Defender Cave Bear (Protection, Inc: Defenders Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “For not protecting you better. For losing control of my bear. I’m sorry as hell that you’re having nightmares about that.”

  “About that?” Tirzah gave an unexpected laugh. “Pete, you think my nightmare was about you?”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No! It had nothing to do with you!”

  “Oh.” Pete felt like an idiot. “I guess I’m so vain, I think the song’s about me.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Maybe I’ll have gargoyle nightmares later. But no, that was about… something else.”

  “You want to talk about it?” Pete asked.

  “I wish. I wouldn’t mind if you knew. I’d like you to know. But whenever I’ve tried, I… I…” She was sitting so close that he could feel her muscles tense and her breath come faster. “Goddammit. Just thinking about talking about it is making me feel like I’m about to have a panic attack.”

  “Maybe I could help.” Pete offered her his hand, palm up. He expected her to hesitate, but she seized it without taking so much as a second to think. At the touch of her skin, he again felt her rising panic like a cresting wave. He reached inside and pushed it back down.

  Tirzah gave a deep sigh, her tension easing. “Thanks. That’s better. Normally I have to try not to even think about it, or I start feeling like I’m back there.”

  Her panic threatened to spill over again as she spoke, but Pete kept a firm grip on it. “Don’t worry about that. I won’t let it happen. But you don’t have to talk about it.”

  “I want to. I like to talk, you know? I don’t tell people I know in real life about Override. But I talk to other people as Override, who don’t know about Tirzah.” She added, “By ‘talk,’ I mean I email.”

  Pete couldn’t help being amused by that. “I didn’t think you were meeting them for coffee.”

  Tirzah smiled too, but quickly grew serious again. “But this… It’s something nobody really knows about. I mean, I can tell them what happened in a couple sentences. But what I can’t talk about isn’t just what happened, it’s how it felt.” She swallowed hard. “That’s what my nightmares are about. That wasn’t the first one, you see. Ever since…”

  Once again, he had to shove down her fear. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

  “I know.” She turned her eyes up to his, brown and beautiful and trusting. “You’ve never asked why I use a wheelchair.”

  “It was none of my business.”

  “You weren’t curious at all?” She sounded disappointed.

  “Yeah, okay, I was. But you didn’t say, so I figured I shouldn’t pry.”

  “I guess I do enough prying for the both of us.”

  Pete squeezed her hand, then put his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled in close. He’d missed this kind of intimacy so much: not only physical touch, but holding someone, being held, talking late into the night about things that might be too hard to speak in the light of day.

  She swallowed. “Okay. Enough putting it off. You’ll catch me if I start falling, right?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

  TIRZAH’S STORY

  I love Refuge City, but sometimes it gets to be a bit much. All the noise. All the people. And I love my neighbors, but sometimes they get to be a bit much, too. So I have a place I go to take a break, be alone, and recharge. It’s a little cabin in the woods, in the mountains north of the city. You take the freeway out of town, then go up this mountain road, then up a dirt road.

  It has internet, of course, but no cell phone service. Sometimes I go there to concentrate on some really difficult hacking, sometimes I just go to relax. I like—I used to like the drive up there. It’s very green. Very quiet. If you’re on the road at twilight, you have to watch out for deer and wild turkeys.

  A year ago I drove up there to take a week or so to relax. Though actually, I ended up doing some hacking too. It was late fall and the autumn leaves were absolutely gorgeous. When I hit the time I’d meant to go back, I decided to stay for one more week. But I’d only bought enough groceries for two weeks—there’s a supermarket in the town at the base of the mountain, about an hour’s drive away—so I drove down to stock up.

  What I didn’t know was that there’d been a cold snap overnight. And there had been some water spilled on the road. It turned into a very thin, very slick sheet of black ice, and it didn’t melt because it was in the shade.

  That’s what I was told afterward. I never saw it.

  I’d just gone around a hairpin curve when my car hit something slippery and skidded. It seemed like everything was happening in slow motion. It was a narrow road along a cliff without a shoulder or guardrails or even a tree—nothing to stop me from going over the edge. I knew that if I couldn’t get control of my car back, I was going to die.

  I remembered not to slam on the brakes. I braked slowly and tried to steer around the corner. But the car just kept on sliding straight ahead. I remember thinking, “This isn’t a nightmare. This is real. I’m really going to die.”

  And then the car went over. It tumbled in mid-air. Everything inside the car was flying around and hitting me. I was listening to an audiobook, and it kept playing. To this day, if I ever see its title mentioned, I feel like I’m going to be sick.

  The car smashed into the ground, flipped over a few times, and then it slammed into something and stopped.

  I don’t know how long it was before I realized that I was still alive. The audiobook had stopped. At first I thought I’d been blinded, but then I realized that there was something over my face. I pulled it off—it was part of the seat cushion—and I could see again.

  The car was completely destroyed. All the windows were shattered, and big parts of it were just crumpled metal. The driver’s side door had been ripped off, and my legs were both out of the car. I knew as soon as I saw them that I’d never walk again.

  The car was in this dense thicket at the bottom of the cliff. There was no way anyone would’ve been able to see it from the top. And I’d emailed my neighbor who was watering a plant I had that I was going to stay another week, so no one would expect me back.

  My legs hadn’t hurt as long as I stayed still, but once I moved, they hurt so badly that I screamed. And then I started screaming and yelling at the top of my lungs, hoping someone would hear me.

  I screamed until my voice wore out. But I didn’t hear an answer. I hadn’t really expected one. There was no one living there—it’s just forest—and a car goes by maybe once every hour. The chances of anyone in that car being able to hear me were slim to none. I could either stay where I was and die there, or try to get back up to the road.

  So I crawled out of the car. It hurt like—I can’t even describe how much it hurt. I had to pull myself up a muddy slope with my hands. I’m stronger now than I was then—I actually get more exercise using the wheelchair than I used to do walking—but back then, I basically sat in a chair and typed all day. Trying to crawl on my belly up a steep hillside was excruciating and exhausting and awful. I think I cried the entire time, I was so sure I couldn’t do it.

  But I did.

  It took me all day and part of the night. Most of my clothes were ripped off by thorns and rocks and sharp bits of metal. I was hypothermic and dehydrated, and I’d lost a lot of blood. But I made it. I lay down by the side of the road and waited for help to come.

  When I saw the headlights, I tried to flag down the car. But I was too weak and exhausted to sit up. It drove right by me—never saw me. So did the next, and the next. There were no streetlights, and I was covered in mud.

  I finally dragged myself into the middle of the road. I figured the next car would either hit me or see me, and either way it’d be over. My guess was it’d hit me. Lying there in the road felt like lying on the train tracks. It was even more terrifying than falling had been, and it went on and on. Every time I heard a noise, I’d try to wave in case it was a car coming, b
ut it never was.

  Eventually I got so weak that when I heard a noise, I couldn’t move at all. I thought, “This is it. All that work and pain, and it was all for nothing. I should have stayed with the car.”

  That’s the last thing I remember. The next car did see me and stop, but by then I was unconscious. I woke up in a hospital a week later. I was so glad to be alive and between clean sheets and be able to lie down and not have to try any more, I can’t even tell you.

  The doctors told me I’d never be able to use my right leg again, and they weren’t sure about the left. They brought in a counselor to talk to me, but that didn’t go so well. See, she thought I’d be angry and grieving and all that stuff over being disabled. When I said I thought I’d deal with that just fine, she said I was in denial. I told her I knew myself better than she knew me, and she could kindly fuck off. Out she flounced.

  But I was right. I mean, adjusting to being disabled is no walk in the park—ha, it’s literally not a walk! I had to do a lot of hard, painful physical therapy to get any use of my left leg back, using a wheelchair is physically hard work and there’s a steep learning curve, once you can use it strangers treat you differently, and a lot of normal stuff is about 500% harder if you can’t walk.

  But the thing is, I already spent most of my time sitting down at home. I wasn’t an athlete or a hiker or anything like that. You can get almost anything delivered. I stayed with my family for a while and they helped me out, and when they started getting on my nerves I went back to my apartment and my neighbors helped me out.

  I tried going to another therapist once, but the exact same thing happened: he thought I was in denial over how upset I was about being disabled, and wouldn’t believe me when I said it was mostly just an big inconvenience. And when I tried to explain what was bothering me, I got a few words out before I started crying and hyperventilating, and he took that as proof that he was right and I was much more traumatized than I was admitting. So I walked out. Excuse me. I wheeled out.

  He wasn’t wrong that I’m traumatized. But he was wrong about why. Being disabled is just a thing I deal with. It’s not traumatic or horrible. What was traumatic and horrible was the crash. And getting up to the road. And watching the cars go by without them seeing me. And lying down in the middle of the road, knowing I might get run over, because I’d die for sure if I stayed where I was.

  That’s why I don’t drive. I physically could. I could drive with my left foot in a pinch, though it’s too weak for me to go long distances. So I bought a car with hand controls. And it’s been gathering dust in the garage under my building for almost a year, because every time I even think about driving, I feel like I’m falling.

  Oh, it’s great being a computer genius! I can earn whatever money I need any time I want to. So I own a car I can’t drive and a cabin in the country I can’t get to and a fantastic antique bed to have nightmares in, when I’m not staying up all night hacking because I’m afraid to go to sleep.

  CHAPTER 19

  I t wasn’t an easy story to tell, even with Pete lending her his strength: inwardly keeping her from panicking or flashing back, and outwardly in his steady regard and the solid warmth of his body. But nor was it as hard or terrible as she’d always imagined it would be. Once she was done, she felt that a burden had been lifted from her. She was still scarred, but she no longer staggered under the weight of the unspoken.

  His face had begun to darken with anger when she’d recounted her visit with the counselor. And when she finished, he burst out with, “I can’t believe those asshole counselors!”

  Tirzah was gratified to see his anger on her behalf. “So you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you!” He still looked royally pissed off. “What gets to people isn’t always what you expect. I’ve seen guys go through shit in combat like you wouldn’t believe, but what wrecks them is that their girlfriend broke up with them while they were gone. And I’ve seen them get told they’re in denial, too. People can be such assholes.”

  “Don’t I know it. You should see some of the stuff Override digs up. But I have to tell you… Thanks again. I feel so much better just having told someone this story.”

  “I’m honored that I was the one you told it to,” Pete said. “If you ever want to tell anyone else, I could… sit next to you, I guess. Like a therapy dog.”

  Tirzah giggled. She didn’t just feel better, she felt lighter. Free. “I could also take another crack at therapy. Call them up and ask them straight up if they believe what people say even if it sounds weird.”

  “And if they get on your case for asking, hang up on them.”

  “Good idea. The first time, I just made an appointment and marched on in.” She chuckled. “Really, the hardest thing about using a wheelchair is trying to figure out if I can still say words like ‘marched’ and ‘walked.’”

  Pete remained serious. With the utmost sincerity, he said, “You are one of the toughest, bravest people I’ve ever met. Crawling all the way up that hill, and then deciding to lie down in the middle of the road—that took a lot of guts, and it must’ve been absolute hell. I’m not surprised it left a mark on you. Think of your nightmares and panic attacks and being afraid to drive as battle scars, okay?”

  “But…” Tirzah knew he meant it, but on some level it was hard to believe. He was a combat veteran, and she was just a hacker who’d been in a car crash.

  “But nothing. Look.” Pete pulled up his shirt. Tirzah obediently examined his brown skin, his black hair, his six-pack abs, the swell of muscle beneath the bandages...

  He tapped a jagged white scar, and she guiltily forced her attention away from his body, or at least away from the sexy parts of his body. Not that the scar wasn’t sexy…

  “Night patrol,” Pete said. “Someone set up a low-tech booby trap with barbed wire, and I walked right into it.”

  “Ouch.”

  He bent his head, showing her the back of his neck. There were a few flecks like pale freckles. “Shrapnel. Anyway, my point is, I’m like you. The scars you can see aren’t the ones that bother me. Like you not being able to walk doesn’t bother you. It’s the ones on the inside that did the real damage.”

  She bit back the question that rose to her lips. He didn’t want to talk about it. Or did he? They were sitting together, side by side, in bed. He’d held her the whole time she’d told her story. He’d showed her his scars. He’d literally been inside her mind. It didn’t get more intimate than that.

  Maybe she should stop trying to sneak around and break through his walls. Maybe if she could get him to take a good look at them and think about why they were there, he’d take them down himself.

  “You know, Pete, you keep dropping hints that something really bad happened to you. When I ask you about it, you shut down. And then I feel guilty for asking.”

  “I don’t mean to make you feel guilty. There’s just stuff I don’t like to talk about.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed. And I know you’ve been in combat, and you were kidnapped and experimented on. I don’t know if it’s like me, where I could say what happened but not how it felt, or if there’s other things I don’t know about at all. But if you really don’t want to tell me, why do you keep hinting? Are you hoping if I pry hard enough, eventually I’ll break through?”

  Pete looked taken aback. He was silent for a long while, then said, “Maybe I was. But if I tell you, I don’t know what you’ll think about me.”

  “You care what I think about you?” Tirzah blurted out. “Sorry, that came out wrong. Me and my big mouth.”

  But he took no notice of the awkward way she’d phrased it. “Yeah. I care.”

  The golden glow from the reading lamp was the only light in the dark room. It made her feel like they were sitting around a camp fire. Like they were the only people in the world, huddled together against the cold.

  “I care too, Pete. I care about you. I hate to see you weighed down by all this stuff you feel like you can’t talk
about. I can’t give you the Shoulder of Strength, but I’ll give you my real shoulder.”

  She took his hand, and felt a shiver go through his body.

  “Okay.” His voice was husky, his head bent so his face was in shadow. “I’ll lean on you.”

  PETE’S STORY

  I started working as soon as I graduated from high school. I wouldn’t have even bothered to graduate, except high school dropouts have bad job prospects, and I had a family to support. I spent a couple years doing odd jobs, messengering, handyman stuff. My parents were both working, so me not having a 9-5 schedule was better for Lina—that’s what Caro went by then.

  Once she was old enough for preschool, I went into the police academy. I liked being a cop. Mostly. There was a lot of paperwork. But I liked being on the beat. This was in a pretty rough part of Los Angeles, so there was always a lot going on.

  I was working Narcotics when I noticed something weird. On some of the drug busts I’d done, the quantities of drugs I’d turned in that had gotten recorded in the file didn’t match with what I thought they were. And the recorded weight was always lower, not higher.

  I got suspicious. I got myself a scale and the next bust I did, I weighed the drugs myself before I turned them in. When I checked the file later, sure enough, the weight recorded was lower. Someone was falsifying how much had been turned in so they could skim off some of the drugs themselves, but nothing would seem to be missing from the evidence room. Like, ten pounds of coke was recorded as confiscated, and ten pounds of coke was in the lockup. Only it had really been thirteen pounds confiscated.

  I was furious, and I didn’t know who I could trust. So I did my own investigation, and it was so much bigger than I’d realized. It was a whole ring of corrupt cops in my division. Including my own watch commander. I’d really respected him, too.