Backwoods (5 page)

Again, Andrew glared. “Fine.”

Glancing over his shoulder at O’Malley, he
said, “Corporal, escort Mister Braddock to the barracks wing. Take
him to Lieutenant Carter’s room.” With a slight frown, he added,
“He won’t be needing it anymore.”

“Yes, sir,” O’Malley said.

CHAPTER FIVE

“I know what you’re thinking.”

Andrew remembered when he’d brought Lila home
to meet his parents for the first time, for dinner on a snowy
Sunday afternoon in the middle of February. They’d been sleeping
together for a little over three months at that point, and he’d
fallen more than head over heels in love with her. He’d been
nineteen years old—going on thirty in terms of maturity, if you’d
asked him—and he’d been a college freshman longer than his sister,
Beth, had been in her grave.

“Oh, so you’re a mind reader now?” his
mother, Katherine, had replied as they’d stood together in the
kitchen while he helped her clear the dishes from the dining room
table. His father, Eric, had retired with Lila to the living room
for coffee.

Katherine had said this with a smile, a
gentle and playful sort, slipping stacked plates from his hands,
her own fingers wet and sudsy from the sink in which she had been
setting a roasting pan to soak. She’d fixed prime rib roast for
dinner, sparing no expense for their guest. If she hadn’t agreed
with Andrew’s choice of women or shared his enthusiasm for Lila,
then at least, she had gone along with it well.

“You think she’s too old for me,” Andrew
said.

“I didn’t say that.” Katherine turned and
began scraping table scraps into a square of aluminum foil. She
rinsed each dish in turn, then passed them to Andrew, who placed
them into the dishwasher.

“You didn’t have to. I can tell by your
face.” She was deliberately avoiding his gaze and he cocked his
head to meet her eyes, ducking a bit because he was taller than she
was. “Mom, I keep telling you. That doesn’t matter to us.”

“Okay.” Katherine nodded, paying too much
attention to the growing mound of meat scraps and half-eaten
asparagus spears.

“She’s smart,” Andrew said. “More than that,
she’s brilliant.”

“Okay.”

“She’s got her Ph.D. She’s tenured. And she’s
beautiful. And funny. She makes me laugh, makes me think. She likes
to argue—politics, religion, philosophy, you name it.”

Katherine nodded again, handing him a plate.
“Okay.”

“Will you stop saying that?” he pleaded,
catching her hand, making her look at him at last. “Mom, I love
her.”

She studied him for a long, quiet moment. “I
can see that.”

“I love being with her. I love talking to
her. I love listening to her. You always say I should find a
partner I enjoy being with, who I can talk to.”

“Is that what you see her being?” Katherine
had asked. “A partner for you? You’re that serious about this
woman?”

He’d nodded, eyes round and earnest. “Yes,
Mom.”

She’d reached up, touching his face, her hand
still damp. “What I think of Lila doesn’t matter, Andrew. It’s what
you
think that counts because you’re the one who’s involved
with her.” With a gentle smile, she added, “And it’s obvious to me
that you think the world of her, that what the two of you have
makes you happy. And that makes
me
happy.”

He’d smiled back, then hugged her, drawing
her onto her tiptoes. “Thanks, Mom.”

She stepped back, brushing his hair back from
his brow. “If she breaks your heart, I’ll break her kneecaps.”

He’d laughed. “She won’t, Mom.”

****

“Meals are served in the
dee-fack
at
oh-six-thirty, twelve hundred and seventeen hundred sharp,”
Corporal O’Malley said as Andrew trailed him across the main lobby
toward the adjoining barracks annex.

“The what?” Andrew asked.

O’Malley glanced over his shoulder. “That’s
what we call the dining facility. The
dee-fack
. The mess
hall. There are snack and soda machines in the rec room. There’s
also a canteen, too, with toiletries, cigarettes, magazines.”

“Nice,” Andrew remarked dryly.

“It beats Fallujah,” O’Malley said. He led
Andrew up a flight of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell to the
second floor of the barracks.

“You were in Iraq?”

O’Malley nodded. “Served fifteen months. Just
got back in December. You ever been enlisted?”

“Me? No.” Andrew managed a laugh.

“Something funny about serving your country?”
O’Malley stopped in his tracks, arching his brow, clearly not
sharing Andrew’s amusement.

“Uh, no.” Andrew shook his head. “Not at all.
It’s just…” He sputtered for a moment, trying to figure out how to
get the proverbial foot out of his mouth before O’Malley planted
his up Andrew’s ass—non-proverbially. “I’ve never really thought of
myself as military material.”

O’Malley cut him a head-to-toe glance, then
offered a concurring snort. “Yeah,” he said. Then, continuing with
his tour, “Anyway, DARPA just finished building all of this a
couple of months before we arrived. Before that, this was all a
federal reserve forest, inaccessible to the general public. Like
the Major said, you can use any of the public areas, the downstairs
facilities. Just don’t leave the grounds or go near Dr. Moore’s
residence again. Or the house of pain.”

Andrew blinked. “The what?”

“Dr. Moore’s lab. The building in the back of
the compound.” He walked again, stopping next at the end of a
corridor, outside a closed door. “Each person at this compound has
their own unique security pin number. That way we can control who
has access to restricted areas. Yours will be four-two-eight-zero.”
As he said this, he punched it into a key pad beside the door, and
Andrew watched the red light on the panel change to green.

Inside, the room looked like any standard
full-size hotel accommodations, with nondescript furnishings—desk,
bed, bureau, nightstand—and adjacent bathroom with shower stall. As
with a hotel, the room had been stripped of any sign of previous
occupancy; of the absent Lieutenant Carter, nothing remained.
Andrew thought O’Malley might say something about the former
occupant, what had happened to Lieutenant Carter and why his room
was now conspicuously vacant, but he did not.

“I’ll have someone run you up some clean
towels.” O’Malley crossed the threshold, reached into the darkened
bathroom and flipped on the lights. “Fresh sheets for the bed, too.
Oh, you’ve got a mini-fridge over by the bureau.”

Andrew followed him, curious, taking note of
a television set atop the bureau.
And matching VCR,
he
observed. “Jesus, didn’t these things die out with the dinosaurs?”
he asked with a laugh.

“There’s a video library down in the rec
room,” O’Malley said. “No cable or satellite.”

Great,
Andrew thought.

“If there’s nothing else, I’ll leave you to
it,” O’Malley said, not elaborating on whatever ‘it’ he was
specifically leaving Andrew to.

“Oh,” Andrew said. “Hey, sure. Thanks for the
nickel tour.”

O’Malley nodded once, politely, as he walked
toward the door. “Be seeing you.”

****

After O’Malley had left, Andrew went back
outside. He followed the sidewalk encircling the compound and annex
until he came to the approximate spot beneath Moore’s balcony where
his iPhone would have landed. It didn’t take long for him to find
it. Or what was left of it after its two-story fall.

“Shit.” He stared in dismay at the cracked,
darkened screen, pushing impotently at the power button, even
though he knew there was no way in hell it would work.

“Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” he heard Suzette
Montgomery say from the deck above, and he looked up, eyes flown
wide with surprise.

“Hey,” he said with a startled, awkward
laugh. “Uh, hi. I didn’t see you there.”

“Hi, yourself,” she replied, leaning
languidly over the deck railing, her arms crossed, a cigarette
dangling from one hand. In the other, she held a glass tumbler with
ice cubes, a wedge of lime and a clear liquid inside. “If I didn’t
know any better, I’d say you were trying to spy on me.”

“I was looking for my phone,” he replied. “I
dropped it into the bushes earlier.”

“Any luck?”

Again, he glanced at the broken iPhone in his
hand. “Yes and no.”

He wondered if Dr. Moore was still in the
apartment and thought about just turning around, bolting back into
the building to be on the safe side. Apparently he was going to be
stuck there for awhile, and since for all he knew, Dr. Moore was
working on biochemical weapons in that top secret, hush-hush lab of
his—one O’Malley had ominously referred to as the “house of
pain”—he figured it might be in his own best interest to avoid
pissing the guy off any more than he already had.

“I’d say you could use mine, but there’s
still no service.” Suzette drew the cigarette to her mouth and
inhaled deeply, setting the smoldering end brightly aglow. It
occurred to him that her stance allowed him a virtually
unobstructed view down the front of her blouse. “I’m sorry about
earlier. Edward hitting you and all.”

“That’s alright.” Andrew’s hand trailed to
his cheek. Not much of a bruise had formed where Moore’s knuckles
had connected, but the residual soreness from the blow remained.
“He hits like a girl.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

Andrew laughed. “Please don’t. I’m in enough
trouble as it is.”

“That’s right.” Suzette inhaled on her
cigarette. “I hear you’re going to be staying with us awhile.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s too bad,” she told him with a playful
sort of smile that suggested she thought it was anything but.

Before he could open his mouth to answer, he
heard a sharp sound, the staccato
patta-pat-pat
of automatic
gunfire echoing from somewhere in the distance, deep in the woods.
Startled, he whirled, eyes flown wide.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, shoulders hunched
reflexively, just as more gunshots rolled out of the trees. The
noises overlapped, multiple rifles firing simultaneously, a heated
exchange from the sounds of things. “Those are gunshots!”

“Sure sounds like it,” she agreed, using her
fingertip and thumb to flick her cigarette butt into the
courtyard.

“What are they shooting at?”

“The last guy they caught trespassing,” she
said solemnly. Then she laughed. “I’m kidding. They must be out
doing artillery drills, that’s all.”

She tipped her head back, downing the rest of
her drink. He thought of how her breath had smelled like alcohol
the night before and wondered if there was more than water in her
glass.

“See you around, Romeo. Parting is such sweet
sorrow and all that.” She dropped him a wink, then turned, walking
back inside the apartment.

CHAPTER SIX

Seventeen hundred sharp,
Andrew
thought after he’d finished showering. That was when O’Malley had
told him that supper was served in the dining hall—or
dee-fack,
as the case may be—and sitting on the side of what
would be his bed while stuck at the Army barracks, he counted in
his mind, trying to convert standard time to military hours.
That’d be…what? Five o’clock?

He glanced at his bedside clock. Ten minutes
to go. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and his stomach was
growling again. About a half hour earlier, Corporal O’Malley had
stopped by his room, delivering the clothes he’d been wearing at
the time of his crash—his shirt, jeans, socks—all freshly
laundered, still warm from the dryer.

“Thanks,” Andrew had said, surprised, as he’d
accepted them.

“Don’t thank me,” O’Malley had replied. “Dr.
Montgomery took care of it.”

Which had surprised him all the more.

He hadn’t heard any more gunfire that
afternoon. Suzette hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about the
sounds, as if they were common enough occurrences. That didn’t make
them any less unsettling to Andrew, however. Sound in the mountains
carried fast and far and he wondered if McGillis and Allcott had
returned to the woods to look for him, had heard the shots and
grown alarmed.

As he toweled his hair dry, he heard a knock
at the door. “Hang on a minute,” he called, because he was still
wearing only a towel around his waist. Thinking O’Malley might be
bringing him another pleasant surprise—maybe an operational
satellite phone or the keys to a helicopter waiting in the
courtyard—he hurried to grab his jeans. “I’m not dressed. Hold
on.”

He heard a quick series of beeps, someone
punching in on the key pad, and had a split second to realize the
corresponding
click
was the door unlocking before it swung
open, quickly and wide, sending him stumbling back from the
threshold in surprise. “Hey!”

His startled cry of protest cut abruptly
short as Edward Moore stepped into the room, then swung the door
smartly shut behind him. He raised his right arm, pointing at
Andrew, and after a bewildered moment, Andrew realized it wasn’t
the man’s
finger
he was aiming at his head.

Shit,
he thought, blinking down the
barrel of what appeared to be a semi-automatic pistol.

“Dr. Moore,” he hiccupped, eyes round, nearly
crossed as he gawked at that cold, black hole bored into the
muzzle. “What are you doing?”

Surely the guy couldn’t be that pissed off
over a right hook to the gut.
Could he?
Andrew thought, very
much alarmed, because whatever the reason, Dr. Moore was pissed
about something. That much was plain. The man’s face had flushed
bright red, glossed with a sheen of anxious perspiration, and his
brows were furrowed so deeply, his eyes were all but obscured by
the resulting shadows.

“Look,” Andrew said, backing up until he hit
the nearest wall and thus could go no further. Helpless, he held up
his hands. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he dimly hoped like
all hell that the towel around his waist didn’t loosen and fall,
because he figured being found with a bullet in his skull, buck
naked on the floor would be a far shade worse than just the former.
“About upstairs, what happened this morning, I was only…”