Do-Gooder (8 page)

“Get out of the vehicle.”

SOMEWHERE, SOMEONE
with a giant remote control hit Pause. Everything froze in that instant, just stopped exactly where it was. My heart didn’t beat, my lungs didn’t expand.

The gun tapped on the window again. A voice said, “Get out.”

The ominous
clank
,
clank
set everything back into motion. In fast-forward. A fifty-foot roller coaster drop, like someone pulled my blood and guts out through my nose and left a gaping chasm of nothingness in my stomach. “What do we do?” I asked.

“We get out, I guess.” Henry’s voice shook. I hadn’t expected him to be as scared as I was. He seemed to know what he was doing in every situation, so to hear him as shaky as me made it somehow worse. If he was scared, we were screwed.

My hands trembled, and I fumbled with the door handle. Hot, heavy air poured in through the open door, but my blood still ran ice cold. The seat belt, which I had forgotten, trapped me, so I reached down to unlatch it.

“Hands!” the guy with the gun barked.

My hands flew up. “Seat belt.” A dry mouth and a throat closed in fear made it nearly impossible to get the words out.

He nodded and took half a step back, but the gun didn’t waver.

My left hand stayed up and I slowly undid the seat belt with my right, trying to avoid any sudden movements. Next to me, Henry did the same.

The—soldiers?—motioned us forward until we stood in front of the Range Rover with the first four. The shortest of the guys—still at least six feet tall—signaled to the side of the road, and even more camo-clad men came out of the trees. “Hands on head.” He spoke in a rough voice, heavily accented by something Eastern European, maybe Russian.

Three men surrounded each of us, two with those wicked-looking guns pointed at each of us. One man, unarmed, clamped a hand on my shoulder and kicked my feet until they were shoulder width apart. Then a thorough pat-down. He found my insulin pump right away and pulled my shirt up to identify the small contraption. He said something to the short guy in a language I didn’t know and pulled the monitor from my waistband. The pinch of needle and tubing being removed barely registered under the sting of tape ripping from skin.

Four of the men huddled together, inspecting the insulin pump. I don’t know if they thought it was some kind of listening device or an explosive of some kind or what. “It’s medicine.” I snapped my mouth closed at a glare from one of the gun holders.

The short guy wrapped the clear tubing around the monitor and tucked it in his pocket.

“I need—” A glare cut me off. My hands clenched with the need to grab the device back.

The pat-down resumed; the stranger’s hands glided across every part of my body, stopping periodically to examine my pants’ pockets and my socks and shoes. Next to me, one of the men made Henry remove his boots. Henry didn’t protest, but he stood wide-eyed and gray faced as the man searched him. When the search was done, they allowed Henry to put his boots back on, a consideration I hadn’t expected.

“Kneel.” Shorty gestured the ground with his rifle. Strong arms pushed me to my knees. It was an awkward movement with my hands still linked atop my head and fear making my muscles stiff. I glanced at Henry who was kneeling next to me, execution-style.

We were going to die.

I closed my eyes. Tears leaked down my cheek, and I waited for the bullet.

I don’t want to die
cycled through my head, over and over again.

Dozens of images joined the repetition. Mom, laughing at something I’d said. Wendy’s tear-streaked face filled with shame and guilt. Dad bandaging a little girl’s knee when I was six. Henry smiling. There was so much I hadn’t done, hadn’t experienced. And amid all of that, was the question: Why? Why was this happening?

I don’t want to die.

There was no shot, no bullet, no pain. No death. I blinked my eyes open and looked around. Men still surrounded us, guns pointed our way, but most of the others pulled boxes out of the Range Rover, tearing into the cardboard.

They dumped the boxes into the road, scattering the contents in the mud.

“What are they looking for?” I didn’t know I’d said it aloud until one of the guards with guns growled at me to be quiet.

Henry shrugged, a small gesture, easily missed if I hadn’t been glancing in his direction every other second. The quick look showed me Henry had adopted the same Zen-like expression he’d had after the snake bit him. This was Henry in control of his fear. Reassured—at least a little bit—I tried to match my breathing to Henry’s even breaths.

The short guy slammed the hatchback of the Range Rover closed. He and one of the other guys—I wish they didn’t all look alike; it was freaky—shouted at each other.

Shorty stalked back until he loomed over Henry and me. “Where are they?”

What was he talking about?

“Where are what?” Henry asked. I admired his calm tone. I thought I was going to piss my pants, and my voice would have probably been shakier than my nerves.

“Do not play with me.” The man jabbed his finger at Henry. His already-hard face grew tighter.

Henry swallowed audibly. “I’m not playing, I swear. If you need something that we have, you can have it. Just, please, let us go.”

“Where are the canisters, you idiotic child?” A quieter growl this time, but scarier somehow.

Henry’s head jerked up. “Canisters? What canisters? We have medical supplies, that’s all. We don’t even have any narcotics.”

Shorty hauled Henry up by the collar of his polo shirt. Henry grabbed at the man’s hand, trying to keep from being strangled by his shirt.

“Hey!” I lurched forward. Not my brightest move. One of the guards hammered the butt of his rifle into my shoulder, forcing me back to my knees. Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I flattened my hands atop my head again.

“Where are they?”

Henry shook his head helplessly.

Shorty stepped back and gestured to one of his companions. The other man lifted his bigass gun and aimed it at Henry’s head.

“
Don’t
!” I fell forward, digging my fingers into the dirt.

Pain exploded in my head, and the world tumbled into darkness.

MY HEAD
throbbed and my stomach lurched when I came to. My shoulder ached. Someone had secured my arms behind my back. The world rocked, sending me rolling into something warm. My eyes flew open. Henry. I craned my neck as far as I could and saw his long hair, loose, covering his face.

Oh my God, he wasn’t moving. My heartbeat roared in my head, blocking out all sound. The flutter of brown hair almost made me cry. Breathing.

I wriggled and shifted until I could roll over and face him. Bound with his hands behind his back like me, Henry lay completely still.

“Henry?” I tapped his ankle with my foot, hoping to jostle him awake. “Please, please, please.” Another tap of my feet punctuated each word. He didn’t move.

I looked around the enclosed space and realized we were back in the Range Rover. The vehicle jumped and I bashed my hip and elbow against the floor. The boxes were gone, probably still scattered over the road. My backpack bounced around somewhere near my feet, and I saw Henry’s bag in the corner. Another bump, this one big enough I was actually airborne for a second before I landed with an oomph.

A soft groan echoed next to me. “Henry?”

“Question.”

I nearly laughed in relief. “Shoot.”

“Where the fuck are we?”

“I don’t know.” I tried to see how badly he was hurt, but I still couldn’t see his face through the curtain of brown hair. “Are you okay? I mean, I guess they didn’t shoot you.”

He blew at his hair, moving it enough so one eye and part of his forehead were visible. One swollen eye and a patch of bruised forehead.

“What did they do to you?”

“After they knocked you out and I couldn’t give them the information they were looking for, they hit me too.”

“I thought they were going to shoot you.” The admission escaped through my thick throat. The terror of that moment, even knowing it hadn’t happened, still made me want to throw up.

“So did I.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“No idea.”

“Did you ever figure out what they were looking for? Canisters? Canisters of what?”

“I have no idea.” He sounded as disturbed by his lack of knowledge as I was. He closed his swollen eye and relaxed.

“Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“How badly are you hurt?”

He sighed, sending the curtain of hair fluttering again. “Just a bump on my head and the eye. Is it black yet?”

“It’s still at that puffy reddish-purple stage, but it shows potential to be a damn good shiner.”

“Nice.”

“Shut up back there.”

For the first time I realized if we were tied up in the back of the Range Rover—a moving Range Rover—it meant someone drove. Which meant there was nothing separating the front of the Range Rover from the cargo area. The backseats had been folded down to give Henry and me enough room to lay out, even if we had to lay diagonally in the space to keep from having to curl around each other to fit. I looked up to the front seats and saw two bald heads, one white, one black. The barrel of an assault rifle poked out above the seat back. The black man turned in his seat and glared at us. “Be quiet or I’ll gag you.” The freakiest thing about him—even freakier than the gun—was the complete absence of expression or emotion in both his face and his voice.

Another lurch of the vehicle sent me rolling into Henry. Instead of rolling away from him, I stayed where I was, head resting on his shoulder. I should have moved, of course, but the contact, the connection, was the only thing keeping me from losing my mind completely. Henry looked at me through his swollen eye, the other still hidden from view, and rested his forehead against mine.

Terror jolted and sizzled through my body, so sleep was out of the question. Despite that, we stayed silent, closed our eyes, and waited. What else was there to do?

I DIDN’T
know how much time passed. It felt like hours but was probably a lot less. It wasn’t too early, though. The sun glowed red over the top of the rain forest when the Range Rover stopped. My expensive shoes squished in two inches of mud when I scrambled out of the vehicle’s cargo area. We were deep in the heart of the jungle. We could have been on the set for a movie adaptation of
Heart of Darkness
. Tall trees, weighed down with dark green leaves, created dense shadows on the forest floor. Bushes that looked like ferns on steroids spread their feathered arms, filling the space between trees. Moss and fungus draped from branches and vines and carpeted everything. It smelled of green and rot. I expected the foliage to swallow me and everyone else in the area.

“We are certainly in one of the dark places of the earth,” I said. Henry looked a question at me. I shrugged. My lit teacher would have been impressed.

Long shadows from towering trees covered the narrow paths surrounding a small block of buildings. Rotting piles of lumber and ancient, rusted cutting equipment littered the clearing. It looked like the place had been used for some kind of lumber processing once upon a time, but it had obviously been a while. The jungle had done its best to reclaim the area, and the big main building—the size of a grocery store—crumbled at the corners. Smaller buildings, barely huts, were positioned in a row behind the larger building. Looking around, it really seemed like the structures had been randomly dropped in the middle of a rain forest. No wonder the Range Rover had lurched and jerked. There was hardly a path wide enough for a go-cart.

One of the guards gestured with his gun to get us moving. The route took us past the big building. A quick glance in a door big enough to back a semi into showed half a dozen smaller vehicles that looked like they came from World War II parked on one side of a giant open space. A couple of other bigger, more modern trucks were parked on the other side. In the back, stacks of wooden crates and metal cases lined the wall. The man escorted us to one of the middle huts and indicated we needed to go in.

It was a small, one-room… thing. The ceiling hung so low barely a foot separated it from the top of my head. There was no furniture of any kind. Slits near the ceiling let in air and light, but they were small, only a couple of feet long and four or five inches tall. Too high to actually see out of, so no way to scope out the camp.

Our escort shut the door behind us. I didn’t hear a lock or anything click into place, but I was sure someone would be guarding the entrance.

Henry and I stood in the middle of the room, arms still bound behind our backs. Now that I could see his whole face, I could tell the black eye was probably the worst of his injuries. A small knot above his brow added to the blotches of red and purple on his face, but his nose hadn’t been broken, and there was no blood.

“Henry?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s going to happen to us?”

“Usually—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Usually whenever missionaries or foreigners are kidnapped or taken hostage in this area, it’s to be held for ransom.”

I forced my brain to think logically. The exercise helped mute the panic. “But they weren’t planning on kidnapping us, right? I mean, they were looking for those canisters. Does that mean they want to exchange us for the canisters? But they must have gotten the wrong people, right? We picked up medical supplies. When they realize they have the wrong guys, what are they going to do with us?”

“I’m not so sure they got the wrong people.”

“What?” I jerked my head toward him. Was he serious? “We didn’t have what they wanted.” A sudden thought made my body still. “Did we?”

“Maybe we did. Remember those footprints we saw around the Range Rover this morning? What if someone took something out?”

“What? You think the refugee camp is a front for some kind of smuggling thing? There’re, what, diamonds in these mysterious canisters?” I rolled my eyes.