by Ilsa J. Bick
“Whatever you whip up will be fine. I only wish I had something to contribute. I can fetch more wood if you need it.”
She shook her head. “There’s plenty in the lean-to, and I can get at it through a back door in the other room, so we’re good. But thanks for offering.”
“Hey.” Mark’s mouth moved into another of those very nice grins. “What I’m here for.”
5
“Thank God, you guys were here.” Perched on a warm rock close to a cheery blaze, Kate tugged off her headlamp. With her spidey-sense, she really hadn’t needed the lamp but kept it on both for show and to make sure no one mistook her for a marauding bear and squeezed off a shot. She aimed a brilliant ten-trillion megawatts smile at the three men seated opposite. All were outfitted in winter camo and bristled with weapons on slings and in holsters. None had given out names. They were like a tribunal.
Or a firing squad.
“I was about ready to give up, find an overhang, and hole up until morning. Knock on wood, I just lucked out that I spotted your fire ... well, fires.” She gestured toward a second blaze some twenty yards distant where two more men, similarly kitted out, watched over the girls huddled together and that woman. One guy was shoveling down on an MRE, chili mac from the smell, if she wasn’t mistaken. The woman had—she let the odors collect—tuna noodle.
Yet none of the kids were eating. Why? Something off about them. Strange odor. She rolled the aroma around her tongue. Salt and metal. Were they sick?
“You saw the fires?” one of the men asked.
“Yeah. Once I did, it was like that kids’ movie. About the bugs heading for the light?”
The guy in the center she’d pegged as the leader grunted. “If I’m remembering right, the bugs head for the light on account of it’s a zapper.”
“Oh.” He hadn’t been with the girls when she and Gabriel first spotted the group. Which meant this guy had been off rounding up the second group? “Lucky I’m not a bug, I guess.”
“Uh-huh. You’re saying you saw our fires through all that forest and snow, too? From the west? What you got there, honey, Xray vision?”
She couldn’t tell if honey was a way of baiting her or simply being condescending, but she could smell he wasn’t buying everything she was selling, either. The guy practically steamed suspicion, a rank and murky odor reminiscent of rats scurrying along slick pavement in thick fog, as well as the unmistakable funk of spent gunpowder and blood. Her eyes trailed down to the edge of a bandage showing just below his right ear. Nicked in a gunfight, maybe?
He was right to wonder about her, though. The men had built their fires well: off the ground and buttressed by a foot-high circle of rocks covered with aluminum foil to reflect heat. Tarps had been stretched north and west to capture more heat but also as a break against the storm.
What this boiled down to was simple geometry. She really shouldn’t have seen their fires if she’d been coming from the direction she claimed.
Jack: “You decided to try for higher ground ...”
Thank you. Getting to higher ground was also logical. “I headed for a ridge to get my bearings. I didn’t really see the fires so much as”—she’d been about to remark on smelling smoke then realized the wind would’ve been against her—“a general ...well, this weird glow. If you’d had only the one fire, I might have missed it.”
“That’s some luck there, Mac.” In the firelight, the man’s dark eyes were suspicious slits. “It’s Mac, right? That a name-name or a trail name?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be.” She didn’t ask his. The guy sounded like an Italian mafioso out of Chicago and had the hard, deeply seamed features she associated with either a seasoned beat cop or an ex-military guy who’d been in the shit. She’d put money on ex-military.
The guy waited a beat then nodded. “Okay. So, Mac, where were you again, exactly? You said you came in from a side trail?”
She pretended to think. “More of a bushwhack? On account of being, like, lost?”
“Go easy on the uptalk, Kate,” Jack said. “You’re a little confused, not Reese Witherspoon out for an Academy award. You can only come off as so clueless.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. “It was stupid. I got all turned around and then with the snow ...” She let the rest go.
“Uh-huh.” Reaching into a pocket, Chicago—as good a nickname as any, she decided—rummaged then withdrew what she instantly recognized as, with a small sink of her heart, a topographic map. “And you said side trail? Where?” He began unfolding the map. “How far back? Only side trails I know along this stretch come in south and southwest.” He turned to the man on his left, who sported a week’s growth reminiscent of Aaron Rogers at mid-season. “Oz? You know something out there?” He flapped a hand. “West? For hiking, I’m saying. There’s something there. Come on, you know what I’m saying, what’s it called?”
“Ahhhh…” Pulling back the flip-top of his right glove, Oz dug at thick stubble under his chin in a contemplative scratch. “Well, there’s a slide.” Nails still rasping, Oz looked at her through his eyelashes. “You know, what I’m saying.” Playing up a memory lapse, he snapped his fingers a couple of times. “You know, whatsisname?”
Okay, testing her already and she had just learned something new: this particular snake-in-the-grass smelled like foot fungus when he lied. “Gunny Peak.”
“Right.” Oz snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”
You knew the name all along. She was tempted to buy the guy a year’s supply of Dr. Scholl’s. “I gave the boulder field a whirl and then bushwhacked from there.” Reaching across, she tapped the map. “It’s about ten miles west of Dead Man, which puts it about five from where we are now, see? And, oh my God, did you feel those tremors the last couple of days?”
“No, musta missed that,” Chicago said.
They’d missed the tremors? Hmmm. Had they been that far north? She wondered how much mileage these guys put in on a daily basis. They had the air of guys who spent most of their time tramping outdoors. Ex-special-forces guys turned private contractors and mercs following the money were like that. “Yes, the shaking kind of got to me. I kept thinking the slide was going to, you know, slide.”
“I can imagine. I’ll be honest, though. I never would’ve figured a girl like you could, you know ... with your disabilities.” Chicago waved a hand at the exposed titanium bones of her legs. “I’m surprised you’d try something like that, especially with the ice and all.”
“A girl’s got to dream.” When she’d blundered into camp, she’d played up the gimp angle, making every step a little wider than it needed to be and stumping along as if walking on wood pegs. It was, she thought, the only way to sell it, put these guys off their guard. People always underestimated those with disabilities. Now, she bunched her right pant leg up a touch more, the better to allow the fire to catch metal and make it gleam. She judged it was safe enough to show them most of the prosthetic. No one would be able to tell the difference just by looking. If Chicago or anyone else got a better look at her thighs, which were biosynthetic skin and circuitry ... then she was in trouble. “I know guys who mountaineer. They’ve got crampons instead of ankles and boots.” Hers were in her pack. No need to advertise.
“No shit. You’re not just stumping around like Captain Hook, then. Uh,” Chicago added quickly but with a nasty grin that negated the apology, “you know, no offense.”
Oh, you asshole, you’re making fun of me. Wanting to see how quickly she might lose her temper, how far she could be pushed. Best to be a soft wall, the way Bibi was. Had been. God, why was she thinking about Bibi now?
Jack’s voice brushed her left ear. “Because if you’re right, it’s the same situation, same story, Kate. Just different actors, is all.”
Well, let’s hope for an HEA, Jack. She gave Chicago a smile that showed only a few of her teeth. “None taken. They’re not good as having my own legs but better than nothing. ”
“Do they hurt?” It was
the dog handler on Chicago’s right. The youngest of the three men, he looked nothing like Tompkins, who’d been reedy and sandy-haired, but he did possess the same kind of country-boy air. He dropped a hand to stroke his shepherd’s massive head. The dog lay in a relaxed sprawl, head up, cinnamon eyes locked on her every move. Whenever their gazes touched, the tip of the dog’s tail would twitch ever so slightly. The shepherd wasn’t worried. He already liked and accepted her. The spice in his scent said so. Back in Afghanistan, she’d sensed the same from Six, who’d taken to her at once. She wondered if there was something in her scent, even back then, that put dogs at their ease.
“Hurt?” she echoed.
“Yeah, I’m just asking because they’re, you know, metal. They must get kind of cold. I know Dax hates it when ice builds up under his pads.” He grinned as the shepherd’s tail thumped at the mention of its name. “I keep him good and gooped up with Vaseline.”
“Man, Wynn, you and that dog,” Chicago said. “Gonna spoil it.”
“You clean and oil your guns, don’t you?” Wynn shrugged. “Same principle.”
Dax? If the name came from where she thought it did, she liked Wynn already, which might be a mistake.
“Listen to yourself,” Jack said. “Stay objective. You can’t afford to like these guys, Kate. You saw the dog’s tattoo? Might have to use that.”
God, she hoped not. Too much déjà vu all over again. She smiled at the handler. “Well, I wish it was as easy as goop. That was the one thing my prosthetist never warned me about. The titanium bolt they put in my bone aches when it gets cold.” Sighing, she massaged her thigh still hidden by her pants. “Like a toothache? And the joints will sometimes freeze up.” Her joints never did, but she had to sell it. “Then you really are stumping around. So,” she said, steering the conversation, “Dax is different. I’ve never heard a working dog called that before.”
“You know working dogs?” Chicago said.
“There was one in my unit. He and his handler were, like, joined at the hip. Did everything together. Six was whelped in Germany, though, not Lackland.”
“Yeah, same with Dax,” Wynn said. “Came over here after a year or so.”
She’d been right about that tattoo. Excellent. “Who was the Deep Space Nine fan? You? Or the guys in Germany?”
The handler grinned. “You know, you’re the first to get it? These guys, I had to explain.”
“That’s because it’s a dumb show,” Oz said. “Man, those episodes you made me watch are hours of my life I’ll never get back. And talk about boring. They never went anywhere. They just hung around the station. Dax was a girl, too, you know? Pussy name.” Oz slipped a sly look her way. “You know what I’m saying.”
Yeah, that you’re a macho prick. “Actually,” she said, smiling a little too sweetly, “Dax was the symbiont, and the host it had before Jadzia was Curzon, who was a guy. As I recall, Sisko called her ‘Old Man’ because he and Curzon had been friends. She also whupped Worf’s butt, and he was a Klingon.” And suck on that, asshole.
As Oz’s face darkened, the handler laughed. “How do you know the show?”
“My dad’s a sci-fi nut. He has this whole library, and we watched reruns on Friday nights.” Those were excellent times: a relaxed meal, her parents having the one glass of wine they allowed themselves a week, and hours of reruns. Work never ended on a farm, and a farmer never left his work, but time did seem to slow down a bit on Friday nights. “So, why Dax?”
“She was an interesting character. Like, instead of it being your conscience or Jiminy Cricket or something, it’s a whole personality with its own ideas, its own way of doing things.”
“I think we can relate,” Jack said.
She certainly could. “And the other reason?”
Wynn tipped his head at his animal. “Because his original name was Der. You know, German. To me, it sounded too much like ‘there.’ So, I changed it. Took Dax a couple months, but he came around, didn’t you, boy?” he said, patting the grinning dog.
“Well,” she said, “I think he’s very sweet.”
And then, without asking permission, she reached for the dog.
“Wait,” Wynn said a fraction of a second too late, “you really shouldn’t ...”
“Shouldn’t what?” Still scratching the dog behind the ears, she looked up, all innocence. “Oh, I’m sorry. My bad. He’s a working dog, of course.” She took her hand away. At the interruption, Dax ducked his head with an unhappy whine and inched closer, butting her fingers with his nose. “Sorry, Dax, you’re a sweet boy, but you go sit with Wynn now.”
“Well,” Oz said as Wynn leashed in his dog, “guess we know how it is she got so close and your dog didn’t alert none.”
Wynn purpled with embarrassment. “I don’t know what got into him.”
“Uh-huh.” Chicago jerked his head. “Maybe time for you and that dog to take a walk.”
“Sure.” Wynn called the dog to heel. “We were heading out for a perimeter check anyway.”
“Don’t blame him. It’s my fault,” she said. “I’ve always gotten on with dogs. The handler I knew used to call me a dog-whisperer.”
“You can blow in my ear any time you want,” Oz said.
“You can be a real asshole, you know that?” Wynn looked at Chicago. “Borrow your radio a couple minutes? Mine’s charging.”
“You let yours run down that much?” Shaking his head, Chicago fished a unit from a pocket. “You know better than that.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got busy. Won’t happen again.” Taking the radio, Wynn nodded at Kate. “Nice to meet you, Mac. See you in the morning, maybe.”
“Sure.” She watched the shadows close around the handler and his dog as they stepped away from the fire. God, she hoped the gray and his lieutenants were someplace upwind. Interesting about the radio, too. She wondered who he’d be calling.
“He might not be calling anyone,” Jack said. “He might only be monitoring a few frequencies, although wasn’t the asshole talking to someone earlier?”
Which asshole? But she knew who he meant and Jack was right. Oz has been on his radio, several hours before Chicago and the new group showed up, presumably keeping tabs on Chicago’s progress. If everyone was now accounted for, though, who would Wynn be monitoring?
“Good question.” Jack was silent a moment. “I think we both know Chicago didn’t cut himself shaving. The handler might be monitoring police frequencies.”
That would have to be some radio. Wynn and Dax were moving off to the north and higher ground. So far as she could tell, he wasn’t speaking, only listening. Searching for better reception, more than likely, although he did a curious thing just as he mounted a small rise.
He glanced back and then all around. The movement looked almost furtive.
“Worried about being overheard?” Jack asked.
If you’re asking me to put money on it ... She watched Wynn and his dog slip out of sight as they moved off the rise and down slope. Weird.
“So, where were you?” Chicago asked. “Deployed, I mean.”
“Afghanistan.” She wrenched her attention back. “Based out of a KOP near Leatherneck. Combat medic.” See? We’re all military here, guys, one big happy family. She was glad of the chance to slip that in. Maybe Chicago, who still reeked as if he smelled a rat, would lighten up.
“Medic, huh?” Chicago’s black eyebrows crawled to his hairline. “How many tours?” When she held up two fingers, he nodded. “Interesting. So that’s how you, uh ... your legs? I was wondering about your pack, too. Man, I took one look at that thing and thought who the hell is this girl, Wonder Woman? ’Cause that thing looks like you got some serious gear. Must weigh upwards of sixty pounds. I never heard a girl humping so much and especially not, you know, a gimp. But, you being ex-military, now, I’m thinking, okay, this makes sense.”
The weight of her pack was something she hadn’t considered these guys might wonder about. “Oh,” she said, forking hair from
her forehead, “it’s not so bad. I’m pretty tall, and I’ve worked at upper body strength to compensate for, you know, no legs.”
“I get it. You figured this was some kind of test?”
“Yeah, I got too confident, that’s all. My own stupid fault, getting stuck up here. I thought I had plenty of time to sightsee after Gunny, but then that first storm blew in and put me behind. I figured to make that up by bushwhacking, try to keep to the schedule.”
“Schedule.” That made Oz sit up. “You got check-ins?”
She nodded. “You know what they say, hope for the best, plan for the worst.” Any seasoned hiker would do the same. If a hiker failed to show at a rendezvous or missed a check-in, worried relatives or friends would raise an alarm, and fast, especially given how conditions had deteriorated out here. She needed these guys to believe that could happen. Search-and-rescue teams or helicopters churning overhead might give these guys pause about putting a bullet in her brain, if it came to that. She sincerely hoped things wouldn’t get that dire. “My brother, Gabriel? We hiked together, and then he split off for that town, at the base of Chaney.”
“Lonesome,” Chicago said. “That where you two going to meet up?”
“Uh-huh. Is that where you guys are headed?” She tilted her head toward the second fire. “With your daughters?”
“No.” Chicago’s face closed down.
“They’re not our daughters,” Oz said.
“But you got to know that,” Chicago added.
“Pardon?” Her heart kicked. “How would I know that?”
“Our weapons,” Chicago said, easily. “Not exactly what you take along on a little father-daughter hunting trip. Don’t really need a working dog to run down a deer either.”
