Page 84 of Deathless
Well, this was just fucking peachy.
My dominant shoulder was a throbbing, burning ball of pain. I was pinned under my bike in a damn hole in the ground, and there was dirt in my eyes, mouth, and ears. Oh yeah, and there was the fact that I’d taken a cheap shot by a cultist and had fallen into a literal trap.
“Fuck,” I groaned, trying to breathe through the pain like I was going into labor. I couldn’t feel my legs from the knees down, and that was also a bad sign. My back was also massively uncomfortable, like something was underneath me.
“Come on, Wilder.” With my right arm useless, I had to throw everything into my left side to get the motorcycle off my legs. For a touring bike, it was pretty lightweight. That still didn’t make it easy to move a four hundred pound metallic contraption with one fucking arm.
After several tries, I got just enough leverage to turn the handlebars and front wheel and pull my left leg free. With gritted teeth to brace for the pain, I wiggled my toes inside my boot. When that worked, I tried rolling my ankle. Then I flexed myfoot up and down. A little sore, but it didn’t feel sprained or broken.
“Alright. Now the other.” I didn’t know when I’d become a person that gave myself pep talks, but no one else was going to get me out of this. All my men were up on the surface, fighting for their lives. And I needed to get back up there and help as soon as possible.
Now that I had one good leg in addition to my arm, I used both to push the motorcycle off my remaining leg. I tried wiggling my toes in that boot and—
“Oh fucking Christ! Fuck me!”
The pain shooting up my leg was blinding, leaving me breathless and shocked.
“Okay,” I panted when the pain reduced to a manageable level. “Not riding any time soon. Or climbing out of this hole myself, I guess.”
It drove me mad that I was stuck and had to wait for help. I was the president. It was my job to lead the charge and protect my people. But my crew was capable, skilled, and not to mention vengeful. I knew they’d finish what they came here to do, then come find me when they could.
I didn’t dare yell for anyone to get me out. Santos and Devin saw me fall, they knew where I was. And I didn’t want to add to the noise and potentially distract someone in a life-or-death situation.
So I listened to the sounds of battle raging above me while moving as gingerly as I could. My whole right side was fucked, from ankle to shoulder. And that was damn annoying when it was my dominant side. Even with being in as much pain as I was, it was hard to shake the habit of depending on that arm, that leg.
It reminded me of one of the many lessons my dad Gunner had taught me. He made me do shooting drills over and over with my non-dominant hand until I was just as accurate withmy left as I was with my right. When teaching me hand-to-hand combat, he’d even tied my right hand behind my back and had me throw punches and knife strikes for an entire month like that.
“What if you got captured and they broke your dominant hand?” he’d say whenever I complained. “What if you’re tied up and you can get more leverage on your left side to wiggle free? You just going to give up because that side is weaker? No, you’re not, Rori. You know why?” Then he’d pulled me into a hug after seeing how tired and frustrated I was. “Because you’remydaughter. And no daughter of Demons is going to give up on herself.”
His words repeated in my head as I leaned my weight into my left side, finding balance and steadiness in my good leg while my hand braced against the dirt wall. For the first time since falling in, I was able to get my bearings and look closer at the hole I’d found myself in.
It was big, obviously. Big enough for me and my bike to fall cleanly through, and deep enough that I wouldn’t have been able to climb out even with two good legs. By my estimate, I was about eight feet deep, and the space around me couldn’t have been more than six square feet.
They’d been expecting us on our bikes, it seemed. Even so, digging multiple holes of this size had to be a hell of a job. The opening had been covered by thin plywood and loose earth, disguised to look like part of a long row of tilled earth. Even I had to admit it was clever.
Loose dirt and broken pieces of plywood littered the ground where my bike and I had fallen. My bike which now had a bent frame and scratches and probably even more damage that I couldn’t see.
“Don’t worry, baby.” I leaned my good shoulder against the wall while I reached out with my left foot to give the front tire anaffectionate stroke. “Jandro will get you right as rain when this is all over.”
The bike leaned at an odd angle against dirt mounds of various sizes. I remembered the discomfort on my back, like I hadn’t fallen against packed earth but something else instead.
Curious and with nothing better to distract me from the pain, I gingerly moved closer to the dirt mounds. Cradling my right arm against my chest, I used my good arm to toss aside the broken pieces of plywood and start wiping away the loose soil.
When I uncovered the face of a man, I forgot all about pain for a single instant.
I screamed and scrambled away, my right foot shooting a reminder of its condition all the way up to my skull. My breath whistled through my teeth, both because of the pain and the shock of seeing that face I couldn’t look away from. He stared blankly up at the sky, eerily unmoving.
I didn’t need to feel for a pulse or wipe away more dirt to see the gray of his skin. The poor man was dead. There was no other reason he’d be at the bottom of a hole, dirt carelessly thrown onto him.
It took a few more minutes of pained breathing to come to terms that I was in a hole with a dead man. Once the shock wore off, I could start to think rationally again. He wasn’t stinking or decomposing yet. So he must have died recently.
Somehow, I got up the nerve to brush more dirt off of him. I wanted to see this man as he had been, as a human being who once had a life. Most likely, I wouldn’t be able to tell much, but I wanted to find out what I could about who he had been.
I uncovered one of his arms and turned his hand over. God, his body wasn’t even stiff yet.
The sight of his palm brought fresh tears to my eyes. The skin was broken and raw in so many places. He’d been bleeding from his hands before he died.
That explained how these holes had been dug.
