Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“Keep shooting,” he screamed to Dani, scrambling backwards, yanking Alice away from Prendick.

“Come on!” Dani cried out over the booming reports of gun fire.

“Can you run?” he asked Alice, hooking his arm around her waist, As he stumbled to his feet, he leaned on the girl to keep from putting his weight on his maimed side.

“Can you?” she gulped back, eyes wide and frightened, all-too aware of the pain he was in.

“Yeah,” he said through gritted teeth. I have to, he thought. Furrowing his brows, he bit back a strained cry as he forced himself to try anyway, in the end dragging his right foot behind him.

“Close the door,” he yelled to Dani as he dove back onto the pavement outside, holding Alice pinned against him, her face tucked into the nook of his shoulder. “Close it. Hurry!”

Once he was clear, Dani threw the gun aside and seized the door again. Even in the dim light and heavy shadows inside, he could see that Prendick was on the move again. The deformities in his face and head as the battered tissue regrew, swelling out in protruding masses, soon swallowed any distinguishable from his silhouetted form. There wasn’t anything evenly remotely human left in that shape.

Gritting her teeth, Dani heaved with all of her might. Andrew limped upright and helped her, falling against the door, putting all of his weight against it as he pulled. With a sudden, shuddering lurch, the door came crashing down, slamming into the plane of concrete beneath it.

From the other side of the door, they heard Prendick screech, that inhuman, furious sound, then the metal plate shook as he barreled into it from the opposite side. Over and over again, he battered into the door, causing it to shake violently in its tracks.

“He can’t get through,” Dani said, her voice breathless and shaking, on the verge of hysteria. She looked at Andrew, wild-eyed and trembling, her face and clothes blood-soaked and torn, and began to laugh. “He can’t get through! Oh, my God. We did it.”

He hooked his arm around her and they crumpled together. She shuddered in his embrace, clutching at him, laughing and sobbing all at the same time. Beyond her shoulder, he could see Alice staring, glassy-eyed and shell-shocked at the garage, watching it shake with each furious blow.

“Alice.” Easing away from Dani, he reached for her, crumpling to his knees so that when she stumbled hesitantly toward him, he could fold her into his arms. She didn’t weep, didn’t make a sound, but simply shivered against him, her fingers twining anxiously against the front of his shirt.

“It’s alright.” He kept saying that over and over, mantra-like, as he rocked her back and forth. “It’s alright now, Alice. I promise. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“My daddy’s dead, isn’t he?”

Alice had found the keys to one of the compound’s Humvees, and the hulking truck jostled and bounced beneath them as Dani drove them down the mountain toward the highway. As she had on the night Andrew had first met her, she sat behind the wheel, clutching it in her hands with such force, her knuckles had turned white, and the dim light from the dashboard instruments cast her face in an eerie glow.

Andrew sat in the back with Alice curled beside him, her head resting on his shoulder. He’d found some blankets in the rear of the truck and wrapped them around her. Dani had the heater going full blast, belching hot air throughout the cab, but still Alice trembled like a dried leaf caught in a maelstrom at his side.

As she spoke, her voice was small and tremulous. Her hair was damp with grime. He could see the pale skin of her scalp in places where the locks had clumped and coiled together and the sutured edge of one of her most recent trepanation wounds.

“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered.

Because that’s what people say when they find out someone’s dead, Dani had told him once, back when he’d still thought of her only as Specialist Santoro, before he’d come to understand that everything he’d felt for Lila Meyer had been a lie, a pale and distant shadow to what love would truly be when he stumbled across it.

Alice looked up at him, her large, dark eyes swimming with tears. Lost. That was how she looked. He recognized that disconnect and shock that had glazed over her eyes. He’d seen it in his mother’s, as well as his own, when Beth had succumbed to lupus.

Lost.

“Did you cry when your sister died?” she asked.

Andrew nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I cried a lot.”

“Oh, good.” She offered a crooked smile, her tears spilling. “Then I’m doing it right.”

The nearest hospital was in Pikeville, the eight-story regional medical center housed in a building of unexpectedly contemporary design, fronted on all sides with smoky glass windows, sharp angles and a cool, clinical façade. Dani pulled the Humvee beneath an overhang in the back outside of the emergency ward, the place where ambulances customarily docked to deliver patients.

“You can’t tell them anything about what happened,” she said, turning in her seat to look at Andrew. Alice had long-since fallen asleep during the nearly two-hour drive, and rested with her cheek against his heart. “Only that you got shot, okay? Just let me handle it.”

He started to ask why, righteously indignant, then remembered what Suzette had told him upon his arrival at the camp. Top secret. Hush hush.

“I’ll call my C. O. in New York,” Dani was saying, only now she seemed to be talking more to herself than to him. Like Andrew, she was in shock from both blood loss and pain, and rocked in the driver’s seat back and forth, like a little girl in need of the bathroom. “He’ll know what to do. There’s a base in Fort Knox. They can send someone to take care of things.”

A man in a rent-a-cop uniform tapped on the Humvee window, a hospital security guard. When Dani jumped in surprise, then opened the door, he stepped back a wary distance and studied her for a moment, taking into account her ghastly pallor and shell-shocked eyes, her wet, blood-stained clothes and battered, disheveled appearance.

“What seems to be the trouble, miss?” he asked, suspicious enough to drape his hand against the sidearm he wore holstered at his hip, to flip back the restraining strap with his thumb to allow himself ready access to the pistol if needed.

“I’m Specialist Daniela Santoro, with the U.S. Army National Guard.” Dani held up her hands, palms facing the guard. “There’s been an accident. I have civilians in my truck.” At this, the guard glanced past her into the Humvee, catching sight of Andrew and Alice, now roused somewhat and blinking in sleepy bewilderment. “Please,” Dani said, drawing the man’s gaze again. “We need help.”

“Andrew Braddock?” one of the nurses asked, a fresh-faced kid who looked for all the world like he’d just graduated from high school.

They had just finished transporting Andrew inside, having transferred him from a wheeled stretcher to a hospital bed in a brightly lit emergency room bay. They’d begun removing his clothes and connecting a variety of medical equipment and instruments to him, an automatic blood pressure cuff around his arm, a pulse and blood oxidation monitor to the tip of his index finger.

“Where’s Dani?” he’d asked repeatedly. “Where’s Alice? Please, are they alright? I want to see them.”

The hospital staff bustled and buzzed around him, a ceaseless blur of uniforms and faces, people talking to him, around him and about him. It was enough to make his head—dazed to begin with—spin all the more. He couldn’t imagine how terrifying and bewildering it would be for poor Alice.