Just when I felt my grip on reality slipping right into pre-vomit mode, Sam reached down with wet paper towels and cleaned most of my arms with quick strokes. Then he grasped my wrists and brought me up gently for both David’s sake and mine. All the blood on the floor made it dangerous for anyone to move too quickly. An underling emergency responder was hurriedly mopping it up for her superiors to work in safety. I felt bad for her. I was tracking bloody footprints wherever I stepped, but she seemed okay with it, seizing my feet and spraying the bottoms of my shoes with some sort of disinfectant spray and then giving them a vigorous, though cursory, rub-down.
I had blood stains on my legs where I had propped David’s gushing self up between them, and somehow my elbows had crusted with some of it as well. I knew there was a smear on my face where I had swiped some hair out of my eyes, so it was probably streaking my ponytail as well. My shirt and jeans were ruined. Even if someone managed to clean them, I would refuse to ever put them on again. I wanted to shed my skin and go crawl off somewhere quiet and calm to die to this memory and rise again, a brand new individual with the cleared conscience of a newborn.
“Is he…?” It sounded more like a pant than actual words. I was wobbly with adrenalin.
“He’ll live. Right now, let’s worry about you.” Sam spoke quickly, hurrying me down from the stilted shack. Grasping my arm, he partially dragged me back to the vehicle. “I am so sorry, but we don’t have time to get you clean at the moment, I need to get you safe. We have a potential situation- David’s sniper is still out there.” He helped me into the car and situated some towels around me until I was a mummy.
He jumped in and started the engine.
“Wait,” I croaked.
He glanced back at me.
“Shouldn’t we make sure that David makes it to the hospital? What if the sniper attacks him again?”
Sam pursed his lips. I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“Sam.” I tried again. “What in Deka…”
“Okay, okay. Here it is. I don’t think David had any idea that he was followed. It seems that there is a hit out for him to, by his own cartel. They’ve turned on him. Apparently they think he’s more of a liability than ever. But you- you they want alive now. I don’t know why- and that’s even worse than them wanting to kill you.”
“This couldn’t have anything to do with a certain dishonorable Federation judge, could it?” I whispered stoically.
He gritted his teeth. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Though I was exhausted, I continued to try to make sense of the thing, grasping at straws of information. “What about your friends?”
“None of them came. I couldn’t get a hold of anybody. We’re on our own.”
What? “But the Comms conversation you had-”
“Faked. I was hoping you would change your mind about luring David out.”
I laughed. There was no other responsible way to react.
Watching the white ambulance pull out in front of us, Sam expertly turned our decrepit vehicle around and pulled out of the driveway, spewing gravel.
“Is there a chance I could get a shower and a change of clothes along the way to wherever it is we’re going?”
“Soon. We’ll find a safe place soon.” He rubbed his face tiredly and glanced back at me through the rear-view mirror.
“Ok.” Blood-stained clothes sticking to my thighs and bloody fingers sticking together, I leaned back with the seat belt strap snugly under my cheek, and dozed off, too numb and exhausted to be miserable.
CHAPTER TEN
It felt like we were home free, in a way. Sam used the Comms to radio in back-up, although not the back-up I had originally expected. David was mercifully under guard; I couldn’t understand how that seemed to iron itself out, but it seemed that the local patrols had gotten involved and left both the peacekeeper and the soldier branches of the Deka Federation Military out of it. From what Sam had told me, it seemed that the peacekeeper branch held the rotten apple. Peacekeepers and judges worked closely together, so it made sense.
We pulled over at a truck stop and commandeered a shower room with a lock on it. Sam waited outside. I stripped off the blood-encrusted shirt and jeans and threw them into the plastic evidence bag Sam had given me. It wouldn’t be wise to leave these behind. They were now federal evidence. Inasmuch as I was still a witness. I don’t know- was I? If you fall out of favor with a rogue sector of your government, what does that make you?
Extremely unpopular.
I spit out a few bleeps when I saw that my gray intimates had David’s blood on them too. I washed them in the shower with me, watching the mesmerizing stream of dirty pink flow into the drain, swirling around in a vortex of sorts before it got sucked into the sewer system of pipes below. I must have stood under the nozzle for a good fifteen minutes, staring at the water tornados. I zoned out; one moment I was running my hands through my hair in the water stream and trying to feel normal again, and the next moment I looked up from staring at the off-white tile to find the minutes had flown like magic.
I cannot fully express how much of a relief it was to see Teran minutes ticking by on the clock and not the horrible mess of numbers that those Hectan devices displayed.
I found a cheap hairdryer located under the sink and dried the intimates with that. It didn’t take as long as I had expected. I tried to go quickly, knowing that I had taken way too much time already. Slipping the new shirt and shorts on, I wriggled back into my familiar sandals. I gave my hair one last squeeze with the towel, and grabbing the bag of soiled clothing, yanked the heavy metallic door open and didn’t look back.
I didn’t want to remember what the place looked like. Sam met me at the door and escorted me back to the car.
We walked in silence. He seemed preoccupied with something and I was in no mood to be chatty. My own basic needs being met, I didn’t blame him for lack of conversation. I just wanted some peace. Angels; it was indescribably good to be clean again.
He took the bag from me and taped it shut with a label I didn’t take the time to read. He threw it in the luggage compartment and leaned against the hatch for a moment. We were both tired, and past the point of conversing in more than monosyllabic sentences.
“Hungry?” he offered. Leaning down to his boot, he retrieved his pocket knife and hacked off a chunk of a Federation-issued ration bar.
I realized I hadn’t eaten in…how long? Days it felt. Probably just 6 hours. I had an over-achieving metabolism. “Thanks.” I took a big piece of the dried stuff he waved at me and then held it in my fist, waiting for hunger to strike. Somehow, just holding nourishment made me feel better. I was refreshed enough to say something stupid when I should have just kept my mouth shut. “So this is what your job is really like, every day.”
He stood, hands on his hips, his open jacket displaying the typically hidden shoulder holster. “Sometimes.” He was quiet. He contemplated the dirt for a minute. “You handled that back there like a champ. Thank you.”
Saying ‘You’re welcome’ over the gory scene back there at the shack was way too weird for me, so I just nodded. “So did you.”
He snorted. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not just saying that. If you weren’t there, I wouldn’t have been able to ‘handle it like a champ.’”
He smiled sadly at that, but relaxed a bit, opening the passenger door for me.
He muttered to himself. “If I wasn’t there, you wouldn’t have had to handle it like a champ.”
“Oh come on.” I rolled my eyes. “What were you supposed to do? Swoop in and save the day? I’m glad you didn’t. In fact, I made sure of it. I wanted to call the shots on this one and you let me, so you really shouldn’t be surprised that you didn’t have a chance to get involved.”
“What?” His voice was angry, his posture rigid. All of a sudden he was very near to me, getting in my face.
“I said,” I spoke clearly, emphatically, as if explaining to
a child, “I made sure of the fact. So if you want to blame someone, blame me! But don’t go beating yourself up. I don’t take it kindly when my friends get hurt.” I was overwhelmed and tired and possibly on the verge of fainting again. If he wanted to get angry and have a ridiculous, stupid argument, this was exactly the right time for it.
His eyes burned holes into me. “That,” he said, “is krivving stupid.”
“Well, how do you think I get into messes like these in the first place?!” I expounded, stamping my foot. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but maybe it’s time you reassessed your loyalty to the Federation’s Peacekeepers. How much of a future do you have there anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He was caught off guard.
“Oh, come on! You don’t belong in Federation service. You’ve known that for ages- once a proclaimer, always a proclaimer. You’ve been steadily burning out for years now, and the girl- the poet or whatever- she was just the icing on the cake. You don’t belong in this rat race; you’re better than that.” My head spun out of control. What were we even talking about again?
“I still don’t see the point of trying to get yourself killed.” He set his jaw.
I sputtered. “I wasn’t trying-”
“Oh, now you come on.” His voice was dark and harsh. Did I mention he was angry? More like fuming. “You’re just scared because you’ve never “belonged” anywhere and life didn’t happen the way you wanted it to, and you can’t just blend into the background anymore. You want to hide; want to give up when you should keep going. You push away your potential- you don’t even have beliefs! At least I subscribe to something greater than myself!” His voice lowered even more. “You are selfish, Natalie. You could do so much, but you don’t want to risk it.”
I opened my mouth to snap back at him and closed it again. Everything he said hit entirely too close to home.
He touched my face. I flinched from the words previously spoken.
He was upset, but it was more than that. There was an emotional realism to it- I had never seen him so animated before. Sam wasn’t very demonstrative. But right now, I got the distinct impression that I was seeing into his soul. And it was intense.
He gripped my shoulder, his eyes vehement. “It pains me to see you throw your life around like it doesn’t mean anything-” The rest of his words were drowned by the sound of a hovering, open-air transport.
I looked up and dropped my jaw. My frustration and hurt and anger gave way to fear. We were ambushed.
~
Ambushed. By military escort, no less.
It was only one transport, but it was heavily armed. There was nothing to do but surrender. It was most likely stolen from the soldier branch of the Federation, so there was some hope of it being spotted and reported by patrollers, but the odds weren’t overwhelmingly positive.
I was too emotionally blinded by the fight and physically blinded by the headlights on the military transport to make much fuss about getting caught. Sam took it quite calmly, which of course, infuriated me.
But by the time we had been tied up and dragged onto the aircraft, my hot anger had simmered into regret, and then cooled into fear. We were captured. By whom, though? The criminals? Or the judge’s minions? Or were they one and the same? It was getting too confusing for me...
I bit my lip. Wasn’t this exactly what Sam had said? That I wouldn’t get involved with something even if I had the ability? I had a brain- now was the time to use it!
Alright… so, what was the most logical reason for the capture? Whether dead or alive, someone wanted us. Judging by the way the aircraft was not heading inland; we were probably going to become fish bait. All they had to do was drop us in a patch of jagged rock out in the creature depths, or even throw us into one of the electric seaweed nets that drifted together on the current of the ocean, and we were history.
There are so many ways you can die, I thought soberly.
I reigned in my imagination and forced my brain to think on the situation at hand. What was it that Sam told me about the Formists? ‘Tell the only truth you know and believe it.’ They always stripped things down to the very simplest. Proclaimer logic at its best. I liked it, but on the other hand I feared it. Things were seldom simple in my head. And I found myself unsettled that the “secret to life” (if there was any such thing), could be explained in such a brief way. They seemed to believe it though, with all their hearts, and that’s something I found myself both admiring and clinging onto, like a life-preserver. How could I use their rationality to aid in our escape? Their minimalism was something to respect, but it was also something to be wary of. I had seen before how the passionate eradication of the unnecessary could become chillingly cruel and dogmatic.
I coughed, trying to relieve my popping ears. I couldn’t hear myself over the roar of the transport.
Sam glanced at me, but flicked his eyes away, forehead taut and gnarled. Pensively unresponsive. I wondered if he knew of our destination and was trying to keep me calm by keeping it a secret.
Sam had said something a while back to Tom about the judge being possibly corrupt. And we had no back-up to speak of, at least not in peacekeeper form. And we were most definitely headed to the shore for a quick swim in the cold Winter waters of Myceania; whilst tied up. David was obviously out of the picture. They had to know he was in the hospital under patrol guard. Was it really that simple? Did they really just want to bump us off and go along their merry way? ‘The truth is always simple.’ Sam’s voice entered my thoughts.
I snickered. I was starting to collect a lot of truth-speakers in my life, ever since becoming Nicki-Ray. Sam. Tom. Simone. Even Ange, in her weird way of destroying every happy thought, did so with scrupulous honesty.
I must have been louder than I thought, because the look of venom from my captor struck a warning into the very marrow of my bones. One more stupid move or noise on my part and they wouldn’t wait for the ocean to do their dirty work for them. Sam might even be callously murdered alongside me and thrown onto the barren dirt and sand patches we skimmed over.
Sam looked grim and calculating, bound up more securely than I. It didn’t much matter; I was hardly strong enough to take even one of them down on my own. But could I use my lack of restraints to somehow release Sam? The aircraft swerved and I used the shift to my advantage, bumping into the man in front of Sam who shoved me straight into Sam’s stomach, while cursing me and my mother.
Sam grunted slightly; our eyes met for a split second; I could see the determination flickering within. He would gladly take any kind of aid I could render. His eyes darted around, looking down towards the floor of the aircraft. Then it hit me. The pocketknife! In his boot- if I could get it to him he could figure out something, couldn’t he? Well, that was the easy part. The hard part was to actually get it from his boot to his hand without prompting suspicion.
Fortunately, the transport was choppy, so the next bounce of air turbulence sent me to the floor anyway. While sprawled on all fours, I groped around Sam’s ankle for the weapon. The floor was very rough, perfect to keep traction in a moving military aircraft, but absolutely terrible for sensitive hands. Scrabbling stung painfully at the unprotected flesh of my palms and elbows and knees. The floor grated underneath my swaying body and I gritted my teeth against the pain of skin grating away, yanking the small, practically indiscernible Velcro pouch from where it was securely fastened to Sam’s limb. For his part, he was able to lean forward somewhat to disguise my search. To the criminals, we probably looked like pitiful abductees, thrown around like rag dolls in a sack by the air turbulence. I was surprised by how long I had been allowed to writhe around on the floor without being forced back up and under their constant scrutiny. Maybe this would be easier than anticipa-
I thought too soon.
I felt a swift, sharp kick to my thigh. That’s gonna bruise…
“What in the blue hells are you doing? Get up!”
How was I going to conceal th
e black pouch in my hand?
I took a deep breath. He cursed and bent to grasp me by the shoulder.
Then Sam made his move. He was so quick, I was shocked. He brought his knee up to make contact with the man’s face, crushing his nose with a sickening *snirk* and then kicked him squarely in the gut while his hands clutched his streaming nose. He gave a shriek and went flying out the open compartment, landing somewhere on the flat, hard ground. Judging by the angle he fell from, he probably landed on his back, or if luck was with us, his head. Either way, he was not getting up on his own. The other criminal attacked with his fists, slashing out with a knife. Sam ducked just in time. In a red-tinted haze of adrenalin, I managed to slash my tied hands and backed up behind him, waiting for my opportunity. It came. The aircraft dipped again, but I was ready. I seized the snap-tie that secured Sam’s wrists and sliced it clean through. His hand reached out swiftly and grasped my wrist and traveled over my hand, the one clutching the knife, almost like he knew which hand it would be in.
Fortune's Detour: Prequel of the Deka Series by Abigail Schwaig Page 19
