Be Strong For Me

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Description Blurb

After being figuratively burned while deployed by his unfaithful wife, and then literally burned in combat, convalescing war hero Kirk Alder is befriended by his nurse, the beautiful, enigmatic, and idiosyncratic Gilana Cord.

As his relationship with Gilana deepens, Kirk realizes she is the woman of his dreams, but he just can't shake the nagging suspicion that she might be too good to be true. What constitutes a horror story to a man who has been through what Kirk Alder has? The prospect that it could happen again.

As Kirk and Gilana prepare to host an elaborate and lavish Halloween party, Kirk must battle his demons and wrestle with his past to decide whether Gilana is the woman for him.

***

Author's Notes

1. This is a novel-length story which is complete. I was originally planning to publish this story in five parts, but I'm submitting it in one piece to include it in the Halloween contest.

2. This story contains marital infidelity, elements of erotic horror, and the supernatural. There are graphic depictions of war, violence, and sex. Please consider whether you want to read this before you start.

3. None of the characters who are under the age of eighteen have sex in this story.

4. This work is my creation. I hold the copyright. You may not copy this story off of this site, or use this story to create bullshit screen-read content on YouTube or any other site.

5. Terrible Taste in Tees references are owned by qhml1 and are used with permission.

6. Special thanks to my editing and beta reading crew for corrections and advice.

They are:

MormonJack

BB from AU

BS

MTM

EM

I had to coordinate their corrections into my master document and so any mistakes in the text are mine alone.

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I have huge respect for anyone who serves or has served in the armed forces of their nation. If you have served in the US military, thank you for your service.

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Part 1 - Burned

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The war in Afghanistan officially ended for me, CW-2 Kirk Alder, on May 12, 2008. At the time, I was an AH-64 Apache pilot halfway through my second tour in Afghanistan. I was part of a three-ship formation providing close air support for a JSOC snatch operation. The snatch turned out to be a carefully-prepared enemy ambush. When that ambush happened, we were in exactly the right place at the right time.

For reasons only known to him, the pilot of the Apache I was in, CW-2 Alonzo Herrera, brought us out of position and into a hover right next to the insertion zone. When the rooftops of two buildings right in front of us suddenly swarmed with enemy combatants, I stopped the ambush in its tracks by hosing down both rooftops with our 30mm cannon.

As always, the shot that gets you is the one you didn't see coming. We took an RPG rocket to the upper canopy from a third rooftop. Herrera was immediately killed, and the helicopter was badly damaged. The Apache shuddered horribly and fell out of the sky. After the longest and scariest thirty seconds of my life, we hit the ground hard. Damned hard.

When I could think again, I was still strapped into the chopper, which was in pieces on the ground laying on its side. I was covered with blood and brains. It took me a minute to figure out they weren't mine. I could barely feel my legs. I had to crawl away from the wreckage using only my arms. As I did so, the wreckage burst into flames, which set my feet and legs on fire. I remember being so scared I hyperventilated. That's it. That's all I really remember. I have a fuzzy memory of several JSOC guys pounding on me and throwing dirt on me to extinguish the fire. I also have a vivid memory of an enormous navy corpsman screaming at me, "Stop moving, you pussy!" as he jabbed me full of pain meds.

I woke up three days later in a burn unit at a Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. The skin on my calves, just above where my flight boots ended, had serious burns that required grafts. My burns were infected. On top of that, I was dealing with partial paralysis. This combination was awful and was somewhat of a worst-case scenario. I was injured enough that I couldn't move my legs much and there was a legitimate possibility that I might be permanently damaged. However, my nerves were still working well enough that the pain from the burns and from the skin graft donor areas was excruciating. Worst of all, I was not responsive to some of the pain medication that they tried to use on me. What they ended up giving me for the pain was Ketamine.

Ketamine is a dissociative analgesic. It doesn't stop the pain. It disconnects you from your physical reality so you don't notice the pain is happening to you. The Ketamine doses they were using gave me a continuous out-of-body experience that lasted for days on end. If you've ever heard a psychedelic drug user talking about "tripping balls", that was me. I tripped balls for weeks. I spent my whole time in Germany in a sweaty hallucinatory haze barely able to move, talk, or communicate. Later, I was told that the term for this was "k-hole", short for "ketamine hole".

After a few days of misery, I suddenly noticed that my soon-to-be ex-wife Sarah McMurphy Alder was my night nurse. The mahogany brown hair that used to drape half way down her back, was now butterscotch blonde and was cut into a wavy long bob that didn't even touch her shoulders. Her breasts had also grown a lot larger. However, her cornflower blue eyes, her attractive high nose, and lovely eyebrows had not changed and were unmistakable.

It made no sense to me that Sarah would be a nurse. First, she was a lawyer. Second, she practically passed out whenever she saw a drop of blood from a shaving cut. Third, she sent me a "Dear John" letter on the second month of my deployment. She moved out of the condo we shared and moved in with her boss. In her letter, she declared him to be her soul mate.

There she was in Landstuhl, Germany acting as my nurse and doing it with atypical selflessness. So, let's just say that I found it mighty strange. I wanted to understand why she was there, so I spent hours marshalling my resources to talk with her. Every once in a while I would suddenly be able to blurt out a single question.

My first question was, "Sarah, when did you cut your hair? It looks amazing that way. Don't ever cut it differently."

Sarah smiled as brightly as I'd ever seen. She told me that I made her day.

My second question was, "Why did you leave me?"

Sarah didn't respond to that. She just adopted a look of utter sadness.

The third question I asked was, "Didn't you move in with your boss, the douchebag lawyer?"

She didn't respond to that one at all. She just walked straight out of the room.

The last time I remember talking to her, I said, "Sarah, I knew you'd come back to me. We were made for each other." Strangely, this last one made Sarah cry for a long time. Every moment she worked on me that day, she cried.

When I finally got over the worst of the infection, I was sent to Walter Reed in DC. When I got there, the doctors fiddled with my medicine and took me off Ketamine. I was no longer tripping balls all day long.

The first afternoon that I wasn't totally out of it, a doctor swung by and told me what was going on. I received burns to my legs. The worse part was third degree burns from my knee to mid-way down my calves. Those burns were healing, but my skin had tightened and the calf muscles had atrophied from being stuck in bed. He warned me that the physical therapy, which would stretch the skin and rebuild the muscles, would be brutal. The doctor also warned me that the nerve damage would likely cause me to feel intermittent pain from the burns long after I healed.

The scariest injury, according to the doctor, was the partial paralysis. My spine had taken quite a jolt during the crash and it was damaged. The doctor said because I didn't lose all nerve conduction and they'd observed a steady increase in my nerve sensitivity, his intuition was that I just severely bruised my spine. If that was the case, I should fully recover. He admonished me to stay positive, as studies showed positivity helped quality of life and speed of recovery.

The doctor started allowing me visitors a couple of hours a day. The first visitor was a major from the pentagon wearing aviator wings. He was accompanied by a Master Sargent. He told me that he was part of an investigative team and wanted to know exactly what happened the night I was shot down. He was already familiar with the setup of the mission, so I explained, "We got on target. Alonzo was flying us on our predefined orbit. As the first JSOC Blackhawk hovered above the target and started to fast rope people in, I saw a bunch of bad guys swarm out on to the rooftops of two nearby buildings. The building to the west and the building to the south of the target."

He had satellite photos and I pointed out which ones.

"We were just south of both rooftops. About here. When the enemy came out, I saw silhouettes of RPGs. I reported the contact and requested permission to fire."

The officer asked, "What did Warrant Officer Herrera do?"

I replied, "Alonzo pulled into a hover and told me to engage them. They were only about 200 meters away, which was way too close for comfort. It would be better to be a thousand meters away. I hosed down both rooftops. At one point, I was having trouble getting lined up on the last clump of bad guys. I said, 'Yaw to Three o'clock.' He did it and gave me the angle I needed to get the last group, Sir."

The officer asked. "Do you know how many bad guys you wasted on those rooftops?"

"I don't know, Sir. Maybe twenty guys?"

The officer said, "Eighty-nine."

"I beg your pardon, Sir?" I responded.

"You killed eighty-nine enemy combatants."

"That many?" I asked.

He said, "The SEAL team counted the bodies. Well, to be precise, they counted the torsos."

I nodded. I'd been in combat. A body hit with a 30mm cannon shell usually doesn't stay in one piece.

The Major said, "They recovered a dozen RPGs. They were there to engage the helicopters. You thwarted an ambush. There were three SEAL platoons on that operation. You and Warrant Officer Herrera saved their lives. When did you get shot down?"

"On the way out, Sir. Maybe, thirty seconds later?"

"How did that happen?" he asked.

"I had no more bad guys to engage, so I told Al to get us out of there, pronto."

The officer asked, "Really? Why?"

"We were too close. We were flying at couple hundred feet in altitude and we were maybe two hundred meters from the bad guys. It would be trivial to hit us, Sir. My scalp was itching. We normally engage from a long way away. Fifteen hundred meters would be more typical. I said something like, 'Got 'em Al, get out of dodge!' I figured we would zoom out of town, reorient and come back in from a different direction. Al hated being predictable."

The officer prodded gently, "And you headed out?"

"Al lowered the nose and we headed off in the direction we were facing. He was going to follow a road which went due north. We were picking up speed when there was a God almighty bang. I felt it rather than heard it. Every alarm on the helicopter went off at once, there was smoke in the cockpit, I couldn't see shit and I instantly sensed we were completely out of control. I grabbed the cyclic and collective out of reflex. I had to fight with a lot of strength to stay properly oriented. I realized that meant Al was slumped over the controls. If it weren't for the trim system, I wouldn't have been able to handle it, Sir.

"I started shouting Al's name, but he wasn't responding. We were still moving North, so I aimed for the small field to the North of town which we'd identified as the emergency LZ. Just as I got to the edge of town, the transmission shit it's guts out, Sir."

"How did you know that's what happened?" he asked.

"My flight instructor at Rucker told the class that a transmission disintegrating sounded like two of those mile-long freight trains...copulating, Sir. That's a fair description of what I heard."

The major asked, "What did you do?"

"I tried to autorotate, Sir, but my horizontal stabilizer hit something. The last thing I remember was the sensation of falling. It was just like a drop tower at an amusement park. The bottom just fell out from under me. I get sweaty just thinking about it, Sir."

"Couldn't you see anything out of the canopy?" he asked.

"No, Sir. The cockpit was obscured. I was flying using the monocle," I replied.

"What was obscuring the canopy?" he asked.

"Al," I replied. I decided not to tell him exactly what that was like.

The Major nodded grimly.

"It wasn't your horizontal stabilizer," the Major responded. "Your blades hit a cinder block wall to a hutch on the roof of a three story building. They severed. You fell three stories. You are lucky to be alive."

My first non-military visitors came the next day. They were my parents. When they saw me, they broke down and cried in happiness and relief. This was the first time they were allowed to see me in the weeks since the accident. They knew I was burned, and presumed I would be burned everywhere. They were beyond delighted it was just my legs. That was, until they saw my legs. My mom left the room. My dad wept silently. I'd never seen him so much as sniffle before. I remember trying to give him assurance, "Dad, I'm going to survive and I get to keep my legs. This is a good thing."

Their visit gave me a welcome dose of gratitude. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself up until then.

I managed to survive a visit from Alonzo Herrera's parents and his fiancée. Al had been married once before and it didn't work out. He vowed he'd never marry again, but then he met Melanie. To hear Al tell it, she was the keeper of all keepers. They'd gotten engaged just before we deployed.

This visit was hard. They wanted to know what happened to Al, so I told them a mixture of truth and lies.

I stated first that what we were up to was classified. That was true.

I told them what we were trying to do made a difference. That was a lie. We'd been baited into an ambush, and there was no bad guy leader there to snatch.

I described that what Alonzo did was heroic. This was partly a lie. We did save the lives of three squads of SEALs, and the guy from the pentagon intimated a decoration would come from that. However, it happened so fast, it required no courage at all. There was no fear to overcome.

I said that Alonzo asked me to front-seat the mission only because he wanted an experienced night-mission aviator with him. That was true. I was normally pilot in command on my own ship. As experienced aviators, both of us had been paired up with NFGs straight out of flight school at Fort Rucker.

I told them that Alonzo saved my life by his actions. That was a bald-faced lie.

I told them that Alonzo was killed instantly before the crash and that he did not suffer. That, thank God, was true.

After that, Melanie asked me how Sarah was doing. They had been introduced at a cookout just before the deployment. I was shocked that she didn't know I'd been dumped. She was a civilian and a bit of an outsider. I ought to have known she wouldn't be looped into the gossip network. If she was in the loop, she'd have known everything there was to know about it because that gossip network went off the rails after Sarah left me for the lawyer.

I told her point blank that I'd received a Dear John letter the first month of the deployment. I tried to change the subject. Unfortunately, Alonzo's parents were morally outraged and wanted to know exactly how it happened. They wanted to know every last fucking detail, so they could feed their outrage. I didn't want to talk about it and they were too clueless to drop the subject. The conversation became a death march for me.

My day nurse, Lt. Maite Sanchez, realized that. Almost everyone in the Army during the war on terror experienced or knew someone who'd been dumped on deployment. None of us ever wanted to dwell on it. Maite broke in and said, "Time to change your bandages, Kirk."

She told my guests, "You're welcome to stay and chat while I work. This can be quite painful and it is good for him to be distracted."

She rapidly swept off the blanket covering my legs with a flourish like a magician uncovering his next trick. When my visitors saw my legs for the first time, both Melanie and Alonzo's mom turned completely green. When the smell of the infection hit Alonzo's father, he projectile vomited into the trash can in the room so hard he shit himself. After Maite helped him get cleaned up, he said, "They told me it was bad, but that was damned awful!"

All three of them beat a hasty retreat. After they left, Maite and I laughed hysterically for nearly ten minutes, imitating their horrified reactions. She was a natural mimic and could get the tone of Mr. Herrera's pre-hurl groan just right.

Later, I felt horrible about it. It was an awful thing to have laughed at the family of a dead hero, but the laugh was beyond therapeutic for me. When you go through horrible things in life, what gets you through it is the dark humor. Wounded soldiers, and the nurses that tend to them know this all too well.

I said a silent prayer and asked Al for his forgiveness. "Al, you were a great hero. Please forgive me for disrespecting your parents and bride-to-be. They paid the ultimate sacrifice and deserved better. Please, forgive me."

In my second week at Walter Reed, a young woman came to visit me. She looked very familiar, but I couldn't quite place her. She was one of the most breathtakingly beautiful women that I'd ever seen, with a glorious head of butterscotch blonde hair. Despite her abject beauty, she had an air of deep and prolonged sadness. My eyes reflexively darted to her left hand. I didn't see a ring.

She introduced herself as Lt. Gilana Cord. "Nice to meet you ma'am," I replied.

"I'm out of uniform," she said. "Please just call me Gilana." She pronounced it with a soft G: Jhee-LAWN-ah.

"Then please call me Kirk."

"Kirk as in Star Trek?" she asked.

"Kirk as in Douglas," I responded.

This made her smile. "Ah! Spartacus. That's a much better option," she said. She explained she was an army nurse and she met me when I was being treated in Germany. She said this expectantly, as if it would jog my memory. It didn't.

After an awkward pause, she said, "I was your night nurse in the burn ward in Landstuhl. There's no easy way to say this. You kept calling me 'Sarah'. You were on heavy doses of Ketamine. We eventually put together that you were hallucinating that I was your ex-wife."

"Oh my God!" I replied, "I've spent the last week wondering if I'd gone crazy. I have such strong memories of her being there and tending to me. That was you?"

"That was me," Gilana admitted.

I blushed at the memory of getting a sponge bath from her. I was a little more lucid than I normally was. It had been deliciously sensual and I had become aroused. Every touch and movement made me groan at the sensual pleasure of it. At the time, I felt terribly betrayed by my own body. I swore I would never let Sarah near me again and I'd gotten totally aroused at her first touch.

"Then I owe you a huge apology, Gilana. I didn't mean to insult you."

"How did you insult me?" she asked.

"You are way more beautiful than Sarah," I replied. "If you ever saw her, you'd understand why I was apologizing."

I'm not the most charming guy, but something about the way I said this won her over. She pulled my visitor chair a little closer to me and sat in it.

"Well, I have it under good authority you like my haircut a lot better than you liked Sarah's too," she said with relish.