Response Team

Chapter 29.

It had been months since our last long weekend off, and our wedding anniversary was coming up so the topic of a 4-day weekend was mentioned at work. When we joined the service neither of us knew that major crime and terror around the world was usually seasonal. Our captain was the first to officially document it on his computer, he'd been keeping track on his own for years and showed us his raw data. He showed us charts on his computer that illustrated a relationship between temperature and crime in general, temperature and acts of terror (in the USA). He also made one that tracked the major religious holidays but the hot summer weather was a better predictor.

My mother always claimed heat caused the perpetual conflict in the Middle East; she said it made everyone cranky including the camels. Our captain laughingly agreed with her observation and added that as long it's hot and dry in the Middle East there will never be peace there!

We discussed camping before peak summer heat arrived, maybe a four day weekend somewhere we've never pitched our tent before.

Like most people from El Paso we usually drove north during our time off. Dense pine forests and black dirt were as close as Cloudcroft. But there was a well known and well maintained state park in the desert east of El Paso just north of Montana Avenue (major east-west thoroughfare across eastern El Paso). The state park was miles outside the city limits and not in El Paso County either.

The park had an Indian name, it's called Hueco Mountains State Park. (Hueco is pronounced: WAY-ko). The park had lots of amenities: a small camp store, RV and primitive camp sites, water, coin-op hot water in camp showers, electric hook-ups, five marked and manicured hiking trails, lots of neat rock formations, and some caves too. A nearby geologic feature called Hueco Tanks were pools formed in solid rock that captured and stored rain water, thousands of gallons. Some people believed they were hand carved into solid rock in areas where rainwater was collected by the mountains. The park also had a tall natural rock wall (like a 1/10th version of Half Dome in Yosemite) for climbing sports too. There was also plentiful evidence that ancient people (Indians) lived in the area and ground corn and other grains in the smaller 'tanks.' Those Indians were also part of the reason why Fort Bliss was in its present location.

We decided to spend a few nights camping: Thursday to Sunday morning. They allowed ATVs on the roads but not on the trails but it would be handy for running to the store to get charcoal, ice, and more beer. There were other places nearby that allowed ATV exploration.

We excitedly counted down the days as we got started getting ready a couple weeks prior. From home the park wasn't that far, and Montana Avenue was near the airport. The park was 48.8 miles door to door to the ranger's check-in station. We decided to take our cases up to White Sands for maintenance. One of our warheads had been on a lot of trips, getting jiggled around inside the pelican case. That was a weapon you didn't want to fail when you needed it the most. They wanted to replace some of the batteries in the Pelican case and our wrist keyboards too. Our missiles had USB connectors that munitions techs could connect to and test the guidance and visual recognition functions, charge internal batteries and perform overall health tests on the weapons.

There was no bigger disappointment than a bomb that didn't go boom. If that happened we'd be expected to retrieve the warhead and be willing to die trying. The nuclear material was a tightly guarded state secret.

Our service has never experienced a nuke rocket malfunction. Since our service started we've been the only team to use them in anger, I suppose they were somewhat impractical in the northeastern USA. All of the teams have fired and witnessed a live detonation inside an underground test facility in an abandoned salt mine under Kansas. Witnessing the detonation made quite an impression but it is an expensive test at over $400k each. That is almost half a mil for a flying cylinder the size of two cans of Pringles.

The rocket and launcher was not new technology but it used highly advanced target recognition circuitry. The actual nuke warhead near the front of the rocket is tiny, smaller than a baseball. The rest of it is: parachute, steering jets, fin controllers, battery, and a single stage solid fuel rocket motor. Extra rocket fuel stages were the size of a small can of mushrooms (stems and pieces) and screwed on the ass end. They weighed less than 11 pounds each and flew without leaving a smoke trail. I think they said it could reach speeds of nearly 700 mph if it had three rocket stages.

As a joke last summer we took one rocket out of the pelican case and stuck a tube of Pringles in its place and took some pictures to show the guys at WSMR.

We've found most campgrounds to be rather hetero, for some reason gays didn't go tent camping much. David said the percentage of same sex marriages in the USA was rather low, that was why at campgrounds we were usually the only same sex couple walking around. We wished it was different but that was the reality of being gay in 2017. We should be thankful we were alive in this time and not back in the 1700s.

"Hold the phone there a minute Einstein; I thought you said the majority of gays are masculine, not feminine?"

"Well, yes the university study I read in Penthouse Magazine back in college said that feminine gay males constituted about 15-19% of the total population of self-identified gay and bisexual men. The vast majority of gay men were masculine acting, preferred masculine activities like camping, and never `came out' to friends/family." David recited from his alcohol-fogged memories of college.

"What did it say was the percentage of adult American men that identified as other than strictly hetero?" I asked. "No, it only tried to establish the ratio of feminine gays to masculine gays for males without regard to race and age. But that other study has been done lots of times. It said they found lots of variability in study results based on how terms were defined, like the meaning of masculine and feminine, gay and bisexual."

I asked, "I wonder what the percentage was on UTA when we were there?" David said he didn't know but he guessed maybe one in forty. I had to ask, "What about in Seal school?" David laughed saying he thought it was even lower because of the type of personality that was attracted to service in the Seals. He thought maybe one in two hundred, and then he smiled and added, "Except our class." I recalled reading that Seal schools had an average dropout rate over 50%, and up to three young men died trying every year.

Then he added, "The thing to remember is masculine gays fit into society like color blind people. You can't ID them by simple observation."

I had to remind him (this always made us chuckle), "Let's not forget our favorite Navy slogan: It's not gay when you're underway."

David asked, "I wonder what they called it back in the days of Columbus and Magellan?" I laughed and said, "Didn't the Brits call gays Buggers back then? It was probably got you walking the plank at the tip of a sword, while everyone cheered above and the sharks circled below."

Since the atmosphere for good conversation was mostly ruined after those comments I added, "Can you imagine what life must have been like in the days before hot showers? I wonder how many women died from vaginal infections caused by crusty foreskins. I wonder what mothers said to their young daughters about cheese dick?

David said he bet it was simple advice: make sure he washed it good with soap and water first, it would be nice to have her wash it for him since she had more to lose. I told him to imagine all the men that waded into the Nile River thousands of years ago with a bar of soap to clean Mister Wiggly so he could go home and `service' the wife. But she probably smelled just as cheesy back then too.

By then we'd turned off Montana Avenue and were heading north to the state park. About six miles north of Montana Avenue we stopped at the gate to pay for our site (in cash), and were handed a map and brochure with features and rules for the campground along with our receipt.

The tent site we got was the furthest one on the driveway, it also got shade earliest in the afternoon from a nearby rock formation. It was furthest from the bathroom but closest to shade and the ranger said there were no scorpion stings reported at the far end of the tent campground. We got a 20% discount for showing our active duty military ID cards. Our ID cards were marked 'Department of Defense' instead of 'United States Navy.'

On the slow drive through the campground David speculated why there were no scorpions in that part of the park. I suggested some kind of bird, maybe owls, snakes, or bats might make a quick meal out of a crunchy old scorpion. Then I asked if scorpions were all dark meat. David gave me `the look' that I'd gone too far towards gross with my comments.

After we got situated in our campsite David unloaded the ATV and rode it to the camp store but came back upset. He said their beverage selection was Coke products, Budweiser, and energy drinks. While I assembled our tent and cooking gear he left in the truck and drove fourteen miles back to town for groceries and beer. He returned with the goods for the rest of today and tomorrow too, and along with that our two ice chests were now completely full of ice and cold beer.

He also stopped at a gas station for foot-long subs and munchies. I was half expecting to see him whip out a joint or something but he never did. It's been years since the last time we smoked pot, but we told people that we smoked regularly. We both smoked in college, David tried cocaine and hashish at UTA but said they were a waste of money and never tried them again.

While he was gone I rode the ATV down to the camp store and bought two boxes of fake fire logs, real wood was a scarce commodity in the desert.

I also strung up a clothes line and got our butane lantern ready to light. I also had charcoal neatly stacked into a small pyramid in the bottom of the grille, but we woulnd't need it tonight. David returned 45 minutes later with a smile. I wasn't sure if he was smiling because he was happy to see me or because he loved his truck and loved to drive too. I helped him unload the stuff and carried the (very heavy) ice chests beside the tent.

While we were standing by the tent the park ranger truck drove up, "You boys from Bliss?"

David walked up to him and said we were air traffic controllers at Biggs Field. The guy smiled and chatted for another minute then left. I thought he was mostly interested in talking to people that were in the First Armored Division; he was probably a vet. Besides, practically nobody knows anything about Biggs Field, it's a small military base with a very long runway.

David smiled and walked back by me and we discussed what to do since it was only 2:50pm. So we decided to walk the two shortest trails as we'd probably have them to ourselves since the tent camping crowd looked very thin.

We walked along the driveway to the sign marked: North Mountain Trail, it was one mile long, flat, and took almost an hour. Neither of us got worn out or too thirsty so we hiked the Laguna Prieta Trail too, it was only 3100 feet long. The second trail took us about thirty minutes because we stopped to take pictures and enjoy the well maintained trails.

The trails had a very finely crushed rock and small rocks along the edge. It was obvious someone spent tons of hours making these trails look nice. I bet a blind person could walk the trails using a long cane, they were that well maintained. Like we read online, it's a very nice looking park. David commented that he understood why the Indians lived there, "...it had almost everything they needed to survive..." He suddenly stopped talking which I think meant he wanted to say, "...until the European settlers moved in and ruined everything. And then came the US Army, and they killed off most of those pesky Indians and battled the Mexican Army too." It's easy to forget today that all this land used to be part of Mexico and before that was part of Spain, they were the ones to give this area the name "El Paso del Norte." The Spanish soldiers once had an outpost all the way up in Santa Fe and there was an established trail (The Royal Road or Camino Real) from Mexico City to Santa Fe. They probably dealt with the Indians that lived here too. There were stone ruins outside the park where the Apache and Comanche lived in the 1700's.

"Can you imagine riding a horse from Mexico City to Santa Fe wearing a metal suit of armor, during the summer?" I asked David.

"Uh no, not at all, I could drive it but never on horseback. I bet it was a long ride with lots of soldiers pulling horse carts loaded with supplies too. They probably pulled a small cannon along too, just in case." he replied.

Since we were in the area anyway we hiked the Nature Trail and took more photos, saw lots of hummingbirds and cute little squirrel-like rodents running around carrying things to store and eat some day. They pretty much ignored us and I think our presence kept away the winged predators that ate them, so it was a co-dependent relationship, us and the mice critters. David pointed to the small signs warning people not to leave the trails, and there were venomous snakes and scorpions in the area. I told him I never recalled never actually seeing a rattlesnake in the wild in my life, not even in the Everglades during Seal school.

I looked at David to see if he noticed the cute little rodents watching us go by, but he never looked down so I never asked. Sometimes he thought stuff like watching rodents was dumb, so I learned not to ask.

By the time we got near the end of the nature trail we came up on an older guy with a pro-camera on a large tripod taking hi-res video, we paused and watched him trying to capture video of the humming birds feeding on flowering plants.

"Hi!" David announced. The guy paused with a smile, greeted us back, and rested his elbow on the tripod handle. "Tryin' to shoot the hummin' birds?"

"Sort of. Really with them you pick one area and let the camera run and hopefully they'll fly into frame. Following 'em is nearly impossible; it's not like shooting video of a mountain." I quickly picked up on the man's gay accent and since David was a lot closer I saw the man's eyes darting down David's front every time David seemed to be distracted by the hummingbirds that buzzed around the cactus flowers.

"You know you're missing some good shots down there?"

"No, I'm still shooting. Like I said, I pick a spot and let them fly into the frame or not. I shoot an hour of video and maybe get 60 seconds of lucky shots. Ever see a hummingbird face up-close?"

"Uhhh, no not really." David answered. Then the man looked at me so I shrugged my shoulders but didn't try to inject myself into their exchange.

Then the photographer looked around behind him and seemed to notice his shadow was getting in the image so he moved further away, and then raised the bottom of his tank top to wipe his forehead which exposed his tummy.

For a guy with some gray hairs by his ears he had a tummy that looked like he was twenty years old. His belly was flat, and sexy as hell. He wasn't as erotic looking as David's but it was way above average.

As I stepped back I noticed the camera guy was now watching my groin and David seemed in mild distress, maybe for the same reason as me.

Wanting to further the discussion David asked him if he had videos online and he said yes, on Youtube and Rumble. Then he reached in his shorts pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to David, who glanced at the card and held out his hand for me to take. I looked at it then glanced at his crotch and wondered what else he was packing, with a tummy like that. He wasn't great in the face but his belly looked very well maintained. I liked it because he had no ab-muscles, just an innocent looking young belly and a perfectly round hole like secret little place that collected semen.

I think that was the first time I looked at a man with gray hair and saw something alluring.

We stood there talking about hummingbirds for a while and the guy sort of subconsciously ran his hand under his shirt and rubbed his stomach while we drilled him about the tiny flying birds.

Then he reached down and got out a small photo album from his equipment case, it was full of prints of hummingbirds and it was surprising to see how menacing their tiny faces looked. How could such colorful and acrobatic birds have such menacing looking faces? And who would want to go through life with lips that stuck out longer than their body was tall? I guess Hummingbirds never kissed their mates.

Another thing that bothered me about them was when they zoomed by your head they sounded like a gigantic bee that might have a two inch-long barbed stinger that dripped poison! The camera guy said the ones here stayed all year but stayed in their nests when it got near freezing. Their particular species in other places migrated south into Mexico for the winter but these stayed here because there was always water and food.

They discussed humming birds for a while, so I sort of walked around looking for scorpions on the ground and started to feel hungry and thirsty, so while the guy was talking I whispered to David, 'Let's go please.'

David soon interrupted him and said we had to leave to make dinner. The guy asked if we were camping and like a fool David told him where our campsite was, then we shook hands and left for the driveway and the hike back to the campground.

Back at our campsite we got out our subs, Italian subs with very cold beer in cans. While he got the grub out I lit a campfire and set the chairs by the fire pit enjoying the flames while we ate. It was very peaceful and relaxing. We saw a tall slender man walk by, but several hetero couples also walked by our site. I thought the tall slender guy was Mister Hummingbird but David thought not. And Mister Hummingbird was taller than David, maybe 6'2" and very slender. We stayed up until the sky was dark and went to bed early.

On day #2 we figured out we could ride the ATV to the trailhead and then hike the trail since each trail had a small parking area. We parked the ATV by the bicycle racks. Each trail head had a bike rack.

On the longest trail we came up to a large granite boulder beside the trail that was flat on top (knee height), probably most kids that walked by climbed on top to be king of the mountain. David stood beside it, shoved his shorts down to his ankles and sat down with his legs wide apart. Then he leaned back and waited for me to notice knowing I couldn't resist his boner. So I kneeled between his thighs and took him in hand, stroked him hard, then took him in my mouth once he leaked enough to make it taste nice. He smelled sweaty. It didn't take long and he started to squirm and moan, he thrust his hips toward my face and came in my mouth. Moments after his orgasm ended his dick started to shrink and slipped from my mouth, so I stood up to drink some water. Suddenly I felt something like a bee sting on my right leg, near my ankle.

"Ouch! Fuck that hurt!" I stepped back, David sat up (raised his shorts) and noticed the upset look on my face as I twisted my hip to see the side of my leg."

I lifted my leg and parked my foot beside him on the boulder; David looked closely and said, "Uh oh, four dots, looks like a snake bite." At first I had no idea what to do or maybe just ignore it.

We briefly stared in each other's eyes and he said, "Let's get outta here." I stepped back and looked all around for a snake but saw nothing. He put one hand on my shoulder and escorted me quickly to the ATV and drove back to our site and for some unknown reason he immediately loaded the ATV in the truck (without using the ramps), I stood by the tent watching him move rather quickly. He stood in front of it and lifted the front tires so the quad was vertical then rolled it to the tailgate, then he picked up the back end lifted it up high then shoved it in the bed and slammed the tailgate shut. I'd never seen him manually put the ATV in the truck bed before, the thing weighed over 400 pounds.

The bite area on my leg already started to burn and when I looked it was already changing color, plus I saw faint streaks of red heading up my leg. He grabbed some of our gear from the tent and put the ice chests inside and zipped the tent shut and said, "We should go get that checked right away." Moving rather quickly he got in the truck and cranked the motor and gestured vigorously for me to get in. I had been standing there watching him (strong-arm the ATV into the truck bed without even strapping it down), like my brain was in zombie mode or something. "Come-on!" he yelled with an angry tone and gestured for me to get my ass in gear.

"Aren't you going to strap it down?" I asked about the ATV.

David opened his door and got out of the truck and glared at me. He pointed at the other side of the passenger compartment and shouted, "Get in the fucking truck right now or I'll put you in it!" He looked furious, and I think that was the first time he actually threatened me.

I walked to the truck and reached for the door handle and noticed my arm felt weird and my vision was getting glossy too. He backed out and stomped on the gas and drove fast around the campground and stopped at the ranger station and yelled that I got bit, "...what'er the most common snakes here?" The park ranger said all the bites were Western Diamondback; the others avoided people and the trails.

We raced from the park entrance back down to Montana Avenue (six miles on State Park Road, which was paved but not straight) then west toward town. I'm sure we were easily going 110mph on the straight sections, passing lots of people and getting honked and flipped off too. I tried to see the speedometer but my vision was too wonky. On the long straight sections he glanced at me repeatedly like he was checking if I was still alive.

When we got down to Montana Avenue (six minutes since the bite) he screeched the tires as we spun sideways and onto the four lane roadway. I turned to look and saw the ATV was still in back. I told him we should stop and strap it down and he shouted at me, "Shut the fuck up!" We hit every traffic light red on the way into town to our next turn at Highway 375, the loop highway that took us to the hospital on Fort Bliss, William Beaumont Army Medical Center (WBAMC). It was about 38 miles from the campground to the hospital and on the main street he did over 112mph with his hand punching the horn button the entire way. He was swearing loudly at people that blocked us from passing. Most of the way, Montana was four lanes with a median down the middle. We used the left turn lanes several times to pass cars stopped at lights.

I didn't feel bad but was noticing some weird sensations. My leg was nearly numb and it was getting hard to see. From the knee on up my leg was tingling and starting to feel like it weighed 100 pounds. I also noticed everything was looking highly three dimensional and glossy. The sky was too bright to look at and I felt dizzy too. The thought crossed my mind this might be a good time to listen to Dark Side of the Moon!

Next thing I noticed was David was furious, shouting at people as he inched forward into intersections to run the red lights, then when traffic cleared he stomped the pedal and blasted forward. I was about to tell him I felt fine but decided to just hold on tightly to my seat and trust him. But I still thought he was over reacting to a simple snake bite.

Finally, we got to the 375-Bypass and raced north across the desert toward the exit for the hospital. David used the cell device built into his truck dashboard to call the OD and finally got connected.

David narrating:

"Hey man it's Larsen. Listen I need you to call the ER nurse manager at the base hospital and tell them we're on final approach with a Rattlesnake bite twenty three minutes ago, lower leg, four marks, the ranger said all their bites were Western Diamondback but the snake was never seen."

Ryan Narrating:

She said she would deliver the message to the ER shift supervisor nurse. A few minutes later we took the exit for the hospital then the long driveway and followed the signs to the ER lobby entrance. David hit the brakes hard and yanked out the keys and ran around the truck, opened my door. He said I was sitting there with a stupid smile on my face as he reached in and took off my seat belt and got me to my feet against the side of the truck, shut the door and picked me up like a new bride and carried me in the lobby; a medical tech ran over pushing a wheel chair and David dropped me on it and we raced through the double doors and down a long hallway. (27 minutes since the bite)

We ran past several patient rooms to the large trauma room and they had me stand up, turn sideways and sit down on the cart. ER staff arrived one at a time and one of them used his trauma sheers to cut off my shorts and under ware, then he cut off my shirt and I was naked (which was highly embarrassing). I leaned back and stared at the uncomfortably bright lights in the ceiling. I heard them page Toxicology doc to Trauma-1. Someone took photos and carefully measured my leg at different points and marked with a black Sharpie where the measurements were taken. Someone else installed IVs in both of my arms. The hubs were green which I think meant they were 18 gauge. They connected saline to one of them and put me on the cardiac monitor (3 electrodes: one near each shoulder and the third went on my left side near my bottom rib) and taped an oxygen sensor to my finger and put a blood pressure cuff on my arm. I felt it start to inflate and heard some beeping, I guessed my heart rate was fast because I was scared and embarrassed. Whenever I had to strip in public before my dick always shrunk down to a stump so I'm sure it was tiny in this very cold trauma room too, I bet David was not proud either. My crotch was shaved bald too, just like my entire body from my knees to my ears.

My head was spinning and I felt nauseated, I looked around for David but couldn't find him. Then I felt a hand gently touch my shoulder, it felt like his hand so I looked upward and said, "I'm gonna puke." He grabbed a wastebasket and told me to turn my head and I puked nothing but saliva and bile - we hadn't eaten anything yet.

The last thing I remembered was looking in the wastebasket when I suddenly felt super dizzy and sickly and everything went black. (31 minutes post bite)

David narrating:

Soon after we arrived in the ER Ryan had a grand mal seizure. His entire body twitched and he stopped responding to us. His eyes were partially closed, his wrists drew up towards his chin and his legs kicked weirdly. Then his heart had fits and went into V-fib (no longer pumping blood). I stepped back as they opened the code cart and the ER nurse spun the dial on the front of the defibrillator put the paddles on Ry's chest and yelled CLEAR! Once another nurse replied with `CLEAR!' she squeezed both triggers and shocked him.

His entire body kicked really hard and his legs came up off the mattress, everyone looked the monitor. Ryan became flat line for about two seconds then back into a normal rhythm. The ER doc said, "Normal sinus," and the nurse applied two huge conductive electrodes on his chest to take the place of the hand-held paddles. At the same time another nurse shouted she had one milligram of Epi ready to push in his IV, but Ryan remained unconscious. While everyone was sort of poised for him to go back into V-Fib again, I asked them if I should push the CODE BLUE button behind me on the wall and the DOC held up one finger, he wanted me to wait. The doctor listened carefully to his chest and felt the pulse on his wrists while watching the monitor, he said, "strong radial pulses feel regular, maybe a PVC or two." The doc looked at me again and softly said, "We all just witnessed the hand of God!"

I moved across the room so I could see the cardiac monitor better. Almost everything in the room was alarming about something and it took a while for all of them to get silenced. People from all over the hospital came to the room and I heard someone paging different people to Trauma-1. I saw his vital signs just updated and said: 115/82 89 98%. He was still naked on the cart which was starting to bother me.

Someone said it looked like Ryan was `throwing a few PVCs but otherwise he was stable.' She looked at me and said everyone was unstable right after a cardiac arrest. The doc said, "His PVC count is high, let's intubate, everyone get ready. Is Respiratory here yet?" Someone else said he was outside smoking. One of the other nurses said his potassium level was probably high from the snakebite. During a quiet moment I told the ER doc that Ryan had no medical history, no surgeries, no allergies, and took no daily meds. He glanced at me and said, "Thanks for that. Are you in the service too?" I nodded yes and said we worked together for the Pentagon and told him Ryan was a Navy Seal. One of the nurses simply said, "Wow! So he's a hero!" And I replied with, "Yes decorated multiple times, we both are."

He asked if I was a Seal too and I silently nodded yes. Everyone in the room glanced at me, then the Respiratory Tech came in the room and started unpacking all the plastic tubing for the Vent machine.

Someone brought in a small blood analyzer machine to test my blood potassium level, so they stuck a needle into one of the blood tubes and drew out a small sample, injected it into a tiny plastic cartridge and inserted it in the machine to test for his potassium level, then they'd run one for cardiac markers in injury, but it was too soon afterward for that to show up, unless he had a silent heart attack earlier in the day and the snakebite pushed him over the edge. Most people don't have seizures and cardiac arrest after a snakebite, but it does happen.

I was stunned-scared, I just watched my husband seize and die on the cart after a simple snake bite. Everyone seemed to be standing around as if they were waiting for him to `code' again. I stood against the wall watching with one hand over my mouth and nose. I was too scared to do anything but watch, my eyes started to drip tears and I wanted to run outside and drop to the grass and cry and scream. My heart was pounding hard in my chest.

Someone from pharmacy rolled in an IV pole and pump in the room with a one liter bag of solution (hung inside a brown plastic bag) with Rattlesnake anti-venom added and connected it to his other IV site. Then the ER doctor intubated Ryan and they hung a bottle of white solution, which was for general anesthesia, like in surgery. They manually bagged him until the Respiratory technician had the ventilator ready. Quickly, they set down the blue ambu-bag they had been venting him with and connected him to the ventilator machine but luckily his heart stayed in a normal rhythm. We learned about CPR and cardiac rhythms in Seal school but I never used it since, so I was a little rusty on cardiac arrest, other than proper CPR. All I knew was most people that coded also died, but he was only dead for a few seconds.

Everyone in Seal School at Great Lakes spent a weekend at a hospital in Racine, so I saw several codes from drug overdoses and gunshots. I got used to the sequence they followed, Ryan's went the same: restore heart function, protect his airway, stabilize him -- treat anything that could be treated in the ER (what they called: The 5-H's and T's) then send him to the ICU. I think his main problem was too much potassium.

The x-ray girl came in and took a chest x-ray, someone else came in and did an EKG and the lab people drew ten tubes from a vein in his forearm. She said it was in case he needed emergency surgery. I assumed she meant something like an emergency amputation of his right leg.

The Cardiology doc came in; Toxicology was already in the room when he coded. They said it was not uncommon for people to react badly, and Ryan must have gotten a big dose of snake venom. He said that was one of the hard parts with snake bites was you never knew how much poison the patient got, so they initially adjusted the anti-venom according to his weight and how rapidly the symptoms on his leg spread upward. I saw the area around the bite looked very dark red, almost navy blue now. The Tox doc said they saw a steady trickle of rattlesnake bites on Fort Bliss, that's why he was in the building.

The Toxicology doctor explained how the anti-venom worked but his chemistry explanation sort of went over my head. It sounded like their drug was toxic in big doses, but as a tiny trickle into the veins it mixed with the venom and chemically broke it up into harmless chunks of protein that the liver excreted into the small intestine. The bad part was it took almost two days to reverse all of it from his entire body.

I asked what his prognosis was and the Tox doc said Ryan was critically ill, but he would probably recover; he put the odds of him going home at 65%. But they would have a much better idea tomorrow, after 24 hours of carefully monitoring his progress and if he had any more cardiac issues. He looked at me and said Ryan nearly died. "If that happened in your car he'd be in a body bag right now." I think he was criticizing my choice of driving him to the ER instead of calling 911. My problem with calling 911 out in the state park was the time it would have taken for an ambulance to arrive, so we left right away and I got him to the ER before an ambulance would have arrived at the park. If I had stayed and waited on an ambulance I would have ended up doing CPR on my husband hoping paramedics arrived eventually.

He said, "You gambled with someone else's life." His words hit my brain like an electrical shock and I had to fight back tears, but it also made me mad. I turned to face the wall as tears ran down my face briefly. When I looked again they finally had Ryan covered with a plain white bed sheet and his nurse was typing on the computer and everyone else left the room. It looked like the main show was over for now.

About 90 minutes later they moved him upstairs to the ICU. I had to identify myself and explain we were active duty military, and legally married. I was allowed to stay, and made sure I stayed out of the way of the staff trying to save his life, so I stood against the wall and watched. If they told me I couldn't stay because we were a gay couple I would have called our lawyer and the post commander immediately.

Later that evening they shut off the anesthesia IV med and soon after that they extubated Ryan; the ICU nurse said he was waking up. I offered to clean him up a little and the ICU nurses told me to leave his right leg and IV sites alone but the rest of him was okay to clean.

They brought me a small bottle of soap and two washcloths, towels, and a tub of warm water. I pulled the curtain across the doorway too. I used a wet washcloth to clean his face, arm pits, and between his legs.

After that job I sat on the stool beside the bed and lowered my head against his arm and got very emotional. The stress and fear of the day caught up with me and I couldn't stop. I guess they heard me at the nurse's station and one of them came in the room but turned around, shut the door and left again. I think when I cried and my head was against his ribs it gave him a false heart rhythm that set off an alarm at the nurse's station.

I lowered my forehead again to Ryan's ribs with my lips pressed against his upper arm. I got emotional and cried again and I spoke softly into his arm, my lips touching his soft flesh, as I confessed my love. If he'd been awake he would have heard me over Whispernet too.

"I love you so much." I barely got those words out, "I'm sorry for being so serious, I'm sorry for ignoring you and calling you a whimp and making fun of your fears. Please don't leave Ry, I really need you. You know that, right? You know that's the honest truth! I'd rather be dead than lose you. You know that, right?" In my mind I imagined myself crying because he was pronounced dead and the doc pulled the white sheet up over his face, then driving home and slicing open a poison gas capsule in the bathroom with a knife. All you have to do is slice one open in the sink and sit on the floor and wait for the gas.

I turned my head sideways and cried again, slid one hand across his stomach under the patient gown and felt his soft hairless stomach and closed my eyes and tried to make my tears stop. I had my right hand on his stomach and gently strummed his belly button surrounded by his baby soft hairless stomach and my left hand was on his right shoulder or down on his chest. I kept my eyes closed and listened to him breathe and wished it was me with the snake bite and not Ryan. We should have never had sex on a nature trail like that, it was a stupid idea. We completely ignored the warning signs.

Eventually I stood up and blew my nose by the sink.

After about ten minutes of pacing around the room and praying silently inside my head I saw his right arm move so I quickly sat down and held his hand.

I whispered in his ear, "You there Ry?" His hand barely squeezed mine back. I used our implants to tell him over and over that I loved him and I was sorry for being insensitive and impatient with him. He squeezed my hand again (slightly stronger) so I pressed the nurse-call button.

The nurse came in the room, I told her, "He's wakin' up, he squeezed my hand." The nurse was a middle aged Hispanic woman in a military combat medical uniform; I think she was a 2nd lieutenant. Her name on her uniform said, Rodriguez.

She took her little flashlight, raised one eyelid at a time and flashed it across it his pupils and spoke loudly at him, "Colonel Malone, squeeze my hand." She gripped his hand and I saw his fingers tighten around her hand, and then she left to call the doc. Another person came in the room and repeated the measurements of his leg above the snakebite. I heard her talk on the phone and told the doc his GCS increased, pupils reactive and equal and squeezed fingers on command. She said he was a GCS 10 of 15, but last time was 8/15.

When one nurse came in and tried to give him a tetanus shot I told her "No thank you." She dropped the syringe and vial in the sharps container and walked out in a huff. His primary nurse came in and swapped his oxygen mask to a nasal cannula, turned down the oxygen, listened to his lungs and left again.

About fifteen minutes later Ry turned his head toward my voice and barely opened his eyes. I softly told him, "Welcome back to Earth." I lifted his hand and kissed his knuckles. He barely smiled.

"Am I alive?" Ryan asked after struggling to moisten his mouth with his dry tongue.

"Yes, you cardiac arrested but restarted a pulse within five seconds thanks to the ER nurse. I should buy her a pizza, ER people love pizza."

He closed his eyes and turned his face back toward the ceiling and nodded yes. I held his hand firmly in mine. I softly whispered `I love you' over and over, but all Ry did was smile briefly. It looked like he was slowly gaining more awareness. He whispered that the light was bothering his eyes. I opened the cabinet and took out a washcloth, wet it and folded on top of his eyes to block the light.

I sat there on the doctor's stool watching him breathe, once in a while he squeezed my hand just to let me know he was alive. When we were alone in the room I slid my hand (under his gown) across his tummy and strummed his belly button hole or up to his chest and thumb massaged his nipples. That was guaranteed to wake him up because his tits were super ultra sensitive.

"Where'd you go?" I softly asked him when we were alone.

He shrugged his shoulders, so I asked him if he went toward the light.

Ryan gently shook his head no then turned his face toward me but kept his eyes shut. So I asked if he saw his dead relatives or Jesus or anything. Ry smiled but all he said was "God told me not to tell you." I got Ryan sips of ice water in a small cup with a bendy straw. That made him smile. Then I told him he was a God damn liar. Ry smiled but his joke told me he was gonna be okay.

Did you know you died?" I asked.

Ryan nodded yes, so I asked him how and he said he heard the cardiac monitor alarm and assumed it was his heart.

"Did it hurt?"

"No, but I felt warm and full of love." He whispered and had a look of strong emotion on his face. One tear fell from his eye onto the bed sheet.

I squeezed his hand and told him I loved him more than air and Ry slowly shook his head `no,' then he smiled and whispered, "You're too young and full of energy to love anyone more than yourself." I sat there staring at him as his chest went up and down but his expressionless face stared in my eyes. His words were true but they made me cry and consider all the people I've hurt in my private life. I lowered my forehead to his ribs again and my lips to his upper arm and cried again, what he said hit home really hard. That was the first time Ry actually criticized my character, it stung but I'd admit it was true.

Further down the bed sat an extra pillow I used to sit him up, I grabbed it and pressed my face into it and cried. Magically, his hand landed on the back of my head with his fingers dug deeply into my hair and I cried like when I found out my Grandpa died. He grabbed a clump of my hair and held on to it.

I discovered his words would repeat in my brain for the rest of my life. I was actually an asshole and needed to focus on being a better spouse. It made me aware of how patient and faithful Ry was with me. He was better than I deserved.

He fell back asleep so I moved back and let him sleep. Something crossed my mind and I went to the ICU nurses station and asked if the ER nurse that saved him was still at work and she glanced at the clock and said their shift ended at seven. I told her I was going downstairs briefly, I'd be right back.

I took the elevator downstairs to the ER lobby check-in and asked to speak to the nurse that defibrillated Ryan Malone and in a few minutes the tech came back and said she'd be out shortly.

Moments later a young female nurse (probably a civilian) came out with a smile and asked how he was doing, I told her he was awake and talking. I thanked her for acting quickly and she said it was a normal part of what they did, no big deal. I disagreed and said she saved the life of my husband and we would be forever grateful, I asked her name and if she liked pizza. She laughed and said she was an ER nurse, we all like pizza. So I asked her, "Pepperoni and cheese pizza from The Hut?" and she said, "Ahhh, food of the Gods!" So I thanked her again, shook her hand, bowed my head out of respect, and went outside. I used my cell to order four large (16 inch) pepperoni and cheese pizzas for the ER staff at the army hospital, paid, and got off the phone. Delivery time, 50 minutes. I told the triage nurse I ordered food from Pizza Hut for them and went back upstairs to the ICU.

Seventy minutes later someone from the ER carried a Pizza Hut box into the ICU. One of the nurses used the TV speaker to call me to the nurse's station, and then I stood in the hallway outside the ICU and wolfed down three slices myself.

Later that evening when he was more awake I hand fed Ry a cup of pudding and asked if he still loved me and he sort of chuckled and looked me in the eye and said, "That's a stupid question. Of course I do, how else can I prove it? I try to tell you every day." As I thought back it was true, he said it at least twice a day. I needed to do more for him; I think our relationship was probably rather lopsided. I'd give Ry an A for effort and myself a C-.

The thought crossed my mind that I should get counseling for how to be a better husband. With Ry it was super easy, I just offered him my boner and he was thrilled. Ryan was super easy as a husband, like a good dog. All I had to do was hand him a rawhide bone and in his mind life was fantastic again!

I stayed beside his bed all night. The next morning after the three docs did their rounds: tox, cardio, and the ICU doc I went home, showered, and changed clothes. Then I called ELP to update the boss. I took a five hour nap and drove back to WBAMC ICU at 2:45pm.

When I got back Ry was sitting up in bed, his anti-venom IV was nearly done, maybe 150ml left in the bottom of the bag. The red streaks were faded on his leg and the swelling was going down, so his situation was moving in the right direction. Ry said he felt better but his leg was very sore.

His cardiac rhythm was perfectly normal and his labs looked normal except one that showed an increase from dying human tissue was way up as muscle cells died from the venom. The afternoon shift nurse said he might go home in 48 hours as long as he remained stable and kept improving. She said there was a slight bump in his cardiac enzymes but that was normal after a cardiac arrest, but it was going down and his potassium was much better now too.

She said the anti-venom drip would be finished tomorrow and they'll switch him to oral meds. She explained that the venom inside his body would be totally reversed overnight but tissue damage around the bite will continue to appear. He'll need close follow-up with the Tox doc at his office until the extent of the injury becomes visible. It would be almost four months until all that was left was four tiny white dots where he got bit. I asked the nurse what happened to snake bite victims before anti-venom was invented and she said 90% of them had the limb quickly amputated, but many still died. It all depended on how much venom you got but there was no way to know, all they could do was estimate by the symptoms (swelling, streaking, and skin color change). As a joke the doc said to weigh the snake before and after the bite to calculate the volume of venom, but he said it was just a few drops from each fang. Snake venom was very concentrated.

I left WBAMC (William Beaumont Army Medical Center) and drove back to the campground to collect our gear and updated the rangers with what happened. I nearly cried as I told the story. They both scolded me and said I should have called 911 on the trail and not hauled him to the hospital myself. They've had kids and elderly hikers die from snakebite in the past because they drove themselves back to town. I wanted to defend my decision but just smiled and thanked them and drove to our campsite to gather our gear. They said at first snake bites don't appear dangerous which was why so many people drove themselves to the hospital and some of them ended up with amputated limbs, or worse. Once the venom starts to work on living tissue the effect is nearly impossible to halt or reverse.

The reason why I drove him myself instead of calling for help was the nearest ambulance crew was at least nineteen miles away, and that was assuming that when I called they weren't already busy on another call. In rural America most ambulance crews were not at the fire station, they're at home. I also believed I could get him to the ER faster than the ambulance got to our campsite. And the ambulance does not carry anti-venom, which was what he needed more than anything else. What I didn't know at the time was how a snake bite victim might cardiac arrest when a bunch of muscle cells suddenly burst and released their contents into the blood stream. That could cause a sudden spike in potassium and lead to a cardiac arrest, like Ryan had. Luckily, he was naked on a cart five feet from a defibrillator and a well trained nurse when he went into V-fib. And it became easy to see if I had stopped and waited for all those lights to change to green he would have arrested in the truck and probably died.

In my opinion, if I had taken him back to our campsite and called 911 he would have arrested before they arrived, which would have left me doing CPR on the ground for fifteen minutes. Ryan would have died had I done what everyone said I should have done.

Looking back on it I think the one thing I should have done differently was to have him sit on top of the boulder and ran to get the ATV and drove him back to the truck instead of having him walk to the ATV. Then I should have pushed everything inside the tent, along with the ATV and drove him to the ER several minutes sooner.

I quickly packed our stuff into the truck and while I was lifting the ice chests into the truck bed the old photographer guy walked up and re-introduced himself and said he'd heard about our snakebite. He said the rangers went around and warned everyone. He stayed and helped me fold our tent and sleeping bags. I offered him the all beer in the cooler and he said he'd be right back with his cooler, his had wheels and a handle.

On his return the photographer (I forgot his name and we lost his business card) said after the story about the snake bite was circulated he carried his camera gear to the big flat top boulder and set-up to take pictures of the bats leaving the cave at sunset. He said he killed two Diamondbacks near the flat-top boulder. We laughed. I looked at the pictures and said "That'll teach the little fuckers!" and we laughed again. It was possible he killed the one that bit my husband.

I asked how he killed them and he said he smashed their skulls with a five iron, each snake was a par-1. And we laughed again and I got an image in my mind of a new mini-golf course feature I could make with a giant snake head and glowing eyes. It would look very Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We packed the beers into his cooler, then I dumped ice over into his until it was full, the rest went on the driveway.

At a gas station in town I dumped our deli food in the trash can and filled the gas tank. Driving nearly 117mph really drank the gas!

On the drive west down Montana Avenue I got pulled-over by a city cop, he said they received videos people took of us running lights, three people sent them to police and clearly showed our license plate. I had to explain it was a medical emergency but he said that didn't matter so I got three tickets and was polite to the officer. Since I was in that part of town I took the tickets to work and handed them to the OD who said she'd take care of them. The thing that bothered me the most wasn't being stopped or signing the tickets, it was the time wasted.

The tickets were faxed to the El Paso Chief of Police. His only comment over the phone to the OD was to thank us for our service and the tickets would be nullified. The chief well knew I could have had that cop busted by the MPs for detaining me. He completely ignored the stickers on the back of my truck, which was a serious federal crime, but I let it slide just to get it over as quickly as possible (but I got the officer's name). The secretary of the Chief of Police later called our OD that they summoned the officer that wrote the tickets into the office and reminded him about the stickers on our truck. If I ever ran into him again I'd surely tell him he came within inches of losing his life for some bullshit tickets that went into the shredder and earned him a reprimand on his work record.

It seemed sometimes no matter how much education we did for police and fire that we still ran into cops that never got the training or forgot about it. It was really hard to keep from getting upset at them for doing their jobs (poorly).

David still narrating:

In Ryan's ICU room that evening I saw a large vase of flowers on the bedside table. When I looked around the room I counted three more. They came from the Pentagon, Laughlin Nevada, ELP airport admin, and our office. Ryan was awake and talking but looked like pale and weak. The nurse said he would be moved to a telemetry room tomorrow. I lifted the sheet and inspected his leg. The red streaking up his leg was nearly gone and the swelling was down even more, but his piss still looked like coffee with blood added, and he was getting lots of saline and his heart was fine, his vital signs were normal, and his recovery was typical for a rattlesnake bite. Ryan said his leg hurt a lot and he was given Percocet pills for the pain.

I spent the night in a recliner beside his bed. When he needed to piss I took care of it for the nurses. Not too many family members offered to handle urinals. I put the urinal on the counter so the nurse could chart the color and volume. His piss looked very abnormal and it worried me.

That night the ICU nurse said something interesting. She said they saw cardiac instability once in a while after snakebite, depending on the location and dosage. And the other big unknown was nobody knew the dosage of venom. She said a similar thing happened with scorpion stings, the dosage was never known. But with scorpions the smaller they were the worse the venom symptoms because the younger ones often overdosed their prey. She said usually scorpion stings were not a medical emergency unless the victim was a baby or toddler, otherwise it's usually a case of `Sucks to be You' for 48-72 hours.

I asked, "Isn't there a scorpion venom antidote?"

"Yes, but unless the sting is putting a child's life in peril no doctor will prescribe it. It's very expensive and usually not covered by insurance unless the patient'll die without it. Those hyper-severe stings are rare." Then she said, "If you got a 12 month old infant you think got stung by a scorpion you better take her to a children's hospital because the second thing a regular ER is going to do is call for an ambulance and transfer the baby to the hospital they should have gone to in the first place. Pediatrics is a specialty area of medicine and only certain hospitals admit children, most do not. It takes a special hospital license to admit children. But any ER should be able to medically stabilize them for transport to the correct ER."

I barely slept that night with people coming in the room every half hour to do repeat testing, like draw more blood (they were checking kidney function and cardiac enzymes after his arrest, and his electrolytes.

One of our pre-dawn visitors was a Chaplin from Fort Bliss, he said they rounded every twelve hours and saw us listed in the ICU and wanted to stop by. I told him we were not religious and the Chaplain said, "Me neither but I attended Divinity school in Indiana." I asked where and he said University of Saint Francis in Valparaiso. I asked what branch and he said it was a Roman Catholic Jesuit school but he didn't run church services, Fort Bliss had a Post Chaplain but with all the young soldiers there for basic training it grew into a four-man job. He was sort of a back-up preacher.

"The USA is a big country with lots of different people who believe all sorts of different things." He explained and said the churches on Fort Bliss were open to all people regardless of what they believed. When I asked why he went to divinity school if he wasn't religious his answer surprised me, "I'm a fan of ancient history, that's what the Bible is all about."

I told him all this medical stuff was very stressful, it felt out of control to me. Then he interrupted me and said, "And you feel somehow responsible for what happened to Ryan, sort of a bible story with the snake and what it represents, right?"

I felt a surge of sadness and tears came to my eyes and I could barely speak and he got up, grabbed the box of tissues and dropped it in my lap.

"Thanks." I barely squeaked out then blew my nose.

"David, that means you're a sensitive caring spouse, you feel his suffering and it hurts you too." Then he stopped and looked me in the eyes as if he was scanning my soul then added, "You'd be a lousy executioner."

What he said was so farfetched and wrong it made me laugh loudly, but the man had no idea I was laughing at him, what he said was totally the opposite of the truth! Both I and Ry were actual killers for Uncle Sam but I couldn't correct him. I held my hands over my mouth and nose and nodded yes.

He smiled as I regained my composure, still with tears on my face and still coming from my eyes. He gestured for my hand. He took mine with his hand and with his other he held Ryan's hand, so I reached over and set my other hand on Ryan's shoulder and we stayed in that position and silently prayed for his full recovery.

I thanked the Chaplain and he left. On the way out the door he stopped, turned around and said his brother was a professional photographer and went to that park to photograph hummingbirds and told him about what happened. I was astonished and couldn't think of anything to say, so I waved and he slipped past the curtain and was gone. Small world!

The next morning around 10:30am they moved Ry to a telemetry room and removed the big adhesive electrodes from his body (one on his chest, the other one on his ribs). It made me cringe to think how much that probably hurt as they peeled them off his ultra sensitive nipples. If he had any little hairs growing on his chest they just got ripped out by the roots!

At 5pm the anti-venom IV bag was done but there was still some redness and swelling at the site. Around the actual bite was still a very dark patch of skin, the Toxicology doc said he needed to see him twice, once next week and again a week after that to make sure it didn't become necrotic. In most cases smelly black skin meant dead tissue. I think Ry came close but rapid treatment saved him from losing meat on his leg.

I spent that night in his room again, but these were two-patient rooms so we had to be careful what we said out-loud; we used Whispernet a lot that evening.

People watching us talk over Whispernet can see our throats moving and jaw and neck muscles move and it looked really weird. We've had to find ways of whispering that nobody could detect, so he stayed on his side in bed, and I hugged a pillow to my chest and neck to hide the movement. The hospital doctor came in the room at 10:30 and said Ry's labs improved a lot (his pee was no longer dark reddish brown but it wasn't clear yet). He said he wanted to run two more liters of saline then he could go home but he'll need to follow up with his PCP this week; they may want to repeat labs too. I gave him the office number for our primary care doc in town; we also saw one in a clinic for active duty soldiers on Ft Bliss. He said Ryan should be discharged in 24 hours if he continued to improve. I thanked him for his good care and the doc left. As he turned to leave I looked at Ryan and pointed to my shoulder where our rank insignia would go, the doctor was a captain and we were colonels so we outranked him and he was probably old enough to be our parents. We both kind of snickered and wondered what kind of trouble he got into to only be an O3 in his early 50s!

That evening Ry got his appetite back and the evening hospital meal looked nasty so I went out for dinner and got us Deli roast beef sandwiches on bread and bottled waters and brought them into the hospital hidden inside my motorcycle backpack. We split a bag of chips too. That was the first time since the bite that he seemed more like his old self again. But he still looked a little pale and his eyes still looked sunken. I got him out of bed that evening and walked him twice around the telemetry unit, he said his leg hurt a lot, the bite was about four inches above his ankle bone on the outer side of his right lower leg. That spot was still rather dark red, almost burgundy colored. It was nearly three inches across. When I examined the site Ry said it was almost as big as my tits. When he said that I knew his brain function was recovering because when he felt good he was constantly thinking about my body.

I went home at 11pm and showered and slept in our bed. I grabbed his pillow and hugged it against me and fell asleep with his scent in my face.

The next morning I drove back to the hospital at 9am. At 10:45 the doctor came in and talked to both patients, Ryan's second liter bag of fluid was nearly done. He said his morning labs were much improved, his urine was yellow, and his cardiac enzymes were negative and his bite spot was a lighter shade of burgundy. He was going to discharge him and he needed follow-up with the Toxicology doc later this week and to call our PCP and make an appointment, first available for both docs.

Two hours later the Tele nurse came in and removed his IV, we got Ryan changed into some cheap disposable pajamas. We reviewed his discharge instructions and I rolled him to the ER lobby in a wheelchair and helped him get in the front seat and we drove home, but we stopped at the airport outside the tarmac door so everyone could come outside. Ryan was so happy I saw him get teary eyed as he thanked them for the flowers but said next snake bite make it chocolates instead of flowers! We all chuckled.

The stench of jet engine exhaust was nearly over powering so we left and went home after a quick stop at the pharmacy to buy some crutches. At home I carried him again and set him on the living room sofa. He didn't want to get in bed, he actually wanted to sit by the pool so (reluctantly) I built his crutches and helped him amble outside and then adjusted the overhead blinds. It made the yard look weird with the sunlight in narrow bands that ran across the entire back yard. But he stayed outside and told me to swim laps, he wanted to watch. To me that meant he was thinking with his dick again, which was a good sign.

Beside the pool Ryan sat in a lawn chair, I could see on his face he wanted to get in the water but his leg wound had to remain dry for at least another week. I got him a tall glass of water with ice and dragged over another lawn chair to sit beside him, there were things I wanted to ask him.

"Hey Ry, how did you know you died? What was it like?"

"I heard the monitor alarming and assumed it was my heart, but what I saw was a mix of real and dreaming. I suddenly was in a dark place like my eyes were closed and some strange voice told me that I had to go back. Then I felt like a enormous person, bigger than a house put his arms around me and I felt intense love and comfort, then it faded and that's all I remembered until I woke up with that damn tube down my throat, but I still couldn't open my eyes." Ryan said.

Then we had a moment of quiet and he continued. "He told me to go back and told me he loved me, but I learned something about God and Heaven while I was waiting to get in."

"What's that?" I asked.

"This is really weird but what happened is hard to put into words. When they spoke I understood words but what I actually heard was sound like data was being injected into my brain, like a high pitched sound, sort of like fax machines trying connect. It immediately translated into words I understood, so the voice I heard was my own, but the words were not mine. What I saw while I waited was that God and Heaven is functionally like a big bucket of water. We're all drops of water and after we die we return to him and become part of God again. Every one of us are tiny pieces of God, I think that's why the bible said we're made in God's image. I think they were referring to our souls, not our faces. Everything on Earth is a drop, all the living and non-living are droplets. Dogs, cats, horses, birds, worms, ants, cars, rocks, and grains of sand, they're all droplets of water and all small pieces of God, if that makes sense."

I asked, "What happened to the mall bombers when they returned to God?"

"Judgment Day. You review your life in front of God and you have to justify what you did, the punishment is severe after God tells you it's His job to decide who comes back and when. But you still return to the bucket and are reabsorbed. If you were totally evil you lose your individuality and have to start all over again as something like a fish or a spider. Your entire life is erased and you cease to exist, everything you learned or accomplished in life is deleted. Everyone forgets you ever existed. For murderers it truly is a death sentence."

What could I say after hearing something like that? I didn't know if what he said mattered, but it was definitely weird. There were so many things I could have asked but it seemed upsetting to Ry when he spoke, I could see he was almost in tears sitting on the lawn chair. It'll be interesting to hear him talk about this after he had more time to think about it. The thought crossed my mind considering the people we've killed, but our actions were approved military actions which I think was considered differently by God than someone that murdered. We considered ourselves to be like soldiers in combat.

Since he's back I'll let Ryan resume the narration again.

Ryan resumes narration:

Everywhere I went people asked me how I felt. Actually, I felt okay but I also felt weak and tired. Aside from my leg I had no pain anywhere except maybe a small headache. My brain felt foggy and slow like I was hung over. My mind kept replaying my death, it repeated over and over in my brain. No, I didn't see a light coming through the ceiling, I didn't see all my dead relatives in the room, it was sort of like passing out from being too drunk. Boom! Lights out, but my soul stayed awake and I didn't see anything but I sensed everything in great detail. I told David I `saw' him against the wall in tears while everyone stood there watching the cardiac monitor. It felt like I was floating in the air above my body.

It was weird because with each passing hour I remembered more and more about what happened but my eyes were closed the entire time. The one thing I had no memory of was the seizure.

I sat there on the lawn chair by the pool and heard bare feet running across the deck, and then David raced by and splashed down in the pool. He coasted all the way to the deep end under water. One hand reached up and grabbed the edge then his head emerged. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his thumbs, and then he turned around and smiled at me. We used salt in our pool instead of chlorine so our water wasn't as harsh on the eyeballs.

Sometimes in the late day sunshine when he's in the pool with his black hair and brown skin he looked totally Mexican, when he rose up from the water he reminded me again how dark he got during the summer.

My body was covered with tape and adhesive residue from blood draws and IV dressings so I sat there picking stuff off my skin, it hurt but gave me something to do other than watching David swim laps and the two big dark-red circles on his chest. The bruising from blood draws was amazing; my arms looked like a miniature battle field. It took a while and I finally got everything off my skin except the glue residue. Then I raised my shirt and looked at my chest and stomach, I was covered with adhesive gunk and cardiac monitor electrodes. Slowly, I peeled off the electrodes and stuck them to each other. Just when I thought I had them all gone I found one more.

"Hey! What'll remove this crud?" I shouted to David across the pool. He swam closer, walked up the stairs, and stood by me looking as I held my shirt up. He said, "Let's try alcohol and if that don't work we'll try acetone." I sat there watching while he turned to dive back in the water then paused and looked back at me, "Right now?" I smiled and nodded yes.

So he grabbed the towel and lightly dried himself and went inside, down to the basement. When we got in the pool we usually draped two beach towels over the railing by the steps. His favorite towel was the one with the muscle surfer dude riding a large curling wave on the north shore of Oahu. My towel had Foghorn Leghorn smiling.

A couple minutes later he came back with a wash cloth, a can of Acetone, and some of those alcohol skin preps the nurses used to clean skin before a needle stick.

The alcohol barely worked, but the acetone instantly dissolved the adhesive residue. I sat there in the lawn chair while he slowly removed the adhesive from my arms and chest. He was still in his skimpy swim suit so I mostly watched his tits as he cleaned my skin, and looked all mentally focused on the job. Normally being that close to him in a swim suit would turn me on but Little Ryan was still dormant.

While he was cleaning he had me lift my butt off the chair and slid my shorts down to my knees and pretended to be inspecting my lower belly for adhesive but it remained totally limp. I think if I got he would have blown me but I stayed totally limp.

I felt good enough that I cooked dinner for us then we went to bed at 8pm and he held me against him like I was his baby, he moved so my face was at his chest and I held onto him and we slept most of the night in that position, I felt at peace and safe like a puppy sleeping at my mommy's warm/soft belly with my litter mates. I fell asleep with my face against his chest.

I sensed that David remained mostly unchanged, but maybe he was listening to me a little bit more now. I experienced a significant life event and he was still totally focused on himself. I wondered if he was as obsessed with his body as I was. I'm not exactly sure how to ask that question without hurting his feelings.

Ryan narrating:

The next morning I got on the phone and made appointments with the two doc's offices, Tox and PCP. David went to work like normal. He reminded me it might be weeks until I was allowed to work again. I thought while I was off I might clean our machine guns and the launch tube too, but all our stuff was still up at WSMR. I assumed David would go up there today or tomorrow and come home later than normal. If he ran up there it would make him about two hours late getting home. He'd text me so I didn't have dinner on the table while he was driving north into New Mexico.

To me, driving up to WSMR was not a pleasant drive (it felt like it took forever to get there), but David had to drive from work to WSMR and loved the added distance so he came home smiling, I suspected he jerked off on the way. I was going to ask (when he got home) if he needed a smoke break but decided to keep that to myself too.

During dinner he told me they discussed bringing one member of our backup team down here from Omaha to take my place. He reminded me it could be a long time until I was able to return to full duty. That evening I made him sliced potatoes with cheese sauce (Cheese Whiz) and pork chops on the griddle. It was not easy cooking on crutches. My arm pits got sore from using the crutches wrong. They said you should never put all your weight on the crutches in your arm pits but it was nearly impossible to cook dinner without leaning against something. If I put any weight on my right leg it hurt bad. We even got a knee brace to help keep my knee bent to help me remember not to stand on it.

That evening at bed time he was in the bathroom in his briefs shaving and staring at his face, I hobbled into the bathroom and peed while he worked on his whiskers with the electric. I stepped back against the wall and watched him, our eyes made contact in the mirror and we smiled. I asked him if he met a guy with the exact same body as his how much would that turn him on. His answer was different than I expected.

"I'm a top, for me it's more about his desire to take my dick inside him whenever I want it. It's like having a wife that never says no to sex. He said he thought he had a nice body but what turned him on was his partner's hunger (for dick) more than what he looked like. I asked how it felt being married to someone that fantasized about his body 24 hours a day and he said he thought it was weird because he rarely had thoughts like that.

He turned around, we were only a few feet apart and I was leaning on the crutches with my back against the wall. David said, "You're into boners and nipples, but I'm into fucking. To me it's the conquest, being on top, being the lead, it's about a big finish, the sweat and physical effort. To you it's about having something in your mouth or your hands. You see our disconnect?

I asked him which felt better: coming in my mouth or in my ass. He said both were nice but he couldn't get as physical with it in his mouth as he could in my ass. I reminded him I spent years trying to discover the best orgasm for myself. I said my best way was to be physically relaxed so I could feel the internal pumping action during the orgasm, like the bowling ball knocking down all the pins. But for him it was like crossing the finish line ahead of the other runners, with his arms in the air, crowds of people cheering, his sweaty naked body glistening in the sun, people admiring his body.

I asked him about his nipples, when they got huge. He said they were always big, but they really started to grow in 6th grade. David said he spent years hating them and how often he got teased in gym about his girl tits. He said in gym they wore shorts and white tank tops. His tits were way wider than the shoulder straps and kids were constantly pinching them or calling him Pepperoni Tits, or Pizza Tits.

The end of our conversation was when we agreed to try stuff to tease each other more often. He wanted me to get some ass-less pants and sometimes act a little slutty and tease my ass at him, but be prepared ahead of time for what would follow. And for me he promised to show more dick and tits around the house and offer to breast feed me, sort of role playing like I was the baby and he was the mommy.

Then he told me my nice round ass cheeks really excited him, I should show them more often, maybe try to dress like a school boy offering daddy his ass. Then we hugged and kissed for a couple minutes in the bathroom. We really needed that conversation. But I had yet to get an erection since the snake bite, but I knew it would be back in service soon.

In the bedroom he reminded me how my body perfectly fit the definition of Twink, I could easily dress like a young boy and tease him with my big hairless butt cheeks. I told him I had no idea how to dress and he said to look up pictures of kids from small town England going to private school in uniform, find one in 5th grade and get those clothes. Maybe try an adult costume store for role playing and cosplay. I agreed.

We got in bed that evening and I snuggled behind him, then he rolled over and I put my head on his chest and fell asleep beside him.

The next day David accepted a mission involving a reported murder/suicide in Oklahoma. Two bodies were found in a garage, shot in the head. Initially, it looked like a poorly staged murder/suicide but the police soon called it a double homicide, possibly linked to other similar murders along I-44/70 across Missouri and all the way to Pittsburgh PA. The FBI only had one agent on the case and he immediately requested David's help with the investigation.

Some Feds in Texas and New Mexico believed David had a 'Sixth-Sense' when it came to assessing crime scenes, but David denied it. I always knew he really did (he told me so), but didn't want to be known that way because eventually it would destroy his credibility.

I've even heard him deny being anything except just another olive skinned Texan when people who asked. When people asked about his race he usually said we had an outdoor pool in the back yard. He rarely admitted being one quarter Indian (Atakapan), but freely admitted being part Hispanic (which wasn't true at all).

And you didn't want to be heard talking about ESP in our line of work. So we never mentioned it outside our home but he actually `saw and felt' things. That was part of what made him a great investigator, and an excellent leader in combat. If I was sad or depressed about something he felt it immediately. Sometimes if I was injured he felt it the exact moment it happened, no matter how far apart we were. He told me recently he believed he felt the fear in the snake that caused it to bite me, because my legs got too close while she carried one of her eggs to a new burial spot.

One time years ago I asked David why he told some people he was Hispanic instead of Indian. He said his grandmother's tribe (Atakapan aka: "Coastal People") was so unknown today he didn't like having to explain who they were. He said as far as he was concerned being Mexican was the same as being Indian.

According to David, all the major Indian tribes in Central America were descended from the same people. So Maya, Aztec, and Toltepec had their own creation stories but genetic studies showed they were all descended from the Clovis people. He said it was believed Clovis people migrated from the Orient, across the Bering Sea to Alaska and down into North America during the Ice Age, but David believed they actually sailed across the Pacific settling islands (and breeding with island women) as they crossed and ran out of ocean when they landed on the US west coast. He thought the `ice free corridor' story was bullshit, but believed their trip across the Pacific took many years, possibly decades.

He also said, "Ask any gay man that's sucked Oriental boner from Taiwan, Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and American Indians (Navajo, Maya, Hopi, etc), their faces look different but their bodies are exactly the same. The body and boner on a guy from Taiwan still looks exactly the same as a Maya from Yucatan." He also said he thought they also had a dash of African DNA in the mix too, since those people also headed across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. He believed that's how he got his big nips.

David flew to Oklahoma City to help the fed investigator. He brought along his glasses, a .22 pistol on his ankle and a zombie knife in his pocket. He also took the keyboard off his Batsuit to link his implants and glasses to me in ELP. I told him to take a spider and some pellets but he didn't want to. Linking to the TDRS satellites via the keyboard was very sketch, and it was considered unreliable, but it worked fine when used outside. It worked better through wood buildings than steel and even better outside away from trees and overhead power lines. Enabling the TDRS link in the keyboard also killed the battery much faster. While he was packing I handed him the external charger and his implant jammer, he nearly forgot them.

I wanted so badly to go with him, even if I had to stay in the hotel room all day. I'd gladly stay there just to be with him in bed at night.

He was met at the Will Rogers World Airport by an FBI dude and driven 95 minutes west on I-40 to the town of Elk City, the location of two corpses in a small garage. He told me over the cell they were quite ripe; he smelled rotting flesh fifty feet from the garage. He wore a full gas mask and saw the bodies covered with galloping rice (maggots). The air inside the garage was thick with flying insects. His boots crunched with each step (on a layer of dead insects) as he got closer to the bodies. As he described the scene I started to get queasy.

After an hour wasted at the site they drove to the Elk City cop building to meet with police (local, county, state, and FBI). They had no processed evidence yet but already (possibly) linked them to a series of killings along the I-44/70/40 corridor. The state cops (in Missouri) already called it the Interstate Killer Case. He told me he was surprised they didn't hire an artist to create a logo and copyright it, maybe sell t-shirts at local truck stops.

While he was in the garage a coroner tech used a meat thermometer to get core temps from the bodies (usually the liver) and found they were already at ambient temperature so they were at least 30 hours post mortem, he said based on the insects and their eye lids it was more likely several days old, maybe as much as two weeks. The temperature inside the garage when he arrived was 84 degrees and 89% humidity. It was probably raining when the murder occurred and every day since. The local cops were done collecting evidence, now it was time for the coroner to bag them and take `em to the county morgue.

There comes a point in human bodies where the internal organs begin to swell and burst open, it appeared that had already started to one of the bodies but not the other (temperature and other factors can vary the time). Even if you're embalmed and buried in a casket in a concrete vault after so many days in the ground your organs still swell and burst (its why the ancient Egyptians had their organs removed and stored apart from the body). The inside of the casket gets the appearance that there was a fire because everything looks charred. Afterward, decay slows dramatically and the corpse can usually be easily identified for a hundred years after burial.

The group of fifteen investigators met in a nearby hotel conference room, David said he took three pages of notes. David said it looked like he was the only one actually paying attention. Half the people were fiddling with their cell phones down on their laps. I kidded with him saying this week was the annual 60% off sale at pussy.com if you installed their app, but he ignored my joke.

So I made up a bogus text and sent it to him: `Hey Babe, it's Jenny at Pussy.com, we've been thinking about you and gettin all wet! Download our app and join us for 60% off chats and 1:1 video with your favorite girl! We want your hot action!' But he never replied. Real sites like that charge $5 a minute or more and I'm sure everything you did was recorded too in case they wanted to blackmail you later. Just ask the celebs that visited the sex island near Saint Thomas USVI in the 1990s.

The murders they reviewed had definite similarities. The victims were males between the ages of 17 to 36, all of them were found in a garage within a half mile of the interstate highway, all had a rope tightened around the neck, and two other ropes around their wrists and ankles. The neck ropes were cranked tight with a long wooden rod, often a household broom handle. All suffered bullet to the head but died of strangulation. All of them were stripped naked and had bite marks around the body and were posed to look like a murder suicide. None of the murders were discovered soon enough to establish a precise time of death, which eliminated cell records as a useful resource. But David read all the reports anyway because he generally trusted the coroner's time of death estimates.

David made one page of notes that only dealt with time and date of death based on the coroner's certificate. Next, he downloaded local cell tower records and saved each one as a separate spread sheet. Finally, he combined them into one very long Excel sheet and searched for duplicate entries but that made a list of 491 cell phones near the scene at the time of death. Numbers on taxi drivers, delivery vans, police, students, and local residents were responsible for most of the duplicates. He went to his hotel room and continued his work.

He called me that evening and explained how the FBI ruled out using cell records since the death times were not fixed and they lacked the manpower to do those comparisons. "It sounds like they're just being lazy." I offered.

"Well, there's that too, but I focused on the data and not what we already knew about the feds."

"You find anything yet?"

"Ahhhhh no. But I had to get out my notes on how to do sorting stuff in Excel and that took some time. Whoever wrote the manual for Excel should have his nuts chewed off by hungry sewer rats while he was forced to watch."

"Wow, hostility, turns me on!"

He snickered knowing I didn't entirely believe his anger report. "Well there's something else you can do after retirement, write a better manual for Excel, or make training videos on DVD." I suggested.

We talked a while longer. I was stretched out under a blanket on the sofa with all the lights in the house off, he was in his hotel room bed in Elk City under the blanket with the AC cranked up on high, just how he liked it (ice cold/dark bedroom). He said his FBI roomie was out doing drunk karaoke with the other feds. Sometimes when he talked about feds he adopted a hissy metro-sexual accent, it often made me laugh because David looked and talked extremely hetero most of the time, but his fake gay accent was over the top funny.

I told him to send me a copy of the cell records, I'd look for details too, so he got out of bed and copied everything to me on our work email accounts, his attachments were way too large to email conventionally (1.14 terabytes total).

We spoke for almost another hour and discussed how to divide the work and he told me to use the coroner's death times, search for cell units active and moving within four hours prior, then make lists of just those, and look for duplicates. He said he was reviewing the coroner's notes to try to get a feel for if the death times were close enough, but we were only looking at ten murders, not going all the way back to Pittsburgh. My search was limited to the area between Elk City and Waynesville. David said my search was based on repeating cell numbers in those areas near the time of death, but his would be based on repeats in the locations alone, regardless of date and time.

He explained how to write a search routine for the GPS coordinates column, so we were only searching within 2,000 feet of the bodies, how to change that into degrees, minutes, seconds longitude and latitude. Roughly, 1 second equaled 100 feet. We also discussed his sense that the killers and the victims were all alive together in the garage before the killings and possibly had intimacy first, things slowly escalated into murder and each victim had semen in the rectum and mouth. He said he'd look into why those specific locations were used and if they were related or not. He said most of them were abandoned properties, awaiting delinquent tax auctions.

After we got off the phone I pulled the blanket over my head and pictured him doing the same thing in the hotel bed. He actually told me he hated sleeping alone. Knowing his mind like I do I'm sure when the other investigator returned to the room David pretended to be sound asleep under the blankets and got little glimpses of him undressing and getting in the other bed.

I woke up at 4:59am the next morning after having another of my Seal school dreams. I swore to myself that I would never again swim in Lake Michigan, Seal school really zapped my innocence and blind trust of mankind. It also made me a remorseless killer when necessary. I used to know how many people I've killed but lost count and stopped thinking about it. But sometimes it invades my dreams and I was powerless to stop that.

Some of the trainers at Seal school were highly sadistic and evil toward us, I vowed if I ever met certain ones of them again I'd give them a taste of what they did to me and David. More than two of them I think were high and got sexually aroused while torturing us. In the class ahead of ours one student drowned but there was no investigation and the teachers thought it was funny. I heard the student struggled to survive but even that was not good enough to graduate, but he refused to drop out, so he mysteriously drowned one night in the Everglades.

After hobbling over to the kitchen to nuke some leftover pizza I got my laptop and sat at one of the small diner booths and started working on my search terms for Excel. It took me nearly two hours to write the sorting rules for all the reports and just as I was about to run the first search David called; he was having breakfast with a bunch of cops at Denny's in Elk City and was checking on me. I told him I was eating leftover pizza then I'd start the searches. We got off the phone just after he told me their group was moving back to Oklahoma City that afternoon. He said he'd call around dinner time.

I ran the first search but Excel locked-up, I had to reboot the computer and try it again.

The second try it sat there and did nothing but it was a huge list. Each corpse record had lots of data, including:

Name, date of birth, gender, race, date and time of discovery, date and time of death, location of corpse, last time seen, hair color, eye color, height, weight, tattoos, piercings, blood testing hits, cause of death, next of kin, employment status, cell numbers, outstanding physical features, unusual injuries, surgical history, general description of corpse condition, and marital status. So the sheet was wide and extremely long.

I ran the search again and that time I got a three page comparison of similarities in dates and times and cell numbers and other things. I wrote a totally new search routine comparing things he never asked about (adding cell sites that covered hotels along the highway too). Once I got the search writing technique figured out it was much quicker to do new ones. Some of the results yielded weird data that made no sense when compared to the FBI's suspect profile. I also narrowed the search areas by about 500 feet, which made the results much smaller, but it still had way too many entries.

At first I thought I was still doing something fundamentally wrong so I started a very basic search on the data of just one dead person, and the cell records he sent me from the cell tower that covered the garage.

So think about this: What were the odds that some person or persons in the normal course of life might happen to be near a mass murder site, by coincidence, every time one happened near the highway? It simply frosted my brain cells to find there were six cell phones that managed to be near each murder victim in three states over the past nine weeks, but were possibly not involved in the killings.

I found movement patterns that were near the murder sites but never at the site. Imagine there were six dead along I-40/44 but each time it happened the same six other cells were always within two miles, at a hotel near the highway. I considered the possibility there were people involved in the killings that only provided support before and after, like helping tie their arms and legs, or luring them to meet somewhere for fantastic sex. Maybe they were the bait but not the trap. That lead me to consider they might be using children to attract victims, and some kids might not even know they were being used as bait. It's very rare to have killings that used support people unless there was some complicated plot involved, like they were only killing child predators.

As I looked at the cell account ID data I wanted to rule out most of them. The results I came up with were too weird to tell David, so I kept checking and changing my search terms. It almost appeared like six people were involved and they'd do two murders then go back home to Ohio and Indiana, then another group would take over, drive further west on I-70 and I-44 and select new victims, kill them, drive home and then one more group took over. And all of the people used the exact same MO. How could that be possible? I also found some similar driving patterns that came from west central Indiana along the same highway. It also suggested a ritual murder type scenario and deviate sex/murder cult.

The thing I did next was to investigate the possibility that someone at the FBI was entering data from one case (copy and paste) into nearly nine different cases out of laziness, or the belief it didn't matter because none of the cases would ever go to trial. I didn't want to tell David so I didn't jam-up his karma.

I spent the rest of the day checking my results and getting more and more frustrated. I even started reading newspaper accounts to verify if what they printed matched the FBI reports. The entire time I was researching my snake bite site burned like someone was touching a hot poker to the skin. I shone a flashlight at it and to me it looked darker (and swollen) in the very center, but it could have been my imagination. My Tox follow up appointment was tomorrow, and I'd have to take a taxi. It itched and stung like crazy, sometimes it felt like I had ants crawling on my leg but when I aimed the flashlight at it there was nothing there except my skinny leg with sharpie writing all over it. My feeling of nausea slowly got worse too.

That evening instead of calling, David texted and said he was exhausted and drunk, but he was showered and alone in bed. David said he was sharing a hotel room with some dude who was an Illinois State Police detective, but the guy reminded him of Clark Kent (an actual do-gooder character from the 1950s TV series). They spent two hours at a bar after working all day on the records and calling different police departments to clarify records on the dead bodies. They stayed until both of them were yawning too much to even drink then they caught a cab to the hotel. He said the detective was kind of funny but very hetero, and constantly talked about his wife's cooking too. David said Clark claimed his wife was a culinary school drop-out for behavioral reasons, she was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

The next morning when I got up my leg hurt worse but my appointment wasn't until around 11am so I called for a taxi as soon as the Tox doctor's office opened. He took me right in and said I needed to go to the hospital; some of the flesh around the actual bite started to look borderline necrotic and had to be fixed in the OR. So he had his secretary call for an ambulance and then he came in the exam room with a plastic tray and got out a small scalpel and without numbing meds he sliced the center of the dark spot and thick stinky pus oozed out, then he squeezed the leg which hurt really bad and even more pus oozed out. It came out as thick as toothpaste and it stunk like a dead mouse under the basement stairs. They got out enough of that crap to fill a shot glass. That alone made my leg feel better but he said this was a life threatening infection that needed immediate care in the OR. He said it was tunneling around inside my leg as it grew.

Several minutes later the ambulance arrived, they rolled a cart into the doctor's office room and got me strapped down on their cart and took me to WBAMC and I was taken directly to a room in the ER, but luckily it was not the trauma room. On the ride to the hospital the medic in back commented about the stuff oozing out of my leg and how nasty it smelled. I told him it was an infected rattlesnake bite. He said it looked like dark gray toothpaste with blood clots.

About three hours later I was in surgery for wound cleaning, and that time they blocked the nerves in my leg, so I wasn't intubated or anesthetized. They said I could go home in a few hours, but my entire leg was numb and felt very heavy. They said it would stay numb for days, but that was okay since I wasn't supposed to be walking (or standing) on it anyway.

They removed a rotted chunk of dead skin and muscle about the size of a large walnut. I texted David after the procedure and told him some of what happened, but my leg felt a lot better with that stuff gone from my body. He wanted to fly home but I wanted him to stay on the mission, even though there was no reward posted yet. Rewards were something we paid close attention to because it affected our eventual retirements.

I took a taxi home and stopped at the store to buy more wound dressing supplies. They put me on antibiotic pills (Vancomycin) and gave me another bottle of hydrocodone/tylenol pills too. I also got a huge starter dose of antibiotics in a shot in my butt in the recovery room to get it kick started. So I was back on the sofa again for another 48 hours, only getting up to use the toilet. I ordered delivery food but the one of the meds made me nauseated and itchy. Our neighbor Jeremy came over and helped me with household stuff for a couple hours. He said I looked like a corpse. I checked my vital signs and they were lousy, 99/52, heart rate of 127, O2 sat of 92% on room air. I ended up dry heaving twice that evening, but the pills stayed down. My entire body had tiny red dots and I itched like crazy and I swear I felt like I was high.

I called our office and I think I started talking gibberish while I was on the phone with the OD. I woke when the ambulance crew was in my living room with Jeremy standing nearby. The medics put me on their cart and into the back of an ambulance then drove me back to WBAMC (again). That time I did not go to the ER, instead I was a 'direct-admit' to a tele-room for IV antibiotics and nausea meds, and steroids, allergic reaction meds, and IV fluids of lactated ringers solution. I texted David but I think his phone was off, he never replied. So I fell asleep around 11pm with my cell under the pillow. My nurse that night was the same one I had last week in the room next door. She said they probably shouldn't have discharged me home earlier today, I should have been admitted for IV meds and close watch on my vital signs. I also needed IV fluids and close monitoring.

They did dressing changes and also put me in the hyperbaric chamber to improve the condition of my leg the next day. David finally called the next day late in the afternoon and said he was on the way home, but I argued and told him over and over that I was in no risk of dying, just stay there and finish the mission. I heard the sounds of a busy airport terminal in the background as we talked, so he was already in the process of flying home. Times like this he can get really stubborn, it really pisses me off when he gets that way and won't hear anything anyone says.

I softly wept while we spoke and I begged him not to come home so he hung up on me. After he hung up on me I went online and found the reward was finally posted on the serial killer in Missouri, they offered $10k tax-free cash paid by check in the mail. Making it tax-free was like an instant 35% bonus, that way 10 thousand was actually worth 13.5 thousand (270 fifty dollar bills).

David arrived five hours later and practically ran into the room, he had his airplane carry-on under his arm and tossed it onto the recliner chair and inspected all the IV bags and pumps and looked me over, and my vital signs, then he pressed the call button and asked to talk to the doctor. Ten minutes later he left the room and had his meeting with the hospital doctor for the med-surg unit.

David walked back in the room half an hour later and rolled the stool over by the bed and rested his arms on the railing and sighed and stared in my eyes for a while. I could see the gears turning in his head. I could practically hear them turning.

"Ry, do you know what sepsis is?"

"Uh... sort of. It's dangerous I know that."

"The docs said your wound got infected again while you were focusing on search criteria and the increased swelling partially pinched off the nerves and circulation, and all the time you were fucking around with Excel your leg was getting blacker and now you got shit growing in your blood stream from dead flesh on the side of your leg. You almost died again. He said if you hadn't gone to the doc's office early you would have been dead by noon."

He asked me if they told me I had sepsis. I said no, but the nurse said they told me twice but they think I was confused and not thinking clearly. I suddenly felt humiliated and just stopped talking while David stood there looking at me like I was partly to blame. I sat there with my eyes closed and a pillow squeezed against my chest while he scolded me. When my husband scolded me it hurt badly and I usually started to cry, and he knew it hurt bad coming from him so he never raised his voice or insulted me.

When I tried to defend myself he told me to shut up and listen... tomorrow I was being transferred to a VA residential clinic for wounded soldiers for long term treatment. I interrupted him and blurted out, "A fucking group home for the pre-dead!"

David sternly ordered me: "For once just shut up and listen to me. Your brain is too stoned and toxic to understand, so trust me and cooperate. You remember the word Cooperate when we were kids watching Sesame Street? I know you know what that means!" So I shut down my brain, stared at my feet and avoided eye contact with him. He's never really talked to me like this before, he really was angry and sounded scared too. David sat on the edge of the mattress and held my hand and explained things to me slowly.

The nurse came in with a clipboard, David signed and said that was consent for transfer tomorrow; it was on Fort Bliss up near the VA hospital on the old medical campus along Fred Wilson, near the canyon road. Then he took my hand and said the place would be full of poorly dressed young soldiers that were recovering from serious wounds in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. He winked at me and said he had to get back to Oklahoma City, so we kissed briefly and he said the last flight back left in ninety minutes.

He slid his hand under my gown and massaged my lower belly briefly, with a drugged-up smile I put my hands on top of his (outside my gown) and softly smiled back and stared into his black eyes and fell in love all over again. He really understood me which felt really neat and made my eyes get all watery but I was too stoned on Percocet to get turned on. After several minutes he stood up and whispered that me he loved me.

David waved at me as he turned to leave. "Hey," I shouted when he got near the door. "Almost forgot, I saw something in the numbers, at first it didn't make sense."

"What's that?" He said standing in the doorway.

"That case, the last ten bodies, I figured out why the numbers seem weird on the ones in Oklahoma and Missouri."

"What?"

"It's not 'a' serial killer, it's at least four and maybe eight, and they're taking turns and carefully using the same M.O., like a sex ritual with a restrained person they killed and had sex again while he was dying, and after."

After he left I typed him an email that my belief was they trapped young men then tied their wrists, ankles, and knees together and put a rope around their neck which marked them for sacrifice. Next they took turns fucking and doing anything sexual they wanted for maybe a full day, then they cranked the rope around the throat which killed them within one minute and while they were dying someone fucked them, and immediately after someone else did it again. Then they staged them and shot rounds at close range to make it look like a murder suicide, but they were probably dead for a day before that happened and the ritual was over. I told him they could even have a group of people watching the sacrifice.

It was really sweet of him to fly here for two hours then fly right back to work, very non-selfish of him. I noticed that since the snakebite he started to treat me differently. I had vague memories of him promising to be a better husband but that was something we hadn't discussed yet. I was focused on David and David was focused on David too, but that won't sustain a life-long marriage. Sometimes I thought to myself that if I had a body like David's I'd probably lust after myself too. Thank God he didn't have an identical twin brother living nearby!

David arrived back in Oklahoma City that evening and reported my findings to the lead Missouri State Police detective. They said the M.O. was so exact that they felt it was impossible that multiple people were involved but some of the cops wanted to re-organize based on my research. David said he could not yet show them my raw data because he didn't understand it without me explaining it. And the data was only on my laptop and he forgot to send it to himself before he left El Paso.

The next day I was taken by medical transport (an empty/old ambulance) to a residential care facility (group home) where I would continue on IV fluids and IV antibiotics. They also opened and rinsed out my wound, which was now much larger, it stunk, and nasty looking stuff was still leaking out of it. One of the techs said it looked like a four inch diameter cheese and sausage pizza but stunk like road kill!

I was admitted into a large room with five other patients, all young men, most of them had recent limb amputations that didn't heal properly. Many of them also had developed sort of a chronic septicemia condition, so it meant take antibiotics daily just to stay alive. But each of them were slowly dying anyway. The problem was all of them were under age 30, most were younger than me. Some were poorly educated types but a few seemed nice. I heard some sobbing at night and nearly one patient in the house died every week. When we arrived everything in the building stopped and everyone watched the transport guy roll me to the only empty bed. He used the sheet to slide me from the transport cart onto the bed.

The building we were in was one of those old wooden WW2 2-story barracks buildings (easily seen in the 1964 movie: `Goldfinger' at Fort Knox) that Fort Bliss should have torn down in the 1960s, but this one was always in use. It was two stories tall and modified for wheelchair access and was divided into two large dorms per floor. Each vet had a small space to himself, they were divided by hospital curtains so there was no sound privacy and very little sight privacy.

This part of the old hospital campus used to be high-end housing for retired top military officers that needed to live near the hospital. Many of the celebrity admirals and generals from WW2 and Korea lived the final years of their lives here but all those old homes were eventually bulldozed, just like much of Fort Bliss. The ten story tall VA hospital here today used to be the Army hospital (formerly: WBAMC).

Food service came from the VA hospital which was only 1000 feet up the hill.

One of the guys in my ward said IED injuries were the worst because they often lead to chronic infections, sometimes from bugs that were native to the desert in Iraq but foreign to the US Army antibiotic supplies and the rest of the world. Some of the Middle Eastern desert fungal infections did not respond to modern drugs. I suddenly wondered if it was safe to even be in that place exposed to those foreign germs. I asked to be discharged home, with home healthcare. They told me the cost per day would run about $650 per day (paid in advance, not including dressing supplies) and was not covered under my military benefits. But we were wealthy and we rarely touched our savings, so I signed the form and said I could leave tomorrow and nursing at home would start that day. I confirmed that drugs were covered but not a home healthcare nurse or home transport equipment (wheelchair, bedside toilet, crutches, etc). The bad part was that other than drugs I would have to pay everything in advance in cash, the home health nurse would get the IV meds from the VA pharmacy but the supplies came from him. I had to submit bills to Benefits Admin to get reimbursed some day.

I only spent one night in the nursing home, but was supposed to be on IV meds and have professional wound care for the next two weeks, I'd need round the clock care for the first 72 hours at home, that was most of what I had to pay out of pocket. She ran the numbers for me but stressed it was approximate: 3x$650=$1950 for just the nurse in our home for 72 hours. I'd have to pay for IV tubing and other supplies but most of it would be reimbursed eventually by the DOD. We'd been through this before and had to call our lawyer to actually get reimbursement, but we had a real asshole of a lawyer on retainer for just such incidents. The guy never smiled but he was a damn good attorney and he graduated 2nd in his class at Yale Law School nineteen years ago.

That evening I fell asleep after unit lights-out time (10pm), and woke up when I heard voices talking in the unit, I assumed another soldier had died. Someone shone a flashlight in my eyes and I turned over to see the last person I ever expected to see standing by my bed, it was a smiling Captain Johnson (in his army dress greens). He said he heard I was up here near his home and wanted to see what was going on and offered his help but there was nothing to do just then, so he slid a chair close to the bed and we softly talked for ten minutes.

The first thing he commented on was the peculiar odor in the unit. I said it was the stink from bizarre fungal infections feeding on human flesh. The room had a dead mouse odor to it.

"You know that theory you gave David led to three arrests about an hour ago near Alton, Illinois?"

"I hadn't heard from David yet, but that's great news."

"Yes, it's on the TV news all across the country, three Interstate Killers were arrested and more arrests are coming, probably four more from Indiana and Illinois later tonight. It was your research that broke the case and darn near ended your life too." He told me I would probably receive a congressional citation, and that made me laugh.

"What I wanna know is why the feds didn't figure it out." I asked.

"They're some jurisdictional issues so they're only helping, the case was mostly the Missouri State Police." He answered deflecting blame away from the feds, which was what he usually did.

He shook my hand but I was too weak and nauseated to care. The captain fluffed my pillow and got me comfortable on my side, I thought for sure he was going to salute me but he turned and left instead. To be honest, all I wanted to do was sleep and get rid of the constant feeling like I was about to puke. It surprised me that moments before the captain left he patted me on the forehead, his palm was very soft and felt almost the same as David's. That was the first time either of us had a friendly intimate moment with the boss. I wasn't going to tell David because he thought Captain Johnson was a crook.

Soon after the captain left the flashlight hit my eyes again and someone else was here to see me. The captain and another man bumped elbows in the doorway. I recognized the voice right away it was Cousin Mark. I guess David called him, he actually only lived about five blocks away. He leaned over and kissed my forehead and sat beside me. We whispered softly since it was after visiting hours and everyone in the unit was trying to sleep. I was surprised nobody shouted at us but I bet all of them were listening closely.

We whispered our brief conversation for a while. Mark said he brought me something over to help me fall sleep. I heard a plastic wrapper crinkling then he pressed something against my lips, it felt like a gummy bear so I opened-up and chewed it. We chatted briefly then after about ten minutes he left after kissing my forehead again. When he left the unit lights were already off. I closed my eyes and after about 40 minutes I started to see weird geometric colored patterns in my vision and managed to fall asleep anyway. I think he gave me half a 5mg THC gummy at David's request.

The last thing I remembered thinking about was how nice an Outback Bloomin' Onion and a double burger with onion and tomato would taste right now. Despite the munchies I fell asleep thinking about music I used to jam to in college on the radio.

The next day (Saturday) I was transported home (on a cart) in a non-medical transport van and met with an older guy in our driveway, a home health nurse. He said we had to discuss money first, since it was not a covered service. So I used my cell to text our neighbor Jeremy to come over ASAP while the nurse dude was out in the driveway getting supplies from his car trunk. Jeremy never replied, he simply strolled in the back door about sixty seconds later. I had him go to the TAC room door, I told him the combination and he opened the door and grabbed a shoe box off the closet floor and brought it to me on the sofa. When he made the turn from the hallway into the living room he said, "What's in here, chunks of steel?"

"No. Go in the kitchen and get a small knife from the drawer please. Then close the door to the small room."

He came back with a small paring knife and watched me slit the tape on the lid and reached my hand inside a plastic bag and pulled out several bundles of fifty dollar bills. I handed Jeremy one `U.S. Grant' (fifty bucks) and thanked him for the help, he ran out the back door (stripping off his t-shirt) and dove in the pool. I already asked him not to leave without checking with me first. Just to be annoying (as he turned to leave) he clicked his heels, saluted and said, "Yes Sir Colonel Malone!" I laughed at his antics; he was trying to be funny, but I (smiled and) flipped him off anyway because I've told him before to call me Ryan and knock-off the Colonel crap. To make things worse he saluted me like a junior officer in the British Army in the 1950s, with the backs of his fingers against his forehead, his palm facing me.

The home health nurse returned inside and we discussed terms and costs, I told him I wanted to pay for him to stay for exactly 72 hours, the cost was $1100 per day with supplies and the IV meds. I counted out sixty six ($50) bills and got a hand written receipt. We settled down quickly into a routine. He wanted the TV on and complimented me on our kitchen; he said it looked exactly like a miniature Waffle House kitchen with a pool outside! I told him we didn't even own a waffle cooker, but yes it did sort of look that way. And I said they didn't have a wine rack and an ice cube machine that made perfectly round/clear ice cubes in their kitchen either!

He moved the recliner closer and we spent the rest of the day with the TV on but the sound muted sharing stories about the military, I told him I went to Seal school at Great Lakes but he didn't believe me. He handed me the alert box, I turned it off since my cell would be near me 24/7. He got my cell charger from the kitchen counter too and plugged it in.

He asked if I really was a full bird colonel and I said yes, but I outranked Colonel Sanders, he was a different kind of bird colonel. We laughed. He looked at a patient data sheet and confirmed I just turned thirty years old and he asked how I managed to make O6 at age 30. I told him I had a master's degree and was trained to handle extremely dangerous weapons and nobody in the military was allowed to do that without being O6 or higher and having the highest security clearance. Not even the President had a security clearance as high as mine, which was true but the nurse thought I was joking.

At 8pm my husband called and talked to the nurse but not to me, he said he'd be home late tomorrow. I fell asleep after the morphine shot and slept all night. He also gave me an anti-nausea pill which made a huge improvement. That was the first time in almost 72 hours that my nausea was practically gone. And the burning sensation in my leg was nearly gone too.

The nurse stayed for exactly 72 hours, and all the IV meds were infused. David came home very late on day #2, he walked in the front door at 10:05pm but the house was dark, the nurse was asleep on the recliner and I was on the sofa with two IVs running and a plastic urinal sitting on the coffee table.

He arrived in a taxi even though his truck was at the airport. The first thing he asked was, "What's that smell?"

The nurse gestured for him to come closer and showed him my leg. David just said, "Oh that looks horrible." He kind of stepped back and leaned his head over and stared at the site then said, "It actually looks like a tiny tomato and sausage pizza." He paused briefly then asked "I thought that got cleaned in the OR a couple days ago?"

The nurse (Brian) said it got cheesy quickly because Ryan was on the wrong antibiotic for that kind of cheese and sausage. David asked why they used the wrong antibiotic and Brian explained that they did a test called `Culture and Sensitivity' on an infected site. They ran swabs across the site then sent them to the lab to grow whatever was bugs were living there, and then they tested antibiotic discs against the growth to see which one killed the largest area of bacteria. But those tests took days to grow, in the mean time they started the most likely broad spectrum antibiotic and hoped it worked regardless, once the sensitivity test comes back they can switch (if needed) to the best med.

The nurse said I must have received a lot of venom too, and the bite went deep. He said most of the damage was caused during the time before I got the anti-venom, it was almost an hour that the venom had the chance to work on my muscles. I got to thinking when I heard that, it was a lot more dangerous going to that park than we realized. Someday we should go back and do a snake roundup. I thought my idea was genius; even I never considered using a spider to kill snakes before.

I asked David if our poison gas pellets would kill snakes. He said if they had lungs and their bodies made and used ATP to make muscles operate it would work just fine. It wouldn't kill ants or fish but reptiles and mammals were vulnerable. The toxic gas works by immediately blocking production and re-uptake of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in the body, so it rapidly halts all living processes within seconds.

I told David I had Jeremy go in the TAC-room to get me a box of money, so he made up with another 4-digit combination and re-programmed it (after he found the instructions).

He went to bed after shutting off the lights. I didn't even get a kiss.

My nurse was named Brian Fry, he said he was originally from Kalamazoo Michigan. He said he went to college in Ann Arbor but joined the Michigan National Guard then went on active duty and served in the first Gulf War then got out and became a home healthcare nurse. He said he had a master's degree in nursing, I told him we both had electrical engineering degrees from UTA.

We spent our last evening with the nurse talking about military stuff and horrible combat wounds. Brian spoke about IEDs and their death toll. The worst part was sometimes the wounded soldiers lingered in the hospital for nearly a year before the infections finally killed them.

We talked about my snakebite and he said I'd need physical therapy and could take a year to recover fully since it became very complicated and caused me to code. David asked him how long until I was able to get a hard-on again and Brian laughed and said it could be a while, maybe a couple more weeks. He reminded me that I coded in the ER, those five seconds took much more of a toll than I realized. He said it was not like having your tonsils removed. David laughed while I sat there wondering if I would ever get a boner again. I had some urges that I was still able to ignore. Brian added I was lucky I was 30 and not 80 when I coded.

He also explained that when my heart stopped it was about ten seconds before it got shocked, then two more seconds to re-start, then about 5-10 more seconds of beating until my blood pressure fully returned, so my brain and heart went half a minute without oxygen, that took a toll on living tissue, I was lucky to have not had a stroke too. He said maybe I had a stroke but nobody detected it. He said anytime blood stopped circulating it begins to clot, even in a 30 second incident clots probably formed. You'd possibly not learn where the clots got stuck until more damage became visible. He finished by saying I could have made hundreds or thousands of tiny blood clots in those minutes, but the body is designed to quickly break apart and dissolve unnecessary clots.

Then we talked about being gay in the military. He asked what we did in the Army and David told him we couldn't discuss it. David said we usually made up bullshit answers but out of respect we really appreciated his nursing service but could not discuss work. Brian smiled and said he took that as a high compliment. The room was silent for a while, the TV was still on but muted.

I asked him why they called it Code Blue. Brian said hospitals used color codes as a way to alert staff to problems. Some of the other color alerts covered dangerous people, fire, weather, utilities, and blue was the color cyanosis, an early sign of hypoxia and impending death. Later on blue usually turned into black, lastly came the maggots. Then he said in the ER they used other color codes as a joke, like Code Brown when a patient had diarrhea in bed. He said you had to be really thick skinned to work in the ER.

David went to bed as Brian rinsed-out (with saline and dilute peroxide) and dressed my wound and started the last bag of antibiotics and gave me anti-nausea meds in my IV and morphine too. I told him we really weren't in the Army, but were sort of `in the Pentagon' instead but it was complicated. It was legal for us to wear Navy or Army uniforms but in either branch we were O-6 in pay grade and authorized to wear that rank. Then I told him if we were invited to Washington DC for a full dress event we usually wore a full dress naval officer's uniform, but we didn't own swords. Brian laughed loudly. I told him those ultra dress uniforms were special order and super expensive but as gay men we couldn't resist owning them.

While he was slowly injecting the morphine into my IV I had tears in my eyes and told him, "That really hurt." Brian said, "That's actually a good sign, if the flesh was totally dead you wouldn't feel a thing, that's bad. Their nerve block injection is wearing off."

While he was pushing meds in my IV he said, "You know you're pretty young for an O-6, right? That probably bothers older officers, especially the ones that were in 20 years and only made Captain."

I smiled and told him we outranked our boss too.

He cleaned then screwed a syringe into a port on the IV tubing then slowly pushed the plunger in on the rest of the morphine, I felt it hit my head like I suddenly got warm and the sofa started to slowly spin around. I closed my eyes and felt the tears run down my cheeks. "You feel that?" He softly asked and I nodded yes. He said I was a light weight; I nodded yes again and whispered 'thanks.'

Then he un-wrapped an Ondansetron tablet and had me open my mouth and placed it under my tongue. He reminded me to let it dissolve. A few seconds later I whispered, "Mmmmm, cherry flavor." Then I fell asleep while he finished re-dressing my wound. He mumbled while working closely on my leg that it looked better.

On his last day at our house my leg definitely felt better and he said it was definitely starting to granulate, which was when the body started to grow new skin over a large open wound. He said one of his partners would be over once a day (which was covered under our military medical plan) for wound care. I was to stay off my feet, (aka: strict `sofa' rest). The pool was forbidden and so was a bath. I could shower but had to keep my right leg dry. We used packing tape and trash bags for that. David shaved my entire right leg because of the tape.

So that was my boring-ass routine for the next ten days. Daily wound care, oral meds, nausea, headaches, and pain in my leg. I noticed even my foot looked like crap since circulation was partially compromised due to the swelling. My toe nails stopped growing briefly and the toe hairs fell out.

We had to check three times a day to make sure blood circulation to my right foot was okay. He showed us how to do what he called 'cap refill' by squeezing the tips of two toe nails until the nail bed turned white then release it and count how many seconds it took to return to the normal color. That day it was almost immediate, but it was a valuable test we could use anytime circulation was in doubt. He demonstrated the same test on my fingernails. Like if a sprained a finger and it got swollen and you wondered if blood circulation was still intact, do that cap refill test on the fingernail. On a normal healthy person he said it should be near immediate return to the regular color. On a dead person there would be no return of color, ever.

On day #5 my husband brought home a walker and said he had another gift being delivered that afternoon, it was a (rented) motorized chair that could go nearly one mile on a full charge, but it allowed me to go out by the pool or in the kitchen. It was narrower than the walker but still wouldn't fit in our kitchen (because of the sharp 90 degree turn to the left in front of the refrigerator). There was also a difference in height of four inches going from the dining room outside to the pool deck, so David made a ramp out of pieces of 2x4 and 1x2 for the wheels on the chair. He said I might have to hit it at high speed to make it over the bump in a motorized wheel chair.

I couldn't go down to the basement so David did the laundry and the cooking too, but I maintained the house while he worked. He offered to carry me downstairs but I told him I couldn't stand that long either, but I knew he was kidding. Then as a joke I told him we could cut a big hole in the living room floor and install a small elevator the size of a phone booth, then he said I could stick a broom handle up my ass too and sweep as I go!

I thought about bottoming for him but if my right leg was a no-touch zone sex would get too complicated so my ass was out of business until further notice. Luckily I still had a very skilled mouth and two hands. With my hands and mouth alone I could play his boner like a Stradivarius and make him howl with pleasure like Luciano Pavarotti.

Every afternoon Jeremy came over and offered to help. After seeing I had a shoe box tightly packed full of cash he was eager to do nearly anything to earn more fifty dollar bills so I put him to work. He did our laundry and he made me promise I would never tell his parents that he learned how to run appliances. We both laughed each time I handed him another fifty. I had Jeremy doing some of the stuff I told David I was doing with pain. It turned into a private joke between us and made us a lot closer than we ever were before. David might be his idol, but I had a box of cash! One day he asked me why I had a shoe box full of cash on the coffee table and I told him it was reward money for offing a bad guy up in New Mexico.

"You killed a bad guy? Gimme a break dude!" he remarked. I just kept my eyes on the Weather Channel and never replied. Jeremy commented that he watched the network TV news at dinner time with his parents, which explained why he was what we called "low information." The poor kid knew nothing about the real world, all he knew about was his little high school world and a few girls and a couple of his guy friends. He admitted he knew how to roll a joint but they looked like pregnant worms and usually fell apart.

He ran the sweeper, did the dishes, three loads of laundry, filled the salt tank out by the pool filter, cleaned leaves (from our neighbor's trees) from the bottom of the pool, and drove my car to the gas station to fill the tank and check the tire pressures. He said he barely fit in my little race car but it was a nice ride, "I'd love to take a girl out on a date but it's too small to do anything in, but it looks cool." I told him, "Yeah, I like it too." We chuckled then I told him I flew to Tennessee to buy it and drove it home but since it was new it had engine RPM restrictions all the way back, but it was still a nice ride. He asked if David liked it but I said no, he loved his truck more than anything else on the planet. We were silent for a minute then Jeremy told me he really liked David and wished his father was like him. I tried to get him to say more, but he stopped talking and finished hanging two loads from the dryer. We had such a nice time together he brought two laundry baskets upstairs with hangars to hang and fold our clothes in the living room so we could gab while he worked.

He asked how much my car cost and I told him it was about $68k and I paid in cash. He immediately replied: "Fifty dollar bills?" I smiled and said yes. We both laughed. I told him there was originally enough money in the box to buy eight of `em.

After three hours of lite housework Jeremy walked home with a smile on his face and a bunch of old fifties in his pocket. I lost track of how many I gave him but I don't think he did. Every time he came in the room to report another task was done I handed him another musty old bill. He quickly plucked each one from my fingers and stuffed it in his front pocket.

When I asked what he was going to do with all that money he said he was taking a girl (from school) out for pizza on Saturday, so I gave him another fifty and wished him luck. I hoped I didn't get him in trouble with his parents, but I suspected his new found wealth would be a tightly held secret. I really didn't pay attention but I think I might have paid him exactly five hundred bucks that day, and I forgot to ask what the girl's name was. I assumed he knew her from school.

Jeremy asked me how much money was in the box and if it was all fifty dollar bills and I said I didn't recall the amount but it used to be completely full and originally held half a million bucks. I told him that was only ten thousand small slips of paper. The kid was stunned that I had that much cash sitting in a shoe box on the coffee table as if it had no more value than a plate of stale Girl Scout cookies. Jeremy chuckled and said, "This is too frickin' weird." I reminded him not to discuss anything he saw or heard in our house and he said, "I'm cool with that, I don't talk to nobody about nuthin, especially my parents."

We had a few moments of silence while we stared at the TV which was on but still muted. "You guys kill people don't you?" He said still watching the TV.

"What makes you say that?" I asked.

"Most people are proud to say what they do for work, except hired killers and arms dealers. You two don't dress like arms dealers so that leaves only one thing."

I glanced at him and smiled, then we both went back to staring at the muted TV. I reached in the box and pulled out another fifty and handed it to him. Jeremy reached over and snatched it, stuffed it in his pocket and said thanks. Then he said he wished David and I were his parents. I told him we sort of were. "In life every young man usually has several fathers, older men that take an interest in teaching life lessons. That's normal, all of us have father figures other than the guy that got your mom pregnant. As long as you keep your mouth shut about us then you're welcome here. And remember this, it's the guy that teaches you about life that's your father, the guy that got your mom pregnant is called the Sperm Donor, but he's not necessarily your real father."

When I said that he laughed loudly, presumably he never heard it before and it really clicked in his brain. After some awkward silent moments I said, "David likes you a lot too, but don't go getting any ideas that either of us is gonna blow you on your 18th birthday, `cause that ain't gonna fuckin happen." Jeremy chuckled and adjusted the lump in his groin and asked if he could skinny dip in the pool on his birthday and I said yes, we'd watch but nothing else. We might throw a party for him too and let him do a strip tease dance for money. He stood up suddenly and held his arms over his head and slowly moved his hips in a circle and I applauded his belly dance and thought he's obviously watched porn. I told him if he wanted a party we'd have to coordinate things ahead of time, like food and if he wanted to bring anyone over.

Just before he left he admitted he'd love to see David punch his father in the nose, but not kill him. He said the man needed to get knocked down once in a while and bet his mom felt the same way. I told him all men needed it at some point in life, his father was not alone. Then I asked Jeremy, "If a man can't speak his mind under his own roof then where can he? A bar? Another woman's house? In the desert? Where?" I turned to look Jeremy in the eyes and he looked deep in thought, which was a good sign. "If I can't screw up and say stupid shit at home then where can I? Post stupid shit on Facebook? You might want to reconsider that Jeremy? Imagine if that rule was applied equally on you too."

He told me he closed his Facebook account this year because of all the stupid postings, and then he left for home. I don't think he expected to hear me defend his father and sort of resented it.

On Day #8 we got a certified letter from the Governor of Oklahoma thanking us for our help solving the Interstate Killer case, we each received a reward of five thousand bucks (cashier's checks). One of the suspects was already killed in the county jail, even though he was on suicide watch. We heard he was shanked by one of the other inmates, similar to how Dahmer got it.

Later that day the physical therapy tech arrived and we worked on basic walking. Luckily we had plenty of room around the pool to practice, our deck was nearly flat. Three days later we'd graduated to using the sidewalk out front instead. Walking on the sidewalk caught the attention of our neighbors and we got all sorts of offers for help around the house. Our neighbors were friendly toward us but we were not huge socialites. They all sounded surprised that a snake bite could end up with such a serious wound, cardiac arrest, and two trips to the OR in a week.

My follow-up leg appointments all went well, the wound was shrinking and the color was much better. The stench of rotting flesh was gone but my pee was still slightly darker than normal because there was still a lot of work going on inside my leg. I learned that I lost a sizeable chunk of muscle in my lower leg that my foot and ankle needed walking exercise. I had a noticeable limp now, but with some pain I could briefly walk without a limp. Recovery was a very slow process that moved ever forward.

They took me off narcs for pain which was a setback and it nearly started my physical therapy all over now that I only had tylenol for pain. On day #15 I went down the basement stairs for the first time and walked on the treadmill with David by my side.

On his last day the physical therapy person wrote out an exercise calendar which was mostly walking on the sidewalks in our neighborhood every day. He said I could advance to running as tolerated and should be able to run in a few more weeks, but I should wait until after I could walk around our block without stopping due to pain.

It felt like I lost a lot of lower leg muscles on my right leg. The loss of muscle made my right foot droop and I tended to drag the tip of my right shoe on the sidewalk. Everyone said it would be dangerous to run like that, I'd trip and fall on my face. The PT tech recommended considering wearing boots to protect my right foot from injury while running. He also suggested running with gloves, a motorcycle helmet, and knee pads. I got myself some bicycle riding gloves but not the other stuff.

He also suggested doing leg presses with free weights and try doing them on my toes too. He insisted the best therapy was walking, lots and lots of walking (not running). He suggested using the treadmill much more extensively too. David bought me a treadmill harness so I couldn't fall and smash my face on the frame. He also got me two pairs of soft moccasins to protect my feet during my early attempts at running.

I also learned that walking around for weeks in moccasins changed the shape of my feet and I had to buy new shoes that were wider!

On day two of my sidewalk walk-rehab David was introduced to a family down the block with two kids and a dog. That family offered to let me walk their dog every school day; two trips in the morning, each one a mile long. Their dog was a large standard poodle (59lbs, male, short curly white fur), he was very nice and we quickly became friends. I've wanted a dog but David said no-way, not with our work schedules. The poodle was named Milo, and we sort of half-adopted him. I got him every morning and kept him until just before the bus brought their kids home from school.

We live on Raymond Telles Drive in Tobin Park. It's exactly one mile to walk west to Joe Herrera Drive to Diana Drive to Marie Tobin Drive, to Alps Drive and back to our house on Raymond Telles.

I noticed Milo was fascinated by the smell of my leg (snake bit area) and tried to lick it clean, but I kept it bandaged. After four weeks of daily 2-mile walks with Milo I was re-evaluated at the medical clinic at WBAMC (like an urgent care) and cleared to return to limited duty at work: no combat, and no lifting or running, but I could now get in the pool again and shower without a cover. So I started each morning as the assistant OD. They already moved one man (Duke) from our backup team in Omaha over to El Paso to cover for me with David (which I thought was funny, but David didn't agree).

We got into a dispute over my pay during medical leave, they said the bite happened during time off, they said we were off the calendar that weekend. But that was not what our captain said (he never actually put us on leave so he didn't have to activate Omaha, but he told us we were off duty) so we called our lawyer and after he called the DOD were summoned to the Pentagon again and it turned into a real shit show. As soon as the lawyer filed a dispute with the Pentagon legal counsel they settled and paid full benefits and back pay. I already paid the home health nurse but my meds were covered and so was physical therapy and wound care, but we had to pay a deductible since it was at home. Our total out of pocket for the snakebite was getting close to twelve thousand so far (not counting cash given to the kid next door). The cost of that blow job on the hiking trail kept inching higher.

Six weeks after the bite a group of military brass from Washington arrived at our airport office, but I was not present. They arrived by private jet and said they were making the rounds presenting medals on behalf of the President and the Joint Chiefs. They had five soldiers to decorate on Fort Bliss and their next stop was the Naval Air base in San Diego. My husband accepted on my behalf, posed for photos, and then they left.

What I received was a brass plaque mounted on a wooden base that cited me for exemplary service, above and beyond, in the protection of civilian life, which was exactly what our service was created for. We hung it in the TAC room; David said he was proud of me.

Seven weeks after the bite we went camping again (Hueco Mountains State Park again) and brought our AR glasses along and two (used) spiders with poison gas pellets. This time we left the ATV at home and brought my motorized chair along just in case, but I was walking okay without it. Using their built-in software and skills we positioned them eight feet either side of the flat-top boulder on the nature trail as the sun was going down and let them run autonomously. We walked back to the truck and sat inside and watched them on our glasses and sometimes steered them with joysticks. Since they went in swarm mode they stayed exactly one meter apart and surveyed the area and discovered several rattlers in a hole near the hiking trail (about 60 feet from the flat top boulder) and vented a poison gas pellet which wiped out the entire nest.

The hole was at ground level and invisible to humans unless they laid flat on the sand and looked under the lowest part of a very large rock formation. The entrance was three feet wide but only five inches tall, it went back under the overhang about five feet and appeared to house as many as a dozen snakes that lived together and slept in a tangled heap of reptiles. When the first spider entered the cave some of the snakes just stared at it trying to recognize if it was a threat, all their tongues were tasting the air. Both spiders entered and stopped about a foot apart and surveyed (photographed) the pile of snakes but the stack was too complicated. Back at home we tried to count eyeballs (in photos) and estimated at least six and maybe a dozen snakes.

Our second spider was soon attacked by a large beetle but it had no effect so it got gassed too since it wouldn't let go of the titanium leg. David said he thought the beetle wanted to eat our spider. We couldn't recover either of them, but they were used spiders we kept at home for our personal use. We kept the TDRS (tracking data and relay satellite) link off so we could use the spiders without the Pentagon knowing. David thought people in the CIA situation room would have enjoyed the live nature video.

I was surprised to see that so many snakes lived in one small cave, we manually moved-in closer until one of them raised his head like he'd strike if we got closer, then David did the keyboard command and they sat there guarding the entrance while the gas began emitting from their back ends. All the rattlers died quickly. Using both spider we simply watched everyone stop breathing, and then sent the self destruct command. In swarm mode we only sent it once and the entire swarm burnt themselves.

David said we should buy a large black scorpion from the pet store and put it in a glass aquarium with one of our used spiders and see what they did together. They probably thought our spider was an actual insect, and scorpions ate insects. Our guess was it would sting it and try to eat its body and legs. I thought it might damage the leg muscles and immobilize our spider but we decided to try it sometime. The people in Nevada said no study had ever been done, considering the cost. But with a used spider there was no actual cost. None of our other USA teams ever commented on how they experimented with used spiders but I'm sure all of us experimented with used spiders. In my opinion they were way too cool and useful to simply set them in a large ashtray and have them self-destruct.

We never heard anything from Jeremy how his date went but we never saw him with a black eye or a hickey so my guess was he had a nice time but perhaps he struck-out with that girl. I guessed he might be challenging for a girl to appreciate since he was so awkwardly built. And I think Jeremy spent way too much time playing combat simulator games online. Despite fake bravery around us he was very shy around girls too. It was sort of funny to compare how he talked to us versus how he talked to a girl his age. But that was typical for a disabled high school senior. We suspected Jeremy was still a virgin, and he has brought over pool dates before.

That evening I got all the laundry done and put away. I cooked dinner for David, we had thick ribeyes on the indoor griddle, deep fried fries, and large helpings of spinach. I liked mine with lots of butter and salt, maybe some Cholula too. I could tell David had something on his mind because he seemed distracted during dinner.

I shut off the lights in the kitchen after starting the dishwasher and went to the bedroom. In our bathroom David was closely looking at his face in the mirror, checking for blackheads and if he needed to trim his nose hairs. He was in his brief undies, his drink coaster size red nips always caught my eye. I stood in the doorway watching, he saw me in the mirror and smiled, "That was a great supper."

Then he looked down and saw I was getting hard. So he slid off his undies and shut off the light and escorted me to bed and we got under the sheets and blankets. He pulled me over to his chest and gently pulled my face to his tit and whispered, "Mommy's ready." So I fake nursed on his tit for a while then had to let go before my mouth got too sore. That was the first time I got hard since the snake bite, almost two months ago.

I slid up to the headboard and sat with my legs spread apart. David got between my legs and took me in his mouth and worked it between the roof of his mouth and his tongue; with his hands he fingered my belly button. I felt pressure building quickly as he carefully worked my head with his lips and tongue. He moved a lot slower than normal to make it last longer since it had been weeks since my last orgasm.

I loved the feeling of my boner inside his mouth. I put my hands on his shoulders to feel his strong upper body muscles. I usually didn't warn him verbally because I moaned as my orgasm began.

He worked me expertly and slowed when I moaned louder. One of his fingers was fully inside my belly button hole and rubbed the inside while his other hand was gripped around the base of my dick. When he fucked my belly button with a finger it always made my orgasms more intense.

When we watched porn on TV we noticed that almost nobody treated belly buttons as a place of intimate pleasure but we both enjoyed it. If his was a tiny bit larger I could probably fit the head of my dick inside his and come inside it. His hole went in kinda deep, mine only went in about as deep as a fingernail was long.

It started pumping into his mouth, and I felt every contraction of my prostate as I squirted four times then oozed for several seconds afterward. Then I felt exhausted and thirsty. He pulled off and grabbed the bottle of water off the night stand then pulled me down so I was flat on my back on his side of the bed. David positioned my pillows just how I liked them, then snuggled beside me and we were asleep very early, 8:55pm. I fell asleep with my lips gently touching one of his nips so I fell asleep with a boner.

The rest of the house was dark.

Note: just a reminder, 100% of this story is fictional, none of it ever happened, all the characters and locations are made-up.

Notice: Google cut off my email so I have a new address, effective June 2023:

Borischenaz at mailfence com please do not use the gmail address.

On Twitter: @borischenaz but that could disappear someday too.