Brett Battles - Sick

“If she’s taking me to where these people are, isn’t there a danger she’ll slip again?”

Matt hesitated. “Perhaps. But you were a surprise to her, an unknown. She already knows what to expect where you’re both going.”

“Are any of the rest of you coming?”

“I wish we could. This…outbreak has stretched our resources. We’re already working with a skeleton crew here. If any of us leaves, it’ll make it all that more difficult to support the rest of our organization, and many are in just as much danger as you will be.”

Ash couldn’t help but frown. “I’m having a hard time understanding just what your purpose is.”

“Do you want to know? Because we’ll tell you if you do. It’s pretty heavy stuff, though.” He paused, thoughtful for a moment. “Your children are your goal right now. Anything we tell you will only distract from that. It’s your choice.”

Several silent seconds went by.

Matt was right. Until Josie and Brandon were with him, Ash didn’t need anything else clouding up his mind.

“Tell me about where they’re keeping my kids.”

The desert was tricky, even more so in the moonless night with their headlamps off. But Paul, with Lisa sitting behind him, and Nick didn’t have much of a choice. The only thing they could do was keep their speed down, and hope they didn’t hit any of the random holes and ruts too hard.

At midnight, they found a small canyon and stopped. About fifty feet in was a rock overhang, so they decided to use it as shelter and get a few hours of sleep.

Because none of them thought to set an alarm on their cell phone, those few hours turned into almost seven. By the time Paul opened his eyes, the sky was blue, and the warmth of the early spring day had already pushed back the cold of the night.

“Ah, crap!” he yelled, then nudged Lisa, who was sharing his sleeping bag with him. “Hey, baby, we got to get up.”

She groaned, but didn’t open her eyes.

“Come on, Lisa. It’s already late.”

“Just a little longer,” she said, her voice low and raspy.

He gave her a kiss. “One minute. That’s it.”

“You’re so generous.”

He crawled out of the bag without unzipping it, then scrambled over to where Nick was sleeping and shook his shoulder.

“Time to get up.”

Nick tried to turn away from him.

“Come on, Nick. We overslept.”

His brother opened one eye halfway. “It’s morning already?”

“We should have been gone four hours ago,” Paul told him.

Nick grunted and rolled onto his back.

Now that Paul knew the other two were basically up, he went over to his backpack, took out one of the sandwiches his mom had made, then all but inhaled it. Since their water was limited, he was careful to drink only a few ounces.

Nick and Lisa were both sitting up now, neither looking particularly eager to get going.

“Come on,” Paul said. “We’ve got to move!”

“All right, all right,” Nick said. “I’m up.”

He unzipped his sleeping bag and rolled out.

“Me, too,” Lisa said.

“I don’t want to stop for a while,” Paul told them, “so eat something. I’m going to go see if I can get above the rim and figure out where we are.”

Nick gave him a halfhearted wave of acknowledgment, then held out a hand to help Lisa out of her bag.

Paul scanned the canyon. Near the back he saw that part of the wall had crumbled down, creating a difficult but not impossible ramp to the top. He jogged over and carefully climbed up the slope.

He was just nearing the top when a rhythmic noise began, echoing through the canyon. He looked around, trying to spot the source, but though it kept getting louder and louder, he couldn’t see anything that might be causing it.

Nick stepped out from under the overhang, looked up at Paul, then lifted his shoulders and held out his hands, silently asking what was making the noise. Paul, having no answer, repeated the gesture back.

He was about ten feet from the top of the ramp, and thought maybe he could see whatever it was from up there. But the moment he started to climb again, two helicopters streaked low across the sky just beyond the edge of the canyon. As soon as they passed the open end, they turned and descended to the ground.

There was no question in Paul’s mind why they were here.

“Hide!” he yelled down at Lisa and Nick.

There was no way they could hear him above the whirl of the helicopters, but they’d obviously had the same thought. They began running through the canyon toward the crumbled ramp.

Paul looked quickly around, then slipped into a crack between two large clumps of dirt, keeping his head elevated just enough so he could see over the top.

Six men piled out of the helicopters, three from each, and began running into the canyon. Paul wasn’t sure what was scarier: their rifles, or the full bio-protective suits they were wearing.

He looked down the ramp for Lisa and his brother, but it was too uneven, so while he could hear them scrambling on the slope, he couldn’t see them.

Two of the armed men stopped near the bikes by the overhang, while the other four continued toward the back of the canyon.

“Stop!” one of them yelled, his voice distorted by his suit.

Paul heard Lisa and Nick stop climbing, and knew they’d been caught.

Dammit! Sarge was not going to be happy.

He watched the men, expecting them to move in and herd Lisa and Nick away, but instead, two of them raised their rifles.

No! No! No!They’ve stopped! They’ve stopped!

Paul started to open his mouth to yell exactly that, but before the words could even reach his lips, the men fired. The double boom ricocheted off the canyon walls, but what Paul didn’t hear was more upsetting. Neither Lisa nor his brother yelled out.

As the men lowered their guns, Paul felt as if the earth had just swallowed him up. He watched all four men walk over to the ramp, then pass out of his line of sight. He could hear them moving around and talking quietly amongst themselves. When they reappeared on the canyon floor, two had Nick slung between them, and two had Lisa.

His brother.

His girlfriend.

Both of them clearly dead.

Paul stared down at them, hardly able to process what he was seeing.

No one was going to believe this. No one would ever believe helicopters had found them in the middle of the desert and-

His hand snapped down to his pants pocket, and he pulled out his cell phone. He turned it on, and worried for a moment the people would disappear before it started up. But he was in luck, if you could call it that. They set the bodies down near the base of the ramp, while one of the two who’d stayed near the motorcycles ran back to the helicopters. The man returned a few moments later with a clump of black plastic.

As soon as Paul’s phone was ready, he accessed the camera, flipped it to movie mode, and began recording.

The man with the plastic gave half to the guys standing near Lisa, and the other half to the ones next to Nick. As they unfolded their pieces, Paul realized they were bags-body bags-just like ones he’d seen in some of the Military Channel documentaries Sarge liked to watch.

He had zero doubt this had been a killing operation from the beginning. There had been absolutely no intention of simply bringing any of them in. Why else would they have the bags with them?

“That’s my brother, and my girlfriend,” he whispered next to the camera, hoping that the suits the people below were wearing would make it hard for them to hear anything. “Those…those men shot them. We weren’t doing anything, but they shot them.” He opened his mouth to say more, but decided he’d already pressed his luck enough.