Page 47 of Dissent (The Dissenter Saga #1)

W e were off again, racing toward the tree line, Chelsea and Wes quick on our heels.

Things were not looking good for us because we had what felt like an entire army battalion on our heels.

As we made it into the forest pines, we didn’t stop.

We kept running hard, hearts pounding in our chests and the genuine fear that this might be the end for us all pushing us to go faster than we had ever been.

As we raced through the forest, I could hear the soldiers behind us, and I could tell they were gaining on us.

My chest ached from the exertion, and I could feel my legs burn as the continued push for more speed propelled them past their limits. I didn’t know how much longer I could go, but I kept going, racing on, because I knew that my life depended on it.

“Watch out!” It was Chelsea, and as I turned to see what she was talking about, I saw one soldier, hot on my heels, with a gun in his hand, firing… right at me.

I had a second of clear thought, and all I could think about was how I never got the chance to tell Matias how I felt about him. I prepared for the blast to hit me, but it never did. Chelsea jumped into the line of fire, grunted, and collapsed to the ground.

I screamed.

Matias was on me, grabbing my wrist, and yanking me onward. “No!” I shrieked. “We can’t leave her!” But there was no time, and I was too weak to fight him. We kept running, everything moving past me in a blur, and the whole time, I just kept thinking that we left her.

Over fallen trees, leaping over shrubs and forest debris, we ran.

I lost track of the time, and I couldn’t tell how long we had been racing through the woods.

At some point, however, I noticed I no longer heard the feet pounding behind us.

I no longer sensed the bodies of soldiers closing in, and my survival instincts seemed to relax.

But we didn’t stop. We kept running until we came onto familiar ground, and then finally broke through onto the path where the truck stood alone. Wes wasted no time barking orders.

“Get in the truck!” He held onto his shoulder, his jumpsuit glistening from the moisture of his blood.

Matias opened the driver-side door and pushed me to get in.

I slid across the bench seat toward the middle.

Wes opened the passenger-side door and slipped in as he clutched his shoulder and gritted his teeth in pain.

Matias slid in right next to me, fired up the engine, slammed his foot on the accelerator, and we were off into the night.

***

My hands were covered in the slick, thick liquid that was Wes’s blood as we drove. Cramped up, sitting in his lap, I firmly pressed down on the gunshot wound in his left shoulder. For a while, he grumbled about the pain, but then he went quiet. And that was when Matias got worried.

“He’s lost too much blood,” he told me. He instructed me to apply pressure, which required me to climb onto Wes’s lap to get the right angle.

We were driving for what felt like hours, but I knew the trip had been less than that.

As we drove, I just kept putting all my weight on Wes’s shoulder, trying my best to slow the bleeding. But it just kept oozing out.

Matias’s white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel told me he was stressed. His face set with hard lines as he focused on the road ahead of us, twisting us to the left, then another turn to the right. I just kept fighting back tears that I so badly wanted to cry.

We left her.

Chelsea and I may not have been friends, but I was hoping we would get there.

Slowly, of course, but it felt like maybe—just maybe—we could be there one day.

And now she was gone, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was my fault.

The thought placed a kink in my mental reserves, causing the knot in my throat to swell up.

“Chelsea had the chip.”

The whisper came from Wes, startling me. He sounded groggy as his head lolled against the headrest.

“Shh… Don’t talk right now.” I kept applying pressure, watching little beads of blood seep from between my fingers, dripping down the backside of my hand.

“Chelsea had the chip.” He lifted his head, his eyes catching mine as he spoke. His breathing was labored, and it was painfully obvious to me how ashen his skin looked. “If you hadn’t come…if I had made you stay in the truck…she would have made it out.”

His words felt like an accusation to me, and as they sank in, I felt the rising threat of tears, vision blurring.

One blink and the water tipped over and flowed down the curves of my cheeks.

He said what I already knew was true, what I had been desperately trying to shove down into my subconscious.

Chelsea was gone because of me. If I hadn’t come, she would still be here.

I sniffed, returning my attention to Wes, but his eyes had drifted closed and sat motionless.

“You’ve got to hurry, Matias.”

“I know.” He focused on the road, his expression giving nothing away. And I think it was this look on him that scared me more than anything else. And I couldn’t help but think to myself that Wes was going to die.