by Brian Savage
The going was slow and at times painful. Jack did his best to pick an easy route, his heavy coat protecting him from most of the unpleasantness of the crawl. He kicked himself for not giving it to Aeralyn. He looked back over his shoulder. Her brow was damp, sweaty from the exertion of pulling herself along, and most likely the exertion of keeping up with him. He realized she had probably never before crawled like this in her life, and slowed down.
They neared the edge of the airstrip, the grass now just above Jack’s head when he raised up on his elbows. He took a moment and chanced a peek above the tufts of fox tail grass. The first thing he saw was the smoldering wreckage of the plane, scattered over the gravel strip. He felt the heat on his face, even from the five hundred or so meters away. He scanned beyond the wreckage, at the long row of buildings on the far side. He saw one gasser, idling, headlights on and aimed directly at the wreckage. An agent sat between the twin beams, another off to the side, smoking a cigarette. Jack didn’t recognize them, but even from this distance could tell their young age and inexperience. He snorted at their complacency, lowering his head back down beneath the tops of the grass.
He motioned to Aeralyn their turn to the left, and began crawling again. He had parked his personal gasser in a garage around the back of the main office of the small strip. He hoped that it had gone unnoticed, the only thing the other agents would be interested in being the persons they believed were still on board the aircraft. As he crawled, he tried to work out their next move. Eventually, they would run out of grass, and run into the problem of a wide-open space and copious amounts of ambient light. Regardless of the complacency of those across the strip, there was a good chance of being seen before they would be able to get to his gasser.
They would have to chance a mad dash. There really wasn’t any other way he could see. The space was too open, and the fire hadn’t dimmed much since they had worked their way out of the tree line. It was a good distance to cross; shots from that distance would be easily missed, especially with moving targets. Jack relaxed a bit. The agents would have to close the distance before engaging, and that would give them enough time to at least find a position from which to defend.
The crawling dragged on. He checked on Aeralyn repeatedly, each time finding her determined and dirt-smeared face right behind him. He marveled at the tenacity of someone who had never been in a similar situation, and wondered at how shitty his own experiences must have been to have found himself in this situation before. He laughed silently and morbidly to himself. The problem, he found, was that he liked it. Liked the rush, liked the challenge; the fact that his life was in jeopardy when he did it just made it that much more exhilarating. The predicament he found himself in now was there was a life behind him that he did care about, a life that didn’t volunteer for this, didn’t like this, and most likely regretted ever being pulled into this situation.
That guilt rushed back in, like the water on a beach at high tide. He had brought her into this, dragged her around, and put her in more danger than she had ever been in—perhaps in her entire life. He hated himself for those facts, allowing no forgiveness in that he had been somewhat assimilated when they had first met. He didn’t allow excuses. Wouldn’t believe that he had been so out of his mind to have been controlled. I should have known, he told himself, beating himself bloody in his mind.
They reached the edge of the grass that was tall enough to conceal them. Jack popped his head up to survey their surroundings. They were now nearly around the far end of the airstrip. The agents who remained sat five hundred meters to their right, and hadn’t moved significantly since the last time Jack chanced checking. He looked back at Aeralyn, lying behind him, still as an iron fence post. Her eyes were slightly wider than normal, speaking to the fear that permeated the situation.
He looked back up and forward. Nothing but wide-open space separated them from the small office. Just beyond that sat the small shop and garage that housed his gasser. Roughly two hundred meters to go. He quickly did some calculations. They could probably make it to the shop before the agents could get in the gasser and drive over. Driving would be quicker than running the six hundred or so meters to cut them off. Two hundred meters to get to cover and stand a fighting chance—if they were slow enough on the draw and didn’t just run them down with the gasser. Jack looked back toward the agents. Both now sat on the bumper of the gasser, like high school kids in front of a summer bonfire. The light drizzle had done little to dampen the burning wreckage of the plane.
He crawled back to lie beside Aeralyn.
Whispering as quietly as possible, he told her the plan. “We are gonna run for the office. Once we get there, you’ll go on toward the garage to get the gasser. I’m going to hold them off as best I can, then head to you. Just pull the gasser around the opposite side of the building.”
“I’ve never driven one before,” Aeralyn said, eyes even wider now than they had been before.
“Never mind, then,” Jack said, looking back to the office building. “Just stick with me, keep low; if there’s shooting, get down.”
She nodded to him, shivering slightly in the cold.
“Ready?” he whispered, raising an eyebrow, hoping that the nonchalant expression would calm her nerves. She nodded at him again, stone faced.
Jack jumped up, grabbing her hand, and took off, making a beeline for the office building. He sprinted as hard as he could, pulling Aeralyn along with him, slowing only at the very edge of what he felt was her ability to sprint. They made it almost seventy meters before the two agents noticed their mad dash. Yelling nondescript expletives, the agents jumped into their gasser, revving the engine hard as they skidded toward them on the gravel strip. Jack chanced a glance back at the quickly approaching gasser, before turning back toward the office. Fifty meters to go. His legs burned, his lungs burned…he urged Aeralyn on faster.
They hit the far corner of the building, turning sharply toward the entrance. Jack completely forgot about the cement poles, used as vehicle deterrents, that ringed the outside of the front doors. He dodged one but felt Aeralyn clip another in her momentum forward. She spun around, landing hard on her rear end. Jack’s momentum pulled him forward and her hand slipped from his. He spun back around. Bending down, he roughly grabbed her beneath her arms, lifting and pulling her toward the glass doors. The beam of the headlights slashed a quick arc around the corner. Jack, with Aeralyn in his arms, dove headlong through the space between two of the dividers as the gasser made impact. The crunch of metal and breaking glass was all Jack heard. He opened his eyes, quickly surveying the crushed front of the vehicle just inches from where they lay.
He heard a groan from inside the vehicle, and the screech of twisted metal as a door was forced open. Jack pushed himself up and drew his weapon in one fluid motion as he moved around the front of the vehicle. He aimed his weapon at what appeared to be the only of the two that were conscious. The other, who must have forgotten to attach his seat belt, lay through the windshield and half on the smashed hood. The conscious agent had stepped halfway out of the vehicle, blood trickling down his pale white face. Their eyes met for a brief moment. The man winced, eyes squinting slightly as Jack pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. Jack pulled the trigger again, before looking down his arm at the weapon: two green lights lit next to one glaring, angry red one. The one that paired his weapon with his implant. The other agent looked wide-eyed for the briefest pause, not believing what had happened, before coming to his senses. The agent struggled to free his weapon, holster tangled in the lose seat belt he’d released, as Jack did his best to close the distance, half-heartedly hurling what was once his most trusted piece of equipment, as a last-ditch effort to slow his opponent down.
The man shielded his face from the oncoming missile, blocking it with his forearm as he finally pulled the weapon from the holster. Jack was on him, using the door to batter the man’s leg, the one he’d stepped onto the concrete, and reaching through the broken
side window to get a hand on and control the only weapon left in play. As young as he was and as inexperienced as Jack had previously thought he was, the man was no fool. He kept his weapon low and close to his far hip, firing three rounds in quick succession through the side door of the gasser. Jack felt two impacts on his jacket, and a third skirt by, searing through the muscle and fat of his lower left side.
In a mad attempt to keep the smaller man from firing again, Jack reached both hands through the absent side window, and pulled with all his might, dragging him out of the vehicle and onto the pavement. The agent kept his weapon tight, trying to get a shot off the hip at Jack’s unprotected stomach and chest. Jack trapped the weapon against the man’s belt, turning the barrel away from himself between their two bodies. He delivered blow after blow with his free hand to his opponent’s face. The man, somewhere in the flurry of blows, tried to shield his face, and released his two-hand grip on the weapon.
Seizing his chance, Jack dropped his striking hand to the weapon, wrenching it down and behind the younger man. The agent screamed in pain, grip loosening on the weapon, but unable to free his finger from the trigger guard. Jack mercilessly twisted the weapon back, and ripped it savagely toward himself with a two-handed grip. The man hunched over, his trigger finger now hanging by a single tendon, screaming in pain. Gripping the weapon by the barrel, Jack brought it down in a crossbody slash, striking the agent in the temple and ending his screaming. Jack, following the momentum of his strike, ended up on one knee, bent over on the ground. He breathed deeply, the fight that had lasted but a few moments threatening to zap his remaining energy.
He looked back toward the front of the wrecked gasser, and found Aeralyn standing, staring wide-eyed at him. The searing pain beneath his shirt snapped him back to reality as the adrenaline receded. He groaned, reaching a hand within his shirt, and bringing it back out, glistening wet in the now distant firelight. He pressed his hand against the widening damp spot on his shirt and struggled to his feet. He took a step toward Aeralyn, dropping the weapon he still held in his hand. She ran forward, ducking under his arm and taking some of the weight of his body.
“Are you hurt?!” she asked, almost frantically.
“I’ll be okay, went right through,” he said dryly.
“You were shot!” Aeralyn looked up at his face, doing her best to keep her eyes averted from his wound.
“I know, dear, I was there,” he said, smiling slightly. He winced as she adjusted his arm across her shoulders.
“Let’s get to the gasser. We need to get out of here.”
They struggled their way across the parking lot to the outbuilding, and fumbled with the locked door. Jack eventually smashed a window with a rock, and boosted Aeralyn, as best he could, up and through. They groped in the darkness, unsure of light switches or the mechanism that opened the large roll-up doors. Jack, finally coming to his senses a bit in a second wind, remembered his key fob and pressed the button that flipped on the headlights. Now able to see, they extracted themselves from the steel-constructed building, and quickly drove away from the lonely little airfield.
“Grab me the black bag in the seat pocket behind you?” Jack asked, still holding pressure on his side with one hand and maintaining control of the steering wheel with the other.
Aeralyn unbuckled and spun around, retrieving the bag, and handed it to him, a worried expression on her face. He pulled a tab on the top, ripping open the Velcro and nylon pouch. The various contents, each vacuum-sealed in plastic, spilled into his lap.
“Take the wheel,” he said, letting go before she had a chance to do as he asked. She reached over, eyes wide in fear. “Don’t worry, just move it left and right to keep it between the lines.”
He rummaged through the contents spilled all over his lap, before selecting a large, cylindrical sealed package. Ripping it open with his teeth, he unrolled the emergency trauma bandage, exposing the white pad impregnated with antifibrinolytic chemicals. He lifted his hand and snaked his fingers inside the hole in his shirt, careful not to touch the wound beneath. Doing his best with one hand, he pulled hard against the already torn material, enlarging the hole so that his entire hand could fit inside. The gasser hit rumble strips on the side of the road. Jack dropped the bandage, quickly pulling the vehicle back to the center of the lane. “Eyes on the road!” he snapped at Aeralyn, before adding in a softer tone, “Don’t worry about me.”
Retrieving the bandage that had fallen between his feet, he lifted it, and pressed it against the now exposed wound. Jack closed his eyes and bared his teeth. It had been a while since he had been shot, and this was the first time he had ever been shot with the specialty weapons carried by the agents. It hurt a bit less than a regular bullet. Most likely because of the speed at which it traveled, and smaller wound channel. He snapped out of his reverie and opened his eyes. He took the tail end of the elastic portion of the bandage and began wrapping it tightly around his middle. Once he reached the end, he utilized the sewn in metal clips to attach it on itself, wiggling around a bit in his seat to test that it stayed put.
He looked around on the floor again, eyes searching in the dim cabin light for the small pack of pills that came in his trauma kit. Locating the one that read, “Pain Management,” on the outside, he tore it open and poured the powder underneath his already dry tongue. He closed his mouth and chewed, realizing the powder would have trouble absorbing given how dehydrated he had become. He placed a hand back on the wheel. Aeralyn’s knuckles, white from the force by which she gripped the wheel, relaxed and fell away, back into her lap.
“You okay?” he asked her, glancing sideways at her. She seemed to be watching the road, not hugging herself like she usually did, or studying her hands, as was her habit when asked difficult questions. She shook her head side to side before replacing her seat belt across her lap. She sat there quietly, eyes forward, not saying anything. Jack went back to watching the road as well, willing himself to stay awake. It was a long, two-hour drive back to the city. He was glad that the old man’s shop wasn’t in one of the rings, though. His mind couldn’t wrap around trying to get through one of the security checkpoints or over the slick metal walls.
Why are we going back? he thought to himself, questioning each decision that he had made from the time he had decided to jump from the aircraft. The worst case, the old man was dead, and there was nothing that he could do about it anyway. The best case, the old man had been let go, and was picking up his wrecked shop. He remembered the kindly old man’s face. He had to be sure. He had to know if the one person he had ever called his friend was okay.
He looked over at Aeralyn, now fast asleep, forehead pressed against the cool glass. The first person he had called his friend, but not the only one. He gazed at her pretty and dirt-streaked face. He hit the rumble strips, jerking the vehicle back into the center of the lane. She sat straight up, looking around, then at him, questioning what had just happened. “Sorry,” he said quietly. She relaxed back into the seat, watching the road a few minutes before deciding it was safe enough to nod off again.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered again to her, but too low for her to hear. So sorry for dragging you into this, dragging you through it, and taking you with me, he continued in his mind. If I thought that there was some other way to ensure your safety, I would have done it, even if it meant never seeing you again, but I know no other way. I would do anything to keep you safe, my love.
My love. The two words had emerged in his inner monologue without the purposefulness of choosing them. He felt them. He chanced a glance back over her sleeping form. Sleep well, my love, he thought, as he turned his eyes to the road, and his mind to the next problem he needed to solve: Keeping her safe, and ensuring the old man was safe, too.
Chapter 17
Jack drove the two-hour distance, going over in his mind every conceivable possibility that might arise upon their arrival. At least, every one he could think of. Aeralyn slept, dreaming troubled dreams, which cau
sed unintelligible snatches of moaned words to escape her lips every so often. Jack woke her up the first couple of times, before deciding the troubled sleep would be better than no sleep at all for the exhausted woman who slept beside him.
As the city grew ever closer, the buildings zipped by the gasser more frequently. Jack purposely took a longer route, abandoning the direct highway into City Prime for little-used byways, relegated to ruin by an ultra-modern system dominated by the aerials that flew overhead. The clock on the dash read 02:33 a.m. when they finally came to the street on which the small house, that doubled as the old man’s shop, sat. Jack turned off the lights, passing the street by and pulling into an alley off the cross street.
The narrow alley, cobbled in old brick and limestone, which warped into rounded humps down its entire length, was blocked off well before the little shop, by large, flipped-over metal dumpsters. Jack turned off the vehicle, leaning forward to peer at the top of the house over the hedges, fences, and other buildings that pressed in on it from all sides. He could make out a single lit window on the second story, which he assumed was the old man’s apartment. He pulled the key from the ignition, quickly spinning a small bezel on the left side of the steering column to turn off the cabin lights. Aeralyn stirred, the comforting sound of the road, and the rock of the vehicle as it made its way down it, an absence her unconscious mind thought an apt waking point.
She sat up, taking a deep breath, and yawned, stretching her arms above her head. Jack pictured the same motion, but in a warm and comfortable bed, in a distant life. A life he didn’t know if the two of them would get to experience. He turned back to the house, trying to remember the layout as best he could. He had only ever been in the first floor, and only truly a part of that. He assumed there would be a back door, maybe a small yard, based on the way the house sat farther forward than the more modern structures on the block.
