Escape (9 page)

“I think it would be easier if...” The Bokan was blushing. Again. Maybe it was some kind of glandular issue. A problem regulating his body temperature.

“What?”

Luka looked down into the med kit, plucking through the supplies. “Should you take off your coat?”

Tarik unbuttoned his coat, grunting his pain as he started to shrug it off his shoulders. When Luka reached forward, meeting his eyes with a look seeking permission, he let him help. As gingerly as a doting mother with a child's broken arm, the kid slowly drew the sleeve off one arm, then the other. When he brought his hands to his chest to unbutton his shirt, hot pain sliced through his back. Again, Luka silently sought leave, then carefully stripped him of the garment.

“I don't see any other injuries.”

Surprising, reassuring, how calmly the kid was coping. In battle, Tarik had seen soldiers years older—big, beefy men with a habit of striding around like death's own handpicked executioners—fall apart when it was time to deal with anyone's blood and pain.

“Where's your knife?”

“I don't know. I was holding it when the mine exploded.” Fuck, he was out of it. “What do you want the knife for?”

“To get the shrapnel out.”

Tarik laughed, and his simmering pain boiled over. “Maybe use one of the sterile surgical scalpels, not the hunting knife I've been using to carve meat for the last couple months.”

The pale alien turned pink. “Yeah. Of course.” Luka rooted through the kit some more, extracting a scalpel sealed in its sterile packaging, a wad of cotton, and the antiseptic. “Do you want the morphine?”

“No.” Maybe he'd need it for something worse, later. Besides, he couldn't lay there in the dirt all day. They had to keep moving. And he had to keep his wits, no matter how harmless his prisoner seemed.

“I'll sterilize the wounds first, okay?” Luka spoke to him in a low, calm voice as he worked his hand into a pair of latex gloves.

“Sounds good.”

The kid's hands shook a little when he'd finished swabbing the lacerated flesh and he took up a pair of forceps. “I'll try to go easy.”

As Luka worked the first piece of shrapnel free of his flesh, it felt like someone was sadistically carving away a piece of him. Tarik gritted his teeth, huffing air in and out loudly between.

“It's coming out. Just a couple more seconds. There.”

The rhythmic adrenaline thrum beating at the center of his chest, reverberating in every vein in Tarik's body slowed a little until Luka started digging out the next chunk of metal rooted somewhere under skin and muscle, and then the third. Weird, how limp and rigid Tarik felt, all at once, straining against the pain wearing him out second by second.

“You need to palpate the fourth wound, to see if there's still something in there or not.”

“Okay.”

Tarik bit off a scream as Luka rooted into his shredded flesh.

“I feel something.” When he reached for the forceps, Luka's gloved fingertips were gory with blood. “I'm going to try to get it, okay?”

“Yeah.” Tarik forced big, deep breaths of air in and out, willing himself to yield to the pain. Let it come, let it go.

Almost done. Almost done.

The small, focused agony of the forceps digging into him, then the cruel, slow sawing of his flesh from the inside out.

“Got it. That's it. That's it.” Was Luka trying to soothe him, or himself? “Maybe you need stitches. I'm not sure.”

Tarik made him describe the wounds and show him with his fingers how long each gash was. Yeah. Stitches.

“Were you a medic?”

“Just a barber.”

“I mean, in the army.”

“I'm not in the army.”

Shock was making him stupid. “What do you mean?”

“I'm not a soldier. Never been a soldier.”

“The uniform?”

“They put it on me, after they beat me up. I was just at the camp because, after the soldiers kicked me out of my room where I used to live, I didn't have anywhere else to go.”

“You didn't tell me that, in the cave. Why'd you let me think you were a soldier? I might have shot you.”

“Because you wouldn't have believed me.”

True.

When Luka had Tarik sewn and bandaged, Luka circled around him, now and then gingerly sweeping at the thick accumulation of rotten leaves blanketing the ground with a long, leafy branch until he found the knife a good ten meters away. Brave kid. A little surprised Luka handed it to him, as if it hadn't even occurred to him to keep it from him, Tarik tucked the knife back into its sheath. “Help me get my shirt and coat on?”

Luka cast him a sheepish glance, then helped him into his things. When Luka put away the med kit and cinched the pack closed, Tarik let him shoulder it without protest. And again, with a twinge of consternation at what a helpful little prisoner he'd captured. Even if the kid had some crazy idea about trying to get his gun, Tarik could peg him with the knife before he'd have a chance to fire a shot. Wounded or not.

“Were you really going to try to spear that rabbit with your knife?” Luka asked when they'd made camp and were slowly masticating a meager serving of the remaining rations.

“Try? We'd be feasting on rabbit kebab if that treacherous beast hadn't suicide bombed us.” He couldn't tell by the dim, fickle light of the fire whether Luka's expression suggested awe or something darker. Resurrected fear?

“You're that good with a knife?”

Tarik grinned. He'd meant his little boast as a joke. Bragging and bravado weren't qualities he was fond of in others, much less in himself. But it also didn't hurt to keep his companion a little wary. “I am.”

“How do you learn something like that? Spearing something that little from that far away?”

“With a lot of practice.”

For a few seconds Luka stared at him, like he was trying to read his mind to divine just what kind of practice he was talking about, then his gaze drifted toward the fire.

“Thank you.”

Luka met his eyes.

“You were brave, back there. And kind.”

Luka's broke eye contact, his head sinking toward his chest.

“A lot of people in your position would have taken that chance to run. Or finish me off.”

Luka still didn't look at him. If anything, he was curling in on himself more and more.

“I hope your kindness means that you know I'm not planning on hurting you. Or doing anything that'll get you hurt.”

Without raising his eyes, “It was my fault.”

“What was?”

“I moved. I scared it.”

“No. Some birds startled it.”

“I mean after. It was running toward me, and I moved. That's why it changed direction, and set off the mine.”

Damn. If the kid hanging around to help him was a surprise, that note of pained remorse in his voice was unfathomable.

“Bullshit. If you need to blame someone, blame the psychos who stick mines in the ground, blowing up bunnies and children along with their enemies. Or blame me for being so reckless I'd pull that stunt, hunting in a mine field. I let my growling belly put us both in danger.”

Luka didn't say another word the rest of the night.

*

Bitter soreness of torn flesh haloed by a dull tenderness in angry magenta and morbid purples, but after two days there was no change in his urine so his kidney was hopefully fine. He'd keep taking the antibiotics, and with Luka changing his bandage and sterilizing the wounds twice a day, hopefully he wouldn't die of an infection before he got where he was supposed to be.

Luka's stoic—even dutiful—attitude in bearing the burdens of Tarik's injuries was surprising. Perplexing. Without so much as a reproachful or even questioning glance he hoisted Tarik's heavy pack onto his lean frame each time they got back on their path. And it was always Luka who said, when they woke in the morning, and when they made camp in the evening, “We should change the dressing.” Maybe he was playing the long game, gently courting Tarik's trust, waiting for him to let his guard down. Or maybe he thought he needed Tarik to get out of that vast wilderness alive. Or maybe he was just that good.

Gentle alien, stranded on this mad planet. Stranger in a strange land.

They were getting close. Tarik angled them gently northeast, toward the Dzoraget River. In a few hours, they'd cross. If they pushed themselves, they'd make it by midnight.

He felt like a sadist, death-marching his overburdened captive, pack and all, long past the hour of their usual midday rest, but they were out of water and too hungry for the crumbs that remained of their provisions. Disastrous as the outcome had been, hunting that suicidal rabbit had planted an obsession with fresh meat in Tarik's belly. He wanted grilled fish for lunch.

By the time the river was in sight, Luka was flushed and drenched in sweat, even though he hadn't once complained or asked to rest. Only when Tarik said, “Bathe and wash your things,” Luka looked at him like his torturer. “We'll make camp early. Stay here for the night.” It had taken longer to reach the river than he'd estimated, since he was slowed by his injuries and Luka was hobbled by the pack. They wouldn't make it today without an all-night forced march.

Even fatigued to the bone and in pain, Tarik realized he was smiling as he stripped himself bare, though his mirth at the thought of surprising Luka with a fish dinner withered when he noticed Luka slinking away to hide himself behind a screen of foliage, looking anxiously over his shoulder two or three times as he undressed. Something in the slope of those pale, angular shoulders and those furtive glances. Luka was still afraid of him. But not as an Eršban soldier. Tarik swallowed against the sickening sense that Luka was afraid he would hurt him in a way that had nothing to do with knives or guns or shrapnel-flinging explosives.

Or maybe he was only shy. Timid about standing beside him and baring his slender, pale body. Desperately discreet about not looking, not being seen seeing Tarik's body, excepting a few square centimeters of mangled tissue when Luka transformed from prisoner to nurse two times each day.

Tarik crept along the bank, grinning at the feel of the wet gravel and mud shifting under his bare feet, and the breeze cooling his sweaty skin, all so familiar, like being a kid again with his cousins when their families caravanned to the Mlava, where the grown-ups would fly fish, and the kids would frolic and swim at a safe distance so they wouldn't spoil the sport of the adults.

Wading out, just downstream from a rocky ledge where he could see dozens of steelhead thrashing against the current, trying to get upstream, Tarik sighed his pleasure as the cool water thrilled his skin, soothed his abused feet. Glancing back, he made sure Luka was still in sight. Luminous, half submerged, bare ass discreetly hidden from view. But the mottled grays and purples and yellows of the fading bruises clouding his torso were bared to the world.

Between Tarik's legs, under the mercurial surface, a big fish, its silver body twisting under the light-bending curves of the rippling water. A quick-flashing, darting body. A furtive body, hunting and dodging. How do fish mate? Some, flopping, writhing in the wet sand, gasping, gills flaring. A mating between frottage and copulation, seed spraying onto seed.

Luka licked his fingers then wiped them on his pants.

“Full? Already?”

Luka shrugged.

“So have more. It won't keep past morning, anyway.” Tarik pulled a skewer off the fire and handed it over.

Luka took it like a beggar accepting alms.

Tarik leaned back against the big stone behind him, careful not to put pressure on his wounds. Sprawled out, full and weary and content, he pulled in a long, deep breath, and sighed.

“You actually like it, don't you?” When Tarik opened his eyes, Luka dodged his gaze and stared into the fire as he chewed.

“Like what?”

“Being out here. You act like we're on a camping expedition. Like it's a vacation, or something.”

Tarik chuckled. “Beats some things. Beats a lot of things, actually. Would you rather be penned up in that refugee camp?”

Luka didn't answer, but Tarik thought he saw a faint shudder ripple through him. Still not looking at him, Luka asked, “How'd you catch them?”

Tarik put his hands up and waited until Luka finally turned his head. “Like this.” He made a triangle with his thumbs and index fingers.

“With your bare hands?”

“It's not hard. The trick is finding the right spot in the river. You get these traffic jams when they have to fight their way over an obstacle to get upstream. Like that saying about shooting fish in a barrel.”

“Did they teach you that in the army?”

Tarik grunted. Like the army had taught him anything, except how to hunt humans instead of animals. “We figured it out when we were kids. My cousins and me. Summers, the whole family would go camping as many weekends as we could. The men would fly fish. So we were always camping by the best rivers for fishing. Us kids would invent all these games and contests. Who could throw a rock the farthest, who could float the farthest downstream without standing up or swimming, stuff like that. One of my cousins came up with a contest to see if anyone could catch a fish with their bare hands. Antonija was the youngest, and the only girl, and she was the first of us to catch one. A trout almost as big as she was. Then she taught us. But she was always the best one, out of all of us.”