by Jake Bible
She should be dead and she was reminded of that fact every time she reached out with weak arms, grabbed a handful of grass, and pulled herself another couple of feet before having to lay still and gasp for breath. The bullet wounds in her back tore and ripped with each meter she traveled. Her body was sticky with her blood. The copper smell was thick and filled her nostrils.
But on she went. Handful of grass over handful of grass. She pulled, rested, passed out for she didn’t know how long, pulled, rested, passed out, but never stopped.
The sun crested the horizon by the time Olivia reached the edge of a copse of the trees. She could already feel her wounds festering. She could also feel the constant biting of the insects that had landed on her during her nightmare journey. They were feasting on her torn flesh, nibbling at the wounds through her shirt.
Olivia blacked out.
When she came to, the sun was down again.
Despite the tropical heat of Flipside, Olivia was shivering all over. Fever had her and she almost laughed. To die from an infection from being shot after surviving the disease that had taken Astrid was just too much irony to handle. But laughing would have taken energy she did not have.
Olivia lay there and stared at the dirt. She couldn’t even lift her head to shift away from a small rock that was digging into her cheek. At least the pain of the rock reminded her she was still breathing. The pain from her back was such a dull throb that it was almost as if she hadn’t been shot. Although, she was certain if she tried to push herself up she’d probably have a different opinion rather quick.
The night calls of nocturnal birds and other creatures filled the copse of trees around her.
Creatures flitted from branch to branch; little feet padded around her; a buzzing filled the air.
Then the pain in her back was awakened as many large pinchers started in on her wounds.
Olivia screamed.
It was barely a croak since she hadn’t had anything to drink in close to twenty-four hours.
Then the ground around her shook. It wasn’t a shake like an earthquake or a Turn, but like a small truck was driving toward her.
Olivia panicked. Even with whatever insects munching away at her back, the thought of the Russians tracking her down was the most terrifying thing that her mind could conjure. She hadn’t gone through everything she went through to get to the trees in order to be found by some assholes on patrol.
Then her mind caught up with her fear and she realized that there was no sound of a motor. The night was silent. Or as silent as a prehistoric night could be.
No, wait, it was truly silent. The birds were no longer calling to each other; the nocturnal creatures had stopped moving; even the buzzing from her back was gone and she no longer felt like she was a bug buffet.
A grunt from her right sent shivers down her spine. It was a good-sized grunt, from a good-sized dino. Olivia had been Flipside long enough to know when a big one was near. But she couldn’t turn her head to see what creature was about to snack on her.
“Do it,” she whispered. “Fucking kill me, you dino motherfucker.”
She screamed when the tongue began licking roughly at the back of her head. Or tried to scream. Again, only a croak.
She snapped her mouth shut.
A tongue was licking the back of her head. A tongue. Not teeth chomping on her skull, but a tongue doing…what?
Cleaning her head wound.
Then the tongue moved down to her back and started in there.
She broke through the croak in her throat and the scream she let loose caused a hundred night birds to take flight. The nocturnal creatures that had been waiting close by scurried off into the brush.
There was some more grunting and a soft tap on the top of her head. Olivia stopped screaming and bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, tasting blood as the licking of her back started up again.
There was no more fear. She knew what was happening.
“Good…boy,” Olivia whispered just before passing out. “Good boy, Elvis…”
In and out of unconsciousness was Olivia’s reality. At some point, she knew she was being dragged backward by her leg. At another point, it felt like she was going uphill. Then she was rolling downhill and all went dark again.
The hits kept on coming.
Olivia did not wake up with her face pressed into the dirt, her body at the bottom of a hill. No, she woke up as freezing cold water enveloped her. She gasped and water poured into her mouth, filling her lungs. It took every ounce of strength to scramble to the surface and take the deepest breath she’d ever taken in her life. A breath that expanded her ribcage and reminded her that she’d been shot four times in the back.
She would have screamed, but she was too busy puking up water. Olivia realized the water was shallow enough that she could get onto her knees and most of her torso would be above water. She straightened, puked more water, then she started screaming.
A grunt of disapproval answered her scream and Olivia focused on the large shape standing at the edge of the pool she’d been tossed into.
“Elvis,” she said. She puked some more. “Hey, buddy…”
Then she fell face first into the pool.
She awoke as Elvis was dragging her up onto the shore. It wasn’t the dragging, but the roughness of the rock that made up the pool’s edge that woke her. That roughness was digging into her back wounds, creating a warmth that she knew was fresh blood seeping out of her.
“Elvis… Stop…,” she begged.
Elvis stopped, let go of her, then licked her face over and over again.
“Stop that…too,” she said, a big dino tongue getting her right in the mouth. “Oh! Gack!”
She turned her head for one more vomit session before she managed to roll onto her hands and knees. Even the smallest flexing made the edges of her wounds tear, so Olivia stayed as still as she could. Finally, she eased herself back into the pool, able to keep her arms, shoulders, and head above water, letting the freezing chill of the pool ease some of her pain.
Several minutes later, after realizing she wasn’t going to die right that minute, Olivia swiveled her head to look at the pool. A spring. Like a thousand she’d seen when visiting Florida. A fresh water spring, bubbling up from deep below, hidden within a small oasis of trees. A small oasis that she knew no one could see from Flipside BOP’s walls.
Flipside BOP…
Olivia had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. All sense of time was lost to her.
Grunt.
“Hey, E,” Olivia said, looking back at the ground and the huge dino sitting attentively only a couple feet away. “Thank you.”
Grunt.
Her stomach growled. Elvis stood, bobbed his head up and down, then took off into the brush. After a few minutes, he returned with a mouthful of plant matter, which he promptly dropped onto Olivia’s head.
“Ow,” she said and studied the plant matter.
Some type of tuber. A potato-looking root with long, dark green leaves sprouting up. Her stomach growled again.
“I don’t know what that is,” she said to Elvis. “It may be poison, E.”
Elvis stood there and watched her for a few seconds, then turned tail and rushed off into the brush once more. He returned in a couple of minutes and gently opened his mouth to let some bright blue berries tumble out next to the tuber.
“Those could kill me too,” Olivia said.
Elvis waited again, grunted, then was gone once more.
Over and over, the pattern repeated itself until there was a cornucopia of fruits and roots surrounding where Olivia clung to the edge of the pool.
Her stomach growled and Elvis snorted. He was getting annoyed, she could tell.
“Alright,” she said finally, her hunger forcing her to face the reality that she’d have to try to eat something or she’d eventually starve to death. “Might as well get it over with.”
She dragged herself out of the pool, swatting Elvis away when he
tried to clamp his beak onto her shoulder to help. It took her a while, but she finally climbed up out of the wet, and over the mound of food, to rest in the dirt.
Olivia had to rest for a good hour before she had the strength to sit up on her elbows, grab a handful of berries, say a quick prayer, and toss the berries into her salivating mouth.
“Oh, fuck me,” Olivia said as sweet nectar exploded across her tongue. “Oh, those are good.”
She ate all of the berries in three more bites before her arms were shaking too much to keep her up. She fell onto her back, her breath exploding from her lungs as fresh pain tore through her. Olivia rolled over onto her side and the pain subsided by about ten percent. That was good enough. She reached out and picked up a tuber.
Starchy and slightly sweet. The tuber wasn’t heaven like the berries, but she didn’t even think of spitting it out. Olivia finished the tuber and thought about eating the leaves, but decided not to.
Her stomach groaned. It didn’t growl, it groaned.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Olivia sat up, screamed at the pain, managed to scamper a couple feet away from the pile of food, and got her pants down to her thighs before her bowels let loose. When her body was done voiding itself, Olivia lay there for a long while, crying silently as the sun crested over the trees then began to set.
Elvis dragged her away from her mess. Her pants were pulled down to her ankles, stopped by her boots, and Olivia was instantly coated from mid back to her calves in mud and dirt, poop and leaves. She didn’t stop crying until it was night again.
The morning sun broke through the branches above and nailed her directly in the face.
“A few more minutes, Astrid,” Olivia complained. “Then I’ll get up.”
Her reality cracked her half-dream and she started crying again.
Elvis nudged her shoulder.
“Yeah, I know,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes. “I have to get up.”
Olivia didn’t know if that’s what the dino wanted or not, but she did know that she needed to get up, get cleaned off, and figure out if the future held her death or her life in its palm. She reached out and Elvis ducked his head so she could wrap her arm around his neck. As she thought he would, because he was such a damn good boy, he lifted his head, pulling Olivia to her feet.
She stood there, leaning all of her weight on Elvis, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling, her wounds tearing and ripping, tearing and ripping, until she thought maybe, just maybe, she could put one foot in front of the other.
Then she looked down at the state she was in and laughed.
She had shit, literally, dried and caked all over her legs, along with half of everything else the tiny jungle had to offer.
“Okay…”
It took nearly an hour before she could get one boot off. Another hour before she could get the other boot off. She stripped naked, screaming most of the time as she managed to tear her shirt off her body, then rested against Elvis for most of the afternoon. By the time evening came on, she was able to stumble into the bushes and use the leaves to wipe a good portion of her body clean. Or as clean as it would get.
Olivia dug her hands deep into the dirt and scrubbed and scrubbed, until she was certain she’d gotten most of the filth off.
Then, with Elvis’s help, she made it back to the pile of food. She staggered to the water’s edge and washed her hands before she went back and picked up a handful of wilted berries and ate them. Still tasted like heaven, just a little drier. She skipped the tuber and stuck with the berries.
Then her guts began to roll gain. Except that time she was able to get away from the edge of the pool and into the bushes where she relieved herself noisily, but was able to keep the mess contained.
“Berry shits,” she said to Elvis after wiping with leaves she prayed weren’t the ancestors of poison ivy.
Naked, her back still bleeding, but nowhere as bad as before, her bowels empty, but belly no longer growling, Olivia let Elvis help her walk into the spring where she floated out into the middle, her face up to the trees above. She knew being in the water was going to dirty up her only source of drinking water, but it was a risk she had to take. She also knew that springs, if they were like any back in her timeline, would naturally filter themselves as the constant churning and flow pushed the water through minuscule cracks in the rocks, using them like a filter.
That’s what she hoped, at least.
Sleep wanted to overtake her as she floated in the water, but she fought it off and managed to swim back to the edge. Elvis helped her out of the water and eased her over to a bed of branches piled against the trunk of a large tree.
“Did you make me a bed, E?” Olivia asked.
Elvis snorted and pushed his beak against her shoulder.
“Thank you,” she said and gave his neck as strong of a hug as she could manage.
That was their routine for the next few days.
Olivia would wake, Elvis would help her move about, she would eat, take a horrible shit, get cleaned up, then float in the spring for most of the day until it was time to repeat the pattern in the afternoon before she finally passed out on the soft bed of branches that Elvis was constantly adding to.
When the second week began, Olivia had probably the most comfortable bed she’d ever slept on. If it wasn’t for the pain and smell coming from her back, she would have been fairly content. Also, the constant thoughts of what was happening to her friends at the base kept a pallor over her survival.
In the middle of the second week, Olivia made a decision.
Instead of fighting off the insects that wanted to snack on the necrotic flesh around her wounds, she gave in and took the pain. She had to yell at Elvis to stop trying to shoo the bugs away. At least until she was certain they’d gotten all of the dead flesh. Four days of that routine and she finally stopped smelling the rot coming from her.
More baths in the spring, more eating the berries and tubers, and some flowers that tasted like cantaloupe, a lot less shitting herself, and as much movement as she could stand, was how she passed her time.
Weeks went by. Then months.
To Olivia’s surprise, she survived. Her back healed over, she never died from infection. However, she could feel the bullets still in there, a couple grinding against her ribs when she turned wrong. But she knew bullets rarely killed people; the trauma of getting shot or the resulting infections from what the bullets carried into the body was what killed most people.
And she’d survived both.
By her count, she was in the tiny jungle, forever camped out by the spring, for eight months, if not longer. Those first couple of weeks had been a haze and she didn’t trust her time keeping during that period, so it was all an estimation.
In the beginning, she kept expecting a patrol of Russian operators to find her. Especially when they saw that her body was gone from the base of the wall. The realization hit her that everyone must have figured one of the many Flipside scavengers had snagged her corpse in the night. There was no reason for anyone to think otherwise.
Her skin was tanned and her muscles tight. Olivia had learned to hunt for herself, even taking down some of the smaller predators that dared get too close. She fashioned spears out of branches and sharpened rocks. She fashioned some basic clothing out of the tanned hides of dinos, not because she was suddenly feeling modest, but because she was sick of the bushes with the large thorns slicing into her when she hunted.
A year went by before Olivia dared exit the safety of her little jungle oasis.
She left at night and crept her way back to Flipside BOP.
Torches rimmed the top of the wall that still surrounded the base. Olivia had to grin at the fact that even Petrov couldn’t get the generators to work again. She crouched, hidden in the long grass, and studied the guards’ patterns. They were efficient and alert at all times. No matter how long she watched, and she had to come back several nights in a row to get a true sense of the patt
ern, Olivia never found a gap in the base’s security.
Petrov wasn’t stupid, Olivia had to give him that. He knew there was still the chance of operators out in the field. Yes, odds were that Cash and his team, as well as Ivy and her team, were long dead, but Olivia knew better.
Brain had said to look for Ivy, so Ivy was coming back at some point.
Two weeks of surveillance and Olivia knew she was never getting inside Flipside BOP. Petrov had the place locked down tight. Even the patrols he sent out during the day were beyond disciplined. They had all angles covered as they hunted the plains for fresh meat or scavenged for wood.
The time came when Olivia had to abandon her oasis.
The Russians had stripped the landscape of the few trees that were close by and her tiny jungle would be next.
It took her a couple of days of careful work, but she erased any sign of her presence within the tiny jungle. No one was expecting her to be alive, so if they came across where she had lived and survived for over a year, they would think it was a dino nest.
Olivia liked to think she left the oasis on Easter. She didn’t know why that made her smile, but it did. An Easter escape.
She loaded up Elvis with as much food and water as she could fit onto his back without him getting testy and trying to shake it all off, gave her home one last look, then lead her friend out of the tiny jungle, headed in the opposite direction as Flipside BOP. Olivia had no idea where she was going to go, but shew knew at the very least, Ivy was out there.
“Let’s go find our friends, boy,” she said to Elvis.
He grunted and bobbed his head. Then tried to shake the supplies off his back.
“Asshole,” Olivia said with a laugh.
Sixteen
It had been exactly twenty-six months and seven days since Petrov had taken Flipside BOP. Tressa could have told anyone the hour too, if they asked. But no one asked. Everyone had learned not to talk about that day. They had learned not to talk about Petrov except in complimentary terms.
They had all learned the hard way.
“Hey,” Mike said as he his shadow darkened the doorway of Tressa’s hut. “Got a second?”