It was only her training as a trauma nurse and then a surgeon that prevented Kayla from going into immediate panic. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that she could make out a very cramped space. As she took stock of her surroundings, she tried somewhat unsuccessfully to control her tears.
Think, Kayla, where are you? Wherever it was, it was moving. Trunk? No, I’m sitting up. Kayla was sitting cross-legged with her back against a wall. No, not a wall, she realized as she felt behind her, it’s another box. She rocked up to her knees and felt around in the small area and saw that she was mostly surrounded by boxes. What is this place? Kayla didn’t recognize it as any place she’d been before. This only made her heart beat faster and her fear spill down her face in big salty tears.
Steve had to fight to focus on the man that was standing in front of him when he arrived into his 1989 body. Everything was weird about this jump from minute one. It was hot, his hair was off his neck, his face felt strange, and his vision was a little blury. As he tried to take hold of Kayla with his right hand, he reached up with the left one to adjust his patch and ended up grabbing the lens of the glasses that were inexplicably sitting on his face.
“What the hell?” he mumbled as the glasses jostled off his face and onto the ground. Then he realized with horror that he was in public without his patch.
“Did you hear me?”
Steve instinctively clapped his hand over his left eye to shield it from view and lowered his head. Where the hell am I?! Now Steve saw the man wearing a blue and yellow flannel more clearly, but for the life of him he didn’t know who he was.
“What?” Steve asked as he distractedly looked around for Kayla, the alarm building in him with each passing second.
“I said you’d better go greet your congregation, Brother, because sermon or no sermon, they’re filing in.” Steve gaped at him as a distant memory started to take shape. Distant and very fuzzy. “What’s wrong with your eye, you got something in it?”
The eye his fingers were feeling beneath his hand was all wrong. Completely wrong. It didn’t feel like the scar he knew, it felt like – like an eye. That’s when Steve realized that for the first time 20 years, he had two good eyes. One was real, one was glass, but his face was whole again. “This is Saul’s Retreat,” he said with dread as he slowly lowered his hand from his eye and stood up straight again.
The man glanced behind him at the followers getting seated for their sermon, then back at Steve with suspicion. “You been drinkin’, Brother Daniel? You’ve lost your twang.”
Steve fought the chaos in his head to think and think fast. Daniel Something – Lucas! Daniel Lucas … Peach Creek, not Tree … Emily & Gideon’s bible … Marcus and Cleaver … the cave … That’s all he remembered. Where is Kayla right now? Is she at home? My God, we’re not together! But we were holding on to each other! How did we not jump together?!
“Brother Daniel. You’re flock is waiting for you,” the man said with mildly disguised mockery.
“Right,” Steve muttered. “Of couhrse they ahr,” he said in a southern drawl that he hoped sounded passable. Apparently, it was, because the goon in front of him just looked at him sideways as he walked off to patrol.
The Reverend Saul Taylor’s Revival Tent had come to Salem in the summer of 1989, and with it came imminent threat to Marcus. The only reason he knew it was 1989 was because that was the year that all hell broke loose with Marina. The year he almost lost Kayla. That memory was so bad and so overwhelming that the whole ISA undercover business had paled considerably in his memory. As a result, he had no idea where Kayla was at this moment.
“God bless, Brother …”
“Good evening, Brother Daniel …”
“What’s the good word, Brother …”
Saul’s followers were piling in and greeting Steve with religious contentment and joyful anticipation for an uplifting sermon from this recently saved soul. That didn’t give Steve any time at all to dwell on the fact that that he was separated from Kayla. He looked around him with worry and fear, forgetting, not caring, or both that he had a cover he was blowing. Where did you jump to, Sweetness? Where are you, baby? He had to get home. He had to get out of there and get to the house. She had to be there.
Steve started rocking back and forth on his heels. “Good evenin’, uh … brothehrs,” he said to them absently, “and, uh …”
“Daniel?” Faith Taylor said softly.
“… and sistehrs …”
“Daniel, don’t worry,” she whispered. “I told you, it’s going to work.”
Steve dug deep for her name. “F-Faith?”
“Yes?”
“N-nothing … nothin’, I mean. Uh … what’s gonna work, now?” he asked with as much airy Georgia lilt as he could muster.
“Just wait till their heads are bowed, and I’ll keep them busy with the hymns. Then you can sneak out and check around the camp.”
“Right, of couhrse,” he said with trepidation he couldn’t hide.
Faith was somewhat alarmed at Daniel’s very sudden change in demeanor. “I can still count on you, can’t I, Danny? You’re acting a little – a little strange.”
Was he really going to have to say a sermon?! There was no doubt in Steve’s mind that he was not going to be able to pull that off. “I’m fine, Faith,” he assured her.
“You’re sure? You’re going to be able to sneak out?”
“I promise, you can count on me.” For what, he still had no idea.
It was a long ride in the back of the van from Salem to Saul’s retreat in the woods, and Kayla had jumped into her body at the tail end of the ride. She still didn’t know where or when this was, but she’d at least figured out that she was in the back of a van and that she probably wasn’t a prisoner because she wasn’t tied up. But she had no light, no real visual cues as to when she was, and no one there to tell her. If she’d had more time to think about it, she’d have worked out where and when she was. But she was distraught and not thinking clearly. She didn’t check to see what she was wearing or the style of her hair. She couldn’t very well open the back doors of the moving vehicle, and there was no access to the front seat. Instead, she felt around for what these boxes might have inside them. She managed to see the writing on the side of one of them that said “gauze,” so she thought they could have been from the Emergency Center or the hospital. But her heart wasn’t in it, she just wanted her husband, he wasn’t here, and she had no idea where she was being taken in this van. So, Kayla curled up into a ball on her side and named the bones of the human body to try to keep herself from losing it. “Steve,” she said between the tibia and fibula, “where are you? Please come find me!”
“I have only a, uh – a brief sermon tonight.” Steve stood at the back of the tent with ten or so pairs of eyes on him looking for a preaching of the gospel. He knew this was right about when Saul had begun to doubt him and that Kayla was going to show up soon, but he didn’t think this was the night, and he sure as hell had no idea where he was supposed to be going when Faith played interference for him, nor what he was supposed to be looking for. Add to that the fact that he felt completely naked without his patch. He could feel the air blow over the eyelid that Marcus had expertly crafted for him and felt both conspicuous at its exposure while also anxious to see his face whole again. He really wasn’t ready for people to be looking at him, so the quicker he could get off this figurative pulpit the better.
“And that sermon is about the dangehr and the evil that lurks about.” Seemed as good as anything else. “Dangehr needs no long discussion. You need only to know that it is thehre, brothehrs and sistehrs. It is here, it is thehre, and it is everywhehre.” Paul McCartney never seemed to let him down. “We simply must place our trust in the Lord and let him protect us.”
“Amen, brother!” the faithful hollered. “Praise be the Lord!”
“Yes, praise be,” Steve took and ran with as he added a hallelujah, a blessed be, and another praise the Lord. It lasted all of 90 seconds, and that was all he could stand up there in front of them all. “Now let us bow our heads in silent prayher and ask God for protection from evil.”
Steve looked at Faith, who came down the short aisle with hands clasped in prayer. “And now, brothers and sisters, let us keep our heads bowed in silent prayer as we sing Praise unto the Lord,” she seamlessly took over.
Steve took his cue and exited the tent as Faith began singing.
Rock of ages, cleft for me … let me hide myself in thee; let the water and the blood, from thy wounded side which flowed …
Steve stopped in his tracks at the sound of the hymn. “The van!” It was like a memory downloaded. One minute he was thrust onto a live stage where he didn’t know his lines or what the play was about; the next minute he knew with burning clarity exactly where Kayla was and how he was going to get to her. He wasn’t sure where they were going to go once he found her, but he was dead certain of exactly where she was. “Thank you, Faith!” he whispered as he realized it was the song that triggered his sudden awakening of purpose. He wasted no time as he headed the 20 or so feet from the tent to where the van was sitting with Kayla inside it. “Right on cue,” he whispered.
As he climbed in, he was practically jumping out of his skin in anticipation, frantic to get her hands solidly around him. Closing the door behind him, he hoped that was her laying very still under a tarp and that she hadn’t already run out.
“Baby!” he cried as he pawed at the tarp, feeling her unmistakable form. Relief washed over him. “Kayla, it’s me! Come out of there, baby!”
“Steve?!” she cried as she pushed the tarp over her head upon hearing his voice.
When Steve saw her he was overjoyed and just needed to hold her. Kayla on the other hand was in shock. It had been so long since that short period of time when he had two eyes instead of the patch that had etched itself into her memory of his handsome face, that she froze. And it wasn’t just the glass eye, it was the hair several shades whiter blonde than his natural dark golden color. He just looked completely different.
Steve saw the astonishment in her eyes. “It’s me, baby,” he said with the door open a crack for light. Kayla. Sweetness, it’s me! The ISA mission for—Marcus. Reverend Taylor?” He gathered her up in his arms and kissed her everywhere. Her cheeks, her forehead, her lips, the top of her head, waiting for her to say something. “Kayla!” he held her shoulders tightly as he looked her in the eye.
She reached her hand up and touched his left cheek where his scar had once been. Then his hair fell over his forehead in an unkempt mop. That shook Kayla out of her stunned silence. Her eyes quickly misted over as she held her arms out to her husband. “Thank God you found me,” she whispered.
“Oh, Kayla!” Steve breathed out heavily in relief as he fell into her waiting arms. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t.”
In answer Kayla began to sob into hysterics.
“No, baby, don’t cry, now. I’ve got you,” he said as he shifted to do the holding. “Come here.”
“Steve,” she cried into his chest as he held her next to him, “I jumped alone! We were separated, and I didn’t kn-kn-know where you w-w-w-were.”
Steve wanted to cry with his wife, she was so beside herself. He had to calm her down. “Listen baby, you have to stop crying, now,” he choked out, “you’re gonna make yourself hyperventilate, here.”
“I-I-I …”
“Too late, I think.”
Kayla nodded and tried to stop crying. He held her to his chest, and he felt different, but the same. His clothes were different, his body seemed bulked up and beefier, and he smelled like the outdoors of the Retreat, but he was unmistakably hers, and all she wanted to do was melt into his arms and let him hide her away from the reality of what just happened.
“Shhh … Sweetness, you have to calm down, because we’ve got to get out of here before they drive off with us.”
Just then, a guard named Larry came and closed the door to the van, shuttering them in darkness. Kayla stopped her crying on a dime for fear of being found.
After a moment, the front door slammed shut and the engine roared to life. “Shit,” Steve cursed.
Kayla sniffed and inhaled deeply as her breathing started to right itself. She remembered a little better than Steve did that this did not end as she’d hoped the first time around. Steve had been captured, and she’d walked all the way back to Salem in search of help.
“This isn’t good, Sweetness.”
“We’re in trouble aren’t we?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yep.”