Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Did the men who watched him hobble off feel sorry for him? he wondered. Was he a cautionary tale to all of those who were where he had been as recently as April?
He’d been a highly trained soldier, too. He’d had weapons and strength and cunning—and a secret mission. Granted, he’d worked for the government, and been sent here to wipe out C.P.’s lab… but then just like the way his body’s cells had betrayed him, he’d learned that all was not how it seemed on the surface.
And now that laboratory was fighting for his life.
Like a camera lens being focused, the house in his rearview suddenly registered with clarity. The massive stone structure was gleaming in the soft illumination of its security lights, the multitude of windows and doors covered with a reflective film that meant there were one-way mirrors all along the various elevations, nothing but the dark, barren landscape projected back at him, all that white furniture and art hidden from view.
The people, too.
As he scanned the glass panels, he wondered who might be looking back out at him and his conscience squeaked a protest somewhere below his conscious thoughts. What the hell was he doing, sneaking out to the woods again? Especially considering what he was bringing with him.
Turning back around, he kept going, and when he finally reached the trees, he penetrated their ranks in a random location so he didn’t create a trailhead that might show in the daylight. And then, as he continued along, he did what he could to leave the foliage undisturbed. Just like the whiskey and soda in his hand, and what was in the pocket of his jacket, this whole covering his tracks thing was a holdover from his old life, the one he had lived for twenty-nine years, five months, and twelve days.
A gunshot wound that should have been fatal had been the gateway to what was actually going to kill him—or his knowledge of what was cooking under his surface. That cough that wouldn’t go away? The one that sometimes came with a little blood? The tiredness? The weight loss?
Not allergies, as it turned out. Not his bad diet, his lack of sleep, or the stress that came with keeping Lydia from becoming collateral damage while he executed his mission.
When the docs at C.P. Phalen’s had X-rayed his chest to assess the damage… that was when they’d seen the cloud in his lung. The secret his body had been keeping from him was out, and the second era in his life had begun.
Daniel had to go slower now that he was in the woods, and it was hard to believe that there was a downshift below “snail’s pace,” but there it was. As a buffering fog set into his mind, his disorientation in what should have been a familiar landscape made him panic, everything suddenly looking foreign even though he could see quite well, the trees forming no pattern that he recognized even though he’d been tromping around in here for at least two weeks, the ground cover an obstacle course he couldn’t remember how to get through.
Getting his phone out to use the flashlight seemed like a lot of work, especially because he wasn’t sure how more illumination was going to help his—
He was saved by a broken branch.
The inch-thick, five-foot-long maple shooter had been split by a pair of hands, the messy crack in the wood no longer fresh, the angle pointing in a direction about seventy-two degrees to the right. A little farther on, he found another that was propped in the juncture of a birch, and as he kept going, he crossed paths with a third.
He’d left the arboreal arrows because chemo brain was real, but also because working a plan, even if it was as simple as designing an orientation system that covered only a hundred and fifty feet, made him feel like he wasn’t completely useless.
And there it was.
The fallen tree had been an old one back when it had still been up on its root system—not old-growth old, but its thick trunk had suggested a good fifty years’ worth of four seasons, and the proliferation of branches at the top made it seem like it had been healthy for a good, long period. Something had happened that had cut its life short, however, and as he came around to where it had broken free of its base, he shook his head at the ragged scarring that was obvious even in the moonlight. There was rot in the core, some kind of black staining of the wood in an invading pattern, maybe a fungus? He wasn’t sure. He’d never been into nature much, except as it provided coverage in situations when either he needed to defend himself or because he hadn’t wanted to be seen.