Cold Red

by Fiona Quinn

  That just made the SIC connection that much stranger.

  “So maybe it would be best if we used some rocks and ran it along the inside of the root,” Finley offered. “That way the moist soil won’t be sucking our body heat and the reflective surface will be broader.”

  “Okay, can you do that?” she asked as she tugged her own fleece sweatshirt over her head.

  Finley reached across the shelter to get the Mylar blanket next to where the pack was set. He wondered what else she’d found to put in the bag. He decided not to ask and not to look. It seemed to give Zelda a sense of control, and she probably needed those feelings to keep her going right now.

  When Finley was done with the emergency blanket, he turned around to make sure it met with Zelda’s approval. She was standing off to the side hanging her pants on the line that ran parallel to the embankment just under the lip, keeping them out of the falling snow.

  When she moved back toward the fire, his breath left his body.

  She was covered in fresh, angry-looking bruises. All down her back, her legs, her right arm. It looked like someone had taken a bat to her.

  She hadn’t said word one about her pain.

  Finley was having trouble seeing her so viciously wounded.

  His heart squeezed down. He swallowed hard.

  Yep, he recognized this reaction from relationships past. And he realized how dangerous these surfacing feelings were. He wasn’t a guy who fell for damsels in distress, what got to him was a powerful, intelligent woman, battling past her dragons. If he had any strength left at all, he’d fight these emotions tooth and nail.

  Falling for headed-to-prison Zelda would be irrational.

  Standing on the toes of her boots, Zelda hung her socks, then moved into the shelter dressed in her bra and panties… black with yellow smiley faces.

  Not what he’d expected – not that he’d had an expectation in mind.

  Zelda laughed at his expression. He must look absurd.

  He felt absurd. Off kilter. Dizzy. It felt like a knife stabbing through his head, and he wondered if his skull wasn’t fractured.

  “You need to get undressed,” she said. “You’ve been sweating in those clothes, and moisture will wick away your body heat.”

  “Okay,” Finley said, moving outside to sit on the rock where Zelda had perched.

  “We’ll get the clothes dry, then bring them in and put them on in the morning. The wind is almost nothing down in the creek bed, but I tied my things to the line anyway. It would suck if your clothes blew away,” she said.

  Finley lay his coat on the line and zipped it shut. As long as the line held, it would stay safe. Finley glanced over at the knots she’d used, and it was a neat timber hitch on one end and a figure eight on the other. Of course, it was. This line wasn’t going anywhere.

  “We have the white blanket,” Zelda called over to him as she rustled in the pack. “It’s warm. We should be okay if we sleep upright on the mat and share body heat. Though, one of us has to stay awake and feed the fire. We can’t let it go out. We’d die of hypothermia in our sleep. I figure three-hour shifts.”

  “Okay,” Finley said again and realized he sounded like a simpleton as he gently maneuvered his sweater and shirt over his neck brace. He tied the clothes to the line by the arms. The cold air brought goose bumps to his exposed flesh.

  Zelda was tugging on a pair of socks from the pack. A t-shirt hung down to her mid-thigh. Finley knew without asking that she’d taken these from Mulvaney’s body.

  “Here’s the deal,” she said as he hurriedly tugged off his boots and socks. “You’re not my prisoner. You’re not under my control in any way. I won’t bring my weapons against you unless you try to hurt or incapacitate me.”

  “Alright.” He flung his pants over the rope, shivering in his black boxer briefs, copying Zelda and standing on the toes of his boots to keep his feet off the ground. “You understand that I’m not really in any kind of shape to do either of those things, right?”

  “But we have a problem.”

  Finley chuckled as he pulled back the plastic and crawled in, surprised at how warm the space was. Not exactly comfortable, but a survivable temperature. “A problem?”

  From her crouch, Zelda opened the blanket and handed it to him. “We’ve got a bunch of problems, actually.”

  Finley moved in next to the trunk, wrapping the blanket around his back, leaning against the car mat along the root. “You said share body heat. Is this what you were thinking?”

  Zelda shifted her eyes to the nest he’d made with his crisscrossed legs, his arms held wide ready to envelop them both in the blanket. He watched her calculating, watched her eyes travel around the small hut, watched her come to a conclusion.

  This morning, he had had his forearm pressed into her back, anchoring her to his car while he kicked at her legs, unfastened her pants, and yanked them down none to gently, making his point that she shouldn’t try an escape.

  This evening, he was welcoming her into his arms to sleep.

  He’d learned from the battle field – things changed in the blink of an eye. Loyalties. Coalitions. Alliances were often made of the moment instead of any deep conviction. Though, Finley didn’t normally cozy up with criminal elements.

  That’s an utter lie.

  Just look at all the cozying up he had done when he was working undercover to take down the East Coast cell of the Zoric family last year. Not just cozying up with the women on that case, sleeping with them.

  He’d paid the price, too. He’d let his heart get involved with Lacey Stewart, his asset, making him an A-number-one, moron scum bucket. It was a cardinal rule for undercover agents: Keep an emotional distance.

  Finley was going to hell for the choices he’d made on that case. He wasn’t just paying a professional price for those choices, being anchored to his desk; he’d paid an emotional price, too.

  Here was the question, though: If he was already bound for hell, why did he feel like such cad for sharing body heat with a prisoner? This was about survival.

  Had to be the head injury.

  Zelda moved forward and settled in against him. Pulling her legs to her chest, she tucked the blanket in securely to guard their heat.

  “Good?” he asked.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “We have problems,” Finley reminded her, smoothing down the flyaway strands of blonde that tickled his nose as she shifted around. She tipped her head to use his shoulder as a pillow.

  Little mewling sounds came from under her breath, and he could feel a hot tear slip off her cheek and down his chest.

  He held back the kiss he almost dropped into her hair. There it was, again – the squeeze of his heart.

  Of course, he had feelings for this woman, he told himself. She’d saved his life. Was saving his life. This was what gratitude and compassion felt like. I’m human. Sue me.

  Anna’s soft voice edged past his self-recriminations. “The snow was supposed to be eight inches deep today,” Anna said. “The weather forecasters were expecting more tomorrow.”

  “That’s a big problem.”

  She sighed. “I had it in my mind that we’d gone was as far as we needed to go. I thought we could hunker down for a couple of days. Once things had thawed out, the SIC militia went back to their day jobs, and traffic on the mountain picked up, we could find a likely car through the binoculars and pop back out. But that’s not going to work.”

  “Why’d you let me pick the route?” Finley asked. It had been bothering him since she’d handed him the map.

  “It was a test. You needed to pick the right route, or I was going to clap the handcuffs on you and leave you there until your buddies showed up to save you.”

  “My buddies. Who did you think I was in cahoots with?”

  “I don’t know.” Her breath was a warm tickle on his chest.

  “You don’t have a gun trained on me, do you still think I could be a bad guy?”

  “Absolut
ely.”

  “If you’d left me cuffed until SIC got there, I could have ratted you out. I knew your routes.”

  “You knew the easy routes. On my own, I’d planned to take the hard one,” Zelda said.

  Finley could feel her eyelashes brushing over his bare chest. She blinked a few times; each time it took her a little longer before she opened her eyes again.

  “I’ll take first watch and keep the fire going. Rest,” Finley said in Slovak.

  Zelda nodded her agreement.

  As she drifted off, Finley adjusted himself to better hold her deadweight. With that thought, a chill brushed through his system, and he edited his vocabulary to just “hold her weight.” There had been enough “dead” for one day. “Spánok. Spánok,” he whispered in Slovak. Sleep.

  Now that he was thinking about it, it could be that hearing Johnathan speak Slovak in the car today had turned Finley’s thoughts to the Zoric family and that was why he had that burst of emotion when he saw Zelda’s bruised body. What were the odds, he wondered of two detainees being in his FBI car in West Virginia, and they spoke Slovak?

  Finley thought back to what Johnathan was saying just before he freaked out and killed himself. He was talking about getting paid for laundering money. Finley hoped to hell that when he got back to civilization, and he sent a team back, that they’d find video cameras and mics still in the car and operational. Would SIC think to look?

  He couldn’t worry about that now.

  One step, then another. Survive the night. Get back to civilization.

  He tucked the blanket around Zelda’s head to keep her ears warm.

  As he held her, Finley realized that she hadn’t finished her thought. She had been saying they had a problem, that she’d planned for them to stay here until the storm was over and the roads had cleared. Obviously, something had made that impossible. It must have been something she figured out when she went on her recon. He wondered what it could be.

  He wondered how dangerous it would be.

  Looking out at the yellow glow of fire, Finley was too tired, too pained to think much beyond how tenuous life really was. You wake up in the morning to do a favor for a buddy, and you go to sleep at night with a beautiful stranger in your arms not sure if you’ll live to see morning…

  Chapter Eight

  Anna

  The alarm softly beeped on Finley’s wrist, letting Anna know it was her last watch; Finley’s turn to get a couple more Z’s before they started today’s trek. Blindly, she followed Finley’s arm down to where it rested on the car mat and tapped the button to quiet the alarm on his G-Shock. She was almost afraid to open her eyes. Finley’s arms no longer wrapped around her, and she thought he might have died while she slept against him.

  Moving her cheek away from his bicep to Finley’s chest, Anna focused on the steady beat of his heart. He’d fallen asleep; that was all.

  The level of relief that flooded her body was a surprise. He was a stranger. They’d exchanged a few required sentences. It wasn’t like they were long-time battle buddies or anything.

  She’d been on many a mission where many a teammate hadn’t made it back to base. She wasn’t immune to the horror of that moment of realization; she had maybe learned to desensitize by necessity. Kept things at arm’s-length as a practical matter.

  So yeah.

  This was kind of a jolt to her equilibrium just how scared she’d been and just how relieved.

  She stored that away.

  Refocused.

  She was on a mission to save this man, so she’d better get going with the saving.

  Anna shifted away from Finley, tucking the blanket back around him. She gasped at the pain stabbing down her back and into her legs as she dragged herself over to feed the fire.

  Sliding her hand under the plastic tarp, she was astonished at the disparity of temperatures. Their little shelter had done great. She wished they could just stay here for the next few days. It would have been so easy. But the man on the snow mobile had said that Bella was coming in. And Bella was a bloodhound who was renowned for her particularly gifted nose and her tenacity.

  Anna focused her attention on the snow conditions. It was still coming down pretty hard and from the sound of the howl, the wind was blowing steadily. As far as Bella was concerned, that helped them. Bella was, after all, average height for a bloodhound which meant she’d barely be able to get her head above these drifts. And she’d be clambering on her little bloodhound legs.

  Still, they weren’t all that far from the accident. The sooner they were up and out the better. The longer the snow had to fill their tracks, the safer. First light should be in about an hour.

  The fire blazing up radiated warm air into the shelter giving Anna a shot of motivation. Before she could save Finley, she had to get herself operational.

  She popped some pain pills and reached for one of the Coke cans they’d filled with snow and left warming beside the flame. The pill bottle was emptying quickly. Anna counted out the pills, dividing them by two and decided that they’d run out long before they could possibly make it to safety. She’d allow them each one pill every four hours instead of the normal dose.

  Okay. That sucked.

  Anna was so stiff and pained; she wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk. She remembered Ranger school. Pulled up those pictures and put them right in front of her. One night, she was standing in the middle of the icy swamp with a full pack, her weapon held overhead, sleeping. She’d been so sleep deprived – fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there. The lack of food, she could handle. The lack of sleep? That had been hard. The wanting to prove herself to all the men around her, whom she thought resented having a woman in their ranks, took up energy she really didn’t have to spare.

  The need to prove herself as worthy was too big. Too heavy with no useful components.

  When she packed her ruck, it was with tools that served her. Nothing superfluous. Leaving her ego behind was a lesson she’d learned the hard way.

  She’d ached then. Every muscle was sore and overused.

  She’d been cold and hungry then, running on minimal calories.

  She’d done it. Not for days but for weeks on end. And when an injury took her out the first time she tried to make it through the challenge, she signed up, and lined up, and recycled to try it again. Anna wasn’t a quitter.

  Making it to the ceremony where she received her Ranger tab was a huge personal victory.

  She could make it now, too. Even though now every move, every thought was life or death and not just practice. There would be no opportunity to call it quits and head home to a hot bath and a stiff drink.

  Anna pushed her hips back and folded into child’s pose. She had learned from a physical therapist friend some moves that would loosen her up to keep her functional even if they couldn’t take away the sting and the ache. As Anna moved through the cat-cow yoga poses, she considered Finley. She simply didn’t trust his head and spinal injuries. He wouldn’t be able to ease himself into today the way she was. He was going to be one hurting cowboy.

  She blew out a breath and rolled onto her back to pull her knee to her chest. She hoped she could get Finley functional. What would she do if he couldn’t walk?

  They had a few things going for them. A little food. A couple more Cokes. The twelve-hour chemical-heat back wraps would keep their cores warm and stave off hypothermia as they started today’s trek. She planned to keep them moving from first light until last, allowing time to build their next shelter. With any luck, they could press all the way to the railroad track. That was her goal.

  Actually, surviving the day, free from capture, was her goal.

  She got dressed in the clothes Finley must have brought in and neatly folded. They were placed on the pack. As she picked up her own clothes, she patted Finley’s pants. He still had the four meal replacement bars in their plastic wrap Velcroed into his thigh cargo pocket. She’d found them, of course, when she’d searched his unconscious body in th
e car and had decided to leave them in place. She’d expected that he would have eaten at least one while she slept. She’d leave them there. What kind of test she was laying for Finley, she didn’t know. So far though, he’d passed.

  Anna warmed more snow in the Coke can and got one of the three precious MREs she’d salvaged from the emergency kit in the car trunk. She squatted on the ground and poured a drizzle of water from the Coke can into the chemical packet heater, then shoved the packet back out of their shelter so they wouldn’t get a buildup of hydrogen gas. It would suck for sure to go through everything that had happened to them just to be blown to smithereens.

  She was turned to wake Finley when she realized he’d been watching her.

  “What’s today’s plan?” he asked.

  “Eat, hydrate, break down the camp, pack our bivouac-footprint under the snow. Bella will still find it, but she might get confused. The wind running through the creek bed is helpful.”

  “Bella,” he said then licked his lips, obviously sticky with cotton mouth. “Bella is the reason we can’t stay here until the storm is over. I’m guessing she’s a tracking dog.”

  “Bloodhound.”

  He moved to a crouch and stopped to gasp.

  “Slow,” Anna said. “Why don’t you drink this first, so we can get more water melted before we leave? We need to take advantage of the heater pack on the MRE.” She handed him a Coke can of hot water and took one for herself. Hydration was key. She gave him two pills to get him going. She’d tell him about the reduced distribution plan once they were up and moving.

  He looked out at the brown bag heating on the other side of the tarp. “MRE?”

  “Amazing how delicious they are in these situations.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Two more. Three protein bars from Mulvaney’s pocket. Four Cokes, a roll of lifesavers, some electrolyte packets, a shaker of salt, some glucose gels.” She opened the bag and pulled out the heated package of their food. She left the heater outside and slid over next to Finley, so they could share the food with a single plastic spork. “I figure an MRE in the morning, share a bar at lunch. Share a Coke for mid-afternoon. Two lifesavers each for dinner. The glucose and electrolytes get saved for emergencies. Well, bigger emergencies. The point of life or death.”