Fall Back

By C.L. Hadyn

Chief Petty Officer Calder Reade, a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman thinks he was sent back to 19th century England to be a physician. But what if he’s wrong? If not a physician, then what? Perhaps the sorceress grandmother of the Chinese apothecary he just met will have the answer

Fall Back is Book 1 in the Golden Hours series. It can be read as a standalone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Decadent Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683613527

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Fall Back

Copyright 2019 by C.L. Hadyn

ISBN: 978-1-68361-352-7

Cover art by Fantasia Frog Designs

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden

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Published by Decadent Publishing Company, LLC

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Military Medicine, by necessity has always been in the vanguard of healing. Military medics and naval corpsmen strive to give their patients that golden hour, which is to keep them alive long enough to reach a modern surgical unit. All medics and corpsmen are taught to make, sound, life-changing decisions on the spur of the moment.  Calder Reade, the hero of this book, is no different.  If you enjoy Calder’s story, please contact me at [e-mail].

Chief Petty Officer Calder Reade, a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman thinks he was sent back to 19th century England to be a physician. But what if he’s wrong?  If not a physician, then what? Perhaps the sorceress grandmother of the Chinese apothecary he just met will have the answer

Fall Back is Book 1 in the Golden Hours series. It can be read as a standalone.

Fall Back

Golden Hour Book One

By

C. L. Hadyn

Chapter One

As Calder Reade waited for the nurse to finish cutting the patient’s bloody T-shirt away, the ER continued to maintain its status of controlled chaos. At the nurse’s nod, he moved forward and began what he liked to call the Golden Hour dance to keep the teen gang member alive long enough to give the surgeons upstairs a fighting chance.

One more week remained of his internship at St. Petersburg’s West Bay Medical Center trauma ward, and Chief Petty Officer Reade could call himself a fully certified Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corpsman.

But for the present, he would concentrate on searching for the source of his patient’s bleeding, as he tuned out the usual cacophony surrounding his bay.

C’mon, c’mon, stop hiding from me, you little bleeder. I can fix you if I can find you. Not bothering to lift his eyes from his patient’s chest, he said, I need more—

The ER nurse gave him the suction before he could complete the sentence.

Since his surgical mask hid his grin of appreciation, he winked at her. The slow wink the nurse returned told him he’d be getting some after their shift.

Ah-ha, got you! Now hold on and let me work my magic. Keeping his focus in the ER was a damn sight easier than in combat. No whistles of incoming RPG rounds or the staccato beat of machine guns to break his concentration on his patient. He only needed to hear the nurses calling out vitals and the prompts from his supervisory doctor. When Doctor Feinstein bellowed a warning of Gun, he looked up and, in a blink his world went from clamping the bleeder closed before the kid bled out, to a searing pain blossoming across his back. He had the fleeting, crazy thought a mule kicked him. Whatever the cause, his focus strayed from his patient, and he gasped an apology as he fell across his body.

Before his vision went haywire and the ER disappeared entirely, Chief Petty Officer Reade asked himself another of his favorite what-if questions. What if he forgot to wear his body armor to the ER and got shot by a rival gang member on a retribution mission?

Chapter Two

He saw double again. Double as in the weird image of himself he’d first seen when he was a kid, and, unlike the first time, he dared to speak to it. Not you again. I thought I left you in my uncle’s barn.

He’d been eleven the first time he saw his doppelganger. He and his cousin failed to heed his uncle’s warning against goofing around in the hayloft, and their roughhousing sent him sailing backwards out of the loft.

His youthful self winced as he recalled the sharp smack he made as he hit the floor and knocked the wind out of himself. And he also vividly remembered laying spread-eagled on the barn floor, doing a fair imitation of a fish out of water, and looking up at the loft to see if his cousin would render assistance. But rather than his cousin, he gaped at a strange version of himself.

The brief flying stunt left him without air enough to comment on the fact his double wasn’t wearing jeans and a T-shirt but a pair of loose knee breeches and a fitted waistcoat.

His double’s worst sartorial feature, in his opinion, was tying his unfashionably long hair in a ponytail and adding, of all things, a sissy bow. It came nowhere close to the crew cut he usually combed by using spit and his hand. When his strange twin disappeared with the first gulp of air, and he was able to draw into his lungs, he forgot it ever happened.

Why this look-alike apparition chose to reintroduce himself now in the ER befuddled him, however, not enough to not realize his ghost twin had grown along with him. His mysterious double appeared to be the same age, twenty-five, and, instead of the scared expression he wore when he looked down upon him from the hayloft, his adult doppelganger stared directly at him with his head cocked in a listening attitude. While they might both have the same face, his twin still dressed like something out of a Dickens novel. He wasn’t wearing hospital scrubs, for sure.

Doctor Feinstein calling his time of death drew his attention away from his unexpected and unexplained visitor.

"I’ll pronounce. Time of death is 23:59. God help us, this is a fucking hospital not a shooting gallery. These fucking gang members and druggies don’t deserve the excellent care we give them. We have a dead corpsman, a dead patient who bled out because a street thug shot his corpsman, and a dead gang member shot by a cop, and soon no one in their right mind will want to practice here.

Son of a bitch, are we going to have to start wearing fucking body armor in this ER so we don’t lose more medical personnel in the line of duty?

Doctor Feinstein’s Bronx temper froze everyone in place, and Calder wanted to give his supervising doctor a friendly punch on the arm and say it wasn’t so bad, but an examination of his torso and he had to agree, the call was a sound one. The bullet went in small, pinged around his internal organs like a pinball, and came out large.

He no sooner thought, Whoa, I’m having an out-of-body experience, when an unexpected force began propelling him through, for lack of a better description, a dark tunnel. Kind of like when his parents took him and his brother to their grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania and they had to drive through the mountain tunnels on the Pennsylvania turnpike. He enjoyed staring at the evenly spaced lights on the ceiling as they flashed by, and he experienced the same feeling as when he was a kid. This surrounding darkness struck him as both scary and comforting.

A voice drew his attention away from thinking of tunnels.

Hey there, Doc, it’s been a while. I didn’t get a chance to thank you for doing your best for me and writing the nice letter to my folks, so I volunteered to be the one to show you the way.

He recognized the first patient he ever lost. Fisher, yes, Lance Corporal Fisher. The kid had barely made it out of his teens before being fatally wounded in Afghanistan, and he kept his promise to tell Fisher’s mom how much her son had loved her.

Fisher’s death hit him hard. He’d tried his damnedest to give the kid his golden hour, but bad weather delayed the medevac chopper and he bled out.

His hands flew to cover his face as a blazing white light separated him from Fisher’s apparition. The dazzle was so bright, only by squinting through his fingers could he make out a nebulous form asking for an answer to a startling question.

Had his twin suddenly decided to speak to him? He scoffed at the idea his ghost twin would be the one to ask, Are you prepared to die? But the stark question made him focus his attention inward.

Although his ministrations brought a number of men back from the brink to give them their golden hour, he never considered he might one day not get one of his own. He couldn’t quite grasp the fact, despite being surrounded by the best medical equipment anyone could ask for, no one could give him the needed grace period to keep him from slipping from quick to dead.

Calder scanned the ER and took note of the examination table, the complex equipment, the high intensity lights, and the bandages in their sterile packaging, and made up his mind. For his entire military career, he’d trained hard to save lives, so cashing in his own life before he could use what he’d learned seemed like a gross misuse of medical and military resources.

The minute his tongue touched the roof of his mouth to begin forming the word No, everything went black. He reached out in surprise and wrapped his arms around his double as he felt himself falling.

The falling sensation made him woozy but not enough to stop him from wondering if this visitation by his twin was going to end up in some sort of Deja vu experience, where he again found himself winded and lying on a hay-strewn barn floor, staring up at his strange twin.

While this descent didn’t end on a hard, wooden floor, it did end with a similar feeling of hitting something, and he took a moment to get his bearings. This time, rather than landing on the floor of his uncle’s barn, he found himself seated at the family dining table with his father, mother, and brother. However, unlike his childhood experience, he no longer wore modern dress but his ghost twin’s style of clothing. Maybe someone forgot to tell him they were attending a costume party with an early nineteenth-century theme. His confusion increased when his father addressed him with a British accent and not his usual Texas twang.

While his overloaded brain scrambled for something to say, an outrageous thought sent a pain shooting through his skull. Maybe the collision with his twin left part of him in the twenty-first century and sent the rest of him into the nineteenth with the wherewithal to function in both. However, if his self-diagnosis was correct, sitting frozen in his seat wasn’t exactly functioning in either era.

Calder forced his attention away from the contemplation of his clasped hands to study the strange family tableau arranged around the dinner table, and swayed in his chair when he discovered his centuries-old doppelganger’s memories took pride of place in his consciousness.

At his involuntary jerk of surprise, his hand grazed the plate before him, and he recognized steak and kidney pie and a tankard of ale. The flavor of both food and drink tickled his palate, and they shouldn’t have.

Corpsman Reade had never eaten steak and kidney pie, and the only ale he had experience with came in a six-pack, and he shouldn’t have been able to recognize the meal before him as one his mother scoffed at for being such a plebian repast but served once a month to please her husband.

Calder, are you drunk?

His father’s sharp question tore his gaze away from his plate to look at the man.

Son, I’ve watched you sit there with your head bent over your meal for the last five minutes, and you almost fell out of your chair when I called your name. So, you will listen to me and listen to me well. I’ll not have you coming to this table in your cups. You do your mother and me a disservice with such rude behavior. Graduating from Edinburgh University as a physician, while a laudable achievement, is no excuse for being drunk this evening.

Drunk? He had the notion to answer, nope, not me, ask my twin, because his doppelganger had come to the table slightly tipsy from the drinks his friends stood him for graduating from university, but both of them were stone cold sober now. Daring a longer glance at his father, he tapped into his doppelganger’s mental trivia trove and discovered his father made a very good living as a cotton importer.

He wanted nothing more than to excuse himself and hide out in his bedroom until this strange split in his psyche healed itself. Recalling the location of his bedroom as the one on the left of the stairs on the third floor of a large brick house in a wealthy suburb of London made him think normal was not going to be reached this evening.

A loud, nasal snort drew his attention across the table. He frowned at the smirk his brother John gave him. His doppelganger, fuck him straight to hell, gave him no peace and continued the memory upload.

He and his brother were not bosom buddies. Mainly because John never grew out of acting like a first-class lickspittle. Lickspittle? Yes, the old-fashioned word described his brother very well. He was indeed a fawning subordinate, a toady.

Although he loved his brother as part of his family, he didn’t much like him. It was a long-standing dislike. He erroneously thought his brother would protect him when he joined him at boarding school at the tender age of seven.

He never imagined his brother would be so cruel as to make him his whipping boy. Whenever the upperclassmen picked on John, John passed it on to him. At least until taken under the wing of an upperclassman who loathed John and taught him how to fight. His newfound prowess with his fists and a large growth spurt compelled John and his sycophant friends to leave him alone.

To give his brother his due, John had his own reasons for making the dislike mutual. For one, he’d inherited their mother’s Scottish genes, which endowed him with a tall, muscular physique. And he also favored her side of the family with auburn hair and blue eyes that could broadcast how he felt with no need for words.

John, on the other hand, inherited their father’s Welsh genes, which made him short, dark-haired, somewhat myopic, and not physically imposing. To his brother’s immense and vocal dissatisfaction, women noticed his younger brother, never him.

His attention returned to the present when his mother intervened on his behalf.

David, you are being too hard on the new doctor in the family. I don’t think he’s feeling well. Look, he’s white as a sheet.

Is your mother correct? Are you unwell?

No, Father, I’m a trifle tired. I traveled a long distance today. While part of him meant his trip via carriage from Edinburgh, Scotland, his other self recalled Heaven by way of St. Petersburg, Florida.

Well, I’ll say my piece and you may retire for the evening.

David Reade wiped his mouth on the linen napkin and sat forward in his chair, the better to give his youngest son the benefit of his wisdom.

At great expense to this family, I paid your way through four years of medical school. And, against my better judgement, I let you persuade me to pay for an expensive apprenticeship with a surgeon because you couldn’t make up your mind whether to be a physician or surgeon.

His father smiled briefly at his mother and then returned his attention back to him.

I do thank you for graduating at the top of your class. I worried my money would be spent on wine and women rather than medical texts, and I’m happy to say you’ve proven me wrong. You are duly licensed as both a physician and surgeon, so I don’t think I need remind you, your medical education is the end of my financial responsibility.

He wisely kept silent as his father held up his hand to ward off his mother’s protest of her son being cast financially adrift from the family.

However, I know you, as a recent graduate, lack funds to hang out your shingle in your own establishment, so my old friend Harry Black and I came to an agreement on your behalf. His daughter Imogene has taken quite a fancy to you.

At his father’s startling pronouncement, his brother John pushed his plate aside, the better to leave room to put his head in his hands and laugh uproariously. An excellent choice, Father. I quite agree, Imogene Black is the perfect choice for a physician’s wife. Why, she can cure most ills with one glance.

He followed his brother’s lead and pushed the remnants of the steak and kidney pie aside. He almost doubled over from the onset of nausea as he recalled his last meeting with the woman, and he began protesting, vociferously. How could she possibly fancy me? I only danced with her once in my life because I felt sorry for her. No one said so much as a hello to her at the soiree I attended last summer, and she looked hurt and miserable. I wanted to save her from embarrassment.

John drew his attention again when, enjoying his distress immensely, he continued, You deserve to reap the rewards for being a Good Samaritan, Brother. His brother made no attempt to keep the drollness from his voice as he continued to rub salt in the wound. Her father’s foundries will more than pay for your own townhouse in a decent part of London, and you can use the ground floor as your office. You needn’t be put off by Imogene’s lack of beauty, Brother. As a physician, you can prescribe a sleeping draught to yourself each evening. And if you are quick in blowing out the candles, you never need face the gorgon.

Cease teasing your brother, John. You are being cruel.

Calder shot a grateful look to his mother for her intercession, even though he agreed with his brother’s unflattering description of Imogene Black. No way in this world would he, short of being trussed up and blindfolded, climb into bed with her.

Imogene, poor girl, possessed a number of the same attributes as the rats they’d experimented on in medical school. From her pointed, pink-tipped nose, which twitched whenever she spoke, to the dark hairs framing her mouth like whiskers, her face was bereft of any feature a red-blooded male in his prime would find attractive.

Selling himself into indentured servitude sounded like a better proposition to raise the funds necessary to hang out his shingle than marrying the woman.

He leaned forward and addressed his father with genuine conviction in his voice. You will have to inform Mister Black of my refusal. I am quite capable of finding my own wife, Father.

The ale sloshed out of his father’s tankard when he banged it on the table.

I’ll do no such thing, Son. Black and I have shaken hands on it. You need funding, and he needs his daughter wed to a respectable man.

He barely managed to stifle a groan when his father assumed a wheedling tone.

It won’t be so bad. After all, John is happy with my efforts in his behalf.

His temper rose at the latest reference to his brother being the good son and resolved to make it the last time he swallowed such an untruthful comparison.

He straightened his spine and cast his brother a disdainful look. "Yes, John would be, wouldn’t he? He’s too lazy to find one by himself, and too unprepossessing in his own looks to have found one who has both a large dowry and beauty. It’s quite obvious my brother has settled for only the dowry with Arabella Snow."

John came over the table for him, and, anticipating the reaction, he planted an excellent facer on his brother. The gush of blood from his brother’s nose had his mother moaning in distress, and he did feel contrite for causing her upset, but the crooked angle of his brother’s formerly straight nose gave him immense satisfaction. Damn if he’d offer to fix it for him.

"That’s quite enough, his father roared as he stood so suddenly his chair fell over and hit the floor with a clatter. Calder, you are excused."

He gave his parents a perfunctory bow as he withdrew to the solitude of his bedroom. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror over his washstand disconcerted him. It reflected the image of his nineteenth-century self. The one with outdated clothes and long hair tied with a leather thong this time and not a girlish bow.

The strange image made him feel fuzzy, like a double-exposed photo. Photo? Thank God the twenty-first century man hadn’t disappeared altogether.

Not wanting to stare at his historic reflection a moment longer, he roamed his bedroom until a desk strewn with papers and books caught his eye. Picking up a ribbon-wrapped document, he unrolled it and stood staring down at his sheepskin from university. As his father had mentioned, he did graduate with honors and could count himself a newly minted physician in the Year of Our Lord 1804.

He dropped his diploma then tripped over a thick medical text on the floor as he attempted to cross the room to his bed. He cursed himself for not returning things where they belonged, and then curiosity made him open the book to a random page.

After one chapter, he struggled to resist the urge to open a window and fling the scurrilous textbook into the nearest trash pile. No twenty-first-century physician in their right mind would bleed a patient who displayed anemia symptoms.

As he slammed the book down on his desk, his favorite what-if game popped into his head. What if he’d been sent back in time to correct a few things? The question made his legs go wobbly.

He had to stagger to his bed before he did an ass-plant on the carpet. This had to be some sort of waking hallucination from long hours, little sleep, and too much caffeine. Maybe, if he closed his eyes for forty winks, he’d wake up tomorrow morning in wrinkled surgical scrubs and back on duty at the trauma center.

Chapter Three

His mind whirled and sleep eluded him as he continued to play the question game. What a conundrum to have his future be his past and his ancestral past be his present. How in the hell did he get from a twenty-first-century trauma center to a nineteenth-century English home, and all without benefit of psychotropic drugs?

Was he delusional in some past life and having visions of being a modern medical practitioner in the distant future? Or was he lying comatose in a twenty-first-century Intensive Care Unit, dreaming about what his mother discovered about their family roots with one of those DNA kits? Whatever the reality, he hoped his life wasn’t fucked-up beyond all repair.

His subconscious recorded frequent pinging sounds as he lay on his bed, but the hamster wheel of his brain was too engaged to take the time to seek out the source. Too engaged until one of the pings almost shattered the glass of his bedroom window.

He rolled out of bed and flung open the window. He spotted a young man about to fling another missile and hissed at his late-night visitor.

Unless you intend to pay for a broken window, stop throwing rocks. What do you want? It was too dark for either of his personas to recognize the visitor, so he forgave himself the rude address.

He was surprised when answered in kind. His unidentified visitor had a temper of his own.

About bloody time, man. Move away from the window, I’m coming up.

He complied, and leather saddlebags were flung into his room right before the head and shoulders, and then the rest of the man’s body fell to the carpet at his feet.

Well, aren’t you going to help a lady up, or did you lose all your manners at university?

Seeing the uninvited visitor’s face jarred his memory, and he bent over to help the woman sprawled on his bedroom rug. He bid his worries adieu when he decided to stop stressing over which of his personas should respond to being addressed and accept that whoever responded would be the right one.

Good evening, Miss Avery. Thank you for your concern, but my manners are right where I left them. You, on the other hand, are missing your attachment to femininity. What do you mean by traipsing about in men’s breeches?

He held up his hand to stop Angeline Avery’s quick rejoinder. I am also compelled to point out you put yourself in grave peril by climbing up the trellis.

He refrained from further comment and simply waited while his visitor twitched her disarranged attire into place before answering his question regarding her choice of dress.

My, my, I was unaware they taught prudery at university. Have you forgotten how you and I used the ivy trellis as a means of entrance and exit every summer since we were old enough to escape our nannies?

Even though he heard the lecturing tone in his voice quite clearly, he, perversely, didn’t care to stop. Aren’t you getting a little long in the tooth to be haring around dressed in male apparel? It was fun when we were children, but I hardly think your guardian would approve, and she most certainly wouldn’t condone you being in the bedroom of a male not your relation. An unmarried male, I might add.

He hid the grin behind his hand when, belying her masculine attire, his friend gave a very feminine foot stomp to emphasize her feelings.

My guardian can take the first carriage headed to hell for all I care.

He admonished with an audible tsk, Such language.

As she marched across the room and threw herself full-length onto his bed, he had a chance to study his childhood friend. Too caught up in his studies at university, he’d exiled himself from most of the social whirl of his friends, and thus caught only one glance of her at the solitary soiree he attended last summer. The same one where, in a weak moment of sympathy, he’d asked Imogene Black to dance. His friends dragged him away to a local pub shortly thereafter.

His attention remained riveted on his childhood friend, for, despite her effort to conceal it, she was a very attractive woman. It was embarrassing to realize his penchant for making her eyes snap and her face flush with anger hadn’t been outgrown as he began teasing her over the imperfect fit of her servant’s ensemble.

He moved to the side of his bed, stared down at her, and shook his head in mock outrage. Tsk, tsk. Whoever your tailor is, Avery, you must sack him at once. The shoulders are too large for your frame. Might I suggest some padding? And the fit of those breeches is an abomination. Why the knees bag, as does the waist. Oh, and the fit across the chest is much too tight, and your hat is simply ridiculous. It does not suit at all.

He put a prudent distance between himself and his former playmate’s quick temper, remaining silent as she sat up, removed the offensive hat, and dragged her fingers through her hair to create more disarray to her coiffure.

Angeline wouldn’t meet his eyes as she gave vent to her temper.

"My guardian is, at this moment, locked in the library with Colonel Easton, and I doubt either one of them is fully clothed at this point. My aunt Sabrina developed a tendresse for the colonel, and intends to accept him as a husband, when he asks, and follow him to his next posting.

He scoffed. Surely you don’t expect me to tell Colonel Easton to cast his attentions elsewhere? I’m not a relation, and I don’t fancy having to meet the man over pistols at dawn for sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.

He refused to be provoked as she tilted her head and made a face that fell short of sticking her tongue out at him.

Don’t be silly. I like Colonel Easton, and I’m happy for my aunt. The conundrum is she feels she can’t accept Easton’s proposal until she completes her duties as guardian by seeing me wed. And so, I’ve braved the climb to your window this evening to make you a proposal.

He struggled to make sense of her intentions. Women did not propose to men, especially men they’d only known as a childhood playmate. He needed more information before he made an ass of himself.

A proposal? Care to be more specific? He got a bad feeling when his innocent question made her wring her hands in distress.

Umm, you will recall my parents died when their carriage was washed away by a flash flood last spring.

Yes, and I am deeply sorry for your loss, Angeline. I hope you received the letter of condolence I sent as soon as my mother wrote to me of your tragic loss and included your new address.

I did, and I thank you for your sweet words. As you know, my aunt Sabrina is my only living relative and my guardian, and I do adore her. However, I am not at all happy with my aunt giving Lord Halleburton permission to pay me court. She wants me married so she can follow Colonel Easton to wherever he is posted, and she had the nerve to say I should be pleased with the offer as I would become a titled lady, and Halleburton is, reputedly, as rich as Croesus, so he isn’t after what monies my father left me.

Halleburton? I’m unacquainted with the man. Studying to become a doctor left me no time to follow your social whirl, Miss Avery. Why do you find this lord not to your favor?

His eyes widened at the volcanic eruption his mild question sparked from his childhood friend.

I don’t give a fig for Lord Halleburton’s title. My father’s estate left me quite comfortable, so I don’t need a title to advance my social standing. If I were twenty-one, I could tell Halleburton to go piss up a rope. However, my aunt wants me wed to the man within the year.

He couldn’t contain his snicker at the vulgar expression. He could only surmise she learned it from a stable hand, as riding was her favorite activity.

He tried another tack. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume you are here to induce me to help you.

"That’s it, exactly. I came to you in the hope you