Troubleshooters 16.8 - Free Fall (3 page)

 “Oh, good,” Adam said darkly. “A jump. Thanks for sharing. God, I hate jump days.”

 Eden did, too. The idea of Izzy leaping from a plane and falling to earth with only a piece of fabric to keep him from splattering on the hard ground below . . . “I shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “But . . .”

 “You had to tell someone,” Adam guessed, “and you didn’t want to tell Jenn, because God forbid the anxiety makes that baby suddenly pop out of her—which is crazy-thinking, by the way? That baby’s not coming out until it’s good and ready. But whatever, and yay,
I
won the prize. Jump day. Whoo-hoo!” His laughter was a mix of admiration and disgust. “You and I are so much alike, it’s scary.”

 “Maybe after you pick up Ben,” Eden said, “you could, you know, swing past the base?”

 “Casually drop by. It’s already on my to-do list,” Adam reported. “I’ll text you when I know they’re safely on the ground. And oh, yeah? As long as you’re up in wine country, Toots, Tony likes a full-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon. And I like whatever Tony likes, so . . .”

 “Got it,” Eden said. “Thanks, Pookie. Glare at Ben for me.”

 “That you’ll have to do yourself,” he said, and then out-obnoxious-nicknamed her by dropping a “Later, Cupcake,” before cutting the connection.

 As Eden hung up, too, she could feel Jenn watching her, so she forced another smile and reported, “Adam’s gonna get Ben.”

 And then she went and got herself another cup of coffee, because it was going to be a long,
long
morning.

****

Chapter Five

 Izzy tried to slow his dive by opening up his arms and legs just before he nearly hit the edge of Tony’s canopy.

 This was not the right way to do this—get tangled in the para-fucking-chute and kill them both—but it was better than missing him.

 Tony hadn’t cut away—hypoxia’s loss of oxygen to the brain could make the smartest men stupid—and Izzy grabbed on to anything he could—Tony, his pack, the lines—anything. Izzy clenched his entire body and clung like a motherfucker, refusing to let go, locking himself around his teammate with his arms and legs, wishing he wasn’t wearing these gloves so he could grip with his fingertips, too, but knowing that even if he’d managed to pull them off during that dive, his hands would’ve frozen and been even more useless than they currently were.

 The chute miraculously held, bouncing under his sudden additional weight, and then dropping—marginally—faster than the other six SEALs.

 Tony’s eyes were open, but no one was home. You’d think the jolt of suddenly being hit by a human bullet would’ve woken the guy up, but he’d completely checked into the stupor suite at the Hotel Hypoxia.

 Izzy heard the chatter over his radio headset—the chief asking him for Tony’s condition, and the CO already talking up the chain of command, requesting medical assistance on the ground.

 Except they were jumping into the desert, which was, as the word implied, deserted. They were many miles from the base. Even if the Navy immediately sent a Blackhawk, Izzy and Tony were gonna hit the ground first.

 “He’s in trouble, boss,” Izzy reported as he quickly fumbled some of his favorite short bungee cords free from his vest and hooked himself to Tony. He kept his legs locked around him, too, as he then checked the SEAL’s mask and the tube leading to his oxygen bottle. Step one in troubleshooting was always to tap the mic and say
Is this thing on . .
.
?

 Everything was correctly attached, and the apparatus appeared to be working—except for the fact that Tony clearly wasn’t getting enough O2. The malfunction might’ve been with the gear, or it might’ve been with Tony himself—couldn’t count that out. Not yet, anyway.

 Tick tock. Time was steadfastly marching forward the way time was wont to do, and there was only so long a human could exist without oxygen.

 Izzy moved quickly to his plan B and unplugged Tony’s hose from the O2 tank connector in his vest. “Might need a portable decompression chamber,” he announced over his mic. “Or two. And a hospital corpsman on the ground would be nice.” Hint, hint, Chief Lopez. “And maybe a coupla pizzas. I wouldn’t say no to extra cheese.”

 “A decom
press
ion . . . ?” he heard Big Mac echo, along with Chief Lopez’s warning, “Zanella, what the hell . . . ?” and Danny’s “Zanella, are you fucking kidding me!”

 They weren’t stupid. They all knew exactly what he was going to do. It was what they would do, too, if they were here, clinging to Tony V. like a giant space monkey.

 And now the conversation was temporarily over because Izzy was holding his breath after unfastening his own tube from his bottle’s connector in his vest. He popped Tony’s hose into his, hoping the other man was still capable of drawing air into his lungs by his lonesome.

 But . . . Nothing. He got nothing from the T-man.

 So he exhaled hard as he unfastened Tony’s hose and reattached his own, drawing in a deep lungful of the good ol’ O2 before popping both of their masks free.

 Fuck it was cold, but death was even colder. He covered Tony’s icy mouth and nose with his mouth and forced the damn oxygen into him. Izzy slapped his mask back onto his own face to draw another breath—rinsing and repeating one, two, three more times before Tony coughed and blinked and even retched a little.

 And then—oh, good, because this wasn’t hard enough—he began to struggle, trying to get away from Izzy.

 There was something called the
oxygen paradox
, and it basically went like this: When treating hypoxia with oxygen, the symptoms sometimes got worse right before they got better. And although T was now breathing on his own, he was still badly disoriented. Also, he was wildly sucking in this thin-ass non-air, which wasn’t helping the sitch.

 Izzy knew a thing or two about fighting with a Navy SEAL, even a groggy and weak one. Bungee cords or not, it was only a matter of time before Tony wrenched his ass free, sending Izzy back into a sky-dive while Tony slowly floated back into hypoxia and certain death.

 Arguing with him wasn’t going to get it done. There was really only one way to guarantee Tony would make it to the ground still alive.

 Izzy slapped the mask back onto Tony’s face, connected T’s tube to Izzy’s tank, and then went for the three-ring release that would cut away Tony’s chute and send them back into free fall.

 Together.

 It was a gamble—a big one—the assumption that breathing Izzy’s O2 would bring Tony back to cognizance in enough time so he’d return the favor and not let Izzy die. But it was the only way they’d both survive, and Izzy was willing to take that risk.

 As they plummeted to earth, with Izzy’s legs still locked around Tony, as Tony still flailed and tried to shake him free, Izzy recognized his own telling signals of hypoxia as he breathed the frozen, too-thin not-quite-air.

 The brilliant sky took on a haze of red, and Izzy could feel his heart accelerating as his mind sputtered and disconnected to a place where nothing hurt and nothing mattered because he simply didn’t care. “Z . . . out,” he managed to say, even as a part of him scoffed at the lameness of what could well be his final words before shuffling off this mortal coil.

 Because he did. He cared. Truly, madly, deeply.

 Eden.
Eden
. Izzy focused on the sound of his heartbeat racing in his ears, as his body attempted to find the oxygen he needed from somewhere, anywhere. Eden.
Eden
.

 Way in the distance, tinny and metallic, a song played in his head.

 
Making love with you has left me peaceful, warm, and tired . . .

 
Okay, those lyrics weren’t going to help him stay awake. Izzy fast-forwarded to the refrain and forced himself to loudly sing along.

****

Chapter Six

 The other kid was a little bit shorter than Ben, but was probably half again his weight.

 Big guy. Broad shoulders, solidly built.

 A football player.

 Of course.

 As Adam went into the high school office, both boys were slouched in hard plastic chairs that were part of a row lined up against the wall, in what was clearly the designated punishment zone. He’d sat in similar seats plenty of times during his own high school years, even though he’d dropped out when he was only sixteen. Seriously, the colors and even the smell—he’d caught the first whiff of that unique public school aroma right when he’d walked past the guard and into the building—were enough to trigger flashbacks.

 With luck, he wouldn’t have to be here for long.

 Eden’s little brother Ben and his fight-club adversary had left three of those ugly plastic seats empty, like a no man’s land between them, as they both held medical icepacks against various body parts.

 The football star was nursing both a bloody nose and his crotch, while Ben was icing the knuckles of his right hand and the side of his head.

 Ben looked up as the door closed behind Adam, a defiant apology in his blue eyes. His face also held a hint of relief—probably that it was Adam who’d come instead of his brother Dan or Izzy. He knew that Adam’s can of whoop-ass was considerably smaller for a whole slew of reasons.

 The football player’s focus remained on the industrial tile floor but his assholeishness wafted off of him in near visible waves. His casual indifference was almost laughably feigned. And Adam knew from his own past experience of having gotten the crap beaten out of him, that this kid was both frightened
and
mean. And considering the size difference between the two boys, it was a miracle that Ben wasn’t in the hospital.

 “Are you okay?” Adam asked.

 “Yeah.” Ben took the ice away from his head. “But there’s a pretty big bump.”

 Adam leaned forward, thinking he would probably have to feel it, but there it was, visible to the naked eye. “Holy shit,” he said. There was an egg, like something from a cartoon, just above Ben’s ear.

 The frosty-haired school receptionist glared in response to his language, and the football star himself even glanced up. His eyes widened in what Adam had come to recognize as home-team recognition.

 And wasn’t
that
a surprise.

 Yeah, Adam may have been a movie star. But, no, as an out, gay actor, he’d mostly appeared in gay-themed indie films—with the exception of the more mainstream
American Hero
, the story of a gay soldier and the man he’d fallen in love with, set in war-torn Europe during World War Two.

 Haters had publicly boycotted that film due to its alleged hot man-on-man action, AKA several very sweet and tender kisses, several slightly more passionate kisses, and several tastefully filmed, fade-to-black love scenes between Adam and the actor playing his true love.

 But although that movie was still a critical favorite, it had been years since the firestorm fueled by its release.

 So the football star
may
have seen Adam’s photo on his local hate group’s Facebook page, or—and the
or
was
way
more likely—this young man spent a significant amount of time locked in the privacy of his bedroom, streaming boy-meets-boy rom-coms and angsty coming-out dramas on his computer, and probably whacking off to the more intimate scenes.

 As the boy refocused his gaze back on the floor, Adam took a longer look at him, because a bump like that hadn’t just magically appeared on Ben’s head. Whoever had put it there had had a serious boatload of intent to harm.

 In a world that celebrated blond hair, blue eyes and a square jaw, this boy might’ve been called handsome, but there was something slightly . . .
off
about him.

 Adam let himself stare openly, knowing from experience just how disconcerting that could be. And sure enough the kid glanced up at him again and . . .

 Bingo—it was his eyes. The pale blue color didn’t help, but it was the lack of life within that flattened them and made him seem cold and dead.

 He was destined for greatness, provided his life’s goal was to be a serial killer or the model for a Neo-Nazi recruitment poster.

 But then Adam noticed the array of scars on the boy’s face. One above his left eyebrow, one next to his nose, on his right cheek, on his chin, on his left cheek, too . . .

 Just as Ben’s bump hadn’t gotten there on its own, those scars hadn’t magically appeared, either.

 Adam had gotten the mean part right, but he’d greatly underestimated the level and degree of this kid’s well-grounded fear.

 Jesus.

 As the football player’s gaze slithered back to the safety of the floor, Adam sat down next to Ben, who reported, “The nurse has been checking me regularly for a concussion. I’m not supposed to sleep—of course the minute she says that, I immediately need a nap.”

 “Don’t they, like, take you to the hospital when you’ve had a head injury?” Adam asked.

 “You got here pretty fast,” Ben said.

 “How about your blood sugar levels?” Ben’s diabetes scared Adam more than any ass-kicking from a homophobe.

 “I checked it while I was in the nurse’s office,” Ben reassured him. “I’m good. I had a little orange juice.”

 “Doesn’t the fact that you had to have a little orange juice mean you’re
not
good?” Adam countered.

 “No, it just means it’s a normal day,” Ben said. “I check levels pretty regularly. It’s not a big deal.”

 “So, are you, like, his boyfriend?” the football player spoke in a tone that was the very definition of a vocal sneer. It was so gloriously exact, Adam almost stopped and asked him to say it again so he could pay full attention and put it in his actor’s toolbox. “That’s disgusting. He’s, like, fourteen, and you’re, like, forty.”

 “Oh, I am
not
forty,” Adam said indignantly. “FYI, he’s sixteen and he’s my Navy SEAL fiancé’s teammates’ brother—S apostrophe on that team-mates’,
Junior
, because there are two of them related to Ben. And did I mention they were Navy SEALs?
Three
Navy SEALs, along with my fiancé, the
Navy
.
SEAL
.”

 So much for being careful until DADT was over for good.