Page 8 of Brody

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“Don’t get your panties in a twist. You’re not gonna die if you have to wait a few seconds. Go around if you’re that impatient. Not like there’s anyone coming, anyway.”

He said this, but he still pulled the truck forward anyway. As soon as we started moving, the driver behind us swerved around to cut in front of us. As they passed by, they flipped Brody a middle finger before speeding off with a squeal of tires.

I gripped tight to the handle of the door. The sudden loud noises were irritating, but even worse was the thought that the person in the other car was mad at us. Just thinking about it caused my heart rate to spike and I had to take several deep breaths.

“You okay?” Brody asked when he noticed my reaction.

“Fine,” I said, and I almost managed to keep my voice steady. “It’s just strange being out here after spending several days in the hospital.

“Well, I can’t promise my place will be quiet, but we can at least give you something better than hospital food.”

This did manage to get a laugh out of me, albeit a very small one, until I realized that I didn’t even know my own favorite food.

Was it pasta of some sort?

Maybe lasagna?

Maybe. I was pretty sure noodles were involved somehow. Thinking about various types of Italian food made my stomach flip with hunger, but that might have just been a result of the crappy hospital food I’d eaten for the last few days. Any proper food sounded like my favorite thing right now.

I spent the next several minutes listing every different type of food I could think of in my head.

How strange that I could identify all these different foods, and even recall what they tasted like, but I couldn’t remember which ones I preferred.

As we kept driving, Brody filled the silence telling me about his home in Emberwood. He was retired from the military, and it was a shared homestead that he was in the process of building with his other veteran buddies.

Out of the corner of my eye, I gave Brody a closer look. When I thought about the concept of retirement, the picture that came to mind was of someone in their later years of life. Seventies or maybe even eighties. Brody, on the other hand, seemed to be about my age. At forty-five I wasn’t exactly young, but I wasn’t retirement age, either.

At least, I didn’t think so. Without knowing what I did for a living, I couldn’t be sure.

Either way, Brody didn’t fit the image of a retiree, and hearing such a word from his mouth felt wrong. He was a large man, full of life and vigor. Nothing as depressing as retirement should be part of his description.

The description of his home lasted until we reached the edge of town. As soon as we crossed the border out of Rynkirk, trees practically seemed to spring up around us, blocking our view of the town behind us. If I didn’t know Rynkirk was only just down the road, I would have thought we were lost in the middle of nowhere. The forest around us was mostly untouched by man, practically the same now as it had been hundreds of years ago.Even in the middle of the day, the trees shaded the road and made everything look like perpetual twilight.

What had possessed me to go camping alone in the middle of such a landscape?

I couldn’t imagine doing such a thing now. Either, I’d turned into an entirely different person when I lost my memories, or my past self had a very important reason for being out in that tent.

We’d barely left Rynkirk behind when another car pulled up behind us. There was only one road leading out of town in this direction, so the presence of another car wasn’t suspicious and didn’t deserve any special attention. The only reason I even noticed the car was because it didn’t have its running lights on despite how dim it was under the trees’ heavy canopy. Sure, it wasn’t nighttime, but in such low lighting having their lights on would still be safer.

Then, shortly after the car appeared behind us, Brody brought our truck to a sudden stop. A tree lay across the road, completely blocking our path. We had no choice but to come to a stop, along with the car behind us, and both vehicles were left idling in the middle of the road.

“Now what?” I asked Brody. “Should we call someone? Let them know that a tree has fallen down here.”

Brody didn’t look at me. His hands gripped tight to the steering wheel as he glared at the tree.

“It didn’t fall.”

“What?”

“That tree didn’t fall,” he repeated. “I’m a lumberjack. I know what a fallen tree looks like. There’s no disturbed earth where the tree roots pulled up. It didn’t just fall. It was placed there.”

Grabbing the stick shift, he put the car in reverse, but when he looked in the rearview mirror, he froze.

I turned in my seat to see what had caught his attention behind us, and nearly had a heart attack.

Several men climbed out of the other car, each wearing a mask that covered their face, and several of them holding weapons. It looked like something I’d seen one of the movies I’d watched while waiting in the hospital and I almost suspected I was dreaming.

Except I wasn’t dreaming.