Click: two minutes
The fourth shot hit me in the back. I didn’t at once feel pain, only the jolting impact, which drove me against the truck, my face inches from the timer.
Maybe it was the fifth shot, maybe the sixth, that slapped into one of the bricks of plastic explosive with a flat, wet sound.
A bullet wouldn’t trigger it. Only an electrical charge.
The two detonation wires were set six or eight inches apart. Was one positive and the other negative? Or was one just a backup in case the first wire failed to carry the detonating pulse? I didn’t know if I had to yank out just one or both.
Maybe it was the sixth shot, maybe the seventh, that again tore into my back. This time pain hammered me, plenty of it, excruciating.
As I sagged from the brutal impact of the bullet, I seized both wires, and as I fell backward, I jerked them out of the explosives, pulling the timer and the batteries and the entire detonator package with me.
Turning as I fell, I hit the floor on my side, facing the truck ramp. The shooter had ascended farther to get a better shot.
Though he could have finished me with one additional round, he turned away and sprinted down the ramp.
The foreman roared past me and descended the ramp in a forklift, somewhat protected from gunfire by the raised cargo tines and their armature.
I didn’t believe that the shooter had fled from the forklift. He wanted to get out of there because he couldn’t quite see what I had done to the detonator. He intended to escape the underground docks and the garage, and get as far away as luck allowed.
Worried people hurried to me.
The kitchen timer still functioned. It lay on the floor, inches from my face. Click: one minute.
Already my pain was subsiding; however, I was cold. Surprisingly cold. The underground loading docks and the receiving room relied on passive cooling, no air conditioning, yet I was positively chilly.
People were kneeling beside me, talking to me. They seemed to be speaking a host of foreign languages because I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Funny—to be so cold in the Mojave.
I never heard the kitchen timer click to zero.
STORMY LLEWELLYN AND I HAD MOVED on from boot camp to our second of three lives. We were having great adventures together in the next world.
Most were lovely romantic journeys to exotic misty places, with amusing incidents full of eccentric characters, including Mr. Indiana Jones, who would not admit that he was really Harrison Ford, and Luke Skywalker, and even my Aunt Cymry, who greatly resembled Jabba the Hut but was wonderfully nice, and Elvis, of course.
Other experiences were stranger, darker, full of thunder and the smell of blood and slinking packs of bodachs with whom my mother sometimes ran on all fours.
From time to time I would be aware of God and His angels looking down upon me from the sky of this new world. They had huge, looming faces that were a cool, pleasant shade of green—occasionally white —though they had no features other than their eyes. With no mouths or noses, they should have been frightening, but they projected love and caring, and I always tried to smile at them before they dissolved back into the clouds.
Eventually I regained enough clarity of mind to realize that I had come through surgery and was in a hospital bed in a cubicle in the intensive-care unit at County General.
I had not been promoted from boot camp, after all.
God and the angels had been doctors and nurses behind their masks. Cymry, wherever she might be, probably didn’t resemble Jabba the Hut in the least.
When a nurse entered my cubicle in response to changes in the telemetry data from my heart monitor, she said, “Look who’s awake. Do you know your name?”
I nodded.
“Can you tell me what it is?”
I didn’t realize how weak I was until I tried to respond. My voice sounded thin and thready. “Odd Thomas.”
As she fussed over me and told me that I was some kind of hero and assured me that I would be fine, I said, “Stormy,” in a broken whisper.
I had been afraid to pronounce her name. Afraid of what terrible news I might be bringing down on myself. The name is so lovely to me, however, that immediately I liked the feel of it on my tongue once I had the nerve to speak it.
The nurse seemed to think that I’d complained of a sore throat, and as she suggested that I might be allowed to let a chip or two of ice melt in my mouth, I shook my head as adamantly as I could and said, “Stormy. I want to see Stormy Llewellyn.”
My heart raced. I could hear the soft and rapid beep-beep-beep from the heart monitor.
The nurse brought a doctor to examine me. He appeared to be awestruck in my presence, a reaction to which no fry cook in the world is accustomed and with which none could be comfortable.
He used that word hero too much, and in my wheezy way, I asked him not to use it again.
I felt crushingly tired. I didn’t want to fall asleep before I’d seen Stormy. I asked them to bring her to me.
Their lack of an immediate response to my request scared me again. When my heart thumped hard, my wounds throbbed in sympathy, in spite of any painkillers I was receiving.
They were worried that even a five-minute visit would put too much strain on me, but I pleaded, and they let her come into the ICU.
At the sight of her, I cried.
She cried, too. Those black Egyptian eyes.
I was too weak to reach out to her. She slipped a hand through the bed rail, pressed it atop mine. I found the strength to curl my fingers into hers, a love knot.
For hours, she had been sitting out in the ICU waiting room in the Burke & Bailey’s uniform that she dislikes so much. Pink shoes, white socks, pink skirt, pink-and-white blouse.
I told her that this must be the most cheerful outfit ever seen in the ICU waiting room, and she informed me that Little Ozzie was out there right now, sitting on two chairs, wearing yellow pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Viola was out there, too. And Terri Stambaugh.
When I asked her why she wasn’t wearing her perky pink cap, she put a hand to her head in surprise, for the first time realizing that she didn’t have it. Lost in the chaos at the mall.
I closed my eyes and wept not with joy but with bitterness. Her hand tightened on mine, and she gave me the strength to sleep and to risk my dreams of demons.
Later she returned for another five-minute visit, and when she said that we would need to postpone the wedding, I pushed
