C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

“Porridge? I’ll eat it while you’re frying the bacon. And making the pancakes.”

I grinned real quick. “Anything else I oughta be cooking up?”

“I think that’s enough to start.” She smiled an’ I tried not ta see the blue circles under her eyes, or the weight that had fallen off of her in the past couple days. She looked half burned away, an’ the rash hadn’t faded all the way yet, bright red streaks standing out against awful pale skin.

I pulled her close again and held on a minute, finally whisperin’, “Thanks for staying with me, doll. You had me scared for a while there.”

“Me too. Me too, Gary, but I have to eat before I can talk about it. Before I can even think about it. Okay? Please?”

“Yeah. Yeah, doll.” I kissed her again more fiercely, an’ it turned out hungry an’ weak as she was, there was something she needed more’n food right then. Took a while for me to get out to the kitchen, but I started ferrying food right back into the bedroom. Juice first, trying not to see how fragile she looked holding the cup in both hands and drinking with her eyes closed, an’ then the porridge with lotsa cream and brown sugar while the bacon fried up. Turned out making pancakes wasn’t that hard either, following a recipe from Annie’s cookbook. I only burned a couple. We ate on the bed, balancing plates on our laps an’ knees, just like kids sharing a Sunday morning breakfast with their folks.

I’d never seen Annie pack away so much, or been so glad to see it. Seemed like her color got better with every bite, an’ after about six pancakes, a couple eggs, an’ more bacon pieces than I bothered to count, she sighed an’ put her fork down. “You might have to start doing the cooking, Gary. This is delicious.”

“Hunger makes the best sauce, darlin’.”

She nodded, then closed her eyes a minute, like she was fortifying herself. Then she looked at me, straight an’ clear. “What happened?”

I explained as best as I had it figured out, watching Annie’s face grow more solemn with every word. When I finished, she asked the question she’d done before: “Why me?”

An answer came up from the back of my mind, but I choked it off before it got loose. Because I love you wasn’t any kinda answer that made sense, and hell if I was gonna make either of us start wondering if getting married had been a bad idea. “I don’t know, doll, but if something’s comin’ after you, then we gotta assume it’s gonna come again. I’m thinking maybe we got lucky that this…poison-demon, whatever you wanna call it, that it was slow and had ta be carried inside of somebody else’s body to get close enough to strike. If it had been quicker, I wouldn’t have gotten there in time.”

A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth. It woulda been cute any other day, but worry had claws in my guts. After a minute she got what I was thrusting at, an’ put it in plain words. “Are you suggesting I learn to fight?”

“At least a little bit, sweetheart. I know you’re a nurse to help people, but that thing wasn’t a person. I don’t wanna lose you, Annie. Let me teach you a few things.”

“And what if I get a fright at work and use some of those things on an unsuspecting patient?”

“Annie, you saw that thing. Oily black smoke an’ dead eyes. You really think you’re ever gonna mistake something like that for a patient?”

“You said the starlight demon was a beautiful woman.” She took a breath so deep it shuddered comin’ out, an’ murmured, “It’s hard to believe I’m even saying these things out loud. Gary, this isn’t real . Magic isn’t…real.”

“Ain’t it? Didn’t the saints fight dragons an’ heal people and do miracles? Didn’t Christ? I donno, Annie. Maybe it’s right there under our noses an’ we just don’t believe it. Maybe sometimes it just crops up and bites somebody on the—” I cleared my throat. “Knee. On the knee, hard enough we can’t ignore it. Maybe we just got…bit. An’ maybe it ain’t you, sweetheart. Maybe it’s me. I’m the one your pop thought he could pass his burden on to, an’ the one who killed something outta this world in Korea. Maybe you’re just getting tangled up in…me.”

Her frown came back, but then her mouth pursed like she was trying ta hide a smile. “We could spend the rest of our lives doing this, couldn’t we? Worrying about which one of us it is. Trying to take the blame, or reassure the other, or apologize.”

When she put it like that, it was kinda funny. I spread my hands. “Guess we could, yeah.”

“Maybe we should just put it behind us, then. Maybe if we’re going to keep having…unusual circumstances…crop up in our lives, maybe we should just accept them. Together,” she said with a little emphasis. “Husband and wife. Both of us doing our parts, like God intended.”

“All right, but I’m telling you if we’re gonna be ready to face whatever comes along, God intended for you to learn ta use a gun, Anne Marie Muldoon.”

She said, “Yes, dear,” so nice and sweet that even after a while, when we went back ta sleep, I still had the funny itchy feeling I’d been fleeced.

Truth was, Annie took to shooting more naturally than I had. She didn’t like pistols much, even if she saw their use, but she was a rifle sharpshooter inside’a six months. My Sarge woulda loved her, if he coulda put her on a hill with a scope. She wasn’t afraid of knives, either, though she got grim at the idea of using one. “I know what they do to bodies, Gary,” she said one evening. “I’ve helped stitch people up after knife fights.”

“We ain’t looking to fight people, doll. Not now and not ever.”

Guessed it did the trick, or she found a way not to think about it, because she got good with the knives and then found a fencing teacher. Not the showy stuff they did for sport, but a Spanish fella who followed old swordfighting techniques and taught us both how to kill things with a long blade. “Go to Pamplona,” he told me. “Run with the bulls. Fight in the ring. If you survive, you will be a man.”

“He’s man enough already,” Annie told him , an’ wouldn’t let me go even when I said it sounded kinda exciting. She gave me one of them level looks that dames do, an’ said we could discuss it when I took her to Spain. I graduated college and started playing saxophone gigs and saving up, not so I could run with the bulls, but ‘cause I figured I’d surprise her something fierce on our fifth anniversary. Lotta the gigs started late and ran later, so I got into the habit of making dinner, too, so it was something Annie didn’t have to do when she came off shift herself. Turned out I was a better cook than her, but insteada being upset by it she looked like the cat who stole the canary. Between that an’ her dab hand at fighting, all I could figure was women were mysterious creatures.

Wasn’t long before that Spanish anniversary I was planning when I came home late one night an’ found Annie still up and waiting for me. She’d been crying, though she’d fixed her hair an’ washed her face to try to hide it. I still saw the stains on her cheeks an’ the flush of color that said something was wrong. A hundred ideas came an’ went in a second, most of ‘em revolving around what kinda monster she’d had ta kill. I knelt in front of her. “What is it, doll?”

“I saw a doctor today.”

All the building blocks of my world went out from under me. I thumped down onta my heels, wonderin’ how my hands had got so cold so fast, an’ tried not to sound shaky. “How come?”

“It’s been almost five years, Gary.” Annie’s voice wasn’t like anything I’d ever heard from her, all remote an’ hollow. She wasn’t quite looking at me, but I wasn’t sure she was looking at anything at all, the way her eyes were bruised an’ empty. “We should have had at least one baby by now.”