Disclaimer: I don't own them.
A/N: Okay, I freely admit that the beginning of this chapter exists because I was running out of ways to kill time...and I got bored. -_-; Anyway, ignoring that, welcome to some action. This chapter is about when I first had one of those 'oh wait, the plan I worked out won't necessarily work in practice...hmm...' moments. It kept things interesting. Anyway, enjoy! Reviews are appreciated and make me update faster.
Chapter 9
Day three, no boat. As much as I was enjoying the chance to swim with Heero, I was getting slightly annoyed. That was two days now where I'd spent my morning cold and wet, and it's not like I had dry clothes to change into, and drying out takes forever in the morning.
We spent some time making sure the camouflage on our traps was solid, and making sure none had been dislodged by animals or freak falling branches or something. Then we hauled a medium-sized stockpile of food back to base in case we couldn't get near anything edible or wound up in the equivalent of a forest siege. And man was that a weird mental image…
That took up the morning, but by afternoon we were bored. We went back to home base so we'd have no chance of accidentally setting off a trap, which would be bad since nearly all of them were deadly.
I was contemplating the wisdom of attempting to climb higher than was safe in the tree I was in when Wufei finally seemed to get fed up and dropped to the ground. He started doing some sort of martial arts routine, with kicks, punches, and blocks built in. I looked over at Heero, who had apparently given in to boredom as well and was doing pushups on his platform.
It took some effort to drag my eyes off Heero, but I went back to watching Wufei. I made a point of cataloguing every point in which I could take him down if we were fighting. At about point ten I decided official martial arts and street fighting did not agree well. Of course, to make a couple of those hits I'd probably have to take some myself. But that's what you get in a street fight, do what it takes to win and survive.
What the heck, I was bored.
I slid from my platform to some lower branches and to the ground. "Hey, Wufei, want a partner?"
He blinked at me. "There is no way you are combat trained."
"Officially, no. But I'm pretty good at making things up as I go. I've survived this long, y'know."
"All right. If nothing else, perhaps you'll learn a few moves." Read as: Wufei's bored too.
It was worth the somewhat derogatory acceptance to see his face the first time I ducked in behind a punch, grabbed his shoulder and waist in a definitely non-kosher hold, and dumped him on his ass. Like I said, creativity.
Of course, he got me back by doing some sort of leg sweep that knocked me down next to him.
We rolled away from each other and started circling. I was pretty sure we had an audience by then, but I wasn't going to look away to check. If I did I'd most likely find myself on my butt on the ground again. I slid in with a punch to the side, which Wufei promptly blocked. I dodged his return punch only to get caught by a low kick to the back of my knees. I went with the momentum, falling backwards and tucking into a ball. When I hit the ground I shot a leg out, forcing Wufei to hop back and giving me time to get up again.
We kept going for a good fifteen minutes. Some time in there Wufei found my weak point and proceeded to use it for the rest of the match. Fighting on the streets, you do a lot of punching because given the chance, it's a lot better if you can run like hell and get away. So I'm not really used to either using or dealing with a lot of kicks. I'm not terribly good at blocking them. I got lots of practice now. Bastard.
Over the course of the match, neither of us did any real damage or managed to pull a trick that actually ended the fight, so eventually when I was hot and sweaty and I landed on my ass for the umpteenth time, I just stayed down. "Truce?" I shoved my sweat-soaked bangs out of my face.
"Truce," Wufei echoed. He took a few steps back until he could lean against a tree. Nice to know I'd managed to make him work too.
I flopped down completely flat on the ground. "Man, I needed that. Let's hear it for working off tension."
"You're not a bad opponent, Duo," Wufei admitted from over by his tree.
"Nice to hear. You're pretty good yourself." I waved in his general direction.
I blinked as Heero managed to appear leaning over me. "Your form is awful."
"But it works!"
"It's still awful." I think he was smirking.
I stuck my tongue out at him. Somewhere off to my right, Quatre burst out laughing.
We spent what was left of the afternoon and the evening generally having fun. Heero showed me some martial arts with a better form, and I taught him a few useful tricks that were not legal in any official fight. I never managed to get the better of him while we were sort-of-sparring, but with all the grappling going on I had plenty of opportunity to have my hands all over Heero and his hands all over me, so count me as a happy camper. Quatre surprised us all by knowing some self defense and dumping Wufei on his ass once. Trowa did some acrobatic tricks and juggled a bit. I attempted to juggle and gave up before I hit myself in the head with a rock.
After dinner it got kind of quiet because we were all trying not to think about tomorrow and what could possibly happen. Since the suspense broke the fun mood, we all pretty much decided to turn in early. Plus we'd have to be up at an unholy hour of the morning anyway.
Day four: boat.
Well, boats, since there were two of them. And maybe I should call them ships since they were pretty big…I mentally smacked myself to stop babbling. I crouched lower against my rock, making sure I was out of easy sight of any curious people on the deck.
I had a long wait between the time I spotted the boats and the time they actually reached the shore. Big, they were. Fast, not expecially. I tried not to fidget, but the suspense was killing me. I was about to sneak onto a boat. An occupied boat. With people who were trying to kill me. Who had weapons while I was unarmed. Was I insane? I stuffed my panic into the back of my head and ignored it. Now was definitely not the time.
The boats finally slid into place, and the captives on the far boat were led out on deck. I couldn't tell how many there were. I had an awkward angle for the view of that boat, and I was actually further from it than I would have been if I were in the tree line, but the strange acoustics on the water made it so I could hear bits and pieces of the conversation on the boat. It wasn't terribly useful; about all it told me was that the speech we'd gotten at the beginning was standard. The terrified yells as the captives were tossed out of the boat made me wince and hope like hell that Heero, Wufei, Quatre, and Trowa could get them all to safety.
The five minute break seemed like it would never end. I couldn't get on the boat until the hunters got off, but damn I hated waiting. I wanted to be out of there ASAP, with a radio so we could all get off the island ASAP, and get these people thrown in jail ASAP, and my mind was rambling at me again, this time with acronyms. Damn mind.
Finally the ramp went down and the hunters trooped off their boat. I slid into the water and kept one eye on them as they headed for the trees; this time, there were fourteen hunters, and a few made straight for the trees while the others aimed for tracks. As soon as I was sure they were all occupied, I started swimming quietly for the boat.
My back was crawling, and I felt like I had a great, big target painted on it and a sign saying "Shoot here to bag a street rat!" I heard startled and panicked yells from the forest and grinned somewhat maniacally. Someone had found a trap. I hoped none of them made it back out of the forest alive.
I had a bad realization and froze for a second as I reached the boat; if they decided the forest was too dangerous, they might come back. The prey was gone, hopefully vanished if we'd done our job right. My timeline before I would be in massive trouble was both unknown and probably shorter than any of us had thought. I wished I'd thought of this earlier; if I had, we could have made a contingency plan, probably involving playing cat-and-mouse with the hunters. Shit.
No use wasting time on "could-haves;" I started climbing the side of the boat and blocked everything else out of my mind. As I reached the top, I froze and peeked over the side. No one on deck, and closest cover ten feet away. I slid over the rail and sprinted while crouching to put my back against the wall. Keeping low, I crept quietly until I reached the doorway of the little room you steered from. Hey, hell if I knew what it was called. I crouched lower; this room was occupied.
I scanned the room, looking for anything like what Heero and Wufei had described to me. I found it. Right next to the guy in the room who was boredly reading what appeared to be a bad romance novel. I decided not to let my brain go there, and firmly derailed the train of thought that produced before it left the station.
There was no cover in the room. I had two options: try to get the guy out of the room, sneak in, and grab the radio with no one the wiser; or try to take the guy out and steal the radio. Option one had issues because I had no idea how to get the guy to move. Option two had issues because it would make it obvious that I was here and had stolen the radio. Although they'd prob'ly notice anyway if a radio went missing. And shit…I looked behind me. Yep, I'd left a nice trail of water across the deck. So much for advance planning. Option two it was.
I hesitated again for a minute; I'd never killed a person before and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to right now. This guy was driving the boat for a bunch of evil bastards who were killing kids, but did that make it right for me to kill him? Had he ever actually killed anyone? Why did I take now to develop a conscience? Probably because this guy was right in front of me and acting like a normal human being…enough mental rambling. It's not like I had many options. I looked around, but there was nothing loose on the deck I could use as a weapon. I scanned the room and spotted a piece of equipment that looked heavy and unsecured. I had no idea what it was for, but what the hell.
I reached up and tried the doorknob. Unlocked. I turned it as quietly as possible, mentally thanking whoever it was who had oiled the knob. I knew as soon as I opened the door the guy inside would notice; no way not to in a room this small. So I used the small element of surprise I had. I opened the door completely all at once and slid in as quickly as possible, grabbing the whatever-the-hell-it-was in the same move. As the guy jumped and started to turn around, I moved as fast as I could and hit him in the back of the head as hard as I could.
He went down. I don't know how badly I hurt him, and I didn't much care right then. If he survived, he survived, if not, he didn't. I'd freak out about it later. I grabbed the radio, somewhat awkwardly since it was the size of a large lunchbox and if I wasn't careful the walkie-talkie part would pop off its mount and bang into things, and ran back to the side of the boat in a crouch. I scanned the beach: no people yet, and from the few yells I could hear, they were a bit occupied. I decided to count on the ambient noise being loud enough and dropped my impromptu weapon over the side of the boat, where it sank quickly.
I held the radio in my left hand and made my way down the ladder on the side of the boat in an awkward cross between a scramble and a fall. I hit the water with a slightly louder noise than I'd intended, but no one seemed to notice. Maybe no one was around to notice. It was possible the guy I'd hit was the only one on the boat right now. That would be good, because it was light enough now that I was pretty damned visible.
There was nothing I could do about it anyway, and I went swimming back toward the rocks. Swimming was damned awkward while carrying a heavy radio, even if the thing was waterproof so I didn't have to keep it dry. I ended up resorting to swimming on my back while holding the radio on my stomach. I just wasn't coordinated enough in the water to breaststroke with it in my hand. And even if I was, that damn walkie-talkie bit would probably find a way to fuck things up. Stupid detachable bits.
When I reached the rocks, I followed them to the beach and grabbed a leafy tree branch I'd hidden behind one of the last rocks earlier. I used it to sweep my tracks from behind me as I quickly crossed the sand to the woods, and then ditched it. We'd purposefully left a safe path here leading to a climbable tree, and I followed it in a sprint. I felt much better as soon as I got myself off the ground and out of easy view.
Now I let myself start listening to the sounds on the island again. I needed to be alert to the location of the hunters in order to make it back to base. There was some faint yelling to my right and crunching to my left, but none of the noises were close enough to be an immediate threat. I got moving, keeping my ears cocked. Gunshots to the right…I hoped everyone was okay. Nothing I could do about it if they weren't, so block that thought. Nothing else to the left. Maybe whoever was there either left or died. Or maybe it was a squirrel or something; little buggers can make an inordinate amount of noise compared to their size.
I slid through the trees as quietly as possible. I had to stop and backtrack once when I ran across a hunter slicing his way out of a net he'd triggered. Figures I'd find someone caught in one of the few not-instantly-deadly traps…I backed off before he saw me and took an alternate route.
It was a nerve-wracking trip, and I froze any time I heard a noise. I almost had a panic attack at one point before I realized that I was the one who'd broken a branch and made the noise. I was really starting to hate the distance from the beach to our hideout. It made us safer, but it also made getting to safety harder. Since I was hauling the radio, which seemed to be getting increasingly heavy as the morning wore on, it took me a good five hours to get back.
I practically fell out of the tree I was in and onto a platform when I arrived. Quatre popped up next to me almost immediately and grabbed the radio. "Wufei, Heero, and Trowa are out harassing the enemy along with some volunteers from the new arrivals. Heero left me detailed instructions on how to use the radio to call the police frequency. Can you try to keep the people here calm? I'm worried we'll be found if someone has hysterics loudly."
"I can try. I've got some bad news, though. I had to knock a guy out to get the radio, so even if they would have been stupid enough to not notice it being gone if I just snuck it out, they're sure going to notice now."
"I don't think it matters. They didn't leave immediately, so our revolution here has pretty much destroyed any chance we had of being left alone."
"Point." I looked for the new faces in the grove. All of them were huddled onto one platform two trees over. A quick count gave me seven. "Quatre…how many are out with Heero, Wufei, and Trowa?"
"Three. We lost two on the way in. There isn't time for a full story now, though. I'm going to try to get this working." He gestured with the radio.
I gave him a one-armed hug. "I'll go make sure our new arrivals are doing okay." I got a half smile in return.
Quatre bent to fiddling, and I hauled myself up and in the general direction of the newbies. Four of them looked to be older teens, two tweens, and one that I would swear couldn't be older than seven. The seven-ish year old (I couldn't tell if it was a boy or girl) appeared to be glued to one of the older girls. I gave a mental shrug. Hopefully that girl wouldn't mind being used as a teddy bear, because if it was helping the kid, I was all for it.
Five hours of traveling had gotten me mostly dry, but my much abused clothes were a wrinkled muddy torn wreck. My hair, per usual, was not drying well because of the braid, so I basically had a wet rope down my back, and the tree walking had yanked little bits out of the braid that were now frizzing. In a nutshell, I probably looked like crap. Which was probably why I was getting stared at.
"I'm Duo," I said and bowed theatrically as soon as I got to the right platform. "Welcome to our humble abode. If you tell me what you already know, I can fill in anything you don't. Also, please refrain from panicking until the roller coaster has completely stopped moving."
I got some stifled chuckles and a smirk or two for that comment. The girl being used as a teddy bear outright grinned at me. "I'm Ret," she said. "This's Joy," she nodded her chin at the young kid, "Pete, Jazz, Elen," the older boy and other two girls, "Max an' May," the tweens. "We got th' spiel on th' boat about bein' 'game.'" She grimaced. "There wasn' much other time f'r explanations. As soon as we hit th' woods th' blond boy over there an' th'other three had us in th' trees an' runnin'. Th' brown-haired boy got the cuffs off most us soon as we had some room. He said somethin' about callin' for help and holdin' out 'til it gets here, but then we were runnin' again, for a long time, an' all but the blond split off back near the beach. Three of th'others din't wanna sit, so they split too t' help, an' we lost two when one ran and one got shot. So what's th' full setup?"
"That's the bones of it," I told her. "I'll have to back up some to get this all told. 'Parently some bored bastard hunters decided they wanted intelligent prey. So they started pullin' street kids and buyin' extras from slavers, bringin' them to this island, and huntin' them down." I made a mental note that my street accent got worse when I was listening to someone else with the same accent. "The cops got wind, but they thought the grabbers were sellin' to the slavers, not th'other way around, so they sent in two undercovers to get grabbed. But they didn't plan for somethin' like this, so when the boat they were on, and I was on the same one, brought them here, they got stuck. We three−tha's me, the brown-haired guy who picked your cuffs, and the black-haired one−survived by runnin' and hidin' in the trees, and we met Trowa, the guy with the weird haircut, who was already here. Quatre survived from the next boatload. We made a plan to steal a radio offa one of the boats to call for help. And since we'd be advertizing ourselves by stealin' the radio, we decided to hell with it and we'd try to rescue anyone we could off the boat. Anyone got questions?" I didn't have any problem telling any of these that if we hadn't been able to rescue them we wouldn't have. They understood already.
Ret snorted. "A cop picked th' locks? Now I've seen everythin'."
I grinned back. "Not only that, I taught him how to do it. I feel evil already, corrupting the good."
She laughed. I blinked as I realized something I'd forgotten to mention. "Ah, I'm guessing you already noticed some of it on the way here, but I wouldn't recommend wanderin' in the woods by yourself, because we booby trapped most of it. If you don' know where the traps are, it's damn dangerous, and I'd rather not have anyone get hit by friendly fire. This place is safe, and it's pretty safe to travel by tree, but we did trap some of the more obvious tree-routes so it'd still be better if no one wanders off."
"Got it, boss!" Pete spoke up. "Y'all're our best chance of getting' out of here; we'll be good." He smirked at me.
"Fair enough." I gave a vague wave. "I'm gonna go see if Quatre's got anywhere with the radio."
I did my monkey impression again and slid back into Quatre's tree; he had the radio on and was talking into it. When he saw me he waved for me to sit down but kept talking. "Code red, operatives 01 and 05, require assistance. Civilians and operatives in danger, location unknown island approximately two and a half hours southeast of the mainland by boat. Repeat, code red." He let go of the radio talk button thingy for a minute. "Basically I get to keep doing this and hope someone's monitoring the frequency. It's somewhat depressing since I know no one can talk back."
I snorted. "Look at it this way, the cops can't be that stupid. Heero and Wufei's check-in time was something like five days ago. If they're not monitoring every radio frequency possible, I'm not sure I want them to try to help us. They'd prob'ly just make things worse. I can just see the three stooges attempting a rescue now…" I mimed someone walking into a low-hanging branch and Quatre giggled.
"You're right. But I still feel kind of stupid saying the same thing over and over knowing I'm not going to get an answer."
"You'll get an answer. It'll just come in the form of people and not words!" I was grinning again. "Oh yeah, I talked to the new people. They'll be fine; mostly they just wanted the rundown of exactly what the hell is going on. They're all street kids, and we're damned good at staying calm when in trouble. If you've got anything simple to do, they'll prob'ly help you with it."
"That's good. Wait, help me? Please tell me you're not implying what I think you are." For a nice guy, Quatre's got a great evil eye.
"I would, but I'd be lying. I don't sit still well, I'm going to go see if I can help. I'm betting the hunters aren't going to give up since they've lost their prey and they didn't turn around immediately, and I'm pretty sure we've got a good 24 hours at least until help arrives. I also want a look at what kind of trail got left by hauling everyone here. I'm impressed, by the way. How did Heero get everyone's cuffs off in time?"
"He did them in stages. We shepherded everyone to the same place and let Heero get the cuffs off the youngest first. Then we moved everyone through the trees to a more safe location before trying for the rest of them. It was a bit close; that's how one boy got shot." Quatre's expression dimmed. "The other boy we lost thought we were taking too much of a risk and ran off on his own. We pointed him away from the booby traps, but he got caught by one of the hunters."
I put my hand on his shoulder. "We got most of them out. They'd all have died if we weren't here. Focus on that." It's what I was doing.
I got a tremulous smile. "I'm trying, but sometimes…"
"I know. You get back on the radio, I'll go see if I can help the others."
"Be careful!"
I laughed. "No shit?"
