by Mike Ryan
“Who’s that?” Porter asked, going to the window herself, removing her gun and holding it down by her side in case she needed to use it.
“That is Boka’s friend.”
Porter observed a modestly dressed man getting out of a car and approaching the building. He was a middle-aged man, probably late forties or early fifties, and had a backpack slung over his shoulder. As he got to the door, Porter took a few steps back so her shoulders could be square to the door in case she had to start firing quickly. Once the man was inside, both Khayone and Boka proceeded toward him. Boka and the man were speaking in Zulu at first, then the man started talking to Khayone. Porter couldn’t quite hear what they were saying as they were speaking softly, only hearing their voices and no specific words. After a minute of getting a rundown from the two men, the man moved closer to Porter. After hearing that she was very cautious with new people, the man walked slowly, making sure he did nothing to alarm the woman. He stopped about halfway to her.
“I understand you need medical attention.”
Porter looked him up and down. “Who are you?”
“My name is Jeso. Boka told me that you need help.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“I used to work in a hospital.”
“Used to?”
“That is a long story best saved for another day.” Jeso slowly took the bag off his shoulder and gently placed it on the floor a few inches in front of him. “If you’d like to look inside, you’ll see that I have supplies. I understand you have a shoulder wound.”
Porter briefly glanced at the bag, but didn’t have much interest in looking inside. She’d already assumed medical equipment or supplies were in it. She was much more interested in the man who would be using them. After all that had happened to her so far, she wasn’t eager to turn her back to anyone.
“I don’t have any money,” Porter said. “I can’t pay you. At least not right now.”
“Money is not a requirement. I seek no payment. Boka said you needed help. That is why I am here.”
“Why? You don’t know me.”
“I am often called to help those who, for whatever reason, cannot go to a proper medical facility for treatment.”
“There are people after me. I don’t know why.”
Jeso smiled briefly. “I assumed as much. Most people who are shot have someone after them.”
“But I’m not—”
Jeso interrupted her as she seemed to be concerned about his thoughts about her. “You do not need to defend yourself to me. I am not here to pass judgment upon you. Whatever has happened is something you need to clear up after this is over.”
“But why would you agree to come help someone you don’t know?” Porter asked. “For all you know, I’m an evil person that might kill a hundred people after you’re done.”
Jeso smiled again. “I usually only help those who seem to have been wronged in some manner, those who have been crucified or pronounced guilty before they have had a chance to defend themselves. Khayone put in a good word for you. He believed you to be a special case.”
Porter let out a deep sigh, then let her eyes dart around the room. “You say you used to work in a hospital?”
“Yes.”
Porter’s eyes began to tear up as she thought about her situation. “I can’t remember anything. I… I, don’t remember anything before yesterday. Why is that? What could have happened to me?”
A sympathetic look came over Jeso’s face. “Let us first take care of your shoulder. Fix it up, stop the bleeding, get the bullet out. Then we will talk about the rest of it. OK?”
Porter cleared her throat and contorted her face to open her eyes wider to prevent any tears from coming out. She nodded, finally ready to accept the doctor’s help. She looked around the room and saw a small, beat-up-looking couch that matched the rest of the house’s condition, rips and tears in the fabric.
Porter pointed to it. “Will that work?”
“That will work.”
Porter sat down on the couch and took her shirt off, leaving her in just a sports bra. She lay on her stomach as she waited for Jeso to get started. Before they began, Khayone and Boka stepped outside, figuring the woman needed some privacy at a time like this. Jeso knelt beside Porter and started going through his backpack, getting the tools that he needed. He got out what looked like a tongue depressor and tried to give it to her.
“Bite down on this. It may help with the pain.”
Porter looked at it but shook her head. She didn’t need it. Whatever amount of pain shot through her system, she would just bear it. Biting on a wooden stick wouldn’t negate any of that. “I’m good.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, let’s just get this over with.”
Porter put the depressor back in his backpack, then got to work on her shoulder. He cleaned up the wound, then cut into her shoulder to try to extract the bullet. As he performed his surgery, Porter closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, trying hard not to scream. The whole thing took about thirty minutes. Once Jeso got the bullet out, he held it in his hand for a second, then gently placed it on the floor.
But there was something else. It wasn’t only the bullet that interested him. When he was digging around in her shoulder, something else caught his eye. Porter continued dealing with the pain, though it wasn’t quite as intense now as it was in the beginning. But having a hole in your shoulder could never be described as a comfortable experience. After a few more minutes, Jeso used his surgical tweezers to pull out what appeared to be a small SD card. He held it up high with the tweezers, inspecting it, trying to figure out what it was. Without having an answer, he placed it down on the floor next to the bullet. He then closed up Porter’s shoulder and put a bandage on it.
Once done, Jeso got up so he could wash his equipment off. As he did, Porter sat up and gingerly put her shirt back on. She didn’t even pay attention to the bullet and other item on the floor next to her feet. She slowly moved her shoulder around, trying not to overdo it. Jeso came in and noticed her moving around already.
“Just try not to move that around too much. You’ll need some time to heal.”
“When should it be back to normal?” Porter asked.
“Difficult to say. Everyone is different. It didn’t look like it did any major damage in there, so it shouldn’t be too long. Maybe a week or so. Of course, you may be able to use it sooner, it just depends on how much pain you will be able to tolerate. Judging by the look of things, you can tolerate quite a bit.”
“Yeah.”
Jeso came over to his bag and knelt on the floor, putting his equipment back in. Once he was done, he reached over and grabbed the bullet and the other object and looked at them a little more. He then held the bullet between his fingers and held it out for Porter to see.
“Would you like to keep this as a souvenir or something?”
Porter looked at it and laughed. “No, I don’t think so. You can just toss that.”
“And what about this?” Jeso asked, holding the SD card out.
Porter scrunched her eyebrows together as she looked at the item, unsure of what it was. “What’s that?”
“I do not know. It was in your shoulder.”
“What?”
“This was in your shoulder. Not far from the bullet that struck you.”
Porter reached over and grabbed the card to analyze it. “This was in my shoulder?”
“Yes.”
“Why would something like this be in my shoulder?”
“That would be a question for someone other than me to answer.”
Porter held it with her fingers, turning it in every direction as she looked for a clue as to what it was. There were no discerning marks on it, though. It was just a plain, black object that looked like an SD card. Not a single letter, number, or mark on it anywhere. After Jeso finished putting his stuff in his bag, his attention turned back to the item in Porter’s hand.
“For what reason would som
ething like that be in your body?”
“I don’t know,” Porter answered.
The longer she thought about it, though, the more she believed it had to have been placed there for some unscrupulous reason. Then it hit her. Somebody found her at the motel. Somebody found her walking down the street. They knew where she was at all times. It had to be some kind of tracking device.
“They’re tracking me.”
“What?” Jeso asked.
“It’s gotta be a tracking device. That’s how they’ve known where I am.”
A concerned look immediately came over Jeso’s face, worried for all of their safety. “Destroy it. If it is what you say, destroy it.”
Porter tossed it on the ground, then stomped on it, but it didn’t seem to do much good. It still appeared to be intact. Porter’s concern level was as high as it could be now. If it was a tracking device, then they knew where she was. Right now. She took her gun out and placed it directly on top of the card.
“What are you doing?” Jeso asked.
Porter didn’t answer. She just pulled the trigger, blowing the card into hundreds, if not thousands of little pieces. There was also a new hole in the floor. Honestly, though, it didn’t look that much out-of-place considering the condition of the rest of the building. It was actually kind of surprising that there weren’t holes in the floor already.
“Is somebody coming?” Jeso wondered.
“I don’t know.” Porter had a concerned look on her face as she answered, almost afraid to admit what she believed to be the truth. In reality, she knew different. Her head snapped toward the window, wondering if anything was on the other side of it.
Porter then scurried over to the window and looked out, seeing her two friends that brought her here standing by the door, talking. She looked further out, not seeing any potential signs of trouble. But that didn’t mean they weren’t there. And if they weren’t there, it didn’t mean they weren’t coming. What it did mean was that they had to move. And now.
6
They were all looking at the screen when the bright red light was extinguished. Everyone started looking around at each other, wondering what was going on.
“What just happened?” Stephenson asked.
No one replied. The analysts in the room that were working the computers feverishly tried to get Porter’s signal back. Myers went over to one of them, looking over the analyst’s shoulders to try to decipher what was happening.
“I need an answer,” Stephenson said, already running low on patience. Still no one replied to him, almost sending him over the edge. “I need somebody to talk to me, and I need it right now. What the hell is going on?”
Myers finally unburied his head from the computer station and turned around to answer his boss. “We lost her signal.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. It just vanished.”
“Malfunctioning again?”
“I don’t think so,” Myers answered. “This time was different than the others.”
“How so?”
“Before, when we lost her signal, it would periodically blink off and on for a few minutes. Then it would just fade away. This time it just suddenly disappeared.”
“What’s that say to you?”
“That maybe it’s not the device breaking down. Maybe she’s either disabled it or destroyed it.”
“Put the location of her last known signal on the screen. Then put up a satellite image.”
“Coming up in thirty seconds,” an analyst replied.
Exactly thirty seconds later, the image of the building Porter was now in appeared on the large screen on the wall. The fact that it was a worn-out building in the middle of nowhere seemed to alarm Stephenson the most. Combining that, along with the tracking signal being lost, he knew what that meant.
“She went there to get operated on,” Stephenson said.
“What?” Myers asked.
“You said she got hit in the shoulder, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Left or right?”
“Left, I believe.”
“What shoulder do we put the chips in?”
“Left,” Myers said, looking at the screen, understanding what he was saying.
“She went there for a doctor to get the bullet out and probably found the chip at the same time. Realizing what it was, she immediately destroyed it.”
“That would make sense. Figures. Just our luck that she would have to find it.”
“There’s a reason we don’t tell them it’s there.”
“What now?”
“How long until the team is on site?” Stephenson asked.
“A couple minutes.”
“They need to hurry up before she blows the scene. Hopefully she’s still getting patched up and will take a while. If not, she’s probably already gone.”
“I should give them a heads-up that she might know they’re coming.”
“Good idea.”
“If Porter’s got any locals with her there, what do we do with them?”
Stephenson turned to his subordinate as he gave the orders. “It’s their call. If they feel they’re a threat, take them out. If they can get to Porter without engaging anyone else, that’s fine.”
Porter hurried to the door and opened it. “You guys need to get in here,” she told Khayone and Boka, afraid for their safety.
“What is it?” Khayone asked once they came inside.
Porter explained about that tracking device and what she thought it meant, though the men weren’t really sure what was going on. They certainly didn’t understand the threat level as well as Porter did.
“If there are men on their way here, then we need to move,” Jeso said. He’d been through a couple of close calls like this before, though probably nothing quite on this level. He knew their lives were probably literally only minutes away from being over if they didn’t get out of there quickly.
“He’s right,” Porter said. “I wish I had more time to express my gratitude toward you guys, but I don’t.”
“It’s OK,” Khayone replied. “We understand.”
Porter smiled at them both. “You guys need to go… now.”
“What about you? Where will you go? How will you get there?”
“I’ll figure that part out later. For now, I just need you guys to be safe.”
“She’ll be fine,” Jeso said. “I’ll take her with me.”
Porter snapped her head around, not sure about what she just heard. She didn’t want to put Jeso in more danger than he already was either.
“You guys need to hurry,” Porter said, wanting them to get as far away from her as possible. “You don’t know me, never helped, and don’t know a thing about me, OK? It’ll be better for you if you don’t admit to ever seeing me at all.”
“OK,” Khayone replied.
Khayone and Boka walked out the door. Porter turned to Jeso to convince him he needed to do the same and leave.
“You gotta get out of here too,” Porter said. “It’s not safe for you to be near me. I thank you for what you’ve done. But now you have to think about you.”
“I can’t leave you here, not knowing whoever these men are that are coming for you.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“If we leave now, I can get you to a safer place.”
“I just need you to go too.”
“Please, we don’t have time to argue,” Jeso said.
Porter sighed, not wanting to get him further involved, but it didn’t seem like he was willing to accept no for an answer. She also knew there was no time for debate. She finally was willing to comply, just because it was safer for him to be anywhere else other than where they were at the moment.
“All right, get your bag and let’s go,” Porter said.
Jeso walked over and picked up his bag. Just as he put it on his shoulder, Porter heard terrifying sounds coming from outside the building. Gunshots. She looked at Jeso, who heard them too. They ran over to
the window and looked out, horrified to see the bodies of both Khayone and Boka lying on the ground. They were motionless, and Porter could see blood leaking out from both of them. Jeso stepped away from the window and rushed toward the door to check on their condition. Porter ran over to him and grabbed his arm to prevent him from going outside.
“You can’t go out there,” Porter said.
“They need help.”
Porter looked away from him, not wanting to stare into his eyes. “There’s nothing you can do to help them now.” It was hard for her to admit they were dead. She wanted so hard not to believe it. If only she had never run into them. Their deaths were on her. At least, that’s how she felt.
“If you go out there, you’re going to join them,” Porter said.
Jeso finally stopped trying to wriggle free from her, nodding as he accepted the truth. “What do we do?”
“Is there a back door here?”
“Yes.”
Porter quickly tried to formulate a plan. Not knowing how many of them were out there made it more difficult, but there were several things she did know. From where they were, they likely weren’t getting far with Jeso’s vehicle. Even if they escaped out the back, they’d still have to circle around back to the front to get out of there. They weren’t going to get away on foot. There was also the possibility that the place was surrounded. The more she thought about it, the likelier she thought it was that the people outside had guns pointed at both doors.
“We’ll wait them out for now,” Porter said.
“Are you sure that’s wise? What if more people are coming?”
It was a good point. Right now, Porter couldn’t really be sure of anything. She looked back out the window to see if she could point out the shooter, making sure she didn’t make her head a target at the same time. She couldn’t see anyone, though.
“No, I’m not sure it’s wise,” Porter said. “I just don’t know of a better plan yet.”