On Broken Wings Read online

  On Broken Wings

  Title Page

  Part One:

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Two:

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part Three:

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  On Broken Wings

  A novel

  Francis W. Porretto

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright (C) 1998 by Francis W. Porretto

  Cover art by Donna Casey (http://DigitalDonna.Com)

  Discover other works by Francis W. Porretto at Smashwords.Com

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  ====

  Part One:

  Hatchlings

  Chapter 1

  At first, there was only darkness, and a dim sense of upward motion, like swimming through dark water. Then there was light, and noise, and incredible pain.

  Christine half-remembered the crash, but had no idea where she was or what was being done to her. The flood of pain from her face blocked her rational powers. The perception of restraint threatened her sanity. A single phrase roared through the torture.

  "She's coming awake!"

  She surged upward against whatever was holding her. Strong hands pressed her back. Something metallic attached to her face, pulling upon it, tore loose and fell off to rest against her ear. Her scream could have shattered stone.

  A needle pierced her arm. Her terror flew beyond any recall. She dropped back into the darkness, certain she would never see light again.

  ***

  Christine awoke already crying. When she opened her eyes, the duty nurse was standing over her.

  "Miss, are you in pain?"

  The professionally kind, concerned face swam in a sea of her tears. She shook her head to clear her vision, and instantly regretted it. Pain shot through her as if from an axe blow to the skull.

  She took several deep, gasping breaths before answering.

  "Y-yes."

  Tears ran down her face in rivulets. They soaked into her bandages and stung her in a hundred places.

  The nurse pressed something against her lips. Pills. "Open and take these, Miss. I can't give you another shot till noon."

  She opened her mouth to accept them. A straw followed, and she took several sips of room-temperature water. She swallowed with difficulty.

  "Thank you." She closed her eyes again, tears still welling beneath the lids. She did not see the shudder that ran through the nurse's frame, just before she left the room.

  ***

  Two men sat hunched over a small table in the dinette area of a large trailer. Both were short of stature and slender of build. One displayed the stolidity of a statue. The other radiated distress from every pore.

  "What can I do?"

  "Nothing."

  Louis Redmond gaped.

  "That wasn't the question you wanted to ask, was it?" An observer that could ignore the weariness of Malcolm Loughlin's face and the hardness of his eyes might set his age no higher than that of his protege. But Loughlin's countenance showed eons of fatigue, and his eyes were chips of agate. "You want to ask if I can do anything. But the answer is the same."

  The cold fear that surged through Louis had the vitality of a tiger. It was all he could do to keep it caged.

  "Did you think your training would allow you to undo cancer, Louis? Or did you think it was just a trick I hadn't taught you yet?"

  Louis stiffened. "Don't mock me. You haven't earned the right."

  The older man's lips curved in the ghost of a smile. "That's better."

  "Defiance at all times, Malcolm?"

  "What would serve you better, now?"

  Louis scowled, irritation washing over his fear. "Malcolm, you are too damned smart, and one of these days it's going to land you in trouble." He rose, walked the length of the trailer, and stared out the tiny end window at the dozens of acres of Onteora County, New York, mostly left to scrub oak and pine, that Loughlin owned. After a moment, he returned to the table and waved an arm jerkily. "Why don't you get yourself a decent place? A man can't pace properly in here."

  Loughlin ignored it. "When does treatment start?"

  "It's already started."

  "Any nausea?"

  Louis nodded.

  "I was hoping you might be spared that."

  Louis caricatured a show of surprise. "I didn't know you cared."

  "Now who's mocking whom?"

  An awkward silence descended. Louis was reluctant to break it. Presently, Loughlin spoke.

  "What will you do?"

  Louis shrugged. "I don't know. It doesn't really seem to matter."

  "Why? Because you're dying?" Loughlin's voice turned harsh again. "You were handed your death warrant the day you were born. Do you really mean to say there's nothing worth your time or energy, just because you've been told you won't make your threescore and ten?"

  Louis made a weary spare-me gesture. "From you, that has a very curious ring."

  "Show some backbone, damn it!"

  "What's the matter, Malcolm? Afraid you picked the wrong guy?"

  Loughlin shook his head slowly. "Never."

  Louis leaned back against the windowsill, caught and held his mentor's eyes.

  Maybe he'll tell me now.

  "Why me anyway?"

  Loughlin scowled. "Do we have to go through this again?"

  "This is the one thing I've always wondered if you were straight with me about. Why me? And after that, why anybody?"

  "It's my contribution. My ground rent."

  "You don't owe anybody."

  The old warrior shrugged. "You're right, I don't. So?"

  "So why?"

  "It's what I want to do. I've been doing it for a long time."

  "And why me?"

  Loughlin leaned forward over the table and perched his chin upon his folded hands. "I could almost understand why you'd ask that before your training. But why now? I've told you a hundred times that you're the best I've ever had. No one else has ever beaten me at anything. You've beaten me at everything. You're a better fighter, a better analyst, and a better strategist. I suspect that no
one with gifts like yours has ever walked the earth before."

  "So?"

  "So why question my judgment now? Even if it were nothing but intuition, hasn't it been borne out a hundred times and more?"

  "I still want to know, Malcolm."

  "Not today."

  "When, then?"

  "When you've done something for me."

  Louis straightened up at that. Loughlin had never asked him for anything. "What do you want from me, Malcolm?"

  Loughlin sat back and turned away. When his eyes returned to Louis's, they were unreadable.

  "Select and train your replacement."

  ***

  At the intersection of Lumberjack Road and Arnulfson Way stood an old Army barracks. It was a simple clapboard structure, thrown up in a hurry to house the draftees being mustered for service in World War II. After the war, it had been abandoned. It was of no use except to a gang of men on their way to somewhere else. Such a gang had claimed it.

  In its largest room, the motorcycle gang that called itself the Butchers had gathered at the command of its leader. He stood six-four and weighed two hundred fifty pounds. All of it was muscle and bone. His sand-colored hair was cropped so close to his skull that it was difficult to find his hairline except by touch. His habitual costume was heavy black leather, scarred here and there by the caress of the road or the kiss of a weapon. None of the twenty-two other riders in his pack knew his birth name; it had cost one of them three teeth merely to ask. They called him Tiny.

  Tiny was upset. He had lost a middling-good friend and an incredible piece of ass in one accident. They had been riding the same bike. They'd found the friend spread thinly over a concrete bridge abutment, and surrounded by Onteora County cops. The slut had simply disappeared.

  "Who saw them last?"

  From the front of the gathering, Tommy Lekachmann spoke up hesitantly. "Boss, Tex's carb was barking like he had a problem. He couldn't keep pace, so he dropped back to the tail of the formation."

  "And you didn't drop back with him?" Tiny watched the young biker's face flush as he realized his mistake. "Tommy, how many times have you heard me say that whoever's got Christine does not ride tail?"

  Tiny hadn't shouted, hadn't intended to, but in the silence of the barracks his voice seemed unusually loud even to him. Tommy lowered his head and chewed his lip. The other Butchers remained silent.

  Tiny would miss Tex, who had been a good drinking buddy and handy with a knife or a bicycle chain. Tex had been a Butcher as long as Tiny himself. They'd spilled a lot of blood together, little of it their own. But it was the loss of Christine that truly pained him. They'd captured her here, a disoriented, incoherent girl with an incredible body and no memory, who'd wandered into their barracks completely naked ten years ago that month. She'd seemed like a gift from the cycle gods. He'd been looking forward to celebrating her tenth anniversary as their pet pig in a special way.

  Tiny could see how badly his Butchers wanted to disappear until he had calmed down. Yet not one of them would move until he'd dismissed them. He'd made the consequences of his displeasure lethally clear to them many times. As he raked them with his glare, he mused over how to emphasize their failure.

  He snorted and spat into a corner of the room, not quite missing Rollo's booted foot. Rollo didn't twitch.

  "Get out of here and get drunk. Keep your eyes open. She comes from around here. She's not likely to run off, at least not right away."

  The room emptied in less than ten seconds. When the roar of overbored, unmuffled cycle engines had diminished to nothing, the biker lord stomped into the sergeant's quarters he'd taken for himself, dropped onto a filthy sofa and hunched over in thought.

  He'd been herding them to Buffalo to join forces with another gang, a spinoff of a more famous pack. Its leader was a friend, and had proposed some profitable-sounding plans in which Tiny would have been pleased to include the Butchers. It was of such things that the Butchers' travel agenda was composed. But now he was unwilling to leave Onteora before he knew what had become of Christine.

  Here they had found her, and here they had lost her. In the ten years had elapsed in between, they had passed through this area many times. If she had harbored a yearning for someone or something here, it would have surfaced before this. There would have been an escape attempt. There had been none.

  Yet he could not accept the accident, the locale, and the disappearance as coincidence. More to the point, if Christine was still alive, as he was certain was the case, he was determined to retrieve her. If the accident had somehow been her creation, he would make her wish she had died in it.

  No one defied Tiny.

  ====

  Chapter 2

  It was late afternoon when Christine was roused.

  Though the pain from her face still roared, it had dulled enough to permit her to feel her other injuries in detail. She seemed to be bruised everywhere. Her left ankle was swollen and stiff. A huge ache resided at the base of her spine. Both her forearms throbbed as if they'd been crushed between boards.

  "Miss?"

  Her inner advisor, whom she called The Nag in the silence of her skull, came awake and began to talk.

  If the white coat and stethoscope are any indication, this is a doctor. You'll have plenty of time for pain later. Concentrate on him.

  "Yes, Doctor?"

  He looked young, grave and puzzled. "Do you know where you are?"

  She shook her head without thinking, and received a sharp jolt of pain along the back of her neck.

  Don't do that again.

  "This is Onteora General Hospital. Do you know what happened to you?"

  "Bike went over."

  He nodded. "Were you wearing a helmet?"

  "Yeah. Came off, huh?"

  He nodded again. "We had to do a lot of work on your face. Some of the sore places on your legs are because we needed skin for grafts."

  She strove for calm. "You patched me up?"

  "Yes, with a lot of help from another fellow you'll probably meet later. We did our best, but we'll have to wait and see on some of it. Not all skin grafts take properly, I'm afraid."

  Fearing to tax her face too far, and uncertain what it would look like from beneath the bandages, she attempted a gentle smile. The pain wasn't too bad.

  "Doctor, what's your name?"

  He returned her smile with added wattage. "Miles Jefferson."

  "Doctor Jefferson, I'm lucky to be alive, and grateful to have come under your care, and everything else can go to hell. Thank you."

  You probably haven't said that much at one time in two years. Don't push your luck.

  Jefferson's expression turned solemn again. "Your partner didn't make it, I'm afraid."

  There was a momentary clenching in her chest. "I guessed."

  "Was he your husband? A relative or friend?"

  She tried to keep her voice steady. "Just a guy I met recently."

  He reached down to the foot of her bed, lifted a clipboard from a hook there, and leafed through the papers on it. What he read appeared to perplex him.

  "What is it, Doctor?"

  "Miss, what's your name?"

  Of course he doesn't know. You haven't carried any identification for ten years, at least.

  "Christine."

  "Just Christine?"

  She opened her mouth and closed it again at once. If she had ever had a last name, she did not know it, and she had not prepared a lie.

  Give nothing away. You don't know the stakes yet.

  "Can we leave it at Christine for now?" She tried the smile again, and he shrugged.

  "What was his name?"

  "He told me to call him Tex."

  "Just Tex? Nothing else?"

  "Nothing else. Doctor, how long will I be bandaged?"

  He peered at the clipboard. "I'd say about five days. The damage was extensive, and we don't want to risk infection while the grafts are still new. May I send an administrator in to talk to you now, or sho
uld he wait until later?"

  "Could he wait until later, please?"

  "Of course." Jefferson replaced the clipboard on the hook. "Get some rest. I'll be back to see you this evening." He pulled the door closed carefully as he left.

  She took several slow, deep breaths. Whatever they had given her to dampen the pain was probably working as well as could be expected. Straining against the multitude of aches, she twisted, plucked the phone book from the nightstand, and began to riffle through it. She had to have a last name before the administrator arrived.

  She'd known she'd be hurt, possibly even killed. At the last, it hadn't mattered much. The opportunity had been too good to squander. The Nag was there to remind her.

  He's dead, and you're alive, and that's the way you wanted it. Now hope the others don't find you. If you have to stay here too long, they will, so get well.

  ***

  Louis's fingers dug into the leather of the antique rectory armchair. "What can I do?"

  "Only you know that."

  "Father, please! Don't toy with me."

  Father Heinrich Schliemann's face remained grave. "You know better, Louis. Try to take it seriously. You can do whatever you can do. But nothing is guaranteed to help."

  Once more Louis Redmond felt coldness surge through him. He had pinned more hope on the old priest's wisdom and counsel than he'd realized.

  The priest rose from the sofa, went to the rectory kitchen, and returned to the sitting room with a fresh pot of coffee. Rays of late afternoon sun shone through the half-closed blinds. The alternating bands of light and shadow gave the little room a surreal cast. Louis sat in silence as his pastor poured for them.

  "You're not the first. In all your pride, you could never think that. If there were some formula, some magic string of words I could recite that would restore your faith, I could convert the whole world." Schliemann returned to the sofa and shook his head, smiling ruefully through the murk. "Too much power for a parish priest."

  "I thought you were a vicar of Christ. Christ could have done it." Louis was surprised by the bitterness in his own voice.

  But Schliemann was shaking his head again.

  "What? Why not?"

  "Because he would not. The nature of omnipotence is generally misunderstood."