Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“Andrew,” he heard Dani call out. He risked a peek around the truck’s front bumper and saw her crouched against the wall by the partially opened door. “Are you okay?”

“I’m hit,” he called back. Using the fender to brace himself, he tried to get to his feet. Each time he’d settle his weight against his injured leg, however, it would abruptly fail him, sending him crashing to his knees with a frustrated, hurting cry. “I can’t stand up.”

“Hang on. I’m coming,” Dani said. But as soon as she ventured a cautious step forward , new rounds burst out, plowing chunks out of the concrete near her feet and she scrambled back again, yelping in fright.

“Who’s out there, goddamn it?” she shouted. “We’re friendly, I said. Friendly!”

The shots stopped. As the resonant echoes subsided, a heavy silence fell upon the dark garage. Then, from outside, a soft but steady sound, the crunch of thick boot treads against concrete. Footsteps.

“I would have thought you’d be dead by now, Mister Braddock,” a voice called as a pair of legs stepped into view beneath the edge of the door. “I’ve given you plenty of opportunities.”

A familiar voice.

“Prendick,” Andrew seethed. When the bullets had flown again, he’d shrunk behind the truck’s tire, but raised himself enough now to look beyond the grill. As he watched, Major Prendick crouched down and entered the garage, crawling the way he’d undoubtedly learned in basic training ages earlier: on his belly, his rifle in his hands, his head raised so he could keep a wary eye ahead of him. Once inside, he stood again, sweeping his gaze cautiously around, waiting for his field of vision to adjust to gloom. Cocking the M16, he chambered a round, then clasped the gun at the ready.

“And you, Specialist Santoro,” he said. “I’m extremely disappointed in this gross dereliction of duty. This is going to go down in my report, I’m afraid, along with a recommendation you be brought up on official charges. You’re looking at a bad-conduct discharge, young lady, along with forfeiture of pay and jail time. All mandatory. I hope aiding and abetting Mister Braddock in the undermining of this facility and its operations has been worth it.”

Past the older man’s shoulder, Andrew saw Dani, even though Prendick hadn’t yet. She’d been crouching, motionless, in the shadows by the doorway, but moved her hand now, reaching for something lying on the floor. Andrew couldn’t make out what it was until she picked it up and it caught a wink of dim light—a monkey wrench. Looking across the garage, she met Andrew’s gaze, her eyes round and imperative.

He read her loud and clear.

“The only one guilty of anything around here, Prendick, is you,” he snapped, watching the man’s face whip in the direction of his voice. Prendick swung the gun toward him as well, his finger folding against the trigger, and with a yelp, Andrew scrambled back on his hands and knees as bullets peppered the front end of the truck. Within the confines of the garage’s interior, the sound was deafening, like overlapping rounds of cannon fire.

“You missed me,” Andrew yelled, once the echoes faded and the pungent stink of scorched gunpowder began to dissipate.

He heard the faint squeak of rubber against the floor as Prendick stepped toward him, then the older man chuckled. Andrew pressed himself onto his belly so he could look beneath the truck. He could see Prendick from the knees down, as well as Dani as she peeled herself away from her corner by the doorway and began inching along behind the Major, the wrench raised in her fist.

“You’re a good one to talk about dereliction of duty, you son of a bitch,” Andrew called out, baiting Prendick. “Since it’s your fault those guys in Alpha squad ended up monsters. Moore tried to tell you what would happen if you gave them the virus too fast, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“I’m having trouble deciding where I’m going to shoot you next, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, still in an odd, friendly sort of voice.

“You set up every soldier in this camp,” Andrew snapped. “They trusted you and you brought them out here to put that shit inside of them, use them as your goddamn guinea pigs.”

“Some place that won’t be immediately fatal,” Prendick continued, sounding unfazed.

“You mean like Idaho?” Andrew called back. “Because the way you shoot, that’s about all you’re going to hit, you dumb fuck.”

“Some place that’s sure to cause you excruciating pain,” Prendick said, then uttered a little a-ha! sound. “I know.”

Pivoting, he squeezed the trigger, shooting at Dani.

“No!” Andrew screamed, just as Dani’s anguished cry overlapped his own. She jerked in an erratic, convulsive dance as several of the rounds struck her, then she crumpled to the floor, laying in a sprawled, motionless heap.

“You son of a bitch,” Andrew howled at Prendick, groping at the body of the truck and kicking vainly with his feet as he struggled to rise. Again and again, his foot failed him and he collapsed. “You son of a bitch!”

Prendick smiled as he turned away from Dani and approached the truck. “I’ve done my duty at this outpost,” he said to Andrew. “Just like I’m doing it now.”

“ Duty? Thomas O’Malley is dead because of you. Lieutenant Carter’s dead. All of the soldiers in Alpha squadron, everyone who was stationed here, they’re all dead now because of what you. That’s your duty?”

“The United States government expects results, Mister Braddock,” Prendick replied coldly when he stepped around the front fender. Shouldering the rifle, he took aim at Andrew’s face. “A return on their investment. Lieutenant Carter wasn’t prepared to give that to them. Nor, as it turns out, was Dr. Moore. But their failings—their weaknesses, Mister Braddock—are not my own, I assure you. I am unafraid to embrace risk in the name of duty, to suffer necessary casualties as a result of those responsibilities.”

The headlamps of a truck facing them, less than twenty feet away, abruptly snapped on, pinning Andrew and Prendick in a sudden, broad swath of bright light.

“What the—?” Prendick turned as Andrew squinted against the blinding glare, trying to shield his eyes with his hand. He heard the growl of the engine revving, the squall of its thickly treaded tires against the garage floor. Like a Rottweiler turned loose from its leash to lunge at a would-be intruder, the enormous vehicle plowed forward.

Andrew had less than a second to scrabble backwards in frantic alarm, ducking beneath the truck behind him. Flat on his belly, he clapped his hands over his head, his frightened cry drowned out by the roar of M-923 five-ton cargo truck’s diesel engine as it slammed into the one above him. When one truck’s massive bumper plowed headlong into the other’s broad, steel-plated flank—mashing Prendick like so much peanut butter in a sandwich between them—it sounded like the eruption of some great and terrible volcano, a caldera of epic and catastrophic proportions that had lain dormant for millennia, its inner stew of magma and searing gases released in a sudden, apocalyptic explosion. The floor beneath Andrew shuddered violently; a sharp blast of wind from the point of impact buffeted him and the screech of metal against metal, twisting, warping, bending, snapping, ripped through the air. The force was enough to shove the truck over Andrew’s head sideways a good three feet, and after a long moment in which he huddled against the floor, shaking and shaken, he lifted his head, wide-eyed and breathless, to find himself blinking at the scorched, stinking treads of the other truck’s left front tire. It had come to a stop less than two inches from Andrew’s head.