A/N: It's been a long while since I've been able to get back to my Tikbalang stories. Here's the first chapter of the third novel in my series. I do hope you enjoy it, and I would really appreciate your feedback. Hopefully I can get back into my writing groove and be able to post more chapters soon.
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"Then wake up to a brand new day to find your dreams have washed away." ~ Inxs, Original Sin
"First Lt. Habagat Bagyo Batumbakal, Philippine Air Force, 26. Assigned to the Western Mindanao Command. Interesting."
The disembodied female voice above Habagat was disturbing his dream. It was a helluva nice dream, too. He didn't want to wake up from it just yet. The voice called him close to wakefulness as it addressed someone named Nurse Ogie, amid the flipping of paper. He didn't listen to the other words because, well, pretty girls who wanted to make the beast with two backs with him in a dream were way more interesting, especially when the dream girl was pin-up perfect and was down to fuck.
The heavy bass from the Inxs' song
Original Sin
played the perfect soundtrack to his dream, but it was fading under the mellifluous but businesslike voice of the woman speaking to Nurse Ogie in slightly hushed tones, as if she was trying to be considerate of him while doing her job. They were discussing his vitals, heart rate, pulse rate. Boring stuff.
Fuck it. Back to the dream. Naked girls are much more fun than reality, especially if they're naked and hot for me.
He rolled over to his right so he could go back to sleep and get back to the pin-up girl clad only in a thick mane of black, shoulder-length curls, flawless tanned skin, and a wicked grin. She was beckoning to him with a teasing index finger and hot, dark eyes that were heavy-lidded with promise and ringed with long, thick lashes.
Mmmm, yes, sweet thing, I'm there. I am so there.
His roll's momentum was cut short, however. There were restraints at his wrists and feet and he felt the scratchy and thin cotton hospital gown against his bare skin. He also felt a cool hand touch his forehead and would have jack-knifed had the restraints permitted, which they did not.
"Our patient has a slight fever, I think. Nurse Ogie, please take his temperature again," the soft, feminine alto brought Habagat fully back to consciousness and he opened his eyes, focusing on the view from his vantage point: One lovely pair of double-Ds covered in a white lab coat over a red blouse. The woman was standing right beside his head, and a metal clipboard hid her face from view. Not that Habagat was complaining about the view.
Her hands were long-fingered and finely made, tipped with neat, short nails and with no rings on them.
Aha, she's single
Part of the nameplate embroidered on her lab coat was visible: Her surname, he read, was Salamanca.
Magic lady,
Habagat thought.
Please let her be pretty.
Bewbz.
Habagat blinked as he looked up at her fabric-covered breasts again in appreciation, then drew in a deep breath preparatory to asking the question:
What the ever-living fuck is going on?
Yes, he could multi-task. You don't learn how to fly aircraft without knowing that.
On the inhale, he smelled the doctor (or at least he presumed she was a doctor). Under the antiseptic smell of the hospital room, and the rubbing alcohol she'd no doubt doused her hands in was the sweetness of Arabian jasmine, locally known as sampaguita, and a slightly spicy, kind of earthy scent that just had to be her skin and probably the soap she'd used.
She sure smells pretty.
He remembered that scent from somewhere, but couldn't quite place it.
"So, doc, will I live?" Habagat's query came out hoarse, rather sarcastic and was accompanied by the rattling of the metal bedframe he'd clasped and shaken. "And what the hell am I doing here? And where in the name of all that is holy is 'here'?"
The clipboard came down almost to his forehead before the pretty, long-fingered hands stopped its descent.
"You're awake, Mr. Batumbakal." The medic's voice was slightly startled, but it sounded like she was regaining her composure as she continued speaking to him. "Good morning. I am Dr. Salamanca and you are at the National Center for Mental Health. According to your chart, you were brought here late last night while you were suffering from seizures and hallucinations. The admitting staff had to sedate you."
Dr. Salamanca's face was a perfect oval, and the smoothness of her naturally tan complexion and high cheekbones were cast into prominence by the severe black bun her hair was strangled in, Habagat noted. Her eyes were a brown so dark they were almost black, and they were surrounded by long, thick lashes that swept up almost to the neat wings of her strong eyebrows. Like the eyes of that pin-up girl in his dream.
She wasn't just pretty. Her face was pure enchantment. The kind mortals would die for.
I'm a mortal! I'm a mortal!
Well, he was
still
mortal. Until someone was able to tame him, that is.
But enough of that, look at that beauty standing above me, he thought. I wouldn't mind being in restraints and naked if this were sex. That would sure be fun...
Habagat's eyes roved over her face, taking note of her lush mouth and the smoothness of her neck. This was a young doctor, maybe about his age. Perhaps she was an intern, or starting her residency. Wait... what did she mean he was in a mental hospital?
He struggled against his restraints, asking the question out loud in a less than calm tone of voice and the doctor looked over his head, presumably at Nurse Ogie. Habagat felt a strong pair of masculine hands hold his left arm firmly against the bed and pillow under him, then the prick of a needle entering the muscle of a bicep. He also found that he had to fight to keep his eyes open as his struggles slowed to a stop despite his mind ordering his body to keep flailing until he could get loose.
"I am sorry to sedate you," Dr. Salamanca's voice sounded far away, and vaguely like the voice of his pin-up girl, from that dream he'd been having. "Rest for now. I'll be back in a few hours to see if you're less agitated and, if you are, we can talk then."
***
In the space between sleep and waking, Habagat's memory of the time before waking up in the mental hospital played like a movie in his mind.
The roar of blades from the OV-10's turboprop rotors was a comforting sound to Habagat's ears. He was held aloft in his cradle of steel, doing a low hover over the thick jungle cover limning the edges of the Limpapa Bridge, some 40 kilometers from Zamboanga City and close to the coastline of the Zamboanga peninsula. The bright morning sun and blue sky were reflected in his helmet's visor.
This is such a beautiful place. Too bad there are enemies in them there woods.
The bandits below could probably hear him, sure, but they wouldn't hear the Scout Rangers he was providing air support for. Plus he could drop ordnance close enough to the soldiers he was supporting if that became necessary—this aircraft was good for that. But he hoped he didn't have to. His mission on this flight was for support and medevac, and he prayed to the Old Gods that was all it would be.
"Tikbalang calling in, we have targets in sight, over," Habagat smiled at the call sign he'd been given when he'd begun to fly the actual aircraft to support ground troops. "I'm keeping track of them from up here."
He'd gotten that moniker because he was taller than your average military flyboy and because he actually did like running and, when athletic competitions beckoned in his branch of the service, or across the Armed Forces of the Philippines, he usually won the track events hands down.
If they only knew.
He chuckled to himself as he surveyed the movements of the bandits he was tracking, reporting them back over the radio.
The Scout Rangers had tracked the bandits to a makeshift camp in the rough terrain and dense jungle—something this specialized unit of the Philippine Army was justifiably proud of.
Six hostages of varying nationalities needed rescuing, and soon. Those unfortunate people were kidnapped off a small coastal resort just outside the city, and had been held captive for nearly seven weeks.
Military intelligence had gathered information about the bandits and their captives from locals who'd informed them that two of the hostages seemed ill, while the bandits, the locals said, were running low on supplies and were making forays into small communities to buy, bully away, or outright steal food and medicine under the cover of darkness. The rescue had to go down flawlessly or those bandits would begin killing their captives, and possibly bring a running gunbattle to the nearby communities.
Now or never, dudes.
Habagat cheered the ground troops on silently, hoping they reached the target area he was sweeping, along with some special foreign military personnel who were not officially supposed to be in on the operation. He'd spotted one of the hostages in a small clearing below, a Caucasian woman whose light brown hair was matted and whose skin was marked with bruises and bloody cuts, and sunburnt a painful shade of red. She was attempting to signal to his aircraft with a bright yellow piece of cloth when one of the bandits noticed her, and she was dragged off and dropped into some sort of pit.
Habagat flew off, hoping to mislead the criminals below into thinking his plane was just another cloud seeding aircraft come to bring rain in the dry months of summer. Then he doubled back and hovered a bit higher over the target area.
