by Joshua Guess
“Oh, my god,” said the other guard, the woman.
She leaned against the rear doors, right arm and shoulder noticeably lower. Broken clavicle, Kell guessed, and badly given how misshapen her upper chest was. Her left arm reached over instinctively, drawing a loud hiss of pain from her as it shifted the broken bones, but she kept pawing for the pistol on her hip.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Kell said, a dubious statement considering where he stood. “If you stop trying for that gun, I won’t kick you in your broken collarbone. Believe me, it’ll make you want to die.”
He said it without heat, his voice streaked with pain. It was always hard to tell whether people heard resolve in his tone or just a flat, dead statement. Every word was sincere, however. As much as he didn’t like the idea, he’d take the fastest and most effective route to safety the situation gave him.
The woman let her hand fall.
“Good,” Kell said. “We’ve got a problem. I want my hands free, but I don’t want to turn my back so you can cut these ropes. If I can walk away without having to kill you, I’d like to. Any ideas?”
She waved her good hand at the body beneath Kell. “He has a knife on his belt if you can crouch down and get it.”
The pain in Kell’s legs was only getting worse, no longer solely a deep ache. Sharp, jagged lines of it crept through them like broken glass. He was fairly sure some major things were wrong in there. Bone chips, maybe. Standing was taking a toll, though he tried hard not to show it. Crouching was out of the question.
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” he said. “Okay, we’re going to have to trust each other a little. You’re going to slowly reach across and remove that gun with two fingers. Only two fingers. Then you’ll toss it by my feet. Do I need to make threats about what happens if you try to shoot me?”
Her eyes darkened with anger. “No, goddammit. How do I know you won’t just do it anyway?”
“Because I haven’t already,” Kell said, as if the answer was obvious. “Did you hit your head? If I wanted to do that, I’d just hurt you and then do what I did to this guy. Yes or no?”
She nodded, again hissing through her teeth with pain, and raised her hand with thumb and forefinger extended. Kell held his breath as she worked, teeth clenched, to remove the pistol.
When it was done, he kicked the gun behind him so it was well out of the way.
“Now what?” she asked.
Kell stepped back a few inches. “You hand me the knife while facing me. You’ll have to reach around and put it in my hands. After I’m free, we’re done. You can wait around for your friends and I’ll go look for mine.”
Even as he said it, he wondered if it was true. The minutes since the crash drained him. Fortunately the guard was scared enough, hurt enough, or both not to try anything. Rational self-interest was a reliable wedge to use in negotiation.
Kell’s belly fluttered when she pushed herself to a mirror of his own hunched standing position and handed the knife over. Reminding her he would slam his considerable mass into her shattered torso was unnecessary, but blind terror made him want to anyway.
The ropes were paracord, tough but thin. It took thirty seconds of awkward sawing and more than one shallow cut across his wrists to free himself.
“Ah,” he groaned. The circulation and release of tension sent pins and needles through every muscle in his arms, chest, and upper back. After the feeling began to come back, he fished the pistol from where he’d kicked it.
The female guard locked her eyes on the gun like a guided missile. The expression on her face was one of fear tinged with something else; a species of smug satisfaction that took Kell a few tries to parse out. She thought he was going to kill her after all. It was the expression of someone convinced they were right regardless how bad that certainty was for them.
No longer leaning against him, the woman sighed and closed her eyes. She looked resigned and powerfully tired.
Kell tucked the gun into the back of his pants, snatched the cooler full of samples in one hand, and opened the door with the other.
Mason
No matter how many times he rode in the swaying, dangerously unstable RV while it barreled down highways at truly suicidal speeds, Mason never got used to it.
Ten minutes into their mad dash to find Kell, they stopped. The first wave of reinforcements had appeared, a troop of scouts on motorcycles. Emily traded places with one of them and sped off ahead as the rest of the group just began to move.
The woman whose motorcycle Emily ran off with sat near Mason in the RV but didn’t seem concerned when Mason worried aloud that they’d lose Emily if she got too far ahead.
The scout, who had introduced herself as Beth, shook her head. “It’s not a problem. All our bikes have longwave radio beacons. We carry tracking systems, too, though we have to stop to use those.”
Mason was impressed. “That’s pretty clever. Where’d you guys find those?”
“We didn’t,” Beth said. “There’s a guy who used to do electrical design work for a military contractor. He put the systems together once we found components. I think most of it is re-purposed stuff that did the same thing but for boats.”
Mason could almost feel his blood pressure drop to sane levels. Sure, they’d have to stop and probably triangulate a position, but at least they’d be able to find Emily if things got bad. The little reminders how far things had come since the truly bad times when people had to survive without the safety of walls or technology of any kind were hitting him more frequently. Maybe he’d eventually get used to it.
“Will is mobilizing the militia,” Beth said a few minutes later. “I forgot to mention that. Sorry. They’ll follow us as soon as they can get bodies in vehicles. We’ll get your friend back.”
Mason nodded but didn’t engage. He could hear the curiosity in her voice, understandable since most people had no idea who Kell was or what he was working on. Knowing reinforcements would follow the trail of flares the scouts dropped at regular intervals helped, too.
One thing he would never get used to was the intense worry he felt for other people. Put him in a firefight? Cool. No problem. Drop him off a few miles from shore, force him to swim the rest of the way, and then carry out a critical mission? Sure.
Fear—real, primal fear—only crept into him when someone he cared about was in danger beyond his control. It wasn’t panic, which Mason had eliminated from himself years ago, but a distant cousin. A ghostly, nebulous worry that he wouldn’t be there in time or make the right call.
“Shit,” Hal spat from the driver’s seat. “Emergency flare!”
Mason moved to front and looked through the windshield. Sure enough, a red spark lit the sky in the distance. That had to be Emily, and if she was sending up a signal where she was, it meant she’d found Kell or found bad guys.
“Let’s hope she has him,” Mason said. “If the bad guys are close enough to see that, they’ll be hauling ass to check it out.”
From right behind him, Beth spoke up. “If she had him wouldn’t she put him on the back of her bike and move. Without, you know, letting everyone within twenty miles know where she is?”
Mason had thought of that. “Yeah. She would have.”
“She might be trying to signal Kell,” Hal said. “We’ll be there in a minute. Looks like it’s just over this hill.”
The scene they rolled to a stop in front of was not what Mason expected. Emily stood over a prone body in front of an overturned van, everything lit by guttering flares. He was out the door almost before the RV stopped.
“Where is he?” Mason shouted as he ran forward. “He’s not…still in there?”
He stopped himself from asking if Kell was dead. The person on the ground seemed to be in bad shape, and Emily fidgeted with what he knew was barely-contained rage. Best not to strike the spark on that powder keg if it could be avoided.
“He’s not here,” Emily said. “She says he left a few minutes ago. Took the sa
mples with him.”
The woman on the ground nodded emphatically. “I didn’t see where he went. He was gone by the time I dragged myself through the door.”
Wrecked in the middle of the road on the north-bound lanes, the van at least gave them a point of reference. Mason stepped to the edge of the road near the woods—it was unlikely Kell would have crossed the median, wanting to get beneath cover as quickly as possible—and looked for signs. He found them immediately.
“Em, he went this way,” Mason said. “Someone walked through this grass. He’s in the woods.”
“You’re sure?” Emily asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Grass this tall doesn’t spring back easily. We’re going to have company really soon. What’s the call?”
Emily pursed her lips. “If he was close enough to see us, he’d be here. Damn it. Okay, if you can track him, do it. I’ll take care of things here.”
Mason heard the sharp edges in the words, but didn’t hang around to listen to details.
Generally speaking, running through the woods in the dark was a terrible idea. Doubly so if the area was unfamiliar. All it took was a small lapse in attention and you were likely to step in a hole and break your ankle or run right off the edge of a cliff you didn’t know was there. On the spectrum of interesting ways to die, doing a Wile E. Coyote was deeply nestled in the dumb slice.
Being killed by a friend was close to it, so Mason shouted Kell’s name with the regularity of a metronome. In between he looked for signs of passage. This was harder than what he’d done with the grass, but a man as large as Kell running for his life wasn’t exactly a forest spirit, leaving every twig untouched.
“Mason?”
He stopped, trying to figure out where the harsh whisper came from. “Yeah, it’s me. I can’t see you.”
“I’m up here,” Kell said in a tight voice.
A large shadow stirred in the darkness of a tree’s lower branches to Mason’s right. He walked over and looked up, letting his eyes adjust as best they could to the much lower light. “Are you hurt?”
“Very much so,” came the reply. “I barely got up here. I think the wreck did more damage than I realized. My legs barely work. That’s why I climbed the tree.”
As his vision clarified, the details became disturbingly clear. Sweat streamed down Kell’s face, highlighting the tension in it. Clenched jaw, deepened lines around his mouth and eyes. The way he sat on the branch above, arms extended and muscles bunched to support and balance him. His legs dangled, not dead but clearly in bad shape. Mason had once had his own legs beaten until they turned black with bruises. It had been a week of hobbling after, everything below the waist feeling like one giant knot.
The memory reminded him that he wasn’t fully fit at the moment, hip twinging as he shifted his weight. “We need to move. If we’re very lucky, we can get out of here before we have to start shooting people.”
“Okay, coming down. Here, grab the cooler first.”
Mason took it and stepped back, ready to help if needed. Kell unfolded himself carefully, straining to lower his weight slowly enough not to overload his upper body and fall. When he dropped to the ground, his legs gave out and he fell into a sprawl.
“Goddammit!” he shouted. Mason winced sympathetically and put out a hand.
“Normally I’d say I could carry you if it came to that, but you’re big and my leg is kind of fucked up,” Mason said, slipping himself beneath Kell’s arm and reaching across his chest to grasp the dangling wrist with his free hand. “I’ll carry the cooler. We’re going to walk in sync to make this easier, so move with my count, okay?”
Kell nodded, the desperate pain in his face giving the movement urgency.
The cadence came easily. Left, right, repeat.
They weren’t far from the road when the filtered sounds of vehicles began to echo through the woods. It was more than the hum of scout motorcycles. This was a symphony composed of a distant but approaching group of cars or trucks, tires singing against the pavement. Mason picked up the pace, Kell huffing out labored breaths as he struggled to keep up, and fervently prayed they would get to the RV before the shit and the fan had a fateful encounter.
“Wait, what?” Mason said when they reached the edge of the woods. The RV was gone. Only the van, the injured woman, and the flares remained. The gears began to turn, and he realized Emily’s words about taking care of things hadn’t been a threat against the injured guard. Or rather, not only a threat against her.
She was planning to wait around and actually pick a fight when the Rebound agents showed up.
“New plan,” Mason said, turning around. “I’m pretty sure Emily had everyone retreat back over the crest of the hill, which means we should get back in the woods and travel that direction under cover.”
Kell cocked his head. “They’re close. Think I can hear some from the other direction, too.”
Mason nodded. “Yeah, that would be the reinforcements from Haven. Looks like Emily is going to force a confrontation. Would have been nice if she’d have waited here for us so we didn’t have to stumble through the fucking woods to get behind the front lines.”
They moved parallel to the road for what felt like miles, far enough in the woods to stay unseen but close enough to hear and see. It didn’t take long for the enemy to appear, the lights of their vehicles casting spears of light through the trees.
Breathing hard and beginning to cramp from the effort of moving his own damaged body as well as helping Kell, they crested the hill. Mason jerked to a stop, causing Kell to grunt in pain.
“What the hell?” Kell groused.
“Sorry,” Mason said quietly, pointing with his chin. “Didn’t want to kill both of us.”
Though the terrain next to the road was relatively tame, things in the woods weren’t. In front of them gaped a black maw, a sinkhole twenty feet across and at least as deep. They were common in Kentucky and surrounding states, but Mason hadn’t had much room in his head to consider geology as they hobbled along.
Halfway around the sinkhole, things grew unnervingly quiet. Mason glanced back over his shoulder, trying to find a slice of space between trees to gain a line of sight down the hill. The rolling hum of wheels on asphalt was gone, replaced by the sound of slamming doors.
“Things are about to get ugly,” Mason said. “We need to move faster.”
Kell nodded and set his jaw and picked up the pace.
Mason wasn’t surprised. Though he hadn’t known the guy until the world had already been knocked on its ass for a few years, there wasn’t any doubt he was tough. He’d heard the stories about Kell, always an academic, surviving on sheer ingenuity and resourcefulness right after everything fell apart. You don’t live through tides of starving cannibals without a deep reservoir of grit to draw on.
They almost walked right past the section of road where their allies waited. No lights burned in or on a single vehicle. Mason only caught the irregularly-shaped shadows making up the cars and trucks out of the corner of his eye. The moon was weak and dim, leaving the road bathed in darkness.
“We made it,” Kell said when they turned to rejoin the party.
Mason patted him on the side with the hand providing support. “Yeah, we did, but I don’t think we’re getting out of here without a fight.”
It wasn’t just a matter of principle at this point. Mason gamed out the probabilities, and retreating would buy them time but only serve as a delaying tactic. He very much doubted the Rebound agents who took Kell lacked an emergency long-range means of communication. Burst transmissions or something. They would have sent up the electronic alert as soon as possible. Which meant they would come this way, and soon. Seeing the bodies on the road, talking the guard if she was still alive, only reinforced their need to reacquire the target as soon as possible.
When trying to regain an asset, time was the most valuable commodity.
Mason thought theirs was running out.
Emily
&nbs
p; She waited for the signal. The guard at the base of the hill was alive, though every murderous instinct in her heart screamed for Emily to kill her. While the small voice of her conscience did weigh in, that wasn’t what made the call. A living witness would be questioned, which would prolong the time the enemy would spend at the bottom of the hill.
Muted cries of surprise caused Emily to look to the source of the noise. She saw them emerge from the woods at once, neither in particularly fine shape.
“Hal, when they give the signal, proceed,” she said, putting a hand on the older man’s arm.
Hal nodded, though he looked as though he would rather join her.
Dashing off, Emily put herself under Kell’s other side. He smile down at her wordlessly, and though there was a lot of pain in the expression, it was genuine and unforced.
“Mason is mad you moved the cars,” he said after a few seconds.
Emily snorted. “I figured between the two of you, you were smart enough to look before leaving the woods. Was I wrong?”
Rather than answer, Kell sucked in a breath as one of his legs nearly gave out. Emily strained under the shock of the unexpected weight. Had more backup arrived, she’d have called out for someone to help. Emily locked her back rigidly and pushed on.
“You two rest,” Emily said as she and Mason wrestled Kell into the RV. “We’ve got this. I’ll be back.”
She left him there, sprawled on the bench in the tiny kitchen, letting her fingers slide from his. He might not be spontaneous or overly romantic, but those weren’t important to Emily. His essential nature was one of curiosity and kindness, a child-like glee at the idea of knowing. It was of course much more than that, but the surprising and infectious energy of his mind formed the nucleus of why she loved him.