The Inn(19)

“Nick, buddy,” I said, grabbing at his sweat-soaked shirt. “Look at me. Listen—”

He held up the gun, aimed into the distance. I braced for a shot, my hands against my ears, my stomach dropping as I imagined who he might be targeting out there in the wild. Instead of firing, though, he shouldered the gun and ran off. Effie, who’d struck her head on the back of a rock, touched her scalp and checked her hand for blood in the light. We ran after Nick, now only a shadow among thousands of shadows, dissolving in the dark ahead of us. Branches whipped at my arms and face. All my senses were waiting for that terrible sound—the gunshot in the night.

Please, please, please, I prayed to whoever might be listening. Bring my friend back safely.

In my search for Nick, I lost Effie briefly. I saw her silhouette against the sea and followed.

We stopped short on the smooth gray stones before the sand. Nick was waist-deep in the water, standing rigid, his hands on the gun and his back to us. I approached, not completely certain it was him, his unnatural stillness making him seem like a man-shaped tree standing sentinel in the glassy water.

“Nick?” I called. He didn’t move. I sighed, exasperated, and walked into the water.

Cold needles pierced my calves, thighs, buttocks, crotch. The icy water crawled into my boots and around my feet. I could feel the edges of my bones grinding together in the painful cold as I waded out. I huffed and tried to steel myself against the freezing water, but my upper half was shaking furiously by the time I reached him. Nick wasn’t shivering. His eyes were fixed on the black hump of Milk Island on the horizon. I could see what fueled his delusion that he was in the desert. The featureless surface of the ocean interrupted only by the island could easily have been a desert cast in eerie blue light.

“I lost him,” he whispered.

“Nick, please.” I stuffed my hands helplessly into my armpits. “We’re going to get hypothermia if we stand here too long. Look at me. It’s me. It’s Bill. You’re home in Gloucester.”

“Living the Dream.” He looked at me. “Devil Nightmare.”

“What?”

“Devil Nightmare. That’s the name of their unit. The six. Living the Dream was a code. An anagram. A warning. They’re at the back of the convoy. They positioned themselves back there so they could block us in. We pursued and cornered one of them. Now he’s out there.” Nick gestured to the horizon. “In the desert.”

“Nick—”

“He’ll come back,” he said. “He warned us because he wants to come in. Cross over. Give us intel on the traitors.” He hefted the enormous weapon in his hands, scanned the horizon with the scope. I watched his wide eyes in the moonlight. His skin was covered in goose bumps while his body struggled against the chill. I had to get him out of the water. I saw Effie at the edge of the sand. She snapped her fingers to get my attention, then saluted, clicking the heels of her boots together. I didn’t get what she meant. She pointed at me and did the gesture again. I understood.

I turned to Nick. “You’ve done a good job, soldier.” I hesitated, trying to see if I was getting through. “You’ve, um, identified the target and now we’ll pass it on to command. I’m ordering you to terminate this operation for the night. Give me, uh … surrender your weapon and return to camp.”

“Cap.” Nick nodded, lowering the weapon. He slammed the slide open, ejected the round from the chamber, and popped the magazine. He handed the gun to me and walked back toward the shore.





CHAPTER TWENTY





WE FOLLOWED NICK toward the house. I could see that the light in Marni’s room was on. Clay was waiting for us in the doorway, his face creased with concern, his big eyes under his heavy brows trying to analyze Nick.

“You all right, soldier boy?” he asked as Nick approached. I knew from past experience Nick would be exhausted after his little dance along the edge of reality. The last time this sort of thing happened, Nick had convinced himself that he could hear gunshots in the distance and tried to mark down their frequency in a notebook with a series of strokes and dashes. He’d kept up his surveillance of the distant gunshots for an hour, sweating and recording furiously, then he crashed and slept for fourteen hours. I’d never tried to get Nick out of his delusions before by pretending to be a part of them. I grabbed Nick in the back doorway and wrapped my arms around him. It was like hugging a sleepwalker. Though he was barely with me, I needed to know he was safe, to slap his hard shoulders.

“Buddy,” I said. “Jesus. You can’t go scaring us like that. You really can’t.”

“Hmm?” Nick patted my back halfheartedly. “What did you say? What time is it?”

“It’s bedtime,” I said.

“Right. Yeah. I knew that.”

Clay, Effie, and I watched as Nick walked away, leaving wet footprints in his wake and muttering to himself.

“Got room in your gun safe?” I asked Clay. Effie handed him the rifle. He took the big black weapon by the barrel with reverence, hefted the stock in his hand to check out the sight.

“Jesus. What’s the guy hunting?” Clay asked. “Moose?”

“Shadows,” I said. “He was off on one of his trips into the past again.”

“You know, I think you should talk to Doc about him.”