You guys are amazing - by the way. Keep the reviews coming! They make me so excited! Hope you enjoy this one and I welcome any ideas! Let me know what you want to see! I still don't own Burn Notice.
They were stuck. No phones. Three pistols. No food. No way to get help.
And no reasonable hope of finding civilization.
When their captors dumped them in the everglades Sam, Fiona and Michael all knew it might not end well. They just didn't factor in Aubin.
Michael and Fiona had both been tortured. She was worse off, but neither was truly, empirically up for the trek through the swamps that undoubtedly lay ahead of them.
Michael had a ricochet wound in his hip and Fiona had one in her upper back. All three of them had been tortured in their own right. Sam was the most in tact, as their captors had quickly realized they wouldn't get any information from the ex-SEAL and that he was too stoic to be used as leverage against Michael. A couple cuts on one arm and a dozen bruises were all Sam had to show for his ordeal. Michael had more bruises – including a black eye that had split the skin on his forehead, sending a rivulet of blood down his face. A line of cuts on one forearm – far more than the four on Sam's – spoke to the time he'd spent in questioning. Fiona had benefited marginally from some inherent chauvinism – they hadn't actually interrogated her – but they had used her to get to Michael. They'd hurt her less systematically than Michael and Sam. She didn't have orderly rows of cuts. They'd just tied her to a chair and gone at her with a broken table leg. There were cigarette burns, and cuts and splinters and too many bruises to count. She was holding onto consciousness – but both she and Michael were fading fast.
They made it a good mile and a half before she stopped, leaning more heavily on Sam than she had been, holding the worst of her injuries – a penetrating blow from the table leg along the inside edge of her ribs.
"Michael we need to stop," Sam said, taking in Fiona's unnatural pallor, then looking up to see just how bad off Michael was as well. He was limping badly, his eyes glazed and focused straight ahead.
"Mikey, brother," Sam repeated when his friend didn't respond.
"Michael!" Fiona cried. That snapped him out of it. Michael stopped, turned, rushed back to them.
"What's wrong?" he asked, fingers tracing the curve of Fiona's blood-stained cheek.
"You both need to stop," Sam said.
"We'll be fine," Michael retorted, "right Fi? You can make it a couple more miles? We're bound to hit a road somewhere soon..."
"Not before one of you passes out on me," Sam replied with equal vigor.
Michael just shook his head, taking Fiona's hand and starting forward again. But she jerked back, pulling away from him.
"Michael, we need to stop. Now. Michael you're shaking – you're going into shock – that bullet wound is pouring blood – we need to do something about it before you…" Fiona began, but before she could finish Michael confirmed her worst fears, passing out on the swampy earth, his head hitting the ground hard as a fresh stream of blood rushed from the injury in his leg.