Page 25 of Night in a Waste Land

A passing helo had picked up a high heat signature in a rural, forested, mountainous part of Kentucky, and Gold Company was called in to handle it. The idea was that the conduit – or conduits, judging by the flare of heat on the infrared – needed to be neutralized now, before they got into a heavily populated area.

A plane took them to Kentucky, to a tarmac where rain was bucketing down, and white mist was lifting off the grass, shifting like ghosts between the close-set trees. Their helo, an ancient Blackhawk, sat with lights blinking, rotors turning, slinging water that stung her face where it wasn’t covered by goggles.

She glanced toward Lance, whose jaw was set in that firm, square line that meant he was eager for the job ahead, but that his stomach was probably cramping. She had to shout above the whir and thump of the rotors. “Isn’t the weather too bad?”

He shook his head, and spared her a quick glance from behind his own goggles. “There’s a storm moving in. We’ve gotta do it now, or we’ll have to wait forty-eight hours before the pilot’s willing to go back up.”

They climbed aboard, secured their gear, strapped in, and the Blackhawk lurched up off the tarmac and took to the sky with a heavy, unsteady gait that propelled them up into the rain and over the tree line.

The terrain climbed, and the helo with it, chugging and struggling to find an updraft that wasn’t there and couldn’t help them. The trees were mostly pines, short and sickly, but plentiful, with the occasional white skeletal hands of a hardwood reaching through the yellow-green needles. The mountains thrust up into the underbellies of the clouds, and between them, the land folded in on itself, canyons and ridges with sharp trees along their spines like the knobs of vertebrae.

Gallo was on the infrared, and as they lumbered over a ridge, and a large bowl-shaped swath of forest greeted them on the other side, he said, “Down there.”

The helo dropped low enough to allow them to rappel down, and then lifted up and away, scheduled to return in an hour. Rose watched it disappear, head tipped back, raindrops splattering her face and her goggles. Her chest was tight – tighter than normal, a heavy sense of unease she couldn’t shake. This op made no sense: conduits didn’t linger out in the middle of nowhere. What destruction could they wreak there?

They did a weapons check, and Lance fired off a sequence of hand signals. They split up.

The rain fell steadily, a quiet susurrus like a veil around Rose as she swung wide of the heat signature. An occasional fat drop would plink off her helmet, or the barrel of her rifle; they pattered on the carpet of old leaves and needles underfoot, a papery skin that gave way to sucking mud with every step. It wasn’t possible to be silent, in that way, and she could only hope that the hiss and shush of the rain drowned out the sound of their approach.

The helo hadn’t been able to land because the trees grew too close together; she had to turn sideways more than once to slip between trunks; rough bark snagged at her sleeves.

She ducked around an unusually fat pine and spotted a set of tracks in the leaf mold and mud of the forest floor: large tracks, heavy boot prints with thick tread.

Rose wasn’t supposed to – Lance would have scowled – but she slung her rifle across her back and drew two of her knives instead. The clean steel gleamed faintly in the gloom, a shine like bared teeth in the gloaming. Her pulse picked up, a ready tick-tick-tick, and the adrenaline that flooded her veins – a tolerable amount – came from anticipation, and not fear.

She followed the tracks, lengthening her stride so she stepped in the conduit’s prints, rather than leave her own. Seven strides took her around one of the rare hardwoods, its trunk full of knotholes like eyes in the pale bark. Another seven strides led her down into a creek bed, where rainwater rushed up to mid-calf. The tracks disappeared on the bank, but she no longer needed them: a conduit stood in the middle of the thickening stream. A man. Heavy-bodied, muscular, wearing a hunter’s clothes: canvas pants and jacket, a baseball cap with the brim pulled low. He held an old bolt-action rifle in one big hand.

He turned his head, slowly, and she saw the bright flare of his eyes through the water dripping off the bill of his cap.

Rose tensed, settling in her hips and ankles, prepared for action.

The prickling awareness, that turned-on-TV static across her skin, touched her from behind, and she ducked to the side.

Just as something heavy whistled through the air where her head had been.

The water dragged at her legs, pulling her off balance; she overcompensated, but swung her arms, caught herself, and twisted around, upright, knives at the ready.

The second conduit was a woman, a large one, and carrying a woodsman’s axe. That was what had cleaved the air where Rose had stood moments ago.

Dressed like the man, in rough, sturdy hunting clothes and a cap, the woman hefted the axe and gathered herself for an approach – or maybe an outright attack.

Water sloshed as the other conduit moved toward them – and he had a gun.

Rose took a split-second to weigh her options. Took a deep breath. And dropped.

It was a controlled fall. She slipped down, belly-first, ducked beneath the water, stretched out her arms, and swam.

It wascold. The shock of it nearly left her gasping, but she bit her tongue and held her breath in, that precious last sip of oxygen. The current helped her along, even stronger as she treaded deeper down into the hollow the runoff had carved through this fissure between hills. Her goggles were fitted, and waterproof, and she could keep her eyes open. The water was dark, and murky with mud from the bottom, but she saw two shadows like tree trunks planted ahead – the conduit’s legs – and she struck as she passed him. She felt the knife bite flesh; felt the judder through her arm as the blade found bone. Felt the splash and displacement of water as he fell, the tendon severed, his balance compromised.

Then she was by, and rushing on. She kept her head down, clenched her knives tight in fingers rapidly going numb, and kicked and stroked for all she was worth, working with the current.

When the burn in her lungs became unbearable, she snagged a bit of branch dangling in the water, and hauled her head up above the surface, gasping and sputtering.

Her surroundings didn’t look familiar. It had been hard to tell how far she’d gone underwater, but the conduits weren’t in sight, and the banks rose steeply on either side of the stream – which was rapidly trying to become a river.

She took a moment, despite the hard chill of the water swirling around her, to regret the impending lecture: she’d taken her rifle in the drink, and all her gear, besides, Wraith Grenades and everything. Then she took a deep breath, and hauled her waterlogged self up the dangling branch.

The bank was leaf-strewn, and mud beneath, terraced from years of erosion. But webbed with tree roots, and she used those as toe-holds, and the branch as her lifeline, and she managed to pick her careful way to the top, no longer cold when she reached it, limbs burning.

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