Genre Scribes: Friday Fiction Writing Challenge #44 — Foreigner

Wind whipped around Kelvin as he sat slumped against the snowmobile, adding to the cold that was chilling him to the core. He stroked Amy’s cheek. She’s alive. And for some reason that was all that mattered. Not the man he’d had to kill. Not the fact they were all pretty much fucked. Only that she was alive.

Harvey cleared his throat. “Friend of your’s?”

Kelvin let his hand fall from Amy’s face, and forced his icy professionalism back in place. “Does it matter?”

Harvey surveyed the bloody scene. “Guess not.” He scraped snow over the evidence of the short but violent battle with his feet. “Should I be worried?”

“Yeah.” A shiver ran down Kelvin’s spine. He grunted as his body shuddered uncontrollably.

Amy sprung to her feet. “You’re freezing.” She ran to where Harvey was finishing piling snow on Anton’s body and grabbed the coat he’d taken from yet another man he’d killed.

She was a foreigner in his deadly world, Kelvin thought. It was a world a woman like her shouldn’t even know existed, and yet somehow she hadn’t shattered into a million pieces. How he’d ever thought this woman was a hindrance he’d never know.

“Let’s go.” Harvey brushed snow off an ancient-looking sled attached to his snowmobile. “We’ll have an evac in thirty, get you patched and debriefed by morning.”

“No!” Panic closed in on Kelvin, crushing him. “I’m not going anywhere near DU.” He hadn’t had time to access all the files to know who in Deniable Unit had been turned or were plants. Walking into a DU facility blind would be suicide.

Harvey leaned against his vehicle, waiting for an explanation.

“Here.” Amy crouched in front of Kelvin and tucked the insulated coat around him. She lowered her voice, “I thought you worked for DU. How do you know we can trust Harvey?”

Harvey stepped forward, clearly pissed that Kelvin had shared his employment details.

Kelvin chuckled and instantly regretted it as pain sliced through him. “He’d have put a bullet between my eyes the moment he saw me.”

“I may even do it now, just for my entertainment.” Harvey loomed over him and pulled the coats away to expose Kelvin’s knife wound. “I know a local doc, she worked on me a while back. She’s good, trustworthy.” Something sparked in his eyes, but a moment later, it was gone. “What’s coming our way?”

“Nichols and however many of his team are still breathing.”

“Fuck.” Harvey snapped his head toward the ridgeline. Obviously catching up to the reality that DU’s number two sniper had gone rogue. “We need to move. Now.”