Andrew sat in the back with Alice curled beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. He’d found some blankets in the rear of the truck and wrapped them around her. Dani had the heater going full blast, belching hot air throughout the cab, but still Alice trembled like a dried leaf caught in a maelstrom at his side.
As she spoke, her voice was small and tremulous. Her hair was damp with grime. He could see the pale skin of her scalp in places where the locks had clumped and coiled together and the sutured edge of one of her most recent trepanation wounds.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered.
Because that’s what people say when they find out someone’s dead, Dani had told him once, back when he’d still thought of her only as Specialist Santoro, before he’d come to understand that everything he’d felt for Lila Meyer had been a lie, a pale and distant shadow to what love would truly be when he stumbled across it.
Alice looked up at him, her large, dark eyes swimming with tears. Lost. That was how she looked. He recognized that disconnect and shock that had glazed over her eyes. He’d seen it in his mother’s, as well as his own, when Beth had succumbed to lupus.
Lost.
“Did you cry when your sister died?” she asked.
Andrew nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I cried a lot.”
“Oh, good.” She offered a crooked smile, her tears spilling. “Then I’m doing it right.”
The nearest hospital was in Pikeville, the eight-story regional medical center housed in a building of unexpectedly contemporary design, fronted on all sides with smoky glass windows, sharp angles and a cool, clinical façade. Dani pulled the Humvee beneath an overhang in the back outside of the emergency ward, the place where ambulances customarily docked to deliver patients.
“You can’t tell them anything about what happened,” she said, turning in her seat to look at Andrew. Alice had long-since fallen asleep during the nearly two-hour drive, and rested with her cheek against his heart. “Only that you got shot, okay? Just let me handle it.”
He started to ask why, righteously indignant, then remembered what Suzette had told him upon his arrival at the camp. Top secret. Hush hush.
“I’ll call my C. O. in New York,” Dani was saying, only now she seemed to be talking more to herself than to him. Like Andrew, she was in shock from both blood loss and pain, and rocked in the driver’s seat back and forth, like a little girl in need of the bathroom. “He’ll know what to do. There’s a base in Fort Knox. They can send someone to take care of things.”
A man in a rent-a-cop uniform tapped on the Humvee window, a hospital security guard. When Dani jumped in surprise, then opened the door, he stepped back a wary distance and studied her for a moment, taking into account her ghastly pallor and shell-shocked eyes, her wet, blood-stained clothes and battered, disheveled appearance.
“What seems to be the trouble, miss?” he asked, suspicious enough to drape his hand against the sidearm he wore holstered at his hip, to flip back the restraining strap with his thumb to allow himself ready access to the pistol if needed.
“I’m Specialist Daniela Santoro, with the U.S. Army National Guard.” Dani held up her hands, palms facing the guard. “There’s been an accident. I have civilians in my truck.” At this, the guard glanced past her into the Humvee, catching sight of Andrew and Alice, now roused somewhat and blinking in sleepy bewilderment. “Please,” Dani said, drawing the man’s gaze again. “We need help.”
“Andrew Braddock?” one of the nurses asked, a fresh-faced kid who looked for all the world like he’d just graduated from high school.
They had just finished transporting Andrew inside, having transferred him from a wheeled stretcher to a hospital bed in a brightly lit emergency room bay. They’d begun removing his clothes and connecting a variety of medical equipment and instruments to him, an automatic blood pressure cuff around his arm, a pulse and blood oxidation monitor to the tip of his index finger.
“Where’s Dani?” he’d asked repeatedly. “Where’s Alice? Please, are they alright? I want to see them.”
The hospital staff bustled and buzzed around him, a ceaseless blur of uniforms and faces, people talking to him, around him and about him. It was enough to make his head—dazed to begin with—spin all the more. He couldn’t imagine how terrifying and bewildering it would be for poor Alice.
They hadn’t let him see her, or Dani, either, but he’d been able to overhear them at least in part from one of the neighboring bays as they’d tended to Dani’s injuries. She was the worst off of the three of them, and he’d caught a glimpse of her on a fast-moving wheeled gurney, with a crowd of harried nurses around her as they’d wheeled her away from the ward for surgery.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?” a male nurse asked him. “Andrew Braddock?”
“Yes,” Andrew said. “How did you know?”
“I’ve seen your picture in the paper,” the nurse replied. “You’re the guy who went missing a few days ago, back in the hills, right?”
“They’ve been looking for you,” another nurse said, taping down a clear plastic I. V. port beneath the bridge of his knuckles, then began fiddling with the line, making sure there were no kinks or constricting loops.
“Who has?” Andrew jerked again at the doctor’s light but painfully persistent prodding.
“The sheriff’s office,” the nurse replied. “Couple of good-sized search parties, too. Your disappearance has been the most excitement we’ve seen in these parts for awhile.”
She seemed friendly enough, sympathetic, and when she moved to leave his bedside, he caught her by the wrist.
“Please. There was a little girl with me.”
“She’s fine,” the nurse soothed.
“You don’t understand. Her name is Alice Moore. She’s autistic. Just let me talk to her for a minute. I can—”
One of the doctors did something to his ankle at that moment, which though unseen, felt akin to peeling back the flesh with a pair of needlenose pliers, then prodding the molten tip of a fireplace poker into the raw, exposed meat beneath. Andrew cried out sharply, and the doctor gave a nod to the nurse.
“Give him two milligrams per minute, morphine sulfate by push,” he said, and within moments, the nurse was fiddling with the intravenous tube again, this time inserting a filled hypodermic syringe into another plastic port in the line.
“What is that?” Andrew asked, alarmed, because the last time someone had poked a needle into him, as it had turned out, they’d been identifying him as a potential subject in a bioengineering experiment.
“It’s medicine,” the nurse said.
“It will help your pain, Mister Braddock,” the doctor told him.
“Everything’s going to be alright,” said the nurse and about that time, Andrew felt his eyelids drooping, his mind growing cloudy. The pain in his leg became something distant and vague, like a nightmare that upon waking, is nearly forgotten, with only the lingering unease it inspired remaining.
“Mister Braddock?”
Andrew felt his mind emerging from this subterranean bliss, a murky sea of clouded dreams. He was only dimly aware of something draped against his face, some kind of tendril-like tubing he could also feel against his arm in loose coils. When his eyelids fluttered open a dazed half-mast and a man came into view leaning over him, dressed in military fatigues, Andrew had a moment of stark and bewildered terror.
Prendick made his way out of the garage, oh, Christ, and found me!