Flight (8 page)

They finally stopped and Wolfgang
sank to the ground, his eyes shut, grateful for the lack of motion.
Leah gave him a water bottle, then he heard her ask a question that
puzzled him.

“Who’s that?”

“A picket. A lookout. A guard for
the gang that attacked us and killed Cyrus.”

Wolfgang wasn’t sure what the
first two descriptions meant, but he understood the third. He could
also hear the anger in Wlazlo’s voice.

He looked through bleary eyes and
saw a small outline lying on the ground with arms awkwardly at his
sides. The picket’s hands were tied behind his back.

“He’s just a boy,” Leah
said.

“He killed my friend.”

“He’s a boy!”

Wolfgang couldn’t keep his eyes
open and just listened.

“His gang tried to kill us and
he’s a lookout for them. We need to kill him.” Wlazlo.

“What? No. He’s a child.” Leah.
Desperation in her voice.

“He’s got a rifle.” Wolfgang heard
something rattle. “And he would have shot us if he hadn’t fallen
asleep.”

“You blew up a truck. How could he
be asleep?”

“That was hours ago. They put him
up here to watch for us. I can’t tell in the dark. I don’t know how
far he can see from here. But he was probably the one spotting for
them, the one who told them we were coming. He’s probably got
binoculars. Find them!”

Wolfgang heard rustling and
swearing.

“A radio,” he croaked in
German.

“A radio?” Wlazlo cried. The word
was similar in both languages. “That’s right. He’d have to have a
radio. Find the radio. Search everywhere.”

“Right here,” the lieutenant
colonel said.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll take
it.”

Wolfgang heard
smashing.

Then Leah spoke in her native
tongue.

He’d never heard her speak Italian
before. She spoke rapidly, fluently, and it almost surprised him.
Her German was passable but weak. Her English was better, better
than his English, but he’d gotten used to her halting accent.
Hearing her speak naturally made him realize how intelligent she
must be. When he only heard someone speak like a kindergartner, it
was easy to think that’s how intelligent they were.

His opinion of the young, Swiss
girl began to change and he painfully opened his eyes to watch
her.

The boy stared at her, terrified,
and she raised the pitch of her voice, her face in front of the
boy’s and he began shaking his head, crying.

“No, no, no,” the boy
repeated.

Leah hammered him with questions
and he continued to say no.

She finally looked up at
Wlazlo.

“He wasn’t part of the attack. He
doesn’t know who was,” she said in English.

“And you believe him?” Wlazlo
shouted.

“It wasn’t him! He’s only a
boy.”

“He’s old enough to carry a
gun.”

Leah turned to the boy and shot
him a question. The boy responded with a number.

“He’s only thirteen,” she said
coldly.

“He’s on this hill. He’s armed. He
has a radio. Do you think he’s a Boy Scout? He’s a soldier,” Wlazlo
screamed, getting into Leah’s face. “He killed my best friend, he
almost killed your boyfriend, and he’d just as soon kill us as give
us the time of day.” He brought his gun up and pointed it at the
boy.

“No,” Leah cried and got in front
of his gun. She straddled the boy, preventing Wlazlo from shooting
him.

“You get away from him right now,
missy. This isn’t your war.”

“This is my country. It’s not a
war. He’s not a soldier.”

“He’s armed.”

“He’s not a soldier. He’s a
child.”

“When he doesn’t radio in, the
rest will check on him and find him. It’s standard military
procedure.”

“He’s a thirteen year old boy.
He’s not military.”

“He attacked us!”

“No, he didn’t!”

“He. Killed. My.
Friend.”

“No, he didn’t!” and Leah reached
out and grabbed Wlazlo’s gun.

Wolfgang held his breath. Leah
grabbed the weapon with both hands, keeping the barrel pointed away
from both of them. Wlazlo didn’t let go, but he didn’t fight her.
The two glared at each other across the deadly device. The
lieutenant colonel stood to the side of his officer, looking
unnerved.

“You said this gun makes you as
powerful as ten men,” Leah finally said.

“What of it?” Wlazlo replied. He
didn’t shout. Wolfgang finally let his breath out.

“Don’t shoot,” Leah commanded and
let go. She turned back down to the boy with his hands tied behind
his back. She grabbed his shirt with both hands, bringing his face
to hers and began yelling.

The boy cried again, repeating
‘no’ over and over. She let go of him with one hand and slapped him
in the face, then grabbed him again and yelled something
else.

The pain got the boy’s attention
and he nodded ‘yes’, slowly. Leah put him back on the
ground.

“He understands how dangerous you
are. He understands that when those he is with find him, if he
tells them which way we went and if they follow, you will kill all
of them. That you are heavily armed and trained assassins and it
will be easy to kill everyone. He understands if he ever wants to
see his mother again, he will do exactly as I say.”

Captain Thomas Wlazlo glared
defiantly at the young, Swiss girl, but then turned away and began
hiking up the trail that led up the mountainside. He didn’t say a
word. The lieutenant colonel followed.

Leah checked the boy’s bonds, then
tied his legs and gagged him. She searched his gear. He’d been
sitting in a sleeping bag and had several packs with him, trash
scattered around him. She went through the packs, found ammunition
for his rifle, and threw it down the hill. She also checked the
single action rifle, opened the bolt, and used her fingernail to
pry the bullet out. She tossed it down the hillside
also.

She spoke to the boy calmly now,
in Italian, her voice mild compared to the yelling she’d done
before. She touched his face gently.

Wolfgang wasn’t sure she’d made
the right decision. It was the humane decision, to let the boy
live, but he wasn’t sure a stern warning was enough. As soon as the
rest of his gang checked on him, undid the ropes that held him, and
slapped him around a little, he would tell them everything about
Leah, Wolfgang, and the two officers. Nothing would stop their
pursuit, and the followers would move a lot faster than Wolfgang
could.

Leaving the youth tied up was
foolishness, but Wolfgang didn’t think he could be responsible for
the boy’s death either. He admired Leah’s conviction.

He also hoped his own weakness,
his slowness, wouldn’t get her killed.

“Come, we must go now,” she said
to him in German, speaking gently. She helped Wolfgang stand and he
felt like the pack he carried weighed fifty kilos and his head
weighed a hundred. He looked down at the tied up boy and knew his
safety probably lay in the boy’s death, but he didn’t say that to
Leah. He’d take his chances with her decision.

“He’ll be fine,” Leah said to
Wolfgang, assuming his look meant concern about leaving the boy
tied up. “His friends will look for him when he doesn’t call them
on the radio and they will rescue him.”

Wolfgang knew that would happen,
but hoped it wouldn’t happen too quickly. He wanted to sprint up
the hill, to flee the boy and those who blew up the Army truck, but
his feet and his head refused. He began hiking slowly with Leah’s
help.

17

Eva sat with one booted foot up on
the dashboard, her Glock on the floor easily within reach, and
watched the desert roll by.

Normally, in the summer, they
would have baked in the heat, but gray, ugly clouds covered the sky
and she wore her long sleeved shirt over her tank top. They left
the roll top down, but the air was cool, like an early spring or
late fall day. Mark called it a nuclear winter and said it was
being caused by dust kicked up by the meteor strikes.

“It could just be unseasonably
cold,” she replied.

“It could,” he said and
shrugged.

They didn’t talk for a while. Mark
simply drove and Eva stared at the sky and wondered about it. She
wondered what the aliens were like and wondered what could be done
about them. Her Glock, which felt reassuring in her hands when she
held it, seemed like a toy compared to whatever weapons were
possessed by beings who could drop meteors from the sky with enough
precision to destroy cities.

The sky changed color as she
watched it, gray turning to rippled orange and purple, dullness
turning into beauty. The sun was setting.

“Gilliam, it’s getting dark. What
do you think?”

“I can drive for you, if you need
me to,” Eva answered. She was still keyed up after their encounter
with the border guards.

“I’m going to take that exit up
there,” her partner said.

“Why?”

“Call it a hunch, but I don’t want
to drive into Vegas at night.”

“But it’s the city that never
sleeps.”

“That’s what worries me,” he said
with a grin. “If you think those Utah guys were bad, I can only
imagine what they’re up to in Sin City.”

If he was right; if their
encounter with the border guards was simply a taste of what was to
come, what hope was there? They’d only survived because someone
with common sense and decency commanded the unit that had held
them. Now Mark had said they should shoot first and ask questions
later.

Could Eva do that?

She’d had a lot of training with
the Agency. It was intense, deadly serious, and yet fun. A
challenge that Eva enjoyed. She had performed well. But most of her
assignments since graduation had involved recruiting, as if tall,
dark, and handsome, like Mark, belonged on dangerous missions, and
young, blonde, and pretty belonged at college recruiting
fairs.

The border guards had been
dangerous, particularly the one who watched her. Shay. She thought
about the look on his face and hoped again she had broken his nose.
But what would the next group be like that they came
across?

“Is sleeping somewhere going to be
any safer?” she asked.

“I have an idea,” he said. “Check
this out.”

He took the exit he’d pointed out,
turning off the headlights as they went down the off-ramp. That was
a good idea, Eva thought. Lone headlights heading down a road in
the desert could be seen for miles. Someone might be able to follow
them from a distance.

The sun still provided a little
light as it reflected off the clouds, just enough to see by, but
Mark slowed down nonetheless. Instead of turning right at the
bottom of the ramp, towards a few buildings, he turned left, went
under the overpass, and then made another left onto a dirt
road.

“Where are you going?” Eva
asked.

He grinned at her, like he was a
kid teasing that it was for him to know and her to find out. She
glared back and he must have changed his mind.

“I saw some power cable towers
heading off to the hills over there.” He pointed to their right. “I
bet there’s dirt roads that go up to them. We’ll probably find a
safe place to spend the night. Keep that Glock ready, though, just
in case.”

She picked it up, made sure the
safety was on, and set it in her lap.

The sky dimmed quickly, the dirt
road looking ghostly in the twilight. They passed several abandoned
buildings. Mark made a hard right when he saw a path heading away
from the freeway.

“Almost missed it,” he said as Eva
reached out to grab something to steady herself. The jeep’s wheels
ground in the dirt, sending dust clouds high behind
them.

“That’s not going to give us
away,” she commented sarcastically.

“It won’t. Sure, on a clear, blue
day in the desert you can see dust like that forever. But at
twilight? And with all these gray clouds? We’re fine.”

Eva wasn’t so sure.

The dirt road curved and started
following parallel to a set of railroad tracks they hadn’t noticed
before.

They continued along the tracks
until they got to a set of power cables. Mark stopped the jeep.
Towers stood on either side of them. The one farthest away from the
freeway, in the direction he wanted to go, was to their right and
sat atop a fifteen foot high bluff. There was no way to get up it
and head towards the hills.

“Now what, genius?” Eva
asked.

“That’s why I got a four wheel
drive.”

“Not even in a four wheel drive
are you going to make it up that hill. If you’re going to try
though, let me out. I’ll watch.”

They could hike up it, but it was
probably just flat desert on top for miles. Plus, she didn’t want
to abandon the jeep.