Everything would be great if it weren’t for the pain.
“HELP ME!”
The pain and Tommy.
He hit the button again. Four hours had to be up! He needed that shot!
The door to the room swung open and someone came in. It wasn’t a nurse. It was a guy. But he was dressed in white. Maybe a male nurse. Great! All he needed now was some faggot trying to give him a bed bath in the middle of the night.
But the guy only leaned over the bed and held out one of those tiny plastic medicine cups. Half an inch of colored liquid was inside.
“What’s this?”
“For the pain.” The guy was dark and had some sort of accent.
“I want a shot, clown!”
“Not time yet for a shot. This will hold you until then.”
“It better.”
Ron let him tip the cup up to his lips. It was funny tasting stuff. As he swallowed it, he noticed the guy’s left arm was missing. He pulled his head away.
“And listen,” he said, feeling a sudden urge to throw his weight around—after all, he was a patient here. “Tell them out there I don’t want no more cripples coming in here.”
In the darkness, Ron thought he detected a smile on the face above him.
“Certainly, Mr. Daniels. I shall see to it that your next attendant is quite sound of limb.”
“Good. Now take off, geek.”
“Very well.”
Ron decided he liked being a patient. He could give orders and people had to listen. And why not? He was sick and—
“HELP ME!”
If only he could order Tommy to stop.
The junk the geek had given him didn’t seem to be helping his pain. Only thing to do was try to sleep. He thought about that bastard cop who’d busted up his hands tonight. He said it was private, but Ron knew a pig when he saw one. He swore he’d find that sadist bastard even if he had to hang around every precinct house in New York until winter. And then Ron would follow him home. He wouldn’t get back at him directly —Ron had a bad feeling about that guy and didn’t want to be around if he ever got really mad. But maybe he had a wife and kids…
Ron lay there in a half-doze for a good forty-five minutes planning what he’d do to get even with the pig. He was just tipping over the edge into a deep sleep, falling… finally falling…
“HELP ME!”
Ron jerked violently in the bed, pulling his right arm out of the suspensory sling and knocking it against the side rail. A fiery blast of pain shot up to his shoulder. Tears squeezed out of his eyes as breath hissed noisily through his bared teeth.
When the pain subsided to a more tolerable level, he knew what he had to do.
That old fucker, Tommy, had to go.
Ron pulled his left arm out of its sling, then eased himself over the side rail. The floor was cold. He lifted his pillow between his two casts and padded over to Tommy’s bed. All he had to do was lay it over the old guy’s face and lean on it. A few minutes of that and poof, no more snores, no more yells, no more Tommy.
He saw something move outside the window as he passed by it. He looked closer. It was a shadow, like somebody’s head and shoulders. A big somebody.
But this was the fifth floor!
He had to be hallucinating. That stuff in the cup must have been stronger than he thought. He bent closer to the window for a better look. What he saw there held him transfixed for a long, agonal heartbeat. It was a face out of a nightmare, worse than all his nightmares combined. And those glowing yellow eyes…
A scream started in his throat as he reflexively lurched backward. But before it could reach his lips, a taloned, three-fingered hand smashed through the double pane and clamped savagely, unerringly around his throat. Ron felt incredible pressure against his windpipe, crushing it closed against his cervical spine with an explosive crunch. The rough flesh against the skin of his throat was cool and damp, almost slimy, with a rotten stench arising from it. He caught a glimpse of smooth dark skin stretched over a long, lean, muscular arm leading out through the shattered glass to… what? He arched his back and clawed at the imprisoning fingers but they were like a steel collar around his neck. As he struggled vainly for air, his vision blurred. And then, with a smooth, almost casual motion, he felt himself yanked bodily through the window, felt the rest of the glass shatter with his passage, the shards either falling away or raking savagely at his flesh. He had one soul-numbing, moon-limned glimpse of his attacker before his vision was mercifully extinguished by his oxygen-starved brain.
And back in the room, after that final instant of crashing noise, all was quiet again. Two of the remaining patients, deep in Dalmane dreams, stirred in their beds and turned over. Tommy, the closest to the window, shouted “HELP ME!” and then went back to snoring.
Chapter Two
bharangpur, west bengal, india
wednesday, June 24, 1857
1
It’s all gone wrong. Every bleeding thing gone wrong!
Captain Sir Albert Westphalen of the Bengal European Fusiliers stood in the shade of an awning between two market stalls and sipped cool water from a jug freshly drawn from a well. It was a glorious relief to be shielded from direct attack by the Indian sun, but there was no escaping the glare. It bounced off the sand in the street, off the white stucco walls of the buildings, even off the pale hides of those nasty humpbacked bulls roaming freely through the marketplace. The glare drove the heat through his eyes to the very center of his brain. He dearly wished he could pour the contents of the jug over his head and let the water trickle down the length of his body.
But no. He was a gentleman in the uniform of Her Majesty’s army and surrounded by heathens. He couldn’t do anything so undignified. So he stood here in the shade, his high-domed pith helmet square upon his head, his buff uniform smelly and sopping in the armpits and buttoned up tight at the throat, and pretended the heat didn’t bother him. He ignored the sweat soaking the thin hair under his helmet, oozing down over his face, clinging to the dark moustache he had so carefully trimmed and waxed this morning, gathering in drops at his chin to fall off onto his tunic.
Oh, for a breeze. Or better still, rain. But neither was due for another month. He had heard that when the summer monsoon started blowing from the southwest in July there would be plenty of rain. Until then, he and his men would have to fry.
It could be worse.
He could have been sent with the others to retake Meerut and Delhi from the rebels… forced marches along the Ganges basin in full uniform and kit, rushing to face hordes of crazed Sepoys waving their bloody talwars and shouting “Din! Din! Din!”
He shuddered. Not for me, thank you very much.
Luckily, the rebellion had not spread this far east, at least not to any appreciable extent. That was fine with Westphalen. He intended to stay as far away from the pandies as he could. He knew from regimental records that there were a total of 20,000 British troops on the subcontinent. What if all of India’s untold millions decided to rise up and end the British Raj? It was a recurrent nightmare. There would be no more Raj.
And no more East India Company. Which, Westphalen knew, was the real reason the army was here—to protect “John Company’s” interests. He had sworn to fight for the Crown and he was willing—up to a point—to do that, but he’d be damned if he was going to die fighting for a bunch of tea traders. After all, he was a gentleman and had only accepted a commission out here to forestall the financial catastrophe threatening his estate. And perhaps to make some contacts during his term of service. He had arranged for a purely administrative job: no danger. All part of a simple plan to allow him time to find a way to recoup his considerable gambling losses—one might even say incredible losses for a man just forty years of age—and then go home and straighten out his debts. He grimaced at the enormous amount of money he had squandered since his father had died and the baronetcy had passed to him.