Ryder leans against a tent pole for support, and in his left hand is his rifle. He looks terrible; his body is covered in sweat, and his entire body is trembling. He’s wearing a wife-beater, and I can see a large bandage over his right shoulder, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much good, because it’s bright red and soaked in blood. Some of it is seeping around the edges of the bandage.
“Ryder!”
He tries to smile, but grimaces in pain when his left arm moves. He draws in a ragged breath and raises the rifle until it points directly at Frank’s chest. “Let her go.”
Frank is armed only with a knife, and it’s no match against Ryder’s rifle, and he knows it. Hands up, he slowly gets off the mattress, letting me grab my jeans and hastily pull them on. “Ryder, what’s happening out there?”
“Reese and I got the drop of your Warriors. They were busy with one of your girls,” he sneers. “You pigs deserve what you’re about to get,” he says, looking at me. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”
I keep one eye on Frank, and edge away toward Ryder. When I’m out of Frank’s reach, I turn and bolt toward Ryder, and throw my arms around his waist. He wraps his bad arm around me, even though it has to kill him to do it, and I bury my face in his chest. “I thought you were dead.”
Standing this close to him, Ryder looks ever worse than I first thought. “I probably should be. It didn’t hit the bone and just tore through muscle. Reese patched me up, but he thinks my right arm might not ever work right again.”
“What?”
“It’ll probably cause me pain for the rest of my life. It might have been avoided had Reese been a surgeon with a sterile operating room, but he did the best he could with antiseptic, pressure, and some clean bandages. I hope it holds.” Ryder looks at Frank, who’s still keeping his arms up, and sneers. “I should kill you right now.”
“No, don’t! You’re better than that.”
“I know,” he says, looking down at me. “Come on, let’s go.”
He removes his arm from around me, and I see him wince in pain again. I can’t imagine how badly his shoulder must hurt right now, and I juts want to reach over and comfort him, but that’ll have to wait until we’re safely away from this place.
The second Ryder’s backs is turned, Frank draws his knife and rushes at us. Ryder must have expected it though, and quickly turns and fires off two shots. Both hit Frank dead in the chest, and he drops to the mattress and lays there, unmoving.
I stare at Frank’s body, and have the strangest urge to go over and hit him over and over again. Ryder nudges me, “Come on, let’s go. Reese can’t hold them off forever.”
“We have to free the other girls here.”
“Reese is on it. He found the tent with Tobe and the others, and they’re waiting for us at the boat.”
“The boat?”
“We’re going back to the island from here, and we’re going to gather up what’s left of our supplies. Then we’re leaving this place behind for good.”
I follow Ryder through the tents, trying to ignore the bodies on the ground. They’re all wearing army fatigues similar to Frank’s, and even though I know that they were terrible people, and they probably deserved what they got, I can’t help but feel slightly sick at the sight of them.
These men were people. Sons, brothers, maybe even husbands or fathers. Was it Frank that turned them into monsters, or were they already secretly inhuman, and Frank just gave them the opportunity to be who they really were?
Ryder grabs my hand and drags me along when I start to slow down. “Come on, we have to go.”
“I can’t help it. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink in almost three whole days. And I’m so tired, Ryder,” I say, stopping to catch my breath. “I feel like I’m dying.”
“Listen Sam, you have to keep going, because I don’t have the strength to carry you right now. We’re almost there, just keep moving.” He forces me to keep moving, even though all I want to do right now is drop to the ground and get some rest.
Escaping with Ryder gives me my first chance to actually look around this campsite. It’s small, with only about two dozen makeshift tents, and a stockpile of guns and ammo in the center. We’re only about a hundred yards from the dock, where Reese is waiting with our boat.
Tobe, Naomi, and Melissa are sitting in the back, but only Naomi looks coherent. She’s chugging from a bottle of water, and she actually gives me a smile when she sees the two of us. When Ryder helps me into the boat, she hands me a bottle of water and looks Ryder up and down. “Oh, is this the man you cried for at night?”
I’d reach over and elbow her if she weren’t’ so far away. So I settle instead for glaring at her over the bottle. She shakes her head and tears into a can on soup, eating it cold and fast, almost as if she’s never seen food before. She probably hasn’t, at least not for a while.
The food seems to snap Tobe and Melissa out of it just enough to get some food and fluids into them. My own stomach screams at me when I catch the scent of vegetable beef soup, but I don’t worry about food right now. I’m more concerned about my lack of water, and stick with my bottle as Reese pulls away from the dock.
Ryder sets his rifle down and scoots closer to me, wrapping his good arm around my shoulder. He’s not normally good at showing emotions other than anger, and I know he probably wants to be anywhere other than here right now, but I lean my head against his chest and cry.
Reese gives us worried glances, and he looks at Naomi, who is the most stable girl in the boat. “What happened?”
She looks at me. “I’m not sure. Frank took her to one of the tents a few minutes before you got there. He had time to do some horrible things to her. Did he hurt you?”
I shake my head, and curl up tighter against Ryder’s side. He doesn’t push me away, even though I’m crying into his shirt. He sighs, and looks down at me. “Sam, I’m sorry we couldn’t get there sooner. I was so out of it for the last couple of days.”
“He shouldn’t be up now,” Reese says from the front of the boat. “He’s putting too much stress on his fresh wound, and he’s losing a lot of blood. When we get back to what’s left of the house, he’ll probably crash for days.”
“Are you really hurt that badly?” I ask worriedly.
He shrugs, and winces. “Ah, don’t worry about me too much. I’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t look fine. His face is so pale it’s nearly gray, and his arm is still shaking. I can tell he’s in pain whenever he moves, and he’s breathing like an eighty year old smoker without his oxygen tank. Not to mention that his shirt is plastered to his chest with both blood and sweat. Put all that together, and he is definitely not fine.
“Hang on,” I tell him. “We’re gonna get you back to the house and you can take all the rest you need. Just hold on until then.”
He smiles. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I look over my shoulder at Reese. “Can’t you go any faster?”
The boat speeds up, and the island quickly approaches. When we reach the end of our dock, the first thing I notice is that half of the house is gone. It started to rain as we were being abducted, and that kept the fire from spreading, but it didn’t save most of the roof, the bedrooms, or the dining room.
All that’s left is part of the kitchen and the living room. Reese pulled a large, blue, plastic tarp over a corner of the living room to keep the rain away, and it left part of the room dry. When we get out of the boat, he helps me half carry and half drag Ryder under the tarp, and he arranges some pillows around him to keep him comfortable.
Melissa and Tobe stand off to the side and just watch with wide eyes and fearful expressions. Reese drags over a bag of medical supplies, and tosses me a roll of clean, white bandages. He then peels off the old bandage which is almost completely soaked through, and discards it over his shoulder.
He takes a wad of paper towels and applies as much pressure to Ryder’s shoulder as he can. The second he touches his brother, Ryder gasps in pain
, his eyes roll back in his head, and his entire body goes slack. “Did he just pass out?”
Reese nods, and takes the bandages from me. “I’m gonna need your help with this. Are you ok to assist me?”
“I’ll have to be,” I say. “What do you need me to do?”