The Woman Left Behind: A Novel Read online

  Fucking New Guys. They couldn’t work where they worked and not have picked up a lot of military slang, so none of them committed the embarrassment of asking what the initials meant. Instead there were some awkward head bobs.

  “I’m Baxter.” He didn’t say if that was his first name or his last, not that it mattered. “Okay, we’ll start out the same way as if you were entering the military. First you’re going to run. We need to see who’s in general good shape and who isn’t. Follow me.”

  He took off at an easy lope, his bulk moving with surprising ease. The group of ten cast questioning looks around, then gamely set off after him. Jina settled herself firmly in the middle of the pack, trying to keep Baxter’s shaven head in sight. She didn’t want to come in last, but she had no desire to be first; either one would get her noticed, and she didn’t want to be noticed. Pacing herself was the key; keep something in reserve, because she didn’t know what would be thrown at them next.

  That was a good theory, but in practice it meant the jostling bodies in front of her—and all of them taller than she was—sometimes blocked her view of the terrain. She stumbled when a berm rose sharply under her feet, barely caught herself when she topped it and the ground fell away, then stumbled again when abruptly they were running in sand so soft her feet sank into it and fine grains sifted over the tops of her sneakers. That explained why all the men she’d seen had been wearing lace-up boots instead of sneakers. Only she and the other nine FNGs were wearing sneakers, though MacNamara had specifically said athletic shoes.

  Lesson learned. Ask the people who actually did this kind of stuff what type of footwear she’d need.

  That was assuming she wasn’t the first one to wash out of PT.

  Damn if I am, she thought grimly. Not that she wanted to be assigned to an actual GO-Team, but neither did she want to fail. She’d grown up in the country, in southeast Georgia, running barefoot most of the year, so surely she could hang with at least some of the guys who likely had only done some jogging on a track or city street.

  After about five minutes, her muscles were beginning to burn a little, her heart was pounding, and her breath was coming fast. Five minutes! She was in sorrier shape than she’d realized. About that time, the guys behind her evidently realized they were running behind a girl, and they all started pushing harder.

  Jina dug deeper, ran harder, determined to stay in the middle of the pack. That was all she had to do. This wasn’t a race she had to win, she just had to do what was necessary and not draw attention to herself.

  Abruptly someone roughly brushed by her, jamming a shoulder into her and knocking her to the side. She lost her stride, and when she got back into gear, she was dragging at the end of the line. Panting, sucking air, she glared at the shoulder jammer. It was Donnelly; he’d been in something to do with encryption, and she thought he’d been assigned to Kodak’s team. Easygoing Kodak was the plum assignment, the one she’d have chosen for herself if she’d been given a choice.

  Bastard. Donnelly, not Kodak. Jina sucked in deep breaths and pushed herself harder, driving her legs, passing a few guys and positioning herself just behind and to the side of Donnelly. The uneven terrain made it risky to take her attention away from her footing, but there were some things she just couldn’t let go. Donnelly must have felt her presence behind him; he cast a quick glance over his shoulder, and she took advantage of his momentary lapse of attention to throw a quick kick into the middle of his stride. She didn’t actually hook her foot into his because that would make her fall, too, but the kick was enough to make him stumble and windmill his arms in an effort to regain his balance. He failed and tumbled to the side, skidding face-first in the dirt.

  Baxter must have had eyes in the back of his shaven head, because without turning around he barked, “Get up and run!”

  Donnelly scrambled to his feet and lurched after them, now about five yards behind without much hope of catching up unless he had an untapped reservoir of strength, which she didn’t think he did. She threw a quick glance over her shoulder; he was red in the face, his mouth open.

  What the hell! Why had he jammed her? She’d never done anything to him, never had a cross word with him. Yeah, she’d beat him in the video games, but she’d beaten everyone, not just him. Guess he’d taken it personally.

  Tough, she thought fiercely. It was a freaking game. She’d have never played the damn thing if she’d known it would lead to this. She’d much rather be sitting in an air-conditioned building instead of running in the heat, with sand scrubbing the skin off her feet and dust getting in her mouth and coating her lungs until she wanted to just spit—except her mouth was too dry and too full of dust. Her legs hurt. She thought she might throw up.

  Some guy she didn’t know peeled off and bent over with his hands braced on his knees while he lost breakfast. She sucked in air and willed herself not to do the same. She would not, she would not, she would not—

  Just as she reached the point of being sure she was going to throw up, Baxter held up a fist. “Water break,” he called,

  Oh, God. She lurched to a stop and forced herself to stay upright as she desperately sucked in oxygen. Everyone around her was making the same harsh, gasping sounds. She wanted to bend over, but she was afraid she would collapse if she let her spine bend at all. Not only that, if she bent over, her stomach might take that as a sign to go ahead with its impending spasm. Instead she looked at the sky and concentrated on her wobbly knees, ordering them to not dump her on her butt in the dirt.

  “Don’t just stand there, you morons,” Baxter barked. “Grab some bottles! Hydrate!”

  Water. There was water. There was a big cooler sitting on a rough bench, lid open, revealing beautiful glistening ice and bottles of water nestled within. She stumbled over to the cooler, shoving her arm past the bigger bodies of her run buddies, and snagged a bottle. Every muscle in her body was trembling; she fumbled as she tried to twist the cap off, dropped the bottle, and watched it roll under their feet. Shit! Rather than chasing it down she went for another bottle, because she still wasn’t certain she could bend over without barfing. Her clumsy fingers grabbed some ice along with the bottle and that struck her as a good thing; quickly she slapped the shards of ice on the back of her neck and sighed at the immediate relief. Maybe she wouldn’t puke. Maybe she wouldn’t pass out.

  “Pitiful,” Baxter said in disgust. Jina wondered if she should take offense, then realized he was talking to all of them. That was okay. She didn’t mind being pitiful in a group of pitiful. “A herd of fucking turtles would be faster. Half of you are on the edge of passing out, and we’ve done a measly two miles. The other half of you aren’t much better. Damn, son, are you puking?”

  Huh. That couldn’t be right. If the turtles were fucking, they wouldn’t be covering any ground at all. She thought about pointing that out, but elected to keep her smart mouth shut in favor of guzzling water. Discretion was the better part of valor.

  Wait. They’d run two miles? Only two miles? That was wrong on two counts. First, yay, because she’d run two miles! There was no “only” to it. But they’d been running for hours, it seemed, so shouldn’t that have been something like twenty miles? Her lungs and heart thought it was twenty miles. Baxter’s odometer was clearly wrong.

  She wiped the sweat off her face and guzzled more water. When she lowered the bottle, her attention was caught by something . . . kind of threatening.

  She squinted. Seven men were strolling toward the group, abreast like they were walking toward the showdown at the OK Corral. One and all, they were scary. And big. Big and scary. They were as dusty and streaked with sweat as everyone else, bare arms roped with muscles, not a smile anywhere in sight. The way they moved was fluid with power. Various weapons hung off their bodies, which was scary in itself, because this was a training ground, right? Those looked like real knives and guns and stuff.

  Not guns, she reminded herself—weapons. They never said guns. She knew that much.

&n