When Lightning Strikes Twice. Debrah Morris
growth of beard, he lay motionless as drops of rain splashed onto his face. She checked his airway and palpated his carotid for a pulse, silently willing him not to die.
His shirt and jeans were tattered, but he didn’t appear to be burned. The bolt of lightning had probably not struck him directly. More likely, the current had zinged down the pole, conducting a charge through the steel spikes attached to his boots. Still, he wasn’t breathing, and the electrical shock had stopped his heart.
She crouched beside him, punched 9-1-1 into the cell phone clipped to the waistband of her slacks and ordered the dispatcher to send an ambulance from the hospital in Midland. It would not arrive for at least fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t afford to waste another second. Just as she initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the clouds opened up, and a cold rain poured onto her and the man whose life was now in her shaking hands.
She pinched his nostrils shut and sealing her lips firmly over his, administered a series of life-giving breaths. Under normal circumstances, she never would have allowed their lips to touch, but nothing was normal now. When she determined he still wasn’t breathing, she locked the fingers of her hands together and delivered the rhythmic chest compressions needed to keep his heart beating and blood flowing. An average human brain could survive only three or four minutes of oxygen deprivation, but this was no average man.
Joe Mitchum couldn’t afford to lose any brain cells.
Fifteen compressions, two breaths. Mallory performed the cycle over and over. After four unbelievably long minutes, she heard him gasp in a breath. Color gradually seeped back into his face, but she still couldn’t detect a pulse.
“Come on back, Mitchum.” Mouth-to-mouth was no longer required, so she straddled her patient for better leverage. The change of position gave her tired arms a respite. Counting aloud, she rocked forward with each cycle of compressions. Keep breathing, you stupid son of…don’t die on me. Being only human, it occurred to her that his death would be no great loss to the world. In fact, his untimely end might have been ordained by a higher power.
The thought shocked and sickened her. What was she thinking? She was a doctor who’d sworn an oath to save lives, no matter how wasted that life might be. And what about little Chloe? The child needed a father. The poor kid had the rotten luck to be stuck with a lousy one, but Joe was only thirty years old. He still had time to turn his life around and make something of himself.
If he lived.
“Come back to me, dammit.” Grimly determined and focused on her task, Mallory lost track of time as the rain pelted down, soaking her cotton blouse and khaki slacks, and plastering her hair against her head. She’d never administered one-man CPR in a real life-or-death situation, and the extended effort tightened her muscles into hot knots. She sighed with relief when the shrieking ambulance siren wailed in the distance.
The unconscious man probably couldn’t hear, but she spoke to him anyway. “Hold on, Joe. The paramedics are coming. If you can make it to the hospital, you have a chance. Hang in there for Chloe. Don’t die.”
Please, God, don’t let him die. It was a plea and a prayer. She only hoped Someone was listening.
His eyes fluttered open. During his last life as a Texas Ranger, Will Pendleton had sure enough woke up in some pretty strange places. Border town bordellos. Fancy Fort Worth hotels. Gulf-front flophouses. He’d even come to at the bottom of a dry well once after a gang of drunken malfeasants had knocked him out and thrown him down the hole. Plenty of times, he’d awakened with nothing but the wide blue sky over his head and the cold ground beneath him. The best place for a man to wake up was in a sweet woman’s arms, but in his line of work, he’d learned to be alone.
His skin bristled like a nervous colt’s. It was one thing to wake up in a strange place. Waking up in a strange body was a whole new experience.
When his blurred vision cleared, the only thing familiar was the color of his surroundings. Everything was white. Besides his own, there were five other beds in the room. All held forms draped with white sheets and attached to contraptions that made noises like birds trying to chirp.
He lifted his head for a better look-see, but it flopped weakly onto the pillow. Two women, dressed in blue pajamas like the Chinese laundryman used to wear, tended the folks in the beds. He heard their murmuring voices, but couldn’t make out what they said. Their soft, white shoes made no sound on the floor.
He tried to move, but he was hog-tied by some kind of cord that ran from a needle taped to the inside of his elbow to a bag of clear liquid suspended from a metal pole. A fancy clothes-peg attached to another cord clamped painlessly on the end of his finger. He examined the hand. Long-fingered, callused and sun-brown, it had obviously belonged to a hardworking man.
Where was he? Had the transference been completed? It was possible he hadn’t returned at all, but was stuck in yet another corner of Reception, still awaiting a routing assignment. The thought that he might not have made it back to earth—back to his precious Molly—filled him with aching sadness.
He wouldn’t get another chance. Celestian had barely explained the possibility of walking-in when an appropriate mortal coil had been vacated. At the right time. In the right location. He wasn’t too clear on events after that. Everything had happened fast. So fast the time-out monitor had little opportunity to give instructions, issue cautions or provide historical updates. He only knew one thing for sure. Due to another stunning accident, the spirit inhabiting the mortal coil known as Joe Mitchum had alighted unexpectedly in Reception, his life over and his number up.
In her assigned role as healer, Molly, or Mallory as she was now called, had persevered until she revived the uninhabited coil. According to Celestian, the resident spirit had given up first reenter rights, electing to remain in the Reception queue in hopes of receiving a better assignment.
That’s when things had gotten really lively. Celestian started squawking about how they only had a small window of opportunity during which another spirit could take over, if Mallory succeeded in snatching the coil back from the brink of permanent death. He hadn’t been blowing smoke when he said he’d do anything, take any form, to go back. He had snatched the walk-in opening without considering the implications. Like a baseball player who had spent a hundred seasons on the bench—during which all the rules had changed—he was unexpectedly thrust back in the game.
At least he hoped that’s what had happened.
Thankfully, he’d observed Molly/Mallory often enough on the spirit monitor to know some of the details of her Molly life. In 1973, at age ninety-seven, she’d passed over quietly in her sleep. She had returned as Mallory, born later the same year to a hard-working local couple. Because memories of past jaunts were mercifully deleted before reentry, Mallory recalled nothing of Molly’s existence or any of the other lives she’d lived.
That was the way it had to be.
Oh, yeah. He knew something else. Celestian had emphasized this was the last chance for his warrior spirit and her healer spirit to unite. They would not share the rest of these lives, nor would they be allowed to spend eternity as mates, unless she fell in love with him this time around.
That, too, was the way it had to be.
Another half-formed memory floated into his thoughts. Celestian had yelled something just before he’d been sucked into the new coil. What was it? Thinking only made his head hurt worse, but he had to remember. Celestian had been so danged insistent, it must have been important. He closed his eyes, concentrating until the monitor’s words came back to him.
Yeah. He could never tell Molly/Mallory who he really was, or reveal any details of their past lives together. It was against the rules.
That was the way it had to be.
The fact that Molly was Mallory, and he was now Joe complicated things. What if she didn’t recognize him? She might not even like him. Uncertainty gnawed at him, and he calmed his fears by telling himself it shouldn’t be too difficult to win Mallory’s heart. Not after all they’d been through together. Not after all the lifetimes they’d shared.
When