Tower in the Woods (11 page)

“Don’t,” Nel warned as she crossed her arms in front of her belly, wrapping her fingers around his forearms. Reassuringly, she squeezed her hands over his tightening muscles. “There is no need for you to break your rules. No one gets lost and wanders into the WITCH’s woods. No one without years of training could have climbed up the Tower using nothing more than a rope of hair. I’ve guessed what you are here to do. I’ve guessed it even before we slept together. I don’t need or want to know the details.”

Dane closed his eyes as regret washed over him. Telling her his mission long ago would have been a gesture of trust, a way he could have shown her that his feelings ran deeper than he was willing to admit out loud. Now it was too late. The damage was done and he had been forgiven. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words, couldn’t make himself ask for Nel’s heart when he could offer her no future. It was torturous to hold someone he so deeply respected, the woman he feared he may have already fallen in love with, and not promise her that he would be by her side for as long as he lived.

“If I make it out alive, I’ll come back for you,” Dane swore as he turned Nel around in his arms and cupped her face. Her blue eyes glistened with tears as her gaze bore into his, and a few drops trickled down her face as she shook her head.

“I can’t live the rest of my life waiting for you to save me,” Nel said even as she rose on tiptoe to kiss him. Her lips were soft, yielding and coercing, her body warm and pliant. She nestled into the warmth of his arms even as her words purposefully increased the distance between them. “Let’s not ruin this by pretending there is more to us than what is.”

Dane clenched his teeth at her words. He desperately wanted to correct her, but he couldn’t. The chances of him surviving, the chances of him coming back to this tower to save her were less than 50 percent. It wouldn’t be fair for him to say the words that would woo away her heart only to break it by dying a day later. When he came back for her, if he came back for her, he was going to teach Nel exactly how wrong she was.

“This tower is the safest place for you to stay. There are enough supplies here to last you at least two years. Promise me you won’t randomly decide to take your chances in the woods,” Dane practically ordered before he kissed Nel again, his lips and tongue desperately seeking hers as he felt his heart fill with worry.

Dane had never cared for anyone this way; the welfare of another person had never mattered this much. He needed to know Nel would be safe, and he needed to know it more than he needed to breathe. He was wasting precious time, time he should spend infiltrating the WITCH, but nothing could make him go before hearing her answer.

So he kissed her into submission, crushed her against his body as he sought solace in the feel of her small frame plastered alongside his. In this moment, for a few minutes more, he knew for certain she was safe.

“Promise me?” Dane asked one more time as he forced himself to break the kiss. From a distance, he heard the roaring of a car engine. If he was going to carry out his mission he had to leave now.

Tremulously, Nel smiled, her sky-blue gaze meeting his dark one with surprising calm. “I’ll stay safe, Dane. I promise. Just focus on making it out of the WITCH alive.”

He was a dead man, Dane admitted as the reality of his failure sank in. At first, his mission had gone on without a hitch. He had easily slipped under the tarp that covered the back of Mother Gothel’s pickup truck as she dropped off Nel’s supplies. The rotund old lady had barely said a word to the sniper above, quickly hitching a burlap bag full of food to the rope and jumping back into the car immediately after Nel threw the sack back down. Luckily, he had been lying in wait so by then he was firmly ensconced underneath the heavy, dark fabric.

He had accurately judged the WITCH’s security and known it was unlikely that anyone would check the car of the prophet herself. It had made getting into the veritable fortress that the WITCH had turned Fort Belvoir into remarkably easy. Once there, Dane simply had to wait patiently until he could surreptitiously slip out of his hiding spot and slink into a shadowed corner.

The most important part of Dane’s mission was mapping out the WITCH’s compound. If the FMA was going to launch a rescue operation it needed to know exactly where the kidnapped children were kept, else risk the girls they were trying to save becoming collateral damage. Mother Gothel had chosen her headquarters well—the former hub of the Defense Logistics Agency. The semicircle of buildings that composed the main campus of Fort Belvoir provided a large and easily defendable space that abutted a reservoir of water as well as plenty of arable land. The WITCH had the makings of a very viable colony, if only it wasn’t run by a deranged sociopath.

It took Dane a few hours to locate the section of the building that had been turned into living quarters and schoolrooms for the kidnapped trainees. He had also located several sniper’s nests as well as timed the various patrols. Breaching the WITCH’s defenses wasn’t going to be easy, but with the intelligence he had gathered it was unlikely to cost too many lives. Judging by his experience with Nel, the recruits who patrolled the walls of the WITCH were trained to kill zombies, and they would be at least surprised enough for their response time to be affected during a raid orchestrated by the best agents of the FMA.

Dane was about to sneak out of the fort when a roving patrol got suspicious and he was forced into making the terrible decision of sliding into a storm drain. The foul smell that emanated throughout the underground sewer should have tipped him off, but he hadn’t been thinking about zombies at the time. After all, he was in a heavily fortified paramilitary compound. So when he found himself tumbling into an underground holding cell full of brain-eaters, Dane had been too surprised to think far ahead. Taking out his sidearm, he fired off one shot after the other. While saving his life, the instinctive response inevitably caught the attention of the roving patrol he had been trying to avoid in the first place.

So here he was blindfolded and bound in the back of the same pickup truck he had sneaked in on, driven out to be executed by the cult leader herself. Mother Gothel had been most displeased when Dane had been presented to her, and even more enraged when he had told her his method of entry. After all, the good Mother didn’t want her fallibility to be revealed to her devoted disciples. It would negatively affect her godly persona for them all to find out she was the one who had brought the dreaded “man” into their midst.

After swearing the two AK-47-toting patrolwomen to secrecy, Mother Gothel herself had blindfolded Dane and taken him to her car. Wincing at the pain in his side, he remembered the Mother’s steel-toed boots had impacted his midsection multiple times, most likely causing at least a rib fracture. His hands and feet were tied together, and there wasn’t an inch of his body that wasn’t covered in some sort of bruise. The ham-fisted cult leader had been so angry with him that he had been certain she was going to accidentally kill him as she bludgeoned him with her bare hands.

Apparently, Dane didn’t deserve a simple death via a bullet through the head. He was being driven out into the zombie wasteland outside the WITCH so she could watch him get torn apart limb from limb. According to Mother Gothel, that gruesome death was less than what all men deserved. If he hadn’t been busy trying to figure a way out of his impending demise, he might have been of the mind to suggest to this crazy old lady that she was in need of some serious psychiatric help.

Dane felt the car slow and stop, and he realized the end was nigh. Damn, he had so many bloody regrets, and the one that came foremost to his mind was the woman he had left behind in the tower, the sweet blue-eyed sniper who had stolen his heart. He should have told her that he loved her. He should have damned the mission to hell and taken Nel back to the safety of Washington, D.C. No amount of honor or duty, no deference to morality or pledge to work toward the greater good, was worth the hell he was about to put her through. He knew his sniper, and she would be most assuredly watching his execution through the tower’s window. She was going to watch him die, and he had never even told her that she was the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

The tarp was pulled off his body as pudgy hands grabbed him by the neck and shoved him to the ground. He groaned as his abused limbs hit the hard ground, winced as he heard the shuffling of feet and incoherent howls that signaled his impending doom. The brain-eaters had smelled blood and they were coming for him.

Then a shot rang out through the night and Dane felt a large, heavy mass fall on top of him. He felt the trickle and ooze of blood through his clothing, could smell the stench of loosening bowels that came with a human’s death. Not knowing what had happened, he struggled against his restraints, finally able to flip his own body over and throw off the massive, fleshy mound that had crushed him to the ground.

Then Dane’s mind computed the odds and he realized what Nel had done. The sniper had watched the WITCH since he infiltrated the grounds, had seen what was about to happen through her night-vision scope, and had made a choice. The body that had fallen on top of him was Mother Gothel. Nel had saved Dane and by doing so jeopardized her own life.

Grunting, Dane took a leap of faith and lifted his arms over his head. His hands were bound by metal handcuffs, and he had one hope of getting through the impending zombie attack alive. Holding perfectly still, he didn’t need to wait long before another shot shattered the handcuff’s chains and freed his hands.

Dane acted on instinct, knowing he had little to no time to think. He removed his blindfold first, and his blurred vision quickly confirmed what his brain had deduced. There was a bloody cavernous hole where Mother Gothel’s face once was, and a phalanx of zombies made their way toward the body, drawn by the putrid, ferrous smell. As more shots rang out the advancing brain-eaters slumped to the ground one by one. Racing against time, Dane freed his legs before searching the dead body for keys. Finding none, he crawled over to the pickup truck and painfully lowered himself into the front seat. The key was in the ignition and the engine was still running.

Forcing himself not to think about what would happen to Nel when the WITCH found out what she had done, forcing himself not to turn the car around and head straight toward the tower, Dane floored the accelerator and launched the car straight through the line of zombies. His emotions were telling him to go back to Nel, but he still had the semblance of mind to realize he didn’t have a way to climb up the tower in his injured state. Nel was unlikely to have found a way to anchor the rope in the short time that had passed so there was no way for her to join him. Besides, it had been a veritable miracle the flimsy cord of hair had survived his trip up and down, and he didn’t want her to risk breaking her neck trying to escape.

In short, no matter what his emotions were telling him to do, Dane needed to get back to D.C. if he was to have any hope of saving Nel. Come hell or high water, he was going to get her safely ensconced in his home, and then he planned to dismantle the WITCH once and for all.

Feeling a now familiar wave of nausea hit her, Nel quickly ran to the bathroom and positioned herself by the toilet bowl. Like every morning for the past three days, her forehead and the back of her neck were covered in cold, clammy sweat, and even the slightest righting of her head into a vertical position overwhelmed her with dizziness. She could barely keep any food down, and she felt so tired the trip from her pallet by the fireplace to the bathroom felt like a trek across the zombie wastelands.

Considering her menses hadn’t started on schedule, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that she was pregnant. Nel had a decision to make and time was running out for her to make it.

It had been a month since she had assassinated Mother Gothel, a whole month since she had watched Dane’s battered form climb into the Mother’s pickup truck and drive away into the zombie wastelands. She wanted to believe he had made it out fine; she wanted to believe he had returned to the safety of this mythical city to the north, she wanted to believe he was coming back for her. But it was time to face facts—Dane hadn’t come back for her yet, and it was extremely unlikely that he ever would.

Nel couldn’t let herself think about Dane getting lost in the woods, about him being torn apart limb from limb by a horde of undead. If she let herself think about that outcome she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each day. Better, far better, to simply think he had chosen to not return, chosen to not risk death or capture in order to save her. After all, they had known each other for exactly one week. He hadn’t made any promises, had never even talked about a future with her in it. The notion that he had abandoned her might be depressing, but it was far less heartbreaking than the thought of him no longer being alive in this world.

If she hadn’t realized she was pregnant, Nel may have chosen to hole up in the Tower for longer. Yes, the delivery of supplies had completely stopped after Mother Gothel’s death, but she also had no indication that anyone in the WITCH even knew her location. They weren’t coming after her, at least not yet. One hypothesis was that the other members of the WITCH realized her betrayal and they had chosen to simply execute her by slowly starving her to death. The other hypothesis—they had no idea Nel was in the Tower. Either way, no more food was coming and she couldn’t stay in the Tower forever.

She had food enough to last her the year, two if she was careful, and if circumstances weren’t as they were, the best course of action would be to stay in the Tower until the supplies ran out. However, if she was able to carry her child to term, and if she survived the birthing process, Nel would be forced to flee no more than two years from now, and she would have to do so with an infant in tow. That particular scenario would put her likelihood of survival at next to nil, and even that outcome assumed both her and her child could survive the delivery without any medical attention whatsoever.