My eyebrows bunch together. It’s technically him who’s hugging me, but that’s not what’s important right now. “Why not?”
“I don’t really have anyone. My family died in an accident a few years back.” He sniffles, but that’s all the emotion he lets out.
My heart hurts for Tommy. At the same time, something shifts and slots into place inside me. Something scary, something fundamental. It blooms and explodes like a firework, but I don’t dare inspect it. I’m afraid it will consume me, that it will break all the restraints I’m struggling to maintain and the beast that wants to devour this man will come out, so I stuff it down for now and pretend it doesn’t exist. “Okay, but only for a bit. We need to go.”
“Yes. Okay. Only for a bit.”
For a couple minutes, we stay like this, embracing each other while two bodies lie at our feet. It’s pure bliss and torture at the same time, my heart soaring but my blood burning with need. For more, for a taste, a little one, a second of it. I have to fight the urge with everything I have, and I do, reveling in this moment, in the rightness of it.
Once Tommy stops shaking and can breathe normally again, I get to work. Luckily, most of the workers’ uniforms are intact, so we can use them. After strippingand hiding the bodies on the side of the road in the thick bushes, the two of us get in the truck.
Buckling his seatbelt as he gets comfortable in the passenger seat, Tommy says, “Now what? Do you know where to go?”
I freeze, hands on the wheel. Okay, so that might be one little detail I overlooked. It completely slipped my mind. Fuck. I’ve no idea where the airstrip is. What now?
“Oh shit. You don’t, do you?” Tommy laughs, rubbing the space between my eyebrows with his finger. His touch is gentle but determined, as if he can really smooth out the lines on my forehead. “Well…” He opens the glove compartment, rummages through the stuff there and holds up a folded piece of paper. It looks very old, with rips at the corners, but once Tommy lays it open, it is, without a doubt, a map. “Jackpot. Look what we have here.”
Various points of interest are marked on the map, though it takes me a while to figure out where exactly we currently are. Like I thought, there is a civilian airstrip not far from here, just on the edge of a small town situated in a valley where the forest ends.
“There.” I point at the airstrip symbol.
“Damn.” Tommy grins. “You can actually read maps?”
That’s a weird comment to make. Frowning in confusion, I aim my gaze at him. “Can’t you?”
“I mean… technically, yes. But, ah, the app usually tells me where to go?”
I can’t stifle down the smile that wants out. “Young people these days…”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Tommy pouts those full lips. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. At least I’m not a fossil like you.”
He’s being ridiculous. Yes, I’m not in my twenties or even thirties anymore, but come on, forty isn’t in any way ancient. Maturity, experience, wisdom all come with age, though if I’m brutally honest, I do miss the endless energy I had when I was younger.
“How is your elbow?” I ask, suddenly realizing that I haven’t properly checked on Tommy’s injury. Uninvited worry rises in my stomach.
As if he’d completely forgotten about it too, Tommy lifts his arm to inspect the body part in question. “I scraped the asphalt earlier. It hurt like a bitch, but it’s mostly fine now. I found some peroxide in the truck’s boot while you were dragging the bodies away and dumped a bunch of it on the cut.”Good, not taking any chances. He learns fast. “Oh, I also found a shit ton of these in the crates out back.” Out of somewhere, he holds up a Sig M17 and waves it around, aiming it at me with a pride grin on his face.
My reflexes kick in. I grab Tommy’s wrist and twist it until he yelps and drops the gun. I catch the weapon mid-fall, my heart banging as I empty thefully loadedmagazine. Realization crosses over Tommy’s pretty face, his smile vanishing faster than heat leaving a corpse.
“Nevereverpoint a loaded gun at a person unless you intend to kill them.” I toss the unloaded M17 into Tommy’s lap.
He looks both uncomfortable and relieved, his eyes drawing down in an apology. “Sorry, I didn’t think it was loaded.”
Usually, this is the case during transit. But if the weapons are being transported loaded, then I bet there is avery good reason for it. And I really don’t want to find out what it is.
“It’s fine, just… Let me handle anything gun-related, okay? For both of our safeties.”
Taking a nerve-calming breath, I finally start the truck. Based on the distances shown on the map, it won’t take us more than an hour to get to the airstrip, which means I don’t have all that long to figure out a plan for when we arrive.
“I think you should teach me how to use a gun. And you know, the safety procedures and so on,” Tommy says, humming as he inspects the weapon with squinted eyes. He holds it with his dominant right hand, then uses his left one as support. It’s a surprisingly good grip considering Tommy has no training whatsoever. His intuition is impressive.
“I’ll think about it,” I agree, refocusing my attention on the road. It would be good if Tommy knew how to defend himself. Guns aren’t for everybody, but he is taking things well so far, including witnessing death firsthand.
The rest of the drive to the airfield is uneventful, thankfully. Tommy keeps the questions to a minimum too, either because he realizes I don’t have a plan formed yet and need some quiet, or because he is in shock. Or maybe it’s both.
“You ready? Leave all the talking to me, got it?” I instruct as I pull up in front of the staff entrance to the airstrip.
A tall fence with barbed wire surrounds the premises, while a single two-story building about a hundred-fifty feet to the left comprises airfield control. There are two light gray hangars next to it, and from here I can see the truck with cargo from earlier parked inside one of them.
