Jack Wilder - The Missionary

How could he not be attracted to her? But it wouldn’t—couldn’t—go anywhere past that.

Not when he still had nightmares of bullet-riddled bodies, and memories of pulling the trigger that sent those bullets. He woke up sweating and terrified most nights, reliving and remembering. Wren didn’t deserve that.

So, he kept to himself, watched the students, and watched the streets. Followed behind the group as they made their way to dinner, guarded the bathrooms while they took showers. Kept his hand near the cheap but functional 9mm pistol he’d gotten ahold of within hours of wheels-down.

He was starting to think his intuition had been wrong. The trip was days from completion and nothing bad had happened. Less than a week to go, and the students would be boarding a plane for the States. Which meant Wren would be safe. He prayed the next five days would go quickly. Yet, the feeling persisted. The troubled, gnawing sense of unease in his belly.

He refused to let anyone from the group leave the hostel without him, and without at least four other people. He slept with his pistol under his pillow, as lightly as if he was in the field with his unit again.

When he didn’t dream of the raid in Manila, he dreamed of Wren, of the hopeful gleam in her eyes when she’d told him she wished he would see her as someone other than a sweet, innocent girl.

Friday. Less than forty-eight hours before their flight out of Manila. They’d spent the last twelve hours going out in groups of six, Stone as escort and tour-guide, seeing sights and having fun, unwinding before leaving for home. Now, he was at the head of the last bunch of students, leading them through the thronging crowds. They’d had pho for dinner, bought trinkets and t-shirts and postcards and souvenirs. Having been on his feet since eight that morning, Stone was exhausted. Holding up the level of vigilance he had over the last three weeks was like tensing his muscles, not just for hours on end, but for days and weeks without stop. The mind and body just weren’t made for it. But he couldn’t relax. Not yet.

He stopped at an intersection and did a head count: all six students were there, including Wren. The traffic light turned, and he led them across the street, watching the traffic on all sides, scanning the crowds.

A squeal of tires. Angry shouts in Filipino. Stone whirled in place, shoving back through the crowd to the edge of the sidewalk. Wren and three others hadn’t made it across the street, and had been nearly run over by a taxi before scrambling back to the far sidewalk. Stone cursed under his breath. He met Wren’s eyes, pointed at her and mouthed stay there . She nodded, and Stone turned back to the two students who’d made it with him.

He herded them up against the wall, next to the doorway of a liquor store. “Stay here,” he ordered, his voice gruff, taking on the tone of command. “I mean it. Don’t move, not for anything. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t answer questions, nothing. Just stand right the f—right here. Got it?” The two students, a high school senior named Brett and a college freshman named Leslie, nodded, eyes wide. They clutched hands, and Stone clapped Brett on the shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

Stone brushed his hand against the butt of the pistol at the small of his back, hidden under his loose gray Navy T-shirt. Wren and the other students were still standing on the corner, waiting for the light to turn. It was a busy intersection, four lanes of crazy, honking, speeding traffic. The crowds were growing as evening neared, bringing with it relief from the heat and humidity. Stone bounced on his toes, keeping his eyes locked on the small knot of students, then burst into a run as the light turned and the waiting crowd on the other side surged into motion, carrying Wren and the other three with them. He caught Wren’s arm in his right hand, wrapping his left arm around the other three, and hustled them across the street, not breathing until they were safe on the other side with Brett and Leslie.

“Next time, run across. Don’t get separated again.” He met each of their eyes, received serious nods in return.

They made it back to the hostel, and Stone rested his aching feet before rounding up the last group, mostly volunteer staff and older college students. As they ate tacos and shopped, his sense of unease heightened. Every step had him scanning the crowds, hunting for the source of his fear. But like every day for the past two weeks, he saw nothing unusual. No tails, no suspicious faces.

Nonetheless, his gut churned as he led the last group back to the hostel.

And that was when it came, the disaster he’d been waiting for, half a block from the hostel.

“Stone! Stone!” Emily, one of Wren’s friends—a tall, slim girl with nut-brown hair. She was running toward him, panic scarring her face.

“Emily? Are you hurt?”

“No, no. I don’t know what happened! We went to the corner store to get some water, all four of us together. It wasn’t even a block, and we were all together the whole way, I promise! We even told John we were going. And then we turned around and she just wasn’t there, and we can’t find her!”

Stone felt his gut clench. “Take a breath, Em. Slow down. What happened? Who’s not there?”

“Wren! We can’t find her! She was with us, right there with us the whole time. And then she just wasn’t. We went back to the store but they hadn’t seen her since we left, and she’s not here, and—What if something happened to her? Where would she go? We have to find her! Please!” Emily was sobbing now, trying not to and failing.

Stone swore under his breath. “Where are the others you were with?”

“There.” She pointed to two guys, sophomores at UV with Emily and Wren.

The guys weren’t crying, but they were clearly upset. “What happened?” Stone demanded.

Doug told a version of Emily’s story. “We were like, a hundred feet from the hostel, and I turned around and realized Wren wasn’t with us. She just…she just vanished, man! I don’t know what happened. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make a noise, just…poof, gone.”

“Show me where you realized she was gone.” He pointed to other two. “You two, back to hostel. Tell John I said no one leaves. No one, for anything.”

Doug brought Stone to a spot a few hundred feet from the hostel, a random location on the sidewalk, just like any other. No sign of Wren, no clues. He stood and tried to think. Wren wouldn’t just run off without telling her friends. If she’d been hurt, she would have told them, made a noise. There wasn’t any blood anywhere, no dropped articles. Just a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, an electronics shop, and the entrance to an alley, dark, wet, and smelly.

“Anything else you can think of? Anything?”

Doug shook his head, long blond surfer-style shaggy hair flopping. “No, man. Nothing.”

Stone took a few steps into the alley. The concrete was wet and rucked and puddled, a dumpster on one wall, bags of trash and an abandoned men’s shoe, a broken wooden crate. A rusted, red-metal doorway led into the electronics shop on the left side, and on the right, a blank stone wall. At the end, another street, cars passing intermittently. Power lines overhead.

He turned in place, desperate for any clues, anything.

There. A cigarette butt on the ground. Crushed underfoot, but the white end of the cigarette was still white, recent. Not mud-stained or faded.

“Did a vehicle come out of this alley?”

Doug started to shake his head, then stopped. “Actually, yeah. A van or a truck or something. I don’t know. I was looking for Wren, but I do remember seeing some kind of vehicle pull out of here. I only noticed it because I was facing the alley, wondering if she’d gone back for something.”