by Chris Bostic
“Bring them with us,” Spotted Owl said, having overheard the conversation. He handed a rifle to Katelyn, and then gave me a black one just like it. “We can leave them back in the horse camp when we grab the supplies.”
“Oh, yeah,” I mumbled. I’d forgotten we still needed to go back to get the bomb-making stuff, and then there was a whole heck of a lot more work to do after that. And it was getting darker by the second.
The sun had dipped below the mountain sometime during the shootout, and we’d since spent a fair amount of time gathering up the supplies. We’d been moving very quickly grabbing things up, but still spent arguably too much time. The longer I stood there in the edge of the woods, the more the nerves crept up again. I’d lost the aching in my gut from when the battle had started, but it came back with a vengeance.
What hadn’t gone away was the ringing in my ears. They shrieked at me, and I fished a finger underneath my helmet to press on the flap of skin in front of my left ear. Other than a temporary easing of the pressure inside my head, it accomplished nothing. Still, I would repeat the motion countless times throughout that evening.
“Grab the prisoner and let’s go,” Spotted Owl said, waving us off into the woods. “We’re pushing our luck.”
I agreed with that sentiment. I started walking with Katelyn, happy to be back under thicker cover. I looked over my shoulder so many times that I nearly slipped on a couple different occasions. But I was curious about the kid, and continued to do so.
I watched John lightly take the kid by the arm, and urge him to follow. By my assessment, there was no need for guns poking the prisoner in the back. He was perfectly compliant, if terrified.
The kid kept his eyes to the ground, saying nothing as John guided him along the creek. But eventually he looked up, and caught me staring at him. Again, his eyes went back to the ground. I slackened my pace to wait for John to catch up, though I wasn’t sure why I slowed. I would’ve much rather been done and back in Spotted Owl’s camp—or back in my own.
“Now I’ve got my own prisoner,” John said as he caught up to his sister and me. He cracked a giant, seemingly fake, smile. “You’re not the only hero.”
The kid looked up at me, and examined me through narrowed eyes. I felt uncomfortable under the gaze, and even more so by John’s ribbing.
“I’m no hero,” I said softly, thinking about how I’d performed under fire. I hadn’t turned and ran, but I hadn’t exactly saved the day. Nor had I wanted to. Fortunately, that hadn’t been necessary.
Katelyn nudged me with her shoulder, and said, “Doing okay, Zach?”
I ignored the question at first, and let her slip ahead of me. My boots pounded on the hard ground. Each step seemed extra heavy with the steel-plated vest weighing me down.
The prisoner’s armor bore a name plate sewed onto the right breast pocket. I pulled on the fabric to try to read it upside down.
“Call me, Bullinger,” I told her, announcing the name aloud.
“Okay, Bull.” She looked down at her own armor. “Apparently I’m Sylvester.”
“Stallone. Now you’re Rocky,” I said with a grin.
She seemed to like the nickname. With a wink, she said, “Maybe you should be Bullwinkle instead.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
A deep voice rose from behind us. “Kids. No appreciation of the classics.”
I turned to see Spotted Owl on our heels. With the big gun hefted in his hands like a metallic baby, he was only missing a couple of bandoliers crisscrossed over his shoulders to make him look like the ultimate action movie hero.
“It was like some kind of ancient cartoon, right?” Katelyn asked Spotted Owl.
“At least you got that right. It’s kind of an old one…about the adventures of a flying squirrel and a moose.”
As I stood there clueless, Katelyn asked, “And Bullwinkle’s the moose?”
“That’s right,” he answered. “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”
“So you’re calling me a moose,” I said with pretend annoyance.
“Maybe in that armor.”
“Hey.” I hefted my rifle into my left hand so I could playfully smack her with my right one.
“You forgot to mention the dim-witted part,” Spotted Owl told her. “The moose was dumb. Happy, but really dumb.”
“Ouch,” I said. “This just keeps getting better.”
“I’ll leave you guys to figure all that out,” Spotted Owl said, excusing himself to head closer to the front where Austin and Mouse had scampered on ahead. Those two always seemed to be in a hurry to get somewhere the fastest.
We were close to the horse camp when a shrieking roar built up from the south. Definitely not helicopters. Jets streaked in low and fast, seemingly heading right for us.
“Hit the dirt!” Spotted Owl yelled.
Katelyn and I launched ourselves to the ground, right beside the creek. As the jets roared immediately overhead, the world turned bright white.
Multiple explosions burst all around us. The booms shook so hard that I thought the earth might split apart beneath me. My ears screamed in protest.
Earth and rock rained down over us as I buried my head deeper in the dirt.
A woman screamed.
CHAPTER 23
“Sound off!” Katelyn’s mom seemed to be screaming frantically, though she sounded like she was submerged in a swimming pool. “Kids, where are you?”
I couldn’t respond. My ears shrieked with pain. Too disorientated, my brain swam to the point that I thought I might vomit.
“Everyone alright?” Spotted Owl asked. He rose up from in front of John and the prisoner, and dusted off his heavy vest.
Katelyn groaned next to me. I reached for her, and rolled her to her side.
“I’m okay,” she mouthed, or so I guessed.
I kneeled at Katelyn’s side, and helped her sit up. Leaves and dirt clods covered our clothes. I picked a leaf from underneath her helmet and helped her stand up. Her mother came running over a second later, her dad in tow.
I accepted the hug and a jumble of rushed words that I couldn’t fully hear. Leaving Katelyn to continue hugging her mother, I scanned the area for the others.
The woods looked more like a jungle. Smoke hung low, and not the usual wispy clouds that twisted light as a fairy. It was not Smoky Mountain humidity hanging like a clean mist. The air stank of explosives.
From the direction we had recently vacated, the forest was wrecked. Trees had toppled, some still diagonal like the vines of a tropical rainforest. I had no idea how many bombs had fallen, but they had devastated the forest around the bridge and all the way to the horse camp.
My mother emerged from the smoke, walking with a limp. I ran to her.
“I’m okay,” she said, waving me off.
I cupped a hand to my ear. “I can barely hear you.”
“You’re yelling,” she said, and motioned with her hands for me to lower the volume. She raised her own. “I said I was fine. Just banged up my knee when I hit the dirt.”
“Thank God,” I said, and leaned in for a hug.
“It looks like everyone’s okay,” she added, and spun me around so we could march back toward the others.
“It’s like they knew where we were going,” I muttered, and looked ahead to the camp. It didn’t appear to be as devastated, but a pair of bomb craters and the force of the blasts had leveled a number of trees.
The concrete block of the shower house seemed to have held, but the stables in the back had finally fallen over. I whistled under my breath, and found my feet pulling me away from Mom to get closer to the camp.
The horse barn had toppled over in the direction it had been leaning. Boards poked out from a giant pile.
I wondered about the supplies, and hurried on ahead to where I saw Austin and Mouse dusting each other off. Before getting too far in front of the others, I stopped to wait for Mom, and then Katelyn and her parents to catch up. Bringing up the rear, Joh
n came along with the prisoner.
It had been a miracle, I decided. Obviously, someone had heard the racket or gotten a call or something when we’d assaulted the bridge. We were just lucky that it took a little while for the jets to get there, though not so fortunate that the government forces had basically carpet bombed the woods trying to wipe us out. Things were getting serious, perhaps desperate.
“They might come back and hit us again,” Spotted Owl said. “So let’s hurry.”
He rushed with Mouse and Austin over to the shower house, but pulled up short. I jogged with the others behind him, and soon noticed why he had stopped.
The blown out windows along the front came as no surprise. The bigger issue was the far side of the building. It had partially caved in, scattering concrete blocks across the sidewalk.
We rushed around the back to find the door to the supply room blocked shut with more blocks. The roof in the far corner sagged.
Spotted Owl dropped the machine gun to start chucking blocks from the door. The rest of us joined in and essentially set about dismantling the whole back corner of the building by kicking out loose blocks and tossing the broken scraps into the woods.
“I can climb through there,” Mouse said when we’d removed a good portion of the wall to about halfway down. The rest seemed too sturdy to bust out without a sledgehammer, and the door was still tighter than a rusty bolt.
Spotted Owl looked from her small physique to the opening. Though most of the upper wall had been removed, there remained a solid four feet of wall. She could barely look inside on tiptoes. And the roof sagged even lower.
“Dad,” she said, and made up her mind for herself. She dragged Austin over to the wall and motioned for him to squat. “Give me a boost, Big A.”
In a rare moment of contradiction, he said, “I should go in first.”
She wasn’t having that. “Just follow me.” To everyone’s surprise, she jumped on his shoulders, trying to drag him to the ground.
I decided Rocky was the wrong nickname for Katelyn. If anyone reminded me of a flying squirrel, it was Mouse.
“Now get down here and give me a boost,” she demanded, and he listened that time.
Spotted Owl came over to peer inside, but didn’t turn around to where I could read his expression. Instead, he turned his attention to the sagging roof, and reached up with both hands.
“Help me hold this up,” he said over his shoulder, and Katelyn’s dad joined him in keeping the rafters propped up.
Austin helped Mouse inside the little building. Then John gave him a thigh to step on so he could hustle inside after her.
“It’s all okay,” he announced a second later. My ears had cleared up a bit, and I leaned closer to hear what sounded like heavy bags sliding on the concrete floor. Plenty of grunting and cursing followed. “But no way we can get it outta here.”
“The door?” John asked.
“Not going anywhere.”
“Stand back.” John tried to kick it down, but to no avail.
“Told you,” Austin said. “Hold on.”
“We’re going out the front,” Mouse said, “if we can beat this other wall down.”
“What wall?” John slid in front of his father to look into the room. “Alright. I’ll come around from the other side.”
The sound of shoulders and feet thumping against drywall rose until it sounded like a construction crew was inside the little room.
“Oww!” Austin cursed again. “Why’s this stuff inside here anyway?”
Through gritted teeth, Spotted Owl said, “It needs to be kept dry.”
“So it’s in a shower house? That’s dumb.”
“Actually it’s in the pump room.” Spotted Owl failed at biting back all the sarcasm. “As you’ve probably noticed, that’s separate from the showers.”
“Oh I’ve noticed,” Austin replied. The pounding started up again.
Wood cracked, and I instantly looked to the ceiling, expecting to see it come crashing down. But it was the crew inside finally having some success breaking down the interior wall. That was my cue to get back to work.
I took Katelyn around to help unload before the adults had to tell us. We jogged to the door on the women’s side of the bathhouse. She yanked open the door, the one with two working hinges, and held it wide open. The floor was littered with broken glass.
I stopped in the doorway.
“You can go in,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve always wanted to.”
“It’s not that,” I replied cryptically. Though I was admittedly curious about what kinds of features were inside the women’s room, a reflection in a tiny fragment of glass stuck in the window pane had caught my attention.
“What’s up?” she said as I backed away from the door.
“Something’s moving out here,” I whispered. “Get down.”
I crouched next to the building, pressing my back up against the cold blocks. Through the descending darkness, I scanned the open area. Beyond the first few rows of picnic table and grill boxes, the campsite grew gradually murkier until all details eventually faded out. But I knew I’d seen a shape move.
“Maybe it’s a bear,” Katelyn said, no doubt remembering back to our earlier trip to Gatlinburg when we’d seen a black bear in a similar campsite.
“Maybe.” My eyes focused in on a big green dumpster about halfway across the camp. A bomb had fallen short of the dumpster, and the resulting blast had tilted the sturdy receptacle to one side.
I knew bears liked rummaging through trash, but they wouldn’t find any handouts in the camp. It had long since been deserted. Besides, all the dumpsters had special locking mechanisms on the handle to keep out nosy varmints.
Our moms and John made all kinds of noise from inside the shower house, trying to help Austin and Mouse break free from the back room. With the two men still holding up the roof on the other side, I was left to either explore the noise or wait for more movement.
Waiting had never been my strong suit.
Something had moved, and I knew it was there.
“The best defense is a good offense,” I mumbled, repeating my father’s clumsy sports analogy. “Stay here, Rocky. I’ll be back.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said, and slipped away from the door to the women’s room.
“There’s something behind the dumpster.” I pointed across the campsite. “Just wait here and I’ll be back.”
“Not a chance, Bullhead.”
“I thought it was Bull-twinkle.”
She laughed, momentarily breaking the tension. “Bull-winkle, and you’re acting all stubborn now. Let me help.”
“Fine.” I waved my rifle to the side for her to keep to my right. “We’ll go at it from both sides. Slowly.”
We hadn’t gone twenty paces before I thought I saw a head peek around my side of the dumpster. Bear or not, I made the quick decision that a charge was in order. Better to take the creature by surprise, if that was even still possible.
I reached over to tap Katelyn’s arm, and hoped she didn’t feel the trembling in my hand. “Forget slow,” I said between ragged breaths, and I hadn’t even exerted myself yet. “We run, on three.”
She nodded. I saw the way her slender fingers gripped the rifle until her knuckles turned white. Only then did I notice I was doing the same thing.
Katelyn looked at me questioningly, and I realized I hadn’t started the count.
“One…two…three!”
We took off at a sprint. I ran straight for the corner before eventually veering out wide to the left. Katelyn’s boots pounded as she kept pace with me, circling to the right.
Just short of a big tree, not twenty yards from the dumpster, a dark shadow rustled and jerked away from the corner.
I threw myself behind the tree and yelled, “Come out with your hands up!”
No one answered. Pointing the rifle toward the corner, I advanced slowly. I swung out farther to the side and called again.
“Come out or we’ll shoot. We’ve got you surrounded.” Unfortunately, my voice cracked on the last phrase, dramatically weakening the effect.
Still no answer.
I wanted to tell Katelyn that it had to be a bear, but I kept my thoughts to myself. She had advanced across from me. A few more steps and we’d both find out.
I sucked in a deep breath, and jumped ahead with rifle leveled.
At the top of my lungs, I yelled, “Freeze!”
It was no bear. A brown-jacketed figure startled and backed away, clanking into the side of the dumpster. From a dust-caked face, wide eyes stared back at me.
CHAPTER 24
“Noel!” I shouted, but didn’t lower my weapon.
The cowering man straightened up when he recognized me, but immediately raised his hands when the rifle wasn’t lowered.
“What the heck?” Katelyn said as she rounded the other side of the dumpster.
“Yeah, Noel.” I slowly looked to her. “And, of course, we got attacked again.” I pointed the rifle menacingly, and waved for him to get up.
Noel pointed to his ears, and mumbled something. His eyes, always dull, seemed even more off than normal. Perhaps because his face was dark with soot. His mouth hung partly open, leaning to one side like the broken bathroom door.
He mumbled something and gestured to his ears again.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“I think he’s trying to say he’s deaf.” Katelyn hurried around to join up with me. “Looks like you got yourself another prisoner.”
“Yeah, the same one.”
I waved with my weapon for the man to move. He struggled to get to his feet, but I had no interest in helping the man. Instead, I encouraged him to hurry up.
Noel got himself balanced and pulled up. Splotches on his canvas coat were as black as ash, though not as dirty as his pants. It seemed to me like he’d rolled around in a campfire, and sounded about the same way with how his breathing rattled in his chest.
“His lungs sound funny,” Katelyn said loudly, not able to whisper and have me hear her.
Noel seemed to understand what she’d said, and bobbed his head. He rubbed his throat with his hand.
