“Jesus,” Jason bit out. “Why have they put the poor kid outside?”
“They probably can’t sleep with the horrible reek inside.” Her belly sank. There was nothing quite like the stink of rotting flesh. “The child has a leg injury that’s gone necrotic.”
The child’s mouth sagged open, and—Moooooan.
Behind her, she felt Jason shudder. “Why,” he ground out, “isn’t anyone treating him? There’s a hospital ten miles away.”
“They probably can’t afford it.” For several painful thuds of her heart, she stared at the boy. He couldn’t be any more than ten years old. “I have to help him.”
“With what? A voodoo stick?”
She whirled around and narrowed her eyes on Jason. His features were sliced in half by a pole of lantern light coming through the door crack.
“You don’t have any medical supplies,” he pointed out with a logic that probably wouldn’t have been annoying if she wasn’t so desperate for any sort of feelings out of him.
She set her shoulders. “I have the first aid kit from your bag.”
“The kid obviously needs more than bandages and anti-bacterial ointment, Farrin.”
She took in a parched breath. Helpless anger burst back to life, an acid-like blistering in her chest and lungs. It erupted out of her, but not in nastiness this time. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Shit.” Jason speared fingers through his hair.
She shook her head, but even she didn’t know what the gesture meant in their current impossible circumstances.
He closed the door, latching it by direct pressure with his palm, rather than a brisk click that might have made too much noise. Cloak of night curved around his tall form. “I’m sorry. I know I’m doing a crappy job making things okay for you.”
He stepped back from her, and she knew without seeing that his pupils were closing off.
His murky silhouette shuffled along the wall, and she followed his movements in something like horrified amazement. It was as if he had an internal switch: on, human, off, robot.
He found his backpack, crouched down, and fished around in it, materials rustling. “I’ve got aviation earplugs in here. You can use them to sleep. It’s early enough that you should be able to get a good four to five hours of shuteye before I’ll need you to relieve me.”
So matter-of-fact. So impersonal.
He pulled something out of his bag. “You can bed down in the back room with the horses. It smells like dung and burnt wood in there, but that has to be better than what we’re smelling out here.” His penlight came on.
It wasn’t much light, but it was enough for her to see that she was right about his blank-out.
He straightened. “I’ll help you get settled in the—”
She took two huge steps forward and clenched a hand in the front of his kameez. “You want to do a better job of making things okay for me? Then stop leaving me!” She twisted her fist around the fabric.
He startled; she felt the all-over vibration of his body with her hand. But after only a flicker of a what-are-you-talking-about? look, she could tell he knew what she meant.
His voice quieted, roughened. “You want something I can’t give you.”
“Do I?” She snapped her hand out of his shirtfront. “Why don’t you tell me what it is, Jason?” Because she wasn’t entirely sure she knew herself.
He stood with his body held taut, his features a ghoulish chiaroscuro of white and black in the flashlight. “You want to know me.”
She exhaled a hard breath. Fair enough. “Why can’t I?”
“Why?” he echoed.
“Yes, why? Explain it to me. What did I do to deserve your shutout?”
A war waged across his face. His cheeks flushed, then drained; thunder descended on his forehead, then cleared into a resigned look that he seemed quite horrified by; his mouth…it didn’t exactly tremble, but it fell out of its usual confident lines when his lips burdened the next word he spoke with more guilt than she’d ever heard a single word have to bear.
“Nothing.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jason’s “nothing” answer badgered him all night. He’d said it out loud now, making it real. Farrin wasn’t doing anything to deserve his shutout—the first woman in his life who hadn’t participated in her own demise. So why was he shutting Farrin out anyway?
His mind bent possible answers into every malleable shape and angle, refusing to let the subject go, although not exactly offering him any insights about it either. What little sleep he did get was restless, his legs spastically jerking, like a dog dreaming about chasing squirrels. Probably because he wanted to run away.
Run away from childhood memories.
From blood beneath a furry black head.
From a father sitting on a couch with glassy-eyed cruelty.
From a mother who hadn’t bothered to take anyone else with her into her emotional bunker.
Run away from Farrin, who wasn’t doing a damned thing to deserve his shutout. Just the opposite.
You don’t have to blank out with me, Jason.
That’s what she’d said.
Not: It doesn’t seem like you’re really opening up to me, Jason.
Not: I don’t feel like you’re truly intimate with me, Jason.
No accusations or complaints conveying all the ways he was letting her down as a man. Just a kind offer to be there for him.
Anything you ever want to get off your chest, I’m here. And I’m a good listener.
He flicked his eyes open and breathed out slowly. Who said something like that except a person who thought of others before she thought of herself? And…hell, that was the problem: she was too damned kind and caring…too capable of worming her way beneath his scars.
Just shut her out and run away… That’s what he always did. He liked Farrin; it was terrifying; so go.
Except Farrin wasn’t even letting him do that.
Stop leaving me!
What woman had ever told him just to stop? His mother had been too isolated inside her own padded numb-out room to notice what Jason had done to himself after Barney. And most of his past girlfriends just left him after they had enough of his surface-only involvement, which was—once clear of disguise and with his intentions exposed—its own form of running away.
What would happen if he didn’t run away?
He wouldn’t be able to fall back on his normal cynicism anymore.
He’d have to be willing to try and trust.
A frisson of cold ran down his spine. Yeah, and while he was at it, he’d cast a spell and make the clouds above crap out food and medical supplies.
He shoved to a sitting position. Early morning sunlight was pushing through a hole near the floor in the wall across the room, where some burnt wood had crumbled away. Prying out his earplugs, he got his teeth ready to grit, but… There were only a few bird chirps, and Shane’s mare breaking wind. No moaning. Maybe the injured kid had finally managed to get a little sleep.
The image of that poor kid’s black and putrid shin piled a whole lot more fucked onto Jason’s already full cache of messed-up memories… His gunner Schmidty’s father-deprived newborn, camouflage-dressed corpses playing a macabre game of Twister, I need your man… Yeah, I need to let him slam nose-first into the cyclic, BLAM! Barney’s sweet brown eyes glazed over, that tango wearing Aladdin’s blood-red ruby, the expression on Farrin’s face when she knew she couldn’t doctor the kid.
I have to help him.
With what? A voodoo stick?
Snatching up his canteen, he wrenched it open and chugged water, the taste of which defied description. Maybe some scummy substance shat from a rhino’s festering colon? His plan to trick his stomach into thinking it wasn’t hungry by keeping it full of water wasn’t altogether working, not with his fast metabolism. He was so ravenous now his stomach wasn’t even bothering to growl anymore. Hunger was just turning his belly into a boiler room—steamy and churning.
The horses probably weren’t any better off. Unless he found some hay or oats soon, he didn’t see how the animals could go on.
Problems, problems, problems. They were all piling up, so damned high.
Jamming the top back onto his canteen, he scowled at the hole in the wall. Shoulda risked it and gone into Islamabad last—Hold up. Had that hole been there when they first moved in?
It sounded like water pipes bursting when Little Shit decided to let go of a couple of quarts of urine. The saying “piss like a racehorse” was not lost on this animal. My cue to leave. Rising to his feet, Jason took a moment to settle his mood—without his usual success.
Nothing, Farrin. You’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve my shutout.
With a heavy tread, he ducked into the front room. Everyone was there and seemed okay.
Farrin was sitting with her back against the wall beside the front door.
Shane was still sacked out where he’d started yesterday, under the boarded window, lying so still Jason couldn’t be sure whether the man was sleeping or unconscious.
Farrin lurched to her feet, and Jason stiffened when she walked toward him. He really wasn’t in the mood to be mashed up in her nag-o-matic again this morning.
She came to a stop in front of him, holding a bag that struck a chord in his mind as being odd. He narrowed his eyes on her, sending her a very clear nonverbal message about his mood. Say “good morning,” Farrin, and end it there.
“You’re going to get angry with me,” she said.
He grated a sound against his teeth. The woman had absolutely no skill for reading a room. He bolted down his jaw, preparing himself for—
“I went out last night.”
Not. That.
His brain waves jammed up. He sucked in a nostril-pinching breath and tried to get himself to serve something up, like maybe, Went out where? A question like that might help him fool his brain into thinking she meant she’d snuck over to the house next door and risked exposure by examining the hurt kid. He’d get angry at her for doing that, right? Sure. Stick with this. Because the alternative was too horrific. If she meant she went into Islamabad… IF. SHE. WENT. INTO. ISLAMABAD…
The look in his eyes must have turned lethal.
She stepped back from him, although the brave—no, stupid, idiotic, irresponsible—woman lifted her chin and continued to do something vastly imbecilic. Speak to him.
“Remember how you said you would stick out like a sore thumb in Islamabad? Well, it got me to thinking—I wouldn’t. I know how to act in a Muslim nation, Jason, and I don’t look like a foreigner.”
Hot air seethed from both nostrils. His brain unjammed and began to realize things. With unspeakable clarity. He knew the map, and in order for her to get from this small town of Talhaar into the city of Islamabad, she would had to have traveled for miles through Margalla Hills National Park—in the pitch dark. A single woman. Alone.
Talk, talk, talk. Even though air was hissing out of him like steam escaping a broken pressure valve, she kept talking.
“When it was my turn to sleep, I kicked down part of the fire-weakened wall in the back room, crawled out, stole the bicycle from next door, and pedaled to Kulsum International Hospital.”
Her tone was so matter-of-fact that he wanted very badly to clamp a hard hand down over her mouth and shut her up. The wild pounding of his pulse was machine-gun fire in his veins, counting down to an inevitable explosion. Shutting her up might save her.
“I was able to steal a good deal of medical supplies.” She lifted the bag to show it to him.
And now he knew why the bag was odd to him. He’d never seen it before.
“But I wasn’t able to get any food.” She lowered the bag. “However I figure I can…”
Whatever she continued to say was blotted out by the color red: a crimson curtain unfurling before his vision, rosy heat on his skin, the crackle of scarlet fire in his ears. A single woman…alone at night…in a city full of terrorists. How many different ways could you be dead right now, Farrin?
He lost it.
He snatched her up by the upper arms, surprising even himself by how fast—and aggressively—he moved. “You went where?” he gnashed at her, his voice coarse with the shout he was choking back.
Her initial yelp choked into a gasp.
He felt her flesh squish beneath his grip, his fingers pressing through muscle down to bone. His anger was almost alive. “Do you have any idea how much danger you put yourself in?!”
Tears gathered in her eyes but didn’t fall. In fact, she managed a respectable glare at him. She tried to wrench out of his hold.
But it was as if his hands were spasmed into catatonic bear-traps around her arms.
“You think I wasn’t scared? But I can’t do it, Jason. I can’t not help people when I have the skills to make them better. Especially not after…” Now a tear did fall. One. It slipped down her cheek in such silent agony it was worse than a flood of them. “Not after your copilot was killed because of me.”
He stared hotly at her, his upper lip fish-hooked and tight. She was still blaming herself for that? “Dammit, Farrin. Paul was my copilot, my responsibility. Not yours.”
“He was my patient,” she countered, “and it was my mistake which—”
He cut her off. “We’ve been over this.”
“So I’m just supposed to stop feeling bad because you said it wasn’t my fault about Kaleem? It doesn’t work that way.” She swallowed.
He watched the tendons in her throat move, and—
“Shit!” His hands snapped off her, reflexively, like a rubber hammer had finally been clonked to his gallantry. He’d been holding her too tight… On his next breath, his lungs collapsed into an empty space in his chest. “Dammit! Did I hurt you?”
“No, I’m okay,” she said calmly. She even smiled at him. “I told you I was going to make you angry.”
His head pounding, he paced away from her a couple of strides, opening and closing his fists. Yeah, but since when did he rise to the bait and actually lose it? “I’m sorry. I’ve worked very hard to keep you safe, so when you said you went into Islamabad…” His Adam’s apple balled into an aching knot. His heart pumped pain into his veins. “It sent me off the deep end.”
Her smile tilted off-center. “I’m sorry, too. I know going into town was stupid, although, believe me, I was very careful. Just…Paul, and…everything.” Her hand made a weak, ineffectual sweep through the air. “Do you have any idea how ridiculously relieved I was to find deodorant along with the medical supplies?” She laughed hollowly. “I tell you, Jason, after this, I’m never going to take life’s simple luxuries for granted again. Indoor plumbing, the taste of a fresh, crisp apple, the smell of baking bread, the worn-in, cozy feel of my favorite University of Michigan sweatshirt, a hot shower…all the things I never realized make me lucky, if not downright spoiled. Being without it all is a bit…undoing.”
He knew exactly what she meant—it’d been a damned brutal week—and in this simple knowing, this likable relating, the barely-there connection he felt between them in the beginning increased to a lot more threads. Too damned kind and caring…
He drove his fingers through his hair. “What now?”
She answered the question she assumed he was logically asking, of course, not the subterranean, gibbering real question of what the hell do I do with you now?
“I’m going to go next door,” she said softly, but absolutely, “and tend to that hurt child. While I’m there, I’ll ask his parents to help us get some food, and hopefully they’ll be feeling favorably enough toward me to do so.” She gave him an earnest look. “I need you to trust me to do this right, Jason. I know how to deal with worried parents. I’ll make sure they don’t betray us.”
Trust. There it was again.
The big precipice plummeting into an even bigger, bottomless chasm. Or into a battle arena, like Mad Max’s Thunderdome: Two men enter, one man leaves. No two people
ever walked out of the amphitheater together, having triumphantly survived giving their trust.
Did they?
He gazed at dust motes floating in a beam of hazy sunshine eking its way past the boarded-up window. Well, fuck, he didn’t see how he could stop her from going next door, barring physically grabbing her again. “Okay,” he said.
And the earth didn’t open up, the sky didn’t blacken, and his wounds didn’t spill more blood…although he almost wished they had.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jason had never particularly liked lamb, but he rolled his eyes up to heaven now at the saliva-inducing scent of meat cooking, along with pungently fresh vegetables and plain but belly-comforting rice—pure, basic, delicious smells. Like Farrin’s simple luxuries.
She had done everything right. Admirably. Impressively. He was actually a bit awestruck by her, like a schoolboy crush kind of thing, and thank God no one could hear what was going on inside his head. He would be forced to relinquish his puberty pass card.
He’d spied on Farrin from the fire-damaged hut when she went next door. She spoke in Urdu to the mother of the injured boy, all the while pointing to the red cross on her bag of medical supplies to make it clear her intentions were altruistic. After only a few minutes, Farrin waved for him to come.
Figuring they’d be next door for a good period of time while Farrin treated and monitored her patient, Jason collected all their belongings. Leaving the horses behind, he hoisted up Shane, then humped him, head lolling, to the neighbor’s house as fast as the man’s limping gait would allow. Luckily they weren’t spotted. No one else was around outside, the other village folk probably giving the stinky house a wide berth these days.
Farrin introduced the husband and wife as Usman and Afia, two small-statured, underfed, and calm-looking Pakistanis. Considering that their son was gravely ill, the calm part was remarkable. The couple eyed Shane with genuine concern, bypassing the usual yikes! over his nasty facial scar. But for all their self-possession, they clearly didn’t care for the two rifles Jason carried.
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