APOLLO RISING (The Apollo Saga, Book 1) (3 page)

Tyler was gone, replaced by a creature of myth and fearsome legend. The wolf had taken over.

Suddenly, the truck’s tires crunched over the fresh snow, slowing to an abrupt stop. He heard the driver’s door slam and the sound of footsteps in the snow. It was time to get out. He drew the tarp back to make his escape; the darkness, the wilderness already calling his name.

“Alright you son-of-a-bitch, git up outta my truck nice and slow. Try anything funny and I’ll shoot your head off!” He had been found out. Tyler stood up slowly, his posture hunched to adjust for the pain in his thigh.

The driver’s voice riddled with fear—unwavering fear—as he stood at the foot of the truck bed and shouted from the business end of a double-barrel shotgun.

“
My Gawd! What are you?!
” The man’s hands were shaking erratically, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his trigger finger twitching.

Tyler-the-wolf wasted no time. He had been shot at once already today. With a ferocious snarl, he leapt off into the snow-filled darkness, near death and racing for his life for the second time in only a few hours. Shots rang through the trees behind him as he struggled to make ground; tired, injured and out of breath. Moments later, once he gained some distance between himself and the hunter, two headlights came around the bend, blinding and startling him just before they knocked him back into unconsciousness.

“Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” she repeated, still clutching the steering wheel. She quickly turned off the radio; the static between stations was a stark reminder that if she hadn’t been surfing stations in search of weather updates, she may have kept her eyes on the road.

Allie shut down the engine and peered out into the darkness between wiper blade rotations. The light ahead of her looked wrong, the falling snow was lit only on left side of the jeep.

“Shit, I definitely hit something.”

Zipping up her flannel, she took one last calming breath before opening the door to hop out. She walked around the front of the vehicle to take a quick look at the damage. The grill was pushed in on the right side, where she had made contact. Her initial hope was that she had struck a fallen tree, but her optimism quickly diminished after further inspection. A smudge of blood followed the path of damage across the shattered headlight and rolled down the front of the fender. It was safe to assume whatever she hit had been alive seconds ago, but probably didn’t survive the impact.

She surveyed the road looking for the dead animal, and even peeked beneath her jeep, hoping whatever it was wasn’t too big to remove. But she found nothing. Looking around frantically, it took a few moments to find the source of her collision. It required another few moments for the truth to register in her brain. But even after she rubbed her eyes to be sure she wasn’t going mad, it was still there in front of her. Only feet from where she stood, laying face down in the small drift of snow at the edge of the road, was a naked man.

“Oh my god, are you okay?!” she panicked, running closer to him.

Instinctively, she knelt down, checking his pulse and other vitals. She found him practically lifeless, severely battered and bleeding and unresponsive to her touch, but otherwise, breathing.

“Oh god, please be okay.
Please,
be okay,” she prayed, digging the snow away from his face. She knew better than to move him before calling for help.

She reached inside her jacket pocket for her phone, but gritted her teeth in frustration. In her mind’s eye, she could perfectly picture her cell phone, still where she had left it, back at the apartment. She looked from the unconscious man to her jeep and briefly back down the road she had come up. She had almost lost control twice on the way up, and the snow was getting worse. The nearest hospital was at least five hours’ drive under normal conditions, and there was no certainty that he would survive even that long without aid.

“Shit,”
she groaned. This was not the kind of adventure she’d had in mind when she left Apollo. What the hell was she going to do with a half-dead naked man? The steps played through her head like a reel of Red Cross training footage – no phone, no ambulance, no hospital.  Allie hadn’t seen another car in hours and there were no other homes for miles—the main reason her ancestors had chosen the secluded switchbacks of these mountains for their second home. This man’s only chance of survival rested solely on her.

“Oh, no, no. There’s
no
way I’m taking him to the cabin with me,” she griped, pacing back and forth in the road. “Think, think, think. There’s gotta be someone, somewhere that can take him.” She tapped her foot in the snow, desperately racking her brain for an answer. But after only a few brief moments, she finally resolved on the only choice she felt was left to her. She hoped he wasn’t too heavy.

“This is really going to put a damper on my weekend,” she whined, heading back to the jeep to grab a blanket.

She laid the blanket in the snow beside him. And making the decision to go against everything she had been taught in her first aid training, she rolled him over on it.

“Oh my god,” she gasped, taking a closer look at his injuries. The damage was worse than she imagined. There was a lot of bruising along his right side and across his face. The marks on his jaw and his nose looked fresh, but not fresh enough to have come from her jeep. The blood was already dry.

Her eyes wandered to his legs where she noticed something unusual. There was an open gash—what appeared to be a gunshot wound—in his right thigh.

“Holy shit,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What the hell happened to you?”

She took the blanket by the corners and dragged it back to the jeep, managing to keep him mostly motionless. By the time she arranged him in the passenger seat and tucked the blanket over the top of him, she was sweating, and tremendously thirsty. She climbed back into the driver’s seat, took a final moment to try and convince herself that she wasn’t completely crazy for bringing him with her, and began the slow, treacherous drive up to the cabin.

She took the last half mile in first gear, nearly stalling out more than once during the winding ascent. The snow was falling so heavily by the time she pulled up that she nearly drove onto the raised porch, knocking over an old tree stump in the process. The tires finally crunched to an abrupt halt, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“We’re here,” she announced under her breath, grateful to have made it.

A flood of emotions crashed over her at first sight of the cabin, bringing with it memories of her childhood, summers spent vacationing with her parents and, especially, the last few years she had lived here with her grandmother. It had always been her happy place—full of family and freedom—and despite appearing relatively untouched since her last visit, a sense of ruin now lingered. The whole property was still, quiet and visibly void of life.

Allie paused, mustering up the courage to finally bring some energy back into the old place. It needed it,
she
needed it, she reasoned, even as the menacing concern of another imminent death grew in the back of her mind, and the back of her jeep.

Getting the man out was much easier than getting him in; gravity lent a hand, though she thought she may have caused him a few new bruises. She dragged his lifeless body, up the wooden planks and across the porch, finally coming to a rest just inside the front door. It would have to do for now, she decided, focusing on the more immediate tasks at hand.

Standing in the doorway, she rubbed her hands together and blew into them as she quickly surveyed the darkened room. She had shut the place down pretty well when she left last year, yet all the nostalgia of her earliest memories remained. Beyond the beaten up old couch, which had been in the cabin since before she was born, was a large fireplace; a space where, on so many occasions, a fire often roared. But now it sat empty and cold. She took in a deep breath of crisp air, noting that the conveniences of modern comfort—heat, light, water—needed to be established. And fast.

She hurried back outside and brought in some of the old firewood, stacked it by the fireplace and cleared out the last of the kindling that they kept in a wooden box by the fireplace. In a few minutes, a small fire crackled and grew in the hearth. Allie warmed her hands for a moment, then dragged her injured guest closer to the fire. She left him, returning a short time later with a few creature comforts from the bedroom, gently placing a pillow under his head and some extra blankets over his body to keep him warm.

“Stay,” Allie told him; inspired more by instinct than concern, hoping he would be okay while she unloaded the car.

She made her way back to the jeep, grabbing a couple of her bags and one of the gas tanks.

She hurried to the kitchen and placed the bags on the small table nearest the kitchen, then stepped out the back door to the pump shed, the gas tank still in hand. With the tiny flashlight she kept on her keychain, she looked over the generator. She topped off the tank and primed it twice before pulling the cord. It rolled twice but didn’t start. Allie sighed in frustration.

“C’mon,” she begged. “
Please.
” She tried it a second time and a third, with the same results, before throwing up her hands. “Well,” she resolved, “I guess we do this the old fashioned way.”

She grabbed a bucket and sat it beneath the manual pump, working the handle impatiently until she could get past the stale water. Once it was clear, she didn’t hesitate to quench her thirst and wash away the sweat from her brow. She took a brief pause, allowing the chill to wake her senses and then kept pumping until the buck was full.

Back in the kitchen, she placed the bucket in the sink, nestled her perishables in an old makeshift icebox and then went out for the rest of her things. She set them inside the door and returned to the stinging cold once more to right the stump she had knocked over—it was a family keepsake. Kneeling down in front of her jeep, she brushed the snow from its face, revealing the name of her family’s property carved into the wood.
Tranquility,
it read.

“How ironic,” she said dryly, standing to take in the entire essence of the place she had come to love so much as a child. She would do almost anything to have those moments back – Mom, Dad, Grand Moll – she could imagine them there with her, in that moment, calling for her to come in from the storm. A tear formed in her right eye, swelled and overflowed, then fell down her cold cheek and practically froze by the time it reached her chin. She pursed her lips and wiped it away, along with the hollowness it evoked, and headed back inside.

This time, when she entered the cabin, it seemed just as she remembered it; a bit of dust on the floors and evidence of her arrival, but otherwise the same. The glow from the fire called to her, as she stomped the snow from her boots and closed the front door.

But the sense of sweet nostalgia faded away instantly as the man shifted in his sleep, a faint sound of discomfort slipping from his mouth, reminding her that this trip wasn’t going to be as therapeutic as she had hoped. At this point, it was obvious he was going to need more help than she did.

“Well, it was almost perfect,” she joked, rubbing her hands together as she mapped out her next move.

Allie filled a cast iron kettle with some of the water she had brought in, and hung it on a hook that stood above the fire. While it warmed, she retrieved some medical supplies from the first aid kit in the pantry and began to take a closer look at his injuries.

She treated his superficial wounds as well as she could; cleaned them and covered them, using up the last of the tape and gauze. He never moved. She wasn’t certain what she would do if he did, but she was glad he didn’t. It made it easier to help him, and gave her the opportunity to examine the puncture wound in his leg.

It was going to take more than just bandages to fix that thing, she reasoned, and reached for the sutures. She hadn’t sewn up anything more than a few dolls that her father made her practice on when she was little, and hoped that pretending he was made of cloth would keep her stomach from turning. She also reminded herself that it was only skin and blood: totally natural things, nothing to be afraid of or disgusted by. The mental pep talks seemed to work, and there, by the fire, in an almost loving and motherly way, she began to repair the man she had nearly broken.

When she was finished, she sat back and admired her work. She would never pass as a surgeon, but was certain she had stitched him up well enough. As long as he could keep it clean, he would most likely survive.

She wetted a cloth and cleaned his face, gently pushing his sandy blonde hair back to reveal a handsome stranger. “Of course,” she giggled, feeling mildly inappropriate for thinking of him that way while he was so helpless.

Allie sighed and checked her watch. It wasn’t far from midnight, and the adrenaline from the drive up was already fading. There was no way she was going to be able to stay awake until morning. What the hell was she going to do with this man in the meantime? She frowned. This was looking like a lot less of a good idea than it did earlier, and it didn’t even look good then.