Backwoods (16 page)

Calm down,
he told himself.
Get a
grip or you’re going to die.

He forced himself to stop struggling, to hold
still, and when he did, he slowly stopped swinging. The dead man
beside him stopped eventually swinging, as well, and Andrew
struggled not to look at it again. If he did, he knew it would only
rekindle his panic.

Looking up—or in this case,
down
—Andrew saw the length of rope wrapped vice-like around
his ankle, knotted expertly above him in the tree. From his limited
vantage, it looked like a simple snare design.

Okay,
he told himself.
I can do
this.

Jamming his hand into his right hip pocket,
he fumbled for his folding knife. Curling his fingers around it, he
slipped it loose, moving slowly, carefully.
Because if I drop
it, I’m seriously fucked,
he thought, sparing a glance at the
dead man to his left.
Just like that poor son of a
bitch.

The soldier had been wearing a set of
camouflage fatigues. Clearly in a state of advanced decomposition,
there was no way it was Thomas O’Malley.

Then who is it?
Andrew wondered. Like
the body itself, there wasn’t much left of the uniform. In fact, it
looked to Andrew as if something had been feeding on both, ripping
them apart with teeth and claws. Anything like a name or rank
insignia patch had long since been torn away. Both of the
skeleton’s arms were missing, along with most of its sleeves, and
its abdomen—which Andrew had put his hands through—had been torn
open at some earlier point in time, likely eviscerating the
man.

He caught sight of something on what was left
of the uniform shoulder, a silver pin, a single bar.
An
officer’s insignia,
he realized.
What does that stand for? A
lieutenant? A captain?

Andrew unfolded his knife, then tucked the
blade between his teeth. Furrowing his brows, mustering his
strength, he uttered a grunt and tried to sit up in mid-air. Hands
outstretched, he tried to reach his feet, his fingers splayed wide
and groping madly for the rope around his ankle. The first three or
four tries, all he succeeded in doing was sending himself in
another set of concentric, swinging spirals above the ground and
exhausting himself in the process.

Dangling limply, he struggled to reclaim his
breath.
Shit,
he thought, both because the task was proving
harder than he’d anticipated and because he knew if he dangled
upside for too long, he’d risk blacking out or suffocating.

I can do this,
he thought, brows
knitting again. He forced himself to move, sitting up in the air,
struggling against gravity’s relentless pull. He pawed at the rope,
his fingertips flapping against his heel, and then with a hoarse,
strangled cry, he made himself reach further, strain harder. This
time, he caught hold of his boot laces, and from there, got a
clumsy but firm grasp on the rope. Snatching the knife from his
mouth with his free hand, he clenched his teeth and set about
sawing frantically at the snare line. The muscles in his abdomen
began to cramp, and the strain spread from there through his back
and thighs. His palms had grown slick with sweat, the knife handle
slippery as a result.

I can do this,
he told himself,
forcing the knife back and forth, driving the serrated edge through
the rope.
I can do this, goddamn it, I can do this.

When the rope snapped, he felt the tension
abruptly slacken, then he plummeted to the ground. He landed hard,
luckily catching the brunt of the impact against his backpack. It
was still enough force to knock the wind from himself, and his head
snapped back, rapping soundly against the butt of his fallen rifle.
His mind went murky, his vision fading to black. Just as his
eyelids fluttered shut, he caught a momentary glimpse of the
soldier above him, gaping at him, eyeless and slack-jawed.

A first lieutenant’s bar,
he thought
dimly before passing out.
That’s what it is.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He wasn’t out long, to judge by the quality
of sunlight seeping through both tree crowns and clouds when he
opened his eyes again. Raindrops had made their way through orange
and amber leaves, past pine needles and sap-sticky cones to spatter
against his face in a slow, steadying progression that had
eventually drawn him out of unconsciousness.

At least, his first dimly aware thought was
that they were raindrops. When he blinked dazedly skyward, bleary
and bewildered, he watched something small, white and pellet-like,
plop down from above, falling straight at his head.

What the…?
he thought as it hit his
mouth, bouncing off his lips into the leaves.

His head swam as he sat up and he closed his
eyes against a momentary swell of vertigo. He felt something bounce
of his head and frowned, glancing up again.
What the hell is
that?

Looking down at the ground beside him, he
realized.

“Oh, Jesus,” he gulped, knocking the maggot
that lay twitching in the leaves near his hip away. They were
falling from the corpse that dangled almost directly above him,
tumbling one by one like lemmings off a cliff through the hole he’d
accidentally punched in the body’s midriff.

He felt another one hit him on the crown of
his head, then slip down through his hair, sliding beneath the
collar of his shirt. With a disgusted yowl, he scrambled to his
feet, dancing in a clumsy circle while he yanked the hem loose from
his pants and shook the grub out. Next, he swatted at his hair, his
face, anyplace he’d felt the maggots landing as he’d roused from
unconsciousness, then everyplace else just for good measure.

Jesus, they were falling on me. One of
them almost landed in my
mouth!
And then, in
his mind, he could picture what would have happened had his mouth
been open—the maggot hitting not the closed seam of his lips, but
his tongue instead, falling straight down the back of his throat.
He felt his stomach heave at this and gulped, clapping his hand to
his mouth. Turning in a stumbling pirouette, he grabbed hold of a
nearby sapling for support and threw up into the weeds.

“That is fucking gross,” he wheezed, spitting
violently once he’d spewed the contents of his gut. He wiped his
lips on his sleeve, then wiped them again just to be sure.

Since finding himself dangling upside down in
a tree next to a rotting corpse, he hadn’t given much thought to
the people in the forest who had chased him. In fact, up to that
moment, he’d pretty much reprioritized and forgotten them—that is,
until he heard a rustling from the underbrush behind him. Startled,
he whirled, eyes wide as he stared out into the ambiguously quiet,
shadow-draped woods.

He heard another crunch, then a grey squirrel
scampered between the trunks of two pines. With a shaky sigh and
even less certain laugh, Andrew relaxed, shoving his hair back from
his face.

“You little bastard,” he told the squirrel.
For its part, it blinked at him for a moment, cheeks distended with
an acorn, then it turned and hopped away.

Ducking to avoid any more kamikaze maggots,
Andrew retrieved his fallen rifle. Opting to leave it in hand
rather than sling it out of reach over his shoulder, he spared a
last look at the sorry bastard still strung up in the tree. If his
iPhone had still worked, with its built-in GPS and mapping
applications, he could have marked the spot—literally—where he now
stood so he could find it again. As it was, he squatted and
shrugged his way out of his backpack, opening the front compartment
and fishing out the maps Dani had given him. He didn’t have a
pencil, but a quick glance around revealed a poke plant nearby, its
thick stalks laden with ripened, purple berries. He picked one,
crushed it between his index finger and thumb, then marked
approximately on Dani’s map where he’d found the snare. Or, more
accurately, it had found him.

Because I’ll have to bring her back
here,
he thought, stuffing the map back into the bag, then
slipping his arms through the straps, shouldering it once more.
And probably Prendick, too. They’ll know who this guy is. Maybe
they can figure out what happened to him, how he wound up out
here.

Another rustle drew his gaze again to the
shadows. This time, he didn’t see any woodland creatures scurrying
about to ease that sudden, anxious dread knotting in his stomach.
Time to get the hell out of Dodge,
he thought, stuffing the
map back into the bag, then slipping his arms through the straps,
shouldering it once more.

****

The hike back to the compound wasn’t the
fastest he’d ever completed, but it came pretty damn close,
especially considering he kept whipping around to look behind him,
or to either side whenever he’d hear—or think he heard—a suspicious
sound. Thankfully, however, whatever footsteps had pursued him off
the trail and into the woods didn’t follow him out again, and with
the help of his compass, he was able to retrace his path accurately
enough to reach the facility’s perimeter yard once more.

“You’re not going to believe this,” Dani said
when she caught sight of him at the garage door.

“They found O’Malley,” he tried.

“He wasn’t even missing,” she said. “He’d
been asleep in his room. Said he wasn’t feeling good. Oh, well.”
She laughed. “At least you got some exercise out of the…” Her voice
and smile withered when she drew close enough to get a good look at
him. His clothes were dirty and mud-spattered, and a rather
putrescent stink lingered around him thanks to his trussed up
neighbor in the woods. Her nose wrinkled slightly. “Don’t take this
the wrong way, but you smell.”

He told her what had happened, the foot
pursuit through the forest, the snare trap he’d stumbled upon, the
decaying soldier left hanging upside down in the tree.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped when he finished.
“He was a soldier? You’re sure of that?”

Andrew nodded. “I couldn’t see a name patch,
but he was definitely wearing a uniform. And he had an officer’s
insignia on him, one of those little silver pins. A first
lieutenant’s bar.”

At this, Dani frowned, puzzled. “That doesn’t
make any sense. There aren’t any lieutenants here. Not anymore, not
since they sent Carter home to Arkansas.” Heading for the door, she
said, “Come on. We need to go find Major Prendick.” She cut him a
glance and a wry smirk. “You keep downwind, okay?”

He frowned. “Ha, ha.”

****

“Well, now, that’s quite the story you’ve
come up with, Mister Braddock.” Prendick seemed completely blithe,
even dubious about Andrew’s account of what had happened.

Which, needless to say, pissed Andrew off.
“It’s not a story and I didn’t come up with it. It happened. I told
you. Someone or something chased me through the forest.”

“Or something,” Prendick repeated
pointedly.

Andrew nodded. “At least four of them. I was
following the footpath Dani told me you use for patrols, then they
forced me off it, into the trees. They followed me for at least a
quarter of a mile.”

Crossing his arms, but not losing his
bemused, aloof expression, Prendick regarded him. “Why would anyone
do that?”

“Because they knew where the snare trap was.
They were herding me toward it.”

Prendick rolled his eyes.

“I saw them,” Andrew snapped. “Moving through
the trees, just for a second, but they looked a lot like the thing
I told you I saw the night I wrecked my Jeep.”

“Mister Braddock,” Prendick began.

“I’m telling the truth, goddamn it,” Andrew
snapped, planting his foot on the edge of Prendick’s desk and
yanking up his pant cuff. “Look at my leg. You think I did this to
myself?” He wrenched down his sock, revealing an angry red welt
line encircling his ankle, the painful imprint left by the snare
line.

Prendick frowned. “What I think, Mister
Braddock, is that you hit your head pretty hard when you fell. And
what I know for a fact is that in this forest, it’s easy to get
turned around, mixed up. If you wander off the path, don’t
recognize your surroundings, it’s easy to jump at shadows, every
unfamiliar sound.”

“I work in forests like this pretty much
every day of my life,” Andrew argued. “I wasn’t lost or imagining
things.”

“Well, I’m at a loss to explain it.” Prendick
threw up his hands. “Because you’re saying you saw a dead soldier
out there in the woods, and I’m telling you we’re not missing any.
We’re all present or otherwise accounted for, and this is a brand
new facility. We’re the only unit that’s ever been stationed
here.”

Any pretense of good humor had drained from
his face and voice, and he glared at Andrew now, as bristled and
close to angry as Andrew had yet to see him.

“Major, if I may,” Dani ventured, her voice
hesitant, her tone courteous and deferent. “Upon our arrival here,
sir, we were briefed on the possibility of encountering narcotics
dealers out in the woods. These mountains have a reputation for
hiding marijuana crops and methamphetamine labs. We were warned
about the risks of booby traps, sir, set to protect their
boundaries—nail-pits, pipe bombs, that sort of thing.”

“I remember the briefing, Specialist
Santoro,” Prendick told her dryly. “I was the one who delivered
it.”

“Maybe that’s what Andrew ran into, sir,”
Dani said. Cutting Andrew a wide-eyed, tentative glance, she added,
“Maybe this body he said he saw wasn’t really one at all, but some
kind of effigy, like a scarecrow, that’s meant to keep people
away.”

“No.” Andrew shook his head. “It wasn’t
anything like that. It was a
body.
I stuck my hands
through it.
It was half-rotted, full of maggots and it stunk
like hell. You can still smell it on me.”