Finally the symphony of fire and steel played itself out, and it became eerily quiet. The medics lifted themselves off Hunter's battered body and tended to his wounds again. His bandages put back in place, they picked up the stretcher and began hoofing it down the trench.
Ten minutes later, they reached a dugout, basically a man-made cave cored out of the mud and rock on one side of the trench. Within was a makeshift field hospital. The medics put Hunter's stretcher down just outside the door.
"You will make it," one of the medics told him. "They will care for you here."
That's when Hunter focused his eyes again. He saw the four medics looking down at him, grim smiles all around. Their uniforms were so dirty he thought they were gray, but now he realized they were actually blue.
Then he noticed something else. Each man had a silver badge over his left breast pocket. Hunter did a double take. The badge was a twisted cross, a vaguely familiar symbol.
A swastika?
He cleared his mind of the painkiller just long enough to make sure he was actually seeing this. But it was true. Their badges were swastikas. And even though his memory was clouded over by his 5,000-year time transportation and all of the interdimensional travel he'd been taking since, this memory stuck with him like super glue from his former, former life.
High as a kite or not, swastikas meant only one thing to him: these soldiers were Nazis.
Again, ever since Hunter had started on this long journey of his, he'd been able to remember bits and pieces of his long-ago past, back in the twentieth century. He knew he was a fighter pilot, that he loved a woman named Dominique. That back then, he'd been called the Wingman. That he was a patriot. That he loved his country. That he had fought for it many times.
But very unpleasant memories had made the jump with him, too. Fragments of the enemies he'd fought, people who'd spewed hate and disorder. People who'd killed close friends of his and who'd tried to take over the beloved land of his birth, the United States of America.
Of all these enemies, and there were many, he might have despised the Nazis the most. Their brand of hatred for people of other races was despicable. Their belief that they were somehow better and therefore entitled was just plain wacky. They were so bad, the Russians even hated them, possibly more than Americans. But the Nazis were also very, very dangerous, and back then, Hunter had vowed to stamp out every last one of them. And, he believed, he'd come close to achieving that goal.
But now, they were here in this dizzylando, this very weird place. The question was, why?
He lay on the stretcher for about ten minutes. In that time, he came to realize his wounds were actually superficial and in no way serious. He was still very, very high, though, and even when he saw another wave of huge bombers go overhead, and saw them drop their bombs, and heard those bombs falling, and felt the ground shake when they hit, it didn't faze him. Just another selection from the symphony.
Strangely, though, he believed in his opiate state that his eyes had become telescopic, that he could zoom in on the wings of these bombers, and what he saw were more swastikas. But that made no sense.
Few things did on morphine.
He was finally retrieved by two more litter bearers and brought into the dugout. No surprise, the field hospital was well-equipped, well-organized, and spotless — in that Nazi kind of way.
There were several dozen operating tables, several dozen recovery beds. The place looked way too big on the inside, considering what it looked like without, but again, Hunter knew morphine did strange things to a person's perception and that the medic had given him an overly generous charge.
Hanging on the wall above the operating tables were two signs. One read, Merciless and Moral, an old saying of the original Nazis back in his time, on his Earth. The other read, It Is the Curse of Greatness That It Must Step Over Dead Bodies. An odd saying, Hunter thought, especially for a hospital.
The place was hustling and bustling. Many wounded were being attended to. But luckily for them, there were just as many doctors and three times as many nurses charged with their care. Hunter's stretcher was placed next to an operating table. He lay here for a few minutes, staring up at the lights on the ceiling and getting the distinct impression that someone was hiding up there, staring down at him. Finally, a doctor and two nurses came over to him. All three were wearing long white gowns and surgical masks.
One of the nurses gently removed the bandage near his ear, by far his deepest wound, and still it was little more than a minor abrasion. The other nurse checked under the bandages on his knees.
The doctor meanwhile stared righ't into his eyes.
Suddenly the doctor bellowed, "Who is this man?"
The controlled chaos inside the field hospital came to a halt instantly. Just like that, it was completely silent. All eyes had turned on Hunter and the three people standing over him. Suddenly, he wasn't feeling so high anymore.
The doctor screamed once again, "This man — who is he? What is he doing in here?"
One of the nurses tried to reply, "He is wounded, Doctor…"
She pointed to his numerous minor wounds.
"But he is not a soldier!" the doctor bit back. "This place is for our fighting men, not hangers-on!"
At that, the other nurse reached down and started scraping the mud away from Hunter's clothes.
Indeed, he was not wearing a Nazi uniform — thank God! Instead, he was dressed in a one-piece black survival suit with no place to hang weapons or ammunition. He did have a number of pens in his upper left-hand pocket and a small notebook tucked inside his undershirt.
"He is a spy!" the doctor roared. "Bring him out to be shot!"
Hunter was definitely back down now. Spy? Shot? Him?
Why?
But then one of the nurses saved his life — such as it was. She scraped away the dirt and mud from his left arm and revealed a patch that ran nearly from his elbow to the top of his shoulder. It featured a series of yellow stripes with one word in the middle: Scribe.
"He is not a spy," the nurse said, pointing to the arm patch. "He is a reporter. A war correspondent."
The doctor hesitated only for a moment. "Bah!" he declared. "That is just as bad."
With that, he took off his rubber gloves, quickly, but one finger at a time, and slammed them down hard on Hunter's face.
Then he stormed away in disgust.
"This place is for our brave soldiers!" he said on leaving. "And not for the impure blood of his ilk."
The two nurses were a bit more sympathetic, though a badly wounded Nazi solider had arrived on a stretcher beside him. They quickly put fresh bandages on his wounds, stuck a vitamin pill in his mouth, and called for two orderlies to get him out of there.
As he was leaving, one of the nurses drew out a syringe and gave him another gigantic shot of morphine. Hunter closed his eyes, but instantly, he felt like he was back on the ceiling. He really wished she hadn't done that.
She patted him twice on the head. He opened his eyes just as she was pulling down her mask. Hunter's bleary pupils could barely make her out.
Is that Annie? he thought.
Before he could cry out, the orderlies carried his stretcher back outside, setting him down in almost in the exact spot from where he'd been picked up.
Once again, artillery shells were exploding close by, and the steady drone of bombers going overhead never really stopped. His mind drifted away again. Now in his most elevated moment, Hunter thought that he could actually see the outline of Saturn up there, past the bombers, past the wispy clouds, past the false blue sky. But at the same time, he knew, the way things were working here, that was probably impossible.