Page 44 of Touchdown

I nudged him with a toe in the side. He grunted in his sleep.

“The rain is letting up.” Noah hadn't fallen back to sleep either. “We should probably take this break in the storm as an opportunity to ditch them overboard and get the hell out of here.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Not at all well rested, we communicated in grunts as we dumped the three men on the beach. The rain was only a drizzle again, but the storm had washed away the high tide line. My weariness made me think more slowly than usual, but I remembered where it was well enough to drop them where they'd be reasonably safe from drowning.

If we carried them back into the trees, they were guaranteed to be safe from rising water, but screw that. The lightning strikes were fading, but they were hitting from time to time, and I didn't feel like getting zotted by Zeus in some idealistic effort to save a bad guy.

“How are they doing?” Noah asked.

“Still out. Still breathing.” I turned them on their side. Checked to be sure that their airways were clear. “They're doing better than they deserve.”

I stood there a moment. We owed them nothing. I owed Noah everything. But they were still unconscious and destined to remain that way for an unknown period of time.

He touched my bare hip. “The guy expected someone to arrive at noon. You heard him. We're not abandoning them here. They'll be okay.”

Leaning back, I looked up the hill. The house was up there. The bed.

Why had we ever left?

My bones ached with weariness. Me and Noah. We could be in that bed right this minute.

Chapter 31

Noah and me tumbling across a mattress. It was a hallucinatory image. A fantasy.

We wouldn't be in that bed. They were coming to take us away.

Wake up!

“Slate?” Noah touched my elbow. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Sure.” I faked a laugh. Toed at the guy at my feet again. He had shoes which were a lot more than I had. “You're a sweet guy, Noah. Don't assume I give a flying fuck about what happens to them after we dump them. We were dumped here too. They can go up to the house and help themselves. After a while, that guy will come by with supplies. They'll be fine.”

“Sure, babe.” He squeezed my arm a little harder. It felt good.

All we had to do was push through a little more. Take that helicopter somewhere, anywhere. Any place with any number of people would have some kind of air traffic control and some kind of air force. As soon as we got picked up on radar, they'd get in touch with us, and they could talk us through anything we needed to get us back to civilization.

Back in the chopper, we found some scrubs in a supply closet. The smaller set was that distressing shade of tomato that I associate with surgeons. The bigger set was that sad shade of medical green. Noah could fit into the tomato, and I (barely) fit into the green, but we didn't exactly look like a pair of male models ready for our closeup.

“Emergency extraction, that guy said,” Noah mused. “So what does that mean? Who are we running from?”

“I was thinking about that too. If it's the FBI, if they finally figured out where we were taken, we don't want to run. We want to wait for the rescue. But...”

“But...” He was going to make me say it.

“There's no law that says there's only one set of bad guys or one criminal organization that we're fighting,” I said. “Whatever this is, it's big. If it's big, lots of people want it.”

“The enemy of my enemy could be just another enemy piling on,” he said.

“Yeah.” When you play a game that involves strategy, when you spend a lot of time thinking about all the ways a cool plan can go terribly wrong, well... It's a useful state of mind but also a stressful one. Why couldn't I just sleep? Why couldn't I just tell him to hike up to the house? Crawl in bed? Cuddle up and wait?

But I couldn't.

We were both frowning. We had so little information. What we did have was a helicopter and a tranquilizer gun that still had a few darts left.

Enough to fight off an enemy if that's who was coming for us?

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