She nodded and then gave me a look in the gloom. “Don’t get any ideas, Carver.”
“What?” I laughed.
“Well clearly you’re not above random kisses.”
“Sorry about that. It was all I could think of.”
She shrugged. “Don’t be. It wasn’t bad. You’re out of practice though.”
“Is that right?” I gave her my best incredulous look.
“We’re not practising,” she said as she moved closer and pulled my arm over her shoulders.
I leaned forward and killed the engine, plunging the cab into darkness. In the silence, Johnson’s whispered voice was clear in my ear. “I think you’re in there, Roasties.”
I stayed awake longer than she did. For all the strain I’d put on my body escaping from Afridi’s complex, I found I couldn’t sleep. I watched the wing mirrors, scanning the darkness as Mackenzie leaned on me, breathing softly. Twice I thought I caught pinpricks of light far in the distance behind us. Both times they vanished but they were enough to keep me awake.
Afridi bothered me, more than I really wanted to admit. I’ve never been particularly civic minded. Selfishness is a natural state and it’s not one I fight all that hard against. I joined the army for the career; not from any particular sense of duty to Queen, country, or the world at large. For all that though, the prospect of simply letting Afridi loose on the planet did not sit well with me. I didn’t have a clue what I planned to do about him just yet, but I’d be damned if I was simply letting him go back to torturing people into madness.
*
I woke early, before the sky was fully light, easing myself out from underneath Mackenzie and clambering out of the cab. The dusty ground needed watering and I was dying for a piss, so it seemed fair we sort each other out.
I let out a groan as I rolled my neck, working out the kinks and aching muscles. My chest was sore, but it seemed to be on the mend. My leg, however, was throbbing with a hot, angry, ache, and would need some real attention far sooner than we would be able to provide it.
The creak of the other truck door told me Mackenzie was awake. I stayed quiet—nobody really wants company at times like this. It was only as I turned away from the side of the truck and glanced towards the horizon that I saw it. The sun hadn’t risen yet, or so I’d assumed, but it was light enough to see the dusty murk that filled the sky. The dust-storm looked like a huge brown wall, reaching up from the parched ground for the heavens.
I walked slowly to the front of the truck, drawing out the word as the sight became clearer with every step. “Fuuuck!”
“What?” Mackenzie came around to my side. She followed my pointing finger to the brown wall of dust and sand that filled the sky ahead of us.
“Shit! How long do you think we have?”
“Not long enough.”
I’ve lived through dust storms before. They hit Afghanistan most months and can last for days at a time. Normally they aren’t much more than an inconvenience, but if it wrecked the engine, this one could kill us both.
“What do we do?” Mackenzie asked as she slammed the truck door shut.
I thought for a moment, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. Driving into it risked ruining the engine as the sand worked its way in and forced it to overheat. Staying put risked getting bogged down, and then there was always the chance of Afridi’s men somehow catching up with us.
“We don’t have much of a choice,” I told her. “We can’t stay here. We have to keep moving.”
The truck started easily, and I jammed it into gear, pushing it as fast as we could stand as we bounced around inside the cab.
The dust was more of a danger than I wanted to admit. It would be bad enough if we were in a Mastiff, or an American Humvee, but at least those had air filters built for this kind of thing. You can shake them out and just carry on. The KrAZ lorry we were trundling along in was older than I was, and I seriously doubted its engine had any kind of filters that were worth the name.
I kept an eye on the engine temperature as we went. The dust in those storms was fine enough to work its way down into your lungs, so the engine really wasn’t going to enjoy it. It was too fine to see to begin with, but within an hour the visibility had dropped to mere feet and the dust was hissing against the windows as the wind drove it on.
“How do you even know where you’re going?” Mackenzie asked at one point.
“I don’t,” I admitted. “I’m just going in as straight a line as I can manage. It’s all we can do. We should hit some kind of road, or spot one, eventually.”
“And if we don’t?”
I gave her a long look. “Then we don’t. I don’t have a better plan, Mackenzie.”
I wasn’t about to sugar-coat things. We’d both gone through hell in Afridi’s prison. I wasn’t about to pretend life was all hearts and flowers now.
The engine fought on until the middle of that afternoon before it gave in. To its credit I don’t think many other machines would have lasted that long. I let the truck roll to a stop as Mackenzie and I exchanged glances while steam boiled out from the bonnet, and then there was nothing to do but wait, and listen to the wind as the dust fell.
She watched me for a moment, then pulled her legs up on the bench seat of the truck, facing me with a pair of intent eyes that made the space in the cab feel all that much smaller.
“So, you see the dead men from your squad?” she asked, as calmly as if she was asking me what I wanted for lunch.
I’ve spent most of the last five years avoiding this conversation. I’d managed to avoid it with Susan, she only saw the barest edges of how fucked up I really am. I’d be damned if I was being dragged through it now. I tore my eyes away and looked at the dust storm. Nope. No help there. Mackenzie waited, eyes holding my gaze whenever I was stupid enough to look her way. “I suppose I do,” I replied eventually.
“You said they blame you? Back on the stairs, you told me they say it’s your fault?” She looked out at the dust storm, letting the question hang in the silence until I sucked in a deep breath and sighed.
“There was an… incident,” I told her. “Back when I was in Kabul. They died. It was my fault. That’s about it.” My tone had been harsher than I intended. Talking about this stuff makes me need a drink. I hoped that she would take that as enough of an answer. And for a good long minute, I thought she had.
She glanced down at the laces of her boots, playing them idly through her fingers. “I’m sorry, John. That’s really shit.”
I looked up at her. Had she ever used my first name before now? I haven’t met many Aussies, they’re an interesting people. Us Brits can be a bit closed off, we hold things in that Aussies just let out. Her voice was careful though. It spoke of someone who had known death. Not just someone who had seen it in hospitals and war zone clinics, but someone who was haunted by the wounds death leaves in the living.
“Did you ever talk about it? Properly, I mean?” she continued, her voice a murmur against the hiss of the wind-driven dust outside.
I shook my head and looked at my hands. “Wasn’t something I could really talk about. It’s how I ended up in that shithole.” I jerked my head back toward the complex and she frowned.
“What do you mean?”
I sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. “It was the first time I stopped a bullet. My team were being shot to bits next to me, and when my turn came, I stopped the bullet in mid-air in front of me. Didn’t help them though—they were already dead. So, they follow me around, reminding me every day that what happened was my fault, and generally giving me shit.”
I don’t know what I expected her to say, but when she said nothing, I glanced up and was met with a face full of fury.
“That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard.”
“I’m sorry?” I started.
“Your squad! It wasn’t your fault. A blind man on a mountainside could see that!”
I shook my head again, anger and pai
n building in my chest. This is why I didn’t tell people. This was why I kept it to myself. “It was my fault. I didn’t stop the bullets that—”
Her hand caught my wrist and squeezed. “Just stop. Listen to yourself. Remember what Janan and Elias said. These powers, they come from something broken, a place in us that isn’t whole anymore. I can feel mine, inside my mind. It’s like a gaping chasm where a part of me has been torn open. Any shreds of what I’ve been plugging the hole with for years burned out of me when they… when they killed my friend.”
She shuffled closer on the seat, spreading her hands and taking a deep, steadying breath. “My family died in a massive fire. Gutted the whole building, killed my birth parents, my sister, and other families too. I was just a kid and they found me huddled in a room, untouched by it all. I stopped the fire that day, not because I somehow knew all along how it was done, but because I watched it kill my family. It murdered them, and I think that was when my mind fractured. I’ve been clutching at the splinters of it ever since. My point is, you didn’t have this ability to stop bullets before your mates were killed. You couldn’t have used it to save them, because it didn’t exist. You stopped the bullet because they died, John, not the other way around. You stopped the bullet, because watching them die, and not being able to do a single thing to stop it, broke you.”
Her words washed over me and my hands clenched. “No, that’s not—”
“Carver?” Her hand found my wrist again, gentle this time.
I stopped and looked up. Fuck, I’d managed five years without crying about this. I hoped she couldn’t see the fucking tears.
“It was never your fault.”
I spent what felt like forever staring out the windscreen at the sand. Pearson, Turner and Johnson sat in the back, silent for once, as if the truth they’d been trying to show me had finally been exposed underneath all the lies I’d told myself. Pearson nudged Turner and nodded out the door, and the three of them vanished; leaving me, for once, alone with my thoughts and the woman who’d forced them onto me.
According to the clock on the dash, it was an hour before Mackenzie handed me a water canteen. “Right, sad sack, get your pants off.”
I spat my mouthful across the steering wheel and gave her a startled look. “Um, what?”
“Don’t get excited, big guy. I just want to look at that leg.”
I cleared my throat, flushing as she tugged my trousers down over my knee.
“You could have at least bought me dinner first,” I muttered with a grin.
Her eye-roll almost covered her smile, but not quite.
“Christ,” she said, picking at the matted bandage somehow still clinging to my leg. “You’re a mess.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
That earned me a real smile but then her gaze drifted to my chest. “We need to replace this bandage, Carver. You’re going to get infected.”
“We’re not exactly surrounded with supplies here, Macca.”
“Macca?”
“Mackenzie is a bit of a mouthful,” I said with a smile.
“But you haven’t even bought me dinner yet,” she said with a snort. “I’m going to need some of your shirt, I think.”
I gave her a long look. “Do you plan on stripping me entirely?”
She blushed then, looking down so her dark hair fell across her face for a moment before she met my gaze. “If I was stripping you, Carver, you’d be moaning a lot louder.”
I flushed at that, glancing away and busying myself with ripping a strip from my shirt as she fell silent.
Then she reached for me, her hand was cool on my face as she lifted my chin, but her lips burned as she found mine. The first kiss was tentative, but the second was full of hunger, and I matched it with my own.
Any shock I’d felt was quickly smothered by far more important thoughts as her hands roamed over me, and my own found her body. Her shirt lifted easily, clothes falling to the seat and draped over the dash as she climbed into my lap. There was no awkwardness now, just the two of us as skin whispered over skin and I moaned against her throat as I pulled her down to meet me.
“Told you I’d make you moan,” she gasped.
I didn’t speak. There were no words to match the urgency that held me now even if I’d been capable of voicing them. This was no innocent girl. She knew what she wanted and she was taking it—and I was more than willing to let her. The wind hissed dust against the truck, and we were swallowed by the storm as her legs wrapped around me. I was lost. I didn’t ever want to be found.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The storm lasted almost two days before we were finally free of it. We took advantage of it while we could. I’m no blushing virgin, and Mackenzie knew exactly what was going on. We were taking what comfort we could, any way we could. Making plans would have been stupid. There’s no point in planning your life if you don’t know if you’ll have one in the morning.
Our water was disappearing faster than I would have liked. The dust had us trapped in the heat of the truck, we weren’t making any real progress across the plain, and the fact the radiator might need topping up hadn’t escaped me.
We drove through it at a snail’s pace, slow enough that we wouldn’t wreck the truck on anything we hit. I lost count of the times we had to stop to let the engine cool, and the hours we lost watching the temperature needle slowly drop. The storm didn’t help with that either. All of the things you could normally do; lifting the bonnet, or opening the radiator valve, would just have let more dust into the engine and made things worse.
I wasn’t overly worried about Afridi and his men finding us—they wouldn’t be able to travel any faster than we could, and with any luck the storm should have covered any tracks we left. I was more worried about our supplies.
Storms like this don’t end like rain storms; simply stopping. The dust just grows thinner over time until you can’t see it anymore. For two days we’d had no choice but to point the truck at the lightest part of the sky in the morning, and hope that we weren’t driving in a massive circle.
Naturally the dust storm passed off to our left, rather than out behind us where it might have hidden us from anyone still searching. As it turned out, the dust had done little to hide our tracks. It wasn’t a sandstorm or a heavy snowfall, and the truck was simply too heavy. The cracked ruts in the ground we had passed over were still visible to anyone who took the time to look. I checked the mirrors often, and kept my gun close to hand as we drove.
I heard it before I saw it. That heavy bass-line thwopping that every soldier the world over has learned to hate. You can hide from a plane—by the time they spot you they’re already halfway to being gone. You can see tanks or tracked vehicles coming for miles if you’re lucky. Helicopters are just bastards. Without an RPG launcher, or a gun big enough to do the job, there’s not much you can do but run, and escaping a helicopter in a stolen Soviet-era rust-bucket was about as likely as the Taliban hosting the next Miss World competition.
I met Mackenzie’s wide eyes as the helicopter thundered over us, coming in low and sweeping around to face us as it hung in the air. Even from this distance I could make out the rocket launchers slung low on either side of the cockpit.
“Shit,” I breathed and glanced over at Mackenzie. “Do you think you could…?” I left it hanging.
“God, John,” Mackenzie shook her head. “I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if there’s anything left in me.”
The gunship inched closer, the threat looming, and as obvious as a cliff-edge.
“Fuck!” I slammed on the brakes, and threw myself out of the truck as it slid to a halt on the dusty ground. A handgun is a ridiculous weapon to try and take a helicopter down with, but it was better than hurling rocks and bad language.
I’d gone from fatalistic, to downright fucking furious, in the space of half a breath. I was damned if I was going out like this.
I took my time with the first two or three shots, squinting
against the wind as I aimed for the helicopter’s glass windows. The rest of the shots went to shit. I might as well have been tossing the bullets at it with my hands. The rotors were kicking up dust and I doubted any of the shots even got close.
“Come on, then!” I screamed into the wind. “Fucking do it!”
Mackenzie grasped my arm. I hadn’t even realised she was out of the truck. She was tugging on me, urging me back, or to run, or to do something other than stand there screaming at a helicopter in the desert. “John!”
“Bastard!” I screamed. I hurled the cloned Glock at the gunship, knowing it had no chance of hitting.
I was done. Spent. After all the effort of fighting our way out of Afridi’s circus, to end like this seemed especially cruel.
“Roasties,” Johnson’s voice was a whisper on the wind, drifting to my ear over the sound of the rotors. “Stop the bullets.”
I shook my head, shielding my eyes with one hand from the dust that the damned thing was kicking up, as I fought off Mackenzie with the other. “What fucking bullets? They’re not even shooting yet.”
“No, they’re not. But what’s out there that’s moving almost as fast as a bullet?”
I blinked.
This power, this thing that Afridi had woken in me, was so utterly alien it ran contrary to instinct. It was a thing apart from me, and the very touch of it repulsed me. I didn’t seek it; I shied away from it. This was a sorcery that had slipped through the fingers of Prometheus as he fled Olympus. Something never meant for man.
They had strapped me to a wooden frame, to my own personal crucifix, naked and abused as they tortured me. They had shot me just to see if I was able to stop them as they demanded I grasp this magic. They kept pushing until I was a broken animal. Until finally I learned to reach for the power just to stop the hurt. Until the action became like muscle memory, and all I had to do was reach.
The magic was waiting for me. That same nausea-inducing strength, lurking on the other side of the fissure in my sanity. I could picture it now, a blazing white line that had been scored through the very fabric of my being. Something unnatural, and better left alone.
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