Tritium Gambit (Max and Miranda Book 1) (28 page)

She leaned into the cab to talk to John and then leapt off the truck. She bounced with lightning speed toward the waterfront.

“
Keep him busy?” I asked. “That should be easy.”

I pulled a loose chain off the flatbed, stepped all the way back toward the cab, and then made a running leap toward the Wendigo. I landed on his stomach. With blinding speed, he grabbed hold of me with his giant hand, and I lashed repeatedly at his fist with the chain while he tried to crush the life out of me. I wasn’t winning the battle but I was keeping him busy.

We hit a huge bump as the tow truck flew over a curb and onto a wet sidewalk. The Wendigo groaned as his flesh was ripped off his back. My ribs began popping as he squeezed, and I lost sensation in my legs when my spine finally snapped. I kept lashing at his hand with my chain though. Bright green blood oozed from him now from everywhere I could reach.

Miranda leapt back into view holding a red gas can. The Wendigo swung at her, but she jumped back and forth out of the way. Each time she leapt over him, she dumped more gas on him. In his rage, the creature threw me at her. I landed on a pile of rocks like a ragdoll. My vision went blurry, but I fought to remain conscious and watched the tow truck drive toward the end of a dock with the Wendigo on the end of the chain hooked to the boom. Miranda then lit the Wendigo and he went up like a bonfire. The creature moaned and roared.

I blinked a few times as black spots tangoed in my vision. Through the haze and dancing shapes, I saw that the Wendigo managed to pull its feet free of the tow truck right as it went over the end of the dock. The flames on its body were dying out, but the beast looked panicked to be on a dock over water. He leapt over Miranda and shot out of my line of vision. I lost consciousness.

Chapter 34. Miranda

Sirens wailed in the distance as the charred Wendigo sprinted into the forest. I wanted to chase him down, but I didn’t have a weapon that could do more than irritate him, and both Max and John needed help.

John had driven off the end of the dock with the tow truck. I saw him pulling himself onto the dock with his one good arm, and so I knew he was alive. I jumped to Max where he lay unconscious on a boulder. His whole body was broken and bloody, but I could feel he had a heartbeat, actually several in sequence. The bleeding had already stopped when I reached him, but he wasn’t conscious and I wondered if even he could mend from so many terrible wounds.

I carried him to the dock and a large sailboat with two masts. I laid him down in the cabin below deck. Even though the boat seemed large from the outside, the inside was small. The bathroom was under the stairs, and the small room where I put Max acted as sleeping quarters, dining area, and kitchen. I was glad I chose one of the larger sailboats.

I dashed out of the boat to help John, who was lying on the dock breathing hard.

“
Are you in any condition to move?” I asked.

“
I’m going to be fine. Help me up,” he said.

I offered him a hand and helped him up. He limped as he walked toward the boat I had commandeered, but he simply shook his head at me when I tried to help him. So I ran back to the boat and hotwired the ignition. We needed the gas motors to navigate out of the harbor. I wasn’t much of a sailor, and so I would need the time underway using the engines to figure out how the sails work.

By the time John was aboard, I had the engines going and the ropes untied from the dock. We bumped a few of the other boats as I did my best to navigate out into the bay. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped, but I got us out of the harbor. I could make out the flashing emergency vehicle lights back on shore, but the rain obscured my vision and I wondered if the responders would even notice us sailing away.

John hunkered down on the bench next to the cabin. The rain was steady, and the wind was cold and biting.

“
You should go below deck,” I said.

He didn’t look up. “I’m right where I want to be, thanks.”

“
Are you worried I will sink the ship?”

“
A little,” he said. “I don’t think you’ve ever been on a boat.”

“
I’ve been on a boat!” I didn’t bother mentioning that I had never steered one and had no idea how to work the sails. I figured that, if humans had been doing it for centuries, I could do it.

He glanced up at me and then looked back down. “You are so worried about your partner that you are going to fail this mission.”

I knew he had been an agent, and maybe that’s why it stung when he criticized me. “Your partner always comes first,” I said.

“
The mission comes first, and then your partner. You let the Wendigo go.”

“
I didn’t have a way of stopping him!”

“
You are an agent. You are trained to find a way.”

“
It wasn’t possible. My pistol was out of ammo, and the weapon wouldn’t do anything to the creature even if it was fully loaded.”

He looked me in the eye. “If you didn’t want an impossible job, you should have signed up for desk work. Out here, we’re lucky when the odds are a thousand to one against us. You have strengths of your own that you could have used.”

“
I was doing everything I could,” I said, my tone now more defensive than I liked.

“
It wasn’t enough.” He got up and crawled to the front of the boat, where he sat huddled in the rain.

I was left alone to navigate the darkness.

Chapter 35. Max

I woke up in a tiny room, lying on a bench next to a kitchen table. I sat up. Nearby was a miniature kitchenette and stairs going into the sunlight. I stumbled a little when I stood, and then I realized that the floor was moving. I crawled into the light. Miranda was holding a tiller and drinking a Diet Mountain Dew.

“
Where’s the sheriff?” I asked as I noticed we were on a small sailboat. She pointed to the bow, and I saw John sitting on the deck.

I sighed. “I’ll bet he’s still upset about the car. What happened to the Wendigo?”

Miranda frowned. “He escaped. I think the water freaked him out or we would all be dead. He got a good swipe in before he went though.” She lifted her shirt enough for me to see some scratches along her stomach.

“
So, why are we on a boat?”

“
You needed a safe place to recover and we needed a quick getaway. The police were converging on our location, and taking to the water seemed like the easiest way out.”

I scanned the horizon. “Won’t they send helicopters or something?”

“
It has been windy, and the first day on the water was stormy. We’ll have to get off the lake soon now that the weather has cleared up.”

“
How the hell are we going to kill that thing now?”

Miranda sighed. “I don’t know. We gave it everything we had and it still survived. We’re not going to trick it into getting that close to the water again.”

“
Its greatest weakness is that it needs to breathe, just like the rest of us. There are other ways to suffocate it. Maybe we can trap it in a burning building or launch it into outer space.”

“
We’re fresh out of spaceships, and the thing is twenty feet tall now and getting bigger. There aren’t many buildings we could fit it into.”

“
We’ll need to improvise. He’s tough to kill, but he’s not invulnerable. We need to keep trying. If we don’t do him in and he gets large enough, he’ll start making babies; and soon we’ll have more of them to deal with. It wouldn’t take long before the Wendigo’s progeny overrun the planet.”

“
If we find him too many more times, we’ll all be dead,” she said and shook her head. “I know we don’t have any other option, but I want to go on record that this is a bad idea.”

I nodded. “Gotcha. If it doesn’t work, we’ll leave a note for any intergalactic travelers that the planet is overrun by Wendigo and that this was all my fault.”

I climbed along the sailboat’s rail to the bow where John was listening to a radio. One of his arms was in a makeshift sling. The injury on his forehead had scabbed over.

“
Hey, I’m sorry about your car,” I said.

John nodded and took a sip from a beer bottle.

I cleared my throat. “So, I have a plan.”

John didn’t look up, but he didn’t leave either. Maybe because there really isn’t anywhere to go, a little voice said inside my slowly clearing mind.

“
We’re going to sneak up on the Wendigo, figure out how to kill him, and then do it. Are you in?”

John nodded but kept his eyes on the horizon. “You’re an idiot.”

I crawled back to the stern and sat next to Miranda.

“
He likes my plan,” I said.

“
We’re all going to die.” Miranda turned the tiller, and the sailboat headed toward shore.

“
It could be worse,” I said.

“
How?”

I thought for a moment. “Well, we could be unarmed bite-sized snacks for a creature that will smell us coming before we know where it is.”

She smiled reluctantly. “You’re right. It could be much worse.”

The scream of a rocket propelled grenade split the air.

“
Look out!” Miranda shouted. She pulled me overboard into the frigid water of Lake Superior, but a moment later I felt the heat of the explosion above us even as Miranda pulled us deeper. I could see that the sailboat was ripped apart above us, and I hoped John managed to get off in time.

When we surfaced after what seemed about a half minute too long to me, I gasped for breath.

Miranda spat water out of her mouth. “Wendy!”

“
Maybe the situation could be a little worse after all,” I admitted.

John was sputtering and treading water with one arm a few feet away. Miranda swam over to him and helped him. I swam after them in my clumsy half-drowning way. The shore was a long way off, and I wasn’t confident I could make it that far.

As we swam toward shore, I peered around us in all directions, but the source of the rocket propelled grenade was nowhere to be seen. I was sure Wendy was watching us, though. She wasn’t trying to kill me yet, which she had made clear she wanted to do slowly, but I was sure she wanted Miranda and John out of the way first. You couldn’t get further out of the way than dead.

We kept low against the large boulders as we neared the shore and scanned for signs of our attacker.

“
How did she know where we were?” I asked through my labored breathing.

Miranda frowned. “She might have put a tracking device on you while you were unconscious.”

“
Why? She thought you guys were dead and she was planning to torture me to death in that room.”

“
Maybe,” John said as we climbed into the rocks, sitting down beneath the skyline to get our breath. “She might have known there was a chance Miranda and I would live. She could have had a contingency plan. Planting a tracking device is what I would have done.”

“
She might have been planning to keep him alive for years,” Miranda said. “Having a tracking device on him would keep him from escaping.”

“
So what do I do about it?” I asked.

“
Well, we lost our backpacks, and so you can’t switch clothes. Why don’t you take off your shoes first and we’ll try to check them?” Miranda asked.

“
She’s probably watching us right now,” I said.

“
She is definitely watching us right now,” John said. “But Miranda is right—there’s no sense running if she can just follow us.”