The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  “You think you can take us out with a bow and arrow?”

  “I’ve got a rifle now.”

  “You’re still outnumbered.”

  “I’ve done all right so far. Only three of you left, plus those two you left behind at the falls. Or maybe I already took those two out, who knows?”

  Lundquist tried to pinpoint the direction of Milton’s voice. He was a decent distance away and maybe off to the right, maybe moving between sentences, but it was difficult to be sure. The sound bounced around the tree trunks, and the rain deadened everything. He took his hand off the barrel of his rifle and scrubbed water from his eyes.

  “Milton!”

  Milton didn’t answer.

  “Want to know the way I see it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “We outnumber you, and you have one arm. There are five hundred soldiers coming into these woods right now. They’ve got helicopters, too, probably already on their way. If I were you, I’d come out of there with my hands up right now and hope to God that I’m feeling disposed to bringing you in alive.”

  “Don’t think I’m going to be doing that.”

  He turned to Chandler and Michael and hissed, “We need to move. You ready?”

  Michael’s eyes were wide. Chandler’s face was bloodless. Lundquist glared at them both, nodded up the slope, and said, “You two go first, and I’ll cover you. Get up to those trees, see them?”

  They nodded.

  “Then you cover me when I come up. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Lundquist looked up into the sky, allowing the rain to wash off his face for a second.

  He took a deep breath and tightened his grip on the rifle.

  “Now!”

  Lundquist crouched and swung around the edge of the tree, the rifle aimed into the forest where he thought Milton’s voice had come from last. Michael and Chandler ran liked scalded deer, their feet slipping and sliding through the mud and the cataract of water that was coming down the slope from above. He thought he saw a shimmer of movement from within a stand of hardwoods. There was the sharp retort of a rifle. Lundquist swung the rifle up and aimed at the spot, firing two rounds in quick succession. He stared hard into the underbrush, straining his eyes and ears, but there was nothing. He glanced up the slope and saw Michael at the top, turning back to him and crouching down behind a fall of rocks, aiming back down into the woods. Chandler’s head appeared around the trunk of a large oak.

  Milton had missed.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering his scripture.

  The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life.

  He opened his eyes and ran. He pulled his boots out of the quagmire, each step splashing in the torrent as he ran as hard as he could to his son. He stared fearfully at Michael’s face, terrified that it would register the sight of Milton below him, the preface to the bullet that would find him between the shoulder blades, but Michael’s face remained intent with concentration. The bullet didn’t come.

  “Did you get him?” the boy cried out as he slipped into cover behind him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Tom Chandler hurried over to them.

  “What do we do?”

  “We need to get as far away from here as we can. We need to keep running.”

  Chapter 38

  THEY HAD made it to the top of the ridge and then the uplands beyond when the radio crackled with static from the lightning.

  Lundquist put it to his ear and tried to press it there as he ran on.

  “We… helicopters… too… thunder.”

  “This is Lundquist. Say again. Repeat, say again.”

  “Dangerous… lightning… on foot.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  The radio buzzed and fizzed and popped, and when the static dissolved, the voice wasn’t one he recognised, and he couldn’t even be sure it was meant for him.

  “Dammit!” He was gasping from the hard running. “This is Lundquist. We are under attack. Men down, repeat, men down. We need help.”

  The lightning crackled again, lighting up the uplands, and then the thunder rolled over them, on top of them, so loud that it felt like his ears were ringing. Lightning flashed again, and Lundquist suddenly worried how wise it was to be out in the open when the storm was directly overhead. The whiteness stained a lattice against his retinas, and he blinked it away, squeezing the water out of his eyes, and then it was gone and the uplands were dark again.

  “They’re not coming,” Michael gasped out.

  “I don’t know… this weather…”

  “We’re on our own,” the boy said, his eyes still bulging.

  Lundquist knew that they had to hurry. The land around here was horribly open. Milton wouldn’t need to track them; he would be able to see them. He remembered the creek that they had followed earlier, cutting through the uplands, down the rise and then into the thicker forest. But where was it? He couldn’t remember. What about the falls that Milton had climbed to get away from them? If they could find the river, maybe they could climb down there and get back to Truth. If they could keep Milton behind them, there was no reason why they wouldn’t be able to get to help in one piece.

  “Dad?” Michael called.

  “We’re going to be okay,” he shouted over the roar of the storm. “I know a way down.”

  “What about—”

  “He’s behind us, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “We keep him behind us. He’s been shot. We’re halfway home, boys, you hear? We just have to keep on going.”

  Rain pelted his face. He reached up to wipe his eyes when a gust of wind swept across them, snagging the brim of his hat and tearing it away. It jerked up into the sky, twenty feet high in an instant, and then spun away behind them.

  Lundquist was past caring.

  They started off, rushing out of the tree line and onto the wide-open space of the uplands. They covered the first hundred feet without incident but then Chandler turned and started to trot backwards so that he could look behind them, with his eye off the path ahead. His left leg plunged down into a rabbit hole, and he overbalanced, his leg buckling with a stomach-churning crack as he fell to the left, the leg still planted in the hole. Chandler screamed.

  MILTON DIDN’T think it would be possible for it to rain any harder, but he had been wrong.

  It was.

  He reached the top of the ridge and held himself still, listening hard. He heard nothing. His breath coming thick and heavy, he poked his head up and surveyed the terrain. The upland was as he remembered it: broad ridges with rounded summits and wide, shallow valleys. There were rough grasslands, scrub, and pockets of trees. Plantations of conifer came in geometric blocks and formed hard, angular lines across the rounded slopes of the ridges. Patches of scrubby woodland, pastures, and marsh added to the mosaic.

  He saw the three men in the near distance. Five hundred yards? They were running and, as he watched them, Chandler turned around to look for him, trotting backwards and tripping. He dropped down onto his side, and Milton heard the scream even above the thunder and the ululation of the rain. He watched as Callow stooped down to him. He heard another scream of pain. Chandler stayed on the ground as Lundquist turned and knelt, his rifle sweeping the ridge as he tried to find Milton.

  He pressed himself down into the wet ground and watched.

  Callow slipped his hand beneath Chandler’s shoulders and hauled him upright. Another scream as his left leg was freed from the hole into which it had jammed. They started towards the south again. Chandler was hopping on his right leg, Callow was trying to support him on his right hand side, Lundquist was jogging ahead then turning back to cover them.

  Knee ligaments?

  A broken ankle?

  A broken leg?

  Milton calculated.

  The odds had swung further in his direction, but he was still outnumbered and outgunned. The m
agazine of the rifle that he had taken from the dead man had been almost empty, with just the two rounds left in the chamber. They were gone now. The young cop had fallen in a spot where he wouldn’t have been able to get to him without getting shot himself. He wondered whether he should go back now and look for his weapon. He decided against it. He didn’t want to give them any more of a head start. The bow would have to do.

  He squinted out into the rain. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to take them if he followed them out into the upland. They had long guns, and as soon as he came out of cover, they would be able to start taking potshots at him. He could make himself difficult to hit, and the weather would mean that they would need luck to make the shot, but, at the very least they would be able to keep him out of range. It would be a stalemate, apart from the fact that he didn’t know how long he would be able to survive out in the open in the middle of the storm. They were better equipped than he was. Better dressed. They would be able to last out the weather. He didn’t know if he could.

  He stopped beneath the shelter of a pin oak and tried to remember the map.

  He needed a way to get ahead of them.

  LUNDQUIST STOPPED, turned, and raised his rifle. He was looking back into the wind, a constant gust that seemed impossibly freighted with rain. He narrowed his eyes to slits, then scooped the water away, squinting so hard that the muscles in his brow started to ache.

  No sign of Milton.

  Where was he?

  A wounded deer must feel like this. Injured, helpless, the hunter stalking it, sighting it, waiting for the proper time to finish it off.

  “Come on! Too slow! We need to go faster!”

  “This is as quick as I can manage,” Michael yelled out over the noise. “His leg, Pops… Jesus.”

  Chandler moaned. The boy had snapped the tibia in his left leg. Lundquist had heard the crack, loud as a gunshot. His leg had been wedged up to the knee, and the sudden shift had torqued the bone too much. A compound fracture. The bone had sheared in two, one sharp half slicing through the skin at his shin. The colour in his face had disappeared completely now. He looked like he was about to faint.

  “We’re going to have to leave him.”

  “We can’t.”

  “He’s going to get us killed.”

  “No,” Michael shouted at him, suddenly angry. “No man left behind. You know that as well as I do.”

  Dammit.

  Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong.

  Lundquist turned back to the south. He could leave them, he thought. He should leave them. He had God’s word to consider. He had been chosen by God to do His will. Michael and Chandler would give Milton something to think about, buy him enough time to get all the way clear. There was backup ahead, Randy Watts and Archie McClennan, the two men he had left at the falls. He could run back to Truth and leave this whole sorry mess to the National Guard.

  He could.

  But…

  Michael was right. No man left behind.

  Dammit.

  He raised his rifle again. The wind blasted him and the rain soaked him to the skin, but there was still no sign of John Milton.

  Come on, you bastard. Show yourself.

  MILTON HEADED across the upland, following a path through a shallow depression that would shield him from Lundquist. He ran as hard as he could, tripping and falling three times, but, after each fall, he scrambled back to his feet and kept going. He ran for a full hour and, by the time he arrived at the creek, he was dizzy from the pain.

  The river was in full spate now, swollen by the cloudburst, and the water had flowed over its banks. A great torrent swept down from the hills, sweeping over the goat track and surging around the trunks of the trees that had sprouted in the rich soil.

  Ahead of him, the water reached the fall that he had climbed earlier and piled over the edge, the cacophonous barrage competing with the sound of the rain and the thunder.

  Milton lowered himself down a slope of scree and onto the gently cambered wall of the creek, and then he saw them.

  Fifty feet behind him, laboriously clambering down the side of the creek, the rushing water springing at their feet.

  He dropped low, scuttering down the scree, pebbles clattering around him as a tiny avalanche was pouring down into the water. There were slabs of rock stacked up along the edge of the river. Milton slid between them and lowered himself into the water. My God, it was cold. The fierce current tugged at his legs, jerking him downstream. There were straggles of thick root from the bald cypress tree that grew on the bank, and Milton knotted them in his right fist, the fingers of his left hand pressed into a rocky cleft.

  The water was freezing. He wouldn’t be able to stay in it for more than a minute or two.

  He heard them approach, bickering, their footsteps clattering across the loose rocks, and he lowered his head beneath the surface. The water was so cold that it seemed to sting his brain, and he gasped, sucking a mouthful into his nose and the back of his throat. His eyes bulged, and his every instinct was to drag himself to the surface, but he squeezed his eyes shut and counted to five, then pulled up against the roots and took a deep, hungry breath.

  He heard their footsteps and muffled voices right overhead, and he ducked down again, praying that they would keep walking, praying that they didn’t stop, praying the bow across his shoulder wasn’t poking out of the water.

  He prayed they didn’t see him, helpless, below them.

  The water closed over his head, and time became a concept impossible to quantify.

  One minute?

  Thirty seconds?

  Ten seconds?

  He surfaced, gasping for breath again, and saw the back of Michael Callow’s head as it disappeared beneath the line of the bank ten yards downstream.

  Milton reached out with his right hand, fastened it around a rock, and used it as an anchor, tugging up and slithering out of the water and onto the bank. He pressed himself to his feet, took the bow, notched his second-to-last arrow, and pulled back on the string. He knew before it happened that he was going to fall. Blood rushed away from his head, and he quickly became dizzy, his balance awry, and he stumbled across the flooded path until he tripped and went down to his knees. The water splashed around him, and he must have groaned, because Chandler, who was being dragged sideways by Callow, now turned his head and saw him.

  Chandler had his pistol aimed down and to the side, into the river, and he was swinging it around when Milton let go of the string.

  The arrow hit the boy in the gut. He fell backwards, breaking free of Callow’s supporting grip, slumped against the rocky wall, and slid down onto his backside.

  Now Callow turned.

  Lundquist heard the commotion, and he, too, turned.

  There was no time to notch another arrow, so Milton clambered up and charged them. He crashed into them both, all three men pitching onto the rocks. Callow tripped and slammed down backwards onto a large boulder, gasping as the wind was punched out of his lungs. His rifle was jarred out of his hands, and it spun away into the river and disappeared.

  Lundquist felt solid and muscular, and he knew that Milton couldn’t use his left arm. He rolled on top of him, concentrating his weight on Milton’s right arm, squaring his forearm and striking down with the elbow. It drew a glancing impact against Milton’s forehead, enough to dim his vision for a moment.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he snarled.

  He tried to use his elbow again, but Milton jerked his head aside.

  “Michael! Help!”

  He tried to strike down again, but Milton pressed his feet flat and pushed up, bucking Lundquist away from him.

  Callow was still on the ground.

  Lundquist and Milton staggered up and stumbled farther down the path. It bulged upwards for a short stretch, lifting it above the swollen river, a drop of a few feet on the right hand side with spume spraying up from where the water clashed against the rock. The falls were clos
e now.

  They closed again and Lundquist threw a punch that Milton blocked. He reached in with his right hand and grappled the older man closer to him. Lundquist forced his rifle up, pushing until the gun was held vertically between their bodies, pointing at the thunderclouds. Lundquist’s right hand was pressed against Milton’s chest, his fingers still looped through the trigger guard. It was just at the right height for Milton to reach across with his left hand. He grimaced from the blast of pain as he grabbed Lundquist’s fingers and started to bend them backwards, one by one. The hand came away from the trigger, but he still had his left fastened around the barrel.

  Milton butted him in the nose.

  Lundquist relinquished the long gun and stumbled backwards.

  Milton had the rifle now. He swung it at him, one handed, the stock slamming into Lundquist’s left shoulder.

  The older man reached the end of the path overlooking the falls as the water rolled over the edge and crashed down sixty feet to the plunge pool below. He tottered on the edge, his arms windmilling comically, before he took another backward step, his foot pawing the air, finding nothing.

  He overbalanced and fell into space.

  Milton dropped to his knees and crawled to the edge. Lundquist hit the water on his back and disappeared underneath the surface.

  “Pops!”

  Callow shoved Milton out of the way and leapt straight out from the lip of the cliff, turning in the air and hitting the water in an untidy dive.

  He was swept beneath the surface, too.

  Milton reversed the rifle and aimed down at the river, watching the frothy torrent, but there was no sign of either of them. He remembered the two men, who he guessed must have been left here, but there was no sign of them, either. The water roared, loud and angry and hungry, and still there was nothing. The current must have been strong, an underwater riptide that might have kept them below the surface or dashed them onto the rocks.

  Milton waited for another ten seconds, staring down onto the roiling surface, tons of water crashing down every second, and finally, he saw them.

  The river had carried them fifty feet away. Lundquist was on his back, Callow with his arm wrapped beneath his father’s shoulders. Both of them were kicking against the pull of the water, slowly sliding across to the opposite bank.