The trees had all started to look alike to Andrew, because when he’d been chased through them, he hadn’t thought to admire the view for long, or at least try to find some visual landmarks by which he might reorient himself later.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“It’s alright,” Dani told him, quiet and close enough so no one else heard.
“I thought it was right around here,” he said, turning in a circle, looking every which way.
“We’ll find it,” she murmured in reassurance. But she didn’t believe that, and he knew it.
Because she doesn’t believe me. She’s my friend and she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, but there you go. She thinks I’m as full of shit as Prendick does. They all do now.
“Major Prendick, over here,” called one of the soldiers, Maggitti, who had ventured ahead of the group a modest distance, surveying on point for the team. “I’ve found something.”
Andrew darted in the direction of his cry, with Dani and the rest of the squad right in step. Whatever momentary excitement and vindication Andrew might have felt quickly withered, however, when he caught sight of a deer carcass dangling by the neck from a tree limb. It had been stripped of its skin, its limbs hacked off, its entrails removed along with most of the viable meat. What remained was putrid, ripe with the dim, sleepy buzz of flies.
“Looks like poachers again,” Maggitti said to Prendick.
“Aw, man,” Hartford remarked. “I bet they got some good eating off that one.”
“You want me to cut it down, sir?” Maggitti asked.
Prendick shook his head. “Leave it. The coyotes and cougars will find it soon enough.”
“This isn’t what I saw earlier,” Andrew said, and when Prendick turned to him, any semblance of courteous tolerance was gone. He looked doubtful and aggravated.
“Mister Braddock, it’s getting late,” he said. “The sun will be setting soon.”
“I’m telling you, this isn’t what I saw,” Andrew insisted.
“You’ve done a lot of that since your arrival, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, his voice growing sharp, his eyes cold and brittle. “Telling, I mean. It seems to me that in a few short days, you’ve seen all kinds of things in these woods, more than the rest of us have in months. At least, according to you.”
Andrew bristled. “I’m not lying. Or imagining things.”
“Be that as it may…” Prendick’s voice trailed off and he offered a condescending shrug. “It’s raining and cold and if we stay out here much longer, at least half of us will have hypothermia by the time we get back to the barracks. Besides that, I’m hungry and tired and don’t feel like humoring you anymore. If you want to stay out here and walk in circles a while longer, by all means, be my guest.” He held his hand up in the air, fingers folded into a fist, a signal to the soldiers. “As for the rest of us, let’s head back in.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Upon their return to the compound, Andrew beat a hasty retreat to his room for the rest of the night, humiliated and frustrated, ignoring even Dani’s attempts to make sympathetic eye contact with him. Flopping onto his bed, he propped himself up with pillows, kicked off his boots and tried to watch some of the video he’d borrowed the night before.
As the opening credits for Universal Soldier rolled, he closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. A headache had been brewing there even before they’d found the putrid deer hanging from the tree, and he could feel it pulsing now behind his eyes, the steady, rhythmic cadence of a midget banging a bass drum deep inside his skull.
I didn’t see a dead goddamn deer, he thought. His head hurt. He was exhausted, his mind foggy, his emotions scraped raw with fatigue. I wasn’t imagining things. It was a soldier in the tree. A dead soldier. I saw him. I know I did.
But in that moment, with nothing but the music from the TV overlapping with faint buzz of the overhead fluorescents and the whispered rush of the building’s central air-conditioning to surround him, he found himself no longer so certain.
He’d known other foresters who’d panicked while out in the field. Without a compass or GPS readily in hand for orientation, it was all too easy to feel disoriented and confused. Even small animals could make noises that made them seem larger, more menacing in a carpeting of dried leaves, and one’s imagination could certainly play tricks, filling in the blanks, conjuring up mental images of all kinds of unseen horrors crashing and lumbering through the underbrush.
Maybe that’s it, he thought, forcing his pride aside, the part of him that insisted he’d been a trained field professional long enough to know the difference between fact and fantasy, that he’d delved into deeper, thicker, denser woods than these a hundred times, if not a thousand, and made it out again with only his wits and an occasional glimpse of the sun overhead to guide his way. Massaging his aching temples, Andrew struggled to push this part of him away, to muffle it. Because the only answer that makes any sense is that I imagined it all. I got scared, got lost, got caught in a trap and saw a dead deer hanging from a tree. Anything else was all in my mind.
“All in my mind,” he whispered, and man, he wished he could believe that. It would have made things a hell of a lot easier.
He heard a knock at the door and his eyelids fluttered open. He hadn’t meant to doze off, didn’t even realize that he had until he tried to sit up in bed and winced to feel the tight strain of a crick that had formed in his neck as he’d napped.
With a groan, he swung his legs around, his feet to the floor. Shoving his disheveled hair back from his brow, he glanced at the clock and realized he’d lost almost an hour.
“Alice?” he asked, blinking stupidly to find her on his threshold.
The little girl looked up at him. “There was smoke everywhere.”
Bewildered, he shook his head. “What?”
“When the fire started, there was smoke everywhere,” Alice said again. “I couldn’t see. Martha couldn’t either and she got lost.”
It took him a second of fending off the last residual, groggy cobwebs from his mind before he realized what she was talking about. The night her house was firebombed.
“They found her after they’d put the fire out,” Alice said. “She was all burned up in a corner of the kitchen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, moved with sudden pity for her. Folding his legs, he squatted down to her eye level.
“She was seven steps from the back door,” Alice said. “And in the smoke, she didn’t even know it.”
“Is that why you always count your steps?” he asked and she nodded once, reluctantly.
“So I always know how to get out,” she whispered. “So I don’t end up like Martha.”
Andrew cupped his hand against the back of her hair and drew her to his shoulder, offering her a hug. If she drew comfort from his touch, it didn’t reflect in her posture. She stood rigidly against him, as stiff as a plank of lumber, and made no move to return the embrace. Feeling awkward, Andrew drew back. “Sorry,” he said, but she only blinked at him impassively. “You want to come in?”