At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by K. M. Fawkes

  He allowed himself to breathe heavily for a few more moments, summoning his strength, and then got to his feet and pushed himself forward. Bullets were still flying around him, but they were starting to slow, he was sure. The bikers were losing their numbers.

  He pulled out one of the guns and began firing randomly behind him, only half-caring if he was hitting anyone. If he slowed the bikers down, that was good enough for him. Honestly, if it kept the bikers on his trail, and kept them from following the rest of the group as they escaped into the desert, he would count his life well spent.

  And that wasn’t his only goal. Somewhere here, Kraken was leading the charge. Garrett was sure of it. And if he could just find that man, take him down, that would be the end of it.

  Garrett didn’t know the bikers well, and had only spent a little bit of time observing them, but he thought he could say with confidence that Kraken had them all following him like a bunch of ducklings. The rest of the crew might not be good people—Lance was the prime example of that—but they also weren’t extremely driven people. Men like that never were. They needed a leader. Someone telling them what to do, when to shoot, and when to get the hell out of there.

  He still didn’t know what Kraken’s ultimate goal was, but he did know what thing for sure: take Kraken out and the rest of the gang would crumble.

  Take Kraken out, and this whole thing would be finished.

  So along with running and returning fire at the bikers shooting at him, his new goal became finding Kraken himself. And with that in mind, he took a right at the next alleyway, then a right at the next small street, and a right into one alley back. There, right where the alley met Ash again, he paused, breathing heavily. The bikers had been behind him. He didn’t know how many there were, but if they thought they were chasing the leader of Trinity Ranch, then maybe it meant they’d called their own leader in. Maybe Kraken had been right behind him that whole time.

  Maybe he could end everything right here. Right now.

  He ducked out into the intersection, just enough so that he could look to the left where the bikers should be coming from, and saw a cloud of dust coming from that direction. That had to be them. And if they were so close—

  A sharp pain right behind his left ear took him to his knees, and another followed, sending his own gun clattering to the pavement in front of him before he could spin around to see who was attacking him. When he finally got his legs to obey him and turn him around, rotating on his knees, he saw one of the bikers—and he was holding a gun in Garrett’s face.

  Garrett took one look at the biker himself—a man who was built like a linebacker—and went for the man’s knees. He shoved himself off of his own knees, moving straight toward the biker’s legs. Garrett gasped in pain as he hit the man, his gunshot wound feeling as if it was exploding with fire. A moment later, they were both on the ground, wrestling for control of the one gun left to them—the one the biker had brought into the fight—and doing their best to knock each other out with their fists.

  Garrett took a heavy blow to the nose and heard it crunch, then felt the rush of blood that meant it was definitely broken. He hammered forward with his forehead, using it to break the biker’s nose in response, and heard the man scream. But his vision was now blurry with pain and the man had figured out that Garrett was shot, and was taking advantage of it, kneeing Garrett in the leg as often as he could.

  Garrett reached out, doing his best to maintain his focus through the haze of fire, and jabbed his finger into the guy’s eye—bringing on another howl of pain. The man was roughly twice as big as him, and as far as Garrett was concerned, that meant he had every right to play dirty.

  He reached over and twisted the guy’s ear with one hand, holding him still, while he used the other to pound away at his face, getting in blow after blow before the biker threw him off his body and into the wall.

  Garrett grunted with the impact, but then saw that the biker was, shockingly, seemingly taking a break from the action to try to get his breath back—or his eyes or nose to work again. Instead of following up on his advantage, he’d assumed that Garrett was out for the count and given himself a chance to recover.

  His mistake.

  Garrett dove for the gun that was now lying between them, sweeping it up and shooting in one smooth, seamless move. He hit the guy in the arm, which only served to anger him more, and the biker flew at Garrett, taking him down to the concrete and knocking the breath out of him. He hadn’t taken the gun into account, though, and Garrett was still holding it against his chest—between himself and the biker. He fought to get the nose turned out and away from him, and then pulled the trigger again, sending up a prayer that he had the nose turned far enough away from his own body as to not fatally damage himself.

  The muzzle flash burned him with its heat, but the man on top of him went suddenly still, this second gunshot hitting a more vital area of his body.

  Garrett lay there for a moment, trying to get his bearings and force himself to breathe normally. Then he shoved the dead man off his chest, using what felt like every ounce of his power to do so, jumped to his feet, and started to run again. One more down, but that didn’t mean the battle was won. He had to find Kraken and put an end to this once and for all.

  He’d gone three steps before the fire overtook his body. It started in his leg, where he’d been shot, and flew to his nose and then his ribs, several of which must have been broken. His knees gave out from under him at the pain and he hit the sidewalk without even attempting to catch himself, half-blind with blood and sweat. Dazed, he looked up to see a figure approaching him quickly—though he couldn’t tell who it might be, or whether they were friend or foe.

  He was just closing his eyes, getting ready for the bullet that would end his life, when a familiar voice spoke in his ear.

  “Are you freaking crazy? What are you doing, trying to take them all on by yourself?”

  “Alice?” he wheezed, too confused to think about how coincidental it was that she was right there when he needed her the most.

  She kept speaking, but the world was fading around the edges, now, and though he could see her lips moving, he didn’t hear anything. All he saw was the concern in her eyes—and then the anger as she started speaking more forcefully.

  Garrett turned his head to the side to see several of the people from their town gathered around. She gestured to them, still angry, and after a moment they turned and ran off, leaving him there with Alice, the two of them surrounded by bodies that he now recognized as people from his community.

  Chapter 12

  He felt all the pain before he even opened his eyes, and it made him wish that he didn’t have to open his eyes at all. His leg felt as if it might be missing entirely, and his ribs were on fire. His face was burning, his nose feeling as though it was nearly three times as large as it should be.

  The light on the other side of his eyelids was hurting him. His head was pounding. And he hadn’t even started remembering what had happened to him yet.

  The idea that there were things to be remembered brought a groan to his lips, and Garrett began squirming against the memories as they came back unbidden. Elisa crouched against a wall. Alice running alongside him as they discussed getting the rest of their people out of town. The idea that the townsfolk might not make it out safely. The shooting. The man he’d fought with, and then shot. Steve going to the ground with a scream outside the schoolhouse. Lance shooting Steve in the head.

  The blurred, fuzzy picture of Alice standing over him as his vision faded out. The last memory, which had been that death would come as a relief compared to all the pain.

  Now that pain was flaring back to life, and he grunted again, trying to wrap his brain around it.

  “Stop moving around so much,” a familiar voice snapped. “I’ve just finished the dressing on your leg, but it’s not secure yet. You keep moving like that and I’m going to have to do it all again. And I guarantee it will hurt.”

&nbs
p; The last word brought him to an abrupt stillness, and his brain started chugging through the information again, trying to parse it and make sense of what he’d just heard. Whose voice was that? Where was he, and how had he gotten here?

  He allowed his eyes to open a slit, grumbling to himself as he did. The only way he was going to get any answers, he supposed, was if he stopped hiding.

  To his surprise, once his vision kicked in, he realized he was in the bedroom of his house. There on the floor was the bottle of whiskey he’d been drinking only a couple nights earlier, and there on the floor were his boots and the clothes he’d been wearing when the gunfight started. His pants were shredded, and the shirt looked as though it had been sliced right through the middle. A number of guns and clips were lying next to the pants, and he remembered now that he’d been grabbing weapons off the bodies as he went.

  The bodies.

  His gaze went directly to the person by the bed, and there he saw Alice, her face screwed up in concentration as she finished tending to his leg. When she was done, she sat back and gave him a triumphant look.

  “I have to say, for never having done this before, I’m pretty amazing at it.”

  He breathed out a laugh and glanced down at where he thought his leg had once been, only to be shocked when he saw that it was in fact still there—and functional, given the jerking it was doing at his reaction.

  “Hold still!” Alice hissed. “How many times do I have to tell you that you have to be still or this is going to hurt even worse?”

  She brought her hand firmly down on the bandage he could now see around his thigh, and he hissed back at the shock of pain that went through his leg. Leg still attached, check. All nerves working, check.

  “What exactly did you do to my leg?” he asked, teeth clenched.

  She heaved out a sigh. “The bullet went through clean, so you were lucky in that regard. There was a lot of blood but I didn’t have to dig anything out. I’ve just bathed the wound in disinfectant and wrapped it. It’s not pretty, but it’ll hopefully keep it from getting infected, for right now at least.”

  He gaped at her, thanking whoever had been watching over him that she was the one who had found him. He’d known that she was good with emergency situations and she’d certainly been there to handle medical emergencies before, but right now she actually sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

  “Thank God you found me,” he said numbly. “I think I—”

  “You were going to die,” she said bluntly. “There’s no doubt about it. You’ve got some cracked ribs and a broken nose, but there’s not a great deal we can do about that.” She gave him the ghost of a grin. “It might heal a little bit crooked, but it’ll give you that swaggering air of mystery. Men can get away with that sort of thing.” A roll of the eyes.

  Then she moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you awake enough to talk about the things that matter?”

  He closed his eyes, checked in with his body about whether or not he was ready for that, and then opened his eyes and nodded. “I don’t have the luxury of saying no,” he said quickly. “And I don’t think we have the luxury of time, either.”

  “We definitely don’t,” she confirmed. “I brought you up here and left you asleep, then went out to do some recon while you were resting. I count ten of the bikers from Helen Falls among the dead. Kraken isn’t one of them. The rest are missing. God knows where they’ve gone. I don’t know if they left town or if they’re still here, waiting. I’m hoping they fled into the desert when it looked like they were going to lose the battle. Maybe they just ran out of ammunition. If they did, if they left, they went without water or supplies. If they can’t find their way back to Helen Falls, they’ll be dead in a day.”

  Right. Well that was a lot to take in that quickly, but it didn’t answer the question that had been weighing on his heart since he woke up.

  “And our people?” he asked.

  “Ten dead,” Alice said without hesitation. “The rest are gone. Into the desert with them as well. They came with me to find you, and I sent them away as soon as I saw how badly you were hurt. I knew we couldn’t go with them.”

  “But they know where to find the cave?” he asked hopefully.

  Alice nodded. “They do, and they took what supplies they could carry with them. Again, with luck, they’ll find the cave and be able to rest up for a day, maybe two. Then… Well…”

  “We’ll hope they find a new town,” he said firmly. “A place where they’ll be looked after. I don’t want them coming back here. Not with the gang still on the loose.”

  She met his gaze, seeming to know exactly how much it cost him to say that he didn’t want to see the Trinity Ranch townsfolk trickling back into town, and nodded slowly.

  “We hope they find another home,” she answered simply. “You’re right, of course. It will be better for them if they can carry on somewhere less dangerous. And what about us? Did you have backup plans for two people getting stuck in a town that might still come under fire from a rogue gang of bikers with bad attitudes?”

  He almost smiled at her words, but the truth was that he hadn’t thought about that. The extent of his planning had been to hope that he could act as a decoy long enough for the townspeople to escape—or that he could kill Kraken and bring the battle to an end before the townspeople had to leave at all. As it turned out, he’d failed at both of those goals.

  “If our friends took supplies and water with them, it means we have very little left here for ourselves,” he said, thinking through it as he spoke. “We can’t stay here either. It’s just as unsafe for us as it was for them. We have some weapons and ammo, but that won’t last long.”

  He sat up, groaning at the pain that came with the movement, and Alice moved to support him. He waved her off.

  “I don’t have time to lean on you,” he said. “Believe me, it’s not that I don’t appreciate it. But I have to get used to the pain. I have to find a way to deal with it and move forward. You babying me isn’t going to help me do that.”

  She reared back, offended. “And what in the world made you think I would ever baby you?” she asked. “I just want you out of bed sooner so that we can get moving. And if I have to encourage you to get up, I mean to do it.”

  He looked at the sheets around his leg and laughed bitterly. Knowing Alice, she would shove him out of bed and tell him to get moving. Even when it looked like most of his blood was soaking into the sheets of what had been his bed.

  “Why are you laughing?” she asked sharply. “Do you think I’m kidding? Do you think this is a funny situation? Have you actually gone insane with the blood loss?”

  He gestured at his leg. “Just the fact that this would have been a serious wound six months ago—one that kept me in bed for weeks, no doubt. Now it’s just a flesh wound. Only enough to allow me to rest for an hour or so before you’re threatening to push me out of bed.”

  “We have to leave before the bikers come back,” she told him flatly.

  He gave her a look, hoping she realized how ridiculous she was being. Of course he realized that they had to go. That didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

  “I’m not positive I’ll be any good on my feet,” he admitted. “I can barely feel my leg, and walking is going to be difficult. I don’t even want to consider running.”

  She pressed her lips together, thinking. “Doesn’t mean we can stay,” she finally said. “It’s too dangerous. And we need to be far enough from town that they can’t find us, if they decide to come back. There are a couple of old motorcycles by the school—bikes that some of them rode in on. Maybe we can take one of them.”

  “What happened to the men who rode in on them?” Garrett asked, trying to find any holes in the plan.

  “Dead,” she said succinctly.

  “Well then,” he answered, swinging his legs out of bed and wincing again at the pain. “Help me up and let’s get going. I want to be out of this town as quickly
as possible.”

  Alice helped him get into a new pair of trousers—after he noticed with embarrassment that he’d been in bed in nothing but his boxers—and threw one of his T-shirts over his head. Then she started shoving the rest of his things into his backpack. He noticed that she already had a bag sitting next to the door to the room.

  “Already packed?” he asked.

  “One of the first things I did when I figured out the gang had left town,” she said as she continued to shove things into his bag. “I figured we would want to get out of here as quickly as we could. And between you and me, I won’t be at all sorry to see Trinity Ranch in our rearview mirrors. This place feels like it’s been nothing but trouble since we got here.”

  Garrett nodded. In many ways, she was right. In many others, this town had saved their lives. But with the gang from Helen Falls invading, he agreed with her—they needed to get out of here, as quickly as they could. Hopefully without attracting any attention.

  “I think we can safely assume that the Helen Falls crew is currently involved in their own dramas,” he said, skipping right to that last point. “If they’ve gone out into the desert, they’re worrying more about their own survival than whether they left anyone alive. Let’s stop by the schoolhouse to see how much we can take in terms of water and food, and then get the hell out of here. I vote we favor speed over stealth.”

  Alice shoved the last of his clothing into the bag, followed that up with the three guns he’d collected, and then poured the clips into the front pocket before she looked up at him. “I second that vote. Let’s go.” She threw the bag over her shoulder and picked up the one she’d had sitting by the door, then held her arm out to him. “Lean on me as much as you need to. We just have to get to the schoolhouse and we’ll get you onto a vehicle that can take your weight.”