The man was local so he knew the area better than I did. All I could think of to do was run towards the road and pray that he didn’t shoot me and that we’d see a car coming on the main road before he could reach us. I prayed that we might run into the other searchers looking for her and that they were armed.
By the time we hit the paved road, he had reached the bottom of the cliff and was running for a section where he could cut us off. I didn’t know that so as we ran down the center line in the direction of what I hoped was the Walmart, he stepped out of the woods in front of me. I skidded to a stop and put Sami behind me as I looked for a direction to run. He leveled the pistol and I bolted, dragging the girl with me off the shoulder of the road and back into the woods. The boom of the big gun frightened both of us and made the birds flutter out of the trees. Something smacked me in the back, nearly dropping me to my knees but I managed to keep going as I pushed branches out of the way and slivers of bark hit my arms and face as his bullets came close.
“Run, Sami!” I shouted, my eyes searching for something, anything to help me. I saw a stand of hemlocks that had grown too large and too old, had rotted and fallen over in a massive deadfall. Dragged her trembling body into a split between two rotten trunks and told her to hide in the cleft.
Clambered back over the deadfalls leaving no obvious sign until I was well past space where I had hidden her and then left tracks in my direction so he could follow me. My feet stumbled and I nearly fell, leaning on a maple to help hold me upright. My lungs struggled to bring in the air but I couldn’t get any relief.
My hand was red. I pulled it up to my eyes and saw bright red blood. My knees collapsed and bright spots sparked in my vision. I fell to the forest carpet and it was cold and musty, my fingers scrabbling in the leaves as I tried to drag myself forward.
The first inkling I had that he had found me were his fingers in my hair jerking my head out of the leaves and rolling me over. “Who the hell are you?” he asked furiously. I could barely see his face; his eyes were two dark holes in a tan blob but I could smell him. Stale body odor and wood smoke, dirty clothes that had not seen a washing machine in years. He wore coveralls and hiking boots, the Marshal’s gun held steady in his big hands. His nails were black and cracked.
“You’re shot, boy. You only got minutes, you is bleeding out from a lung wound.” He laughed and tugged at my pants. I couldn’t understand what he was doing until the cold air hit my belly and he stuck his finger in my ass. I screamed but it was all of a thin rabbit’s bleat that made him all the more eager.
“Where’s the girl? I been watching her for weeks. Tell me where you stashed her and I’ll make this quick.” He fumbled for his fly and his dick sprung out, fully engorged and ugly as a warthog. Huge, big enough to tear me apart. He was drooling with lust as he stared at me.
He grunted and his eyes rolled up in his head. I watched in indifference as if what was happening was not related to me, a three-foot arrow went through him, the broadhead erupting from the center of his chest like an obscene flower growing from his corpse. He fell backward, his hand still tight on the .45, his dying brain telling his fingers to pull the trigger. The boom of the pistol was the last sound in my head before I passed out, drowning in my own blood.
*****
Voices rang over me. Loud noises that bothered me. In some fashion, I knew that loud noises were dangerous to us. I moaned and a face hovered over mine. I was shaking from side to side as if I were being carried on a stretcher. Or I was on a small gauge train.
“Where is she, Lake?” I didn’t know that voice but it sounded official. By straining my eyes, I was able to pick out a group of police and rescue workers, all gathered in the clearing where I had fallen. The dead man lay off to the side and covered by a blue tarp. The sun was much lower on the horizon than I remembered.
“In a tree, deadfall, uphill,” I mumbled. “Marshal’s dead. Dog?”
“The Marshal isn’t dead, Lake. Knocked out, came to and the dog is with him. He called for help with his cell phone. We need to get you down the mountain and airlifted to the hospital,” the deputy said. “But first, we have to find where you hid Sami.”
I searched for Mairy and her face looked frightened. By her side stood Leon and Robin. In Robin’s hand, he held a compound bow and across his shoulder hung a quiver of hunting arrows.
We waited. Leon and my companions made vocal protests at the delay and were seconded by the paramedics. I drifted in and out, my healing ability on the fritz because of the expenditure of energy that I had put out. Puzzlement filled me; I was almost positive that he had been dead and my help had come too late and not enough to fix his injuries.
Shouts preceded a crowd of uniformed men and women. Shouts that announced that they had found Sami. A tall man in a sheriff’s khaki carried her little pink clad body into the clearing. As soon as she saw me, she demanded to be put down and she ran to my side.
I saw myself in her eyes, white-faced, pale as death, sweaty with IVs in both arms and fluid flowing into me like the Nile in the flood. Blood staining my chest through my clothes and a mass of bandages piled over my ribs.
“Laky,” she cried and gently laid her blonde curls on my chest, careful not to hurt me. “The bad man shot you?”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “But he’s dead. Can’t hurt you anymore. Or anyone else.”
The paramedic looked at the Sheriff. “Now can I call Life Flight? Before we lose him?”
I coughed and blood sprayed her face. Gagged as more blood filled my throat as I struggled to breathe through an increasing deluge in my lungs. Cried out but no sound left my throat. My vision narrowed to a tiny tunnel and all I could see was a hazel eye, a black pupil, and darkness.
*****
Cameron, Chase, and the teams saw the Life Flight helicopter land in the field just off the dam access road and from the Walmart parking lot. The doctor hacked into the police channel to eavesdrop on the activity. Aiken reported that a child had wandered off and a search was underway for her but it had changed to a suspected child abduction with a U.S. Marshal injured and the suspect killed. A child was shot in critical condition but hadn’t been air-lifted yet because he was the only one who knew the location of the abducted girl.
Immediately, they knew that it was Lakan involved and both Cameron and Chase cursed. “Shot?”
“Through the back, exited the chest, lung hit. He’s hemorrhaging out,” Aiken reported. They watched the chopper lift off and bank, heading for the nearest trauma center.
“They’ll take him to Washington General, it’s the Level I Trauma Center in D.C. It’s the best place and the closest,” Cameron stated.
“Why isn’t he healing himself?” Chase demanded.
Cameron stared out over the parked cars in the Walmart lot. “Maybe he can’t. Maybe he used so much of himself healing others, there’s nothing left for him.”
“What are we going to do, Dr. Cameron?”
“Nothing. If you try to move him before he’s stabilized, he could expire. We need to let the ER surgeons do what they do. Once he’s recovered from surgery, then we can step in and remove him.”
“The FBI?” Morrell questioned. “They’re here, too.”
“Along with every other intelligence agency in the U.S.,” Aiken said sourly. “What do you want us to do, sir?”
“Sarah Hamilton had a stroke today,” the director said. “She’s not expected to survive. She left everything to the grandson and told the lawyers who the boy really is. The President now knows the truth about him as well.”
“Hamilton or Houston?” Cameron asked naming the former and the present President.
“Both.” Chase stared at the departing air ambulance. “What a cluster fuck this is turning out to be. Get everyone to Wash Gen as quick as you can. Aiken, you and Cameron come with me in the chopper. I want to talk to both of those paramedics, the kid rescued and the Marshal as soon as possible. Get me all the info on the dead kidnapper.” He stalked off to his vehicle and ordered the driver to take them back to the helipad.
*****
The flight nurse kept pushing words into my head. Sometimes I heard them clearly, others were just droning noises that kept me from the soothing darkness. I was spinning in a vortex, twirling and whirling in slow parabolic swings that kept me dizzy. I felt light and insubstantial as if my body had suddenly become pounds thinner. A puff of air or thistledown would weigh more than I. I wondered if I was dying and tried to laugh. They said I couldn’t die. The nurse thought I was trying to say something.
I felt it when the whatever I was in landed. It was a gentle bump but it still made me cry out in pain yet no one heard me. The air rushed in with cold and vicious fingers as the hatch opened, bright lights burned my retinas and blinded me. The stretcher became a gurney, a magic carpet and they ran, they flew me into the arms of waiting blue cranes. Down a long hallway where doors magically opened, the sun followed burning brightly overhead as I flew surrounded by blue ibises on long stilt legs.
I screamed when the storks slid me onto a cold slab inside the refrigerator and a hawk tore off my clothes with stainless steel beak and talons as a spider crawled up my arms and bit me. They put a pillow over my face and held it down until I couldn’t breathe in even as they blew the air in my face.
*****
“Vitals?” the ED doctor demanded as the trauma team cut off the boy’s clothes. The paramedic calmly relayed the STATS as they transferred the IVs over to the poles on the gurney.
“BP is 65/42, pulse is 130 and thready. He’s diaphoretic, bleeding from two GSWs in the upper thoracic cavity. Entered from the posterior. We gave him two boluses of lactated ringers to get his volume up and 4ml morphine sulfate. His respirations are 12, shallow with a pneumothorax on the right side. Inserted a chest tube and drained off 450cc of blood.”
“Let’s prep him for surgery after x-rays,” the surgeon ordered. “Let’s do this before he bleeds out, people.”
“What’s his name?” One of the nurses asked. “Any info on medical history?”
“His name is Lake, he’s 15-16 maybe and he saved a little girl from a child molester, found her when no when else could. And maybe a US Marshal, too.”
“I can’t wait to hear that story. Is this Marshal coming here? Is he injured?”
The paramedic stared her in the eyes. “He said he was pushed off a 100-foot cliff by the perp and broke his neck. He said he died. And this kid came back, fixed him somehow and dragged his body out of harm’s way. He’s coming in with a broken pelvis, arm, and several ribs. A concussion but he’s alive. In shock but alive. And his neck shows a healed fracture at C3.”
The entire trauma team stared at the paramedic and the boy in utter silence as the machine recorded his vitals in the background. The hiss of O2 going into his lungs was the loudest sound in the room until it was broken by the heart monitor’s alarm as it rang in a flat line.
“V-fib,” the doctor said calmly. The team flew into action. The EMT stepped back out of the way as they tried one drug after another with no results. Until finally, he cracked open the boy’s chest, reached in and massaged the flaccid heart with long slender fingers. With utter disbelief and shock, they saw a faint blue light emerge from the boy’s chest and bathe them all in its penumbra.
Every one of them felt the first trembling flutter as the boy’s heart began to beat and kept beating as they rushed him up to the OR, the doctor’s hand around the muscle all the way there.
Only when he was given over to the cardiac surgeon did the doctor release his grip and watched the blue glow fade.