Tower in the Woods (2 page)

“Is there anything you can anchor the rope to? Something bolted into the wall that won’t move?” he asked, sounding frustrated. Snow and sleet rained down, and it was getting colder and colder as they spoke.

Nel forcefully shook her head before remembering once more the man couldn’t see her. “No. Everything inside the Tower can move. It was designed so I can’t tie the rope to anything and climb out. Mother Gothel said the best path to obedience is removing temptation.”

She heard the man mutter a number of words that weren’t in her vocabulary before he said, “Tie the rope to your waist and throw it down. It’s at least worth a shot.”

The idea of helping the man into the Tower was so alien to Nel she simply froze. The teachings of the WITCH clearly stated men were evil and violent abominations, that they existed on earth for the sole purpose of hurting women. The prophet once told Nel she had experienced the cruelty of men before she discovered Mother’s teachings, that a group of men had burned out her left eye after keeping her tied up in chains and raping her for weeks. Nel didn’t know at the time what rape meant but she knew from the pain and anger in Mother Gothel’s face that it must have been something truly horrid. Helping the man get into the Tower was definitely a very bad idea, one she shouldn’t even consider.

Clearly sensing Nel’s refusal, the man cried out persuasively, “If you don’t help me, you might as well just put a bullet through my head. Out here I will either freeze to death or get killed by zombies. It’s your call, but if you don’t do it you will be committing murder.”

And murder wasn’t good. There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of being directly responsible for the death of another human being. The man was right; letting someone die was the same as murder.

Squaring her shoulders, Nel reached for the rope and looped it over the pulley. She tied one end around her waist before holstering the pistol, but she kept a bullet in the chamber. After all, if this man got violent and tried to hurt her it would be self-defense and not murder if she had to kill him.

*

Special Agent Dane Prince silently cursed as he hauled himself up the Tower in the woods. The flimsy rope cut painfully into his palms, the small sharp fibers that were braided elaborately together feeling like prickly thorns. He could only thank his lucky stars the woman on the other end was holding steady. Dane couldn’t make out any facial features when he first looked up at the Tower, the moonlight having silhouetted the female and obscuring his view. He had been desperate, asking her to pull him up, even though he strongly doubted any female had the strength necessary to do so. Now that he was a good fifteen feet off the ground, he was relieved he had been wrong, but intimately aware if she suddenly let go of the rope he would most surely die.

Dane would have refused this godforsaken mission had it not been for the fact that all of Washington, D.C. was in an uproar. Every month for the past twenty years, at least one little girl had been abducted from New America’s capital city, and the Federal Military Agency had made no progress tracking down the kidnapper. The agency’s first and only lead came in the form of a young lesbian refugee couple, who said their names were Michelle and Angela.

The two women had arrived at the city’s gates severely wounded, claiming they had escaped from the Women’s Independent Territory Church. They had been tortured within an inch of their lives, escaping and journeying toward the capital without much hope of success. Michelle was clearly a trained soldier while Angela had told them she had been in charge of the school. Neither of them had been in good enough shape for any significant interrogation to take place.

They had both been infected by the Undead Reanimation Virus, but luckily for them, the disease hadn’t progressed too far. They were sedated and pumped full of antivirals, and the FMA was only allowed short snippets of conversation by the hospital staff. They learned the WITCH was a large cult occupying several hundred acres of Virginia woodlands, and that it had been abducting girls from the federal government compound for the past two decades.

Dane along with a handful of other operatives had been sent out to scour the zombie-infested areas neighboring the capital in search of this mythical cult. After weeks of intelligence gathering among small enclaves of resistance fighters, Dane had learned the WITCH had been founded about fifty years ago at the height of the URV outbreak by a woman who called herself Mother Gothel.

Composed mostly of women with military or paramilitary training, the WITCH had been able to take advantage of the military’s abandonment of Fort Belvoir where the cult supposedly set up its headquarters. After taking over the weapons and resources in the military base, it established an enclave for women that occupied most of what was once Mount Vernon National Park. For the first thirty years, as the URV outbreak wiped out most of the world’s population, enough women and girls had flocked to the WITCH’s stronghold for recruitment to not be a problem.

But with the discovery of a vaccine for the Undead Reanimation Virus twenty years ago, what was left of the American civilian and military leadership opened up Washington, D.C. to refugees in lieu of keeping the mostly unscathed capital city under a virtual lockdown. The city was now quickly rebuilding itself with a population of over fifty thousand people and growing agricultural and manufacturing sectors. The Federal Military Agency was set up to serve the dual roles of defending the city against the horde of zombies that surrounded its borders as well as policing the city’s population against crime. Dane’s father had been part of the FMA since its inception, and Dane had proudly followed in the general’s footsteps.

Unfortunately, that particular career choice had landed Dane smack-dab in the middle of zombie-infested woodlands several hours outside the capital, during what was gearing up to be the biggest snowstorm of the century. He had made the fatal mistake of driving his Jeep over land mines strategically placed at the junction of Interstate 495 and Richmond Highway. His shoulder scratched by shrapnel from the explosion, Dane had been forced to pick his way along George Washington Memorial Parkway, a road that had long since been reclaimed by trees, weeds, and zombies.

Although Washington, D.C. was now the strongest and most prosperous human stronghold in the world, the fledgling government was very reluctant to incite direct conflict with any human enclave outside its borders, kidnapping or no kidnapping. The city had survived through absolute isolationism, literally cutting off the rest of humanity and using all of its resources to preserve only what was within its domain. Because of that cutthroat decision fifty years ago, Washington, D.C. had survived and prospered. Considering the conservatism of the military and civilian cadre that now administered the city, it was a miracle public sentiment had forced the FMA to accept refugees at all.

The intelligence regarding the existence and location of the WITCH was tenuous at best, and Dane understood the federal government’s bureaucracy well enough to know no action was going to be taken without visual confirmation of the WITCH’s stronghold along with detailed schematics of the headquarters. Even then the FMA was likely to drag its feet for as long as humanly possible before attempting a rescue operation.

Through sheer random luck, Dane had made it all the way to Mount Vernon without getting torn apart by brain-eaters, and now he was one slippery hand away from falling off a five-story tower. All that stood between him and certain death was a woman who was, by her own admission, a member of the very cult he had been sent to investigate—a nameless, faceless individual who couldn’t have sounded more reluctant to help him. All he knew about his savior was that she had the sweetest voice he had ever heard, one that reminded him of honey and spring flowers, and that she was one hell of a sharpshooter. Dane was an expert at all firearms, but he doubted he could outdo what the girl had just accomplished in the past twenty minutes.

Dane could only hope as he reached out his hand to grab onto the window’s ledge that the woman wouldn’t decide to lodge a bullet straight between his eyes. After all, if she wanted to kill him, she had been given plenty of better opportunities.

Taking in deep, steadying breaths after she finished untying the rope from her waist, Nel aimed her pistol directly at the middle of the man’s forehead. Now that the large body had pulled itself through her small window, she was hyperaware of the very real danger in which she had placed herself. This human, this man, was indeed more than capable of overwhelming her resistance. Now that he stood in her small room it was apparent he was more than six inches taller than her, and his broad shoulders were easily twice the breadth of hers. Even those bloodied hands were large and burly, the opposite of her small, slender ones in every way. His black leather boots appeared huge against the narrow wooden floorboards, and the dark, thick denim above them stretched over what were clearly strong, muscular legs. He wore a thick brown leather jacket so Nel couldn’t know for sure what his torso looked like, but from the way his chest filled out the oversize clothing, she suspected he was very muscular.

He held his hands up in the air, his bloodied palms facing her, as his brown-eyed gaze calmly met hers. His skin was weathered and darkly tanned, especially compared to her now pasty-white coloring, and his face appeared very different from what she was used to seeing. His jaw was sharp and angular, his cheekbones protruded to make his face look rectangular in shape, and there was a cleft above the blunt, stubborn chin. His nose stuck out from his face, hooking at a bony bridge before pointing downward, appearing almost crooked. His lips were thin and without color, and brown tendrils of hair stuck out from his knitted black cap in wisps that framed his face.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man told her as he took a step forward. “Not in the way you think, anyway.”

“If you move I will shoot,” Nel warned, recalling Mother Gothel’s teaching that all men lied. The problem was, she too was lying. If she had it in her to shoot this man, she would have done so long before he reached the Tower.

The man stopped immediately, his hands remaining in the air. “I’m not armed. Put the gun down before you accidentally shoot me.”

Nel’s eyebrows rose in confusion. “I have never accidentally shot anyone,” she said, trying to compose her thoughts. For some reason this man’s very presence unsettled her, making her feel odd sensations in her stomach and causing her heart rate to increase despite the freezing wind.

She wouldn’t describe the man’s face as attractive, but for some reason she couldn’t take her gaze off it. There was something about him, a sense of strength and the promise of protection that made her feel oddly safe, even though the truth was clearly the opposite. She had no reason to trust this person, no reason not to believe he had every intention of hurting her. Even then, knowing too well what might happen, Nel couldn’t bring herself to execute him.

The man’s lips curved into a crooked grin, and Nel felt as if her heart skipped a beat. “You know what? I actually believe you. You’re probably the best sniper I have ever met.”

Praise was something Nel wasn’t accustomed to. Doing the best she could was a matter of duty, something that was expected rather than appreciated. “Why are you here?” she asked, feeling distinctly uneasy. The man’s gaze swept up and down her body, lingering at her breasts and hips before rising back to her face. There was a gleam in those brown eyes that made an instinct Nel did not understand flutter into awareness, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold running down her spine as she took another step back.

“I got lost in the woods. This was the only shelter in the area,” the man answered, his voice rougher, tinged with an emotion Nel didn’t recognize. He took a step toward her. Followed by another.

“I told you to stop,” she protested, suddenly very afraid.

“You’re not going to shoot me,” the man replied calmly. “You’ve never shot a human, have you, sweetheart?”

“My name is Nel,” she corrected instinctively. She knew what sweetheart meant, but she didn’t understand why he called her that. It was a term of endearment and they barely knew each other.

The man took another step toward her, and for the life of her Nel couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just pull the trigger. “I’m Dane. Dane Prince,” he offered, his voice low and soothing. “Nel, I want you to put down that gun.”

“It’s not a gun, it’s a pistol,” she corrected again, moving reflexively backward and nearly tripping over a box of ammunition on the floor. There wasn’t much room to maneuver as the area was stocked full of food, supplies, and bullets. The entirety of her quarters took up less than five hundred square feet and most of it was covered in boxes and stacks of books.

“You’re right. Guns are in ships and very big. Have you ever seen one?” the man asked as he continued to crowd into her space.

Nel shook her head and her voice came out in an unfamiliar squeak. “I’ve seen pictures. Please, don’t come any farther. I don’t want to hurt you.” She realized once she spoke her body trembled, something that rarely happened, not even when it got so cold her water supply froze.

“You’re not going to hurt me. I know that now. You’re not a killer; you’re just a girl,” he argued even as he stopped in front of her so close the barrel of her pistol dug into his jacket.

“I’m too old to be called a girl,” Nel corrected one last time. She found it difficult to breathe, air coming into her lungs in shallow gasps. She should have listened to Mother Gothel, should have realized this man’s very presence would mess with her mind. What was she going to do now that she had let this very dangerous entity into her home? He was right. She didn’t have it in her to pull the trigger.

“Yeah. I noticed that,” the man remarked with a wicked grin.

Less than a second later, he grabbed her weapon and easily twisted it out of her grasp. Before Nel had time to react, she found herself pinned by the man’s weight onto the floor, her small body completely imprisoned in a warm cage of hard muscle stronger than any steel.