by Romi Hart
One more frantic glance over her shoulder brought all the terror and desperation crashing back on her shoulders. That hideous beast lunged for her and snapped his fangs.
The stick went slack in her hand and she stared at the demon menacing her from behind. The afterburn deflected off his cheeks. He closed his eyelids for a second, but that blast of heat did him no harm. He almost seemed to enjoy it.
What the hell was she seeing? That maneuver she pulled with Rover wouldn’t do anything to these creatures. The afterburn didn’t hurt him. Whatever else this thing was, he was different from the dragons the team fought last time. Maybe they adapted to that, too.
If they did, she was sunk. She couldn’t use weapons or anything else to defeat these things. She was finished.
In front of her shocked eyes, the monster made one more catastrophic dive for her. He flew faster than she ever imagined. He was just toying with her back there. He could kill her whenever he wanted.
He gave an Earth-shattering bite. His fangs punctured the fuselage and the plane shuddered. The engines coughed and the cockpit lurched under her. Rover’s voice thundered in her ear. “Eject, Pocahontas! That’s an order! Eject now! Eject! Eject!”
She froze staring at her death stalking her from behind. She couldn’t put her thumb on the eject button. This was her only chance at survival, but she couldn’t move.
Just then, the dragon to her left veered in. He slammed his iron frame into her plane. The wing snapped. The jet jerked away and the engines failed. The craft tumbled into a tailspin plummeting straight toward the ground.
The blow knocked Riley out of her stupor. She crammed her thumb onto the button. The windshield sailed back and the full brunt of rushing air hit her helmet. A powerful ripping motion tore her from her seat.
The next thing she knew, she was soaring through the clear blue sky. Dragons fluttered everywhere. Her plane raced away without her on its death dive to nowhere.
The huge green monster hovered over her head. He arched his neck and watched her flutter at the end of her parachute. She floated down, down, down and left Rover and Bishop and Lancelot to their fate.
The dense Louisiana forest rushed up at her fast. She made out roads and streams and fields. Houses and buildings dotted the landscape. She tried to steer for a field, but thirty feet off the ground, a gust of wind caught her chute. Against all her efforts to guide herself away, it puffed under her and swept her several miles south.
She kicked herself for not checking her location before she ejected. Never mind. She could check her GPS as soon as she landed.
That confounded wind wouldn’t leave her alone. It blew her miles away over some nameless bayou. Just when she hoped it would deposit her somewhere convenient, it died without warning. It dropped her straight into a swamp and the slimy water closed over her head.
2
Riley floundered to break the surface, but her parachute blocked her efforts. She pawed at it trying to move it out of the way. She sensed her air running out and struggled to free herself.
She did her best to remain calm, but the last particle of oxygen ran out all too soon. She coughed and swallowed ten or twelve mouthfuls of filthy water before she managed to get out from under the chute.
She slapped the saturated fabric away and spluttered for air. She dog-paddled in one place for a second retching the water out of her lungs. In the midst of that, she felt her harness towing her underwater again. She clawed at the clips, but her fingers slipped in the ooze.
She kicked to keep her head above water while she extricated herself from this mess. When she got loose, she treaded water for a while trying to get her brain working. She couldn’t stay here. She dragged her sodden form to the nearest bank and hauled herself out.
Once she got on solid ground, she collapsed on her back panting for breath. She couldn’t bring herself to get up. Every limb weighed a ton. The whole scene from a few minutes ago kept repeating in her mind.
She nearly lost her life to those infernal dragons. They killed Pineapple. For all she knew, her teammates were already dead. She cracked an eye open, but she couldn’t see anything but endless sky in all directions.
At least she was alive. She was somewhere in Louisiana, but she had no idea where. The Navy would come and find her as soon as she activated her homing beacon.
The surreal confusion and anguish of the dog fight haunted her for longer than she expected. She let herself lie where she was. She dripped water into the grass and did her best to calm down.
The sun felt good on her face, but her wet clothes chilled her in spite of the heat. She had to change and she couldn’t do that lying here.
She pulled herself into a sitting position and rummaged her pockets. She found her GPS unit, but when she depressed the power button, it wouldn’t turn on. Damned thing. She couldn’t activate her locater beacon, either.
Whatever. How lost could she be? She just had to find a road and maybe a phone. As soon as she called Major Dickerson, he’d be able to trace her call and pick her up. He would take her back to Barksdale and that would be it.
She stuffed the unit back in her pocket and looked around. Dense vegetation surrounded her on all sides. A slick of motionless water glistened before her eyes. Her parachute covered half of it. The rest of it disappeared into the murky brown slurry.
She took the time to examine her predicament. Nothing offered any a clue which way to go. The sun gave her a basic orientation. Other than that, she didn’t see anything that might guide her to a road or human habitation. That was strange. She ought to at least see some power lines or…or something.
She frowned. Then she shook those thoughts out of her head. No one could be that far from civilization in modern America, even in the Louisiana bayou.
She climbed farther up the bank and started walking east. Her wet clothes made traveling harder, but so what? Just a few more miles and she would find something or someone to help her.
She meandered through dense trees and forded ponds. She avoided a few small gators, but she didn’t see anything that could harm her. At least she got away from those dragons. She didn’t look forward to seeing them again anytime soon.
She walked for hours until she got tired. Her wet flight suit chaffed her elbows and knees and she sweated inside her jacket. She tied it around her waist and stripped her flight suit down to her tank top. She knotted the sleeves across her stomach. The sultry air felt a little better against her arms and neck, but not much.
She pulled to a halt when the sun dipped behind the trees. She scowled at the landscape one more time. How could she walk all that way without seeing the slightest evidence of humanity?
The bayou throbbed with life of all kinds—all except human. Insects, reptiles, and birds chirped and squawked and crept all around her as far as she could see. This was their domain. She didn’t belong here.
That was stupid, though. She grew up in the bayou. She belonged here as much as they did, but something didn’t fit right. From the vegetation, she guessed she was somewhere in mid-southern Louisiana, probably near Baton Rouge.
She scanned her memory. She couldn’t think of any patch of bayou big enough for a person to walk in for over seven hours without coming to any road or house. Maybe she’d been walking in circles all this time, but that wasn’t like her, either.
This made no sense. She forged ahead. This time, she made absolutely certain to locate a landmark first. She picked out a huge cypress tree that topped the canopy. She measured it up and down and detected a few irregularities in its branch pattern. She memorized it so she couldn’t mistake it for any other tree. Then she walked toward it.
When she reached it, she picked out another tree on an eastern line. She went through the same mental exercise until she would recognize that tree out of thousands. She repeated this process to make sure she continued heading eastward with no mistakes.
Still, she found no one, no roads, no trails, no fences, no overhead wires. This was really strang
e, but she refused to give in to phantoms and irrational fears. She was in Louisiana. What could possibly go wrong?
What went wrong was that the sun kept going down. The air cooled and still she wandered without any destination in sight. She never thought she’d live to spend the night out here, but what the hell?
Dusk settled over the bayou. Now she had to consider where to spend the night. At least she wouldn’t have to keep walking in these wet clothes.
She found a large tree with some branches near the ground. She decided how she would climb it. Once she got up there, she could take off her chilly flight suit and hang it out to dry while she got some sleep.
She started to relax. She hadn’t spent the night outdoors since she was a kid. This might actually be fun—at least, she could pretend she was doing it by choice and not because she was lost.
She put her foot on the lowest branch and took hold of the second one to pull herself up. She cast one fleeting glance around and froze. A hatchet-shaped face stared out at her from the dense undergrowth.
She blinked. It didn’t disappear. She didn’t imagine it. Then another face materialized out of the bushes. All at once, the whole area appeared alive with faces all glaring at her.
She scanned the vegetation and her heart skipped a beat. The next minute, she went back to relaxing into this. She was looking for people. Now she found them. Either way, she couldn’t run. She had nowhere to go.
She dropped her hand and her foot and confronted the strangers. “Hey! I’ve been looking for you.”
They didn’t move. The first face eyed her with wary reserve. It was a man, a white man with buzz-cut hair and a scruff of beard around his jaws. His brown eyes flashed at her, but he didn’t come out.
She dared a few steps toward him. The faces flanking him didn’t look like him at all. Some of them looked Native. Others were black along with a few more white people, and they were all men.
That should have made her nervous, but it didn’t. This was her ground. She knew her way around these swamps as well as the next person.
She halted in front of the short-haired man and peered at him through the bushes. “Hello? I’m lost. Can you tell me how to find a road or a phone or something?”
He blinked. He was alive even if he pretended to be a statue. Without warning, he crashed through the branches and emerged to stand in front of her. “You don’t belong here. You should leave.”
“That’s what I just said,” she returned. “I’m trying to leave. I’ve been searching for a road or something for hours. Do you have a truck or something nearby?”
His features darkened. “I don’t have a truck.”
She surveyed the area. “How did you get here, then? Are you hunting or what?”
“We’re hunting.”
His abrupt response confused her. Why didn’t he just answer her questions like a normal person? She rallied. She had to get through to him somehow. “Who are you guys? Where did you come from?”
He jerked his chin behind her. “Over there.”
She ignored that. “Do you have a name?”
He swiveled his gaze around and locked his brown eyes on her. That direct stare disconcerted her when she was trying to act casual and friendly. “Victor. Victor Griffin.”
She nodded for no particular reason. “Good name.”
“Pocahontas.”
Her head shot up and her eyes popped. “What did you say?”
“Pocahontas. Your name is Pocahontas.”
Her jaw dropped staring at him. “It is not!”
“He called you Pocahontas.”
She shut her mouth with a click. What the fuck was he talking about? “Who called me that?”
“The man. The man who told you to eject. He said, ‘Eject, Pocahontas’.”
She couldn’t blink. She could only gape at him in dumb shock. “How do you know that?”
“I heard him. I heard him say that to you before you landed here.”
She couldn’t get her brain to function. “My name is NOT Pocahontas. Don’t you dare call me that.”
He shrugged and looked away. “You shouldn’t be here. You should leave.”
She gritted her teeth. What a fucking jackass. “I’m trying to. If you just tell me which way to go, I’ll get out of your hair. I don’t want to stay here any more than you want me here.”
“This is our land. You have no right here.”
Now he was making her mad. “I have as much right here as you do, cracker—maybe more. I should be telling you to get off my land.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Your land?”
“That’s right. My land. Our land. I was born here and my people have lived here a lot longer than you have. Don’t you tell me this is your land.”
He rotated around and locked his gaze on her one more time. “You can’t be here.”
She compressed her lips. How could you talk to a slack-jawed caveman like this? “Look, just leave me the fuck alone, okay? I’ll spend the night here, and in the morning, I’ll leave. Just go back to whatever the fuck you were doing. I’ll be fine. Thanks for asking.”
She turned around and took hold of the branch to swing up. She withdrew her attention from this fuckwit. He couldn’t even carry on a civil conversation. Pocahontas, indeed! Who the hell did he think he was?
She shifted her weight onto her foot to climb up when the guy lunged for her quicker than light. He grabbed her wrist and yanked her down. “Don’t do that. You can’t.”
She rounded on him spitting tacks. “You son of a bitch! Get your stinkin’ fucking hands off me.”
She slapped his hand away. In a fraction of a second, all the others burst out of the trees to surround her. None of them carried guns. That was a mercy, but she could see plain as day they were just as dangerous as if they had been carrying.
They formed a circle around her. Riley’s nerves prickled and she braced herself to fight her way out of this. She spun one way and then the other to keep them all in sight, but she couldn’t face them all at once.
They closed in, but the short-haired guy didn’t move. Victor. He said his name was Victor. He straightened up. “You can’t stay here. It’s forbidden.”
“Go fuck yourself, asshole,” she snarled. “You don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. Now back off before I tear you a new one.”
Someone to her left inched forward. A hand landed on her shoulder and Riley exploded. She trained for confrontations just like this. She would go down swinging.
She whipped around and let her fist fly. She made contact with a black guy’s jaw. The impact ricocheted up her arm. Someone grabbed her from behind. She told herself to wheel and lash out again, but at that moment, an invisible force hit her hard.
Her neck wrenched and her teeth locked. In a flash, every muscle in her body tensed to devastating tightness. She couldn’t move. Crushing tension seized her all over. Her spine contorted and her knees buckled. She folded to the ground spasming all over. Then the lights went out and she lost consciousness.
3
Victor scanned the strange woman up and down. She lay on her back across the bare ground. Her head lolled to one side.
Shiny black hair trailed over her neck. He couldn’t see her black eyes behind her closed eyelids, but he remembered them from their earlier encounter.
Her flight suit and leather jacket covered her body to keep her warm. A patch on the upper lapel read, Strickland. So that was her name. No wonder she got so mad when he called her Pocahontas. Well, it was an honest mistake. Anyone could make a mistake like that.
She shivered inside her wet clothes. He wanted to take them off and wrap her in blankets, but he knew better than to go near her in her current state. He just had to sit back and watch and wait.
While he sat there thinking things over, Finn Weeks slunk over to him. He squatted next to Victor and murmured into his ear. Finn’s stark white eyes gleamed out of his sleek black skin. “What do you want to do with her? We can’t tak
e her back with us.”
Victor didn’t remove his gaze away from the woman. “We can’t leave her behind like this. Did you get the others?”
“They’re both gone. We burned two of them and the other beat it back to Barksdale. Do you want to follow it up?”
“We won’t have to,” Victor replied. “They’ll be back. You can bet on that.”
“They’ll come after her.”
Victor shook his head. “Not without the signal to guide them. We’ll take her into the Quag. They’ll never find her.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Finn whispered. “She’s one of them.”
“It’s my mistake to make.”
Before Finn could answer, she stirred. She tossed her head from side to side and moaned under her breath. Finn slipped away and left Victor alone with her. They would all act like that from now on. Victor saw the same thing too many times before.
She lurched off the ground and strapped her arms across her stomach, but she didn’t open her eyes. She contracted her midsection and heaved into a sitting position. She rocked there with her head bowed. Her long black hair swayed around her twisted face while she groaned to herself.
She clamped her eyes shut and gasped for air, but Victor didn’t move. He rested his back against the house and observed. Whatever else she might be, she was his enemy. Finn was right about that much.
She stopped rocking for a minute and combed her hair back. Then she cracked her eyes open to look around. Victor watched the dawn of comprehension break across her features. Her agony faded and blank astonishment took its place when she realized where she was. She gaped around her with her mouth open…right up until the moment she spotted him.
Even then, it took her a minute to place him in her memory. That’s right, girl. Put it all together. She blinked her languid black eyes. She wasn’t half bad to look at now that she sat still long enough for him to check her out. She had a nice shape under that jumpsuit of hers and her eyes showed she was intelligent. She knew exactly what she was seeing.