Anson slapped my face to rouse me and the first face I saw wasn’t either one of theirs. It was Aiken’s puzzled face that caught my attention and reminded me of my present situation. He spoke and I still could not hear anything save for a curious rushing sound in both ears. Even my own voice did not come back to me.
Someone must have told him so, for he picked up my hand and placed my fingers on his lips. The better to read them, he thought. His eyes had lost that sharp, harried look but his question stunned me.
“Why?” he asked, his face pale under the sun brown of an outdoorsman. “Why did you save me?”
“You remembered?” I asked painfully, aware that I was a sitting duck and that he could capture me at any time.
“I remember dying. Yet, you risked your own life and liberty to save mine when I was destroying yours. Why?”
“Isn’t it enough that I did?” I returned.
“No. It would have been smarter to let me die. You hate me. I wouldn’t be here now, ready to bring you in.” He looked over at the two FBI men with their weapons aimed at him. I couldn’t see their mouths move but they must have said something to him for he replied.
“I know you wouldn’t let that happen, Assistant Director Anson. Or you think so. My death wouldn’t stop Director Chase or Dr. Cameron from sending another team or coming himself. I’m living proof of the reason that they’ll never stop searching for him. Nothing you can do will stop them.”
“What happened to George and Leon?” I asked in fear for I had to know the answer. To his credit, he hesitated.
“We picked them up in Canada at the border, tagged and released them. They didn’t know they were tagged until we cornered them at the rendezvous point on the river. Mr. Little Bear drowned trying to escape across the river and Mr. DeCarlos disappeared into the woods near there. No one had been able to locate him, even with the tags. We suspect he’s dead, too. The microchip only works if the subject is alive.”
“You didn’t kill him?” I searched his face, reading the micro-tells that revealed if he was lying or not. I saw no evidence that he was telling me anything but the truth before he said it.
“No. But that doesn’t mean someone else didn’t do it.” He paused. “Chase likes to get his hands dirty and Cameron has developed a taste for field work, too.”
“If Leon is alive, he’ll find a way to the rendezvous point,” I said. He held up his hand.
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Why? I thought all you wanted was to capture me and bring me back to them.”
“Lakan, you saved my life. I was dying and you stopped to heal me. I would have forgiven you if you’d just stayed with me until the end. No man should die alone but you gave me life, knowing that I would come after you.”
“Maybe I did it so you would understand and let me go,” I suggested and he laughed.
“You healed my brain and saw my heart, Lakan Strongbow. You think I didn’t see who you are?”
He hauled me to my feet, all six foot two of him and held me as I wobbled. While I’d slept or been unconscious, my body had healed enough so that my broken bones were no more than aches yet I was so exhausted that standing was still an effort. Behind me, I heard odd rumblings that became noises, the babbling of everything around me all jumbled together in an onslaught of noise that my brain had trouble decoding. Until suddenly, I heard individual voices.
“I can hear you!” I shouted and there wasn’t silence because I could still hear birds, rustling trees and even the groaning of the earth. My grumbling stomach. With hearing came the sharpening of my other senses.
All of us looked as if we had come through an explosion. We had. Clothes ripped to shreds, torn, soot covered with blood-soaked rags. Faces in desperate need of washing and trimming. Hungry eyes. The FBI men looked a day or so cleaner than I, Aiken the worst. But Delaney and Anson had weapons and gear where Aiken had nothing on him but me. He checked my ears.
“No blood, no concussion. That’s good. Follow my finger,” he ordered and I pushed that digit down.
“I’m healed, no concussive side effects, no ruptured tympanic membrane. Question is, what are you going to do about us?” I snapped point blank. I thought I knew the answer but I wanted him to vocalize it.
“Hell, Lakan. What do you think? You saved my life, you made me the same as the Jacobi girl, like Mike Faraday and the others you healed. We’re part of your underground family now. I could no sooner turn you in than I could myself.” He went through his pants and pulled out a slim sat-phone, obviously one that the two FBI had missed. They had the grace to look embarrassed. Instantly, the two had him under the sights of their guns but I turned slowly and told them to holster them.
We listened as Aiken contacted his home base. They were frantic, trying to get info on the chopper and its crew.
“This is Rogue One, Base. Come in, Base. This is Rogue one. Do you copy?”
There was a burst of static and their voices rose, calling, one after the other so that all were garbled.
“Shut up!” Aiken shouted. “I can’t hear you!”
“This is Chase, Aiken,” a louder voice broke in. “Give me a sit-rep.”
“The chopper crashed,” Aiken reported. “That kid---he did something, threw something big into the rotors and the whole thing blew apart. Jacobson made it out alive, I gave him basic first aid and left him at the crash site. He wasn’t hurt bad, caught a tree on the way down.”
“The boy,” Chase demanded. “How is the boy? Have you acquired him?”
“He’s dead, Chase. We hit him with four doses of Special K and the chopper blades took his head off at the shoulders.”
There was utter silence for a moment. “Cameron said he can use his DNA.”
“No can do. The body burned in the chopper fire. The only thing left is a handful of his hair I snatched off his head before it exploded in the heat.”
I grimaced at the image of my head and brains doing that and nearly yelped as he pulled out a handful of hair, grinning at me as I grimaced back.
“What are your coordinates?”
“Thanks for asking about my health. I’m fine, by the way. A few sprains, cuts and a mild concussion,” Aiken spoke dryly. “I found the two FBI agents. They were left behind by the boy.”
“Bring them in. Where are you?”
Aiken looked around. We were at the bottom of a ridge between two mountains. Both sides were rocky with tall conifers covering most of the slopes but I could see a thin trail winding across the one ridge. “Somewhere over the next ridge. I'll get back to you when I calculate my position. Out.” He thumbed the off button.
Spirals of smoke trailed lazily across the sky, residue from the crash and miles away. We were in Horseshoe Canyon if my memory served me. A box canyon, the only way in or out was directly in front of us and led to a Forest Service road out. The trail I saw on the ridge went only to a rocky outthrust that stood over the valley and dropped five hundred feet to the Dolores River. It wasn’t a route that two desk agents and a previously injured pair could manage.
“They’ll be sending another chopper to pick us up,” Aiken said. “You should go.”
I looked at the pair and interrupted before they could protest. “You can’t come with me and I’m not coming back with the FBI or the NSA. I have to find Leon and my friends. Will you let me do all that or are you going to be a part of killing the god your doctor has created? Killing me?”
Anson looked at me steadily, his face dirty, scratched by briars and limbs with a three-day-old beard. “Don’t you know, Lakan Strongbow died in that helicopter crash?” He held out the last of the backpacks with the last of the gear and supplies. Somehow, they had found my bow and quiver, the quipp and two canteens.
Delaney took off his Carhartt coat and placed it over my shoulders, squeezing me as if I were a favorite son. Aiken handed me his maps.
“North is that way.” He pointed over my shoulder back towards the wreckage of the chopper. “I would suggest that you avoid that area, Chase will have teams scouring the crash site. I’d go west and then cut back north but don’t tell me. If I don’t know, I can’t lie.”
I shook their hands and before I could feel the lump dissolve in my throat, I faded into the brush. I was gone from their sight in minutes but I caught the low murmur of their goodbyes far longer until the slow thunder of approaching Black Hawks drowned their voices out.
Fear made me forget my exhaustion and I made as many miles that night as I could wring out of a body made sluggish by the healings I had performed. Through it all, the sound of the helicopters and men hunting drove me on.