—Smith glanced over to check on them.
It’d been a while since he’d last looked, not that he really needed to see them to know they were still out there. He could hear the car getting louder and louder easily enough.
The screaming yellow paint job against the white and brown landscape made it stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe it was their way of advertising themselves. Here we are! Can you see us now? It was that obvious.
Now that it was closer, Smith could make out the shape of the vehicle. It was a Jeep Wrangler, probably running on diesel fumes. And it was fast. Or, at least, it seemed to be pretty goddamn fast as it sped across the flat grounds toward him.
Smith turned around and slipped behind the fireplace wall. He didn’t bother drawing the pistol to check it. He’d already done that before leaving the junkyard with Mandy to make sure her people hadn’t done anything to it.
It was fine. The gun wasn’t the problem.
The guys coming, on the other hand, was.
Smith took a breath and leaned against the wall. For a second or two, he was afraid he might knock it down, too, but it proved sturdy. Then again, it would have to be to have survived the fire that had ravaged the rest of Lucky’s house. Smith hadn’t seen a corpse while he was running through the remains of the living room, and he hadn’t asked Mandy if she had, either. It hadn’t seemed important then, and still didn’t now.
Dead was dead, and Lucky was dead.
Smith was hoping not to join him.
The Jeep was close enough now that Smith couldn’t just hear its engine overwhelming the land around it but also the grinding of its tires against the ground. He listened to it, trying to decide how much time he’d have before the men in the vehicle figured out where he was hiding. Maybe they might have even spotted him slipping behind the fireplace from a distance; it would be just his luck that at least one of them would have binoculars on them.
The Jeep’s tires squealed as the driver slammed on the brakes. They were somewhere at the front of the house, so if they had seen him, they weren’t bothering to drive around until they could outflank him. Either that, or they figured he didn’t stand a chance anyway and wanted to make sport of this.
He was praying for the latter, because that was the only option that gave him any chance of surviving.
Smith heard a familiar voice calling out, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” and knew it was the latter.
Travis. But of course it was Travis. Who else would it be?
The sound of his voice—singsong, like he was having the time of his life—was all the proof Smith needed that Travis had come to play. And he was probably not alone. There would be at least two, maybe more with him.
They had just chased him like a rabbit into a corner and were probably brimming with confidence right now. This wasn’t a fight to them. This was a game. An execution. Smith was prey.
Or he was supposed to be.
That was the problem with being part of a gang instead of having to rely on just yourself. The presence of other people convinced you that there was strength in numbers. And that belief could make you stupid.
And careless.
Smith stepped out from behind the fireplace and drew.
Twenty-Two
There was three of them.
For some reason, they always came in threes these days.
Travis was among them. He was standing next to the Jeep’s open driver-side door. There were two others with him—Kyle, the kid, was climbing out the back, while a third man that Smith had never seen before was checking his rifle next to the open passenger side door.
The vehicle itself was surprisingly clean, as if it’d been hidden in a barn underneath blankets until this morning, when it was uncovered and then waxed. The yellow color practically beamed underneath the sunlight, standing out like a beacon against the gray and white background and the remains of Lucky’s soot-stained yard.
Smith’s eyes snapped from Travis to Kyle to the third guy, where it stayed. More to the point, it was the bolt action rifle that the man was cradling as he wiped dust off the front of the scope with a silk rag. A Remington, from the looks of it; a decent gun, made for long-distance shooting. Certainly the large optic on top of the weapon made every shot much easier.
The man was in his thirties, with a shaggy beard and dressed all in black. He wore an urban assault vest with pouches for emergency supplies and extra ammo. A canteen hung off one hip, over a sheathed knife. The man looked as if he’d been lying down on the ground all day and hadn’t managed to brush all the dirt off his clothes when he picked himself up.
…lying on the ground all day, or on top of a hill, waiting for some poor sucker to come through so he could pick them off.
Like Smith and Mandy, earlier.
Like Smith had, yesterday.
The sniper was the first person to see Smith as he revealed himself, stepping out from behind the fireplace’s wall. They were thirty yards apart, and Smith could see the man’s eyes widening to almost comically absurd levels. Shock and confusion flicked across the man’s face, because he and his two friends had done this before. They knew Smith was alone and running. They’d probably done it before—hunted down some poor sap that had escaped Gaffney, only to be recaptured and then taken back for, as Blake had said, “reeducation.”
And they had the numbers. That made them even more confident.
And cocky.
Smith saw all of that in the brief two to three seconds after he stepped out from behind the fireplace and looked across the blackened remains of Lucky’s house at the three men. They had parked their Jeep where the “front” of the building used to be. Maybe if Smith wasn’t so used to the situation and hadn’t been in one before, it might have taken him longer to see everything there was to see.
But he had, and it didn’t.
Mr. Sniper was scrambling to raise his rifle when Smith shot him in the forehead. The man collapsed, exposing Kyle just as the youngest member of the Gaffney trio was rounding the back of the Jeep.
Kyle froze and wasted a second of reaction time by watching the rifleman as he was falling in front of him. Not that it would have made any difference if he’d gone straight for his pistol. He wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway.
Smith shot Kyle through the chest, then was already swiveling around to find Travis even as the young man fell out of view.
Travis was gone!
Smith ran through what used to be Lucky’s living room, crunching charred debris under his boots as he did so. He kept his eyes on the Jeep, on the open driver-side door, even as he ran, jumping over a puddle that used to be a sofa—
Travis popped up from behind the driver-side of the parked car, squirrely eyes searching for Smith.
Smith squeezed off a quick shot, sending Travis scurrying back down for cover. The round wasn’t meant to hit Travis, just keep him from firing first. The Gaffney man had wisely stayed behind the cover of the Jeep, and Smith would have needed a near-perfect shot to hit him in the two or three inches of forehead he’d exposed.
As he ran, Smith kept count of his rounds. The gun felt lighter, but not by much. He’d fired three shots, which left him with seven. That was good enough. If he needed more than seven to take out Travis, Smith figured he might as well put his gun away for good and call it forced retirement.
Smith didn’t bother checking on Mr. Sniper as he ran past the man. No one got up from a bullet to the forehead. At least, no one that was alive when they took the bullet. Ghouls, on the other hand, could survive a whole lot more. But ghouls didn’t walk around in daylight while carrying a Remington rifle.
As for Kyle…
There was a chance the kid was still alive. One to center mass wasn’t always a fatal injury, and so Smith spent just half a heartbeat glancing toward the rear passenger side of the Jeep as he approached the vehicle to make sure Kyle hadn’t gotten back up.
He was still down.
Maybe not for good, but it was good e
nough for now.
Smith had almost reached the Jeep when Travis popped back up, this time all the way at the rear of the vehicle. He had his gun in his right fist and was aiming. Travis’s new location threw Smith off for about half a second. Maybe even less than that.
They both fired at the same time.
Smith felt the burn along his left leg, coming from somewhere around his thigh area, but he was too busy falling down to do much about it. Both feet gave out from under him, as if he’d tripped on an invisible wire, and Smith tumbled to the soot-covered floor and skidded into what used to be a section of wall.
Get up! Get up!
Smith got up and hobbled his way to the Jeep, then around it. He kept waiting for Travis to spring up like some kind of nightmarish version of a live Whack-a-Mole, but the man stayed down this time.
He found out why when he rounded the vehicle and reached the back, where Travis lay on the ground, gasping for air. Blood dripped down his face from the small opening in his hairline where Smith’s bullet had grazed him. It wasn’t a killing shot, but it’d shocked the man enough to drop him and kept him on his back.
When he saw Smith, Travis tried to raise his gun. Smith rushed over, grimacing against the sudden stabs of pain coming from his left hip, and stepped on Travis’s arm to pin it to the ground. Travis grunted, but didn’t let go of the gun.
“Don’t make me break it,” Smith said.
Travis unfurled his fingers around the pistol grip, and Smith kicked the weapon away. Smith took a step back before sitting down on the back bumper of the Jeep and, finally, looked down at his hip.
A graze, similar to the one that had taken Travis down, except Smith’s was in the right place. Travis had taken his on the forehead, which was probably interfering with his ability to focus right about now, because Travis kept blinking at Smith.
“Jesus Christ,” Travis was saying. “You’re crazy. Fucking nuts.”
Smith looked over at him. “Am I?”
“Yeah, you are.”
“Not the first time I’ve been called that.”
“Crazy…”
“Why? Because I defended myself?”
“Coming out like that…three against one…” He shook his head. Or tried to. “Who does that? A crazy guy. Fucking crazy guy does that.”
“That’s your problem, Travis. You’ve had it too good for too long. You’ve become too reliant on numbers.”
“Crazy fucker,” Travis said, as if Smith hadn’t said a word. “Crazy motherfucker.”
“Blah blah blah. So was this the plan all along?” Smith said. “Get me to bring Mandy out, then ambush us?”
Travis kept blinking at Smith and saying, “Crazy asshole. You’re fucking crazy.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ve already established that. Moving on.”
“Who does that? Who does that?”
“Travis, pay attention. We’ve already moved on.”
“Crazy…”
Smith snapped his fingers in front of the man’s face to get his attention. “Hey, Travis, listen to what I’m saying.”
“…crazy…”
“Travis. Listen. Focus.”
“…crazy…”
“Focus. Was this the plan all along? If I don’t kill Mandy at the junkyard, then get me to bring her out—”
He stopped talking because Travis had closed his eyes.
“Shit,” Smith said, and crouched next to the man.
He felt for a pulse…and found one. Travis wasn’t dead, just unconscious. Smith made sure the guy wasn’t pretending by relieving him of his weapons—a gun behind his back and a knife in a sheath at his hip—before getting up and walking around the Jeep to check on the other two.
Kyle lay on his back, eyes wide open and staring up at the cloudless sky. He was dead. Smith didn’t know how long he’d been dead but dead was dead, so what did it matter? He couldn’t bring himself to feel any sympathy for the kid.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Still, he was young, and unlike Travis, there was nothing squirrely about the kid. Maybe Smith felt some sympathy for him after all.
Mr. Sniper was nearby, and he was a different story. Smith would have shot him again if he were still alive, but he wasn’t. A thin trickle of blood came down his forehead where Smith had shot him. The tiny amount of blood that had ended Mr. Sniper’s life was an interesting contrast to all the red that had dripped down Travis’s forehead from what was, essentially, a bullet graze.
Smith took a moment to check out the rifle. The scope, as Smith had guessed, was a powerful one, capable of shooting someone from a great distance. Smith still didn’t know if it was the same weapon that had nearly killed him—twice, now—and had taken Mandy’s life. For all he knew, it had also taken Lucky’s, since Mr. Sniper was up there in the hills waiting when Smith showed up. That seemed to be a favorite place of his.
Smith stared at the face. He didn’t know the man; didn’t even know his name. Not that it mattered anymore. Dead was dead, was dead. It’d always been the case, and it was even more so now.
He walked back to where Travis lay and took the keys to the Jeep from his pocket, then looked for and found a first-aid kit in the car’s glove compartment. Smith took off his pants and tended to his hip wound, washing and then taping up the cut. It wasn’t bad—he’d had a lot worse—though it felt like fire burning down there anyway. He swallowed some painkillers that came with the kit to help with that.
Next, Smith relieved Kyle and Mr. Sniper of their weapons and anything else useful on their persons, tossing them all into the back of the Jeep. He was surprised none of them carried radios, which meant Travis and Kyle were nearby when Mr. Sniper took his shots at Smith and Mandy.
That lent credence to his belief that this had been the plan all along. The Judge had sent him here to kill Mandy or bring her out. One way or another, the ultimate goal was always to take out Mandy.
“So what changed yesterday?” he had asked Mandy.
“I don’t know,” she had said. “Maybe the Judge just got tired of him helping us.”
Smith picked up Travis and dragged him to the car before pushing his unresponsive body into the front passenger seat. He located a roll of duct tape and fastened Travis to the seat, making it as tight as possible just, well, because.
Then he drove around looking for the horses.
Twenty-Three
The Jeep had a recent coat of wax on it, but the gas tank was only a quarter full when Smith took it for a drive. Instead of heading to Gaffney and the Judge and putting a bullet between his eyes, he instead headed south—back toward the junkyard.
Before that, he’d retrieved Mandy’s body and put her into the back of the car. He’d toyed with the idea of “sitting” her back there with Travis, her head on his shoulder, just to get a kick out of the man’s reaction when he woke up. But that was probably a little too much of dark humor for Mandy’s people when he drove up to the junkyard’s front gate.
He found the horses about a mile away, but only the Paint didn’t take off immediately when he approached them in the car. Smith tied the animal’s reins to the Jeep, then drove south slowly to allow the horse to keep pace.
The junkyard looked as uninviting and ready for a fight as the first time Smith had seen it clearly this morning. It was a large area with piles of metal and steel and chrome. Three modular homes—more modern versions of the old mobile homes, but these were designed for office space—sat in a U-shape in the very center. One of those belonged to Mandy, but the other two had been converted into living quarters. The buildings were visible as he drove over the hill but wouldn’t be so readily obvious from ground level until you got closer.
There were guards on the grounds, but they stayed away from the open areas where they could be picked off by a sniper from the nearby hills. Fortunately for them, most of the land around the junkyard was relatively flat. After last night’s intense battle with Gaffney’s men, Mandy hadn’t taken any chances. Smith w
as certain there were eyeballs watching him—along with a rifle or two, or three—as he drove over.
Smith parked the car in front of the gate and climbed out, his hands raised. He called out, “Don’t shoot!”
It took about twenty seconds before two figures appeared out from behind a pile of old appliances and rushed toward the entrance. One of them was Gramps, but Smith didn’t recognize the other one, another woman. They rushed over, rifles pointed at him.
Smith kept his hands raised as they approached the other side of the gate. He glanced to his left and right as more heads popped up from behind the larger piles to scan the outside area in case he wasn’t alone. They’d clearly been up there for a while but had stayed hidden until now.
He imagined they would have been able to hear the Wrangler coming for miles out here, and were probably just as shocked to see it as he had been earlier. Or maybe they weren’t. Did they know Gaffney had these kinds of resources and didn’t tell him?
Gramps lowered her rifle slightly as she reached the gate. “What the hell are you doing back here so soon? Where did you get that car?” Then, spotting Travis in the front passenger seat, “And what the hell is he doing here?”
“It’s about Mandy,” Smith said.
“What about her?” Gramps narrowed her eyes at him before looking around. The other woman with her—she was smaller, younger, with short blonde hair—did the same. “Where’s Mandy? Where the hell is Mandy!”
“She’s in the Jeep,” Smith said.
Gramps looked past him at the parked vehicle. “Where?”
“In the back,” Smith said. “She’s dead.”
“What?”
“She’s dead. One of the Judge’s men shot her.” Smith turned and nodded at Travis. “He was there. Ask him what happened.”
Smith walked back to the Jeep, then past it.
“Don’t be too gentle,” he added.
“Hey!” Gramps shouted after him. “Where the hell are you going now?”
Smith glanced back at her. “Gaffney. I have unfinished business to take care of. Give Roger my condolences, and tell him that he’s in charge now.”
After The Purge, AKA John Smith (Book 2): Run or Fight Page 15