“Shit,” Lujan says when he notices. “How bad is it?”
“Go on without me.” Briggs leans against a tree. He’s sweating profusely now, his adrenaline probably beginning to wear off. “I’ll be fine here. Any of ’em come across me, I won’t engage.”
Lujan stares him down for a few seconds and then nods.
“We can’t just leave him here,” I protest.
“Our mission is to get you to the bunker safely,” Lujan says for what feels like the tenth time since I met him. He’s already starting to jog away.
“Well, I’m not going without him.”
The colonel turns to me, sneering a bit.
“At this point that’s not your decision.”
I look back and forth between the two of them, but neither seems like he’s going to budge on this. So I keep talking.
“You don’t know the enemy like I do. That’s the whole reason the president wants me, right? If we leave Briggs here and the Mogs find him, what do you think will happen? A wounded, lone soldier near the wreckage of one of their ships? Best-case scenario they kill him immediately. More likely they’ll take him prisoner. I’m guessing he knows where we’re going. You’d be leading them straight to the president.”
“I won’t talk,” Briggs says.
“You think that matters?” I ask, raising two fingers to the side of my head where the Mogs used to attach electrodes. “They’ll rip everything you know out of your mind. They have technology you’ve never dreamed of. You’ll tell them every secret you know and only then will they start to really hurt you.”
Lujan grits his teeth. For a second I worry that I’ve actually doomed Briggs to an early death, and I mentally start readying arguments against putting the man down. Eventually, Lujan points a thick finger in my face.
“Don’t move. I’m going to scout ahead.” He glances at Briggs. “When I get back, be prepared to run.”
Then he’s gone. Briggs stares at the ground, seething. He looks angry, but I’m not sure if it’s at the Mogs, me or himself. Likely a combination of all three.
“You should just leave me behind,” he finally mutters.
“You pulled me out of the wreckage, right?” I ask.
“I was doing my job.”
“Well, now we’re even.”
He gets quiet and keeps his eyes on the grass. I take my satellite phone out and make sure I haven’t missed a call from Sam and that it’s still intact after the crash. Then I pat my pockets to see if I have anything else useful that I’ve forgotten about.
“Lose something?” Briggs asks.
“The Mogadorian blaster, in the crash. I’d stashed one in my bag.”
He shrugs and pulls a pistol from a holster on his back.
“Know how to use one of these?” he asks.
“I’m better with a sniper rifle, but I think I can manage.”
He lets out a single laugh and hands over the weapon. It’s got “Beretta” engraved across the side.
“It’s not an alien gun,” he says, “but it’ll get the job done.”
Briggs has some extra gauze in his pocket, and I talk him into letting me re-bandage his leg. He needs some kind of real medical attention, but right now I’m all he’s got.
I’m just finishing up when Lujan returns.
“We’re pretty clear up ahead,” he says. “I saw one Mog patrol booking it towards the crash site. They must have been called in to search for survivors. Hopefully the bastards aren’t very good at tracking.”
He notes the pistol in my hand.
“Don’t fire that thing unless you have to. Stealth is our greatest advantage right now.”
There’s a noise above. Gamera’s bouncing on one of the branches, chittering in strange rodent squeaks and looking back and forth between me and the rows of trees we’ve already walked through.
“Let’s get—,” Lujan starts.
But whatever he says after that is drowned out by the bellowing roar coming from the trees behind us.
CHAPTER SIX
SOME KIND OF ANIMAL MOVES OUT OF THE SHADOWS. No, more like a demon. Even in the relative darkness I can make out its grotesque face. There’s something bat-like about its features. Black eyes sit above what looks like a row of four or five quivering nostrils—perhaps the creature found us by scent? Its jaws open so wide that they look unhinged, showing off rows of jagged teeth that drip thick saliva onto the grass below. Its arms and legs are too long and muscular to be mistaken for an animal of Earth, each elbow or joint capped with a jagged horn. In the dim light I can’t tell if its slick-looking body is gray or a dark blue.
“What the fuck is that?” Lujan asks.
A Mogadorian monster, I think, remembering Sam and Adam and the others talking about such creatures. But I don’t have time to explain. The beast roars again and then charges on all fours, propelled by its oversize limbs. I raise my gun and pull the trigger. There’s only a click, no bullet.