by Dale Mayer
She laughed in delight. “Well, I’m glad he did,” she said. “It’s been a pretty rough day.”
“Just a day?” teased the soldier. “I figured you’ve had a rough couple days.”
“I can’t remember what day it is,” she said. “I was taken last Tuesday. It’s just been one long terrible event ever since.”
“What happened exactly?” the soldier asked. With the doctor listening in, she quickly explained what had happened and how she’d woken up. She said, “I think Beau said today was Tuesday, and, if so, I was supposed to have a job interview. I guess I didn’t get the job, huh?”
They both winced at that.
“And it’ll be a few days before I’ll be working too hard at trying to get another one,” she said sadly, looking down at her feet. “I’d like to lie in front of a fire somewhere and just have my feet up with a good book and a cup of tea.”
“Hold that thought,” the doc said. “We’ll get you out of here soon.” He lifted her feet back out, checked them again, nodded, and said, “Okay, we’re good to go.” He took a soft towel and pressed into the soles of her feet to soak up most of the moisture. When he was done, he slathered the bottom with an ointment that had her nerves tickling just enough that the soldier had to grab her foot again so the doctor could work on her.
With both feet slathered and bound up in gauze, the doc said, “I’ll leave you a bunch of gauze. I want you to do this every night. Wash them while you have a bath. Then put the ointment on after they’re dry, and wrap all this gauze round top and bottom. Then I’ve got a tension sock here.” He picked up a weird stretchy-looking thing that let her toes stick out and came all the way around her heel up to her ankle. “You wear these throughout the day and at least for the first few nights. After a couple days, if your feet feel like maybe you’re okay without the tension socks, go through the night without them. But, other than that, you keep changing your dressing. You hear me?”
She stared at her feet in curiosity. “I can do that,” she said. “Is the pain likely to wake me up in the night?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “I can give you a couple painkillers, but I don’t have too many here. Otherwise you’ll have to get a prescription filled, and then you can have as many as you need.”
“Right,” she said, “but that won’t be so easy.”
“I’ll see what I’ve got,” he said, “but I don’t keep much in the way of supplies here.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I really do appreciate what you are doing for me.”
Finally he was done. He handed her a small plastic bag with a couple rolls of gauze, some bandages, the socks, and sample packs of painkillers, obviously from drug reps.
He said, “I’ll give you a shot for the pain because, once the numbness wears off from that gel, you’ll really feel it.”
After the shot, he turned to the soldier and said, “She’s good to go.” They turned to look around and realized only two vehicles were left alongside the medic’s truck.
“Wow,” she said. “Everyone is gone?”
“Most of the military went to the compound,” the soldier said, “and the others transported the women to town.”
“So, Doc, are you going back now too?”
He nodded. “But I’m hoping to hear from the group at the compound first, in case I’m needed.”
“Right,” she said. “Let’s hope not, but the cult had some pretty heavy-duty weaponry.”
“Like what?” the soldier asked.
“Well, hand grenades, for one,” she said. “Presumably you guys were given the locations of the bodies to collect, right?”
The two men looked at each other, then at her, and shrugged.
“I know for a fact three cult members are on one side because one cult guy lobbed a grenade at his two friends who were tied up, so that’s nasty. Plus, with all the wildlife around here, I’m afraid there won’t be a whole lot to pick up if we don’t get those bodies first. The man who threw the grenade ended up getting killed, and he fell down around his friends. I know that the cult guys have long rifles,” she said, “but they didn’t fire just one shot at a time but multiple shots. Honestly, they had quite a few guns. Handguns, rifles, machine guns—I don’t know what you call them all—but, when we saw that grenade, that was a whole different story.”
“I’ll send a message just to make sure my team knows that.” The soldier stepped away and made a couple calls.
She looked at the doctor. “I was expecting the captured cult members to be picked up because I know more cult members are alive and even more kidnapped women could be tied up out there too.”
“Do you remember where they were?” the doc asked.
She nodded. “At least I think so. I might be able to draw a map.”
He pulled out a pad of paper that he was using and handed it to her. “Do the best you can.”
She sat here, mulling it over, and finally made a diagram of the front gate where she’d seen the two white vans and where the one guy had died. Presumably he was long gone. She continued drawing, now including the side of the fence.
As she drew, the soldier returned to study her diagram. “What are you detailing?”
“Location of the men from the cult who are alive and tied up,” she said, “not to mention the dead bodies too.” She quickly put three Xs where the three dead bodies were after the grenade exploded. She put an X in front of the gates and said, “I don’t know if he’s there or not, but one driver was dead right out front. I took one of the trucks and pulled out …” She stopped, thought about it, and said, “I think one or two dead are over here at this lookout tower.”
“Lookout tower?”
She nodded, and, with her pencil, quickly sketched, saying, “All of this is a fence with that razor wire stuff above it. It’s deadly to go in that way. If you can’t get through the front gates, you can climb these lookout towers. At least, Beau and Asher climbed them somehow. You can see almost everything going on and then climb down the other side, but, on this one in particular”—and she put a check mark there—“Beau cut the barbed wire so he could get through the fence.” She pointed out where the grates were. “As far as I remember, the underground jail cells are here, but I know Beau said that this building was full of children—at least I think it was this one.” She pointed to the long hall that she’d drawn.
“Children?” the doctor asked in horror.
She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons Beau sent out a message saying no air raids—because there’s a building full of children.”
“Right,” the soldier said. “I was wondering about that.”
“Yeah, we can’t do anything about that right now,” the doc said. “Let’s hope everybody can get this settled and fast.”
Just as she thought that maybe it would be over and done with, the soldier grabbed the sheet, held it up, took a photo of it, and sent it onward.
“Look. I don’t know how much else I might have missed on this,” she said. “You can’t take it verbatim.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “It gives us something to go by.”
She nodded and then retrieved the piece of paper. “Over in this section is where we had our getaway vehicle parked,” she said, “so there’s a body in here somewhere.”
“Wow,” the soldier said, “this place is just a nightmare.”
“You’ll need a couple trucks to collect them all,” she said seriously. “Maybe you can get an ambulance, or … I don’t know. What do you do with the bodies?”
The doctor smiled and said, “The army will bring out an army doctor and body bags, and they’ll go to the hospital morgue for the moment.”
“Well, in the heat,” she said, “they’ll spoil very quickly. I’m really concerned about the ones who have been blown up.”
“With good reason,” the doctor said. “We can’t have those left for too long. We’ll have wild animals tearing them apart.”
She said, “If I had to guess, I�
��d say they’re already torn apart.”
The soldier took another picture of her map and said, “We can work with this. Thanks. It helps.”
“I hope so,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like very much help though.”
“Well, what else can you tell me?”
She told him what Nania had said and how she’d then seen somebody and bolted toward him. “Beau wondered if she was part of it all, but I don’t know,” she said. “She was terrified.”
“If she was one of the women disciples, or whatever they call themselves,” the soldier said, “chances are she’ll be punished pretty severely by the cult.”
“So why go back?” the doctor asked.
“She didn’t say but I wondered if she didn’t have a child, she suddenly couldn’t leave,” Danica said. “I know that was her primary thought.”
“Right, children again,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “It’s kind of sad.”
“More than kind of,” the soldier said. He looked down at her feet, back up at the doc, and said, “If you’re staying here, Doc, maybe I’ll run her back into town.”
She frowned, looked up at him. “Or I can sit here with the doc, have a few more sandwiches and some coffee,” she said with a big smile, “and make sure that your guys don’t need to ask me more questions while you’re here.”
The soldier hesitated, but the doctor nodded. “It won’t make any difference if she’s here or there,” he said, “but she needs to push her butt back so that her feet are higher up and not hanging over the end of my truck.”
As soon as he said that, she scooched backward a little. He put a cushion underneath, lifting her legs, and she was propped up against one of the inner benches. She said, “This is comfy.”
The soldier frowned and said, “My orders are to take you to Anchorage.”
“Yeah, that’s the thing about orders,” she said. “They only really make sense if they make sense. In this case, it won’t make much difference. If the doc is still working on me, what does it matter if it’s five minutes or twenty-five minutes?”
“Not necessarily any,” doc said.
As the soldier was obviously unsure, she shrugged and said, “At least give us half an hour. If they don’t need us, then we can leave.”
He nodded and said, “In that case, I’ve got to make some phone calls and make sure that people are getting your map.” He disappeared to his truck.
She looked at the doctor and smiled. “Not that I want to make you my waitress or anything, but do you know if any coffee or sandwiches are left over?” she asked hopefully.
He motioned to a truck, the back of it open, revealing great big trays full of sandwiches and coffee. He picked up a tray, loaded coffee onto it, and brought the whole thing back. “You might as well sit and wait in comfort,” he said. “The other soldiers will be coming back too.”
“Right,” she said, “they’ll need food too. I should save it for them.”
“No,” the doc said, “no point in saving the coffee at all. It’ll be cold. As for saving the sandwiches, that doesn’t make any sense either. They all got a chance to eat earlier.”
“Okay,” she said. She picked up a big white bun that looked like it was full of ham, cheese, and tomato. “I know I ate earlier, and it wasn’t all that long ago, but I’m still ravenous.”
“You’ve been running on empty for a long time,” the doctor said, “and your body is showing that. So tank up.”
She sat here, quietly and perfectly content, with the painkiller taking the worst of the edge off her feet, and munched away on the sandwich. She asked herself why she did not want to leave, but she already knew the answer.
Beau.
She was hoping he would come back, and she’d see him again. If she was at the hotel, nobody would update her in any way, shape, or form, yet she could only sit here and wait so long. She also didn’t want to take a chance on not getting a ride back to the hotel. It was six of one, half a dozen of another to make sure that she was safe and sound. Once again it wasn’t easy to do what she really wanted.
She looked at the doc and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
He shook his head. “Nope, and I hope I never do again. I was a paramedic before I went back to school to become a doctor,” he said, “but this isn’t what I signed up for.”
“But you’re military, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” he said, “that’s who paid for my med school, and then I signed up again. And sure, we deal with a lot of injuries, but they’re usually small, localized, or odd gunshots because I’m not in an active war zone.”
“You’ve been over there?”
“I was there for Desert Storm,” he said quietly. “After you see something like that, it changes you.”
She thought about it, nodded, and said, “I can’t imagine what that was like, but I know that, just even after this, it will change me. No way I’ll be as complacent about anything anymore. Not about walking alone, not about having plans and no future because I came so close to losing it all. It’s not something that I’ll ignore from now on. I don’t know what it’ll be like to sleep alone again or whether or not I’ll even be able to. And of course, relationships. Some of the women in the truck were very distrustful of Beau, and I understood it at the time, but I’m afraid that this is something that we’ll take forward with us and will affect all aspects of our life.”
“It will if you let it,” the doc said. “It’s one of the reasons why I’m up here in Alaska. This is enough action for me these days. If I were deployed again, I know how many nightmares I’d come home with. I’d do my tour because it’s my duty, but I’d probably walk away at the end of it.”
“Right, there comes a point in time when you can’t take anymore,” she said quietly.
“Exactly.”
She munched away in silence as the soldier walked back to her. “I’ve been ordered to stay here now,” he said. “They say you’ll have to stay here with the doc too. We’ll get you back into town sometime in the next hour or so.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Why are you staying?”
“They’re bringing out some people,” he said, “and I don’t have too many details, but I think they’re bringing them here.”
“Then you don’t have enough manpower here.”
He nodded. “The drivers taking the women to the hotel will return and help. We’ve got several staying at the hotel with them, but all the other servicemen are coming back.”
“Okay,” she said. “That should be almost a round-trip then?”
“The first men are on their way back, yes,” he said. “With any luck, they’ll all arrive at the same time.”
“Wow,” she said. “Does the gas station know they’ll need more sandwiches?”
At that, both men laughed. “No, but they will soon,” the doc said.
Asher and Beau stood in one of the guard towers while Asher quickly explained to Jax what was to be found on this side of the compound, since this was the area that he’d been focused on. Jax was connected to the military unit here as well, sharing intel live. From where Beau and Asher stood, they could see the military men spreading out and doing a full-on approach. Beau shook his head. “They really should deal with this with more finesse.”
As they watched, a door opened from one of the buildings, and two cult members crept out. They had weapons, and both were heading toward the military. Instantly, both Beau and Asher lifted their rifles and shot into the wood on either side of the men. Immediately they dropped to the ground. Beau sent a message on his comm to Jax about two men exiting, both now down on the ground, and reported that, with all the military coming from one end, it only made sense that the cult members would try to dash out the back.
“Maybe let them,” Jax said. “You said the compound is completely fenced, so, as long as the military has the front covered, they’re good to go.”
Beau sat back with Asher and watched, and, sure enough, an
other half-dozen men bolted out through a side door—but there were no women. He looked at Asher. “Where are the women?”
Asher’s face was grim. “Where’s Nania?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m definitely worried though. How many tunnels were there underground?”
“I didn’t have time to find out,” Asher said. “I was getting the women out, not finding out how far the tunnels went.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we had time to do something these days?” Beau asked. He studied the compound below him. “I think I’ll head into one of those underground cells and see if I can find out where everybody’s hiding.”
Asher nodded. “I think we both should. I swear to God there has to be a good twenty or thirty women still in there.”
“Well, we’ve taken out at least ten men. You’d think there would be at least that many women, and I counted at least ten to fifteen kids in the hall, if not more. Yet our intel said sixty people were here. Did that include children?”
“Who knows?” Asher said. “In this business, our intel is never accurate if we can’t check it out ourselves.”
They both slipped inside the compound by way of the lookout tower and raced to the spot Asher had pointed out. “This one I know for sure we can get out of.” They lifted the grate and dropped in.
Once inside, Beau straightened and realized that the ceiling was so low it was just inches above his head. He smelled damp ground and the fear of the previous occupants. He followed Asher out the door. It was dark, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust.
They quickly checked the cells. He counted a dozen of those and, at the far end, was another tunnel and a door. He quickly opened the door, and, just as he did so, a shot rang out, slamming into the door right beside his head. Both of them dropped to the dirt, and a woman’s voice said, “And stay there.”
Beau lifted his head to see a woman with four children around her. “Who are you?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” she said wearily. “I want to know who the hell you are.”