The Book of Dema

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE + These Memories Aren't Mine

Carter found sleep difficult with the Banditos. From the first day, he had been surprised at the amount of movement in and around the camp, no matter the hour. There were three person teams coming and going at irregular intervals. They talked. They unloaded gear. They came in and out of his tent. They yelled for food at the commissary if Upton wasn't there to serve them. Carter hadn't determined if this was intentional or just the nature of living this way.

From what his recovery team had told him, the simple act of keeping the camp running required constant excursions to acquire supplies. The core of the mission, though, revolved around rescuing Dema escapees, harassing Saturators and Numan who ventured into Trench, and gleaning information that could help them eventually take down Dema. These activities required the constant vigilance of the recovery and hunter-seeker teams. Kashbar, Nate, Olivia, and Oscar rotated between these two units. This meant they spent most of their time away from the camp, and their time there in the tent asleep.

Carter had been assigned to bunk with them, and here as he lay mostly awake in the dark tent, he tried to decide what to do. There was movement outside, and the sound of sleepers on the inside. The blink of a small battery powered clock faced away from him, throwing the dimmest of lights into one corner of the tent. There was no way to know how long he had laid there or whether he'd actually slept. He sighed, fully awake now, making the decision to rise.

He swung his legs over the edge of the cot. The army-issue field bed was hardly better than sleeping on the ground. It was uncomfortable, the wrong width for a human body, creaked with every movement. Every night he spent hours staring up into the darkness, listening to the sounds of those who meant to be awake. He needed an assignment that wore him out the way his tent mates' work exhausted them. Each time they returned, he watched them collapse into their cots and sleep like the dead for five or six hours. Carter still had not worked out their schedule. He had returned on several occasions after lunch to find them there. It had been more than one night that they had not come back until morning.

The week had crawled by with no direction. The Vulture said nothing more to him, and while the attendants at the various monitoring stations were happy to let him observe, he received no specific training regarding their functions. They would answer his questions, but they never invited him to help.

Halfway through the week, Debbie had appeared. That helped break the monotony. After leaving him to his abduction at the tunnel entrance, she had come to visit the Vulture, but she had said nothing to Carter. This time, she had located him in the camp and asked if he had any news to convey to Josh or Tyler. She would play courier as long as Carter had information. A warning accompanied her question: "I cannot waste away my minutes on frivolities. If you have matters of importance, I will make every effort to provide them to Josh and Tyler; otherwise, I will not risk it." She had also informed him of their plans to link him with Clancy.

Carter still had not met the man he was expected to replace. Word has spread about Clancy's immediate physical condition. Kash explained that the Dema escapee had spent weeks roaming the rocky crevices of Trench. It had taken days for him, Nate, and Oscar to retrieve him. Famished and bruised, he had welcomed the rescue, but he was surly. Clancy had learned quickly that despite his interest in the nature hikes he had taken with Keons, the wider world was no place for a novice. Escape had seemed like the hard part. He had committed the great sin of the dreamer: he hadn't considered what his life might be like if he was actually successful.

Clancy had been training to be an administrator in Dema. Those skills were useless in the wilderness. Trench was an unruly country, and the less adept at survival a person was, the more likely he would be to find his way to an unwelcome demise. For Clancy, the odds of succumbing to a life-threatening situation rose to the red the minute he stepped through the tunnel grate. He had been fortunate up to the point of his rescue. When they brought him in, Clancy was only suffering from mild exposure. While he had needed two weeks to recover, he had survived his journey to the Banditos.