Cold Red

by Fiona Quinn

She stepped, floundered. Fear was a palpable beast. She righted herself.

  She had to get out of the swamp, so she could warn everyone that there was something bigger afoot. Something important and dangerous and the government probably had no idea it was coming fast. She’d figured it out as Johnathan started babbling in Slovak. Some of it, anyway.

  She took another step.

  She had to get out of the swamp. She had a mission to accomplish. She focused on her task. Step. Balance. Shift. Pull. Step, again.

  A fire. Think how great that’s going to feel. If only Finley had the starter, he could have a blaze going by the time she pulled herself out of the swamp. Anna had kept that equipment in the heel of her boot as a power move. Finley had let her, or he would have taken the equipment from under her sole while she slept.

  Man, was it stupid for her alone to carry the equipment. Because of things like ice covered mud bogs. But now she was realizing how selfish and hard-hearted she’d been.

  He was one of the good guys. If he wasn’t, she’d know by now.

  He was a good guy.

  She had to get out of the swamp and save him. Get out. Set the fire. Save him. She cheer-led each step with an end task.

  She took another step and another.

  But her thoughts drifted sideways instead of down a straight path. Just started and then meandered off.

  “Come on, Zelda. Come on. Don’t give up!”

  She lifted her head and a black shadow wavered in the distance.

  “Walk!”

  The voice seemed to float out toward her and envelop her. It had a drag and a pull that helped her get her foot out and step forward. Now, she vaguely realized, the mud was below her knee. She stopped and looked down at it.

  “No!” yelled the mist. “You will not stop. You will not rest. You will come here to me. Walk!”

  She tried. She took another step, then started toppling backward. Flailing her arms out, she caught hold of a rail. Her mind told her she was in first grade at school. Her shiny new shoes had slipped out from under her, and she had reached out and grabbed the railing. She held on until she got her balance, and out of fear that she’d fall down the stairs, she gripped it with both hands.

  Hand over hand, she took the steps one at a time. She hadn’t remembered her teacher, Mr. Graham, standing there telling her what a good job she was doing. She didn’t remember anyone having been there at all.

  “That’s right. I’ve got you. Hold tight to the stick. You’re almost to me,” Mr. Graham was calling.

  But he was wrong. She wasn’t almost too him. She was in a swirling storm of shades of grey and strange sounds. She was floating. Flying. She didn’t need her feet anymore.

  “I’ve got you. Here, wrap your arms around me. Hold on. Stay awake. Hear me? Don’t you dare go to sleep. Fight! Fight to stay awake. Fight, Zelda.”

  “I’m not Zelda,” she mumbled as she dropped her head onto his bare shoulder. “Don’t you recognize me Mr. Graham? I’m Anna.”

  Chapter Ten

  Finley

  Finley, had Anna in his arms, begging his mind to stay vertical, so he wouldn’t drop her as he set her on the stump.

  “What’s your motto soldier?” he asked bending down to yank her mud-covered boot off.

  “Rangers lead the way.” It was said as an exhale and not actual words.

  Rangers? Finley thought as he peeled her shirt off, and reaching to unhook her bra strap, getting her out of the wet clothes as quickly as possible. He had already shed his own clothes, and the wind was wicking away the last of his heat. He was numb from head to foot, which relieved the pain but wasn’t exactly a godsend.

  He needed to keep Anna, Anna? Yes. That was a much better name for her. It fit much more comfortably on her framework. Anna needed to stay conscious. She needed to remember that she’d trained to never give up.

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say as he dug in her boot for the fire-starter, so he repeated. “What’s your motto, soldier?” He looked down at her and this time his blurry vision was focused enough to see that the stump he’d set her on was once a pine tree – fat wood. His guardian angel must like him at least a little.

  He kicked the snow from a spot on the ground and moved Anna off the stump as she said, “Rangers lead the way.”

  They had let women get their Ranger tab for a couple of years now. He brushed the snow from off the craggy stump. He thought back to what he knew about women Rangers. Not much. A few years ago, they’d tested to see if women could even make it through one of the hardest training programs in the world. Two of the nineteen who tried made it. Neither one was named Anna.

  He scraped the flint fire starter. As the sparks landed on a nest of dry leaves in the cavity, the resin impregnated heartwood blazed up in a miracle of powerful heat.

  He picked up a piece of wood and used it to push the snow from in front of a fallen oak, using the drifts to form a snow shelter, a three-sided igloo of sorts, to shield them from the wind. He was using tricks he’d learned in his boy scouting days when they were tested in their skills. If they were going to make it through this, he’d need every trick he knew about survival and hypothermia.

  Finley squatted and pulled Anna’s arm around his neck and rethought that idea. His neck brace was off. He tucked her arm around his back and did a power lift, moving them into the sheltered area and as close to the fire as they could stand without further injury.

  Sitting cross legged, he tucked Anna into his lap to keep her off the frozen ground, and hugged her, torso to torso. Step one, get some semblance of warmth back in their bodies. Two, hang up their clothes so they could dry near the fire. Three, find the equipment. Four, set up a more useful camp for the night.

  Calories.

  Electrolytes.

  Anna was a Ranger.

  That was a lucky break for him. How many times had she saved his ass so far? Real skills. A toughened mindset. Anna’s being a Ranger inspired hope that, between the two of them, they’d get out of this mess.

  Ranger? She would be one of a very finite set of women. She could have been the female attachment that the Rangers took along with them to frisk and interrogate the women. Those women were hard core and battle hardened too. But then she’d use her own motto, wouldn’t she?

  “What’s your motto, soldier?” he asked again, rocking them back and forth in front of the blazing heat.

  She babbled, “Otatsiihtaissiiststakio piksi makamo ta psswia.”

  “What are you saying? What does that mean?” Finley didn’t recognize those words in Slovak. But she was slurring and chattering, so he wasn’t surprised.

  “It’s B-b-b-blackfoot for ‘Normal is a cycle on a washing machine.’” Her eyelids were shut.

  He couldn’t let her fall asleep, couldn’t allow her heart to stop. CPR might bring her back to life but wasn’t sustainable out here. She’d need immediate intervention and obviously that wasn’t part of their equation. He jostled her. “Stay with me.”

  She nodded her response, and he felt a finger tap, tap, tap on his back. It wasn’t her shaking; it was her signaling that she was still conscious even if her eyelids had shut. She definitely needed to sleep but not until she was warmed up. He’d keep her safe one step at a time.

  He held his fingers up to measure the descent of the sun on the horizon. They only had about thirty minutes of light, then finding those supplies was going to be hard. He gave himself five more minutes to get himself warm before he took off to gather their things.

  Blackfoot. Maybe she got her survival skills from a native heritage. She didn’t look like she had Indian ancestry – but then again, that meant little.

  Blackfoot for a normal cycle on washing machines. Finley remembered reading about how hard it was to speak modern ideas in ancient languages, baseball in one native language became “Hit it with a stick.” How would the Blackfoot language have a word for washing machine?

  Finley liked the puzzle Anna was presenting to him. It h
elped to keep his mind clear and his thumb off the panic button. “Normal is a setting...” He’d heard that before, somewhere. He felt sure she was answering his question not just spouting gibberish. He was on the verge of discovery. So Finley pushed a little harder. His voice edged into a commander’s voice he’d used to focus his troops in Iraq. “What is your creed, soldier?

  "Think. Adapt. Anticipate."

  And there it was.

  Shit.

  Now everything was falling into place. Anna must have come through Ranger school and found her home in the Asymmetric Warfare Group.

  Anna was a fucking badass.

  Of course she’d escape and evade and make sure he got out. Of course she’d plunge into the icy waters and drag him to safety.

  Of course she was risking life and limb to leave no man behind.

  “Normal is the cycle on a washing machine” was indeed a motto. They said it at the AWG, the Asymmetric Warfare Group, a special mission unit. Huh. He stroked his fingers through Anna’s long hair, lifting the strands to be warmed and dried by the fire. But why would the AWG be operating in West by-god Virginia? On that leap, he was lost.

  Does it matter right now? Finley thought, the fire is hot, the wind is blocked, and Anna is in my arms where she belongs. Finley heard those words in his head but wouldn’t attach to them. That was some dangerous territory to be landing on.

  Putting Anna on the ground, he went to hang up his clothes. When he was back and got her dressed in Mulvaney’s clothes, Finley would take some time to rub Anna’s mud encrusted clothes in the snow to get them as clean as possible and let them dry overnight. Right now, out there, were the things they’d need to make it through ‘til morning. “Zelda, do you know where you dumped the equipment?” he asked. He used Anna’s code name, he was pretty sure that she hadn’t meant to let “Anna” slip.

  “Under the bent tree on the east side of the pond and the gun belt is up where you went over the edge. Clothes along the way between the two.” Her voice lacked animation.

  “I’m going to leave you for a few minutes, and you’re going to stay awake. Promise.” It was almost the same thing Anna had said to him last night when she went on recon.

  Twenty-four hours that felt like a lifetime.

  Anna wrapped her arms around her legs that she’d drawn to her chest, the trained recovery position meant to protect the core warmth. She was in her black smiley-face panties and a pair of tan socks that had stayed dry.

  Finley was completely naked except for the boots he was pulling on. The chemical waterproof coating on his boots had done an admirable job repelling water, even submerged the way he’d been. If – no, when he got back to civilization, Finley planned to write the company a good review. Right now, his goal was to get as far as the supplies and get the blanket. That would improve his life a thousand-fold.

  Finley stood to absorb a last dose of warmth from the fire while he lit a stick in the flame to use as a torch. He felt Anna’s eye on him. “It’s cold out,” he said. “No judging.”

  A smile traced over Anna’s lips, and he got half a laugh from her which felt like a gold medal.

  And with that image in his mind, Finley took off to circumnavigate the pond.

  ***

  As he trounced through the snow drifts, Finley contemplated the absurdity of this situation. Today was his day off. He’d planned to go to the gym, catch a movie, grill a big fat steak, and hunker down in front of the fireplace with Elon Musk’s new biography. Well, the fire he could check off that list. Instead, his gym time was jogging naked in twenty-degree temperatures, and his big fat steak would a meal replacement bar from his pocket, which thanks to the plastic wrapper had survived his plunge much better than he did. He was looking forward to scarfing one down. He’d been saving them to pull out in a moment when things turned dire.

  Things had turned dire.

  As soon as he got back and got Anna hydrated with some of those electrolyte packets she’d mentioned, he’d break out his supply. She needed the calories to recover.

  Finley had planned to surprise Anna with the meal replacement bars he had in his pocket. But she must have known about them. She would have found them when she frisked him, which he was absolutely sure she had done when he was unconscious.

  Finley wondered why she’d left them in his pocket.

  Another test, he assumed.

  Must be.

  Anna was a strategic thinker. She kept laying out snares to see if she could trip him up. He wished he was up to the mind games, but he’d thrown in the towel on that. His goal was simply to get them to a hospital. Stat.

  As he bent down to snag the backpack with the car mats looped into the webbing, he spotted the FBI blue with yellow letters in the distance. Three steps in that direction, and he picked up, shook out, and pulled on Anna’s coat which had landed a few feet before Mulvaney’s. His frozen fingers fumbled with the zipper until he gave up.

  A stride later, he had Anna’s Coke can full of snow. He slipped it into the jacket pocket. They’d need that.

  Next, he arrived at Mulvaney’s coat. He tied that on around his waist, trying to protect the boys. If – no, when – he got out of this, he wasn’t about to spend the rest of his career as the living embodiment of blue ball jokes back at headquarters.

  Was it possible to get frostbite on your dick? Would that lead to amputation?

  That was a damned sick thought. He pushed that image to the side, thinking for the first time how much he appreciated the evolutionary adaptation of testicular retraction.

  Things were feeling better for his guys with the jacket protecting them from the sting of the wind.

  When he got to Anna’s fleece hoody, he stabbed his torch into the ground and stopped long enough to pull the duct tape from the sack, replacing the neck brace Anna had devised for him. That too was an improvement.

  Here, he’d been trudging along all day thinking how much it had all sucked when,as if taunting him, fate said, “You think that sucked? Here, hold my beer. You’re about to lose everything.”

  That was his thought when he watched Anna fall through the ice.

  He was about to lose everything.

  As Finley hefted the sack onto his shoulders and lifted his torch to follow the slope, he pictured Anna sopping wet, flailing in the swamp. That would be a loss that… When he lifted her into his arms, he… His head started pounding to the point he thought he might black out.

  Chapter Eleven

  Anna

  Anna roused herself, slowly pulling herself away from feeling oddly contented.

  Something had changed. Something wasn’t right.

  The pine stump still put off heat, though it was more a pile of red-hot coals and less of the blaze it had been at the beginning. They were warm enough.

  She focused on Finley. His chest rose and dropped with his breath. His heart beat under her ear. He wasn’t the source of her anxiety.

  They were nestled in their shelter on top of the car mats and wrapped up tight in the dog blanket.

  This shelter Finley had made for them while she had shivered in fetal position last night. It was a clever design. He had taken the laces that Anna had stripped from Mulvaney’s boots and used them to wrap around the tops of four saplings that he’d pulled together, knotting the laces off to form a dome. He draped the Mylar blanket over that, reflecting the rising heat back down on them, then added the plastic tarp. He’d shoveled the snow to form an igloo that kept the wind from blowing cold into their space, like she had done down in the creek bed. Was that just yesterday they’d woken up in the creek? Seemed like a long time ago.

  Wind.

  That was what was missing.

  The snow had stopped. And the wind wasn’t howling.

  That was bad.

  Anna picked up Finley’s wrist to check the glow-in-the-dark hands on his watch. The alarm was going to go off in less than an hour. She was awake now, might as well work out today’s plan. Same as yesterday, to start: T
ry to unfold her aching body. Eat. Drink. Bury the fire. Wipe their footprint as best they could. Get going.

  Could they get all the way to a hospital today?

  And if they did, would they be safe there?

  She begrudgingly left Finley’s arms, then tucked the blanket back around him. Anna crawled over to the pack where she pulled out the cell phones and checked each one – just in case the signal had improved with the storm’s abatement. But Nada.

  “You okay?” Finley whispered over to her.

  Anna brought her phone with her along with her to light the map she held in its Ziploc baggie as she moved back to Finley. “We have to come up with a strategy.”

  “Alright.” Finley opened the blanket, and she crawled back in, nestling between his thighs, appreciating the shared body heat, curving into his arms where she’d learned over the last two nights to feel comfortably at home.

  “I’m hearing whirring cogs in your voice,” Finley said. “I would have thought that, now that we’re back parallel to the accident with an unscalable hill between us and the cabin road, we’d be safe from Bella.”

  “I think you’re right about Bella.”

  “I’m still hearing it. You’re figuring out a plan to stay clear of the SIC forces. What are we up against today?”

  She nibbled on her thumb nail. “They need to find us. They won’t give up.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I’m slowly working my way to a conclusion.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Think about search and rescue rings, at this distance, if they plotted the circumference out on the map, searching the possible terrain would take a massive effort. I mean, we could be dead under the snow.”

  “Or at the bottom of a pond.” Anna wished she hadn’t said it. A deeper pall wrapped over them. That near-miss lived in her lungs, making each breath a reminder of last night. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  “Back to your concerns. Snowmobiles… what else could they throw at us?”