Backwoods (34 page)

“I’ve got you!” He scrabbled, catching her by
the wrist. “I’ve got you, Alice.”

“Andrew,” she squealed, caught now in a
tug-of-war as Prendick jerked her toward him. “Andrew, help
me!”

“I’ve got you,” Andrew said again, fighting
to keep his grasp on her arm. “Let her go!” he shouted at
Prendick.

Prendick wrinkled his teeth back in a
gruesome parody of grin, then whipped his tail around, striking at
Andrew. Alice screeched and Andrew rolled to the side as the tip of
his coccyx struck the ground. Prendick may have been injured, but
he was strong as hell, stronger than Andrew had anticipated, and in
that moment of distraction, Andrew nearly lost his grip on Alice
when Prendick gave a mighty heave on her ankle.

She screamed, piteous and panicked, and
Andrew looked wildly around for anything he might use as a weapon.
He heard the whistle of wind as Prendick drove the wicked hook of
his tail bone at him again, and this time when he rolled, he felt
the bone scrape against his cheek as it struck the floor
millimeters from his face.

Fuck, that was close,
Andrew thought,
not wanting to consider the sort of damage could incur if one of
those vicious strikes hit home. He saw a wink of light against
metal to his left—the wrench Dani had dropped when Prendick had
shot her. It had skittered across the floor when it had fallen from
her hand and now lay within a few feet of his own.

I can reach it,
he thought, stretching
out his free hand, fingers splayed wide.
Shit, almost!
He
cut a glance at Alice, then cried out, rolling again as Prendick
drove his tail toward the base of his skull. The jagged tip whipped
past his ear close enough to lacerate his scalp in a stinging
stripe.

“Andrew,” Alice cried.

I have to get that wrench,
he thought.
Another glance at Alice, into those wild, wide, terrified eyes.
If I let her go…

He shook his head. There was no way he’d risk
it. The only thing keeping Prendick’s attention—and most
specifically, his tail—diverted from her at the moment was Andrew,
and if he turned her loose, even for a millisecond, it might be all
that it took for Prendick to hurt her.

“Don’t let go,” she pleaded, as if having
read his mind, clutching at him desperately with both hands.
“Please, Andrew!”

“I won’t,” he said, teeth gritted as he
strained to reach the wrench. His fingertips fumbled against it,
knocked it further beyond his reach.
Shit!

“Look out,” Alice cried and Andrew tucked his
head and jerked again as Prendick’s tail smashed into the concrete
beside him. He’d long since battered the sharpened wedge of bone to
bits, but the regenerative capabilities of the retrovirus kept
refashioning it, rebuilding it anew. Now more than one point, it
had grown into three, a deadly triton of bony spines, each nearly
as long as Andrew’s forearm.

Shit!
Andrew thought as Prendick
struck at him again, then again, forcing him to scramble and flip
like a fish caught on a line, struggling all the while to keep his
hold on Alice. Desperately, he strained as far as that grasp would
allow and grabbed hold of the wrench. He heard the whip of air as
Prendick attacked, and swung the heavy wrench around like a
baseball bat, smashing the triton tip aside. He heard the
definitive, sickening crunch of bony, and Prendick uttered a
high-pitched screech.

“Let her go,” Andrew yelled, smashing at
Prendick’s intestines with the wrench, bludgeoning the thick coils,
pummeling them over and over until they began to squelch open and
burst. “Let her go, you son of a bitch!”

Prendick lunged forward, gnashing his teeth,
and from the doorway came a sudden, thunderous burst as Dani fired
the M16. Bullets plowed into Prendick’s deformed trunk, punching
wet craters into the meat of his torso, splattering the twining
tentacles of his guts. He shrieked and thrashed, violent and
enraged, and at last, Andrew felt the resistance against Alice
slacken.

“Keep shooting,” he screamed to Dani,
scrambling backwards, yanking Alice away from Prendick.

“Come on!” Dani cried out over the booming
reports of gun fire.

“Can you run?” he asked Alice, hooking his
arm around her waist, As he stumbled to his feet, he leaned on the
girl to keep from putting his weight on his maimed side.

“Can you?” she gulped back, eyes wide and
frightened, all-too aware of the pain he was in.

“Yeah,” he said through gritted teeth.
I
have to,
he thought. Furrowing his brows, he bit back a
strained cry as he forced himself to try anyway, in the end
dragging his right foot behind him.

“Close the door,” he yelled to Dani as he
dove back onto the pavement outside, holding Alice pinned against
him, her face tucked into the nook of his shoulder. “Close it.
Hurry!”

Once he was clear, Dani threw the gun aside
and seized the door again. Even in the dim light and heavy shadows
inside, he could see that Prendick was on the move again. The
deformities in his face and head as the battered tissue regrew,
swelling out in protruding masses, soon swallowed any
distinguishable from his silhouetted form. There wasn’t anything
evenly remotely human left in that shape.

Gritting her teeth, Dani heaved with all of
her might. Andrew limped upright and helped her, falling against
the door, putting all of his weight against it as he pulled. With a
sudden, shuddering lurch, the door came crashing down, slamming
into the plane of concrete beneath it.

From the other side of the door, they heard
Prendick screech, that inhuman, furious sound, then the metal plate
shook as he barreled into it from the opposite side. Over and over
again, he battered into the door, causing it to shake violently in
its tracks.

“He can’t get through,” Dani said, her voice
breathless and shaking, on the verge of hysteria. She looked at
Andrew, wild-eyed and trembling, her face and clothes blood-soaked
and torn, and began to laugh. “He can’t get through! Oh, my God. We
did it.”

He hooked his arm around her and they
crumpled together. She shuddered in his embrace, clutching at him,
laughing and sobbing all at the same time. Beyond her shoulder, he
could see Alice staring, glassy-eyed and shell-shocked at the
garage, watching it shake with each furious blow.

“Alice.” Easing away from Dani, he reached
for her, crumpling to his knees so that when she stumbled
hesitantly toward him, he could fold her into his arms. She didn’t
weep, didn’t make a sound, but simply shivered against him, her
fingers twining anxiously against the front of his shirt.

“It’s alright.” He kept saying that over and
over, mantra-like, as he rocked her back and forth. “It’s alright
now, Alice. I promise. Everything’s going to be okay.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“My daddy’s dead, isn’t he?”

Alice had found the keys to one of the
compound’s Humvees, and the hulking truck jostled and bounced
beneath them as Dani drove them down the mountain toward the
highway. As she had on the night Andrew had first met her, she sat
behind the wheel, clutching it in her hands with such force, her
knuckles had turned white, and the dim light from the dashboard
instruments cast her face in an eerie glow.

Andrew sat in the back with Alice curled
beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. He’d found some
blankets in the rear of the truck and wrapped them around her. Dani
had the heater going full blast, belching hot air throughout the
cab, but still Alice trembled like a dried leaf caught in a
maelstrom at his side.

As she spoke, her voice was small and
tremulous. Her hair was damp with grime. He could see the pale skin
of her scalp in places where the locks had clumped and coiled
together and the sutured edge of one of her most recent trepanation
wounds.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered.

Because that’s what people say when they
find out someone’s dead,
Dani had told him once, back when he’d
still thought of her only as
Specialist
Santoro,
before he’d come to understand that everything he’d felt for Lila
Meyer had been a lie, a pale and distant shadow to what love would
truly be when he stumbled across it.

Alice looked up at him, her large, dark eyes
swimming with tears.
Lost.
That was how she looked. He
recognized that disconnect and shock that had glazed over her eyes.
He’d seen it in his mother’s, as well as his own, when Beth had
succumbed to lupus.

Lost.

“Did you cry when your sister died?” she
asked.

Andrew nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I cried a
lot.”

“Oh, good.” She offered a crooked smile, her
tears spilling. “Then I’m doing it right.”

****

The nearest hospital was in Pikeville, the
eight-story regional medical center housed in a building of
unexpectedly contemporary design, fronted on all sides with smoky
glass windows, sharp angles and a cool, clinical façade. Dani
pulled the Humvee beneath an overhang in the back outside of the
emergency ward, the place where ambulances customarily docked to
deliver patients.

“You can’t tell them anything about what
happened,” she said, turning in her seat to look at Andrew. Alice
had long-since fallen asleep during the nearly two-hour drive, and
rested with her cheek against his heart. “Only that you got shot,
okay? Just let me handle it.”

He started to ask why, righteously indignant,
then remembered what Suzette had told him upon his arrival at the
camp.
Top secret. Hush hush.

“I’ll call my C. O. in New York,” Dani was
saying, only now she seemed to be talking more to herself than to
him. Like Andrew, she was in shock from both blood loss and pain,
and rocked in the driver’s seat back and forth, like a little girl
in need of the bathroom. “He’ll know what to do. There’s a base in
Fort Knox. They can send someone to take care of things.”

A man in a rent-a-cop uniform tapped on the
Humvee window, a hospital security guard. When Dani jumped in
surprise, then opened the door, he stepped back a wary distance and
studied her for a moment, taking into account her ghastly pallor
and shell-shocked eyes, her wet, blood-stained clothes and
battered, disheveled appearance.

“What seems to be the trouble, miss?” he
asked, suspicious enough to drape his hand against the sidearm he
wore holstered at his hip, to flip back the restraining strap with
his thumb to allow himself ready access to the pistol if
needed.

“I’m Specialist Daniela Santoro, with the
U.S. Army National Guard.” Dani held up her hands, palms facing the
guard. “There’s been an accident. I have civilians in my truck.” At
this, the guard glanced past her into the Humvee, catching sight of
Andrew and Alice, now roused somewhat and blinking in sleepy
bewilderment. “Please,” Dani said, drawing the man’s gaze again.
“We need help.”

****

“Andrew Braddock?” one of the nurses asked, a
fresh-faced kid who looked for all the world like he’d just
graduated from high school.

They had just finished transporting Andrew
inside, having transferred him from a wheeled stretcher to a
hospital bed in a brightly lit emergency room bay. They’d begun
removing his clothes and connecting a variety of medical equipment
and instruments to him, an automatic blood pressure cuff around his
arm, a pulse and blood oxidation monitor to the tip of his index
finger.

“Where’s Dani?” he’d asked repeatedly.
“Where’s Alice? Please, are they alright? I want to see them.”

The hospital staff bustled and buzzed around
him, a ceaseless blur of uniforms and faces, people talking to him,
around him and about him. It was enough to make his head—dazed to
begin with—spin all the more. He couldn’t imagine how terrifying
and bewildering it would be for poor Alice.

They hadn’t let him see her, or Dani, either,
but he’d been able to overhear them at least in part from one of
the neighboring bays as they’d tended to Dani’s injuries. She was
the worst off of the three of them, and he’d caught a glimpse of
her on a fast-moving wheeled gurney, with a crowd of harried nurses
around her as they’d wheeled her away from the ward for
surgery.

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” a male nurse
asked him. “Andrew Braddock?”

“Yes,” Andrew said. “How did you know?”

“I’ve seen your picture in the paper,” the
nurse replied. “You’re the guy who went missing a few days ago,
back in the hills, right?”

“They’ve been looking for you,” another nurse
said, taping down a clear plastic I. V. port beneath the bridge of
his knuckles, then began fiddling with the line, making sure there
were no kinks or constricting loops.

“Who has?” Andrew jerked again at the
doctor’s light but painfully persistent prodding.

“The sheriff’s office,” the nurse replied.
“Couple of good-sized search parties, too. Your disappearance has
been the most excitement we’ve seen in these parts for awhile.”

She seemed friendly enough, sympathetic, and
when she moved to leave his bedside, he caught her by the
wrist.

“Please. There was a little girl with
me.”

“She’s fine,” the nurse soothed.

“You don’t understand. Her name is Alice
Moore. She’s autistic. Just let me talk to her for a minute. I
can—”

One of the doctors did something to his ankle
at that moment, which though unseen, felt akin to peeling back the
flesh with a pair of needlenose pliers, then prodding the molten
tip of a fireplace poker into the raw, exposed meat beneath. Andrew
cried out sharply, and the doctor gave a nod to the nurse.

“Give him two milligrams per minute, morphine
sulfate by push,” he said, and within moments, the nurse was
fiddling with the intravenous tube again, this time inserting a
filled hypodermic syringe into another plastic port in the
line.