Backwoods Read online

  “You think she’s too old for me,” Andrew said.

  “I didn’t say that.” Katherine turned and began scraping table scraps into a square of aluminum foil. She rinsed each dish in turn, then passed them to Andrew, who placed them into the dishwasher.

  “You didn’t have to. I can tell by your face.” She was deliberately avoiding his gaze and he cocked his head to meet her eyes, ducking a bit because he was taller than she was. “Mom, I keep telling you. That doesn’t matter to us.”

  “Okay.” Katherine nodded, paying too much attention to the growing mound of meat scraps and half-eaten asparagus spears.

  “She’s smart,” Andrew said. “More than that, she’s brilliant.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s got her Ph.D. She’s tenured. And she’s beautiful. And funny. She makes me laugh, makes me think. She likes to argue—politics, religion, philosophy, you name it.”

  Katherine nodded again, handing him a plate. “Okay.”

  “Will you stop saying that?” he pleaded, catching her hand, making her look at him at last. “Mom, I love her.”

  She studied him for a long, quiet moment. “I can see that.”

  “I love being with her. I love talking to her. I love listening to her. You always say I should find a partner I enjoy being with, who I can talk to.”

  “Is that what you see her being?” Katherine had asked. “A partner for you? You’re that serious about this woman?”

  He’d nodded, eyes round and earnest. “Yes, Mom.”

  She’d reached up, touching his face, her hand still damp. “What I think of Lila doesn’t matter, Andrew. It’s what you think that counts because you’re the one who’s involved with her.” With a gentle smile, she added, “And it’s obvious to me that you think the world of her, that what the two of you have makes you happy. And that makes me happy.”

  He’d smiled back, then hugged her, drawing her onto her tiptoes. “Thanks, Mom.”

  She stepped back, brushing his hair back from his brow. “If she breaks your heart, I’ll break her kneecaps.”

  He’d laughed. “She won’t, Mom.”

  * * *

  “Meals are served in the dee-fack at oh-six-thirty, twelve hundred and seventeen hundred sharp,” Corporal O’Malley said as Andrew trailed him across the main lobby toward the adjoining barracks annex.

  “The what?” Andrew asked.

  O’Malley glanced over his shoulder. “That’s what we call the dining facility. The dee-fack. The mess hall. There are snack and soda machines in the rec room. There’s also a canteen, too, with toiletries, cigarettes, magazines.”

  “Nice,” Andrew remarked dryly.

  “It beats Fallujah,” O’Malley said. He led Andrew up a flight of concrete steps in a narrow stairwell to the second floor of the barracks.

  “You were in Iraq?”

  O’Malley nodded. “Served fifteen months. Just got back in December. You ever been enlisted?”

  “Me? No.” Andrew managed a laugh.

  “Something funny about serving your country?” O’Malley stopped in his tracks, arching his brow, clearly not sharing Andrew’s amusement.

  “Uh, no.” Andrew shook his head. “Not at all. It’s just…” He sputtered for a moment, trying to figure out how to get the proverbial foot out of his mouth before O’Malley planted his up Andrew’s ass—non-proverbially. “I’ve never really thought of myself as military material.”

  O’Malley cut him a head-to-toe glance, then offered a concurring snort. “Yeah,” he said. Then, continuing with his tour, “Anyway, DARPA just finished building all of this a couple of months before we arrived. Before that, this was all a federal reserve forest, inaccessible to the general public. Like the Major said, you can use any of the public areas, the downstairs facilities. Just don’t leave the grounds or go near Dr. Moore’s residence again. Or the house of pain.”

  Andrew blinked. “The what?”

  “Dr. Moore’s lab. The building in the back of the compound.” He walked again, stopping next at the end of a corridor, outside a closed door. “Each person at this compound has their own unique security pin number. That way we can control who has access to restricted areas. Yours will be four-two-eight-zero.” As he said this, he punched it into a key pad beside the door, and Andrew watched the red light on the panel change to green.

  Inside, the room looked like any standard full-size hotel accommodations, with nondescript furnishings—desk, bed, bureau, nightstand—and adjacent bathroom with shower stall. As with a hotel, the room had been stripped of any sign of previous occupancy; of the absent Lieutenant Carter, nothing remained. Andrew thought O’Malley might say something about the former occupant, what had happened to Lieutenant Carter and why his room was now conspicuously vacant, but he did not.

  “I’ll have someone run you up some clean towels.” O’Malley crossed the threshold, reached into the darkened bathroom and flipped on the lights. “Fresh sheets for the bed, too. Oh, you’ve got a mini-fridge over by the bureau.”

  Andrew followed him, curious, taking note of a television set atop the bureau. And matching VCR, he observed. “Jesus, didn’t these things die out with the dinosaurs?” he asked with a laugh.

  “There’s a video library down in the rec room,” O’Malley said. “No cable or satellite.”

  Great, Andrew thought.

  “If there’s nothing else, I’ll leave you to it,” O’Malley said, not elaborating on whatever ‘it’ he was specifically leaving Andrew to.

  “Oh,” Andrew said. “Hey, sure. Thanks for the nickel tour.”

  O’Malley nodded once, politely, as he walked toward the door. “Be seeing you.”

  * * *

  After O’Malley had left, Andrew went back outside. He followed the sidewalk encircling the compound and annex until he came to the approximate spot beneath Moore’s balcony where his iPhone would have landed. It didn’t take long for him to find it. Or what was left of it after its two-story fall.

  “Shit.” He stared in dismay at the cracked, darkened screen, pushing impotently at the power button, even though he knew there was no way in hell it would work.

  “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” he heard Suzette Montgomery say from the deck above, and he looked up, eyes flown wide with surprise.

  “Hey,” he said with a startled, awkward laugh. “Uh, hi. I didn’t see you there.”

  “Hi, yourself,” she replied, leaning languidly over the deck railing, her arms crossed, a cigarette dangling from one hand. In the other, she held a glass tumbler with ice cubes, a wedge of lime and a clear liquid inside. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to spy on me.”

  “I was looking for my phone,” he replied. “I dropped it into the bushes earlier.”

  “Any luck?”

  Again, he glanced at the broken iPhone in his hand. “Yes and no.”

  He wondered if Dr. Moore was still in the apartment and thought about just turning around, bolting back into the building to be on the safe side. Apparently he was going to be stuck there for awhile, and since for all he knew, Dr. Moore was working on biochemical weapons in that top secret, hush-hush lab of his—one O’Malley had ominously referred to as the “house of pain”—he figured it might be in his own best interest to avoid pissing the guy off any more than he already had.

  “I’d say you could use mine, but there’s still no service.” Suzette drew the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled deeply, setting the smoldering end brightly aglow. It occurred to him that her stance allowed him a virtually unobstructed view down the front of her blouse. “I’m sorry about earlier. Edward hitting you and all.”

  “That’s alright.” Andrew’s hand trailed to his cheek. Not much of a bruise had formed where Moore’s knuckles had connected, but the residual soreness from the blow remained. “He hits like a girl.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  Andrew laughed. “Please don’t. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

&n
bsp; “That’s right.” Suzette inhaled on her cigarette. “I hear you’re going to be staying with us awhile.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s too bad,” she told him with a playful sort of smile that suggested she thought it was anything but.

  Before he could open his mouth to answer, he heard a sharp sound, the staccato patta-pat-pat of automatic gunfire echoing from somewhere in the distance, deep in the woods. Startled, he whirled, eyes flown wide.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed, shoulders hunched reflexively, just as more gunshots rolled out of the trees. The noises overlapped, multiple rifles firing simultaneously, a heated exchange from the sounds of things. “Those are gunshots!”

  “Sure sounds like it,” she agreed, using her fingertip and thumb to flick her cigarette butt into the courtyard.

  “What are they shooting at?”

  “The last guy they caught trespassing,” she said solemnly. Then she laughed. “I’m kidding. They must be out doing artillery drills, that’s all.”

  She tipped her head back, downing the rest of her drink. He thought of how her breath had smelled like alcohol the night before and wondered if there was more than water in her glass.

  “See you around, Romeo. Parting is such sweet sorrow and all that.” She dropped him a wink, then turned, walking back inside the apartment.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Seventeen hundred sharp, Andrew thought after he’d finished showering. That was when O’Malley had told him that supper was served in the dining hall—or dee-fack, as the case may be—and sitting on the side of what would be his bed while stuck at the Army barracks, he counted in his mind, trying to convert standard time to military hours. That’d be…what? Five o’clock?

  He glanced at his bedside clock. Ten minutes to go. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and his stomach was growling again. About a half hour earlier, Corporal O’Malley had stopped by his room, delivering the clothes he’d been wearing at the time of his crash—his shirt, jeans, socks—all freshly laundered, still warm from the dryer.

  “Thanks,” Andrew had said, surprised, as he’d accepted them.

  “Don’t thank me,” O’Malley had replied. “Dr. Montgomery took care of it.”

  Which had surprised him all the more.

  He hadn’t heard any more gunfire that afternoon. Suzette hadn’t seemed particularly concerned about the sounds, as if they were common enough occurrences. That didn’t make them any less unsettling to Andrew, however. Sound in the mountains carried fast and far and he wondered if McGillis and Allcott had returned to the woods to look for him, had heard the shots and grown alarmed.

  As he toweled his hair dry, he heard a knock at the door. “Hang on a minute,” he called, because he was still wearing only a towel around his waist. Thinking O’Malley might be bringing him another pleasant surprise—maybe an operational satellite phone or the keys to a helicopter waiting in the courtyard—he hurried to grab his jeans. “I’m not dressed. Hold on.”

  He heard a quick series of beeps, someone punching in on the key pad, and had a split second to realize the corresponding click was the door unlocking before it swung open, quickly and wide, sending him stumbling back from the threshold in surprise. “Hey!”

  His startled cry of protest cut abruptly short as Edward Moore stepped into the room, then swung the door smartly shut behind him. He raised his right arm, pointing at Andrew, and after a bewildered moment, Andrew realized it wasn’t the man’s finger he was aiming at his head.

  Shit, he thought, blinking down the barrel of what appeared to be a semi-automatic pistol.

  “Dr. Moore,” he hiccupped, eyes round, nearly crossed as he gawked at that cold, black hole bored into the muzzle. “What are you doing?”

  Surely the guy couldn’t be that pissed off over a right hook to the gut. Could he? Andrew thought, very much alarmed, because whatever the reason, Dr. Moore was pissed about something. That much was plain. The man’s face had flushed bright red, glossed with a sheen of anxious perspiration, and his brows were furrowed so deeply, his eyes were all but obscured by the resulting shadows.

  “Look,” Andrew said, backing up until he hit the nearest wall and thus could go no further. Helpless, he held up his hands. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he dimly hoped like all hell that the towel around his waist didn’t loosen and fall, because he figured being found with a bullet in his skull, buck naked on the floor would be a far shade worse than just the former. “About upstairs, what happened this morning, I was only…”

  “Shut up.” Moore made a show of conspicuously thumbing off the safety on the pistol. “Who are you? How did you find me here?”

  At a loss, Andrew shook his head. “I told you. I’m a forester. My name’s—”

  “I know what you said.” Spittle sprayed in fine droplets from his lips as Moore’s voice rose a ragged, scraping notch. “Now I want the truth.”

  In three swift strides, he collapsed the space between them. Andrew hunched his shoulders, closing his eyes as Moore shoved the gleaming barrel of his pistol against his temple.

  “Please don’t,” Andrew whispered, frightened now; damn near the closest he’d been in his adult life to unadulterated terror. Because this guy wants to kill me. This isn’t a game. He’s come here to shoot me.

  “How did you find me?” Moore demanded. “How did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t,” Andrew said, wincing as the muzzle dug more fiercely into his head. “I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, I swear.”

  The gun remained pressed against his skin for another long moment, then at last, Moore drew it away. Uttering a shuddering sigh, Andrew remained rooted in spot, eyes closed.

  “Haven’t you people done enough?” Moore asked. Some of that furious venom had been stripped from his voice, leaving a hoarse, nearly pained tone. Andrew opened his eyes hesitantly, and inexplicably found the older man staring at him with a pleading sort of expression, the pistol now dangling in his hand at his side.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Andrew said, and Moore’s face hardened again, that cleft between his brows deepening. Again, the pistol raised and Andrew cowered as Moore crammed the muzzle into his brow once more, forcing him to his knees.

  “Please,” Andrew gasped. “Please, don’t.”

  He gritted his teeth, his body tense as he waited for the horrible, thunderous report of gunfire, for what he assumed would be searing pain as the bullet punched through his skull. Moore pulled the gun away again, but Andrew remained rigid, frozen in place, paralyzed with fear.

  “No,” Moore said, his voice low and guttural, nearly a growl. Andrew heard the soft sound of his footsteps and risked opening his eyes in time to see Moore walking out the door to his room. “That’s your way. Not mine.”

  * * *

  What the hell have I gotten myself into? Andrew thought again as he walked downstairs, because things were sliding progressively from bad to worse to plain old fucked up at entirely too fast a pace for his liking.

  He hadn’t decided if he should tell Major Prendick about his encounter with Dr. Moore and his pistol. Given the Major’s reception—which had likewise involved a pistol aimed at his head—Andrew suspected Prendick might not have been too opposed to the idea of Moore popping a cap in his ass. Hell, he might have even instigated the entire confrontation.

  At the foot of the stairs, Andrew was struck by a strong smell emanating from the dining hall. Not entirely unpleasant, it wasn’t exactly appetizing, either, and reminded him of the way the corridors in elementary school had smelled in his youth close to lunchtime: the intermingling odors of canned corn and fish sticks.

  Ahead of him, he could see a large gathering of uniformed soldiers at the doorway of the dining hall, lined up and ready to fill their trays.

  “You don’t want to do that,” he heard Suzette say as he headed in that direction. He glanced to his left, found her crossing the lobby toward him.

  �
��I was just on my way to find you,” she said with a smile. “Invite you to join me for dinner.”

  He laughed without much humor, given that the imprint of Dr. Moore’s gun barrel was now outlined in a dim bruise against his temple. “You must really want to see me killed.”

  She looked quizzical, the good cheer faltering in her smile, and he told her about what had happened.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, seeming appropriately aghast. “I can’t believe he did that. He wouldn’t have shot you. Trust me. He’s all bluff and bluster. He wouldn’t have the balls.”

  Despite this reassurance, Andrew didn’t find himself so easily convinced.

  “Come on.” Suzette took him by the hand. “Eat with me down the hall, in the rec room. Dr. Moore likes to have dinner alone with Alice in the apartment. It’s their special time together. Or some such bullshit.” She cut her eyes toward the mess hall line, then back to him as she stepped closer. Near enough so that when she raised onto her tiptoes, stage-whispering into his ear, her breath tickled his skin, she said, “Besides the grunts all take turns in the kitchen fixing food. And none of them can cook worth a damn.”

  For the first time since he’d opened his door to find Dr. Moore on the other side, Andrew relaxed enough to smile. “But you can?”

  Her smile widened, coy and enigmatic. “Dr. Moore didn’t hire me for my medical background,” she replied. Still holding him by the hand, she gave his arm a light tug. “Come on. I’ll prove it.”

  * * *

  “Someone firebombed his house,” Suzette said. They had the rec room to themselves. She’d trundled a Styrofoam cooler down from the upstairs apartment and had everything set up, waiting for them.

  “How’d you know I’d say yes?” Andrew had asked.

  “I didn’t,” she’d replied. “But either way, I’m not eating that shit.”