Читать книгу Flashback - Gayle Wilson - Страница 7

The aura was like how people describe a migraine. Except it wasn’t. There was no pain. And nothing he could take to prevent what he knew was about to happen.

He leaned against the side of his truck, waiting for the inevitable—that burst of light or energy or whatever it was that marked the disappearance of the present and the return of the sights and sounds and smells of the day his life had changed forever.

What he smelled mostly was the diesel fuel. Smoke. And the blood, of course, but that came later.

What he heard—immediately and until the very end—were the screams. Those echoed and reechoed in his nightmares as well, but never with the intensity they had in the flashbacks.

This time the force of the transition was so strong it battered him physically. Although he wasn’t conscious of the movement, his knees buckled, throwing him to the ground beside the pickup.

Bile rose in his throat as he waited for the rest. Carter’s shrieked profanities, intermingled with pleas to the Virgin, as he tried to stuff his intestines back inside his body. The sound of the second RPG striking the vehicle behind them.

After that came the smells. All of them. Everything that signified agony and death and loss.

This time, however, there was an almost eerie stillness. He opened his eyes—although he’d never been able to ascertain if they really closed during these episodes—and found not the monochromatic sameness of the desert landscape that had always been there before, but a pit. A hole. Something dark and sinister, although he couldn’t identify anything else about it.

And instead of Carter’s screams, all he heard was water dripping. The slow, steady pulse of a leak or of condensation off the overwhelming dampness that now surrounded him. He shivered against its chill, fighting a primordial response to its blackness.

He had no idea where he was. Or why he was here. All he knew was that he was terrified, a gut-level fear his extensive combat experience didn’t alleviate.

He wanted to close his eyes again. To hide from the cold, terrifying darkness. To deny its existence.

As his lids began to fall, he caught a peripheral glimpse of something else that shouldn’t be here. Not in this cave, this hole, this wherever it was.

Not in his flashback.

Before he could fully open his eyes again, it was all gone. He was suddenly back in the present, kneeling in the dirt beside his truck, his mouth dry as old bones, his hands trembling.

He knew from experience that the episode had lasted only seconds. Despite its short duration, his entire body was drenched with sweat. His chest heaved as he tried to slow his racing heart before it exploded.

After a moment, he leaned his forehead against the comforting heat of the metal beside him. His pulse finally nearing something approaching normal, he stifled the sobs that tore at his chest.

Always the same reaction. An urge to shed the tears he hadn’t shed then. Or consciously since.

He denied them now, finally lifting his gaze to the branches of the massive oak that stretched above his head. Concentrating on controlling his breathing, he watched the Spanish moss draped over them sway in the breeze off the Gulf.

Something about its motion helped ground him in reality. In the present.

That’s why he’d come back. Back to what had once been home. Although there was no one here now who constituted family, this place was as close to the feeling of safety that word connoted as he had ever found.

He looked around, relieved that since he’d been back, this had only happened here. The house was isolated enough that it was unlikely anyone would ever witness an episode. He wanted to keep it that way.

He licked his lips and then began the struggle to rise to his feet. Despite the months of therapy the Army had provided, there were still lingering physical effects from his injuries.

He had finally reconciled himself to the reality that there always would be. He was lucky to be alive. Luckier than Carter. Or Martinez. Chan. Luckier than he deserved.

He wasn’t going to whine about what he’d lost. Not even about the occasional reimmersion into the past. Into that particular day.

Except it hadn’t been that day, he remembered, as he grasped the door handle to pull himself up. Not this time. This time…

He closed his eyes, trying to bring the images from the flashback, or whatever it had been, into his consciousness again, but there was nothing there. Nothing but an aching sense of cold. And darkness. And an unspeakable horror.

Uncomfortable with the return of those sensations, he began to open his eyes. As he did, he remembered the other thing that had been in that place. The last image he had seen—half seen—before he’d been brutally catapulted into the present.

He didn’t understand why she was there, but there was no doubt in his mind she had been. A little girl with blond hair. Maybe four or five. Maybe older. His knowledge of children was limited enough that he couldn’t be sure.

He was certain only that she’d been there with him. In that pit. That black hole.

And that, like him, she, too, had been absolutely terrified.