Steve

Steve Ross woke with a start. Alone.

Where's Candi?

He reached for his phone, checked the time. Almost nine.

"You OK?" Candi was standing by the bed.

"Yeah. Dreams. I'm all right."

He had been dreaming, he knew. And vivid as his dreams were he couldn't remember them a few minutes after waking. It hadn't always been that way. In the past three years he could only remember one dream. Some wires had gotten crossed when they put that psychotropic cocktail in him for three months.

"Coffee's ready. Want me to bring you some?"

"Nah. I'd spill it. I should be up anyway."

He was wearing flannel pajama pants and a cotton T-shirt. Candy was still in midnight blue silk pajamas and yellow socks. He followed her into the kitchen.

She poured two cups of coffee and set them on the bar. Steve took a sip of the hot black elixir while Candi put some Pop-Tarts in the toaster. It was a four-slicer and she put two pairs of frosted cherry tarts in. When they popped she put them on the bar and sat down beside him.

He took another sip.

Black coffee is honest if nothing else. Hot, bitter, doesn't really taste all that good. People put stuff in it to make it easier to drink, until it's barely coffee any more. And try to do the same with life.

"You don't seem to be having them as often," Candi said. "Are they the same?"

"Beats me," Steve replied. "I never remember them. They don't seem to be as bad while they're going on."

He'd had a heart attack, his own damn fault. Working fifty hours a week, going home and working some more, eating too much and not exercising enough. Still he shouldn't have had a heart attack - he had just had bypass surgery to prevent one.

Vapor-locked in the ICU after the surgery, heart and breathing stopped for fourteen minutes. Called Sam and Charlie and told them I was gone.

Sam and Charlie were his sisters, Samantha and Caroline. Charlie was two years older and Sam was almost three years younger. Alex, his older brother, was a pilot for a charter airline in Denver and he rarely saw him. He got home in time to find his kid brother in a coma that would go on for months. Sam and Charlie were with him the whole time.

And Candi. She had worked with him and Harris Billings but he didn't remember her for quite a while after he woke up. She quit her job when she was told he was likely to be in a coma for a long time, possibly never to return. Only he wasn't in a coma. He occasionally woke up and acted crazy, had to be tied to the bed. Drugged some more. Candi got enough of a look at the records to see what they were doing, administering a psychotropic cocktail that was going to kill him before long. Sam and Charlie read the riot act to the doctor and he backed off the drugs and Steve woke up and seemed almost normal.

Amost. Wires still crossed in there somewhere, maybe some cut.

"It's amazing you're alive," Candi said. "Most people subjected to that treatment never recover, and most die early. Physically you're in great shape."

"Yeah, good thing. Out of a hospital into a war. Gordon wants to see me."