~3.26~

“We’re out!” Brenda said. “We made it!”

“Nobody relax just yet,” Detweiler said. “We got caught with our shirt down back there… I don’t want it happening again.”

“Pants,” Lee corrected.

“What?”

“Pants down,” Lee said.

“You know what I mean,” Detweiler said. “We lost good people back there.”

“Half the group,” Lee said.

“Was it that many?” Detweiler asked. “It seems like less… Bornheim and the newbie left on their own, and then… then what? Who disappeared after that? We’re going to need an accounting.”

“I’m not sure who went first,” Lee said. “We were just counting heads.”

“Right,” Detweiler said. He looked at the other five in the group, Adam the witch and what he thought of as the civilians. “You lot, what were the names of the others in our group?”

Blank stares and nervous glances met this question.

“The other guy who left was Steve or something,” one of them suggested.

“Right,” Lee said. “But who were the ones who were taken?”

“I don’t remember them,” Brenda said. “I can’t remember what any of them looked like…”

“Crap,” Detweiler said. “What the hell is this? Somebody has to know. We’ll have to report what happened.”

“Did anything really happen back there?” one of the men asked.

“We all saw it,” Lee said.

“What did we see, though?” he asked, to answering murmurs of things like “I didn’t see anything,” from the others. “I mean, maybe those two guys left on their own and the guards panicked.”

“Hey, I didn’t panic!” Detweiler said, more comfortable thinking that half the group had been lost to a real danger than entertaining the notion that he’d lost it over nothing. “We lost people tonight. People disappeared.”

“Leave it,” Adam said quietly. “For them, it didn’t happen… might be better that way.”

“Was it just our group?” Lee asked.

“What would be special about our group?” Adam asked. “I’d say anybody caught out in the open was vulnerable.”

“Or, all of tribe,” Lee noted.