Page 3 of Captive Wilderness
With a nod, my sister clipped my cord to the lines above the door then reached for the second pack on the floor. My heart pounded in my chest and head at the same time. I couldn’t hear anything except theboom, boom, boom. The sense of unreality gripped me, my vision tunneled.
Movement to my left made me turn. Two white men strode through the door at the front of the cargo hold. One wore a black cowboy hat and western-style boots, the other a Metallica T-shirt and a trucker hat. They saw the empty cages first and froze.
Sabrina spun, reaching for the long handle on the door. She pushed down on it.
Everything happened in a blur of movement and sound.
A deafening roar entered the plane the moment the door released. An alarm sounded. A red light flashed above the door. The suction from outside pulled at my limbs and knocked me off balance. I fell to my knees and tried to hold on to the slick, metal floor.
At the same time, the man in the trucker hat moved toward us with inhuman speed. He leaped, shifting mid-jump, clothes tearing away from his body, a cougar appearing where a man had been seconds before.
He landed on Sabrina’s back, her chute in his claws, his jaw opened to bite the back of her head. I heard the other one shout, “We need them alive!”
Sabrina didn’t have her pack on all the way yet, and it tore loose from her body when she twisted away. The cowboy pulled out a set of keys and turned to the gun rack on the wall.
The suction of air against my body didn’t stop, and I could do nothing to help my sister. I screamed her name right before the night snagged me out of the plane and threw me into the sky.
2
BROOKE
A rushingof air against my body. Freezing, whistling wind pressed all around me. I fell with no way to stop it, without knowing which way was up and which was down.
I’m going to die.I would hit the ground,splat. As a bobcat shifter, I had the potential to live a couple hundred years, and instead, I wasn’t going to see my twenty-fifth birthday. Mind-numbing fear enveloped me.Please be painless.
Ka-thwap.My body jerked in the opposite direction, my head snapping back so hard it hit the collar at my nape. A groaned shout ripped from my chest. Pain shot through my temples. I stopped moving.
No, not stopped, but fell slower. With the parachute open, I descended in graceful inches, pawing at the straps on my shoulders for something to hold on to.
The freezing air made my teeth chatter. I’d never been so cold. Goosebumps covered my body. I looked up. The parachute was black, almost invisible against the night sky except that it blocked out the stars. Only moments had gone by from the time I fell from the plane to when the chute opened, but it had felt like a lifetime.
I scanned the sky for sight of the plane, its humming sound becoming more distant with each passing second.So many stars.I’d never seen such a display in my life. A full moon hung over the world, bright and luminescent, so big it seemed an unnatural thing. The airplane passed in front of it, a bullet shape heading away from me. A small, dark form dropped from it, then disappeared a second later. Another person.
“Sabrina,” I whispered into the night, my feet dangling into nothingness.
The last image I had of my sister replayed in my brain, the cougar on her back, the parachute in his claws. Would Sabrina have been able to escape? She would have needed to take care of the cougar, then the cowboy. And if he’d gotten the gun out of the locked cage… On top of that, she’d need to find another parachute. Was there another parachute? I rubbed at my face. Everything had happened so fast. I couldn’t remember if there were more.
A sob broke from my lips. Ever since I’d woken up, I’d been living a nightmare. None of it seemed real. I prayed it wasn’t. But I was cold, hungry, and nauseous at the same time. Would I really be feeling any of this in a dream? I scratched my nails against the skin of my wrist. They scraped me raw. It felt real.
No matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, this was happening. I’d jumped from a plane. A cougar shifter had abducted us. Tears froze to my cheeks. I tried to wipe them from my face. My teeth chattered. My whole body shook. I gripped the straps at my shoulders tighter.
Clips hung near either side of my face. I grabbed one, thinking it was the way to control the parachute. When I pulled, I spun to the right.Too fast. The stars sped by in a tornado-like blur. My battered stomach rolled and clenched. I pulled on the other side trying to correct the mistake and spun in the other direction. Yanking on both at the same time, I leveled out, but my head whirled, making my stomach heave.
I clenched my jaw and tried to breathe through it. I couldn’t see the airplane anymore, the sound of its engines faint. Looking down, the outline of trees speckled the world beneath me, a flat carpet, consistent and never-ending. I twisted back and forth, trying to find some sign of civilization, where I could head once I landed, where I could get help. Nothing. No lights, no roads, no mountains or any other distinguishing landmarks, only the outline of trees upon trees illuminated by the glow of the full moon.
Where am I?
The tree line crept closer and closer. It seemed so far away at first, but as I drew near, time sped up. The trees reached for my toes, greedy and scratching, then my calves and hips. Too late, I realized I was headed straight for a big one. I pulled on the clip. Pine needles scraped my arms and legs, tearing into my skin, making me gasp.
A stretching, ripping sound rent the air. I held the straps tighter as the parachute became tangled in the branches. I jerked to a stop, my head snapping against the collar around my neck.
The ground lay only a few feet away. I was stuck. In a tree. My feet dangled useless underneath me.
Another sob broke free.This is ridiculous.I was a puppet with broken strings, trapped. I pulled at the buckles and straps, trying to remember how Sabrina had secured me into the thing in the first place. Maybe I could get the parachute to tear enough to allow me to fall the rest of the way if I kicked my legs.
I dangled there helplessly. It wasn’t working. The more frustrated I became, the jerkier my movements. Out of sheer dumb luck, I finally unclipped the correct clasp at my chest. In the next instant, I plummeted, hitting uneven ground with a thud. My ankle buckled beneath me. I gasped. Pain shot up my shin and calf as I fell forward on my hands and knees. My teeth clattered in my head. Pine needles and rocks pressed into my palms.
Shivering, I brushed the frustrated tears off my face and stood on weak legs. My ankle burned and throbbed. God, I wished I could shift. Then all these aches and pains would disappear.
