Out of the Dark

by David Weber

  “I’ll try not to,” he promised her, reaching up with his good arm and hugging her briefly.

  The acute discomfort in his left shoulder turned into something much sharper and hotter when he moved, but he ignored that and concentrated on how sweet her freshly washed red hair smelled. There was gray in it now, he realized with a pang, and he didn’t have any business adding more to it.

  He turned his head, pressing his lips to her cheek, then let himself settle back again with a carefully hidden sigh of relief as his injured shoulder returned to its familiar dull throb.

  “I heard that,” she said, with an unusually gentle smile, and patted him on his unkissed cheek.

  “Was worth it,” he replied, and was rewarded with a much broader smile. Then she looked at her wristwatch and grimaced.

  “You’d better get some rest while you can,” she told him. “Rob says Sam and Dennis have someone they want you to talk to. They’re supposed to be here in about an hour. And I promised the kids they could have an hour with you before supper, too. I think Morgana and Maighread are afraid elves are going to carry you off if they don’t keep an eye on you, and Keelan says Uncle Dave promised to finish telling her that story about the technicolor monster. Oh, and Malachai says the two of you are three chapters behind on David and Phoenix.”

  Dvorak smiled. He’d read to all three of their children every night, virtually from the moment they came home from the hospital. More recently, the three of them had been taking turns reading to him as their literary skills improved. Morgana and Maighread were old enough now that they took the occasional glitches in the schedule in stride, but Malachai was still insistent that he was supposed to read to Daddy when he was supposed to read to Daddy, and little things like alien invasions weren’t supposed to intrude on that sacred duty.

  “He’s probably right,” the Daddy in question said out loud.

  “No, he’s cutting you some slack,” Sharon retorted. “He’s not even counting the week or so when you were too drugged up to recognize our children when you saw them. You are so lucky he had brand new puppies to distract him!”

  Dvorak grimaced, but she had a point.

  “All right, I’ll take a nap,” he promised. “But did Rob drop any hints about just who it is that wants to talk to us?”

  “Stop trying to wheedle information and go to sleep!” she commanded in awful tones, then turned and stalked out.

  At least there was no door to slam behind her for emphasis, he thought.

  Since it might have been just a little awkward trying to explain to any Shongair patrol who wandered by how one of the adult males of the household happened to have acquired a bullet hole entirely through the bony part of his left shoulder about the time one of their other patrols had been ambushed and killed less than fifteen miles from the cabin, they’d moved him out to the cave. He couldn’t say the decor appealed to him. Somehow he didn’t think most hospitals built the walls of their patients’ rooms out of crates of food, standing rifle racks, cases of ammunition and reloading supplies, racked M136s and M240s, and storage tanks of gasoline. Big as the cave was, it was also so crowded now as to make him feel almost claustrophobic. The rock roof didn’t do a lot for him, either, and he was getting heartily tired of the fluorescent light.

  Besides, he’d become rather uncomfortably aware of what would happen if someone inadvertently dropped a match or something in here. Sure, the gas tanks were independently vented to the outside world, but still. . . .

  Whatever its drawbacks, however, it was dry, warm, and about as securely hidden as any place they could have parked him. They were damned lucky they had it, when all was said, and he knew it.

  In fact, “damned lucky” was a pretty good description of everything that had happened from the moment he was careless enough to get himself shot.

  He’d come to the conclusion that he was never going to know exactly what had happened after he was hit, since Wilson had been the only witness and obviously wasn’t going to tell him. Although his brother-in-law was perfectly prepared to strike a properly heroic pose, chin lifted and steely eyes fixed on an invisible horizon with noble determination, whenever Dvorak asked him, he’d actually provided exactly zero in the way of details. Which led Dvorak to suspect things had been even dicier than he’d thought.

  What he did know was that he was inordinately fortunate that the bullet had managed to miss any of the major arteries on its way through. He was also fortunate that Wilson had spent the last five years of his Marine career in search and rescue. The SAR training had bobbed to the surface when Dvorak was hit, and he’d managed to apply pressure bandages and get the bleeding stopped. Mostly, anyway.

  After that, he and Dennis Vardry had somehow gotten Dvorak away from the scene of the shootout and back to the cabin—well, to the cave, if he wanted to be picky—before any Shongairi turned up.

  They had been visited by a Shongair patrol, accompanied by a North Carolina state trooper “guide,” the next day. Fortunately, the trooper in question had passed along his entire agenda ahead of time, so Sharon and Jessica had “just happened” to have the kids down at the dam, swimming, and both shepherds banished to the cave with Dvorak, when they arrived.

  Both of the big dogs had always been intensely protective of “their” people. Nimue had turned even more protective than usual since giving birth to her six puppies, and Sharon had decided—wisely, in Dvorak’s opinion—that it would be just as well to keep both of the dogs away from the aliens under the circumstances. The last thing they’d needed was to get one or both of the shepherds shot because they growled at the wrong Shongair.

  They’d also had time to move every weapon, other than a pair of shotguns, Dvorak’s old sporterized SMLE .303 deer gun, and four handguns none of them had ever been particularly fond of out to the cave, as well. There certainly hadn’t been any fancy, long-ranged weapons or anything that could possibly have punched bullets through even improvised vehicle armor lying around, anyway. Which was probably a good thing since, predictably, the Shongairi had confiscated every firearm they’d found. They hadn’t found anything else, though, and they’d settled for interrogating Wilson and Alec (Veronica, who’d been trained as a nurse’s aide, had been in the cave, keeping an eye on Dvorak), rather than hiking the rest of the way to the dam to question Sharon and Jessica—or the kids—as well.

  Dvorak was just as happy he’d been only intermittently conscious when that happened. There were some things, frankly, which he’d discovered he lacked the courage to face, and he would have been terrified out of his mind lying there in the cave, not knowing what was happening with his family . . . or if one of the kids might inadvertently let something slip.

  They were all good, smart kids, but that was the point. They were kids, and smart grown-ups all too easily trapped or tricked kids into saying more than they thought they were saying. Especially scared kids, and only a child who was invincibly stupid—which none of theirs were—wouldn’t have been scared in the face of what was happening to their world. Whether they wanted to admit it to their parents or not, all the children had bad dreams and occasional nightmares, and he knew it had gotten worse since he’d been shot. He and Sharon had always made it a point to answer their children’s questions, whether it was convenient or not, and they’d followed that same policy since fleeing to the cabin. Oh, sure, there were some things they’d skated their way around, but by and large, they’d leveled with their children. So the kids had always known what was going on, understood why their parents were so grim and focused these days. Yet that hadn’t been the same as seeing Daddy brought back to them bloody on a shutter. No, that had brought it home to them in a way he would have given his left arm—hell, his right arm, and it was the one that still worked!—to spare them.

  No wonder they want to spend time with me, he thought now, once again trying futilely to find a comfortable way to lie. And I want time with them, too! I just wish I didn’t catch them with that scared look in their eyes when
they don’t realize I’m watching them.

  He growled with fresh frustration at that thought. He wanted up. He wanted out of bed, out of this cave, back spending time with his family where his children could see him—and he could see them—and all of them could know the others were all right.

  Not going to happen until you can actually stand up and walk more than fifty yards at a time, boy-oh, he told himself sternly. Last thing we need is for the Shongairi to drop back in unexpectedly and find you lying around with this damned hole in your shoulder after all!

  He reached across his body with his right hand, touching the back of his left hand where the immobilizing straps held it across his chest. He found himself doing that quite a lot. He could wiggle the fingers of his left hand, but he’d discovered that he needed to reassure himself that he still had feeling in it, as well. That it could feel the pressure of his right hand’s fingertips.

  Of course, the real question was whether or not he’d ever actually be able to use that hand again. At the moment, the odds didn’t seem all that good.

  The Shongair bullet might have missed arteries and veins, but there was a lot of bone in the human shoulder. “Flesh wounds” to the shoulder were far rarer in real life than in bad fiction, and Dave Dvorak’s shoulder had been pretty thoroughly pulverized.

  Once Wilson had him home and realized how bad it really was, he’d headed straight back down the mountain. Veronica’s training had been a priceless asset from the very beginning, but their medical supplies had never been intended to deal with something like this. For that matter, Veronica hadn’t managed to fully stop the bleeding, and it had been obvious to Wilson that without proper medical assistance, they were still going to lose his brother-in-law. So he’d done what Marines always did when they needed help—he’d called on another Marine.

  Or, rather, on the cousin of a Marine, in this case. Which was how Dvorak had come to wake up—mostly—and find himself looking up into a very black face wearing a surgical mask and a professionally competent expression.

  “Hosea?” he’d gotten out.

  “In the flesh,” Dr. James Hosea MacMurdo had replied.

  Why a young black man had preferred “Hosea” to “James” when he was growing up was something which had always puzzled Dvorak, but MacMurdo had been insistent about his given name from the time he was six. Maybe because he’d had an uncle named James that no one in the family had ever liked very much. Dvorak didn’t know about that, but he’d known MacMurdo for almost fifteen years. His cousin, Alvin Buchevsky, was a Methodist pastor who’d been a frequent visiting preacher in Dvorak’s own church. More to the point, Alvin had been one of Rob Dvorak’s best friends since the two of them had been Marines together. Rob was almost ten years younger than the other man, but they’d been from the same hometown, they’d known a lot of the same people, and they’d kept ending up assigned to the same duty stations, especially before Buchevsky had become an officer, a squid, and a chaplain.

  Which, Wilson had explained to Dvorak some years ago, while he, Alvin, and Dvorak had watched steaks turning brown on a grill, had been something of a shock to him. But despite Alvin’s defection to the Navy—and as an officer, at that—they’d discovered they could remain friends. As long as no one else found out about it, at least.

  While his cousin had been shooting people, then getting a divinity degree and a commission, however, Hosea MacMurdo had been getting his medical degree. Several of them, in fact. He was the senior and founding partner in MacMurdo Orthopedic Associates and generally regarded as one of the finest orthopedic surgeons in the entire state of South Carolina, and Dvorak was far from the first recent gunshot victim to whose side Rob Wilson had chauffeured him.

  “What . . . are you . . . ?” Dvorak had gotten out groggily, and MacMurdo had snorted.

  “Oh, puh-leeze!” he’d replied, rolling his eyes. “You got shot in the shoulder, not the head, Dave! What d’you think I’m doing here?”

  “When you care enough to send the very best,” another voice had said, and Dvorak had rolled his head and seen Rob and Veronica Wilson standing on the other side of the bed. His brother-in-law wore a surgical mask, as well, Dvorak’s oddly floaty brain had observed. So did Ronnie, now that he noticed, but she was wearing surgical gloves, as well.

  “Spare my blushes,” MacMurdo had said dryly. “Oh, and Al sends his regards, too.”

  “Thanks,” Dvorak had whispered.

  “And now, despite the somewhat primitive nature of my facilities,” MacMurdo had continued, nodding to Ronnie to start the IV inserted into Dvorak’s right arm, “we’re going to do something about that shoulder of yours. So go to sleep, and let me get on with it.”

  Dvorak knew how fortunate he’d been to have someone with MacMurdo’s skill and experience working on him. And he’d been almost equally fortunate in that MacMurdo and Sam Mitchell between them had been able to come up with almost enough in the way of painkillers, given that morphine and its derivatives weren’t exactly widely available anymore. Unfortunately, MacMurdo hadn’t been joking about the “primitive nature” of his facilities. There was only so much skill could do without the right kind of backup, and he’d warned Dvorak soberly that he was going to suffer serious loss of mobility in the shoulder.

  “I’ve done what I can,” he’d said just before Sam Mitchell drove him the forty-odd miles home, “and as long as nothing gets infected, I don’t see anything coming up that Ronnie can’t handle. But I couldn’t begin to do all I’d like to have done.” He’d made an unhappy face. “It’s going to take you months to come back from this, Dave. I want you to take it easy along the way, too, because you may have noticed we’re just a little short on the kind of follow-up care I’d normally prescribe. I’ll be in touch with Ronnie again in a week or so, see how you’re coming along, maybe start thinking about what kind of physical therapy we can manage under the circumstances. The truth is, though, that I wasn’t able to do anything like a full rebuild on that shoulder. You were lucky in a lot of ways, but that bullet . . . well, let’s just say it didn’t do the skeletal structure of your shoulder any favors.”

  “Can’t say that comes as much of a surprise,” Dvorak had replied, his voice calmer than he’d actually felt.

  “I didn’t think it would, somehow.” MacMurdo had flashed a brief smile. “Anyway, what we really need is a properly equipped operating room and the time to do the job right. I could fix you up with a nice replacement shoulder joint if I had those, but I don’t. And somehow, I don’t think either of them’s going to come our way anytime soon.”

  He’d smiled again, sadly, then shaken Dvorak’s good hand and departed, leaving his patient with his thoughts.

  Not very happy thoughts, really.

  All the same, intellectually, Dvorak had realized then—as now—that he was unbelievably lucky to be alive at all. And when he thought about the fact that he was alive, and that so were Sharon, Morgana, Maighread, and Malachai, little things like whether or not his left arm was ever going to work properly again quickly dropped back into their proper perspective.

  None of which, he thought now, drowsily, did anything to make him any less curious about whoever was coming to visit.

  • • • • •

  “Are you decent, dear?” Rob Wilson called in a high-pitched falsetto from the far side of the partition of ammunition cases which had been arranged to give Dvorak his own little cubicle.

  “No, but I’ve got a gun under the pillow, you dirty old man,” Dvorak replied.

  “Yeah? Well, I guess the good news is that a lousy shot like you couldn’t hit anything, anyway!” Wilson retorted, poking his head around the corner. “Seriously, ready for your visitors?”

  “Ready as I’m going to be, anyway,” Dvorak replied, scooting to sit up a little straighter against the pillows despite the hot throb in his shoulder.

  “Good.” Wilson looked back over his shoulder and nodded to someone Dvorak couldn’t see yet. “This way, gentlemen,” he
said in a considerably more businesslike voice.

  Dvorak’s eyebrow arched as his brother-in-law’s tone registered, and then Wilson led three other men into his sleeping space.

  Things seemed a lot more crowded all of a sudden, Dvorak noted, but his attention was on the newcomers. Sam Mitchell was no stranger, but he had no idea who the compactly built fellow with the black hair and green eyes or his taller, bearded companion might be.

  “Sam,” he said, nodding in agreement to the one visitor he knew, and then looked at the others with a politely inquiring expression.

  “Dave,” Mitchell said, “let me introduce our friends here. This here”—he indicated the green-eyed man—“is Dan Torino, Major Dan Torino, who goes by ‘Longbow’ for some reason. And this”—he nodded to the considerably taller and much darker-skinned stranger—“is Abu Bakr bin Muhammed el-Hiri.”

  Both of Dvorak’s eyebrows rose, and the bearded man chuckled.

  “Really is my name,” he assured Dvorak. “And for a hick cop, Sam didn’t do all that bad a job of pronouncing it!”

  “Hey, six months ago I’d’ve been checking to see if the Feds had gotten around to issuing an arrest warrant on you yet,” Mitchell retorted, grinning down at el-Hiri, who, despite his height, was still a good two inches shorter than he was. “And they probably would have!”

  “Let’s not be bringing up the past, gentlemen,” the man named Torino said in a chiding tone, and Mitchell and el-Hiri snorted almost in unison.

  “Anyway,” Mitchell said, “to complete the introductions. Major, Abu Bakr, meet Dave Dvorak.”

  “Pleasure,” Dvorak said, holding out his good hand to each of them in turn.

  Both of them showed signs of strain and fatigue, he thought. Most people did these days, of course. But Torino and el-Hiri had that wary look, as well. The one that combined the awareness of the hunted with the tightly leashed violence of the predator. He was pretty sure they hadn’t been sitting around in cabins up in the mountains for the last three or four months, he thought with something very like a sense of guilt.