“Okay,” she said with a sigh, “you better keep it then. But turn it off for a sec, so my eyes can get used to the dark.”
Jim had to wonder about that you better keep it—what was she thinking…? Still, he obliged and they were plunged into the kind of moonless darkness that was suffocating in its absoluteness. It descended around him, heavy and wet against the bare skin of his face and hands.
Ashley must’ve been having the same reaction. “Shhhhhit,” she breathed, the word barely voiced.
“Let your eyes get used to it.” His own voice was a rumble in his chest as his other senses kicked in more fully. There was a raucous battle going on between tree frogs and locusts, and Team Locust was winning.
He could hear the sound of Ashley breathing, too. Her inhales were too shallow—she was breathing too fast.
“Easy,” he murmured.
“Nothing about any of this is easy,” she muttered.
“Rumor has it that Bull Edison wept and wet himself before his team leader night-hike was over,” Jim told her.
She laughed. “Telling me that is inappropriate. And mean.”
“Or I’m creating a false narrative to bolster your self-confidence.”
This time her laughter was a short burst of air but no less musical. “You mean you’re lying to keep me from weeping and wetting myself.”
“I’m convinced that weeping and wetting yourself is something that you would never do. Ever,” he emphasized as his own eyes adjusted and she turned into a dark shape standing on the road beside him.
But she sighed heavily again. “This isn’t going to work,” Ashley said.
“What isn’t?”
“I thought I could run ahead—leave you here with the flashlight. I thought if I could move fast, I could see where this road leads—if it’s an obvious route back to the camp—and then run back to let you know if I’m right. But there’s no way I can run without a light. This darkness is dizzying.”
“So take the flashlight,” he suggested.
“I’m not leaving you alone in the dark.”
“Navy SEAL,” he pointed out.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Really, Ashley, I’ve been left alone in the dark a lot.”
“Well, I’m not gonna do that to you. Not tonight.” She was absolute, which was interesting. Apparently she was capable of standing her ground—when someone else’s comfort and safety were at risk.
He heard more than saw her shift, but was still surprised when her fingers lightly bumped his shoulder.
“Sorry,” she quickly said.
Jesus. If someone followed this woman around and recorded everything she ever said, the word-cloud created would feature Sorry smack in the middle, in a size four hundred font.
She cleared her throat. “May I have… Are you allowed to let me have the flashlight? You did say I could take it…?”
“Here. Yes.” Jim caught her reaching hand and pressed her fingers around the thing, making sure she had it firmly in her grasp before he let it and her go. Funny, her fingers were cool despite the night’s heat. Cool but not as fairy-princess soft as he’d imagined. She clearly used her hands to do hard work. Huh.
“Thanks,” she said. “Watch your eyes, Lieutenant, I’m turning it on.”
The fact that she’d thought to give him a heads-up was interesting, too. Dunk had given Jim and the other the instructors a variety of warnings about working with civilians, and the most dire involved the use of NVGs—night vision goggles. Be ready, the former senior chief had said, for some numbnuts to flip on the headlights and completely blind you.
Apparently, Ashley DeWitt didn’t fall into the typical SEAL World numbnuts subset.
And yet again, she was surprising Jim as he watched her through squinted eyes. He’d expected her to lead the way down the road in the direction that the van had driven off—at a walking pace so that he and his freaking knee braces could keep up. Instead she used the beam of the light to explore the area at the side of the road. She even shone the light up into the branches of a big banyan tree.
He laughed, and she glanced over at him so he said, “I have no idea what you’re looking for.”
“It’s going to rain,” she informed him as—right on cue—thunder rumbled. And yes, it was louder—the storm was closer—this time. “I was hoping this tree would provide at least a little shelter.”
“Shelter…?” Jim echoed.
She used the light to examine a rather impressive lump of a bench-sized tree root before somewhat gingerly sitting down on it.
“What…?” Jim laughed. “Wait…”
“Exactly,” she said, looking up at him. “That’s my plan. We wait.”
He found himself pointing down the road. “You don’t want to…?”
“Potentially put more miles between us and the camp?” she finished his question for him. “Nope.”
Now he was surprised for a different reason. “Wow, I didn’t peg you as a quitter.”
“I didn’t say quit,” Ashley said. “I said wait. We know we’re five miles from the camp, and we also know the GPS will go off in three hours. I’m banking on the fact that at least one of the other team leaders will go crashing off in the wrong direction and put himself more than five miles from the camp, which means that his team—not mine—will win the black-tank loser’s prize.”
“Sitting still means you definitely won’t win the, you know, winner’s prize,” Jim pointed out.
“Please sit down,” she told him. “I’m turning off the flashlight, both to conserve batteries and to keep mosquitos from being drawn to us.”
As he sat, she plunged them back into darkness as she continued, “I feel pretty confident that the winner’s prize is not within our reach. Realistically. I mean, come on. But not-losing—not coming in dead last—that we can do. With a little luck. Especially when that also means you don’t have to walk any miles tonight.”
“You need to stop worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
He heard her turn toward him, even though he was surely as much of a dark faceless shape to her as she was to him. She asked, “You really expect me to believe that your knees won’t hurt after five miles—”
“My fucking knees hurt,” Jim snapped, “every fucking minute of my fucking life, regardless of whether I’m sitting still or walking.”
And… scene.
Except there was no curtain, and the frogs and locusts were still screaming their relentless chorus with that basso profundo thunder descant coming more often now. Could a descant be basso profundo, or did it always have to be a soprano line? Jim honestly didn’t know and he filed it under Things he’d Google later, when he was back in his RV icing his knees.
Meanwhile, Ashley’s silent response to his bratty baby-man outburst continued to rack up time on this conversation’s scoreboard.
When she finally spoke, it was to say, “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Her use of her favorite word pissed him off all over again. “You don’t have to be sorry for my freaking knees! What you should be sorry for is your bullshit acceptance of some deluded belief that just because you’re a girl you can’t win this thing!”
She countered his loud-and-angry with a voice that was super calm and in control. “I’m a woman, not a girl.”
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he said. “How did you say it?” He spoke in an obnoxiously bad imitation of a high-pitched little girl’s voice, complete with an Elmer Fudd-like speech impediment. “A wittle girl like me will never win a game against all those big stwong boys. Wealistically. I’m just too weak and dumb. I mean, come on.” Back to his real voice. “What the hell was that…? You know what you don’t have? You don’t have upper body strength. Big deal. You have a giant brain and legs that can run forever—”
“And a companion who just admitted he’s in constant pain—which I already knew. I could tell just from looking at your face,” she said, but her voice was still calm, contained. “That was me,
doing what I thought a team leader was supposed to do—be aware of my teammate’s limitations. Because I also know that you’re lying, and your knees will hurt worse after walking five miles. I said we couldn’t win this thing, but if I were alone, trust me, I would already be running.”
“Then run,” he said. “I’ll keep up.”
“No,” she said. “But I will let you sit here in the dark. Flashlight’s going on,” she warned as she stood up. “Move into the road. I’m going to run out about a mile, and then I’ll come back. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes.”
Jim stood, too. “Yeah, I can’t let you do that. There’s really only one unbreakable rule for this particular exercise. Separation of team leader and instructor is that one giant no-can-do.”
Ashley stared at him in disbelief.
He shrugged and hit her with her favorite word. “Sorry.”
It was then, with diabolical timing, that thunder clapped almost directly overhead, and the skies opened up in a deluge.
“You told me to take the flashlight,” Ashley shouted at Jim over the roar of the rain as he pulled her closer to the main trunk of the banyan tree. “You tried to talk me into leaving you here! And now that’s not an option…?”
The branches overhead helped only a little, and she had to close her eyes because the rain was streaming down her face. Without a hat, it was like standing in the bathtub with her face aimed up at the shower head.
“It was actually a good idea,” he shouted back. “I wanted to see if you’d do it. And since you didn’t want to, I didn’t have to shut it down. Until you did, and then I did. Shut you down. Because yeah, we’ve gotta stay together. We can definitely run—I can keep up.”
Ashley opened her eyes to look at him and had to use her hands to shield her face from the rain. “You’re serious.”
He was still holding the flashlight and it made his eyes look very blue. “Yeah. Navy SEAL…?”
It was then, as their gazes were locked with the rain pouring down around them and on top of them that Ashley realized… She may not have had a map, but she had a Navy SEAL.
“What would you do?” she asked him. “If you were in charge.”
“First, it’s called command, if I were in command.”
“That,” she said. “What would you do?”
He was silent but only for a few seconds before he said, “I’d take inventory.”
“Inventory?” she repeated.
“Yeah, you know, what do I have, what do you have…?” he said. “I’d also do an inventory of the team members’ skill sets. You’re a runner, that’s great, but alas, right now I’m an anti-runner, with my knees. But okay, what else are you good at? Arguing a court case—not gonna do us a helluva lot of good out here…”
“What are your skill sets?” Ashley asked him. “An ability to pull an extra baseball cap out of your ass during a thunderstorm would be awesome.”
Jim laughed. “Okay, so you’re way funnier than I thought.”
“What,” she repeated as pleasantly as she could, “are your skills sets?”
From SEAL Camp
Tall, Dark & Dangerous #12
© 2018 Suzanne Brockmann
Available in ebook and print from Suzanne Brockmann Books and in audio from Blackstone Audio
(60,000 words or 200 pages)
Excerpt from Out of Body
Out of Body by Suzanne Brockmann
A romantic comedy with otherworldly elements
First published July 2018 from Suzanne Brockmann Books
Now a feature film starring Jason T. Gaffney and Kevin Held
Friends to lovers, with a supernatural twist...
Henry’s been in love with his best friend Malcolm since college, but after he kisses Mal on Halloween night, things go desperately wrong. Awkward turns to just plain weird when Mal mysteriously vanishes.
And weird gets freaky when Henry starts to wonder if he’s being haunted by Mal’s ghost.
Henry’s other friends think he’s losing it—that Mal’s just run from conflict. But freaky turns to full-on crazy when, with the help of a “spirit guide,” Henry casts a spell that allows him—and only him—to see and hear Malcolm, who’s been right there, in his house, the entire time.
If Mal really is a “lingering spirit,” he won’t “move on” until he completes some undetermined “unfinished business.” And Mal—who’s been in love with Henry since forever, too—assumes his task is to help his best friend woo and fall in love with another man.
But sometimes things aren’t what they seem, being invisible doesn’t always mean you’re dead, and love really can conquer all…
From Chapter Nine:
Henry
I was a mess.
I lay there, in my bed, in the dark, physically ill at the idea that Malcolm was really dead.
Although… the alternative was that he’d sat there, laughing and enjoying the “joke,” as I’d cried my eyes out on my living room floor.
So if Mal wasn’t dead, he was, like, the world’s biggest asshole.
Unless he was only trying to make me believe that he was the world’s biggest asshole so that I’d fall out of love with him.
As I lay there, eyes wide open, I grabbed onto that possibility with both hands, like Jack’s grip on the floating door as the Titanic sank. (That analogy made better sense to me at holy-crap o’clock in the middle of the night. But I bet you know what I mean. There was some intense stupidity happening for both Jack and me.)
Somehow—Gina—Mal had found out that I was hoping to nudge our platonic relationship toward the romantic end of the friendship-scale. And he panicked. And instead of sitting me down and giving me a gentle Let’s just stay friends speech, he’d created this elaborate Halloween-themed, high-asshole-factor prank, meant to dissuade me of ever thinking about him romantically again.
And stupid, stupid me. Instead of thinking, Jesus, Mal’s a shithead, my fucked-up brain had dreamt that he’d kissed me. Tenderly. Gently. Lovingly.
He’d kissed me and…
Smiled. He’d smiled at me and said… Yes, it is a very stupid dream, but let’s see how much you remember when you wake up, okay?
“The orb!” I exclaimed. In my dream, Mal had said something about the orb being… red…? I leapt out of bed, grabbing my phone from its charger as I raced into the living room.
“Where the hell is that thing?” I asked aloud as I looked around, trying to remember where Gina had put it… On the bookshelf!
There it was.
And—holy shit—dream-Malcolm had been right.
It was glowing brightly red.
“Oh, my God…” I quickly scrolled through the recent calls on my phone, and found Pat’s number and dialed.
It went straight to her voicemail: “You’ve reached Pat Bergeron, leave a message! Peace!”
“Pat?” I said, my voice cracking. “It’s Henry—Collins. You were right and I apologize. I’m really, really sorry. Malcolm and I need you. Badly. So if you can fit me in before next Thursday, please do, and if not, I’ll see you then.”
I ended the call and rushed over to my computer, opening the laptop and Googling Pat Bergeron, Spirit Guide.
Her website came up right away—complete with obnoxious auto-play new-age music, all Tibetan drums and ocarinas and chimes. I swiftly muted it and said—aloud, in hopes that Mal’s wind-noise speakers had mics that picked up everything, “This is where, if this is a prank…? You’ll jump out and mock me for the rest of my life.”
There, on Pat’s oddly normal-looking, blue-sky-themed home page was a link for the book she’d mentioned: the Crimson Book. I hit the link for the e-book edition, and leaned in closer to read the page…
“Because this is where I spend—holy fuck! Seven hundred dollars…? On an e-book…?” My voice went up an octave. “Are you fucking kidding me…?” I took a deep breath. “Okay, but see, I’m doing it. See?” I spoke loudly and clearly for anyone listening in. “Visa card, name:
Henry Collins. I’m typing in the card number, expiration date, January… And I am now hitting enter, and my credit card is being charged seven fucking hundred dollars because you’ve convinced me that you’re dead and you’re haunting me and I will live—gladly—with your mockage til my own dying day. Just please jump out at me now, Mal, please…”
Malcolm
I could not jump out at Henry—at least not in any way that he could see.
“I wish I could,” I whispered as the clock ticked.
He’d come running out of his bedroom, surprising me—and not just because he was stark naked again. He’d remembered at least some of what I’d told him while he’d been asleep. So things were sort of looking up.
“Okay,” Henry said, after he’d waited long enough and nothing had happened. “I just bought a seven-hundred-dollar e-book. Let’s see what it can tell us.”
I leaned in to look at the e-book he’d opened on his computer screen. “Oh, my God, it has infinity pages?” How could a book with infinity pages have a table of contents—and yet it did. “Ooh, you can input search words…” I pointed to the screen.
Henry was already over there, narrating as he typed, “Spirit… communication…” He hit search, then leaned in to look. “Uh-oh.”
I read aloud: “Seventeen million four hundred and thirty thousand pages of info for spirit communication.” This might take some time…
Henry scrolled down the list, stopping on “Spirit communication, comma, spells. Whoa, really…? This book has spells…? Like, spells?”
He clicked that link, a new page opened, and something that looked like a recipe with an attached poem appeared.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Henry said. He raised his voice slightly. “Malcolm, stand in the middle of the room.”
I did as he asked, uncertain as to what we were doing, but whatever it was, maybe he wanted to put on pants first…?
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 31
