Dr. Melinda Johns was still sitting at the same table, sipping black coffee and ignoring her food. It didn’t look all that appetizing. There was a limit to the amount of instant mashed potatoes one person could be expected to eat. Still, her expression was very distant, and her expression was one of a tragic nature. Never had Taylor seen eyes so sad on another human being.

“Good evening, Doctor,” Taylor said as he set his plate on the table across from her. “Are these seats taken?”

“Hm? Oh! Mr. Mann. Still with us, I see. By all means, sit. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you come in. Hello, Angelica.”

“Are you all right?” Angelica asked, frowning a little as she took the place to Taylor’s left.

Melinda gave a short laugh and caught herself, biting her lower lip to silence the sound. She looked at the plate of food in front of her as if she’d forgotten it was there. “Yes... well, no, but thank you for your concern. I’m just not feeling my best...”

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Taylor asked, exchanging glances with Angelica, who shrugged.

“Wrong? My goodness. I suppose the question is more what’s not wrong. I must sound like an awful complainer, but I find things distressing sometimes, rather unpalatable.” She took off her glasses and placed her knuckle over her lips, letting the lenses dangle dangerously close to the plate. “Please, you mustn’t mind me; I just... it was a bad time, you see, in surgery I mean. I... the subject did not survive.”

The subject? You mean patient, right?

“I’m so sorry,” Angelica said, reaching across the table to lay her hand on Melinda’s arm.

“I... thank you, my dear. It’s so wonderful to have someone to say things to, isn’t it? You have your very handsome man here to lean on and I assume that you have her, Mr. Mann, or are you one of those men who do not need anyone to lean on in troubled times?”

Taylor shook his head. “No, I rely on Angelica for support quite often.”

“That’s good. Nothing worse than someone who won’t admit they hurt. Sometimes it shows, sometimes it’s plain and obvious and...” She looked up. “And sometimes, my dears, the pain is so obvious that you hurt with them.” She sighed and straightened up. “But I suppose it’s all the nature of the challenge. If we had wanted to be sure none of our patients ever came to harm, we’d be doing plastic surgery and earning a great deal more money than this.” She grinned at them, but the edge of her pain still shone in her eyes. “As I said, please disregard my demeanor; I have always been a tender-hearted soul. Oddly enough, that was what drove me into medicine and nearly caused me to forsake my calling.”

“How do you mean?” Taylor asked, using his fork to poke dubiously at what had been billed as meatloaf. Not that he wasn’t listening. On the contrary, he was being quite attentive. He’d found people tended to speak much more freely when they thought people weren’t actually paying attention.

“Ah, the reporter’s reflexes,” Melinda said. “Always wanting the story, always searching to see if there is a story.” She placed the glasses on her nose and pushed the plate away. “Very well,” she said as if settling in to tell a bedtime story. “I deplore pain. I hate seeing people in pain, all kinds of pain. I turned to the medical field while in my second year of college when my then current major was a cross between boys and booze. A friend of mine, a young lady, developed a particular problem; she was in a terrible car accident. As she was a close friend, I stayed with her as much as I was able and nearly did not pass that semester. Luckily, there was an unknown—to me—clause in the administration of the school that the loss of one’s roommate or relative causes an automatic A in the classes at the time of the death.”

Melinda shrugged. “The ironic twist was that if she’d gotten help sooner, there was a much better chance she could have been helped. Not completely restored, but she would have suffered a great deal less. I decided at her funeral that I would pursue medicine to prevent people from feeling that sort of pain.” She looked at Angelica. “Perhaps you’ve had similar motivations in your life. But then I learned that doctors don’t have that power. All they can do is try to stave it off. Delay it for another day, another hour. Instead of preventing anyone from going through pain, I got to watch it happen over and over again.”

“We don’t make miracles,” Angelica said, squeezing Melinda’s arm gently.

“I know it,” Melinda agreed with a heavy sigh. “Don’t I just know it. But it’s no easier to handle now than it was for the bright-eyed party girl so many years ago. And today, my subject died on the table and there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

Angelica stood and walked to the other side of the table, sat beside Melinda, and hugged her.

“Oh, my!” Melinda said, patting Angelica’s shoulder. “Well, thank you. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the phycological healing power of a hug.” She smiled and hugged Angelica back. “Alas, if it only worked on the physical as well. I would say we’d all be out of work in a world where ills can be remedied by a hug.”

“Sounds like a good world to me,” Angelica said, releasing the older woman and returning to her seat.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” Melinda smiled a little, her gaze distant. “I thank you both for allowing me to vent.”

Taylor looked at the woman’s hands. He remembered the last time he’d met her, the only other time he’d met her, how they flittered and moved around as if they had their own will and tried to jump off her wrists and fly away. Now they seemed heavy; they carried too much despair and frustration to lift off, as though even lifting her fork would be too much work to be worth the effort. It was no wonder she wasn’t eating.

“Doctor, I’m sorry if I pried, it’s... like you said. It’s a hazard of the profession. I ask too many questions.” His apology was in earnest. Much as he loved the career he’d chosen for himself, he’d never enjoyed questioning people when the questions brought pain.

Sometimes pain is necessary, he reminded himself. Even a doctor knows that. Pain helps us diagnose the problem.

“Not at all,” Melinda said, rising from her seat. “In fact, your questioning helped me to clarify some things and to find my resolve once more. What we do here is important and must continue. We have an obligation, after all. Thank you. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to draw a scalding bath and try to get the sound of pain out of my ears.”

Taylor watched as she picked up her plate and dumped the entire contents into the trash before placing the plate on the bus cart by the door. Without so much as a word of goodbye or acknowledgement of their conversation, she turned and walked out the door.

“Wow,” Angelica murmured, staring at her own food with distaste, as though the other woman’s display of grief had killed her own appetite. “I’ve lost patients before, and while it never gets easier you have to learn how to let it go. When you work for Doctors International, or Meadowlark, or whatever they’re calling it now, you’re placed where you’re needed. And in some of those places, death is pretty common. Sometimes there’s not much you can do but try to make the patient more comfortable. It hits hard, you know? And while this posting isn’t as bad as some, we’ve had a sickness going through the camp for a while now that’s been taking out people who never would have died in the States.” She shoved her plate away, untouched. “It gets to me, too.”

“Then why do it?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Because we can. Because if we weren’t here a lot more people would die. Because for every one we lose, there’s someone else who’s alive today because of the work we do. Because it’s the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

He smiled at her and pushed her plate back at her. “Then eat, so you can do that work, Doctor. You need your strength.”

She laughed a little and prodded at the limp vegetables on her plate. “I’m half tempted to ask your tiger to rustle up a rare steak from somewhere. I’m not sure this stuff is going to build anything except a good case of indigestion.” She glanced up at him when he didn’t respond. “What’s going on?”

“Hm?” He chuckled and lowered his fork, which he’d been holding suspended for several minutes without realizing it. The gravy had congealed on the meat to the point where even the tiger didn’t want it. “Now I’m doing it. I don’t know, there was something in there that I missed, something that isn’t... I don’t know what it was, but it was...” He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He leaned back in the chair and stared at the empty space where Melinda had been sitting, as though all the answers were there right in front of him. Or had been. “Something wasn’t right.”

“About her?” Angelica looked between him and the door Melinda had just gone through. “Taylor, she’s hurting. You don’t know what it’s like to lose that battle. I know...” She moderated her voice to stay as quiet as possible, though the only other people in the room were too far away to hear much anyway, “I know you’ve killed people, probably a lot of people, but you’re not a doctor. We dedicate our lives to beating back death and illness. It’s hard to lose that battle. More than you can imagine.”

“I don’t mean to discount anything,” he said, spearing another piece of meatloaf to try again. “And I can tell she’s legitimately upset. I just... I don’t know if I missed something. I think I have, and it’s going to...”

“Excuse me.” A man in a soldier’s uniform came through the doorway. He was carrying an AK-47 and made a beeline straight for their table. “You’re wanted in the lieutenant’s office. Right now.”

Taylor looked the man over. He was one of those types that could stand completely still and still seem to be in motion. The rifle was easily slung over his back, but somehow Taylor knew that he could have it in hand faster than Taylor could stand up from the chair. Like Batu. Whoever he was, he was good. Deadly good.

And right now, they were in danger. He didn’t need the cat to tell him that.

Taylor rose slowly, keeping his hands in plain sight at all times. This soldier recognized that, and his brow crept up in surprise. Okay, without the poker face Batu had.

“Taylor?” Angelica asked, standing with him, one hand going to his arm to clutch at it. Not wanting to let him go, he realized.

“It’s okay,” Taylor murmured. “I’ll be back at your apartment as soon as...”

“No,” the soldier said flatly, interrupting him. “He demands you both come. Now.”

Taylor exchanged glances with Angelica. She’d gone very pale.

Maybe she should have eaten her spinach after all.

“Fine,” Taylor said, drawing himself up. “We’ll go.”

The soldier nodded and smiled. “Yes. You will.”

***

“THE TWO OF YOU ARE very busy people,” Lieutenant Robert Durand said, leaning back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other. His face was flushed, and his breathing seemed to be shallow.

Flushing is caused by increased blood flow through the skin, causing warmth and, because of engorgement of the subpapillary venous plexus, redness. The vasodilation of flushing may be caused by a direct action of a circulatory vasodilator substance.

“Are you all right, Lieutenant?” Angelica asked him. She moved, wanting to get closer to him that she might examine him, but their escort stepped in her way, the rifle suddenly in his hand. He was surprised to see that Taylor was already between him and Angelica. So was she. She hadn’t seen Taylor move, he was just suddenly there.

The two men seemed to be having a mutual testosterone moment, eyeing each other, sizing each other up. She leaned in and whispered, “If you two want to whip them out and measure them off, I’d be happy to get a ruler...”

“Franco,” the lieutenant admonished, “she’s a doctor. She was just going to examine me. Stand down.”

“Your leash just got yanked,” Taylor said under his breath. Angelica watched as the soldier’s knuckles grew white on the rifle. His expression didn’t change, but that grip said it all. He stepped back.

The lieutenant didn’t beat around the bush. “The two of you were seen walking into camp this evening, quite a while after dark,” the lieutenant said, shuffling papers on his desk as if one of them was pertinent to the topic. Angelica wagered that not one of them had anything to do with them. “Mind telling me what you two were doing in the clean area at this time of night?”

“Clean area?” Angelica asked, surprised that the clearing had a name. And that she hadn’t heard it before.

“It’s the area cleaned out of the jungle,” he replied with a shrug. “I don’t think there’s really a name for it. However, if it makes you feel better, let’s just stick to what the hell you two were doing out of camp in the middle of the night.”

“I wanted to see jungle,” Taylor said, never taking his eyes off the man. “I flew all the way around the globe to get here and the jungle was within walking distance. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“I see.” Durand shifted his bulk in the chair, which protested. “And how was it?”

“Scary,” Taylor said, his tone even. “I came running back as soon as mommy came out to get me.” He thumbed at Angelica.

What the hell is he doing? It’s like, as soon as he got here he became belligerent... is he trying to pick a fight? Time to step in before this gets nasty. Nastier. Whatever.

“I just went out to find him. I got off my shift and he wasn’t at my place, so I wanted to find him.” She shrugged like it was the most natural thing in the world to go into a jungle in the middle of the night looking for an errant reporter. “It’s our first night together in a long time.” She took Taylor’s hand and smiled at him, though the effort felt painted on. Unreal. “You know how it is...” She even went so far as to bat her eyelashes at him.

“Yeah.” Durand wheezed, waving that off. “I’m sure. There were a lot of people running around tonight, past where they should be. Tell me, while you were out there, did you see anyone else?”

“No.” Angelica bit her lower lip, and even blushed a little. “We were, uh, catching up. If there was someone else out there, they would have gotten an eyeful.”

Taylor took his hand from hers and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “Ever made love in the jungle?” He touched Angelica’s face and paused to stare into her eyes. His look was positively... smoldering? Angelica was caught between wanting to laugh hysterically and punching Taylor for playing things up so much. And so badly. “It’s very stimulating.” His hand cupped her face. Caressed her cheek.

Good heavens, what is he doing?

The redness of the corpulent man grew deeper and more pronounced.

The lesions of rosacea that initially occur in the central convex areas of the face consist of papules and pustules against a background of erythema, telangiectasia, edema, and eventual permanent induration or thickening of affected skin.  

Oh, yeah. That. She pulled free of Taylor’s embrace, stepping in to peer with concern at Durand’s face. “Lieutenant, are you sure you’re all right? You seem overheated.”

“Thank you for your concern, Doctor, but I assure you that I am, in fact, quite fine.” He licked his lips and smiled. “It happens that I was exploring my own rendezvous when certain things were called to my attention. I came from a rather pleasant, even strenuous, night. Though I at least had the common sense to not be trysting in the jungle!”

Angelica glanced at the soldier, who was resolutely not looking at anyone else at that moment. He hadn’t moved a muscle, but disgust was rolling off him in waves. What was it he disapproved of?

“Lucky you. I’m glad I’m not the only one who isn’t alone here,” she said, not taking her eyes off the soldier for a minute. “Perhaps we can meet her, or...?”

The lieutenant hesitated, Taylor cocked an eyebrow at Angelica, but the soldier... he bit down hard on something and the expression on his face was one of pure disgust and anger. The expression was gone in an instant. If she hadn’t been looking directly at him, she would have missed it entirely.

“Yes, well,” Durand said, waving that off as well, “be that as it may, I wanted to inform you that I’m doubling the security at the perimeter of the clinic and the housing areas. I don’t have the men to lock down the camp entirely, so they can come and go as they please. That’s up to the politicians. But you two...” he pointed at Taylor, “you two and the rest of your foreign medical staff are going to have to stay put! You don’t get to run off in the middle of the night. If you want to explore each other, you do it in the privacy of your own room just like everyone else.”

“That’s it?” Taylor crossed his arms and stared the man down. “You could have written a memo for that. What did you really want?”

“That’s all, reporter.” Durand looked beyond them to the guard, as though they were no longer there. “Franco, get them out of here.”

Franco lifted his gaze to Taylor. Even Angelica could read this one. Franco didn’t want to deal with this. He would follow orders, but his heart wasn’t in it. She reached up to her shoulder and took Taylor’s hand in hers and stepped free of his arm. “I think going back to the room is a wonderful idea,” she practically purred. “I have to be back on shift in a few hours and I’m exhausted.” She looked up at Taylor and wondered if adding a coquettish ‘please’ would be overkill.

Taylor looked into her eyes. Every word she’d said was so much more than just a request for him to go back with her. He read the unspoken desperation in her eyes. He nodded. Without another word to their host Taylor turned and walked out of the room, still holding her hand.

They were escorted down the hall, Franco behind them.

“Tell me, Franco,” Angelica said when her heart had found a normal rhythm again. “Do you live in town like the nurses and the orderlies, or are you stationed out here?”

She thought that he wasn’t going to answer her, he was silent so long. “Army stays in the admin building,” he said tersely. “Second floor. All the way in the back.”

“Thank you, Franco,” Angelica said quietly.

Franco didn’t say anything further, he just turned on one heel and walked off, leaving them standing in the middle of the hall. Apparently, they weren’t going to be escorted all the way back to her quarters after all.

“What the hell was that all about?” Taylor asked under his breath.

“Let’s find out,” Angelica said, and made a dash past the exit and headed to the door at end of the hall that led to the stairs.

Taylor followed in close pursuit.