Ariel
Rain hit everything all at once and Cap's hand found the back of my shirt and pushed me forward before I'd fully processed that we were running.
"Left," he said, so low I felt it more than heard it.
We cut behind the cinderblock wall, past something that smelled like old onions and bleach, and hit the alley.
Mud grabbed at my shoes and let go and grabbed again like it was making a decision it kept changing its mind about.
Trash cans loomed up and slid past. Behind me I could hear Juno's breathing and the hoarse man's labored footsteps, both of them keeping up, which was all I was asking for right now.
"Count," Cap said, tapping twice on my sleeve.
"One two three four," I breathed. Steady. He was steady, so I was steady, and it worked like borrowing someone's umbrella when yours had turned inside out. Behind me, Juno picked up the count under her breath. The hoarse man kept pace a step back.
The fence came up fast. Cap went over first. Hands on the top rail, wire catching his forearm as he cleared it, a dark line opening across his skin that I filed away to deal with later.
And landed and turned and held out his hand like he hadn't just cut himself open on rusted metal.
I grabbed it and went over with Juno half-attached to me, and then we were in the mud on the other side, which made an embarrassing sound and tried to keep us.
The hoarse man got stuck halfway over. Cap grabbed the back of his jeans and pulled, the way you'd yank a stubborn drawer, and the man hit the mud and looked up and grinned with every tooth he had left. I liked him for that.
We ran again, following the low ground the way water would, because water knew where gravity wanted you to go and it was easier to agree with it.
The alley opened into a cemetery, headstones coming up out of the dark in quiet rows, rain making every name shine and not look particularly concerned about any of this.
We cleared the low fence where roots had pushed the iron up into a bow, and the grass went soft underfoot.
I kept my count going. Juno held my sleeve. The man stayed close.
Cap's shoulder brushed mine. "Hands," he said, shaping his palms against his sides to show me. No flapping. No wild movements. I mirrored him and matched his footfalls until my feet found his rhythm and stopped making extra noise.
Out past the tree line, trucks were idling wrong. Engines running through impatience rather than need. Farther out, a voice broke through, flat and trained, the kind of voice that didn't say anything by accident. We picked up the pace. Men who talked like that were not out here for any good reason.
We hit the trees and the rain dropped to a whisper that still found every gap between my collar and my skin.
The ground dipped where an old creek had once run and informed our knees about it on the way down.
Juno's grip on my sleeve tightened and then steadied as her feet found it.
Cap looked back once, quick sweep across Juno's face, the man's posture, and nodded, then angled us downhill where the ferns were thick enough to close over footprints.
Something caught my cheek. A branch, and the sting of it brought me fully back into my own body.
Cap reached back without looking and skimmed his knuckles across my cheekbone, checking, not comforting, then ran the back of his hand across his forearm where the wire had gotten him.
Blood. A thin ribbon of it, bright against the dirt on his skin.
"Stop," I said, before he could tell me to keep moving.
He got us behind a fallen trunk, slick with those little white mushrooms that always looked fake. The world compressed to bark and the sound of our breathing.
"Thirty seconds," he said.
"Twenty," I said, because Juno was shaking in the specific way people shook right before they stopped being able to push through it.
Cap glanced at her and didn't argue. He shrugged out of his cut and I tore a strip from the liner of my shirt, not graceful, it took two tries and my teeth, and wrapped his forearm with hands that were more used to icing birthday cakes and typing report cards than field dressing.
He let me do it without making it a whole thing.
Didn't tell me it was fine. Didn't pull away.
Just held still and watched the tree line while I worked.
I liked that about him more than I knew how to say.
The hoarse man coughed. Not loud, not soft, just the sound a throat made when rain and fear had been sharing space in it for too long. Cap's eyes moved to him. The man lifted both hands, apologetic. Cap gave him one finger, understood, it's okay, and the man's shoulders dropped about an inch.
I tied off the bandage with my teeth and sat back. "Done."
Cap tugged it once to test the hold, then put his cut back on. The weight of his hand on my shoulder for just a second, settling it into place. It helped more than it should have.
"Walkers," he said quietly.
The word arranged itself into sound a moment later. Men moving through the woods without bothering to be subtle about it. Wet denim. Boots on wet ground. And at the end of a leash, a dog working the air in quick, eager pulls, a handler's low voice keeping it focused.
Juno pressed into my side. I put my palm flat on her wrist. "You're doing so well," I told her, and I meant it, she was, she really was, and she straightened up a fraction and drew a breath that had some backbone to it.
Cap mapped it out with his fingers for us. South. The creek. The space between the fallen log and the brush behind it. Two minutes, then we moved. Same count.
He slid off into the trees to read what was coming, and disappeared the way he did sometimes, not gone, just somewhere the dark kept better than the light could. I stared after him and got nothing but rain on leaves and my own heartbeat.
One two three four.
The dog's voice lifted once, uncertain, then reset. Cap reappeared in a gap in the dark like a seam opening, held up one finger then two, back and left, and I passed it down the line with my hand because hands were quieter than mouths right now.
We moved. Not far, not fast. Enough to put a ridge of ground between us and the sound.
Cap took the hoarse man by the back of his jacket and steered him around a patch of bracken that would have given us away.
I got my hand on Juno's shoulders and guided her foot over a root.
She caught a bad step before it happened and redirected us both around a brittle branch, and I felt something loosen in my chest a little.
She was thinking, not just reacting. Good.
The shed materialized out of the dark like it had been there the whole time, which it had, obviously, but still.
Half-collapsed, roof settled into a shape that would keep rain off without looking like much from a distance.
Ferns had taken over the back edge. Cap dropped to one knee and tested the lowest brace with his shoulder before he waved anyone through.
Juno went first, folding herself in with a full-body shiver that made noise and then stopped. The man went sideways with a grunt that Cap's hand on his neck quieted to something the rain could cover.
I crouched at the opening. "Hands on sleeves. No moving around. No light." I had nothing to give them but the last strip of my shirt liner and the count I'd been running since we left the building. I gave both. "If you need to be sick, do it into your jacket. I'm serious."
Cap settled next to me, shoulders blocking the wind from the opening. "Two hundred yards," he said, nodding toward the creek. "We'll draw a line between them and us if we have to."
"How long do we keep them here?"
"Until the engines shift." As if they'd heard him, two engines revved somewhere out in the dark.
A call and a response, rough and impatient.
He closed his eyes for one breath, that thing he did when he was running numbers on something he couldn't see.
"The handler knows his dog. He'll work the paths he can walk first, let the nose pick the second pass.
We need the first pass to come up empty. "
Sunshine's face surfaced in my head. The way she'd looked at me right before she told us to run. Deliberate. Already decided.
"She told us to go," I said. Not an apology. Just the thing that had built this moment, that had put Juno here breathing beside me instead of still in that cage.
"Then we make it count," Cap said. He pressed his palm to the wet bark of the shed frame and listened to it, which was a very Cap thing to do. I listened for his heartbeat and found my own aligning with it without my permission.
The first sweep came close enough that I could smell cigarette smoke on the men.
The dog chuffed and sneezed, wet earth was messy information, then dropped its head and pulled hard on the leash.
The handler said one word. Good. Boots on wet sod.
A flashlight swung across the ferns, white and thin, and moved on.
The shed stayed quiet around us, old boards deciding not to complain.
When it passed, Cap let out one slow breath and I let mine go with it.
"You did great," I told Juno. I meant it. She'd been running on empty for longer than any of us and she was still here, still counting, still moving when Cap said move.
"Is Sunshine—" she started, and her voice broke on it.
"She's alive," Cap said. Like he'd seen through the walls and checked. "And loud. Sunshine does not go quietly."
Juno made a sound that started to be a cry and swallowed itself into a nod. The man's cough stayed buried in his jacket.
The engines shifted out in the dark. The watcher's voice rearranged men without getting louder. The dog turned and its breath came fast and certain.
Cap's hand closed on my sleeve. "Creek. Now."
We came out of the shed one at a time and let the dark take us back. Juno first, then the man, then me, then Cap bringing up the rear. The count rode my breath the whole way to the water.
The cold hit as soon as we got to the bank. Up through the rocks and straight through my shoes like it had been waiting. Cap stepped in without reacting and turned and held out his hand.
I took it and stepped in and the cold rushed up to my ankles and then my shins, and it was so sharp and so real and so present that it pushed everything else sideways for a second. The fear, the shed, the sounds behind us. Just the water and Cap's hand and the count.
"Stones when you can," he said to the group, quiet. "If you slip, sit down first. Don't try to catch yourself standing. That's how you break an ankle."
Behind us, the dog's voice cleared into something sharper. Not a call. A finding. The handler's praise pitched up.
Cap didn't look back.
"Faster," he said, and pulled me with him downstream.