Ever Hayes - Redemption

We covered our clothes and visible skin with mud from a spring-fed creek bed and climbed the densest trees we could find. The comfort of sitting in the crook of a high, densely shrouded tree branch lasted all of about ten minutes. An hour later, my legs and butt were asleep. Awesome . Twelve more hours felt like sixty, but finally sunset brought a little darkness. Just when I thought we would be able to move again, I heard dogs barking and voices.

A line of troops as far as I could see in each direction crept through the evening shadows toward the clearing beyond us. The quantity of enemy soldiers was surprising—there had to be hundreds of them—but I was more concerned with the dogs. We were well hidden in these trees but, even if the troops couldn’t see us, dogs could still sniff us out. That could be a problem.

I couldn’t see anyone holding a THIRST system—Qi Jia’s thermal imagery trackers—so the soldiers seemed to be relying on the dogs—during the day at least. Maybe that was good news. Having covered ourselves in mud—which really stunk now—only flies seemed to be paying any attention to us. The dogs might not even pick up our scent if we stayed still. But we needed to move. We needed to get across that clearing. Bet those snipers on the ridge have infrared scopes though . It was going to be a risky move in any light.

Glancing over at Flynn I could see traces of fear in her eyes. It occurred to me then that I didn’t feel afraid at all. Odd . That in and of itself was rather freaky. This was not something a person should get used to. I motioned at her to stay calm. I couldn’t see Lazzo from my perch—as he was in a tree about ten yards directly behind me—but I was certain he knew the troops were approaching too. He was a little bigger than Flynn and me, a little more restless, and a little harder to conceal. Lazzo, you better not give us away . These guys had been walking all day. They were clearly tired and could barely see in this light. If we didn’t move, they would pass us by and we’d be okay. Or so I thought.

Instead, when they reached the edge of the clearing, they stopped and clustered. I saw them taking off their packs and looking around. Shit . They were setting up camp. Right beneath us . I watched as six men gathered under Flynn’s tree—twenty feet to my right—and another half dozen settled in about thirty yards to my left.

I had seen Red Dawn and the Hunger Games movies a dozen times each on Redemption—themes and settings we could certainly relate to in our “post America” existence. A decade ago those plots were entertainment—a distant fictional “surreality.” This—our plot today—was anything but. These men below us reminded me of the scene in the original Games where some of the participants camp under Katniss—waiting to kill her. But—unless I’d missed them—I didn’t have the luxury of genetically engineered wasps to fight back. And Ms. Everdeen’s one-on-three was nothing like our three-on however many hundred.

I could hear the soldiers speaking but had no idea what they were saying. Maybe Lazzo would know. I wished I could move enough to see him, but I couldn’t yet risk shifting that much. In another hour it would be pitch-black. One more hour of being a statue .

Each group of soldiers was collecting wood, and soon there were a dozen small fires crackling around us. I couldn’t see Flynn’s eyes anymore, but I was sure she was either watching me or the men directly below her. I knew I was going to have to make the first move.

By 10:00 p.m. all but two of the men around each of the fires were asleep. But even those men were struggling to stay awake. Occasionally they would stand and stretch, walk around a little, and then settle back down. Finally, around eleven, I saw the last two under Flynn’s tree nod off. It was time.

I slowly stood on my branch. I needed to let the blood flow through my lower extremities, needed to stretch, needed to flex. I couldn’t afford a slip or misstep, and after about fifteen minutes of loosening up, I slowly slipped down to the ground. I set my bow and quiver against the base of my tree and tiptoed away from Flynn’s tree and the men by that fire. Five minutes felt like an hour to inch to Lazzo’s tree. I took the penlight out of my pocket and flashed it quickly twice up at him. I could hear him shifting around. He wasn’t the most agile—and made considerably more noise than I had—but ten minutes later he stood beside me, shaking off his own stiffness. He apologized for taking so long to climb down but I dismissed it. He didn’t need to explain himself—not when a single cracked branch could kill us all. He whispered that there were over three hundred soldiers just this side of the clearing and about a dozen dogs. Far as he could tell they were all Libyan, or at least North African. Most of them had been communicating in Arabic. No one had seen any sign of us, but they were only looking for two people. They don’t know anything about Flynn .

Clearly everything Lazzo had shared with the Libyan commander had been shared with his men. They had all been talking about their mission around the fires. There was even a significant bounty on our heads. The reward for Lazzo depended on him being taken alive. The reward for me was without restriction—dead or alive. Taking that into consideration, it was evident that the Libyan commander didn’t trust Lazzo to come in on his own. He didn’t care what Lazzo’s plan was at all. He was hoping to catch Lazzo and lure Danny into a trap. Lazzo’s life expectancy would be short after that. Once the commander had the book, Lazzo was done. The writing was on the wall. And all over Lazzo’s face.

I imagined Lazzo was pretty conflicted about this. I knew the status of his family was uncertain. He claimed he’d received convincing proof of life, but how long was that good for? Even if he did get the book from Danny and hand it over to the Libyan commander, there was no guarantee the commander would deliver on any of his promises. In fact, the opposite seemed more likely. The commander had lied to him about everything.

I don’t know what Lazzo had been expecting in the beginning—honesty, integrity, fairness—but I could tell he wasn’t confident in that anymore. I could tell he was embarrassed. I could tell he felt lost. As I leaned in to listen to him, I could feel him trembling. I almost felt sorry for him. “I’m sorry I did this—that I’ve brought you here. You shouldn’t be here Hayley. My family was never going to be free. I should have known better and kept you out of all of it. I’ve only made everything worse. You and Flynn deserve better. I’m so sorry.” He seemed to be conceding their death, his own death—our death. Well, I wasn’t. Not yet.

I grabbed him by the arm. “Listen to me. It’s too late to go back now. You need to be a soldier now—a fighter. There’s no turning around. You can’t take back anything you’ve done. Danny is either coming or he isn’t. We don’t know. But we’re six miles from the rendezvous point. We have to at least try to get there. You hear me?”

I was close enough to feel him nod. “Yes, but Boli’s not going to let my family go. He’ll kill them all.”

“Lazzo, hey.” I grabbed his face and forced him to look at me. “Maybe that’s true, but we die here and we’ll never know. We still have a shot. Don’t give up on them. Okay?”

He shrugged. “I—”

“Okay.” I looked around. “I’ve got to get Flynn out of that tree. Lazzo—hey, Lazzo… you with me?”

“Yeah, I’m with you.”

There we go. That’s a start. “Hold my bag.” I handed it to him.

He looked at me like I’d just given him a pink purse. “Where’s your bow?” he asked.