Chapter Two
The ringing wasn't only in my head as I woke. The phone. Fred was no longer on my chest and my right arm was asleep, so when I tried to lever myself up off the couch, it folded under me and I wound up between the coffee table and the couch.
I used my other arm to shove myself onto hands and knees and then answered the phone. I could smell breakfast cooking somewhere in the building and it made my stomach growl.
"Hello, and what time is it?"
I sat down in the chair next to the phone table and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.
"Eight-thirty, sir," said a woman, who then officiously asked for me by name.
"You got me. Who's this?"
"This is Officer Parks, DPD. Do you happen to know if your car is missing, sir?"
Warnings went off in my head as I remembered the night before. I decided to be cautious with information, just in case. Who'd believe me?
"Sure do. It's somewhere along I-30, probably just as dead as I left it. Are you going to tow it someplace? Will I have to pay to get it out of the pound?"
"Ah... No sir, you won't receive a ticket. May I ask how you got home?"
To simplify my explanation I said, "A woman picked me up on I-30."
I thought I heard a noise from the kitchen and figured Fred was nosing around for something edible.
"I see," said the lady cop, "It really wasn't too smart of her to pick up a stranger."
"Oh, I dunno, she seemed pretty capable to me."
I heard another small noise from the kitchen.
"Sir, when would be a good time for you to come down to the station this morning?"
"This morning isn't so good, ma'am. I don't have a car at the moment, you know."
"I quite understand, sir," she said smoothly, "We have an officer who will pick you up if you'd prefer."
I noted her use of 'will' instead of 'can' or 'could' and continued to play dumb.
"Will I be arrested? It's off the road, isn't it? It was the middle of the night. There wasn't much else I could do."
Officer Parks hastened to clarify for me that I was not going to be arrested and that the location of the car wasn't a problem. She asked if I'd read the paper this morning.
I said as how since she had just wakened me, that was unlikely, so she went on to explain that there had been an incident on the highway and the police were investigating it, and they just wanted to ask me a few questions.
We compromised with plans for a cop picking me up a little after noon to take me to the station. I made sure that she knew I wanted a ride home, too.
Replacing the phone, I headed for the bathroom with the smell of someone's eggs cooking making me think about breakfast.
Pausing at the front door to let Fred out, I grabbed the paper off the mat and tossed it at the couch. Whatever had been written about the previous night's events could wait until I'd taken a leak and organized a cup of coffee.
I had aches and twinges of pain everywhere as I walked to the bathroom. I noticed my clothes were filthy and that there was blood on my shirt as I stood over the pot. That meant that last night wasn't altogether a bad dream.
I took off my clothes and put on my swimsuit that I'd left hanging on a faucet handle to dry, then made a pile of the stuff from my pockets and dumped the clothes in the bathtub to be dealt with later. There was dried blood on my belt knife. I took a moment to scrub it in the sink.
I was lost in trying to recall exactly what had happened out there on the road as I headed to the kitchen, so I was completely unprepared for what I found.
There was the woman of last night, sliding eggs out of a pan and onto a plate. She was wearing snug jeans and one of those 'University of Someplace' sweatshirts and she was standing in my kitchen, softly laughing at my expression.
I almost asked how she got in, then noticed the open window. Six floors up wouldn't mean much to her, would it?
"A woman picked you up on the road, huh? Well, that's true enough. I'm April."
She brushed past me with the plates on her way to the dining table.
"I already know who you are, Ed. I looked at your electric bill after I let myself in."
She called over her shoulder for me to bring the coffee and cups and whatever else I thought we'd need.
I tried not to stare during breakfast, but she was SO beautiful. I was lost in her eyes as memories of the night before kept cycling through my head. April seemed rather amused by the attention. Her foot bumped my shin.
"Hey," she said, "Eat. I'm not going anywhere for a while. Stare later."
I snapped out of my reveries and forked up some egg. I found that I could eat if I didn't look at her too often or too long at one time. When we'd finished breakfast, I began to gather up the dishes, waving her off as she offered to help.
"You cooked, I'll clean," I said.
She smiled and I froze about halfway to the kitchen, my hands full of dishes. God, she was beautiful.
A fork fell off a plate and broke the spell by just missing my foot and sliding under the refrigerator. With my hands full, I couldn't pick it up, so I put the dishes on the counter by the sink and started back for it just as April rose from her chair.
April leaned to wrap her arms around the fridge, then lifted it upward with apparently very little effort. She casually reached a toe under the fridge and slid the fork clear, then set the fridge down as gently as she had lifted it.
I said nothing. Perhaps my eyes were open a bit wider than usual as April approached me with the fork. It seemed that every time I looked at her I became mesmerized by her. I wondered if I could ever look at her enough.
We soaked up the first pot of coffee before the dishes were done, so I put together another pot. When it was ready, I carried it to the table and poured us each a fresh cup, then sat. April had been studying me for some time as I worked in the kitchen.
I wondered what she was thinking, and I worried a little, the same way I worried back in Junior High when Connie looked at me, hoping I could measure up to some unknown standards in her mind.
On the other hand, being there seemed to suit her purposes. 'Wait and watch', I told myself.
April began the conversation. "Do you know anything about me?"
"Not much," I said, "What you've told me this morning is about it, I guess. Your name is April, you fly, you're, um... unique, and you're very beautiful."
She made a face that said, 'yeah, we've kind of covered that' and seemed fairly surprised at my ignorance.
I shrugged. "Sorry. I've sort of been out of touch for most of the last decade. Stories about superwomen in America didn't seem too important in the middle of Africa."
"You didn't see anything in the papers or on TV?"
"No TV in the bush and not much news that didn't have to do with African issues."
"Africa. The bush? What were you doing there for so long?"
It has been my experience that people who don't know much about Africa don't usually like the answers they receive to such questions.
"You really want to know? You probably won't enjoy hearing about it, ma'am."
She gazed across the table at me for a moment, then said, "Yeah. I'd like to know."
For some reason, I felt a slight sense of embarrassment as I told her of my years as a medic in the mercenary forces in and around several countries.
"So why'd you stop?" she asked bluntly, "You couldn't have run out of sick and wounded in a place like that."
"No," I said, smiling, "Never happen. I think wars will go on over there until there's only one live African left or until the continent sinks, which is more likely."
Then I told her about the school bus convoy that had been the target of mayhem one morning. I told her about the five busloads of M'Buto kids who'd been shot and hacked all to hell because of a tribal dispute, how quickly I'd run out of medical supplies, and the screams of the living and the silence of the dead.
I also told her how I'd tried to drown in several flavors of booze for a week or so afterward, of my self-prescribed "retirement", the loneliness when you're no longer of your own kind and belong to no other kind, and what it had been like to try to find a meaningful place in things in the civilian world.
I laughed. "The 'previous employment history' on a job application... There's no point in lying to them 'cause they'll check you out, and I didn't officially exist from 1970 until I returned to the U.S."
Then I told her about the farm I'd bought in Mesquite, Texas. I don't love the land there, or think it's particularly beautiful, but I'd helped one of my teachers install herself there when I was 16.
She remarried and moved to San Antonio and the farm had been rented out for years. It was for sale when I went to look her up. I don't really know why I bought it.
I tried living there for a while, but it was full of memories of a summer spent helping that 'older woman' (26 at the time) fix the place up and making sweet, lingering love with her almost every evening or weekend afternoon.
Sound good? About a week there was more than enough. I rented it out and got an apartment in North Dallas.
There'd been a few women who tried me more out of curiosity, I think, than anything else. Cute, soft, fluffy, and generally senseless women who spent their off time by the pool, preening or tanning to keep their bait fresh.
They were 'been nowhere, done nothing' sort of people who become somewhat uncomfortable around people who haven't lived fairly ordinary lives. It makes them wonder what they've missed, I guess, or makes them resent the fact that they never got out and around more in life.
April listened to all of it, then said, "History. All that can be no more than history if you want it to be. I saw a man attack an Aktion Beta armed with a particle rifle last night. What's more, he won. Above all that, he did it to save me."
A what? I knew what a particle beam was, more or less, but what the hell was an Aktion Beta?
"What the hell is an Aktion Beta?" I asked her, "And don't forget I was doing it to save me, too."
"Did you shove me aside when the Beta aimed at me? Did you charge up the slope with nothing but a handful of dirt as a weapon? Did you hang on and think of a way to succeed when there really didn't seem to be one?"
"Well," I said, fidgeting a bit, "I didn't have time to come up with a better plan. So what's a Beta? Other than big, strong, and all that?"
"Oh, yeah," she said, "All that. And then some, where you're concerned."
April told me about Aktions being genetically human -- but vastly enhanced and bred for war -- and of her own race, also genetically enhanced, but trained to protect homeworlds.
It was a lot to absorb or even believe, but she seemed to be the living proof.
She concluded with a smile, "And, by the way, you're stuck with me now because you risked your life for me."
I blinked at that. She explained the custom of her people. At first, it seemed a bit hokey to me. How many times had I saved someone or been saved in 27 years of war? We'd just considered that sort of thing proper conduct in the field.
Yet here was a fabulous woman who probably hadn't been in serious danger anyway telling me that I had a claim on her because I did what I felt was needed to try to save us both. I told her how I felt about all this.
"I could be passing up a wonderful opportunity here," I said with a wry grin, "But I don't think I can work with that. I'm very happy to have met you and glad to have been of service, ma'am. You want to pay me back? Drop by now and then for a visit. From what you've told me, I'd just be a liability to you the first time one of the bad guys grabbed me."
April's face changed and I was sure I'd pissed her off by treating the matter too lightly, even though I hadn't meant to. The coffee cup in her hand exploded and her other hand was squeezed the metal arm of the chair so that it squealed.
Her eyes flashed brilliantly and I felt a warming sensation across my chest. I could smell singed hair and knew that I had, indeed, pissed her off.
"You're right but you're wrong," she said, enunciating every word distinctly, "You fully believed I was in danger and placed yourself between me and that danger at the obvious risk of your own life. That makes it a point of personal honor for me. Not many have refused such a gift as I offer you."
April forced her fingers open and let the cup parts dribble on the table, then forced her other hand to release the chair. She laced her fingers together under her chin, elbows on the table, and gazed at me.
I did NOT say, "...and maybe not many lived to tell of refusing..."
Instead, I placed my hand on her arm. I looked right into her eyes as I apologized, then said, "I refused an obligation. Yours. You don't need personal liabilities, April. You have the whole world's butt to cover. What I'm saying is only that I'll just be in the way like a child in a combat zone, needing protection all the time. I'm too squashable."
Her impassive stare made me wonder if I was getting through to her.
"April," I continued, "I'd just become a target because if they could get to me, they'd have gotten past you to do it. Or they'd be using me as bait. How would you feel about that? Remember who carried who home last night? I may be a real bad-ass in my world, but in yours I'd be almost helpless without your constant protection."
April sat very still for a moment, as if considering her next words carefully.
"I realize that would be the case as you are now." The last four words were separately and distinctly pronounced. She continued, "But I can change you, enhance you, so that you wouldn't be quite so...squashable."
"Uh, huh," I said, sitting down. "Strong enough and tough enough to take on an Aktion Beta with reason to believe I'd win?"
She nodded slightly. I thought about things as I got April another mug and refilled our coffees.
"Tell you what, milady... You're as close to a real goddess as I'm ever likely to meet, so if you can make me even reasonably useful to you and show me that I won't become a burden or a risk to you, I'll go for it. If that's what you really want, and aren't just following some old social custom, I'm all yours."
I waited for her response, which wasn't long in coming. One eyebrow rose as she sipped from my coffee cup.
"Do you always question everything you're offered?" she asked.
"Yeah, usually," I said, "But just tell me what to expect. Nothing like this comes without a big price. Do I have to spend a month in some kind of gene-machine or get a bunch of shots or what? Doesn't matter. Whatever it is, I'll do it."
I couldn't figure out what I'd said that was so damned funny that a goddess would choke on her coffee and roll on the floor laughing.
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