Page 38 of Running Scared
Bailey turned his attention to Chance, who was oblivious of the byplay.“He and Dean were a pretty impressive team,” he said, not sure if he should feed Chance’s apparent crush.“I mean, Marcus drove, and Dean planned and bossed everybody around, and Marcus read his mind.I, uhm, don’t think they’ll be working with anybody else soon.”
That smile again—gah!Bailey had a thought that if Dean ever smiled atBaileylike that, he was a goner.Lights out.That’s all she wrote.Here lies the ghost of Bailey Dodge’s resistance to falling drastically in love with a man crazy enough to toss him out of an airplane with his cat.
Then he remembered the way Dean had climbed into the shower that last morning and gentled Bailey’s skittishness with warm hands and matter-of-fact chatter, like he was calming a rogue horse.
Apparently Bailey Dodge’s resistance was already dead and buried, and Bailey had simply not acknowledged the gravestone.
He glanced at Val again, who—arrested in the middle of checking his phone—caught Bailey’s gaze and nodded.
Yeah.They hadn’t heard from Dean in nearly thirty hours.It was a hell of a time for Bailey to admit to himself that he was in love.
Wishes, Plans, and Hallucinations
TURNED OUTthey actuallywerecloser to the compound than the town, but Birdie insisted it didn’t matter.The diminutive pilot had one thought on the brain during the entire three-hour trip through the blistering heat.
Revenge.Payback.Utter destruction and chaos.
Fuck all the fuckers that fucked Birdie’s beautiful bird.
At one of their hourly pauses for water—necessary in the heat, particularly after the cold packs in the flight suits failed—Dean finally said, “For Christ’s sake, Bird, we hear you.Man, if you’ll shut up long enough for Marcus and me to come up with a plan, we’ll even let you set the C-4.Is that good enough for you?”
Birdie gave him a rather watery gaze.“You’re good people,” Birdie said.“Thanks, Dean.I might fly you again someday.”
Dean stopped and cocked his head.“Marcus, did you hear that?”
Marcus—who was in the middle of gulping his own water ration—cocked his head and listened.
“No, not out in the desert,” Dean snapped, thinking about what Birdie had said.Although he didn’t blame Marcus for trying to listen over the engine noise that had rattled their bones for the past couple of hours.Marcus was like he was, his skin and his hearing and his sense of balance were fuzzed out for being out in the heat on the motorcycles for such a long period of time.They had sunblock—hell, they had solid zinc oxide, because just plain sunblock wouldn’t do it—and they were riding the bikes at a moderate speed to not overheat the engines.But that didn’t change the fact that they would both hear the rumble of the bikes and the plane and even the car they’d abandoned back in El Paso long into the next week after an adventure like this.A pool helped—Dean swam as often as possible, and so did Marcus—but until then their travels would rumble under their skin.
“Then what?”Marcus asked irritably.“I thought we were paying attention for signs of the compound.Or town.Or whatever.”
Dean swallowed, sort of wishing he wasn’t always the first person to see the scary shit.
“Compound is thirty miles northeast,” he said, nodding to a smudge on the horizon.“Town is fifteen miles north past that.”
Marcus stared at him.“Do I even want to know?”
Dean held out his phone—it was set on compass.“I’ve been doing some calculations,” he admitted.“Airspeed, wind, where we were over the desert when the shots hit, where we were when we jumped, how fast we’ve been going since.”About twenty miles an hour, as the crow flew.The road they were traveling on wasn’t a maintained highway—there were lots of detours for clusters of cacti and, in one instance, a small rock canyon that literallyechoedwith rattlesnakes.Dean would be waking up screaming about that one for a couple of years, he was absolutely sure of it.
“Are you positive?”Marcus asked.
Dean grimaced.He had sunshades in his pocket, but his and Marcus’s helmets had vision enhancement in the goggles, and since they’d gone from skydiving to motorcycling, they’d kept the helmets on.
“Look that way,” he said, nodding to the northeast, “but put your helmet back on.”
Marcus did, and for a moment everything went still, with only the whisper of a thin, hot wind in their ears to penetrate the silence.
“I can see the antiaircraft guns,” Marcus said in surprise.“That’s why you’ve been tugging us east.”
Dean grunted.“We should stop five miles out,” he said.“At least until nightfall.Set the chutes for shelter, catch a nap—”
“Forge a plan,” Marcus said grimly.“I’m hearing you.”
He glanced around them, the flatness of the plain making them both feel naked and exposed.“Is five miles far enough out?These things make a hell of a clatter with no ambient noise to drown them out.”
“Under normal conditions a small motorcycle runs at about eighty decibels,” Dean told him.“Which carries about half a football field on a quiet night.But they’ve got watchers, and while we can see the antiaircraft guns from thirty miles out on a plain, I think five miles is plenty safe.”The chutes were desert camouflage, so they wouldn’t draw attention, and pulled taut over a boulder—or even over the bikes—they’d provide shade to rest under and cover them from sight.
“And if we draw close enough to the road,” Marcus reasoned, “the main road from town, we can get an idea of who’s coming and going.”
