Soldier's Heart Part Four: Brotherhood Protectors World

by Ilsa J. Bick

  A purpose would be nice, too.

  He knew the score. Mac had gotten him out of the way, pure and simple. Did her plan make a lot of sense? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, he saw the logic. As a woman...better, a double-amputee hiker on her own and lost...she stood much more of a chance to get close to the guys herding those Asian kids. There was also this inescapable fact: Mac was half machine, and not in the way those guys suspected. He’d seen what she could do.

  The thing that still creeped him out, though: those damned nanobots, biobots, whatever they were. He suspected she had other capabilities of which she was only partially aware, and wondered if maybe they were responsible. Like that night he’d found her dangling from the cliff off Gunny Peak. He’d been hurt, holed up, essentially unconscious when, all of a sudden, there was that voice which had roused him from a delirium followed by a physical nudge that spurred him to action. Had he simply stumbled on the rope in her pack, or been directed? His memory was hazy, but he thought the chances he’d been told what to do and where to find what he needed were pretty high.

  Which was spooky. Just as spooky was that moment in the woods, when he’d spied Mac making mincemeat of that tree with that right hand. Something had shoved him in the back hard enough to make him fall. He hadn’t imagined that.

  So, what was all that? An extension of Mac? Something telekinetic? Maybe. If her senses were sharper now, who was to say other abilities hadn’t surfaced or been augmented?

  A palm of wind shoved, spackling his coat with fresh snow and sending clots of ice against his neck. He shivered against the crawl of slushy ice down his spine. He couldn’t afford to get too wet, either, from snowmelt or sweat. How much longer until Chaney Peak? He checked his watch. About three twenty in the morning. Making decent time, and so far, he didn’t think he’d gotten lost. The few land features of which he was certain, a ridge, a valley, the long but narrow ribbon of Logan’s Run he’d managed to cross without getting wet, all tallied. If he was reading his map right, he was maybe five, six miles from Chaney Peak. Thanks to Mac’s ministrations and decent food, he was in okay shape, but the cold was draining, sucking away strength and drive. For the last two hours, his left cheek, from his eye socket to the angle of his jaw, had started to really sting something fierce, like someone had taken a drill bit of pure ice and begun coring through flesh into bone. What worried him was that the pain had started to ebb, leaving only a weird numbness, like a dentist had shot him up with Novocain.

  Not good. Stopping for a brief moment, he tugged off a glove, winced at the sudden lash of cold against his fingers then dug past an ice-encrusted muffler he’d snugged up to his nose to touch a forefinger to his left cheek. The sensation was distant, wooden. Getting frostbite. At least his feet still worked. Aiming his light down, he wiggled his toes and then let out a pained gasp. The movement provoked a blizzard of pins and needles, bad enough to prick tears.

  “Shit,” he whispered, the word coming out in a hissing gasp. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to move his toes again, watching how his boots bunched and—

  What? He felt his breath suddenly catch, stubborn as a burr in his throat. What the hell?

  The snow all around his feet was broken. Trampled.

  For a split second, he thought he might be looking at his own tracks. Thought, I circled back? That was possible. People who got lost at night were three times as likely to truly walk in circles. But, no, he’d been careful and the tracks were wrong. The snowpack was all broken up, like there might have been more than a single guy. Maybe two, though the tracks they left were wide and a little oddly shaped as if they walked in snowshoes that were still too short for them. And had they been dragging something? He could see what amounted to long skid marks. But they were also weird. His mind jogged to an image of kids trailing heavy sticks through wet sand. What were they dragging? A sled? No, given a sled’s double runners, there ought to be two tracks dug out of the snow, not one. Stepping to one side to avoid trampling the trail, he continued on, noting how the snow was even more broken and chunked.

  How far did this go? Peering straight ahead, he slowly panned his light from left to right. At the very limit of his light, he spied a large amount of snow gathered in a huge pile. While the area was riddled with lower, bushier snow-covered hummocks of buckthorn and a few downed pines, there were no trees there, which meant that mound hadn’t been formed from snow slipping from boughs.

  The mound had been made.

  Oh my God. He stood stock-still, thunderstruck. A snow shelter? It was the first thing that popped into his mind. Somebody was in there? This wasn’t an ideal location. Personally, he’d have found the lee side of a hill or perhaps some boulders to buttress a crude snow cave. Even a few trees would be better than out in the open like this. But maybe he’s hurt. He thought of the deep troughs leading here. Someone who’d been hurt, maybe, and dragged himself until he just couldn’t go any further.

  He opened his mouth to call out—and then closed it. Why, he couldn’t exactly say. Something about the mound bothered him. The trail, too. No, the tracks. Dropping to a knee, he scrutinized the snow, the odd too-long and very large prints—and then he had it, something he’d not seen before because the snow both was broken and had continued to accumulate.

  These weren’t boot prints.

  They were paw prints. Paw prints…with claws.

  A bear? His blood iced, though his mouth went desert-dry. He’d not considered there might be any roaming the Black Wolf, but he’d been higher in the range where game was scarce. He was in a valley now and, storm notwithstanding, it was still relatively early, only October. One storm wouldn’t push bears into hibernation, especially not when they were at their most hyperphagic. In the period before they denned, bears were eating machines, desperate to put on calories. He also knew both blacks and grizzlies were omnivores. More to the point, they frequently cached their food, returning to various kills over and over again.

  Shit. The hackles spiked on his neck. He should get out and fast. The bear might be close. If it thought he threatened its food supply, he might just wind up as a midnight snack. Skin jumping, he scanned the snow to see in which direction the bear had headed. The last thing he wanted was to blunder into the thing. Get the hell out of here. He was already moving, turning away, thinking he could backtrack, hole up somewhere until daylight—when he saw a flash of color near the bottom of the mound.

  And paused.

  The color was not red, so this was not blood. This was, instead, something black and nearly flawless set in what seemed to be porcelain.

  Don’t. His heart was throwing itself against the bars of his ribs even as he knelt. Don’t look, don’t even think about it, just go, go!

  He didn’t listen to himself. He probed with his headlamp—and lit up an eye set above the graceful curve of a cheek he thought might once have been tawny, but was now the color of salt.

  “Jesus!” A cry jerked from his mouth. He flailed backward as if he’d just touched a live wire. His pulse raced. A body, that was a body, and he was pretty sure a girl’s, too. And the eye, its shape...Asian, like the girls he and Mac had seen. From the same party? This couldn’t be a coincidence. But what was she doing out here? She’d run, that was it. She’d gotten away. Mac and he suspected there must once have been more girls because there were just too many adults and not enough kids.

  And here’s one who escaped. Only she’d not been able to run far enough or fast enough because no one could outrun a bear.

  God, the poor kid. Tears pricked the backs of his eyes, but he gnawed on a knuckle until he felt a needle of pain. He couldn’t afford to lose it, not now when the bear was more than likely nearby. The best he could do for the poor kid was mark this spot and send someone after her body. For a split second, he thought about taking her, but he had nothing to carry her—

  From the darkness at his back, someone screamed.

  Chapter 8

  Hank awoke in agony, his world pitch-black,
his clothes frozen so stiff ice crackled when he moved. The frigid air was laced with a scent of aluminum, sick sweat, a brackish mustiness Hank associated with a swamp but knew was blood. Curled in an emergency blanket, he lay on his right side on icy ground that stole his heat. His entire body shook so badly the clashing of his teeth wasn’t much different from those wind-up chattery teeth he once bought at the midway of the county fair. He was colder than he’d ever been in his entire life, worse than he’d been only...wait, it had only been seconds ago, right? Just a few minutes at the most. How long had he dozed? What time was it? Shit, time didn’t matter. He had no fire. Frantic, a sob balling in his throat, he strained to catch even the faintest orange glow from one dying ember.

  His fire was out. Completely. Out.

  Oh God. A blister of panic in his chest where his heart ought to be. Oh Jesus.

  His fire had gone out. His fire was dead. He would be dead, too, and soon if he couldn’t get it started up. But, my God, it had been so hard the first time, had taken so long, and he was weaker now, he had the shakes again. A small sliver of his consciousness, the one that could still think and process, knew that shaking this hard was bad, a sign that his body temperature had slid down to ninety-five degrees. The shivering was his body’s way of trying to generate heat, but his muscles would tire and things would only get worse. People who died of hypothermia were often found stark-naked because, at the end, the capillaries that had constricted down tight to keep vital organs warm had suddenly released all at once. A paradoxical response. No one knew why. But a person freezing to death spent his last semi-lucid moments believing he was burning up.

  Something to look forward to. A grim thought that still provoked an insane urge to laugh, something he quickly stifled. He had to start a fire. But how? It was dark. He couldn’t see. He had to think what to do. But thinking was close to a physical effort, the clogged and sluggish gears of his mind refusing to mesh.

  It took him two precious minutes to remember…headlamp.

  The headlamp was a gimme. He should’ve remembered. But I didn’t. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. Instead, raising a quivering hand to his forehead, he slapped awkwardly with stiff, insensate fingers. He didn’t think he’d taken the headlamp off. He groped, searching, and then felt his fingers blunder into something blocky over his right ear. His headlamp had been knocked askew as he slept, but he hadn’t felt that. Swatting it with the side of a hand, he got the headlamp to move. He was afraid to try and take it off, petrified he wouldn’t be able to strap it back on—

  And he forgot because his brain wasn’t working well. Even if the headlamp came off, that didn’t matter. All he had to do was prop up the lamp or hold it in a hand. Instead, he wasted precious time trying to center a light on his forehead when that mattered not at all.

  Okay, okay. Finally, he felt the skin of his forehead bunch as he slid the headlamp into place. Now I’ve got you, all I have to do is turn you on.

  Except he couldn’t. He couldn’t find the button because his right hand wouldn’t stop shaking. No. Throttling back his mounting panic, he bore down, trying to force his wooden fingers to stop their insane bouncing and jouncing and flailing. C’mon, c’mon...

  Then, he remembered. He had two hands. Oh Jesus, oh shit. That he would forget, that he might have spent an hour trying to press a button with an unsteady hand when he had another to hold the headlamp in place scared him even more than this uncontrollable shivering. If he couldn’t think, he was dead.

  A spear of white light stabbed the inky black. His fire, pitiful even when he’d started it, was only so much ash. Have to start it again. He could do that. How had he done it the first time? His thoughts were both sluggish as snails and slippery as minnows. He’d done something...what? Wait. Right. Gunpowder from several bullets, right, and his cotton balls saturated with petroleum jelly. He’d used his knife to pry open his bullets then scraped magnesium shavings onto that precious mound of powder. Where was his knife? His duty belt? He couldn’t remember.

  If he’d checked the time, he would’ve seen that it took him two minutes to remember that he’d put his duty belt behind him. Without lifting himself from the ground, he reached back with his left hand. When his arm brushed against the wood impaled in his flank, a bolt of pain shuddered up from his pelvis and into his chest. He grunted, tears squeezing from his eyes. After dragging his belt over, he had to hold himself still until the ache dulled. Then, walking his fingers over the items on his belt, he lumbered past his pepper spray, the Glock, his Leatherman. Bullet, bullet... Thumbing them out from their leather holders was hard, and then he had to capture them as they bounced out of his grasp, the slick brass slippery as wet watermelon seeds. When he’d finally corralled two, it took him another full minute to realize that his gunpowder trick wouldn’t work again. He couldn’t hold his knife steady. The blade only ticked-ticked-ticked against metal. He’d just as easily slice off a thumb as pry a bullet apart.

  All right. Not a deal breaker. He still had his cotton balls. All he needed was more tinder and... Oh crap. He’d used up all his kindling with that first fire. Had to get more. That meant moving and moving was hellish, like someone had taken a blowtorch to his pelvis and back. But he had no choice. He had to get warm. He wasn’t thinking right. His body was shutting down. If he couldn’t start a fire, he was dead. He had to get fuel. That meant wood. Wood was outside. He could do that.

  Except he wasn’t thinking. If he had been, he wouldn’t have flopped onto his belly and begun worming his way out of his shelter. If he’d been thinking, he would have remembered. His shelter was all wood. All he had to do was reach up and break off branches and gather up pine needles to have as much tinder as he wanted.

  But he did forget. People freezing to death often do.

  Dragging himself out of the shelter was a shock that stole his breath even as the pain seared his vision red. Once he was out, he could only lie, panting, snow rucked up around his chest and neck. He should try and walk. He could gather kindling faster. He’d managed to stand before, using a tree for balance, a long stick as a kind of crutch. Where was his stick? He’d left it propped against the shelter. Which side? Pushing up on all fours, he craned a look over his left shoulder. An emergency blanket he’d thrown over this deadfall for added insulation was a hard-silver glimmer, with only a light mantle of icy snow.

  Stopping. He hadn’t noticed, but now he saw how the flakes were sparser, larger, drifting lazily. Mesmerized, he stared a little stupidly for a few moments. Pretty. Sarah would think so. He wished she was here. She would love this. But Sarah was back at the fire tower and alone. At that, a flicker of fear licked his heart. Whoever shot at him had to know he was coming down-mountain, not going up. All the shooter had to do was backtrack and there would be Sarah, not knowing that a person she might mistake as someone on search and rescue had tried to kill Hank because he’d seen a dead girl.

  Got to save Sarah. The thought gave him a burst of new strength. Have to stay alive. Grimly, he waded on all fours through snow. He would grab the stick, find fuel, start a fire. Come morning, he would set the whole damn pile on fire if he had to. Someone would see the smoke, and if snow held off, they would come looking. Yeah that’ll work, he thought, as he raised his right hand to grope for his stick, all I have to do is restart—

  Behind him, something chuffed.

  Oh. The word was tiny, a cramp of a thought. Hank stopped, dead. Everything seized for just an instant and in that dead space, there was only instinct and no thought. His hackles rose. His breath stoppered. His veins iced. Because he was downwind, Hank caught a rancid odor as if he’d just opened a packet of hamburger so old, it had grown a green fuzz.

  Another chuff.

  Hank’s brain, fueled by adrenaline, kicked to life. He should’ve thought about this. Not that there was much he could do now, except… Pepper spray. Where was it? On his duty belt, and that was inside his shelter, along with his Glock, his knife.

  He want
ed to lunge for the shelter, scramble back inside. It would be easier to defend himself there. But he couldn’t risk a sudden move or anything that might provoke a charge. He had to think about the sequence, too. Bring his arm down first then a slow slide to his left. He let his arm drift down, slowly, slowly, thinking, gun belt, pepper—

  The grizzly charged.

  A full-grown grizzly weighs anywhere from four- to eight-hundred pounds and charges at speeds of thirty miles an hour. So, Hank had about two seconds because if a grizzly is close enough to smell, it’s too damned close.

  He made a wild dive for his shelter. And he almost made it. Almost.

  Searing pain, red-hot and liquid, erupted in his right calf and flooded into his gut. Hank let out a long, bawling shriek even as he made a desperate swipe for his gun belt. His clawed fingers snagged leather, and then he was being dragged backward through snow which clogged his nostrils and piled into his open mouth. Coughing, wild with panic, he groped for his holster ...gungungungungun...but then closed his hand around something smooth and metallic. Still screaming, he ripped his pepper spray from its Velcro strap. At the same moment, the grizzly, maybe wanting to shut him up, maybe wanting only to grab hold and crush Hank’s skull like an eggshell, let go of his leg.

  And there was his chance, his chance, his one chance! Gasping, Hank rolled right.

  Spotlighted by Hank’s headlamp as if on stage, the grizzly was a monolith. Its head was enormous, massive as a sledgehammer. Its mouth was open so wide, its breath, rank with decaying flesh and new blood, gusted over Hank’s face. He saw scarlet flashes of unbelievably bright, fresh blood—his blood—and clots of flesh stuck between its teeth, which were long and very sharp, the better to snag and hold onto a potential meal. There were even shreds of blue fabric and an incongruous dusting of small white feathers at its neck, which had to be the remnants of the dead girl’s coat, the one it had taken apart like a roast chicken.