by Ian Bull
A rock moves below. I can hear breathing sounds moving closer. He’s climbing up next to me, not Steven. He perceives me as weaker; that’s why.
“Puta.”
My hands go up. “Don’t hurt me!”
He laughs and grabs my shirt front. From his breath on my face, a mental picture of his size and height pops in my mind. I stab hard where his throat should be.
The glass goes in, deep. He gurgles as he screams, and warm fluid spills onto my hand. He grabs my arm with both hands. My wrist is connected to his neck, and I twist and saw with the glass, drenching myself with his blood. It smells like a butcher shop. He releases one hand and leans back, trying to pulling me off the ledge. A gun barrel touches my stomach. I twist away as it goes off.
BAM! My backs slams into the stone behind me as a searing heat stabs the flesh above my hip. My hand comes out of his throat.
I’m shot. Steven gets shot. I’m not supposed to get shot.
Steven kicks him. The man lets go of my shirt. Steven must be punching and stabbing him. The man falls and cries out as he hits the rock below.
My side is bleeding, but the bullet didn’t hit bone. It went through flesh and muscle, thank God, but now I’m bleeding both outside and inside.
“Put these on,” Steven whispers. Goggles hit me in the chest. He got the man’s goggles? I slide them over my face, careful not to stab myself in the eye with my glass shard.
Green images appear. We are up high. There are rocks across from us, a canyon between, and a tumble of rocks below. A drone flies three feet above our heads. Steven looks like a haggard green alien, and he’s cradling something in the crook of his right arm—a gun. He got the man’s gun, too?
He gestures for me to take it. It smells like burning metal mixed with firecrackers. It’s heavier than a prop gun, and hot in my hand.
“Fast. Hit the drone, then the men below. I hear three of them.”
I hold up my laced-up right hand as if he could see it. “I’m right-handed.”
“You’re a lefty today. Brace against me.” He sticks his right arm in front of my face. My grandfather trained me how to aim and shoot a rifle on our duck hunting trips, and his lessons come back to me. The gun fits in my left hand, I brace it with my right and rest my wrists across his rigid forearm.
“Up two inches,” I whisper.
He raises his arm.
I must hold my breath and squeeze. BAM. I hit the drone as it retreats.
The man who we wounded groans below us. I wish we could help him, until I see three moving shapes on the rocks. BAM-BAM-BAM. They retreat.
Steven gestures with his elbow to put the gun back in the cradle of his arm. “Take off the shoelaces,” he whispers. “Put the glass in my pocket, keep the laces in yours.”
My teeth and my left hand unwind my weapon. I slip the shards into his pocket and the laces into mine. My hand tingles with pins and needles as the blood flows into my fingers again.
He holds up his right hand. “Now me.”
My fingers tremble.
“Are you bleeding?” he whispers.
“Just my love handles.”
“Stick the wet socks against it.” He jams his wet socks into my hand and I tuck them into my underwear, along with my own.
“Why don’t they just shoot us? Don’t they want us dead?”
“They’re lingering. Our suffering is their entertainment,” he whispers, then slaps the gun in my hand. “Someone below us. Five o’clock.”
His heat outline is clear in the night goggles. I aim. BAM. He grunts and tumbles behind a rock.
Did I kill him? My stomach drops. I hate that Steven is making me do this. My muscles tremble again as I barf the raw egg and dirty water back into my mouth. Was that fear? Or am I bleeding to death?
“Put the goggles on my head. I’ll guide you down.”
“I can’t climb blind.”
“You must.”
I put the goggles on his head, and the dark night returns.
“Give me the gun back and your shoelaces,” he asks, and I gladly do. He looks over the edge, then leans against the rock next to me. “There’s a ledge twenty feet down, and then we can jump from there another six feet to the ground. I’ll guide you, and I’ll shoot anybody who comes close to you. Then, I’ll lower the gun down.”
“How?”
“Shoelaces and my elastic bandage. Then you do the same for me.”
My hand finds his in the dark. I squeeze three times.
“Sidestep four steps to your left. Reach down with both hands. You’ll feel a pointed rock. That’s the top of your ladder. Grab it and scoot yourself off the edge and turn around so both feet land on the rock wall. Prop your legs out.”
My hands find the pointed rock. Time to climb down the rock ladder. I’ve done this with Steven at rock climbing gyms, but never in the dark on a strange mountain with people trying to kill me.
I scoot my butt out into thin air and twist my body. My toes land against stone.
“Right foot down two inches.”
My right foot moves.
“Right hand down six inches and to your right two feet.”
I find the handhold. And another. Steven guides me down fifteen feet.
BAM! Something zings off the rock to my right and dust goes in my eyes. I scream, which makes the men laugh. Steven shoots another bullet. BAM!
“Stretch down with your right foot. Far.”
I stretch my foot but touch only air. I let go with one hand—and my foot lands on it. Hand, foot, hand, foot and I’m on the ledge!
My legs buckle as pain shoots up my hip and blood squishes from my wound. The socks stuck to my stomach are sticky. Thick gooey stickiness. Maybe that’s good. There’s a breeze on my face. There’s a thin line of light to my right. Dawn is coming, which terrifies me.
Steven whispers. “Stand and reach up with your right hand.”
Stretching hurts even worse. The dark makes me dizzy and my fingers touch only air. I hear wood cracking and gravel moving below me. The men are close.
“It’s there. Reach higher.”
My hand brushes the stone wall, but my fingers touch nothing. It’s like I’m clearing invisible cobwebs from an imaginary ceiling.
“Take two steps to your right.”
Someone is breathing close to me. Warm metal lands in my hand.
A hand grabs my arm and an image of the man forms instantly in my brain. I spin, aim for his chest, and shoot twice. The explosions push me back. My head hits rock, sending a white flash of pain through my whole body. The man grunts as he falls and hits the rocks, then I hear nothing. I crouch and get sick again. Did I kill him?
“Incoming.” The long elastic bandage and the shoelaces still attached to the gun land on my head. Thanks, Steven.
A moment later, he’s beside me. We untie everything. “You did great.”
No, I didn’t. I hurt more people. The shoelaces and elastic go back into our pockets.
“Hold my pants from behind. When I exhale, we jump.”
I aim the gun to the side to avoid shooting him or myself. My hand finds the back of his sweatpants and grabs tight.
He exhales, and we jump into blackness. We land in loose gravel, pitch forward onto our faces, and tumble down a rocky hillside.
We jump up and run, sprinting barefooted across rocks as sharp as glass. Bushes scratch me on both sides and whip my face. There’s enough light that the rocks are now gray shapes that we can dodge. The voices chase us but they can’t keep up. My eyes glance up and spot red LED lights. Another drone, but it’s not overhead. Maybe it hasn’t spotted us. We dive headfirst into tangled bushes. We’re hidden by thick brambles now. We crawl deep inside, and he pushes against the twisting twigs and branches, uncovering some kind of animal trail. We get on our hands and knees again. It’s like crawling through a tunnel of razor-sharp toothpicks. My front is so soaked with blood that my sweatpants stick to me.
Steven grunts with every movement. His hand must be kil
ling him.
He stops. We’re inside a larger space. He moves to the left and I follow him. My hands touch soft sand. He taps code on my back. Dig. Bury.
I put the gun down and dig. He taps again. Grave deep. Yuck, Steven, is that some kind of dumb Ranger humor?
We dig six inches down and lie in it, side by side, our arm and legs intertwining, then scoop the sand back on top of ourselves.
He squeezes my hand. Hold gun and hands it back to me. Why does he make me hold it? I push my arms and legs deeper into the sand, trying to hide. We both stink. Can they find us by our smell?
Steven freezes, which is my signal to do the same. We did this before, in the Bahamas. He can stay still like this for hours. Cracking noises surround us. Can they see our heat in their goggles? Can the drones? Maybe we’re too deep in the brambles and the sand to be spotted. Or maybe we look like a coyote.
Minutes pass. Are the men gone? There’s more light from dawn now. Steven pushes out of the sand and rolls onto his back. The brambles are six inches above our faces. He takes the gun back and lays it on the sand, then pulls the shoestrings and elastic bandage from his pocket.
He taps on my leg. Dress wound.
It hurts to pull my arms and legs out from the sand. He hovers over me. Thankfully, he’s a medic too. He touches the sticky wet socks but doesn’t move them. I’m bleeding right through them, but they’re stopping a creek from turning into a river.
He squeezes my hand. Tap me when tight enough. Lift hips.
I set my heels and lift my hips. A wave of electric raw pain flows right up my spine. I bite my tongue to keep from screaming. He wraps the bandage around my hips and across the wet socks two times, then tightens.
Tight.
He stops. My hips touch sand again. My side throbs. My bare feet feel like cold stumps, and they have a million cuts on them. The cold makes my brain cloudy. Or is that the blood that I’ve lost?
I grab his hand. How bad?
Bad. Rest now.
We lie very still.
A week ago, we were in Malibu, stressing about the start of production, anxious about finding the time to get married, and worried about whether our love was strong enough to raise a family.
I’d give anything to have those worries back again.
49
STEVEN QUINTANA
Saturday, March 16, 9:00 a.m. (PST)
Baja, California
Being cold helps when you’re bleeding. Everything slows down. But, good turns bad when hypothermia sets in. Being terrified helps. Fear keeps the system moving. But we can’t lie here much longer.
Julia’s tough. She can run and climb faster than I can. She must. I’m the gimp.
My hand is infected. He took my finger. It’s not hurting as much, which is a bad sign. Once blood poisoning sets in, I have two days. Then I’ll lose the hand for sure. I may get sepsis and die. That makes my heart pound. Fear wakes me up.
I squeeze her hand. Time.
Plan?
Find water. Get warm.
Then?
Talk to Carl.
We roll onto our hands and knees and push through the prickly bushes. We reach hard sand. Light comes in from above. Brambles cut our faces. Spines jam into our arms and legs. My hand is a swollen stump.
We listen but hear nothing. But they are out there, looking for us.
Dried scat is next to my hand, bleached white—coyote shit. That’s a good sign. Things live out here and find water.
More yellow light. The sun is up. It rose on our right, which means we’re crawling north. The water to our left is the ocean, not the Sea of Cortez. It looks to be about five miles away, so, by the law of threes, it’s probably fifteen miles away. We’re at the base of a small mountain, about a thousand feet high.
I try to remember the call sheet for the press conference from last Saturday. My eidetic memory trick fades fast. I put myself back on the bluff in Malibu and see the paper in my mind’s eye. My thumb moves to the four quadrants as my eyes scan the writing. Sunrise on March 9 was at 7:11. Or was it 7:21? The sun rises a minute earlier each morning. That means today, March 16, it rose about 7:02 a.m. Or 7:12. I think.
The Army also trained me to know my internal clock. It feels like it’s been two hours since the sun rose, so it’s now 9:00 a.m. The sun will be at its highest point in three hours. I remind myself again that during the spring equinox, the sun is between 40 and 45 degrees high in the sky in the northern hemisphere, depending upon where you are. I need to find bare, flat ground to figure how high the sun will be exactly.
Julia tugs at my ankle and squeezes. Listen.
We hear talking, but far behind us. Let’s hope they stay noisy, so we avoid them.
Our hands touch. Water next.
Animal trails lead to water. Animals stick to them no matter how many predators are around, because they have the best success rate over time, even if your babies get picked off once in a while.
We come out of the prickly tunnel in a sand gulley, half in sun and half in shade. High rocks are to our right, and there’s cardøn and candelabra cacti to our left. This is an arroyo, a dry river bed that fills with water maybe once a year. But there’s water underneath.
We crawl forward, staying on our knees. Against the rock embankment on the other side of the arroyo, I spot tracks. I see no scat but spot a dry hole in the sand. I reach back and grab her hand. Dig here for water.
Why?
Animals did.
Julia digs fast, scooping out handfuls of dry sand. We’re lucky it’s March. In August, we’d overheat and die of dehydration. She digs, alternating hands, and soon she’s forearm deep. I try to help, but she pushes my arm away. She points at me, at the gun in my hand, then at her eyes, then points at our surroundings.
She’s right; I’m the lookout. My brain is cloudy with fever and thirst. I’m losing situational awareness. It’s getting worse.
Focus. Assess.
Thank you, Carl. There’s no breeze. This arroyo is low, so we are still hidden. But we have to be out in the open if we want to make progress. Then they can see us.
How many bullets do we have? I count back. This gun went off twelve times. The clip holds fifteen bullets. We have three bullets, at most. Fewer if he fired the gun more.
The hole she’s digging is shoulder-deep now, and she must put her face against the sand to get another scoopful. The sand she pulls out is dark with moisture. She smiles so big the mud cracks on her face. She’s found it. Water.
She motions for me to peer into the hole. At the bottom is a black mirror with the silhouette of my head moving in and out of the light. We trade grins. I pull off my jacket and try to yank my shirt off, over my head.
The fabric brushes my stump, which feels like sandpaper on raw flesh. The pain makes me dizzy and nauseated, and I stagger on my knees with my head still stuck in the cotton. Julia pull it off the rest of way. My bare back is frozen in spasm, until a shaft of warm sunlight hits my shoulders. That helps. I ball up my shirt and toss it in the hole, and she presses it the rest of the way down.
She pulls her hand out and squeezes mine. Is water clean?
Sand is clean. So yes.
But muddy.
I love mud. Squeeze it into my mouth.
I roll onto my back, making sure the weapon is secure in my right hand. She pulls out my shirt like a rag out of a bucket, with water dripping off the bottom. She squeezes a glorious stream of muddy water into my mouth. It tastes earthy and sweet. She fills me up three times, then I wave for her to stop. Too much water and my stomach will cramp. We squeeze. Your turn. Three. No more.
She lies down. I drop in the shirt and pull it out sopping wet. There's no way my lame hands can squeeze as well as she can, so a third of the water goes onto her hair and down her blood-soaked shirt, but she doesn’t care. She grins as the water fills her mouth, then motions with her hand to stop. I repeat the process three times.
We roll onto our knees. Our hands touch. Shirt back on.
She squeezes out the excess water and helps me pull the wet shirt onto my torso. It’s cool and clammy at first, but the sun warms me up. She helps me zip up my jacket next, like I’m a little boy on the playground. A little boy with a stump for a left hand and a black pistol in my right, shaking from cold.
Assess the environment. What do you have?
My eyes spot a plant with clumpy stems that look like thin, green straws. That’s ephedra, also called Mormon tea. Chewing it gives you a rush of energy.
I squeeze her hand—break some plant—then, point to it, and then my mouth. She glances around, then reaches up, and grabs a handful. I put down the pistol, take the stems, jam them into my mouth, and chew. She watches me, then chews just tiny piece. It will give us a rush like caffeine, maybe enough to push us through.
My hand finds her. It gets rough now.
She looks around, listening. She squeezes back. No choice.
I put on the safety and tuck the gun deep into my right pocket. Julia takes out the elastic bandage and wraps it around my waist, tying the weapon against my hip so it won’t fall out.
Her face is filthy, her hair is matted, she smells like a latrine, but damn, she’s still beautiful.
Energy returns to my legs. It must be the ephedra. We smile…and run.
We dart to the other side of the arroyo and onto the rocks. She falls into place behind me. The full sun hits us, warming us enough to remind us how cold we are. But now we’re out in the open. We’re at risk.
I climb. She follows. There’s a path between the rocks. It becomes a steep trail. The Pacific Ocean, flat and blue, appears in the distance. Civilization is there, but that’s where they want us to go. For my plan to work, we can’t go there yet.
Someone shouts from behind, but they’re far away. We’ve been spotted. Time to zigzag. We head west for four hundred yards, trying to put distance between us and them. I want them to think I’m heading west, toward the ocean.
Julia pants behind me, right on my heels. My left hand throbs, shooting pain up my arm. A thick vein bulges out on my forearm, heading up to my biceps. Blood poisoning. Not good.
After four hundred yards, we cut back and go higher. A break appears in the rocks—a way up the steep hill. We climb. We’re still exposed, but now in shade and hopefully they’ll think we’re still heading toward the ocean.