Dallas kept his mouth shut and held Charlotte to his chest. His shirt was wet with blood, his and hers…the wound looked bad. He just hoped the Gultranz wouldn’t pull out of his damaged host and show himself. There’d be no explaining that.
The ambulance was ready for them at the dock with lights flashing. Two cop cars parked beside it added to the light show. Charlotte was carefully loaded onto the gurney and whisked away as Dallas gave his statement to the officers. There was no way he could explain that his employer had just been slashed by the weapon of an offworld assassin, but he gave them as good a description of the guy as he could remember. Not that it would do them any good if they found him.
The police car trailed the ambulance to the hospital, and Dallas got out almost before it came to a stop at the emergency entrance.
“If you think of anything else useful, call me. I’ll take your little buddy here to Mojo’s. It’s an animal boarding service nearby. You can collect him when you’re done with the doctors.” The officer wrote a phone number on the back of a card and pressed it into Dallas’s hand.
“I really appreciate it. More than you can imagine.” Dallas stuck the card in his pocket next to the dreaded Limbus card and ran up the steps of the hospital, his thoughts in freefall.
“Your girlfriend’s one lucky lady.” The doctor came into the waiting room where Dallas was hunkered down in his bloody clothes. “She lost a lot of blood, but we got her stabilized and put back together. She’s lucky — the cut missed her heart and lungs.”
Dallas had gotten over his shakes and now simply felt numb. “She’s going to live, right?”
“I think she’ll make it. We’ll know more in the morning.” Dallas nodded. He was prepared to spend the night in the waiting room, because as the doc said, there was nothing more to do now but wait. He was getting good at that. But those barnacle scrapes were starting to hurt like hell. He pulled the shirt away from his back and grimaced. The doc gave him a look and sent him off to a treatment room. After what seemed like hours, a young RN knocked at the door and came in, only mildly appalled at his blood-soaked appearance. As an emergency nurse, she’d probably seen worse. Efficiently peeling off his shirt, she swabbed his scrapes with a light touch, taping gauze over the worst ones. She also found his story fascinating, at least the part of it he was willing to share. “You jumped off the MacArthur Causeway? The section with all the party lights?”
He closed his eyes, trying to decompress. “Yep.” The only act of heroism he’d ever performed was going to be fuel for many nightmares to come.
“Done. I hope that feels better.” She patted him on the shoulder.
“Much. Funny, it didn’t start hurting until I got in the police car.” He wondered what his parents would have thought of the stunt he’d just pulled — an idle thought because it was a chapter in their son’s life they weren’t ever going to hear about. He considered his bloody shirt. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare T-shirt lying around, would you?”
The RN smiled and patted his shoulder again. “I think I can find you something.”
Engulfed in an oversized Miami Hurricanes green and orange tee, Dallas caught what sleep he could in the waiting room, but by early morning he was prowling the maze of hospital corridors looking for the cafeteria. He couldn’t help giving anyone who got too close to him a second look because who knew how many assassins had been sent to collect their bounty on the outlaw Gurtz. He wolfed eggs, sausage, and black coffee, and then went to the Central Registry to find where Charlotte was recovering. He found her in a tiny private room on the third floor. A transfusion blood bag suspended on a pole near the bedside dripped dark red slowly through the I–V line taped to her arm. He was shocked at how pale she was, lying still in the white sheets.
“Hey,” he said softly, coming into the room and shutting the door.
Charlotte turned her head. “Dallas. You’re safe. I was worried.”
“I’m fine, it’s you we need to be worried about. How do you feel?”
“Drugged up. The nurse told me I’ve had four units of blood.” She cast her eyes up at the drip bag. “It must have been a mess. I don’t remember much after the assassin showed up on the bridge. I recall falling and being in the water, but nothing after that until early this morning. How bad is it?”
“The doc says you’ll make a full recovery. Police are looking for the slasher, but a lot of good that will do. It might be better if they don’t find him.”
“Where’s Buster?”
“Boarding at a nearby vet. The cop assigned to your case took him there.”
Charlotte looked relieved. “I knew you were the right one the day you showed up on our doorstep. Just a gut-level instinct. A smart guy who’s basically good at heart.”
Dallas felt his ears heating up. “How could you know that about me?”
Charlotte laughed and then flinched. “I work all day among people whose job it is to dress up the worst products in the best possible package. We make our living telling lies, big and small, for commerce. Sincerity is rare in my line of work, so when I meet someone who has it in spades, I can’t help but notice.”
“I almost chickened out, you know. A couple of times.”
Charlotte smiled. “Doesn’t matter. You’re still here, and so am I, thanks to you. You saved my life without thinking.”
“I’m not a hero. I was scared shitless… still am.”
Charlotte frowned. “You sell yourself short and I don’t know why. But you’ve proved yourself to me. I couldn’t be more grateful.”
Dallas swallowed and asked the question he dreaded. “Is Gurtz still there?”
Charlotte nodded. “He’s not enjoying the sensation of human pain any more than I am.”
“Good.”
Charlotte closed her eyes. “We have one day left before the gate shuts down. Somehow I have to get out of here and go looking with you.”
“No way. I’m not letting you risk your life for him.”
“You’d rather have him stuck in my body for good?”
Dallas shuddered. “No! But I don’t see how—”
“We’ll figure something out. We have to.” Charlotte hesitated, then added, “Gurtz needs to survive.”
“Why? If he died you’d be free! He’s an alien, for chrissakes.” Dallas could feel his blood pressure spiking.
“I know, but it’s not the whole story.” Charlotte frowned, whether from pain or frustration he couldn’t tell. “He corrects the horrible mistakes made by others not as skilled as him. The truth is he’s on the run for being the instigator of a dissident group trying to create better treatment and conditions for offworld slaves.”
“And you believe this?” Dallas didn’t even try to conceal his incredulity.
“I want to.”
“Why, exactly?”
Charlotte turned toward him. “There’s a movement to change the way the Slave Guild operates, and Gurtz is at the heart of it. He knows he can’t wipe out an institution that’s been around for millennia, but he thinks he can at least change the way slaves are treated. He’s trying to establish rights for them."
Dallas listened, his tenuous grip on The Truth evaporating, only this time it was cosmic truth that refused to cooperate, not some meaningless classroom debate about the significance of poetry. And even as he grappled with enough stuff to drive him mad into the next century, a new truth dawned on him. Charlotte wanted to believe because it was the only way to cope with the whole experience. If it ended up being for a good cause, it wasn’t so horrible, right? Dallas tried to imagine lovely Charlotte being ‘refurbished.’ He just couldn’t deal. “He abducts humans and animals for body templates!”