Dresden: For God and Country

Chapter 5

Joey carried me through the doorway before I realized that Parker had not been released. I started to struggle with him, trying to go back to my fiancé.

"We can't leave him. He doesn't know anything. Doesn't know... Parker!" I said, slurring my words badly. The door closed behind us.

"Shhh, He'll be ok." Joey tried to sooth me quietly. I started to cry into his shoulder. I was embarrassed, but I had dealt with all I could for the day. Joey stiffened but did not tell me to stop. He was a confusing person, but then, he was in a terribly confusing situation. He probably didn't understand any better than I did. He took me back to my cell and put me down gently on the cot. The men we'd attacked were no longer here, which was no surprise as they would have woken up a long time ago. Joey pick up my shirt and handed it back to me. I couldn't coordinate my exhausted, agonized limbs well enough to put it back on, so he helped me. Quietly, he whispered that the next meal that was brought in to us would have mint in the water and if we washed my burns with it, it would help. Then he left. I slept until they brought Parker back. He looked no worse for wear, but he looked as tired as I felt. He winced visibly when he saw me, so the sleep must not have helped much.

"Are you ok?" I asked him. He laughed blackly.

"I saw things today that will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life."

I didn't know what to say to that. I swung my legs off the bed and gestured him over. He sat beside me and I leaned my head on his shoulder cautiously, in case he was tender. He placed a very light arm around my waist.

"Why Alex?" He burst out suddenly, pain evident in his voice. "Why did you force this on us? We could be free right now. Safe and healthy." I hesitated before answering.

"Could you have left, knowing they were still held by that man. What about Joey? If we'd left, he would be lying in a ditch somewhere and probably his father with him."

"What does that idiot have to do with anything?"

"He's Kattan's son." I told him.

"I suddenly feel much less sympathetic to his situation." He growled. I felt the tension in his body. I wished I could rub it out, but my hands were pretty useless at the moment and I was drained of all energy. I turned my head and kissed his chest. "I'm so sorry. I didn't want to do this to you. You're angry with me, not with Joey. He's more of a victim in this than we are. We knew what we were signing up for.

"You didn't sign up for any of it." He said, jaw so tight, it looked ready to break.

"Yes I did. When I planned this fake escape."

"You didn't ever mean to leave, did you?" He asked, dispirited.

"No."

"Why? You knew what would happen."

"Two shall become one" I quoted. "Your mission is my mission. How could I look at myself in the mirror, or look at you, or ever enjoy another day if it was bought at the price of another's life? How could I knowingly abandon the prisoners when the means to save them was laid in my lap? The Lord has placed us here for a reason. I believe this is it. We haven't moved past plan A yet. Destroy the evidence and save the mission. Our attempted escape proved our identities in his mind and my leadership directs his attention to me and thus protects most of the information. What one does not know, one cannot tell."

He looked both sick and impressed. He seemed to look for words for a minute. Giving up on that, he kissed me in a new way. Deep respect, love, and... fear. That took me back a pace. I pulled away a short distance. There were tears just escaping the corners of his eyes. I brushed one away as it rolled down his face. My fingers left a trace of red-brown blood on his face. He captured my hands in his, examining the cuts and cleaning away the dried blood. The cuts on the left hand were only surface damage, not much worse than a paper cut and bruising. The right was far worse. A noise in the back of Parker's throat was the only sign of the very violent thoughts he was thinking. He gently kissed the spot just below the marks on both arms. I examined his wrists as well. He had moderate lacerations on both, not deep enough to seriously damage tendons or muscles, but they would definitely scar.

"My turn to play nurse." Parker told me. His tone allowed no debate, but I didn't really want to argue anyway. He had me do a series of motions to test damage to bones, tendons, ligaments, muscles and other soft tissues. He was very concerned by the results, but it was certain that the high level of swelling would impair motion and flexibility just as much as any damages would, so we decided the experiment was inconclusive. I made him do the same things and his results were poor, but far better than mine. I told him of the interesting experience I had with Joey which helped to defrost Parker's feeling toward the boy a little, especially the part about the mint in the water. He said that he'd had to endure only fifteen minutes of questioning to my hour and a half. When he'd been brought back, he'd heard that we would be moved to Rashid's compound as soon as safe transport could be arranged. He felt horrible about all of this. I knew that this was harder for him than suffering himself would have been and that being moved to Rashid's hideout would only make it worse. The idea made my stomach turn cold.

It took another hour for the food and promised healing water to arrive. I suppose we were lucky to be feed at all. Joey had even managed to send us a cloth, for which we were very grateful as our ragged blanket was already growing much too short. Pushing the food aside, Parker immediately began to see to my burns. He hesitantly raised my shirt and washed each burn in the cool liquid. It burned like cold fire. I gripped his leg in response to the sensation which immediately made it twice as bad as my injured hand added its own complaints. Parker pulled the cloth away.

"I'm sorry. Do you want me to stop?" He asked anxiously.

"No" I said through clenched teeth. "Keep going."

It took an eternity. There were more burns then I remembered. Individually, they weren't bad. All together they were horrible. Especially where they overlapped. I had sixty-four burns, each about the size of a small pea. He'd touched me with that awful gun thirty-two times. That was not counting the two needle like holes in my back from the Taser. Those had not left burns, but the ends of each needle are barbed to prevent them from falling out. They had ripped the skin coming back through it and throbbed with every beat of my heart. At last, he was finished. After that, I did his. He only had sixteen. Eight touches. However, I saw in passing the thick clusters of bruises on his ribs. Some were obviously new, others looked very old. A few of the bruises had half healed cuts on top of them. I explored these gently and found that the damage was not confined to the surface. Suddenly, he was not the only one with tears in his eyes. He turned to me.

"Hey, now. It's alright." He said and caressed my face. "Things look bad now, but they'll get better. The night is always blackest just before the dawn, right?" His thumb brushed the wetness from under my eye. He pulled me close and we both winced, but neither pulled away.

"I suppose we better have a plan." I said a while later.

"A plan for what?"

"How to free the prisoners, what to do with them once they're out, how to escape ourselves, and how to contact the wet team."

"Oh that." He thought for a long time. "It's hard to make those sorts of plans before you have a look at the situation." I waited expectantly. "Well, until we see the cell, it's impossible to plan our own escape from it, which will naturally be the first task. After that comes the release of the other prisoners, which has the same issue as our escape. However, after they are released we will have to hid them quickly. I suggest scattering them so that if something goes wrong, it is much harder for them all to be gathered up again. Where and how we hid them will depend on where this base of Rashid's is. Given our last experience, I doubt we'll have any notion of the surrounding territory until we walk out the door with the captives in toe. We will have to make a plan for as many eventualities as possible. After that, we will need to figure out exactly where we are so we can give that information to the wet team. Then we have to figure out a way to contact them." He paused thinking very hard.

"Ormaybe we can combine those last two. My handler must be frantic about ourdisappearance by now. He will have told command about it and they will bewatching for anything unusual in the area. There's a number that agents aregiven. It doesn't actually connect to anything at all, but if you try to callit, then the agency knows. If I could call that number, they could get a roughlocation and narrow down their search. Then we could send another type ofsignal to let them pinpoint the location and hopefully let them know what's up.Then the op continues nearly according to plan and ends in success." Heconcluded optimistically. 

(Unfinished. Will update soon)