a mug of hot cocoa. Ashely held her phone in her hands, thumbs flying over the screen.
Red Rooster (Sons of Rome Book 2) Page 2
