by Erik Hyrkas
Chapter 34. Miranda
Sirens wailed in the distance as the charred Wendigo sprinted into the forest. I wanted to chase him down, but I didn’t have a weapon that could do more than irritate him, and both Max and John needed help.
John had driven off the end of the dock with the tow truck. I saw him pulling himself onto the dock with his one good arm, and so I knew he was alive. I jumped to Max where he lay unconscious on a boulder. His whole body was broken and bloody, but I could feel he had a heartbeat, actually several in sequence. The bleeding had already stopped when I reached him, but he wasn’t conscious and I wondered if even he could mend from so many terrible wounds.
I carried him to the dock and a large sailboat with two masts. I laid him down in the cabin below deck. Even though the boat seemed large from the outside, the inside was small. The bathroom was under the stairs, and the small room where I put Max acted as sleeping quarters, dining area, and kitchen. I was glad I chose one of the larger sailboats.
I dashed out of the boat to help John, who was lying on the dock breathing hard.
“Are you in any condition to move?” I asked.
“I’m going to be fine. Help me up,” he said.
I offered him a hand and helped him up. He limped as he walked toward the boat I had commandeered, but he simply shook his head at me when I tried to help him. So I ran back to the boat and hotwired the ignition. We needed the gas motors to navigate out of the harbor. I wasn’t much of a sailor, and so I would need the time underway using the engines to figure out how the sails work.
By the time John was aboard, I had the engines going and the ropes untied from the dock. We bumped a few of the other boats as I did my best to navigate out into the bay. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped, but I got us out of the harbor. I could make out the flashing emergency vehicle lights back on shore, but the rain obscured my vision and I wondered if the responders would even notice us sailing away.
John hunkered down on the bench next to the cabin. The rain was steady, and the wind was cold and biting.
“You should go below deck,” I said.
He didn’t look up. “I’m right where I want to be, thanks.”
“Are you worried I will sink the ship?”
“A little,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve ever been on a boat.”
“I’ve been on a boat!” I didn’t bother mentioning that I had never steered one and had no idea how to work the sails. I figured that, if humans had been doing it for centuries, I could do it.
He glanced up at me and then looked back down. “You are so worried about your partner that you are going to fail this mission.”
I knew he had been an agent, and maybe that’s why it stung when he criticized me. “Your partner always comes first,” I said.
“The mission comes first, and then your partner. You let the Wendigo go.”
“I didn’t have a way of stopping him!”
“You are an agent. You are trained to find a way.”
“It wasn’t possible. My pistol was out of ammo, and the weapon wouldn’t do anything to the creature even if it was fully loaded.”
He looked me in the eye. “If you didn’t want an impossible job, you should have signed up for desk work. Out here, we’re lucky when the odds are a thousand to one against us. You have strengths of your own that you could have used.”
“I was doing everything I could,” I said, my tone now more defensive than I liked.
“It wasn’t enough.” He got up and crawled to the front of the boat, where he sat huddled in the rain.
I was left alone to navigate the darkness.