He didn’t get very far, but not because he’d stopped rolling on purpose. It was because he had bumped into something and couldn’t get around the obstacle.
Smith turned his head—
—and stared into Mandy’s lifeless eyes.
She lay on the ground, having landed on her side, her legs and arms positioned awkwardly around her. She’d been wearing a gray shirt and navy blue jacket over it with the zippers pulled down halfway, exposing the bloody patch and the hole that was almost exactly in the middle of her chest.
Smith didn’t have to waste his breath asking if she was okay.
Mandy was dead. She was deader than dead. All he had to do was stare into her eyes and know she had probably died long before she crashed to the ground.
And he was next.
Twenty-One
First Lucky, who had gone years being a thorn in the Judge’s side.
Now Mandy, who’d had less time to needle the Judge but had needled him just the same.
Both were dead.
In the space of two days.
Coincidence?
Smith didn’t believe in coincidences.
“So what changed yesterday?” he’d asked Mandy about Lucky’s killing.
“I don’t know,” she had replied. “Maybe the Judge just got tired of him helping us.”
Maybe the Judge got tired of a lot of things, Smith thought even as he rolled away from Mandy’s body.
Another crack! rang out, and something fast and hot zipped over his head. A puff of brown cloud appeared spontaneously in the air about a foot in front of his face just before Smith rolled through it.
Then he was on his knees, springing up to his feet a second later, and running as fast as he could.
Run run run!
Don’t look back!
Just run run!
The horses were gone. They’d both taken off after the first shot. Mandy’s mare was chasing after Smith’s Paint, the two animals getting smaller. Smith went in the other direction, moving away from the hills to put more distance between himself and the shooter. He was very well aware that the last time he’d been shot at—likely by the same man—he’d only survived because his canteen had stopped one of the bullets meant for him.
He’d gotten lucky yesterday, but luck only got you so far out here. Wasn’t that the same thing Mandy had said? And look how it had turned out for her.
So Smith ran, zig-zagging like he had the previous day, hoping the shooter still couldn’t figure out a pattern the second time around. More than that, Smith hoped there wasn’t a pattern to his movements, because if the guy could—
Crack! as a round screamed past his left ear and sent up a cloud of dust about ten yards in front of him.
That was a close one, but it didn’t slow Smith down. He continued running at full speed, zigging left, then right, then right again.
No patterns! No patterns!
He waited for the next shot.
Ten yards…
Where was the shot?
Twenty more…
Where was the goddamn shot?
Thirty…
There wasn’t another gunshot. Instead, Smith heard something he hadn’t expected out here and hadn’t heard in quite some time.
Were his ears deceiving him? Was he imagining it?
He had to know. He had to know.
Smith slowed down just enough to glance back toward the hills.
A thick cloud of dust had plumed into the air as something appeared from the other side of the hills. The yellow color made it stand out against the brown and white of the Nebraska plains, but even if it had been perfectly painted to camouflage against its surroundings, there was no way Smith was going to mistake it for anything else.
It was a vehicle, painted bright yellow, moving like a banshee across the open ground toward him.
Sonofabitch!
He couldn’t tell the make or model, but that wasn’t going to matter a damn bit once it reached him. He had a feeling there were guys with guns inside it, and if they’d taken out Mandy, he was possibly next.
Possibly? Probably goddamn likely!
So that was why the sniper hadn’t wasted another bullet trying to take Smith out. He didn’t have to because they had something better that they were going to run him down with. And that was exactly what they were going to do: Run him down.
That is, if he stayed on this path. He had to get out of the open. Get—
The house. Lucky’s house.
It might have burned down to the ground, but there was still enough of it left to provide him with cover. Okay, not a lot of cover, but some. If nothing else, then it was better than him running out here with nothing that even remotely could be used as a defilade.
Smith was already turning toward Lucky’s house before he realized he’d even made up his mind.
He snapped a quick look back at the only working vehicle in probably hundreds of miles, maybe the entire state of Nebraska, though that was a bit of a stretch. Gasoline—at least the still-usable variety—wasn’t easy to find, but armies like Black Tide had figured out how to get the refineries working again. And if they could, why couldn’t some other enterprising asshole with people and time to spare? Though Smith didn’t see the Judge having those kinds of resources. Did Mandy know?
He wished he could have asked her, but she was dead. Besides, he didn’t even know if these were the Judge’s men, though the chances that they weren’t was probably about the same odds as a snowball surviving beyond a second in Hell.
Fortunately for Smith, the remains of Lucky’s house was closer than the vehicle speeding its way toward him, even if the sound of its engine made him think it was about to run him over any second. Smith gauged the distance to the house at a hundred yards. About a football field. It was a good thing he wasn’t carrying anything but the SIG Sauer in his hip holster. Travis hadn’t allowed Smith to take some spares.
“One mag should be good enough,” the man had said, back in Gaffney.
“Two would be nice; three would be better,” Smith had said.
“What would be the fun in that?”
“I didn’t know this was supposed to be fun.”
“Maybe not for you, but it definitely is for me,” Travis had said with that stupid and very punchable grin of his.
Goddamn, Smith wanted to punch that face in the worst way. Just one time. That was all he asked.
But he wasn’t going to get that chance now.
Unless, of course, he survived this.
Smith needed to reach Lucky’s old homestead and find some kind of cover. He wanted to believe it was a mistake on the sniper’s part to take out Mandy before him, but that was probably Smith’s ego talking. It was pretty obvious they’d killed Mandy first because she was the priority. He, on the other hand, was just a loose end. One that they could be easily rid of because they had a fucking car.
Where the hell did they get a car?
Smith could smell the remains of Lucky’s house as he neared it. He was going to reach it before the vehicle got to him, that much was clear now. So he had that in his favor. As for everything else, well, that would probably depend on how many men were in the speeding car and what kind of armaments they were carrying.
Fifty yards…
Smith checked in on the vehicle again even as his breath hammered out of his chest. Every breath seemed like a Herculean task, but he willed himself to keep going, to not slow down. If anything, he got faster.
It’d been a whole day since the house burned down, but Smith could still detect soot lingering in the air as he finally reached the property and made a beeline for the thickest part of it, which was easy to pick out from the remains. The wooden foundation was gone, along with the walls and roof, so it was hard to miss the section of brick wall still standing near the center.
It was a fireplace, made from brick and mortar. How the hell Lucky ever managed to locate, then drag blocks of bricks and cement out here, Smith couldn’t fath
om. Then again, according to Mandy, the guy did have a lot of time on his hands. You could do a lot of things when there were no other pressing matters to attend to.
The top half of the fireplace had fallen, leaving behind a seven-foot tall wall for Smith to hide behind. Charred remains of the house crunched and fell apart underneath his boots as Smith ran through the place, glad to have the weight of the SIG Sauer against his right hip.
The gun was a full-sized P220 with a ten-round magazine. He would have preferred something with a higher capacity, but the pistol was a good gun and he was used to it. Besides, unless there were ten people inside that vehicle—
—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 did
n’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 enough 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.
After The Purge, AKA John Smith Box Set | Books 1-3 Page 29