by Matt Rogers
So who was he?
And what the hell was happening here?
Slater injected as much of a Western drawl into his accent as he could muster and said, ‘Your prisoners. Give them to me.’
Shuffling closer together, they looked at him, befuddled.
Then a couple of them figured it out.
Slater could sense them connect his accent to the hostages they were keeping. The pair nodded to each other and pointed in the direction of one of the huts.
Slater said, ‘Walk.’
He shook the carbine’s barrel in that direction.
Four of them turned around and headed for the hut.
One of them took off in the other direction, sprinting for a rifle lying discarded on the ground.
Slater shot him in the back of the neck, killing him instantly.
The other four froze like someone had pressed “pause” on a universal remote.
The gunshot echoed through the valley.
Slater said, ‘Walk.’
This time louder.
They continued onward, none of them daring to even turn around and look at their recently deceased colleague. He was dead to them — their survival instincts had kicked in, and were operating at full speed. Pushing them toward whatever the hell Slater wanted them to do. They made it to the small hut and formed a semi-circle around the closed door, shoulder-to-shoulder.
One of them turned around, his face pale, and gestured with a shaking hand for Slater to go in.
Slater silently shook his head, and gestured with the barrel.
You do it.
The man nodded, stepped forward and opened the door immediately.
For a moment, Slater thought he’d got too suspicious. He’d figured there would be another ETIM soldier camped out in the hut, and he’d figured all of them knew about it, but this guy hadn’t a clue.
He pushed the door inward, still determined to follow Slater’s every command—
—and he paid for it with his life.
24
His head snapped back as the gunshot blared in unison, and Slater spotted the muzzle flash from within the hut before the ETIM soldier had even hit the ground.
Then there was a moment’s hesitation as the occupant dwelling within realised what he’d done.
Friendly fire was never a pleasant feeling.
The guy had been ready to shoot at the first person to open the door.
Slater leapfrogged over the dead ETIM soldier and shot the occupant in the face.
A female voice screamed.
A young male voice shouted, ‘Fuck!’
Slater came to rest in the doorway and assessed the scene.
He’d shot a big, broad-shouldered man with his shirt off. The man — now a corpse — had his back pressed to the far wall. To Slater’s left was a young man chained up, and to his right was a young female tied to the wall. They were both pale and shaking, in states of shock. The firefight had been brief, but it had been vicious. It had taken no more than three seconds from beginning to end, but it had claimed two lives violently, up close, with no privacy or consideration of emotions.
So the two kids sitting in this tiny hut would remember it for as long as they lived.
With his ears still ringing, Slater kept his voice low and said, ‘You’re both scared. Focus on your breathing. In and out. Like this.’
He breathed in, long and slow, and breathed out, long and slow.
They followed him like sheep.
He said, ‘Good. Everything’s going to be fine. I’ve been sent to get you out of here and that’s what I’m going to do. Keep focusing on your breathing, and don’t look at that guy in between you, and try not to think about how else this might have gone. Because it didn’t go that way, so there’s no use pondering it. It all worked out. Think about that. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ the girl said.
‘Great. Give me a moment. I’ll be right back.’
He stepped back out of the hut, and closed the door behind him.
The three ETIM soldiers were right where he’d left them. None of them had made a dash for a gun. Things were unfolding too fast for them to comprehend.
They couldn’t believe they were witnessing such violence up close.
No.
Not that.
Slater studied them, and he figured out what had happened. They were too shocked. Which could only mean one thing.
The guy in the hut had been important.
Their leader, perhaps.
Slater opened the door again and took a long look at the corpse. He was unlike the other soldiers. He was tall and broad-shouldered where all the other ETIM men were slim and frail. He was well-fed, and then Slater saw his bare torso in a different light.
His gaze drifted over to the woman, and he noticed her blouse was torn.
Slater said, ‘Did he…?’
‘He was trying. Then it sounded like a war broke out, so he got scared and took out his pistol. I thought he was going to kill me. But he just aimed it at the door. He was shaking.’
Slater said, ‘Are you okay?’
‘For now.’
‘Okay.’
He closed the door again.
He said, ‘Now I’m angry.’
The three remaining men stared at him blankly.
Slater said, ‘I was going to let the three of you walk away, because I figured you’d go willingly. But if that’s what your leader was doing then you’re all a bunch of scum.’
They kept staring.
None of them spoke English.
Slater didn’t care.
He was speaking out loud.
He pointed to the biggest of the trio. He was the same height as Slater, but much scrawnier. The other pair were shorter and skinnier still.
Slater said, ‘You. Come here.’
He beckoned.
The taller man stepped forward.
Slater switched his grip on the carbine and turned it around in his palms. He swung it like a baseball bat from the ground to the sky, in a giant vertical arc. Like an oversized uppercut. The stock hit the guy underneath the chin and snapped his head back and sent him sprawling to the earth.
Then Slater dropped the gun and fell on the other two.
He figured he could take two on one with his bare hands effortlessly enough. In reality, he could have handled all three, but he wanted one out of the equation early just to reduce the odds of failure to practically zero.
He wrapped a hand around the back of the first man’s neck and delivered a colossal elbow to his forehead. The guy crumpled, semi-conscious, but not out completely, so Slater held him up with the same hand and delivered a second consecutive elbow.
That did the trick.
As he went down Slater pivoted and kicked the last guy in the stomach, doubling him over. Like he’d been struck in the ribcage by a steel pipe. The guy practically fell forward and Slater made sure his face met a knee on the way down.
Out like a light.
He took off running for the warehouse and came back thirty seconds later with a roll of duct tape he’d fished from an old cabinet in the repairs bay. He surveyed the damage he’d dished out to the three men at his feet, and winced accordingly. It was never as pretty as the movies made it out to believe. The force you had to generate to knock a fully grown man unconscious was something to behold, and it led to broken bones and swollen skin and bloody mouths.
None of the trio were even remotely recovered by the time he made it back with the duct tape.
Slater wrapped the tape around their wrists and ankles, preventing them from getting to their feet. Maybe when they were in a better state of mind they could wriggle around in the mud until they were able to lever to a seated position, and make their way upright from there, but until then they’d swim in their own heads until their wires reconnected and their consciousness returned in full.
Slater checked his handiwork, and came away satisfied that he’d successfully neutralised every single pers
on in the valley.
Then he made for the hut.
Now he was able to give his full attention to the hostages.
25
He stepped back inside, and said to the male, ‘Are you Ethan or Noah?’
‘Ethan,’ the kid mumbled.
‘You’re Samantha?’
The girl said, ‘Yes.’
‘How old are you both?’
‘Twenty,’ Samantha said.
‘Twenty-two,’ Ethan said.
Slater said, ‘Christ.’
Ethan seemed incapable of stringing a sentence together, and Slater didn’t blame him. Samantha was surprisingly aware and alert, so he turned his attention to her.
‘Do you have any idea where the keys to your shackles are?’
‘On him,’ she said, and pointed to the broad-shouldered corpse. ‘He was dangling them in front of my face. Teasing me.’
‘Where?’
‘Breast pocket.’
Slater bent down and retrieved the keys from the big man’s pants. He unlocked each of their manacles, one by one, and helped them to their feet.
Then he ushered them out of the hut.
‘You might not want to see this,’ he said. ‘Look at the ground if you need to.’
‘I’m fine,’ Samantha said.
Ethan didn’t say a word.
The camp was a wasteland. There were bodies strewn everywhere — from their position, they could all see through the open warehouse doors to the corpses riddling the concrete floor within. Everywhere they turned was a dead ETIM soldier, and Slater ushered them straight out of the centre of the clearing. He pointed them in the direction of the trail leading up into the mountains and said, ‘Wait there for me.’
‘Where are you going?’ Samantha said.
‘We need a ride out of here.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m with the U.S. military.’
‘In what capacity?’
Slater stared at her. He’d never had this many questions from a hostage. ‘Does it matter?’
‘I’m wary. I already fucked everything up by coming out here. I don’t want to keep making the same mistakes and look like a gullible moron by the time this is over. You could be anyone.’
‘If I was going to kill you,’ Slater said, ‘I would have done it by now.’
She looked down at her raw wrists, and shrugged. ‘You could just be taking us to another camp. There could be a hundred of these camps out here.’
‘You’re just going to have to trust me. But I admire that.’
‘Admire what?’
‘I haven’t run into many people who think that clearly in the aftermath of something like this.’
‘You do this sort of thing often?’
‘Often enough.’
‘You seem calm.’
‘This is my job. You seem calmer, considering the circumstances.’
‘He doesn’t,’ Samantha said, nodding in Ethan’s direction.
Ethan said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘No you’re not,’ Slater said. ‘But that’s okay. You don’t have to be.’
Ethan sat down in the mud.
Just like that.
Planted himself down on the floor and put his head in his hands.
Slater scouted the camp, but there was no sign of trouble. The place was dead. The wind howled in, coming off the mountains, whistling between the buildings.
You could hear a pin drop.
Slater sat down alongside him.
He gripped the back of the kid’s neck, and slapped him on the back, and said, ‘I’m so fucking sorry this happened to the pair of you.’
Ethan stifled a sob and said, ‘I’m sorry I’m acting like this.’
‘You’d be a psychopath if you weren’t.’
And that set Samantha off. She sat down at the mouth of the trail and put her own head in her hands, and both of them let out all the tension and emotion that had been building for the past five days.
Slater sat there with his carbine in his hands, and watched them diligently.
He was no psychologist, but he knew how to handle a traumatic experience.
Mostly it involved staying quiet.
Eventually he clambered to his feet and helped them up, one by one. They stood there, each of them shuddering.
‘Sorry again,’ Ethan said. ‘I’m holding us up. It’s my fault.’
Slater didn’t say a word. He just looked at the kid and shook his own head.
Ethan nodded.
Probably thinking, I’m overreacting. I know.
But Slater had saved him for a torturous death, and that gave him the need to apologise for everything.
Samantha said, ‘Should we tell him?’
Ethan bowed his head and said, ‘I don’t know if I want to know what happened.’
‘Is Noah dead?’ Slater said.
Samantha shook her head. She stifled another sob, and said, ‘Close to it, though.’
‘He could be dead,’ Ethan said. ‘We haven’t seen him in days.’
‘And when you saw him,’ Slater said, ‘what was he like?’
Ethan locked his fingers tight around the back of his skull, opening his chest. He spun in a slow half-circle in the chilly afternoon light and exhaled a cloud. He said, ‘Oh, fuck. It’s going to come out either way.’
‘What is?’
‘Noah lost his mind, man. We did acid in the Jiaohe ruins. That’s when these guys got us. They came in and scooped us up when we were tripping hard. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I really don’t want to talk about it much, if that’s okay. But it fucked Noah up for good.’
Slater thought about what sort of terror a kidnapping might invoke at the peak of an acid trip, and closed his eyes in disbelief.
He said, ‘Holy shit,’ under his breath.
26
Ethan said, ‘I know.’
Slater scrutinised them, one by one. He looked deep into their eyes. He found awareness there. He found all the regular emotions he didn’t expect to find.
He said, ‘How are you guys functioning right now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘My best guess is that we weren’t experienced with LSD. We didn’t know what it would do. Samantha and I thought it was all part of the trip. We didn’t know it was real until it wore off. Noah would have known it was real the whole time.’
‘He got hit, too,’ Samantha muttered.
Ethan turned to her and said, ‘What?’
‘He got hit.’
‘We all got hit.’
‘We got roughed up,’ Samantha said. ‘Noah got knocked clean out. I saw it happen, but I still didn’t know if it was real. Who knows how acid mixes with a concussion?’
Slater said, ‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’
Softly.
Under his breath.
Samantha said, ‘You’ve got experience in that realm?’
‘I’ve consumed a drug or two in my life,’ he said, minimising the reality of the situation.
What he wanted to say was, In my downtime I frequently consume everything I can get my hands on. Makes what I do easier to cope with. Keeps the demons at bay.
But instead he said, ‘I’ve also got experiences with concussions. They can fuck you up all on their own. What was Noah like when you saw him?’
‘Frothing at the mouth. It looked like he was having a seizure.’
‘Shit.’
‘He might still be alive,’ Samantha whispered.
‘Do we want to see him?’ Ethan said.
Slater saw Samantha move to slap him in the face, and he caught her wrist right before her palm slammed home on his cheek.
Slater said, ‘No.’
Samantha said, ‘It doesn’t matter what state he’s in. We need to try and help.’
‘It depends,’ Slater said.
‘What?’
‘If he’s still alive but the concussion left him permanently disabled, there’s not much we can do for him. I
t’s my job to prioritise. Sometimes that involves making hard decisions. It’s a long road out of here. We’re not out of the woods. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is far bigger than a single camp. We’re not going to be able to babysit him if he’s completely unaware of his surroundings.’
‘So we leave him here?’
Ethan said, ‘This whole fucking thing was his idea, Samantha. I know you were in love with him, but he practically brainwashed the both of us. What the fuck are we even doing out here? How did he ever manage to convince us this would be a good idea? I mean, of course it’s my fault for agreeing, but you both spent a week straight persuading me to come out to this goddamn desert. And what else was I going to do? Stay on my own in one of the cities? This is Noah’s fault, and if we have to leave him here then we leave him here. We’re not responsible for his decisions.’
This time, she didn’t just move to slap him.
She hurled herself at him.
Slater caught her around the mid-section and threw her back in the direction she’d come from. She landed awkwardly and stumbled a couple of steps, and when she turned back to stare at Slater, her eyes were full of scorn.
As if to say, How dare you?
Slater had reached the limits of his patience.
He said, ‘What?’
But he said it loud.
It worked.
She shrank away.
Slater said, ‘The last thing I need is you two fighting each other. I’ve risked my life multiple times to get you out of this hellhole and I’m not going to let it fall apart because you two can’t leave each other alone for five minutes. Stop arguing, and let me decide.’
‘We can’t leave him here if he’s alive,’ Samantha said.
‘Yes, we can,’ Ethan said.
And folded his arms across his chest in a faux display of determination.
Slater said, ‘Ethan, shut up. Both of you go to that hut at the mouth of the camp. See it?’
