I crouched under a blackberry thicket with a bundle of dry, dead branches that lay near my hand. I’d almost been caught flatfooted by four men and I was stuck in the briar patch with my bow on my back. Out of reach. Any movement, no matter how slow, to reach for the bow would draw their instant attention.
They moved ten feet apart and were clearly hunting prey. Human prey. Worse yet, one of them was recognizable even though it had been years since I’d seen him. Aiken. My blood froze as I remembered being in the same situation years earlier and in another state. My hand twitched. I wanted desperately to reach for the bow and nock an arrow yet I knew that any movement on my part would trigger an instant reaction from Aiken.
I assumed that they had found Morrell’s remains and from their quiet comments learned that they knew a bear had taken him. One of the three was sure that his death was entirely natural and the other three argued that no bear would have any interest in the human equipment. Aiken cursed them, warning that voices carried even as low as a whisper.
A blue jay landed near my head, bobbing its bright eye as he stared at me, trying to decide if I was a threat, a meal or part of the environment. He fluttered his wings, maintaining his precarious perch on the thin canes and dive-bombed Aiken as he neared me.
The jay caused a rapid reaction as all four men pivoted but it was Aiken that shot first. I watched in horror as the blue jay was obliterated in a shower of feathers as a silver tube hit the bird.
Their guns were not familiar to me; these looked more like modified hand weapons capable of firing a tranquilizer dart yet I also saw a .308 Weathersby rifle slung across Aiken’s back. Now that would take down Mama Grizzly with the right shot and I knew Aiken was capable of that.
He stopped, almost past me and turned around to survey the small cleared area where fire and wind had torn through, leaving enough space for sunlight and briars to take over the rough ground.
“Brings back memories, doesn’t it, Lakan?” He spoke in a conversational tone. “I remember finding you in a place very much like this once before. Do you remember? I know you’re out here, I found your fingerprints on Morrell’s gun barrel.”
His eyes swept the clearing, searching for the shadow that shouldn’t be there, the smallest quiver of a branch where there was no wind. I could not expect help from Tungasila’s spirit guide and to pray for help from the grizzly would be to risk her death from a bullet wound.
When a sign did come, I almost didn’t make use of it---the shock to me was nearly as great as theirs.
A girl walked out of the trees. Clad in pure white ceremonial buckskins, beaded with her hair in braids and feathers, she was an Indian maiden straight out of the history books. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled, startling all of us. As they swiveled to track her by gunpoint, she ran for the trees.
I saw them shoot her, but not one of their darts hit; they could not for she was a ghost. A chindi.
Only Aiken turned back but by then, I had lost my paralysis and stood, brought up the bow and nocked an arrow. Let the string go but I knew it was a miss before he saw me and dove to the ground, shouting for his men to return. I bolted downhill, taking huge leaps that would have impressed an elk yet he was up and after me.
I felt a sting in my thigh and brushed against the coveralls without slowing down. My fingers found a tear in the material and a thin scrape along the outside of my leg with just a small trace of blood. The damage was less than the wound I’d made with the tines of the fork so I ignored it. The trank dart had only creased me, not injected me with its powerful payload.
I headed for the thickest part of the forest risking a look behind when I thought I had sufficient distance from them. Aiken was still coming, his face in a grimace but he had his two-way at his mouth and was shouting orders and directions into it.
I leaped an old stone foundation, an old cabin had once stood there and all that remained were a few laid stones with trees growing out of what was once a 14x14 square.
“Lakan!” he shouted. “Stop! If you don’t stop, I will order DeCarlos and Little Bear terminated!”
Right then, I knew that they were already dead and stopped with a roar of grief. Beneath my feet, the rocks shifted and trembled. I aimed and let another arrow go hitting him in the center of his chest just as he triggered his own weapon. I swore that I saw the two projectiles cross each other’s path before they hit their intended targets.
Mine struck over his black heart yet he casually pulled it out as if it were a rubber suction tip from a child’s toy. His bobbled in my chest over my left lung, rising with my heart beat. I pulled it out, my movements sluggish and there was blood on the tip of the strangely hooked canister that was the size of a woman’s lipstick.
My knees wobbled. The other men caught up to him and surrounded me. I raised my bow with an effort; it weighed as much as a grizzly bear. Before I could shoot any of them, three more darts hit me. Time slowed. But not of my doing. This fractured block of time was of drugged perception as a massive overdose of sedative coursed through my bloodstream. I fell to the ground. This time, there was no flying through the air and a water landing to carry me away from capture. This time, there was no Great-Grandfather to save me.
Aiken’s face loomed over mine and he tore the bow and quiver out of my hands. He answered my unasked question by opening his coat and exposing a bullet and arrow-proof vest.
“Special made because we know you favor broadheads,” he grinned. “Base, this is Geronimo One, the target is acquired. Possible OD, the subject has taken four, I repeat, four doses of Special K.”
The light flickered at the edge of my vision. My body struggled to absorb the massive dose of Ketamine that I had taken. I felt time shift again in the middle of his words, his mouth paused midway, his eyes unblinking as I sat up. And fell over. Crawled on hands and knees, my breathing a series of constricted grunts as if my lungs were paralyzed. I wasn’t sure how far I could make it before time stretched back to normal. I knew it wouldn’t be enough so I kept crawling even when I wanted to lay down and die. Let the waves of sedation take me to that place where life was not compatible with living.
I threw up, each successive wave of retching made me feel worse and in the middle of one bout with my head hanging between my braced hands, spittle and drool strung from my mouth. I looked up to see a jagged side of the mountain broken by huge rocks and gnarled brush that fell away towards a river several hundred feet below.
Here was the ridge and cliff face that I was searching for, the backside of the cave where I’d stashed the FBI agents. For all the good it did me, they were too far to help. I would never make it around to them. Above me, frozen in the air hung a black helicopter with the sides open and men hanging out on ropes and tethers. Some had binoculars in their grip and were in the process of rappelling out, to join Aiken and to find me. It didn’t matter that time was frozen in the arctic past, I was too incapacitated to do much more than watch. I didn’t have any weapons on me, Aiken had removed all mine and the only piece of equipment I still possessed was the backpack. It had a rigid aluminum inner frame and tough nylon belting. I managed to stand upright and with the last of my strength, threw the pack at the rotors.
As soon as it left my hands, the backpack froze, motionless and unmoving like the rest of the world. Or at least, near me. I was reasonably sure that it affected everything not just those things close to me.
So, I jumped after it in a shallow, desperate dive. As my hands took hold of the nylon, time stretched as the material did, I pushed the frame into the rotors, let go, fell into the dangling rope and soldier just as the incredible stasis broke around us.
The man on the rope screamed in terror, the rotors shrieked in a high pitched howl, metal blades vibrated at unheard of stress as pieces of hot broken steel cut through metal and flesh with equal ease. The chopper exploded. Two of us swung at the end of a rope no longer tethered to anything but air as the rest of the crew followed the burning wreckage to the canyon floor. There, what was left turned into a fireball.
The black-clad BlackOps roper and I managed to spin on the rope, catch a tree’s crown and bounced our way from branch to branch. What I remembered most was the familiar smell of pine and cedar before we hit the ground. I fell as a limp doll, unconscious and rubber-limbed as a drunk that came through an accident without a scratch where a sober victim would have been killed. The other agent must have landed near me. But for all I knew, he could have landed on top of me and I wouldn’t have known or felt it. I never felt myself touch the ground.
Groans woke me but only to the point that I realized someone was alive. I wasn’t sure if I classified as one of the living and I was equally unsure if it was one of the crew members who had survived. It could have been Aiken and I was willing to bet that of all the people on the helicopter and the ground forces, that it would be the NSA agent that made it out alive.
Someone was dragging my unresisting body by the shoulders away from the burning wreckage. The smell of roasting flesh and Avgas caused a retching at the back of my throat. I vomited all over my front and that smell was worse than what was around me.
I couldn’t see who was taking me away; all I could see where my feet. Both my boots and socks were gone and from the state of my coveralls, I thought I was nearly stripped bare from the force of the explosion. Whoever it was removing me didn’t take any special care as they hauled me over torn metal, broken branches and shattered rocks. The only thing I didn’t hit was something on fire. That debris, my rescuer went around.
I tried to speak but my voice was disconnected, my comprehension that of a shell-shocked war victim. He seemed to haul me for miles or for hours and finally, I was dropped under the shade of some tree where it was cold and smelled fresh.
Only then did I see the face of my rescuer and my heart sank. Blackened by soot and fresh blood from a gash on his forehead, Aiken stared down at me with a blank expression and from the look in his eyes, I suspected that he was concussed for he didn’t seem to understand what was going on. I didn’t understand what was going on. To my utter consternation, he asked me who I was and what had happened.
“We crashed,” I mumbled and he shook his head leaning closer and closer until I realized that it was because he was falling. His head hit me in the face, chin smashing into my nose with a force greater than a punch. My nose broke and blood gushed. Unfortunately, most of it went down my throat making it hard to breathe. I lost what little awareness that I had, floating on a wave of pain, firefly sparks, iron in my mouth and a persistent ringing in my ears.
An equilibrium of sorts was reached as we lay together. Cast adrift from my own senses, I migrated towards his. I saw inside his mind, his hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I saw his brain swelling and dying from the force of the explosion and I was glad. And then, ashamed for even his life was precious. So, I put aside my own dislike and healed those things I could do without taking too much from my own. I healed his broken bones, organ failures, ruptured spleen until all that remained were his memories and swelling brain.
That was the hardest part for me and if I hadn’t been down that road before and had the practice, I would have taken too long to repair, losing those memories forever. Many areas of his brain were dark, dead and dying. As I triggered the return of their function, it drained me almost faster than I could recover with each cell and neuron.
As I finished, he shifted off my body and lay next to me in a quiet sleep that was neither sleep nor unconsciousness.
I had to get up and get away before he woke but my body refused to move still bound by the concrete accumulation of animal tranquilizers.
The ground trembled under my back. I wasn’t sure if it was more helicopters landing or approaching agents running up to me. I barely suppressed a scream when two people dropped to their knees at my side, hands busy roaming over my flesh and finding spots that hurt when they touched them. There were many.
Their voices were annoying buzzes in my ears and it wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I could read their lips. My ears did not work past the loud buzzing.
It was the two FBI men that I had left in the cave, both were armed with Sig Sauers as they checked me over. Anson’s lips formed words. “Lakan. Lie still, you’re bleeding and your arm and legs are broken for sure. I’m not so sure about anything else. Can you move anything?”
I couldn’t hear my answer but I felt the words in my chest. I thought I said, “you have to move me before the rest of their team gets here.”
“Your back or neck could be broken.”
“Doesn’t matter. Is anyone else hurt?”
Delaney must have said something but I couldn’t hear it. Anson said, “can you hear me, Lake?”
I watched his lips. “No. I’m reading your lips. My ears are---.”
Delaney leaned in towards my face. “The agent in the climbing rig is badly hurt. The rest of the chopper crew are toast.”
“Toast? Burnt? All in one piece?” I asked and he shook his head in denial.
“Not enough left to call hamburger,” he said frankly. “Even beyond your skills.”
“Bring me climber,” I said and he said no vehemently.
“Too much damage to move him, Lake. He’d die before I dragged him two feet and you’re hurt badly. Too badly to heal anyone but yourself.”
I pushed against Aiken and used him to get up, ignoring the sharp surge of broken bones. I had to fight against the two men’s protest not to move. Finally, they gave in to my determination and steered me towards the injured man.
It was weird walking without hearing any sound, even the thumping of my own heartbeat was missing. I found the man from the zip line lying tangled in the remains of his rope and downhill from where I’d landed.
Both of his legs were broken in compound fractures and the bones bleeding through the skin told me that one of his major arteries was in jeopardy. Not severed all the way but close from the spurting of blood. I grabbed that first and healed it before he could bleed out.
His insides were a mess. The more I explored, the more I found and each successive healing brought me to the edge of total collapse. I did just enough to keep him stable before Anson and Delaney dragged me away, yelling something but I still couldn’t hear them.
Trying to read their lips became nearly impossible as their faces grew darker and slower. I was moving away from them at the speed of sound when I felt myself picked up and thrown over someone’s shoulder. The rest of my recollections were fragmented and hazy. As if seen through the lens of a kaleidoscope. I scarcely remembered them, I knew I didn’t understand them---they were broken and painful.