“Bear!” Jamie’s scream barely cut through the bellows of the creature, and the night erupted into chaos.
I hurled myself toward the truck, and hot breath blasted at the back of my neck, my ears ringing with the roar of the infuriated predator.
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!
Chris opened up with the M60, but the bear just reared higher on her monstrous legs and swung a dinner-plate sized paw at the gun turret.
Metal sheared, the gun stopped firing, and the truck rocked under the force of the blow. Jamie and the other rangers scattered, their rifles blazing angry trails of fire into the night, but the bear didn’t seem to notice their bullets.
Fast as lightning, the creature swatted Darren into a nearby tree, his body flying end-over-end. Even with my ears ringing, and the gunfire in the background, I heard his bones crunch under the force of the impact.
Fumbling with the bolt of my submachine gun, I accidentally hit the magazine release, and dropped to my knees to snatch my mag from the dirt.
Come on, come on, load, load, load!
Pierce’s gun jammed, and he tried to run, but the angry bear pinned him to the ground with one pounce. Her claws sank into his back as if it were butter, and the bear brought her jaws down around his head.
The downed ranger let out a high, agonized shriek.
Crunch.
Whipping her head to the side, the bear tossed what remained of Pierce over the edge of the cliff, before turning back to where I sat in the muck.
Bright red blood dripped from her crooked teeth, some at angles pushing out from under the bear’s lips, a mass of razor-sharp enamel that could easily cut through my skinny corpse. Her beetle-black eyes bore nothing but blind hatred for me, for us, for anyone who would threaten her precious cub, and I knew my gun would do me no good. Nine-millimeter couldn’t stop a bear this big.
“The truck!” Tyler dashed forward to empty his rifle into the bear, placing himself between me, and the beast. “Get to the truck, move!”
Hands seized the back of my shirt and dragged me over the ground so fast that I didn’t have time to stand.
“Get up!” Jamie stopped by the truck to haul me to my feet, her eyes wild, the bolt on her AK locked open on an empty magazine. “Go, go, go!”
Tyler let out a grunted shout, and I looked back in time to see him drop his smoking rifle and meet the bear’s swipe with his knife. His blade bounced harmlessly off the beast’s armored hide, and Tyler folded in half under the muscled paw, his broken body tumbling over the cliff’s edge.
The armored door to the compartment swung open, and Chris reached out to help me inside, his old-fashioned pistol clutched in one hand. “Come on, I’ve got you—Jamie, look out!”
Jamie dove into the truck beside me, a streak of black missing her by mere inches to tear one of the metal doors off the vehicle.
From the diver’s seat, Blane revved the engine, but the world tilted, and it hit me in an instant as to why.
It’s got our tires.
Driven by primal rage, the bear jammed its head and left foreleg into the compartment doorway, clawing and snapping at our feet, the metallic stench of blood on its rank breath. Pressed back against the cab of the truck, Jamie, Chris, and I barely had room to pull our legs in to avoid the barrage of teeth, the truck rocking into a 45-degree angle off the weedy gravel. The truck wheels spun helplessly in the air, and I couldn’t even hear myself screaming for all the roaring, metal screeching, and engine revving.
Chriss kicked at the snout of the bear with his boot and poked the long barrel of his antique handgun into its face.
Bang.
Groaning in pain and anger, the bear yanked its head out of the compartment, and slammed the truck over and over with a series of furious paw-slashes. Both back tires blew out, the sides of the pickup armor dented inward, and the entire rig rolled over. Gear tumbled like rain around me, gravity pulled at my limbs, and panic surged in my veins.
I dug my fingers into the nearest seat in a desperate attempt to keep from being thrown around like a rag-doll and caught a glimpse of the world passing by outside the ruined doors of the compartment.
Oh no.
“Grab onto something!” Jamie yelled, and I watched in terror as the cliff’s edge slid past us.
All at once, we were weightless.
My world spun like a washing machine between abyssal darkness rushing up, and the triumphant bear looking down from the cliffside, as gravity seemed to shut off, and air rushed into the truck from all sides. Jamie curled into a ball over a toolbox bolted to the floor, Chris swung from the nearby machine gun support like a flag in the wind, and I wrapped both legs around the seat I clung to. Over and over we bounced off obstacles, either trees or rocks, I couldn’t be sure, mud and leaves flying in from all directions. A plate of the steel armor peeled away like dead skin from a blister, and branches crunched under the squeal of collapsing metal. The truck’s alarm briefly went off, a final woo-woo-woo of civilization for the last few yards.
Wham.
Metal groaned, glass clinked, and displaced earth crumpled to a halt.
I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, my head still spinning in dizzy circles. My body ached from being pummeled by loose items that lay all around me, and I didn’t dare open my eyes, for fear of what injuries I might discover. The ringing in my ears stung, high and shrill, and I tasted coppery blood in my mouth. Nothing else moved, and my heart pounded on double-time.
Calm down, Hannah. You’ve got to calm down. Check and see if you’re hurt.
Forcing my eyes to open, I slowly moved my head from side to side, waiting for a shooting pain to tell me that I’d broken my neck.
Nothing.
I wiggled my arms, legs, fingers, and toes.
Still, nothing.
Bringing my hand to my face, I touched my nose to be sure it wasn’t broken. While it did throb, the pain wasn’t that bad, though my fingers came away sticky with blood. I definitely had some bruises, and my ribs were on fire, but so far, I seemed to be intact.
Stunned, I shoved a tangled bundle of rope off my legs and sat up.
My stomach rolled, the motion too much too soon, and I couldn’t stop the tide. I vomited onto the cold steel of what had been the right side of the compartment wall, the greasy substance spattering like chunky salsa. Thankfully I didn’t have much to throw up, what with the meager communal rations and weak tea from New Wilderness, but it still tasted horrible, sour and acidic.
Once the nausea subsided, I spat, wiped my mouth, and squinted into the shadows around me. It was dark, very dark, and I figured my headlamp must have flown off during the tumble from the clifftop. The truck’s engine had stalled sometime after the first or second impact on the way down, and none of its lights worked anymore. Unburned diesel fuel, and my own putrid vomit stank up the air to choke me, along with the coppery scent of blood.
Wait . . . what if it’s not all mine?
“Jamie?” I whispered into the darkness, my voice raw and shaky. “Chris? Is anyone there?”
Only the ringing in my ears responded, and my heart twinged with terror. I couldn’t be alone, not out here. I didn’t know where I was, or what to do. I couldn’t even see without my light, and what if the bear came down after me? I didn’t even know where my gun was.
Crawling slowly over the interior of the truck, I fumbled around in the dark until my fingertips brushed rough denim.
Oh please, please don’t be dead, please . . .
My heart jumped, and I traced the leg up to a set of shoulders, above which sat a patch of close-cropped hair. “Chris? Chris, wake up. Please wake up, come on. Chris.”
His shoulders twitched, and a cough rang through the shadows. “Who’s there?”
Tension melted from my shoulders, and I swallowed a relieved sob, his voice pulling me back from the razor-edge of panic. “It’s me.”
Without thinking, I tried to help him sit up, but the moment I touched Chris’s right shoulder, he yelped in pain, and my hand came away slick and stickier than before.
“Sorry.” I patted his knee in a fervent apology, unable to see his face in the blackness. “A-Are you okay?”
Rustling around in the dark, Chris grunted a few times, and sucked in a pained gasp. “Yep, all good.”
Liar.
My eyebrows shot upward, though I knew he couldn’t see my disbelieving face. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll be fine.” A soft hushed grinding clicked in the abyss, followed by a burst of yellow light. “Not my first crash landing.”
I shielded my eyes with one palm, and saw a small zippo lighter, its flame dancing merrily on the cotton wick. Chris sat only a few feet away, his right shirt sleeve smeared with red from a nasty gash across his upper arm. He had a leaf stuck in his hair, and still clutched the old pistol in his opposite hand.
“Your nose.” Chris pointed the lighter at me, his worried blue eyes traveling over my face.
“It’s fine.” I tried to be brave, but then wondered if perhaps my adrenaline had numbed my poor nose to just how bad my injuries might be. What if it really was broken? “Does . . . does it look okay?”
Despite the jumble of equipment lying around us, the blood, vomit, and mud, Chris grinned, his eyes fixing on mine. “Looks like a nose to me.”
Something about the way he smiled, his tone still soft and smooth even after everything we’d just went through, made warmth spread through me, and I started to breathe a little easier.
Jamie. I forgot about Jamie.
Just like that, my panic returned, and I whirled around to scan the chaotic interior of the truck compartment, searching for a pair of khaki pants and a black uniform shirt.
My eyes caught a motionless combat boot poking out from a heap of camouflage netting, and I crawled toward it on hands and knees.
Oh no.
A line of crimson blood trickled down from a cut on the side of her head, but otherwise, Jamie looked alright . . . except for her left arm.
It hung at a strange angle, wedged under the toolbox that had kept her from flying around the truck interior like a pinball, but the muscle near her shoulder seemed deflated in shape, and my sick guts twisted with another attempt at vomit. That wasn’t supposed to look that way.
As gently as I could, I prodded at Jamie’s shoulder, and felt the gap, the strained, twitching muscles where bone should have been. My mind flashed back to the time my dad had fallen off the garage roof while attempting to install a satellite dish on his own, and the way his arm had looked after landing on it.
“It’s dislocated.” I swallowed a bile-tasting lump and turned to find Chris crouched right beside me, his right arm still dripping little tears of red. “She must have pulled it out of socket on the toolbox.”
“And hit her head on it right after.” Chris holstered his pistol and dug around in Jamie’s pockets until he produced a small, silver penlight, which he gave to me. “I’ll carry her, you light the way. We need to get clear of this wreck and see what we can do for treatment.”
Having a plan helped ease some of the knots in my gut, and I switched on the light to guide our way out of the compartment. Everything lay in a jumbled mess, backpacks, loose cartridges, towropes, tools, and a half-unrolled tarp scattered all over the interior. I stepped carefully around my own puddle of vomit, and a glint in the shadows caught my eye.
“No way.”
Leaning down, I shook my head in bewilderment, and pulled my little submachine gun free from where it had been wedged between the seats. Aside from a healthy dent in the heat shield, the gun looked no worse for wear.
Well done Mr. Hoppman. Well done indeed.
Slinging it onto my shoulder, I pushed the one remaining armored door open with a creak and stepped into the night.
Fog roiled in cotton-ball blankets all over the wet, marshy ground, and the nearby trees stood in silent watch over our little crash site. The truck lay on its side at the base of the cliff, covered in dents and mud, one of the front wheels gone. At the front, the cab had caved in, and from the remains of the shattered driver’s window, a solitary hand hung limp.
My stomach churned at the sight of snapped white bone and bloody torn sinews, and I slammed both eyes shut to keep from gagging.
Don’t. It’s not the time, not now. There’s nothing you can do for him anyway.
“I don’t think she fractured her skull.” Chris knelt with Jamie by the back of the truck, wearing a headlamp he must have scrounged from the wreck. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a concussion. You want to give me a hand?”
Unsure what to do, I crouched beside Jamie, noting how pale she looked. “So, what’s the plan?”
He gently pulled her dislocated arm straight out, and then back, with slow, deliberate movements. “I’m going to try and pop it back in. You hold her down, in case she comes up swinging. We don’t want her to hurt herself even more.”
My pulse quickened. Jamie had a few pounds on me, and I didn’t want to have to wrestle her down, but I also didn’t want her to get hurt either. With the same caution I would have shown a loaded mousetrap, I sat on the ground beside Jamie’s slumped form and wrapped my arms around her torso.
Chris stood just behind her and cupped one hand on her shoulder, guiding Jamie’s arm up and over her back as if to scratch her opposite shoulder blade.
Jamie twitched, and Chris’s eyes met mine. “Gotta go slow with this, or I’ll just make it worse. I’m gonna move on three. One . . . two . . .”
He pushed the arm over with a steady motion.
Click.
A screech of pain rang shrilly in my ear and echoed off the trees like a siren, as Jamie jolted awake. Wings beat the air at her cry, and a flock of Ringer-Heads soared upward with frightened ring-a-lings, their white flickering screens dancing across the canopy of stars. Chris let go of her arm, which seemed to work now that Jamie clutched it to her chest, the shoulder no longer mishappen. I however didn’t release my hold on her, not knowing if she would lash out at us.
If it’s broken, we’re screwed.
Her eyes still shut, Jamie sucked in a deep groan, and muttered a stream of curses that would have made a sailor blush.
“Feel better?” One eyebrow raised in concern, Chris bent down to look into her face.
“Screw you and all your sisters.” Jamie hissed between gritted teeth, but I felt her start to relax, and I let go to sit back with an apologetic smile.
Chris’s grin chased away the worry on his face, and he winked at me. “A generous offer. Too bad the only sisters I have are nuns. Can you move it?”
Jamie flexed the arm, and other than a few winces, she breathed out a long, relieved sigh. “Mmmm hmmm.”
Pulling off his flannel overshirt, Chris folded it into a triangle, and met my eye. “I’ll help get her gear off. We don’t want that chest rig pushing on her shoulder. Could you look around for some painkillers?”
Painkillers. Got it.
I darted back to the wrecked truck, while Chris bound Jamie’s arm up in a sling with his shirt. With all our gear so disorganized, it took me a few seconds to decide where to start.
“Meds.” Crouched in the dark of the armored compartment, I whispered to myself to help sort my cluttered thoughts. “I need to find some meds for Jamie, then water, then ammo. Okay Hannah, come on, you can do this.”
Gathering up the backpacks, I pawed through each medical kit until I found a little plastic bottle of Ibuprofen. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do. Next, I picked up all the spare canteens that had flown around in the chaos and dumped them into one of the packs. Lastly, I got on my hands and knees to pull every spare cartridge from the nooks and crannies of the compartment, knowing we might need every round I could find. My headlamp turned out to be under one of the seats, and Chris’s AR lay in one corner, its receiver smashed from where a green ammunition can had come down on it. Just seeing the rifle curled nearly in half like a pretzel gave me shivers.
If that had been my head, they’d be scraping my brains off the floormats.
“Hannah?” Chris’s voice floated to me from outside. “You good?”
I shook the thought away, and jerked the weapon’s magazine loose, adding it to the bulging backpacks looped over my arms. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
Back outside, Jamie sat next to Chris on a fallen log, drinking from her own canteen.
I let the packs slide off my shoulder and handed the meds to Chris. “Here. I know it’s not much, but I looked everywhere, and—”
“You did fine, Hannah.” Chris surprised me with a grateful smile, and his eyes shone like sapphire stars. “You’re a lifesaver.”
His fingers brushed mine as he took the bottle, and something about that sent a ripple down my spine, tingly and pleasant. Warm, fuzzy static swelled in my brain, and I pulled away to pretend I was inspecting my backpack just to give myself time to think.
I’m a lifesaver. Wow. Oh, snap out of it you starry-eyed moron, he literally gave you the easiest job ever.
Blissfully unaware of the tornado he’d spawned in my mind, Chris unscrewed the pill bottle to shake a few little tablets into Jamie’s hand. “Well, our only radio was in the truck, and judging by its condition, I’d say we’re not calling anyone tonight. I figure we’re far enough away that our guys won’t see a flare, so it looks like we’re walking.”
Jamie popped the pills into her mouth and jerked her thumb at the cliffs. “We’ve got rope, we could climb back to the top.”
Both Chris and I exchanged disbelieving looks.
“We?” I blinked at Jamie and wondered just how hard she’d hit her head. “You can’t climb, if you pop that arm out again, you’ll fall.”
She waved me off with her free hand, but I could see the fingers on it trembling, and noted the way Jamie gulped down more water with a nervous eye to the trees. “I’m fine. Just stings a little. Besides, it’s not that high.”
Chris inspected Jamie’s AK in his lap, racking the bolt to check for damage. “Yes, it is. You’re lucky you didn’t land on this, or your spine would be snapped like a twig. Hannah’s right, it’s not worth the risk.”
Her shoulders slackened, and Jamie turned to me with a remorseful wince. “So much for an easy op.”
“We’ll be fine.” My level of optimism surprised even me, but the strained expression on Jamie’s face, the way Chris kept looking over his shoulder into the darkness, made me want to preserve some semblance of normalcy. “Like Chris said, we’ll just walk until we’re close enough to fire a flare, and then wait for the others to pick us up.”
I glanced at Chris, who granted me a small, grateful nod as he adjusted Jamie’s chest rig to fit his torso, the AK hanging from his shoulder now.
Let’s just hope its as easy as I’m making it sound.
Chris squatted next to Jamie and I, unfolding a weathered road map of Barron County with several markings on it in ink. “Alright, so near as I can figure, we’re here.”
He pointed to a small, dotted line that I guessed to be the road our truck had fallen from.
“With the ridge all covered in cliffs on this side, and ELSAR to the west, we’re going to have to walk further to our southeast towards Collingswood. If we hug the base of the ridgeline all the way out, we might be able to avoid the worst of whatever is out there. Besides, we don’t want to stray too far, since the fault-line shift could make navigating by old landmarks impossible.”
“How long will it take to get back?” I ran my eyes over the faded blue, red, and yellow lines on the map, remembering how easy life had been when I could just use the GPS on my phone to drive anywhere I wanted.
Chris’s face drew into a stoney frown. “On foot, three days. That’s assuming we don’t run into anything else in the process. We haven’t had any refugees from the south since the Collingswood massacre, so I can only assume the freaks down here rule the roost now.”
“We could head for the water and try to boat our way to the northern side.” Jamie tapped on the spidery channels of a body of water labeled ‘Maple Lake’. “That would put us only twelve hours of walking from New Wilderness, at the start of the ridgeline. Since we’d be offshore, we’d be safe from the freaks, and it’d save on steps.”
“Where are we going to get a boat?” Chris stared at the map with an exhausted shake of his head.
“There are houses all along the lakeside.” Jamie leaned closer and poked the edge of the blue on the map repeatedly. “My cousin owns a cabin near the gated community by Sunbright. Everyone has at least a cheap canoe, or a kayak, all we have to do is get to the lake and we’re safe.”
“Assuming that everyone who lives in those houses didn’t think of that already.” Chris rubbed his forehead like he too needed a painkiller. “Besides, water attracts wildlife, you know that. The odds of us running into something get better the closer to the lake we go.”
With a frustrated huff, Jamie turned to me, and Chris waited for my reaction, his arms crossed.
Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I tried to bore a hole in the map with my eyes to avoid looking at either of them.
Of course they make me pick a side. Come on Hannah, think, you’ve got to make a choice.
“Well,” I scooted closer, and drew a deep breath to steady myself. “What if we walk along the ridge, like Chris said, but head north instead of south? That way if we get close to the lake, we can try to find a boat to cut our walking time down, and if not, then at least we’ll be closer to New Wilderness instead of going the long way around.”
Chris and Jamie eyed each other, and I could tell they both were reluctant at the idea. As the least experienced of the three of us, I felt stupid for even having an opinion, but I also didn’t want to let either of them down. They were asking for my help, and I wanted to do the best I could.
Somewhere in the distance, a roar cut through the night, and we all jumped, like rabbits waiting for a hawk.
Folding up his map, Chris dug into his backpack, and held out a spare headlamp to Jamie. “You say your cousin has a boat?”
“A fishing boat, yeah.” Jamie tugged the light over her tangled hair and drew her Beretta with her good hand. “It should be about 15 miles from here.”
Chris helped Jamie to her feet and stepped closer to sort through the gear I’d found alongside me. “I guess we’re going north then. With any luck, we can slip by the ELSAR patrols on the western end of Maple Lake during the night. Let’s hope everything between here and there is either dead, sleeping, or stupid.”
As we tramped through the swampy ground away from the crash site, I found myself looking over my shoulder more and more at the surrounding darkness, icy doubt sinking through my guts. My plan seemed like a good idea when I’d said it, but now that our survival hinged off it, my confidence waned. Jamie had saved my life, Chris too, and I didn’t want to risk theirs over my rough approximation. Three days out here sounded insane, and Chris’s warning about the water stuck in my head like a siren on repeat. If one bear had torn apart our armored truck, and killed three experienced rangers, what hope could we possibly have if we ran into something worse?
My eyes fell on Chris’s broad shoulders in front of me, and I furrowed my brow in determination.
No turning back now.
Sliding my thumb along the grip of my submachine gun, I hefted the sling higher on my shoulder, and followed my friends into the gloomy shadows of the south.