Renee Ryan - Homecoming Hero

His breathing quickened into hard, angry puffs. The acrid smell of death surrounded him. He swiped at his forehead.

Bang!

Bang, bang, bang.

Enemy fire. Coming at them fast.

Wolf ducked. The Humvee started its roll.

He grabbed for Clay, but he missed and hit the ground hard. The impact knocked the breath out of him.

He dragged in choking gulps of air.

Another round of gunfire exploded through the air.

Wolf reached for Clay again. This time he caught him. Clay shrugged him off. “Not me. Hailey.” His face turned a dingy gray below the blood-smeared cheeks. “Promise me, Wolf-man, promise you’ll save my sister.”

“I will,” Wolf vowed. “No matter what.”

The rapid-fire shots came again. Faster. Louder. Bang, bang, bang.

Wolf looked frantically around him. His vision refused to focus. “Medic,” he shouted. “We need a medic.”

“Wolf.”

The oddly familiar voice came at him from a distance, like an unwanted echo inside his head.

Bang. Bang.

“Wolf.”

He peered into the darkness that had fallen over the desert. The landscape blurred in front of him.

“Wolf, come on, man.” The voice came at him again. “I know you’re in there. I heard you call out.”

Wolf pushed to his hands and knees.

The ground turned slick under his sweating palms. Slowly the room came into focus. His mind cleared, inch by brutal inch. Right. Right. He was home. Back in the States. In one of the apartments on post. And he’d had The Dream again.

Bang, bang, bang.

Wolf flinched, resisting the urge to take cover.

“Wolf!”

He rolled his shoulders forward, recognizing the low-pitched baritone at last. What was J. T. Wagner doing here?

Shaking off the lingering despair that always came with The Dream, Wolf shoved to a standing position. He moved too quickly and lost his balance. He grabbed for the desk, miscalculated, knocked over a glass, which proceeded to shatter into a thousand little pieces.

“You all right in there?” J.T. called.

“Yeah, yeah, hold on. Just hold on.” Wolf ached everywhere, but forced his feet to move. “I’m coming.”

He made two tight fists with his hands, breathed in slowly. Exhaled. Repeated the process until he was back in control.

Barefoot, he maneuvered carefully around the broken glass and headed toward the door.

With each step anger warred with confusion. What did Hailey’s pastor want with him? And why hadn’t the man used the modern convenience known as a cell phone? If J.T. could find out where Wolf lived, he could have gotten his phone number just as easily.

Wolf kicked aside the duffel bag he had yet to unpack and yanked open the door. “What?”

Unfazed by the rude greeting, J.T. skimmed his gaze over Wolf’s rumpled form. “You look terrible.”

No kidding. The weight of The Dream was still on his chest, like a living, breathing monster determined to drag him back to that day on the Iraqi roadside. Back to… Back to…

He pressed the tips of his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “What time is it?”

“1730.”

Five-thirty? In the afternoon? “And the…uh, day?”

“Thursday.”

Not good. So. Not. Good. He trooped to the lone window in the room and tossed back the curtains. The afternoon light assaulted him, the pain a physical reminder that he was alive. Alive, while Clay and the others were dead.

Wolf’s eyes slowly adjusted, enough to see that the sun was making its descent toward the horizon.

Grimacing, he gripped the curtain tightly inside his fist, then let go. Darkness returned to the room, blinding him as effectively as the light had. “Guess I was more wiped than I thought.”

Making an odd sound in his throat, J.T. flicked on the overhead light. “How long did you sleep?”

Wolf wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “Twenty, maybe twenty-one hours.”

“Ah.”

Confused by this visit, Wolf turned to face J.T. The guy had moved a few steps deeper into the apartment. Apartment being a loose term for the seven-hundred-square-foot dump. The room was made up of cinder blocks, linoleum, a metal desk and a twin bed. But as dismal as the tiny space was, it was twice the size of the room he’d had in Iraq.

J.T.’s gaze drifted around the perimeter. “I take it you haven’t had time to find a permanent place to live.”

“Not yet.” Wolf hoped J.T. was through with the questions. It was none of his business why Wolf had chosen to bunk in a barren apartment reserved for enlisted men and women.

“If you need help finding a place to live,” J.T. offered, “I have a lot of contacts in the area.”

“I’m good.”

“Okay.” J.T. leaned calmly against the wall next to the door. A delusion. There was nothing casual about the guy.

“Why are you here?” Wolf asked.

J.T. didn’t move away from the wall. He just kept…leaning. The guy did a lot of leaning. Strange that Wolf hadn’t noticed that before.

“I thought we could talk about the survival classes you’re going to teach at the church.”

Yeah, right. Like that couldn’t have been done over the phone. “Nothing more?”

J.T. didn’t move, not an inch, but Wolf could see the man morphing into a pastor right before his eyes. Here it came…

“That’s up to you.”

Wolf sighed. Looked like FCC’s young pastor had a new project. “I don’t have anything I need to discuss.”

“Whatever you say, but I’ve been where you are, Wolf, and I think—” J.T. stopped himself midsentence and started over. “Well, anyway, I spoke with the senior pastor about your class this morning. He gave me the go-ahead.”

Wolf waited for the rest. J.T. hadn’t made the twenty-mile trek to Fort Stewart to tell him something he could have relayed in a text message.

Pretending only a mild interest in his surroundings, J.T. inched his way around a camouflage backpack, the unpacked duffel bag and various piles of gear.

For the first time, Wolf noticed the slight catch in the guy’s steps.

How had he missed that?

“If the classes go well we might consider turning them into an ongoing series.”

“That’s nice,” Wolf said, his voice tight. J.T. was clearly working his way around the conversation the same way he’d picked his way through the apartment.

“It would be a great ministry opportunity for a soldier.”

And there it was. The guy’s real agenda.

Wolf shook his head, his uncompromising glare relaying the message No, no. Not me. Not me. He already had a “ministry opportunity.” And her name was Hailey O’Brien.

That was the one good thing about The Dream. Whenever it came, he always woke up more determined to carry out his promise.

“No pressure, Wolf,” J.T. clarified as he perched on a corner of the metal desk. “For now, let’s focus on your first class. I’d like to set it up for next Wednesday.”

That soon? “Any specifics you want me to cover?”

“I’ll let you decide.”

Oh, J.T. was good, tossing the responsibility back at Wolf, making him engage in the task from the get-go. No pressure? Yeah, right.

An awkward silence fell between them. Wolf refused to be the first one to speak.

A mistake. J.T. steered the conversation in a personal direction. “What’s your story, Wolf?”

No way were they going there. “I was wondering the same thing about you.” Wolf shoved his hands into his pockets. “Why’d you leave the military?”

J.T. shrugged, oh so casually, but Wolf noted the closed-off look that filled his expression. Denial. Yep, he recognized that one immediately.

“I was called into ministry.”

Wolf didn’t buy it. “A soldier doesn’t decide to leave the Army one day and become a minister the next,” he challenged, suddenly very interested in what the good pastor had to say next.