by Sam Sisavath
So where did that leave him? He would be a fool to stand here all day waiting for help that might never come. All the while, the sniper was probably crawling toward him right now, feet by feet, inch by inch.
It was just a matter of time before the fucker reached him. And then what?
“Screwed, that’s what,” the voice said. “So, what’ll it be?”
Fuck it, Mason thought, and pushed off the tree and ran toward the woods in the far distance.
“Like the wind!” the voice shouted. “Like the wind, champ!”
He kept his head down and his body bent at the waist and his legs cranking. He stayed in a straight line as much as he could, hoping the sniper wouldn’t be able to see that he had taken off with the tree between them until he’d gotten a good head start—
The thundering crack! of a gunshot, unhindered by any other noise in the world, followed by the sound of Mason screaming broke the silence.
But he didn’t stop running. He couldn’t.
The wall of trees beckoned to him, promising shelter, but it was still so damn far away. Why the hell was it so far away?
THREE
CHRIST, it’s dark.
He didn’t know why he was scared. He shouldn’t be. He was wearing the right clothes and in the right spots, and it wasn’t like this was the first time he’d had to move through a thick, wooded area with way, way too many shadowy parts.
“Nothing to be scared of,” the voice said. “We’ve been up a creek with nary a paddle in sight before.”
That’s right. That’s exactly right.
The trees around him looked vastly taller than they had from the outside for some reason. The crowns were way thicker and more spread out, providing just a tad too much shade wherever he walked.
And he was bleeding. Again.
“At least this time it’s just a flesh wound.”
The voice was right, but a wound was a wound, was a wound. And he’d had enough of that for a handful of lifetimes.
Mason had managed to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief, and although the bullet had taken a nice chunk of flesh with it, luckily for him it had missed bone or otherwise he wouldn’t be moving as well as he was now. It hurt, but it was more of an annoying throbbing pain than something that would stop him in his tracks. Certainly, it wasn’t like being shot in the leg at point-blank range by a Ranger-wannabe.
Gaby.
It still irritated him that he couldn’t finish her off in Gallant. He’d gotten close, but close only counted in horseshoes and grenades.
Grenades. Wish I had one or two of those with me right about now.
A flesh wound or not, the brief loss of blood had clearly made him momentarily dizzy and he might have even swayed once or twice. It didn’t help that his leg (the same one that the Ranger-wannabe had shot) was starting to hurt again from the mad dash to safety, slowing him down enough that he had to force himself to stop and rest before he could go any farther.
Mason glanced back for the first time. There was no blood on the slightly damp (Way, way too many shades in this place) ground, which was a good sign, but everything else…wasn’t. He’d left a big enough trail—boot-print indentations on the ground, broken twigs, snapped branches—for a blind man to track.
He sighed. He guessed he hadn’t been as careful as he had thought.
“That’s an understatement,” the voice said.
How much distance had he managed to put between himself and the tree line? Maybe fifty yards, give or take, which wasn’t bad with a bleeding arm and a gimpy leg. But it probably wasn’t going to be enough. If the sniper really wanted him dead, the man would follow him inside. There was no doubt about that.
Mason guessed he’d find out how desperate the guy was for his scalp.
“And such a pretty scalp, too,” the voice said.
We got jokes now?
“Seemed appropriate for the occasion.”
Mason shoved the Sig Sauer back into its holster and pulled out the bottle of painkillers he’d scored before arriving in T10. It was strong stuff, and he felt almost instant relief when it disappeared down his gullet. Of course it was probably all in his head (“That’s never stopped you before.”), but Mason had always been good at telling himself whatever he needed to hear in order to keep moving forward.
Giving up’s for losers. That’s what she’d say.
Snap! as a twig snapped behind him.
Mason pushed off the tree and launched back into a sprint. The throbbing in his leg returned almost immediately as he picked up speed, but pain now was better than dead later, so he gritted through it and powered on.
Sonofabitch followed me inside.
It had to be the third Mercer man, looking for payback for what they’d done to his friends. It had to be. No one would still be this bloodthirsty after Lyle and Rummy.
Not that the whys mattered. Dead was dead, and if he stopped now he was going to be exactly that.
So he didn’t stop.
It wasn’t hard to notice that he was making an awful lot of noise as he ran, grunting loudly each time he slipped between trees, and had to put in the extra effort to go around them when he couldn’t, and dodging low-hanging branches produced more than a few grunts. And he’d be damned if the farther he went into the woods, the darker it got. It wasn’t just that the shadows seemed to be expanding, but they were getting thicker, causing the air around him to become colder with every step he took—
Snap! Snap! from behind him.
Shit! Mason thought, because the sounds were much louder than before, which could only mean one thing: his pursuer was closing in fast!
“Don’t stop now!” the voice shouted.
Gee, thanks for the advice!
Mason pushed himself harder and picked up a few extra bursts of speed. Or he thought he got faster, anyway. The truth was, his chest was hammering so loudly and his body was so numb from the fatigue and pain that he could have actually been going slower and wouldn’t have known it.
Then it finally came, the sound Mason had been waiting for.
Crack!
The shot was still echoing across the woods, bouncing off the trees and scattering birds that populated the branches, when the pek! of a large-caliber round slamming into the tree trunk about three feet in front of Mason rang out.
Mason snapped his eyes shut for a brief second and lifted both arms to use them as a shield (regretting it immediately as pain rippled from his fresh wound) against flying bark. He held the position as he barreled his way through thick shrubbery, praying there wasn’t something on the other side that might impale him. Talk about a sickening end—
Crack! as a second shot sailed over his head, followed a split second by another dull pek! as it embedded itself into a tree somewhere in front of him.
“Haha, he missed you, now he’s gotta kiss you!” the voice laughed.
Mason couldn’t help it and might have actually chortled out loud that time, but that couldn’t have been possible because he barely had the energy to suck in air as he ran.
The only possible explanation of why he wasn’t lying on the floor with two (three?) holes in him right now was because the sniper was running and shooting at the same time. That was hard enough to do with a handgun, but when you had the length of a rifle to worry about, well, it would take a really good shooter to run full speed and hit something at the same time, even given their narrowing distance.
“So keep running!” the voice urged. “Faster! Faster!”
How long before the guy gave up? It didn’t matter. Mason was going to keep running for as long as it took, because to stop now would be to give up and die, and Mason had never given up in his life, and he wasn’t going to start now.
Giving up’s for losers!
He smiled. He hadn’t thought of her in so long; he didn’t know why she was suddenly at the forefront of his mind. When was the last time he had (let) himself think about her? He couldn’t remember. It had been such a long time—
BAM! as he slammed forehead first into a thick branch dangling out of the air, and something ripped his legs from underneath him.
Mason thought it probably looked like one of those silly comedy routines where a guy slips on a banana peel just before he slammed ass-first on the ground. The impact sent shockwaves through his body, particularly his leg and shoulder, and he thanked God for the painkillers and that pretty blonde who had supplied them to him outside of Gallant, otherwise it would have been so much worse.
“Get up, you idiot!” the voice shouted. “Get up, or you’re going to die!”
Oh, shit, he thought, and sat up—
Just as a shadowy figure, its chest heaving out of control, appeared above him and the cold (God that’s cold!) muzzle of a gun barrel jammed mercilessly into his right cheek, pushing with so much strength that Mason thought the person wielding it meant to shove it right through his face.
The gasping figure looming above him looked ridiculously tall, but Mason knew that was just the result of his warped perspective staring up from the ground. A small trickle of something wet stung his right eye, and trying to blink it away didn’t do any good; if anything, it only spread the thick wetness to the rest of his eye.
“So it’s come to this?” the voice said. “Sitting on your ass, looking up at a rifle? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”
Mason would have told the voice to shut the hell up and let him concentrate on surviving the next few seconds, but he couldn’t even muster up the strength to think those thoughts. Instead, he gazed up at the silhouetted figure while struggling to breathe, an act that was mirrored by the man holding the rifle shoved against his cheek.
The two of them were standing deep in a particularly dark patch of the woods, and Mason could make out the man’s slim outline, but not his face, because he had green and black paint all over it. Camo. Just like the two Lyle wasted with that MG of his.
“Ready?” the voice asked. “Here it comes. Close your eyes.”
Mason refused to close his eyes.
“Close your eyes! You don’t want to see this!”
But there was no this, because the bullet he knew was coming, didn’t.
Mason spent the next few seconds trying to breathe and at the same time understand why he was still alive, why the slightly wet ground under him wasn’t already covered in a thick layer of his brain and chunks of his skull.
He focused on the man’s rifle—it was olive green, some kind of bolt-action piece, with a big scope on top—and the finger in the trigger guard, resting on the trigger, ready to provide the very slight pressure necessary to pull it.
So why hadn’t he fired?
Or maybe he had already, but nothing had happened?
Is he out of bullets?
A sudden flurry of hope washed through him. After all, it was just as difficult to run and shoot as it was to run and reload, and the guy hadn’t had the chance, not if he wanted to keep up with Mason.
He’s out of bullets! That has to be it!
But there was a problem. He had dropped the Sig Sauer when he fell, and it was—
There.
Barely five feet from his right hand—
“Go ahead,” the shadow above him said. “See if you can reach it before I put a bullet through that ugly face of yours.”
Mason froze. Not because of the threat, but because of the sound of the voice.
Why was that voice so familiar?
Could it be? Here? Had she actually survived after all?
Why couldn’t she have? It made sense. He had survived, and there was nothing special about him.
And there was everything special about her.
His heart skipped a beat, and excitement and fear and anxiousness slammed through him in one explosive emotion.
“Ange?” he said breathlessly. “Is that you?”
The woman jammed the muzzle of the rifle harder against Mason’s cheek (if that was even possible) and snickered. “Who the hell is Ange, dead man?”
FOUR
IT WASN’T ANGE.
The girl was too young, too small, her nose was too sharp, and her eyes were the wrong color.
“Ange’s dead, remember?” the voice said.
You don’t know that for sure.
“Of course I do. I know everything you know. Or did you forget how this works?”
Despite her stature, the girl carried the sniper rifle just fine. That thing had to weigh fifteen pounds easy, even more with the ten-round detachable magazine with all ten bullets accounted for. He knew the weapon was fully loaded because Mason had watched her reload just twenty seconds ago while he sat on his ass with his back against the tree, his hands zip tied in front of him while she kept her distance some ten yards back. How many bullets did she have in the old magazine before she reloaded? He’d never know the answer to that question now.
She had taken his knife and the Sig and put both of them into a tactical pack slung over her back that looked bigger than her. She wore a 1911 model Colt automatic in a hip holster, the handle wrapped in duct tape for some reason. Better grip, he guessed, not that he knew all that much about weapons, even though he’d learned a lot since the end of the world. Accumulating previously unknown data was vital to successful adapting, after all.
She had laid the rifle across her lap and was leaning back against another tree trunk to rest. He didn’t know if the chase had tired her out more than it did him. He might have been wounded and running on a bad leg that refused to get better, but she was carrying that rifle and the pack, and yet she still caught him.
“You’re out of shape, spud,” the voice said. “But that’s no excuse, is it? Let’s hope no one ever finds out about this little embarrassment, or we’ll never be able to live this down.”
She stared across the narrow space at him now, as if she was trying to figure something out. The more he looked at her, the more mystifying it had been that he ever thought she could have been Ange. Even their voices didn’t sound the same.
“You wanted it to be Ange,” the voice said. “You wanted her to still be alive.”
Maybe she is still alive.
“Bullshit.”
You don’t know for sure.
“Complete and utter bullshit,” the voice said.
His captor wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform or name tag. Her wardrobe looked more like a weekend hunter’s, one covered in dirt and mud from heavy use. The untouched parts of her face revealed a pale complexion and a generous sprinkling of freckles. Strands of red hair poked out from underneath a skullcap that was pulled down almost all the way over her eyes. Despite the hard look, the clothes, and the guns, there was no getting around that she was still just a little girl.
“Like I said, let’s hope no one finds out about this,” the voice said. “I don’t think we can take the additional ego bruising, do you?”
As painful as it was, Mason had to agree with the voice one hundred percent.
“Who’s Ange?” the girl said. She had taken an energy bar out from one of her cargo pants pockets and was chewing on it slowly, as if she had all the time in the world.
And maybe she did. He, on the other hand…
“What?” Mason said.
“You called me Ange. Who was she?”
Is. She’s still alive.
“Oh, stop it,” the voice sighed.
“None of your business,” Mason said.
The girl shrugged. “Hope you got to say good-bye to her, because you’re never going to see her again.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Probably.”
“So why haven’t you already?”
“That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
Mason felt like snorting—she didn’t just look like a kid underneath all that camo paint, but she sounded and talked like one, too—but managed to refrain. He said instead, “I didn’t kill your friends. That was Lyle. The kid on the hood of the truck that you bumped off first. And Rummy—t
he older guy—was driving. I was just along for the ride.”
“That’s what they all say,” she said, and took another bite from the bar.
“I’m new here. To the town. Just got in two days ago.”
“Congratulations.”
“I’m not in charge—”
“I don’t give a crap,” she cut him off. “You were there. And you’re wearing the uniform. Two and two equals four. And in today’s world, four gets you a bullet for your trouble.”
“I can take the uniform off.”
She didn’t say anything, but eyed him under her cap and took another bite from the energy bar.
How old is this kid?
“Old enough to shoot you dead,” the voice said.
You’re a master of the obvious today, aren’t you?
“That’s what I’m here for.
Mason sighed out loud. “You’re taking this too personally.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she asked.
“You had to know this was a possibility when you came out here. After what Mercer did to the towns.”
She popped the last piece of the energy bar into her mouth and tossed the wrapper into a nearby bush.
“Someone hasn’t heard that you should never Mess With Texas,” the voice chuckled. “I wonder what else she hasn’t heard of?”
What are you going on about?
“Really? Do you need me to spell it out for you?”
Oh, right, Mason thought, and said, “Aren’t you supposed to be standing down and ceasing operations anyway?”
That perked her up. “What are you talking about?”
“The radio that your team was carrying. It said for you guys to stand down and wait for further orders.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, but didn’t say anything.
Mason suppressed the urge to grin smugly at her. He had a feeling all it would take was one wrong sentence for her to pick up that sniper rifle and waste him. At this range, she wouldn’t even need both hands to do it.
“It was on the radio,” Mason said. “Some kind of repeating broadcast. You didn’t hear it?”