Origin - Season One (25 page)

The rush of hot air pushed him another three feet down the tunnel before the hole in front of him disappeared and the world turned black. It felt as if both his eardrums had burst this time, although he thought he could hear faint screaming coming from somewhere behind him. He started moving again, pushing himself back, first with his hands and then his elbows. After an awkward minute of this he figured out a way to use his knees to gain a little more momentum, but it was still slow going. His hands and elbows went numb as the skin turned raw in places. If Amanda hadn’t been waiting for him at the other end, he thought he might have just given up. The ringing in his ears was so loud he didn’t think he would be able to hear her, no matter how close he was getting. He was about to stop for breath despite his panic when his foot bumped something. A hand reached down and grabbed his ankle.

“Jesse?”

Her voice sounded as if it were coming from the other end of the tunnel. He moved a little farther until his legs were bent up against her feet and reached for her hand. She grabbed it and squeezed, sending a bolt of pain up his arm as the sweat on her palms soaked the raw exposed flesh on his palms.

“I can’t open it,” she said. “It’s too heavy.”

“I’m not even sure I can stand up unless you climb out,” he said.
His
voice sounded like it was coming from inside his own head. He heard the groan of effort as she tried again to push the plate up.

“It’s stuck,” she said. He could hear that she was starting to really panic now. This was the claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. Not just being trapped in a small space, but buried alive. The other end of the tunnel was closed off now, which meant it was this way or none at all.

“Try to squat,” he said. “Hold your palms out and keep your arms straight. Then stand up quickly like you were going to jump.”

It took her a moment to make sense of what he was saying, but then he felt her backside touch his knee. There was a thump and he felt her squat again. On the third attempt she let out a little yelp and Jesse felt a rush of cold air sweep past him. Her foot brushed his leg as she climbed out. He pushed himself the rest of the way into the small space and just managed to stand up by bending his neck and pushing his head out of the tunnel with one hand. When he turned his face up to see the entrance he felt cold rain on his face. Amanda reached down to help him. When he cleared the lip of the hole he dropped to the ground and lay face up staring at the blackening sky. After the heat in the tunnel it felt wonderful. Amanda had dropped to one knee beside him and was looking at him in horror, but he didn’t notice.

“My God! What happened to your face and hands?” she said. She was crying, had probably never stopped, Jesse thought.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

“What happened?”

“I threw a grenade into the bunker.”

“He’s dead?”

“If he’s not, he can’t be killed,” Jesse said and let out a hoarse bark of laughter that didn’t sound entirely sane.

“Was he alone?” Amanda asked.

That made Jesse sit up. It was a pretty fucking good question. One he hadn’t even considered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think we should wait around to find out.”

“Where do we go?”

Jesse thought about it and pointed east. “We should follow the lake around. It’s a long way, but I don’t think heading that way is a good idea.”

He pointed into the forest. She looked in that direction and nodded.

“I’m pretty sure the cabin is that way,” Jesse said, pointing east. “If we cut across to avoid it, we’ll reach the lake eventually.”

He got to his feet and helped her up despite the agony it caused his hands. She went to hold one of them and Jesse winced.

“Oh, shit. Sorry,” she said grabbing his wrist instead. They set off at a slow walk. The moon had all but disappeared behind the clouds and visibility was close to zero. Within a minute they were both soaked to the bone.

“Jess, we’re going to get hypothermia if we stay out here,” Amanda said.

“I don’t think you can catch hypothermia in July,” Jesse said.

Amanda’s reply was interrupted by a loud thump. A chunk of bark on the tree beside her exploded and peppered the side of her face with small fragments of wood. Jesse grabbed her arm and pulled her to the ground. Amanda looked at him, her eyes full of confusion.

“Rifle shot,” Jesse said.

“How do they know where we are?” she said.

“He’s using a night-vision scope,” Jesse said, remembering the way the man had kept lifting the rifle to look through it.

He tried to think but it was hard. Too much was going on and he had no idea who was following them. If there were two of them, there could be three, or ten for all they knew. And if they had been expecting Eddie instead of a couple of scared kids, that made perfect sense.

But he wasn’t going to just lie down and die. Not while Amanda was alive and there was a chance, no matter how slim, of saving her life.

Jesse reached down and felt the contour of the second grenade in his pocket. He pulled it out and held it up to Amanda.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The other grenade. You’re going to crawl over to that tree. I’m going to throw this thing as far as I can in that direction and run.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jess.”

He ignored her and began to crawl away. “Mandy, get behind that tree and don’t move.”

Jesse got to his knees, pulled the pin on the grenade and imagined it was a football. He threw it high, using every bit of strength he could find, then set off at a run despite being almost blind in the darkness. He hit a tree with his shoulder, fell to the ground, then got back up and kept going. A moment later the grenade exploded.

For several seconds the forest around him lit up as if someone had turned on a set of stadium floodlights and he saw the shooter. He was on his knees and leaning against a tree about thirty yards ahead and slightly to the left. Jesse turned toward him and started sprinting. The flash of the explosion faded as quickly as it had erupted, but the ground where it had landed was still burning. It was too far from the shooter to make him out in the faint glow, but it made it much easier to avoid running head on into a tree and braining himself.

He closed the distance quickly, but the man saw him when he was still several yards away. Jesse saw a very faint muzzle flash and something stung his left arm. He fixed his eyes on the point, took five long strides and jumped.

The first thing he felt was the scope of the rifle hitting him above the left eye, followed by a bright light on that side of his head. A second later he collided with something that felt almost as hard. Jesse bounced off the man and hit the ground on his back. Before he could get up a cold hand closed around his throat. The voice that spoke to him barely sounded human. It was a voice he associated with severely retarded people, or deaf people who had learned to talk. Jesse couldn’t make out a word of what the man was trying to say. As the grip grew stronger Jesse felt his windpipe start to close.

Jesse reached out with his right arm – his left had gone numb – and felt for the man’s face. What he found was a jawbone full of jagged teeth covered in warm liquid. He brought his hand up, feeling for the nose and found only a hole. One of his fingers traced the line to the man’s left eye, but the socket was empty and oozing what felt like warm jelly. And yet somehow the man’s grip on his throat kept tightening.

Knowing he would soon be unconscious if he didn’t do something, Jesse lifted his right shoulder off the ground just far enough to extend his hand across the man’s face to his other eye. He put four fingers on the temple and pressed his thumb into the eyeball. The response was a howl of rage, and then the hand let go of his throat. The man staggered back. Against the backdrop of the fire, Jesse saw he had no right arm. The man tried to stand up, got to one knee and fell back down again. Jesse was having too much trouble breathing to do anything but watch. The man began his incomprehensible mumbling and lashed out blindly with his remaining arm. How he could still be alive was something Jesse would never know.

The man began to crawl away. When Jesse could just about breathe, he got to his knees and reached for the rifle. He pulled back the bolt, saw a bullet sitting in the top of the magazine and pushed it into the chamber.

Jesse raised the barrel, making no effort to aim, and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the man in the center of the back and he went toppling forward onto what was left of his face. To Jesse’s astonishment the man was still mumbling. This time Jesse stood up. He reloaded the rifle, brought the silencer to the back of the man’s head and pulled the trigger again.

Jesse stepped forward, not quite daring to believe the man was dead. If he had come from hell, as Jesse strongly suspected he had, it wasn’t an unreasonable thing to think. He kicked the man in the side, then did something he wouldn’t have believed himself capable. He lifted the butt of the rifle and brought it down on the side of the man’s skull. He began to scream as he repeated the motion until there was nothing left but a stain on the ground above the man’s shoulders, then sat down, threw the rifle aside and regarded the mutilated corpse though the eyes of a lunatic.

He might have sat there until the sun came up if he hadn’t remembered Amanda. That got him back to his feet. He knelt beside the body and pulled off the waterproof jacket. It was shredded in places and missing an arm, but it would have to do. He set off in the direction he had come from. When he tried calling out, he discovered his vocal cords had stopped working. He made a conscious effort to retrace his path through the trees and found it impossible. The rain had almost put out the fire and everywhere he looked he saw only darkness and the vague outline of trees.

When several minutes had passed and there was still no sign of her, Jesse began to panic. He tried to shout her name again and began to cough instead. When he stopped to try and get his bearings, he found he had lost all sense of direction. Then he heard something behind him, or thought he did, and began to run in that direction. With the light from the fire all but gone, he was now effectively blind as well as dumb. He had time for one final thought before he hit the tree – please, god, let him be the only one they sent – then he was falling back, his vision a field of bright exploding stars.

– – –

When the light from the exploding grenade began to fade, Amanda got to her feet. She moved cautiously, taking care to stay behind the trees as she went. It was hard to hear anything above the falling rain, which seemed to be getting heavier by the minute. She thought she saw a faint flash off to her right and began to move in that direction. A moment later, she
did
hear something. But it was coming from behind her. When she turned around, two shining eyes were looking back at her.

“Jesse?”

No answer. The eyes were joined by a second pair, and then a third. She knelt and swept the ground in front of her, not daring to look away. Her hand passed over a fallen branch and she picked it up.

“Jesse?”

Still no answer. Two of the eyes began to move toward her. Amanda reached back and threw the branch as hard as she could. The thing in front of her retreated. The word at the front of her mind was
woodchuck
. But that was absurd, of course. These were no more woodchucks than she was. Amanda knelt again, but before she could find something else to throw, the silence was broken by a long rising howl. The response was a chorus of them that seemed to be coming from all around her.

Amanda ran.

The pack maintained a safe distance, but it had now been joined by several more members, and the curiosity which had brought them was quickly turning to expectation as the smell of blood grew stronger.

When she rounded the tree and stumbled over the body, her first thought was that she had found the man who had shot at them. When she saw it was Jesse she let out a small cry of horror.

“Jesse?”

She put a hand to his face and brushed the hair out of his eyes. He didn’t move and she could feel her own resolve shrinking. Then he opened his eyes.

“Mandy?” he croaked. “Mandy, is that you?”

“It’s me. Jesse, we have to get out of here, now. Can you walk?”

He nodded. But when he tried to stand his legs buckled beneath him. She caught him before he fell, knelt down and raised him over her shoulder. It took all the strength she had to stand back up, but she got to her feet and placed one foot in front of her, took a step and then another. She carried him that way, mostly stepping and sometimes staggering, until she saw the dying embers of the fire up ahead. From there it was only another twenty yards to the cabin.

She heard a growl and looked back to see a wolf the size of a young bear reared down on its haunches not ten yards away. Amanda met its eyes and saw something in them that brought the naked truth of Darwin’s Origin of Species home in a way two years of sociology never could. She lowered Jesse to the ground, turned around and let out a shriek so loud it made her vocal cords burn. When the wolf took a step back, she took one forward. It moved back further. Before she knew she was going to say anything, Amanda summoned all the volume she could muster and shouted, “Do I look like little red fucking riding hood to you? Do I?!”

The wolf sprang back at the sound of her voice and disappeared. She had no way of knowing how final the retreat was, but she had no intention of waiting around to find out either. When she turned back to Jesse he was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“Come on,” she said. “We better get inside.”

She laid him in front of the fireplace, stacked several logs into it and emptied the rest of the lighter fluid over them. Within a minute the fire was burning steadily. She pushed him as close as she dared and began to remove his clothes. She covered him with the blanket from the bed then sat down next to him and brushed the hair from his face. His eyes opened slightly and he tried to say something, but Amanda put a hand to his mouth and shook her head.