I paid dearly for that moment of bloodthirsty elation as it left my entire back exposed, and the seconds I spent staring down at my victim and gloating about just how precise my blow had been cost me time I didn’t have. The downed man underneath me tried, in vain, to take a rattling breath as another kick landed squarely between my shoulder blades, sending me forward and pushing me off him. I tried to roll but they anticipated it, and I had to take two more kicks to my lower back and stomach before I could get one in on my own. Yet, it was badly aimed and only warded off another boot instead of sending anyone crashing to the ground. Again, the stock of a rifle smashed into my head, hitting my other temple, and this time the pain was strong enough to make me vomit. I tried to fight the urge but my body was already leaning to the side to leave my airways clear as I hurled up stomach acid and chunks of rabbit, my body going into panic mode with my lungs screaming for air. Before I could get a grip on myself, I was grabbed underneath my arms and pulled upright, and the last bits of upchucked dinner landed squarely in the face of the guy getting ready to punch me. That was a small win in turn for him socking me two good ones, the first hitting me in the jaw, the second breaking my nose.
This wasn’t looking good.
It looked even worse when three more figures materialized out of thin air behind the one giving my face a good work-over. It was about time that I turned the tables on them—
And that’s when another asshole that I hadn’t seen coming jabbed a needle into the side of my neck, leaving behind a burning sensation that rapidly started to spread into the center of my body and then further out into my limbs.
Uh-oh. Not good. So not good!
It wasn’t a paralytic—or at least not the same potent stuff that, back in the day, Emily Raynor had shot me up with that had completely and utterly immobilized me—but it was definitely some kind of tranquilizer. The asshole who had been holding me let go, yet as much as I willed my body to lash out—or, failing that, to run—all I managed was a staggering step, and it took all my strength to remain upright. That quickly changed when another punch hit my jaw. I went down like the proverbial sack of rice, incapable of breaking my fall as my arms wouldn’t cooperate fast enough. I waited for panic to set in, to maybe undercut the need to fight and give me that extra bit of strength to fight through the haze of the drugs, but there was nothing but that ever-seething pool of rage deep inside of me—that I suddenly couldn’t access anymore. Oh, my pulse was still racing and I could feel the jitters left by the adrenaline all right, but try as I might to grasp that extra strength and stamina that should have been there, it was like I was attempting to hold on to water in a gurgling stream.
Sounds of fighting coming from farther into the forest pulled my attention away from my frustration. They must have found Nate; or he had found them. I waited for shots to be fired, dying screams to be uttered, but wasn’t rewarded. One of the idiots kicked me again, hitting my left thigh, right where titanium met bone. It hurt like hell, and for a moment, that pain cut through the effects of the drug. Gathering what strength I could, I launched myself forward in something between a crawl and a four-legged pounce, toward where I saw something straight and solid on the ground. Nothing in nature was ever that perfectly geometrical—and I was right, I realized, as my fingers closed around the spade.
Gone was my perception of who or what moved around me, but I still hit solid flesh when I rolled over onto my back and flailed at whatever might be coming for me, doing my best to orient myself once more. The scent of freshly turned earth—among other things—made me guess that I was very close to my pit once more, which meant that my shotgun should have been somewhere around here as well. The sounds of fighting I could still hear didn’t come from where I guessed the tree house was, so that must be going on down on the ground as well. Bright as the sky seemed compared to the trees all around me, it was still so dark here that I could barely make out the shapes converging on me as they drew closer. With their gear, it would be the same to them where this went down, but I’d definitely have an advantage if I made it to the small forest clearing that I knew must be around a hundred feet to the south of where I was. Out there, I would be able to see them, and if I saw what was coming, maybe I could better react. But my shotgun wasn’t out there in the brighter light coming from the stars and what little illumination the moon cast tonight.
Decisions, decisions.
It was then that I started to wonder why none of them had shot me yet. It wasn’t like I hadn’t earned it. The conclusion was obvious—they wanted me alive, if not necessarily un-concussed, because that latent woozy feeling that just wouldn’t go away anymore let me know that my brain had gotten pretty stirred and shaken. As much as I appreciated being alive—and not in even more pain from a bullet wound or ten—I didn’t like the odds of well-trained men coming in overwhelming force who knew they needed to incapacitate us so they could drag us off. Just, no. It could all be coincidence, but so could be my aversion to small, white-tiled cells—and that certainly wasn’t.
Shotgun it was, if I could just find it!
The spade helped a lot to get me back on my feet, both because I could use it as a crutch, and because it was a great weapon that gave me something I could normally not rely on: reach. On the first swing, I managed to hit one of my assailants in the head using the blade to best capacity. Yet on the second, I got enough force going on that my grip on the handle slipped for good and only the fact that my other hand found purchase when it slipped back along the shaft let me keep it. I did my best to back away to keep all five of them where I could see them, but they were in no hurry to put me down, I realized. They must be waiting for the drugs to do all the work for them. I staggered and wavered enough that I could see what gave them that idea but at the same time I hoped that my body was very busy churning through that shit and rendering it ineffective.
The sounds of fighting weren’t coming any closer but hadn’t died down yet, so I saw that as a good sign as well. With Nate, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to miscalculate doses, and sooner or later they’d realize that had happened with me. So I kept stabbing the shovel blade in the direction of anything trying to advance on me, turning the fight into what must have looked like a hilarious standoff. That was working for now, but it was definitely not a solution.
After a full minute of that—and my arms slowly getting heavier, not a good sign—I decided that unless I tripped over it, the shotgun was a no-show, and started casting around for other options. I could try getting close to one of them to divest them of their weapons, but I wasn’t sure if I’d get a chance to use it once I went down the next time—or whether I’d even be able to get up if they miraculously let me. That left option two: one of the many caches we had hidden around the forest. Some of those had come from paranoia but most from practicality—who wanted to run back the entire way to the base if a gun and some ammo was easily hidden in this old tree stump or behind that boulder? And as good as I’d become hunting deer or boar with a bow, I didn’t mind using a gun over a knife for a last killing blow.
Now all I needed to do was find one of those caches.
Easier said than done since I couldn’t quite pinpoint my location with the world dipping and swaying like a small boat on a big, big ocean at the moment.
The clearing—right. I could find that easily enough as through the gloom of the tree canopies I could see lighter patches to my very far left, almost behind me. So that’s where I started backing toward, step by step, my five heavily armed shadows following me. They were definitely biding their time.
Suddenly, silence fell, the other fight having come to an end. I considered shouting—my inner optimist still expected Nate to have come up on top—but moving and keeping the shovel blade up was hard enough without additional distraction. If he was still conscious—or alive, for that matter—Nate would find me. If not, no need to draw even more attention that I couldn’t handle.
The mossy ground turned increasingly more grassy, letting me
know that I was heading in the right direction. And then I saw it from the corner of my eye—that crooked birch tree, so out of place right there next to the other trees, easy enough to notice when, say, you were running through the forest, chased by rabid boars. I was a good twenty yards off direction-wise, but a brief halt and some useless stabbing the air with my spade gave me a good excuse to change it up. The idiots were humoring me, keeping just out of reach as they followed, step by step.
As soon as I was next to the birch, I didn’t hesitate or look around, but made a jump for the hole in the ground underneath the roots for the neighboring tree, ignoring the dead leaves and other rotting debris my fingers dug through. My fingers brushed cold, wet steel, and all it took was a light yank and the handgun was free. It was fully loaded but with no round chambered, so I quickly rectified that—and as soon as my eyes would focus on a dark shape looming over me, I fired.
One, two, then switch to the next one. Three, four, five, and a second body hit the ground. Two shots went wide as my vision swam too much to properly focus, but then a third was too close to miss and I squeezed the trigger two more times. Just my luck that he fell on me and buried me under his weight, and the next thing I felt was pain radiating from my right hand as someone stepped on it to keep the gun pinned to the ground. I tried squeezing the trigger one last time but my fingers broke before I could get there, agony exploding and racing up my arm.
An impassive face, mostly obscured by the night vision goggles, loomed over mine, followed by a boot—and then, nothing.
Chapter 3
I came to—something resembling consciousness pushing through the blackness—not much later, I guessed, as the musty scent of the forest was still surrounding me. Also the sharp twang of blood, likely my own. Gravity was heavily pulling on my head, and I couldn’t move. Some blinking revealed that the reason I could only see out my right eye was because the other side of my face was mashed into whatever I was lying on. The slight motion of blinking my eyelid was almost too much effort, but I managed to keep it open for a bit. There was pain radiating from several points in my body—and more of that chemical burning from the side of my neck—and it took me a little to sort out the differences and realize why my arms and legs were feeling weird. They’d pretty much hog-tied me, wrists and ankles bound together behind my back, leaving me completely helpless and with a lot of strain on my chest—enough so that breathing was hard, and the likely cause for why my vision was swimming so much: the joys of latent hypoxia.
Whatever I was lying on suddenly started to vibrate, with a lot of noise—a vehicle, its engine starting up. Particularly the agony in my head skyrocketed, making it hard to hold on to consciousness—although I asked myself, why was I even trying? Even if I could somehow roll myself off whatever I was stashed on, I’d die of thirst, incapable of freeing myself, or get eaten by all sorts of critters.
Blinding light hit my eye, making me squint, but once it passed, I managed to get a slightly better look at my surroundings. What had passed must have been an ATV like the one I saw idling a few feet away, making me guess I was stashed away on a similar vehicle. And in the back of that ATV I could just make out another tied-up form—Nate. It was too dark to see colors with no direct light, but his hair was heavily matted—with blood, I figured.
I must have made some sound of distress because a figure stepped into my line of vision, obscuring my sight of anything but him. I tried in vain to raise my head—to do what I had no idea—but a fist smashing into my jaw put a stark end to that action.
I welcomed the blackness enveloping me, hoping that things would look less bleak when I came to once again.
If I came to again.
I did, and not in a good way. My mouth was completely dried out, my tongue feeling like a swollen, foreign object. My body hurt with every rocking motion of the ATV underneath me, and there was a lot of jostling going on. I didn’t recognize the landscape, cast in the early light of dawn, but gone were the trees, and the plains looked different than over by the plantation where I grew my salad. Salad that would now go to waste, I realized.
Random thoughts—your best friend when you have a concussion and can’t think straight.
I tried to get my bearings, but other than a few glimpses of another ATV following the one I was tied to, there was nothing to focus on that didn’t make me want to vomit. Mercifully, I blacked out before it got to that.
By noon, the drugs were starting to wear off, allowing me longer stretches of being lucid—which was no consolation whatsoever. It mostly meant that I felt the sun beating down on me, the severe dehydration that added to my splitting headache, and immense cramps in my thighs and upper arms in particular. I wasn’t hungry—duh!—but could feel myself getting weaker and weaker as my body burned through reserves it shouldn’t have had a need to touch yet, but fighting the drugs in my system and healing my injuries took its toll. My right hand was a mess, sticky with blood from what I could tell and a constant, pounding source of pain, often surpassing what was going on in my temple—and I didn’t care at all for how my addled mind loved mixing the actual pain with agony from my memories.
A few times I got a glimpse of Nate, but he never stirred. Nobody came to check on either of us, obviously trusting that between the ropes and the drugs, we were down for the count. There were ten vehicles from what I could tell, all of them running with conventional engines which made me guess that it wasn’t simply a raiding party gone bad—as if everything else I knew about them hadn’t told me as much yet. They stopped every small eternity—likely intervals of two to three hours—until, later in the still-scorching-hot afternoon, they were joined by two trucks and another group of ATVs.
I must have blacked out for a longer stretch of time then because it was sudden vertigo that startled me awake as someone pulled me off the back of the ATV and onto the grass, wet with dew. It was much cooler, the sky above almost black once more, and in the near distance I could hear the sounds of many more people moving around. My wrists and ankles were still tied together but my limbs had long since lost sensation—a very small respite at the moment since motion made the pain in my head flare up once more. All around where I was dumped, people were busy unloading cargo from the vehicles, only part of which was human—but Nate and I weren’t the only living pretzels that I could see. One by one, their bonds were cut but none made any efforts to flee. I realized all too well why when it was my turn—my entire body had turned into a wad of dough, most of my muscles unresponsive except for the pain that slowly but surely rose as blood returned to the parts of me furthest from my heart. All I managed to do was turn my head and finally locate the lump that I identified as my husband—
And then they took him away—two men grabbing his lifeless body underneath the arms, his legs dragging behind—while I was left behind.
That couldn’t be good.
As I watched, I realized it was up to two men who made the rounds and pointed out which heaps from the ground were dragged off the way Nate had disappeared, and what others in a different direction. It took me a few minutes to figure out, but I didn’t like the conclusion my mind jumped to when I realized that all the remaining prisoners appeared to be women.
Finally, they reached me. I’d tried to work some circulation back into my limbs but the drugs hadn’t worn off completely yet, or dehydration was messing with me to the point where it rendered me useless. Either way, I stopped, pretending to be out cold still. That turned out to be impossible to keep up when someone behind my back kicked me hard in my remaining kidney, making me groan and seize up before I could cut down on the impulse to react.
“That’s a special case,” the kicker ground out, addressing the two men. “Darius wants her in the pits. Says he doesn’t care what happens to the bitch as long as it’s painful, humiliating, and ends with her dead.”
Gee, sounded like I had a new fan. I distinctly felt like telling him to get in line, but then my thoughts caught up to the implications. This didn’t
sound like what I had expected. My first—and, so far, only—guess had been that Nate’s past had finally caught up with him, and while I saw a lot of torture and possible brainwashing in my future, I’d been pretty much convinced they’d want me alive, if only to put more pressure on him. Guess I was wrong.
The two men shared glances, looking less than impressed by the other’s statement.
“She’ll be more use to us in the kennels,” one of them said, sounding rather bored. Somehow I got the feeling he wasn’t talking about turning me into dog food.
Kicker would have none of that. “That bitch and the bastard who we picked up at the same place killed five of our people and wounded three more! She deserves so much worse!”
“Then put her on twenty-four-hour duty,” the second, so far silent, guy suggested. “They usually don’t make it much more than a week of that.” He and his buddy shared a laugh.
Kicker wasn’t impressed, doing once more what he knew to do best, which made me end up on my stomach, my hands uselessly splayed out on either side of my body. The laughter stopped. Kicker sounded vaguely disgusted, but more satisfied than before. “As if anyone wants to stick his dick into that kind of a deformed cunt.” Gee, my ego definitely needed that—much impact as it had, coming from a lowlife like him.
“Then how about you don’t make her give you a hand job?” the one with the funny suggestions offered. “From behind, on their knees, they all look the same.” And thus they moved on, leaving the less-than-happy kicker alone with me, grumbling under his breath.
“You find that funny, bitch?” he snarled, obviously mistaking my attempt to keep breathing as a wheezing laugh. Or maybe I was the mistaken one because if I could have, I would have laughed him in the face. But before I got a chance to set the record straight, he wandered off, not even gracing me with another round of physical or verbal abuse. That would have left me feeling better if I hadn’t had the distinct feeling that I had lots more of both coming, all too soon.
Green Fields Series Box Set | Vol. 4 | Books 10-12 Page 4
