Tritium Gambit

by Erik Hyrkas

  Chapter 37. Max

  When I woke up, I was tied to a tree in the forest. I could hear the distant waves of Lake Superior, and so I knew Wendy hadn’t dragged me far. I wondered if John and Miranda made it to safety.

  “Ah, you’re awake,” Wendy said. “You’re ability to regenerate is amazing, but I have to tell you that you resemble the Incredible Shrinking Man.”

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  Wendy looked both sad and incredibly pissed at the same time. “I had been waiting four days for Tyler to return, and he had never kept me waiting before, when I saw Tyler’s ship plummeting from the sky. It only confirmed my worst fears. You don’t know what it has been like.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “Everybody is afraid to touch me. I had finally found somebody who wasn’t scared.” She stifled a sob, and I had to admit nearly feeling sorry for her, psychopathic bitch that she was. “You’ve robbed me of my happily-ever-after.” She pulled out a long knife. “But you can still give me some pleasure. I’m going to test just how far your regeneration can be pushed. We’ll see which breaks first, your mind or your body.”

  I started to ramble while watching her knife. “It wasn’t my fault. Tyler was crazy. The Wendigo was never going to honor the deal—they didn’t even have the Tritium. They had always planned to eat him, and he was just too stupid to figure that out.”

  “I see you are trying to reason with me,” Wendy said. She tossed her knife at me, and it stuck deep into my upper thigh. “Ah, I missed by three inches.”

  I groaned softly. “When I get free, I’m going to put this knife in you.”

  “Empty threats,” she whispered as she sauntered toward me. She wrenched the knife in my leg, then sliced downward to my knee.

  “You must have a plan. You aren’t expecting to simply kill me and then go quietly,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Oh, I have a plan.” She pulled the knife from my knee and slashed me across the cheek. She smiled. “Let’s worry about one thing at a time though.” She blinked, and I noticed that, for a brief moment, her eyes turned a cloudy black. I had never noticed that about her before, and it reminded me of somebody else I knew.

  A thought hit me. I couldn’t remember her ever asking a question. “Did you know that my blood has healing properties?” I asked. “It can heal you and even make you look younger.”

  “That’s what Tyler said. That’s why he thought you were so valuable.”

  She touched a scar on her arm and then considered the bloody knife she held. She took a tentative taste. Not exactly what I had in mind, but whatever works for her. Then she licked it off more feverishly.

  “My god, your blood tastes amazing,” she whispered.

  She stabbed my arm and then sucked right from my injury like a vampire that fell off the wagon. When she stopped to take a breath, my wound closed.

  She looked at the scar on her arm, and the tissue was smoothing over.

  “Amazing. I found the fountain of youth. Maybe there is a reason to torture you without killing you.”

  Then her triumphant look turned to a grimace, she gripped her stomach, and fell to her knees.

  “Oh, did I mention a little known fact?” I asked. “My blood happens to be poisonous to Teslians.”

  She spit and retched, and while she was distracted, I began working on the rope holding me to the tree. As an agent, she was an expert in knots, but as I was also an agent, an expert in escaping said knots. Between heaves, she cursed me.

  When the ropes fell away and she realized that I was free, she somehow found the strength to shoot me six times in the chest. I was lucky. She ran out of ammo again or she might have killed me. Unfortunately, I was in a metric ton of pain. She passed out while I lay panting on the ground.

  I lay on the ground for twenty minutes as my body struggled to find the raw materials to heal, but I was nearing my limits and so it took longer than it would had I been eating more regularly. When I had the strength to move, I checked if Wendy was still alive. She had a pulse, but she also had an intense fever.

  I saw that she had left a small backpack against a tree not far away. I wondered if it had food in it, but I had to attend to Wendy first. I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t wake up and shoot me, and so I grabbed her gun and searched her for ammo. She had two clips on her. So I reloaded and put the extra clip in my pocket. I put her knife in my boot sheath and tucked the gun into my waistband—if nothing else to help hold up my pants. Finally, I took the rope she had bound me with and tied her hands together as tightly as I could. It wouldn’t hold her for good, but she was going to have to work at those knots for a few minutes.

  I didn’t have the strength to stand, and so I crawled over to her backpack. Inside was a six pack of Power Protein drink and a giant bag of beef jerky, probably to keep me alive so she could torture me longer. Wendy had been right about one thing: I was starting to resemble a skeleton. With each wound I suffered, I had to sacrifice more muscle, and now I had very little left to give. I drank the whole six pack.

  I was worried about Miranda and John. I wanted to help them with the Wendigo, but I wasn’t ready to move yet. I was still much too weak. I ate the beef jerky while I rested. When the jerky was gone, I dug deeper into Wendy’s bag and found a tin of cinnamon mints. The container said they had five calories each, and so I ate all of them. She had a change of clothes that I tossed on the ground as I dug. There at the bottom, I found a wad of twenty dollar bills and a standard issue stun grenade shaped like a pen. I put the money and the pen in my pocket.

  I looked at Wendy’s spare clothes again. I didn’t have a functional shirt of my own, and so I tried on hers. It was black and didn’t go all the way to my shorts, but it was clean. The shirt had the words Team Edward on it. I put her empty backpack on because you never know when you’ll need a bag.

  I struggled to my feet. I couldn’t tell if Wendy’s unconsciousness was life threatening. I wasn’t exactly feeling too empathetic, but I didn’t kill people, not even evil, sadistic witches. I wanted to bring Wendy in to the Service for prosecution, but stopping the Wendigo and helping Miranda were more important. I had a decision to make, however: risk trying to take Wendy with me, knowing that, if she woke up, she would eventually break free of the ropes and probably try to shock me to death; or leave her here on the ground where she might die.

  I walked to her and pulled out the knife I had taken from her. Just like I promised, I stabbed her in the thigh, but she didn’t wake up. She didn’t even twitch. I wiped off the knife and sighed. Decisions, decisions. I put the knife away in my boot. An injured thigh would at least slow her down and make her easier to deal with.

  I couldn’t carry her, however, because skin contact was a bad idea. If she woke up, she’d knock me out with a zap and then I’d be right back where I was before: tied to a tree and bleeding. And she wasn’t likely to drink my blood a second time. I didn’t like it, but there did not seem to be a choice: I left her lying there. If I could get a com link, or even a mobile phone, I’d have somebody come pick her up.

  The protein drinks and beef jerky were starting to kick in, and I felt a little stronger. I didn’t look any bigger that I could tell, but I knew the calories were helping.

  I began walking through the woods away from Lake Superior. I would eventually come to a road. I wished that I had the graviton bars, because I would have risked using reverse to make myself lighter and bouncing through the forest. At my current pace, I wasn’t going to catch up to the others soon.

  I came out of the trees at mile marker fifty-three on an unknown highway. The sun was still bright and high in the sky as I started walking toward town. I held out my thumb for a ride as cars went by, but only one car slowed down enough for the occupants to yell, “Team Jacob.” Then they sped off. “Effing shapeshifter lovers,” I called after them.

  I walked for hours, and I began jogging as the sun was setting. I was tired and hungry again but couldn’t
waste another minute. A green and white sign indicated I was one mile from Grand Marais. By the time I arrived in town, the sun had long set and a half-moon was shining in the sky.

  I saw a Walgreens, and I ran toward it. I counted the wad of cash I had—five hundred dollars. I was going shopping. Inside, I grabbed a basket. I took the best prepaid Internet mobile phone I could find, four large containers of Weight Gain 3000, two one-gallon jugs of milk, a carton of orange juice, and a giant silver and black fifty-two ounce mug with the words Bubba Keg on it. When I got to the cash register, I grabbed a pack of Tic Tac mints.

  Price of a phone call and a meal? One hundred eighty-two dollars. Paying with your ex-girlfriend’s money? Priceless.

  I sat on the curb outside of Walgreens and dialed the Service’s number. While it rang, I started making myself a high calorie drink in the Bubba Keg: equal parts Milk and Weight Gain 3000.

  “Anderson, Bremermann, Bohern, Johnson, and Peterson,” a female voice answered.

  “Agent Maximus, here. Clearance fifty-two thirty-one,” I said as I shook the Bubba Keg violently to mix my drink.

  “Voice signature match. The line has been secured,” the lady said. “Proceed.”

  “I left Agent Wendy in the woods south of mile marker fifty-three off Minnesota Highway Sixty-One. Please send a pick-up for her,” I said.

  “I’ll request cleanup immediately,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “Have there been any more pings in or near Minnesota?” I asked.

  “One moment,” she said. “Nothing. The last ping was a hunk of space junk falling to Earth in Ely, Minnesota.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I was aware of that one. Good bye.” I hung up the phone and drank my dinner.

  I chose the phone because it had Internet access. I typed in news searches looking for anything out of the ordinary while I continued drinking. I found a new post on a Canadian Bigfoot blog. The caption read: “Bigfoot Ate my Dog.” But the blogger lived in Silver Mountain, Ontario, which didn’t seem right for our Wendigo because there were more lakes that way. I would expect the Wendigo to move away from the water. Maybe Bigfoot was causing problems—but they were somebody else’s problems right now. I kept searching. A teenager named Darcy Henderson had gone missing in Cloquet, Minnesota. According to Google, I had a little over 131 miles to walk to get there.

  I mixed another Bubba Keg of calories and began walking. As long as I was stocked up on calories, I could run a mile every four minutes, but that meant it was roughly nine hours to Cloquet. It wasn’t right to steal a bike or car, but I didn’t want to do this on foot and so I decided I would run until I found alternate transportation.

  I finished the milk and Weight Gainer mix, and then I drank the orange juice. As I was putting away the Bubba Keg in my pack, I found the Tic Tac mints and ate them. Big mistake. They do not taste good after orange juice. Satisfied that I had a few calories to work with, I began my long run. I decided to stick to the road because, even though it wasn’t the shortest distance, it was easier than trying to swim across lakes and streams and there was much less chance of getting lost.