Dr. Deirdre Hall pushed hard, propelling her wheelchair forward at a rapid clip while she balanced her groceries in her lap. She was nearly home, eager to beat the rain that was beginning to show promise of being a downpour, eager to get her groceries under cover before their paper bags disintegrated. The grocery store stood five blocks from her home.

Deirdre had covered four of those blocks already and the only obstacle between her and the apartment building she called home was a long hill to climb. Deirdre knew every rut, every crack in the concrete, every curb between her apartment building and the grocery store. Even as she pushed herself forward, Deirdre eyed a break in the concrete sidewalk about two-thirds of the way up the hill before her.

That flaw in the sidewalk, where the concrete had heaved over the course of many winters, was a convenient place for her to stop if need be, because the broken concrete kept her chair from rolling backward while she rested. By force of habit, Deirdre paused to take stock of her surrounds before pushing on.

To her left was a mostly-empty warehouse that occasionally became home to a few vagrants who begged for coins before being chased away by the warehouse's owner. Across the street, drug dealers hung out in a weed-infested, empty lot; peddling their wares, heckling honest citizens and generally causing trouble. Knowing that the crippled lady packed heat and could shoot straight, said drug dealers knew better than to harass Dr. Hall.

The empty lot was well-known for that sort of trouble, so much so that the cops hadn't bothered to investigate on the day that Deirdre proved to the group of malcontents and juvenile delinquents that she could take care of herself, chair-bound or not. Most of the empty lot's misbegotten inhabitants were fleeing the rain as Deirdre rolled by, seeking shelter from the first few fat drops of rain that, combined with the ominous roll of thunder overhead, promised to turn their lot into a muddy mess.

Having paid for her medical doctorate through her service, military-trained Dr. Hall had never lost the habit of being constantly aware of her surroundings. Keeping a mental tab on everyone around her was an ingrained skill that only active combat could teach someone. Dr. Hall had seen her fair share of action even before medical school.

Rolling past the warehouse, Deirdre noticed movement within the building. It also registered that two of the large windows had been broken recently. She clearly remembered that they'd been untouched on her way to the supermarket. The anomaly was enough to forget the rain that was beginning to fall; enough to make her forget her concern over the paper bags of groceries in her lap.

Through the broken windowpane, Deirdre noticed activity inside. It wasn't the usual homeless-person-making-a-nest type movement either. Curious, the doctor stopped her chair long enough to study the situation. Shouts and muffled banging noises spoke of fighting- but not the gangland style fighting typical of the area.

She counted four combatants total; three males, one female- each wearing what appeared to be a silk gi, three fighting against one in an Eastern-style, martial arts battle. Three of the fighting martial artists wore gi similar enough to be uniforms, one black and two iron-grey, all with matching masks, all painted with the blotches of military-issue camouflage.

"Nakimura, behind you!" The female's warning call made Deirdre stiffen in her chair. That name, if not the voice, was very familiar to her. Surely there could only be one man with such a name, fighting as a ninja warrior!

The name brought back a host of memories, some bittersweet, some merely bitter. Wearing black with an orange and white lightning insignia on the front, left shoulder, the lone combatant disappeared; but not before Nakimura had struck him a solid blow at critical mass. Deirdre winced in sympathy, mentally assessing organ damage.

She guessed the victim of Nakimura's blow would have several broken ribs and a bruised kidney at the very least. A shiny stain on the black silk of his leg indicated blood-loss while an erratic jerking of his left hand, which he tried in vain to control, told the watching medical professional that he'd taken a serious blow to the right side of his head. Deirdre didn't know how the fight had started or who the lone, injured ninja might be, but she did know what the lightning symbol stood for.

An inner prompt from the Holy Spirit told her she was to help the wounded man. As rapidly and silently, Deirdre argued. He wears THAT symbol, Lord! Look what they did to me.

Knowing Nakimura as she did, Deirdre could guess why they were fighting. She watched the wounded man fall, saw him crawl under some crates to hide.

Once, before she'd lost the use of her legs, Deirdre had fought alongside Nakimura and the other members of ECHO, a top-secret, joint military unit comprised of Special Forces members from all branches of the military. The men and women of ECHO lived apart from society, most of them with no other family but the unit. Extreme Counteraction, Hidden Operations; the very name left a bad taste in Deirdre's throat as the knowledge of why she was no longer a part of them surfaced.

Anger surged through the crippled woman. She didn't want to help her enemies, but she was a soldier and soldiers obeyed orders from superiors. With the Lord God as her Supreme Commander, Deirdre would do as He asked.

"Hey!" Deirdre called, making her voice sound hoarser than it was. "You better get out of here before I call the cops! This is private property and I don't care for visitors!"

Everything she'd said was true, except for the intended impression that she owned the warehouse. Deirdre didn't care at all for the owner, cared less whether or not his property was damaged, but the chance for retribution against those who'd abandoned her was too great to pass up. Besides that, as a doctor, she felt honor-bound to help the wounded man, no matter who he worked for.

Her call had the desired effect. Silently, Nakimura and the other two, whom Deirdre guessed to be his students, fled the warehouse. Deirdre wheeled herself over to the crates and knocked them over, staring pointedly at the hiding ninja she'd just exposed. "You're hurt. I'm a doctor, let me help you."

He shook his head and tried to flee. Deirdre watched him jump out a window and take five steps before he fell just outside the building.

"Yup, you're fine," she wise-cracked as she wheeled herself back through the door and over to where he lay in the weeds beside the sidewalk. "I don't think you have much choice. Your friends will be back soon. Do you really want to be here when they return?"

She paused, giving him a chance to make up his mind. "Have a seat. My place is just up the hill." Deirdre moved her groceries and indicated her lap.

He shook his head once. "I will not take advantage of a crippled woman," the injured man refused in a weak murmur. "Leave me. I cannot protect you from my enemies."

Deirdre pressed her lips together to bite back a retort. With a tight sigh, she locked the wheels of her chair, stood up and carefully sat her groceries aside. "Come on; I can make the run to my front door in four minutes flat. I collapse after six and a half, so we'd better hurry."

She hauled him up into her chair, handed him her paper sacks and fished out a cell phone. After a moment, she spoke into it, already starting to push her burden forward. "Sam, it's raining and I'm at the bottom of the hill. I really would hate for my paper bags to split again. Would you please open my apartment and wait by the door for me? You're a doll. See you in four."

Deirdre's reluctant passenger turned in the wheelchair to stare at her, so she grinned at him as she pushed the chair forward with her hips so she could stow her phone before she grabbed the handles behind his shoulders again. "Hang on, Fella'; this could get bumpy." Deirdre started to run.

Pavement slipped under her running shoes, quickly at first but more slowly as she neared the broken pavement towards the top. "Guess I'm not used to running with so much weight," she admitted, steering around the buckled sidewalk at almost a walk.

"One minute to the door, one-thirty 'til total shutdown." Her voice rose to a yell. "Sam! Open the door!"

The door of the apartment opened and Deirdre zoomed through it, calling her thanks as she sped by the laughing doorman, across the lobby and through an open door. On her way through her apartment door, Deirdre's foot kicked the door closed. It was a drill the two of them often practiced. She only hoped that Sam had been too busy with the door to notice her passenger, hiding behind the twin, bulging sacs of groceries.

"Thirty seconds," gasped Deirdre, dropping her groceries on the coffee table. The man in the gi was entirely silent as she pushed her chair over to the bed and unceremoniously heaved him onto it.

She reached for the farther leather tether and buckled it around his wrist, leaning heavily on the bed-rail to do so before she collapsed into her chair, sweat beading her brow. Teeth clenched, Deirdre raised the bed-rail and tethered his free hand, effectively making him a prisoner in the hospital bed.

As soon as the unresisting man was restrained, Deirdre leaned back in her chair and sighed. "Six minutes, thirty seconds on the button. I hate six minutes, thirty seconds!" After a deep breath, she straightened herself in the chair, legs totally paralyzed. "Okay, now for you."

The patient/prisoner lifted one wrist without jerking at the restraint. "You didn't need to do that." His voice was a pleasant baritone- or would be if he were whole and not wracked with pain.

"I did, actually," Deirdre retorted. "In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a cripple that lives alone. Oh, and I know who you were fighting and who that symbol on your gi represents, which means you are not a safe patient to have in my home." Deirdre winked at him and wheeled herself to the bathroom to fetch first aid supplies.

Why him, Lord? she groaned silently.

The voice of her Heavenly Father, her Supreme Commander, answered back with affection. Trust Me.

"Your home?" asked Deirdre's patient as he watched her through the open bathroom door, his voice marginally weaker. "This looks more like a secret base than a home."

Deirdre shrugged and wheeled herself back to the bed. "It's home to me. Swallow this, please. It's the best I can do by way of anesthesia, and believe me, you will want anesthesia when I start sewing up your leg." She held up a couple of pills and a water glass with a bendy-straw sticking out the top.

He shook his head. "I will not move. Please, no drugs."

A small, plastic caddy held the supplies Deirdre had chosen for her ministrations. Deirdre reached into them for a pair of sharp, bent scissors normally used for cutting bandaging tape. When she had the scissors, she lowered the bed all the way down, making it easy for her to reach his face.

"I have also had occasion to hide my identity," she explained quietly as she cut a hole in his mask where his mouth was, "so I will respect yours. But you must take these. They're not addictive, I promise." She pressed them between his lips and held up the glass. Obediently, he lifted his head and sipped at the liquid enough to wash down the pills.

"That wasn't water." His observation was more of a gentle rebuke, since the clear-colored liquid had indeed been pure cane alcohol.

"Two hundred proof gin," she grinned at him, "or to be precise, non-denatured lab alcohol. It will make the pills dissolve and be absorbed faster. I can't afford to wait half an hour, if your skull has been caved in."

He nodded and closed his eyes. Deirdre attacked his pant-leg with her scissors, revealing a leg with skin-color denoting Asian ancestry and a gash dangerously near his femoral artery. Quickly, she swabbed the wound with an iodine preparation and selected some suture.

"You were lucky," Deirdre commented, not caring if he heard her or not. "Another fraction of an inch and we'd be doing an arterial repair right now, rather than a simple suture."

"There is a difference?" The pills reappeared outside his mouth as he spoke.

Deirdre shook her head and continued stitching his leg wound. "Yeah, six weeks' recovery versus a few days; oh, and arterial repair takes a lot of tiny stitches, which take my best skill; and I'm not at my best after a six-and-a-half-minute sprint." She paused to grin at him. "Not to mention the possibility of bleeding to death without a tourniquet beforehand."

He chuckled wryly. "Then I am lucky."

Deirdre finished his leg then bandaged it with gauze and surgical tape before she replaced the absorbent, disposable pad that protected her bed from bloodstains. She frowned at the discarded pad. "You lost a lot of blood. That pad should be far heavier than it is and your blood is darker than it should be."

Carefully, she disposed of it in a bright red garbage bag. "Fortunately for me, I have a lot of medical waste in the garbage at times. No one will notice the extra this time." That being said, she moved her chair in order to reach his ribs.

The tell-tale grate of the bones told her pressing fingers that there were, indeed, broken ribs. "How bad does that hurt?" she asked him, knowing he was still awake as long as he could hold his liquor.

"It hurts."

"One to ten?"

He thought about it. "Six."

"Then we have a good chance of not having to repair a kidney. If you'd needed surgery, it would be closer to an eight, accounting for the alcohol. Nothing I can do about the ribs and you'll be seeing blood in your urine for a little while."

He nodded once, accepting her assessment. "Look toward me?" Deirdre shined a pen-light into his eyes, watching the reaction to her light. As she'd expected, his pupils dilated at uneven rates. "Hmm, turn your head toward the wall, please?" When he'd complied, she ran her fingers over his head, looking for the dent in his skull.

Finally, she sat back in her chair. "Concussion- but your skull is intact, which is good because I don't have the equipment for that kind of surgery."

"But you have everything else," the comment was almost a question while she started an IV in his left hand.

"Most everything," she agreed thoughtfully. "A good deal of it was for my own care when I was first injured, but the rest I bought in the course of my studies. I started out in battlefield medicine and emergency surgery, switched to gastro-intestinal before I got into cardio-pulmonary."

Deirdre grinned at him. "I tend to grow bored rather easily. This is just water with glucose in it to keep you from being dehydrated while your body replaces your blood supply." She started an IV bag flowing into his arm, adjusted the drip rate, then hooked up his other arm to a blood-pressure cuff and clipped a pulse-oxygen meter to his middle finger.

"And now?" he asked, still showing no signs of any effect of the alcohol he'd ingested. Beside him, the monitors whirred steadily and beeped in quiet time to his heart.

"I do a little surgery at City General a few blocks away, consult by video the rest of the time. My PT takes up a lot of time too." She nodded toward the back bedroom.

"Your groceries still need to be put away," he reminded her. Deirdre sighed. "Thanks for reminding me. I sure hope my ice cream isn't total soup by now." He closed his eyes when she turned her chair toward the twin sacks of her purchases, still sitting on the couch. Deirdre went to put away her purchases, made herself a sandwich and wheeled herself in front of her office area to work on various projects.

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