Bumping Uglies

Chapter Twenty One

I felt the warmth of sunshine across my eyelids and something cool across my forehead.

Opening my eyes proved more of a challenge than such a simple manoeuvre ought to. Once I had succeeded, my vision was blurred for several seconds but I saw a golden sheen around the pale shape of a face which hovered above me.

"Satchmo? Are you awake?" Sophie said, her voice soft but edged with concern.

"Ugh..." I grunted.

I suppose you could call what I was experiencing a state of wakefulness, though I felt that I had been mangled in a car-crusher and my brain was clouded with a fog that my thoughts could not seem to pierce.

"I'll go and get Ty," Sophie said. Leaning forward, she kissed my forehead, her blonde hair tickling across my cheeks.

I tried to sit up, but no sooner had my head lifted from the pillow than I felt faint and nauseous. I collapsed back down onto the bedding with the grace of a hippopotamus settling into a mud hole.

The blur of my vision was receding, and I realised that I was in the familiar surroundings of the hayloft back at Pebble Deeping. My right side felt a little stiff, but there was no pain.

There had been shooting. I remembered the sounds; a series of loud popping bangs interspersed with cracking noises that seemed like the sound of a giant snapping tree trunks with his bare hands.

I closed my eyes and could see snippets of the scene.

I remembered screaming. Some of the women were running, others were lying motionless on the ground outside of the Tunnel of Love. Everything was washed with pulsing blue light.

I had been shouting, then I fell for some reason, and then... Nothing.

Had I been shot?

I carefully removed the blanket from my torso and inspected the familiar landscape of my chest to see if I had any new and unexpected orifices.

My right side was smeared in a dark yellowish stain of iodine and there was a line of stitching perhaps thirty centimetres long that ran just behind my rib cage. What I could see of the wound looked to be clean. The two edges of my flesh had been pulled together to form a low ridge by sutures and butterfly stitches that, when taken together, gave the impression of there being a short length of barbed wire embedded beneath my skin.

No obvious bullet holes, and I felt like bullet holes are the kind of thing I would notice. We former Private Detectives rarely miss bullet holes in our own bodies.

"Good afternoon, Rambo!" I heard Ty's cheery voice seconds before his dark-haired head emerged over the top of the ladder and he moved with effortless grace up into the hayloft. "How's the hero?"

"I feel like re-fried dog shit," I groaned.

"Well, you took quite a beating. You also picked up a wicked future scar, lost a bucket of blood and inhaled quite a lot of smoke."

Ty moved my arm to take a good look at the wound which including moving close to it and giving it a prodigious sniff.

"Not bad, if I do say so myself. You'll be fine once we get you some strapping," he said, prodding around the edge of the stitches.

"You did this?" I asked, numbly.

"Who do you think it was? The magic battlefield pixies?" Ty smiled.

"Thanks," I said, suddenly remembering something important. "Elira, where's Elira?"

"She's fine. She's in the farmhouse, sleeping it off," Ty responded.