Two Crazy, One Wild

by Shaye Marlow

  It was too much of a coincidence that we’d just been shot down, and now there was a gunshot coming from the woods nearby. So, I locked my arms around Frances, and rolled us off the wing.

  In less than a second, her come-hither gaze had widened into shock. As her back hit the marsh, that gaze narrowed back down into upset, and then bald accusation.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Somebody’s shooting at us.”

  “That’s bullshit.” She struggled to get out from under me. “Somebody’s just shooting. Somebody’s always shooting.”

  The next shot went through the fuselage next to our heads, and those beautiful eyes of hers widened into an acknowledgement of my awesome rightness. I didn’t need to drag her to her feet. She was already getting up, and pushing me with her.

  And then we were running, slogging desperately through the bog, headed for cover. Pain shot through my bum knee with each unstable, sucking step.

  “Bob and weave,” I panted, stumbling deliberately to the side.

  “That’s not gonna help,” Frances called over her shoulder, “because that shot came from the side. Maybe starting and stopping would help, but you’d have to stop at just the perfect—” she sank into the mud past her knee, and came to a sudden halt. She finished her sentence, but the word was drowned out by another gunshot.

  I looked at her, and she was looking at me, and I noted that she had no bullet holes in her. Then I grabbed her, yanked her out of the mud, and half-carried her toward the woods.

  “Why are they shooting at us?” I asked. Helping her wasn’t easy, with her trying to shake me off.

  “How should I know? They’re probably shooting at you.”

  I glanced back. “I don’t recognize them.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything.” She grunted, stumbling up out of the muck onto dry land.

  I gave her a nudge because she wasn’t moving fast enough. “Yes, it does,” I argued. “Usually I have to get to know someone before I inspire them to murder. I think they’re after you.”

  Shaking me off again, she paused to blink up at me. “Why would anyone want to murder me?” Her innocent look was about as good as Rory’s.

  “I dunno, you tell me.”

  My statement was punctuated by a spray of wood chips as a bullet took out a chunk of tree just past her head. She flinched, then fled up the hill.

  I followed, waiting for her answer.

  But she didn’t answer, instead opting to concentrate on running. Frances’s breathing was quickly becoming labored. “So what’s… the plan… here?” she asked, dodging around a healthy stand of devil’s club.

  “Run,” I said. “Hopefully lose them.”

  “The river should be… just a little ways… from here,” Frances panted.

  I grinned, reminded of the kid in the wheelchair from Malcom in the Middle. “I think once we get over this rise, it’ll be all downhill to the river.”

  “Oh, thank god,” she groaned.

  “Don’t I remember you saying something about how a pilot should be in shape? In case of samurai, or ants?”

  “Shut up,” she wheezed.

  “Seems like, with all the men you cavort with, you’d have a little more stamina,” I added.

  “Doesn’t take much,” she shot back, “to swing a whip.”

  “Ha!” I glanced away, and when I swung my head back around, she was gone. I turned to find her twenty feet back, doubled over and gasping. A hundred feet or so behind her, I saw movement in the trees, a man shouldering his rifle.

  “Frances, move!” I yelled. There wasn’t time to make myself clear, but luckily, she lurched to the side. The bullet missed her, and stung my leg as I ran back to fetch her.

  “Like hell they’re not shooting at you,” I said, dragging her to her feet. “C’mon.”

  “I can’t.”

  I growled, getting in her face even as I watched the shooter reload. “This is life or death, honey. Do you want a bullet in you?”

  She growled right back, then forced herself forward. Less than a minute later, and still shy of the top of the hill, she’d had enough, and so had I.

  I turned and knelt. “Get on my back.”

  She wrapped her arms over my shoulders, and I was already straightening, hitching her up with a thigh in either hand. Then I was running for the top of the hill, strafing like J.D. always did when we played video games, thighs burning as I propelled us both upward.

  We got to the top, and then I really got to stretch my legs. I piled on the speed, jumping logs and dodging branches as I bounded through the trees. My injured knee protested, but I ignored it.

  “Holy shit,” Frances mumbled into my ear.

  “I know, I’m amazing. Feel free to heap on the compliments, just as soon as you catch your breath.” She pinched me, and I laughed. “You should tell me why those men are after you,” I said, hitching her up again.

  She tightened her legs around my waist. “No point.”

  “What do you mean?” I was seeing flashes of brightness through the trees that could only be the river. I sped that direction.

  “Well, I’m out a plane. That means you’re out a plane, and an instructor. I’m going home.”

  “What? No!”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Frances, I’ll get your plane fixed.”

  “Do you realize how long that would take? Don’t bother.”

  “We’ll get a new plane.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where are you gonna get a plane? Are you gonna pull it from your ass? Because last I checked, your sphincter’s a bit smaller than plane-sized.”

  I wanted to throw her down and check her sphincter, but alas: gunmen. “There’s a plane for sale upriver,” I said. “That Super Cub I pointed out.”

  She shuddered. “Super Cubs are gutless.”

  “But, they can get you in just about anywhere,” I said.

  “Even your sphincter?”

  “Possibly even my sphincter,” I allowed. “We can go get the plane tomorrow, and won’t even be out a day of lessons.”

  We broke into the light along the river, and found ourselves at the top of a thirty-foot cut-bank. Turning, I picked my way along the faint trail at the edge.

  “Zack, I really think, with all the problems we’ve had, maybe it’s just not meant to be.”

  “What problems?” I paused a moment to confirm it was the faint drone of a boat I was hearing. That would be a yes.

  “Getting shot down, for starters!”

  “That was not my fault. They’re shooting at you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Doesn’t change the fact that it happened. We got shot down. We crashed a plane.”

  I grunted. “Fine, we crashed a plane. Is that all you got?”

  “As if that’s not enough. We have no electricity. That means no showers, and what little food you have left—which you can’t even get at, because, ermines!—is rapidly going bad. You have no ground school, and not even a book!”

  “I ordered my book, and I’ve been reading the one you loaned me. And the rest, I can fix.” The boat had come into view, and I hurried, angling toward a small beach where I was hoping I could flag the occupants down.

  “Yeah? When?”

  “Today. This evening, for some of it. And we’ll go to town tomorrow to get a book, and the medical certificate you said I’d need.”

  “With what plane?” she asked with exasperation.

  “We’ll buy that one I’ve had my eye on tomorrow morning.” I jumped a little stream, and headed out onto the shore. I swung Frances to her feet, then started waving my arms.

  A few moments later, the boat swerved toward us.

  “Oh, thank god,” Frances said.

  But, as they came closer, the driver suddenly let off the throttle. I met his narrowed eyes. It was a guide I was pretty sure I’d seen before. One of Ed’s.

  Shaking his head, the guide swerved away.

  “Hey!” I called.

  The guy flipped me the bird a
s he throttled the boat back up to speed.

  Next to me, Frances was laughing. “I take it that’s someone who knows you.”

  Thankfully, not well enough to open fire. “It’s not funny.”

  “Little bit,” she said, holding her fingers together.

  “Hey, you’re in this too, you know. If you’d maybe showed some skin, he might have…”

  She peeled the front of her shirt open, and there were her breasts. “Like this?” she asked.

  I gulped, staring. “Yeah, that might’ve helped. Little late, though.”

  She winked at me, and it wasn’t until she put her fun-bags away that I recalled our situation.

  We were stranded on the wrong side of a really, really cold river with men with rifles chasing us. Granted, after they’d gotten lucky in bringing the plane down, they were proving to have pretty poor aim—another shot rang out, and just beyond us, water sprayed—but still: They outnumbered us, and they had guns.

  Slinging Frances up onto my back again, I continued upstream. We passed a couple cabins, and at both, there was nobody home. At the second, there was a boat.

  “We could borrow it,” Frances said.

  I stared at the boat—a tiny thing lying upside down, no motor—and considered that if the owners found out, it’d be just another nail in Rory and my’s coffin. Then I thought about the fact that we were being chased by men with guns, the next person along in a boat was just as likely to do what the first had done, and if we found a cabin with somebody home, ditto. And I was kinda tired of running carrying a hundred and some-odd pounds of attitude on my back.

  I let Frances down and went to one end of the little boat. “Let’s do it.”

  We managed to flip the boat over, but when it came time to lift, she didn’t even get it off the ground. We switched sides, and I was able to lift and drag with her pushing on the other end. We got it into the water, and I started looking around for paddles.

  A shout came from the woods beyond the cabin, and then a shot ricocheted. Frances jumped into the boat, a smallish dead tree in her hands. “C’mon, Zack, we gotta go.”

  “We need paddles.”

  “We can use this as a pole. Let’s go!”

  With a growl, I gave the boat a running shove and hopped aboard.

  Frances had her head bent over the tree, snapping off branches and flipping them over the side.

  Turned to watch the shore as we drifted away, I saw one of our pursuers run down to the beach and take aim. I jumped on Frances, shoving her down. The bullet put a hole in the gunwale next to my head.

  “I’m getting a little tired of this,” I said, watching water pour in through the new hole in our borrowed boat.

  Frances jammed a twig in it, then wedged in another, reducing the flow to almost nothing.

  “Nice,” I said, impressed.

  The guy on the beach fired again, but his shot went wide, resulting in a splash a good boat-length away. We were finally drifting out of range.

  “Help me with this,” Frances said. “Can you get the big branches?” She held the spiky beginnings of a pole out to me.

  I was on the fence about the whole pole project, but I did as she asked, quickly stripping off the half-dozen branches near the tree’s base. Then she took her new ‘pole’ to the edge of the boat and plunged it into the water.

  I had to grab her by the waistband as she almost plunged right in after it. I hauled her and her stick back into the boat.

  “It’s too deep,” she panted.

  “Well, it’s bound to get shallow again.” We both looked ahead, and I noted we’d been swept into the fastest—and what was probably the deepest—channel, and were being moved along at a good clip. “At some point,” I added. The way the boat spun lazily, often presenting its broadside to the current, was making me a little ill.

  Frances growled. “Does this shit happen to you often?”

  I decided I should probably answer that conservatively. So, sitting on one of the benches, I shrugged. Then I took the opportunity to check out my stinging bullet wound. I hadn’t noticed any bleeding, and when I tore my muddy pant leg open to check, I saw why. The bullet had barely grazed my calf. The red stripe was a burn more than anything else.

  Frances turned on me. “Does it?”

  “You want me to be brutally honest?” I asked, dropping my leg.

  “Honesty would be brutal, in this case?”

  “Yes, yes it would. This shit happens to me all the time. All. The time. I don’t know if it’s bad luck or shit choices, or what it is, but this is actually one of the milder scrapes I’ve been in. I mean, at least we’re no longer being shot at. At least we’re in a boat. It’s just that we’re free-floating—”

  “With no way to get ashore.”

  “—that’s the problem. But that’s not too terrible-much of a problem. Eventually we’ll drift past somebody that doesn’t know us—”

  “Know you.”

  “—and especially if you look really pathetic, they’ll stop and pick us up.”

  “Why am I the one that has to look pathetic?”

  “You’d be better at it.”

  She crossed her arms. “And why do you say that?”

  “You’re a woman.”

  She scoffed and laughed and scoffed some more. But, looking at me, she maybe saw where I was coming from. “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Why don’t you come over here and sit with me? All we can do, really, is wait.”

  She pushed her pole into the water again, and still didn’t touch the bottom.

  I patted my thigh. “C’mere. You can sit in my lap.”

  “If I sit in your lap, there will probably be some necking, and I don’t want to neck. I’m mad at you.”

  “It’d take your mind off things,” I said.

  “I’d rather slap you.”

  I shrugged. “You can do that, too.”

  She crossed the boat and fired one right across my face. She grimaced, holding her hand. “That was for my plane.”

  “Which wasn’t my fault,” I pointed out, and got a finger jabbed under my nose.

  “If you hadn’t insisted on me teaching you, I’d be back at my dad’s right now, safe and sound and—”

  “Boinking all the guides,” I said.

  “Yes! But instead, I’m—” She slapped me again, making my other cheek burn. “—free-floating out here on this icy fucking river, with you.”

  “We could boink,” I offered.

  “You— I don’t even— Ohhhhh.”

  The sound was so cute I had to smile. When she started kissing my smile, I got with the program. I hauled her into my lap, ignoring the way her muddy legs soaked my thighs.

  It was a somewhat painful embrace. She was liberal with the teeth, and when her hands slid up my neck, she yanked on my ear. But then her fingers were sifting through my hair, and she was leaning into me, the softness of her breasts flattening between us. I turned my head, tracking her mouth, deepening the kiss, and she wound up bent over my arm.

  I dragged my mouth away from hers to nip at one erect nipple through her shirt. Her breath hissed. “Open your shirt,” I ordered, shifting my right hand so it curved under her thigh, the side of my pinky pressing against the hottest spot on earth.

  She shook her head, and so I ripped it open, making buttons fly everywhere, and her gasp with outrage, and the day get a whole lot brighter. Then I was kissing her breasts, running my lips across the points of her nipples, and my tongue along the milky skin around her areola. I nipped and sucked, feeling her body go taut and languid by turns. She was melting on my lap, clutching at my head while her knees drew up, and that spot against my pinky grew even hotter.

  A throat cleared. I didn’t hear that part, only the words that came after. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Yes,” Frances said, and her breasts jiggled under my mouth as she nodded. “Yes, you are. Please go away.”

  The fog cleared, and I yanked Frances’s shirt tog
ether over her chest as I looked up into my sister’s gaze.

  Her lips quirked. “You need some help, here? I wouldn’t have stopped, but I noticed you’re drifting. And in fact, you have no engine. And no paddles. Just a… tree,” she said, glancing at it, “and a lapful of woman with really nice breasts.”

  Climbing off my lap, Frances grinned.

  I frowned. “Are you offering to help me with her breasts?”

  “No. I’m offering to tow you to shore, where you can more safely enjoy those breasts—so I guess, yes, in a roundabout way, I’m offering to help you with Frances’s breasts. Though really, they looked like they don’t need any help.”

  Frances laughed as she scrambled to throw Helly the bow line. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “No problem,” Helly said. “I hate to see innocent bystanders caught up in my brothers’ shenanigans.”

  I opened my mouth to argue that Frances was nowhere near innocent, and this was really all her fault, but then Frances shot me a look, and I decided if I ever wanted to put my mouth on those breasts again, I’d better keep it shut. I needed to convince her to stay.

  We’d been hearing a boat engine droning in the background for the last few seconds, and we all looked up as it angled toward us.

  It was Rory, in our blue boat. He throttled down, drifting the last few feet. “Do you need assistance?” he called. He tumbled to the side to grasp our gunwale and hold our boats together.

  Then he glanced up, and recognition flared in his eyes—might have been all the mud that confused him, plus the unfamiliar boat. “Dammit, Zack,” he said. “You were supposed to be somebody else.”

  “What?”

  He blew out a long-suffering sigh. “I was at the post office dropping Conway off so he could catch a ride to town, when Dotty stuck her head out and said a couple in distress had been spotted along the river. But how are we supposed to garner favor, Zack, when all we’re rescuing is each other?”

  “You’re not rescuing me. Helly’s rescuing me,” I said as we drifted downstream.

  A boat passed, the occupants’ heads turning to watch our three-boat powwow. Helly waved.

  “Did they look like they needed assistance?” Rory asked.

  “Uh…”

  “I’m gonna go see if they need assistance,” Rory decided, releasing us. He fired up his engine, and spun the boat around to give chase.