Of course there was nothing August could do, except the same as he’d done before in that first 1918.
August rose to his feet and walked over to Walsh’s body, rummaging through the dead man’s clothing until he came up with a gun. A Colt Model 1911 .45 Automatic, I saw at once, when he returned with it in his hand. He’d known precisely where to find it.
The Colt.
I buried my face in McDuff’s fur and closed my eyes. The dog trembled, his broken back leg jerking in spasms like a horse kicking. It was as if he, too, knew what to expect.
August put Will’s things in his own pocket for safekeeping. Meanwhile, he talked to the boy, right over the top of the sounds Will made. He talked of the old days, of how much the time with Will’s family had meant to him, of how sorry he was about Frank. I think he’d forgotten I was there.
“Please Gus, please,” Will interrupted, panting, sounding now as though he were speaking through a mouthful of sponge. In truth, I hadn’t thought he’d heard or assimilated, if he did hear, a word August said. “I can’t bear it. Help me.”
“Ach, Vill.” Then August fell silent.
Will’s breath went in and out of his lungs on a queer note like an E minor played on a mouth harp.
I didn’t breathe at all.
I only jumped like the bullet had struck my heart when August and the Colt finally put an end to Will’s suffering.
“Go,” August said hoarsely into the quiet. “‘Get the hell out of here, Boothenay. More of my unit is on the way. That shot will bring them right to us.”
“All right.” To tell the truth, I kept expecting the power to shunt me right back to my own time. Back to Dad and Scott and the rest of the real world. God knows there’d been enough blood spilled here tonight to power the transport of a regiment, let alone one small woman.
Blood, blood everywhere. But the magic didn’t want me—not yet. Of course it didn’t. Not without Caleb. With all the horrors I’d witnessed these last few days, my job, my obligation, my heart’s desire, was still not fulfilled.
Tired to the bone, I got to my feet. Since I could not bring myself to look at the dead, I stared instead into August’s eyes.
“August, do you know you’re changing?”
He wiped a hand over his face. “You see it, Boothenay. I don’t expect anyone else will.”
I’d forgotten he had his own magic. Perhaps he included the art of illusion in his repertoire of tricks.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter what happens to me. All these years I thought that if I had it to do over again, I’d see things I could’ve done differently. I thought I could save Will, that maybe we could go home together. But everything’s the same. The words, the fear, the pain. And finally, the same cold death.”
Knowing there weren’t any words, I still wished for a way to comfort him. I put my hand on his arm.
“You’re the only thing different, Boothenay,” he said, looking down at my hand as though wondering what it was. “And you shouldn’t be here. You’d better go.”
“At least you know. At least you tried. You can stop blaming yourself, August. You did help him in the end. He was suffering so horribly and you stopped the pain. And he didn’t die alone. That’s important, too.”
Platitudes. That’s all I could give him for eighty-five years of suffering.
He shrugged and smiled faintly. “Is it?”
I had no answer and there was no time to discuss the matter. Philosophy would have to wait—perhaps forever—because McDuff let out a soft warning growl. He faced into the wind and, by his actions we could tell he scented trouble.
“That’s a good dog,” August said, as though noticing him for the first time. “He’ll take care of you.”
“Yes, he will—he has.” We stood stiffly, both of us, neither with anything to say until I knew I couldn’t wait any longer.
“Well,” I said awkwardly. “I’ll be seeing you. On the other side.” On the other side of what, I didn’t elaborate.
“Sure, sis.” As though the inanity of my words released him, he turned abruptly and melted away into the night. In a minute there came a flurry of shots over toward my left, then his voice yelling in German to which someone farther off replied.
I’d almost left it too late. Yet that realization still didn’t put much speed on my escape. I stood indecisively, without a clue on which way I should go.
But McDuff knew.
CHAPTER 27
Caleb could have sworn his gimpy leg had its foot nailed to the ground with him spinning in the same old circle, time after time, constantly repeating, without ever getting anywhere.
He arrived at the village sometime around midnight. The town proper was under heavy attack by the German artillery, and he had a devil of a time working his way through the crowds of soldiers, vehicles and terrified villagers. Once or twice he wondered if there’d be anything left of the hospital when he got there.
What would Boothenay be thinking of this war? He knew by experience that she was cool under fire. She’d say she was scared, but he defied anyone to tell one way or another just by looking at her. Listening to her was a more accurate indicator of her level of fear. She had a tendency to chatter, picking topics by free association.
Thinking of her made him smile—until the garden wall between two buildings not twenty feet from where he stood exploded into shrapnel of bricks and stone. Automatically, Caleb flopped onto his face, the wind gushing from his lungs with the force of his fall. Fragmented material flew over the top his head. Close. Too close for sure.
The female dog, his most constant companion, shrank down next to him, her belly dragging on the village street.
A second shell hit not fifteen seconds later, blowing the outside corner off one of the buildings. Caleb was picking himself up at the time and the concussion knocked him flat again. He swore with vicious abandon, spitting filth from the street out of his mouth.
The dog, more wary than he, stayed put. Taking his cue from her, he waited through yet a third explosion that broke through the building’s roof. This time, he didn’t complain. Only a matter of a split millisecond, he calculated, separated whether the shell landed on the roof or on him. He was glad fate had chosen the roof. He lay, waiting until the dirt finished settling before clambering to his feet.
With his ears still ringing from the explosions, the shelling suddenly stopped. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, for the cessation very likely meant a horde of German infantry was on its way. He suspected he didn’t have a lot of time before they arrived.
The bombed building, he saw with a sense of shock, was the bistro he’d spent the previous night in. Which meant he’d arrived at his destination—more or less. The field hospital was across the street and a couple of blocks down, and from here, it looked like it was doing a pretty good business.
In a few minutes he’d be with Boothenay, and she could begin the process of getting them home.
Eagerly, he called up the dog and crossed the street, wending his way through the crowd of Model Ts, horse-drawn ambulances, and stretcher after stretcher of battlefield casualties. Most of them had taken the nearby shelling in stride from the looks of things, refusing to panic. The medics kept evacuating the wounded as trucks became available.
Taking the hospital steps two at a time, he shoved through a crowd lined up outside the door. There was a heavyset nurse on station at a table set up in the hall, the starch in her soiled uniform wilted at this hour, She wrote patient names on a list she kept, then made a name tag to pin on the patient. This seemed to be the extent of triage.
“You must wait your turn,” she told him sternly when Caleb bent over her desk. “That’s barely more than a scratch you have. There are others in line more in need than you. And get that dog out of here.”
“In a moment,” Caleb said easily. Her attitude didn’t disturb him. In fact, he agreed with her on all counts—or did on general principal. He was finding his principals to be falling by th
e wayside.
“I’m not here because I’m wounded. I’m looking for someone,” he said, ignoring the shuffles, the curses and cries of the men stacked up behind him. It was too late for them anyway. What had been written in their book of life was coming to pass. He couldn’t change that and neither could they. “I’m looking for a woman.”
Seeing—and recognizing—by the determination in his manner that he would not be moved until he got an answer, Nurse Peabody studied him for a moment before sighing. “Let me guess,” she said. “A woman who has no business in this facility and who isn’t trained as a nurse. I’m told, however, she spells reasonably well.”
“Spells?” Caleb’s ears perked up.
Miss Peabody hadn’t been exposed to the verbal differences between spells and spelling. “She arrived around noon today, escorted by one of the troops, and said she, too, was looking for someone. Only she was looking for a man.”
Of course was implied, though not spoken aloud. Seeing her interrogator wasn’t about to go away, the nurse made a note in her book and wrote out another name tag as she spoke, not very distracted by the conversation with Caleb.
Caleb’s mouth went dry. “Did she happen to mention this man’s name?”
Nurse Peabody raised her brows. “You surely don’t suppose I remember every name I’ve ever heard, do you? Especially when spoken by a little person I’ve never met before. We’ve been a bit busy today!”
Yet there seemed to Caleb a guileful implication in her words. “Not every name, Nurse Peabody.” He read her name tag. “No one could. But this one?”
She made him wait while she directed the next patient-filled litter to be carried into a curtained examining room. Blood left a wet smudge when the canvas stretcher was lifted, gore that everyone ignored. Guilt that he wasn’t helping seared him briefly. He brushed it aside.
“Hmm,” she said, coming back to him. “Perhaps I did hear a name.”
Caleb’s hands clenched. He didn’t find coyness in an old blister like Nurse Peabody particularly becoming. Cutting to the chase, he said, “Ned Smith ring a bell?”
“Why, it may at that.
“Where is she?” Caleb’s tired green eyes sparked
Belated caution slowed the woman’s response. “You tell me her name first,” she said. “Then I’ll say. How do I know you’re Ned Smith?”
Caleb nearly groaned aloud. “Her name is Boothenay Irons. She has the most beautiful dark eyes you’d ever hope to look into and lots of curly hair.” He leaned closer. “So where is she?”
“There’s no need to shout, Sergeant Smith,” she said, her mouth pursed into a prim line. “You’ll find her in the mess tent, I expect. If not there, she may have gone over to the nurses’ barracks. We’ve worked her hard today.”
Caleb’s kiss landed on her dry lips and she blushed scarlet. That, of course, set every man capable of speech to cheering, which increased her embarrassment. But when she recovered breath enough to chastise him, he was already walking out the door with the black dog at heel.
A FEW EXHAUSTED men sat around the long table in the mess tent.
Only men. There were no women at all. The men were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches, weapons near at hand. These weren’t doctors, Caleb knew, but truck drivers, stretcher bearers, and a few of the walking wounded.
They looked up warily as he hurried in, then ignored him as they continued to eat.
Absently, he snatched a sandwich for himself and one for the dog. “Anyone seen a dark-eyed, dark-haired woman in here in the last while?” he asked, mouth full of bread and corned beef.
When had he last eaten? He didn’t remember.
Without speaking, a couple of the men shook their heads; the others didn’t so much as look up.
Caleb grabbed another sandwich. “You sure?”
One of the men relented enough to say, “Buddy, I’m not sure of anything right now, except I wish we’d get this damn hole evacuated and leave it to the Huns. But most of us have been shuttling back and forth to Neuilly-sur-Seine all night. We could’ve missed her.”
“She might have a dog like this with her,” Caleb said, indicating the dog. The male hadn’t come back after he’d sent the animal to find Boothenay. That meant one of two things: either the dog had found her and stuck by her, or he was dead.
“That’s a dog?” asked one wit, blinking his eyes. “Hell, I thought it was a Shetland pony.” The rest of the men laughed, a forced laugh to be sure, but enough to bring most of them to their feet, revived enough to get on with their duties.
Caleb let himself be carried outside again with the others. It had seemed very still when he’d gone into the mess hall, what with the creeping artillery barrage over for the moment. Since he wasn’t exactly at novice at the art of war, he’d known the only reason for a creeping barrage was to protect the troops moving up in its wake.
Well, they’d evidently arrived. Only a few streets over, the sound of fighting rose to a steady roar in a mixture of both large and small weapons fire, men yelling and the racket of moving machinery. The Germans must’ve brought up a tank company, he thought in amazement. This town was toast.
He lost no time, therefore, jogging down the street to the building the nurses had been using for a barracks. Though his gimpy leg protested, threatening to give out on him entirely, he forced himself to ignore the pain.
Drawing up outside the building, he paused a moment, struck by a sense of déjâ vu. Hard to comprehend, he told himself, that only a little more than twenty-four hours ago, you were standing on this very spot, mooning over a woman who didn’t care two hoots in hell for you. And not only that, he wryly admitted, he hadn’t really cared all that much for her, or only in passing. He’d been lonely. She’d been lonely. He’d been afraid, and she’d been afraid. All of their intense emotion, in retrospect, was already lost in the past.
Caleb’s fist beat a steady tattoo on the door for all off two minutes before he forced open the locked door and yelled into the completely dark interior.
“Hello, the house. Ladies, this is an emergency. Prepare to move out.” His voice boomed, funneling up a marble-stepped stairwell.
Only silence replied. If any of the women were there, he surmised that remark should bring them. After repeating the statement a couple of times, and hearing it echo in the hushed space, he knew it was no use. The nurses were gone. The ladies barracks was empty.
So where the hell is Boothenay?
Caleb hadn’t realized he was angry until he heard those words reverberating in his own head. Why couldn’t she, just for once in her life, be where she was supposed to be, and do what she was supposed to do? Why did she think it was up to her to save the world, and to save him from the consequences of the unholy power she possessed? Jesus!
He completely pushed aside the fact—one he’d been thinking about in his saner moments—that it had not been Boothenay who cast him into this time. Not at all. Somehow he’d managed to do it to himself.
“Think, Deane,” he said aloud. The whisper spread to fill the women’s hall. Okay. The woman at the hospital had told him she wasn’t there. That made sense. Her aversion to blood would drive her away. Scratch the mess tent and scratch here as possibilities. That left⏤
He sighed. That left her running around the countryside again, looking, he had no doubt, for him. Damn headstrong women anyway! What a farce. So now he’d have to try—again—to find her. But staying here didn’t seem to be much of an option given the incursion of German infantry. The only thing he found to be thankful for was the mercy of neither side utilizing poison gas tonight. For once, the policy makers and officers on either side must have figured out that with ground changing hands so rapidly, they were as likely to destroy their own side as the enemy.
The simple expedient of a bullet whizzing past his head brought him out of this reverie. He ducked and spun about, automatically checking the load in his Springfield while he looked for the shooter.
“Hey, you ther
e. Soldier.” An officer, young and harried-looking paused as he jogged by, calling to him from the street. From somewhere, the hospital most likely, judging by the collection of bandages the men wore, he’d rounded up twenty or so men and had them headed off toward the battle line. This was not as simple as it sounded since hordes of townspeople crowded the street going in the opposite direction. It seemed they’d left escape a little too late and panic drove them now.
Caleb blinked once more at the splintered jamb where the bullet had penetrated—eye level, he couldn’ t help noticing—before acknowledging the officer. “Me?”
“Yes, sergeant, you. Do you happen to be busy at the moment? We could use your help, if you’d be so kind.”
Since the infantry officer didn’t sound especially forceful or commanding, it must have been his reckless gaze that brought Caleb down the steps to meet him.
The shooting had moved closer and intensified. As Caleb watched, a civilian threw up his arms and fell, clutching at a woman who strove to hold him upright. Her screams added to the din.
He understood the source of his own near miss now. Stopping beside the officer, he said, “Custer’s last stand?”
“Remember the Alamo,” said the officer with a little salute. “I’m Garrett. Let’s get moving.” He led off toward the arena of greatest noise.
Caleb didn’t see that either of them had much in the way of choice. He knew he didn’t. And he might as well go along. Knowing Boothenay’s penchant for trouble the way he did, he guessed he’d find her wandering through no-man’s land, smack dab in the thick of things, in need of rescue. That’s if he lived long enough to find her.
The American force, made up of mostly half-crippled volunteers, scrambled toward a hastily erected barricade at the end of the street. Their boots slipped on the wet cobblestones, adrenaline erupted into their blood. They were in a race against time, for, beyond the barrier, Caleb saw German troops running, trying to beat the Americans. Whoever got there first seemed bound to win the skirmish.
Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2) Page 27
