“And they can’t watch every inch of it. If they send people out here to see what’s going on, that’s less people to notice us going in.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“You are serious.”
“I just said yes.”
“But they’ll be alert now, not sleeping like before.”
She’s got a good point.
Even so, Smith thought his plan was a decent one. He didn’t like the idea of running around out here in the open, and potentially being run down by men on horses. The people at the ranch may have been alerted, but that still didn’t mean they could watch every corner of the place. And it was a big place, too, surrounded by rickety fencing that couldn’t keep out a crawling toddler.
“Smith?” Blake said. “This is a dumb idea.”
“I need to find out what’s happening in that place. Don’t you? Have any of you guys been in there?”
“No…”
“So here’s your chance to find out what this ‘reeducation’ is all about.”
“Yeah, but…”
“This is our best chance.”
“How you figure that?”
“We have a distraction. The ghouls. When they get out here, the Judge’s men will be dealing with them.”
“That’s not going to take them very long. Unlike us, they probably have silver bullets.”
Smith couldn’t help but agree with that. Out here, in the open, the people at the ranch would be dumb not to at least have silver bullets lying around, just in case.
“Long enough,” he said.
“You hope.”
“Yup.”
He picked himself up from the ground, then turned around and took the knife out of its sheath and handed it to her. “Take it.”
“What?” Blake said, staring at the knife.
“I’m going to the ranch to find my friends. I owe it to them. But you don’t owe them anything, so you can take off. You already paid me back by coming here with me. You don’t need to do anything else.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She squinted at him. It was dark but not dark enough for him to see the momentary confusion, followed quickly by annoyance on her face.
“Go,” Smith said, motioning with the knife for her to take it.
Blake shook her head. “No.”
“No?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Are you?”
He grinned. That was a good question.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
She smirked. “I know that. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, but I’m doing it anyway.”
“Why?”
“I want to know what’s happening in there, once and for all.”
“That’s all?”
“You need more?”
“No,” Smith said, and put the knife away.
He stood up on the hill, looking back down at the base. He could see a couple of ghouls getting closer, but they were still just silhouetted stick figures underneath the moonlight. Not dangerous whatsoever to them.
He turned back around and stared at the ranch.
There was continued activity inside the big red barn, but no one had shown themselves yet. That wasn’t going to be the case all night, though. The Judge’s men would come out to investigate the shooting. If he were lucky, they’d bring a lot of men, leaving just a few to watch all the many ways into the property behind them.
If he were lucky.
“Let’s go,” Smith said, and began hopping down the side of the hill.
“Smith,” Blake said behind him.
“What?”
“If you get me killed, I’m going to kill you.”
Smith grinned to himself. He hadn’t thought it was possible, but he was liking Blake more and more. Of course, it could just be his little head talking, but he didn’t think so.
Not entirely, anyway.
Nine
Three horses left the barn and trotted across the ranch grounds, heading for the hills. It was too dark for Smith to get a proper look at the makeup of the riders. It didn’t help that he and Blake were hidden about fifty meters away, hiding among the tall grass as the ranchers streaked toward the source of the gunfire earlier. If any of them even noticed Smith and Blake, no one stopped to investigate.
“They don’t see us,” Blake whispered. She didn’t really have to since they were so far away from the closest rider.
“No,” Smith said. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Am I being too loud?”
“No.”
“It feels like I’m being loud.”
“You’re not. Relax.”
“Relax. Right. Just a walk in the park.”
Not quite, Smith thought as he pushed himself up onto his knees, then scanned the ranch in front of them.
The lights he’d seen come on earlier had remained lit, but there wasn’t any additional illumination. Three warm bodies had come out of the place, so how many were left? That was the question. One that he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out. If Smith had his way, he’d find Mary and her son and get the hell out of here.
Like you’ve had things go your way all week.
He checked his watch, the hour and minute hands glowing along with the indices in the darkness. Three-fifteen. He still had plenty of time before sunrise. Not a lot, but enough to do everything he needed to.
Blake got up onto her knees next to him and brushed at dirt clinging to her clothes. “So we’re really going to do this?”
“Having second thoughts?”
“Second thoughts? I’m already on fifth thoughts.”
Smith smiled. “You can still turn back.”
“Nah. I came this far; I might as well go through with it.”
“You know you don’t have to.”
“You keep telling me that.”
“It’s true, though.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve always wondered what was going on in this place.”
“You guys never tried to find out?”
“We scouted the place lots of times, but there were always too many guns around. Mandy decided the best way to free the people here was to take out the Judge. That was the plan, anyway.”
“Having fifth thoughts about that, too?”
“No.” She paused for a moment. Then, “Maybe a little.”
“Let’s find out what’s going on in this place,” Smith said, and got up.
He jogged across the field toward the nearest fence. There wasn’t any barbed wire, and it was easy to slip through two of the three pieces of rickety lumber. Blake followed suit and did likewise until they were both inside the perimeter.
Smith went down on one knee again, his right hand casually next to his holstered SIG. Oh, how he wished he had silver bullets. Not that he needed them to take out another warm-blooded human being, but he didn’t know what was waiting for him further inside the ranch.
That was the problem: He just didn’t know what he’d find.
He eyeballed the distance to the closest building. About 70 meters, give or take. It looked like some kind of supply shack. Not very big at all, but perhaps just enough room for a couple of shelves and tools on top of them. Wooden sides, faded white paint making it just barely stand out in the semidarkness.
“Ready?” Smith said.
“Yeah,” Blake said.
They got up and jogged over to the shack, when the first pop! of a rifle shot rang out from behind them.
Smith immediately went down on one knee even as his right hand dipped to his holstered sidearm. He didn’t draw the pistol, though, because the shot hadn’t been directed at him.
It had come from the other side of the hill.
Two more shots: Pop-pop!
Then the bang! of a handgun.
A series of shots, about a dozen in all, followed.
He exchanged a glanc
e with Blake, crouched next to him. She had the Glock in her hand.
“They definitely have silver bullets,” she said.
Smith nodded. “Yeah, sounds like it.”
He knew that because the riders hadn’t continued shooting. Instead, they had only fired about a dozen times—which was about the same number of ghouls that Smith and Blake had left in their wake around the base of the hill. If the riders weren’t properly armed, then they would have been forced to keep shooting since the nightcrawlers wouldn’t have stayed down.
But they hadn’t. There was just silence in the fields around them again.
“Come on, before they come back,” Smith said.
He got up and jogged the rest of the way over to the shack. Blake was right behind him, then beside him when he finally reached his destination. They slid up against the cold wall, keeping to the darkest part of the building.
Smith glanced back toward the hill—a big hump in an otherwise flat land—but there were no signs of the riders. Right now, he imagined them performing some kind of investigation, trying to figure out what had happened earlier. They would have no doubt noticed the way the ghouls were crippled and put two and two together.
He looked over at the big barn, about fifty meters away. The house was in front of it—another fifty meters or so. The other structures—some bigger than the one they were hiding behind now, others about the same size—were spread out, though they were clustered around the eastern part of the ranch. Smith hadn’t realized that when he was looking at the place from the hillside. He guessed that had something to do with his angled perspective while he was up there.
The barn wasn’t much to look at up close—big, red, and ugly. The colors along the walls and slanted roof on the second floor were badly faded and peeling, with just as much strips of brown and white as there were sheets of red. Twin double doors at the front, with two large windows above them that gave the front of the structure the appearance of a menacing creature with wooden teeth.
“What now?” Blake asked. She was still whispering, small wisps of white clouds coming out between her lips every time she spoke. It had gotten noticeably colder, though not enough for Smith to wish for a jacket.
“The house,” Smith said.
“That’s pretty far away.”
“It’s not that far.”
“It’s pretty far.”
“Is it?”
She gave him a look that might have been annoyance. Or worry. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
“I don’t think so.”
He got up and hustled around the shack, moving in a straight line toward the next closest one. It was also white but had recently been repainted, and seemed to almost glow in the shadows. Smith slid up against it, with Blake doing likewise next to him a second later.
“Might want to give me a heads-up next time you move, handsome,” she said.
Smith glanced over at her. “Handsome?”
“What?” Blake said.
Smith smiled, and said, “Ready?”
“Where are we going now?”
“The house.”
“Not the barn? It’s closer.”
He shook his head. “We’d need to run across the property to reach the barn. The house may be farther, but we won’t have to expose ourselves to reach it. Stick to the shadows.”
She nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Does it?”
Blake shrugged. “As much as anything that’s happened tonight makes any sense, I guess.”
He moved again, and they hopped from building to building, eventually passing the barn all the way across the property. To reach it, they would have had to race across open grounds. It was still dark enough and there weren’t any bright lights to illuminate them if they’d tried it, but it was more risk than he was willing to take. This way, they could remain along the outskirts of the ranch by sticking to its darker parts.
It wasn’t hard to key in on the house—besides the barn, it was the only one with lights illuminating its frame. There were three that Smith could see: One above the double front entrance and two hanging off the corners from posts. He could also make out additional lights on the other side of a window along the first floor. There were more windows on the second, but those remained dark.
There was only one more shack before the house—this one was double the size of the first and had a fading mural of what looked like two kids playing on the side—and Smith and Blake reached it just as—
Voices, coming from the other side.
Smith flattened his back against the cold, wooden wall, his right hand dipping and scraping the butt of the SIG Sauer. Blake stiffened next to him, the Glock still clutched tightly in her right hand.
They exchanged a look, even as they heard a male voice speaking—not quite crisply but clearly enough to indicate he wasn’t very far—to someone: “…how many?”
The “someone” that answered was electronically muffled, telling Smith the other party was talking through a radio speaker: “A dozen.”
“That’s more than last time,” the nearby voice said. “They must know about the barn.”
“Yeah, but how?” the muffled voice said.
“I don’t know. Maybe they can smell each other.”
“They can do that?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“You said it.”
“It’s just a guess.”
Smith’s mind raced, trying to piece together the conversation.
“…a dozen…”
“…more than last time…”
“…smell each other…”
Ghouls, he thought. They’re talking about the ghouls at the hill. I guess this isn’t the first time ghouls have shown up at the ranch.
Then there was this:
“…they must know about the barn…”
The barn. The big, red barn that Smith and Blake had run past, because trying to reach it was too risky. (And now, knowing that there was a man outside, somehow hidden from them until now, was confirmation Smith had made the right choice.)
What was inside the barn? And why had it attracted ghouls? And not for the first time either, apparently.
What’s inside that barn?
Smith could see the puzzled look on Blake’s face. Maybe she’d even put the same pieces together as he had.
The man talking didn’t sound very far from them. Maybe twenty or so meters, standing somewhere between them and house. They might not have been able to hear him so clearly if the night wasn’t so quiet around them. He had to have come from the house. He was also alone as far as Smith could tell, because Smith hadn’t heard a second voice out there piping up. If there was someone else, they were being extremely quiet. Smith didn’t think so, though.
“…what happened?” that same man asked now.
“Looked like a fight,” the muffled voice answered, still coming through a radio speaker. “They didn’t have the right ammo. Shot the legs from under the ghouls. Looked like it worked; nightcrawlers were hobbling around while they skedaddled.”
“Can you track them?”
“It’s too dark. I can barely see shit out here.”
“You have flashlights.”
“There’s just three of us. Don’t know if we should even bother.”
“They came here for a reason. If those ghouls didn’t stumble across them, who knows what they were up to.”
“What did Gaffney say?”
“About what?”
“The shooting we heard earlier.”
“Some guy with a gun.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all they told me.”
Sounds like they’re talking about me, Smith thought. If true, he was surprised that he was just “some guy with a gun.” Heck, a man might be justified in feeling a little insulted by that description.
I guess I didn’t make the kind of impression I thought I did.
“Far as I know, they might still be around her
e,” the man on the other side of the radio said. “You see anything over there?”
There wasn’t an immediate answer. Smith imagined the man standing in front of the house, scanning the ranch grounds looking for potential intruders.
Finally, the man answered. “No. All quiet.” Then, “Get back to the ranch.”
“Roger that,” the voice on the radio said.
Smith remained still, his right hand close enough to the SIG he could draw it without even thinking about it. He listened to the soft crunch of boots moving around the hard Nebraska ground on the other side of the shack.
Next to him, Blake was just as silent and still, even if the look on her face told him everything: If she’d been having second thoughts (or fifth, as she had claimed earlier), then it was onto the sixth now.
The very loud squawk of a radio, followed by the same man asking, “You ready?”
“Ready?” Smith thought. Who is he talking to now?
There was no answer.
Instead, the man said, “Hit it.”
“Hit it?” Smith thought, just before floodlights snapped on all around them, and suddenly they were no longer so “hidden” next to the shack.
Smith sighed, and thought, And there goes my final element of surprise!
Ten
Smith only had two choices that he could see: Run or fight.
The former was the smarter choice. He was still unexposed, even if he was surrounded by pools of bright artificial light. In theory, he and Blake could take off east, away from the shack they were hiding behind. If they ran fast enough, and if the man they were listening to happened to be staring in the wrong direction—that was, anywhere but toward them—they could make it to the dark parts of the ranch and out of the lights before he could spot them.
Like cockroaches, running away from the light.
Is that it? Am I a cockroach now?
He didn’t like that idea. Even if the man didn’t notice them right away, he would likely hear them fleeing. He would turn, and the gig would be up. He’d radio his friends back at the hillside, and they’d come storming on horseback.
And then what?
Smith couldn’t outrun a horse. He was fast, but he wasn’t that fast.
And neither was Blake.
So what about the latter option? Fight?
After The Purge, AKA John Smith (Book 3): Shoot Last Page 6