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He stood calmly while she put a heavy blanket over his back and fastened it, but he did balk at the trailer. He got all the way to the ramp without trouble, but when Phoebe tried to lead him up, he reared back. She’d made the mistake of wrapping the lead too tightly around her hand, doing it without thinking while she was trying to convince him to come forward, and he pulled her off her feet. She face-planted on the ramp and slammed her cheek pretty hard. Ouch. Fuck.
Thankfully, Smoky didn’t run off. As soon as she fell, he settled and came close to nose at her, worried.
“I’m okay, baby,” Phoebe said as she sat up. She stroked his nose. “I’m okay. But now you owe me. You gotta get on this trailer.”
Not until she offered him another apple did he comply. But as he finally stepped onto the ramp, she heard a sickening crack and saw her phone in actual pieces on the ridged steel. It must have fallen from her coat pocket when she fell, and the horse had crushed it under one cracked hoof.
Smoky had not noticed that noise. He walked the rest of the way into the stall and finished his apple, then started in on the fresh hay. Phoebe stood with the pieces of her phone in her hand and stared at the bony grey ass of the horse she’d finally rescued.
“Win some, lose some,” she muttered and dropped the corpse of her phone into her pack. “Hope we don’t need to make a call on the way home.”
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~oOo~
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Smoky hated the trailer. As soon as it started to roll, he panicked. Phoebe had to stop every thirty minutes or so and spend fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes back there settling him again, trying to convince him that it was going to be okay, that he had no need to break through the trailer and escape.
Doing this by herself was a huge pain in the pooper. But Margot was away for the weekend, and Vin’s stump was infected, so he was wheelchair-bound outside the house. She’d known it would be a hard day when she’d headed out alone this morning, but damn.
It was past midnight when Phoebe reached the western limit of Tulsa and finally felt stress unspool from her spine. Last hour of the trip. Maybe they’d made their last stop before home.
Sadly, while this might well have been Smoky’s lucky day, it was not Phoebe’s.
Just as she put the southeastern limit of the city behind her, a bang like an explosion filled the air.
A massive flashback surged into Phoebe’s head and she went into battle-mode at once, which probably saved her and Smoky both. Not until it was all over and her head was back in the present, with her ass planted in the cushy seat of her truck, was she able to understand what had really happened in the past minute or so.
The bang had not been an IED. There were no IEDs on Oklahoma highways.
Something had gone wrong in her truck. The engine had just up and stopped—probably threw a rod. Not good, but better than getting blown up in the Afghan desert. One of those per lifetime was enough, thanks.
Flashbacks were so weird. While her brain had suddenly time-traveled five-plus years backward, her body had stayed right here and done what it had to do, and it had kept a log. She could remember that minute both as flashback and as the present, two timelines happening at once.
In 2018 Afghanistan, she’d been flying through the air in a storm of fire, gore, and shrapnel. In 2024 Tulsa, the power steering of her truck had frozen with the death of the engine, and it had taken everything she had to get the Sierra 1500 and its trailer and passenger to the side of the road without taking anybody else with them. If it had been a normal hour of the day, she would very likely have caused a pileup and ended up on the news.
So ... this was a better result than either an early-morning bomb or a midday pileup. But it still sucked. She could have perspective and also be pissed the fuck off.
It was the darkest hours of the night, twenty-two degrees and windy, she was on the shoulder of the Broken Arrow Expressway with a dead truck, a sick, cold, freaked-out horse, and no goddamn phone.
They were still well within the Tulsa metro area, so even at this hour of the night there was a little bit of traffic, a few cars whizzing by at a fairly steady clip. She could flag somebody down and at least ask them to make a phone call for her. Surely somebody would stop.
First, though, she had to go back and make sure Smoky hadn’t gotten knocked around. She could hear he wasn’t calm; he was stomping in the trailer and whinnying that screechy note that meant a horse was deeply unhappy. She’d been listening to that particular tune most of the night.
Sometimes she wished she’d decided on a different kind of life after the hospital. Sold the farm and rented a little apartment, adopted a couple of kittens. Gotten a job in a quiet office somewhere, with a desk and some fake walls to call her own.
She had, however, decided on a life of rescuing and rehabilitating strays. As she herself had been rescued and rehabilitated.
Phoebe sat for a minute and got her mental legs firmly beneath her. Then she closed her coat back up, pulled on her beanie and gloves, and went to check on her newly rescued horse.
