Dreamboat Ch. 08

Usual standard declarations about age, ownership etc. apply here.

Welcome back to a rather strange life on the ocean wave.

If you haven't read chapters 1-7, then this is going to be like trying to climb that new climbing wall at the gym by starting halfway up it – either way is hard. So go back and give them a try. Just click on my name and choose. You'll enjoy it a whole lot more.

This one took much longer than I expected, as things became convoluted in my mind as well as in the story. Strange, but true. Plus, it's much longer once again. More bang for your buck as they say. And sex is back on the menu – so, yay, even more bang!

So, sit cross-legged in the circle, with the fire warming your face and hands, as I dance naked around it for your edification and delight. Only kidding, I'm the guy on the other side of the fire with my face in the flickering shadows, sitting there comfortably about to tell you a story. You get to have your say afterwards, so get your marshmallow-onnastick into the fire, sit back and listen...

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Lachlan Reid felt a fresh surge of agony from his back, enough to bring him back from a long sleep. He lay very still, and tried to work out what was happening. The first RPG strike had come in and taken out Peterson and Gomez on the roof. There was nothing anyone could do to help them. Their bodies had fallen, along with the rest of the roof, into the dining room of the main residence in the compound. The second strike had taken out Gatts at the gate, evaporating him into a cloud of red mist.

Then the east wall had gone down to another RPG and the compound was open to the street, deserted as it was, dotted here and there with the twisted metal of someone's motoring dreams.

The surviving five members of the patrol had retreated as planned, one by one under covering fire, into the two wings of the main house. Reid had crawled from one to the other, checking on his men, the defensive positions they'd chosen, their stocks of ammo and grenades, food and water. They had accused him of trying to mother them, and sent him back to his central position in the remains of the dining room.

Peterson's body was completely buried, but Gomez' gave up six ammo clips. His weapon was out of action and Reid left it jammed barrel down into the ruins to mark their grave.

Then they waited.

Twenty minutes later there was a sudden burst of firing from the north and west sides, bullets striking aimlessly in the compound dust.

"East side! Cover the east side wall!" he tried to shout the warning, but the pillow under his cheek seemed to muffle the sound completely. Tears flowed silently as the memories flowed on.

All weapons were trained on the gap in the wall, but when movement came, no guns sounded, no bullets flew.

Singing in little thin voices in a language no one in their small audience understood, a little train of children climbed hand-in-hand through the hole into the compound, shepherded by a tall, thin woman covered head to toe in black. Surprisingly, her face was bare and Reid could see her strong, proud, but rather inelegant features as she organised the children into a line in front of her.

At a word from her the children – aged between three and six – began to dance to the song, skipping clumsily in their bulky coats from place to place, always maintaining their hold on each other, the littlest one giggling as she tried to keep up. The teacher moved with them, always behind and always shepherding their movements.

"What do we do, Reid?" ask Conway nervously from his left. Reid could feel the silent tension of his men as they waited for his decision. He knew the whole scene was being watched from a drone high in the sky above, and could only hope to hold out until the cavalry arrived. But how to handle a dozen very small children who sang and danced in the middle of a battle? What did it mean? Should he let them dance? Should he take them out? More to the point – could he even force himself to do that?

Then he saw the woman lift her hand, seeing the wire too late – a wire which lead from her and connected each child in turn to the next in a lethal daisy chain of death.

"Take her out," he yelled, pulling the trigger and seeing dust explode from her abaya as bullets struck from all directions. He saw the dead man's trigger slip from her hand.

"Down!" he screamed, as he twisted away, his head and eyes still locked on the scene. The woman and children disappeared in a roaring serial cataclysm of fire and noise.

He was flung forward, his twisted neck almost breaking with the jolt as first the shockwave and shrapnel rolled over him, to be followed by the quick, hair-crisping fireball. Somersaulting twice, he landed across the heap of rubble and slid down the far side, his back and hip haemorrhaging blood. Reid had no expectation of surviving more than a few seconds, but he was lucky, or unlucky – depending whether you saw his life from then on from the outside, or from the viewpoint of his inner torment. The action of him sliding helplessly down over the crushed and mangled remains of the compound roof forced dust and sand into the wounds, mixing them with blood and sealing them just enough to reduce the flow to a trickle.

Seven minutes later, with Reid one of just three survivors in the compound, a flight of three drones put paid to the ambitions of the local warlord who had led them into a trap and then ambushed them. The area around the compound was reduced to dust and micro fragments of human tissue, ending the warlord's tribe and his line in its entirety down to the last man, woman and child. Innocent and guilty; right down to the goats and dogs, cats and rats; all were extinguished. Twenty nine minutes later, Reid, along with the other two badly wounded soldiers, was in a medevac helicopter and starting on his long, slow, lonely journey to a home where he was no longer welcome.

Another wave of pain, and he opened his eyes. The face that breathed steadily against his own from less than a foot away was that of the children's shepherd from his memory and he quaked with fear and anger. The face was thin and pinched; eyebrows very dark; long lashes; a nose that put him in mind of a hawk as it thrust forward a little at the bridge to then slant down into a handsome, almost pointed tip; the lips – ah the lips were different. These were generous and soft, not the thin grimace of bitterness and rage that the shepherd woman had shown. Her hair hung over one cheek, threatening to tickle that fine aristocratic nose, and he wanted to brush it away for her.

Pain lanced in him again as he tried to move, and he came to realise that he was too weak to do more than crook a finger or two. Distantly, in a far off part of his brain, he realised that he should be questioning this whole situation, that something was very wrong, but everything felt so dreamlike and misty. It was too hot and there was just too much to think about. He tried again to move his fingers.

That slightest of movements seemed to awaken the woman. Her eyes popped open, and for a moment as they came into focus, he saw how dark and deep her irises were – an emerald green that seemed somehow to melt seamlessly into the black of the pupil. She smiled at him for an instant, and then that smile turned into a raging scream.

He took a fist to the forehead, and dazedly wondered what he had done to deserve that, then she had shaken free of the enveloping blanket, drawn one bare leg up, and then stamp-kicked him in the stomach. He felt the cabin whirl around him as he flew from the bed and then he was in renewed, hellish agony.

He heard a screech of rage and then heard and felt nothing further.

Wren heard her own voice crack as she yelled in both rage and fear.

"Get that bitch!" she screamed, and in her peripheral vision saw Sasha throw herself on top of the woman, who was now struggling with the blanket yet again. The blond only had eyes for Reid, who was now curled up in a foetal position, the bandage rapidly turning a deep red.

She wanted to kill the woman. What was she doing, attacking Lachlan? Was she with King Cole?

"Throw the cunt overboard!" she screeched as she tried to put pressure on fresh pads she hurriedly pushed into place over the newly re-opened wound.

Sasha had thrown her arms and legs around the woman and simply locked her in place. She began to shift towards the edge of the bed, imprisoning her within the confines of the blanket and pulling the struggling woman back with her.

She wasn't happy about the order to toss the woman to the sharks, but she was a whole lot less happy about having brought her on board in the first place and placed them in danger. It had been her decision, on seeing the shivering, unconscious wreck in the inflatable, to bring her on board, even though she had had to swim the last few yards to the bobbing boat, not wanting to leap on board and possibly bounce the woman into the sea. She had tied the boats together and then made the jump back to the little RIB. In a few minutes they had been back at the stern of the boat, which now had a large hole in it where a section had lowered to form the launch pad for the RIB.

The woman had still been unconscious as Sasha carried her onto the boat, lain her down for a moment to draw the little boat back onboard and close the platform, before carrying her in a fireman's lift up to the main cabin.

Now she was awake however, and struggling against Sasha's hold as the young woman dragged her onto the stern deck. The younger girl had the guilty suspicion that Serge might have set up this attack somehow, but even so, the brunette actually had in mind to basically drop her back into her inflatable and then let it loose. She just didn't have it in her to simply throw her overboard, and she was pretty sure that Wren didn't either.

But she still wanted to punish the woman for possibly causing Reid's death. They had cared for him so carefully through the night and it had seemed that somehow he might get through it, and then the bitch had done that to him. She backed up to the stern rail, easily avoiding the backward head butts that were aimed at her from time to time.

"Say prayer," she suggested.

"No," the woman moaned, still fighting to get free of the brunette's hold. "Please, don't kill me."

Wren joined them, her normally pale face red with anger, her eyes as grey as the sea. "Hurry up and dump the bitch over the side like the garbage she is. I need your help to get Lachlan back on the bed, Sasha."

"Stop! Stop, please! Okay, I'll do it. I'll fuck him," the woman cried.

The other two stared at her for a moment, and then Wren really lost it.

"Why the hell would anyone fuck a bitch like you? Especially Lachlan. That time you spent drifting at sea must have turned your brain to mouldy cheese. I mean he could have Sasha or me or both of us at any time, so what would he want with you?"

"You are ungrateful bitch," added Sasha. "You hurt the Captain after we save you."

"No, I woke up and he was in my bed and..."

"Fuck you!" screamed Wren. "It was the other way round. You were in his bed. He's wounded and we still put you in his bed to try and help you. To get you warm again. And then you go bat shit crazy and pull that stunt? It's not happening. Dump her, Sasha."

"Wait, please. I didn't know. I thought I was..."

"Oh I can guess what you thought," spat Wren. "But if he had made a move on you, then you would have been lucky. Now you've run out of luck."

Sasha grunted in agreement.

"That man saved both of our lives, and our sanities," Wren was hissing now."That guy is the best person I know. You – not so much! I don't know you at all. All I know is that you have piss poor boating skills, and managed to slice yourself open on your own propeller. And what else – oh yeah, just one more little thing - you're an outright crazy mad-maniac bitch!

"And the problem with that is we don't happen to have a strait jacket just lying around, and this boat is too small to have crazies running around trying to kill us. We have too many other problems to deal with without that. So you have to leave. Now!"

"I put her back in her boat," said Sasha hopefully.

Wren considered the suggestion. "Yeah, okay. As long as she's gone, I don't care how she dies."

The woman sagged in the Russian girl's arms. "I'm sorry. I didn't know he was wounded. But please, don't set me adrift – I won't make it. And I can help. I was a medic."

At her words, Sasha paused in her efforts to hoist the woman back to her feet.

Wren stared at her for a moment. "Talk fast, bitch!"

In an accent that Wren finally placed as British, the woman gabbled out her story.

"My name is Nirupesh Shahidi, and I was a volunteer, a medic in one of the YPJ units of the PKK," she gasped. She saw the blank looks on their faces. "The YPJ ... the Women's Protection Units, part of the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria."

Wren's face grew thoughtful. "So you have experience with bullet wounds?"

"Yes, I was there for a couple of years when we attacked Al-Hawl and later Tabqa."

"Get her back in the cabin please, Sasha," said Wren. She turned to Nirupesh and pointed a finger at her fiercely. "If you pull any stupid stunts, you are going over the side. There will be no putting you back in that boat of yours, no further chances, nothing! Understand? Just a long, cold drop all the way to the bottom."

Nirupesh nodded with a shiver at the thought.

"Right, let's get Lachlan back on the bed." The three women, one of them still weak from her days at sea in the open inflatable, managed to get him back on the bed after Wren had the idea to start the bed spinning, halt it when it was almost level with the floor and then gently slide him sideways onto it. They then used the compressed air assistance part of the cycle to raise it to normal height with him on it.

"Nero ... or whatever," said Wren. "Get on with it!"

"Nirupesh," the woman corrected her, checking Reid over as she spoke. "It's Persian for something like a ... a honey sweet. Everyone at boarding school started calling me Honey when they found that out and it stuck. So if you want to call me Honey, that's fine. Easier to remember."

"You have strange accent," said Sasha. Wren found herself suddenly giggling at the sheer irony of that, and then slapped a hand over her mouth, astonished that she could even smile, never mind laugh, at that moment. She must be going crazy!

"I was born in northern Iran, but when things got weird, my father managed to get us to the UK. Through friends there, he got a job at the university and I was sent to boarding school."

"Nice for you," commented Sasha, watching the woman's hands as they removed the blood-soaked bandages and pressure pads, using a clean one to keep mopping up the blood which leaked steadily from the bullet hole.

Wren moaned at the steady trickle of thick blood and thin serum. He had lost so much blood already and looked so pale.

Honey ignored the sound. "Have you any idea of how awful British boarding schools can be?"

Her fingers were probing around the wound, feeling to see if the bullet was subcutaneous. Bullets sometimes did weird things upon hitting living flesh, tumbling, looping and curving around organs, sometimes smashing them with the shock wave and sometimes just pushing them neatly aside.

Her green eyes were almost closed as she probed, letting her fingers do all the work, and feeling for swelling or build-ups where fluid shouldn't be.

"Actually," she continued, used to talking to frightened patients as she worked. "That's not fair, the boarding schools were brilliant, but it's traditional to run them down and claim they were much worse than anyone else's. I was able to study whatever I wanted, talk with whoever I wanted about anything at all, and go to any university that I could get into. I studied medicine for four years at Oxford. But when I read about the women fighting ISIS in Syria, I put my studies on hold to volunteer."

She reached around and felt Reid's stomach. "Help me please. I need to turn him slightly."

They rolled Reid half onto his left side, while Honey palpated his stomach, feeling the unnatural tightness of the skin.

Finally, she rolled him onto his front once again.

"He has a fever, which means infection, and the bullet is still in there, but it's too deep for me to feel from the exterior. I'm going to have to open him up. If it stays in there it could kill him. It has to come out."

"Oh Jesus," whimpered Wren, looking terrified. Sasha's eyes watered and she wiped them with the back of her hand. "I've been giving him penicillin every couple of hours."

Honey nodded approvingly. "Good thinking. As he's not dead yet, it's less likely that he'll die of blood loss than infection. But if that starts really getting a hold he could go into septic shock at any moment, and that will be that unless we can get him to a hospital."

Wren shook her head. "The engines aren't working."

Honey sighed. Out of the frying pan into the fire, she thought. She looked around. At least it was a luxuriously appointed fire. "Do you have any medical supplies at all?" she asked.

Wren turned wildly, and then her face settled into a determined expression.

"Yes," she said. She snatched open the little drawer containing the sealed plastic packets of curved suture needles, as well as the thread and antiseptic and dumped them onto Honey's lap.

Then she dashed out to the forward cabin, rummaging in the supply boxes that she and Sasha had moved there during the night.

Honey held up a suture needle and looked at Sasha questioningly. The Russian simply pointed at her left arm. The Iranian woman looked. On the far side of her forearm, was a curving wound, the skin neatly sutured back together with the tiny stitches characteristic of Wren's work. Honey's eyes widened. She hadn't even noticed that the wound had been closed.

"Wren sews good," Sasha commented.

"The propeller," Honey murmured. "A loose rope somehow got caught up in it and jammed it. I started to undo it, and as it loosened it suddenly span up again and caught me. Then it jammed up again. After that I could only drift."

Sasha thought about that. The woman might be a doctor, but when it came to boats, she was as dumb as a sack of hammers.

After a few moments Wren was back again, handing over a square plastic case made of thick grey plastic, the lid clearly marked with a red cross.

"This was part of a supply order," she panted. "I was desperate to find something to help Lachlan, so I opened it. But I have no clue what to do with most of the stuff in there."

Honey threw it open. It was basically a first aid kit for people who knew what they were doing. She picked up an instrument and wondered why there would be an amputation saw in a first aid kit. Weird! She took out a pair of forceps.

"There's nothing much here that can really help at this stage. The scalpel I'll need if I have to open him up to search. These are forceps, which I'll need to use once I can find the bullet. But I can't just go poking around with these things or I'll end up puncturing an intestine. And that will kill him very painfully. What I need is something long and thin, but not sharp or pointed, that I can feel around inside him with."

She drew a shape in the air.

"Wait," Sasha said. Purposefully she strode out of the cabin and disappeared towards the front.

Honey turned back to Wren. "Any other supplies?"

Wren shrugged sadly.

"A few pills, nose drops, cream, things like that," she said. "Shouldn't we bandage him up again?" She was no longer raging at the woman, although ready to revisit the subject later once Reid was out of danger. She couldn't let herself imagine him not getting through this.