Rough and Ready (22 page)

Just as they were about to leave the scene, Torolf thought he heard Hilda calling to him. It was his conscience tugging at him. In some ways, he felt as if he'd abandoned her, even though he had helped rid the Norselands of that scumbag, Steinolf. True, the guys hadn't left the women with buns in their ovens, as they'd unbelievably expected, but that was a good thing, not bad.

Now

that there was peace, the women would find husbands. All would be well.

Then, why am I so troubled?

"Where is he? Where is the lout? Toroooolf!"

Torolf and his buddies turned as one to see a fireman pulling something out of the mudslide. Creature from the Mud Lagoon, he joked to himself. But this was no joke. It was tall and slim and covered with mud from head to toes and small breasts in between.

"Oh… my… God!" He rushed forward and took her hand. "Hilda, is that you?"

"Who do you think it is, you bloody maggot?"

"Britta better not be hiding under that mud pile," Pretty Boy said, his face white with worry. They soon found out she wasn't there, which caused Pretty Boy to let loose with a loud exhale of relief.

Torolf grabbed the hose from Cage and began to wash the mud off of her. She screamed and squealed and cursed at him as he did her that favor. The whole time, his stunned brain kept repeating, Hilda is here. What am I gonna do with her? Hilda is here. What am I gonna do with her?

When he was done hosing her down, she kept rubbing her eyes. "Give me something to wipe the mud from my eyes. I can't see."

An EMT came up and handed Torolf a linen cloth. He wiped, but Hilda continued to complain that she couldn't see.

"Let me," the EMT said. Lifting her eyelids, one at a time, he stepped back and nodded some hidden message to his partner. To Torolf, he mouthed, "Blind." To Hilda, he said, "We've got to get you to a hospital, miss."

Hilda is here. And she's freakin' blind. What am I gonna do with her? What am I gonna do with her?

Over her protests that she wasn't going to any bloody "hospitium" and have monk healers prodding her body and bleeding her with leeches, he and two EMTs managed to get her into the ambulance and strap her down. One of the paramedics was on the phone, talking with a doctor, who advised him to sedate her before bringing her to the emergency room. Soon she was dead to the world, so to speak.

Hilda is here. And she's freakin' blind. What am I gonna do with her? What am I gonna do with her? "Blind? Hilda is blind?" he said to no one in particular.

"No, it must be some temporary thing from the shock. She'll get better. She has to. Then what? Talk about the need for an exit strategy! Oh, my God! We are in serious shit here."

"No, mon coeur" Cage said, patting him on the shoulder. "You are in serious shit here. We are free at last, free at last, thank God, thank God, we can go home at last."

The other guys laughed. Not him, though.

Hilda is here. And she's freakin' blind. And she's sure as shit gonna blame me.

What am I gonna do with her? What am I gonna do with her?

He gave the police and ambulance driver all the vitals and told Slick, "I've got to go to the hospital first. Hilda will be a madwoman."

"We'll all go with you." Cage squeezed his shoulder.

Once the ambulance took off and they completed their reports, barely avoiding a TV crew and newspapermen who'd just arrived, the five of them got into Slick's SUV.

"XO Gilman is ready to put you all in the brig for not answering your beepers.

Where the hell have you guys been?"

They all looked at each other, then began laughing hysterically.

"You wouldn't believe us if we told you," Torolf said.

"Try me."

"We were fighting a battle."

"Well, shiiiit, why didn't you invite me to come along? My ex-wife was in town, and I would have taken any excuse to kick butt somewhere else."

" 'Somewhere else' about says it all."

Hilda is here. And she's freakin' blind. And she's sure as shit gonna blame me.

And now I'm responsible for her, and I feel so damn bad. What am I gonna do with her? "What if Hilda never regains her sight?" he murmured aloud. "What if she's locked here in the future?"

Pretty Boy summed it up well. "One thing is clear in this whole damn mess.

You

are a classic case of FUBAR."

Yep! Fucked up beyond all recognition.

When they got to the emergency room, Torolf was the only one permitted to enter and then only because he claimed to be Hilda's fiancé. He felt like a vise was squeezing his heart when he saw her lying on a gurney. Straps restrained her across the forearms and chest, belly, and thighs. There was mud in her silvery hair. Her skin was ghostly white.

"Is she unconscious?" he asked a guy whose name tag ID'd him as John Flanigan, RN.

"We had to sedate her. She was screaming and flailing to beat the band, could have hurt herself or one of the orderlies. She claimed she was going to kill the lout if he didn't show up and take her out of here." Flanigan gave him a knowing look. "Don't suppose you're the lout?"

"In person. Has she been examined yet?"

"Yes. Dr. Hendershott over there can give you the lowdown."

He walked over to the nurse's station, where the middle-aged doctor was writing on a clipboard. Torolf introduced himself and again repeated—shudder, shudder—the fiancé story. After filling out some admission forms as best he could—How does one explain that a thousand-year-old woman doesn't have medical insurance?—the doctor took him into a small office.

"Ms. Berdottir has sustained a blow to the head. We need to hold her overnight…

maybe longer… to make sure her vital signs continue to be okay."

That sounded like good news. "So, she's not blind anymore?"

The doctor shook his head. "She still has vision problems, but that should be temporary. Of course, we'll have her checked out by a neurologist and ophthalmologist, if necessary. Don't worry, son. She should be back to normal in a day or two." The doctor paused and took in his mud-splattered clothing.

"Why

don't you go home and shower? Get a good sleep. Hopefully, I'll have good news for you when I make my rounds tomorrow morning about eleven."

Torolf shook his head vigorously. "Hilda is a stranger here. She'll be frantic if I'm not there when she awakens."

The doctor shrugged. "We're going to keep her sedated, give her body and brain a chance to rest. She won't even know you're there."

"When do you think the tranquilizers will wear off?"

Another shrug from the doctor. "Eight a.m. or so. When the nurses change shifts would be my guess."

Torolf glanced at his watch. It was four p.m. "Nah, I think I better stick around."

When he went out to the waiting room, he told the guys to head back, that he was going to stay. They agreed reluctantly.

By eleven, Hilda still hadn't awakened. Once again, he was told, this time by the night nurse, that Hilda would not be awakening till morning because of the orders for sedation every three hours.

Torolf thought about the necessity of reporting in to the base, a two-hour drive. I could go to Coronado, take care of business, and be back in plenty of time, he convinced himself.

So Torolf left.

Big, big mistake.

She was in an alien place…

Hilda was frantic.

She was blind. She was strapped to some kind of mattress. There was an odd, unfamiliar scent in the air. Every time she awakened, screaming for answers, there were soothing voices and a prick in her arm, immediately followed by deep sleep.

Where is the lout?

What did he do to me?

Oh, gods, what if I am really blind? I would fain be dead than blind.

The next time she emerged from the strange sleep, she forced herself to remain calm lest they give her the magic jab her in the arm again. Pretending to still be asleep, she listened to the voices. There appeared to be two, a male and a female.

"No change, dock-whore. Mzzz Berdottir gets frantic and flailing every time she awakens."

"Has her fee-ant-say returned yet? Someone's got to give an explanation for these blood results. I've never seen anything like it before in my entire career."

"We're running another series right now. There must be a mistake."

"Absolutely." The woman giggled then. "You won't believe what Dick Phillips down in the lab believes. He thinks we've got an ale-yen on our hands."

"God! Is he the loony who came from the National Center for Alien Research?"

"Yeah. He's a good tack-nit-shun, though, except when he goes off on one of these ale-yen tangents."

Hilda's brain was hurting, and not just from the blow suffered in the mudslide.

She was confused. Where was this hospitium she was in? The closest hospitium to The Sanctuary that she knew of was days distant at Oslofjord. These people in her room… they spoke an English unlike the Saxon English she was familiar with.

She could understand much of it, except for the occasional word, like ale-yen, dock-whore and fee-ant-say.

She moaned and opened her eyes. All she saw was a gray haze, but that was an improvement over the blackness she'd seen before. Her arms were strapped down, which caused her to panic, but she tamped that down, merely clenching her fists.

"Where am I?"

"You're awake?" the man said. "That's good, that's good. How do you feel?"

"The sedative shouldn't have worn off yet," the woman said, probably to the dock-whore.

"Terrible. I cannot see."

"That will probably pass. Nurse, get her bee-pee and temp."

More words I do not understand. "Where am I?" she repeated.

"Holy Cross Hospital. You've had an accident, but we're taking good care of you.

I'm Dock-whore Hendershott, and your nurse is Miss Wilson. Don't worry.

You're

in good hands."

Good hands? Since when are a whore's hands good hands? And since when are there male whores? Well, I am learning new things every day. If a woman can pleasure herself, why can there not be male whores? "Holy Cross Hospitium? I have ne'er heard of such a place here in the Norselands."

The dock-whore's voice sounded worried, and she thought she heard him whisper to his nurse in a worried voice, "Hall-loose-nation." He patted Hilda's hand and asked, "Norselands? Do you mean Norway?"

"Yea, Norway." The idiot. An idiot whore.

"You're not in Norway. You're in Ah-mare-eek-ha."

"Whaaat?" The land that Torolf spoke of…a land far away. "How can that be?"

"Now, relax, dear. Would you like a drink of water?"

"Yea, I would." Or a cup of mead. A big cup.

"Nurse," he said.

Something was stuck into her mouth. She gagged. When it was pulled out, she snapped, "What was that? I asked for water."

"It's just a straw, honey," the woman said, placing the object into her mouth again. "Just suck."

She did and surprisingly, water came up. Why they couldn't have just put a cup to her mouth was beyond her comprehension.

"How long will it be afore my sight comes back?"

There was a pause. Then, "No telling right now. We need to run more tests. It might come right back in an instant. Or it might… uh, take months."

"Months?" she screeched, bucking against the straps. "Where is Torolf? I want Torolf. Get the lout so I may kill him."

Hilda felt another jab in her arm, and she drifted back to sleep. Not surprisingly, she dreamed of putting her hands around the neck of the lout, but then the dream turned on itself, and it was his hands on her neck… and everywhere else on her body. How could she dislike a man so much who made her feel so good?

It was a nightmare, not a dream.

And, in the midst of that nightmare, she heard two men talking in whispers over her… neither of them the dock-whore who had been there before.

"I don't know, Dick, she looks pretty normal to me."

"Yeah, but you haven't seen her blood tests. There's no blood type in existence like hers. It's like the dean-nay you get from ancient artifacts, thousands of years old. Of course, they think it's just a mistake here, and they'll be retesting in the morning. The dock-whores don't see any urgency yet, because apparently this oddball type is compatible with type B, and besides she hasn't had an open wound yet."

"And you think she's an ale-yen?"

"Could be. Must be. It's worth investigating. But we've gotta find a way to get her to the lab in Dee See. I've already alerted the board."

"The hospital will never release her to us, and I doubt she'd come on her own."

An evil laugh. "Who could blame her? Willingly submitting to dice-section? I…

don't… think… so."

"We'll wait for the right chance and slip her out. Late tonight. Can you get a van ready that quick?"

"Yep."

"This could be our greatest discovery… the one thing that convinces the world there really are ale-yens."

The voices drifted away.

Hilda was left with the disquieting sense that danger lurked. They wanted to take her somewhere and perform some tests, apparently without her permission.

Where is Torolf?

And then the lout came strolling in… ELEVEN hours later…

Torolf arrived at the hospital at ten a.m. the next day.

The reaming he and his teammates had gotten from their commanding officer at the Special Warfare Center took longer than he'd expected. Where the hell had they been the past few weeks, out of beeper range? Their explanation that they'd been in Norway hadn't cut any ice. Punishment would be in the future; Gig Squad had been mentioned more than once. They had one week to get ready to muster out again on a new deployment. One week! He sure as hell hoped he had Hilda back in eleventh-century Norway by then, or settled God only knows where.

He'd left Coronado, stopped at his apartment to shower and change clothes, and called his sister-in-law, asking her to take care of Slut a few days more.

Luckily, Alison hadn't been at home, and he'd been able to leave a message on her answering machine.

He had inquired by phone about Hilda's condition several times, and he'd been assured that she still slept. The doctor on duty, not Dr. Hendershott, had told him that Hilda was moved to another floor, no longer needing critical care. A good sign, in Torolf's opinion.