by Riley Flynn
His fingers stretched, Alex willed them longer.
There was the edge of the pocket.
“Alex?” Cam shouted. “Alex, where are you?”
He tried to answer but as soon as he opened his mouth, it filled with fetid air. Every sinew of his body was focused on growing his fingers that extra millimeter needed to reach inside the pocket. He held his breath. Couldn’t reply. A deep gulp of oxygen, drawing in all the rotting odor, it couldn’t happen. He couldn’t do it. These fingers needed to grow.
“Alex, where the hell?” Cam’s voice was dropping to a whisper.
“I’m… here…” Alex tried to say without breathing. He knew it wasn’t loud enough.
The fabric inside the pocket was soft. Alex tugged. Something heavy inside, he could tell.
“Alex!” the voice was a hiss.
The other hand readjusted on the wing mirror, holding all Alex’s weight. Just a tiny bit closer. Just a bit. A finger was inside.
“Alex, there’s someone coming.”
A fingernail tapped against firm plastic. The words hit home. He’d taken the risk. He’d known the dangers. The two words hit him like a sledgehammer: someone’s coming.
The sound of Cam stuffing everything into a backpack. The fingernail scratched against the object. Couldn’t reach.
“We need to go. Now!”
Alex collapsed. A gust of fetid air rushed into his lungs. Alex rolled and grabbed the Savage. He ran around the Humvee and found Cam kicking his loot across the road, scattering the evidence.
“Where the hell were you?” he hissed, quiet and furious at the same time, his rough face creased up with rage. “Come on!”
Cam ran towards the side of the road, towards a Jeep which had flipped, turned on its side, and burned. Alex watched him go. His head turned sideways, training his gaze down the length of the asphalt. A vehicle, a black spot. Growing larger.
Someone was coming.
Chapter 15
Alex ran. He chased after Cam, whose boots hit the road with a clap. They reached the shell of the Jeep, propped up on its side, roof facing the approaching vehicle. Together, they ducked down, sat on the ground, and pressed their backs up against the underside of the Jeep.
“What the hell were you doing?” Cam, hitting Alex on the shoulder with an angry clout. “I told you to keep watch.”
Alex craned his neck out around the metal skeleton of the flipped Jeep. The dot on the horizon grew with every second. A pinprick to a bottlecap to a dinner plate. Snapping his head back behind the cover, he winced. A shard of glass poked through the leg of his trousers. He shifted his weight.
“They’re almost here. A Cadillac.”
“I knew it was a two-man job.” Cam was livid, but there was another emotion in his voice, hiding behind the seething syllables. “What good is that if one man deserts his post?”
Sitting closest to the hood of the Jeep, Alex looked up. There was nothing he could say to Cam. He’d made a mistake. He’d taken a gamble. He’d deserted his post. Again. But this time, instead of waking up from a pleasant sleep, there were enemies approaching.
“I’m sorry… I just needed to…” Alex’s voice drifted away. Cam wasn’t listening anyway.
The roof and the panels had been bent out of shape, their jagged edges jutting this way and that. But there it was. One of the wing mirrors, struggling to hang on. He reached up and snapped what was left of the plastic.
The mirror in hand, Alex bent his knee upwards. His sneakers were filthy. He rubbed the reflective glass up and down across the mud on the sole of his shoe. The filth across the surface thickened, the image growing cloudy.
Leaning out, ducking down, Alex placed the mirror on the surface of the road, facing the spot where they’d been piling the loot high. He adjusted the angle with his toe.
An empty scene. But they heard the sound. A rumble, the unmistakable sound of a gasoline engine. It rumbled. It churned. A guttural noise bellowed out from the belly of the beast.
The turning engine slowed, sank in pitch. The Cadillac pulled to a halt.
The front bumper rolled into view in the mirror. Alex held his breath. The curvature of the reflective surface gave him a fish-eyed view of the scene. When the car stopped, he heard two doors open and close in unison. Footsteps. Murmured conversation.
In his head, Alex couldn’t help but imagine what they were seeing. A crash site. A blood bath. Ransacked packages. Every tiny detail, every single hint which suggested people had been here, it screamed out and gave them away. A puddle of gas. A freshly torn piece of fabric. A newly adjusted wingmirror. All these minor changes which might give away their position.
Alex tried to push the thoughts from his mind before the terror overtook him. He remembered an old nursery rhyme, let the words echo through his head. Anything to think something else. An old tune, one which his mom had sung to him while he balanced on her knee on the porch. A safe time.
One, two,
Buckle my shoe.
The hiding spot was some twenty feet away. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Two men, in suits.
Three, four,
Knock at the door.
They walked from the black car to a spot just beyond the place where Alex had been standing five minutes earlier.
Five, six,
Pick up sticks.
Reaching out a toe, he twisted the mirror just enough to get them into view. One turned his head, hearing a sound.
Seven, eight,
Lay them straight:
The man turned back. Alex breathed out. The rest of the rhyme vanished into the ether of his mind.
Both men wore dark fatigues. One man wore sunglasses, the other carried a small steel briefcase. As the man with glasses looked around, his companion crouched down, opened the case and buried his hands inside.
From the briefcase came a device. Squinting, Alex struggled to recognize the shape. With practiced hands, the newcomer began to assemble and unfold rods and levers. Soon, he had fashioned the device into a miniature, portable satellite dish.
The man pressed a button and the dish began to swivel and move of its own accord. The man stood up to his full height, standing shoulder to shoulder with his companion. They looked alike, in a way. One was white with a thick mustache on his top lip, one black with a younger, clean-shaven face.
But their hair was trimmed to the same length, and their bodies shared a similar build. They wore the same officer-issue fatigues and their aura – the way their held themselves, Alex could see – was the same. Cut from the same cloth.
The man with the mustache spoke. His words fell away on the breeze. As the other man turned, his glasses surveying the tree line above, Alex noticed an empty space on the Kevlar vest where a name should have been.
As they shook their heads in harmony, the watching man adjusted his sunglasses. He stared down at the satellite dish. He kicked it. Not hard, but hard enough to raise one corner from the ground. A heavy device, Alex noted. It rocked and then began turning and spinning.
Together, the men looked over the road. A casual investigation. They found a medical pack, shook it open and noted what items had been taken. They touched the surface of the road. With binoculars, they scanned the steep forest ridge.
They searched. They studied. They hunted.
A breath had caught in Alex’s throat. His lungs creased, crying out for oxygen. He didn’t make a sound. He didn’t dare. Staring into the mirror, he saw both men pack up the satellite dish. They muttered. Even out of hearing range, their annoyance was obvious. Cursing, furious, they packed away their device.
The air slipped out of Alex’s nose. A long, slow whistle. He closed his eyes, unable to watch while he made a sound. When he breathed normally again, both men were back beside the car.
He heard the doors open. The men had slipped from sight. Reaching out a toe, his muscles straining, he nudged the mirror towards the car. The plastic scraped against the asphalt.
Alex
stopped moving. So did the men. The man with the glasses, hanging out the passenger’s side, turned his gaze down from the top of the slope to the burned-out cars all around him. His head turned with a slow fury.
As his neck rotated, sweeping the area, it stopped over the Jeep. He stared.
The muddied mirror had the man in the center. Staring. His view lingered. Alex waited. And waited. He willed his heart to stop, his blood to still in his veins, his hair to stop growing.
Any sound, he thought, any sound should stop.
Quiet.
Quiet.
The agent watched.
The glasses turned, training his stare elsewhere. Spotting nothing, the man ducked his head into the Cadillac and slammed the door shut. The engine started. They drove away.
* * *
Alex didn’t move. Not until the last rumble of the Cadillac had faded into the distance. The sharp metal curls of the underside of the Jeep dug into his back. He eased away, allowing himself to lean forward.
“Who the hell were they?” he asked Cam. “Feds? Military?”
No answers. Dropping his head into his hands, almost laughing, Alex breathed deep.
“Cam?”
Alex turned. Cam was sitting bolt upright, eyes boring a hole into the sloping bank ahead of them. The blood had drained from his face, the once-tanned skin now the color of cheap ceramic. His hands were gripped tight into two fists, the knuckles almost bursting through the skin.
“Cam?” Alex asked again, reaching out a hand to the man’s shoulder.
As soon as the hand touched, Cam reacted. He struck away Alex’s arm, scrambled to his feet, and began to search around.
“Leave me alone,” Cam shouted as Alex watched with worry. “Leave me alone!”
Alex stood up. Cam was struggling to stand upright, lunging all sorts of ways, his eyes staring a thousand yards each. Someone might hear him.
“Cam, it’s okay.” Alex took hold of the bigger man’s wrist, wrapping his empty arm around the shoulders. “They’re gone.”
Laboring his breath, Cam looked up into Alex’s eyes. Panic. Fury. Fear.
But he began to relax, his boiling energy settling into a simmer.
Still, he tried to swat Alex away.
“Leave me alone.” Cam stumbled and dropped to his knees, shivering. “Just leave me alone, please.”
Alex withdrew his hands, allowing Cam space.
“Fine, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”
As Cam rolled over from his knees, sitting with his knees bent and arms perched loosely on top, Alex came and sat beside him. Not too close.
They sat without a word.
After three silent minutes, Cam’s breathing had slowed. His head spent more time up than down.
“Let’s get back to the cabin,” said Alex. “The others will be wondering what happened.”
Cam nodded.
* * *
Not a sound was shared as they walked back. Just wind and tress and birds; ambient noises which littered the world like the leaves from the tress, blowing inconsequentially across their path. That charming Cam, the breezy, laid-back Southern man who’d crept up on Alex in the woods and smiled, seemed to have disappeared down the road with the Cadillac.
A shell had been left behind, a quiet vessel whose silence left Alex with nothing but his thoughts.
Cam seemed embarrassed, Alex told himself, shaken by the way the close encounter had gotten to him. He was supposed to be military, not a cowering wreck. If this was the kind of soldier the country was producing, then a war against China would be more one-sided than everyone thought.
But that wasn’t fair, Alex decided. Something had happened. Something which had shut Cam down completely. A bad thought, catching a switch as it passed by; a ghost in the halls of his memory. Whatever it was, it was bad enough to turn a strong, competent man into a shuddering husk. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it.
Alex had his own demons. The ring in his pocket, the furniture under the sheets in his parents’ farmhouse. The dead faces he’d left in his wake since leaving Detroit. He’d made his own mistakes, he had his own failings. Cam wasn’t alone in that respect. Not at all. Hell, that damn rhyme had snuck into his mind as the men had edged closer and closer. A time when he’d felt safe. Secure.
* * *
After two hours’ walk, all in silence, the occasional raised fist the only break in the monotony, Alex thought he recognized the area. Familiar rock formations. Fallen trunks, laid across certain paths that he’d seen before. It felt like they were almost back at the cabin.
That fist went up again. Alex stopped. Cam turned to face him, resting the jerry can of gasoline at his feet.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
“I’m listening,” said Alex, the weight of the backpack and the rifle becoming more and more apparent.
“We’ve got everything we wanted, right?”
“I guess so. The medicine was the most important, and we got that.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t get no food. Nothing to eat.”
“But we’ve got plenty of food-”
“Proper food, I mean. Something robust.”
As the two men talked, Alex was sure he saw something new in Cam’s eyes. Not fear, not fury. Those moments had passed.
This was different. Pleading, perhaps.
“Okay. What did you have in mind?”
“Rabbit.”
“Rabbit?”
“Just through those trees, trust me.”
So Alex did. Laying down their bags, taking the Savage, they walked where Cam had pointed. From behind the wall of trees, it had been impossible to see the clearing which opened up. Not huge. The size of a 7/11 parking lot. Grass rippled across the ground, caught by the breeze.
Cam stopped them just on the edge, motioning to lay flat. Alex did as he was told.
Pointing to his eye, Cam then pointed toward the rifle, then to the other side of the clearing.
Alex raised the gun, looking through the scope. Cam reached across and guided the barrel in the right direction.
There they were. Three rabbits: sitting, chewing grass, twitching their noses.
“There should be one much larger than the others. The male. That’s who we want.”
Cam’s words were hushed, barely audible over his breath. Alex found the rabbit. Laid the crosshairs over the animal.
“What if someone hears?” Alex asked, his finger thinking about the trigger.
“It don’t matter.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“But, what if-”
“Give me the rifle.”
Alex handed it across.
“Watch,” Cam told him, taking aim. The shot rang across the clearing.
Alex cupped his hand over his eyes, trying to see.
“You hit him?”
“Yep.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yep. Or he will be. Soon.”
“He never saw it coming.”
“Nope.”
Cam left the rifle on the ground beside Alex. He walked to the other side of the clearing, moving with speed. By the time Alex was on his feet, holding the gun and collecting the spent casing, Cam was already there.
Watching, Alex saw the man reach down to the animal and pick it up. The leg kicked out. The rabbit was still alive. Cam twisted his forearms quick. The kicking stopped. The man walked back.
There hadn’t been time to look away. Alex had heard the bones cracking from across the clearing. He’d heard bones crack before. People’s limbs. Screaming. A moment of casual violence brought it all back.
Stop it, Alex chastised himself. It’s just a rabbit. Rabbits die all the time. Hell, you’ve seen Dad shoot plenty of them. He forced himself to watch the dead rabbit swing from Cam’s hands as the man walked across the clearing. At one point, Alex knew, he was going to have to confront death. It wasn’t good to look away, not if he wanted to save his friends.
&nbs
p; Together, they walked back to the cabin. Cam hooked the two hind legs of the rabbit over one another, slinging the carcass over a strap of his backpack. The animal hung upside down, bouncing in front of Alex as they walked.
Gradually, Cam eased back into conversation. By the time they could see the wooden walls of the cabin again, he was almost his old self. Just before they stepped on to the porch, Alex reached out and tugged back on the man’s arm.
“Hey. Just before we go in. That – back there – whatever that was. You want to talk about it?”
Cam fixed Alex with his eyes. Flat. No more hints.
“No.”
And he stepped up on to the porch, rapped at the door, and entered. Alex watched him go and made sure to remember what he’d seen. Cam had his ghosts and he wasn’t going to share them.
Chapter 16
Skinning a rabbit was difficult.
Cam gave instructions, Alex watched, and Timmy wielded the knife. Joan, stating her nausea, retreated to the bedroom with Finn, working on his training. This was, Alex suspected, less caused by the blood than by the shouting and diminished space available when everyone tried to be heard in the kitchen.
The dead rabbit was placed on the countertop. Arrange it, Cam had said, as though it were sitting down and then pinch it at the back of the neck. Timmy had lifted the loose skin, slipped in the knife and made a slit from side to side while Alex watched, trying to remember whether he’d ever seen his father do this. It was a blank spot in his memory.
Spend too long trying to forget people, he thought to himself, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when those memories shrivel up and waste away.
Taking a hunting knife, heaving down hard, he cut off each of the feet at the spot above the knee. Next, the tail. The head was more difficult, Timmy announced. The thick neck muscles fought back.
With two fingers, narrating the whole time, Timmy reached in and under the fur. Spreading the hole he’d cut, he found room for all his fingers, gripped the inside of the skin, and pulled. Hard and slow, each hand moving away from the other along a straight line. Soon, he had two handfuls of rabbit fur.