Out of the Dark (50 page)

“Very well, Ground Base Commander.” Thikair’s ears nodded in agreement. “I’ll leave you to your conference. As soon as you’ve satisfied yourself as to the best fashion in which to proceed, by all means do so. Report back to me when you’re prepared to begin actual development. In the meantime, hopefully Teraik will have some success against these elusive raiders of his. Whether he does or not, however, I see no reason why the ‘accidental release’ shouldn’t still occur in his ZOR. Bear that in mind during your research. It would be well for your documentation ‘proving’ all of the work was carried out in Ground Base Two Alpha to be in order from the very beginning.”

“Of course, Fleet Commander.”

“Ouch!
Easy
there, Florence Nightingale!”

“Oh, shut up,” Sharon Dvorak said tartly as she finished adjusting the pillow. “And stop being such a
baby
! I swear,
Malachai
whines less than you do!”

The universe, Dave Dvorak decided grumpily as he tried to settle himself into something like a remotely comfortable position, wasn’t exactly running over with justice where the wives of heroically wounded warriors were concerned. Somehow he didn’t think Penelope had given Odysseus such a hard time when
he
got home to Ithaca.

“You wouldn’t think I was whining if
you
had to put up with this,” he told his wife severely.

“I don’t
think
you’re whining; I know you are,” she retorted. “Besides, I told you to be careful out there and you come back
this
way?” She shook her head with a disgusted expression. “You’re not going to get any sympathy out of me because you didn’t do what you were told to do in the first place. You and Rob—idiots the pair of you! Who did you think you were, anyway? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”

Since his brother-in-law had shared his very thought to that effect with him, Dvorak wisely maintained silence.

Sharon glared at him for a moment longer, hands on her hips. But then her blue eyes softened and she leaned forward, resting one hand on his uninjured right shoulder, and kissed him gently on an unshaven cheek.

“Now stop carrying on like a big baby and get better,” she whispered in his ear, her voice going husky. “And don’t do something like this again. I was . . . that is, the
kids
were worried about you.”

“I’ll try not to,” he promised her, reaching up with his good arm and hugging her briefly.

The acute discomfort in his left shoulder turned into something much sharper and hotter when he moved, but he ignored that and concentrated
on how sweet her freshly washed red hair smelled. There was gray in it now, he realized with a pang, and he didn’t have any business adding more to it.

He turned his head, pressing his lips to her cheek, then let himself settle back again with a carefully hidden sigh of relief as his injured shoulder returned to its familiar dull throb.

“I
heard
that,” she said, with an unusually gentle smile, and patted him on his unkissed cheek.

“Was worth it,” he replied, and was rewarded with a much broader smile. Then she looked at her wristwatch and grimaced.

“You’d better get some rest while you can,” she told him. “Rob says Sam and Dennis have someone they want you to talk to. They’re supposed to be here in about an hour. And I promised the kids they could have an hour with you before supper, too. I think Morgana and Maighread are afraid elves are going to carry you off if they don’t keep an eye on you, and Keelan says Uncle Dave promised to finish telling her that story about the technicolor monster. Oh, and
Malachai
says the two of you are three chapters behind on
David and Phoenix
.”

Dvorak smiled. He’d read to all three of their children every night, virtually from the moment they came home from the hospital. More recently, the three of them had been taking turns reading to
him
as their literary skills improved. Morgana and Maighread were old enough now that they took the occasional glitches in the schedule in stride, but Malachai was still insistent that he was supposed to read to Daddy when he was supposed to read to Daddy, and little things like alien invasions weren’t supposed to intrude on that sacred duty.

“He’s probably right,” the Daddy in question said out loud.

“No, he’s cutting you some
slack,
” Sharon retorted. “He’s not even counting the week or so when you were too drugged up to recognize our children when you saw them. You are
so
lucky he had brand new puppies to distract him!”

Dvorak grimaced, but she had a point.

“All right, I’ll take a nap,” he promised. “But did Rob drop any hints about just who it is that wants to talk to us?”

“Stop trying to wheedle information and go to sleep!” she commanded in awful tones, then turned and stalked out.

At least there was no door to slam behind her for emphasis, he thought.

Since it might have been just a little awkward trying to explain to any Shongair patrol who wandered by how one of the adult males of the
household happened to have acquired a bullet hole entirely through the bony part of his left shoulder about the time one of their
other
patrols had been ambushed and killed less than fifteen miles from the cabin, they’d moved him out to the cave. He couldn’t say the decor appealed to him. Somehow he didn’t think most hospitals built the walls of their patients’ rooms out of crates of food, standing rifle racks, cases of ammunition and reloading supplies, racked M136s and M240s, and storage tanks of gasoline. Big as the cave was, it was also so crowded now as to make him feel almost claustrophobic. The rock roof didn’t do a lot for him, either, and he was getting heartily tired of the fluorescent light.

Besides, he’d become rather uncomfortably aware of what would happen if someone inadvertently dropped a match or something in here. Sure, the gas tanks were independently vented to the outside world, but still. . . .

Whatever its drawbacks, however, it was dry, warm, and about as securely hidden as any place they could have parked him. They were damned lucky they had it, when all was said, and he knew it.

In fact, “damned lucky” was a pretty good description of everything that had happened from the moment he was careless enough to get himself shot.

He’d come to the conclusion that he was never going to know exactly what had happened after he was hit, since Wilson had been the only witness and obviously wasn’t going to tell him. Although his brother-in-law was perfectly prepared to strike a properly heroic pose, chin lifted and steely eyes fixed on an invisible horizon with noble determination, whenever Dvorak asked him, he’d actually provided exactly zero in the way of details. Which led Dvorak to suspect things had been even dicier than he’d thought.

What he did know was that he was inordinately fortunate that the bullet had managed to miss any of the major arteries on its way through. He was also fortunate that Wilson had spent the last five years of his Marine career in search and rescue. The SAR training had bobbed to the surface when Dvorak was hit, and he’d managed to apply pressure bandages and get the bleeding stopped. Mostly, anyway.

After that, he and Dennis Vardry had somehow gotten Dvorak away from the scene of the shootout and back to the cabin—well, to the
cave,
if he wanted to be picky—before any Shongairi turned up.

They
had
been visited by a Shongair patrol, accompanied by a North Carolina state trooper “guide,” the next day. Fortunately, the trooper in
question had passed along his entire agenda ahead of time, so Sharon and Jessica had “just happened” to have the kids down at the dam, swimming, and both shepherds banished to the cave with Dvorak, when they arrived.

Both of the big dogs had always been intensely protective of “their” people. Nimue had turned even more protective than usual since giving birth to her six puppies, and Sharon had decided—wisely, in Dvorak’s opinion—that it would be just as well to keep both of the dogs away from the aliens under the circumstances. The last thing they’d needed was to get one or both of the shepherds shot because they growled at the wrong Shongair.

They’d also had time to move every weapon, other than a pair of shotguns, Dvorak’s old sporterized SMLE .303 deer gun, and four handguns none of them had ever been particularly fond of out to the cave, as well. There certainly hadn’t been any fancy, long-ranged weapons or anything that could possibly have punched bullets through even improvised vehicle armor lying around, anyway. Which was probably a good thing since, predictably, the Shongairi had confiscated every firearm they’d found. They hadn’t found anything else, though, and they’d settled for interrogating Wilson and Alec (Veronica, who’d been trained as a nurse’s aide, had been in the cave, keeping an eye on Dvorak), rather than hiking the rest of the way to the dam to question Sharon and Jessica—or the kids—as well.

Dvorak was just as happy he’d been only intermittently conscious when that happened. There were some things, frankly, which he’d discovered he lacked the courage to face, and he would have been terrified out of his mind lying there in the cave, not knowing what was happening with his family . . . or if one of the kids might inadvertently let something slip.

They were all good, smart kids, but that was the point. They were
kids,
and smart grown-ups all too easily trapped or tricked kids into saying more than they thought they were saying. Especially scared kids, and only a child who was invincibly stupid—which none of theirs were—
wouldn’t
have been scared in the face of what was happening to their world. Whether they wanted to admit it to their parents or not, all the children had bad dreams and occasional nightmares, and he knew it had gotten worse since he’d been shot. He and Sharon had always made it a point to answer their children’s questions, whether it was convenient or not, and they’d followed that same policy since fleeing to the cabin. Oh, sure, there were some things they’d skated their way around, but by and large, they’d leveled with their children. So the kids had always known what was going on, understood why their parents were so grim and focused these days. Yet that hadn’t been
the same as seeing Daddy brought back to them bloody on a shutter. No, that had brought it home to them in a way he would have given his left arm—hell, his
right
arm, and it was the one that still worked!—to spare them.

No wonder they want to spend time with me,
he thought now, once again trying futilely to find a comfortable way to lie.
And I want time with
them,
too! I just wish I didn’t catch them with that
scared
look in their eyes when they don’t realize I’m watching them
.

He growled with fresh frustration at that thought. He wanted up. He wanted out of bed, out of this cave, back spending time with his family where his children could see him—and he could see them—and all of them could know the others were all right.

Not going to happen until you can actually stand up and walk more than fifty yards at a time, boy-oh,
he told himself sternly.
Last thing we need is for the Shongairi to drop back in unexpectedly and find you lying around with this damned hole in your shoulder after all!

He reached across his body with his right hand, touching the back of his left hand where the immobilizing straps held it across his chest. He found himself doing that quite a lot. He could wiggle the fingers of his left hand, but he’d discovered that he needed to reassure himself that he still had feeling in it, as well. That it could feel the pressure of his right hand’s fingertips.

Of course, the real question was whether or not he’d ever actually be able to
use
that hand again. At the moment, the odds didn’t seem all that good.

The Shongair bullet might have missed arteries and veins, but there was a lot of bone in the human shoulder. “Flesh wounds” to the shoulder were far rarer in real life than in bad fiction, and Dave Dvorak’s shoulder had been pretty thoroughly pulverized.

Once Wilson had him home and realized how bad it really was, he’d headed straight back down the mountain. Veronica’s training had been a priceless asset from the very beginning, but their medical supplies had never been intended to deal with something like
this
. For that matter, Veronica hadn’t managed to fully stop the bleeding, and it had been obvious to Wilson that without proper medical assistance, they were still going to lose his brother-in-law. So he’d done what Marines always did when they needed help—he’d called on another Marine.

Or, rather, on the cousin of a Marine, in this case. Which was how Dvorak had come to wake up—mostly—and find himself looking up into a
very black face wearing a surgical mask and a professionally competent expression.

“Hosea?” he’d gotten out.

“In the flesh,” Dr. James Hosea MacMurdo had replied.

Why a young black man had preferred “Hosea” to “James” when he was growing up was something which had always puzzled Dvorak, but MacMurdo had been insistent about his given name from the time he was six. Maybe because he’d had an uncle named James that no one in the family had ever liked very much. Dvorak didn’t know about that, but he’d known MacMurdo for almost fifteen years. His cousin, Alvin Buchevsky, was a Methodist pastor who’d been a frequent visiting preacher in Dvorak’s own church. More to the point, Alvin had been one of Rob Dvorak’s best friends since the two of them had been Marines together. Rob was almost ten years younger than the other man, but they’d been from the same hometown, they’d known a lot of the same people, and they’d kept ending up assigned to the same duty stations, especially before Buchevsky had become an officer, a squid, and a chaplain.