And then, immediately, she was filled with the opposite of relief. Anxiety. Overwhelm.
She did not have the—what did Thomas call it? The skillset to be out here, pretending that she was capable of facing down whoever was hunting them.
Sure, she knew how to handle and fire a rifle. Thomas had left this one locked and loaded—another hint that he’d been in a massive hurry—so she treated it with extra care.
She’d had her share of weapons-safety training, starting when she was tiny. This is a firearm. It is very dangerous. Never touch it unless a trusted grownup says that you can. And even then, keep the barrel carefully pointed away from all people at all times. Always. If you’re at a friends’ house and you see a firearm, any kind of firearm, and it’s not secured in a locked weapons closet or safe, do not touch it; go tell an adult. And if the adult won’t take you seriously or tells you not to worry about it, call Mia or Uncle Alan or Thomas or Mrs. King immediately to come pick you up and bring you home.
Of course, as Tasha got older, her training included time on a firing range. She was a decent enough shot, but she’d never thought target-shooting was particularly fun. Still, she knew her lessons were important to Uncle Alan, so she’d dutifully showed up and paid attention and always properly respected the deadly power of weapons of war.
But marksmanship was definitely not something she could call one of her top skillsets. It wasn’t even one of her bottom skillsets.
She was really good at writing. And certain types of creative problem solving. Which was also why she was so good at being Ted’s personal assistant. Give her an iPhone and internet access, and she could research the crap out of just about anything. But that skillset wasn’t going to help her out here.
She looked around her, aware of the sharp coldness that made her breath hang in the air. She was alone on the side of a mountain. The pod was far enough from the ski lodge that it seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. A narrow footpath—a trail—led back to the lodge in one direction. Where it led, past the bulkhead, she had no idea.
She hadn’t really noticed much of anything but the concrete bulkhead in the darkness when she and Thomas had first found the entrance to the pod. But the door was built into a gentle hillside that crested about six feet above it.
The top of the hill had an outcropping of partially exposed rock—craggy and sharp, with a cluster of hardy trees growing nearby. Back when she was eleven, she would’ve deemed it the perfect place to play Away Team Explores a Class M Planet—a game she’d been perhaps a tad too fond of during her anti-princess-pro-Star-Trek phase.
But okay. She had to do something besides stand here.
What would Thomas do?
He’d start by rearranging the brush and branches that concealed the entrance to the pod.
As she did that, still leaving the door slightly open, she realized that before emerging, Thomas also probably would’ve opened the door just a crack and listened hard for any sounds of... what did he call them? Hostiles. Any sounds of hostiles in the area. There were at least twenty men wandering this part of the mountain, searching for them.
She’d been lucky—there were currently none in her immediate area.
But reality crashed down around her again. What did she think she was doing? Rushing out to “rescue” Thomas? How exactly? By somehow tracking him? Like she could snap her fingers and somehow know how to do that? Even if she’d had her phone so she could google How to track a Navy SEAL, it didn’t seem likely that was something she could easily learn from a YouTube video.
Tasha looked at the ground at her feet, at the scattering of dry, crisp leaves on the trail.
Thomas had left behind no tell-tale footprints or even the hint of the direction he’d taken via a pattern of overturned leaves. Assuming he’d taken the trail and not simply gone into the forest.
Although, he’d mentioned that the extraction point—the hollowed out tree she’d imagined or whatever it was that he’d gone out twice a day to check—was to the north of the pod.
Moss grew on the north side of trees, didn’t it? Except as she climbed up to examine the trees above the now-camouflaged bulkhead, the smattering of moss she found was growing on all sides of the trunks, so that didn’t help at all.
Crack.
The sound of a twig being broken made her head snap up, even as she turned and wrestled the rifle into a firing position.
Two men. Ear Flaps and someone she’d never seen before. Looking pissed and heading up the trail, toward the ski lodge.
They spotted her several fractions of a second after she saw them, while she was still swinging the rifle barrel in their direction.
They were armed, but their weapons were casually slung over their shoulders, so while they were rushing to reach for them, she had a heartbeat of a lead, which she took by bracing herself for the recoil and pulling hard on the trigger as she fired vaguely in their direction, hoping to scare them off.
The rifle’s roar startled her—she’d only ever fired a weapon like this with heavy-duty ear protection—as both of the men hit the dirt, buying her even more time to scramble down toward the entrance to the pod.
She swept aside the brush, and yanked open the hatch as she heard the answering roar of at least one gun being fired back at her. She dove through the little door headfirst, scrambling to pull it shut behind her with a solid sounding clank, then swiftly keyed in the numbers that would engage the lock.
She could hear the sound of repeated gunfire, and bullets pinging off the solid metal of the hatch, and she got ready to scramble down the stairs, in case they were somehow able to blast the door open.
But the door didn’t budge and the bullets soon stopped.
She’d hurt herself in that dive—she was bleeding. She’d torn her pants, her knees were a mess, and they really, really hurt.
But as her eyes started to well with tears, it wasn’t from the physical pain, but rather the realization of how completely foolish she’d been.
She’d not only failed to rescue Thomas, but she’d taken his sacrifice, made to keep her and the pod hidden, and she’d thrown it away.
Tasha put her head in her hands and cried.
Thomas heard gunfire.
First one shot—it sounded like a hunting rifle, similar to the model he’d appropriated from the dead man at the ski lodge—and then a second, from a different weapon. A third and a fourth, a fifth and a sixth... All from that same second weapon, before the mountainside descended once again into an echoing silence.
It was close to impossible to pinpoint where the gunfire had been coming from, but the hair had gone up on the back of his neck, and every cell in his body was screaming for him to run.
Run.
As fast and as hard as he could, back to the pod.
To make sure Tasha was okay.
Thomas had yet to reveal himself again to the quartet of men who’d been following him. He’d yet to lead them to the cave, where they could “find” where he and Tash had been sheltering.
He knew he should follow through, but he couldn’t do it, his sense of foreboding doom was so intense.
So instead he chose Tasha, and ran like hell toward the pod.
Chapter Twenty-One
There was blood on the trail about twenty meters from the bomb shelter bulkhead and Thomas felt himself shift even further into firefight mode.