Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2

by Elizabeth McLaughlin

  I dropped the burning plants to the ground and ran, whacking at the insects as I moved. Each one that I detached by force left either a fragment of their mouths or stingers in my skin. By the time I made it back to my camp only a few remained. I grabbed a rock from the fire pit, still warm, and drove it into the shiny segmented bodies. The insects died instantly and dropped to the dirt. I laid down in the dirt and slammed my fists into the ground.

  “Damn it!” The bites and stings on my legs burned. Worse, when I sat up to try and pluck them out, the ground swung out from under me and the horizon tilted. Either it was shock or the bugs must have had some kind of venom in their bites or stings. I shook my head which only made the sensation worse. Plucking one of the stingers from my leg, I held it up to my face. A drop of clear venom hung from the end, the stinger spent of everything else. I tossed the stinger to the ground and pushed the tip of my index finger against the sting. The pain was so shocking it made me gasp. My finger sunk into the flesh and it was like someone had hooked up a battery directly to the nerve. When I moved my hand I could see that some of my flesh had come with it, dark red and gooey between my finger and thumb.

  Shit.

  Pushing myself first on to my knees, then to my feet, I made my way towards the stream. My face was getting hot by then, nausea making itself known in bouts of dry heaves that left me gasping. I stumbled and found myself in the dirt more than once. The fever was coming strong now and I started to see phantasms crop up. Fiona’s voice floated past me on the wind calling my name. Calling me to come home to her. Marcus’s scowl appeared before me, his eyes blazing with fury. I saw Eliza standing twenty or so feet away from me, her arms crossed in an expression of stubbornness. I reached out for her to help me and she turned away, disappearing into the air.

  I couldn’t be far now.

  The ground became damp underneath me and I knew that the stream was near. Finally I heard the mocking laughter of water running over stones and relaxed a little. If I could make it to water I could wash the poison from my veins and survive this. I stopped in place as a low growl sounded in front of me. The cat-thing’s eyes glinted from between blades of tall grass, twin orbs of vivid yellow with slits for pupils. This one was bigger than the first I had encountered, and far more muscular too. My legs throbbed. My hands, too. The cat-thing flexed its massive paws in the dirt and crouched lower, ready to pounce. I looked around in front of me for any kind of weapon. The only objects within reach were tiny pebbles. What I wouldn’t give for that utility spade. The minute I looked down the cat’s growl grew louder and I snapped back to maintain eye contact. The only shot I was going to have would be to make it to the stream and play dead. I slowed my breath, waiting to see the animal’s legs bunch.

  As soon as I saw the huge predator leave the ground I sprinted forward and hit the ground, skidding. The cat-thing sprang right over me, its tawny underbelly less than half a foot over my head. My dive brought me over the stream banks and I rolled over as fast as I could, ready for the beast’s return. When I looked, there was nothing there.

  The cool water of the stream brought instant relief to my wounds. A shudder ran through me and I lay back in the water, letting it cascade over my body. The frigid liquid whisked away the pain and heat from the stings and had the added effect of slowing my pounding heartbeat. A wave of exhaustion settled over me and I relaxed, folding my hands under my head as I stared at the sky. I wasn’t sure how much venom had entered my body, or how much. The only way to see how this would affect me was time. All in all, it wasn’t a terrible way to go. If the venom was making its way through my circulatory system, falling asleep like this was pretty nice. The water carried away the stink from the wounds and the temperature relieved the growing fever inside of me. While I waited for god or nature to decide whether or not my life would end that day, I reflected on what a strange end to a long life this was.

  “I’m sorry, Fiona.”

  At least she would think that I was still out here somewhere. Perhaps my bones would go undiscovered for a while, or the stream would cover them in gravel and sand. Marcus had already taken on being the man of the house, he would be able to take care of his mothers and ensure that a settlement was properly established. Eliza...well, Eliza would probably dance a jig all the way to my unmarked grave. Before I could think anything else, the world went black.

  I woke up with a sharp pain in my cheek. I opened one eye to see a brightly colored bird of some kind quirking its head at me one way and the other. “Mmph, piss off.” I growled at the thing. It danced back a couple of inches...and flew atop my head and resumed its pecking. I flexed my hands and the tips of my fingers had gone numb but they were mobile and I swatted my assailant away. I pushed myself on to my elbows and found that my muscles worked. I flexed my toes. Those worked too. The sun was dipping lower in the sky. I had been out for at least an hour or two. Examining my wounds showed that the progress of the venom had slowed. The stings themselves were still red and puffy but the skin around them had settled down to my regular tone. My head pounded and my stomach threatened to bring up the remnants of my stomach, but it didn’t feel like I was in immediate danger of dropping dead.

  With no other obvious source of food and extremely limited water, my time was up. Rationing food had caused me to lose a good amount of muscle and fat; I didn’t have nearly the reserves that I used to. As it was I would require medical treatment for the stings-adding severe dehydration and malnutrition to that was going to make recovery that much harder. Time to get that fire going.

  Chapter Twenty

  I spent the remainder of the day carrying the utility spade everywhere I went. There were no guarantees of it being remotely effective as a defensive weapon if the cat-thing or something worse showed up, but the psychosomatic sense of security it provided made me feel better. I scanned the ground for any more dried animal dung and found quite a few the further I walked from the shelter. I gathered as many piles as I could hold. I thought that I might be able to use it as some kind of border for my camp, make the place stink badly enough that cat-thing and friends wouldn’t want to come anywhere near me. I deposited my fetid treasure at camp and after procuring a fresh set of bugs and dispatching them to their maker along with a hearty compilation of plants and grass, I decided to explore. There wasn’t much to see. The area around the shelter entrance had clearly suffered because of the storms. I ran across a few weathered tree stumps, too broken and battered to be of any use to me. I determined that I could set a fire a little under six hundred feet from the shelter’s cameras that would grow big enough to get someone’s attention. Not that I was going to count out six hundred feet. Even I didn’t give that much of a crap about precise measurements. Close enough would do, that is if I didn’t manage to turn myself into a piece of charcoal first.

  My kingdom for a tree.

  On my second circumnavigation of the shelter’s entrance, I saw something just over the horizon that answered my prayers. I jogged over and found myself looking at a small cluster of brush, sprinkled sparingly with thin trees. It was as if a pocket of nature had stood up in defiance of the climate disaster and held on for dear life. I gave the area a cursory inspection. Meeting one large predator was more than enough for one day. As no immediate threat presented itself, I noticed something odd. The sounds of small animals filled the little forest. They had silenced themselves when I drew close but if I stood stock still, I could hear the voices of prey animals return to the air. My stomach growled at the idea of something more substantial to eat than the tiny crabs. I reassured it by promising myself a dinner of whatever was out here after I planned out my signal fire.

  The trees were young, not much bigger around than my arms. I shook one vigorously and was rewarded with a shower of some kind of nut. I twirled one between my fingers. Another potential food source. Pulling on one of the thin branches I found that the wood was green and flexible. Shit. This wouldn’t be good for starting a fire. I pressed a fingernail into the end of the
branch and my worries were confirmed as a bead of water leaked out over it. I thought about trying to dry the wood in the sun but there was no way to do it before I ended up as kitty chow. Knocking shavings off of it with the spade might work, perhaps trying to use some smaller twigs.

  I took an experimental whack at the tree’s trunk with the spade and the whole thing swayed. Twigs and leaves fell to the ground and upon inspection I saw that a good sized chunk of tree had been cut away. Even if I chopped the whole thing down, it would probably be a waste of energy to drag the whole thing back to camp. I made the decision to try anyway. If nothing else, hacking at the tree provided a great outlet for the anger and frustration pent up in my veins.

  whack

  Marcus, Fiona, and Eliza, trapped in an underground bunker with a computerized psychopath.

  whack

  Allison and Tarik, and countless others who had undoubtedly suffered a horrific death suffocating on their own blood and water.

  whack

  Me, the idiot who had put a thousand people in mortal danger. Me, who was too weak to take the courageous way out and risk dying alongside my people.

  whack

  Our chances of survival, winnowing to nothing with every passing minute.

  WHACK

  The way I was going to rip Gabriel apart, limb by limb, if I made it through this. The tree fell with a massive crack, scaring away every living creature within hearing distance. So much for the hopes of a squirrel dinner. Hefting the tree onto my shoulders I started the long trek back up the hill and to camp. My work was nowhere near finished. The feel of the bark against my neck was rough. As it scraped up and down on my skin, the rhythm became meditative. Scrape, scrape. I would no doubt have a wound by the time I got ‘home’, the tree wearing its own mark into my flesh. I didn’t mind. If the tree was to be the arbiter of my salvation, the least I could do was to let it leave one lasting imprint in this world. I crested the hill to discover that my camp had been invaded. The small prey animals I had scared away with my lumberjack act had apparently discovered my camp-and the food within. I dropped the tree and ran towards my tent.

  “Hey!”

  A bevy of small mammals leapt out of the grass and bolted. I bent to inspect the damage. A palm sized hole of fabric had been chewed away from my tent fabric. Unzipping the tent, I discovered that the little bastards had made off with most of my would-be crab dinner. As sorry as I was to lose the food, it was stranger to me that what I assumed were prey animals were carnivores. A distant lesson from younger days ripped through my mind. Something about how certain animals could adapt from a primarily herbivore diet to an omnivorous one in times of hardship. Given how wasted away the cat-thing was, I guessed that food was scare out here for everything. The crab meat that remained had been chewed away and I tossed it as far as I could from my campsite. There was no sense in trying to cook through contaminated meat. Plus, with luck, I wouldn’t need more food anytime soon. The second to last survival ration of food served as a decent dinner. A little more water went down with it, the cool liquid making me distinctly aware of how very thirsty I was.

  First on the agenda was making my own fire. I ran to retrieve the tree, now stained orange by the late afternoon sun. I dragged it to camp and set about ripping off as many twigs as I could. Thankfully, my invasive little forest friends had largely left the pile of grass and plants I gathered earlier in the day alone. Leaving them in the tent all day had done a good job of leaching any remaining wetness, resulting in a pile of dry tinder. I returned to my little fire pit and laid out the largest plants in a triangle. The smaller plants and scraps of grass went on top, and twigs on top of them. I ripped a patch of grass from the ground and laid it out next to my flint stone. A drag of the spade against the entrance let loose a shower of sparks. They dropped onto the grass and I bent down to blow on them gently, and a tiny flame burst forth. It attached itself to the long plants and grew, the warmth spreading, light dancing. I chopped a couple of larger branches from the tree and laid them into a pyramid. The fire cast a light wide enough for me to work by.

  I picked up the remains of my torch from the day before and lit it. It wouldn’t last me very long, but it illuminated the trek from camp to the back boundary of where I wanted the fire to end. I dug a small ring of dirt at the end of the line and set the grass inside it on fire. More theater for my nerves. I figured that if the cat-thing was out there it might see the second fire and decide to stay away for now. The spade Gabriel had provided me was small—only about the size of my forearm—and made digging all the harder. By the time I was finished I had a length of overturned dirt almost a hundred feet long. When I stood, my knees protested. The cloth I had wrapped around my feet was starting to come apart, the ordinary strength of the fibers ripped by rock fragments and the roughness of the ground. I wiped the sweat from my brow and ran a hand through my hair. Only three hundred feet to go.

  It was freezing by the time I had finished, the sweat soaking my body leeching any warmth my muscles generated away from me. This was made worse by my having to sprint back and forth from camp, to fire, to fire, just to keep things going. I didn’t want or both of the fires going out. It was too windy to start another blaze and the flickering had probably attracted every predator for miles. This was do or die.

  Taking the branches I had left to dry during the day, I lit one and held it high. The area I had carved out for myself lay in front of me, a patch of land roughly three hundred square feet. Very roughly. I hoped the fire would sustain itself long enough; I was counting on someone noticing within an hour or two-if they hadn’t seen by morning, well, I’d formulate a plan then. I started walking along the perimeter of my dirt piles, trailing the branch as I went. There was a whoosh as the grass caught fire behind me, and then a hiss as it sputtered out.

  Seriously?

  I tried again. Once more the grass sizzled, but the flames wouldn’t progress more than a foot or so before dying again. Panic shot through me so strongly I almost dropped the torch. What if I couldn’t get the fire lit? I was rapidly running out of supplies and the temperature wasn’t getting any warmer each day. If this didn’t take, I might as well start walking towards the horizon and wait for something to figure out I am edible. I dropped the torch, cursing as it lit a fire underneath my bare feet. Once they started coming, the swearing flowed like water. I threw back my head and howled to the sky. I dragged out every epithet I had ever heard and invented new ones. I set a curse on Gabriel, on his supporters, on my parents for bringing me into this godforsaken place. I screamed so loudly my voice became hoarse. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I stamped my feet into the ground, burning myself in the flames the torch had set. Nothing mattered anymore. I had fought so fucking hard and come so goddamn far only to have my death brought about by the inability to light a simple flame. What a stupid way to die.

  “SHIT!” I picked up the torch and flung it as hard as I could towards the shelter door. It crashed against the metal, cloth unravelling and grass exploding everywhere. What fire had stayed with the torch tumbled in fragments to the ground, the embers rolling away from the door. From where I stood, they almost looked like fireflies.

  Shit. The word struck me in the head like a rock. Shit could be my savior here. I sprinted past my campsite to the latrine. The smell of urine and feces had done its job warding away animals. The site was untouched. I turned my head and wrinkled my nose as I stuck a hand into the hole and pulled out a handful of my own leavings. It had dried out somewhat and had a clay-like consistency. I set it on the ground next to the hole and gagged as I dug both hands in. Dried or not, the smell was horrific. If anyone was still alive in the shelter, I suspected I would be in for a round of antibiotics-or two. Just don’t shit your pants now. I thought to myself.

  When I was finished I had amassed around two fist-sized piles of excrement. Not nearly enough to spread around a three hundred foot perimeter. I settled on the idea that sprinkling it as I walked might work best. The bacteria in t
he feces would help fuel the flame and the fiber would keep it going long enough to catch in the grass. A quick sprint back to camp and I returned with the tarp I had laid out to catch rainwater. Seeing as this was my last and only shot at rescue I figured it didn’t much matter if I soiled it. I carried my humble fertilizer back to camp where the campfire was starting to burn low. I threw a few of the extra pieces of wood I had set aside on it and took one of the stronger branches for myself. Plunging it into the stinking package I held in my arms I smeared the end of the wood liberally and stuck it into the flames.

  “Fuck!” I turned my head and coughed as the reek of burning human feces hit me full in the face, courtesy of a passing breeze. I swallowed hard to keep my gorge from rising any more and spat into the grass. At least it was burning.

  I set about my business at the corner of the perimeter, stooping and placing little piles of crap every few feet like some perverse farmer. As unpleasant as the task was, it did work. The grass along the perimeter caught fire like it was dry tinder. I stopped just short of encircling the square in flames; if I didn’t leave a door to escape rescue would be pointless. Returning to my starting point I touched the torch down in random areas, close enough to the established blaze to encourage it to spread. Soon I was starting at a veritable wall of fire and I ran for the gap I had left, barely making it through as the inferno licked at my clothing. Once I had cleared the box I stood back and watched. The dirt that had been overturned to form the perimeter wasn’t very high. What if the fire passed over it and I set the entire field on fire? As soon as I thought it a spark from a burning twig inside the fire popped and landed outside the pile of dirt. For a moment, nothing happened, and I breathed a sigh of relief. There was a crackle as the spark grew into a flame all its own. Like a kind of hellish snake, the burning grass wove back and forth across the field. It occurred to me that I should get my ass in gear and start running but I found that I couldn’t move my feet. The primal fear of death by burning paralyzed me. After what felt like an eternity I found my muscles again and ran.