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We huddled in a group next to the dead firepit as Tox appeared, shoved unceremoniously from the jungle and into the clearing hard enough to fall on his hands and knees. Aw Fuck marched up from behind him, bristling angrily as he came out of the jungle, and before Tox could get to his feet the keeper snatched him up by the back waistband of his pants and hauled him like a Samsonite suitcase toward the center of camp.
"The fuck?" KC whispered from beside me, his tone incredulous.
"Tox tried to pull a Flic," Tank said quietly, and everyone looked at me.
"What?" I demanded, a quiet hiss.
"He rabbited," Calm said flatly. "Bailed on his unit. Fucker." He watched impassively as my keeper, and Tox and Calm's too, lugged Tox to the far side of the fire pit, then dropped him to the dirt. Tox was coughing and gasping; apparently this brutal treatment had been for his entire journey back to camp, however long that had been. He was filthy and his fatigues hung off him in tatters, and there was blood on his face.
"He doesn't behave like that toward me," I said, watching in horror as Aw Fuck crouched beside Tox and retrieved something from his belt.
"Told you," Sender pointed out. "This is why you're our runner. Not Tox."
Aw Fuck lifted Tox's feet by grabbing the backs of his pants legs, then wound something around his ankles from his other hand. I did a spot-check on the other keepers and saw they were watching but making no move to intervene.
The dark-skinned keeper stood and tilted his head back, looking into the mahogany tree where they hung their kills to let them bleed out. Then he tossed the loose length of the rope or wire he'd tied around Tox's ankles up over the thick, overhanging limb and began to haul him up.
"Oh, no-no-no," Sarge objected, and started forward. On the other side of the fire pit the Green Meanie came instantly to his feet and barked a warning. Sarge's keeper, telling him to keep his distance. "Don't do this!" he pleaded, holding up his hands and moving them slightly as if he could physically push their awesome tempers down.
Tox groaned and started to thrash as his legs came off the ground, then Aw Fuck gave a sharp tug that lifted him and set him dangling. "Sarge!" he started shouting, trying to lift his head and look around as he spun. "Sarge!" Another tug and his head was at the same height as Aw Fuck's belly, well out of reach of the ground. Satisfied, the keeper went to the trunk of the mahogany and tied the line off, leaving Tox to dangle. He returned to Tox but stared at the Sarge, the visors covering his eyes flashing as they reflected the firelight.
"Felicia?" the Sarge said, tossing my full name over his shoulder. I flinched, surprised, then looked from the Sarge to Tox. Then at Aw Fuck, bristling with barely suppressed rage. I'd never seen him so angry. Even Loco Marrón was keeping out of this.
I could feel my squad-mates' eyes on me as I hesitated, then I stepped forward from the huddled group. The slight movement of Aw Fuck's mask warned me that he'd switched his regard from Sarge to me and I flinched, then continued forward until I was side-by-side with my sergeant. "Do something," he hissed, as if I had any control over this situation. Tox was a raving lunatic asshole most times, and while I didn't particularly like him I had no interest in watching him die. Especially not as it appeared, like he was about to be gutted.
As if to confirm my thoughts, Aw Fuck's upper arm bulged and the blades housed in his right gauntlet sprang out over the back of his fist, and Tox started keening like a wild animal. The momentary delay hadn't cooled the keeper's rage, apparently. The individual tendrils of his long black hairs were crested at their roots, rising off his scalp to create a dark crown behind his mask that only added to the menace emanating from him.
Gathering my resolve, I limped forward two more steps, my fists clenched so tightly they were trembling. "Hola, novio," I greeted Aw Fuck, keeping my voice steady. I was astonished to hear a rough trill in response, as if he was courteously returning my greeting despite his temper. "See what happens when you take me out of the game? This stupid idiot decides to take my place."
"Flic," the Sarge hissed.
Aw Fuck lifted his head to look past me, issuing a low growl to the Sarge.
"Hide and seek's my game," I said quickly to draw his attention back to me. "Tox sucks at it."
Loco chortled, then reached up to slap the side of Green Meanie's thigh with the back of his hand. The dark green keeper looked down and something was communicated between them before he took a step back to settle on his haunches next to Loco Marrón, where he'd been relaxing before standing and stepping forward to back the Sarge off. They were leaving Aw Fuck to handle this one on his own, then. Letting him finish what he started, despite the human intervention and all.
Emboldened, I shuffled closer, passing the fire pit and putting myself squarely on the keeper side of the camp. Enemy territory. And me without my gun.
"Flic...help me..." Tox pleaded, reaching out toward me when he spun enough to face me. Aw Fuck growled again and reached out with his left hand to shove roughly at him without taking his attention off of me, sending him back into a fast spin.
"He'd probably stop bugging you if you'd just cut him down," I suggested helpfully. "He'll just scoot back over thataway and shut the hell up. Won't you, Tox?" I called, thumbing over my shoulder.
"Whatever...you say..." he agreed weakly, swinging and spinning head-down.
Aw Fuck's thick hairs were settling back into their usual place, I noticed. Relaxing, in other words. I think. "Would you let him down now?" I requested. "Pretty please?"
I heard Sarge grumble behind me, no doubt appalled by those words coming out of one of his soldiers' mouths. Aw Fuck's hair crested again, then just as quickly subsided. Oh, he was on edge alright. Every little thing was setting him off.
Abruptly he straightened and withdrew his wristblades, then pointed at me with the first and middle fingers of his right hand. Then he thumbed back at Tox. Point, thumb. Point, thumb. Becoming annoyed again as I stood there staring in incomprehension, he growled.
"What?" I asked, shrugging and shaking my head. "It should be me hanging there?" I finally guessed.
Trilling, he finally nodded. I looked away from him to regard Tox, still swaying upside-down but quiet now.
"Looks like no fun," I commented.
Aw Fuck tilted his head, some of his thick hairs sliding over his shoulder, then he started to trill. It roughened into a chortle as he nodded again. The other three of his kind joined in his amusement. Sure it was at my expense, but anything to deflate the tension, right?
Aw Fuck grunted, then raised his right hand again, pointing beyond me and holding the point while staring at me. His message was clear: I was to go back to where I'd come from, the opposite side of the camp.
"Let me take him with me," I requested quietly. I didn't much like Tox but he was my squad-mate, and squad-mates looked out for each other despite their differences.
My keeper growled, a long, low sound of warning. Because growling was his primary form of communication, at least him to me, I'd become adept at interpreting his growls. This one wasn't directly threatening or dangerous; it was his 'You're pissing me off' sound, a warning. Usually my response would be to back down or comply with whatever demand he'd made that I was defying.
"You'll stick with the program, right Tox?" I asked, raising my voice. "You've learned your lesson?"
"Right," he agreed, his voice weak.
"See?" I said brightly, hopefully, looking at the dark-skinned keeper. "Lesson learned. All good now."
Aw Fuck had gone into super-still mode, just staring at me. I waited, unsure if he was translating my words into something he could understand, and when he still didn't move I dared to limp even closer. God, he was huge. Just enormous. I imagined I could feel the heat pouring off of him as I caught a strong whiff of coffee, but no vanilla or cinnamon. Pure coffee was not a good thing, since we'd come to learn that the stronger that smell, the higher the level of aggression.
I stopped just out of Aw Fuck's immediate reach, my hands still fisted in tension as he stared down at me. "Tox," I said quietly, "what exactly happened?" When my dangling squad-mate coughed weakly and didn't answer, I said, "Tox," my voice harder. He'd given up trying to pull himself up the line he was suspended from and had let his arms hang down. When I dared a quick glance at him I saw he was staring at the ground four feet below his face.
"Broke off during an engagement," he rasped, not looking at me.
"Leaving your team one short," I pointed out. From what I understood, it hadn't been planned or anticipated by the rest of his unit. It was a cowardly thing to do. At least when I did the rabbit thing it was under direct orders and anticipated by the rest of my unit.
"Made it to the cliff," he continued, and I was surprised enough to dare to turn my head and focus my full attention on him. "Fucker cut me off, so I shot him."
"You shot Aw Fuck?" I said, stunned. No wonder the aggression. Rule Number One, enforced with extreme prejudice: Do Not Shoot The Keepers. Early on in our captivity of course we'd tried to stun them down, and we'd learned the hard way that the pulse rifles on their lowest settings stung them but didn't knock them out. Wasn't even powerful enough to knock out the the younger, smaller ones that we were actually allowed to fire on during hunts. Tox had been one of the guys who'd tried to shoot down a keeper at the end of a hunt, so he should have known better. He'd been used as an example to the rest of us that shooting a keeper was a no-no. You would have thought the lesson had stuck with him more than the rest of us, but apparently I'd overestimated his intelligence.
"Like five fucking times. Sonuvabitch wouldn't go down," he admitted, still staring down at the ground. Blood dripped off his face from his mouth and nose, and I assumed that Aw Fuck's immediate reaction had been to strike him.
I wanted to hit him myself. We'd learned the rules and abided by them in order to maintain some semblance of a truce between us and our keepers. We wanted them to drop their guards, cut us some slack, hoping that one day soon it would pay off and factor into our escape or release.
"You stupid motherfucker," I hissed, digging my fingernails into my palms. Here I was on the wrong side of camp, defending an idiot who'd gone against orders, putting myself in the middle of the mess he himself had created. I'd been this close to offering to trade places with him, too, sure that Aw Fuck would go easier on me than on Tox.
"Whatever," he said distantly.
And at that I took a step back, then returned my attention back to the looming predator, still standing absolutely still as he observed and listened. Tox had not only pulled a fast one on him, he'd lifted a weapon and discharged it at him. To continue standing here and protesting his case would reflect badly on the entire squad, instead of focusing the blame on where it belonged. "Sorry to bother you," I mumbled. "Carry on."
His right forearm flexed again to extend the blades as he rumbled, creating an impressive bulge of muscle on the front of his upper arm, then he stepped toward Tox and grabbed his shins in his huge left hand. I was just about to turn away and get the hell out of Dodge when I saw Aw Fuck lift his blades high, above the level of Tox's feet. He was going to cut him down.
"You bitch! You fucking bitch!" Tox started hollering as the blades lifted. I looked at his face, his eyes wild and fixed on me. He didn't know that Aw Fuck was fixing to cut him loose and he was screaming at me, I realized. Blaming me for the death he thought was coming.
The reaction was instantaneous. There was a metal-on-metal scrape as Aw Fuck's right hand opened and he retracted the blades back into his gauntlet, still grabbed Tox's shins in his left hand, and punched Tox right in the breadbasket with his fist. Tox's cursing at me cut off with a whomping whoof of air and spit and blood, and Aw Fuck sent him into a fast spinning swing, then growled and walked away, heading for the other three keepers.
"Dumbass," I hissed, not even sure Tox would hear me over the sound of his own keening and blubbering. I turned from him, glancing Aw Fuck's way to see his back to me, then I headed for the other side of camp.
"Flic? What happened? What's going on?" my sergeant demanded, his eyes moving between my face and Tox's still-dangling form.
"Let's go," I muttered, wanting and needing to beat a retreat, to distance myself from both the keepers and my stupid, unpredictable squad-mate. I was relieved when Sarge chose to follow me back to the others instead of ordering me to stop and report immediately.
The squad was tense and quiet as we gathered into a small circle to pow-wow. "So, not only did Tox go haring off on his own, apparently when Aw Fuck caught up to him...he shot him. Five times," I announced. There was a collective intake of breath, and the Sarge lifted his head to glare over at Tox.
"Not cool," Benson sighed.
"Mierda la cabeza," Ramirez muttered darkly, and Guerrero nodded. Shithead.
"So why'd he curse you out?" Sarge wanted to know, looking at me.
"When Aw Fuck was gonna cut him loose, I guess he thought he was about to get gutted," I shrugged, then picked a small stick up out of the leaf litter.
"And how's that your fault?" Patty demanded.
"Tox had just admitted to me that he'd bolted and shot Aw Fuck. When I heard that shit, I backed off from trying to defend him," I admitted, clearing a small space in front of me of debris and scratching in the dirt with the stick. "I woulda been willing to switch places with him for bolting, but I'm not taking the punishment for shooting."
"Damnit," Sarge growled, after a moment of silence. The mood was collectively dark as everyone mulled things over. It most definitely wasn't one of our finest hours.
"At least one good thing came of this," Reece spoke up, then waited til everyone looked at him. "Least we know for sure now that Flic's novio's sweet on her."
I glared. "Knock if off with that already, wouldya?" I snapped, annoyed. "It's like the third grade around here anymore with this shit. In case you haven't noticed, the whole reason I'm fucked up, the reason Tox tried to pull a Flic like Calm said, is because Aw Fuck knocked my brains out and messed up my ankle, okay? He's not my pal."
Reece met my eyes but subsided, and the group slipped back into mulling silence. Forty three days we'd been stuck here; Sarge kept track by carving a notch for each day on the edge of the wooden deck that formed the front porch of his tent. Every time I headed for the river, my eyes looked at the number of notches; I was sure the same was true for every one of us.
"Somebody had a hot date last night," Nubby drawled, and when I lifted my head with a grin to see who he was calling out, I saw he was looking at me. At his cue, the rest of the squad looked at me also.
"What?" I demanded.
"Last night, bang, everything goes quiet," Nubby said slowly, drawing it out and locking eyes with me. "I wake up and listen, and I hear whispering. Female whispering, loud-like. So I went to the tent flap and what do my eyes see? The big black carrying Flic back to her tent." He gave me a toothy, triumphant smile. For my part I paled, then probably turned a shade of red that didn't exist on any known color scale.
"Is this true, hermana?" Ramirez demanded.
I dropped the stick and held up my hands. "Whoah, whoah, whoah. It wasn't like that, okay? I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the river to soak my ankle. Aw Fuck pops up, checks me out, takes a bath, then tries to shove me back to the site. Only it was pitch dark and I'm fuckin' lame, remember? So next thing I know he chucks me over his shoulder and carries me back to the tent, okay?"
"You went to the river by yourself?" the Sarge asked, his voice loud. "In the middle of the night?"
I huffed. "Who'm I gonna ask, Sarge? Everybody's gotta get up at the crack and run for their lives. Fuckin' Nubby should have come out, since obviously he was awake." I glared at him.
"I didn't see you go. I only saw you come back, and I wasn't about to interrupt that."
"What that? There was no that," I scowled. "Fuck off with whatever you're trying to imply. Aw Fuck's the reason my ankle's wrecked."
"Your mouth is the reason your ankle's wrecked," the Sarge corrected icily. Great. Patty went and tattled on me. I shot her a look but she was avoiding my eyes. "And now I got Tox swinging upside down on the wrong side of the fire cuz he went and tried to be a hero."
"With all due respect, don't go there, Sarge," Sender protested. "Tox wasn't trying to be no hero."
"I second that," Calm agreed quietly. Surprising, since Calm and Tox were tight. He lifted his canteen and swigged some water, then washed it through his mouth and spat it into the dirt. "He saw an opportunity and he took it."
"Well, no more opportunities," Sarge snapped, then passed a hard glance across every one of us. "Got it?"
"What, then? We're just giving up?" KC demanded boldly. I was glad he'd said it, cuz I was about to. And I was relieved to see that I wasn't the only one about to ask the same question.
"No," Sarge scowled."We're not giving up. We stick to our roles. Flic's got some pull, obviously. She's our runner. It's only a matter of time before she clears the playing field."
It was quiet for a moment after that statement, and I mulled his words over busily, unsure about his confidence. I didn't have 'pull', despite what he thought, despite what Nubby saw. Aw Fuck had almost dashed my brains out against that boulder, and he didn't strike me as being sorry for fucking up my ankle. Seemed to me that something about my injury pissed him off more than anything, causing friction between him and Loco Marrón. Far as I could tell, Aw Fuck had tried to argue with Loco's decision to bench me for this morning's fun and games.
"Doesn't matter. He'll go after her," Nubby said quietly. I lifted my head in time to catch Ramirez's nod of agreement.
"I think they'd run down anybody who tried to escape," I pointed out sourly.
Carter, who'd been amazingly silent all this while, snorted. "I think that one would chase you to Manhattan if that's what it took. Rest of us, fuck it. They'd probably just bail."
"Wait, what?" I asked hotly. "What about me and Aw Fuck?"
"Felicia," the Sarge said, his voice hard and flat, "concentrate. Stick with the plan. You're our ticket outta here."
Ramirez was looking at me. If I was any judge of her hard face, I'd say her expression was sympathetic. Guerrero and Patty refused to look at me. I furrowed my brows, suspicious of what my three female squad-mates were thinking. Whatever it was, it wasn't good.
"I'll do it," I assured the rest, my voice firm. I couldn't think about the price that might have to be paid for my team's freedom, or the fact that I might end up being the one paying it. I had to keep on, to try. Aw Fuck, brutal bully that he was, treated me differently. I couldn't deny that anymore, not after what happened between him and me and Tox. I was smarter than Tox for sure, knowing better than to actually try to hurt my keeper. It would never cross my mind to fire my dumbed-down pulse rifle at him when he caught me on my forays, and maybe that made all the difference. Or maybe, like the others thought, it was merely my sex that made all the difference. But no matter what, if the rest bolted and made it clear, there would be no reason for Aw Fuck to hang on to me, right? If the jig was up and the game was over, he'd let me go my way while he went his. I had to believe that.
Annoyed with my squad-mates, I got to my feet without waiting for Sarge to dismiss me, then limped off to my tent. Sarge didn't call me back, and I had a sneaking suspicion, as I collapsed on my bunk, that I was the topic of conversation. Screw them. Screw everyone. I would do my job, do what had to be done, but I didn't need to hear their shit, too.
