AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Wake up, sweetheart.” I nudge Briarlee awake.
She blinks and frowns, curling up with a grumpy expression, then extending her legs and sitting up to look at me.
“Are they gone?”
“Yeah.”
“I gotta pee,” she announces. “Where am I going to do that?”
I cast my arm at the wilderness around us. “Pick a spot.”
The look she gives me is one of pure disappointment. “This is so gross.”
“Don’t go too far. Don’t want anything wild to find you.”
“Something wild already did find me,” she pouts. She’s referring to me, of course. Except I’m not wild. I’m controlled. I know exactly what I’m doing and why. Even if it doesn’t make sense to her. Even if it looks like paranoia—though if I am, being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, as the old adage goes.
“Go pee.”
She stamps into the bush. I listen, getting a sense of how far she’s going by the way her petulant footsteps crashing through the undergrowth and litter recede.
“That’s far enough!” I call out to her.
The footsteps stop. There’s silence.
She’s going to pitch a fit if I get too close when she’s toileting, but Briarlee doesn’t have the best instincts for danger and I wouldn’t put it past her to let an animal creep up on her while she wasn’t watching.
I walk quietly through the bush, my larger frame making much less noise because I make sure not to step on twigs, to land my feet softly instead of stamping my way through the undergrowth.
The soft flow of her urine is what I expect to hear. Instead, I hear muffled cursing.
“Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?”
I look around a tree and see her with a phone she is absolutely not supposed to have pressed to her ear. Did I tell her not to bring it? Maybe I forgot. But the fact she sneaked off to use it makes me pretty certain she knows I wouldn’t approve.
“Police, please…”
She’s calling the cops on me! I flare into action before I can think this through. I don’t know if she has a line open. I don’t know if they have enough to track her call. All I know is that phone has to die, and now.
Coming from behind, I snatch the phone from her hand, drop it onto a rock, and stamp on it with my heel and crush it to plastic dust and circuits.
“No phones,” I growl.
She looks at me with fear in her eyes. I never wanted this for us, but now she’s in this with me, she can’t decide to opt out. We are being tracked, of that I have no doubt. And that phone she’s carried around has probably been like a big flashing red light for people with the resources to track that sort of thing.
“That was fucked up, Daniel,” she complains. Not so afraid she can’t still give me attitude, I see.
“Who were you calling?”
“The cops!” She doesn’t even try to deny it. “We can’t live in the woods forever because you took some drugs that make you think the military is looking for you. I saw enough of that in college.”
“Regenermax isn’t LSD or pot,” I growl. “I’m not making this up. This is serious.”
“No, it’s not! You’re fucking crazy! Nobody is after you! Nobody cares!” She throws the words at me wildly.
* * *
Briarlee
I see the exact moment that he loses all trust in me. I feel the moment I stop being his ally, and start being another person he has to worry about.
I made a mistake. I never should have said that I didn’t believe him. The look he gives me isn’t one of anger—it’s of pure, utter betrayal. I hate seeing that look in his eyes. It breaks my heart. But he had to hear it, because he’s going too far. He’s getting too extreme. We haven’t seen so much as a toy soldier, let alone the actual military.
He grabs me by the hand and marches me out of the forest, back toward the car. Thank god. Maybe he’s going to send me back. I refused to go before, but now I’m thinking I won’t be of any use to him out here, feeding these delusions.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
“What?”
He repeats the order in a deep, rumbling gravel. I don’t comply, because I don’t understand what he’s saying, or why he’s saying it. He sounds like the cops he didn’t want me to call.
When I don’t do what he wants, he takes me in those big hands and pulls my arms behind my back, then begins lashing them together with the tape I thought we had purchased for constructing shelters.
“Daniel!” I panic. “What are you doing?”
It’s a stupid question. It’s obvious what he’s doing. He’s taking me prisoner.
“I’m sorry,” he grunts as I struggle. “I have to do this.”
“No, you don’t!” I kick and twist and squirm, but it’s useless. He has me and he’s not letting go. I have no idea what he plans to do with me. I do know that he won’t hurt me—at least, I hope I know that. This man is not the one I used to know, though he must still be in there somewhere, lurking behind this bestial creature.
