Saving Grant Ward

Chapter Seven

"SLATER! WAKE UP!"

I jolted awake, heart racing as I shot up.

"What? What is it, what's wrong?" I asked in a panic, looking around wildly. Instead of finding some deadly threat, I came face to face with Grant Ward, so close our noses were almost touching.

"It's time to move," he said, suddenly calm as he leaned away.

"You couldn't gently shake me awake to tell me that?" I asked, sighing and rubbing a hand over my face. "I almost had a heart attack, I thought we were under attack."

"I tried. Seven times. You really need to be a lighter sleeper if you want to survive once you don't have someone watching your six."

"Yeah, ok, I'll work on that," I muttered, barely able to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Now that the adrenaline had worn off I was barely awake.

Grant moved out of the tent and I tried to motivate myself to get up. I desperately wanted to lie back down and wake up slowly, but I knew that if I did I just wouldn't wake up at all.

I sighed heavily, then dragged myself out of the tent to find everything but the tent and my sleeping bag packed up. Considering that Ward was training me, I thought it was pretty nice of him to not make me pick everything up "for practice".

I shook my head to clear it as Ward ducked back into the tent and rolled up my sleeping bag too.

"Thanks," I said sleepily, leaning against a tree while I waited for my legs to wake up enough to walk.

"The sooner we're packed the sooner we can move."

Instead of responding, I just started helping pack up the tent. By some miracle, no monkeys had come and stolen our food in the night, so we ate a quick power bar breakfast and then started hacking our way through the rainforest again. My legs were already screaming at me, but I did my best to ignore them.

If Ward was fine, then so was I.

After another several hours of walking, we came to a break in the endlessly dense rainforest. A small, circular clearing was sitting in front of us, seemingly having appeared out of nowhere. Smack in the middle of the clearing was a single tree, with a small blue orb sitting in one of the lowest branches. I had no idea what I'd been expecting, but it definitely wasn't this.

"Is that our object?" I asked.

"Looks like it. All our tech was working, albeit a little unreliably, until we hit this line into the clearing. Now everything's completely out," he said, holding up one of our scanners for proof.

"Alright. So, SO, what do we do now?"

"We approach," he answered. He tucked the tech back into his backpack, then scanned the tree line before stepping slowly into the clearing. He moved carefully and kept his head on a swivel, canvassing the area exactly how my teachers had told us to do it a thousand times at the academy.

Now I got to put that same training into action.

I started to move forward after Ward, but I froze in my tracks when I heard a small rustling noise to my right. I whipped my head in that direction and squinted into the tree line to see if I could find the source of the noise, but I didn't see anything.

I glanced at Ward again, but he was still making his way towards the tree and the orb. He didn't so much as glance back once to see if I was with him.