Complex Three (The Savage Horde Series Book 3)

by Chris Bostic

“Did you catch all that?” he whispered.

  She nodded. “I have our gear ready if we need to bail out.”

  “Let’s hope not, but we couldn’t control it. It’s like the wheel is stuck.”

  “We might actually be alright,” Connie turned around, having also let go of the wheel. “The weight always seems to want to naturally settle to the back, so that useless heavy motor made us spin around.”

  “How do you know that?” Joe asked. He’d expected Jade to be the one spewing the random facts.

  “Years ago, paddling small boats and canoes on the creeks around the farm. You’re always more stable with the weight in the back.”

  Before Joe could take any solace in that, the boat slammed to a halt. He rocketed into his seat, slamming his head into the weakly padded headrest.

  Leisa bumped her shoulder into his, nearly knocking him out into the aisle. Right when Joe had almost regained his balance, the bus settled back hard, throwing him forward out of his seat. He banged into the kneewall.

  The dogs slid up the center aisle as the boat plunged hard to the front, which was still facing backwards.

  “What the heck?” Connie bellowed.

  It was too dark to see anything more than a new spider web crack over the right half of the windshield.

  “Keep it down,” Jade pleaded.

  Joe leaned toward the center to see Jade picking herself back up off the floor, her pant leg soggy from the standing water. A look across the aisle brought a frown. Neither Barta or Faith had seemingly moved a muscle.

  “What the heck?” he uttered, but his words were overpowered by Mira popping up behind his shoulder.

  “Do we have to get out?” she peeped. “That was a fun ride.”

  “Quiet,” Jade chided. She leaned in front of Connie, who was rubbing his forehead from where he’d banged it on the steering wheel.

  Apparently not seeing anything to her liking, she dropped back a row to Faith and Barta’s seat, and stretched out across their laps to look out the broken window.

  Leaves pushed her back inside as the bus rotated with the current.

  Joe wondered if Mira might get her wish. The bus bucked again, jostling them hard. It seemed to pull loose but slammed back into something firm, yet strangely without a racket. No metal creaked or branches raked against the side.

  “We’re wedged tight,” Jade announced. “Decent place too. There’s some cover here.”

  As if answering her statement, a gust of wind picked up, softly rustling brush along the side of the bus.

  “The H-K didn’t seem to notice,” she added. “It’s not deviated from circling behind us.”

  “That’s good news, right?” Connie rubbed at the bright red knot raising like a half-moon on his forehead. “So we stay hidden here?”

  “I would recommend disembarking,” Smig answered. “Cover or not, it will eventually circle out far enough to find us.”

  Connie looked to Jade for confirmation. She didn’t seem as convinced. She opened her mouth as if to object, but pinched her lips shut again.

  “What’s up?” Connie asked.

  Jade locked eyes with Smig for an uncomfortably long time. Then she blinked and came back over to Connie. With an extended hand, she offered to pull him out of the chair.

  “I’ll agree. We should go check out our surroundings. Now is good, before it’s too late.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “We can swim,” Joe said as he stared out the front window across a vast, slow-moving river that looked like a pool of ink. “What about, uhm…you know?” He looked at Smig.

  “I cannot swim, but there will be another way if we all work together.”

  Joe scratched his head and did his best to ignore the dilemma. He helped Leisa to her feet. They cautiously worked their way toward the back of the bus to the ramp where they had loaded Smig originally.

  The door was jammed tight. He shoved against it with all his body weight, but that only served to rock the whole bus.

  “Hold on, babe,” Jade said. “It’s jammed in the mud. We’re going to have to get out another way.”

  Joe looked to the roof to see if there was some type of escape hatch, but the ceiling was a solid dome of shiny metal.

  “How?”

  “The windshield folds out.” Jade hopped past Connie to pry at the corner.

  Joe didn’t see how getting out that way would make any difference. They would be suspended on the hood facing the wrong direction, staring back into the river.

  That’s exactly where he found himself moments later.

  He surveyed the swirling river before training his eyes on the surrounding area. Dense woods lined a tall bank on both sides, but the river was so wide that much of the main channel was exposed to the gradually lightening sky.

  He took a deep breath and checked behind him for any sign of the Hunter-Killer. Nothing came to his human eyes, but he felt like he could barely see twenty yards into the murkiness that lingered well before the dawn.

  Jade looked back at Smig, who remained as expressionless as ever.

  “I suppose we can try to get up on the bank and spin the bus around,” Jade finally said, answering Joe’s questioning look. She reached back inside to retrieve a backpack, and pulled out a rope that she tossed to him.

  “I can’t do this myself,” he said.

  “You won’t,” Jade answered. “We’re all coming to help once Sarge has this tied off inside.”

  Joe helped Leisa out onto the front of the bus with him, but that was all they had for room on the slick, narrow hood. After standing there for a moment settling his nerves, he climbed up onto the roof and pulled Leisa with him.

  Jade and Connie were quick to follow, but no one else came after them. That didn’t surprise Joe seeing how two of the other girls were less than agile.

  Right when he’d turned to head toward the back of the bus, he felt it rock from within. Mira popped her head out of the broken side window a moment later.

  “Help me up,” she exclaimed. “I want to come.”

  “Of course you do,” Jade said. “Sarge, would you help her?”

  Connie grumbled, but did as he was told.

  “Be careful with her,” Jade warned as he lifted her to the rooftop. Joe almost chuckled out loud seeing how compliant he had become.

  Mira didn’t waste any time acting recklessly. As soon as she was with them, both her mind and her feet were moving a mile a minute.

  “Let’s go,” she kept saying. “This is fun. I just love it.”

  Jade flinched every time Mira twirled around. “Please watch what you’re doing.”

  Joe eased his way to the back end of the bus, trying the whole time to forget about the IFP’s patrol ship. But he couldn’t help but be on edge with Jade acting all nervous and Mira bouncing around like a tireless toddler.

  “Should have left her inside,” Connie remarked under his breath, and pretended like he was going to push her into the river.

  “Don’t do that,” Jade said sharply.

  “If she can’t breathe, she can’t drown,” Connie replied with a smirk.

  “No. It would be much worse.” Jade grabbed his arm while watching Mira closely out of the corners of her eyes. “She’s an earlier prototype, and definitely not waterproof.”

  “Oh.” Connie shook out of her grasp. “Same as Smig?”

  Jade nodded.

  “And the other two?” Joe asked while he eyed up the best way to jump off the bus to dry land.

  “They will be fine.” Jade broke into an increasingly rare grin. “You thought I loved shower time. You’ve never seen anyone take so many showers. I swear they wash their hair twice a day. Faith is a major clean freak.”

  “Then she’s really not going to like this,” Joe said, pointing to where the whole back of the bus had lodged itself into a nearly vertical wall of mud.

  Though thick vegetation lined the top of the bank, the entire slope all the way down to the water’s edge was mottled clay
.

  Jade tried to say something, but Connie shushed her with a raised hand. He seemed too busy sizing up the bank to involve her in his plans.

  “That’s gonna be slick as snot.” Connie eyed the riverbank farther downstream while Jade went back to trying to corral Mira. “I don’t even know if we can rappel up that slope without sliding into the drink.”

  “Drink?” Mira stopping twirling to ask. “Are you thirsty? I can duck back inside and bring you some water.”

  She dropped to her hands and knees before Jade could stop her, and inched over to the side so she could slide back into the broken window.

  “Knock it off!” Connie bellowed. “Just sit right there, squirrel. Now!”

  He pointed to the roof so aggressively that Joe thought he could’ve punched through the metal. Mira curled up in a ball and looked up at Jade like a frightened puppy.

  When Jade gave Connie a sharp look, he just shrugged and turned back to Joe to mutter, “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “You haven’t lost your touch,” he replied. “Too bad the hover could’ve heard that from a mile away.”

  “Then it’s a good thing it’s at least two.” Connie looked to Jade. “Right?”

  She erased her scowl to stretch out a hand to hush a whimpering Mira. Her brow creased in concentration. “Yes. At least two miles, but we’re running out of time. If you’d let me-”

  “Just follow me.” Connie looked up into the woods. “I’m gonna have to go for it.” He tugged on the rope, which was secured to the steering wheel of the bus. “Here goes.”

  Connie slipped off the back of the bus from above the door, and hit the ground with a squish. Having fallen only four feet to the mud, his chest rested against the top of the roof.

  “No way we were getting that door open from the inside,” he remarked. “It’s half buried.”

  “Can you push the bus loose?” Joe asked.

  “Only if you want to keep floating downstream without me.”

  “Maybe,” Jade said, “if you keep treating my sister that way. Anyway, we should think about-”

  “Hush!” Connie said, surprising Joe. Clearly he was annoyed, probably stressed about the Hunter-Killer, as well.

  Who wouldn’t be, he reasoned. Death from above frightened Joe almost as much as staring down a thousand piranha-toothed savages.

  Jade slouched by Mira, and meekly said, “You should apologize for yelling.”

  “There’s time for that later,” Connie replied, and spun around to eye up the slope.

  Joe kneeled at the side to watch. The top of the bank was at least ten feet higher than his sergeant. He didn’t see how his sergeant could get any traction on soil that looked as slick as ice.

  As expected, the big man’s boots sunk deeply into the clay, and made a horrendous sucking sound as he muscled them out one at a time, only to sink in again.

  “Grab my hand,” Joe offered, but that only managed to get Connie a couple feet higher than rock bottom.

  “You need to throw the rope around a tree or something to anchor it,” Leisa suggested from over Joe’s shoulder.

  “Or you could come stand on my shoulders,” Connie offered.

  Leisa considered the idea as she wound up the slack in her hand.

  “Let’s try this first,” she suggested and pulled back to toss it.

  “Hold on. Give it to Joe,” Connie said. “I’ve seen you throw.”

  “What?”

  Joe knew exactly what he was talking about. When they’d escaped across the ditch at the prison camp, Leisa was supposed to have passed her weapon on ahead to Connie, but her attempt had ended up woefully short.

  “Remember the coilgun toss?” Joe said with a grin. She slugged him on the shoulder but handed over the rope to him. He looked it over skeptically. “How’s tossing a rope going to help? What’s to grab it?”

  “You need to make a lasso,” Connie suggested.

  Joe frowned. “You’re the cowboy.”

  “Then hand it to me.” With a few nifty flips of the wrist, Connie turned the end of the rope into a loop that would grasp and tighten once it found something to hook over.

  Joe eyed the top of the bank for a boulder or other object to hit, and located a likely candidate the same time as his sergeant.

  “Here,” Connie said, handing it back. “Lasso that stump.”

  Joe gave it his best toss, but the rope fell pitifully short and slid down the bank like a wounded snake. Connie burst out laughing. “That’s was pathetic, princess.”

  “Never said I was a cowboy,” Joe said defensively. “You do it.”

  “Let me try.” Leisa elbowed her way in at his side.

  Rather than fail again, Joe stepped aside. “Go for it.”

  “Wanting a little redemption?” Connie asked. “Can’t be any worse.”

  While Joe harrumphed, Leisa proceeded to make her attempt. Of course, she looped the stump on her first try. While she celebrated with a fist pump, Connie and Joe looked at each other and shrugged.

  “She got you there,” Connie said. “Now I’m outta here.”

  Connie slipped and fell to his knees a half dozen times, but was able to muscle his way to the top. He rolled into the brush along the riverbank and exhaled so loudly that the trees seemed to shake in the breeze.

  “That was rough,” he panted. “Who’s next?”

  No one volunteered immediately. Joe finally relented and slipped over the side of the bus to land with a squish in the muck.

  “I’d say it’s not as hard as it looked, but that would be a total lie.” Connie grabbed the rope and set his feet. “I could just pull you up here.”

  “I’ll climb,” Joe said, but regretted by the third time he’d sunk a knee into the mud. Relatively nimble on his feet, and nowhere near as thick as Connie, he managed to scale the rest of the distance and lock a hand into his sergeant’s meaty paw.

  “Nice climbing.”

  “Thanks,” Joe told him, and sat back in the brush for a moment to catch his breath.

  While Connie helped Leisa and Jade climb, Joe wondered how they could possibly get the boat pulled loose and turned around to where they could get Smig and the others offloaded.

  First, they had to worry about Mira who had become rather impatient to follow them to the top.

  “Wait there,” Jade told her, but the little girl wasn’t having any of that. “We’ll get this moved-”

  Joe held his breath as she jumped off the bus and landed with a thwack in the mud. She slipped only a fraction before wrapping her skinny arms around the rope and clambering up the slope as if she had claws for feet.

  “That was awesome,” she announced as she leaped to the top of the bank and paced like a jungle cat.

  “You didn’t hardly need the rope,” Connie remarked, loosening the lasso from the stump. He coiled the slack around his arm in a giant loop and stared down at the bus. “This should be fun. It looks impossible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” Jade said coolly. “We simply need to pull the bus loose and get it to spin around.”

  “Yeah, simple,” Connie deadpanned. “And what good would that do at this bank? This whole idea was crazy.”

  “If you’d have listened.” Jade turned her back on him.

  Leisa nudged Joe to whisper, “What’s up with those two? It’s frostier than the prison camp around here.”

  “Lovers quarrel,” he explained. “She’s still bent out of shape about Sarge yelling at her sister.”

  “You think she’d know he can be a jerk by now.”

  Jade cleared her throat. “You do realize I can hear you?”

  Joe and Leisa nodded, and he made a production of zipping his lips.

  Sarge butted in, saying, “No time for that. We need to get moving.”

  “Then you should listen to me for a change,” Jade retorted. “I can show you the best way to get them loose and turned around.” She spun around to find Connie already walking back upstream tugging on the rope.
“What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” he replied. “It’s pretty obvious that I need to pull the bus loose, and leverage from the back is the only way to do it.”

  Connie continued muttering under his breath. Joe and Leisa hurried after him to help pull, and ended up catching Connie saying, “I may not be as smart as you, but…”

  “Great, now he’s moody too,” Leisa whispered. “Could this get any worse?”

  So, of course, it would.

  Jade hollered, “Take cover!”

  Joe had never heard her raise her voice before and found himself stuck like he was still mired in mud.

  “Now!” she screamed, sounding more like Sarge than her mild-mannered self.

  It was Leisa’s tug on his arm that got him moving. He chased behind her. Deeper from the woods, Jade’s voiced carried to them.

  “The H-K is closing in.”

  Joe slunk down next to Leisa and looked at her with wild eyes. “Didn’t we need to get in the water?”

  “I dunno.”

  Before he could raise to a crouch long enough to locate Jade, she’d already heard him and answered, “Just keep still. It’s not quite here yet. About a half-mile out.”

  Wrapping Leisa in his arms, Joe froze like a statue. He kept his eyes facing downward as if the drone could pick out little slivers of white eyeballs through the heavy canopy.

  He fought against jerking upright when he remembered the bus stuck down in the river. There was some cover, but not enough.

  Grit sandwich, we’re done for, he thought.

  “Quarter mile,” Jade announced.

  Joe’s pulse ramped up to a fever pitch. Try as he might to calm his breathing, he couldn’t fight off the shudders. So he held his breath until his lungs burned.

  The brush rattled in front of his face. He looked up to find Jade standing inches away.

  “All clear,” she announced. “It’s circling back, so we’ve got time.”

  Leisa exhaled sharply. “That was too close.”

  “You can say that again,” Joe said.

  Jade squinted her eyes at him, and said, “That was too close.”

  Leisa and Joe laughed quickly at Jade’s expense. She stared at them curiously, but fortunately didn’t take any offense.