CHAPTER 17
Landon Lane
CORA’S HEAD NUZZLED INTO THE crook of my neck early the next morning. My alarm clock read four thirty a.m. The moment was perfection. She was perfection.
She’d tried to argue with me and go home the night before. Wasn’t happening. Not while she was afraid. Not after I’d taken her virginity. She was staying in my bed whether she liked it or not.
I’d promised her I would wake her long before Logan got up. She was worried about him catching us in bed together. I nudged her awake after I spent fifteen minutes just staring at her, admiring her, feeling her under my arm, smelling her hair in my face. Every sensation, every smell, every sound, every little detail of how she looked—I burned all of it on the hard drive in my brain. I wanted to be able to recall it instantly, even fifty years from then.
This could be your life if you win.
Cora glared when she first opened her eyes, like she wanted to murder anything in sight. I knew she wasn’t a morning person, but damn. I smiled at her scowl anyway. I loved her whether she was frowning, crying, smiling, or laughing. I wanted every one of her looks every fucking day of the year. As soon as her brain registered where she was, who she was with, her lips curled into that smile that only she could smile, and she stretched her feline arms up over her head and yawned.
I spent the next thirty minutes kissing her, touching her, holding her—until she finally pried herself away and got dressed. Her face tightened when she stood, and despite my plea for her to steal a pair of my sweat pants, she found a way to get her jeans on. I made her coffee to go, and she gave me a kiss, and took off to her house before the sun came up to get ready for work.
I WALKED OUT THE FRONT door with Joe. It was late morning and we were the only two at the house. Joe and I climbed into my ride to head to the gym. Something was off about him. The past four days had been very tense and high-strung.
I stared at the mountains. “We need to have a discussion.”
Joe sighed. “Affirmative, asshole. Soon.”
I tried to make small talk. “They let you off the island at all? Other than for missions?”
“Not once. Missions are hard to come by these days too.”
“What? Doesn’t someone always need to die somewhere?”
Joe glanced over. “Yeah, asshole. But they have gadgets that do that shit now. Don’t you watch the news? We’re outsourced like factory workers to China.” He paused. “I’m using analogy to equate it to something you can relate to.”
“Thanks.” I grinned. “And no. I don’t watch the news.”
“Forget everything, huh?”
“We should have the conversation now.”
“Goddamn right.”
I whipped a u-turn at the end of the driveway and headed straight back up it toward the house. “We’ll train here, and you’ll get answers. Better that way anyway. Kill two birds with one stone.”
“Who the fuck says that shit?”
“Says what?”
“Kill two birds with a stone. Just shoot them with a fucking shotgun. I’ve killed ten before with one shell. Why would you throw stones at a bird?”
I shook my head and stared at him. He made me feel more like a human being.
“I don’t know if you’re ready for this conversation.”
I knew exactly what the conversation he wanted to have entailed. It’s how we worked out grievances on the island.
I threw on the brakes. “Get out.”
“You too.”
I stepped out of the car and took my shirt off. Joe did the same.
“We only had each other, you know?” His feet pounded the gravel and powdered dust shivered off toward the grass.
I glared at him. “We didn’t have shit. Nothing but orders.”
“You’ll have them again soon.” He circled the car and threw a punch at my face. “If you’re still breathing.”
I side stepped his fist, barely. “You on his side?” I faked with a right and threw a left hook. He wasn’t fooled. I didn’t expect him to be. This was just loosening up.
“I’m on my side.” He dropped his guard.
It was a taunt.
“You even remember how to hit someone? A couple days of training and you bled like a bitch. Then you ran off with one and cut your ass whipping short.”
My face went hot. Joe smiled. It wasn’t a personal insult. He was goading me into expelling energy by manipulating my emotions. Every person has energy stored in their body. Potential energy. We convert it and burn it off in certain ways. To be extremely efficient and exact maximum damage, you have to transfer as much of that energy into your opponent as possible. When you get angry, muscles tense, and your body burns it off, fatigue sets in rapidly. You grow tired.
It was fighting 101. Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope. Let the other guy wear themselves out, and then assault them in their weakened state. He was right. I had a lot of work to do. I was rusty.
I relaxed and settled in on my feet. Wouldn’t let his words get to me. Instead of anticipating his moves, I looked for tells in advance. He threw a roundhouse followed with two punches. I dodged them all easily. But he was going slow right now. Another trick if you’re far more advanced than your opponent.
Start slow to accustom them to a certain speed. Their brain and eyes get used to it. Then neutralize them with a burst. It’s like holding something heavy in your hand for a long time. You pick up something lighter immediately after and it feels like a feather. The burst was coming soon.
We circled up in the yard a few more times and he hit me before I knew it was coming. He maneuvered me right to where the sun landed in my face. Timed it perfectly.
Four headshots and a kick to the chest. The whole world went black. I thought I was dead, but I could still smell the Montana air and hear Joe’s voice faintly like I was submerged in water.
“Fuck you for leaving me there alone.” He paused for a moment and then held his hand out. “I forgive you, asshole.”
I took his hand and that was that. Problem solved.
JANET SHOWED BACK UP AND walked through the door. I stood there with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of ice plastered to my face. Joe sat on the couch watching a movie. Some old western. I noticed John Wayne on the screen.
“Oh my God.” Janet dropped her keys on the table and stared at my face. “Someone put a whoopin’ on your ass.” She laughed, and her face said, it’s about time.
Joe raised his hand and smiled. “Me.” Didn’t turn away from the TV.
I didn’t have the strength to get up and look at myself in the mirror. I could barely see out of one eye. The swelling needed to go down because I clearly had a lot of work to do. The ice helped move things along.
I’d taken punches in headgear from the world’s best fighters outside of Hell’s Island, but nothing like Joe. One of his strikes would’ve killed a regular human instantly.
“Good luck getting Cora on board with that.” Janet pointed at my face.
“She’ll have to get used to it. For a while anyway.” I turned to Joe. “Payback’s a bitch.”
He did the Pac Man move with his hand like I was all talk. His eyes stayed glued to The Duke. John Wayne pulled out a revolver and capped a bad guy.
Joe’s arm shot in the air and he whooped like the cowboys on the screen. “Got ‘em!”
I couldn’t help but shake my head and chuckle. I’d missed him, a lot. I smashed the bag of ice against the cost of his forgiveness. That’s how we operated on the island. Parts of it came back to me the more he was around. There wasn’t time for quarrels and grudges. If there was a problem, we handled it with our fists and went back to normal. All was forgiven. Wouldn’t be brought up again.
It was fast and efficient.
After lunch, I could see out of my eye again. It was a perk of being genetically engineered. We were bred to heal faster. Evolution sped up thousands, if not millions of years in a petri dish. It was some world we lived in.
I walked out front with Joe.
“We have to retrain your eyes. They’re sloppy.”
“Okay.”
“Have to retrain everything.” He looked me up and down. “You’re sloppy.”
“How do we do that?”
“Meditation.”
I hadn’t meditated in forever. “We could’ve done that while my eye healed up.”
He whipped around. “No, we couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was watching a movie. Now we can.” He headed off toward the woods.
I followed and shook my head. We started at a walk, that turned into a jog, that turned into a controlled sprint.
“Be aware at all times, asshole.” He pivoted and shot to the side.
I tripped right over a giant hole in the ground and collided with the dirt.
He laughed and kept running. “Idiot.”
I gritted my teeth and took off after him. Mad at myself more than anything. We ran until we came to the water. He stopped at the edge of a hill that looked out over the Clark Fork river. Cottonwood trees lined the banks. Mountains sat behind it.
“Perfect.” Joe walked over and took a seat. “You remember how to do this?”
I nodded and walked about fifty feet away and sat down. My eyes closed, and I took in everything. Focused my senses. Went to another world. It was amazing. I’d forgotten how to be totally in tune with my surroundings.
A bird sat in a nest over my left shoulder. I could hear it above. Another one joined it. It rubbed against an egg, probably to keep it warm. After ten minutes or so I could hear bugs crawling, felt the wind, smelled every scent nature had to offer. It all morphed into one giant sense of being.
“Go back.”
Joe whispered it, but I heard him. Clear as day from fifty feet away.
Crashing waves. Black beaches. I stared at Edmon in front of us. Joe and I were still kids, no older than eight.
I saw the razor wire. The Aurora Borealis undulated back and forth in waves across the moonlit sky. My face chilled from the polar wind and my feet burned hot from the volcano. The guard sat atop the watchtower, high above the razor fence. He rocked back and forth in his seat, his silhouette glancing back at us every minute or two. A Browning M2 .50 caliber machine gun propped in front of him and a heat-sensing spotlight scanned the dark waters for anything human. Waves crashed on igneous rocks and ice cliffs. Lava boiled in the pit behind the barracks.
“This is your new brother.”
Another child two years younger than us stomped out to meet Edmon. He moved like a machine. His eyes were pale and lifeless.
“You.” Edmon pointed to the boy left of Joe and me. “Stand guard.”
The boy leaped to his feet and ran out to the middle. The fight lasted all of two seconds. The younger kid hammered him with his fist and the boy went down. He landed at my feet. His eyes were sunk into his face and his head rolled over. Half of it was caved in.
The younger kid stomped back to the living quarters.
Edmon’s eyes lit up red from the volcano behind us. Shadows flickered across the curves of his nose and eyes.
A hand gripped my shoulder and I snapped out of my dream state.
Joe stood in front of me. “Now, you’ve been back there.”