August inched forward and kicked Gil’s relinquished pistol away, but couldn’t bear to look at the man, restrained now in an anesthetized state of disbelief over what he’d done. The dying man reached for him, emanating wretched gurgling noises, but August turned away, opting to check the welfare of the injured female. “It’s okay now. I can hel—” But he was silenced instantly.
In the minuscule span of time after taking his eyes from her to put down his fellow agent, the girl had unholstered a hidden Glock handgun and drawn down on him. She unloaded the weapon with her bloodied right hand, dispatching round after round after round directly into August’s center mass, into the level three polyethylene armor plate residing within the carrier protecting his chest.
The bone-jarring impact of each successive round was excruciating and kept coming with seemingly no end, each one stealing lungfuls of life from him until, finally, he deflated. His skin tingled all over right before he lost consciousness and collapsed to the forest floor, thumping onto it like an uprooted redwood.
Chapter 37
When August awoke, it felt as though his chest had swollen to three times its original size, and for a large man such as he was, that was no joke. He tested his mobility, feeling that his hands had been tightly bound behind him by some means. His body armor had been removed to expose his bruised, battered chest and rib cage. He didn’t know how many times he’d been shot, and wasn’t sure if any of the rounds had slipped through, but in view of the pain he was registering, they might as well have.
He writhed a bit and groaned, stretching his eyes fully open to see his assailant seated yards away in one of the deceased agent’s chairs, meticulously treating a nasty wound on her forearm. A backpack he didn’t recognize leaned against a tree just behind her, beside an all-black, suppressed M4 of some variety.
Noticing he’d come around, the girl diverted her attention to him and reached for a compact Glock handgun between her knees. “Don’t get any ideas. This is a fresh magazine.”
August coughed a few times, feeling a sharp, guttural ache in his chest with each spasm. “I-I won’t. But…why…why am I—”
“Still alive?” She chuckled slightly. “Good question. I’ve asked myself that about twenty times in the past five minutes. But that question is taking a backseat to a few others.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why you chose to shoot a man wearing the same uniform as you instead of me.” She tilted her head to the side, eyebrows raised. “Think you can clue me in, Special Agent Carter?”
August rubbed his lips together, opting not to respond. He glanced right to a pile of gear and found the maligned threads of his removed plate carrier with his name tape still attached.
“It’s ironic how the thought of dying never really crosses your mind until death is breathing down your neck,” the girl mused. “You can inch your way through life without giving so much as a damn about anyone or anything, without any regard for the disvalues of your actions or the impacts of your deeds…how they’ll affect you or others down the line. But all that changes when you’re inches from death, like when a gun’s pointed at your head. Then it’s all you think about.” The zeal in her tone intensified. “Special Agent Carter, emptying that magazine of nine-millimeter hollow points into your chest plate and not your face wasn’t a mistake or a miscalculation, it was an eleventh-hour decision. Your actions earned you some consideration, but that vaporizes if you don’t cooperate or you choose to fuck with me. So, do you want to play ball?”
August turned his head away shamefully and eventually nodded.
The girl pointed in the direction of Agent Norris’s corpse. “Why him? And why not me?”
“I-I don’t know,” August said, his voice hesitant, denoting his pain. “It was instinct…a reaction. You were hurt, down, bleeding, and he had you. He was seconds away from executing you in cold blood…with a damn, sick grin on his face. And that…didn’t need to happen.”
“So you shot him.”
“No…not at first. I called to him, tried to reason with him…he wouldn’t listen…he…” August trailed off, feeling the tightness constrict in his chest.
“Ribs hurt?”
“Yeah,” he gasped. “Broken, I’m guessing.”
The girl pursed her lips. “It’s better than being dead.” She slowly lowered her weapon and returned it to the spot between her knees, her eyes never leaving him. She went back to putting the finishing touches on her wound dressing. “I found a folder last night, Special Agent Carter. On the outside was typewritten ‘Operation Solve for X’.” She glared at him. “I read all of it; then reread it before I stumbled on you and your buddies. I assume you have a copy?”
“Before?” August probed, grasping that she must have paid a visit to the other encampment prior to coming here.
“Answer the question, please.”
He stared at the ground, a grave reality dawning on him. His other team of agents were extinct. Tucker, Simpson, and the other two—August couldn’t recall their names—were gone, blighted by the same young person who had nearly done him in. He was on his own. Folding his eyes closed, he nodded.
“And have you read it? All of it? Including the direct-action addendum stapled to the back?”
“I have.”
“You’re involved, then,” she determined. “How long?”
A sigh. “Since the inception.”
She rose, relocating her Glock from between her thighs into a holster. She closed in on him while rubbing her arm. “So you know everything. Did you bait and poison the animals we hunted for food?”
August looked sideways at her. “Wait—you’re from there? You live in that valley?”
Her tone went ballistic. “What do you think? Now answer me.”
August hesitated a long while. “I wasn’t the one who performed the tasks, but I led the team who did.”
“Of course.” Her lower lip trembled. “How did you poison our water?”
August hung his head, shaking it in
