19. Chapter 19

My plan was a simple guerilla-style attack. If I wanted it to work, I needed to inflict mass confusion and panic on hardcore soldiers. It would not be easy, but it was doable, especially given that we were on an alien planet.

Willis had made a big tactical mistake. He divided his men instead of keeping them in one place. Had he simply packed up his camp and started moving, he would have made it a lot harder for me to attack. As it was, it was still dark outside, enough for me to blend into the shadows.

Patience was a virtue, made harder by my time constriction, but it paid off. Most people will search on the ground, even well-trained ones like Willis' men. That they didn't have flashlights also worked in my favor; no matter how hard they searched around the trees and in the bushes, I would have been hard to make out. I was using the term trees lightly because most of these looked more like giant, twisted asparagus, but some that reminded me of oversized succulents grew leaves large and strong enough for me to lay on comfortably.

Soon, my patience paid off as one of the guards moved quiet as a cat through the underbrush. Each of his steps was deliberate and light. He was good, but not good enough. He never saw me coming as I dropped off the leaf, grabbing his head on my downward momentum and using it like a break. I pulled it back, snapping it before he even knew what happened.

I took his gun and inspected it. It was indeed made out of plastic, but worked exactly like any other handgun. I pulled the magazine out and found it filled with fifteen very sharp rubber bullets. I didn't know if they were filled with gunpowder or how they worked, but that didn't matter to me as long as they did.

I weighed it in my hand, aimed it to get a feel for it, and pushed it into the waistband of my pants. I left the dead guard where he was, hoping one of his comrades would find him to instill fear.

Being taller than most women played in my favor as I cut the next guard's throat from behind. Had I been any shorter, it would have made it a lot harder.

Slowly, I circled the camp, always keeping track of where Dzur-Khan and his warriors were tied to the trees.

Another guard was just on the other side of one of the twisted trees from me. "Hey!" I whispered, poking around the tree. Startled, he raised his gun, but a rock aimed at his exposed head worked just like it had with the man by the pond. I didn't feel good about slitting an unconscious male's throat, but I needed to eliminate as many hostiles as quickly as possible. Willis had brought twenty men, I had killed three—or as good as—by the pond, three more out here, that left fifteen, including Willis by my count. I had no idea if Dzur-Khan and his Vandruks had been able to take any of them out, but I'd rather error on the side of caution and estimated I had fifteen foes left.

Like with the others, I collected his gun. The added weight was making my pants sag, but that couldn't be helped for the moment. I wasn't about to leave their weapons behind.

Another shadow crept through a set of boulders. I moved ahead of him, throwing a rock lightly against another stone to lure him deeper into the wilderness. I had a plan for him.

He was a little smaller than the others, but he was still nearly six feet tall and definitely double my weight. As with the others, I needed to have the element of surprise. I climbed another array of boulders, dropping one more rock to keep luring him toward me. It was still dark, and I had to keep feeling my way up the hard rock, trying to find a handhold to pull me up another couple of feet. That's when it happened. There was no warning, just a stinging pain in my palm as it landed on something. Heat radiated through my body. What the hell had just stung me? A small shadow darted away with its tail held high. A tail that reminded me of a scorpion. Fuck.

Sweat broke out over my forehead and neck as more heat pooled through me, radiating out from where my palm had been stung. I was hanging about eight feet off the ground, with another six or so to go up.

A dark figure appeared underneath me, and I held my breath. The guard I had picked as my next victim would pass below me at any second now, while God only knew what kind of venom rushed through my veins, accelerated by my increasing heartbeat. I took a calming breath and tried to slow the beating of my heart down.

When the man was right underneath me, I made my decision. We all die one day; that's inevitable; the only choice is how we live and how we face death. I had long ago decided that whenever my time came, I would go down fighting. So, I let myself go and dropped like a dead weight right on top of the guard, careful not to break his neck this time. I needed him alive, now more than before, because I didn't know if my hours or minutes were counted or not, and I needed to at least get Dzur-Khan free. I had no doubt that he would take care of Willis if I couldn't. It wasn't the way I had wanted to play it, but fate or God, or whatever, had taken it out of my hands.

I did take a moment to suck on the bite side and spit whatever I got out into the sand, hoping to get some of the venom out. My palm stung as if it were on fire; my fingers had already begun swelling, and it was hard to move them, but thankfully, it was my left and not my right.

On the guard's wrist, I found what I was hoping for: a Paracord bracelet. A cord made out of twisted nylon cords that would hold up several hundred pounds and unraveled measured several feet, or like in this case, twelve, which was perfect for what I had planned.

Dead weight was always heavy, and this man wasn't any different as I heaved him closer to one of the twisted asparagus trees. This one was a bit shorter than the others that I had seen, reaching a height of forty feet, and it wasn't as thick yet. Perfect.

I secured him around the tree before I threw the line up and over to secure a loop around one of the twisted outcroppings, which indeed wound around it like a serpentine road. Using my weight, I bent the top down before I bound the man's wrists up over his head, shortening the rope. In between, I had to shake my still swelling hand out to get some feeling back into my fingers, glad I wasn't wearing a ring.

With a groan, the man slowly came to.

"What? Who? Let me go!"

He tried to get up but was held tight in place. His movement, however, brought the rope down one loop, stretching his arms even higher as the narran tree ever so slowly began to right itself out of the unnatural bend I had forced it into.

The rope slid down another of the tree's grooves, and the man screamed. Soon, the rightening tree would pop his arms out of his shoulder sockets. He was still screaming when I took off. His howls would alert and dishearten his buddies, sowing more confusion. The cries would bring them all into this one spot, hopefully leaving Willis alone at the camp.

I opted for speed instead of stealth on my way back as the numbness in my hand spread to my wrist. Soon, I would find out if the sting would kill me or not, but in the meantime, I had work to do.

I had calculated my arrival perfectly. Dzur-Khan was right in front of me as another bloodcurdling scream rang through the slowly retreating night .

"Don't move," I hissed at Dzur-Khan, hoping he truly was the warrior I thought him to be. "Keep still," I demanded as I began to saw through his plastic cuffs with his knife. As I did this, I watched one of the guards approach a very agitated looking Willis.

Dzur-Khan was all the way the man I thought him to be. While I sawed, he stretched his wrists, breaking the plastic before I had sliced even all the way through it, without giving an outward indication of what he was doing, even when the knife slipped through my numb fingers and cut into his skin.

"Stay down," I said, lacking the words to tell him not to move until I wanted him to, but I was sure he would get the gist. I dropped the knife into his hand, pulled out one of the guns, and made sure it was ready. Then I aimed it at the man talking animatedly to Willis, blowing a hole into his head.

His body hit the ground, and Willis began to yell for his men, who were, judging by the screams of my bound victim, still searching for him and me. The shot I fired and the ones I fired next would alert them, but I hoped Dzur-Khan, who hadn't wasted any time freeing his two warriors, would take care of whoever was left of Willis' gang.

Taking aim, I fired a round into Willis' knee, bringing him down. "Drop your weapon!" I shouted from behind the tree.

Willis was tougher than I had anticipated. Instead of dropping it, he aimed it at the tree I was hiding behind and fired.

Dzur-Khan hesitated by another tree. I made a shooing motion. "Get the others," I hissed in English, hoping he would get the gist .

He talked rapidly with Dhor-Van, who had pulled Shan-Tal behind another tree before Dzur-Khan vanished into the night. Another bullet embedded in the narran tree, but plastic bullets, no matter how sharp, weren't meant to penetrate hard surfaces.

"How many bullets you got left, Willis?" I yelled, wiping the sweat that was pouring down my face from my eyes.

"Enough to take you down, Tinkerbell," he yelled, trying to find cover. But he was sprawled out in the middle of the camp, bleeding onto the sand, with a pain-stinging, useless leg.

I aimed for a spot right next to his head, inadvertently sending a few smaller rocks flying, one of them cutting his cheek.

"Drop your weapon, Willis, it's over. Dzur-Khan is already taking care of your men out there. Nobody is coming to rescue you," I yelled as a wave of dizziness came over me. Fuck no, I wasn't ready to die. I was so close.

Willis cursed and shot one more time in my direction before he threw his gun into the dirt.

I needed the tree to stabilize myself. The world was spinning all around me, and my heart was beating funny. Another scream rang through the night, but it was cut short. Looking to the left, Shan-Tal was lying on the ground, unmoving. Ahead of me was Willis… No, there were two of him. I shook my head and kept my gun aimed at him. The need to know battled with my fatigue.

Suddenly, strong hands encircled me from behind, and I didn't have the energy to resist or fight. My knees buckled.

I'm sorry Dawn .