“I didn’t mean any wounds,” Carl said, thinking she had misunderstood him. It had been a funny private joke to him before, but now he wished he’d kept it to himself. Something about the chatty, and stupid, girl just left him feeling awkward at times.
“I know,” she said, looking up and smiling without emotion. “Thanks for the clothes. I’ll wash them up when I’m done with mine.”
“Use the sink, the drain still works. I just ain’t fixed the plumbing yet,” he offered, feeling like he was walking on eggshells. It was a feeling he didn’t like, especially in his own house.
She nodded and turned back to it, pouring water from the jug into the sink after stopping the drain. She dumped her clothes into it and pushed them down, then began rigorously scrubbing them even though she had no soap. “I can’t bleed,” she said softly, and for no reason she could explain.
“Huh?” he asked again, not sure he heard her right because what he thought she had said made no sense.
She stopped and stared out a dusty window above the sink through which dirty light filtered. “My period – I don’t get one. I don’t have a uterus.”
Carl’s eyes widened briefly at her revelation. He suddenly wished he was back out cleaning off his solar cells and cameras. He wished he was anywhere, really, but there. “Oh,” he said, uncomfortably acknowledging her for lack of any idea how best to respond.
She turned and looked at him, some water darkening the brown fabric of her borrowed t-shirt from where she had splashed herself. “They took it,” she whispered, staring at him. “Took my womb and my finger and one of my tits.”
Carl really looked uncomfortable now. Jessie stared at him, not letting his gaze go, and reached up to grab one of her breasts in each hand. “They gave me these instead. Bigger, firmer, sexier. Some deal, eh? Make everybody think I’m sexy and hide the fact that I’m broken?”
“I’m sorry,” Carl muttered, realizing he needed to say something, to do something, to keep her from going off the deep end.
Jessie barked a quiet laugh at him. “You’re sorry? Why? For liking them? Don’t be, that’s why I got them. You want to touch them? Kiss them? Maybe slip your cock between them and fuck them?”
He walked around the table to her, seeing the moisture gathering in her eyes and the way she was trembling. She thought that maybe he did want to. She hoped he did, to remind her that she was good at something, that she was wanted, desired. Sure, having Dustin lust after her was great, but he was a kid. He’d lust after the skinny bitch of a sister he had if he had to. No, she wanted proof from a full grown man, a powerful man that knew what he wanted.
She grabbed the bottom of his shirt and started to pull it up She was almost to her head when his hands stopped her. She had seen them rising and assumed he was going to grab her boobs. Instead they rested on her shoulders and stopped her arms. He grabbed her hands and pulled them gently back down, covering her back up.
“Don’t you want me?” she whispered, her eyes pleading with him.
“Jessie,” he said, not knowing what he was supposed to say. “You’re a mess. You’re strung out, you’re confused, and you’re out of your element.”
She let his words hit her, taking them and feeling them roll over her, burying her in more misery. They reminded her of what she secretly fought against, telling her that she was the piece of trash her parents had called her.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you, whatever it was. Sorry you had to go through it even,” he added. “But I don’t pity you. You make out of life what you make out of it. You got choices. All of us do. Choose what you want to do with yourself – and not making a choice is still making one.”
He looked down at the watch on his wrist symbolically then said, “You keep this shit up you’re into now and you’re gonna run out of time.”
She stared at him, tears running down her cheeks. “You got it all figured out, don’t you?” she asked through a strained throat. “You the fucking expert on life?”
“No,” he said.
“So that why you hide out here? Not good at anything else?” she hissed at him.
“No.”
She stared at him, her tears drying up but her mind a circus of jumbled thoughts. She wanted to throw something at him or hit him or kick him or-anything to hurt him and make him realize that she needed him to want her. That’s all. She could just tell him. Ask him to hold her, to let her cry. To tell him…
“Fuck that,” she snarled, not even realizing she had said it aloud. She saw the confused look in his eyes and looked around, desperate for something.
“What about her? What’s that skinny bitch got that you want? Huh? I seen the way you look at her! Seen the smile she gives you. You tap that while I was passed out?”
He stared at her, the muscles in his cheek twitching. Then he regained control of himself after biting back whatever retort he had wanted to say. “She’s accepted control of her life. She’s not letting fate control her. I admire that.”
“She’s scrawny,” Jessie said, staring at the sleeping and injured girl.
“You ever tried gymnastics?” he asked. She just stared at him, confirming his suspicion. “You try her out when she gets better, you’ll be surprised. That kinda strength comes from inside. You show me that kind of strength-well, you just show me.”
She stared at him while he turned and headed off to use the bathroom. He shut the door loudly, waking up Dustin and Tanya both with a start. They looked around, confused, and saw Jessie standing in the kitchen in her borrowed clothes.
“Give me your clothes, I’m doing laundry,” she said, answering their unspoken questions with the only thing she could think of to keep them from complicating her life more.
Chapter 6
Marko Garza paused to wipe the sweat and dirt off his forehead, then replaced the nylon combat helmet and held the satellite phone closer to his ear. “No sir, no survivors,” he confirmed into it.
“Some of the bodies are torn up pretty bad,” Marko admitted after listening to his superior on the phone. “We’re in the identification process now. We’ve eliminated some looters, but in spite of that, the wreckage has been picked over pretty good. We don’t know who yet, but there are three MIA so far.”
The curse that came across the sat-phone did not even make Marko flinch. His boss was old school military, the best the United States Navy had put through their SEAL program in the 80’s and 90’s. That meant, to him, that he was a hard man who could fight, talk, and drink with the best of them.
“Yes sir,” Marko said smartly in response to another request. He paused a moment then asked, “I can’t imagine anyone surviving this, but if they did, we’ll get them back.”
Marko’s eyes widened as he listened to the response. When it was over he could only nod and say, “Yes sir, understood.”
Garza was left holding the phone and surveying the burned out remains of the crashed airplane. For the briefest of moments he began to wonder about the possibility of the missing bodies being survivors. He almost segued that thought into wondering about the mission, but stopped himself in time. He was just a lieutenant in Maelstrom Incorporated’s field team. He had orders to follow and orders to give. Besides, a man like Mr. Kurkova had the money, and the resources, to find out that nobody had survived the crash.
“Sir, we found some tracks. Something was dragged – we think it was a body.”
Cut loose from his wonderings, Marko looked at the new recruit that had spoken. It was Owen Sanchez, just a private, but a former US Marine. Marko had interviewed and hired him personally. He was impressed with the man’s tenaciousness, even if he seemed a bit stupid and bullheaded at times.
“Show me,” he said, pulling his re-breathing mask over his face to keep out the stinging dust. It served as a low grade radioactive scrubber too, in case there were still trace amounts of fallout from the bomb that had taken out LA in the area.
Sanchez led the former Mexican GAFE officer through the tor
n up and burnt out ground to the nose section of the fuselage. They walked past a few other men that were combing through the wreckage, some policing bodies and others trying to find items of worth to take back. A third group of two men could be seen off to the side, dragging the bodies of some looters they had encountered into a ditch.
“Here, sir,” Sanchez said, pointing to a break in the hull. “We figure one or two people pulled out a body and dragged it that way.”
“You find the body?”
“Not yet.”
Marko grunted and started walking in the direction of Owen’s finger. He saw one other man already ahead of him and recognized him as Private Michael Twotrees, a Navajo who had served in the Air Force as a clerk. Marko knew he had a lot more potential than pushing papers around, so he’d hired him quickly and it looked as though he was about to be thankful for his intuition about the man.
“Got something, private?”
Michael looked up from where he crouched. Seeing who it was, he straightened up and glanced around. Sanchez had followed them, but the next closest people were the two in the ditch nearly a hundred yards away.
“One, maybe two people walking, one being carried and dragged,” he said. “It’s been too long, too much wind and dust to know more.”
“So where’d they go?” Marko asked.
Twotrees stared off to the north and west. He shrugged, then said, “Found car tracks over there, but these aren’t headed that way. Not much cover here either, too thin to hide in for long.”
Marko nodded, knowing the Native American was taking his time before giving an answer so he could be sure he agreed with what he said. He also knew that most people knew what they were going to say before they said it, even if they didn’t realize it themselves.
“Mike, can you track them?”
Twotrees continued to look around, as though he had not heard the man. Then he nodded his head towards the same wash that the two men were climbing back out of, now that they had disposed of the bodies. “I wanted to get away, I’d use that creek bed.”
“That don’t make sense,” Sanchez said with a harsh chuckle. “If they wasn’t with the car, why would they go towards it? Ain’t nobody dumb enough around these parts to expect help from a stranger – especially out here!”
With barely more than an annoyed glance at the man, Twotrees nodded. “I can track them. They’ll be injured and moving slow.”
Marko nodded. He looked at the two of them, then saw the two men from the wash heading their way. He waved them over, causing them to jog through the miserable wind and heat of the California mid-day sun. “Javier, take Kevin and Owen with you. Private Twotrees is tracking some looters-or worse. Give him your support. If you come back without any bodies, you’ll need to take me out and show me what happened, got it?”
“Yes Sir!” Corporal Javier Garcia replied, snapping to attention and saluting. Marko scowled at him, causing the man to drop the salute quickly.
“Don’t ever let me catch you saluting in the field again,” he warned. “You just put a target on my head.”
“A sniper?” Sanchez asked, laughing again at the thought. “Out here?”
Marko wheeled on him. “Maybe, maybe not. You want to take the chance?”
His grin faded as he put together the implications of what Marko had told him. He nodded and said nothing. Garcia also had the good sense to look chastised. Of them all, only Kevin Chambers seemed aloof. He had the least training of any of them, having only been a civil patrolmen at Mexicali for three years. In spite of no formal military training, he had at least been smart enough to keep his mouth shut and not make an ass of himself.
“We have three MIA from the crash still, so I need three bodies that will match the passenger list. Sounds like this may be three of them-find them.” Marko ordered, glancing at his men a final time then turning and heading back to the crash site.
* * * *
The squad from Maelstrom made good time through the gully. Michael easily tracked Jessie, Tanya, and Dustin up to the point where Jessie led them out of the wash and back onto the more windswept ground. Here they slowed to a crawl. The Navajo kept double checking the signs, making sure he was seeing real tracks and not making them up in his head.
“Jesus Christ, chief, you know what you’re doing or what?” Owen called out at one point nearly an hour after they had left the dried out stream bed behind. The ex-marine was anxious to prove himself better than their tracker, especially after Michael’s hunch about using the wash had proven true.
Michael ignored him, taking a little extra time to push his anger at the man’s belligerent words from his mind. Seeing no trouble brewing yet, Javier said nothing as well. The lack of response from anyone, however, only served to add fuel to Owen’s fire.
“Let’s go Pocahontas. You take much longer and maybe we can catch them on their way back,” he said a few minutes later when Michael paused again to kneel down beside some rocks that had been turned over and showed signs of scraping against one another.
The Navajo turned to look at the man, a smoldering anger in his eyes. “You want to do this?” he hissed at him.
Owen laughed loudly, trying to draw in the others to his side. He glanced at them and saw no support forthcoming. “Shit no, that’s your job. Just wish you were good at it is all.”
“Sanchez, stand down,” Javier said, stepping up to him and holding out his hand. “We’re on the same team, remember?”
“Team? Shit! Ain’t nothing out here but looters and freaks,” Owen grumbled. “It’s hot and shitty, and if Geronimo here could do his job, we’d be back home.”
Michael lunged, surprising everyone. Owen reacted enough to only let the Native American’s fist graze his chin, but it still sent him stumbling back. Twotrees pushed after him, but was held in place by the silent Chambers, who grabbed him awkwardly from behind. Corporal Garcia stepped in front of the former marine again, staring up at him slightly as he tried to push past him to get at the tracker.
“I said stand down!” Garcia shouted in his face. “We got a mission to finish and a paycheck to cash. You got a problem, you deal with it off the clock, got it?”
Owen tore his eyes from Michael’s, then stared hard at Garcia for a long minute. Finally he spat on the ground and pulled himself away. “You and me got a date, Geronimo,” he growled.
Kevin had to pull on Michael’s gear to keep him from getting loose and attacking again. Javier turned to glare at him as well. The Navajo stared back, then finally allowed himself some calming breaths before he nodded once, curtly, and turned back away.
Turning around, Michael froze and Kevin walked into him. “Hey, what!” he exclaimed.
The landscape before them was shades of tan and light brown. The colors of a windswept desert. Broken rocks, dirt and gritty sand crunched beneath their feet as they walked. Ahead of them lay swells and dips in the ground, as well as skeletal bushes and random rocks. Two rocks, side by side and less than a dozen feet away from them, had a stick protruding from the top of them, resting in the cleft formed where they lay against one another. The stick only resembled a stick at a casual glance. It was too straight, the twigs and bark on it too scarce and too random. Following the stick back to the rocks revealed another rock behind them, this one softer and made up of varied desert hues.
“You got to the count of three to turn around and go away.”
Javier stared, seeing what he saw but still having trouble identifying the shape behind the barrel as a man. He moved, just a little, and it helped him identify the patterns. The corporal realized instantly that he was wearing a gilly suit adapted for the desert. “Who are you?” he asked, stepping around Kevin and Michael quickly to address the man that had gotten the drop on them.
Owen had a few choice words he wanted to share when he saw the man, but the memory of the recent berating he received from Marko about a possible sniper left him speechless.
“You’re on my land,” the sniper said with C
arl’s trademarked deadpan voice. “Leave.”
“Didn’t see no signs,” Owen said, over-compensating for the bladder tightening urge he had felt. He walked up and raised his gun, pointing it at the survivalist.
Javier held out his hands, frustrated again at how the situation was deteriorating. He had to have a talk with Marko about the loud mouthed recruit that caused nothing but trouble. “Nobody wants any trouble, stranger. We’re just tracking some people and trying to make sure everything gets back where it belongs. You see three people come through here? One of them wounded maybe?”
“I saw ‘em,” he said. “What’s it to you?”
“We need to make sure they didn’t take anything. Got reason to believe they might have stolen something important,” Javier said. “Just tell us where they went and how far ahead of us they are.”
“They didn’t have shit with them,” he said. “Not moving too good either, but they was okay. This got anything to do with a plane crash?”
“You talked to them?” Javier said, eyes narrowing and his hand gripping his rifle a little tighter.
“Let’s just fucking shoot him, we’re wasting time!” Owen snapped.
“Who do you work for?” Carl asked, ignoring Owen’s threat.
“We’re with Maelstrom,” Javier said, also ignoring the private but vowing to see that he was fired or disciplined when they got back. “Might be something in this for you if you help. Did you talk to them? Did they survive the crash?”
“What you going to do with them?”
Javier frowned. “Look friend, it’s four guns to one. Time you started answering my questions, not asking your own.”
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