Archive for the 'The Story Arc' Category
Seven
As she crested a ridge above a stunning vista of the river valley below, Julie stopped to wipe the sweat that was dripping into her eyes and took in the view of the swollen river, lined with a thick canopy of trees and shrubs. The river had widened considerably here and was dotted with numerous islands. SAM, her A.I., had once told her that around 700 million years ago this whole area was a large mountain system that had eroded down over millennia. All that remained were the harder Precambrian rocks scattered as islands in the Saint Lawrence River, much like the pink granite outcrop she was standing on.
This region was aptly called the Thousand Islands and a hundred years ago it supported a tourist industry of avid boaters. Now the hazy blue-green landscape before her lay silent to its history, and for a moment she felt akin to the first explorers like Cartier, Cavalier and Champlain, who had forged their way up the gulf of Saint Lawrence and gazed in wonderment at this new foreign land.
Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast and longed for fresh meat. She’d run out of her store of dried venison a while ago and was tired of eating roots, herbs and berries. She decided to risk a fire and catch a vole or shrew with her sling. For silence it surpassed the Pol laser gun. She’d made the sling long ago from a piece of rabbit pelt and Aard had shown her how to use it. She’d quickly become adept at hurtling a stone and hitting its target ten meters away. She’d downed grouse, other birds, voles and even rabbits with her silent weapon. Although her hunting weapon of choice was the crossbow, it had not been practical to take on this trip, so she’d settled for the sling, which she could fold up and stash into her pocket.
Julie found a small grotto with a thicket and slung her pack out of view in a silver birch tree before proceeding to a clearing where she’d seen several burrow holes. Accepting that she was trading good travel time for some comforting food in her belly, Julie resigned to wait it out. She found a comfortable position and sat cross-legged, the sling poised in her left hand, and watched the scrubby ground littered with den entrances.
As she waited patiently, Julie took a deep inhale of the sweet peppery fragrances of mint and heather, mixed with the boggy-sweet smell of poplar, hickory and pitch pine. The breeze that sighed through the shrubs and the snapping of the broom’s drying seedpods reminded her of the time Angel had discovered these delightful things. Three years old, Angel had shrieked with joy at the explosive pop of the pods as they threw their seeds into the air in one of nature’s many exuberant displays of propagation. Julie pulled one of the mint stalks beside her to her nose and after a long sniff, she sighed deeply. Am I doing the right thing? Dear Earth, I hope Angel’s safe~
There! A head popped out of the nearest hole. In one fluid motion, Julie aimed and let fly. Thunk! First shot and she’d successfully struck a vole on the head, instantly killing it. Thinking of supper with a smile, Julie sprang up and fished the limp animal out of the hole it had fallen into.
Back at the grotto where she’d hidden her pack, Julie waited for sunset to hide the smoke and then made a fire using some birch bark and dried grass she’d gathered as tinder. She impaled the animal on a willow branch for a skewer. As she waited for the fire to die down to cook the animal over the hot coals, Julie absently watched the flames lick the darkening sky to the east. Her gaze followed the soaring sparks that winked out one by one like dying stars and found her thoughts drifting home to Daniel and Angel.
When the fire had subsided sufficiently, she propped the skewer against several other branches teepee-style over the coals and let the animal cook as she turned to watch the sunset and sip chamomile tea she’d brewed in her small pot. The pungent-sweet smell of the tea made her smile through the corner of her mouth: Angel hated this tea.
Julie stirred the floating chamomile heads with her finger and let her mind wander to the past. When she’d discovered that she was pregnant with Angel she’d become terrified of whether she’d make a good mother. That had all disappeared when Angel was born. One look at her sweet helpless baby and Julie knew exactly what to do. And she’d continued . . . until now. Her little girl was growing up and both mother and daughter were suffering the growth pains. Lately they’d snapped at one another like snarling cougars while Daniel looked on in bemusement. She’d give anything for even that now. Julie wondered when she’d see her little girl again.
It wouldn’t be in Icaria if she could help it. Where they’d hate and fear Angel for her abilities even as they’d coax her for services from those same abilities. Angel was never going there, Julie thought grimly, her nose flaring with fierce determination as she watched the sun disappear behind the horizon. What if she failed in her mission? It was ambitious at best, with significant deterrents, such as her own status in Icaria. It was going to be difficult to find, let alone convince, those in government to leave her and her family alone, if she was still considered a murderer.
What had Frank done with her information cube? She’d pleaded with him to give her information to someone trustworthy ~ Victor Burke, the mayor of Icaria. Had she been wrong? Her cube not only contained vital information on Darwin’s manufacture and etiology but also held her models of personality-types for Dystopians in addition to incriminating information on Gaia and her henchman, John Dykstra, Chief of Secret Pols ~ information that would have cleared her own name. She knew Burke got her information because SAM told her during their last communication that Burke had arrested Dykstra. What about Gaia, then? Was she so powerful that Burke didn’t want to touch her?
Julie realized how hungry she was when she inhaled the delicious aroma of roasting meat carried on the smoke of the fire. She turned to check the cooking animal and gasped. The rodent was on fire!
“Terrific,” she snarled, grabbing the stick and blowing out the flames. She poked the skewer into the ground and put out the campfire, then turned back to her food with a sigh of disappointment. She gingerly picked the black and smoking vole off her skewer and with wincing fingers practically threw it on her bark-plate. It was one sad looking specimen. “Don’t look so glum, pal.” She smiled sadly at the vole’s melted face. “Someday I’ll be just like you. What goes around, comes around. Happens to all of us.” She sighed, taking a small bite. Her teeth sank through the burnt crust into soft meat and she thankfully chewed.
She had to admit that her luck couldn’t hold out indefinitely. On good days, she made about twenty kilometers. On the bad days, when she had to traverse or veer around a tributary, bay or marsh, she gained less than ten kilometers in her trek. At this rate she was at least another week, possibly two, from Icaria-5. She hadn’t even reached Lake Ontario yet and she still had to cross the turbulent Gananoque River, then hike another three hundred kilometres to Icaria-5. Someone was bound to catch her off guard and she’d be either dead or hauled to the Pol Station for execution or dissected at Icaria’s DP, depending on who caught her first. “Dead or worse . . . just like you,” she said to the vole then took another bite and chewed slowly, letting the evening cacophonies of birdsong lull her.
Her gaze drifted back to where the sun had set to the southwest, the direction she was going. Glowing like crimson embers beneath dark purple clouds, the sky lit a brilliant red gash over the dark horizon. The contrast was remarkable.
Contrast and paradox were deeply embedded in nature, she mused. Her father had always recognized that these lay at the heart of chaos theory. Just as wisdom existed in folly, action in inaction, bravery in cowardice, and ultimately order in chaos. Julie knew her father had been an honorable and meticulous scientist, a fractal ecologist who didn’t shy away from controversy. He’d been brave and daring when it came to seeking the truth, yet he’d carelessly cast her to the neurologists to play with and then lied like a coward to her about what he’d done. Julie looked down at what was left of her food and sighed, no longer hungry.
How did chaos theory apply to her? Irregular phenomena, that’s what chaos was. She seemed to cause it wherever she went ~ like the spread of an epidemic. Changing populations of insects, the propagation of an impulse along a nerve, the random changes in weather, the rise and fall of civilizations . . .What had her father created? A paradox. That’s what she was. He’d called her his angel. “Yeah,” she murmured to herself. “I’m an angel alright, an angel of chaos . . .”
After cleaning up in the growing darkness, Julie carefully surveyed her surroundings to ensure no one lurked nearby, then laid out her insupad and sleeping bag on a flat piece of ground inside a tight ring of bushes. She placed her backpack as a pillow at the head of the insupad then took off her sweaty clothes and slid into the bag, tucking Aard’s gun beside her. She lay on her back, hands clasped behind her head, and looked up at the clear night sky through the broken canopy of shrubs above her. She spotted the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and Cepheus and wondered if Daniel was gazing at the same night sky. The rhythmic sissing of crickets covered the night with a comforting mantle.
She felt Aard’s gun nestled against her skin like a lover’s hand. It seemed so long ago, she thought, when out of rage she’d shot Frank in the crotch for hurting her uncle and then accidentally shot and killed Ron Hicks, Frank’s Pol partner in the ensuing struggle. Where was Frank now? Probably dead. While he’d recovered well enough from her gunshot wound, he’d told her just before she fled Icaria that he was battling Darwin disease. No one lived more than six months with Darwin, she thought, stroking the weapon and feeling it warm in her hand.
She heard the lonely cry of a wolf echo in the darkness. It sent her mind traveling to the times she and Daniel curled up together with legs and arms entwined and watched the stars, wrapped in nature’s exquisite night sounds. Since they’d come out here they’d never been apart. Until now. Was she soothing herself or torturing herself by coaxing out these thoughts? She supposed that depended on whether she expected to see him soon again . . . or not . . .
Julie turned on her side and, shutting her eyes, she imagined Daniel’s arms embracing her from behind, his warm body moulded to hers. His warm breath sighing on her neck. She felt the ache of longing swell inside her and wrapped her arms around herself. Did he ache for her too? More likely he was outraged with her.
When Karen Mason persuaded me to let her create and run this website for my book, “Darwin’s Paradox”, I had no idea how much talent she would bring into this project. Besides being a shaman of incredible power, she runs Starfire World Syndicate and is herself an accomplished writer, private pilot, and cryptologist. We had discussed doing a promotional podcast of the book over some virtual drinks and ** presto! ** Heather Dugan appeared! More of that persuasive shamanism, if you ask me… If you want to know why I was so overwhelmed, listen (and watch) the podcast, below, of Chapter Two of Darwin’s Paradox. Heather is magic to your ears. Lyrical, sensitive and genuine, her fluid and clear narrative flows like a bracing mountain brook. Evoking emotions and touching your heart. I am proud and honored that she has joined the Darwin team.
Heather Dugan is a voice-over artist and on-camera talent. Born in Ann Arbor MI, Heather resided in beautiful Ohio, state of rivers and streams, most her life. She received a BA in Communications from Indiana University, Bloomington. After making a splashy entrance in the media field as Miss Columbus (“Sshhh,” says Heather. Sorry! I just had to!), Heather went into radio sales where she was discovered as a talent in “voicing”, which jumpstarted her varied career that included community theatre, radio/TV commercials, industrial films, narrations, phone network commercials, and talk show co-hosting. She has done voicing for Nationwide, The Columbus Dispatch, Bank One, Verizon, Honda of America, Cintas, Lazarus, The Truberry Group, among many other prestigious clients.
Heather is also an accomplished writer, photographer and musician (keyboardist). She wrote and co-wrote several documentaries, plays and musical compositions. You can see her photography on her travel blog, “Footsteps”. Her first poem, written when she was seven years old, was framed by her mother and sits on her desk. Heather is herself a devoted mother of three children. An avowed passionate traveler, Heather loves the outdoors and adventure. She keeps fit by running in races, kayaking, biking, swimming and weight-lifting. Heather currently lives in Lewis Center, Ohio, with her three children and chocolate lab. Thanks so much, Heather. Your dedication, professionalism & excellent work ethic, and remarkable voice are truly appreciated.
~ Nina Munteanu
Six
In the dim light of pre-dawn, Julie rose from the bed with a sad but determined look back at Daniel’s sleeping form. He murmured something in his sleep and continued breathing heavily. She dressed quickly then slipped the gun into the makeshift holster at the small of her back. After stuffing more clothes, her knife and sling and a few other essentials into her backpack she turned for the door then stopped and let her gaze linger over Daniel’s bearded face. Mouth open and snoring softly, he showed the vague contentedness of deep sleep. His dark hair, a mess of sleep-tangles, spread out from his face over the pillow and she wished with all her heart that she could be curled up beside him, to make love again when he woke.
As she committed that image to memory, she felt her throat swell with longing and regret. He’d think she was abandoning him again, and she was certain that this would irrevocably shatter his trust in her. It was a fragile trust that he’d forged over twelve years and which she would crumble within moments. Julie swallowed down her emotions, realizing that everything Daniel had built and accomplished had been to keep her here, content with him. Perhaps he never did quite trust her. And perhaps he was right. Darling, forgive me . . .
But there was no stopping what she had to do and she knew he’d try to stop her. Icaria wasn’t going to get Angel and the only way she was going to prevent that was to leave. They were after her now ~ Aard had as much as told her that ~ and they weren’t going to stop following her. She thought of the clean, fresh boot track she’d spotted yesterday in the mud among the willows. That had been the first time a spy had come so close and so soon after they’d relocated. She and Daniel hadn’t even finished building their new home.
That was distressing enough, but then she’d spotted the unique and unmistakable tripod impression of the Shadow Unit’s assassin’s gun mount. She’d recognized it from ones Frank had shown her a long time ago. A further examination of the area had revealed that a struggle had occurred where branches had snapped off and a body was dragged for some distance. Who had stopped this operative from killing her? She wondered if Aard was still out there, fulfilling his initial directive. Either way, the stakes had escalated and she knew she was lucky to be alive. If they wanted her, they’d have to follow her and find her, she thought.
She paused at Angel’s own half-finished hut and peered inside. Her daughter lay sprawled on her stomach on her bed, covers akimbo, feet exposed, mouth open in the bliss of sleep and auburn hair spilling in all directions. Julie raised her hand to her mouth and took in a halting breath, fighting the urge to stay. She swung her heavy backpack over her shoulder and that simple action coaxed back a flood of memories: how she’d carried Angel everywhere as an infant in a modified backpack without once considering the added weight. Julie had carried Angel as she tilled the garden, foraged, fished or hunted or fetched firewood or water; while the happy baby pulled her mother’s hair and put it to her mouth, wriggling with pleasure. Julie had never been apart from her child. Now she was willingly leaving her.
Fighting down a moan of grief rising in her throat and quelling the need to seize Angel in one last embrace, Julie turned away and hurried out of the camp.
~~~~
She struck southwest in the burning summer heat toward the large river once called the Saint Lawrence. She intended to keep fairly close to the river in her 450-kilometer trek until she reached Lake Ontario on whose northern shore the ghost surface city, Toronto, used to sprawl. Lying beneath it, with its resplendent towers sprouting up like great crystal stalks out of the brown froth of heath was Icaria-5.
She foraged and ate as she hiked. The season was ripe for berries and ground herbs and so she had plenty to eat. While her plans were admittedly a bit sketchy, her mission was clear: lure them away from Angel and Daniel and then stop them from pursuing her and her loved ones, forever. The first part had been easily accomplished by leaving her family behind. The second part of her mission ultimately relied on her returning to Icaria-5 and confronting those responsible, Julie decided, as she bedded down for the night under a grove of feral apple trees in a long-abandoned settlement. Before she fell asleep, she wondered if she was just rationalizing her urge to return to Icaria.
On the second day she reached the great Saint Lawrence River at the remnants of the small village of Iroquois. Julie made out the seaway locks and the dam as she waded through the hummocky wetland of sedges and purple loosestrife. Overgrown and crumbling from disuse, the locks used to control the river’s fluctuating levels and linked the northern shore, once a part of Ontario, Canada, to the south shore that used to belong to New York State in the United States of America. Now it was all simply Icaria’s North Am.
The Iroquois Locks formed part of an extensive navigation system of dams, powerhouses, locks, channels and dikes that made up the St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Julie imagined the deep-voiced grinding of those locks a hundred years ago, serving the constant traffic of heavy cargo ships and pleasure boats. Now these monoliths languished under a thick mantle of moss and scrub in a quiet breeze, ghosts of a bygone age.
~~~~
She’d known the day was going to be hot when she woke from a restless sleep the next morning already perspiring. By mid-morning, the sun blazed with an oven’s heat, rousing the grasshoppers into an oscillating chorus. Their hissing songs seemed to commiserate with the heat that crawled over her body as sweat ran down.
Around noon she stopped to eat a meager lunch of berries, roots and several over-ripe plums she’d picked from a derelict orchard. In the shade of the copse of pitch pine trees she had a view of a bridge remnant that once spanned the two-kilometer wide river. As she leaned back, letting the drowsy heat of mid-day envelope her like a narcotic, Julie peered abstractly up at the canopy overhead. How deeper a shade of blue the sky appeared through the gap in the green than in the open. This was, of course, perception, perhaps enhanced by the physics of increased moisture from the trees ¾ it was the same sky, after all.
Was that how her father saw the world? The same ~ yet different ~ through his lens of stable chaos? And how was it possible that he chose to make his world ~ the very same one as hers ~ so different? She would never, NEVER give up her daughter to anything or anyone, no matter what the cause. Julie realized that she’d squeezed the black berries in her hand and their crimson juice ran through her fingers. She jerked to her feet and pressed onward.
By mid-afternoon she was sweating under the beating rays and found an inviting cold creek to cool off. When she returned to her pile of clothes and bent to put them on, she inhaled sharply at the sight of a fresh men’s size nine boot print with unworn treads in the sand of the dried creek bench. After the initial surge of adrenalin, she realized that if he’d meant to kill her, he’d have done it by now ~ even taking into account a delay out of vicarious pleasure to watch her bathe. She let herself feel the thrill of knowing that she’d lured her pursuers away from her family and concluded that this one was simply a spy like Aard, not an assassin. She smiled grimly and fought the impulse to look around as she rose, feeling like a celebrity caught in a compromised position.
Okay, buddy boy, get a good look, she thought as she dried off and hastily dressed, careful not to display Aard’s weapon. She slung her backpack over her shoulders and sprinted up a long rise into scrub-forest. In her dash from the open heath, Julie decided against any more luxurious baths. Dirty was better than dead.
That night she camped inside the foundation of an old church beside a hickory woodland populated by moss-eaten gravestones. Despite her physical exhaustion from the fourteen-hour hike, it was a long time before her restless mind gave in to sleep. She lay on her back inside her sleeping sheet and gazed up at the night sky listening to the crickets that chirped together in an endless hypnotic oscillation. It reminded her of her father’s lectures on stable chaos. How order emerged spontaneously from chaos as synchronous self-organization. Like this field of crickets chirping in concert. Or the millions of neurons firing together in her brain to control her breathing . . . Darwin’s “insect” jargon in her head seemed to follow a similar synchronous pattern. Was it self-organized too and what did that mean?
~~~~
Julie smelled smoke long before she saw the blazing wildfire. It was the middle of a hot day and she’d scrambled up a hogback ridge after traversing a small creek. The smell grew stronger but she saw neither smoke nor fire as she wound her way through the thick forest in the creek’s grotto. She made for higher ground, hoping for a clearing so she could make a bearing and assess the fire.
At the top of the ravine, the trees opened up and she saw carbon-coloured smoke fill the sky. She heard the snapping and crackling of flames ravenously consuming forest and scrub. It was difficult to tell where exactly the fire was burning. It seemed to be all around her, Julie thought with rising alarm. She darted in one direction, realizing she’d chosen it out of no particular reason except to keep moving, only to catch a blaze eating up the trees ahead of her. She veered left, thinking she recognized a clearing. She smelled charcoal and heard the fire sizzle as it gobbled up the juicy flesh of living plants.
Julie burst into the clearing and gasped at the blazing wall of fire as a blast of heat hit her face. Tall flames licked the sky and thick smoke billowed up and roiled in the wind. Coughing from the smoke that burned her throat, she turned and saw that the wind had thrown sparks into the trees behind her. They’d caught like torches dowsed with tube-jet fuel. The fire to her right moved with incredible speed, meeting the flames behind her like mating amoebas.
Julie bore left again, the only direction open to her, and pelted through the scrub forest. She was vaguely aware that several small animals bounded alongside her, likewise dashing for safety.
Somehow ~ she wasn’t sure how ~ she made it through an opening in the advancing firewall and pounded down another valley into a shallow wetland. She plunged with a sharp intake of air into waist-deep bog and scared up a large bird. It squawked and took flight, its great wings sweeping with the sounds of wind gusts. Julie gasped with excitement, momentarily forgetting the fire behind her. A crane ~ her namesake! No, it was just a heron. Since they’d come to live in the heath, Julie had sought the supposedly extinct crane, hoping it still existed. The Head Pol had lectured her once on the Whooping Crane and how it was considered extirpated. Then he’d made some awful reference to her name and her family’s unlucky legacy and personal extirpation.
“Nice guy,” she muttered, stumbling out of the marsh down-wind of the fire. Julie pulled herself out of the rank bog water and forced her screaming muscles into a jog. She refused to stop, throwing frequent glances to her right where the scorched heath continued to smolder.
Exhausted, Julie approached a small creek with giddy relief. She shrugged off her backpack, pulled off her soaked hiking boots and stumbled into the shockingly cold water, sliding and almost falling on the rocks. She directed one of her stumbles into a motion to sit-down and sucked in a sharp breath at the bracing temperature. Pulling off her wet clothes, she once again washed herself, her hair and then her buckskin shorts and faded blue shirt with the soap she’d brought along. It was only then, as she splashed the cool water over her and felt the sharp stings, that Julie noticed the burns on her legs and arms.
She laid out her clothes on sun-heated rocks to dry and settled herself on the nearby grass with her ankles crossed and hands clasped behind her head. She watched in a daze as the cumulus clouds scudded overhead, dotting a shocking blue sky. To the north, from where she’d just fled, whorls of carbon-coloured clouds spiraled up from the still burning forest in self-entangled streams of black filth. They threatened to swallow the sky in a turbulent display of pure destruction. She remembered her father’s creative definition for turbulence. He’d called it the result of a steady accumulation of conflicting rhythms. Odd, pondered Julie, how the fire, in having destroyed so much life in its expansive sweep, was still part of the natural world. Was this simply nature expressing itself in an inexplicable way, seeking harmony in a scabrous world? Another one of nature’s paradoxes, she thought.
Fire had been a constant hazard in the heath. Yet, fire served the heath by discouraging invasive shrubs and halting succession. The grazing deer populations completed the job of keeping the heath from reverting to woodland. So, fire had its place as creative destroyer in the natural cycle of ecosystem behavior. Stable chaos, according to her father.
It was a harsh and rude environment, Julie concluded. Like thieves in the night, bell heather, gorse and purple loosestrife snatched everything for themselves, leaving nothing for the others. Like many things in nature, the heath plants, though beautiful and fragrant, were ruthlessly greedy. Just like Gaia, Julie thought suddenly with a wry smile . . . Yes, Gaia . . .
The same day Julie and SAM had discovered that she was Prometheus, they’d uncovered Gaia’s dubious history and her insidious connection to Julie’s dead father. When Julie was five, Gaia, still known as Monica Schlange, the mayor of Icaria-11, oversaw the creation of Proteus by Dr Damien Vogel and its injection into Julie. Schlange had cleverly convinced Janet, the cousin of Julie’s father, to spread the virus, hoping that it would give her city a decided advantage. Instead, Schlange watched in silent complicity as Proteus pathogenically morphed into Darwin disease, the killer plague of the century that eventually destroyed Icaria-11.
Schlange quickly slithered out of that mire, covered her tracks by arranging her own “death” and ensured that all witnesses to the creation of Proteus were silenced, including Darwin’s creator, Vogel, whose murder was blamed on Julie’s father. With the help of nuyu and nuergery treatments, she then emerged as Gaia.
Julie snapped into a sitting position with an exasperated grunt. Summoning her earlier resolve not to expose herself in the open like this, she rose, flung on her damp clothes and got back on the move.
~~~~
When Julie doubled back around a treacherous river gorge, she found fresh boot tracks and a recently dropped soy-chip wrapper on the ground. They were getting sloppy, she thought, picking up the wrapper. Or was that they didn’t care if she knew they were there. Either way, it suggested over-confidence. Reminded of how she’d evaded Frank when he’d stalked her after she broke up with him, Julie found the idea of playing cat and mouse with her pursuers strangely pleasant.
A sudden breeze cooled her face and Julie stopped to gaze at a dark anvil-shaped cloud rearing up like a fierce dragon above the lower cumulous layer. The storm cloud cast a rain shadow that bore down on her and within moments black clouds scudded overhead. A salvo of huge raindrops hammered down on her like missals, soaking her instantly and sluicing down her back and front. The wind wicked away her remaining heat and she ran for cover. Her magnified senses now detected someone following her, about fifty meters behind. Her sloppy pursuers, she thought, fingering their litter in her pocket.
She found a small grotto and hastily erected her tarp under a few scrubby birch trees as if to settle in. She left her pack inside then slipped out through the scrub and doubled back to where she heard the sounds of her pursuers, rustling nervously and whispering to one another. She found them hunkered under an ash tree that offered little protection from the pouring rain. One lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes trained at her tarp, still thinking her there. The other pressed into the tree to get out of the rain and complained about everything, including her: “Vee-damn it, Roger. Every time our air scanner finds that crazy chickyvee, she takes off. It’s as if she knows we’re here. Veemelds give me the creeps. Especially her. Chaos, she deserves to be dead. When do we pull her in?”
She felt anger boil up and broke into a crouched run. Before the complainer had time to react, she’d raced up from behind and whacked him hard with the butt of her gun. Roger, who’d trained his binoculars on the tarp the whole time, turned. For a heartbeat they stared at one another, eyes blinking back the rain. Then, hardly breaking her initial momentum, she leaped, leg flying. Her boot connected with his chin. It threw him back and he collapsed on the ground as she landed on her feet.
“Now you have a reason to call me a ‘crazy chickyvee’,” she said darkly.
Both men were going to have king-size aches when they woke up, she thought as she tucked the discarded wrapper into the waste-band of Roger’s pants. She found communicators and Pol-issue laser guns on both men. Julie grabbed the pair of binoculars, the communicators and the guns and was about to leave when she turned back, smiling suddenly with wicked inspiration.
After a few moments, she sprinted back to her tarp and backpack, both pairs of pants under her arm. She removed the spare laser-cells, tossed the guns and the men’s pants into the bushes, then packed up and set off in the hissing rain as darkness fell. Negotiating rough terrain was treacherous in the dark, but Julie pressed on, needing to gain a good distance from her clumsy and no doubt angry pursuers.
