Another more focused scan of the room told me that she wasn’t in here—though there was a neatly made bed and a dresser with enough stuff spread across the top that I thought someone probably lived in here. I moved to the dresser and started pushing the stuff around, looking for clues as to where we were—and who we were with.
A compass. A watch that appeared to also measure things like distance and depth. Several different versions of Swiss Army knives—which was weird, I thought. I mean how many versions of those did one person actually need? And—I did a double take, and then reached out a finger to poke at the last thing on the dresser. A stethoscope. I’d never been part of any medical group in the military, so I didn’t know much about medical practices, but I was certain that normal people didn’t go around storing stethoscopes in their own personal rooms.
Had we somehow been…rescued by a doctor?
My mind rebelled at the thought, though, as it was both too fortuitous and too convenient. Way more likely we’d been rescued by some crazy survivalists who happened to have stethoscopes for some unknown reason. We were in the middle of the wilderness in Michigan.
This wasn’t a place where doctors tended to hang around.
Though it would explain the wrapping across my body and the fact that those bear wounds didn’t hurt anymore.
I jerked the shirt I was wearing up and stared down at the bandaging, my mind reaching back to the wounds I’d received in Afghanistan and the dressing the doctor had done. Three full seconds of staring at the bandage and a quick finger running over the seams, and I’d confirmed that whoever had done this seemed to be a professional. The wrap was tight—but not so tight that it was cutting off my air or my circulation—and done with extremely even strokes, the tape reaching across my chest and belly in even, consistent movements. I knew from having asked the medics in Afghanistan why they did that.
Better coverage, they’d told me. Better stability in case of broken ribs. Better chance of the tape sticking rather than getting caught on something and pulling apart. Less chance of dirt or bacteria or anything else getting under it and into the wound that was trying to heal.
So whoever had done this had training. Terrific. Now I just had to hope that they were going to use that training for us rather than against us.
I turned back to the doorway and ducked through it and into the hall again. Now that I was paying more attention, I saw that this hall was some sort of central hall in the house. There were rooms on both sides of it—but windows at either end, to let in the light. No lights on here, either, and when I came to a switch and flipped it up and down, nothing happened.
That EMP was looking more and more likely. Either that or we were in a house where they didn’t believe in electricity. Which seemed highly unlikely, given the level of decorating they’d done.
But that didn’t answer my more immediate question. Where was Angie? And was she okay?
“Angie!” I hissed out, trying to make my voice carry, but keep it quiet at the same time. I wanted her to hear me. I didn’t want our host to get involved until I knew she was okay.
And I needed her brain. Needed to know what she remembered about whoever had rescued us. Needed to know whether she knew anything more about them than I’d already deduced. And I wanted to start building a plan. Because if this person turned out to be as dangerous as Randall and his crew had been, then we were going to have to make a run for it again, out into the snow and ice and freezing, deadly cold.
I needed to know whether she was going to be able to make that run. Or whether I’d be strapping her across my back and depending on my own body to get her to safety.
9
“Angie!” I hissed again into the dead quiet of the hallway.
I paused and listened with everything I had, my body absolutely still with the hope that I’d hear her—and the fear that I would have attracted the attention of whoever else was in this colorful house. I took one creeping step forward, then another, feeling the absolute lack of any weapon, and then saw a table sitting across from me in the hallway.
A table with a lamp on it.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen it before—it was sloppy, really, to have missed it—but I was willing to blame my absolute focus on trying to figure out what had happened and where we were for my lapse of concentration.
Dammit. If Special Ops had taught me one thing—one thing!—it was to always be observant of what was around us. You just never knew what could be important, or what could be hiding a potential enemy. You needed to look around, figure out what you could use as a potential weapon.
As a potential shield.
And I’d completely flaked on that. Now, when I needed it so badly, when I was unarmed and in unfamiliar territory. Now, when I had to find and potentially save my wife. I’d forgotten all of my training.
What kind of soldier was I if I couldn’t keep it together for ten minutes when I was in a non-lethal situation without anyone doing anything like pointing a gun at my head? I’d been in far, far worse situations in Afghanistan—too many times to count—and I’d been able to keep my focus laser-sharp then.
I was losing a step. And this was definitely not the right time to do it.
I narrowed my eyes, forcing my brain to take on that soldier’s perspective again, and looked up and down the hallway, considering. Still too many doors for my liking. Too many doors for anyone to be hiding behind. But the hallway itself was empty, and I needed a weapon. After another moment of waiting, I dashed the step across the hallway and grabbed the lamp up from the table, yanking the cord out of the wall.
There. Weapon in hand, check. It wouldn’t do much against someone with a gun, but if I managed to come up behind whoever was holding us here, I’d at least be able to slow them down.
Then I heard something. A whisper of sound so faint that I almost missed it the first time.
“John? Are you out there?”
My heart stopped for a moment, then started pounding at five times its normal speed.
“Angie!” I whispered back. “Where are you?”
“John!”
I could almost feel the relief in her voice, and that alone had me moving forward, my instincts trying to figure out where the sound had come from. There were two more doorways in front of me, both of those doors open, and I thought she had to be in one of those rooms. There were no other options.
I moved on silent feet, still aware that I didn’t know who else was in this house, and when I got to the first doorway, I turned sharply into it, my eyes moving as quickly as I could make them to go through the room and catalog its holdings. Bed, check. Dresser, check. Window with a curtain, check.
Lights off, check.
Interesting, but no Angie. And that meant this room was unimportant.
I turned on a heel and darted diagonally across the hall toward the other room, my heart hammering against my ribs. She had to be in here—she had to. I wasn’t willing to venture into the rest of the house without her. Without knowing that she was safe, and whole.
A quick glance across the room, though, told me that she wasn’t, and I whirled around on my toes, legs already tensed to take me out into the hall again. But then I paused and tried to get my mind to work. She wasn’t in either of the open rooms, and I’d come from the other side of the hallway. I’d heard her on this end, though—and I didn’t think I would have been able to hear her through any of the closed doors that had been behind me.
Where the hell was she? Where had the bastard who’d found us stashed my wife?
I crept into the hallway again, gaze going left and right and then left again as I tried to figure out whether I’d missed anything. Another door. A nook where she was sitting. Anything. But there was nothing there; just the hallway I’d already come down—complete with doors I’d passed and rooms I’d checked—and these two rooms at the end of the hall. Where else could she—
“John!” I heard again, and this time I heard what direction it was coming from
.
I turned sharply to my left, my eyes on the spot where I thought her voice had come from, and started walking. I didn’t bother to get up against the wall or try to hide. I didn’t bother to creep.
I wanted to know where my wife was. And I wanted to know now. If that meant I came face-to-face with whoever had brought us here before I was ready or in any way armed, well, that was a risk I was willing to take.
Three steps had me at the end of the hall, and that was when I saw the thing I’d been missing up to that point. Though this hall did indeed end in a window, it turned out that it also turned, in a corner that was so abrupt and tight, the next hall almost doubling back on this one, that it had been impossible to see from where I’d been standing.
I went around it and jerked to a stop, barely breathing.
There was an entirely different hall in front of me. It looked exactly the same—and it had at least ten doors ranging down the left-hand side. This hall must have run almost parallel to the one I’d been in, with only enough space for the set of rooms between them.
At the other end of the hall, another window. All the doors were closed.
“How big is this place?” I whispered to myself, shocked. I’d known that there were some large houses in the backwoods near Ellis Woods, but this place now had, by my count, at least twenty rooms in it. That seemed extensive, even for a big house. Had we somehow found our way into some sort of hotel? A bed and breakfast?
In the middle of a wild and largely unpopulated forest in Michigan?
It seemed highly unlikely.
But that also wasn’t my problem. I didn’t care what kind of place this was. I just cared that I found Angie and got the hell out of here.
“Angie!” I hissed. “Where the hell are you?”
“She’s in here,” a person who definitely wasn’t Angie answered from directly to my left.
10
I jerked and turned, trying desperately to get my heart to go back into its correct position, and cursing myself once again for having been caught unprepared. And what I saw surprised me. I’d expected someone that measured up to Randall. Well, perhaps not. We were in far too nice of a house—with decorating that was at least civilized—for that to be the case.
But I’d still been expecting someone who would have had a house out in the middle of nowhere. A survivalist, perhaps. Maybe some sort of mountain man who also happened to like the comfort of a sofa and full kitchen when he got home from the hunt.
Instead, I was looking at a man who looked for all the world like he belonged in a university, teaching classes. He was clean-cut, with salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Behind those glasses lay a very intelligent face which, though lined with age, didn’t exactly scream “wild forest living.”
He was wearing blue slacks, a sweater vest, and some sort of lab coat. And loafers. Loafers, for God’s sake.
My brain came skidding to a stop and then started forward again, trying desperately to re-catalog where I thought we were—and who I thought we were with. But no matter how hard it scrabbled, it couldn’t give me anything that seemed reasonable.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked, too shocked to remember my manners.
Too untrusting to think that I might need them. Because whoever this guy was, and no matter how sophisticated he might appear to be, he’d still brought us here without asking whether we wanted to come.
Would I have rather stayed in the forest, freezing to death? Probably not. But I didn’t like it when people made my decisions for me. Particularly when those decisions impacted my wife and her health.
And I was still more than a little bit scarred by what had happened in Randall’s cabin. Yeah, maybe people helped just out of the goodness of their hearts. Sometimes. But that wasn’t my most recent experience—and my most recent experience was definitely going to drive my current actions.
To my shock, he strode forward with his hand extended. “Marlon Jones,” he said quickly. “Very pleased to meet you. And you are…?”
“John,” I replied firmly. “John Aikens. We were—”
“How is your side, John Aikens?” he asked, interrupting me. When I opened my mouth to argue, he put a hand up to stop me. “I don’t need to know why you’re here. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And it might be better for both of us if I never know. But I do care about how your side is. I had to patch you up quickly, and I didn’t do as extensive a job as I would have liked.”
I snapped my mouth shut, trying to process all of that. He looked like a college professor, but he didn’t talk like one.
No, the things he was saying made it sound like he’d been part of the military. And involved in a part that dealt with top-secret situations. No one in the real world—the world normal people inhabited—ever said things about it being better if they didn’t know certain things.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked quietly.
I could see from his face that he understood exactly what conclusions I’d jumped to, and that he accepted it. But he didn’t show me anything else. Instead, he asked again, “Your side? Is it feeling better?”
“Yes,” I answered, my voice monotone. “Now where is my wife?”
At that, he whirled around and made his way into the room he’d been standing in front of.
“In here,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “And I’m glad you’re awake. I wasn’t expecting you to wake so quickly, but I’m glad you did. I haven’t treated her yet, and I’m going to need help.”
I followed after him, my gaze going around him to see Angie laying in another bed in a room that looked…well, exactly the same as the others I’d been in. Which seemed incredibly odd—and brought back the question of where exactly we were.
Who was this guy, why was he living in such a big house out in the middle of nowhere, and why the hell did he have so many rooms that looked exactly the same? None of it made any sense. None of it matched anything I’d ever experienced.
But he had Angie. She was alive, and her color looked better than the last time I’d seen her. I could see that her leg was still strapped up in the splint Randall had put on her, so this Marlon character wasn’t lying about not having treated her yet, but she was at least…well, human-colored again. She was warm. She was safe.
And at that, I started to breathe again. Started to forgive Marlon for having brought us here without our permission.
“I’m going to need you to help me move her,” Marlon was saying as he walked toward her bed. “And quickly. That leg is broken, as I’m sure you’ve realized, and though the bleeding has been slow, she’s still lost an awful lot of blood. I can’t replace the blood. But I can set the leg and sew her up. After that, it’s up to her to come back to us.”
He seemed to notice that Angie was awake and listening to every word he said at that point, and he gave her what I thought was a mostly kind smile.
“Think you’re up to it, my girl?” he asked softly. “If I put you back together, can you do the rest?”
“Damn right I can,” she said through cracked lips.
I grinned widely at that. That was the woman I’d married—and the woman I hadn’t seen since the bear attacked us. The fact that she was giving him sass, that alone was worth the price of admission. That alone made me feel like everything was going to be okay.
Marlon turned to me with one eyebrow lifted. “In that case, we need to get her downstairs to my…surgical room. That’s where I have the heavier tools. And we need to do it while there’s still enough daylight to see by, or we’re going to be in trouble. I have a generator out here but it’s old, and it’s not capable of doing much more than keeping the house warm. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t like doing surgery by candlelight.”
“I don’t like doing surgery at all,” I replied, putting all my distrust and fear behind me. “But I’m guessing it’s even harder by candlelight. How do we want to do this?”
“The splint will make it easier, but we obviously can’t use her le
g to lift her,” Marlon said quickly.
We both paused to take stock of the situation, and suddenly the solution presented itself to me. Angie was laying on a quilt—with another over her—and that would provide the ideal means for carrying her.
“We carry the quilt underneath her,” I said firmly. “If we grab it close enough to her body, it’ll keep her from rolling around. And it will mean we don’t have to put any pressure on that leg. Will give us better maneuverability. Also, it’ll make it easier to put her down once we get downstairs.”
Marlon cast me a considering—and, I thought, respectful—glance. “Military,” he stated. “I saw your tags, so I suspected. But I didn’t know how long you might have served—or how much training you had.”
I reached down to take a hold of the quilt, figuring we had plenty of time to have that particular conversation later. “Enough to know how to move an injured soldier, Cap,” I told him quickly. “Now let’s get her down there so you can get started. I want her patched up as soon as possible. There might be men coming after us, and if they arrive, I want her in a state where I can move her without feeling like I’m going to hurt her.”
Approximately seven minutes later, we had gone down the hall I had yet to travel, found another door at the end, and descended a set of stairs into what I thought was either the first floor of the house or a basement of some sort. Whatever it was, it had been built with the need for daylight in mind. Two entire walls were taken up with large windows that let in the bright, snow-white sunlight.
“Awful lot of windows for a house in the middle of a snow-prone area,” I noted, trying to prod for some more information on who he was and what the hell this house was about.
He gave me a shrug, careful not to disturb the woman we were carrying between us. “They’re energy efficient,” he said quickly. “Double-paned, low-emissivity glass. Keeps the cold out and the heat in, or vice versa. And I like the daylight. You never know when you’re going to need it.”
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 7
