Page 28 of Rarely Pure and Never Simple
"I see it. How about you not get so close, dumbass? At least until I get a look around. We could be walking into anything here."
Damien peered closer at the shifting projection. Strange. Random images of flowers flickered past, bright spots of color in the winter landscape without text or audio explanation. It had to be a memorial of some sort. He took another step toward it, staying a good few yards back with Blaze's warning in mind.
The click under his left foot barely registered. He hesitated, certain that something was off. The ground beneath him suddenly shifted. To his horror, a slab of rock tilted up in front of him as his feet slipped. He scrabbled at the dirt and stones, trying to find purchase, anything to stop his downward slide.
"Blaze!"
A dark pit yawned beneath him, black, unyielding, dragging him into an old, familiar hell. He screamed, his heart hammering in his ears as he fell, fetching up on the bottom of an eight-foot shaft with a painful thud. The sunlight, the air, life, hope, all of that was above him. He clawed at the smooth sides of his prison, desperate to escape before it was too late.
The stone slab tilted back up and shut him in, his screams echoing in his ears.
Blaze lunged for him,sliding to a stop at the edge of the hole just as the top of the trap snapped shut. "Damien! Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
He crawled on his hands and knees around the perimeter of the slab, frantically searching for the pressure trigger. There had to be one. Damien must have stepped on it to activate the damn thing. If he could get it open again, jam something in the trap lid to keep it from closing again, he'd be able to lower his coat or a branch to get Damien out. Nothing. No catch, no spring, no sensor, he couldn't find a damn thing.
The screams drove ice picks through his core, terrible howls that by rights shouldn't be coming from a human throat. Maybe it was being trapped or being underground, but whatever the hell had caused it, Damien had freaked out completely. That horrible blank stare as he slid into the pit—that hadn't been Damien anymore. That had been some frightened animal no longer capable of reason.
Blaze ran back to the car and snatched up the entrenching tool. Back at the pit, he began to dig, snarling at the frozen ground. He had to get Damien out. No one should have to be that afraid. He wasn't sure the human heart could stand more than a few minutes of it. The emergency channel would be useless. There wasn't even a first-response outpost nearby, so they'd never arrive in time.
After a good fifteen minutes of near-futile digging and cussing, Blaze lifted his head. A machine whine reached him over his ragged breathing, growing louder. He searched the horizon, turning in time to spot a small fleet of pocket bikes speeding toward him, at least fifteen of them.
"Oh, what the hell now?"
At any other time, he would have been looking for cover, for a defensible place with a good line of sight. Now, though, he couldn't bear to leave Damien, especially since these bike jockeys might be the architects of this little fiasco. He put the shovel down and spread his hands wide, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. With any luck, these people were just isolationists trying to protect their territory.
The pocket bikes zipped around him, circling mechanical sharks. If they were just assessing the situation, Blaze would give them time to do it. If they were bandits or worse, he had enough firepower to make their little trapping operation a costly one.
Without any visible signal or much discipline, the bikes landed in a rough circle around him. Some of the riders had weapons, but with lowered face shields, Blaze couldn't gauge their intentions.
"What're you doing here?" the one directly in front of Blaze snarled. The voice was young and defiant, the hand holding the weapon not entirely steady.
"We were picking wildflowers." Blaze waved a hand at the pit trap. "What the fuck difference does it make? Let him out of there!"
The helmet turned toward the trap. "What's in there? Your dog?"
"No, you cretin! That's a person in there! A freaked-out, scared-to-death human being!"
"He does sound awful," a second voice, young and female, spoke up on Blaze's right.
The leader waved his weapon, apparently trying to look cool and menacing. "You put your hands on top of your head. We're not doing anything until you cooperate."
Blaze complied, hoping it would speed the process, at least get the slab open, something, anything. Someone came up behind him, yanked his arms behind his back, and cuffed him. He squirmed around on his knees, taking in as many helmeted figures as he could, roaring, "Fuck all that! Stop screwing around and get him out of there!"
Damien had stopped screaming. It scared the hell out of Blaze. What if Damien had stroked out and died? What if his heart had given out? What the hell was in his past that he reacted so badly to the situation? Sure, it would be scary for anyone, but Damien had gone blizzard whiteout, no doubt about it.
Leader kid finally fumbled a controller out of his jacket and tapped the screen. "Back him up or he'll fall in."
Blaze didn't need someone to tell him twice. He scooted back from the trap as the top clicked and opened with a scrape of rock on rock. A couple of his other captors removed helmets and leaned over the pit. They all seemed to be young, maybe not kids, but so far, Blaze couldn't peg any of them as over twenty-five.
"Toby, he doesn't look good," the dark-haired girl on the left said with a worried frown. "Hey! Can you hear me?"
Blaze tried to shuffle forward to look in. Someone shoved him hard with the butt of a laser rifle. He fell over on his side, anger rising. "Damien!"
"Hey!" The kids were trying again. "Grab on, we'll pull you up."
"Is he staring at you like you're some kind of alien monster?"
The girl glanced over. "Yeah. Kinda like that."
