Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within (6 page)

“Hey, babe,” she said as I walked into the living room.

“Hey, yourself. Smells good in here, whatcha cooking?”

“Beef stew and your favorite.” She held up an iron skillet. “Flatbread.”

“Mmm. Sounds good.”

While I hung my jacket on a hook beside the door, Allison stood up and came to me with her arms outstretched. I picked her up and held her tight. It didn’t take much effort; she hardly weighed anything. I breathed in her scent and nuzzled her neck, swaying back and forth with her.

“You smell good.”

“You always say that.” She leaned back, her face only a couple of inches from mine.

“It’s always true.”

Her smile flashed like a hundred-watt light. I drank it in and smiled back, feeling the warm, comfortable weight that had been growing in my chest since the day I first met her. Lips softer
than a whisper brushed against mine, and I pulled her closer, my hand cupping gently around the back of her neck, knowing she liked it when I did that.

Allison responded by wrapping her legs around my hips and squeezing. She could feel that I was happy to see her and began moving her hips around in languid little circles, pulling herself tighter against me. I kissed her harder, and she kissed me back, soft moans escaping from deep in her throat. My heart beat faster in my chest, and my skin began to heat up. The grinding of her hips grew faster and more insistent. Her nails dug into the skin of my shoulders, carving shallow furrows that would leave marks for days. For just an instant, she leaned her head back, breaking the kiss.

“Kitchen table,” she said, and went back to work.

That was all I needed to hear.

An hour later, after we cleaned ourselves up, pulled the table back to the center of the room, and picked up the chairs we had knocked over, we sat down in front of the fireplace with steaming bowls of stew and cold apple cider. Warm light from the fire danced around us on the hardwood floors and cast twisting shadows on the paneled walls.

“So what did you do today?” Allison asked.

I turned my head to look at her. Her dark brown eyes shined in the firelight, warm and happy. It made me ache to see her sitting there, so beautiful and trusting. As important as it was to keep my forthcoming mission a secret, I hated the idea of lying to her.

“Steve came by and got me this morning after work. You heard about the Army bringing supplies into town today, right?”

“Heard about it? That big-ass helicopter scared the bejesus out of me when it flew over the clinic. I thought we were about to get bombed or something. Was that Steve’s doing?”

I nodded. “He negotiated for supplies and equipment for the recruits, and I think for some communications equipment. We’ll find out tomorrow when we take everything to the camp.”  

“Well that’s good, we need all the help we can get. I don’t suppose they’re going to be sending us any troops, are they?”

“Actually, two guys came in on the helicopter. Steve told me they’re both Navy SEALs.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “No shit? That’s awesome. Did you get a chance to talk to them?”

“No, but they’re supposed to come by the camp tomorrow to introduce themselves to everyone.”

“That’s cool. You’ll have to tell me what they’re like. Didn’t some Army guys come in as well? Someone at the clinic was talking about that.”

I nodded, swallowing a mouthful of stew. “Yeah, the freaking general in charge of Army Special Operations Command.”

“That sounds important.”

“It is.”

“What’s he here for? Is he going to be helping us out against the Legion?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s in town for at least a couple of days, so I imagine we’ll find out soon.”

Allison put her bowl down and stared into the fire. “You know, this is exciting stuff. The Legion has been making life hard for us for so long. Maybe soon we won’t have to worry about them anymore.”

I ran a hand up her back. “We’ll deal with them, babe, one way or another. By this time next year, the Legion will be a memory.”

“I hope you’re right. This town has seen enough heartache. It would be nice to have some peace and quiet for a while.”

There was a weight of pain in her voice that made me want to pull her into my lap and hold her. I let my hand move over her back.

“Oooohh, can you scratch?” she said.

I did as she asked, gently raking my nails over her shoulders in little circles.

“Lower, lower … a little to the right … ahh, right there.”

I smiled, scratching at a spot just above her right hip. She gave me permission to stop after a few seconds, then scooted over to sit closer to me. Warm, slender arms wrapped around mine as she leaned her head on my shoulder. Between her and the fire, I was warmer than I had been all day.

“How’s the new mommy?” I asked, shoving a poker at the bed of coals.

“Jenny’s doing great. That woman is a machine. She’d be back in her vegetable garden by tomorrow if I let her. That baby of hers is just about the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen.”

“You say that about all babies.”

“Yes, and it’s always true.”

I chuckled, putting an arm around her shoulders and pulling her tighter against me. “I had a meeting with Mayor Stone today.”

“Uh oh. What about?”

“Well … I can’t really talk about it right now. She wants me to work on a few projects around town, and then there’s a bigger assignment that I’ll be helping out with after we finish training the militia.”

Allison sat up and leaned away from me. I studiously avoided her intelligent, glittering stare, afraid that those eyes would cut into me.

“Does it concern the Legion, this ‘assignment’?” She made little air quotes with her fingers.

I kept my face blank. Or tried to, anyway. “I can’t say.”

“So that’s a yes. Next question: Is it dangerous?”

“Allison, please, let’s not do this, okay? I only brought it up because it’s going to pull me away from town for a while. I just want you to be prepared when the time comes for me to leave.”

“Well that answers my second question. It is dangerous.”

I sighed and rubbed a hand against my forehead. Life had been so much simpler when I was just a shallow womanizer.

“Allison, someone has to fight those assholes out there, okay? I signed up to do the job. At some point, things are going to get bloody and, when that happens, I’m going to be involved. If you’re going to get like this every time the subject of me doing something risky comes up, then you’re going to be spending a lot of time pissed off at me.”

She glared a little longer, then looked down, her expression softening.

“Eric, I just don’t want you to get hurt again. I love you too much to watch you-” She stopped, realizing what she had just said.

Her cheeks flushed as she looked up at me, her eyes a deep well of glistening vulnerability. There they were again, those three words. Not for the first time, I felt the course of my life hinging upon them. But this time, I wasn’t afraid. This time, I was ready. I smiled and reached out to her. She slipped her soft, slender fingers around my thick calloused ones and held on with both hands.

“It’s okay, Allison. I love you, too.”

She smiled, and the happiness in her eyes pierced me like an arrow, punching through all my armor and making me grin like a schoolboy with his first crush. I would have said more, but Allison’s arms shot around my neck and squeezed so hard that for a few moments, I couldn’t breathe. For being so small, she was surprisingly strong.

After a moment, she let go, and just as I was drawing a breath to speak, she pushed me over onto my back and straddled me. Her lips met mine with frantic urgency while her hands tugged at my shirt. She leaned up for a moment to struggle out of her sweater, her firm breasts spilling out, and anything I was about to say suddenly didn’t seem all that important anymore.

I was sitting at the kitchen table again, brooding. For some reason, this cramped little room had become my favorite place to do that. Maybe it was the window that overlooked the back yard, or the proximity to the warm stove, or maybe it was the smell of wood polish that had been worked into the floors for God knows how many years. Whatever the reason, it was a good place to think.

While I was sitting there, it occurred to me that there is a distinct difference between thinking and brooding. The kitchen was a place for thinking, being that it was indoors and protected from the worst of the elements. It was quiet, with a minimum of distractions. Brooding, however, is best done outside in the fresh air, where a man can see the sky and feel the smallness of his existence. Maybe there would be clouds. Clouds are conducive to brooding. 

Eric left his bottle of whiskey sitting on the kitchen table, which I took as an invitation and carried it outside to the front porch. I sat down in a rocking chair like the old man I was slowly becoming and poured myself a tall one. Crickets chirped in the woods while marlins chased mosquitos under a bruised purple sky. It was a good environment for brooding, I decided. And also for self-medication. The bottle of Knob Creek was probably the last of Eric’s stash, but that was okay. I’d give him a bottle from mine if he made an issue of it.

The whiskey warmed me up as I stared out into the darkening night. My thoughts began to wander, as they often did, back across all the long years to the war, and everything after. The demons were getting restless again. Time and distance had made them weaker, but they were still there. Waiting. I tossed back another drink.

If I had to point out one decision, one single instant of time that had caused my life to go so horribly wrong, I would have to say it was when I decided to leave the military. That was when the trouble started.

After leaving the Marines, I swore to myself I’d live a life of peace. I’d get a job, settle down, start a family, and enjoy all the things I had risked my life to defend. I even met a nice girl and got married, maybe a bit too quickly in retrospect. I thought I could turn away from the war and do something good with my life, decide for myself what kind of person I wanted to be. But instead, my marriage fell apart in less than a year, my wife kicked me out of the house and, stupid bastard that I was, I fell right back into my old habits again.

I remember sitting in a shitty fleabag motel room, staring back and forth between a piece of paper with a few numbers scribbled on it and the telephone. I had just gotten laid off from my
third shit-paying job in six months, and I only had enough cash in my pocket to keep a roof over my head for two more days. After that, I’d be out on my ass.

I didn’t know where to turn, so I called my old friend Rocco. He and I had worked together as a sniper team in Fallujah. He was good. Ruthless, efficient, and utterly lethal. Just like me.

He had sent me an e-mail not long after I left the Corps telling me about the contract work he was doing for the intelligence community. He’d told me if I ever wanted to get back in the shit, and make some serious money doing it, then I should give him a call. I didn’t relish the idea, but at the time it was either that or wind up homeless.

I thought about all those poor old bastards with greasy, scraggly beards who populated street corners with bottles of cheap booze in brown bags and grimy ball caps proclaiming them veterans. I thought about all the oblivious people that walked right by them every day without ever bothering to look down. I thought about how most of those people didn’t possess the faintest concept of what those veterans had been through and what they had given up for their country. A country that treated them like trash. I thought about how short of a distance it was to that place, and how quickly my seemingly solid life had fallen apart.

A choice between destitution and getting back on my feet was no choice at all. I picked up the phone.

“You got skills, bro,” Rocco told me, the crappy phone connection buzzing in my ear. There was laughter in his voice, like he’d known all along that I’d be calling sooner or later.

“A badass like you, you can write your own ticket, man. I can put in a good word and have an interview set up for you by the end of the week. Can you get down to D.C. by then?”

I told him I could. He gave me an address. I did a quick count of the precious few bills left in my wallet, and determined that I could indeed afford the bus fare. I packed up a bag, left my key on the front desk, and never looked back.

There were missions in Beirut, Tehran, Bali, and Bogota. A couple of surveillance jobs in London and Munich, and finally a six-week stay in a hospital after a botched rescue operation outside of Baghdad. That had been a bad one, the closest I had ever come to punching out. Shrapnel from an RPG cut a gash in my abdomen big enough for me to see my own guts. I still have nightmares about it.

Rocco came to visit me at Bethesda. He was pissed that the CIA had sent me into that snake pit on nothing more that the shit intel their man on the inside had provided. 

“That fucker was probably a double agent, you realize that, right?” He bounced his leg rapidly as he spoke, his pupils narrow as pinpoints from the cocaine he’d just snorted in the bathroom. I remember looking at that big Italian nose and wondering how long it would be before his mucous membranes wore thin and he started getting chronic nosebleeds.