Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

The guy pitched forward on his face. He landed square on the feathers. The arrowhead punched out his back. It looked wet and slimy. Not red. Green, of course.

Steven had lost one of the flashlights. The GPS had blinked off and never returned. An impact, possibly. Currently the surviving flashlight was sixty feet in the forest, sixty yards from the track. It had not moved for many minutes. He didn’t know why.

But his bigger worry was the heart rate monitors. Now four had flatlined. Now four of their customers were technically dead. Which was obviously insane. It was an equipment fault. Had to be. But better safe than sorry. Maybe someone should go take a look. The GPS showed Peter and Robert widely separated, on the flanks, at the edge of the forest. Still in neutral mode, not interfering, there for advice and reassurance alone, only if called upon, nothing more. Mark was moving, in a wide loop back towards the buildings. Not fast. He was either walking or riding slow on his bike. Too slow. They all needed to get moving. He needed to tell them. But he couldn’t. The radio hub had burned up. Their earpieces were useless. They were hearing nothing. Therefore doing nothing. Watching the fire, maybe.

Then the surviving flashlight started to move.

SHORTY’S PANTS LEG was soaked with blood. Patty couldn’t tear the fabric. Too wet, too heavy, too slippery. She ran back and got an arrow. She used the edge of its head to widen the slit the first arrow had made. The new arrow was sharp. It was as good as a kitchen knife. She opened a length about six inches either side of the wound. She peeled back the sticky fabric. She took a look. The wound was vertical. The arrow had come in with one tang up and one tang down, and it had hit above his knee, about a third of the way up his thigh. Dead on central. It had speared through muscle and hit bone. She wasn’t a doctor but she knew the words. Through the quadriceps to the femur. Ninety degrees from the femoral artery. Not even close. He wasn’t going to bleed to death. They had been lucky.

Except she was pretty sure the impact of the arrow had broken the bone.

She felt around. There was a ledge-shaped lump on the back of his leg. Like a displaced fracture. His hamstrings were pushed out of place. He was gasping and groaning, muted, teeth clamped, and moaning, partly with pain, partly with fury. He was pale green, in the night vision. In shock, but not all the way. His heartbeat was fast, but steady.

She studied the arrow she had used to cut the cloth. The head was a simple triangle. Two wicked edges came together at the point. The body thickened gracefully in the middle, to seat the shaft. To add weight and momentum. The edges were like razors. They would slice through anything. But there were no barbs. The edges would slice right back out again just as easily. Not even slice. No further damage. The pathway was already cut.

Except Shorty’s muscle had spasmed and clamped down hard. It was gripping the arrow like a vice.

She said, ‘Shorty, I need you to relax your leg.’

He said, ‘I can’t feel my leg.’

‘I think it’s broken.’

‘That can’t be good.’

‘I need to get you to the hospital. But first I need to pull the arrow out. Right now you’re gripping it. You need to let it go.’

‘I got no control. All I know is it hurts like hell.’

She said, ‘I think we really need to pull it out.’

‘Try rubbing the muscle,’ he said. ‘Like I had a cramp.’

She rubbed. His thigh was cold and wet and slippery. Thick with blood. He groaned and gasped and whimpered. She squeezed both sides of the wound, inching the web of her thumb closer and closer to the arrowhead, and then she pressed a little harder, both sides, gaping the wound, opening it like a mouth. Blood welled up, and spilled out in little green rivers, some one way, some the other.

‘Tell me where we’re going,’ she said.

‘Florida,’ he said.

‘What will we do when we get there?’

‘Windsurfers.’

‘What else?’

‘T-shirts,’ he said. ‘Where the money is.’

‘What kind of design?’

He paused a moment, thinking, maybe something elaborate, and she gripped the arrow’s shaft, and jerked it as sharp and hard as she would getting a stuck two-by-four out of a rack at work. The arrow came out and Shorty shrieked between grinding teeth, with pain and outrage and betrayal.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He gasped and he panted.

She slipped off her jacket and used the clean arrowhead to cut off the sleeves. She tied them together, end to end, with a generous knot. She folded the body of the jacket into a tight little pad, as small as she could get it. She pressed it down on the wound. She tied it on with the double sleeves. As good as she could get right then. A pressure dressing on the front, to stop the bleeding, and a splint of sorts on the back. The big knot would hold things steady. At least for a while. She hoped.

‘Wait there,’ she said.

She ran back to the first nightmare figure. The one Shorty had hit. The crack behind the ear. She pulled off his night vision device. Its rubber straps were slick with blood. She took another arrow from the quiver. She ran back to Shorty. She gave him the headset to wear, and the arrow to hold. For security. As a last-ditch defence.

‘Now I’m going to find us a quad bike,’ she said.

She took the working flashlight in one hand, and the clean arrow in the other. She ran back to Shorty’s guy. She stood where she had stood before. She replayed the scene in her mind. The guy had loomed up ahead of her. The nightmare vision. Face to face. In other words, he had been walking in a southerly direction. Coming from the north. From somewhere near the mouth of the track.

She stepped over the guy, and moved on to where the voice from the dark had spun them around. Damn right about that, little girl . They had turned and seen him. Face to face. He had been walking in a southerly direction, too. Also coming from the north. From near the mouth of the track. They were a pair. Working together. Common sense said they would have left their bikes behind them. They would have parked way back, surely, and then ranged ahead on foot.

She stepped over her guy and set out walking, north.

Mark saw her go. He was all set to follow, but then at the last second in the corner of his eye he saw what she was stepping over. A dead man. Two dead men. Which put things in a whole different perspective. Burning the motel was bad enough. It was insured, ironically. But obviously he wouldn’t risk a claim. Even a cursory inspection would call it arson. Because it was. At the time Steven hadn’t understood what he was watching. To be fair, none of them had. At that point the radio was still working, and Steven had described the pads of towels, and he had described Shorty’s mysterious mechanical work, under the rear end of each of the vehicles in turn, but the camera angles were bad and he couldn’t see exactly what the hell he was doing, and no one else had any suggestions either, until suddenly the towels were all on fire, and he was throwing them around.

It had never happened in any of their brainstorming sessions, or simulations, or war games. Now he saw it should have. It was inevitable. If customers pushed for better specimens, this was bound to happen. Sooner or later. A really bold move would come about.

But still, no insurance claim. The cops would come, and they would sift through the wreckage, and they would find all kinds of weird shit. But rebuilding with cash would eat up half of what they were making that night. Which would be a severe blow. Although he supposed they could tell themselves they would earn it back later. And more.