Page 5 of Broken Love

He rolls over onto his back and smiles up at the two of us with dry, cracked lips. “You wouldn’t happen to have some water, would you?” he asks.

Fox reaches for his canteen and kneels to hand it to him. “So, uh…” he says, “want to tell us what’s going on?”

The kid sits up and chugs the entire canteen dry, spilling more of it onto his chin than down his throat. “I got trapped,” he finally chokes out.

“Right…” I mutter. “We received word of an American journalist being held captive in a weapons cache—”

“Never happened,” he says, shaking his head.

Fox stands up. “Never happened?”

“Sorry. I lied.”

Fox and I blink with confusion.

“You what?” I ask.

He reaches out his hand and Fox takes it to help him up. “Yeah, sorry. I hid out in here during the last raid and the ceiling kind of caved in on me…”

I take in the features of his face. Full, boyish cheeks. Dimpled chin. Green eyes. He stands about an inch taller than me. I glance down at his sneakers and jeans and all the way back up to the thin, white dress shirt that’s now completely soaked through with sweat and dirt.

“The last raid in this area was three days ago,” I say.

“Is that all? Feels longer…”

Fox shifts on his boots. “Okay, wait. Go back. What do you mean, you lied?”

The man pats his duffel bag. “I hacked your equipment.”

My jaw drops. “You did what?”

“I sent the intel,” he admits. “Made up a story about a bunch of evil terrorists guarding some crap, I don’t know. Dehydration has me kind of loopy—”

“You realize that’s a felony, right?” I ask.

He chuckles, flashing his perfect, white teeth at me. “Believe me, honey, there are far easier ways to get me in handcuffs.”

Fox lays a hand on my shoulder and gently eases me back to keep me from punching this bastard in the jaw.

“Sir, that’s enough of that, please…” he says to him, although Fox can’t keep the smile from spreading on his face. “So, the roof caved in, trapped you inside, and you hacked our equipment with a distress signal to come and get you out?”

The man nods along with him. “Right.”

“How?”

“I wrote a program to transmit a frequency wave that hijacks any vulnerable government equipment within about ten miles. Kid stuff, really. The only downside is that I had no way of differentiating between American equipment and the not-so-American equipment. So, they could just as easily be headed here right now to shoot me, but it was either take the gamble or die of starvation and/or exposure and that sounds really unpleasant, so…”

He shrugs.

I narrow my eyes at him, inhaling slowly to keep my annoyed rage at bay. “Who the hell are you?” I ask him.

He adjusts the strap on his bag and grins at me.

“I’m Boxcar.”

Chapter 3

Boxcar

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