Tower in the Woods

by Tara Quan

  Chapter 10

  He was a dead man, Dane admitted as the reality of his failure sank in. At first, his mission had gone on without a hitch. He had easily slipped under the tarp that covered the back of Mother Gothel’s pickup truck as she dropped off Nel’s supplies. The rotund old lady had barely said a word to the sniper above, quickly hitching a burlap bag full of food to the rope and jumping back into the car immediately after Nel threw the sack back down. Luckily, he had been lying in wait so by then he was firmly ensconced underneath the heavy, dark fabric.

  He had accurately judged the WITCH’s security and known it was unlikely that anyone would check the car of the prophet herself. It had made getting into the veritable fortress that the WITCH had turned Fort Belvoir into remarkably easy. Once there, Dane simply had to wait patiently until he could surreptitiously slip out of his hiding spot and slink into a shadowed corner.

  The most important part of Dane’s mission was mapping out the WITCH’s compound. If the FMA was going to launch a rescue operation it needed to know exactly where the kidnapped children were kept, else risk the girls they were trying to save becoming collateral damage. Mother Gothel had chosen her headquarters well—the former hub of the Defense Logistics Agency. The semicircle of buildings that composed the main campus of Fort Belvoir provided a large and easily defendable space that abutted a reservoir of water as well as plenty of arable land. The WITCH had the makings of a very viable colony, if only it wasn’t run by a deranged sociopath.

  It took Dane a few hours to locate the section of the building that had been turned into living quarters and schoolrooms for the kidnapped trainees. He had also located several sniper’s nests as well as timed the various patrols. Breaching the WITCH’s defenses wasn’t going to be easy, but with the intelligence he had gathered it was unlikely to cost too many lives. Judging by his experience with Nel, the recruits who patrolled the walls of the WITCH were trained to kill zombies, and they would be at least surprised enough for their response time to be affected during a raid orchestrated by the best agents of the FMA.

  Dane was about to sneak out of the fort when a roving patrol got suspicious and he was forced into making the terrible decision of sliding into a storm drain. The foul smell that emanated throughout the underground sewer should have tipped him off, but he hadn’t been thinking about zombies at the time. After all, he was in a heavily fortified paramilitary compound. So when he found himself tumbling into an underground holding cell full of brain-eaters, Dane had been too surprised to think far ahead. Taking out his sidearm, he fired off one shot after the other. While saving his life, the instinctive response inevitably caught the attention of the roving patrol he had been trying to avoid in the first place.

  So here he was blindfolded and bound in the back of the same pickup truck he had sneaked in on, driven out to be executed by the cult leader herself. Mother Gothel had been most displeased when Dane had been presented to her, and even more enraged when he had told her his method of entry. After all, the good Mother didn’t want her fallibility to be revealed to her devoted disciples. It would negatively affect her godly persona for them all to find out she was the one who had brought the dreaded “man” into their midst.

  After swearing the two AK-47-toting patrolwomen to secrecy, Mother Gothel herself had blindfolded Dane and taken him to her car. Wincing at the pain in his side, he remembered the Mother’s steel-toed boots had impacted his midsection multiple times, most likely causing at least a rib fracture. His hands and feet were tied together, and there wasn’t an inch of his body that wasn’t covered in some sort of bruise. The ham-fisted cult leader had been so angry with him that he had been certain she was going to accidentally kill him as she bludgeoned him with her bare hands.

  Apparently, Dane didn’t deserve a simple death via a bullet through the head. He was being driven out into the zombie wasteland outside the WITCH so she could watch him get torn apart limb from limb. According to Mother Gothel, that gruesome death was less than what all men deserved. If he hadn’t been busy trying to figure a way out of his impending demise, he might have been of the mind to suggest to this crazy old lady that she was in need of some serious psychiatric help.

  Dane felt the car slow and stop, and he realized the end was nigh. Damn, he had so many bloody regrets, and the one that came foremost to his mind was the woman he had left behind in the tower, the sweet blue-eyed sniper who had stolen his heart. He should have told her that he loved her. He should have damned the mission to hell and taken Nel back to the safety of Washington, D.C. No amount of honor or duty, no deference to morality or pledge to work toward the greater good, was worth the hell he was about to put her through. He knew his sniper, and she would be most assuredly watching his execution through the tower’s window. She was going to watch him die, and he had never even told her that she was the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

  The tarp was pulled off his body as pudgy hands grabbed him by the neck and shoved him to the ground. He groaned as his abused limbs hit the hard ground, winced as he heard the shuffling of feet and incoherent howls that signaled his impending doom. The brain-eaters had smelled blood and they were coming for him.

  Then a shot rang out through the night and Dane felt a large, heavy mass fall on top of him. He felt the trickle and ooze of blood through his clothing, could smell the stench of loosening bowels that came with a human’s death. Not knowing what had happened, he struggled against his restraints, finally able to flip his own body over and throw off the massive, fleshy mound that had crushed him to the ground.

  Then Dane’s mind computed the odds and he realized what Nel had done. The sniper had watched the WITCH since he infiltrated the grounds, had seen what was about to happen through her night-vision scope, and had made a choice. The body that had fallen on top of him was Mother Gothel. Nel had saved Dane and by doing so jeopardized her own life.

  Grunting, Dane took a leap of faith and lifted his arms over his head. His hands were bound by metal handcuffs, and he had one hope of getting through the impending zombie attack alive. Holding perfectly still, he didn’t need to wait long before another shot shattered the handcuff’s chains and freed his hands.

  Dane acted on instinct, knowing he had little to no time to think. He removed his blindfold first, and his blurred vision quickly confirmed what his brain had deduced. There was a bloody cavernous hole where Mother Gothel’s face once was, and a phalanx of zombies made their way toward the body, drawn by the putrid, ferrous smell. As more shots rang out the advancing brain-eaters slumped to the ground one by one. Racing against time, Dane freed his legs before searching the dead body for keys. Finding none, he crawled over to the pickup truck and painfully lowered himself into the front seat. The key was in the ignition and the engine was still running.

  Forcing himself not to think about what would happen to Nel when the WITCH found out what she had done, forcing himself not to turn the car around and head straight toward the tower, Dane floored the accelerator and launched the car straight through the line of zombies. His emotions were telling him to go back to Nel, but he still had the semblance of mind to realize he didn’t have a way to climb up the tower in his injured state. Nel was unlikely to have found a way to anchor the rope in the short time that had passed so there was no way for her to join him. Besides, it had been a veritable miracle the flimsy cord of hair had survived his trip up and down, and he didn’t want her to risk breaking her neck trying to escape.

  In short, no matter what his emotions were telling him to do, Dane needed to get back to D.C. if he was to have any hope of saving Nel. Come hell or high water, he was going to get her safely ensconced in his home, and then he planned to dismantle the WITCH once and for all.

  Chapter 11

  Feeling a now familiar wave of nausea hit her, Nel quickly ran to the bathroom and positioned herself by the toilet bowl. Like every morning for the past three days, her forehead and the back of her neck were covered in cold, clammy sweat
, and even the slightest righting of her head into a vertical position overwhelmed her with dizziness. She could barely keep any food down, and she felt so tired the trip from her pallet by the fireplace to the bathroom felt like a trek across the zombie wastelands.

  Considering her menses hadn’t started on schedule, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was pregnant. Nel had a decision to make and time was running out for her to make it.

  It had been a month since she had assassinated Mother Gothel, a whole month since she had watched Dane’s battered form climb into the Mother’s pickup truck and drive away into the zombie wastelands. She wanted to believe he had made it out fine; she wanted to believe he had returned to the safety of this mythical city to the north, she wanted to believe he was coming back for her. But it was time to face facts—Dane hadn’t come back for her yet, and it was extremely unlikely that he ever would.

  Nel couldn’t let herself think about Dane getting lost in the woods, about him being torn apart limb from limb by a horde of undead. If she let herself think about that outcome she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each day. Better, far better, to simply think he had chosen to not return, chosen to not risk death or capture in order to save her. After all, they had known each other for exactly one week. He hadn’t made any promises, had never even talked about a future with her in it. The notion that he had abandoned her might be depressing, but it was far less heartbreaking than the thought of him no longer being alive in this world.

  If she hadn’t realized she was pregnant, Nel may have chosen to hole up in the Tower for longer. Yes, the delivery of supplies had completely stopped after Mother Gothel’s death, but she also had no indication that anyone in the WITCH even knew her location. They weren’t coming after her, at least not yet. One hypothesis was that the other members of the WITCH realized her betrayal and they had chosen to simply execute her by slowly starving her to death. The other hypothesis—they had no idea Nel was in the Tower. Either way, no more food was coming and she couldn’t stay in the Tower forever.

  She had food enough to last her the year, two if she was careful, and if circumstances weren’t as they were, the best course of action would be to stay in the Tower until the supplies ran out. However, if she was able to carry her child to term, and if she survived the birthing process, Nel would be forced to flee no more than two years from now, and she would have to do so with an infant in tow. That particular scenario would put her likelihood of survival at next to nil, and even that outcome assumed both her and her child could survive the delivery without any medical attention whatsoever.

  As much as the thought of leaving the safety of the Tower filled Nel with dread, the logical part of her realized the longer she stayed, the more developed her pregnancy became, the weaker she would be. As sheltered as her life had been, she knew the weak had no chance of surviving the zombie wastelands. So she had spent the past month piling heavy wood and books onto the floor of her sniper’s nest, enclosing the heavy items with any furniture she had, using everything at her disposal to bind the pile into a solid block. She needed to take her chances with the outside world while she was still capable of defending herself, and that meant she was going to have to leave tonight. She had given Dane a month to come for her and she was done waiting.

  * * * *

  That stupid little idiot, Dane swore in his mind as he tracked Nel’s path into the wastelands. Returning to the tower to find only a dangling, tattered rope of hair had been the worst moment of his life. Fear and worry, guilt and regret had coursed through him with such fervor that, for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Nel was gone. She was alone and unprotected in the most dangerous environment imaginable, and it had all been because of him.

  Dane barely remembered the frenzied drive back to Washington, D.C., his mind blocking out all physical pain and focusing solely on survival. The moment he reached the safety of the first checkpoint the adrenaline that had kept him driving through the reclaimed woods and crumbling roads ran out and he had lost consciousness before any of the patrolmen even got to him. A week later, he had woken up in a hospital to find out he was recovering from two cracked ribs and a concussion. Despite his protestations, he had been sedated and pumped with painkillers, woken only to be debriefed by one person after the other, the rank of the person interrogating him rising as more information passed his lips.

  Before he realized it close to a month had gone by and the FMA was nowhere near launching a rescue operation. After all, his report had mobilized the largest bureaucracy left in existence, and that one was known for taking its sweet time before making any risky decisions. But Dane was fully recovered, thanks to the restorative effects of the URV vaccine, and he had long since ceased to give a damn about what the FMA told him he could or could not do.

  He left the city without permission, coming to the tower knowing full well he risked alerting the WITCH to the FMA’s plan. It had been the first time Dane had ever disobeyed a direct order, and now he only regretted he hadn’t done it sooner.

  Throughout the three-hour drive to the tower, Dane hadn’t felt a moment of hesitation. Nel was more important than his duty, and her safety outweighed any cause he would ever choose to fight for. Ever since he’d woken up in that hospital room he had kicked himself for leaving the tower without her, for choosing to infiltrate the WITCH in lieu of taking her back to the city. It had been the worst decision he had ever made, and never had that realization hit so hard as when he arrived at the tower to find her gone.

  Chapter 12

  Something was tracking her, Nel realized with fear as she climbed up the tallest tree she could find. It had been three days since she’d left the Tower and she had never experienced a more constant state of terror. Nothing had prepared her for being surrounded by lumbering zombies, for finding a threat around every corner, for having to dodge a potentially lethal attack almost every hour of the night. Even during the day she had taken to catnapping atop a tall tree, not daring to risk a stray zombie appearing out of the brush to lunge for her brains.

  She wasn’t going to make it to Washington, D.C. alive. Nel knew that now with absolutely certainty. Her body had never felt this fatigued, and her mind was driven beyond the point of exhaustion. She had scratched herself on a branch a mile back and the zombies had been on her scent ever since. Six of them surrounded her tree right now, their decaying fingers clawing at the bark in an attempt to climb up. With shaking fingers, she pulled herself as far toward the leafy canopy as she could, finally straddling a branch before leaning back against the tree’s trunk. Breathing heavily, she pulled out the Glock and pushed in a loaded magazine. As she snapped the slide back, she was faced with the realization that she didn’t have enough bullets to last through the night. At some point in the next few hours, she was going to have to make the decision to lodge the last one through her own head.

  Until then she might as well rid the world of some zombies. Her aim with the pistol was now near perfect and she easily lodged a single bullet between the glazed bloodshot eyes of each of the six zombies.

  Then she heard a rustle in the brushes and a shadow emerged from the dark. Nel aimed but she didn’t fire, her eyes barely believing what she saw. It was Dane. He looked haggard, his eyes were frenzied, and he was covered with dirt and blood. But she would recognize him anywhere. She knew without a shred of a doubt those brown eyes staring back at her belonged to the man she loved.

  * * * *

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Dane roared as soon as he got Nel into the safety of his Jeep. Acting on autopilot, he turned on the ignition and floored the accelerator, heading in a straight path toward the road that would lead them back to Washington, D.C. His mouth set in a grim line, his eyes staring straight ahead, he let the anger brewing within him build and boil over. Anger was better than the arctic fear that had consumed him for most of the night. She was in the car, he finally knew she was safe, and now he could focus on being seriously pissed off.

  “How da
re you get mad at me?” Nel yelled back in an outraged voice. “What was I supposed to do, wait indefinitely for you to come to my rescue?”

  Dane channeled his anger into making the car swerve around various obstacles at breakneck speed. The tires squealed as he cornered sharply, the momentum launching Nel in one direction after the other. “That’s exactly what you should have done. I told you to stay put. You should have trusted me to come for you.”

  He heard Nel hiss out a breath. “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, and I couldn’t stay in that Tower forever. Besides, thus far, I have been the one saving your life, not the other way around.”

  Dane had to admit Nel had him on that one. As far as rescuing the damsel in distress went, he didn’t exactly have a stellar record when it came to the one that mattered. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but point out, “If I had gotten to you a day too late, you would be dead, sweetheart.”

  “Then maybe you should have gotten here sooner,” Nel yelled back. “I didn’t leave until three days ago.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Dane growled as he slammed his hands against the steering wheel to alleviate his frustration. “Not getting to you sooner has been haunting me every minute since I realized you weren’t in the damn tower. I’ve been worried sick because of you.”

  Suddenly Nel did something completely unexpected, something so entirely out of character Dane was frozen into place, his mind suddenly drained of all anger as he struggled to figure out what to do. She burst into tears.

  This wasn’t the slow, flowing, quiet tears Dane had witnessed before he left the tower. Nel wasn’t holding back this time—her shoulders shook with each sob as her breath came in hiccupping gasps. Then she simply buried her face in her hands and unapologetically wept.