Chapter 7 Ranger
RANGER
When she found the sleepy sounds, I smiled.
I couldn’t help it. One of the reasons why I struggled to sleep, outside of the office chair, was that I was a sound person whenever I slept.
I had this twelve-hour reel online that I played, and it mostly consisted of thunderstorm sounds.
A bit of rumbling thunder. Some wind. A little bit of rain.
I enjoyed the background noise while I slept.
It appears she did, too.
When she picked the combination of ocean and rain sounds, I turned back toward my computer.
I typed around a little bit, dicking around with some satellite imagery and hacking in to see if I could pull any other aerial images of the state parks so that we could figure out where some of these landmarks were in her roughly drawn map that she gave us.
I heard her snoring kick in.
“Oh hell yeah,” I muttered as I pulled a couple more pictures and logged out of the program.
You know, before the owners of those satellites grew wise to our machinations.
From the time she began snoring, I timed it, and when she was snoring for an hour, I quickly got up from my chair. I rushed out of the room. My head was on a swivel, looking for a very familiar face…
“Doc!” I exclaimed when I rounded the corner into the common room and found him sitting there with his doctor’s bag wide open, contents spread out everywhere. “Doc, hey. There you are.”
He whipped his head up. “She all right?”
I smiled as I plopped down beside him. I went to speak before I dropped my eyes to what he was doing.
“Uh, everything good here, Doc?” I asked as I pointed.
“Huh?” he asked with a furrowed brow before he looked down at the coffee table in front of us. “Oh, this. I’m just reorganizing things.”
I grinned. “Keep just throwing shit in there?”
“I swear, I have plans to keep it organized one of these days,” he muttered.
I chuckled as I clapped him on the back. “She didn’t throw up.”
Doc practically broke his neck to look over at me. “What?”
I beamed with pride. “She didn’t even gag with this meal.”
“She ate all of it?”
I nodded.
“And she showed no symptoms?”
My smile hurt. “None, whatsoever.”
“Woo hoo!” he exclaimed as he stood.
I jumped up with him and we gave each other a high-five.
“Okay, you know what this means,” Doc said as he tossed his shit back into his doctor’s bag.
I just grinned at him. “Yep. I’ll have her to you in the morning for another round of tests.”
He closed his bag and gripped it at his side. “Good. I’ll go prepare everything for the morning so that we can get her in and out as quickly as possible. I know she’s not a fan of people touching her.”
“She giggled today, Doc.”
His smile softened a bit. “Yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I gave her a burner phone and she found some of those offline games that we downloaded for the other women. One of them actually made her giggle.”
He studied me for a moment. “I bet that sounded good.”
“It. Sounded. Great.”
He clapped my shoulder. “I’ll see you guys right when she wakes up. I want fasting bloodwork this time, so don’t dawdle.”
Fuck. She wasn’t a fan of needles before. I’d have to work with her on that one. “Fasting bloodwork, got it. Anything else?”
Doc shook his head as I escorted him back to his little home on the outskirts of the compound.
“Nope. Just that. If she’s strong enough to no longer throw up or gag at the food we give her, then she’s strong enough for a bit of fasting bloodwork.
I’ll make sure to have something on hand that she can sip on right after so her blood sugar doesn’t bottom out on us. ”
“Should I prepare her for anything else?”
Doc paused just outside of his front door and looked at me.
"I want to run an STI panel on her bloodwork.
And—" he reached into his coat pocket and produced a small box, holding it out to me "—pregnancy test. She can do it herself, in private.
No pressure, no timeline. Just leave it somewhere she can find it. "
I took it from him. "I'll make sure she knows it's there when she's ready."
"Good." Doc unlocked the door. "That's all I need from her for now."
I nodded to let him know that I understood. “Have a good night, Doc.”
He grinned. “You, too, Range.”
He closed the door and I just waited. This always happened with Doc. And when the door came whipping back open, I just smiled.
“Oh,” he said as he looked around, “and one more thing.”
“What’s up, Doc?”
"When she can hold down three meals a day, I want to do one more round of testing," he said. "Physical stuff — range of motion, reflexes, strength. Nothing invasive. Just want to make sure her body is recovering the way it should be. We've got time."
I nodded. “I’ll make sure I drop stuff like that to her so she gets prepared mentally.”
“Good. You have a good night.”
“You, too, Doc.”
When he shut the door for the second time, I waited for a few seconds.
But when I finally heard his steps retreating back into his place, I turned and headed back to the clubhouse.
I always thought Doc should’ve had his own place in the compound alongside the core part of the crew.
But there wasn’t enough room for him and all of the shit he needed as our medical expert.
So he got his own place on the outskirts.
One of the few tiny modular homes we plopped onto the property with electric and water hookups.
That was a fun as fuck project.
I’m sure you heard the sarcasm.
After getting back to the clubhouse, I was famished.
In all of the excitement of hearing Marla eat without having to rush to the bathroom for anything, I barely touched my food.
I retrieved it and got it warmed back up in the microwave, and then I decided to make myself a cream soda.
I didn’t care about the caffeine. I had so much intel work that had to get done that I could spare a night where I didn’t sleep much.
Besides, the sound of Marla’s snoring was like music to my ears.
I wanted to listen to it for a while.
So with my plate of food and my tall glass of Coke with vanilla cream in it, courtesy of Ghost that got me hooked on the fucking shit, I made my way back to my room. I plopped down at my computer.
I pulled up the satellite pictures.
“All right, let’s circle some shit we know,” I muttered to myself.
One of the things I was tasked with doing was taking these satellite images and lining them up like a plotline.
We needed the distinct pathways that carved through the state parks that we all traveled.
I wanted to find the route Cap and Ariel traveled.
I wanted to circle where Wrecker and Ariel was held captive.
I wanted to find all of these places so that we were working with a roadmap, because I knew for certain those fucks over at that law firm and beyond knew exactly where they were in those woods at any give point in time.
We had to be just as knowledgeable about the wooded area.
But with Wrecker, a native to Redd Valley himself, not recognizing some of the trees and landmarks Marla drew for us?
That put us heavily on the backfoot. Granted, we relied on Wrecker’s memories from when he was a high school kid.
A lot changes over the years. But his memory recall was some of the best I’d ever seen.
Probably a byproduct of his time captured behind enemy lines.
I had to find those fucking trees.
“Come ooon,” I grumbled to myself as I took a bite of food, “where are you fuckers?”
Marla was adamant about the drawing of the trees.
She said over and over how she knew those trees were right.
She felt them beneath her hands several times when she stumbled and caught herself.
At one point in time, she even described how she scurried up one of them and hid in it.
And while I knew trauma could skew some memories, it enhanced others.
I was familiar with that particular phenomenon.
Though I didn’t like to talk about it much.
I grumbled to myself as I kept searching through the pictures. I zoomed in to try and get detailed looks at the trees, but that wasn’t really what satellite imagery was for. I worried that we’d have to put boots on the ground in order to get a good look at these trees.
The bark was soft. It was weird.
“Soft bark,” I muttered to myself.
I abandoned the satellite images in favor of an AI chat engine.
I knew a lot of people had the heebie jeebies about this kind of shit, but it was good for a lot of stuff.
I remembered back to the hysterical crying of Marla while she adamantly explained to me some of the things she rushed by and witnessed while running through the woods.
It was clear her memory was patchy, most likely due to the stress and fear of the situation.
But there were a few details that stuck out to her that never changed, no matter how hard she cried or babbled or snotted all over herself.
And that was how soft the bark of the tree was that she climbed.
“All right, AI,” I muttered as I cracked my knuckles and began typing away, “I need a list of trees.”