“At least your face still looks handsome,” a kindly older nurse who reminded him of his mother had said, and patted his scarred arm. Like being pretty was his biggest worry.
His home, before the Marines, had been Virginia, but his folks were both dead, and he had no other family to return to. He’d wished, for a little while, that he hadn’t survived, because he walked with a limp, was covered in scar tissue, had no support system, and no idea what to do with himself now. Deshawn had stepped in, had insisted he could live with them in Queens, in their finished basement.
“It’s not much,” he’d said, “but it’s comfy.”
It had been offered as a gift, but Rooster had insisted on paying rent. “Just ‘til I get on my feet,” he’d said, and meant it literally and figuratively.
And now here he was, dreading the effort it would take to get upright again. Deshawn was on another deployment, and Rooster was cluttering up the poor man’s basement.
Something had to change, but he didn’t know what, or how.
He leaned forward and gritted his teeth, pulled himself along by the coffee table, and got to his feet with minimal cursing and only a little swaying; Ashley was right that he needed to eat, unfortunately.
His knee got looser as he moved, and so by the time he got to the top of the basement stairs he was only puffing a little, and he forced a smile across his face when Desiree spotted him and shouted with delight.
Ashley stood at the stove and shot him a smile over her shoulder.
He definitely didn’t deserve these people, but he was glad he had them.
*
He woke with the phantom tastes of blood and sand in his mouth, choking on them, gasping into his pillow. He propped himself up on his good elbow and scanned what little he could of the dark room, trying to get his breath back.
The nightmares were always shapeless, an indistinct collage of light, and sound, and sensation. He woke aching all over, sore thanks to the clenching of all his ruined muscles as panic worked on him while he was defenseless. He was getting better at coming back from them. Bourbon helped.
He sat up with a groan and swung his legs over the side of the bed, wriggled his toes against the smooth, industrial carpet squares underfoot. The digital clock on his nightstand said it was just after two in the morning.
He was raking his fingers through his too-long hair, gathering the strength to stand, when he heard it: a faint tapping. Four soft raps, and then it stopped.
“What?” he asked the dark room around him.
Probably he’d just imagined it. His brain didn’t work quite right anymore. Probably–
There it was again. And it wasn’t coming from the stairs, which would have been the most logical place, but from the narrow window set just beneath the ceiling. Technically, it was a legal point of egress, one which let out onto the front yard, but you had to stand on a chair to access it. Sometimes, Ashley came down when he was out and cranked it open to let in some much-needed fresh air, but Rooster always closed it again, unable to sleep with the rumble of traffic wafting in.
It was shut tonight, and when he glanced toward it, he nearly leapt out of his skin. There was a face peering in at him, pale in the wash of the porch light, eyes huge and bright and flashing.
“What the fuck?”
The tap repeated, and a small hand waved at him from the other side of the glass.
It was a girl. Staring in the window at him.
“Okay,” he said, panic washing through him in familiar waves. “Sure. Why not.”
For a moment, Rooster convinced himself that it was Desiree, that she’d snuck out of bed, somehow gotten out the front door, and…
But no, she wouldn’t do that. She was a freakishly obedient child, the kind that made single people want children of their own someday. And besides, this kid’s skin was too pale to belong to his goddaughter.
“Hello?” her voice called, muffled by the window. “Sir?”
He heaved himself upright with a groan and a crackle of protesting joints, tugged on the t-shirt that lay across the foot of his bed, and made his way to the window.
He did the maintenance work around the house – when he was mostly sober and when Ashley would let his half-crippled ass do it – so the window was well-oiled and opened easily. The girl moved back out of the way as he did so, and then popped her face into the opening. There was a cool breeze coming in off the street, bringing with it the scents of early autumn…and of a hospital: industrial strength cleaner, the harsh detergent they used to wash the sheets and gowns.
She had a cherub face, rosy-cheeked and sweet, and her hair, when the porch light hit it, sparkled like a tumble of flames. It was red. Not carrot-orange, but the deep russet of an Irish Setter, shot through with the copper of new pennies.
“What are you doing out there?” he asked, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
Her eyes – pale green – widened. “I followed you,” she said, without beating around the bush. Her expression was guileless as a baby deer. “From the Institute.”
He stared at her a moment, stupefied. He would have loved to blame this on a bourbon hallucination, but his head was pounding and his joints were throbbing, and he knew he was sober.
“You mean…the Ingraham Institute?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I ran away.”
“Oh.” Like that was a normal thing to hear.
“You looked like you were running away, too.”
“I…wait. You ran away from the hospital? Why?” She didn’t look like a wounded vet to him, not at all. No way was she old enough, for starters. And she was too perky to be someone who’d been turned away from an experimental study that was attempting to correct significant battle injuries.
No, not turned away. She’d run away, she said.
“Look, kid,” he said, willing himself to be patient. She was just a little thing, and Ashley had been on his case about being kinder to the people around him. “I dunno why you ran away, but your mom’s probably real worried.”
If it was possible, her eyes got even wider. “Oh. I don’t have a mom.”
Shit. “Your dad, then. Your grandma. Whoever took you to that place.”
She shook her head. “Nobody took me. I was born there.”
“Born?”
“At the Institute.”
“You were…born at the Institute.”
“Yes. I’m one of the LCs.”
Something ugly was churning in his belly, the same dark premonition that had accompanied him into that room on his last deployment, on the day he’d saved Deshawn’s life and lost most of his own.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “I can call somebody. Or you can use my phone.”
Her expression grew almost comically solemn. “I don’t want to go back.”
He had no idea what so say. So he said, “Okay.” Like an idiot.
They stared at one another. At another point in his life, when he’d actually had his shit together, he might have done the right thing. Or, at least, the Responsible Thing. Called some sort of authority; offered to take her somewhere.
But he was tired, and confused. So fuck it.
“Uh,” he said. “You wanna come in?” He pointed toward the stairs, intending to go up to the front door and let her in.
But, quick as a little mouse, she chirped, “Yes, please,” and dropped down through the window to land on the floor.
Rooster reacted badly.
That was a nice way of putting it.
He startled back, tripped over his own feet, and landed on his ass on the thin, industrial carpet of the basement floor.
As quickly as it happened, he berated himself, which sent him into one of his now-normal shame spirals. He’d been strong once. Physically; mentally. Fit, tan, hardened, deadly. He’d been a model Marine – for so long that he no longer knew how to be anything else.
But then he’d gotten blown up, and he was a ghost of his former self. Weak, stiff, staggering. Vulnerable. And so he flinched, when he’d never flinched before, and he drank, and he worried, and was a piece of shit in general.
Oh. He’d gotten stuck in his head again. The girl stood over him now, her lips moving. She was talking to him.