That was Smith’s guess, anyway. Not that he glanced back to make absolutely sure, because right now he was already at a great disadvantage and—
Slow. Why was he running so slow?
Right. The pack.
The very heavy pack—
A third crack!, followed by a sledgehammer striking Smith from behind and throwing him forward and down against his will.
Ouch!
He ate a mouthful of dirt and grass, but mostly dirt, and there was probably a huge welt on his forehead where it had smashed into the hard, unyielding ground.
But he was still alive!
And though he was sure he’d been shot, it didn’t feel like there was a bullet lodged in his back. Which was strange. Smith had been shot before, and he knew what one felt like, and this wasn’t it.
Wait. He’d heard a pinging sound when the bullet struck him in the back…
…and the pack. It’d hit either the frying pan he kept back there or one of the titanium canteens!
Smith scrambled forward on all fours before launching himself back up onto his feet. His legs were wobbly, but he managed to get control of it as he began zigzagging across the plains, hoping to give the shooter less of an easy target—
Crack!, followed by a puff of dirt erupting into the air in front and slightly to the left of him.
Close.
Too close.
But not close enough!
He was still moving too slowly for his liking, though. Not quite stuck in quicksand, but it sure as hell felt like it. He had to lose some weight on him, but he couldn’t afford to ditch the pack. Everything he had in this world was in there, including food and water. So how was he going to lighten his load so he could move faster?
The rifle. He didn’t need the rifle.
The AR-10 wasn’t very heavy. Just under 12 pounds, with a fully-loaded magazine. Except right now it was 12 pounds that he didn’t need, or couldn’t afford.
Smith shrugged the rifle off and let it drop, and continued running.
He thought he was moving faster than before when he heard another crack!, followed by something zipping! over his head and striking the ground well ahead of him.
Smith angled right, then left, then right again. All the while, moving away from the shooter after the fleeing Lucky.
The horse trotted on ahead of him. Well ahead of him, actually. Again, he didn’t blame the animal for not letting him catch up to it. It was just being smart. Surviving. Which was exactly what he was hoping to do, too, at the moment.
The shooter hadn’t fired again after the fifth shot, but Smith didn’t stop. For all he knew, the guy was trying to get a bead on him still. By now, Smith had put a lot of distance between himself and the hills, but he didn’t feel comfortable quite yet.
He kept zigging and zagging, randomizing his pattern. The trick to shooting was to aim at where the target was going, not where they were. Smith was fully aware of that and didn’t make his movements predictable as a result.
Or, at least, he hoped he wasn’t. For all he knew, he was overthinking it—
The crack! of another shot, but this one didn’t produce anything even close to a hit that he could see. It didn’t land in front of him, either, so he assumed it had struck behind him, having fallen short.
Smith began to slow down until he could turn around and backpedal safely without worrying about tripping over his own feet and going down on his ass. He scanned the horizon and easily picked up the series of camel humps in the distance. They were impossible to miss against the flat ground between him and them.
There, sunlight glinting off glass on one of the hills.
The shooter.
Crack!, followed by a puff of dirt as the bullet struck the ground a good ten yards in front of Smith.
Not even close.
Smith stopped moving and unslung his pack. He gasped for breath even as he dug out the first-aid kit. It was covered in water, and he realized why when he found the canteen with the hole in it. It’d stopped the bullet but had cost him half of his water rations.
He drank some of the remaining water, then used the rest to rinse the blood off his face. He could feel but not see the nasty gash along his temple as he cleaned, disinfected, then bandaged up the wound.
All the while, Smith kept an eye on the shooter’s hill in the distance. The shooter hadn’t attempted another shot since his last one fell grossly short. Not because the man was feeling generous, obviously, but because Smith was too far away now. At least 800 yards, or nearly half a mile. The guy could probably still see him with his scope, but hitting Smith was going to take some serious skills that the man, apparently, didn’t have. If he did, Smith would already be dead right now.
When he was sure he wasn’t going to bleed to death, Smith took out his binoculars and looked through them.
He zoomed in on the hump in question and could just make out a figure standing up on it, looking back in his direction.
There he is.
A lone man holding a rifle in one hand. Dark clothes, but of course Smith was way too far away to pick up any details on the man’s face.
The shooter waved at him.
Did that sonofabitch just wave at me?
Yeah, he had.
Cocky bastard.
Smith housed the binoculars back in his pack before inspecting the canteen. The hole could be plugged up, but you weren’t going to find a titanium canteen like the one he had lying around just waiting to be picked up. Besides, the damn thing had just saved his life, so it was the least he could do to hold onto it.
Smith didn’t move from his spot and continued watching the shooter back. Even with the naked eye, he knew the man had turned and left the hill when the dark shape got smaller and smaller, until it disappeared completely.
He thought the man might come over to finish the job. Or try to, anyway. Smith was ready for him this time, and even without the AR-10, he was confident he could take on a shooter face-to-face.
Except the man never showed up. That told Smith the shooter was alone.
So who the hell was he? And what was the reason behind all of this?
See you next time, asshole.
Footsteps behind him!
Smith spun around, his right hand stabbing down to his holstered SIG.
The horse, Lucky, was walking back toward him.
Smith relaxed. “There you are. What? You decided to come back? Why now?”
The horse lifted its head and snickered.
Smith rolled his eyes at the animal. “Okay, but this is the first time you’ve abandoned me. If you do it again, I’m going to start taking it personally.”
He waited for the horse to get closer just to show it who was boss. When it finally reached him, Smith climbed back into the saddle. Gingerly. He was feeling a little woozier than he had anticipated, and the sudden shift from ground level to sitting on the horse threw his equilibrium off momentarily.
For a second or two, he nearly fell out of the saddle.
“Whoa, whoa,” Smith said, not realizing until a little later that he was saying it to himself and not Lucky.
He fixed the hills in the distance one last look before turning the horse around. The vindictive part of Smith wanted to ride over and introduce himself to the shooter and ask for an explanation at the point of a gun. The other part of him, that felt lucky to still be alive, thought it was probably best to let it go. His ego was left a little bruised than before, yes, but it was better to have hurt feelings than be dead.
Way, way better.
He did consider going back to pick up the AR-10 he’d tossed but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. For whatever reason, he was feeling tired, and more than a little lightheaded. What he needed right now was to put a lot more space between him and where he’d last spotted the shooter. And if that meant losing the rifle, then so be it.
Besides, he still had the SIG Sauer, and that was enough.
Smith tapped Lucky on the flanks, and the horse
took off north. He glanced back once at the burning house. The fires had almost completely burned themselves out, but they were still sending smoke signals into the skies. He wondered how that had happened, or if anyone had been caught inside during the blaze. Like, maybe, Lucky’s previous owner. The horse certainly didn’t show any affinity for the place.
He rode Lucky through the wide open ground. There was a lot of gray and brown around him, outcrops of rocks dotting the landscape on both sides. After a while, he could make out the highway to his left, the blacktop visible underneath the afternoon sunlight. He might not have seen it if he wasn’t in the saddle and had a higher-than-normal perspective.
Smith angled away from the road. It’d brought him nothing but trouble the last few days, and it was best to avoid it. Besides, he had a horse now, so that made the decision easier. He didn’t forget about the sniper, though—it was going to take a while before that happened—but he was glad to be alive, even if his head was pounding more so now than in the moments when he’d been shot.
Was there a drumline pounding away inside his skull and no one bothered to tell him about it?
It didn’t feel very good, and he considered stopping for a while to get his bearings.
But he didn’t. It was just a little discomfort. He could deal with it.
Smith shook the pain off and kept Lucky pointed north. He wasn’t sure where he was going, exactly, but it seemed like a good start.
What was north? South Dakota. Or was that North Dakota? Was he actually in Nebraska?
Well, it was one of the three. After that was Canada—
He fell off the saddle for the second time, the ground rushing up on him in a blur just before he struck it with a solid and painful-sounding thump!
The last thought that raced through his head before he lost consciousness was Well, this is embarrassing. I hope no one saw that…
Ten
It was bad enough he fell off a horse the first time, but to do it again, and in the same day? It was downright shameful. The only thing that could have mitigated the embarrassment was if no one saw him.
One can only hope.
He knew one thing for certain: Someone had found him after he fell off Lucky. Those same someones had then brought him here.
Not that he knew where “here” was.
Smith was still holding onto the chance no one had seen him fall off Lucky for the second time when a voice said, “Man, the way you just plopped off that horse, that was something.”
Or not.
He woke up on the dirt floor of some kind of shack. It was a small building made of flimsy, termite-infested wood with big slivers between each board, allowing the sunlight from outside to come through in gaping swaths. There was a particularly big pool of light on Smith’s face at the moment, and it was probably why he had woken up.
This is embarrassing.
He could turn his head slightly to the left to avoid most of the sunlight, but that meant keeping his head at the odd angle, which he could only do for a few minutes before straining the muscles along his neck. He certainly couldn’t move the rest of his body, which was fastened to a big wooden pole by thick rawhide ropes that were so tight they dug into his arms even through the fabric of his jacket and the shirt underneath. Whoever had tied him up had done a goddamn good job of it.
He’d expected to feel the headache to end all headaches when he opened his eyes, but that was oddly missing. The drumline that had been pounding away inside his skull like it was trying to win a Battle of the Bands competition during a football halftime game had mostly faded away. Mostly. It was still there, lingering in the background, but it wasn’t as prominent as before. Or, at the very least, it wasn’t making him feel as if his entire head would crack open at any second.
“Hey, can you hear me?” a voice said. “Yoooo hooo.”
Smith focused on the speaker. He was a young kid around fifteen or sixteen years old, crouched in front of Smith. Sandy blond hair, dust-covered boots, jeans, and a jacket. Other than a knife in a sheath along his right hip, he didn’t appear to be armed, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have something behind his back.
And he was grinning stupidly at Smith, which Smith found extremely annoying.
“What’s so funny?” Smith asked.
“You,” the kid said.
“What’s so funny about me?”
“The way you fell. I thought you’d hang on, but…” The kid mimed a tree “falling” with his hand. “Tiiiiiiiiiiimber.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah, it was pretty funny.”
“Wait. You saw me fall?”
“Of course. Was watching you the whole time. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be lying out there right now. Probably end up worm food by nightfall. Or worse.”
Or I could have woken up, with no one the wiser, and spared the embarrassment.
Smith couldn’t tell if he still had the bandage over his temple, where the sniper had shot him. But he wasn’t bleeding again, and he would have been able to feel it dripping down the side of his face. Of course, he didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, so the gash could have started bleeding again and coagulated.
“Did you shoot me?” Smith asked the kid.
The teenager flashed Smith a puzzled look. “Huh?”
“I said, were you the one that shot me?”
“Why would I shoot you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the same reason you brought me here and tied me up in this…whatever this is.”
“Storage shack,” the kid said. “‘Cept we haven’t really had anything to store for a while so we put you in here.”
“We?” Smith thought.
He said, “If you didn’t shoot me, then who did?”
“How should I know? I was just investigating the smoke. When I got there, you were already escaping on Sally.”
“Who’s Sally?”
“The horse.”
“You mean Lucky.”
“I mean Sally. Lucky is the guy who owns Sally. The guy you killed and stole the horse from, remember.”
Smith shook his head. “I didn’t steal the horse.”
“And you’re saying you didn’t burn down Lucky’s place, either?”
“I didn’t.”
“Of course you’d say that. You’re a thief and a killer, after all. Thieves and killers are notorious liars.”
Well, the kid right about one of those things.
“You got a name?” Smith asked.
“Of course I got a name,” the kid said but didn’t offer up what that name was.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What’s your name?”
“You don’t need to know my name, dead man.”
“‘Dead man?’”
“That’s you. Dead man.”
He didn’t like the sound of that.
Smith looked around him again, but there was just a lot of dirty and old boards to his left and right and above him. He tried to peek through the slits in the walls and could make out what looked like colorful…somethings.
Chrome? Metal? What exactly was he looking at, and where had the teenager brought him?
No, not this kid. He was too small and thin. He wouldn’t have been able to drag Smith all the way up here. Smith had to weigh twice as much as his captor. So the kid had help. How many more?
“Relax,” the kid was saying. “Mandy’s coming here and she’ll take of you.”
“Take care of me?” Smith thought.
The kid held up one forefinger to his throat and made a “cutting” motion. Then he grinned that stupid grin at Smith again.
Ah. “Take care of me.” Gotcha.
“Where is she? This Mandy?” Smith asked.
“You don’t need to know that,” the kid said as he stood up. “You’ll meet her when you meet her. In your shoes, I wouldn’t be so anxious.”
The boy turned around and opened the door behind him. It creaked loudly on rusted hi
nges, and Smith glimpsed what looked like a pile of car bumpers stacked outside. He was in some kind of car junkyard. Or maybe it was just a junkyard that happened to have car parts, among other throwaways.
As soon as the teenager with the stupid grin left, a girl with blue eyes and an easy smile came in to replace him.
She was older than the boy—Early twenties? Maybe mid-twenties—and taller, too, but maybe the boots she was wearing had something to do with that. She had long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail and was balancing a metal cafeteria tray in one hand like she’d been doing it all her life.
She stepped inside but didn’t walk over to where he sat right away. Instead, she stood at the open door looking at him. “I’m here to feed you. If you try anything stupid, I’m going to have to kick you in the balls. You understand what I’m saying, dude?”
Smith smiled. “Yes.”
“You gonna try anything?”
“I don’t wanna get kicked in the balls.”
“Yes or no.”
“No, ma’am.”
“So long as we understand each other.”
Unlike the boy, the woman had come in here completely unarmed, but Smith could see figures moving around outside, one of them just beyond the open door, ready to spring inside should Smith try something.
The woman walked over and placed the tray on the ground in front of him, then sat down Indian-style and took out a plastic spork from a jacket pocket. Lumps of mash potatoes and small strips of jerky. The tiny jerky size was to make feeding him easier. Not exactly gourmet stuff, but his stomach growled anyway.
He didn’t know why; he’d already eaten this morning with Mary and Aaron, so why was he so hungry again? Had he been unconscious that long? He didn’t think so. It was still bright outside, with no signs of nightfall anytime soon. Unless, of course, he’d slept through the whole day and this was already the next day, but Smith didn’t think that was the case. He would have felt a big difference if he’d gotten a full twenty-four hours of sleep.
“Someone’s hungry,” the girl said as she spooned some mashed potatoes and held it up for him. “Say Ah.”
He didn’t say “ah” but opened his mouth and let her feed him. They had seasoned the potatoes. It wasn’t great but not entirely bad, either. He’d had worse. Much, much worse, especially since he left Black Tide’s cafeterias behind.
After The Purge, AKA John Smith Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 21