by DL Barbur
I looked at my watch, had to do a double take and look at it again. A little over thirteen minutes had passed since we’d rolled through the front gate and Tased the guard. It felt like a lifetime.
The airport was a huge piece of ground to try to secure. They probably didn’t have an effective perimeter set up yet, but I needed to move quickly.
I looked at the fence. It was maybe seven feet tall, with a couple of strands of barbed wire on top. I started scaling. My left hand was still weak. When I reached up and took hold of the fence, a big dollop of blood ran off my wrist and landed on my goggles. I did my best to ignore it and kept climbing.
At the top, I wrapped my left arm around one of the supports holding the barbed wire up and pulled out my multi-tool. The barbed wire was really too thick for the wire cutters on the inside of the plier's jaws, but I had strong hands and I was motivated. I managed to cut both strands and slither over the fence.
I made it to the ground in the shadows of a tree on the other side. I realized I was dizzy. I decided to risk a little light and look at my arm.
I pulled the tactical vest off and immediately felt a ton lighter. I pulled my coveralls down to my waist and shined the light on my arm. I immediately wished I hadn’t.
The top of my forearm was laid open from wrist to elbow. The deep end of the cut was near my elbow. I realized I was looking several inches into my arm, leaned forward, and vomited.
I squatted there for a minute, bent over and smelling my own puke. I felt cold and shivery all over. Shock.
“I don’t think so,” I said out loud. “I ain’t dying this way.”
I pulled the first aid kit off the front of the vest. I wrapped both battle dressings around my arm. It was awkward as hell doing it one handed. I had to tie the knots in the tails of the bandage with my teeth. The dressings turned dark with blood almost immediately, and the two of them together weren’t even enough to cover the whole cut. The shallow end near my wrist was still open, but I hoped it would be enough to slow the bleeding down until I could figure something else out.
I skinned out of the coveralls and transferred a few items into my pockets: knife, flashlight, extra pistol mags. I shoved the Glock into my waistband and left the rest. I stood and started walking. Now instead of being dressed in a black tactical Ninja suit, I was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, partially melted boots, and had trauma dressings over a knife wound in my arm. I wasn’t sure I was really much more inconspicuous, but it felt good not to be carrying all the weight.
I took a second to get my bearings. I was in a big field on the east side of the airport. Perfect. I forced myself to jog out to the road. I could hear plenty of sirens in the distance, but nothing close.
It was foggy and way too cold for just a sweat-soaked t-shirt. I wound my way through the light industrial area around the airport, hoping the map I’d committed to memory wasn’t faulty. I felt woozy. It was hard to concentrate. I had to keep bringing myself back into focus.
Just when I had myself convinced that I was lost, that I’d been walking way too long and must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or that Mandy’s dad had let me down, there it was: my car.
I came around a corner and there was the white rental sedan. Or at least I hoped it was mine. Mandy’s dad had texted the location and license plate to my phone. I couldn’t remember the plate.
I walked up to the rear bumper, meant to squat, but halfway fell down instead. I took a second to collect myself and felt under the bumper. I pulled the strip of duct tape away and the key hit the pavement with a little metallic ting! that echoed up and down the streets. It was funny how sound traveled in the fog.
I managed to get the door unlocked. I leaned against the car and breathed deeply for a minute.
I realized I’d left a big bloody smear on the door. That wasn’t going to help me be inconspicuous.
I sat down sideways in the driver’s seat, my feet still on the pavement outside.
My vision started to get fuzzy around the edges. I leaned forward and it seemed to help. I guess because it brought more blood to my head. I had a vague idea that that suggested that maybe there wasn’t enough blood in me to go around so everything could have its fair share.
I leaned sideways against the seat. Maybe if I just took a little nap, some kind of solution would occur to me. That sounded like a good idea and I thought about just letting my eyelids close.
Running footsteps echoed down the street and I sat up straight, listening. It was hard to tell how far away they were, or even what direction they were coming from. The fog again. The smart money was on starting the car and driving away. If it was a cop, I was screwed. If it was some citizen out jogging, he or she would see me, bloody and disheveled. Everybody carried a cell phone these days. My life had taken some directions I’d never expected lately, but I wasn’t ready to take out some innocent jogger.
But I just sat there, listening, and there she was. Alex, jogging down the middle of the street with her EMT kit slung over her back. She ran up the car and stopped. She didn’t even look all that out of breath.
“Dent?” She was standing there with her hands on her hips. I realized it was stupid for me to sit like that. I should hug her. Or something.
I stood up, just about pitched forward onto the concrete. She reached out and steadied me.
“Are you ok? What happened? Where’s my dad?”
I focused on each question individually. “I’m not ok. I got stabbed and the plane blew up. I don't know where your dad is. We all ran out of the plane and got separated.”
That had to be true, right? I made it out of the plane. Al would have only been a half a dozen steps behind me at most. Surely he was ok. He must have just been going in a different direction.
She lifted up my left hand, looked at my arm.
She hissed when she saw the wound. “You need to go to the hospital.”
I shook my head. Big mistake. It made the world spin.
“No hospital. Cops.” My words were slurred and my tongue felt thick.
She put her medical kit on the hood of the car and started to unzip it. “Here, at least let me…”
I cut her off, grabbed her arm. “No. We gotta go. Get a few miles away, then you can go to work.”
I managed to stand, stagger around to passenger side, where I opened the door and fell into the seat.
“I think you should drive,” I said.
She threw the medical kit in the back seat and climbed in.
As she started the car and pulled away from the curb, I cranked the heater all the way up. I was so cold. It was wonderful when the engine finally warmed up. I held my left hand up in front of one of the vents, trying to get some feeling back. I leaned my head against the glass of the window and passed out.
When I woke up we were somewhere dark. Alex was half straddling me.
“I really don’t think this is the time Alex,” I said and giggled.
“Shut up, Dent.” Her voice was muffled and I realized she had a penlight in her mouth. She wrapped a rubber band around my right biceps. I felt the sharp poke of a needle.
“Ow!”
“Quit your complaining. Most of the people I do this to are dead.”
One of her breasts was pressed against my cheek and she smelled good, so I just shut up. I tried to remember why I hadn’t gone to bed with her that night.
Alex tied an IV bag to the headrest of my seat and plugged it into the needle in my arm. She shifted back into her seat and I sighed as she moved away. She wrapped my arm up in gauze.
“This is a poor way to treat a wound like that. You need a hospital.”
I shook my head again. “Uh-uh. Not going back to jail.”
“Dammit, Dent…”
“No. We gotta keep a low profile. Lay low for a few days.” She swore and started the car. I realized we were in a dark parking lot behind a feed store. I managed to stay awake until we got on the freeway, then the drone of the tires and the hypnotic passing of the highway
markers lulled me back to sleep again.
I woke up for little snippets of time: once as we pulled off the interstate and onto another road; again when Alex pulled off somewhere to change the IV bag; a third time when the car was braking hard and Alex swerved to avoid a pair of green glowing eyes bounding across the road. I got an impression of trees pressing in all around us.
Finally, we stopped. When I woke up we were in a garage somewhere. I could smell that musty garage smell but underneath it was the smell of the sea. It was still dark and she helped me out of the car. I remember thinking about how strong she was, then everything was black again.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I came to in a bed, stripped to the waist. It was bright outside and Alex was hanging another IV bag off the headboard of the bed. Only this time the bag was a deep, rich red color and Alex had a piece of gauze wrapped around her arm.
“Good thing I’m a universal donor,” Alex said.
“Huh?” My throat felt incredibly dry.
“Never mind.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The beach house.” She slid a needle into the IV line and I fell asleep again.
This time I must have been really asleep, instead of just passed out, because I dreamed, over and over again, about the dead girl I’d pulled out of the van at the airport. I’d pull her out and see Heather Swanson’s face. I’d turn around and it was always somebody different, sometimes it was my mom, sometimes my dad. But there was always somebody there. They never said anything but they looked at me, and I could tell they thought I should have done better.
When I woke up, it was to a watery, rose-tinted light. I realized the sun was setting. I could smell the sea and hear the ocean faintly. The room was dim, the only light from the window. Alex sat in a chair, looking out the window with her long legs drawn up under her. A pump shotgun sat in a corner and her H&K and my Glock sat on the dresser.
I shifted and tried to speak. My throat was dry.
She stood and walked over to the bed, sat down on the edge. She had changed clothes. Now she wore a faded pair of jeans and an old thin t-shirt that had once had some sort of logo on it but was now lost to oblivion. She smelled clean, like soap.
She picked up a glass of water, held it to my lips. “Here. You’re dehydrated from the blood loss.”
I drank it greedily. It tasted wonderful. “Are we clean?” I managed to croak.
She set the glass on the nightstand and nodded. “Yeah. We’re clean. I’ve got the car parked in the garage. I turned my cell phone off so nobody can track it. We got in after dark last night. The houses on both sides are empty. The Lindemans are usually in Florida this time of year. The other house is a rental and no one is there.”
I looked at my arm. It was bandaged with fresh gauze and I could see the end of a row of neat stitches.
“You do good work,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s been a while since I had a live person to practice on.”
She filled up the glass from a pitcher and popped a pill in my mouth. “Here, antibiotics. I’ve got a couple of days’ worth stashed away, then we’ll have to find you some more.”
I swallowed the pill and drained the rest of the water. I propped myself up on the pillow and stared at her. The t-shirt was thin and it was obvious she wore nothing underneath. I caught myself staring, managed to make myself stop for a couple of seconds, then caught myself doing it again. She laughed.
“You seem to be feeling better.”
I felt myself blush in a way I hadn’t since I’d been a teenager. I tried to think of something smart to say. Should I apologize? The frank stare she was giving me back seemed to say no.
Stare or no stare, it took me at least a little by surprise when she swung a leg over me and straddled me with a long, denim covered thigh on either side of me. She leaned over and kissed me. Her hair cascaded down over both of us. It was still damp from the shower. I kissed her back with both eagerness and nervousness I hadn’t felt since I was in high school.
It seemed natural for my hands to fall on her hips, and from there to slide up over the soft skin of her stomach. I could feel muscles rippling underneath. I slid my hands up her sides, just to the point where I could feel her ribs under my hands and she pulled up abruptly. I thought for half a second that I’d somehow gone too far, but she pulled the shirt over her head and flung it in a corner.
I let out a breath at the sight of her, and then she leaned over and started kissing me again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten this turned on this quickly. My jeans were getting uncomfortable. I shifted to relieve some of the pressure.
Alex gave a wicked laugh, reached down to stroke me through my jeans.
“You seem to be feeling much better.”
I was trying to make some kind of witty comment about her bedside manner but forgot all about it as she undid my pants. I forgot about saying anything, forgot about the bad dreams and destruction. I just buried my fingers in her hair and shut my eyes.
Later, I lay on my back with my left arm propped up on a pillow and Alex wrapped around my right side. I couldn’t quit running my hands over her. It was almost like I couldn’t believe she was really there and had to keep touching her to make sure she hadn’t disappeared. She didn’t seem to mind.
“I’m worried about my dad,” she whispered.
“Me too,” I said. I kept replaying those last few seconds in the plane. I hadn’t seen Al get out. I’d been too busy getting clear. But he couldn’t have been more than a few steps behind me. Al had been through so much, surely he wasn’t going to go like that.
“What are we going to do next?” she asked.
“Lay low. Figure out some kind of contingency plan in case Todd’s people find us here. Wait for your dad to figure out where we must have gone. He’s going to figure out that we’re here sooner or later.”
Al and Alex ran the beach house as a rental, so it was registered to a limited liability corporation, not to them personally. It wasn’t bulletproof, but Todd’s people wouldn’t find it unless they knew to look for it.
“What if we don’t hear from him?”
“Let’s give it a couple of days, then we’ll see what happens.”
“Ok.”
She wasn’t happy with that answer. I didn’t blame her. I wasn’t either. But she curled up closer to me and held me a little tighter. I just lay there and held her back, wishing that moment could go on forever.
The next two days passed like they were a dream, a good dream for a change. The house was stocked with food, and in a metal cabinet down in the basement was a shotgun, a couple of pistols and several grand in cash.
I slept. The blood loss from the arm wound left me feeling wiped out. My feet had some minor burns. It was a good thing I’d been wearing heavy leather boots, or I’d be walking around on stumps. I was also sore from head to toe from the van crash, and having Mickey land on me.
When I was awake, Alex was always near. I lost track of the number of times we made love. It was like we were both making up for lost time, and reminding ourselves that we were alive.
“We should have done this a long time ago,” she said after one time.
“Yeah,” I said.
She rolled over on her elbows to look at me. “Why didn’t we?”
“Well… There was Audrey.”
She blew hair out of her face. “Yeah. But what about before Audrey.”
I shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it was hard for me in a way because you were Al’s daughter.”
She laughed. “Dad always wanted us to get together. He was glad you left the night you took me home when I was drunk though.”
“You told him about that?”
“Of course. He’s my dad.”
I thought about my dad. I hadn’t even been able to tell him I wanted to play electric guitar, much less about any of my girlfriends. I resolved that if I ever had a daughter, I wanted to be the same kind of father as Al.
She s
nuggled over close to me. “I’m just glad we’re together now.”
“Yeah.”
Early in the evening of the second day, I was dozing on the couch when Alex woke me up. The house didn’t have a TV, but it did have a radio.
“Hey, wake up. You have to hear this.” She put the little portable radio on the glass coffee table and I stared at the speaker the way people always do when they are concentrating on a radio, like that will help them hear better.
“… statement from Portland Area FBI Office, Special Agent In Charge Brock Wheedon.”
There was a moment of silence as the broadcast cut over, then a rustling sound and some murmurs. It made me think of a big room full of reporters with a microphone on a podium.
I didn’t have much use for most Feds. Brock Wheedon was no exception. He’d gone to some big school back East. Harvard? Yale? Something like that. I’d always gotten the impression he was in the Bureau to punch his ticket before he started a political career or went into some kind of big business, not because he liked to put criminals in jail.
He had one hell of a speaking voice though.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the press,” he began in polished, dulcet tones. Yeah, I could see him running for Senate or something. “I’d like to make a brief statement about our investigation into the terrorist attack at the Albany Oregon airport two days ago. After that, I’ll take questions, but I have to caution you that the investigation is still developing.”
“Early in the morning on the 23rd, local law enforcement agencies responded to a report of heavy automatic gunfire coming from the Cascade Aviation terminal at the Albany airport. As you know, Cascade Aviation is a civilian aviation contractor that provides various services to the United States government in support of the Global War on Terror. As the officers were arriving, they witnessed a massive explosion, caused by a fuel tank fire onboard one of Cascade’s C-130 Hercules Transport planes.”
“Our multi-agency investigation began as soon as the scene was safe, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation taking the role of the lead agency. We discovered that eight members of Cascade Aviation had been killed. Five were crew members on the airplane. Two were employees on the ground crew. The eighth was a young woman who was working as a temporary overseas worker for another civilian contractor who was killed in the crossfire.”