She looked too young for him anyway. Was she even old enough to legally drink? If her mouth wasn’t old enough for liquor, it sure as hell wasn’t old enough to be licking him. He preferred women with experience, not only in bed but in life. No need for the guilt of some overly romanticized youngster getting sucker-punched when he bugged out before sun-up. Fuck. That was not the ass of some twenty-one-year-old. That was a woman’s ass and it needed his hands all over it. His tongue needed to plunge deep between those pillowy, sass-talking lips. Her impatient, pink-tipped fingers needed to curl tightly around his massive… Set of blue balls. Double fuck.
What was he doing thinking about this woman? She was long gone.
A heavy bolt of lightning crashed through his dilemma. The Jeep rocked from the strong frontline wind gust, shaking as roughly as if an IED had gone off nearby. Hail ricocheted down like artillery fire. So similar to the jackhammer assault of bulletproof glass taking on enemy rounds, Nik reached for his rifle.
His fingers closed around thin air.
While he was alone in his Rubicon, the weather raged a war he couldn’t fight with a rifle, imaginary or otherwise. Explosions of thunder surrounded him as bold strikes of light whizzed through the air like missiles. Power flashes went off in the distant town. Just like with the ambush that led to Will’s death, Nik battled his instinct to throttle the Jeep and blast through it. All he knew anymore was how to charge headlong into danger with the volume turned up. But that was in a different world than this one. A different life.
If Nik didn’t stay rooted in the here and now… If he allowed his soul to absorb the adrenaline rushing through his veins like heroin in an addict… He’d be one step closer to signing back up to chase his own particular brand of storm—living in kill or be killed mode. And his team would be pounding Tridents into his coffin with their fists just like he’d done to Will’s.
By leaving the military, he’d hoped the mental demons might eventually quiet down. Quitting the Teams would never stop the real-life demons of this world, though, which had made the choice to re-up or not such a nasty bitch. But he’d made his choice and somehow he needed to figure out a way to live in the civilian world with his soul on lockdown.
Purgatory, Coop called these months and years fresh out of the Teams. But on this highway, trapped in his Jeep, unable to distract himself from the night of Will’s death, Nik may as well have been in hell.
As the cloud cover parted, the boldest chasers jumped out of their cars and trucks, ducking from the remaining spits of hail. Nik stepped on the brake to put the Jeep in gear. He needed to get moving. Get away. Get off the X, as they said in the Teams. But a man in a sporty Action Eight News jacket waved his arms in a warning fashion shouting, “Tornado on the ground! Tornado. On. The. Ground!” His hand signals indicated the tornado would move in front of them, taking a nearly perpendicular path to the highway.
Steadying his breath, Nik grounded himself. Cameras aimed off in the distance, the storm chasers who’d scrambled for better viewing waited for the deadly devil to show itself.
A ferocious gust front wrapped rain around the vortex, hiding its true magnitude…the rawness of its violence. Nik could hear it, though. The groaning moan built power as the tornado edged ever closer, so similar to the restless roaring in his own savage soul. The actual twister didn’t worry Nik nearly as much as the storm already inside of him, but he needed to get away from both and neither sounded ready to die out anytime soon.
It didn’t take long before the angry bastard started flinging cars and buildings out of its way on the horizon. The chasers hooted out cheers while Nik held back from getting out, boxing their heads, and shouting, “Innocent people are losing their homes, maybe their lives, and you’re whooping your punk asses off?”
They were thrill-seeking, danger-loving junkies no different than he, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around their motivation. They didn’t do it for God or country or peace or even because it was the right damn thing to do. No, they did it for the entertainment value of the power and destruction.
Those stupid assholes reminded him of the barflies, with their starched white collars and soft-palm handshakes, who’d beg him for stories of war, delighting in the weapons and desperate to know his kill number. As if being so close to a killer made their balls swell up a few sizes. It wasn’t like taking someone’s life even took balls. Sometimes it didn’t even take skill. But, as much as he denied it, it always took a chink out of his own morality and immortality. The more they asked, the more truth he wanted to bleed out. But no one said it better than Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men. Hell, half the time Nik couldn’t even handle the truth. He told them what they expected to hear until it grew tiresome. Invariably, they found Nik arrogant when after a few too many questions he’d knock back the last shot they’d bought him and shut things down with, “Thinking of giving
