Free Captive Spirit by Anna Windsor Page A

got too stressed and confused. She rubbed her face just above her eyes and decided that last bit about Dio and niceness had been overly optimistic. Or maybe delusional.
    She yawned.
    Sleep would definitely be good right about now, sandwich or no.
    Bela glanced into the treatment room again, but she couldn’t see Duncan Sharp for the swarm of Mothers and curtains of elemental energy blocking her view. Disappointment made her fingers twitch. Even though he had sort of shifted into something weird and screeched at her in a devil voice, she really wanted one more glimpse of his face before she crammed down whatever bizarre sandwich combination Andy had constructed, then crashed.
    How sick was that?
    My world is FUBAR. Hell, maybe it’s just me— I’m FUBAR .
    Wasn’t that the military and cop term for “fucked up beyond all recognition”?
    “FUBAR,” she said out loud as she started for the door, and the word seemed to bounce against the tables full of shining silver instruments filling the main section of her research space.

(6)
    FUBAR .
    That sounded like a woman’s voice, and Duncan liked it even though it had to be a cooked-brain hallucination. He could use a good woman. A strong woman who could drive away the darkness that hunted him like Satan on safari whenever he tried to dream.
    Did women like that even exist—and if they did, why would they consider a banged-up piece of meat like him?
    Duncan’s muscles screamed and burned as he trudged across the sand, which was more rock and flint than anything else. Two dead. Radios shot to hell. He would have carried Johnston and Simms back with him, but he knew he’d never make it, so he’d recorded the spot on his map, and now he was trying to get home. Such as it was. Bunch of shacks and tents in the middle of nowhere—but they’d go back for Johnston and Simms. A sun as big as five planets hammered him with each step, turning his already tanned skin into some new grade of leather. The cuts on his neck from the IED explosion burned like somebody had poured acid on his face.
    Second-degree burns. Almost lost part of my nose and some of my fingers .
    “Don’t forget the cough for a year, after sucking down all this dust,” he mumbled, hating the parched burn in his throat, and the fact that he couldn’t stop taking this walk even though he had survived it years ago. “Why does everything always come back to this place?”
    “Because we never really left Afghanistan,” John Cole said, and Duncan realized his best friend was beside him and matching him step for step, across the endless desert. “Not completely.”
    Duncan glanced at John, who had short hair instead of long. He was wearing his best dress uniform, ribbons and all, pressed and perfect, just like all his buddies who went home in bags—after the Dover Military Mortuary cleaned them up spotless for that last ride home.
    “Can’t hide, sinner,” John said with a wry smile, putting a little tune to the words.
    “Fuck, John.” Duncan kept walking, because he always kept walking, because if he stopped, he’d fall down and fry under the merciless Afghan sun, or get chewed to pieces by a nasty bunch of camel spiders. “You’re dead.”
    John was quiet for a few strides, then said, “Technically.”
    Duncan squinted at the baked brown ground, blinded by the yellow-gray afternoon light. If he was back in camp—and he wondered if he’d ever get back—a screwdriver would be so hot it would scald his palm if he touched it.
    But … that was then, wasn’t it?
    That was back in the war, after one of more than a dozen roadside bombs went off and blew two jeeps all to hell.
    And this was a dream.
    Maybe … a new war? One he didn’t even understand yet.
    Duncan wondered if John’s body would be patched up and sent home to Georgia. Would his friend get the fabled flag-draped casket treatment, all these years after they made it out of the damned desert that killed a part of both of them?
    He drew