by Loki Renard
“Jazz!” I keep calling out for her, over and over, but she doesn’t answer, and I can feel the emptiness of the place just like I can feel the emptiness of my heart.
“Jazz!” How many times am I going to uselessly scream her name? The fire is out now, but the cabin has a hole in the roof. It doesn’t matter. Burned down or not, this cabin is burned. This whole entire area is burned. We’re going to have to go a very long way to lose law enforcement.
“Quit yelling,” Remington growls, bursting out of the woods.
“They took Jazz. They set the cabin on fire.”
“They tried,” he says. “Doesn’t look like they were very successful.”
He’s still so calm, but it’s easy to be calm when it’s not the love of your life who’s missing. I’m consumed with a rage that makes it impossible to think, or reason. If I had one of those assholes here right now, I’d do worse than what I did to Rodney. I’d fucking...
“Jazz!” I scream her name again. I always thought it was ridiculous when people did that in movies, but now I find myself in a hopeless situation having lost the only person who matters, it’s all I can do.
“You’re going to bring an avalanche down on us,” Remington grunts. “She’s a girl, they’re not going to hurt her.”
That’s bullshit and we both know it. If they have Jazz, she’s going to be put in the worst cell they’ve got, fucked with in every way possible, possibly even outright killed. We’re so far on the wrong side of the law now the only mercy we’re going to get is a bullet, but I don’t see any blood to suggest anyone was shot, and I didn’t hear any guns being discharged either.
She’s gone. They have her.
I’ve fucked this up. Or maybe it was fucked up from the beginning. Maybe the moment our eyes first locked on one another in the hall, we were going to end up here, torn apart, ripped to pieces inside and out.
“Get some air. I’m going to salvage what I can. Then we’ll go get her.”
Remington is right, but I don’t care. I’m a dead man walking, coughing on the carbon I inhaled when I thought there was some point to putting the fire out. I may as well have left the place to burn down. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does anymore.
I’m walking in big circles around the perimeter of the campsite, trying to get my head together, trying to think. I’m no good to her panicking or crying like a little bitch, even though I’m the closest I’ve been to actual tears in my adult life. After all we’ve been through, she gets taken like that?
I breathe through my mouth, trying to calm down. Somewhere in my panting and growling, I hear a whimper. At first I think I must have made the pathetic little sound, but then I realize it came from a nearby snowdrift.
I stop and listen, then I hear it again. It sounds like a small animal. I don’t dare to hope, but I dash over to the snowbank, go to my knees in the snow and start digging. Within seconds, my hands touch plastic. What the literal fuck. I pull back the snow and see that there’s a blanket under a plastic sheet. My heart sinks. This is probably just a food stash, like a free refrigerator. The squeaking is probably some kind of rodent...
The blanket moves. Pulls back from the plastic. I find myself looking at Jazz, her face partially obscured by the condensation of her breath against the inside of the bag.
“What the fuck!” I curse, ripping the plastic sheeting open and dragging her out of her coverings, like delivering her from a really shitty nasty womb.
“How did you get in there?”
“I h-h-hid,” she chatters through clenched teeth.
“In a plastic bag?”
“Th-there was plastic there already,” she shivers. It’s cold, but I don’t think that’s why she’s trembling like a leaf. I think Remington was right. She was on the verge of crashing, and that visit from the helicopter has sent her over the edge. I hold her tight, and then realize that the plastic from the food stash wasn’t fully protecting her from the snow. She’s wet with freezing water sapping the heat from her skin.
“I thought you’d been taken,” I tell her, carrying her back to the cabin. It’s warmer there, and there will be fresh clothes for her to wear.
“Of course I didn’t just wait for them to take me. I ran out the back and hid under the snow,” she chatters. “I’m fucking cold.”
Remington is filling a pack as I carry her past him. He looks up and nods when he sees her. That’s all the response I get from him, just a small motion of the head. Goddamn, that man is like ice when the heat is on.
I take her into what was our room and I start stripping her clothing off. She’s soaked and freezing and I have to get her warmed up. The plastic sheet and blanket saved her life, but she could still go downhill if she doesn’t get some heat and food into her.
“She okay?” Remington puts his head in the door. She’s barely clothed, and I’m holding her fingers to try to warm them gently. Hopefully she’s not frostbitten. It’s an intimate, vulnerable moment, but he’s a gentleman about it even though she doesn’t care enough to cover herself properly right now.
“She’s going to be okay.”
He nods and disappears again. There’s no other man in the world I’d let see Jazz like this, but I still pull the fresh blanket around her shoulders tighter and grab some more clothing to get her dressed into.
“Am I?”
“Huh?”
“Am I going to be okay?” She asks the question in such an impossibly small voice that I feel my heart crack. It must have been terrifying for her to be here by herself when that helicopter started coming down. I can’t believe she managed to escape them, but I’m very glad she did.
“Of course you’re going to be okay. You’ve done so well, baby,” I tell her, rubbing my hands over her thighs, back and forth to try to warm her. Then I pull out some of the breakaway heating pads that go inside gloves and I put them inside her palms.
“I don’t think I have done well. I ruined your life,” she says, tears starting to stream down her face. “And I can’t even be happy about what it got me, because I knew today would happen. They’re going to come for me, and keep coming until we’re all dead.”
“Hey, no, shhh...” I pull her into a hug and try to comfort her.
* * *
Jazz
It’s so good to feel him against me, but I can’t stop crying, not for anything. When I heard that helicopter coming down, I dashed out of the house and into the woods, panicking, knowing I had to hide, but not knowing where to hide. Then I saw the food stash and I dived inside it and I cowered there while men with loud voices and hard laughter trashed the little bit of peace we’d managed to make for ourselves.
“They’re never going to let us go,” I whisper against his neck. “Not ever. They’re going to come for us, and come for us...”
“It’s not what they do,” he rumbles. “It’s what we do. And what we’re going to do is stay free. No matter what. You did so well, baby. You got out and you found a good hiding spot without being seen. You survived. And you’re going to keep surviving.”
He pulls back and looks deep into my eyes and I feel strength flowing from him to me. I don’t have any power. I feel drained and lost. I feel as though fate is toying with me, taking me as close to complete ruin as it is possible to get and then watching me scramble away. What happens when our luck runs out?
I push back into his arms and cling to him, sobbing from the depths of my soul. This isn’t okay. I tried to make it okay. I tried to convince myself that nature would protect me from the society hunting us, but nature always loses to man.
“They’re going to come back, aren’t they,” I sniff. “They know we’re here, and they’re going to come and hunt us until they get us and then... why can’t we just live a normal life?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” he says. “What kind of life do you want?”
I know he’s just trying to get me to talk, but I don’t mind. I need to talk. “I mean a house with a white picket fence, and a dog who
makes messes on the rug sometimes, and a really boring job...”
He smiles and nods. “That does kinda sound nice. Maybe we could get a cat that doesn’t like us very much.”
“Yes!” I smile, getting into the spirit of things. “And we could worry about plumbing, and if the neighbor’s wisterias are growing through the fence or not.”
“Sounds perfect,” Jake smiles.
“Okay, you two ready?” Remington comes bustling in, interrupting our brief moment of imagined peace. There’s no time to be weak out here. The weak and the slow are going to be the dead or the captured. And I don’t even know what a fucking wisteria is.
* * *
Jake
“They’re going to come back. They didn’t get a single one of us, but they know we’re close,” Jazz says as we leave the cabin for the last time.
“They also know we’re going to flee. Which means there’s probably a dragnet down the hill, across these mountains.”
“If only we had years of military training allowing us to survive in difficult conditions,” Remington deadpans.
“Smartass,” I growl, hefting Jazz onto my back. I’m not letting her walk. I want her to keep all her energy for what’s ahead, because we all know this isn’t the end.
We start walking uphill, into worse territory and worse weather, following the stream so our footprints aren’t so easily followed.
“Can’t leave the tree line,” I say. “Then we’ll be exposed to weather and to helicopters. We’ll stay just inside it.”
Remington agrees with a swift nod. We’re heading north, toward Canada. Crossing the border won’t solve all our problems, but it also won’t hurt the situation either. It’s also not a quick option. It could take us weeks to pass in this weather. We might have to just dig in somewhere and do our best to subsist. Worst case scenario, we might have to head back down to civilization to get some supplies.
Jazz is a warm weight on my shoulders, making me sink further into the snow than I otherwise would. I have no trouble carrying her, but the extra weight does make a difference once we leave the riverbanks and head back through the trees.
We keep moving all day, stopping just before night falls to pitch a couple of tents. There’s no option to light a fire, but we use a gas cooker to heat some ration packs and hot water for drinks.
This is luxury compared to some of the training Remington and I have done in the past, but I worry about Jazz. She’s so fucking quiet, and I know she’s not trained for this. She’s not conditioned. It takes a certain mental toughness and internal fortitude to survive situations like these, when it feels like the whole world is against you.
“Get into the sleeping bag,” I tell her as soon as we stop. “And pull that cord so it stays tight around your face. I’ll feed you through the hole.”
Weeks ago, she would have made a joke about that, but this time she does as she’s told. I set up the tent and feed her, make sure she’s physically okay, which is about all I can control.
It’s a freezing cold night, but we have sleeping bags capable of keeping us warm and alive well below zero, and in the morning, brilliant sun lifts our moods and we move off again.
Day after day, night after night, we move. We don’t stop moving. We hunt on the track, taking an opportunistic shot here and there when we can and downing a small deer and a couple of snow pigeons.
Occasionally we hear helicopters, but they never get close again. It’s safe to say they’re hitting cabins, but they don’t have the resources or time to put search teams on the ground in winter.
Jazz is walking under her own power now. I carried her that first day because I was worried about her, but she pointed out she had legs, and as a group we decided she could probably use them okay.
We’re walking along a ridge, Remington at the front, me at the rear, and I can hear Jazz muttering to herself under her breath, swearing up a storm. I take a few longer strides to catch up with her, and hear her just going off at Rodney as quietly as it is possible to whisper-scream at your dead ex.
“You okay?”
She turns around, her eyes wide and black, like she’s on something, but I know she’s not. It’s just exhaustion and adrenaline, fear and rage. It chemically affects the body of even the most conditioned soldiers.
“What did you do to him?” She whispers the words.
“I killed him,” I say honestly.
“But... what did you actually do.”
She wants details. I don’t want to give details. They’re not for her. What happened to Rodney was between me and the cowardly man who tried to hurt the woman I loved. The things I did to him were things no man should ever do, but I don’t regret them, not for a minute. He died as he deserved to: hurting.
“Bad things, Jazz.”
“So we’re no better than he was. We should have...” She takes a breath. “We’re worse than he was.”
“Are we going out victimizing people for our own gain? Are we finding innocent women and trying to use them for sex and money? No. Of course not. We’re not bad people, Jazz.” My fist clenches. “I’m not a bad person.”
She’s hitting a nerve. I tried to put that last thirty minutes of his life out of my head. I could have ended it cleanly, quickly, but I didn’t want to. I got all my rage out. I wonder what happened to hers. Is it still inside her? Is she suffering regret and guilt? Or is she feeling impotent, because she was never able to face her tormentor at the end? I don’t know. It’s too hard, and I wish it was more simple. It should be simple.
“We have to move forward, Jazz. We have our lives ahead of us.”
“Out here, in the trees? We can never go back. We’re criminals now. Murderers. We’re wanted. And one day, if people find us, we might end up caught, and in jail. We’ll never, ever be truly free.”
I pull her into my arms as she starts to cry honest, real tears. I don’t know if she wanted Rodney dead. I think what she really wanted was for it all to never have happened. But life doesn’t work that way. I could save her from him, but I can’t save her from everything that went along with it.
“I’m sorry, you must think I am so ungrateful,” she sniffs, wiping her eyes on my chest.
“You must think I’m a monster,” I rumble back. “And you’re not ungrateful. You’re perfect.” I tip her chin up and press my lips to hers in a brief, brushing kiss.
I don’t know how to reach her. Gentle isn’t working. She smiles, but the sadness remains in her eyes and I know that nothing has changed. Normal seems very far away out here on the run. I don’t know how to get her that old life as part of decent society back. I cuddle her close and I think furiously.
“What about plastic surgery?”
“What?” She laughs.
I brush the hair back from her face, the face I love so much. “What if we got plastic surgery. Changed our faces. Got new identities. We could move to a new city, start a new life. We wouldn’t risk being caught. People wouldn’t know who we were.”
* * *
Jazz
“I don’t think I can live without seeing your face again,” I say, shaking my head. “And I kind of like mine.”
“Okay, so no plastic surgery,” he says with what seems like a relieved sigh. “I don’t know how else we do it. Maybe we get to Canada, jump on a fishing trawler, sail to Japan or China...”
“Because we won’t stand out there at all,” I laugh, rolling my eyes.
“There’s a whole world out there, Jazz.”
“And they’ll chase us across all of it,” I say, cuddling into him.
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you two coming, or do you want to wrap yourselves up in a bow for a US Marshal?” Remington yells at us from the front.
I’m tired. It has been at least a week of walking through some of the worst, most freezing terrain. I don’t know how many more nights I can do out at subzero, getting way too used to not being able to feel my extremities. The tip of my nose is a stranger to me righ
t now.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”
So we start walking again, even though it feels hopeless, like this forest goes on forever, and our pursuers will chase us just as far, we walk, because what choice do we have? The alternative is giving up.
A few minutes later, our persistence is rewarded.
“Holy...” A gasp escapes me as we all draw to a halt.
We’re looking at a private cabin set next to a natural hot spring. This must be some rich person’s getaway spot. It is two stories high, the snow-covered roof gleaming in the sun. Next to the house, there’s a trailer with two snowmobiles sitting on it, but out the back is the thing that draws my attention. A hot pool. A natural hot pool. There’s steam rising from the water, and the sight triggers a response I can’t help.
I run toward the water and I dive in, letting the naturally warm bubbling springs envelop me with that perfect heat. Oh, my god...
* * *
Jake
“Jazz!” I barely have time to yell her name before Jazz freaks out. We’ve just stopped in an empty clearing to make camp. There’s a little spring steaming with the late afternoon sun that has worked up enough heat to make the ice floating on top of it give off a vapor. Before I know what is happening, Jazz is sprinting toward it. She goes crashing through that layer with a cry of what I can only describe as glee, and lands in the middle of the water without seeming to notice that she’s going to fucking die in a matter of seconds.
“She’s delirious,” Remington says as we both rush down to pull her out.
“We’re saved, guys! We can stay here in the mansion cabin!” She’s pointing to nothing. “We can ride the snowmobiles!” Now she’s jabbing her finger at two tree stumps.
Jesus. She really has lost it. After weeks in the wild, she’s finally hit the limit of what she can take.
“Get her undressed, we have to get her warmed up. Now. And we’re going to have to start a fire to dry that shit.”