Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  He clutched her buttocks and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around him, hooking onto his hips. He pressed her back into the wall. “Guide me,” he said.

  She grasped his rigid flesh. Did as he bid.

  He pressed inward, trembling with the exertion of penetrating her, his shaft so thick, so long, it took her body a moment to mold itself around him. A moan escaped her throat. Delicious friction. Exquisite expansion. He plowed inward burying his entire length within her. She winced with pleasure when he reached his hilt.

  He stopped, shaking from the effort of keeping himself still. “Am I hurting you?”

  “No.” She felt her heart squeeze inside her chest. This wasn’t some sophomoric male using her for his own gratification, she realized. Daniel was making love to her, carefully, attentively, his heart and body fully invested. And she was keeping herself emotionally apart. He deserved better. But she couldn’t give him what he sought. Not in this city. And both she—and he—were too aroused now to stop. She rolled her hips in a slow grind. More.

  His hips tilted, the sword slowly withdrawing from the sheath. A feral growl rumbled in his chest, and he thrust forward. He hissed. “Oh, Christ, Brenna.” And all restraint deserted him.

  She clung to him, gasping for breath, arms wrapped around his broad shoulders, legs locked around his hips. Her body undulated in rhythm with his, answering his quickening desire with an urgency of her own. Sexual tension coiled tighter and tighter, knotting up on itself. Again and again, he drove in, hard and deep, plundering her as if he couldn’t get enough.

  The intimate trespass, the physical hammering crumbled the barriers around her tattered heart. He was dismantling her defenses. But she couldn’t stop. Not now. Her body wouldn’t allow it. She matched him thrust for thrust, gasp for gasp. Her voice rose in ecstasy, mixing with the sound of his ragged need. The final frenzy engulfed her. Body touched soul and sex transformed itself into emotion. She wanted him. Wanted to be his. Oh God, she thought, and lost her breath.

  A racking orgasm swept through her.

  At her ear, Daniel roared with his own climax.

  She tied her arms around him, pulled his head to hers, fought a sob, undone by powerful emotion she hadn’t planned to feel. Love. Oh, Ari, she moaned, terrified by this vulnerability. Why did you teach me to do this with my heart open?

  Daniel grunted as if he’d been punched. His body grew rigid. “Stand up,” he ordered, pulling her arms loose, his voice jagged as broken glass.

  But the union is still tight.

  “Put your feet on the floor,” he commanded. “Now.”

  She reluctantly uncoiled her legs from his waist. The junction between them broke.

  He pushed her back, holding her at arm’s length. “Who am I?” he demanded. “Look at me and tell me who you see.”

  “What?” she asked. She looked in his face and she was shocked. He was angry. Hurt. But why?

  “Name me,” he ordered.

  “Daniel,” she said, bewildered. “Daniel Ellsworth.”

  He released her. “Daniel. Not Ari.”

  His words stunned her. Oh, dear God, no! She must have spoken Ari’s name aloud. “Oh, God. Daniel, I—”

  “Morgue is next,” he said, cutting off her protest. He yanked up his pants, stuffed his shorts and shirt into the waistband and jerked the zipper closed. “We have work to do.”

  She watched, heart spiraling, as he swept up his jacket and punched his arms into the sleeves.

  He stopped in the deep shadows of the stairs, turned, and looked down at her. “I have feelings, Brenna. I’m not a stud service.”

  He took the rest of the steps. The upstairs door scraped open, then shut again. She remained below, naked from the waist down, boots scattered, pants and underwear pooled on the cold concrete floor. She dropped her face into her hands, fighting tears, and slid down the wall. What a disaster. What a colossal disaster.

  In the morgue, situated in an annex off the main hospital building, Daniel held a battery-operated floodlight aloft for Brenna, aiming it over the dead as she requested, while she taped. Half of what she was shooting was too graphic for prime time television, but he said nothing. He had final control in the editing suite, and he was in no mood to argue.

  The facility was everything she had warned him to expect. The floors and walls were lined with once-yellow, broken tiles. Corpses cocooned in stiff, blood-soaked sheets were piled closely together, many stacked upon each other. Atop one pile, a partially-draped corpse with rigor mortis held up his swollen hand in gruesome salutation. Underfoot, brick-red sludge stuck to Daniel’s shoes, crackling each time he picked up his feet. The air was fetid, a cloying mix of sickly-sweet decomposition and strong disinfectant.

  The attendant, a brown-skinned man wearing a threadbare lab coat, leaned against the doorway, idly smoking hand-rolled cigarettes while his visitors stepped over cadavers.

  Brenna had lost her priestess quality. She was silent, withdrawn, her movements measured and self-conscious.

  He was watching her—not happily—and she knew it.

  Sitting alone in that stairwell after the surgeries, he had wanted Brenna in a way that went beyond the physical.

  His experience in the operating room made him feel that he’d been transformed into a man he didn’t want to be. He came from old New England stock. He believed that every individual had a right to self-determination. However well-intentioned he had been in overpowering Mariana’s patients, as the day wore on he had started to feel he had become part of the madness that inflicted pain on innocents. Sure, in the long run his actions would presumably be beneficial. But in the moment at hand—the only moment of reality for the patients—he had ruthlessly imposed his own will. They had begged him to stop and he had squeezed them tighter, as if he knew what was best for them. A man had the right to declare that he’d had enough. What was the quote from Sophocles? ‘Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.’

  Then when he awoke with Brenna’s gentle fingers on his forehead and saw the tenderness with which she regarded him, it had felt redemptive. She still saw some decency in him. She felt like salvation, the keeper of the man he once believed himself to be, and he had wanted to ground himself in her conviction.

  The compassion she exposed when she thought no one could see her had struck a deep chord in him.

  It had made him want to acknowledge her, too, for preserving that quality in herself in the face of Kavsak’s brutality. It would be so easy to become hard-hearted in a city like this. And yet, she hadn’t. She fought the onslaught with her professional dedication, her crates of medical supplies—her silken fingers on a man’s troubled brow.

  It had made him want to tie her to himself, to assure her at a fundamental level that she was not alone, not the only voice in the wilderness, not forsaken.

  It turned out that what she had wanted was someone else.

  “Shit,” he mumbled.

  Brenna turned. “What?”

  He motioned her to keep taping. “Nothing.” He just wanted to get out of here.

  She surveyed the morgue with deliberation, looked back and pondered him reflectively, and went back to work.

  She bent forward to take a low-angle shot.

  His gaze lingered on the curve of her bottom. Lord help him, he was burning—the heady taste and feel and sound of her was still pulsing through him like his own blood.

  When he’d pulled her hips against his, he’d felt a whoomf of heat, like pent-up propane suddenly igniting. White heat ate him up, and all he wanted was to fuse himself to her. God. She had been so deep, so strong, so unafraid of his sexual power. For the first time in years, he’d been able to fully express his sexuality without fear of hurting his partner. Brenna unleashed him. He’d found his sexual match. He snorted self-deprecatingly. Ill-used, disappointed, and hurt as he felt emotionally, his treasonous body just wanted a reprise—in a bed, with his hands free, and all her clothes off. It made his groin feel
heavy just thinking about it.

  Be that as it may, it wouldn’t happen again. He’d offered her his heart and his body, and she’d only wanted half the deal.

  He wasn’t queuing up in her long line of conquests. Especially not behind some guy named Ari.

  A car horn sounded twice in the delivery bay at the rear of the morgue. That would be Jasha, picking them up. They had to drive down the mountain during the Nationalists’ change of shift, he’d told Daniel. There would be a lull in the artillery barrage while the day team clocked off and the night guys came on. Since the Golf had one wheel on a rim, and speed was out of the question, they had to time the trip just so.

  Their route home would differ from the one they had come up on. They would cut through a tunnel in Mt. Ottoman, the only high ground held by the Separatists. The tunnel was part of an unfinished pre-war thoroughfare, now used for both transportation and as a cistern location that supplied citizens of that part of the city with water. The road would double their travel time, but avoid several sniper zones, and bring them into the city near the old regional army barracks, where Jasha would stop to pick up a new tire and rim for the Golf.

  With all that had happened, it seemed unbelievable to Daniel that they had only that morning driven up the mountain. In Kavsak each exhausting day held the contents of a week, and more risk than a normal lifetime—a normal American lifetime, anyway. He was starting to understand Brenna’s three-day rule. Each day was already an eternity.

  On the road, dusk deepened. The artillery petered out as Jasha predicted, and the countryside was hushed.

  Driving without headlights, Jasha concentrated on guiding the damaged car alongside the treacherous drop-offs. Daniel sat beside him, silently riding shotgun. Brenna was in the back, staring out the window, her elbow on the ledge, her cheek resting on the backs of her fingers.

  If Jasha had noticed the change in the dynamic between them—and he was no fool—he didn’t remark upon it.

  Partway down the mountain, Jasha pulled over, tires crackling on the stones as the car rolled to a stop in a spot where the mountain sheltered them on one side. There was a vast cemetery opposite them.

  Jasha glanced at Brenna in the rear view mirror. “Quickly.”

  She opened the door. Bent at the waist, she scurried across the road with the camera and crouched among the boulders.

  Makeshift crosses, rough boards with pointed tops, and even occasional Stars of David marked thousands of graves, dug so closely-together that the dead lay shoulder-to-shoulder. The earth mounded over them was fresh, dark, bare—and extended out of sight. Down the slope, black-shrouded mourners floated like dark ghosts among the markers and open graves. Distant strains of Albinoni’s Adagio, drifting across the burial grounds like low-lying mist, added to the surreal, haunting scene.

  Wait a minute. Music? “Jasha? Is that—?”

  Jasha nodded. “Famous Kavsak cellist,” he said, naming him. “He plays for mourners now, instead of opera hall.”

  Ten thousand people had been buried in this cemetery since the beginning of the war, Jasha said, many identified only by where their bodies had been found. Since funerals were targeted by snipers and artillery, interments all took place at night now. “Sometimes, the mourners have to jump inside the graves to take cover.”

  After the supply of coffins in the city was used up, people were buried in armoires, or coffins made from rough planks nailed together. Now the dead, transported to the cemetery in hand carts, were simply wrapped in sheets and placed directly into the ground. The Nationalists had confiscated the German-made digger capable of carving out a grave in eight minutes, so now all the holes were dug by hand. “It takes two men all day to dig one grave,” Jasha said. “They are exhausted, weak from hunger. Always cold.”

  Brenna returned as silently as she left, got in, and closed the door with a muted thump.

  Jasha pulled away.

  The terrain flattened, and Jasha drove into the city through a circuitous maze of Separatist-manned barriers and blockades. Everybody knew him, ribbed him good-naturedly about his missing tire, and saluted him through.

  He stopped in front of a pair of iron gates displaying a large ‘UNPROFOR’ sign. Before the siege, the barracks behind the gates had housed the regional militia. Now, they were home to the Ukrainian peacekeepers assigned to protect the city’s core. The armed guard at the gate, a dark, muscular man of about thirty-five, stepped up to Jasha’s window, his AK-47 casually pointed at him from waist level. Jasha exchanged words with the soldier, and he opened the gates.

  Jasha drove sedately through, the bare rim grinding the road.

  In the back seat, Brenna tugged her camera bag onto her lap and dug through it.

  In no apparent hurry, nonchalantly surveilling every quadrant of the barrack compound, Jasha glanced at her in the rear view mirror. “How are you doing?”

  “Fishing. It’s at the bottom of the bag.”

  “Let me know,” he said, and calmly rounded a corner.

  Daniel turned in the seat and looked from one to the other, wondering what they were talking about.

  “Got it!” she said. She peeled off her jacket, unzipped a secret flap in the lining, and rapidly slid a black, palm-sized piece of electronic equipment into a small interior pocket.

  A micro digital video recorder.

  Her hands working swiftly, she grasped the lapel of her jacket, screwed the lead with the pinhole camera into the back of one of the ordinary-looking black buttons at the front, threaded the microphone down one sleeve, and rezipped the lining.

  “Done,” she said.

  Thirty seconds later, Jasha pulled up in front of a garage door, shut off the engine, and held an open palm out to Daniel.

  Daniel pulled the wallet out of his pocket and gave him the whole thing, abandoning the pretense of knowing how much things cost, or controlling the flow of his cash.

  Jasha rifled through the bills, extracted several high denominations, and handed it back.

  “Get a receipt, why don’t you.” Daniel said.

  Jasha snorted, pulled the door handle, and stepped out. He leaned over Brenna’s window and tapped the glass.

  She cranked it down and handed out her shoulder camera.

  “Meet me here,” he said. “One hour, if you live. Longer, if you don’t.”

  Daniel shot a glance over the seat. If she lived?

  “Ha-ha, Jasha. Keep my camera safe. Otherwise, don’t come back. After any amount of time.”

  Jasha’s shoulders were shaking as he walked toward the large white doors with it under his arm.

  “Come on,” she told Daniel. “Let’s go stick our necks out.”

  He got out of the car and followed her. “Where are we going?”

  “Shopping.”

  They walked rapidly along the lee of the garage and crossed diagonally to a separate, less-isolated building. A warehouse, he judged. Loading bays, steel entrance door, no windows.

  They clattered up six metal steps, passed an armed soldier, and tugged the door handle.

  On their left, near the overhead service doors, a cluster of civilian males leaned against wooden crates, smoking cigarettes, grunting monosyllabically, looking for all the world like carrion-gorged vultures, too torpid to move.

  “Don’t stare,” Brenna advised.

  “Who are they?”

  “Kavsak mafia. After this war is over, half those guys will be high-ranking government officials.”

  He picked up his step. “What is this place?” The warehouse was cavernous, brightly-lit, as abundantly stocked as any Costco back home.

  “Party central. Everything here has been looted, smuggled, extorted, or misappropriated.”

  “This is a UN post!”

  “A man with no conscience can get very rich in this town. The Ukrainians are especially open to…strategic partnerships. Glance around,” she instructed, turning so the pinhole camera in her lapel could capture the scene. “Casually.”

 
; There were uniformed Ukrainian soldiers posted at intervals throughout the warehouse, an armed variation on the ‘greeter’ theme.

  “I suppose if we get caught, we’re dead meat.”

  “Pretty much.” She led off. “Look happy. We can have anything we want—”

  “—For the right price?”

  “Exactly.”

  God, she had cojones. But you didn’t get extraordinary footage by sitting on your duff at press conferences. Or at a bar.

  They walked through giant aisles stacked ceiling-high with powdered eggs and milk, French wines, Cuban cigars, cases of Marlboros. Not to mention hand grenades, guns, and ammunition. A gallon of gasoline, he quickly calculated, sold for the equivalent of ninety U.S. dollars. A large jar of Nescafé instant coffee sold for sixty.

  Strolling calmly past soldiers dickering with buyers over the posted prices, she gave him a history lesson—the ‘simple version’.

  Before the war, she said, the militia was multi-ethnic. When General Goran Cavic’s men, now called Nationalists, saw the political split coming, they decamped to the mountains, taking the artillery, tanks, support vehicles, and most of the small arms with them. The remaining troops—a coalition of Kavsaks of mixed heritage, and Fundamentalists—became the Separatists. But there were few firearms left in the armory, and the metropolitan area had been surrounded.

  So the city government mobilized the next-best armed, highly-organized group available to defend them.

  The mafia.

  Thugs set up checkpoints and blockades, enough to hold the Nationalists at bay. That done, they began to loot—all in the name of defending the city. They systematically stole every moveable item they could get their hands on. No penny-ante smash-and-grab, but wholesale theft from government, business, and individuals, using fleets of trucks to move the product.

  All normal commerce halted. They settled in to profiteer. Big revenue generator? Clandestine import of weapons for the Separatist militia—because by now the outside world had embargoed the legal sale of weapons to Kavsak.

  Without food or other essentials, ordinary citizens started selling off their assets—jewelry, furniture, cars—at a fraction of their value to buy necessities at extortion rates. Warehouses filled up with the belongings of the once well-to-do. Educated professionals fell into penury. Criminals became the ruling elite.