♦ ♦ ♦
The sound of something being torn caught Danni’s attention. Paper, maybe fabric. Whatever it was, it was alien to the place where she stood. It didn’t belong and she wasn’t immediately sure why.
But then realization hit. She was in a dream, albeit that didn’t mean it was a welcome one. If anything, the strange sound echoing through the streets of Bonanza Creek was a near godsend. The alpha sasquatch, a massive beast the size of a house, had just finished killing both her brother and Derek. She’d been too late to save them, and now the beast was approaching her, seeking to ensure there were no survivors of its rampage.
The alpha’s hands closed around her neck, but there was no pressure, no sense of dying as her air was cut off. Instead, it became little more than a ghost to her as the strange noise reasserted itself, pulling her toward consciousness and away from the past that continued to haunt her.
More sounds of tearing came – definitely fabric – followed by the feel of something rough and coarse beneath her. Was she in a bed?
Wherever she was, she quickly became aware that she wasn’t alone. Rough, calloused hands grabbed hold and turned her over. More fabric ripped and her body jerked with the sensation. She realized, with no small degree of horror, that it was the sound of her clothes being torn from her body.
Those hands touched her again – across her throat, lingering on her breasts, yanking at her pants, her underwear, all of it.
She reached up blindly, trying to fight them off, until a fist exploded against her cheek, sending her racing back toward the darkness where the doomed Colorado town awaited.
As the air around her again filled with the screams and cries of rabid monsters, she was afforded one brief moment of clarity in which she remembered what had happened and whose hands had likely been grabbing at her.
Suddenly, the nightmare of her past didn’t seem so bad by comparison.
CHAPTER 21
Derek felt something wet being pressed against his face and immediately jolted awake.
He tried to sit up and found himself only partially successful. His left arm didn’t seem to want to cooperate, nor did the majority of his body. His right, however, was grabbed before it could move far and forced back down.
“It’s okay, you’re safe.”
He cracked his eyes open, expecting to see nothing but blackness, certain he’d been blinded by whatever had befallen him. Instead, he saw dim light. It was still dark, but as he blinked, the world gradually came back into focus. He saw trees above him and, beyond them, the stars in the sky shining down.
“I can see,” he croaked, his voice sounding cracked and weak.
“Now that the mud is out of your eyes you can.”
He turned toward the voice, familiar, yet not one he immediately placed. The darkness was broken up by the flicker of a campfire. A stack of equipment lay next to it, equipment that he recognized.
“Hold on. Is this...?”
“Your camp?” Julia Wilhelm replied, leaning over him. “I assumed so.”
“What are you? How did we...?”
“Shhh. Don’t try to move. You’re hurt. I’ll explain as I work. Fortunately, someone left a pretty sizable first aid kit here.”
He tried to sit up again, winced as pain bit him in multiple spots, then gave up and did as he was told. “How bad?”
“I ... have no idea. It’s definitely not pretty.” She poured some rubbing alcohol on a pad and proceeded to clean his left arm, pulling back when he hissed. “Sorry. Not really my specialty. Better than it could be, though. Fortunately for you, I ran an extended story on the local EMTs last summer. Rode along for a couple of nights and watched them in action.”
“Lucky me.”
“What happened to you?”
“Ambushed. Shot.”
“Goddamn,” she whispered before steeling her voice again. “Well, that explains a lot. Nearest I can tell, you got hit in at least half a dozen spots, mostly low caliber from the look of things. You’re missing a strip of skin on your forehead where I’m thinking something grazed you. That or you’re blessed with a thick skull.” She chuckled, then continued her examination. “Hope you’re a righty because it looks like a bullet punched clean through your left arm. All in all, though, I’d say you got really lucky.”
“Doesn’t feel that way,” he wheezed.
“Believe me, you did.” She held up a gun. It was the Ruger from his harness. There was a pronounced dent in the receiver. “Considering where you had this puppy strapped, I’d say a couple of your major organs owe it thanks. Otherwise, it could have been a lot worse.”
“Still not great,” Derek whispered.
“Not great is better than dead.”
“Can’t ... argue there.”
“I’m going to tape you up as best I can. But we need to get you to a doctor. No way am I digging bullets out of your body by myself.”
“Good thinking,” he replied. “Only works in the movies. In real life, I’d probably bleed out if you tried.” After a moment, he glanced around again, his eyes opening wide as remembrance of the ambush fully hit home. “Frank, Danni...”
He again tried to sit up, but Julia held him down. She was either stronger than she looked or he was a lot weaker. “You were the only one I found.” Then, after a beat, as if she realized the significance of this, she added, “I’m sorry.”
“Where?”
“You were at the edge of a bog. Pretty sure you crawled out yourself.”
Derek nodded. After a moment, she produced a bottle of water, which she helped him sip from.
“Thank you,” he said once he was finished. “What are you doing out here?”
She flashed him a guilty smile.
“You followed us again?”
“I had a hunch you’d be back. Besides, I told you to drive something less conspicuous. Not my fault you didn’t listen.”
“How...?”
“I found your camp a couple of hours ago. Almost scared the crap out of me. When I got close, a bunch of flood lights turned on.”
“Trip wire sensors,” Derek said. “Good thing we didn’t set up the sentry guns, too.”
Julia looked down at him, unblinking. “You’re kidding, right? Never mind, I don’t really want to know. Anyway, I marked this place on GPS, then kept searching. I was lucky enough to be close by when I heard the gunshots.” She held up his damaged Ruger again. “By the way, interesting camera you have.”
“You shouldn’t be out here. Too dangerous.”
Julia put the damaged weapon down, opened a nearby backpack, and pulled out a semi-automatic Smith & Wesson. “I may be reckless, but I’m not stupid. And before you ask, yes, I know how to use it. I try to get out to the range a couple of times a month.”
Derek debated how much to say, but quickly came to the conclusion that their situation didn’t call for much discretion. He was too injured to fight and there was no telling whether those ... people were still lurking about. That they were having this conversation was promising, but they were still in a bad spot.
But he had teammates who were quite possibly far worse off.
He gritted his teeth, mentally envisioning how Norah – or Jacob, for that matter – would react upon learning that he’d brought a reporter into the fold. Though they didn’t get along very well these days, he imagined this would be one area where they’d both see eye to eye in declaring him an idiot.
That’s a chewing out for another day. Besides, it wasn’t like she didn’t already have her suspicions. “Listen, Julia. There are some things you need to know about my team and what we’re really doing out here...”
♦ ♦ ♦
“You need to put that thing away before you shoot someone, like me.” Derek was sitting up in a foldable camp chair. His arm was splinted and Julia had done her best to sterilize and bandage the rest of his wounds.
He didn’t feel particularly great, but it was the best he was going to get out here. With his radio gone
and them out of range of reliable cell service, the immediate goal was survival. However, in order to survive, they needed to get out of there, which meant using the remaining ATV since he was certain there was little chance of him walking out in his current condition.
Julia had done an admirable job, but following his confession as to what had happened to him and his team, she’d been increasingly on edge, her gun never far from her hand.
“I thought I heard something,” she said, scanning the surrounding trees.
“You did. It’s a forest. Lots of things make noise.”
“Not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be.” He took another sip of water, doing what he could to stay hydrated. “Listen. Those are all normal sounds. It’s when everything goes quiet that you have to worry. So long as squirrels are chattering and birds are chirping, that means they aren’t worried, and if they’re not worried it means...”
“We shouldn’t be?”
“Not necessarily, but it means we can probably stay one click shy of paranoid.”
“Is it paranoid to want to shoot that thing in the balls and make it tell me where my sister and brother-in-law are? You said it could talk, right?”
“Nearest I can tell it’s ... he’s human, or some sort of human mutation. I don’t know. He caught us by surprise and then his friends showed up while we were debating what to do.”
“A group of mutant hillbillies?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
She grew quiet as she continued to prep the ATV. “What do you think those freaks did to my family? Do you think there’s still a chance?”
Derek was silent for a moment. He’d told her a lot, but had stopped short of telling her about her brother-in-law. She deserved to know, but he was afraid what it would do to her, especially now when he needed her help. But then he remembered what Zeist had said about John Guiterrez’s body. Grief could destroy a person, but anger could focus them. He hoped the latter was true for Julia. She seemed strong, but then, so had Kate Barrows.
“Listen, there’s more...”
♦ ♦ ♦
Derek needed to remind Julia several times that raising her voice was very much not in their best interest. To her credit, she didn’t break down after hearing what he had to say, instead channeling everything she had toward seething rage.
“You knew this when I met you in Shilough and you didn’t say anything?”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“Because of fucking government secrets?” She held up her hands in quote marks.
“Yes. I know you’re angry, but my team is under oath. We have to be very careful what we say, when we say it, and who we say it to. This isn’t a 9 to 5 thing either. It’s all the time.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
He nodded. “I know, but right and lawful are sometimes at odds.”
She stared hard at him for several long seconds, then got onto the ATV and started the engine. For a moment, he was afraid she would hit the gas and take off, leaving him to his fate, but she turned and nodded for him to climb on behind her.
He got on and wrapped his good arm around her waist, even though he was certain he’d catch an elbow to the ribs for it. The rumbling of the engine even at idle was near torture for his wounds, but there was no other way about it. They needed to get out of the woods, get Mitch, and come back with a lot more firepower. He still had friends out there and, until he knew otherwise, he had to assume they were alive.
“Please be careful,” he said as they started moving.
“You’ll be lucky if I don’t purposely aim for any rocks.” Then, after a beat, she asked, “So what changed?”
“Huh?”
“You said you had oaths and shit like that. So why tell me now?”
Derek didn’t consider himself the petty type, but he also wasn’t particularly fond of his team being the fall guys either. He told her about John being cremated without the knowledge or blessing of his family.
She turned back and glared at him. “Are you shitting me?”
“Please pay attention to where you’re going, and no, I’m not shitting you. Believe me, I was just as shocked to hear about it.”
“I doubt that. I told you before that I was going to shoot that monster in the balls, but I think I’m going to save a bullet for the governor.”
“You do know that’s not going to work out for you ... oof!”
“Sorry.” She steered back onto the trail and slowed them to a snail’s pace. “Fine. Then let’s see how he likes it when the six o’clock news runs a story on...”
Derek’s grip on her tightened. “You can’t run with this. I’m sorry, but you’re going to bring a world of hurt down on yourself if you do.”
“What?”
“Think about it. What are you going to say? That the Jersey Devil killed your brother-in-law and the governor is covering it up? Even a tabloid rag would think twice before publishing that. And then there are my ... associates. It would be career suicide. You’d never work in journalism again.”
“It would be worth it.”
“For who? You’d be destroying your life. That’s noble, but where does it leave you? With nothing but some conspiracy nuts believing your story, that’s what. And that still doesn’t help your sister.”
Julia was quiet for several seconds, the rumble of the engine the only sound to be heard. “Do you think she’s...”
“We don’t know what to think. Those things, people, whatever ... I’m pretty sure they took my friends. It’s quite possible they have your sister, too. We have to ... hold on to that.”
She nodded, then took one hand off the handlebars to wipe her eyes. Seeing they were on a relatively level stretch, Derek carefully removed Julia’s cell phone from the breast pocket of his jacket. She’d given it to him for the ride back. It took a couple of painful tries, but he finally got it out. It fluctuated between one and two bars of service. Hopefully good enough to call Mitch.
Before he could try, though, Julia spoke up again. “Okay. But even if we find her, are you saying Governor Yarlberg gets away with it? I thought you said you helped people. That you were the good guys.”
“We are,” Derek replied, dialing Mitchell’s number. “But what we do isn’t exactly black and white. And, I hate to admit it, but we live in a world where the good guys don’t always win.”
CHAPTER 22
Danni jolted awake, the memory of rough hands violating her body far too fresh in her mind.
For perhaps the first time in months, her dreams hadn’t bothered her, especially not once she realized she’d be waking up to a nightmare.
Opening her eyes, she saw a roof above her. Wherever she was, it was dimly lit – torchlight or maybe a low-wattage bulb. It was better than waking up in total darkness, if only marginally.
She gingerly sat up, taking it slow as a wave of vertigo passed. The memory of what had happened slowly filtered in to her waking mind, but it was cloudy, hazy, as if her brain was wrapped in cotton.
Once she was up in a sitting position, she swung her legs off the crude wooden cot she’d been placed on. Her bare feet landed upon packed dirt and she took a moment to look down at herself.
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