After the Wilderness

By Gordon Kearns

216

Chapter 18

Midnight one mid-summer day. A refugee hospital in southern Ethiopia, near the border to Sudan. The duty nurse, a dark-skinned nun, made her rounds, checking blood pressures and pulses, adjusting IV's, and offering encouraging words. She stepped to the window. Outside, in the vicarious light of the building corridors a naked angel moved between cardboard shelters, wiping feverish brows and offering sips of cool water. The inhabitants of the camp were used to the presence of the pretty red-headed white woman; she appeared several times each week in the middle of the night like this to do a job that could make no difference in the condition of the starving children she tended. Most of them will die as certainly as the sun rises. It is doubtful they were aware of her ministrations; indeed, most wouldn't even notice she was at their side this night.

Over twenty-four hundred miles to the north, the resurrected Orient Express rolled comfortably along under a starry Balkan sky, heading in a straight line toward its storied destination, Istanbul. Most of its hundred or so passengers were in their cozy berths, engrossed in exotic dreams. A dozen or so interpid nightfolk were in the posh, wood-paneled bar car listening to the piano player work through his routine of good old songs of the thirties and forties. A few feet above his head, balanced precariously on the roof, the nude Patty Flanery sat in a determined lotus position, daring the car's gentle sway to unseat her. Her hair lifted and fluttered as her body resisted the exhilarating pressure of the wind.

End

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