Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been awake, the jarhead had shown no signs of life other than a few weak moans in the night.
    “You okay, buddy?” Matt asked the man softly, as he had every morning since he’d come back to life. That was his second brand-new skill—talking. The first day out of the coma he’d been unable to articulate any words. He’d think the words, but all that would come out of his throat were raspy, guttural sounds, like an animal. It had terrified him, almost as much as the fact that he couldn’t move much more than his fingers and his toes. As always, the figure next to him swathed in white didn’t answer. He wasn’t hooked up to any machines. He had a drip of a clear solution going into a tube that disappeared into one bandaged arm and a catheter coming out of his groin took the liquid back out. White in, yellow out.
    When Matt had asked the nurse how long his roommate had been in a coma, she’d replied that he wasn’t in a coma, he was “clinically depressed.” Well . . . yeah, Matt had thought. What else can you be in a clinic?
    Matt had got over his own depression. Matt had big big plans for today. Huge, ambitious plans. He was going to get out of this hospital bed and stand on his own two feet, by God. Right now, standing up was the most thrilling thing he could imagine, the most ambitious plan his exhausted mind could encompass.
    In the Teams, Matt was the company tactician and strategist. He’d always been good at thinking ahead several moves, planning actions while always keeping the overall goal in sight. He could see the next step and the one after that, as clearly as if he were looking into a crystal ball. He planned missions down to the tiniest detail so that when the plan was put into action, it was as if he’d already lived it.
    Not now. Not lying flat on his back on a hard cot in room 347. Now his horizon was totally shrunk to today, to getting through each pain-filled hour. Up until now, making any kind of a plan had seemed impossible—something other people did, not people with broken bodies on hospital beds.
    Well, he was going to start grabbing his life back. He knew the hospital schedule by heart. Some black sludge, powdered milk, and a stale Danish had been served up, about a hundred on the Crap Scale, worse than the worst MREs he’d ever had to eat in the field, and just as guaranteed to gum you up for life.
    Nurse Ratched, who’d been assigned to him as part of the VFW’s ongoing effort to make his stay memorable, had cranked his bed up and insisted on waiting until he’d choked down every bite of the Danish, though it tasted like cardboard, and swallowed every drop of the coffee that tasted like what Helmut Dietmayer used to call Lutheran Church Basement Coffee.
    Nurse Ratched—actually, her name was Doris Barnes, R.N., as the badge stuck on her flat chest indicated—would be back in half an hour to wash him, a humiliating ordeal he endured daily. He was treated like a piece of meat—uninteresting meat at that. Everything about being here was humiliating, starting from the appalling weakness he felt. Well, Matt thought, it’s time to change all that. He had half an hour. With a little luck, Nurse Ratched would come back and find him standing on his own two feet, like a man. And then he’d go to the head all by himself and burn the bedpan. Or rather, since it was plastic, toss it out the window.
    He had it all mapped out in his head—throw off the covers, grab the overhead rails for traction, scoot his legs to the right and over the side of the bed, and slowly stand up, holding on to the side of the bed for balance.
    That was the theory and that was the strategy and that was the mission—slide legs out of bed, put legs on floor, stand up. He had half an hour to do it in. Go!
    Grim-faced and determined, Matt threw back the covers. Or at least, he tried to. Damn things weighed a fucking ton. It took him three botched attempts. Such simple movements, even an idiot could do it. Clutch