Hybrid Zone Recognition

by C. E. Glines

  I watched him retreat to the hollow and wedge himself inside. Placing my trash under a rock, I approached the hollow. There wasn’t much room to spare. We certainly wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally rolling out during the night.

  I settled in the space that was left over, and Adam pulled a tarp from his pack and secured it across the opening.

  All tucked in for the night, I knew that sleep wouldn’t come. All I could think about was the rest of the team. The more time that passed without their appearance, the more likely it was that the worst had happened.

  “Adam,” I said softly. “What happens if the Consortium gets them?”

  He sighed heavily before answering. “They’ll probably be tortured for information. Killed, maybe.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Information about me?” I asked weakly.

  “Macy, this is not your fault.”

  “It kind of is. You’re all here because of me.”

  “Because we need you. The Organization needs you. They are not strangers to the Consortium’s tactics, and they are well aware of the risks associated with their jobs.”

  “We have to save them.” When he didn’t respond, I laid my head against his shoulder. “We can’t just abandon them, Adam.”

  “I didn’t plan on abandoning them,” he replied coldly. “But right now, they are not my first priority. And before you ask, yes, getting you out of here is my first priority.”

  “How could I possibly be more important than them? They’re your team, not me. They’re counting on you!”

  “Dad gum it, Woman! I know!” he snapped.

  Of course he knew. I was just making things worse. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean to attack you. I just don’t see what’s so special about me.”

  “We’ve been over this,” he moaned softly.

  Yeah, we had. I just didn’t happen to agree with him on the matter. Then it occurred to me that the reason he hadn’t already tried to find them was me.

  “If you’re holding off looking for them because of me, then you could just leave me here.” I could already feel him bristling to respond. “I’ll be fine. I’ve stayed in the woods by myself before. Country girl, right here,” I said, waving my hand. “I’ve been camping since—”

  “Enough!” he ordered. “When are you going to get it through your head that I am not leaving you? That is not an option.” His hand sliced through the air, adding emphasis to his words. “Don’t!” he warned, halting my rebuttal.

  Roughly, he wrapped his arm around me, pulling me tighter to his side. “Macy, you are just going to have to trust me,” he said gruffly.

  I was trying to, but he wasn’t making it easy.

  “Try to get some sleep. Morning is a long way off.” His tone informed me that the conversation was over.

  I sighed inwardly. What was this alpha male BS? Olivia had it right. Tricky to handle.

  “I can hear everything you’re not saying,” he snarled in warning.

  Really? Then here are a few more adjectives I’m not saying, I thought, angrily crossing my arms over my chest. Arrogant, egotistical, control freak—pressed up against him as I was, I could feel his chest rumbling with the growl he was generating. I rushed to add, bad putty tat. There, I was done.

  We both sat there in the dark, not speaking and not sleeping. Then to my surprise, he started chuckling.

  “Bad putty tat,” he repeated. I was jostled to one side as the chuckling turned into full belly laughs. “That’s pretty good,” he said between breaths.

  Even though he couldn’t see it, I rolled my eyes at him. “Jerk,” I said sourly.

  He finally quieted and an uneasy peace settled between us once again. Uncrossing my arms, I leaned back into him, and he adjusted his position to accommodate me. After a while, I felt his breathing settle into a steady rhythm. I wondered how he could sleep. Maybe it was part of his training.

  Training. There was a whole other line of thought to pursue. When would I get my head above water? Every new piece of information felt like it was pushing me further under. I didn’t like playing catch up or being the last to know.

  And, I hated thinking about what might be happening to Olivia.

  A single tear rolled down my cheek as I squeezed my eyes shut tight. I had a feeling that this was going to be one of the longest nights of my life.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN I AWOKE IN THE morning, I was alone in the hollow. Rubbing sleep crustees from my eyes, I spotted Adam a few feet away. He was sitting and staring across the valley.

  Man, I needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Toilet paper is in the pack. Don’t go far,” Adam said.

  I so wasn’t trying to broadcast that tidbit of information. I was going to have to get better at this shielding thing.

  I guess it didn’t say much for my survival skills that I hadn’t bothered to scope out my pack yet. I pulled the pack in front of me and unzipped it. Scrounging around, I found more water. Uugh, more cardboard. Needle and sutures? I hoped we didn’t need that. Last was one very smushed roll of toilet paper. It looked like I felt. I hoped it wasn’t the other way around, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up with all the recent images the mirror had reflected.

  I crawled out, stretching to alleviate the stiffness the night in the hollow had provided. Now able to move a little more freely, I headed in the opposite direction of Adam.

  My return found him still at his post. I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “No sign of them?”

  “None,” he said quietly.

  I joined him on the ground and stared at the cabin. It reminded me of the one that was now ashes.

  “It is an exact replica,” Adam said.

  I stood, looking for whatever it was on the ground that kept poking my backside. “So, if I ever come across a house like this, I can assume it belongs to the Organization?”

  “More than likely,” Adam said, looking at me briefly as I turned in circles.

  I didn’t see the offending poker, so I sat back down. There it was again. While I wiggled around searching for a comfortable position, my hand bumped my back pocket. I slid my hand up my pocket and pulled out my brush. Well, that was convenient.

  Unclasping my hair clip, I sat cross legged next to Adam and started working on my hair. He shot me the occasional annoyed look at my efforts, but mostly he was intensely focused on the cabin across the valley from us.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Shadows, light, reflections of light.” He inhaled deeply and said, “Scents.” His ears, which he had shifted, kept up a constant swiveling motion.

  “Sound, too?”

  He nodded.

  I fell forward as the knot I had been pulling at finally gave way.

  “Let me have it,” he demanded with an outstretched hand.

  He wanted my brush?

  “Give it to me,” he demanded again, his hand motioning his words.

  Fine. I handed him my brush and angled myself with my back to him. Having your hair brushed always felt good. As long as you were not tender headed, which I was not.

  Now our positions were reversed. He worked on my hair, and I watched the house. When the brush began to glide through my hair freely, I figured he was done and was about to scoot away when he commanded me to, “Be still.”

  Okay. Little bossy this morning. My eyebrows rose in surprise as his fingers began to weave through my hair. He was braiding my hair?

  “Where did you learn to braid hair?” I asked.

  “Little sisters and a busy Mom,” he grunted.

  So he wasn’t born entirely in a test tube. Good to know.

  “Hair clip.” He took it from my hand and did some kind of twist and tuck thing with my hair. The clip he used to secure it.

  I shook my head side to side. Nothing moved or came loose. “Pretty good,” was all I said by way of thanks.

  He grunted again and resumed his previous position.

  I wanted to
ask what was for breakfast, but I feared I already knew. “What’s next on the agenda this morning?”

  “Breakfast,” he replied without moving. “Then, we hunt.”

  I translated that to mean he was not surprising me with anything already prepared. “You mean the cardboard?” I asked sullenly.

  He shot me a look then went to the tree and retrieved a bar for each of us. Reluctantly, I took the bar from his outstretched hand. Studying the package, I had a thought. Perhaps if I ate it as fast as I could, I wouldn’t taste it so much. It was worth a shot.

  I tore into my bar and began chewing furiously. Adam stopped eating his bar and watched me with that cocked eyebrow. After I stuffed a few more bites into my mouth while continuing to chew rapidly, I came to a conclusion. Faster did not equal better. I was only inciting myself to gag.

  “Water,” I croaked out.

  He wordlessly handed me a bottle, and I chugged it down. Finished, I recapped the bottle and looked up at him.

  “What is wrong with you?” he demanded angrily.

  “I was trying to beat the taste,” I explained.

  “You’re a nutcase, you know that?” he said, shaking his head in exasperation.

  Once again, I reviewed my recent past. It was a little on the extreme side. Maybe I was a nutcase. Maybe this whole thing was some sort of induced delirium, and I’d wake up to find out none of this had ever happened.

  “Well, maybe I am,” I said with growing anger, “but you’re along for the ride. So you best buckle up or hunker down as the situation demands, because I gotta tell you, the last week of my life has been one big freaking thrill ride after another!”

  When I finished, I realized I’d yelled the last part at him. Very wisely, he ate the rest of his bar in silence while I tried to flush out my anger.

  Nutcase. What did he know about being a nut anyway? I’d like to see him do all the things I’ve had to do, without training or warning most of the time, in as however many days as it has been. Now I was out here in the woods, stuck eating cardboard and waiting for the team to show up. Correction. Hoping the team showed up. And, there went my anger.

  I looked over at Adam. I didn’t think he had moved since I yelled at him. I knew he was stressed over the whole situation with the team. We both were. We both knew what their absence could mean.

  In the short time that I’d known them, I had come to depend on them. My radically altered future was now tied to them in one fashion or another. I really liked Olivia, too, despite her judgmental ways. It was terrifying to me to think she could be undergoing torture at this very moment. It was so hard to just sit here and do nothing.

  “Shouldn’t we be doing something?” I asked in frustration.

  “We are,” he said as he stood up. “Let’s go.” Seeing my confused face, he clarified, “Hunting.”

  “I meant doing something about finding Olivia and the others,” I said as I followed him.

  “Nothing we can do currently. We had a measure of protection while on the ATV. Now, we’re sitting ducks.” He slowed, allowing me to catch up, then scrubbed his hand across his face as if that could erase the unpleasant thoughts. “Either they’ll show up or the Consortium’s people will.”

  “And if the Consortium shows up?”

  “We run.” As if punctuating his words, he broke into a jog, which I had no choice but to follow.

  “Why don’t we leave now before they get here?” I yelled at his back.

  “Several reasons. One, we’d have to go on foot. You might have noticed our ATV is not standard issue, and we are not that far from civilization. Two, we’d be travelling blind, possibly into a trap. Everything I need to see them, beyond the short radius the bike offers, is in the house. They are not so limited. And three, I’m still hoping the rest of the team shows up.”

  Hope? My experiences with him had him pegged as a realist. I hadn’t thought hope was generally part of his personality. It was a welcome surprise.

  It would also be a surprise if we caught anything with how much noise we were making as we tromped through the woods. Then it dawned on me. We didn’t have any weapons. Unless he had some hidden somewhere on him that I didn’t know about.

  “Adam, how are we going to get anything? We don’t have any weapons,” I said.

  He slowed to a walk and then stopped with his hands on his hips. Turning to look squarely at me, he said, “We have teeth and claws.”

  He expected me to kill an animal with my bare hands? Or worse, my teeth? Oh, I don’t think so. Shooting Bambi from a distance was hard enough.

  “Consider this your first lesson in wilderness survival,” he continued while ignoring my panicked look. “You are part leopard now, which comes with the ability to move soundlessly. Follow me.”

  He stalked off, his body as lithe as, well, a cat. He wasn’t making a sound as he moved through the woods. How was he doing that?

  I started forward and cringed when twigs and leaves snapped loudly beneath my feet. This obviously wasn’t the way he was doing it. I stopped in frustration and watched his sinuous movements as he weaved in and out of the trees.

  “You have to yield to the leopard DNA. Just let it lead you on the hunt,” he called back.

  Yield to the DNA, I repeated silently to myself. Yield to the DNA. How the heck was I supposed to yield to the DNA!

  He stood back up, clearly irritated, and looked back at me. “You are thinking about it too much. It is not that difficult. Just be the leopard.”

  That was it. “I’ve never been a leopard before. I’ve never even pretended to be a leopard before. I don’t even have a leopard costume, so it’s a little more complicated for me than just be the leopard!” I yelled.

  He eyed me a moment then walked to stand behind me.

  “What are you doing?” I snarled at him.

  “Just be quiet,” he ordered. He reached both of his arms forward and placed them on top of mine, covering my hands with his own. Then he did something with our bond, and I felt what he felt. “Do you feel that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said quietly as the feeling engulfed me. It was a singleness of purpose—to hunt.

  “That’s the feeling you are looking for,” he said, and then he backed off, taking the feeling with him. “Let’s try again.”

  He started forward again, and so did I. If I reached for just the feeling, I couldn’t touch it, but when I just concentrated on hunting, it covered me like a blanket. Everything became more vivid, alive somehow. I noticed smells and sounds I never had before.

  Adam paused and sniffed at a particularly pungent smell. Deer, he supplied.

  He dropped into a crouch, and I copied him. We approached a cluster of trees, and Adam pointed, indicating the location of the deer.

  Stay here, he said. He waited until I nodded, then turned his back on me and slunk into the trees. His movements were like watching a real live cat on the hunt. As he moved, he kept up his lecture on hunting.

  Don’t approach a deer from behind, you risk being kicked. Don’t approach a male from the front, you risk being hit by the antlers.

  I watched as a six point ambled into a small clearing directly in front of the trees we were hidden behind. I knew Adam was somewhere in front of me, but I was startled by his sudden appearance. Seemingly out of nowhere and quicker than lightning, he attacked.

  He used the deer’s hindquarters to vault to its neck, and then tore out its throat before it ever had a chance to respond. Straddling the deer, he gripped the antlers from behind and followed it to the ground. Its struggling subsided quickly as its strength failed, and I watched the light fade from its eyes.

  Adam gently laid the deer’s head on the ground, and then used his claws to tear into the deer’s belly. All the good feelings of the leopard on the hunt fled, and I was afraid as I watched Adam.

  “Macy, come here,” Adam said.

  I shook my head no. In horror, I watched as he plopped a piece of the still warm flesh in his mouth.

&nb
sp; “Macy, come,” he said more sternly.

  “I am not eating raw deer,” I hissed from behind the safety of the tree I was gripping.

  He sat back on his heels and searched for me in the trees, stopping when his eyes found mine. “It’s not going to taste like raw meat,” he tried to assure me. “You are part leopard. That includes your taste buds.”

  I was not convinced.

  “Remember you told me that when you ate the rest of the lasagna it tasted different?”

  That didn’t mean this was going to taste good.

  “Macy Greer,” he said impatiently, abandoning any effort to persuade me. “If you do not get over here and try this deer, I will chase you down and force it down your throat.”

  I glared daggers at him. He would not do that. But I saw the resolve etched on his face. Oh God, yes he would.

  “Macy,” he growled in warning.

  Using every ounce of courage I possessed, I let go of the tree and came to kneel by him. “Why do we have to eat anyway? We just had our fill of cardboard.” It was a totally lame thing to say, especially coming from me. And, despite my claim, I grudgingly acknowledged that I was beyond hungry.

  “I promise you, you’re going to like it,” he encouraged softly and reached to cut me a slice.

  “Make it small, please.”

  He rolled his eyes but did as I asked. He held the piece up for my inspection. Blood was flowing down his fingers into his palm. I leaned forward and closed my eyes while opening my mouth. He gently placed the piece on my tongue, and I closed my mouth around it. My eyes flew open almost instantly.

  “Good?” he said with that cocky grin of his.

  I nodded as I started chewing. It was so good. It tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten before.

  “More?”

  I nodded again.

  He cut a larger strip this time and held it up.

  My hands clamped around his wrist, holding it solidly in place. I ate the strip of meat he held and then proceeded to lick the blood from his fingers and then his palm. When I’d licked the last bit, I froze. The realization of what I was doing struck me, and in one motion, I dropped his hand and scooted away from him.