PTSD, car crashes and domestic violence are all referenced in this chapter, and will be making repeat appearances throughout the rest of the story.
She was very disoriented at first, eyes screwed shut as she coughed and sneezed to clear her airway of the fine dust. It was a combination of pulverized perma-crete, pavement dust and ordinary Colorado earth, all determined to take up residence in her lungs. Her arms were pinned to her sides and she couldn't move her legs at all.
A gloved hand worked itself loose from behind her head and brushed away the hair that had gotten stuck to her forehead.
Lizzie blinked fiercely to squeeze the dust out of her stinging eyes. Eventually her vision cleared enough to show her Ayers's grimy helmet very close to her face.
She instinctively tried to flinch away, but there was no extra space to flinch into. They were buried in a dirt hollow with perma-crete for a lid and a dim ray of sunlight shining through a crack in the debris.
She turned her head so she wouldn't cough directly onto his visor.
"Ayers," she croaked. "I think we got buried alive."
A soft green light flickered on inside his helmet, illuminating his face from above.
"Okay?" asked his muffled voice.
She coughed a few more times. His palm cradled her cheek to keep it from touching the dirt.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'll need a sinus rinse after this, but I don't think any of it made it into my lungs."
He nodded. Good.
A metallic voice started speaking inside his helmet, but she couldn't make out the words. Ayers looked at the lower right corner of his visor for something only he could see. He made an odd movement with the corner of his mouth, and the voice cut off in mid-sentence.
Lizzie had wondered how he communicated with Delta if he rarely spoke; his HUD must interpret facial movements into commands if he looked at a certain part of the visor. His suit probably had some kind of automated distress signal, too. Even if the mercenary company dispatched a team, though, it would be hours before they located their operative and dug him out.
When she realized the position they were in, she knew she couldn't wait hours to be rescued.
Ayers's lower legs were clamped around her thighs, and the unyielding surface pinning her down was Ayers himself, stomach-to-stomach and chest-to-chest, with one palm resting between her shoulder blades like an embrace. The other hand had been protecting her head.
The falling building had essentially hammered them into the ground, and she was only uninjured because he'd wrapped himself around her to shield her from all sides. Thank God the armor was a bomb-proof exoskeleton.
Allowing that thought was a mistake: her imagination immediately supplied a vision of what would have happened if he didn't have such a high-tech suit. His body being crushed like a bug. Blood and tissue leaking out through cracks in the destroyed armor. A pale, dead face staring at her with an expression of disbelief … like Hugh.
She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed hard, forcing the memory of Hugh down into her stomach with the bile that had been rising from it.
Ayers wriggled a hand down to his waist and fumbled with some sort of fastening.
She felt a flash of shock. He wouldn't. Surely not. He wouldn't suddenly think, 'Oh, well, I guess we're stuck like this. I've got nothing better to do and she's clearly hot for my -'
Ayers produced a soft cloth from one of his belt pouches. He eased his hand back up to her face and wiped the dirt away from her eyes and nose.
Her anxiety vanished. It was Ayers here with her, not some scummy guy trying to take advantage of her feelings for him; she was safe.
She sniffed when he was done wiping her face. "Thanks, Chester. Now, um, now what?"
Ayers smiled, and shrugged as much as the tiny space would allow. "Not Chester. … Dig?"
She tried to bend her elbows, but their dirt coffin wouldn't allow it. " 'Fraid I'm not going to be much help until we have more room."
He nodded. Right.
Ayers began to rock from side to side, pressing back the crumbly soil around them, and then squirming his legs around to push the loosened dirt down to his feet for compaction. She knew that it was the only way to make more space, but it brought to mind several steamy dreams she'd had. The armor was warm and its surface extremely smooth, creating the impression of bare flesh when felt through the thin material of her T-shirt. She had no doubt his real muscles would be just as hard and warm. Her belly started to quiver, and she prayed he wouldn't notice. The last thing she wanted was for him to feel trapped, pressed intimately against an aroused person that he wasn't really into, with no easy way to put distance between them.
Lizzie did feel trapped here. Trapped. Pinned between several hard surfaces and unable to move her arms, with Hugh's torso lying across her bloody legs –
She quickly shut her eyes and breathed through her nose. 'No,' she told herself. 'No, I am not doing this today. I will not lose my shit in front of Ayers again. Nope.'
She managed to get her right arm loose while Ayers made them a little cave so they could maneuver. Things got even more awkward whenever he had to lean onto her to push dirt away with his feet, which made his armored groin touch her upper thighs.
Predictably, her face began to heat up. It was one thing to have fantasies about somebody; it was an entirely different thing to be reminded of those fantasies while the object of them was basically bumping and grinding on top of you. Thankfully he was looking down his flanks to watch his progress and not staring into her eyes.
Once he'd expanded their hollow into something twice the width, he paused, raising his eyebrows at her. Doing okay? His gaze traced over her burning cheeks. There was more daylight streaming into their little cave now. You look overheated.
"Yup," she assured him, quickly moving her forearm to cover her breasts. 'Don't mind me and my fully erect nipples. Nothing to see here. Move along.' "Fine and dandy, as Vincent likes to say."
He squinted at her. You sure?
"Mmm-hmm," she hummed through her tightly-pressed lips. 'Please hurry up. But not so vigorously that it's suggestive of something else.'
Instead, he uncoupled the ratchet buckles on her hydration pack.
"What are you doing?"
In answer, Ayers lifted her to him with a hand on the small of her back. He was only doing it to slide the backpack out from under her, but having her stomach and hips pressed against his own did not make her more comfortable in the way he intended. Especially because his hand was so large that his fingers practically were cupping her ass.
Lizzie pretended to be fascinated by the progress he'd made, and definitely did not sneak a peek at his dark lashes and half-open mouth, only inches from the pulse pounding in her throat. Ayers's hand moved from her back to her skull, lifting it slightly to slip the slender hydration pack beneath as padding.
That done, he patted his knee. 'I think I can get up to a kneeling position now.'
Lizzie nodded, shielding her eyes from the dirt that would fall. She lifted her ring and pinky fingers slightly so she could continue watching him.
"Ready."
Ayers's initial stance over her was apparently too wide for good leverage, so he moved one knee into the space between her thighs and squirmed around until he got the other knee up and that foot flat on the ground.
'Jiminy Christmas, does he have to kneel right there?' She was practically riding his thigh. Not that she hadn't daydreamed about doing that exact thing too many times to count, but this was not the time to be having such thoughts.
Ayers brought his palms up to the slab where it rested on the slope of his neck and shoulder, and began to force the perma-crete upward. He looked like an armored version of the Greek god Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on his back.
He began to stand in slow motion. A rush of loose topsoil poured in around the edges of the slab, illuminated by sunlight so that he appeared to be bathing in golden sparks.
A tiny Wow was all her thoughts could manage in the way of English. The rest was complete gibberish.
Left unsupervised, her mouth said, "Been a while since I had a hot guy on top of me. Haha."
Ayers froze in place. His eyes swiveled to look at her.
She covered her face with a mumbled curse.
Ayers's body quivered with silent laughter, including the knee between her thighs.
'No, don't do that! Don't vibrate, for Pete's sake! Shiiit, I'm going to end up with some kind of sex-in-a-cave kink.'
"I am so sorry," she said out loud. "That was massively inappropriate and I -"
Ayers's soundless chuckling only intensified. Nervous laughter, probably. Shit, this was horrific.
"- promise you on my life it will not happen again."
Fortunately, her own personal Greek god did not stop to revel in her humiliation, but kept pressing upward until more perma-crete dust poured in. They were either closer to the surface than she'd thought, or only a thin slab of the building had fallen on them.
The power armor began to whine softly as the suit assisted Ayers with lifting however-many pounds of artificial rock lay across his shoulders.
A pile of dirt clods tumbled in from the left and thumped down onto her stomach. The sudden weight was too much.
"Call another ambulance."
"For the guy in the armored suit?"
"No, for the one who's been chopped in half. Of course I mean for the guy in the suit, genius."
Lizzie gasped. She hadn't had auditory flashbacks in weeks.
'No,' she thought. 'Oh, no. Not now. Not when I can't get out. Not in front of Ayers.'
Ayers paused in his half-lunge stance when he heard her sharp inhalation.
"Okay?" he asked.
"No. N-no," she admitted. "I don't … I don't like being trapped like this." Her last few words were breathy, almost inaudible.
The armor's noise level increased a hundredfold. "Cover," Ayers commanded.
Lizzie wrenched her other arm loose and crossed both forearms over her face. There was a rumble and chunks of earth peppered her chest and stomach. Before the finer grains could make their way through her protective arms, Ayers grabbed her high up on her sides, his thumbs perilously close to touching side-boob, and lifted her to sit on the edge of the new crater. Her head spun at the abrupt elevation change.
Ayers used a tiny burst from the armor's mini-jets to hop up onto the pavement himself.
"Th-thanks, M- M–" She tried to call him Maurice to break the tension, but her brain had other plans.
Her heart was hammering like the pistons of a runaway train, and not in an Ayers is on top of me kind of way.
'No,' she thought desperately. 'Not now. Not when I'm away from home.'
Her breath came in wheezes. Goddammit. Goddammit. She knew she was getting enough oxygen. She knew it. She knew she didn't have a collapsed lung. She knew if she checked herself with medical equipment, the reading would show perfectly oxygenated blood. She knew it to be true.
According to the part of her brain ruled by instinct, however, she was dying. Again.
Sparks flew across her vision like aggressive fireflies. She tried to wave them away, but her arms wouldn't respond.
"It's okay, lady. We're gonna get you out. Stay with me."
"Hugh …"
"Shit, the Painsaw barely makes a scratch. This car's one of those new alloys."
"Get the Jaws, then. 50,000 PSI will cut anything."
"Hugh …"
"What's that? 'You …' what?"
"Hhhhugh … help Hugh."
"Ma'am, he's dead. Nobody could survive that. No, don't look. Keep your eyes on me."
"Please help him. It's not his fault …"
"Ma'am, listen to me. He's gone. But you're still here. We're doing our best to help you, okay? The air ambulance is on its way."
"She's gonna lose that arm."
"Someone get this goddamn rookie out of here!"
Shit. She thought she'd gotten away with it. She thought she'd been able to head off the memory before it triggered an episode. But she hadn't. The flashback had only been delayed until she wasn't in physical danger anymore.
Now the threat to her life rose up from the past instead. It had been the helmet. And not being able to move. The helmet, too close to her face. Right in her face. Too close.
The helmet….
The winged symbol for Aston Martin was too close to her face. She shrank back against the passenger door.
Below the emblem on his pure white helmet, Shane's face smiled at them, handsome and cruel.
"Let's all go for a drive," he said. "Move over, Martinez." He gestured with the pistol until Hugh complied.
Her terrified friend placed himself sideways on the seat to shield her from the intruder. "Beth," he whispered. "Unlock your door and get out. Run."
Shane was having trouble maneuvering in his heavy racing suit without taking the gun off them. She knew from experience that the helmet impaired his hearing as well.
"He'll shoot you," she whispered back, fumbling behind her for the door lock.
"I know. Run. Get away."
Shane laughed as he sat down, sounding almost delighted. "An insecure man would think you two were talking about him. Rude." The joints of his white suit creaked when he tapped out the sequence that made the auto-harness wrap itself around his chest.
"The controls are jammed," Beth told Hugh in a panic, louder than she had meant to.
"Not jammed," Shane said smugly. "Under new management." He smiled again with those perfect teeth. Beth realized why the car's engine had died at the same moment their seat belts retracted: Shane had done something to Hugh's vehicle while it was in the shop.
"Now," her ex said with anticipation, "let's see how fast this bucket of bolts can go."
A helmet fell to the ground next to her right hand, and a huge, dark shadow snatched at her.
She couldn't remember making the decision to scream, but the voice piercing the air sounded exactly like hers.
She twisted away, falling hard onto her forearms and scrambling to her feet in such haste that bits of broken pavement tore through the skin of her palms and embedded themselves in her flesh.
Hyperventilating, she stumbled forward as fast as she could. Why were there so many crashed cars on the road? Hugh's was the only car that had crashed, wasn't it?
A man's shape leapt in front of her, his arms reaching for her with crushing strength.
"No! Fuck you! Go away! Fuck you, you … you fucking fucker!" she shouted, hurling the words at her attacker like a child throws rocks. Every time she used them they had less power. "Leave me alone!"
The black figure made another lunge at her. This time she threw real rocks.
He wouldn't stop. He shrugged off the blows from the stones and kept coming.
She sobbed in terror. He was going to get her. He had her trapped. He was going to slap her hands aside and choke her until it felt like her head would explode. She was going to wake up with bruises and broken bones and cuts all down her legs. Again.
Why did this keep happening? Why was she the kind of person who deserved this? Why wouldn't this end?
No one answered. They never did. Even if the answer had been Because you deserve it, that would be better than this indifferent silence. But the truth was that no one cared enough to even tell her she was trash.
Her thin, keening noise of frustration grew to an unbearable shriek that scrubbed her throat raw. She couldn't see. Her feet kept catching on rocks or roots and she fell and got back up again, fell and got back up, fell and got up. Her vision was a blur of dark colors and pale hands striking at her face.
Her face. Her face was the problem. As long as it looked like her, he'd be able to find her. She had to get rid of it. She had to take it off.
This patched-together visage was stuck on there pretty good, but maybe if she could get her fingernails under the edges and peel it down...
The vicious stinging sensation as her fingernails raked down her forehead and over her cheeks was almost a relief. 'Get it off, get it off, get it off...'
Hands grabbed her wrists.
No! This was important! This would save her! Only bad people would want her to stop. Only people who wanted her to be found. Shane's people.
She snarled and thrashed, trying to twist free, but something pulled her tight against a hardsuit. Her arms were pinned at her sides. Oh, God. He'd found her. He was going to kill her. How many times would this be now?
Then a large palm cupped the back of her head and the agony stopped like a switch had been turned off.
Her body went limp. She had a few moments to savor the absence of pain, like floating in a sensory-deprivation pool with soft green light overhead, and then a wave of nothingness pushed her down into the dark.