Whitman closed his eyes, imagined Preach’s delicate-boned hands, felt Preach’s presence mixing with his own gift—as Preach had called it—still a mystery to him. And there it was! All three branches of the trigeminal beneath his fingertips. He sensed the blockages the alkaloid cocktail had set up, interfering with the nerve messages between Flix’s brain and his body.

Quickly now, he manipulated the nerves as he had been taught, playing them like the strings of a violin. He wasn’t yet quite done, but he couldn’t wait any longer. With his free hand, he stimulated the vagus nerve. At once, Flix sucked in a lungful of air, his heart beat strongly, and, as his eyelids fluttered open, Whitman completed reestablishing the brain-body connection through the trigeminal.

Flix’s eyes were clouded, out of focus. Whitman slapped him hard across one cheek, then the next, much as an ob-gyn will slap a newborn’s behind to wake him to the new world.

Flix gasped, his eyes focused, staring up at Whitman.

“Compadre,” he said through a thickened tongue, “I sure could use a shot of tequila right about now.”

Whitman laughed, and Flix, clearly feeling his old self come flooding back to him, turned his head to look at Charlie.

“You’re holding my hand.”

“I can drop it, if you’d rather.”

“Thanks,” Flix said. “Thanks for that.”

Charlie’s gaze drifted over his head to lock onto Whitman’s face for a moment. “Anytime,” she said. “We’re all in this together.” Then she broke contact with him and rose. “There’s no tequila here, but water will be better for you anyway.”

“Flix,” Whitman said, as Charlie went back into the villa. “Tell me how you feel.”

Flix ran his tongue around his parched lips. “Once, when I was a kid, I was real sick. I don’t recall what it was, but my temperature spiked to 104, 105. Two days later, it broke. I feel now like I felt then. Like I’d come out the other side of a hallucination or a nightmare.” He shook his head. “To be honest, Whit, I don’t remember much of what happened since we’ve been here.” His expression turned troubled. “Except … something … I don’t know…”

He was interrupted by Charlie returning with a large glass of iced water. He drank it greedily, over Whitman’s admonition to take it slow. When he had drained the glass he put it down beside him. That’s when he saw the clutch of dog tags dangling from Charlie’s fingers.

“Oh, God, oh, Jesus. It’s true then, it wasn’t a nightmare. I killed all those American Marines.”

“Well, that’s the thing.” Charlie crouched down beside the two men. She spoke to them both as she held up the dog tags, jangling them one against the other. “I’ve been looking at these tags and I can tell you there’s something horribly wrong.”