Inside

by Kyra Anderson

  I tried to blink away the dust from my eyes that had blinded me when we fell, but Mark gave me very little time to recover. Tightening his grip on my hand to the point of being painful, he towed me along, stumbling to get to his feet.

  More bullets were fired, and I was sure it was only a matter of time before I would feel the bite of a bullet.

  All at once, the bullet stopped. An angry voice rang out over the dark desert.

  “I swear, the next person to shoot will get a bullet themselves!” Miss Harris’ voice bellowed.

  “But ma’am! They’re getting away!”

  “You shot them!” the woman snarled. “By the time we find them, they’ll have bled out! Once again, you have cost us subjects for this program. At this point, let the desert kill them. It will cost less money.”

  “…sir, you can’t possibly—”

  “…she’s right,” Dana agreed after a moment’s hesitation. “It is likely that Little Lily has already been killed. And whoever you did shoot out there probably won’t survive in the desert for more than a day.”

  “Let’s get the boy back to the lab at least,” the woman decided. “Although, one out of five is a pathetic waste of my time, Mr. Christenson.”

  Mark pulled me behind a taller bush, where he collapsed to the sand. I sat heavily next to him, trying to catch my breath, my lungs burning. The woman had unknowingly saved our lives. However, she could have also condemned us—the way Mark was cringing as he held his left shoulder terrified me.

  I tried to reach for the flashlight on my backpack but Mark grabbed my hand and shook his head.

  I watched helplessly as he flinched and gasped for breath, gritting his teeth against the pain. I was becoming more and more worried that he had been fatally wounded, particularly when it looked like he was fading in and out of consciousness.

  When it had been silent for a prolonged amount of time and the night grown even darker, I finally jerked my hand away from him and shined the light on his shoulder. I only got a quick glance glimpse of the wound before he snatched the flashlight away, clicking it off, worried about giving away our position to anybody who had lingered to wait for sign of us. Blood had glistened in the brief light, coating his entire hand as he tried to cover the bullet wound.

  I looked around, trying to decide what to do. Without thinking too much about my actions, I grabbed his arm and helped him to his feet, though he stumbled and had to lean heavily on me.

  “We have to get away from here,” I insisted quietly. “We got to start walking until we find a place to lay low.”

  Mark cringed but nodded, forcing his feet forward and walking with me through the brush and sand.

  It was a small miracle that no one stayed around to make sure that none of us had escaped into the desert. Or perhaps, we had just gotten far enough away that no one saw us even when we started moving again. I did not worry about a blood trail, too focused on getting Mark to a safe place where we could assess his wound.

  I remembered far too late that Clark had been the one carrying the few items of first aid that we had. The realization made me fear the worst.

  Distant thunder began to roll over our heads and I finally realized why the night was so dark. Dark clouds had built over our time in the cemetery and flashes of lightning and thick waves of thunder threatened to let loose rain.

  I kept a close eye on the lightning, using it to see our surroundings as the air got colder and a few raindrops fell.

  I knew that there was no way we would be able to survive in a thunderstorm exposed and wounded. I was also hurt and with the chilled air surrounding me, I could feel the cuts on my legs and hands begin to ache. Mark was struggling against his own injuries, falling to his knees with increasing frequency the longer we walked.

  It seemed we had escaped the Commission only to be taken by the desert, as Miss Harris had predicted.

  It took a few minutes, but the sporadic raindrops soon became thick sheets of heavy, cold rain, biting into our skin like needles as I tried to see into the distance, looking desperately for any form of shelter.

  It seemed hopeless, as though we would never find anything, when we happened upon an old barn sitting on the other side a barbed-wire fence. By that point, I was supporting most of Mark’s weight as he fought for consciousness against his blood loss.

  “Come on, Mark,” I hissed, adjusting his arm around my shoulder. “Look there. There’s a barn right there. We just have to get to that barn.”

  Mark somehow managed to get his feet back under him and we carefully picked our way around the barbed wire fence. Stumbling the remaining way to the barn, I opened one of the gates and stepped into a stall, finally hauling Mark’s shaking, half-live body into the interior of the stall, propping him up against the stall wall.

  Breathing heavily, shaking from cold and pain, I frantically looked around. To my shock, there was a horse standing inside of the stall, slowly walking over to us, his head lowered as he tried to see who had come into the stall. I did not know anything about horses, so I did not know he was showing signs of aggression.

  However, once the horse sniffed us, it stepped away, watching us with little interest.

  Figuring that the horse would leave us alone, I turn my attention back to Mark.

  The dim lights in the barn allowed me to finally get a good look at Mark’s condition. He was pale, his glasses nowhere to be found and his face contorted expression of agony. His hand was completely coated in watered-down blood, more thick crimson pumping through his fingers as he shivered.

  I pulled his hand away, trying not to be frightened by the amount of blood that poured out of the holes in his jacket. Moving the fabric aside I saw that he had two bullet holes close together in the upper portion of his chest, sitting just below his left shoulder.

  Even though I had been desperate to see the wound so that I would know what had to be treated, I froze at the sight, my brain unable to come up with any solution.

  At a loss, I took his face, forcing his head to straighten enough to look at me.

  “You’re going to be all right,” I said sharply. “I cannot do this without you, okay? You have to fight this. I’m going to find a way to help you.”

  Mark lifted his other hand and gently wrapped it around my wrist, nodding slowly as his eyes closed.

  “No, no, Mark don’t go to sleep on me!” I snapped. “You have to tell me what I have to do.”

  It was as I said the words that I realized he had no way to tell me how to help him.

  The tears came quickly as I was consumed with the fear he would die in front of me.

  Unsure what else to do, I hugged him tightly, my frozen hand pressing over the wound to add more pressure and stall the blood flow. We remained that way until we both stopped shivering from cold. We both must have fallen asleep briefly, because the next thing I knew, there was a loud clanking sound that startled us both. Mark cringed as the movement jarred his shoulder, gritting his teeth.

  I hesitated, waiting to hear more noise, not sure what had happened. The horse in the stall with us lifted his head and walked to the door, letting out a soft noise. I began to panic once more.

  I should have realized sooner that having horses in the barn meant that there was someone who would come to take care of them. The barn was not abandoned.

  Another horse somewhere in the barn let out a loud noise and a voice answered it.

  “I know, I know, I’m coming,” a man’s voice said, though the thin voice told me the owner of the voice was young. “You’re not starving. You’re going to be just fine.”

  I listened intently as the man’s footsteps walked throughout the barn. There were a lot of sounds I could not identify, though I assumed that the man was gathering food for the horses.

  I looked at Mark, who was also looking at me, his eyes struggling to focus. I had to make a decision—I had to decide whether we were going to remain completely hidden by escaping into the torrential rain outside, or if I would beg him t
o help us and save Mark’s life.

  Rather than make any decision, I sat, frozen in my uncertainty.

  The footsteps and sounds moved closer. I was scarcely breathing as I listen to them, terrified and feeling trapped yet again.

  “I guess with all this rain you’ve decided I’m not so bad after all,” the man said as he approached the stall we were hiding in. I glanced at the bars at the top of the stall door to see a man reaching between the bars toward the horse. The horse snorted and turned away.

  “Yeah…guess it didn’t really change your opinion after all.”

  The man was not at all what I had been expecting from a rancher. He was relatively short and had short blonde hair that poked out from under his plastic-covered hat. He had bright blue eyes set into the face of an adult man, but his voice was thinner than any television cowboy I had ever seen.

  The man opened a latch next to the door, and swung back the bars, to toss some hay into the bucket below.

  However, as he set the hay down, his eyes fell on us. Terror bolted through me as his eyes shot wide.

  “What the fuck?!”

  He dropped the hay and pulled out a knife from his back pocket, swinging the blade open and pointing it out us through the feed slot. “Who the fuck are you?!”

  I raised my hands peacefully, shaking uncontrollably. “Please, sir, we mean you no harm. My friend has been shot. He really needs help.”

  “…are you those fugitives the Commission is after?”

  The tears were becoming overwhelming, choking me as I shivered. “Please, please, I’m begging you. He’ll die if you don’t help him.”

  “I don’t understand how you’re not dead already,” the rancher said, staring at us in disbelief. “You understand how mean this old stud is? You’re lucky he didn’t attack you!”

  He motioned to the horse in the stall with the knife, who seemed disinterested in the food the rancher had dropped into his stall. “You get on out of there,” the man said, motioning with his knife to the stall door. “And move slow. I’m not kidding when I say he’s a mean son of a bitch.”

  I looked at the horse, and then at Mark.

  “I’m not leaving until I know that you’re not going to call the Commission on us,” I said, my voice shaking and thin with tears.

  “You’re fugitives and you’re hiding in my barn.”

  The tears streamed down my face, mingling with the rain that still clung to my face, blurring my vision. “Please,” I repeated. “We won’t be any trouble. I just need a place to rest and treat him.”

  The rancher removed his arm from the stall, looking between us and the horse, an expression of confusion crossing his feature.

  He closed the feed door and went to the main stall door, opening it and stepping inside, reaching a hand out to us.

  “You got to get out of there,” he repeated. “I can’t have you hiding in here.”

  I was about to plead even more pathetically when the horse in the stall let out a snort, darting at the rancher. The man retreated, closing the door as the horse kicked his front legs against the door. Mark, even though he was only half-conscious, tried to put me behind him so I would not be a direct line of the horse’s hooves. I let out a startled scream as the horse snorted angrily at the rancher outside the stall.

  However, once the door was latched, the horse shook its head and walked to its food.

  “What the…” The rancher wrapped his hands around the bars of the stall door, craning his head to look down at us at the awkward angle.

  “Sir,” I started staring into his eyes, though it was difficult to make out his features in my tear-blurred vision. “He can’t die. He’s all I have left…”

  The sobs nearly tore out of me as I held onto Mark, even as the experiment tried to comfort me and remain conscious.

  The short, skinny man was silent for what felt like an eternity. I stared at him, trying to blink the tears away, though they refused to stop. Finally, the rancher sighed and unlatched the gate. We all turned to the horse, seeing him lift his head quickly and watch the man. Slowly, the rancher turned his eyes to me.

  “Come out of there slowly,” he instructed. “I have some place you can rest at least for one night.”

  Trying to help Mark as much as I could with my frozen muscles, we both stood slowly, keeping our eye on the horse eating on the other side of the stall.

  The man opened the stall door wider so we could exit. The horse did not seem bothered by our movement. The man, who was about my height, was staring into the stall as he closed the door, confused by the stud’s behavior.

  “Should’ve known that something weird was going to happen today with this freak storm…”

  Chapter Eighty

  The thin man brought us to the feed room at one end of the barn before leading us to a tiny office off one side of the hay-filled room. He flicked on the single light bulb and then waited by the door as Mark and I stumbled in.

  As a cowboy close the door, he motioned to a tiny bed covered in a faded quilt in the corner near a dusty desk.

  “Over there,” he said.

  I managed to get Mark over to the bed, though he half-collapsed onto it, his eyes tightly closed against the pain.

  The man walked over, taking off his hat and setting it on the desk before stepping closer to Mark. When Mark’s eyes fluttered open to look at him, the man almost fell backwards.

  “Holy shit…” he hissed. “How did you even get into the country?”

  “Please,” I said, forgetting the way people reacted to Mark, “can you help him?”

  “Uh…maybe…” It took him a few more moments of staring at Mark before he finally began to look among the shelves next to the desk where there were different ointments and bandages used on the livestock.

  “So you really are those fugitives from the Commission…” he said, glancing over at me for a brief moment before turning back to the shelves.

  “…yes.”

  “Are you a part of the Central Angels?” he pressed, grabbing some packages of gauze and tucking them under his arm before grabbing some bottles of things I had never seen before, let alone recognize.

  “…the Central Angels aren’t around anymore,” I answered vaguely. The man turned to look at me again, staring at me for a few moments before he extended one hand.

  “I’m Jack.”

  “…Lily,” I introduced myself. “This is Mark.”

  Jack went to Mark side, who had arranged himself flat on the bed, his eyes closed as he flinched occasionally, trying not to disturb the bleeding wound too much.

  “Looks like he’s lost a lot of blood,” Jack noted. “How did you manage to escape?”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure,” I said seriously.

  “Are you fleeing the country?”

  “Trying to,” I said, seeing no harm in telling him the truth. “Don’t worry. As soon as he’s able to walk, we’ll leave. We don’t want to put you in danger.”

  Jack shook his head, avoiding my eyes. “To be honest, I’m not fond of the idea of you guys being here.”

  “But…you’re still helping us…”

  “Yeah,” he admitted, breaking open one of the packages of gauze and wetting it with something from one of the bottles. “The fact is, that stallion didn’t kill you as soon as you got into his stall. He’s a mean son of a bitch, but he saw something in you that made him want to protect you. That tells me enough about the kind of people you are.”

  “I never knew people actually believed in animal intuition like that,” I murmured.

  “Always trust an animal’s intuition,” Jack said.

  He looked at Mark, hesitating in surprise once more before clearing his throat and lifting the gauze to show Mark when he opened his eyes. “This might sting a bit,” he said. “If it becomes too much, just let me know. But try not to scream. Don’t wanna wake the folks up.”

  “Um…he is actually mute,” I explained slowly.

  Jack stared at Mark as
the former leader of the Eight Group looked at him.

  “Well,” Jack started, sighing, “at least you won’t be loud enough to wake the folks up.”

  Mark closed his eyes and Jack set to work cleaning the wound, holding the torn fabric aside with one hand

  I watched quietly, sitting at Mark’s side watching as Jack cleaned the wound, allowing us to see its severity. He then pressed the new gauze over the bullet wounds, placing his hand over it to apply some pressure before opening up a plastic box and unwrapping a needle with some thick thread with his teeth, he glanced at me, setting the open needle in its package off to the side.

  “He can understand English, right?” I nodded silently. Jack turned his attention to Mark, gently tapping his shoulder to wake up the half-conscious man. “Did the bullet go through or do we have to remove it?”

  Mark opened his mouth, lifting one hand as of trying to find a way to explain. When Jack saw this his struggle, he rephrased the question. “Is the bullet still in there?”

  Mark held up one finger, symbolizing that one of the two bullets that had hit him was still somewhere inside his body.

  Jack stood once more, going to the bookshelves to get more supplies.

  Worried, I climbed to the other side of the small bed, taking Mark’s hand in mine.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked stupidly. Mark also found it amusing that I would ask such a question, and the corners of his mouth turned upward. I let out a small giggle and shook my head, rolling my eyes. “I know, dumb question.”

  I squeezed his hand a little tighter.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I breathed, my voice cracking.

  Mark smiled a little wider and squeezed my hand back.

  Jack returned, holding some old surgical tools that didn’t look entirely sanitary. He also stared at them for a moment before grabbing a bottle of alcohol, and pouring it over the large tweezers he would use to extract the bullet.

  “This is going to be rough,” Jack said seriously, fixing the experiment with a stern look.

  Mark nodded and closed his eyes, preparing himself.