by JA Huss
I’m not getting stuck on this mountain. I’m not. Once I’m in, I’m all in. I’ve never been someone who changes their mind once I hatch a plan. And quite frankly, I’m not up to witnessing the disappointment on Brett’s face if he finds out I tried to run and failed.
The tires slip to the right, making me correct the steering, and then they find purchase on some stones or twigs and the truck lurches forward. The snow mound acts like a ramp and then I’m flying through the air. A moment later the front end crashes into the ground and I am thrown forward, my head hitting the airbags so hard I see stars.
Chapter Two - Merc
“Limits are for finding strength. Push yourself until you can’t move… and see what happens.” – Case
There comes a time in every soldier’s life when they realize—all this bullshit is bigger than them. You are small. They are big. You are weak. They are strong. You are dead. They live on.
I picture myself standing out in a vast desert surrounded by nothing but sand on all sides. There’s a crashed plane nearby, smoking.
I’m in uniform, desert fatigues. But they are ripped from the crash. My body is burning from the sun and the pain. My lips are cracked and dry. Water is the only thing on my mind because that’s how you get through as a soldier. You only think of survival.
The problem with survival for most people is that it’s overwhelming.
I’m not most people.
When others see nothing but sand, I squint and see the outline of a mountain range hidden in the mirage of the desert heat.
When others feel their throats closing up as the dry wind whips past their face and threatens to choke them, I picture kissing a woman’s lips, still wet and cool after taking a refreshing drink of water.
When others realize this bullshit is bigger than they ever imagined and all they want is to go back home and fuck their girlfriends and drink beer, I remind myself there is no girlfriend. There is no back home. There is only me.
Other people walk away.
Other people give up.
Other people forgive and forget.
I am not other people. I am Merc and there are three things you should know about me.
Number one. You might be bigger, but I will last longer.
Number two. If you fuck me, I fuck everything you ever loved.
And number three. I never lose. My victory is only delayed.
The tracking app dings in my hand and then a light appears. A smile cracks before I can stop it. Because how fucking perfect am I? I know her so well. And after almost eight years of careful observation and planning, I should.
I tab a graphic on my phone app and pull up a satellite view. It’s real-time. Because while this bitch has been running her little country western bar in Cheyenne, planning cute little theme nights and trying to forget that she was once under the control of a ruthless man, I’ve been accumulating wealth, gathering technology, and feeding my desire for vengeance. I have all the tools. If revenge is a journey, then I’m well-supplied for it. I have anything and everything I want or need to pull off one last job before I disappear for good.
And it all starts now.
I check the laptop in the passenger seat, also showing the drone feed in real-time, and watch as it changes direction when she leaves the parking lot of the lodge that is heavily covered by ancient conifers. A few keystrokes later and I’ve got a pretty good bird’s-eye view of her truck as it turns onto the only road leading in and out of the almost deserted resort.
I knew back in June she’d run. I knew because she changed the wedding date four times. This was her last chance to settle down. And if she had, I might’ve called that a victory in and of itself and found another way to finish this job.
But—I let a smile crack—I’m so glad she didn’t. Her black truck winding down the mountain road is the only reminder I need of who and what she really is.
Sydney Helena Channing. Company kid. Use her, abuse her, and she always comes back for more. If the girl has a motto, that’s it. That’s the girl I’ve come to know and hate as I watched and waited patiently for all the many pieces to fall into place. Tonight is the first move of the endgame. And I’m about to put her motto to the test.
Sydney is the one who started this for me. Yeah, maybe the senator was the one who set me up—but there’s no way I’d have taken the job on Christmas Eve if a teenage girl wasn’t involved.
Channing knew that. He fucking knew that.
I grit my teeth and force myself to push the past away. What’s done is done. The present is coming up on me in a black truck showered in white flakes.
Almost eight years. That’s how long it took for this moment to arrive.
I light up a cigarette and roll the window down, letting in the frigid mountain air. The snow is picking up, and good God, could this night be any more perfect to pull this off?
I glance down at my phone tracker again and my heart rate jacks up a little with anticipation.
Today I get full access. For the first time in years, full, unobstructed access to her. But that’s not all I’m going to get. No, not by a long shot.
Her headlights wind down the mountain and a few minutes later there she is. She guns her truck to get through a heaping pile of snow. It’s hiding a tree that spans the whole width of the road.
No cars in. No cars out.
The resort is closed and so are the roads. Guests arrived two days ago and aren’t due to leave until after the wedding.
If there was a wedding. I’d usually feel a little guilty about taking a woman the night before her wedding. But not this woman and not this wedding.
I’m not the one running. She is.
The truck doesn’t plow through the snow like it should, like she expects. The hard-packed snow underneath the innocent-looking pile shoots her straight into the air.
I appreciate the beauty of a two-ton projectile completing a mid-air arc as it flies towards me and then gravity takes over and pulls her back down to earth front-end first. The crunching of metal almost drowns out the hiss of airbags being released, and then the mountain goes quiet. The only sound is the muted music coming from her radio.
A song I know well. A song she knows well too.
I smile at that. I smile at the crashed and smoking truck on the snow-covered road. I smile at all of it.
I open the door of my truck, and that little annoying alert dings through the stillness. I ignore the open-door alert and step out. My steel-toed boots crunch in the snow as I walk towards the tree, and then I place a hand on the frozen bark and hop over it, listening for her moans.
But what I get instead is swearing. “Fucking shit!”
Perfect. It would’ve really sucked if the crash had killed her before I got my chance to end this properly.
I wait as one gloved hand reaches outside of the broken window of the driver’s side door and pulls the handle. The truck is tilted at an angle, so she tumbles out onto the snow in a heap. “Shit,” she groans.
I watch silently as she gathers herself up onto her knees, and then, after a few wobbly seconds, she rises to her feet. She huffs out a long breath of air and wipes her brow, covering her hand with blood.
“Fuck.” Her head comes up and searches around and she stops dead as she realizes I’m standing about twenty yards off. “Hey,” she yells. “Did you see that?”
I say nothing, simply reach into my pocket.
“Can you help me?”
I raise my gun and squeeze the trigger, hitting her square in the left shoulder.
She flies backward into the snow, not even a scream.
I walk towards her slowly, taking my time and looking around for any sign of headlights in the distance, but there are none. We are completely alone tonight.
I stop a little way off and watch her body in the snow. Her arm jerks a few times, a dark patch appearing underneath her, and then I check my watch and wait three minutes before walking out to pick up my trophy.
When I get to h
er blood-covered body her eyes are closed and her mouth is open. I grab the rope from my pocket and tie her legs first, then her hands. And then I hike her small body up over my shoulder and walk back to my truck bed. I open the tailgate, pull the lever that keeps the bed cover in place, and it rolls back to give me enough room to lay her down on top of the tarp. I wrap her limp body up, and then roll the cover back over the top of the bed and lock the tailgate closed.
Done.
Well—I laugh—she’s done. But I’m certainly not.
The snow is coming down harder now, and I estimate that all evidence of my truck and footprints will be covered in about twenty minutes. Long before anyone at the resort realizes the bride-to-be is gone. Long before they realize they can’t drive down the mountain because of the fallen tree trunk. Long before they call—well, I laugh out loud at that thought.
People I target don’t call the police.
They call killers.
Like me.
I get back in the truck and put her in gear, upping the heater since it’s damn cold out. Poor Syd will be shaking pretty good when the tranquilizer wears off. But she’ll be shaking more from the fear than the cold by the time that happens.
Chapter Three - Sydney
Eight Years Ago
“That feeling? When your mind is blank and your heart is empty. And then you have to pick up that gun and do your job. You mean that feeling? Yeah, I know it. It’s called giving up.” - Sydney
“Sydney?”
I lie there on the ground, listening to the retreating womp-womp-womp of the helicopter, willing this not to be my reality.
A boot to the ribs tells me that’s pointless.
I turn my head towards Garrett, pain radiating up through my chest, and find his face. He’s got his leg back, ready to deliver his foot to my body again, when he stops.
I swallow and close my eyes.
“Tell me he was lying.”
“He—” My throat is dry and my words falter.
Garrett kneels down and grabs me by my jacket, pulling me up and shaking me hard at the same time. “Tell me. He was lying.”
“He was lying,” I whisper. And he was. “I never did anything. I have no idea who he is!”
“You were leaving,” Garrett says. Usually Garrett is a raging asshole when I piss him off. But he’s so calm now. He’s so calm this scares me even more and my whole body starts shaking. “You were running away, weren’t you?”
I swallow again and then before I know what’s happening, I piss myself. The heat leaks between my legs and I start to cry. I just close my eyes and start to cry.
I don’t know how long I stay like that, but the next thing that happens scares me even more than the threat of his boot.
Garrett picks me up and holds me in his arms. I never open my eyes, not even when he places me in the truck and drags the seatbelt across my chest, clicking it into the lock. He shuts the door and walks over to the driver’s side and gets in. Starts the truck. And we drive off.
We drive for hours. The sun comes up behind us and we’re still driving. Going west.
Hours later we pull off the main highway and take a dirt road. That’s when I speak. “You’re going to kill me.” It’s not a question.
“I was,” Garrett says. “Before last night.”
I can’t even muster up a sob.
“But—” He stops. Just stops. Never starts up again. And I don’t push it. I just sit quietly, listening to the song he’s playing on the stereo, letting it calm me, until we finally come to a rest outside a cabin.
I reek of piss, but my pants have long since dried and my bladder is full again, even though I haven’t had anything to drink in the six hours we’ve been on the road together.
Garrett turns the truck off and we sit in silence for a few seconds. A ticking noise from the engine is the only sound.
“We live here now.” And then he gets out and walks around to the passenger door. He opens it for me and then unbuckles my seat belt. “Can you walk?”
I look up at his face and try to find the anger. The hateful, evil, and sadistic man I have come to know. But all that is missing right now.
Garrett reads my silence as a yes and tugs on me until I swing my legs out and stand up. My back hurts. My ribs hurt from where he kicked me. My face hurts from where that assassin punched me.
“Just kill me,” I say, looking up at Garrett. “Just kill me and let me die. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I don’t blame you,” he says. “If I was you right now, I’d feel the same way. Even if I didn’t know what was gonna happen next.”
And then he turns around and walks away, leaving me standing there. He climbs the front porch steps to the small hunting cabin, opens the door without using a key, and walks inside, closing the door behind him.
The wind picks up and reminds me it’s winter.
I wrap my arms around myself and shiver.
I do the only thing I can. I follow him in.
Chapter Four - Sydney
“He always told me that the secret to staying alive was stillness. I’ve seen it in action too many times to disagree.” - Sydney
I wake up and immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m blind.
No, it’s just dark. It’s the definition of pitch black.
I squirm and realize I’m tied up. My hands are secured to whatever it is I’m lying on. My legs are spread apart, also secured, and the ass of my jeans is wet.
I smell the piss and realize that’s where the memory came from. I’m living in a time loop.
No. This is the present. I was in my truck, running away from my wedding to Brett. But there are too many similarities between now and then, so my mind is revisiting them.
Shrink talk. That’s what that is. But it’s true, I can feel it.
I’m a prisoner again.
Has there ever been a day in my life when I was not someone’s prisoner?
Don’t get on your high horse now, Syd. You signed up for this.
I did, I remind myself. I did. But if your last name is Channing, even if it’s a secret, then what choice do you have?
Excuses.
I try to swallow, but my throat is so dry, I can’t make it work. So I do nothing. I don’t move, or struggle, or scream.
It’s no use. I know this.
So I do the only thing I can do. I slip back into my old habits. I go inside myself, looking for the darkness that is even blacker than my reality.
And it comes easily.
It’s a summer day. The dry wind is hot as it blows across my face, but the humidity from the river flowing nearby counteracts it. Makes everything perfect.
“You ready to learn to fish?” Garrett asks me. “I can’t always take care of you, Syd.”
I smile at him. He’s so fucking handsome standing there in the water up to his knees. He’s wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else. His chest is muscular and tanned to just the right level of bronze. The river splashes up against his legs and some of it reaches his lower torso. I follow the drips as they make their way into his waistband, the weight of the water tugging it down a little, revealing that little happy trail of hair that I love so much.
“Hey, Syd?” he says with a grin. “Eyes on my eyes.”
I do find his eyes. They are a dark green from where I stand. But they are bright in all the ways that count. “I’m ready,” I say.
He grins at me and casts out his fly, talking me through all his motions. I can’t even begin to understand what he’s trying to teach me. Or, I mean, I could. Probably. But he’s so handsome, I lose all thoughts of fishing and concentrate on how his muscles move as he weaves the line back and forth into the air.
A fish takes his bait almost immediately—this place is a fly-fisherman’s wet dream—and then he’s laughing. “That was too easy. Now you try.” He reels in and unhooks the fish and tosses it onto the bank, and then extends his hand, asking me to join him.
I take it and let him guide me ou
t onto the rocky shoreline of the Yellowstone River. The water isn’t too deep, but it runs fast up here.
I slip on a rock, but Garrett catches me before I fall. “Easy,” he says, as I gather myself. “The water’s too cold for a swim today, Syd.”
“Sorry,” I say, straightening out my lifejacket.
“You OK?” he asks me in that gentle voice he uses when he knows I’m out of my comfort zone. “Ready for this?”
I nod. “I am.” And then I laugh. “I’m tired of watching. Well…” I blush and correct myself. “Not really tired of watching you fish. But it really does look fun.”
“It is,” he says, kissing me on the cheek.
The blackness is back and my throat is drier than ever after the memory of the cool river. I reach up and touch my throbbing face and realize I’m no longer tethered down.
Someone was in here with me. Who? I rack my brain. How many enemies do I have?
My laugh bursts out into the darkness and then resonates in my head like an echo as the stillness settles back in. The blackness is overwhelming and my breathing spikes as the familiar panic starts to take over.
No. Not now, Syd. “Hush,” I tell myself. “Hush.”
I take long draws of air into my lungs, willing the fear away like a pro. I don’t know how long it takes for my own heavy breathing to allow the small sound to creep into my consciousness, but one second it’s not there, and the next it is.
Dripping water. My throat tightens up as I imagine what it would be like to drink again.
I sit up and stave off the wave of dizziness, but my head spins for minutes before I can swing my legs over the side of the hard wooden platform. I lean over and close my eyes tightly, not sure why this helps, since I can’t see anything anyway. But it does help.
The dripping is coming from the right. I reach down with a foot and find the floor, then drop to my knees and crawl in that direction. I reach out in front of me, but the room is empty save for a drain in the middle of it. Why would there be a drain here?