Chapter Eleven
Briarlee
It’s very, very early morning when the sound of plane engines throbs me out of sleep. The sun is rising, and flying in its golden wake is a big plane, flying lower than seems reasonable. Maybe a sightseeing tourist plane? No. Can’t be. It’s too big for that.
I’m half asleep as little black things start tumbling out the back of it. What are they? I squint my eyes and then realize that they’re men. For a sleep-addled moment, I wonder why you’d sky dive into the middle of the forest—then the parachutes begin to flower and it hits me what they are.
“Daniel! Wake up!”
He sits bolt upright. I point.
“Stay here,” he says. “I mean right here. Don’t move. I’ll be back.”
Just like that, he grabs the bag of medication and dives into the forest. I hear the trees rustling as his big body moves through them, and then there is nothing but silence.
“Daniel!” I cry out for him. “Daniel!”
Silence answers. I watch the parachutes descend, dozens of them, with a feeling of dread. Suddenly, I believe everything he said. But it’s too late now. I don’t know what to do. He told me to stay, and what choice do I have? If I move, I’ll be lost in the forest forever. But if I sit here, near our tent, they’ll find me.
For a long time, nothing happens. The parachutes descended into the forest what feels like almost an hour ago. I’m starting to think that this has nothing to do with us. Like, it’s a training exercise. We just happened to pick a part of the woods popular with families and armed forces, maybe?
I start to get bored, and hungry. Our rations are right there, so I dig into them. A protein bar finds its way into my hand. I’d prefer a croissant and some fresh brewed coffee, but I guess this will do. Daniel is probably going to want us to move again, so I’ll need my strength—assuming he doesn’t carry me to the next spot, like he did this one. Maybe if I act up, I’ll hike through all these woods without ever taking more than a few dozen steps of my own. The thought makes me smirk to myself as I chew on the alleged bar of protein. It tastes like dates and coconut. Ick.
“Don’t. Fucking. Move.”
I don’t recognize the voice that comes from behind me in an aggressive shout.
“I wasn’t moving,” I mumble through a mouthful of protein.
“Face down on the ground!”
Whoever this is, he’s loud and he’s rude. I don’t care for either. I have one brute ordering me around, but even Daniel would never speak to me this way. If this is the military, they can frankly fuck right off. I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not breaking any laws. I’m camping in the forest. That’s allowed.
I turn my head and look into the camouflage-painted face of a very serious-looking man dressed like a tree.
“Can I help you?”
“Lie face down on the ground! Now!”
I take another bite of the bar. It doesn’t taste good. I don’t want it. But I do want to prove to this screaming psychopath that just showing up wearing green and khaki and holding a gun isn’t enough to intimidate me. This is still the United States. There are still laws.
“I’d rather not.”
He grabs me by the shoulder and throws me into the dirt.
“What the hell? I thought this was America! What the fuck?”
“Don’t move, ma’am!”
I try to get up, but a heavy boot pushes me back down on the ground. I really don’t like this guy one bit. He calls for backup and in minutes the campsite is absolutely crawling with soldiers going through everything. They don’t talk to me. They just work around me like I’m nothing. I’m so pissed off I could cry. How fucking dare they treat me this way?
“Okay, get her up.” Someone else is speaking now. Someone with a ring of authority, and the ability to use an indoor voice.
I’m pulled up from the ground as roughly as I was put there and sat on the ground. There’s dirt all over my face and clothes thanks to these assholes. I look like a fucking mess.
The guy in charge is an older man, maybe in his late forties. He has salt and pepper hair, the sort of square face that makes me think he was stamped out of a mold, and what they call military bearing, meaning he’s so straight-backed and square-shouldered he looks perpetually at attention. He also has an old boy Texas-style twang. Maybe it would be charming, if he wasn’t letting his men treat me like a piece of meat.
“You’re Briarlee Smith, right?”
I don’t answer that.
“I want my lawyer.”
“You’re not under arrest.”
“Okay, then I want you to fuck off.”
His eyes narrow at me. He doesn’t like this at all. Good. I don’t like it either. Daniel might take these assholes seriously, but I don’t. We still have rights. I still have rights, and they include not being harassed by goons.
“Where is Daniel Knight?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Camera footage at the store you bought this tent from showed you in his presence. Your phone sent a signal a few hundred miles from here. We extrapolated your position to this sector of the forest. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I know more than you think I do, little lady.”
Little lady? My lip curls.
“Then you tell me where he is, because I don’t know.”
I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Daniel went, and as strong and fast as he now is, for all I know he’s left the forest completely, maybe even abandoned me to these assholes. I don’t think he’d do that to me, but I hope he’s nowhere close. They have me, but I don’t want them to have him.
“There’s a trail this way, sir.”
One of the tree-clad men has worked out where Daniel headed out. Dammit.
“Follow it.”
Some of the men head that way. I’m left sitting between two guys, faced by my interrogator.
“Start talking,” he says. “Tell me how you ended up out here.”
“Well, I mean, that’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time.”
“I guess it started when I was born. August twenty-third. Back of a tractor.”
“Not that far back,” he growls. “Tell me how you came to accompany Mr. Knight to these woods.”
“He came to my apartment a few days ago,” I say. “He seemed, I don’t know, excited, or maybe upset? It was hard to tell. He said he wanted me to come on a trip with him.”
The guy nods. “Did he say why?”
“He said we needed to go down to the woods. And he said we needed disguises.”
“Disguises? What kind of disguises? Why?”
“Let me think,” I say, biting my lower lip, as if in thought. “Okay, so. He came to my apartment, and I was cleaning up. My dishwasher isn’t working. I mean, it is, but it’s leaving sediment on the glasses, and frankly, I don’t think those tablets actually work. I mean they say that they’ll leave your glasses spotless, but mine usually look like they’ve been at the beach. Where does the sand even come from?”
“Quit stalling, Miss Smith,” he says, utterly unamused.
“Okay, so Daniel came over. We’ve been friends for years, you know. We went to our first dance together when we were kids. It was a flower festival, but it turned out he was allergic to the pollen in my daisy chain, and a bee flew out of Melissa Spencer’s roses and stung him, so we ended up in the nurse’s office the whole time…”
“What did he say to you?”
“Mostly ow, my nose. It stung his nose.”
The guy grits his teeth. He is not happy with me. Not at all. I guess this isn’t how their interrogations usually go.
“What did Daniel say to you when he visited you at your apartment?”
“Oh, right. Well, he said we needed to go down to the woods. Today. Had to be today. I mean that day. You know. He said there would be a surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?”
“A big one!”
He leans in a little, thinking I’m on the verge of revealing something important.
“He said… what was it.” I furrow my brow. “Okay, yes, I remember. He said we had to go to the woods, I mean, down to the woods. And we had to wear a disguise, and also be ready for a surprise. Because if we went down to the woods, we would see…” I pause and frown again. “What was it?”
I have his attention fully now. His eyes are locked on my face, taking in every word.
“Right, no, okay, I know what it was now. He said if we went down to the woods, wearing a disguise, ready for a surprise, and if we went down to the woods that day…”
I can see it’s already dawning on him what I’m going to say next, but I have to get the punch line in before he starts shouting.
“That’s the day that the teddy bears have their picnic!”
I laugh uproariously to dead silence.
“Well, we tried doing this the easy way, Miss Smith,” he says, unshouldering his weapon. He hands it to one of the soldiers next to me and advances on me. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but there’s violence in his eyes.
“Last chance. Tell me where Daniel is.”
“I don’t know,” I shrug. I mean really, I don’t. He’s somewhere in the forest. They can probably work that out for themselves. “Maybe a teddy bear got him. Maybe the bears aren’t teddies at all…”
He lifts his hand high, the back of it sweeping down toward my head. I’m not fast enough to move out of the way, but I don’t have to. Two hundred and fifty pounds of pure male fury bursts out of the undergrowth and crashes into the soldier, sending him flying into a tree on the other side of the camp clearing.
There’s chaos. The other soldiers run forward, try to grab Daniel, but there’s no chance of that happening. He is too fast, he is absolutely furious, and his brute strength far exceeds their powers. Seeing him among the soldiers is like watching a gorilla do battle with a troupe of chimps. He’s bigger. He’s faster. He’s more brutal. There are knives drawn. Pistols unholstered. Backup is coming. This is about to get truly bloody.
In the midst of arms and legs flailing and shouting, I feel him pick me up under his arm and make a break through the forest. Loud explosions ring out behind us. Gunfire, slamming into trees and sending bits of bark puffing out around us. He’s never moved this quickly before. He’s sprinting at what feels like an impossible pace. He must have taken more of the drugs. He must have taken a whole lot more than usual.
He doesn’t say a word. He makes a ferocious, feral, grunting sound. Right now, he’s more like an animal than he is a man. I cling to him as the bullets sing out around us, squirming around to the front of him to avoid the fire.
I feel weak with fear. I am shaking and my fingers are somehow too cold and too weak to hold onto him properly. His strong arms hold me close against his chest as we run and run, fleeing for what feels like forever.
And then we stop. He peels me gently away from his massive form. There’s something wet between us. I see a bright smear of red on his abdomen.
“Oh, my god! You’ve been hit!
He shakes his head and points to me. Deep red blood is seeping across my shirt. It’s not him that was hit. It’s me.
* * *
Daniel
She sees her blood and her eyes roll back. She falls into a dead faint, a major mercy considering how painful that wound will soon be. She’s been gut shot.
I can barely think. The fury and the anger and the rage are shouting in my mind, animals wanting revenge. But I have to look after her. Have to fix her. Pressure on the wound. Yes. Okay. Examine her. Think. Think. Think. I have to force myself to focus, past the roar of the beasts in my mind.
There are two holes. The bullet went through her side just below her ribs. Exited through her stomach. Her intestines must be perforated in several places. If we were near a hospital, she might survive. But we are not. We are so far from everything there is no hope for her.
I am holding her innards together, near weeping for the death I know must be coming for her.
There is one thing I can do. Regenermax. A big dose. Administered orally and into the wounds themselves. It is the longest of the longshots. I don’t know if she will be able to absorb it. I don’t know if damage like this can be repaired.
But I know she’s dead either way if I don’t at least try.
I break open three vials. One I slip into her side, the other I pour into the exit wound. The third I drip carefully down her throat, massaging her neck to stimulate the swallowing reflex.
Regret. All is regret. I should never have taken her with me. I should never have left her alone. I thought I would lead the soldiers away from her, but predators always find the nest.
I pull her into my lap and I hold her. Her breathing is shallow. Her pulse is weak. She may last a matter of hours. She may last a few days. If she’s going to die, I hope for the former. I have no means of assuaging her pain.
For now, she is silent and still in my arms. I curl up with her in the hollow of a tree and I sit there, knowing that the hunters are still out there. Knowing that they won’t care what they did to her.
She was so brave. She didn’t know what they were capable of. And now I don’t know what I will be capable of. I took almost a dozen doses as I ran. The surge made my mind vicious and simple, like an animal. It also made me too stupid to realize that they weren’t following the second path I was making, but the first path I’d made. It occurs to my slow brain that they’ll follow this one too. They’ll be here soon. They’ll see the blood. They’ll track us here like wounded animals.
I hear footsteps already.
They see me. Start shouting. I don’t move, so they come around the tree, a dozen guns pointed right at me. And then they see what they’ve done.
They look down at her broken, female, innocent form with horror on their faces. They’re idiots. They meant to bring me down, but they didn’t care what they did to her. Now they see her lying here, dying, they regret it.
I only have two words for them. Two words that matter.
“Help her.”
The leader takes out his radio. “Get the chopper in here now. We have one down. Repeat. We have one down.”